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

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

Brandon Tseng is the President and Cofounder of Shield AI, a defense technology company he established in 2015 with his brother Ryan Tseng, specializing in AI-powered autonomous systems for military applications, including the V-BAT drone deployed in operations like those in Ukraine. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy with a BS in Mechanical Engineering and Harvard Business School with an MBA, Tseng served seven years in the U.S. Navy as a SEAL and Surface Warfare Officer, with deployments including Afghanistan in 2015, where he witnessed the need for AI in warfare. Under his leadership, Shield AI has raised over $1 billion, achieved a multi-billion-dollar valuation, expanded globally, and focused on ethical AI for national security. Named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI for 2025, Tseng has testified before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on technology innovation and serves on the Board of Directors for the C4 Foundation, supporting Navy SEAL families. He advocates for public-private partnerships in defense, advancing AI to protect warfighters, and securing U.S. leadership in autonomous systems amid global competition. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Join the Waitlist - https://theglacierapp.com/waitlist ⁠https://americanfinancing.net/srs⁠ NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 866-781-8900, for details about credit costs and terms. ⁠https://betterhelp.com/srs⁠ This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. ⁠https://calderalab.com/srs⁠ Use code SRS for 20% off your first order. ⁠https://shawnlikesgold.com⁠ ⁠https://helixsleep.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://ketone.com/srs⁠ Visit https://ketone.com/srs for 30% OFF your subscription order. ⁠https://patriotmobile.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://ROKA.com⁠ – USE CODE SRS ⁠https://simplisafe.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://tractorsupply.com/hometownheroes⁠ ⁠https://ziprecruiter.com/srs Brandon Tseng Links: X - https://x.com/brandontseng2 X - https://x.com/shieldaitech Shield AI - https://shield.ai TIME 100 AI Profile - https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305863/brandon-tseng Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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They're not guaranteed. Their values change, and past performance may not be repeated. Brandon Seng, welcome to the show. Thanks, Sean. I'm really excited to be here. Yeah, me too. We've been really looking forward to this for a long time. And now I have a model UAP sitting in my front yard here.

So it's going to be super interesting. I know all the locals are like, what the fuck is that thing doing here? What is that? I'm excited to show you it. It'll, uh, and yeah, it's, it's pretty cool. I can't wait, man. And, and, you know, like I was saying at breakfast before we started the interview, I mean, it's just, I just love seeing not just veterans, but especially team guys, seals, you know, get out and do something totally different. And it's just, it's cool, man.

It's, it's, it's a huge inspiration for a lot of team guys getting out and, and, and, and like, you just have really. broken into a whole new, a whole new thing that is just unimaginable for a lot of people, other than maybe Dino Mavrucus, but, uh, congratulations. Thank you. No, it's, uh, I appreciate that. It's, uh, it's painful and, um, you know, but, uh, you know, we're excited about what we're doing and hope, hope to make a big impact on the world. And similarly, like, I'm super inspired being in this room.

Um, everything you've built is, uh, very cool as well. Thank you, Ben. Thank you. But everybody starts off with an introduction here. So here we go. Brandon Seng, co-founder and president of Shield AI, a defense technology company who co-founded in 2015 to build AI pilots for military assets, helped raise over $1 billion in funding for Shield AI, growing the company to over 1,000 employees.

You're a former Navy SEAL who served two deployments to Afghanistan and one to the Pacific theater, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, and you later earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, advocate for advancing U.S. national security through AI and autonomy, testified before Congress on topics like technology, innovation, acquisition reform, and the role of AI and warfare, your husband, and a father. Yes, sir. Thank you. So, Brandon, I'd like to do a life story. on you. And I know we got limited time today, but I'd like to go from childhood all the way up

into what you're doing right now and talk a little bit about your time in the SEAL teams, how you got into the, into the AI business world. And it's going to be a fascinating interview. Cool. But a couple things to crank out here before we get started. I always like to give gifts. So here we go. first one which once league gummy bears made in the USA legal in all 50 states at least right now

until RFK outlaws red guys and massive amounts of sugar so love it thank you and you know since you're a team guy I think you'll really appreciate this one this is sick

oh Oh, love it. So that is the first SIG-Sauer Autonomous Pistol. No, I'm just kidding. That's the... You're like, wait a minute. I wanted to do that first. But, no, that's the SIG-Sour P-211 G-G-O-9-millimeter.

It's the first 211 model from SIG, so... Amazing. Thank you, Sean. I brought some gifts also. two things like you know you got me a gun seals love guns and knives um and so brought you some guns and knives i love guns and knives these are you can open them up um i was in brazil working with the brazilian navy went out to a place they said yeah we can do these steak knives for you and get them laser engraved look at that and so i'm like they're like what do you want on it first thing that came to

mind was, you know, because I was feeling sorry for myself, uh, suffer in silence. And so, uh, with the seal tried it on there. Um, and, uh, then this one, I'm pretty excited to give you too. How do we give something that is going to be pumped about? Um, that is, uh, civilian version of the HK MP5. Are you shitting me? Yeah. And so, um, apparently who started so yeah oh shit yeah oh shit yeah so obviously mp5 a lot of history and soft socom um don't know if you ever got to carry one around but uh yeah things uh dude this is awesome i'm gonna get one myself thank you thank you yep yeah seal teams have a long history of the mp5 no i never carried one i shot him did you carry one no i never carried one we

had one guy who just like carried it it's his uh um his secondary just because it was fun to carry an mp5 so i'm like why he's like cuss why not so i was like all right so um i've shot it before but yeah never carried it man thank you that is fucking awesome and there are three patches from shield AI on there. One, our work with the U.S. Coast Guard interdicting drugs in the Caribbean Sea, two, flying jet aircraft autonomously.

I think the third one is yeah, AI has the aircraft, which is the call that fighter pilots make when they push a button on the F-16 and it becomes autonomous. That's what this shirt is. That's awesome. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. You just said you're doing Shield AIs doing counter drug ops? Yes. Yeah. Let's just start right there before we get into the live store. I'd love to hear this because, you know, I saw a couple of boats get blown up. Yeah, I joke with my government relations team that I want a letter of Mark. But they say don't talk about that.

But no, we've been work with the U.S. Coast Guard. Actually, in the past couple weeks, like, we went operational with them. So there's this big, long process. We passed operational testing and evaluation, 100% on key performance parameters, 100% on key system attributes. It's our aircraft, the V-BAT, which is 180-pound vertical takeoff, launch, and land aircraft. Easiest way to think about it is like a miniature Reaper predator drone. And two weeks in, have interdicted over half a billion dollars worth of cocaine. In two weeks?

Yep, in the Caribbean Sea. just absolutely Obviously there's a lot of operations going there We're with the U.S. Coast Guard I've also done U.S. Navy operations down there With Fourth Fleet Can't say about like all the ops going on in there But yeah, what I can say is we've interdicted a lot of drugs

interdicted a lot of vessels. I've seen a lot of ships set on fire in the past couple days or past couple weeks. Which feels right good as an American. Ken, I actually, like, always, you know, I'm excited about what they're doing in terms of the Caribbean Sea and just stopping the flow of drugs into the country. And so I'm, like, the thing that I live for is mission impact. And so it's cool to get to have a positive impact on the world in that way. That's incredible.

Man, a billion, over a billion in less than two weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been absolutely, like, it's wild. I mean, yeah. Holy shit. any fentanyl stuff uh not that i don't know well like they they say what they give you is like the the the the weight and they give you the street price and so then i hop on google to determine that that is most likely cocaine so um yeah right on man damn that's awesome one more thing so

i got a subscription account it's on patreon and a lot of these a lot of these folks have been with us here since the very beginning when I was doing this damn thing out of my attic. And, you know, they're the real reason I get to sit down with people like you. And so one of the things I do is I give them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. This is from Hunter Wheddon. How did your battlefield experiences where lives depended on split-second decision shape your vision for building AI systems that protect warfighters in combat? Yeah.

it had a massive impact in the sense so like just really quickly my my first deployment as a navy seal I got to augment development group augment seal team six and just to be like super clear I was not a member of seal team six didn't go through green team but the seal teams would send out junior officers to go gain experience deployed that was your first deployment yeah it's amazing I I am very blessed. I also, it just happened to be with the troop that killed bin Laden. Nice. So this was one year after they had killed bin Laden,

and it was just like a masterclass in ISR in targeting operations, a master class in direct action missions. And so during the day, during the night, the troop would go out. They'd conduct their rage, capture, kill missions. during the day we would conduct kinetic strikes. And so that is understanding that kill chain from the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance targeting to having effects on the battlefield,

like that was, you know, didn't know it at the time, but really understanding that process in and out has helped me build shield AI, help me understand like how to build these, the autonomous systems. Very interesting. Wow. What a hell of a first deployment.

Yeah, to be clear, I tell people I was like, I was, I was the equivalent of a squire for the ground force commander. I do everything from, look, I just wanted to be a good, you know, young seal officer, load his magazines, grab them muscle milks, you know, before the op, get those guys what they needed to be successful. And then, you know, when we were doing strikes, it was coordinating with the battle space commander with air assets. And so the one fun thing, I did try to make it lively and energetic. I would cheer when we would do kinetic strikes and the jock. And I was like, what the hell? I was like, look, this is fun, cool stuff. Like, we're taking out bad guys.

Like, what's not to love about it? So that's cool, man. Well, let's do, let's start with the life story. So where did you grow up? I grew up. So I was born in Houston, Texas. It said grew up in Seattle, moved to, Seattle, Washington when I was 10 years old, finished high school in Florida.

It was just my dad's job in corporate America. But, yeah, it was one of four kids. I have an older, the oldest is my sister, older brother, younger brother. So I was number three. But, yeah, that's where, yeah, a lot of good memories in Seattle and Florida. It was fun times. What'd your parents do? My dad worked in corporate America.

started off his career at Bechtel, largest engineering construction company in the world, then worked for a small engineering construction company in Houston, Texas, did another company called Foss Maritime in Seattle, and then at the age of 50, decided to buy a small engineering construction firm in Orlando, Florida, and that's what took us to Florida. Mom was, you know, 100% mom day in, day out. so yeah that's what they did what were you into uh let's see so when i was four years or in fourth grade i wanted to be a professional basketball player uh when i didn't make the travel team in

sixth grade quickly realized like basketball was not going to be my journey um so i grew up swimming yeah there weren't you know yow ming didn't exist when i was in uh or he wasn't playing professionally didn't have a, you know, an Asian NBA player back in the day. And I wasn't very good, it turns out. But I thought I was good. Got into, so I had always swam growing up, and then got into water polo. So for me, middle school, high school, it was swimming, water polo, and then video games. You know, there's some pretty intense video game playing in Seattle when it rains 300 days out of the year.

I'll bet. Yeah. I'll bet. You close with your brothers and sisters? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Work with my brother. Him and I started, my older brother started the company, brought in my younger brother during

COVID to start the company. He was at MIT getting his MBA. COVID happened. I said, Nick, you know, why are you doing online school? Why don't you, you know, come join Ryan and I and work on this. And my mom holds it against me to the day that I got him to leave MIT. So she's not happy about it. No shit, so three brothers.

Yeah, there's three of us. Yeah, three brothers. Three brothers run in the company. Oh, yeah, working together and yes. Yeah, yeah, enabling it. That's awesome, that. That's very cool. I mean, it was pros and cons.

Yeah, I was going to say. You can communicate really well with your siblings. Almost too well sometimes. Right on. Right on, man. Well, what got your interest in the SEAL teams? Yeah, so 10 years old. saw two movies, Under Siege, which I, to this day, claim is the greatest Navy SEAL movie

of all time, not sure what yours is, but Under Siege and the Rock. So the Rock, yeah, where the Marines kill all the SEALs. Yeah, not a good look, but, you know, those two action movies, like I said, Under Siege is the, you know, my favorite. But that's what got me interested in it. And so then I asked my parents about it, right? I was like, this looks really cool. They're like, oh, they want you to read a lot growing up.

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

And so, yeah, applied there, got in and just kept the dream alive. What age did that fascination start? The Naval Academy? Being a seal. Being a seal? Ten years old. Yeah. Ten years old?

Yeah. Damn, you followed through. Yeah. No, it was, I mean, yeah, it was my older brother. I remember, I was like 11 years old at the time. It was winter in Seattle. He was like, yeah, you got to do cold weather training. Like, go sit in the snow and I'll spray you with the hose.

Right, I was 11-year-old. You're listening to your older brother. You're like, all right, if this is what it takes. So, yeah. Any family history in the military? It skipped a generation. So on my mom's side, my great-grandfather was actually a doctor on a hospital ship in World War II. Actually, I have a really cool picture of the Japanese surrender with,

Admiral Nimitz, and it's a letter, it's signed by Admiral Nimitz saying, you know, Captain Carroll, thanks for your service, you know, to the country during World War II. My grandfather was also in the Navy. He graduated, I think, the Naval Academy in like 1949, but then, like, skipped a generation. I wasn't close to my, you know, grandfather on my mom's side. And then on my dad's side, his dad actually um fought in world war two uh he was a nationalist in china fighting the japanese um wow yeah fighting the communists and then uh left china when uh the communists took over left with shan kajek and uh moved to taiwan yeah that's a that's the topic we'll probably cover later yeah yeah for sure well so what was it like when you i mean

It sounds like you come from an educated family. Your dad was your dad an engineer? Yeah, he was an engineer, electrical engineer. Yeah, they're, you know, typical Asian family push education really hard on you. Nothing. You'd come back, you'd get an A on a test, and 96%. My dad'd say, why didn't you get 100%. Oh, damn.

You get 100%. My dad say, was there extra credit? And if there was 90, you'd be like, all right, good job, you know? So, right on. Yeah. And your siblings sound like they're hard charges too. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

I think we're all, look, one of the things that was always, you know, be grateful, work hard, right? You know, don't give up the opportunity that's been set in front of you guys. Like, don't let that go to waste. And so that was something, you know, ingrained in us from my parents and then from my dad's side of the family who had, you know, come from, you know, seeing war-torn communist China to, you know, growing up. My grandfather was a diplomat in South America, so they grew up in South America. And then, yeah, so just a sense of, you know, gratefulness and work hard and be thankful for the opportunity. And what they would tell us is you won the lottery being born in the United States of America. And didn't really appreciate that until I would say I saw more of the world and joined the Navy and saw the rest of the world.

And like, yeah, I think if you're born in the United States of America, you have absolutely won the lottery in a very positive way. Yeah, we definitely agree with that. But you sound like kind of an outlier in your family. Yeah, in the sense that I wanted, you know, I joined the SEAL teams and, you know, I think that was, you know, different for them. But they're all, yeah, I think they've always been, my mom's always pushed, like, a lot of be confident, like an insane amount of confidence in her kids. And, you know, Brandon, if you want to go to the NBA, you can, which is completely unlawful. realistic. I was like, Mom, there's no way, right? She's like, oh, if you put your mind to it. But, no, I don't know, my brother's, my older brother started a company. He sold it to Qualcomm.

But I would say we're all hard workers. We're very competitive people. And so, yeah, and then, yeah, just like to have fun, be grateful. It's working out. Yeah. So you go to, so you decide you're going to the Naval Academy in 10th grade. Yeah, in 10th grade. went up for something they do where they invite, yeah, yeah, 10th graders. It's between your 10th and 11th grade. It's called Summer Seminar. Saw that place was like, okay, this is like, it's pretty cool, right? It's different. Still wanted to be a seal. Yeah. And applied, got in. And yeah, you ever been? No, I've never been there. It looks beautiful. It's pretty awful on the inside. Is it? It's a military school. It is not a typical college experience.

And like I, it's, it's, you make a ton of great friends just like you do and, you know, the SEAL teams. I have lifelong friends from that institution just because you go through joint suffering together. Yeah, you know, I mean, I've never been there. I don't really know much about it. But I will say that the, the Naval Academy alum seemed to be very tight and tied in with each other. I mean, just curious. I mean, how does that compare with the SEAL teams? It seems tighter after service.

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Association, I think is like ridiculous in terms of the tightness. And then, yeah, the Naval Academy, you know, I would say is they're like pretty good, right? Again, everybody's got those shared experiences where you can understand the walk that they have taken in life. And then, yeah, I would say the SEAL teams, I don't think we do the best job of, like, an alumni association. But I think we do a good job just like trying to talk to each other, trying to, like, I make myself available to any, you know, any veteran. But like, team guys specifically, it's like, all right, you know, someone gives me a call. I'm picking up and or they want to talk. I'll talk to them.

So I'm very big on vets, helping vets, team guys, helping team guys. Yeah, me too. I wish there was more of it, to be honest with him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, it's, yeah, teams are, they don't want, people don't want to ask for help, right? And that's, I don't like the teams especially, right? It's like, I'm a team guy, I'll figure it out type mentality is probably why they don't, you know, aren't more active in that, in that alumni sense. And extremely competitive.

Yes, and extremely competitive. Yeah. But, you know, I'm curious. I mean, what is the pathway from a Naval Academy guide to Buds or the SEAL teams? Yeah. So, your junior year, you know, when I was there, you go through, they still do it. You go through a SEAL screener, right? And this is Friday night to Sunday morning.

It's a hell night, a hell 48 hours, whatever it is. It's run by the seal on the yard. They bring in a bunch of seals from the East Coast to help run it, and along with the seniors who were selectees for the seal teams. You go through that. That is, I mean, I don't know, we probably started with 120 people, and you finished that screener with like 40 people. And so it's very much, yeah, it's no joke in that sense.

Then, based on your performance, you can get a seal billet And so they didn't have, like, they used to have something called minibuds. Now they have something different. When I was going through, I got to go spend three weeks with SEAL Team 2 in May, which was awesome. And so went, spent three weeks with SEAL Team 2. Actually, you know, my fun fact was that's where I got to know, Tim Shehee, Senator, Tim Sheehe, him and I were on the same SEAL crews together. He actually lived a floor below me at the Naval Academy. but got to know them really well on that seal we call a seal cruise um it was an awesome three

weeks we did you know combatives we did uh they were doing the like aggressive driving course down at blackwater um and i was like this is amazing and i can you know and so um then you go back your senior year you put in like your final application final final pt scores get your letter of recs Like we had a letter erect from SEAL Team 2, commanding officer. Actually, Master Chief Jay Manty, I don't know if he was at SEAL Team 2 when you were there at the time. So, yeah, CMC. But then, yeah, so you put in the applications, you go on for an interview. I was competitive.

I did not get a spot right out of the Naval Academy, most soul-crushing day of my life up to that point, right? You take your 10-year-old dream and, like, throw it in the trash. I remember, like, you know, they do, they tell everybody what they're doing, right? You go into this room with your 40 classmates, and they say, you're going to be a pilot. You're going to be, they give you an envelope, right? And you open it up. Open mine up, you're going to be a surface warfare officer. Was crushed, devastated, went back to my room, skipped my afternoon classes.

I think I cried in the shower for like half an hour. And I was like, all right, you know, after I was done feeling sorry for myself, which was like, I get a day to feel sorry for herself. I was like, okay, well, let's figure out how to keep the dream alive. So went to the fleet and, you know, but yeah, then I had to laterally transfer. How was the fleet? I tell people, look, combat, buds, the seal teams is the most mentally and physically. challenging thing in the world, hardest thing in the world. I tell people being a surface warfare officer was a suck on my soul.

It was a spiritual torment. No, and that's just because, like, I, right, if you've ever had a job that you didn't like, like when people say, like, oh, I hate my job, I didn't like my job. Like, I did not, like, that job was not for me. And it's not to say there's anything wrong with that job. It's just like, I could not relate to that job. Now, I did that job extremely well, and that was my mentality. My mentality after getting denied the SEAL teams was like, you know, after you go through

all the excuses in your head, it's like, all right, why weren't you picked up? It's because you weren't number one. You weren't the best. And so that became my mentality. It's like to avoid ever having to experience that again, I better be number one. I better be the best. That way no one can never tell me no again. so that was my mentality going on to the ship got my surface war we deployed i gave up 30 days

of leave right after i graduated i graduated i graduated may 23rd uh i boarded my ship in puquette thailand on may 27th um and was in the arabian gulf conducting amphibious operations in like mid-june um and uh learned a ton um learned like best leaders like learned the best leadership lessons actually in in the fleet um was a hard job uh but you know very thankful for like it's funny how things work out in life and like i'm forever grateful for getting to experience that year and a half on a ship um and like just you know yeah the the the the resilience it built in me and like the mentality uh that it built in me um whatever like yeah it's just funny how things work out so how do you get into the

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

Like, I was pumped, um, to go there. So, um, yeah. How was it checking in? Um, it was awesome. I loved buds. Like, to the point, like, you're coming from the fleet to like, Going to Buds. It was, yeah, one, I think it's, I love the ruthlessness of Buds. I love the humor of Bud. The instructors are the funniest people on the face of the planet. Like, I loved every second of it. Like, just not be, like, that's where I wanted to be.

And so, like, even in Hell Week, like, I remember, like, U.S.S. Pearl Harbor was out on the water, and I'm just like, oh, my God. Like, I'm not on that ship. Like, thank you. Blessed to be here. Blessed to be getting surf tortured. You don't hear that very. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, no, it was great. What kind of, I mean, do you have any tough time at Buds at all? Do you have any hang-ups? Yeah. Like, there's always one thing, I think, for like everybody. Even if, like, someone does things well. And this is the wild one.

had a, the tread took me four times, which I'm embarrassed to say as a water polo player, all my water polo friends from the academy who were, you know, seal officers also, they're like, what the hell is wrong with you? Why can't you tread the water? And I was like, dude, I have no idea. Tribe with the tanks? Yeah, tread with the tanks. Your hands out with the fins. And it was treading with the fins, which I think was like, it's a different motion. And so, yeah, the instructors were baffled too because look I was coming in like first second place on every swim and they're like what the hell is wrong with you saying like you were a water pole player and so anyways I end up you know getting it on my fourth try actually I was underwater and the

instructors were like come to the side I'm like uh-uh I wasn't like I wasn't sure like if they're like you failed or not and it's like my head's underwater and hands are up um they're like get over to the side and like finally like ran out of breath they're like all right and then you have to like swim across and like you know was dead doing it get out they're like congrats saying you pass you know took you four tries and I was like who you know what you get for having you know you being a water polo player and it taking you four tries I was like what do I get they're like 1,08 counts go get it and I just hopped on the pool deck and start doing 1,0008 counts you know for the next whatever two hours so yeah right on let's we got to cover hell week everybody

wants to hear about hell week so let's let's hear about your experience in hell week yeah um let's see hell week one uh loved the beginning right loved sunday night love break out um then like you get into it right i think it's monday night you feel really sorry for yourself um And at least that's what, like, I think it, I think it hits like 24 hours that high wears off. And you're like, okay, I've been doing this 24 hours. You feel sorry for yourself. And I remember one of my friends was a brown shirt rolled back, right? And so he's supporting.

And I just ran by, like, I'm running to like chow or whatever. And I was like, Joe, like, is this as crappy as it gets? He's like, yeah, brother, just keep moving forward. I was like, all right, dude. But like, you know, that's when, yeah, I want to say a majority. of the class quits that Monday night because people are feeling sorry for themselves. Second thing that I would call out.

So, like, after that, like, then you get into the groove and, like, you're just, like, moving forward. I love... I don't think people talk about, like, how ruthless it is under a boat with people. One of the things I loved was, like, seeing boat crews kick the underperformers out and, like, just the viciousness of it.

Like, when you, like, you see someone ducking boat and like, like, their teammates would just punch them in the back of the head and they would, like, fall over. Like, I don't think, like, it is like, if you're not carrying your load, the instructors don't have to do anything, right? Your classmates are going to take care of you. So I love that aspect of it. Wednesday night was, I think it's Wednesday.

Yeah, we did camp surf. And, like, I don't know if people went. That was, that to me was the worst evolution. So it was, you know, one in the morning, and for four hours, there's like the wind is blowing. It's probably like 50 degrees outside. You're soaking wet. And we're digging a trench with our paddles. And every minute on the minute for four hours, we go hit the surf.

And your body is so saturated with, like, salt water, so chafed. Every single time you would jump in that water, it was like shock therapy. It was like a million needles just like crushing my body to the point where you don't, right after hell week, you'd never want to get into the ocean again. It's because you have this like, like this, you were just tortured into recognizing like it's not comfortable getting in that water. So that's what I remember. And then a fun thing we did around the world where you're row on the boats around the entire San Diego or Coronado Peninsula. and one of the instructors brought out

a boombox and they played the techno hit around the world like around the world around the world for the entirety of that like 10 hour evolution to the point where like at one point

the music stopped and he goes oh shit we ran out batteries I'll be back he paddles back like comes back you know 30 minutes later with it bearing

he's like I got new batteries boys and like puts it on and you're just like listening it to again so then i will say like again i love the instructor cadre mattie roberts was our first phase uh instructor that guy is yeah um he's an animal he is uh yeah like one of the cool you know yeah he he told us uh he's like look if you guys are here after hell week i'll tell you how i got uh the silver star and like told us that story and to have that i you know one of the things again amazing people, right? But that's your first-faced instructor. A lot of people don't know. Like, he was nominated for the Medal of Honor. And, like, you get to learn from that person, like, how

cool is that, right? And, like, that is the guy who's putting you through the gauntlet. Like, I loved every moment of it. Damn. Yeah. So what did it feel like, you know, to graduate Buds and SQT? I mean, when you, when you finally got your Trident? Um, it feels, it feels good, right? It's a good accomplishment. And then I would claim, like, the real work starts, right? And it's like, you know, I think the teams do a good job of that. It's like, look, congratulations. You know, you've made it to the community. And now, like, it doesn't get easier. It gets faster. It gets harder. The expectations are real. We're no

longer in, you know, training environments. You're getting ready to go to war. And so, love that. Again, I checked in SEAL Team 7. Actually, you know, like one thing that I always Also, again, I don't think a lot of people appreciate this. At least, you know, probably the same for you when you guys were, like, going through it. But you experience just like in that community, you see a lot of death, like more than any, like I've been to more, right? You go to a ton of memorials, like a lot of funerals, and you just, that's something that I don't think the public realize is like, oh, it's 21, 22, 23-year-old young men are just, you know, in those first couple years, going to a ton. The week before we graduated SQT, extortion happened.

And one of our classmates, Brock, his brother, Heath, was on that airplane, right? And so it's, like, very real. You know, we check into SEAL Team 7, I think it's Mike Tatham. He, you know, was, you know, he died in R&R, you know, but he was deployed to Afghanistan in during that time. And so you just like you're like I thought that was kind of, you know, when I reflect back and think about it, that's something I don't think, um, like thankful to be part of the teams, but a lot of people don't get to, you know, that's like one of the things that I think helps shape you as like a young man being around, uh, you know, all of, you know,

war, death, all of it. So. Yeah. Yeah. What was it like checking into seven for you? Um, it was good. Again, those guys were deployed. And so we have, I had like two months of, I was going to schools. I went to Tier 1 off-road, which was cool. We got to learn how to drive off-road vehicles. And then when the team got back, they're reorganizing. That's when I got to go deploy with, I got to augment development group. And then, you know, after ProDev hit ULT, and, yeah, that was a ton of fun too.

Yeah, so you check in and you go right into. a dev group deployment. Yeah. I mean, that is, that's like one in the lottery too. Yeah, no, exactly. And, you know, can cover down on that. But so, to be clear,

not part of SEAL Team 6, but got to augment them. The SEAL teams were sending junior officers out to basically get experience. And so I spent three and a half months in Afghanistan. out of Fab Shank and Bogram. And so I got to augment the troop that had killed bin Laden.

And I tell people like, look, I was like basically the squire for the ground force commander. But during that time, got to learn it was a master class in ISR and targeting. The troop would go out in the night and conduct direct action raids. And then during the day, we were conducting kinetic strikes. And that's where, you know, I got to play a really nice role as a junior. your officer just coordinating those airstrikes, which was a lot of fun. Did you get to go on any of the hits? Didn't get to go on any of the hits, which was, you know, I get it, right?

It's like those guys train up with, you're a new guy, right? You earn your way onto that mission, and I was a fresh Navy SEAL with a month and a half of, you know, at the team. And so, no, I didn't get to go with them. What, so coming back, I mean, to see, to see the pinnacle of the seal teams, like the pinnacle, especially with that, with, with who you deployed with, you know, year after the bin Laden rate, I mean, did that, did that create some, uh, false expectations? Um, it's a good, like, yes. like right a couple times my platoon commander my troop commander like brandon like yeah we're not we're not damn neck right we're not dev grew like we get those guys only go out at night right why are we going out during the day guys they're like look we got to seize terrain this is our mission um so uh fortunately

on my deployment to afghanistan with my platoon we had a ton of air assets um so that remained the same but that was a very unique thing for my uh for like like our CLO in Afghanistan. But it wasn't to the point where I think it was it was just part of that learning curve, right? I had seen what, you know, the top tier was doing.

And then it's like, okay, like, look, it's a different mission is kind of like what it was at the end of the day. It's not that it's just like, you have to solve that mission differently than what DevGrew was doing with their mission set. So understanding that was, I think, like,

you know, very quick to understand that. And like, look, this isn't, we have a different mission than Dev Greer. This is how we have to execute said mission. Where did you go? Where was your first, first deployment? So first deployment was out of TarynCal, Arousgan, multinational-based Terrancaut. So to Southeast. We would do helicopter assault force operations into Kandahar, into Arousgan, into Gosni, into Zabal.

And then we forwarded stage out of Ghazni sometimes going, I want to say Pactica and Pactea. And got to go. Our mission was, we were paired up with the 8th Commando Battalion, 8th Kandek, Afghan commandos, 900 Commando Battalion, every single mission at that time in the war. It was a 10-to-1 force ratio. We had to bring 10 Afghans out for every single operation. and so we would bring 13, 14 guys in 130 Afghans. Holy shit. Yeah, talk about moving pieces on the battlefield.

Wow. Yeah. What did you think about worker with those guys? It was not, I did not, like, there's pros, there's cons. I would say, like, overall, I didn't enjoy it, right? It was when you go out with that many inexperienced guys, it makes the mission more dangerous. It was very clear to us that that, like, probably like 85% of them didn't want to be there. Those guys would sit down in front of, like, target compounds in front of the fatal funnel.

Like, they didn't value, like, you know, self-preservation. And so now, again, there's probably, like, you bring 130 out. There's, like, 15 hard chargers and, like, you use those 15 hard chargers. but it was uh i appreciated the challenge and the complexity of the operations multi-day village clearances um it was cool we got all the air assets in the world right our mission was you know hey this is 2013 America's not going to be here forever like we have to train the commandos to stand up on their own um and so that was an interesting mission set um but we were also at that point 12 years into a war and it was clear to us like look this is right it was like don't get

yourself killed uh was like kind of a mentality um over over this uncertainty was uh something that we thought about like get the mission done don't get yourself killed um as uh and like yeah take it to the enemy when when they show up was it pretty hairy out there at the time or um i don't think it was Harry, no. Like, we got into some good firefights, which I'm, like, thankful for. And, like, I'm glad the team, like, had that deployment. Um, and we got a, or rack up, like, some of the guys got to rack up some EKIA and I get credit for, like, some J-TAC kills. Um, but, uh, I think it's like one quarter or whatever, but, um, the, uh, let's hear about it. Oh, the, the J-TAC stuff, um, let's see. There's this one, just like a, this was, uh,

got our new J-TACs, right? We have experienced J-TAC, new J-TAC, new J-TACs, the lead J-TAC on this operation. And I'm working with him. And there's this guy that's taking, you know, pot shots at us from probably like 1,300 meters away from a mountain, right? And it's like hard to find them. They're moving. And it's indirect fires, right?

But we're like, all right, let's bring on C-130. and drop some ordinance on this guy. And it turns out the C-130 had not doped in their 30-mic-mike. And so they're shooting at this guy. And we have a rover feed where we can see, and rounds are just missing him. And the guy is running. And he runs.

And the new J-Tack, I'm like, I'm like, what's going? And he's like, they keep missing. Like, why are they missing? And like, right, because he wants to take out this bad guy. They, uh, he runs probably for about four and a half minutes. Just like smoke going everywhere, like rounds coming in on him. Um, finally they drop a, I want to say it's called a Griffin, GBE 39. Uh, it's a glide bomb.

Um, because the guy like stops under a tree, uh, and tries to like hide under the tree. But we, we had him on IR footage. And so that was. That was an interesting one. So, um, yeah, it was new J-TAC's first, you know, J-TAC kill. And so, yeah. That was your first one. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How did that feel? Ah, I'm indifferent. I'm like, yeah, I was, I just wanted the, honestly, like, I just wanted the team to complete the mission. So. Right on. Where do you go from Afghanistan? Um, so, let's see.

Uh, while I'm in Afghanistan, my order. orders were to go, I want to say it was to Seal Team 2. I had orders to go to the East Coast. During that deployment, I get an email from one of my SQT classmates, another officer at Seal Team 5. Say, Brandon, you want to hop on the phone. I was like, cool. So I hop on the phone from Afghanistan. He's in Coronado. He's like, hey, I've got family issues. I have to step down from my platoon commander bill at Team 5. He's like, do you want to take it? And I was like, Oh, that sounds like awesome. Like, all right, I'll get to go right into a workup.

Or like, yeah, I was like, what's the catch? She's like, you're going to go right into a workup. And so I call my wife, said, hey, hon, we can either go to the East Coast, right? And like, make that move and go through a ProDev cycle and do a ULT and do a deployment. I was like, or we can stay in San Diego. And, but here's the catch is like, I'm home for a week. and then rotating right into ULT. I was like, what do you want to do?

And so she said, like, hey, let's, you know, she was like, I'm down for staying in San Diego if you are. And I was like, yeah, that sounds great. So got home, checked into SEAL Team 5. ULT started. It's off to the races. I think out of a, for two, I tracked this, because actually the teams were making us track it at the time.

Two years in a row, I was gone 300 days out of 365 days. I was, yeah. And I was, yeah, my wife's like, this isn't normal. I was like, I don't know, all our friends are doing it. It seems pretty normal. She's like, no, it's not. I was like, all right. So, but yeah, so checked into SEAL Team 5, did the workup, deployed to the Pacific. What are you guys going over there? Um, it was a lot of joint partner operations during the time. So I think like we were, Like, we sent a lot of people to the, yeah, the joint exercises. We sent element to Korea, sent an element to the Philippines, sent an element to the Maldives, like, all over the place. I personally, we went to, I went to Vietnam. I went to Singapore. We did the POTUS detail in Hawaii for President Obama, augmenting Secret Service.

That was pretty cool. But yeah, it was a really cool experience. Why did you get out? I wanted, like, a number of, like, a whole host of reasons. I wanted to do something else. I wanted to see, like, what could be done outside of the confines of the military. And I don't mean that, like, in a negative way. Very blessed, excited.

Like, I would encourage everybody, actually. Like, I think the amount of accountability and responsibility you get in the military, like, at such a young age. is like one of the most amazing things. I would encourage people to do it. But I wanted to see like what could be done outside of a military system. I knew what the career path looked like for officers. Like in the sense, right, it's like, okay,

I would have to go do an ops job before I could go screen and then you go screen, you'd be a troop commander and like you get, you know, maybe one or two more pumps. And then you're commanding and you know and then you're doing another staff job and then like a group commanding like again i got a lot of friends who are doing that i just was not you know commanding a seal team was not something that i i aspired to do um i was like i absolutely aspired to be a seal platoon commander

but um you know i was interested in other things so yeah wasn't happy how things were going in Afghanistan. That was, you know, yeah. I don't know a whole lot of people that were. Yeah. So. So Shield AI, I mean, that, that popped on your, I mean, you wanted to do something before you left. Yeah. So, again, kind of like a planner mentality. I, um, right, wanted to be a seal since I was 10 years old. When I got accepted into business school, I was on deployment. I was based out of Guam. and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. Was it, hey, was it going to do venture capital, was it going to do private equity,

was it going to do hedge funds. I was very, like, inspired by entrepreneurs. My dad was a small business, became a small business owner at age 50. My brother had sold a wireless power company to Qualcomm. I watched something he was, like, 24 years old. And so I had those, like, role models in my life. And I, so eventually landed it on, and I think that fit my skill set, right, leading teams, building culture.

And so I wanted to do something entrepreneurial, was really interested in AI and autonomy, just as an engineer that was, you know, of interest to me, like always followed technology. I remember, you know, thinking, like, wow, it would have been, it was 2014, I was like, it would have been really cool to have been. part of that internet wave of companies, like what's going to be the next wave, like AI and autonomy is what I decided, and like lots of people were talking about it at the time. And then I was trying to figure out what problems I wanted to solve. And typical entrepreneur story just kept coming back to the problems that I had faced, right?

Problems of military problems, problems of national security, global stability, you know, decide, you know what, these are actually really important problems. And I remember, again, look up to Elon Musk as an entrepreneur, and he has done a lot of interviews where he talks about, like, yeah, I was trying, you know, wanted to do something, you know, to progress humankind. It was going to be the internet, sustainable energy, and space, right? And so you have Tesla for sustainable energy, SpaceX for space travel, you have XAI, you had PayPal for, you didn't have XAI, I think. the time but he had PayPal for the internet and I was like what problems is he not working on that are like actually really important for the future of humanity and I think warfare is like one of those like massive unsolved problems uh in human history and so it's like wow is there

you know could work on solving you know call it the problem of warfare was something that I was interested in also what what problems specifically in warfare were you looking to solve One of like deterrence, right, like, and if you look at why countries go to war, like why they don't go to war, because there are a lot of countries have grievances with each other, but they choose not to fight it, right? It's expensive, it's costly. And if you look at how America has built this world order, it's like it's because of our military leadership since, you know, 1945. Right, for the past 80 years, there's been more global prosperity in the world because there's been more global stability in the world. That has been because of like the power projection of the U.S. military. That's, right, nuclear weapons deter nuclear war.

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

And if pilots, people on ships, commandos are obsolete. Yeah. You know, I'll love to hear your thoughts on that a little bit later. But before we get too far into Shield Day, let's take a quick break. Check this story out. A new discovery found a massive trove of gold coins in the Czech Republic, minted, by a long-lost civilization. It's from before the second century BC. They also found silver coins among artifacts. I mean, the proof is there. Not only have gold and silver been valued

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instantly unlock top candidates' contact info. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people. Let's ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now, you can try it for free. It's ZipRecruiter.com slash SRS. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash SRS. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. All right, Brandon, we're back from the break. I need to work on my shooting. That was a little rough author but good break good time right it was a little rough for me too but but um so i want to get into you know while you're here shield ai so he started it in 2015 2015 what was the vision um look i

i believe in a world of autonomous systems um i think they're going to have a profound impact on humanity. As it relates to the defense world, I just fundamentally believe that autonomous systems are like swarms of autonomous systems are going to be the most strategic conventional deterrent of the 21st century. And I think it's important for the U.S. to lead here. And so wanted to start a company that realized this vision. I think there are a couple people talking about it in 2014, Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob work, but, you know, what I was seeing was no one was really working on it because it requires a lot of software expertise to actually build the AI and autonomy, and that's not what the traditional defense primes are known for. They're not known for their

software systems. They're known for building the aircraft carriers, the submarines, the fighter jets of the world. But, you know, the best of AI and autonomy was all going to Silicon Valley at the time. I mean, what, so what is, I mean, I know you guys. have a bunch of different projects, but, you know, what, what, overall, what is SHIELD AI? So, mission is to protect service members and civilians with artificially intelligent systems. In pursuit of this mission, we have been building and proliferating the world's best AI pilot. Easiest way to think about an AI pilot is self-driving technology for unmanned systems. Why is that important?

It enables unmanned systems to operate with, GPS, without communications, or while GPS or communications are jammed, it enables them to operate without a remote pilot, and then it enables them, it enables the concept of swarming or teaming, where they are able to share information with each other, read and react, and work together as a team. And so these, all the different stuff that you're making, these aren't piloted from somebody in Nevada No, they're, they are piloted by an onboard autonomy stack, an AI pilot. And again, it's, if you've ever driven a Tesla or been in a Waymo where it's just navigating the streets, executing the mission of dropping you off from point A to point B, making decisions

about what to do, same type of technology, but for military applications. Damn, damn. So, I mean, so what was the, I mean, that, that, that, that. That's like, it's just a huge thing to take on, especially, you know, coming out of the SEAL teams. I mean, where do you even start with that idea? Look, I think you start, you actually start with like the vision, right? And I ask myself, and then you work backwards from there. But, you know, in 2015, I asked myself, what does the military of 2035 look like?

And what is the role that AI and autonomy plays? decided that AI and autonomy should be powering, commanding, maneuvering every single military asset under the sun. And then you say, okay, well, how do we get there? Like in buds, like in the SEAL team, just one step at a time. And so we started with a problem that I was super familiar with clearing buildings of threats. And so our first product, we put an AI pilot on a quadcopter and it would go inside buildings and structures completely autonomously looking for threats. No shit completely autonomously. Has that been deployed? It has been deployed to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Ukraine. It's been widely deployed. It's been used, like I'm

super proud of the product. The quadcopter market for the military back in 2015 to like 2000, honestly, like maybe even now is it was a very small market so but like the mission impact that we got to have like I'm very proud of you know the best of the best soft forces have used it on operations it has absolutely brought guys home back safely to their families super proud of that product couldn't build a large business from just that product and so had to expand and we executed climbing the aviation food chain which led us to you know autonomous F-16s, Autonomous V-Bats, and now it's like we're just making, like, we're working with every prime contractor to make their systems autonomous.

Wow. Wow. I mean, what is it? I mean, so, you know, one of the interesting things about autonomous warfare or, you know, drones specifically is it's everything from clearing a building. I don't know if they have weapons capabilities on these quad-com. are not, do they? They, like, we would not ship it with them, but folks have figured out, like, how to

strap their own things, but that's not, like, we don't even make these quadcopters anymore, because we've had to, like, in the same way Tesla doesn't make a sports car anymore. We were used as a stepping stone to get to other markets, but other folks have put things on these quadcopters. I mean, it's everything from, like I said, the small quadcopter that's clearing buildings to, I mean, the latest thing that you've made, I think, is 2,000 miles, 2,000 mile range about maneuvering in F-35.

Yeah, it's about 18,000 pounds, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's just wild to even think about. Yeah. So, I mean, what's it like, you know, seeing your product, your innovation get implemented into the seal teams where you came from? Yeah. It was, like, what I care most about, it's not like the size of the kind. it's not the valuation. It truly is like when our products make an impact for our customers,

the warfighter, at the end of the day. That's when like I get, you know, the hair stands up on my arms still every single time. Like it doesn't matter. And like the cool thing at this stage in the game is that is happening at increasing frequency. And so I remember, look, we did a really cool test. I want to say this was back in 2017. The SEAL team's actually, they filmed it. They called it the John Henry test because man versus machine and they sent the quadcopter into a house clearing problem down at LaPosta and they gave a seal squad the exact same problem quadcopter right and like solve the solve the problem faster and at the end of this problem this house clearing problem there's a houseborn NID which was like a way for the seal

teams to say like yeah it doesn't matter like that's you know you cleared the building but you still get blown up. And so seeing the reaction from the guys after that, they're like, okay, like I can see why this is like a valuable capability, even with all its flaws. And it had a lot of flaws back in 2017, 2018 timeframe, but they took it overseas, found utility out of it. And so, you know, I was very proud of that product. And actually working a lot with the Army also was probably even a bigger user of the product

than the SEAL teams were. And again, this was like early days, innovation. Holy smokes, the team must have been like 40 people at this stage in the game. But like, again, proud of, like, no one had ever seen this thing before. No one, a lot of people had talked about autonomous systems. They put it in their 10, 15 year roadmap. And here it was completely, you know, going through these house clearing problems by itself. Damn.

I mean, do you, are you on site when these exercises are going on? Yeah, yeah, we were. We were working hand in hand with these guys. So what's it like when you see? something that you've innovated, something that you've developed outperform the same community that you came

from. I mean, is there a lot of pushback? I would think that it's taken a job, right? And so a job that there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of sweat, blood, tears, dedication, drive that goes, I mean, we just talked about, you know, your pipeline into

the SIL team. I mean, it's you don't, there's a lot of passion to become a seal. And then to have you show up with a drone that's like, watch this. So one, it augments a mission. I don't want to say it takes a job. And I think everybody understands that. And the thing that I think a lot of folks understood in the SEAL teams and so com writ large was, hey, this thing, close quarters combat is a really cool thing to train too.

It's a lot of fun doing it. It's also like one of the most dangerous things that a soldier, a soft warrior, like, does in terms of a mission. And so, like, again, clearing buildings, clearing tunnels, it sounds really cool until you start taking fire from the other side. And you say, look, is there a better way to do this? And that's where I think soft has been a great partner, not just like from the quadcopter, but all the way up to, like,

all of our products. Because they're always asking the question, like, is there a better way to do this? And so that's been just like a positive mentality. But yeah, it was fun doing the tests, the exercises. Again, they were great partners. Their innovation cell working directly with us. Very proud of what we accomplished.

But at the same time, it was at small scale. And that's why we had to figure out how to build other products because they're just not a lot of people. unfortunately care about the soft, you know, fighter or like the infantry soldiers. There's just, it pales in comparison in terms of like the amount of funding that's going towards other capabilities. So was there, was there any, I mean, did they implement it immediately or did they? Yeah, they took it over to the battlefield.

They used it, right? And you get feedback, right? It sucked in this scenario. Why wasn't it working here? And like, that's when my team would solve bugs, solve problems, send it back. we fixed this, they'd use it, you know, again, it was successful in a lot of operations, it was unsuccessful in some, and that's just like the name of the game in terms of like early stage, highly technical products.

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

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

What were some of the things? You'd have trouble in like highly dusty conditions, our first generation. product used a LIDAR, our first generation quadcopter. And so LIDAR, when you're operating in dusty areas, it spins up a lot of, you know, particle sand in the air. And every single time that LIDAR is scanning, it's getting a reflection back from that dust. And so that caused a lot of challenges, a lot of headaches in the early days because simply, you know, that's where our customer was operating in these dusty desert-like environments where people lived in mud huts or there's just sand and you know or there's war zones where there's just like dust everywhere and then when you

fly a quadcopter that's spinning up all that dust that would be a challenge going through really small uh doorways uh and tunnel systems was another challenge because when you like the wind vortices that these things are like when they're flying, it's sucking them into the wall because you're flying in such close proximity. And so that's just like a controls challenge that we had to solve. But those are like some of the headaches

and problems that you have to solve where the customer uses it. They're like, oh, what the hell? It doesn't work, right? Customer at the end of the day just wants their product to work. And so the other good thing about that soft customer is that like they are,

they're a very demanding customer, but they're also like understanding of where our product is in its maturity life cycle. Interesting. Interesting. I mean, how small are these things? These things were about two and a half pounds this big. Yeah, size, like it fit through a standard doorway.

That was one of our product requirements. So what would, what would, I mean, how would it be implemented? I mean, we were just talking about, you know, doing hits and all this stuff. And so what exactly, in the soft world, because that's all I can relate to. It was primarily used in call out operations. So, right, it wasn't going to. be used in a dynamic like HR mission or anything like that. But like when you have a deliberate target where you're executing a callout, right, you can think of like for the non-military

audience, like the FBI surrounding a house, like come out with your hands up, right? There's pros and cons to executing an operation that way. But during those types of operations, you execute a call out, right? People would come out of the building. It's like, well, let's go make sure everybody's out of the building. You send a quadcopter in or you send the quadcopter in first, those operations. Damn. Damn. I mean, what, I mean, what did that, what did that wind up developing into? What was the next product? Yeah, so a couple things. One, to the point where, like, recognize really quickly that, hey, this market is vicious, small. Everybody thinks of quadcopters as toys. This is, again, back in 2018,

1920, like, there's not real money flowing towards these quadcopter products. We said, hey, we have to figure out how to get on to more strategic, more, yeah, strategic platforms, strategic capabilities. That's where a lot of the defense dollars were moving. So what we ended up doing was during the time, we decided, hey, we have to, we're going to buy another platform. So made that decision in late 2019, 2020, there was a couple acquisition targets that we were looking at, ended up in 2021 buying two companies, both at the same time. One of the companies, Martin UAV, they made the VBAT.

The other company, Heron Systems, they were working on AI and autonomy for fighter jets. And so what we were able to do is, hey, let's put the AI pilot on the VAT, which is, again, you think of it as like a miniature. Predator, Reaper drone. And then, you know, we wanted access to these programs where we could put AI pilots onto fighter aircraft. I mean, so we'll get into the fighter aircraft here in a little bit. But, I mean, how do these things, how do they think? I mean, is it literally, like, to the quadcopter all the way up to the, you just called it

the expat? I mean, you know, is it just, you switch it on and point it in the right direction? Yeah, so for the quad cop, there's a button on the side. You press it, like, spin its rotors and, like, take off from your hand and, like, go inside the buildings. The way that, like, it works from a technical perspective, and, like, this is a simplification of it, but there's a series of software modules in every self-driving car or humanoid robot is working like this. And, like, every one of Shield AI's products is working like this. The software modules that make up this AI pilot or this autonomy stack,

You have a state estimation module. State estimation is like, where in the world am I? You have a mapping module, it builds a map. You have a controls module. You have, right, that's like how to actuate motors, you know, your steering mechanisms. You have a reasoning model, what we call global reasoning. You can think of this as like the mission,

is the mission to go inside a building in clear of threats, is the mission to the mission to dogfight F-16s is the mission to find surface air missile systems, like what the mission is. That's what the reasoning module is. Then you have like a path planning module, which is like, okay, what are the steps that I'm going to take to execute said mission? So those are the different software modules that make up an autonomy stack. The way that, you know, it operates without GPS, right, it's building a map of the room, its environment, whether it's using cameras, whether it's using LIDAR, whether it's using radars to basically build a map

of its environment, and then it's estimating its position based on the map that it's built. Again, I think a lot of people try to overcomplicate autonomous systems. At the end of the day, like you and I, we are autonomous systems, and we operate the same way these robots do in the sense that we sense the world with our five senses. then we think about the world using our brain and then we actuate our muscles supported by our skeleton to maneuver around the world. When we come into this room,

we don't think about it this way, but we've made a map of this room in our head and we can now navigate off of this map. I know that wall is 10 feet away. This wall is 8 feet away, right? You're 6 feet from me. These autonomous systems are doing the exact same thing. And just like we learn from our experiences,

these things are learning. their experiences. How do they learn from their experiences? Yeah. So one of the principal ways that we, like, developed a methodology called reinforcement learning. And so this was pioneered. There's probably like academic papers. I would say like it became pretty famous with like AlphaGo, Alpha Star, where it was,

they would put these AlphaGo, you know, beat a world champion at the game of Go, right? It's any time, reinforcement learning is really a good learning methodology when the number of variables or outcomes are massive, right? And the multiple, like, trillions of outcomes, right? Which I couldn't bring up what the outcomes of the game of Go are. But, right, it's, you know, it's almost uncountable. Yeah, right? Same thing with, like, the game of Starcraft, which was Alpha Star, it's like the number of, like, moves are uncountable in terms of. of like the number of scenarios. That's where you find something like reinforcement learning really

shine, right? In the real world, the number of moves that you have are uncountable. And so what you're doing is you're taking, you know, you basically give it a goal and then behaviors that you believe are positive, you reinforce those behaviors, you reward those behaviors. And then things that are negative, like you don't reward those behaviors. And what you'll do is spin up millions of simulations where these things are just playing against each other millions of different times and they just continue to improve. And then you have your engineers, right? They architect this training environment, this, you know, this, I think we've called it a dojo before. But they just keep learning from those experiences. You check in, you validate, you cross-validate, you make sure

it works in the real world. And that's how you're teaching these systems, anything from clearing a room to dogfighting, to, you know, hunting surface air missile systems, to navigating, you know, yeah, any on-man system. Wow, wow. I mean, what do you envision, I mean, you had mentioned what does warfare look like in 2035? And, I mean, obviously, it's a lot of autonomous systems. Yep.

Be a little more specific. I mean, what does it look like? I mean, we had talked about, you know, I was just talking about, did you get any pushback from the SEAL teams of the soft community about, you know, is this going to take our job? Which, you know, my perspective is, yeah, it probably will eventually take your job. But, you know, and that, you know, that sucks for somebody that's aspiring to be, you know, a SEAL, a Green Beret, infantry, whatever, right? But, I mean, for the, for the, you know, broader consciousness of the country and even the world, I mean, that's less people coming home in bags. you know it's and so i you know i mean i mentioned to breakfast i interviewed you know palmer lucky

and kind of asked him the same question you know what does it look like is this going to replace all personnel military wide eventually he says no he knows a hell of a lot more about this than i do but you know when he's talking about and you too i mean when you guys are talking about this stuff i mean it's making uh pilots obsolete it's making you know dino mavrucus and other seal who's doing autonomous surface warfare vehicles it makes a lot of naval vessels obsolete i mean the drone that you you know the quad copter that's that's taking somebody's you know job and and and so i'm just curious i mean which i like i want to i just want to be clear i think that's that is a good thing for the nation less less deaths on our own side of more is

obviously better yeah so you know what does you What is your vision? What does it look like in 2035? In 2035, so there's like, directly in 2035, humans still play a massive role. I think it's going to be a human machine team augmented by swarms of autonomous systems, but you are still going to have, like, it will not have proliferated, autonomous systems will not have completely proliferated by that stage of the game in terms of like how militaries operate.

It's still going to be a heavy reliance. on humans for a number of different mission sets, augmented by, often by like machines. If you look at like, I don't know what the time span is, I'm going to like say a hundred years simply because no one will be like get upset of me for making a hundred year prediction. Yeah, I don't think you see humans playing a big role in warfare 100 years from now. I think that actually happens probably sooner where countries, you know, it becomes a, you know, robot-on-robot deterrence where right and I think that's like it's a good place right where it's like we're not neither side you want to be sending you know young men and women uh to fight each other um

over you know often like what I would call like you know things that we shouldn't be fighting over so I do you think you'll see a lot of autonomous systems in 2035 I don't think they're going to be executing every single mission that the Department of War executes on, but I think people are going to see like, holy smokes. In the same way, we in the soft community saw what, you know, the Reaper drones, the predator drones could do for us from 2000, 2020. I think you're going to see people say, holy smokes, look at what autonomous systems can do for us. You know, we like need to double down, triple down, 10x down on like these

types of systems because they're going to have massive strategic impacts on the battlefield. Happy to talk, you know, about why. Let's do it. Yeah. I think, and like this is why I believe autonomy,

if I had to like point out like the most strategic technologies in warfare for the past 90 years, 100 years, it'd be like our air power. And behind that, you have like, you know, our nuclear triad, our nuclear submarine is super important. In the 80s, we developed stealth technology and GPS guided munitions. Then we adopted large drones from 2000 to 2020.

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

some BC to freaking, you know, the 1800s, you know, then maneuver started becoming more important. And now it's like, how can you maneuver mass most effectively? Even when I was doing my first augment, I was with the ground force commander who conducted the bin Laden, right, he was kind enough to mentor me. And he's like, look, he's like, what we do at DevGrew is like really cool. He's like, but it's like, we need our brothers or sisters in the army and the Marine Corps to bring the mass to the fight. You need mass to occupy. terrain. You need mass to create stability. And like, you know, soft forces just don't bring the mass or the heft to the fight. And that's why you need the Army and the Marine Corps to bring that

level of mass. What autonomy does is it unlocks the concept of near infinite, intelligent, maneuverable mass, where you are no longer limited by the number of personnel you have, right? The number of war fighters that the United States could theoretically field, right, call it able-aged, you know, men and women from age, you know, 18 to 55, there's a finite number of people. You're like with AI and autonomy and combined with, you know, industrial production, you can field million, 10 million, 100 million drone-sized armies. to employ mass effectively on the battlefield. And that's why it's such a big deterrent, and that's why I think the United States has to lead. That's why it's like the most strategic AI and autonomy

being the most strategic capability for the next 50 years. Wow. Damn. I mean, who are your competitors? Not just domestic, but I mean foreign competitors. I mean, we seem to be, you know, from my perspective, on the cutting edge of all this. autonomous warfare type stuff, but I mean, you know, everybody that I bring in here is talking about China, China, China's right on our ass, if not a little bit ahead, you know, with AI, with energy,

with autonomous systems, shipbuilding, all that kind of stuff. I mean, who are the key players in the world? In the world, I think China is the key player that matters. Now, the good news is The United States remains best in the world at software, at AI, at autonomy. But like that in no means we should be complacent. I think the Chinese are highly innovative. They are able to mobilize resources in a faster way than the United States can mobilize resources, at least state-sponsored resources. And their iteration cycle, like how quickly.

they go from version one to version two to version three to version four to version five is much faster than the USA and I've been in a number of classified briefings that actually show their ability to iterate and obviously like can't go into like what those timelines are or what those capabilities are but stuff to say like no one should feel good about it because like as Elon Musk says like all that matters is your cycle time all that matters is your iteration cycle. If you suck at something, but you can get really good at it, really fast, then it becomes a problem. Like, it doesn't matter if you're here and if China's here and we're here, like, we shouldn't feel good if China's accelerating like this and we're just kind of like,

you know, moving forward at a slower clip because eventually they pass us. So, yeah, they're by far number one. And they, yeah, they understand the technology. They've made claims. They want to build a million drone-sized army, right? And we're seeing that more and more from countries throughout the world, basically stating that they're moving towards million-plus drone, drone armies. What, I mean, corporate espionage is a major problem, especially in the defense tech space, you know, with Chinese nationalists coming into the country and getting indoor schools and embedding into companies.

And so I'm just curious. I mean, do you take that seriously? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a major, I mean, you are, you and your company could be detrimental to China. Pretty much, I mean, we just talked about the drug trafficking going across, you know, you got a part in that. I mean, you see where I'm going with those? Yeah, yeah, no, we take security like very seriously. it's um it's the hard thing is right you're in the intelligence community a state sponsored actor

is like a really hard thing to stop right if china can steal the plans for the joint strike fighter right um it is a it's like what's the like it's hard to stop someone that is truly determined to take um no matter like what safeguards that you put in place and i go back to like right And the SEAL teams would talk about speed versus security, right? And I, like, I would tell my platoon, like, speed is a type of security, right? If you're iterating quicker, then that is going to make you, like, more secure, right? If you're, just like, because great, if a state-sponsored actor is stealing something, hopefully it's going to take them a couple years to, like, crack through encryption,

and then all of a sudden, like, they're a couple years behind, right? And they're just getting started. And hopefully by then you're on iteration 10. in terms of what you've been doing, right? And this is very similar to like, or Elon Musk not patenting anything from SpaceX because he's like, we just, he's assuming that, right, they're going to steal rocket plans at some point in time.

And so what matters is just like moving faster than the adversaries. Moving faster than the competition is what matters at the end of the day. Yes, you have to take like basic security protocols. And yes, you have to invest in security and you have to be aware. But like at a core first principle,

level, I think, like, what matters in business, what matters for our country, is an emphasis on speed over security. And I think the U.S. actually has been more challenged in this world where it's always, like, compartmentalize, move things. Security slows things down in a lot of ways sometimes, where it's like, no, we have to be moving at speed. Interesting. Interesting. My days don't slow down. Between work, the gym, and time with the kids, I need eyewear that can keep up with everything I've got going on. And that's why I trust Roka. I've tried plenty of shades before, but these stand out. They're built for performance without sacrificing style. I've put them through it all, on the range, out on the water,

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866-781-8900 or Americanfinancing.net slash SRS. Let's talk about the expat. I mean, we were talking about the two companies that you acquired. The V-BAT. The V-BAT. Excuse me. The V-BAT. What is that? So the V-BAT, 180-pound vertical takeoff, launch, and land aircraft does the mission of a predator, reaper, you know, a fraction of the cost. ISR and targeting mission does it differently than these larger group five they call them group five drones v bat is a group three drone um but essentially it is um yeah conducting isr and targeting so we've deployed that thing to like our big wins have been in ukraine uh they have been um uh in the kirbian sea uh most recently uh but that's where it's like provided massive value to our

customers takes off and lands like a SpaceX rocket that's like logistics footprint is tiny those are like something like the key value AI piloted able to operate where GPS and communications are jammed that's where right on the Ukrainian battlefield the Russia-Ukraine conflict where we've been able to have some pretty unique and rare success so these things vertically take off yes yep I mean can you go into why that is so important yeah um So vertical takeoff at launch and land, and this will, this goes to the UAP that's in your, that's in your backyard that we're going to talk about. But why is that important? It's runways are massive infrastructure.

They're massive targets. All right. And so in this, in like, you can't really hide a runway. And then so when a pure adversary, like, that's one of the first things that they're going to target. Actually, like the Ukrainians, when President Biden enabled them to use attack them into Russia, first thing the Ukrainians went after were runways, right? Actually, then with their special operation where they had a bunch of, you know, these are like FPV drones that they used to blow up Russian assets, those, you know, they were targeting

runways and the equipment on runways because they knew where all these things were because, again, runways very stationary, high value infrastructure that can, massively disrupt operations. And so that's like, you want to, in this world where warfare is incredibly dynamic, where the enemies have long-range missile systems that can hit your runways, that where your adversaries know, you look at their priority list of targets, number one is runway, right? It's an aircraft carrier.

It's a stationary runway. in the Pacific, that's the first thing they're going after because every adversary wants to take away the U.S. and our allies like principal advantage, which is air superiority. So they're going after your runways.

What vertical takeoff launch of land, besides like getting out of runways, it allows you to be very tactical, very maneuverable. The Ukrainians and the Russians, they're moving their strategic equipment every 10 minutes because they're just sitting targets. So you have to be mobile. If you're tied to a runway, like

you're not very mobile. How would these, I mean, how would these be deployed? Would they, are they, yeah, how many of them get deployed? Yeah, so the V-Bats, theoretically, like a swarm, you could use a swarm of V-bats that would be, like, it becomes like an operational challenge to, like, actually deploy swarms, like more of a logistics challenge than anything. But the way that, like, we're, the Ukrainians are using them,

They're putting in the back of sprinter vans, going to a launch point, launching, moving, commanding the thing, landing it somewhere else, right? Again, I don't think a lot of folks, if you haven't been over there, realize how dynamic the battlefield is at this stage in the game. It's just constant movement. Shoot and move, shoot and move, but done like in the essence where it's like, if you're not doing it, you're just getting your target, you're a sitting duck. So you have to have this mobile equipment. You still have to have the ability to conduct ISR in targeting, but you're just limited not just from like that runways are targets, but also the proliferation of surface-air missile systems

make large, exquisite aircraft very vulnerable. Whether it's, you know, everybody saw our Stinger missiles or not our, like they saw Ukrainians shooting down Russian helicopters with Stinger missiles. They saw that in 1980s in Afghanistan. in. They saw it again in Ukraine and just augmented by other surface air missile systems. It's really impossible, like, using large, exquisite platforms and even, like, too dangerous for man platforms to operate in these highly contested environments. And I say contested. I mean, lots of surface air missile systems, lots of GPS jammers, lots of communications jammers.

When you, I mean, when they are deployed, are they, I mean, it's just so foreign to me. I mean, you know, you go to Bogram and you see everything. Yeah. You go to biop and you see every, you see helicopters, fighter, everything, right? From C-130s to whatever, your fighter jets to Chinooks, patches, all of that. And so because of the vertical takeoff, I mean, a couple of questions. I mean, are they dispersed throughout the country? you know, in onesies and twosies or...

That's exactly right, right? You're pushing capability to the lower echelons. And that's actually like, right? When I got to do my commando mission in Afghanistan, I had a full stack of air supporting me, and so I was able to have outsized effect on the battlefield because a lot of incredibly strategic capability was pushed to a lower echelon element, right?

A sealed platoon in Afghanistan. And so what these countries are doing, they're pushing this great capability to lower echelons, it causes a lot of challenges for the adversaries, right? They don't know where they are because they're distributed. They're small. They don't have a massive infrastructure footprint. And so you're creating dilemmas where a dilemma for the adversary being like, I don't know where these things are, where they're launching from, where they're landing from. And that's like it caused a lot of problems for the enemy if you don't know what your adversary is dealing, right?

If you don't know what the other guys are doing. Are they dedicated to specific units? Yeah, they are. Yep. Okay, okay. And so, I mean, that could mean a whole array of different capabilities, you know, with one, you know, with your product, the V-BAT. And so, I mean, if you have one mission that's an ISR mission, you know,

surveillance, detection, stuff like that, and then you have, a kinetic mission. I mean, how do you, how do you tell the machine what you're going to do, like what the mission is? Yeah. So these basically, right, the way to think about it is you're training a system to learn a mission, right? And that becomes, you can think of it as like a library of missions and then you're

going to check out said mission for, like, check out the book, check out the mission from the said library for what you're going to be executing. So that's like that, you know, probably the easiest way. to explain it but it's not you're not pre-planning a mission right but you're saying this is the mission i want to execute the good thing is is like every single military mission has been written in pretty like good detail and description in like army field manuals in you know the infantry squad books right in like every air operations manual these missions are well described and the cool thing is like software engineers can take those descriptions and then turn them into uh you know

you know, a software package, you know, a software emission package. And you guys do both. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Build the product or you build the hardware and the software. Yes, we do, yeah. Was it always like that? It was out of a necessity, right? When we wanted to, we started off with the quadcopter, we said,

hey, are there any other quadcopters that can carry the sensors, the compute, and the package that we need to do to make a product? And the answer was like, no, those didn't exist. And so we decided to, hey, we're going to have to be. build our own quadcopter. So we built a hardware engineering team, built that product. And then when we decided to, like, move up the aviation food chain, a big reason for that was what, like, I could tell someone, I could tell a four-star general,

four-star admiral or like, you know, an undersecretary all day, every day that this AI pilot that's flying your quadcopter, you can put it on F-16. But back in like 2018, 2019, everybody's like, no, like, I don't believe that, right? So we were like, hey, we need another piece of hardware to demonstrate that this AI pilot is transfer forable from platform to platform to platform. That led to the acquisition of the Vbat. We're like, okay, now we can put the AI pilot on the Vbat. Now you see the AI pilot running on a quadcaptor.

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

And again, this is something that we architected our autonomy stack from the get-go, right, with that vision of a world of autonomous systems. And so, like, Shield AI stands alone in our ability to integrate onto platform, platform, platform, platform really rapidly. One of the, like, one of the cool things we can take, we've integrated on a variant of the Lakota helicopter. What used to take 40 engineers in like tens of millions of dollars and two years to do on our quadcopter, we can now do with a couple hundred thousand dollars, three engineers in three months on something like a Lakota helicopter or something like a, you know, a jet-powered drone. So when you're talking about, you know, drone storms with the V-bat, I mean, these are big devices. big, big, big. Yeah, they're 180 pounds. They stand like nine feet tall, I think.

They're not, but again, they fit in the back of a sprinter van, like, in terms of, like, so they're big. They're not, like, F-16 big, yeah. And so if you're going to, if you're going to do a swarm of these things, I mean, are these, do they all know what each other is doing? Yeah, they, exactly. They're sharing information with each other. And so, again, building that map, sharing that worldview with each other, sharing position, friendly position, any me position in the same way. Like, if we were doing an operation together, I hop on a radio, I can share a lot of information

with you. These things are doing the exact same thing. Just faster. Just faster. A lot faster. Yeah. Superhuman speeds. Is it real time?

Yeah. Yeah. We're doing things. It's getting ready to engage something. Yeah. We've done things with fighters. With fighter jets, like one of the things I've learned about air warfare is like if you're doing like fighter jet tactics with whether like multiple fighter jets like four of them in the air, right? The coordination is actually like a really, really important thing in terms of like executing the tactics.

And it's a really hard thing even for the most experienced fighter pilots to pull off. We've had lifelong fighter pilots at Shield AI who are like, look, I could never get my fighter. pilot squadron to do what this AI just did right like it's wildly uh impressive like the accuracy uh and the speed with which they are coordinating with each other reading and reacting off each other wow let's talk about the darfa alpha dog fight yeah what was that so darpa alpha dog fight um it was uh so go back to like you had alpha go you had alpha star darper's like i believe that we could do an ai pilot dog fight to show that, you know, basically a great credit to DARPA is basically show that the value that these systems could be able to provide.

And so what it was is there's a number of companies that participated. It was AI pilot versus AI pilot, dog fighting, in simulation, F-16s. The other good thing that I like about it is, like, it was unclassified so we can talk about it. And AI pilot versus AI pilot in simulated dog fights. And what Shield AI ended up doing, right? What Heron Systems, a Shield AI company ended up doing was we ended up winning the Alpha Dogfight where we defeated every single AI pilot in this dog fighting competition. It was like a ladder, right?

Like you beat them, you move on, a playoff bracket. And then the winner, we got to go up. against um a uh you know an actual fighter pilot in simulation a you know a fighter weapon school pilot a top gun um and want to say we won five oh in that competition right and so what that did is basically say like hey you know and DARPA did that to basically say like look this is why we should invest in this capability this technology um and it wasn't to say hey let's you know build autonomous F-16s, but as we build this next generation of uncrewed fighter jets, you know, a lot of people call them collaborative combat aircraft, it's we can actually have

an AI pilot and autonomy stack that is, you know, running these aircraft. Dude, I mean, you're probably like most overachievers, but I mean, what does that feel like to see your company's innovations outdo everything. I mean, do you even take the time to self-reflect and think about, like, the magnitude of what you? Unfortunately, I don't, just because it's like, you know, like, it's like, I think it's really cool again. I don't, it doesn't, the thing that I just, it's when there's, like, mission impact. That's what is, like, truly does it for me. And I don't say that as, like, a talking point, but it's like, like, truly, like, when the products do something, that's what, like, I really care about.

I, yes, like, the innovation is cool. The capabilities are cool. I'm very proud of the team. But, like, you don't, unfortunately, you see a lot of companies, right, in the military space that we're just innovating for the sake of innovation versus actually building a capability that's going to make a difference on the battlefield. And so that's, like, what I care about. I don't do enough reflection.

I don't do enough. My wife's, like, you never celebrate anything. I don't, like, um, sounds like, something. There's, yeah, yeah, you get it, right? I actually love the, there's an old Kobe Bryant clip when they had won, like, game, like, three of the NBA finals. And, like, Kobe, we can't get a smile from you. He's like, what's there to be happy about? Like, job finished?

Job's not finished. And that is like, you know, the mentality that I have. Yeah, I am plagued by the same thing. Although I will say last night when the ex-back got dropped off. Yeah. I was like, I can't fucking believe this thing, so I went home and I was like, told my wife, I was like, you got to come out here and see this with the kids. Yeah.

We have America's aerial defense in offensive system that nobody knows about sitting in our fucking front yard right now. No, I'm, I'm super pumped to unveil it on your show. It's just wild to be. It's crazy. But you want to talk about the expat? Yeah. I'm happy to talk about the X-Bet.

Now that we're talking about it. All right. So X-Bat, just some background. Shield AI, when we think about hardware, like, we want to build. Hardware's, you know, really effing hard to build. It is because you're stuck with the design choices that you make for a long time. Software, you can quickly, like, iterate on the design choices that you make. There's certainly, like, there are challenges in architecting a good software.

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

that's why we decide to buy VBAT and go with it. But we're not looking to build 26 different hardware products out there. Like, we are an AI and autonomy company. We, build amazing aircraft. And we have these great assets. We have a software engineering asset that's world class. We have a hardware engineering asset that's world class. Since we had to ask ourselves, okay, we've done VAT. What's next? What's the next piece of hardware that we want to build? Do we want to build a one-way attack drone? Do we want to build a USB, a maritime platform? Do we want to build a hypersonic missile. And so after great deliberation and great credit to our head of aircraft,

head of our aircraft business, Armour Harris came from SpaceX, came up with this thing called the expat. And so what is expat? Exbat is a first of its kind, vertical takeoff, launch and land, multi-role combat. that strike jet, you know, platform that, you know, is AI piloted. It is the first airplane in the history of airplanes that has both, or it doesn't require runway and doesn't require a human pilot. It's AI piloted and it doesn't, it's vertical takeoff, launch, and land.

And from that, there are a massive number of benefits to the platform. One of the big benefits, right, if I talk to the geographic combatant commanders, right, these are the four stars, admirals and generals, running into paycom, running Ucom, that are posed with the strategic problem, how do you deter our adversaries, and if necessary, fight to defeat our adversaries, they would tell you, like, the value of expat comes from the ability to create a massive number of dilemmas by having geographically distributed. long-range fires that can be launched from anywhere on the battlefield. And so now where, you know, an adversary like China has to worry about these fixed runways and a couple air, you know, the United States has 11 aircraft carriers. We have to worry about, you know, a couple fixed runways. And these aircraft carriers, now all of a sudden they have to worry about every, you know, 20 foot by 20 foot spot of Earth on the planet.

And that is, you know, why is that matter? Now it basically forces them to redefine their invasion calculus. If you don't know where America's assets are, especially our aerial assets, which are number one conventional strategic deterrent, it's going to force you to, yeah, rethink your war plans. It buys diplomacy another day. on the other side of the coin of what I would tell you about like ex-bat and this is like again I want to be super clear like expat is going to augment uh you know fighter pilots for you know quite

some time um but like when I look at something like the joint strike fighter um it is an incredible capability like if you actually like dig into like what that capability offers the USA it's amazing. But it requires runways, it requires hard and bunkers, it requires a $10 million pilot just to get, like, to be certified on flying it, right?

Not even making them like an expert at that system, right? It's like, I could put, you know, when we became Navy SEALs, we weren't expert Navy SEALs on day one, right? $10 million to make you, you know, base, you know, just dangerous enough with the aircraft. It is limited range.

I want to say it's around like 550 nautical mile combat radius. And so if you want to employ Joint Strike Fighter in the Pacific where there are 1,000 nautical mile ranges, you have to have refueling tankers. And because of the threat environment, we've built autonomous refueling tankers, right? Which is another, like, expensive capability. You have built a refueling?

No, no, no, we did. Like the USA has built refueling tankers. for these joint strike fighters and then the platform itself is $100 million. So when you look at the all-in total cost of capability for the joint strike fighter, again, amazing capability. It's wildly expensive. It's estimated $200 million to $250 million per aircraft.

When you look at all these add-on capabilities, not to mention the total lifecycle cost of it, the hourly cost of operating at $35,000 a hour. Expat, vertical takeoff, launch, and land, no runways. It is, you know, AI pilot, so no human pilot. It has a 2,100 nautical mile range with mission payload. And so you have, you know, massive range. We're targeting $27.5 million per pop on it with a $6,000 per hour operating cost for the aircraft.

And so you're getting fifth, six-gen capability at a fraction of the cost. And that's something that no one else is doing or offering. Wow. Wow. I mean, the V-BAT beat the F-35, correct? No, no, no. No, no. So V-Bat being the – and now V-Bat-X-Bat can get confusing.

V-Bat's the mini-reeper predator. the expat in development we're going to we've got a subsystem prototype that's flying in 2026, full system prototype flying in 2027

going to production in 2029 the AI pilot for that aircraft we're developing AI pilots for this next generation of uncrewed fighter jets and so we have not gone up against

you know F-35, what we've gone up against are F-16s, and actual F-16s, and F-16 versus F-16, and this was part of the DARPA ACE program, which was the next program from the DARPA-Alpha dog fight, where we've gone up against F-16 pilots, and yeah, we've, you know, AI pilot, like, it wins.

Crushes it. Yeah. So. You ready to go take a look? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we've got, you know, a model out there that excited to show. you. It's really cool. Let's do it. Let's do it.

Let's do it. All right, Brandon, what do we looking at here? All right, so this is the X-Bat and the LRV, which is the launch recovery vehicle for the expat. It's actually a scaled model, believe it or not. This is only two-thirds the actual size to get it into trade shows. trade shows and events we are limited in terms of like the actual size but um yeah this is uh the aircraft that we are building uh currently so um but yeah this is our our model that we take to events help people understand uh what we're building the capabilities and you know gives gives them

something visually to look at but uh yeah i uh i don't know this actually my first time seeing it physically i've only seen it uh in the photos from our team and no it's uh like i've told you i've been doing this now for 10 years you get it's hard hard work right but i think this is like i get inspired by this thing like i'm fired up to build this thing i'm fired up to make it a reality for the warfighter i think the capability is it is absolutely strategic it's going to make a huge impact and it's like who who gets to work at the intersection of AI pilots and in fighter aircraft build an AI piloted fighter aircraft that doesn't require a runway so that's cool not very many people yeah but uh so 2,100 nautical mile radius with mission payload yeah

mission payload so basically this thing can carry the same thing uh same amount of payload as an f18 f35 um it's carrying four am rams uh internal uh it's got two a medium range air to air missile um So at the same, so multi-role, it can be for air-to-air missions, air-to-ground missions, air-to-surface missions. It can be used for electronic warfare missions. It is, yeah, it's an incredible aircraft. Yeah, I'm happy to walk around, tell you all about it. Let's do it. All right.

Let's do it. So one of the cool things, we're actually using the F-100 engine is the engine. is the engine that is used in F-15s, F-16s. One of the really cool aspects about it is it's a multi-plane thrust-vectoring engine, which is also the only U.S. airplane, U.S. jet in existence that has multi-plane thrust vectoring. So the F-22 uses 2D-plane thrust vectoring.

I want to say it's the Russians have this, the Russians or Chinese have an aircraft. that has multi-plane thrust vectoring, but basically what that enables is increased maneuverability, some low-speed maneuvers. I was looking it up the other day. It enables something like, I want to call it, like the Pugachev Cobra maneuver,

is something they may have shown in like Top Gun 2 when they're like, holy crap, what the hell is that, that type of stuff. So I know someone's got to check me and it's gonna be some other maneuver, but like, you know. The internet will sort it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the internet will sort it out.

So is this how it launches? Yeah, so it launches from this position, and it also recovers from this position. One of the things we had, so the LRV is also really cool. It's got this called a blast shield, but one of the things that they were discovering with F-35 when it was taking off from aircraft carriers, because they have a, a vertical takeoff or short takeoff launch and land, but the engine was burning holes into the flight deck. And so that was just like a massive problem with the aircraft.

This meant to deflect, you know, when we go afterburner on it and just the heat that's being generated from the engine when we're taken off and when we're landing. So, but yeah, it launches, lands like a SpaceX rocket, again, our head of aircraft. Armour Harris, I feel like he was just built for developing this aircraft, but worked as a principal engineer on the Falcon 9, launching land, and then was doing Starlink, Star Shield, working with Elon, and just wanted to work on the air layer and build next-generation aircraft. So, yeah. That is amazing. What is that hole in the front?

So that's the intake up there. So air intake for the engine. And, yeah, that's what it is. Right on. Yeah, not much more to it. Where do the, where do all the weapon eat? So you've got internal and hard points on the other sides of the wings there. Those are the weapons bay for, again, carrying basically any weapon, any, you can carry larasms, long range, anti-ship missiles, you can carry air-to-air missiles, air-to-ground missiles.

You can carry bombs. Again, very much think of it as like, you know, the same thing that you would find on a fighter aircraft in terms of its weapon payload. The unique thing and like one of the differentiating things about this besides being vertical takeoff, launch, and land. But if I were to compare it to like some of the other new CCA capabilities that you've seen built, those aircraft are using business jet engines. And so they can't generate the electrical power to run fifth generation, sixth generation sensor suites and electronic attack payloads. And so electronic warfare being a massive aspect of the battlefield today, right, jamming enemy GPS, jamming enemy communications, things that something like the F-18 growler would be doing, we can also do that mission. And so it's like, look, even, you know, if you were to go Winchester on the weapons on this aircraft, you still have your electronic attack abilities. And so you're still playing a role in the fight.

You can act as comms relay. Yeah, this thing is sick. mean electronic warfare, like jamming capabilities? Yeah, jamming. Jamming, GPS, jamming, the communications on other enemy platforms. Wow. One of the other cool things, so we like to say this thing hauls ass and sips gas, right? It can fly for 2,100 nautical miles with full mission payload, but it's flying, cruising at 55,000 feet altitude, which is higher than any other like aircraft like definitely like in its in its class right um and why is that important

it actually allows your air-to-air missiles it improves the kinematics on them which makes for you know the easiest way to say there's like longer range weapons um and so now your missiles can actually go further because they're you know they're actually the air's less dense up there they're able to they're not you know using as much gas when they're being fired um and i don't think a lot of people appreciate but like in air to air combat air to air warfare like what matters is your sensor range what matters is uh the range of your missiles um it's not you know as cool as like dog fighting is it's not you know within visual range dog fighting anymore it's you know f35 is amazing because it can see everything before it gets seen um and it can attack those things same thing

uh with this aircraft that is crazy yeah powered by hive mind hive mind being our a i pilot Again, I've just been working on high fine for the past 10 years. And so the mission sets, like we were talking about in the studio, being like that library, I've checked out missions, but continue to work on classified, you know, classified level missions for air-to-air missions, air-to-ground missions for this aircraft. Wow. 55,000 feet, 2100 miles, nautical miles with a payload. How fast does it go?

Um, we're cruising, uh, cruising at Mach 0.85. Um, we're expecting that you'll be able to dash supersonic. The problem when you dash supersonic is that your, your signature goes up. Uh, people now and, um, right, this thing is meant to be, uh, pretty, pretty low observable in terms of, uh, what the enemy's looking for. So, yeah. And it land, so when it lands, yep, it lands just like this? Land's just like this, takes off lands, don't want to say, like, yeah, we took inspiration from, you know, SpaceX, you know, catching the thing. So it just, it lands like, it goes to reverse and just lands right air, hooked up, ready to roll again. We've got a lot of experience doing that with the V-BAT. And actually, believe it or not, V-Bat's a harder thing to launch and land than something like this.

Because, like, in Armour will tell you, it's like, look, Falcon 9, you have all the thrust in the world. and, like, you put that thing wherever you want on the planet, centimeters, like V-BAT, and, like, you have perfect weather conditions. V-Bat, you're operating in the worst weather conditions. You don't have a lot of thrust. It's a big challenge. X-Bat, you have an incredible amount of thrust from, like, a technical challenge aspect.

If this is V-Bat and this is Falcon 9, you have X-Bat, like, right, you know, next to Falcon 9. Again, that multi-plane thrust vectoring allows us to put this thing, you know, wherever we need to put it. Wow. But, yeah, no, it's, right? I mean, not only, it's, you can now make every ship an aircraft carrier. You can make non-standard vessels, aircraft carriers, right?

You can put these things on cargo ships, island chains. It just becomes a really intractable thing for the adversary to track, which can go everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah. We're in a field here, right? You go into a forest clearing. We were joking around. You put this thing on, you know, pickleball court, if you want.

Like every pickleball court in the world is now your runway. Damn. Yeah. That is awesome. Could you imagine a drone swarm of these bad boys coming after your ass? Yeah. No, this thing is, no, and that's what, look, we're very much working on the behaviors, the missions of multi-agent expats flying around, augmenting, you know, fighter pilots,

It's augmenting the mission, executing the mission independently. Like I said, for me, this is like an inspirational aircraft. I'm like, holy crap, this is like one of those, this is a cool thing to build. Like that, you know. One of those moments. Yeah, yeah. Like if you want to be at the intersection of AI, national security, building cool, you know, jet aircraft, shield AI is, you know, a great place to do it. So, no limit, you know, in terms of the ambition and the imagination here.

So, congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm excited to, you know, launch this thing on your show. I think that's like, you know, that's a cool thing. I know a lot of people watch it. I think it's, you know, thanks for letting us bring it onto your property. I'm sure your neighbors were like, what the hell is this thing?

They're worried about what's Sean got going on right now. They're like, what the fuck is going on? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, man. Congratulations. That is, this is the kind of stuff that just makes me proud to be an American. Like, that is the future of area warfare. That is.

Yeah, it fundamentally will transform air warfare, right? Again, no more. Earth is our runway. AI piloted. It's a mean machine that, I think, to the point of it's going to deter our adversaries by diplomacy another day so yeah i'll say i'll say wow awesome i want to see a launch yeah yeah yeah well oh so right we'll bring you out to the happy to bring you out to the first flight i think it's only appropriate that dude i would love that yeah so i would love that cool yeah thank you

absolutely no thanks sean do you feel it that something's on What if none of this is real? For decades, wars have been fought in silence. No bullets, no bombs, just influence. They're called psychological operations, sciops. What if it's all designed for you? Find out who's really pulling the strings. I'm Sean Ryan, and this is Target Intelligence, Sciop, an ironclad original.

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That is, I can't wait to see the launch. Yeah, it'll be sick. And the land. You've got to tired up to see that thing land. But, you know, one thing we didn't cover. or is the V-Bad flew 130-sorty so far in Ukraine? Yeah, probably, I mean, by the time this air is probably a lot more. But, yeah, one of the, again, things that I'm, like, super proud of having that mission impact,

our Ukraine story is like, I think it's one, our results are unique. But the story is kind of interesting in that in 20, 23, the British, the British, the British, British pushed out a bunch of V-Bats to the Ukrainians. We told them, hey, HiveMind, our AI pilot, it's not integrated yet. You're not going to, like, if GPS or communications is jammed, like, it's not going to work. Because, again, we had bought that company in late 21, and we were still in the integration process of the AI with the aircraft and making it a hardened capability. British gave it, they're like, look, we just want to get equipment assets out to the Ukrainians. there's a major push coming in the spring.

And so they pushed out V-Bats. They pushed out lots of equipment. Jamming happened. V-Bats failed, right? As we told them it would. Ukrainians basically said, hey, come back when you have this fix. We still believe in the capability.

Came back in June, May June of 2024. And they're like, look, we're going to put it through an electronic warfare testing regimen. Went up against those three, four days of, every jammer. They had seven jammers, GPS communications, running max power, Vbat flying within 50 feet, no impact on it, right? Because we had integrated the AI pilot on board this time. They kind of strung us along here and said, look, like, all right, great that you passed the test. And this was unique. No one had, no one's ever passed this test. It was, they were trying to

make us fail with all these jammers. They said, okay, great, we'll put in letters of request to the U.S. if it actually proves its worth on the battlefield. And we're like, well, you guys didn't tell us about this, but we said, okay, let's look, we're here to make mission impact. First operation ever flew. GPS communications was jammed. I don't think people realize it's completely jammed in Ukraine on the battlefield. And so every mission that we've done, GPS and COBS has been jammed.

But our first mission that we did, actually fun, the interesting part of the story is, like one of the interesting parts um one of the assumptions we made was that uh we asked them like look we're going to you know near the front is GPS going to be jammed on takeoff they said no like it's not going to be jammed on takeoff um so we go out to operate and lo and behold GPS is jammed on takeoff on this mission we're supposed to execute uh vbat starts flying in another direction right because of GPS jamming um because we had assumed it was going to be available just for takeoff and what ends up happening is like six hours of our team driving through Ukraine kind of like the movie Interstellar when they're like going through the cornfields trying

to capture the drone like that's what our team did they land it um Ukraine is like yeah I didn't think it was going to work on the battlefield we're like well you guys gave us a bad assumption within 24 hours team worked it they came up with a software solution right it's just like basically changing an assumption um tested it in Texas pushed the software software update to Ukraine. Next day we said, hey, give us, you know, we want to retake this mission. Execute the mission. Do fine on takeoff. Executing the mission. Coms GPS jam the entire time. Target an S.A. 11 Buccavel surface air missile system. Ukrainians call in High Mars airbursts round. Destroys the Buccavel. Target is second S.A. 11 Buckevel surface

air missile system. High Mars misses due to GPS jamming. The effectiveness of U.S. weapon systems is really poor in these GPS jammed environments. So that leads to letters of request from the U.S. government. And then president takes office and right stops, you know, funding, which is, you know, again, like I'm fine with the decision as like an American taxpayer. I understand it, right? As Shield AI, we're like, oh, my God, we're at the finish line. And then, like, you know, we're about to deliver capability. thankfully Europeans

step up to the plate they get V-Bad aircraft over there and then we go through training with the Ukrainians January to March and since April they have been absolutely lethal with the system and so God there was like a two-week period

where we were executing 4 to 6 strikes every day or enabling 4 to 6 strikes every single day destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian equipment. It's a capability that they had never had long range ISR and targeting before. They were fighting a very tactical fight,

but now with this capability to penetrate deeper into enemy-held territory while GPS, while comms is jammed. They were finding targets that they had been looking for for six, nine months they couldn't find. And so, again, super proud of the impact that we've played there. And as we think about, you know, when we talk to them now, they're like, man, if we had been able to put up a bunch of these on our border, right?

And knowing that every single V-bats tied into some sort of long-range weapon system, you could deter your adversaries. And so as we look to, you know, the Pacific, that's something that we think about a lot. We see that out of, you know, a country like Taiwan that is absolutely trying to deter adversaries. It's like, well, you have to have the equipment that the adversary respects to deter them. And so, you know, I'm thankful that, like, V-BAT is one of these things that has been battlefield-proven. And to the point, like, what, I'm just going to hammer home in on again, like, there aren't other U.S. companies doing this. Like, they are not having success in these GPS and comms jammed environments. It is a very hard problem.

I actually would say that there's only two companies in the world. I can't name the other company that's actually finding success there. It's a Ukrainian company in these environments. And that's from reporting from, you know, you know, call it the warfighters out there in terms of like actually executing the ISR in targeting a mission. Now, tactically, when you're talking like fiber optic

connected quadcopters, where the GPS, like where you're tethered to something and you can fight in the, you know, one to 10 kilometer range, yes, there's like a lot of tactical innovations happening on that end. But at like the strategic operational level, proud that Shield AI stands along.

Man, again, congratulations. Thank you. You know, when it, you know, a lot of hacking, you know, and so is this, would this be a system that China could hack into, you know, if we were using it for an offensive? It'd be incredibly difficult. Like, it would be incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, I wouldn't say it'd be tactically feasible to actually, like, execute.

You'd have to be, like, proximal to the command station where these things, You'd have to know where they were flying, whether it's V-BAT, whether it's X-BAT, and then you have to, like, get through encryption. It's just not like the way to take out these systems are going to be kinetically using surface-dair missile systems. And that's actually like, look, we've lost V-BATs to surface-dayer missile systems in Ukraine. And I remember, like, you know, we get a report back, hey, you know, S-300 shot down a V-Bat. I'm like, all right, a million-dollar missile, you know, for a $750,000 aircraft.

I'll take that trade. And so that's, you know, that's going to be the way that you see these systems that are able, drones that are able to survive that electronic warfare because they have an AI pilot on them because they have our hive mine running on them, but the only way that you're going to be able to take them out is going to be kinetically. Now, when you're talking about jam communications and jam GPS, I mean, I would, I mean, you know, all the way back to the quadcopter, you know, all this autonomous of stuff that can think on its own and in conduct missions.

I mean, is there any, do we need communication with these devices? Like, if you want the best performance, you're going to want, the communication is, like, very beneficial. In the same way, like, if you, what I tell up, it's like, if we were a seal element, if you were a fire team leader and I was a fire team leader, if we have established communications, we can operate much better together, right? If you're across a mountain ridge and you're saying, hey, Brandon, this is what I'm doing. I can then adjust my tactics, behaviors on what you're seeing, what you're observing.

In the absence of communications, I have all the trust, faith, and confidence that you're going to be able to execute, right, that commander's intent without it. And then you'll adjust your tactics, your behaviors, your mission based on, you know, new information coming through. And so the autonomous systems work the same way. Communications, when you're in a jammed environment, you can think of it as like Swiss cheese. Sometimes you can find pockets. If you're only working with low, you know, low amounts of data, you can push that data out even though you're operating in a jammed environment. And so we'll compress a lot of that data and that allows you to actually push it out so that these systems can even, you know, interact like as a team better with each other. Oh, okay.

I didn't mean, I mean, yeah, that's a good. That's a great point. So the jamming isn't only from human to machine. It is also from machine to machine when they're flying as a team. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I mean, what do you see, what do you see these things?

What is the expat going to replace? Um. Or is it just another weapon in our arsenal? Or is it replacing? I don't like to, I really, like people get sensitive to the word replace, right? And I don't think things replace things for like a long, long time. It doesn't mean that it never happens. But it takes like, you know, self-driving cars, right?

It's going to replace drivers at some point in time. I don't think that happens for, you know, 20 plus years. So in the meantime, like, it's just augmenting in like augmenting that human team, whether it's jet aircraft, whether it's basically mechanisms to deliver long-range fires. So that could be, you know, anti-ship missiles launched from a ship. That could be, you know, fighter, bomber aircraft. It's doing the same mission. It's that strike mission or a air-to-air mission just differently.

And so that can be with human pilots, augmenting them. And I think that's how it will go in the early days. And, you know, from there, yeah, if you extrapolate, you know, the rate of innovation around AI and autonomy, I think you get to, like, really interesting places, again, down the line where you start to replace some of these systems. Do you, I mean, is there going to be any, will these machines fly along in the meantime, in the interim before that happens, which I'm sure it will? Yep. I mean, will will they co-mingle with human pilots? 100%. Yeah, they'll augment, they'll be part of that

human machine team. They will augment the pilots. I, you know, look, I think something like, And that will be, like, the first iteration, then the U.S. military started experimenting with, like, okay, let's just have these systems run on their own and execute missions. But, like, if you, like, I think the mission is going to dictate, like, what the force requirement is. In the sense, like, you're going to see missions that dictate, hey, we want to send in a package of F-35s and expats into this operation or F-22s and expats. I think you're going to see some missions where it's like, look, just send in, you know, some expats, see, like, you know, see what happens. And they can run certain missions independently and then certain missions as human machine teams.

Could you give me an example of what a mission set would look like where it is, you know, human pilots and expats together? Yeah, I think it's good, like, look, again, I think it's going to be the threat environment. And so if you're going up against, like, the worst threat environment imaginable. So I would say, like, you could imagine a strike mission where, you know, intelligence estimates that there's a limited number of surface air missile systems, but there's a complexity to the type of mission in terms of the effects that they want to have where it's like, you want to put pilots up in the air. And then there could be a mission where it's like, look, it's a simple mission, but it's a target that is like health. for any aviator because the number of surface air missile systems in the area are a ridiculous amount. We know they're mobile. We don't know exactly where they are. You might basically

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

As far as D.C. is concerned. I mean, are our politicians on board with us? Are you getting a lot of? Yeah, yeah. I think they're very much. I think not only. the politicians, but also senior DOD leadership. One, I think they're very much bought into the concept

of collaborative combat aircraft, right? These uncrewed jets that are being built by lots of people. I think, you know, for us, the combination of hive mind and expat really stands out in the sense that, again, no one's ever seen an aircraft like this before. It's pretty unique. And then, like, it's non-obvious in terms of, like,

the immediate benefits that it has for the warfighters, essentially that logistics aspect of it and just the tactical employment of it, putting it anywhere, right? It fundamentally redefines how air warfare is executed when you start eliminating the need for runways. Everything has always been constrained by that one thing. And so I think politicians very much understand that.

and absolutely like the combatant commanders and, you know, senior military leaders understand that. And it's, look, I think, yeah, they're excited about it. There's a lot of enthusiasm, support for the capability. The challenge is that no one had ever conceived of something like this. And so it's kind of like this unplanned product that you're like, wait a second, like, okay how to how what impact does this have to you know the rest of our systems as this thing comes online um not to mention the fact that you know shield ai uh is funding the vast majority of

uh its development and so it's it's just kind of you know that will be one of the challenges it's like okay well how does uh how does it affect current dod resourcing plans uh as this capability comes online how fast can you manufacture these um We want to ramp to, like, we want this aircraft to be this generation's F-16, right? I think there's something like 4,000 F-16s out there. I think you're going to see more because lower costs, lower life cycle costs, AI piloted, much easier to adopt and implement into a force structure. 2029, targeting 50 aircraft, but ramping, you know, between 300 to 500 aircraft.

Again, it's, yeah, that's, right, and that's going to be done over a number of of years to get to. But, um, and the demand for the aircraft is going to play a role, uh, in that. But, um, it's the customer reception, right? We've gone public with it today. We've been engaging the customer now for eight, nine months. And the reception has been wild, um, in terms of, like, again, pretty, it's a non-obvious way to solve a lot of problems that were never really, you know, articulated as problems. It's like, what would you do with an Air Force? that didn't require a runway, right? We're air forces, right?

You know, what does this mean for the Navy and the Marine Corps where your strike power is no longer limited to an aircraft carrier, where you can have Marines on island chains with this type of, you know, organic capability? It just redefines so much as we think about air superiority and, like, how that's employed. Yeah, it's a lot to think about.

Yeah, I would claim it's like, you know, up to the point where, like, people, it's almost, I think it'll be as transformational as like when we decided to launch airplanes from ships, right? Like, right before World War II, someone had the crazy idea like, hey, let's try to launch one of these airplane things off a ship, right? And then what did that do? That basically defined the military force structure of the United States for the next 80 years. So. Damn. Damn. Do you think we'll see these loitering for defense, loitering around fobs, loitering around the border of the country? I mean, I don't know if they'll be loitering.

Like, I think of it as like they'll be used as power projection in the same way that our aircraft carriers are used as power projection. And so I don't see them, right, when an adversary or a country is being belligerent to another country and the United States wants to do something, what do we do, we park an aircraft carrier off of its coast and we're flying sordies and saying, hey, check yourself before, you know, you wreck yourself. And I think that'll be similar. It's hard for me to see us using like that type of platform in terms of. of like local, you know, I say domestic like air patrol, domestic border security outside of like, I don't know, the Caribbean C is a pretty interesting place right now. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Brandon, we'll wrap it up the interview. And, you know, one thing that I just want to ask is, you know, for Gen Z, for the upcoming generations, I mean, what inspiration

do you have for them being somebody who's an innovator? Yeah, I think, um, look my recommendation would be uh like be bold be courageous um like you've got you know one you know precious life and just like make the most out of it uh and don't be afraid to to swing for the fences or be part of a team that is swinging for the fences like in no way are you going to regret that like i regret zero of my time in the navy even even on a ship like i'm very thankful for that time. I'm thankful for my time in the SEAL teams, like the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it. And then, you know, Shield AI, like, thankful for it. And, like, I'm, for me and, like, what I'm encouraging, yeah, I want to encourage that from, for my kids,

like, be confident, be courageous, be bold, swing for the fences. Like, why, you know, what do you have to lose is, you know, my mentality. And I would be my message for, you know, this next generation. Love that. Love that. Love that. well brandon i just want to say it was an honor to interview you man and and um just wow congratulations it's awesome what you're doing so thanks john i really appreciate it thanks for having me on the show thanks for letting us bring in the expat to your you know to your facility and you know apologize for the complaints from the neighbors so no no i mean it's like i said out there when when when when you were giving me the tour of the aircraft i mean this

This is you, what you're doing, what you've built is, is, is, is, it just makes me proud as hell to be an American. So, thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Cheers.