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

Summary

Shawn Ryan Show #247: Brandon Tseng – Shield AI’s X-BAT: The First AI Fighter Jet to Outsmart Top Gun (October 23, 2025)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Shawn Ryan sits down with Brandon Tseng, former Navy SEAL, co-founder and president of Shield AI—a leading defense technology company pioneering the use of artificial intelligence (AI) pilots in military systems. Their discussion spans Brandon’s life, SEAL teams experiences, and the evolution of Shield AI, culminating in the conceptualization and unveiling of the X-BAT: an autonomous, vertical takeoff and landing fighter jet. The episode is a journey through modern warfare, technological disruption, and personal grit, focusing on the future of military autonomy and its impact on global stability.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Brandon Tseng’s Journey: From SEAL Team to Entrepreneur

• Early Life & Upbringing

  • Grew up in Houston, Seattle, then Florida; competitive, sports and video-game obsessed childhood (13:29–14:20).
  • Family background in engineering and hard work ethic instilled by immigrant roots. Strong push toward education and gratefulness for opportunities in the U.S. (18:13–19:36).

• Dream of Becoming a SEAL

  • Inspired by movies like Under Siege and The Rock at age 10 (15:15–16:29).
  • Family had military history but little direct connection until Brandon.

• Naval Academy & SEAL Pathway

  • Described shared suffering and tight-knit relationships at the Academy, then the competitive and mentally taxing process to enter BUD/S from a Naval Academy background (25:21–28:24).

• BUD/S and Early Deployments

  • Reflects on the unique challenges (treading water test, Hell Week—“Boat crews kick their underperformers out… instructors don’t have to do anything. Your classmates are going to take care of you.”—34:04).
  • First deployments involved complex coordination with Afghan commandos, highlighting the operational and leadership challenges (44:44–50:42).

• Decision to Leave Military

  • Sought challenge outside military confines; saw entrepreneurial opportunity, inspired by family and figures like Elon Musk (51:31–53:05).

2. Founding and Building Shield AI

• The Vision

  • Founded in 2015 to specialize in developing AI pilots for military aircraft—“I believe in a world of autonomous systems… swarms are going to be the most strategic conventional deterrent of the 21st century.” (60:29–61:34).

• Mission

  • Protect warfighters and civilians with AI systems, focusing on GPS- and comms-denied environments (61:44).

• Early Solutions

  • First product: AI quadcopter for autonomous indoor building clearing—rapidly adopted in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and Ukraine. Brought operators home safely, even though the initial market was small (64:05–65:50).

3. From Quadcopter to the Fighter Jet: Technical & Strategic Advances

• Product Evolution

  • Moved up “the aviation food chain” recognizing greater impact would come from strategic, larger platforms.
  • Acquisitions: Bought Martin UAV (VBAT) and Heron Systems (AI for jets) to accelerate capability and reach (75:51).

• AI Pilots: Technical Foundations

  • Modular software stack: state estimation, mapping, controls, global reasoning, path planning—like human senses, cognition, and action (76:30–78:54).
  • Reinforcement learning methodology—millions of simulated experiences, validated with real-world feedback (78:57–80:59).

• Integration in the Field

  • Quadcopter and VBAT drones deployed with U.S. SOF and allied forces; provided decisive ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) and targeting despite heavy electronic warfare (100:20–103:22).
  • Notable real-world mission feedback, e.g., hunting surface-to-air missile systems in Ukraine under total GPS/comm jamming (135:15–142:04).

• Swarming and Machine-Machine Collaboration

  • VBAT and upcoming platforms coordinate in real time, sharing data and reacting at “superhuman speeds” (106:33).

4. The X-BAT Unveiled: The First AI Autonomous Fighter Jet

• What is X-BAT?

  • Vertical takeoff/landing (VTOL), multi-role combat strike jet, AI-piloted. No runway, no human pilot required—can be launched from almost any location (111:41–123:24).

• Strategic Advantages

  • “No more Earth is our runway… force adversaries to recalculate their plans.”—Brandon (131:52)
  • Deterrence value: “Geographically distributed long-range fires from anywhere on the battlefield.” (111:50–113:50)
  • Enables U.S. and allies to deploy airpower without reliance on vulnerable runways/aircraft carriers.

• Capabilities

  • 2,100 nautical mile range with mission payload (121:39).
  • Internal bay for AMRAAMs; multitarget, air-to-air, air-to-ground, and electronic warfare missions
  • High altitude (cruise at 55,000ft), near supersonic (Mach 0.85+) (128:19).
  • Operates at a fraction of the F-35’s cost, exponentially improving force projection and survivability (123:33–131:15).

• Deployment and Production Plans

  • First subsystem prototype: 2026; production ready by 2029, aiming for high manufacturing volumes (151:16–152:41).

5. The Future of Warfare & AI’s Role

• Warfare 2035 and Beyond

  • Human-machine teams with swarms of autonomous systems will dominate. Over next hundred years, human combatants likely phased out (82:51–84:52).
  • Autonomy will unlock “near infinite, intelligent, maneuverable mass,” fundamentally shifting military calculus (84:52–87:46).

• China’s Role

  • China most serious global competitor in military AI and autonomy, with fast iteration cycles and resource mobilization (88:24–90:08).

• Security & Espionage Concerns

  • Recognizes the challenge of state-sponsored espionage; stresses speed in innovation as a critical layer of security (90:51–92:44).

6. Reflections, Inspiration, and Vision

• Shield AI’s Ethos

  • Focus on “mission impact” above all else. Products are only meaningful when lives are saved or missions succeed (110:05).

• Advice for Next Generation

  • “Be bold, be courageous… swing for the fences. Be part of a team that's swinging for the fences. You’re never going to regret that.” (154:35–155:33)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On mission impact:
  • “The thing that I live for is mission impact. It's cool to get to have a positive impact on the world in that way.” (07:24)
• On BUD/S:
  • “I loved every second of it… Even in Hell Week… I’m not on that ship. Thank you. Blessed to be here. Blessed to be getting surf tortured.” (31:27 – 32:18)
• On leadership:
  • “The best leadership lessons I learned were actually in the fleet. It built resilience and mentality that… forever changed me.” (28:27 – 30:32)
• On AI pilots in combat:
  • “What autonomy does is, it unlocks the concept of near infinite, intelligent, maneuverable mass…” (84:52)
• On the X-BAT’s capability:
  • “The first airplane in the history of airplanes that doesn’t require a runway and doesn’t require a human pilot.” (111:50)
  • “You can now make every ship an aircraft carrier. Every pickleball court in the world is now your runway.” (128:56 – 130:18)
• On AI-augmented/future warfare:
  • “In 2035, humans still play a massive role. …But you are still going to have… swarms of autonomous systems. 100 years from now, I don't think you see humans playing a big role in warfare.” (82:51 – 84:52)
• On inspiration for Gen Z:
  • “Be bold, be courageous. You’ve got one precious life—make the most of it. Swing for the fences, or be part of a team that is.” (154:35)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:04] – Brandon Tseng welcomed to the show
• [03:18] – Life story intro: family, upbringing
• [10:03] – How battlefield experiences shaped Shield AI’s vision for military AI
• [15:15] – What inspired Brandon to become a SEAL
• [25:21] – Naval Academy to BUD/S: pathway and setbacks
• [31:27] – Experience at BUD/S and Hell Week
• [44:44] – Afghan deployments, working with commandos
• [51:31] – Decision to leave the Navy and enter entrepreneurship
• [60:29] – Shield AI: founding vision and mission
• [64:05] – First product: autonomous quadcopter for SOF
• [75:51] – Moving up the aviation food chain; VBAT & Heron acquisitions
• [76:30] – How Shield AI’s autonomy software works
• [82:51] – Future of warfare: AI, mass, and maneuver
• [84:52] – “Near infinite, intelligent, maneuverable mass”
• [88:24] – China’s capabilities and threat landscape
• [90:51] – Security, espionage and the importance of speed
• [100:20] – VBAT deployment in Ukraine: operational stories
• [111:13] – X-BAT introduction: design, unveiling, and implications
• [121:39] – X-BAT performance specs and capabilities
• [131:15] – Transformational impact of a “runwayless” Air Force
• [151:16] – Manufacturing scalability and future plans
• [154:35] – Advice/inspiration for the next generation

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Episode Flow & Tone

• Candid, honest reflections: Both Shawn and Brandon speak with candor about the realities of military service and entrepreneurship—the wins, losses, struggles, and breakthroughs.
• Technical, yet grounded: While much is highly advanced, Brandon explains core AI and autonomy concepts in accessible language, always relating them back to the end-user: the warfighter.
• Patriotic & motivational: Numerous moments celebrate American ingenuity and service, infusing the episode with pride and optimism for the future.

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Summary Takeaways for Non-Listeners

This episode delivers a behind-the-scenes look at the fusion of elite military experience and Silicon Valley-style innovation, tracing how a SEAL's vision catalyzed not just a billion-dollar startup, but the next paradigm of defense technology. As warfare becomes more networked and unmanned, the X-BAT and similar technologies signal a seismic shift—one where victory (and survival) is defined by the speed of iteration, AI-enabled mass, and platforms that can appear from anywhere, at any time… without a runway or a pilot. Brandon Tseng’s journey also offers a template for leadership, grit, and boldness, urging a new generation to take risks for a higher mission.

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Final Note

If you want a peek into tomorrow’s battlefield—and the minds determined to keep America’s edge—this episode is required listening.

Transcript

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[A]

Brandon Tsang, welcome to the show.

[B]

Thanks, Sean. Really excited to be here.

[A]

Yeah, me too. We've been. 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 this is going to be super interesting. I know all the locals are like, what the fuck is that thing doing here? What is that?

[B]

Excited to show you. It'll. And yeah, it's. It's pretty cool.

[A]

I can't wait, man. And. And you know, like I was saying at breakfast before we start 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 just. It's cool, man. It's. It's. It's a huge inspiration for a lot of team guys getting out. And like, you just have really broke it into a whole new. A whole new thing that is just unimaginable for a lot of people other than maybe Dino Mavrukis. But, but congratulations.

[B]

Thank you. No, it's. I appreciate that. It's. It's painful and you know, but you know, we're excited about what we're doing and hope. Hope to make a big impact on the world. And, and similarly, like, I, I'm super inspired being in this room. Everything you've built is very cool as well.

[A]

Thank you, man. Than everybody starts off with an introduction here. So here we go. Brandon Tsang, co founder and president of Shield AI, a defense technology company you co founded in 2015 to build AI pilots for military assets. Helped raise over 1 billion in funding for Shield AI growing the company to over a thousand employees. You're a former Navy SEAL who served two deployments to Afghanistan and one to the Pacific Theater. A graduating a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, and he 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 in warfare. You're a husband and a father.

[B]

Yes, sir. Thank you.

[A]

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. It's going to be a fascinating interview.

[B]

Cool.

[A]

But a couple things to crank out here before we get started. I always like to give gifts, so Here we go. First, one Vigilance League gummy bears. Made in the USA. Legal in all 50 states, at least right now. Until RFK outlaws red dyes and corn amounts of sugar.

[B]

No. Love it. Thank you.

[A]

And you know, since you're a team guy, I think you'll really appreciate this one. This is sick. Oh. Oh.

[B]

Love it.

[A]

So that is the first SIG Sauer autonomous pistol. No, I'm just kidding. That's the.

[B]

Wait a minute.

[A]

Yeah, I wanted to do that first, but no, that's The Sig Sauer P211 GTO 9 millimeter. It's first 2011 model from Sig. So.

[B]

Amazing. Thank you, Sean. I brought some gifts also. Two things like, you know, you got me a gun. SEALs love guns. And knives and so brought you some. Guns and knives.

[A]

I love guns and knives.

[B]

These are. You can open them up. 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.

[A]

Look at that.

[B]

And so I'm like. They're like, what do you want on it? First thing that came to mind was, you know, I was feeling sorry for myself. Suffer in silence. And so with the SEAL Trident on there and then this one I'm pretty excited to give you to. How do we give something that is going to be pumped about? That is civilian version of the HK MP5.

[A]

Are you shitting me?

[B]

And so apparently started selling what? Yeah.

[A]

Oh.

[B]

Yeah. So obviously MP5. A lot of history in soft SOCOM. Don't know if you ever got to Carry one around. But yeah, that thing's sick.

[A]

This is awesome.

[B]

And I'm gonna get one myself.

[A]

Thank you. Thank you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. SEAL teams have a long history of the MP5. No, I never carried one. I shot him. Did you carry one?

[B]

I never carried one. We had one guy who just, like, carried it as his. His secondary just because it was fun to carry an MP5. So I'm like, why? He's like, cuz, why not? So I was like, all right. So I've shot it before, but yeah, never carried it, man.

[A]

Thank you. That is awesome.

[B]

And there are three patches from SHIELD AI on there. One, our work with the US Coast Guard interdicting drugs in the Caribbean Sea. Two, flying, you know, jet aircraft autonomously. And 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 F16 and it becomes autonomous. That's what this shirt is. So that's.

[A]

Yeah, that's awesome.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. You just said you're doing SHIELD AI is doing counter drug ops.

[B]

Yes. Yeah.

[A]

Let's just start right there. Before we get into the live store, I'd love to hear this because I saw a couple of boats get blown up.

[B]

I joke with my government relations team that I want a letter of mark, but they say, don't talk about that. But no, we've been working with the US Coast Guard actually in the past couple weeks we went OPER 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 the Caribbean Sea. Yep, in the Caribbean Sea. Just absolutely. Obviously there's. There's a lot of operations going there. We're with the U.S. coast Guard. I've also done U.S. navy operations down there with 4th Fleet. 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 sent, set on fire in the past couple of days or past weeks. So. Which feels right. Good. As an American, I actually, like, always, you know, no, I'm. I'm excited about what they're doing in terms of the The Caribbean Sea and just stopping the flow of drugs into the country. And so I'm, I'm like, the thing that I live for is mission impact. And so it's cool to get to have a positive impact on the world in that way.

[A]

That's incredible. That, man. A billion. Over a billion in less than in two weeks.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been absolutely, like, it's. It's wild. I mean. Yeah.

[A]

Holy. Any fentanyl stuff?

[B]

Not that I don't know. Well, like, they, they say what they give you is like the, the. The weight and they give you the street price. And so then I hop on Google to determine that that is most likely cocaine. So.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, it had a massive impact in the sense. So like, just really quickly, my first deployment As a Navy SEAL, I got to augment development group, augment SEAL Team 6. And just to be like, super clear, I was not a member of Seal Team 6. Didn't go through Green Team, but the Seal teams would send out junior officers to go gain experience deployed.

[A]

That was your first deployment?

[B]

Yeah, it was amazing. I am very blessed. It just happened to be with the troop that killed bin Laden. So this was one year after they had killed bin Laden. And it was just like a masterclass in ISR and targeting operations. A masterclass in direct action missions. And so during the day, well, during the night, the troop would go out, they'd conduct their raids, 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, helped me understand, like, how to build these. The autonomous systems.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah. Like, 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 young SEAL officer. Load his magazines, grab a muscle milk before the op. Get those guys what they needed to be successful. And then 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 in the jock. And. And everybody's like, what the hell? I was like, look, this is fun, cool stuff. Like, we're taking out bad guys. What's not to love about it?

[A]

So that's cool, man. Well, let's start with the life story. So where did you grow up?

[B]

So I was born in Houston, Texas. I'd say I 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, was one of four kids. 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.

[A]

What'd your parents do?

[B]

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.

[A]

What were you into?

[B]

Let's see. So when I was four years or in fourth grade, I wanted to be a professional basketball player. When I didn't make the travel team in sixth grade. Quickly realized, like, basketball was not gonna be my journey. So I grew up swimming. Yeah, there weren't, you know, Yao Ming didn't exist when I was in. 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 thought I was good. Got into. So I had always swam. Yeah, 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.

[A]

You close with your brothers and sisters?

[B]

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 this day that I got him to leave mit. So she's not happy about it.

[A]

No. So three brothers.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. There's three of us. Yeah. Three brothers. Yeah.

[A]

Three brothers running the company.

[B]

Oh, yeah. Working together and. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Enabling it. Yeah.

[A]

That's awesome. That's very cool.

[B]

I mean, there's pros and cons. Yeah. You can communicate really well with your siblings. Almost too well sometimes.

[A]

Right on. Right on, man. Well, what got your interest in the SEAL teams?

[B]

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 in the Rock, so.

[A]

The Rock?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Where the marines kill all the seals.

[B]

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. Like, oh, you should read books. They got me books on it. Got me more interested in, 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. They said, you should go to college first. I said, well, can I go to college and be a Navy seal? They said, go to this thing called the Naval Academy. And so, yeah, applied there, got in, and just kept the dream alive.

[A]

So what age did that fascination start?

[B]

The Naval Academy or being a seal? Being a seal. 10 years old. Yeah.

[A]

10 years old.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Damn. You followed through.

[B]

Yeah, no, it was. I mean, yeah, it was my. My older brother, he. I remember I was like 11 years old at the time. It was winter in Seattle. He's like, yeah, you got to do cold weather training. Like, go sit in the snow and I'll spray you with a hose. As 11 year old, you're listening to your older brother. You know, like, all right, this is what it takes. So, yeah.

[A]

Any family history in the military?

[B]

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 have a really cool picture of the Japanese surrender with Admiral Nimitz. And it's a letter. It's signed by Admiral Nimitz saying, captain Carroll, thanks for your service 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 grandfather on my mom's side and then on my dad's side. His dad actually fought in World War II. He was a nationalist in China fighting the Japanese. Wow. Yeah. Fighting the Communists and then left China when the Communists took over, left Liu Chiang Kai Shek and moved to Taiwan.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Taiwan.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, he was an engineer. Electrical engineer. Yeah. They're, you know, typical. Typical Asian family, push education really hard on you. Nothing. You. You. You come back, you'd get an A on a test and 96%. My dad say, why didn't you get 100%? You get a hundred percent, my dad say, was there ext. You know, and if there was none, he'd be like, all right, good job. You know, so.

[A]

Right on.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

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. My parents and then from my dad's side of the family, who had, you know, come from, you know, seeing war tor Communist China to, you know, growing up. My grandfather was a diplomat in South America, so they grew up in South America.

[A]

And then.

[B]

Yeah. So just a sense of gratefulness and work hard and be thankful for the opportunity. And what they would tell us is, you won the lottery being born in the United States of America and didn't really appreciate that till I would say I saw more of the world and. Right. 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.

[A]

Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. But you sound like kind of an outlier in your family.

[B]

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 unrealistic. Ticket. I was like, mom, there's no way.

[A]

Right.

[B]

She's like, oh, if you put your mind to it. But no, that I don't know. My brothers. 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. And then, yeah, just like to have fun, be grateful.

[A]

Let's work it out.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

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, it's. Have you ever been?

[A]

No, I've never been there.

[B]

It looks beautiful. It's pretty awful on the inside.

[A]

Is it?

[B]

It's a military school. It isn't. Not a typical college experience. Like I. It's. It's. You make a ton of great friends, just like you do in, you know, the SEAL teams. I have lifelong friends from that institution. Just because you go through joint suffering together.

[A]

Yeah. You know, I mean, I've never been there. I don't really know much about it, but I will say that the Naval Academy alum 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? Seems tighter after service.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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[B]

I actually, I'll tell you what, like, I actually, the Harvard Business School Alumni Association, I think is like, like, ridiculous in terms of the, the tightness. And then, yeah, the Naval Academy, you know, I would say is they're like, pretty good.

[A]

Right?

[B]

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

[A]

I wish there was more of it, to be honest with him.

[B]

Yeah. But, yeah, but, you know, I think, yeah, teams are. They don't want. People don't Want to ask for help.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And that's, I don't like the teams especially.

[A]

Right.

[B]

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.

[A]

And extremely competitive.

[B]

Yes, and extremely competitive. Yeah.

[A]

But you know, I'm curious, I mean what is the, what is the pathway from a Naval Academy guy to buds or the SEAL teams?

[B]

Yeah. So your, your junior year, you're good. 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, it's a hell, 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, 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, it's no joke in that sense then based on your performance, you can get a SEAL billet. And so they didn't have like, they used to have something called mini buds. Now they have something different. When I was going through, I gotta 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 Sheehy. Senator Tim Sheehy. Him and I were on the same SEAL cruise together. He actually lived a floor below me at the Naval Academy, but got to know him really well on that, on that SEAL we call a SEAL cruise. It was an awesome three weeks. We did, you know, combatives. We did. They were doing the like aggressive driving course down at Blackwater and I was like, this is amazing. And I can, you know, and so then you go back your senior year, you put in like your final application, final final PT scores, get your letter of recs. Like we had a letter of REC from SEAL Team 2 Commanding Officers, actually Master Chief Jay Manti. 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 in 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 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, right. You know, after I was done feeling sorry for myself, which was like, get a day to feel sorry for yourself. I was like, okay, well, let's figure out how to, how to keep the dream alive. So went to the fleet and you know, but yeah, then I had to laterally transfer.

[A]

How was the fleet?

[B]

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, 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. Post, you know, my mentality after getting denied the SEAL teams was like, you know, after you go through all the excuses in your head, it's like, all right, why weren't you picked up? It's because you weren't number one. You weren't the best. And so that became my mentality. It's like to avoid ever having to experience that again. I better be number one. I better be the best. That way no one can never tell me no again was my mentality. Going onto the ship, got my surface war. We deployed. I gave up 30 days of leave right after I graduated. I was the first person. Naval Academy, Class of 2008, graduated May 23. I boarded my ship in Phuket, Thailand on May 27 and was in the Arabian Gulf conducting amphibious operations in like mid June and learned a ton of learned like best leaders, like learned the best leadership lessons actually in, in the fleet was a hard job. But, you know, I'm very thankful for like, it's funny how things Work out in life. And like, I'm forever grateful for getting to experience that year and a half on a ship and like, just, you know. Yeah, the, the, the, the resilience it built in me and like the mentality that it built in me, whatever. Like, yeah, it's just funny how things work out.

[A]

So how do you get into the teams from there?

[B]

Yeah, so put in an application.

[A]

You.

[B]

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

[A]

How was it checking in?

[B]

It was awesome. I loved buds. Like, to the point, like, you 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, I loved every second of it. Like, just not being like that's where I wanted to be. And so like, even in Hell Week, like, I remember like USS 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. So you don't hear that very. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. No, it was great. Great.

[A]

What kind of. I mean, do you have a tough time at BUDS at all? Do you have any hang ups?

[B]

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. I, I had a, the tread took me four times, which, like, I'm embarrassed to say, as a water polo player, all my water polo friends from the academy who were, you know, SEAL officers also, they're like, what the hell is wrong with you? Why can't you tread the water? I was like, dude, I have no idea.

[A]

Tribe with the tank.

[B]

Yeah, try with the tanks. Right, Your hands out with the fins. And it was treading with the fins, which I think was like, it's a different motion. 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? Sang like, you are 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, I wasn't, like, I wasn't sure, like, if they're like, you failed or not. And it's like, my head's underwater, My hands are up. They're like, get over to the side. And like, finally, like, ran out of breath. They're like, all right. And then you have to, like, swim across. And, like, you know, was dead doing it. Get out. They're like, congrats, saying you passed. You know, took you four tries. And I was like, who? Yeah. And they're like, you know what you get for having, you know, you being a water polo player and it taking you four tries? I was like, what do I get? They're like 1,008 counts. Go get it. And I just hopped on the pool deck and started doing 1,008 counts, you know, for the next, whatever, two hours. So, yeah, right on.

[A]

Let's.

[B]

We got to cover Hell week.

[A]

Everybody wants to hear about Hell Week. So let's. Let's hear about your experience in Hell week.

[B]

Yeah, let's see. Hell Week one. Loved the beginning, right? Loved Sunday night. Love, breakout. Then, like, you get into it, right? I think it's Monday night. You feel really sorry for yourself. 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 rollback, right? And so he's supporting, and I just ran by, like, I'm run to, like, chow or whatever. And I was like, joe, like, is this as crappy as it gets? He's like, yeah, brother, just keep moving forward. I was like, all right, good. But, like, you know, that's when I want to say, majority of the class quits that Monday night because people are feeling sorry for themselves. Second thing that I would call out. So, like, after that, like, then you get into the groove and, like, you're just, like, moving forward. I love. I don't think people talk about, like, how ruthless it is under a boat with people One of the things I loved was like seeing boat crews kick their, 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, 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, it's. We did camp surf and like, I don't know if people that was, that to me was the worst evolution. So it was, you know, one in the morning and for four hours 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 jump in that water, it was like shock therapy. It was like a million needles just like crushing my body to the point where you don't. Right after hell week, you never want to get into the ocean again. It's because you have this like, like you were just tortured into recognizing like it's not comfortable getting in that water. So that's what I remember. And then fun thing we did around the world where you row on the boats around the entire San Diego or Coronado peninsula. And one of the instructors brought out a boombox and they played the techno hit around the World. Like around the World around the World for the entirety of that like 10 hour evolution to the point where like at one point the music stopped and he goes, oh shit, we ran out of batteries. I'll be back. He paddles back, 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. Matty Roberts was our first phase instructor. That guy is. Yeah, guy's an animal.

[A]

Animal.

[B]

He is, yeah. Like one of the cool, you know. Yeah, he, he told us, he's like, look, if you guys are here after hell week, I'll tell you how I got the silver Star. And like told us that story. And to have that, you know, one of the things again, amazing people, right? But that's your first face 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.

[A]

So.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

So what did it feel like, you know, to graduate BUDS and sqt? I mean, when you, when you finally got your trident.

[B]

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 loved that. Again, I checked in Seal Team 7 actually, you know, like, one thing that I 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 realizes. Like, oh, it's 21, 22, 23 year old young men are just, you know, in those first couple years going to a ton. The week before we graduated, sqt, extortion happened. And one of our classmates, Brock, his brother Heath was on that airplane, right? And so it's like very real. You know, we check into Seal Team 7. I think it's Mike Tam. He, you know, was, you know, he died in R and R, but he was deployed to Afghanistan during that time. And so you just like, you're like, I thought that was kind of, you know, when I reflect back and think about it, that's something I don't think, like, thankful to be part of the teams, but a lot of people don't get to, you know, that's like one of the things that I think helps shape you as like a young man being around, you know, all of, you know, war, death, all of it. So, yeah. Yeah.

[A]

What was it like checking into 7 for you?

[B]

It was good. Again, those guys were deployed and so we had like two months of. I was going to schools, I went to tier one off road, which was cool. 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 augment development group. And so. And then, you know, after ProDev hit ult. And yeah, that was a ton of fun too.

[A]

Yeah, so you, you check in and you go right into a dev group deployment.

[B]

Yeah, so that is.

[A]

That's like winning the lottery too.

[B]

Yeah, no, exactly. And, and you know, can cover down on that. But so to be clear, not part of SEAL Team 6, but gotta 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 FOB Shenk and Bagram. And so I got to augment the troop that had killed bin Laden. And I tell people, like, look, I was like basically the squire for the ground force commander. But during that time, got to learn it was a masterclass in ISR and targeting. The troop would go out in the night and conduct direct action raids, and then during the day we were conducting kinetic strikes. And that's where, you know, I got to play, you know, a really nice role as a junior officer, just coordinating those airstrikes, which was a lot of fun.

[A]

Did you get to go on any of the hits or.

[B]

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're. You earn your way onto that, onto that mission. And I was a fresh Navy SEAL with a month and a half of, you know, at the team. And so, no, I didn't get to go with them.

[A]

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 raid, I mean, did that, did that create some false expectations?

[B]

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 right we're not devgru. 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 gotta seize terrain. This is our mission. So fortunately, on my deployment to Afghanistan with my platoon, we had a ton of air assets, so that remained the same. But that was a very unique thing for our CLO element in Afghanistan. But it wasn't to the point where I think it was just part of that learning curve. I had seen what the top tier was doing. And then it's like, okay, 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 DEVGRU was doing with their mission set. So understanding that was, I think, like, very quick to understand that when like, look, like this isn't. We have a different mission than DEVGRU. This is how we have to execute said Ms. Mission.

[A]

Where did you go? What was your first.

[B]

Yeah, first deployment. So first deployment was out of Taran Count Aruzgan, multinational based Herrankow, sort of southeast. We would do helicopter assault force operations into Kandahar, into Aruzgan, into Ghazni, into Zabul, and then we forward stage out of Ghazni sometimes going, I want to say Paktika and Paktia and gotta go. Our mission was we were paired up with the 8th Commando Battalion, 8th Kandek Afghan Commandos, 900 Commando Battalion. Every single mission at that time in the war, it was a 10 to 1 force ratio. We had to bring 10 Afghans out for every single operation. And so we would bring 13, 14 guys and 130 Afghans.

[A]

Holy shit.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Talk about like moving pieces on the battlefield. Wow. Yeah.

[A]

What you think about worker with those guys?

[B]

It was not. I did not. Like, there's pros, there's cons. I would say, like, overall I didn't enjoy it. Right. Is 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, 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 I appreciated the challenge and the complexity of the operations. Multi day village clearances. It was cool. We got all the air assets in the world. Our mission was, hey, this is 2013. America's not going to be here forever. We have to train the commandos to stand up on their own. And so that was an interesting mission set. But we were also at that point, 12 years into a war and it was clear to us, like, look, this is right. It was like, don't get yourself killed. Was like kind of a mentality over. Over this uncertainty was something that we thought about, like, get the mission done. Don't get yourself killed and, like, yeah, take it to the enemy when. When they show up.

[A]

Was it pretty hairy out there at the time or.

[B]

I don't think it was hairy, no. Like, we got into some good firefights, which I'm, like, thankful for. And, like. Like, I'm glad the team, like, had that deployment 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 JTAC kills, but I think it's like, one quarter or whatever. But the.

[A]

Let's hear about it.

[B]

No, the. The JTAC stuff. Let's see, there's this one. Just like a. This was. Got our new jtacs, right? We have experienced jtac, new jtac, new jtacs. The lead JTAC 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, 1300 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 C130 and drop some ordinance on this guy. And turns out the C130 had not doped in their. Their 30 mic mic. And, like. And so they're shooting at this guy, and we have a Rover feed where we can see, and rounds are just missing him. And the guy is running, and he runs and, like, the new jtac, I'm like. I'm like, what's going on? He's like, they keep missing, like, why are they missing? Like. Right? Because he wants to take out this bad guy. They. He runs probably for about four and a half minutes. Just, like, smoke going everywhere, like, rounds coming in on him. Finally, they drop a. I want to say it's called a Griffin GBU 39. It's a glide bomb because the guy, like, stops under a tree and tries to, like, hide under the tree. But we. We had them on IR footage, and so that was. That was an interesting one. So, yeah, it was new JTAC's first, you know, JTAC kill. And so.

[A]

Yeah, that was your first one.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

How did that feel?

[B]

Indifferent. I'm like, yeah, I was. I just wanted to. Honestly, like, I just wanted the team to complete the mission, so.

[A]

Right on. Where do you go from Afghanistan?

[B]

So let's see. While I'm in Afghanistan, my orders were to go. I want to say it was the SEAL Team 2, I had orders to go to the east coast 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 five. He's like, do you want to take it? And I was like, oh, that sounds, like, awesome. Like, like, all right, I'll get to go right into a workup. Or like, yeah. I was like, what's the catch? He's like, you're going to go right into a workup. And so I called my wife, said, hey, hun, we. We can either go to the east coast, right? And, like, make that move and go through a pro dev cycle and do a ult into a deployment. I was like, or we can stay in San Diego ago. 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 do? And so she said, like, hey, let's, you know, like. She's like, I'm down for staying in San Diego if you are. I was like, yeah, that sounds great. So got home, checked into Seal Team 5. Ult started so off to the races. I think out of a. For two. I. I tracked this because actually the teams were making us track it at the time. Two years in a row. I was gone 300 days out of 365 days. Wow. Yeah. And I was. My wife's like, this isn't normal. I was like, I don't know. All our friends are doing 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.

[A]

What are you guys doing over there?

[B]

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 element to the Philippines, sent 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.

[A]

Why did you get out?

[B]

I wanted a number of a whole host of reasons. I wanted to do something else. I wanted to see what could be done outside of the confines of the military. And I don't mean that, like, in a negative way. Big, very blessed, excited. Like, I would encourage everybody, actually. Like, I think the amount of accountability and responsibility you get in the military, like, at such a young age is, like, one of the most amazing things. I would encourage people to do it, but I wanted to see, like, what could be done outside of a military system. I knew what the career path looked like for officers, like, in the sense. Right. It's like, okay, I. You know, you could. 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 command. And, 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 aspired to do. I was like, I absolutely aspired to be a SEAL platoon commander. But, you know, I was interested in other things. So, yeah, wasn't happy how things were going in Afghanistan. That was, you know. Yeah.

[A]

I don't know a whole lot of people that were.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So shield AI, I mean, that popped on your. I mean, you wanted to do something before you left.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So again, kind of like a planner mentality. I 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 want 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 want to say, when 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 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, what it would have been was 2014. I was like, it would have been really cool to have been part of that Internet wave of companies. Like, what's going to be the next wave? Like, AI and autonomy is what I decided. And, like, lots of people were talking about it. At the time and then was trying to figure out what problems I wanted to solve. And typical entrepreneur stories where it just kept coming back to the problems that I had faced. Problems of military problems, problems of national security, global stability. Decided, 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, was trying, you know, wanted to do something to progress humankind was going to be the Internet, sustainable energy and space. And so you have Tesla for sustainable energy, SpaceX for space travel. You have Xai you had PayPal for. He didn't have Xai at the time, but he had PayPal for the Internet. And I was like, what problems is he not working on that are like actually really important for the future of humanity? And I think warfare is like one of those massive unsolved problems in human history. And so it's like, wow, there, you know, could work on solving, you know, call it the problem of warfare was something that I was interested in also.

[A]

What problems specifically in warfare were you looking to solve?

[B]

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. Right. It's expensive, it's costly. And if you look at how America and has built this world order, it's because of our military leadership since 1945. 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 the power projection of the US Military. Nuclear weapons deter nuclear war. The conventional weapon systems that have deterred conventional warfare have been our aircraft, aircraft carriers, our submarines, our ships. Those have deterred largely state on state conflict up until Russia invading Ukraine, like major state on state conflict. Obviously there have been a handful of small examples, but it became how can you continue to deter warfare just at the conventional level and then also at the asymmetric level. And my belief is that AI and autonomy has a massive role to play in deterring conflict. Yeah.

[A]

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. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that a little bit later. But before we get too far into to shield AI, let's take a quick break.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

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[B]

Good time.

[A]

I mean it was a little rough for me too, but yeah, but so I want to get into, you know, why you're here. Shield AI so you started it in 2015?

[B]

2015.

[A]

What was the vision?

[B]

Look, I I believe in a World of autonomous systems. I think they're going to have a profound impact on humanity. I like 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 US to lead here. And so wanted to start a company that realized this vision. I think there are a couple people talking about it in 2014. Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work but what I was seeing was no one was really working on it because it requires a lot of software expertise to actually, 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.

[A]

I mean what, so what is. I mean I know you guys have a bunch of different projects, but you know what overall what is SHIELD AI?

[B]

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 without gps, without communications or while GPS are getting 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.

[A]

And the, and so these, all the different stuff that you're making. The, these aren't piloted from somebody in Nevada or, or.

[B]

No, they're the, they are piloted by an onboard autonomy stack, an AI pilot. And the same like 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.

[A]

Damn. Damn. So I mean, so what was the. I mean that, that, that's like it's just a huge.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Thing to take on, especially you know, coming out of the SEAL teams. I mean where, where do you even start with that idea?

[B]

Look, I think you start, you actually start with like the vision. Right. And I asked myself. And then you work backwards from there. But you know, in 2015 I asked myself what does the military of 2035 look like, like. And what is the role that AI and autonomy plays? I decided that AI and autonomy should be powering, commanding, maneuvering, every single military asset under the sun. And then you say, okay, well how do we get there? Like in buds, like in the SEAL teams. Just one step at a time. And so we started with a problem that I was super familiar with. Clearing buildings of threats. And, 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.

[A]

No shit. Completely autonomously, Yep. Has that been deployed?

[B]

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, of the product, the quadcopter market for the military back in 2015 to like 2, 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 eighth aviation food chain, which led us to, you know, autonomous F16s, 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.

[A]

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, from clearing a building. I don't know if they have weapons capabilities on these quadcopters or not. Do they?

[B]

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 focus like in the same way Tesla doesn't make a sports car anymore. We were used as a stepping stone to get to other market markets, but other folks have put things on these quadcopters.

[A]

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 with 2,000 miles, 2,000 mile range, outmaneuvering an F35.

[B]

Yeah, it's about £18,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

And it's just wild to even think about. So I mean, what's it like seeing your product, your innovation, get implement implemented into the SEAL teams where you came from?

[B]

Yeah, it was, it's like what I care most about. It's not like the size of the company, it's not the valuation. It truly is like when our products make an impact for our customers, the warfighter, at the end of the day, that's when like I get, you know, the hair stands up on my arms still every single time, like it doesn't matter. And like the, the cool thing at this stage in the game is that is how happening at increasing frequency. And so I remember, look, we did a really cool test, I want to say this was back in 2017. The SEAL teams actually they filmed it, they called it the John Henry test because man versus machine. And they sent the quadcopter into a house clearing problem down at Laosta and they gave a SEAL squad the exact same problem problem. Quadcopter solved the problem faster. And at the end of this problem, this house clearing problem, there's a houseborne nied, which was a way for the SEAL teams to say, yeah, it doesn't matter, you cleared the building, but you still get blown up. And so seeing the reaction from the guys after that, they're like, okay, I can see why this is a valuable capability even with all its flaws. And it had a lot of flaws back in 2017, 20, 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, 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 going through these house cleaning problems by itself.

[A]

Damn. I mean, do you, are you on site when these exercises are going on?

[B]

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

[A]

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, from. I mean, is there a lot of pushback? I, I would think that it's taken a job. Right, and so a job that, that there's a lot of, I mean there's a lot of sweat, blood, tears, dedication drive that goes I mean, yeah, we just talked about, you know, your pipeline into the SEAL teams. You. I mean, it's, it's, you know what I'm. There's a lot of passion to become a seal and, and then to have you show up with a drone, that's like, watch this.

[B]

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 SOCOM writ large was, hey, this thing, like close quarters combat is a really cool thing to train to. It's a lot of fun doing it. It's also like one of the most dangerous things that a soldier, a science, SOF warrior does in terms of a mission. And so again, clearing buildings, clearing tunnels, it sounds really cool until you start taking fire from the other side and you say, look, is there a better way to do this? And that's why I think SOF has been a great partner, not just like from the quadcopter, but all the way up to 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, like, what we accomplished, but at the same time at small scale. And that's why we had to figure out how to like, build other products, because they're just not. A lot of people, unfortunately care about the soft, you know, fighter or like the infantry soldiers. There's just. It pales in comparison in terms of like, the amount of funding that's going towards other capabilities.

[A]

So was there, was there any. I mean, did they implement it immediately or did they.

[B]

Yeah, they took, 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, like, team would solve bugs, solve problems, send it back. We fix this, they'd use it. You know, again, it was successful in a lot of operations. It was unsuccessful on 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, like, can't go into those Missions, but missions where H bids went off, S vests went off, those types of missions where it's like, if there had been guys inside that building, we all know what that looks like. Or you and I know what that looks like. Wow.

[A]

So you're always getting direct feedback from the field on how these things are going. Can you talk about, if you can't talk about, about these specific missions and what they were for? I mean, can you talk about some of the, some of the successes and failures that you saw the product doing?

[B]

Yeah, just simply it would go inside these buildings in terms of like the Svest world. Right. People actually drones had been hunting bad guys for 20 plus years, and all of a sudden 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. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

What were some of the failures? What were some of the things you'd.

[B]

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, so that caused a lot of challenges, a lot of headaches in the early days because simply 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. 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, small doorways and tunnel systems was another challenge because we knew like the wind vortices that these things are like, when they're flying, it's sucking them into the wall because you're flying in so such close proximity. And so that's just like a controls challenge that we had to solve. But those are like some of the headaches and problems that you have to solve where the customer uses it. They're like, oh, what the hell? It doesn't work right. Customer. Customer at the end of the day just wants their product to work. And so the other good thing about that soft customer is that, like, they are, they're a very demanding customer, but they're also like, understanding of where a product is and its maturity, life cycle.

[A]

Interesting, Interesting. I mean, how small are these things?

[B]

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.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

What exactly in the soft world? Because that's all I can relate to.

[B]

It was primarily used in call out operations. So. Right. It wasn't going to be used in a dynamic like HR mission or anything like that. But like when you have a deliberate target where you're executing a call out, where.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You can think of like for, 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 types of operations.

[A]

Damn. Damn. I mean, what, I mean, what did that wind up developing into what was the next product?

[B]

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 strategic platforms, strategic capabilities. That's where a lot of the defense dollars are moving. So what we ended up doing was during the time we decided, hey, we have to, we're going to, we're going to buy another platform. So made that decision in late 20, 19, 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 V bat, 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.

[A]

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. Just called it the expat. I mean, yeah, you know, how is it just you switch it on and point it in the right direction.

[B]

Yeah. So for the quadcopter, there's a button on the side. You press it, like spin its rotors and like take off from your hand and like go inside the buildings. The way that like it works from a technical perspective and like this is a simplification of it. But there's a series of software modules in Every self driving car or humanoid robot is working like this. 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 and clear it of threats is the mission to dogfight F16s is the mission to find surface to air missile systems. Like what the mission is. That's what the reasoning module is. Then you have like 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 it operates without gps, 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 over complicate autonomous systems. At the end of the day, you and I, 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, you know, 10ft away, this wall is 8ft away. Right. You're 6ft from me. This, these autonomous systems are doing the exact same thing. And just like we learn from our experiences, these things are learning from their experiences.

[A]

How do they, how do they learn from their experiences?

[B]

Yeah. So one of the principal ways that we like developed a methodology called reinforcement learning. And so this was pioneer 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 an, a good learning methodology when the number of variables or outcomes are. Are massive. Right. In the multiple trillions of outcomes, which I couldn't bring up what the outcomes of the game of Go are, but it's almost uncountable. Yeah, same thing with the game of StarCraft, which was Alpha Star. It's like the number of moves are uncountable in terms of the number of scenarios. That's where you find something like reinforcement learning really shine in the real world. The number of moves that you have are uncountable. And so what you're doing is you're taking. 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. 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 cloud clearing a room to dog fighting to, you know, hunting surface air missile systems to navigating, you know. Yeah, any, any unmanned system.

[A]

Wow. Wow. I mean, what do you, what do you envision? I mean, you had mentioned what does warfare look like in 2035? And I mean, obviously it's a lot of autonomous systems.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

What. Be a little more specific. I mean, what does it look like? I mean, we had talked about. Yeah, 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 at breakfast I interviewed, you know, Palmer Luckey and kind of asked him the same question, you know, what does it look like? Is this going to replace all personnel military wide? Eventually he says no, he knows a hell of a lot more about this than I do. But you know, when he's talking about, about. And you too, I mean when you guys are talking about this stuff, I mean it's making pilots obsolete. It's making, you know, Dino maverickas another SEAL who's doing autonomous surface warfare vehicles. It makes a lot of naval vessels obsolete. I mean the drone that, you know, the quadcopter, that's, that's taken 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 deaths on our own side and more is obviously better. So you know, what does, what is your vision? What does it look like in 2035?

[B]

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, will not have proliferated. Autonomous systems will not have completely proliferated by that stage of the game in terms of like how militaries operate. Still going to be a heavy reliance on humans for a number of different mission sets augmented by often by like machines. If you look at like, I don't know what the time span is, I'm gonna like say 100 years simply because no one will be like get upset at 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.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And I think that's like a, it's a good place right where it's like we're not neither side. You want to be sending young men and women to fight each other over often what I would call things that we shouldn't be fighting over. So I do think you'll see a lot of autonomous systems in 2035. I don't think they're going to be executing every single mission that the Department of War executes on, 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, these types of systems because they're going to have massive strategic impacts on the big battlefield. And happy to talk, you know, about why.

[A]

Let's do it.

[B]

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, our air power. And behind that you have like, you know, our, our nuclear triad, our nuclear sub 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, 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 4000 BC to freaking the 18th. 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 raid. He was kind enough to mentor me and he's like, look, he's like, what we do at DEVGRU is like really cool. He's like, but he's like, we need our brothers or sisters in the army, in the Marine Corps to bring the mass to the fight. You need, 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 have, right. The number of war fighters that the United States could theoretically field. Right. Call it able aged men and women from age 18 to 55, there's a finite number of people with AI and autonomy. And combined with industrial production, you can field millions, 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.

[A]

Wow. Damn. I mean who are your competitors? Not just domestic, but I mean foreign competitors. I mean we, we, 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. China's right on our ass if not a little bit ahead, you know, with AI, with energy, with, with autonomous systems, ship building, all that kind of stuff. I mean who are, who are the, who are the key players in the world?

[B]

World in the world. I think China is the, the key player that, that matters. Now the good news is the United States is remains best in the world at software, at AI, at Autonomy. But like that no means we should be complacent. I think the Chinese are highly innovative. They are able to mobilize resources in a faster way 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 like obviously like can't go into like what those timelines are or what those capabilities are. But suffice to say like no one should feel good about it because like as Elon Musk says, like all that matters is your cycle time. All that matters is your iteration cycle. If you suck at something but you can get really good at it really fast, 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, 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 that's, we're seeing that more and more from countries throughout the world basically stating that they're moving towards million plus drone drone armies.

[A]

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 into our schools and embedding into companies. And so I'm just curious, I mean, do you take that seriously?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. You're a major.

[A]

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 this.

[B]

Yeah. No, we take security like very seriously. It's, it's. The hard thing is, right, you're in the intelligence community. A state sponsored actor is, is like a really hard thing to stop, right. If China can steal the plans for the Joint Strike Fighter, right. It is a, it's like what's the like it's hard to stop someone that is truly determined to take 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 platinum, like speed is a type of security. 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 crack through encryption and then all of a sudden 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, to like 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 principles level, I think like what, what matters in business? What matters for our country is an emphasis on speed over security. And I think the US 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.

[A]

Interesting, Interesting. With the holidays almost here, so are the seasonal rules. Businesses are hiring fast, everything from holiday market staff to ski lift operators. This means that people with certain skills, experience or even a special license are in high demand. And not easy to find. Whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, the best way to find the perfect match for your role is on ZipRecruiter. And right now you can try it for [e-mail] SRS if you're looking for top talent, ZipRecruiter's matching technology works fast to find them so you don't waste time or money. See quickly how many qualified job seekers in your area are ready to fill your role. And with ZipRecruiter's advanced resume database, you can instantly unlock top candidates. Contact info let 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 today and right now you can try it for free. It's ZipRecruiter.com SRS Again, that's ZipRecruiter.comSRS ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire hey folks. Our friends at Tractor Supply have always stood for community, for neighbors, helping neighbors, and for the people who keep life out here moving forward. And at the heart of every community are the heroes who serve the veterans, veterans, active duty military, first responders, and the families who stand beside them. These are the folks who answer the call, who protect, who sacrifice. And Tractor Supply believes that that deserves more than just a thank you. That's why they created the Hometown Heroes program. It's their way of giving back in meaningful, everyday ways. As a hometown hero, you'll enjoy special perks through Neighbors Club, like earning rewards on every purchase, free trailer rentals and delivery, and exclusive savings on holidays that honor your service. And the best part, once you sign up and verify through ID me, it's automatic. No hoops, no hassles. So if you or someone you love is a Hometown Hero, visit tractorsupply.com hometownheroes to learn more. It's Tractor Supply's way of standing behind them those who always stand for us. Let's talk about the expat. I mean we were talking about the. The two companies that you acquired.

[B]

The VBAT. The VBAT.

[A]

The VBAT.

[B]

Excuse me, the VBAT.

[A]

What? What is that?

[B]

So the VBAT, 180 pound vertical takeoff launch and land aircraft does the mission of a Predator Reaper at, you know, fraction of the cost. ISR and targeting mission does it differently than these larger Group 5. They call them Group 5 drones. VBAT is a Group 3 drone, but essentially it is, yeah, conducting ISR and targeting. So we've deployed that thing to like our big wins have been in Ukraine, they have been in the Caribbean Sea most recently. But that's where it's like provided massive value to our customers. Takes off and lands like a SpaceX rocket. That's like logistics footprint is tiny. Those are like some of like the key value. AI power, 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.

[A]

So these things vertically take off?

[B]

Yes. Yep.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah. So vertical takeoff at launch and land. And this will, this goes to the, 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 peer adversary like that's one of the first things that they're going to target actually like the Ukrainians, when President Biden, Biden enabled them to use ATACMS into Russia, first thing the Ukrainians went after were runways. Right. Actually then with their special operation where they had a bunch of. These are like FPV drones that they used to blow up Russian assets. Those 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.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's an aircraft carrier. It's a, it's a stationary Runway in the Pacific. That's the first thing they're going after. Because every adversary wants to take away the US and our allies like principal advantage, which is air superiority. So they're going after your runways. What vertical takeoff, launch and land. Besides getting out of runways, it allows you to be very tactical, very maneuverable. The Ukrainians and the Russians, they're moving their strategic equipment out 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.

[A]

How would these, I mean how would these be deployed? Would they. Are, are they.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

How many of them get deployed?

[B]

Yeah. So the VBats theoretically like a. A swarm. You could use a swarm of VBATs. 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 them in the back of sprinter vans, going to a launch point, launching, moving, commanding the thing, landing it somewhere else. Right. Again, I don't think a lot of folks, if you haven't been over there, realize how dynamic the battlefield is at this stage in the game. It's, it's just constant movement. Shoot and move, shoot and move, shoot and move, move. But done like in the essence where it's like 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 and targeting, but you're just limited not just from like that runways are targets, but also the proliferation of surface to air missile systems make large exquisite aircraft very vulnerable. Whether it's. Everybody saw our Stinger missiles or not.

[A]

Our.

[B]

They saw the Ukrainians shooting down Russian helicopters with Stinger missiles. They saw that in 1980s in Afghanistan, they saw it again in Ukraine and just augmented by other surface to air missile systems. It's really impossible, like using large exquisite platforms and even like too dangerous for manned platforms to operate in these highly contestants contested environments. And I say contested. I mean lots of surface air missile systems, lots of GPS jammers, lots of communications jammers.

[A]

When you, I mean, when they are deployed, are they. I mean, it's just so foreign to me. I mean, you know, you go to Bagram and you see everything. You go to Biop and you see every, you see helicopters, fighter, everything, right from C130s 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? Yeah, you know, in, in onesies and twosies or, or that.

[B]

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 have 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 impact infrastructure footprint. And so you're creating dilemmas where, a dilemma for the adversary being like, I don't know where the, you know, where these things are, where they're launching from, where they're landing from. And that's like, it causes a lot of problems for the enemy if you don't know what your adversary is doing.

[A]

Right.

[B]

If you don't know what the other guys are doing.

[A]

Are they dedicated to specific units?

[B]

Yeah, they are. Yep.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

And so how. I mean, that could mean a whole array of different capabilities, you know, with, with one, you know, with your, with your product, the vbat. And so I mean, if, if, if you have one mission that's an ISR mission, you know, surveillance detection, stuff like that, and then you have a kinetic mission. I mean, how do you, how do you tell the machine what you're doing? Going to do like, what the mission is?

[B]

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 the, you know, probably the easiest way to explain. 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 engineering can take those descriptions and then turn them into, you know, a software package. You know, a software mission package. Yeah.

[A]

And you guys do both?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Build the product or you build the hardware and the software?

[B]

Yes, we do. Yeah.

[A]

Was it always like that?

[B]

It was, it was out of a necessity.

[A]

Right.

[B]

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, 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 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 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 private pilot that's flying a quadcopter, you can put it on F16, but back in like 2018, 2019, everybody's like, nah, like, I don't believe that.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So we were like, hey, we need another piece of hardware to demonstrate that this AI pilot is transferable from platform to platform to platform. That led to the acquisition of the vbat. We're like, okay, now we can put the AI pilot on the vbat. Now you see the AI pilot running on a quadcopter. You see it running on a V8. We bought Heron Systems that won the DARP Alpha dogfight. And then we're the first company in the world to fly the F16 completely autonomously. Now you see the AI pilot running on an F16. And since then, now we've put the AI pilot on 15 different platforms one way. Attack drones, unmanned ground vehicles, large target drones, jet powered drones, where I think everybody, at this stage in the game, in 2025, people really 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.

[A]

Right.

[B]

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 cool things we can take, we've integrated on a variant of the Lakota helicopter. What used to take 40 engineers and like tens of millions of dollars and two years to do on our quadcopter, 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 jet powered drone.

[A]

So when you're talking about drone storms with the vbat, I mean, these are big devices. Big, big, big.

[B]

Yeah, they're, they're, they're 180 pounds. They're, 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, they're big. They're not like F16, F16 big. Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, they, exactly. They're sharing Information with each other. And so again, building that map, sharing that worldview with each other, sharing positions, sharing friendly position, any me position. The same way, like if we were doing an operation together, I hop on a radio, I can share a lot of information with you. These things are doing the exact same thing, just faster. Just faster? Yeah, a lot faster. Yeah. Superhuman speeds in terms of real time.

[A]

Like it's.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're we're doing.

[A]

Getting ready to engage something. Yeah.

[B]

We've done things already 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 can never get my fighter pilot squadron to do what this AI just did, right? Like it's wildly impressive, like the accuracy and the speed with which they are coordinating with each other, reading and reacting off each other.

[A]

Wow. Let's talk about the Dart DARPA Alpha dogfight.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What was that?

[B]

So DARPA Alpha Dogfight. It was so go back to like you had AlphaGo, you had AlphaStar. DARPA's like, I believe that we could do an AI pilot dogfight to show that, you know, basically 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, F16s. 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 dogfights. And what SHIELD AI ended up doing, right, with Heron Systems, a SHIELD AI company ended up doing was we ended up winning the Alpha dog fight where we defeated every single AI piece pilot in these, this dog fighting competition. Like it was like a ladder, right? Like you beat them, you move on a playoff bracket. And then the winner, we got to go up against an actual fighter pilot in simulation, a fighter weapon school pilot, a top Gun, and want to say, we won 5o in that competition, right? And so what that did is basically say like, hey, you know, and DARPA did that to basically say, like, look, this is why we should invest in this capability, this technology. And it wasn't to say, hey, let's build autonomous F16s. But as we build this next generation of uncrewed fighter jets, a lot of people call them collaborative combat aircraft. We can actually have an AI pilot and autonomy stack that is, you know, running these aircraft.

[A]

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.

[B]

Unfortunately, I don't. Just because it's like, 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 were just innovating for the sake of, 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. Sounds familiar. Yeah, yeah, you get it, right? I actually love the. There's an old Kobe Bryant clip when they had won like game like three of the NBA finals. And they're like, Kobe, we can't get a smile from you. He's like, what's there to be happy about? Like, job finished. Job's not finished. And that is like, you know, the, the mentality that I have.

[A]

So, yeah, I, I am plagued by the same thing. Although I will say last night when the expat got dropped off.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I was like, I can't believe this thing. So I went home and I was like, told my wife. I was like, you gotta come out here and see this with the kids.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We have America's aerial defense, defense in offensive system that nobody knows about sitting in our front yard right now.

[B]

No, I'm super.

[A]

You have to see.

[B]

Super pumped to unveil it on your show.

[A]

It's just wild to me. It's, it's, it's crazy. But you want to talk about the expat?

[B]

Yeah, I'll, I'm happy to talk about the expat. Now. Yeah, now that we're talking about it. All right, so expat. Just some background SHIELD AI. When we think about hard 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 steam 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 VBAC, vbat was, hey, we're going to transform ISR and targeting, right? We need more intelligence. McChrystal very famous for saying intelligence drives operations. Like, if we can transform ISR and targeting with VPAT, like that's why we decide to buy VPAT and go with it. But we're not looking to build 26 different hardware products out there. Like, we are an AI and autonomy company. We build amazing aircraft and we have these great assets. We have a software engineering asset that's world class. We have a hardware engineering asset that's world class. And so we had to ask ourselves, okay, we've done vbat, what's next? What's the next piece of hardware that we want to build? Do we want to build a one way attack drone? Do we want to build a usv, a maritime platform? Do we want to build a hypersonic missile? And so after growing great deliberation and great credit to our head of our aircraft business, Armor Harris, came from SpaceX, came up with this thing called the X Bat. And so what is xbat? Expat is a first of its kind vertical takeoff, launch and land multi role combat strike jet platform that is AI piloted. It is the first airplane in the history of airplanes that has both or it doesn't require Runway and doesn't require a human pilot. It's AI piloted and it'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, these are the four stars Admirals and generals running into paycom, running EUCOM 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 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, and these aircraft carriers now all of a sudden they have to worry about every, every 20 foot by 20 foot spot of earth on the planet. And that is. Why does 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 our number one conventional strategic deterrent, it's going to force you to rethink your war plans. It buys diplomacy. Another thing day on the like, other side of the coin of what I would, you know, tell you about like xat and this is like again, I want to be super clear, like expat is going to augment, you know, fighter pilots for, you know, quite some time. But like when I look at something like the Joint Strike Fighter, 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 hardened bunkers, it requires a $10 million pilot just to get like to be, you know, certified on flying it. Right. Not, 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, to make you 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 a thousand nautical mile ranges, you have to have refueling tankers. And because of the threat environment, we've built autonomous refueling tankers, which is another expensive, expensive capability. You have built the reef? No, no, we did like the, 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 probably like 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, you know, the hourly cost of operating at $35,000 an hour, expat, vertical takeoff, launch and land, no runways. It is, you know, AI pilot, so no human pilot. It has a 2100 nautical mile range range with mission payload, and so you have massive range. We're targeting 27 and a half million dollars per pop on it with a $6,000 per hour operating cost for the aircraft. And so you're getting 5th 6th gen capability at a fraction of the cost. And that's something that no one else is doing or offering. Wow.

[A]

Wow. I mean, I mean, the vbat beat the F35, correct?

[B]

No, no, no, no. The. No, no. So VBAT being the. And now VBAT X Bat can get confusing. VBAT's the Mini Reaper Predator, the X Bat in development. We're going to. We've got a subsystem prototype that's flying in 2026, full system protection 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, F35. What we've gone up against are F16s and actual F16s and F16 versus F16, 16. And this was part of the DARPA Ace program, which was the next program from the DARPA Alpha Dogfight, where we've gone up against F16 pilots. And yeah, we've, you know, we've, you know, AI pilot, like, it wins crushes. Yeah.

[A]

So you ready to go take a look?

[B]

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

[A]

Let's do it.

[B]

Let's do it.

[A]

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

[B]

All right, so this is, this is the EXPAT and the lrv, which is the launch recovery vehicle for the xat. It's actually a scaled model. Believe it or not. This is only two thirds the actual size. To get it into trade shows and events, we are limited in terms of, like, the actual size. But yeah, this is the aircraft that we are building currently. So. But yeah, this is our, Our, our model that we take to events, help people understand what we're building, the capabilities and, you know, gives. Gives them something visually to look at. But, yeah, I don't know. This is actually my first time seeing it physically. I've only seen it in the photos from our team and no, it's like I've told you, I've been doing this now for 10 years. You get it's hard, hard work. Right. But I think this is like I get inspired by this thing. Like I'm fired up to build this thing. I'm fired up to make it a reality for the warfighter. I think the capability is, it is absolutely strategic. It's going to make a huge impact and it's like who gets to work at the intersection of AI pilots and fighter aircraft and actually build an AI pilot fighter aircraft that it doesn't require a Runway. So that's cool.

[A]

Not very many people.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But so 2,100 nautical mile radius with mission payload. With mission payload.

[B]

So basically this thing can carry the same thing, same amount of payload as an F18 F35. It's carrying four AMRAAMs internal. It's got two a medium range air to air missile. 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, it looks like it. Yeah. I can happy to walk around tell you all about it, but let's do it. All right, let's do it. So one of the cool things we're actually using the F100 engine is the engine that is used in F15s, F16s. One of the really cool aspects about it is it's a multi plane thrust vectoring engine which is also the only US airplane US jet in existence that has multi plane thrust vectoring. So the F22 uses 2D plane thrust vectoring. I want to say it's the Russians have this. 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, 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 too when you know they're like holy crap, what the hell is that? That type of stuff. So damn, I know someone's got to check me and it's going to be some other maneuver but like you know, the Internet will sort it out. Yeah, yeah, the Internet will sort it out.

[A]

So is this how it, is this how it launches?

[B]

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, things that they were discovering with F35 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 and just the heat that's being generated from the engine when we're taking off or when we're landing. So. But yeah, it launches, lands like a SpaceX rocket again. Our head of aircraft armor, Harris, I feel like he was just built for developing this aircraft, but worked as a principal engineer on the Falcon 9 launch and land and then was doing Starlink, Star Shield working with Elon and just wanted to work on the air layer and build next generation aircraft. So.

[A]

Yeah, that is amazing.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

What is that hole in the front?

[B]

So that's the intake up there. So air intake for the engine and. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. Not much more to it.

[A]

Where did the, where do all the weapon did where.

[B]

So you've got internal and hard points on the, on the other side, 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, 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 5th generation, 6th 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 communication modifications, things that something like the F18 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.

[A]

What do you mean electronic warfare? Like jamming capabilities?

[B]

Yeah, jamming, jamming gps jamming the communications on other enemy platforms. Yeah.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

One, one of the other cool things. So we like to say this thing hauls ass and sips gas. Right. It can fly for 2100 nautical miles with full mission payload, but it's flying cruising at 55,000ft altitude, which is higher than any other like aircraft, like definitely like in its class. Right. And why is that important? It actually allows your air to air missiles. It improves the kinematics on them, which makes for, you know, the easiest way to say it is like longer range weapons. And so now your missiles can actually go further because they're, you know, they're actually. The air's less dense up there. They're able to, they're not, you know, using as much gas when they're being fired. And I don't think a lot of people appreciate. But like in air to air combat, air to air warfare, like what matters is your sensor range. What matters is the range of your missiles. It's not, you know, as cool as like 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 and it can attack those things. Same thing with this aircraft.

[A]

That is crazy.

[B]

Yeah. Powered by hive mind. Hive mind being our AI pilot again. Just been working on hive mind for the past 10 years. And so the mission sets like we were talking about in the studio being like that library of checked out missions, but continue to work on classified level missions for air to air missions. Air to ground missions for this aircraft.

[A]

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

[B]

We're cruising. Cruising at Mach 0.85. We're expecting that you'll be able to dash supersonic. The problem when you dash supersonic is that your, your signature goes up. People know and. Right. This thing is meant to be pretty, pretty low observable in terms of what the enemy's looking for. So. Yeah.

[A]

And it land it. So when it lands. Yep, it lands just like this.

[B]

Lands just like this. Takes off lands hands. Don't want to say like. Yeah, we took inspiration from, you know, SpaceX, you know, catching this. That's crazy. So it just lands like it goes.

[A]

In reverse and just lands right here.

[B]

Poke. 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 an armor 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 VBA bat and like you have perfect weather conditions. VBat, you're operating in the worst weather conditions. You don't have a lot of thrust. It's, it's a big challenge. Xat, you have an incredible amount of thrust from like a technical challenge aspect. If this is vbat and this is Falcon 9, you have x Bat, like right. You know, next to Falcon 9. Again, that, that multi plane thrust vectoring allows us to put this thing, you know, wherever we need to put it. So. Wow. But yeah, no, it's. Right, it's. I mean not only. It's. You can now make every ship an aircraft carrier. You can make non standard vessels aircraft carriers. Right. You can put these things on cargo ships, island chains. It just becomes a really intractable thing for the adversary to track, which can go everywhere. Everywhere. Anywhere and everywhere. Right. 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. So. Damn. Yeah.

[A]

That is awesome. Could you imagine a, a drone swarm of these bad boys coming after your ass?

[B]

Yeah. No, this thing is. No. And, and that's what. Look, we're, we're very much working on the behaviors, the missions of multi agent expats flying around, augmenting, you know, fighter pilots, augmenting the mission, executing the mission independently. Like I said, I think this, for me, this is like an inspirational aircraft. I'm like, holy crap. This is, this is like one of the, this is a cool thing to build. Like, you know, one of those moments. Yeah, yeah. Like if you want to be at the intersection of AI national security security building. Cool. You know, jet aircraft, shield, AI is, you know, a great place to do it. So no limit, you know, on. In terms of the ambition and the imagination here. Yeah.

[A]

So congratulations.

[B]

Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm excited to, you know, launch this thing on, on your show. I think that's like, you know, that's a, that's a cool thing. I know a lot of people watch it. I think it's, it's, you know, I'm. Thanks for letting us bring it onto your property. I'm sure your neighbors were like, what the hell is this? They're a little worried about what Sean got going on right now.

[A]

They're like, what the fuck is going on?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

So.

[B]

Wow, man.

[A]

Congrats. That is, this is the kind of stuff that just Makes me proud to be an American. Like that is the future of aerial warfare. That is.

[B]

Yeah. It fundamentally will transform. Transform air warfare. Right again, no more Earth is our Runway AI piloted. It's, it's a, it's a mean machine that I think to the point of it's. It's going to deter our adversaries by diplomacy another day. So.

[A]

Yeah, I'll say. I'll say, wow, awesome. I want to see a launch.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Well, 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 you come out to that. Yeah.

[A]

So I would love that.

[B]

Cool.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

Absolutely. No thanks. Sean.

[A]

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[B]

That.

[A]

That is. I. I can't wait to see the launch.

[B]

Yeah, it'll be sick.

[A]

And the land you got to Come up to see that thing land. But, you know, one thing we didn't cover is the vbat flew 130 sorties so far in Ukraine.

[B]

Yeah, pro. 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, I think it's one. Our. Our results are unique. But the, the story is kind of interesting that in 2023, the British pushed out a bunch of V bats to the Ukrainians. We told them, hey, hive mind. Our AI pilot, it's not integrated yet. You're not going to like if GPS or communications is jam, like, it's not going to work. Because we were again, we had bots that company in late 21, and we're 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 VBATs. They pushed out lots of equipment jamming happened. VBATs failed right as we told them it would. Ukrainians basically said, hey, come back when you have this fixed. We still believe in the capability. 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 this three, four days of every jammer. They had seven jammers. GPS communications running max power. VBAT flying within 50ft. No impact on it. Right? Because we had integrated the AI pilot on. On board this time, they. They kind of strung us along here and said, look, like, all right, great that you passed the test. And this was unique. No one, they're like, 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 US Government if it actually proves its worth on the battlefield. And we're like, well, you guys didn't tell us about this, but we're saying, 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 realized it. It's completely jammed in Ukraine on the battlefield. And so every mission that we've done GPS and comms has been jammed. But our first mission that we did actually fun. The interesting part of the story is one of the interesting parts. One of the assumptions we made was that we asked them like, look, we're going to near the front. Is GPS going to be jammed on takeoff? They said, no, it's not going to be jammed on takeoff. So we go out to operate and lo and behold, GPS is jammed on takeoff. On this mission we're supposed to execute, VBAT starts flying in another direction because of GPS jamming, because we had assumed it was going to be available just for two 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. Ukrainians 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 was just like basically changing an assumption. Tested it in Texas, pushed the software update to Ukraine. Next day we said, hey, give us, you know, we want to re, retake this mission. Execute the mission, do fine. On takeoff, executing the mission. Comms GPS jam the entire time. Target an SA11 bukovel surface to air missile system. Ukrainians call in Himars airburst round destroys the bukovel second target a second sample a 11 Bukaville surface to air missile system. HIMARS misses due to GPS jamming. The effectiveness of US weapon systems is really poor in these GPS jammed environments. So that leads to letters of request from the US Government and then president takes office and stops funding, which is again, I'm fine with the decision. As an American taxpayer, I understand it 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 VBAT 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, a two week period where we were executing four to six strikes every day, or enabling four to six strikes every single day, destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian equipment. It's a capability that they had never had long range ISR and targeting before. They were fighting a very tactical fight. But now with this capability to penetrate deeper into enemy held territory while gps, while comms is jammed, they were finding targets that they had been looking for for six, nine months they couldn't find. Wow. And so again, super proud of the impact that we've played there. And you know, as we think about, you know, when we talk to them now, they're like, man, if we had been able to put up a bunch of these on our border, right? And knowing that every single vbat's 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 VBAT is one of these things that has been battlefield proven and to the point, like what I'm just going to hammer home in on again, like there aren't other US companies doing this. Like they are not having success in these GPS and comms jammed environments. It is a very hard, hard problem. I actually would say that there's only two companies in the world and I can't name the other company that's actually finding success there. It's a Ukrainian company in these environments. And that's from reporting from, you know, call it the war fighters out there in terms of like actually executing the ISR and targeting a mission. Now tactically, when you're talking like fiber optic connected quadcopters where the GPS like where you're tethered to something and you can fight in the you know, 1 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 and again, congratulations.

[A]

Thank you. You know, when it, when you know a lot of hacking, you know, and so is this, would this be a system system that China could hack into? You know, if we were using it.

[B]

For an offensive, it'd be incredibly difficult. Like it would be incredibly, incredibly. I wouldn't say it'd be tactically feasible to actually like execute. You'd have to be like proximal to the, the command station where these things, you'd have to know where they were flying, whether it's vbat, whether it's X bat and then you have to like get through encryption. It's just not like the way to take, take out these systems are going to be kinetically using surface air missile systems. And that's actually like look, we've lost VBats 2 surface to air missile systems in Ukraine. And I remember like, you know, we get a report back, hey, you know, S300 shot down a vbat and like, all right, 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 mind running on them. The only way that you're going to be able to take them out is going to be kinetically.

[A]

Now, when you're talking about jam communications and jam gps, I mean, I would. I mean, you know, all the way back to the quadcopter, you know, all this autonomous stuff that can think on a zone and conduct missions. I mean, is there any. Do we need communication with these devices?

[B]

Like, if you want the best performance, you're going to want. The communication is very beneficial. In the same way, like, if you. If we were a SEAL element, if you were a fireteam leader and I was a fireteam leader, if we have established communications, we can operate much better together, right? If you're across a mountain ridge and you're saying, hey, Brandon, this is what I'm doing, like, I can then adjust my tactics, behaviors on, like, what you're seeing, what you're observing 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 it's. When you're in a jammed environment, you can think of it as like Swiss cheese. Sometimes you can find pockets. If you're only working with low, you know, low amounts of data, you can push that data out even though you're operating in a jammed environment. 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.

[A]

Oh, okay. I didn't mean. I mean. Yeah, that's a good. That's a great point. So. So the jamming isn't only from human to machine. It is also from machine to machine when they're flying as a team.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Interesting. Interesting. I mean, what do you see? What do you see these things. What is the expat going to replace? Or is it just. Yeah, another weapon in our arsenal?

[B]

I think. I don't like to. I really. 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 where 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 and 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'll go in the earth early days. And from there if you extrapolate the rate of innovation around AI and autonomy, I think you get to really interesting places again down the line where you start to replace some of these systems.

[A]

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, I mean will they be, will they commingle with, with human pilots?

[B]

100%. Yeah, they'll, they'll, 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 US military start experimenting with like, okay, let's just have these systems run on their own and execute missions. But like, if you like, I think the mission is going to dictate hate what the force requirement is in the sense you're going to see missions that dictate, hey, we want to send in a package of F35s and expats into this operation or F22s and expats. I think you're going to see some missions where it's like, look, just send in some expats, see what happens and they can run certain missions independently and then certain missions as human machine teams.

[A]

Could you give me an example of, of what a mission set would look like, where it is, you know, human pilots and expats together.

[B]

Yeah, I think it's good, like, look again, I think it's going to be the threat environment. And so if you're going up against like the worst threat environment imaginable, like, so I would say like you could imagine a strike mission where you know, intelligence estimates that there's A limit, limited number of surface to air missile systems. But there's a complexity to the type of mission in terms of the effects that they want to have. Where it's like you want to put pilots up in the air and then there could be a mission where it's like, look, it's a simple mission, but it's a target that is like hell for any aviator because the number of surface to air missile systems in the area are a ridiculous amount. We know they're mobile. We don't know exactly where they are. You might basically go stimulate that environment by sending, you know, unmanned systems first things like the Xat first.

[A]

Gotcha.

[B]

Gotcha.

[A]

Is there any stealth capabilities to.

[B]

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. The stealth aspect of the capability to start like, like true stealth coatings as.

[A]

Far as D.C. is concerned. I mean, are our politicians on board with this? Are you getting a lot of.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I think they're very much. I think not only the politicians, but also senior DoD leadership. 1. 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 for us, the combination of hive mind and expat really stands out in the sense that, again, no one's ever seen an aircraft like this before. It's pretty unique. And then it's non obvious in terms of like, the immediate benefits that it has for the warfighters, essentially that logistics aspect of it and like the. Just the tactical employment of it, putting it anywhere. Right. It. It fundamentally redefines how air warfare is executed when you start eliminating the need for runways. Everything has always been like, constrained by that one thing. And so I think politicians very much understand that. And absolutely, the combatant commanders and senior military leaders understand that. And look, I think 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, w. Wait a second. Like, okay, what impact does this have to the rest of our systems as this thing comes online? Not to mention the fact that shield AI is funding the vast majority of its development. And so it's just kind of. That will be one of the challenges, it's like, okay, well how does it affect current DoD resourcing plans as this capability comes online?

[A]

How fast can you manufacture these?

[B]

We want to ramp to like, we want this aircraft to be this generation's F16.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I think there's something like 4,000 F16s out there. I think you're going to see more because lower cost, lower life cycle costs. AI piloted, much easier to adopt and implement into a force structure. 2029 targeting 50 aircraft, but ramping, you know, between 300 to 500 aircraft. Again, it's. Yeah, that's right. And that's going to be done over a number of years to get to. But. And the demand for the aircraft is going to play a role in that. But it's the customer reception, right? We've gone public with it today. We've been engaging the customer now for eight, nine months. And the reception has been wild in terms of like, again, pretty. It's a non obvious way to solve a lot of problems that were never really, you know, articulated as problems. It's like, what would you do with an Air Force that didn't require a Runway? Right. Or Air Forces. Right. You know, what does this mean for the Navy and the Marine Corps where your, your, your, your strike power is no longer limited to an aircraft carrier where you can have Marines on island chains with this type of organic capability. It just redefines so much as we think about air superiority and how that's employed.

[A]

Yeah, it's a lot to think about.

[B]

Yeah. I would claim it's like up to the point where people, I think it'll be as transformational as when we decided to launch airplanes from ships. Right. Like right before World War II, someone had the crazy idea like, hey, let's try to launch one of these airplane things off a ship. Right. And then what did that do? That basically defined the military force structure of the United States for the next 80 years. So.

[A]

Damn, damn. Do you think we'll see these loitering for defense, loitering about around fobs, loitering around the border of the country?

[B]

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 in the United States States wants to do something, what do we do? We park an aircraft carrier off of its coast and we're flying sorties and saying, hey, check yourself before, you know, you wreck yourself. And I think that'll be similar. It's hard for me to see us using, like, that type of platform in terms of, like, local. You know, I say domestic, like, air patrol, domestic, border security, outside of, like, I don't know, the Caribbean Sea. Surprise. Pretty interesting place right now, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Well, Brandon, we're wrapping up the interview, and, you know, one thing that I just want to ask is, is, you know, for. For Gen Z, for the upcoming generations. I mean, what inspiration do you have for them, being somebody who's an innovator?

[B]

Yeah, I think, look, my recommendation would be, like, be bold, be courageous. Like, you've got, you know, one, you know, precious life and just, like, make the most out of it. And don't be afraid to swing for the fences or be part of a team that is swinging for the fences. Like, in no way are you going to regret that. Like, I regret zero of my time in the Navy, even. 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. What do you have to lose is, you know, my mentality, and that would be my message for. For, you know, this next generation.

[A]

Love that. Love that. Well, well, Brandon, I just want to say it was an honor to interview you, man, and just.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Congratulations. It's awesome what you're doing.

[B]

Thanks, Sean. 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.

[A]

I mean, it's like I said out there almost.

[B]

We were.

[A]

When. When. When. When you were giving me the tour of the aircraft. I mean, this is you. What you're doing, what you've built is. Is. Is. It just makes me proud as hell to be an American. So thank you.

[B]

Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

[A]

And, Doug, here we have the Limu.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

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[A]

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