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

24:13Brandon Tseng:Yeah. So, um, 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 a Friday night, a Sunday morning. It's, it's a hell hell night, a hell 48 hours, whatever it is. Um, it's run by, the seal on the yard. They bring in a bunch of seals from the East Coast to help run it. And along with the seniors who were selectees for the seal teams. You go through that. That is, I mean, I don't know, we probably started with 120 people and you finished that screener with like 40 people. And so it's very much, yeah, it's no joke in that sense.

24:58Brandon Tseng:Then based on your performance, you can get a, uh, a seal billet. And so, um, they didn't have like, they used to have something called mini buds. Now they have something different. When I was going through, um, I got to go spend three weeks, um, with, uh, uh, seal team two, uh, in May, uh, which was awesome. Um, and so, uh, went, spent three weeks with seal team two. Actually, you know, my fun fact was that's where, uh, I got to know, uh, Tim 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 SEAL, we call a SEAL cruise.

25:40Brandon Tseng: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 two uh commanding officer um actually master chief jay manty i don't know if he was a seal team two when you were there at the time so yeah cmc um but then yeah so you put in the applications you go in for an interview um i i like i was competitive.

26:24Brandon Tseng:I did not get a spot right out of the Naval Academy, most soul crushing day of my life up to that point. Um, right. You take your 10 year old dream and like throw it in the trash. Um, I remember like, uh, you know, they, they, they do, they tell everybody what they're doing, right. You go into this room with your 40 classmates and they say, you're going to be a pilot. You're going to be, uh, they give you an envelope, right. And you open it up, um, And open mine up, you're gonna 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.

26:59Brandon Tseng:And I was like, all right. You know, after I was done feeling sorry for myself, which was, I get a day to feel sorry for yourself. I was like, okay, well, let's figure out how to keep the dream alive. So went to the fleet and, you know, but yeah, then I had to laterally transfer. How was the fleet? I tell people, look, combat, BUDS, the SEAL teams, is the most mentally and physically challenging thing in the world, hardest thing in the world. I tell people being a surface warfare officer was a suck on my soul. It was a spiritual torment.

27:40Brandon Tseng: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. Like 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.

28:11Brandon Tseng:You weren't the best. and so that became my mentality it's like I to avoid ever having to experience that again I better be number one I better be the best that way no one can never tell me no again so that was my mentality going on to the ship got my surface we deployed I gave up 30 days of leave right after I graduated I was the first person Naval Academy class of 2008 graduated May 23rd. Uh, I boarded my ship in Phuket, Thailand on May 27th. Um, and was in the Arabian Gulf conducting amphibious operations in like mid June. Um, and, uh, learned a ton. Um, learned like best leaders, like learned the best leadership lessons actually in, in the fleet, um, was a hard job.

29:02Brandon Tseng:Uh, but you know, I'm very thankful for like, It's funny how things work out in life. And I'm forever grateful for getting to experience that year and a half on a ship. And just, you know, yeah, the resilience it built in me and the mentality that it built in me. Whenever, like, yeah, it's just funny how things work out. So how do you get into the teams from there? Yeah, so put in an application. You know, best day of my life up to that point. I remember in a parking lot right out, you know, right on the pier, right next to the USS Pearl Harbor. And I get a phone call from the detailer. Her name was Margaret, the officer detailer.

29:48Brandon Tseng:She's a legend in the SEAL teams, like was the detailer for like 40 plus years. She's like, hey, Brandon, like just to let you know, you've been, you know, selected to go to Buds. and we'll work with your ship's admin to get you orders there. And I was like, thank you so much. I hung up the phone and I was in my car and I was just let out screams of joy. I was pumped to go there. So, yeah. How was it checking in? It was awesome. I loved Bud's. To the point, you're coming from the fleet to going to Bud's. Uh, it was, um, yeah, I, it was one, I think it's, I love the ruthlessness of buds. I love the humor of, but the instructors are the funniest people on the face of the planet.

30:42Like I, uh, I loved every second of it.

30:47Brandon Tseng:Um, like just not be like, that's where I wanted to be. Um, and so like, even in hell week, like I remember like USS Pearl Harbor was out on, the water and I'm just like, oh my God, like I'm not on that ship. Like, thank you. Blessed to be here. Blessed to be getting surf tortured. So you don't hear that very. Yeah. Yeah. So no, it was, it was great. What kind of, I mean, did you have a tough time at Bud's at all? Did you have any hangups? 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 had a... The tread took me four times, which I'm embarrassed to say as a water polo player.

31:30Brandon Tseng: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. Tread with the tanks? Yeah, tread with the tanks. Your hands out with the fins. And it was treading with the fins, which I think was like, it's a different motion. um and so yeah the instructors were baffled too because look I was coming in like first second place on every swim um and they're like what the hell is wrong with you saying like you were a water polo player and so anyways I end up you know getting it on my fourth try actually I was underwater and the instructors were like come to the side I'm like I wasn't like I wasn't sure like if they're like you failed or not and it's like my head's underwater my hands are up um they're like get over to the side and like finally like ran out of breath they're like all right and then you have to like swim across and like you know was dead doing it get out they're like congrats saying you passed you know uh took you four tries and i was like who you know four tries and they're like you know what you get for having you know you being a water polo player and it taking you four tries i was like what do i get they're like 1008 counts go get it and i just hopped on the pool deck and started doing 1008 counts you know for the next whatever two hours so yeah right on let's we got to cover hell week everybody wants to hear about hell week so let's let's hear about your experience in hell week yeah um let's see hell week one uh loved the beginning right loved Sunday night, love breakout.

33:11Brandon Tseng: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 running to like chow or whatever. And I was like, Joe, like, is this as crappy as it gets? He's like, yeah, brother, just keep moving forward. I was like, all right, good. But like, you know, that's when I want to say majority of the class quits that Monday night because people are feeling sorry for themselves.

33:54Brandon Tseng: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. Um, I love, I don't think people talk about, like, how ruthless it is under a boat with people. One of the things I loved was, like, seeing boat crews kick the underperformers out and, like, just the viciousness of it. Like, when you, like, you see someone ducking boat and, like, their teammates would just punch them in the back of the head and they would, like, fall over. Like, I don't think, like, it is, like, if you're not carrying your load, the instructors don't have to do anything, right?

34:30Brandon Tseng:Your classmates are going to take care of you. So I love that aspect of it. Wednesday night was, I think it's Wednesday. Yeah, we did camp surf. And I like, I don't know if people, that was, that to me was the worst evolution. So it was, you know, one in the morning and for four hours, 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.

35:17Brandon Tseng:It was like a million needles just, like, crushing my body to the point where you don't, right after Hell Week, you never want to get into the ocean again. It's because you have this, like, this, you were just tortured into recognizing, like, it's not comfortable getting in that water. So that's what I remember. And then a 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 like we ran out of batteries i'll be back he paddles back like comes back you know 30 minutes later with it bearing he's like i got new batteries boys and like puts it on and you're just like listening it to again so then i will say like again i love the instructor cadre uh maddie roberts was our first phase uh instructor that guy is yeah um guy's an animal he is uh yeah like one of the cool you know yeah he he told us uh he's like look if you guys are here after hell week i'll tell you how i got uh the silver star and like told us that story and to have that i you know one of the things again amazing people right but that's your first phase instructor a lot of people don't know like he was nominated for the medal of honor and like you get to learn from that person, like how cool is that, right?

36:53Brandon Tseng:And like, that is the guy who's putting you through the gauntlet, like I loved every moment of it. Yeah. So what did it feel like, you know, to graduate buds and SQT, I mean, when you finally got your Trident? Um, it feels good, right? It's a good accomplishment. And then I would claim like the real work starts, right? And it's like, you know, I think the teams do a good job of that. It's like, look, congratulations. You know, 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.

37:32Brandon Tseng:You're getting ready to go to war. um and so uh loved that again i checked in seal team seven um actually you know like one thing that i also i again i don't think a lot of people appreciate this um at least you know probably the same for you when you guys were like going through it but um you you experience just like in that community you see a lot of death like more than any like i've been to more right you 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.

38:15Brandon Tseng: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. Um, I think it's Mike Tatham. He, you know, was, you know, uh, he died in R and R, um, you know, but he was deployed to Afghanistan during that time. And so you just like, you're like, I thought that was kind of, uh, you know, when I reflect back and think about it, that's something I don't think, um, like thankful to, to be part of the teams, but a lot of people don't get to, you know, that's like one of the things that I think helps shape you as like a young man being around, you know, all of, you know, war, death, all of it.

39:04Yeah. What was it like checking into Seven for you?

39:09Brandon Tseng: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 to augment development group. And so, and then, you know, after ProDev hit ULT and yeah, that was a ton of fun too. Yeah, so you check in and you go right into a DevGroup deployment. Yeah, so. And that is, look, that's like winning the lottery too. Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, can cover down on that.

39:54Brandon Tseng:But so to be clear, not part of SEAL Team 6, but got to augment them. The SEAL teams were sending junior officers out to basically get experience. And so I spent three and a half months in Afghanistan out of Fob Shank 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 master class in ISR and targeting. The troop would go out in the night and conduct direct action raids. And then during the day, we were conducting kinetic strikes. And that's where, you know, I got to play, you know, a really nice role as a junior officer, just coordinating those airstrikes, which was a lot of fun.

40:45Did you get to go on any of the hits or?

40:47Brandon Tseng:Didn't get to go on any of the hits, which was, you know, I get it, right? It's like those guys train up with, you're a new guy, right? You earn your way onto that mission. And I was a fresh Navy SEAL with a month and a half of, you know, at the team. And so, no, I didn't get to go with them. So coming back, I mean, to see the pinnacle of the SEAL teams, like the pinnacle, especially with who you deployed with, you know, year after the Bin Laden raid, I mean, did that create some false expectations? Um, it's a good, like, yes. Like, right, a couple times my platoon commander, my troop commander, like Brandon, like, yeah, we're not, we're not damn neck, right?

41:45Brandon Tseng:We're not DevGrew. Like, like, we get those guys only go out at night, right? Why are we going out during the day, guys? They're like, look, we got to seize terrain. This is our mission. 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 my, for like our CLL, I'm in in Afghanistan. But it wasn't, it wasn't to the point where I think it was, it was just part of that learning curve, right? I had seen what, you know, the top tier was doing. And then it's like, okay, like, look, it's a different mission is kind of like what it was at the end of the day.

42:23Brandon Tseng:It's not that, it's just like you have to solve that mission differently than what DevGrew was doing with their mission set. So understanding that was, I think, like, you know, very quick to understand that. Like, look, this isn't... We have a different mission than DevGrew. This is how we have to execute said mission. Where did you go? What was your first deployment? So first deployment was out of Terenkaut, Aruzgon, multinational-based Terenkaut, Soda Southeast. We would do helicopter assault force operations into Kandahar, into Aruzgan, into Ghazni, into Zabul. And then we forward staged out of Ghazni sometimes going, I want to say Paktika and Paktia.

43:10Brandon Tseng:And got to go. Our mission was, we were paired up with the 8th Commando Battalion, 8th Kandek, Afghan Commandos, 900 Commando Battalion. every single mission at that time in the war. It was a 10 to 1 force ratio. We had to bring 10 Afghans out for every single operation. And so we would bring 13, 14 guys and 130 Afghans. Holy shit. Yeah. Talk about like moving pieces on the battlefield. Wow. Yeah. What'd you think about working with those guys? It was not, I did not, And like, there's pros, there's cons. I would say like, overall, I did enjoy it, right? It was, when you go out with that many inexperienced guys, it makes the mission more dangerous.

44:00Brandon Tseng:It was very clear to us 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 um and so now again there's probably like you bring 130 out there's like 15 hard chargers and like you use those 15 hard chargers um but it was uh i appreciated the challenge and the complexity of the operations multi-day village clearances um it was cool we got all the air assets in the world right our mission was, you know, hey, this is 2013. America's not gonna be here forever.

44:47Brandon Tseng:Like, we have to train the commandos to stand up on their own. And so that was an interesting mission set. But we were also at that point 12 years into a war, and it was clear to us, like, look, this is... Right, it was like, don't get yourself killed. It was like kind of a mentality over this uncertainty was something that we thought about. Like, get the mission done. Don't get yourself killed. And like, yeah, take it to the enemy when they show up. Was it pretty hairy out there at the time? I don't think it was hairy. No. Like, we got into some good firefights, which I'm like thankful for. And like, I'm glad the team like had that deployment.

45:32Brandon Tseng:And we got to rack up, like some of the guys got to rack up some EKIA and I get credit for like some JTAC kills. But I think it's like one quarter or whatever. But the... Let's hear about it. Oh, the JTAC stuff. Let's see. There's this one, just like 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 pot shots at us from probably like 1300 meters away from a mountain. And it's like hard to find them. They're moving and it's indirect fires. But we're like, all right, let's bring on C-130 and drop some ordnance on this guy.

46:25Brandon Tseng:And turns out the C-130 had not doped in 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, 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. um they uh he runs probably for about four and a half minutes just like smoke going everywhere like rounds coming in on him um finally they drop a i want to say it's called a griffin gbe 39 uh it's a glide bomb um because the guy like stops under a tree uh and tries to like hide under the tree but we we had him on ir footage and so that was that was an interesting one so So, yeah, it was new JTAC's first, you know, JTAC kill.

47:27Brandon Tseng:And so, yeah. That was your first one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How did that feel? Ah, indifferent. I'm like, yeah, I was, I just wanted to honestly, like I just wanted the team to complete the mission. So. Right on. Where do you go from Afghanistan? Um, so let's see. While I'm in Afghanistan, my orders were to go, I want to say it was to SEAL Team 2. I had orders to go to the East Coast. During that deployment, I get an email from one of my SQT classmates, another officer at SEAL Team 5, to say, Brandon, you want to hop on the phone? I was like, cool. So I hop on the phone from Afghanistan. He's in Coronado.

48:08Brandon Tseng:He's like, hey, I've got family issues. I have to step down from my platoon commander billet at Team 5. 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? She's like, you're going to go right into a workup. And so I call my wife, said, hey, 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. and but here's the catch is like I'm home for a week and then rotating right into ULT.

48:51Brandon Tseng:I was like, what do you want to do? And so she said like, hey, let's, you know, like she's like, I'm down for staying in San Diego if you are. And I was like, yeah, that sounds great. So got home, checked into SEAL Team 5, ULT started, was off to the races. I think out of a, 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 my wife's like, this isn't normal. I was like, I don't know. All our friends are doing it. It seems pretty normal. She's like, no, it's not. I was like, all right. But yeah, so checked into SEAL Team 5, did the workup.

49:33Brandon Tseng:I deployed to the Pacific. What are you guys doing over there? um it was a lot of uh joint partner operations um during the time so i think like we were like we sent a lot of people to the uh yeah the joint exercises we sent uh element to korea sent element to the philippines sent an element to uh the maldives like all over 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. All right, why did you get out? I wanted like a number of, like a whole host of reasons.

50:28Brandon Tseng:I wanted to do something else. I wanted to see like what could be done outside of the confines of the military. And I don't mean that like in a negative way, big, very blessed, excited. Like I would encourage everybody actually, like I think the amount of accountability and responsibility you get in the military, like at such a young age is like one of the most amazing things I would encourage people to do it. But I wanted to see like what could be done outside of a military system. them. I knew what the career path looked like for officers. Like in the sense, right, it's like, okay, I would have to go do an ops job before I could go screen.

51:06Brandon Tseng:And then you go screen, you'd be a troop commander and like you get, you know, maybe one or two more pumps. And then you're commanding and, you know, and then you're doing another staff job and then like a group commanding. Like, again, I got a lot of friends who are doing that. I just was not, you know, commanding a SEAL team was not something that I 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. I don't know a whole lot of people that were.

51:47Yeah. So. So Shield AI, I mean, that that that popped on your I mean, you wanted to do something before you left.

51:57Brandon Tseng:Yeah. So, again, kind of like a planner mentality. I want to be a SEAL since I was 10 years old. When I got accepted into business school, I was on deployment. I was based out of Guam and I was trying to figure out what I want to do next. was it hey was it gonna do venture capital was gonna do private equity was gonna 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 on, and I think that fit my skillset, right?

52:46Brandon Tseng: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 um i remember you know thinking like wow what it would have been 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 uh ai and autonomy is what i decided and like lots of people were talking about it at the time um and then was trying to figure out what problems i wanted to solve uh and typical entrepreneur story just kept coming back to the problems that I had faced, right?

53:30Brandon Tseng:Problems of military problems, problems of national security, global stability, you know, decide, you know what, these are actually really important problems. And I remember, again, looked up to Elon Musk as an entrepreneur, and he has done a lot of inter-space travel. You have XAI, you had PayPal for, he didn't have XAI at the time, but he had PayPal for the internet. And I was like, what problems is he not working on that are actually really important for the future of humanity? And I think warfare is one of those massive unsolved problems in human history. And so it's like, wow, is there, you know, could work on solving, you know, call it the problem of warfare, was something that I was interested in also.

54:17What problems specifically in warfare were you looking to solve?

54:23Brandon Tseng:more of deterrence. And if you look at why countries go to war, why they don't go to war, because a lot of countries have grievances with each other, but they choose not to fight. It's expensive. It's costly. And if you look at how America has built this world order, it's like, it's because of our military leadership since, you know, 1945, right? For the past 80 years, there's been more global prosperity in the world because there's been more global stability in the world. That has been because of like the power projection of the U.S. military. That's, right? Nuclear weapons deter nuclear war.

55:08Brandon Tseng:The conventional weapon systems that have deterred conventional warfare have been our aircraft carriers, our submarines, our ships. Those have deterred largely state-on-state conflict up until Russia invading Ukraine, like major state-on-state conflict. Obviously, there have been a handful of small examples. But it became, you know, like how can you continue to deter warfare just at the conventional level and then also So at the asymmetric level, and my belief is that AI and autonomy has a massive role to play in deterring conflict. Yeah, yeah. We're going to get heavy into that. I would love to hear what you think the future of warfare looks like.

55:56And 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 Shield AI, let's take a quick break. Okay. There are a lot of choices out there when it comes to cell phone service, and it feels like more are popping up all the time. But Patriot Mobile isn't just another option. They're different. A company built by people who actually share your values and who are committed to doing things the right way. They're also ahead of the curve when it comes to tech. Patriot Mobile is one of the only carriers with access to all three major U.S.

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58:48Brandon Tseng:Woo! Damn it! If you've enjoyed watching, there is a lot more waiting for you over at Vigilance Elite Patreon. All right, Brandon, we're back from the break. I need to work on my shooting. That was a little rough out there. Good break. I mean, it was a little rough for me too. But so I want to get into, you know, why you're here, Shield AI. So you started it in 2015? 2015. What was the vision? Look, 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 U.S.

59:49Brandon Tseng:to lead here and so wanted to start a company that realized this vision I think there are there are a couple people talking about it in 2014 Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, but, you know, what I was seeing was no one was really working on it because it requires a lot of software expertise to actually build the AI and autonomy. And that's not what the traditional defense primes are known for. They're not known for their software systems. They're known for building the aircraft carriers, the submarines, the fighter jets of the world. But, you know, the best of AI and autonomy was all going to Silicon Valley at the time.

1:00:25I mean, what, so what is, I mean, I know you guys have a bunch of different projects, but you know, what, what overall, what is shield AI?

1:00:34Brandon Tseng:Um, so, uh, 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 or communications are jammed. It enables them to operate without a remote pilot. And then 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.

1:01:15And so these, all the different stuff that you're making, these aren't piloted from somebody in Nevada or... No, they are piloted by an onboard autonomy stack, an AI pilot.

1:01:31Brandon Tseng:Again, if you've ever driven a Tesla or been in a Waymo where it's just navigating the streets, executing the mission of dropping you off from point A to point B, making decisions about what to do, same type of technology, but for military applications. Damn. Damn. Yeah. So, I mean, so what was the, I mean, that's like, it's just a huge thing to take on, especially, you know, coming out of the SEAL teams. I mean, where do you even start with that idea? Yeah. Look, I think you start, you actually start with like the vision, right? And I asked myself, and then you work backwards from there, but, you know, in 2015, I asked myself, what does the military of 2035 look like and what is the role that AI and autonomy plays?

1:02:22Brandon Tseng: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 Bud's, like in the SEAL teams, just one step at a time. And so we started with a problem that I was super familiar with clearing buildings of threats. And so our first product, we put an AI pilot on a quadcopter and it would go inside buildings and structures completely autonomously looking for threats. No shit, completely autonomously. Yep. Has that been deployed? It has been deployed to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Ukraine.

1:03:05Brandon Tseng:It's been widely deployed. It's been used, like I'm super proud of the product. The quadcopter market for the military back in 2015 to like 2000, honestly, like maybe even now is, it was a very small market. Um, so, but like the mission impact that we got to have, like, I'm very proud of, you know, the best of the best soft forces have used it on operations. It has absolutely brought guys home back safely to their families. Uh, super proud of that product, couldn't build a large business from just that product, and so had to expand. And we executed climbing the aviation food chain, which led us to autonomous F-16s, autonomous V-BATs.

1:03:49Brandon Tseng:And now it's like we're just making, like we're working with every prime contractor to make their systems autonomous. Wow. Wow. I mean, what is it? I mean, so, you know, one of the interesting things about autonomous warfare or you know drones specifically is is it's everything from clearing a building i don't know if they have weapons capabilities on these uh quad copters or not do they uh they like we would not ship it with them but folks have um figured out like how to strap their own things but that's not like we don't even make these quad copters anymore uh because we've had to focus like in the same way tesla doesn't make a sports car anymore um we've used as a stepping stone to get to other markets but um other folks have put things on these quadcopters i mean it's 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 Yeah.

1:04:53Yeah. Maneuvering in F-35. Yeah. He's about 18 ,000 pounds. Yeah.

1:04:57Brandon Tseng:Yeah. And that's just wild to even think about. Yeah. So, I mean, what, what's it like, you know, seeing your product, your innovation get implemented into the SEAL teams where you came from? Yeah, it was like what I care most about. It's not like the size of the company. It's not the valuation. It truly is like when our products make an impact for our customers, the warfighter at the end of the day. That's when like I get, you know, the hair stands up on my arms still every single time. Like it doesn't matter. And like the cool thing at this stage in the game is that is happening at increasing frequency.

1:05:35Brandon Tseng: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 LaPosta. And they gave a SEAL squad the exact same problem. Quadcopter, right, like solve the problem faster. And at the end of this problem, this house clearing problem, there's a house born NID, which was like a way for the SEAL teams to say, like, yeah, it doesn't matter. Like, that's, you know, you cleared the building, but you still get blown up.

1:06:14Brandon Tseng:And so seeing the reaction from the guys after that, they're like, OK, like, I can see why this is like a valuable capability, even with all its flaws. And it had a lot of flaws back in 2017, 2018 timeframe, but they took it overseas, found utility out of it. And so, you know, I was very proud of that product. And actually working a lot with the Army also was probably even a bigger user of the product than the SEAL teams were. And again, this was like early days innovation. Holy smokes, the team must have been like 40 people at this stage in the game. But like, again, proud of like no one had ever seen this thing before.

1:06:50Brandon Tseng:No one, a lot of people had talked about autonomous systems. They put it in their 10, 15 year roadmap. And here it was completely, you know, going through these house clearing problems by itself. Damn. I mean, do you, are you on site when they're, when these exercises are going on or? Yeah. Yeah, we were, um, we were working hand in hand with these guys. So, so what's it like when you see something that you've innovated, something that you've developed outperform the same community that you came from? I mean, is there a lot of pushback? I would think that it's taken a job, right? And so a job that there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of sweat, blood, tears, dedication, drive that goes, I mean, we just talked about, you know, your pipeline into the SEAL team.

1:07:40I mean, there's a lot of passion to become a SEAL. And then to have you show up with a drone that's like, watch this.

1:07:52Brandon Tseng:So one, it augments a mission. I don't want to say it takes a job. And I think everybody understands that. And the thing that I think a lot of folks understood in the SEAL teams in SOCOM writ large was, hey, this thing, like, close quarters combat is a really cool thing to train to. It's a lot of fun doing it. It's also, like, one of the most dangerous things that a soldier or a soft warrior, like, does in terms of a mission. And so, like, again, clearing buildings, clearing tunnels, it sounds really cool until you start taking fire from the other side and you say, look, how is there a better way to do this?

1:08:29Brandon Tseng:And that's why I think SOF has been a great partner, not just like from the quadcopter, but all the way up to like all of our products. Cause they're always asking the question, like, is there a better way to do this? Um, and so that's been just like a positive mentality. Uh, but yeah, it was, uh, it was, it was fun doing, uh, the tests, the exercises, again, they were great partners. Um, their innovation cell working directly with us. Very proud of what we accomplished. But at the same time, it was at small scale. And that's why we had to figure out how to build other products, because there are just not a lot of people, unfortunately, care about the soft fighter or the infantry soldiers.

1:09:14Brandon Tseng:It pales in comparison in terms of the amount of funding that's going towards other capabilities. So was there any, I mean, did they implement it immediately or did they? Yeah, they took it over to the battlefield. They used it, right? And you get feedback, right? It sucked in this scenario. Why wasn't it working here? And like, that's when like team would solve bugs, solve problems, send it back. We fixed this. They'd use it, you know, again, it was successful in a lot of operations. It was unsuccessful in some. And that's just like the name of the game in terms of like early stage, highly technical products.

1:09:50Brandon Tseng: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%, you know, brought guys back home safely to their families. And so I can't, like, can't go into those missions, but missions where H bids went off, S vests went off, those types of missions where it's like, if there had been guys inside that building, you know, like, we all know what that looks like. So, or you and I know what that looks like. Wow. So you're always getting direct feedback from the field on how these things are going. Yep. Can you talk about, if you can't talk about these specific missions and what they were for, I mean, can you talk about some of the, some of the successes and failures that you saw the product doing?

1:10:35Brandon Tseng:Yeah, just simply, it would go inside these buildings, in terms of like the SVS 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. Oh, shit. Yeah, yeah. What were some of the failures? What were some of the things? You'd have trouble in 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 particle sand in the air.

1:11:17Brandon Tseng:And every single time that LIDAR is scanning, it's getting a reflection back from that dust. And so that caused a lot of challenges, a lot of headaches in the early days because simply, you know, that's where our customer was operating in these dusty desert-like environments where people lived in mud huts or there's just sand and, you know, or there's war zones where there's just like dust everywhere. And then when you fly a quadcopter that's spinning up all that dust, that would be a challenge. going through really small doorways and tunnel systems was another challenge because when you like the wind vortices that these things are like when they're flying it's sucking them into the wall because you're flying in so such close proximity and so that's just like a controls challenge that we had to solve but those are like some of the headaches and problems that you have to solve where the customer uses it they're like oh what the hell it doesn't work right customer at the end of the day just wants their product to work.

1:12:17Brandon Tseng:And so the other good thing about that soft customer is that they're a very demanding customer, but they're also understanding of where a product is and its maturity lifecycle. Interesting. Interesting. I mean, how small are these things? These things were about two and a half pounds this big. Yeah, size. It fit through a standard doorway. That was one of our product requirements. So what would, I mean, how would it be implemented? I mean, we were just talking about, you know, doing hits and all this stuff. And so what exactly, in the soft world, because that's all I can relate to. It was primarily used in call-out operations.

1:12:56Brandon Tseng:So, right, it wasn't going to be used in a dynamic, like, HR mission or anything like that. But, like, when you have a deliberate target where you're executing a call-out, where, right, you can think of, like, for the non-military audience, like, the FBI surrounding a house, like, come out with your hands up, right? There's pros and cons to executing an operation that way. But during those types of operations, you execute a call-out, right? 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.

1:13:27Brandon Tseng:Those types of operations. Damn. Damn. I mean, what did that wind up developing into? What was the next product? Yeah. So a couple of things. One, to the point where, like, recognized really quickly that, hey, this market is vicious, small. Everybody thinks of quadcopters as toys. This is, again, back in 2018, 19, 20. Like, there's not real money flowing towards these quadcopter products. We said, hey, we have to figure out how to get on to more strategic, more, yeah, strategic platforms, strategic capabilities. That's where a lot of the defense dollars were moving. So what we ended up doing was during the time, we decided, hey, we have to, we're going to buy another platform.

1:14:22Brandon Tseng:So made that decision in late 2019, 2020, there was a couple acquisition targets that we were looking at. Ended up in 2021 buying two companies, both at the same time. One of the companies, Martin UAV, they made the VBAT. The other company, Heron Systems, they were working on AI and autonomy for fighter jets. And so what we were able to do is, hey, let's put the AI pilot on the VBAT, which is, again, you think of it as like a miniature Predator Reaper drone. And then, you know, we wanted access to these programs where we could put AI pilots on two fighter aircraft. I mean, so we'll get into the fighter aircraft here in a little bit.

1:15:04But 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... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just called it the expat? I mean, you know, how... Is it just you switch it on and point it in the right direction?

1:15:21Brandon Tseng: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. And like every one of Shield AI's products is working like this. The software modules that make up this AI pilot or this autonomy stack, you have a state estimation module. State estimation is like where in the world am I? You have a mapping module.

1:15:56Brandon Tseng:It builds a map. You have a controls module. You have, right, that's like how to actuate motors. um yeah you know your your steering mechanisms um you have um a reasoning model what we call global reasoning you can think of this as like the mission is the mission to go inside a building and clear the threats is the mission to dogfight f-16s is the mission to find surface to air missile systems like what the mission is that's what the reasoning module is then you have like path planning module which is like okay what are the steps that i'm going to take to execute uh said mission so those are the different software modules that make up an autonomy stack um the way that you know it operates without gps right it's building a map of the room its environment whether it's using cameras whether it's using lidar whether it's using radars uh to basically uh build a map of its environment and then it's estimating its position based on the map that it's built.

1:16:58Brandon Tseng:Again, I think a lot of people try to like overcomplicate autonomous systems. At the end of the day, like you and I, we are autonomous systems and we operate the same way these robots do in the sense that we sense the world with our five senses. Then we think about the world using our brain and then we actuate our muscles supported by our skeleton to maneuver around the world. When we come into this room, like we don't think about it this way, but we've made a map of this room in our head and we can now navigate off of this map. I know that wall is 10 feet away. This wall is eight feet away, right?

1:17:35Brandon Tseng:You're six feet from me. These autonomous systems are doing the exact same thing. And just like we learn from our experiences, these things are learning from their experiences. How do they learn from their experiences? Yeah. So one of the principal ways that we developed a methodology called reinforcement learning. And so this was pioneered, there's probably like academic papers, I would say, like it became pretty famous with like AlphaGo, AlphaStar, where it was, they would put these AlphaGo, you know, beat a world champion at the game of Go, right? It's any time, reinforcement learning is really a good learning methodology when the number of variables or outcomes are massive, right?

1:18:25Brandon Tseng:In the multiple, like trillions of outcomes, right? In which I couldn't bring up what the outcomes of the game of Go are, but right, it's, you know, it's almost uncountable. Yeah. Right. Same thing with like the game of Starcraft, which was Alpha Star. It's like the number of like moves are uncountable in terms of like the number of scenarios. That's where you find something like reinforcement learning really shine, right? In the real world, the number of moves that you have are uncountable. And so what you're doing is you're taking, you know, you basically give it a goal and then behaviors that you believe are positive, you reinforce those behaviors, you reward those behaviors.

1:19:08Brandon Tseng:And then things that are negative, like you don't reward those behaviors. And what you'll do is spin up millions of simulations where these things are just playing against each other millions of different times, and they just continue to improve. And then you have your engineers, right? They architect this training environment, this, I think we've called it a dojo before, but they just keep learning from those experiences. You check in, you validate, you cross-validate, you make sure it works in the real world. And that's how you're teaching these systems, anything from clearing a room to dog fighting to, you know, hunting surface-to-air missile systems to navigating, you know, yeah, any unmanned system.

1:19:49Brandon Tseng:Wow. Wow. I mean, what do you envision? I mean, you had mentioned what does warfare look like in 2035? And I mean, obviously, it's a lot of autonomous systems. Yep. Be a little more specific. I mean, what does it look like? I mean, we had talked about, you know, I was just talking about did you get any pushback from the seal teams of the soft community about you know is this going to take our job which you know my perspective is yeah it probably will eventually take your job but you know and that you know that sucks for somebody that's aspiring to be you know a seal a green beret infantry whatever right but i mean for the for the you know broader consciousness of the country and even the world, I mean, that's less people coming home in bags.

1:20:39You know, it's, it's, and so I, you know, I mean, I mentioned to breakfast, I interviewed, you know, Palmer Luckey and kind of asked him the same question, you know, what does it look like? Is this going to replace all personnel military wide eventually? He says, no, he knows a hell of a lot more about this than I do. But, you know, when he's talking about, and you too i mean when you guys are talking about this stuff i mean it's making uh pilots obsolete it's making you know dino mavrucus and other seal who's doing autonomous surface warfare vehicles it makes a lot of naval vessels obsolete i mean the drone that you you know the quadcopter that's that's taking somebody's you know job and and and so i'm just curious i mean which i like I just want to be clear.

1:21:27I think that is a good thing for the nation. Less deaths on our own side and more is obviously better. So what is your vision? What does it look like in 2035? In 2035, so there's like, directly in 2035, humans still play a massive role.

1:21:48Brandon Tseng:I think it's going to be a human machine team augmented by swarms of autonomous systems, but you are still going to have like it it will not have proliferated uh autonomous systems will not have completely proliferated by that stage of the game um in terms of like uh how militaries operate uh 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 a hundred 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 a hundred years from now.

1:22:32Brandon Tseng:I think that actually happens probably sooner where countries, you know, it becomes a, you know, robot on robot deterrence where, right, and I think that's like a, it's a good place, right, where it's like, we're not, neither side you want to be sending, you know, young men and women to fight each other over, you know, often like what I would call like, you know, 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 there, I think people are going to see like, holy smokes.

1:23:14Brandon Tseng: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. We need to double down, triple down, 10X down on these types of systems because they're going to have massive strategic impacts on the battlefield. Happy to talk about why. Let's do it. Yeah. I think this is why I believe autonomy, if I had to point out the most strategic technologies in warfare for the past 90 years, 100 years, it'd be like our air power. And behind that, you have our nuclear triad, our nuclear submarine, super important.

1:24:07Brandon Tseng:In the 80s, we developed stealth technology and GPS-guided munitions. then we adopted large drones from 2000 to 2020 and I think the next evolution which is really a transformation is this proliferation of autonomous highly intelligent autonomous systems that are ubiquitous on the battlefield now from like again an engineer think about like first principles and if you look at like one of the principles of warfare or actually like two of them, it's like mass and maneuver. Mass, super important, right? Those who are able to apply mass and maneuver on the battlefield more effectively than others have always been more successful in the history of conflict, right?

1:24:52Brandon Tseng:Larger armies, just with mass, often won wars from like 4 ,000 BC to frickin', you know, the 1800s, you know, then maneuver started becoming more important. And now it's like, how can you maneuver mass most effectively? 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 DevGuru is really cool. He's like, but we need our brothers or sisters in the Army and the Marine Corps to bring the mass to the fight. You need mass to occupy terrain, you need mass to create stability.

1:25:31Brandon Tseng:And like, you know, soft forces just don't bring the mass or the heft of the fight, and that's why you need the Army and the Marine Corps to bring that level of mass. What autonomy does is it unlocks the concept of near-infinite intelligent, maneuverable mass, where you are no longer limited by the number of personnel you have, right? The number of warfighters that the United States could theoretically field, right? Call it able-aged, you know, men and women from age, you know, 18 to 55, there's a finite number of people. You're like with AI and autonomy and combined with, you know, industrial production, you can field million tests to lead.

1:26:20Brandon Tseng:That's why it's like the most strategic AI and autonomy being the most strategic capability for the next 50 years. Wow. Damn. I mean, who are your competitors? Not just domestic, but I mean foreign competitors. I mean, we seem to be, from my perspective, on the cutting edge of all this autonomous warfare type stuff. But I mean, everybody that I bring in here is talking about China, China, China, China's right on our ass, if not a little bit ahead, with AI, with energy, with autonomous systems, shipbuilding, all that kind of stuff. I mean, who are the key players in the world? In the world? I think China is the key player that matters.

1:27:11Brandon Tseng:Now, the good news is the United States remains best in the world at software, at AI, at autonomy. But like that, in no means we should be complacent. I think the Chinese are highly innovative. They are able to mobilize resources in a faster way than the United States can mobilize resources, at least state-sponsored resources. And their iteration cycle, like how quickly they go from version one to version two to version three to version four to version five, is much faster than the USA. and I've been in a number of classified briefings that actually show their ability to iterate and obviously like can't go into like what those timelines are what those capabilities are but stuff to say like no one should feel good about it because like as Elon Musk says like all that matters is your cycle time all that matters is your iteration cycle if you suck at something but you can get really good at it really fast um then it becomes a problem like it doesn't matter if if you're here and if China's here and we're here like we shouldn't feel good if China's accelerating like this and we're just kind of like you know you know moving forward at a slower clip because eventually they pass us so yeah they're by far number one and they yeah they understand the technology they've made claims they want to build a million uh drone-sized army right and that's we're seeing that more and more from countries throughout the world um basically stating that they're moving towards million-plus drone armies.

1:28:49Brandon Tseng:What, um, 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? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a major, I mean, 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? Yeah, yeah. No, we take security, like, very seriously. It's, um... It's...

1:29:39Brandon Tseng:The hard thing is, right, you're in the intelligence community, a state-sponsored actor is, like, a really hard thing to stop, right? If China can steal the plans for the joint strike fighter, right, 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 would tell my platoon, like speed is a type of security, right? If you're iterating quicker, then that is going to make you like more secure, right?

1:30:17Brandon Tseng:Just like because great, if a state-sponsored actor is stealing something, hopefully it's going to take them a couple of years to like crack through encryption. and then all of a sudden, like they're a couple of years behind, right? And they're just getting started. And hopefully by then you're on iteration 10 in terms of what you've been doing, right? And this is very similar to like, right, Elon Musk not patenting anything from SpaceX because he's like, we just, he's assuming that, right? They're gonna steal rocket plans at some point in time. And so what matters is just like moving faster than the adversaries.

1:30:51Brandon Tseng: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 matters in business, what matters for our country is an emphasis on speed over security. And I think the U.S. actually has been more challenged in this world where it's always like compartmentalized, move things. Security slows things down in a lot of ways sometimes where it's like, no, we have to be moving at speed. Interesting. Interesting. Let's talk about the expat.

1:31:29I mean, we were talking about the two companies that you acquired. The VBAT. The VBAT. Yeah, yeah. The VBAT.

1:31:36Brandon Tseng:What is that? So the VBAT, 180-pound vertical takeoff launch and land aircraft, does the mission of a Predator Reaper at a fraction of the cost. ISR and targeting mission. Does it differently than these larger Group 5, they call them Group 5 drones. VBAT is a Group 3 drone. 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.

1:32:21Brandon Tseng:Those are like some of like the key AI piloted, able to operate where GPS and communications are jammed. That's where right on the Ukrainian battlefield, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, where we've been able to have some pretty unique and rare success. So these things vertically take off. Yes. Yep. I mean, can you go into why that is so important? Yeah. So vertical takeoff at launch and land. And this goes to the UAP that's in your backyard that we're going to talk about. But why is that important? Runways are massive infrastructure. They're massive targets. All right. And so in this in like you can't really hide a runway.

1:33:06Brandon Tseng:And then so when a pure adversary like that's one of the first things that they're going to target. Actually, like the Ukrainians, when President Biden enabled them to use ATACMS into Russia, first thing the Ukrainians went after were runways, right? Actually, then with their special operation where they had a bunch of, you know, these are like FPV drones that they use to blow up Russian assets. Those, you know, they were targeting runways and the equipment on runways because they knew where all these things were. Because again, runways, very stationary, high value infrastructure that can massively disrupt operations.

1:33:47Brandon Tseng:And so that's like you want to in this world where warfare is incredibly dynamic, where the enemies have long range missile systems that can hit your runways that where your adversaries know they're you look at their priority list of targets. Number one is runway, right? It's an aircraft carrier. It's a stationary runway in the Pacific. That's the first thing they're going after because every adversary wants to take away the U.S. and our allies, like principal advantage, which is air superiority. So they're going after your runways. What vertical takeoff, launch of land, besides getting out of runways, it allows you to be very tactical, very maneuverable.

1:34:34Brandon Tseng:The Ukrainians and the Russians, they're moving their strategic equipment every 10 minutes because they're just sitting targets. So you have to be mobile. If you're tied to a runway, you're not very mobile. How would these be deployed? How many of them get deployed? So the VBATs, theoretically, like a swarm, you could use a swarm of VBATs that would be, it becomes like an operational challenge to actually deploy swarms, like more of a logistics challenge than anything. But the way that 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.

1:35:19right again i don't think a lot of folks if you haven't been over there realize how dynamic the

1:35:25Brandon Tseng:battlefield is at this stage in the game um it's it's just constant movement shoot and move shoot move shoot and move but done like in the essence where it's like if you're not doing it you're just getting your your target you're a sitting duck so um you have to have this mobile equipment you still have to have the ability to conduct isr and targeting but you're just limited not just from like that runways are targets, but also the proliferation of surface-to-air missile systems make large, exquisite aircraft very vulnerable. Whether it's, you know, everybody saw our Stinger missiles or not our, like they saw Ukrainians shooting down Russian helicopters with Stinger missiles.

1:36:05Brandon Tseng: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 contested environments. And when I say contested, I mean lots of surface-to-air missile systems, lots of GPS jammers, lots of communications jammers. When you—I mean, when they are deployed, are they— I mean, it's just so foreign to me. I mean, you go to Bagram and you see everything. You go to Biop and you see helicopters, fighters, everything, right?

1:36:50From C-130s to whatever, your fighter jets to Chinooks, Batches, all of that. And so because of the vertical takeoff, a couple of questions. I mean, are they dispersed throughout the country in onesies and twosies? That's exactly right, right?

1:37:10Brandon Tseng:You're pushing capability to the lower echelons. And that's actually like, right? When I got to do my commando mission in Afghanistan, I had a full stack of air supporting me. And so I was able to have outsized effect on the battlefield because a lot of incredibly strategic capability was pushed to a lower echelon element, right? A sealed platoon in Afghanistan. And so what these countries are doing, they're pushing this great capability to lower echelons. the chat, like it causes a lot of challenges for the adversaries, right? They don't know where they are because they're distributed. They're small.

1:37:45Brandon Tseng:They don't have a massive infrastructure footprint. And so you're creating dilemmas, um, where a dilemma for the adversary being like, I don't know where the, you know, where these things are, where they're launching from, where they're landing from. Um, and that's like, it caused a lot of problems for the enemy. If you don't know what your adversary is doing right if you don't know what the other guys are doing are they dedicated to specific units yeah they are yep okay okay and so how i mean that could mean a whole array of different capabilities you know with with one you know with your with your product the vbat and so i mean if if if you have one mission that's an ISR mission, you know, surveillance detection, stuff like that.

1:38:33And then you have a kinetic mission. I mean, how do you, how do you tell the machine what you're going to do? Like what the mission is?

1:38:41Brandon Tseng:Yeah. So these basically, right. The way to think about it is, um, you're training a system to learn a mission, right. And that becomes, you can think of it as like a library of missions. And then you're going to check out said mission for like, check out the book, check out the mission from the said library for what you're going to be executing. So that's like, you know, probably the easiest way to explain it. But it's not, you're not pre-planning a mission, right? But you're saying, this is the mission I want to execute. The good thing is, is like every single military mission has been written in pretty like good detail and description in like army field manuals, in, you know, the infantry squad books, right?

1:39:24Brandon Tseng:In like every air operations manual. So these missions are well described. And the cool thing is like software engineers can take those descriptions and then turn them into a software package, a software mission package. And you guys do both? Yeah. Build the product or you build the hardware and the software. Yes, we do. Was it always like that? It was out of a necessity, right? When we wanted to, we started off with a quadcopter. We said, hey, are there any other quadcopters that can carry the sensors, the compute, and the package that we need to do to make a product? And the answer was like, no, those didn't exist.

1:40:01Brandon Tseng: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 move up the aviation food chain, a big reason for that was what like i could tell someone i could tell a four-star general four-star admiral or like uh you know an undersecretary all day every day that this ai pilot that's flying your quadcopter you can put it on f-16 but back in like 2018 2019 everybody's like nah like i don't believe that right um so we were like hey we need another piece of hardware to demonstrate that this ai pilot is transferable from platform to platform to platform.

1:40:47Brandon Tseng:That led to the acquisition of the VBAT, where 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 VBAT. We bought Heron Systems and, you know, that won the DARPA dogfight. And then we're the first company in the world to fly the F-16 completely autonomously. Now you see the AI pilot running on an F-16. And since then, now we've put the AI pilot on on 15 different platforms, one-way attack drones, unmanned ground vehicles, you know, large target drones, jet-powered drones, where I think everybody at this stage in the game, in 2025, people realize, hey, the software is actually transferable, portable from system to system.

1:41:30Brandon Tseng:And again, this is something that we architected our autonomy stack from the get-go, right, with that vision of a world of autonomous systems. And so, like, Shield AI stands alone in our ability to integrate onto platform, platform, platform, platform, really rapidly. Like, one of the cool things, we can take... We've integrated on a variant of the Lakota helicopter. What used to take 40 engineers and, like, tens of millions of dollars and two years to do on our quadcopter, 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.

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1:44:19866-781-8900. That's 866-781-8900 or AmericanFinancing.net slash SRS. So when you're talking about, you know, drum storms with the VBAT, I mean, these are big devices. Big, big, big.

1:44:44Brandon Tseng:Yeah, they're 180 pounds. They stand like nine feet tall, I think. They're not, but again, they fit in the back of a Sprinter van, like in terms of like, So they're big. They're not like F-16 big. And so if you're going to do a swarm of these things, do they all know what each other is doing? Yeah, exactly. They're sharing information with each other. And so, again, building that map, sharing that worldview with each other, sharing positions, sharing friendly position, enemy position the same way. Like if we were doing an operation together, I hop on a radio, I can share a lot of information with you.

1:45:27Brandon Tseng:These things are doing the exact same thing. Just faster. Just faster. A lot faster. Yeah. Superhuman speeds. Is it real time? Yeah. Yeah. We're doing things. It's getting ready to engage something. Yeah. We've done things with fighter jets. Like, one of the things I've learned about air warfare is, like, if you're doing, like, fighter jet tactics with, like, multiple fighter jets, like four of them in the air, right? The coordination is actually, like, a really, really important thing in terms of, like, executing the tactics. And it's a really hard thing, even for the most experienced fighter pilots, to pull off.

1:46:05We've had lifelong fighter pilots at S.H.I.E.L.D.

1:46:09Brandon Tseng:AI who are like, look, I could never get my fighter pilot squadron to do what this AI just did, right? Like, it's wildly impressive, like, the accuracy and the speed with which they are coordinating with each other, reading and reacting off each other. Wow. Let's talk about the DARPA-Alpha dogfight. Yeah. What was that? 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. It was basically show that the value that these systems could be able to provide.

1:46:51Brandon Tseng:And so what it was is there's a number of companies that participated. It was AI pilot versus AI pilot, dogfighting, in simulation, F-16s. The other good thing that I like about it is it was unclassified, so we can talk about it.

1:47:07Brandon Tseng:And AI pilot versus AI pilot in simulated dogfights. And what Shield AI ended up doing, right? Heron Systems, a Shield AI company, ended up doing was we ended up winning the Alpha Dogfight where we defeated every single AI pilot in this dogfighting competition. It was like a ladder, right? Like, you beat them, you move on. a playoff bracket. And then the winner, we got to go up against an actual fighter pilot in simulation, a fighter weapon school pilot, a Top Gun. And I want to say we won 5-0 in that competition. And so what that did is basically say like, hey, and DARPA did that to basically say like, look, this is why we should invest in this capability, this technology.

1:47:59Brandon Tseng:And it wasn't to say, hey, let's, you know, build autonomous F-16s. But as we build this next generation of uncrewed fighter jets, you know, a lot of people call them collaborative combat aircraft. It's we can actually have an AI pilot and autonomy stack that is, you know, running these aircraft. Dude, I mean, you're probably like most overachievers, but I mean, what does that feel like to see your company's innovations outdo everything? I mean, do you even take the time to self-reflect and think about, like, the magnitude of what you're doing? Unfortunately, I don't, just because it's like, I think it's really cool.

1:48:45Brandon Tseng:again, I don't, it doesn't, the thing that I just, it's when there's like mission impact, that's what is like truly does it for me. And I don't say that as like a talking point, but it's like, like truly like when the products do something, that's what like I really care about. I, yes, like the innovation is cool. The capabilities are cool. I'm very proud of the team, but like you don't, unfortunately you see a lot of companies, right. In the military space that we're just innovating for the sake of innovation versus actually building a capability that's going to make a difference on the battlefield.

1:49:17Brandon Tseng: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. is like, what's there to be happy about? Like, job finished? Job's not finished. And that is like, you know, the mentality that I have. Yeah, I am plagued by the same thing. Although I will say last night when the ex-bac got dropped off, I was like, I can't fucking believe this thing.

1:50:01I went home and I told my wife, I was like, you got to come out here and see this with the kids. We have America's aerial defense and offensive system that nobody knows about sitting in our fucking front yard right now.

1:50:15Brandon Tseng:You have to see this. I'm super pumped to unveil it on your show. It's just wild to me. It's crazy. But you want to talk about the expat? Yeah, I'm happy to talk about the expat. Now that we're talking about it. All right, so expat, just some background. Um, Shield AI, when we think about hardware, like we want to build, hardware's, you know, really effing hard to build. Um, it is because you're stuck with the design choices that you make for a long time. Software, you can quickly like iterate on the design choices that you make. There's certainly like there are challenges in architecting a good software system, but like same in hardware, it's just like harder to change things once you're bending steel and metal.

1:51:03Brandon Tseng:So you have to get it right out of the gate. And then hardware is just like when you're dealing in the real physical world, everything's harder. Sensors fail, right? Computers have challenges, right? Sensors will fail for milliseconds on like average. And like, there's just so many hard things about building hardware. So Shield AI is very deliberate about the hardware that we build. Has to be absolutely transformative. For VBAT, VBAT was, hey, we're going to transform ISR and targeting, right? We need more intelligence. McChrystal, very famous for saying intelligence drives operations. Like if we can transform ISR and targeting with VBAT, like that's why we decide to buy VBAT and go with it.

1:51:46Brandon Tseng: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 um and so after great deliberation and great credit to um our head of aircraft uh head of our aircraft business armor harris came from spacex came up with this thing uh called the expat um and so what is expat Expat is a first-of-its-kind vertical takeoff, launch-and-land, multi-role combat strike jet platform that is AI piloted.

1:52:53Brandon Tseng:It is the first airplane in the history of airplanes that doesn't require runway and doesn't require a human pilot. It's AI piloted and it doesn't as vertical takeoff, launch and land. And from that, there are a massive number of benefits to the platform. One of the big benefits, right, if I talk to the geographic combatant commanders, right, these are the four stars, admirals and generals running Indo-Paycom, running Ucom that are posed with the strategic problem. How do you deter our adversaries and if necessary, fight to defeat our adversaries? they would tell you like the value of expat comes from the ability to create a massive number of dilemmas by having geographically distributed long range fires that can be launched from anywhere on the battlefield.

1:53:52Brandon Tseng:And so now we're, 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 a couple of fixed runways. And these aircraft carriers, now all of a sudden, they have to worry about 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. Uh, if you don't know where America's assets are, um, our, especially our aerial assets, which are our number one conventional strategic deterrent, um, it's going to force you to, yeah, rethink, uh, your war plans.

1:54:39Brandon Tseng:It buys diplomacy another day. um on the like other side of the coin of what i would you know tell you about like expat um and this is like again i want to be super clear like expat is going to augment uh you know fighter pilots for you know quite some time um but like when i look at something like the joint strike fighter um it is an incredible capability like if you actually like dig into like what that capability offers the usa it's amazing um but it requires runways it requires hardened bunkers um it requires a 10 million dollar pilot just to get like to be you know certified on flying it right not even making them like an expert at that system right it's like i could put you know when we became navy seals we weren't expert navy seals on day one right?

1:55:32Brandon Tseng:$10 million to make you, you know, base, you know, just dangerous enough with the aircraft. It is limited range. I want to say it's around like 550 nautical mile combat radius. And so if you want to employ Joint Strike Fighter in the Pacific, where there are a thousand nautical mile ranges, you have to have refueling tankers. And because of the threat environment, we've built autonomous refueling tankers, right? Which is another like expensive capability. You have built the refueling tankers? No, no, no, we did. Like the USA has built refueling tankers for these Joint Strike Fighters. And then the platform itself is$100 million.

1:56:13Brandon Tseng:So when you look at the all-in total cost of capability for the Joint Strike Fighter, again, amazing capability. It's wildly expensive. It's estimated$200 million to$250 million per aircraft when you look at all these add-on capabilities, not to mention the total lifecycle cost of it, the hourly cost of operating at$35 ,000 an hour. So expat, vertical takeoff, launch and land, no runways. It is AI pilot, so no human pilot. It has a 2100 nautical mile 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.

1:57:05Brandon Tseng:And so you're getting fifth, sixth gen capability at a fraction of the cost. And that's something that no one else is doing or offering. Wow. Wow. I mean, the VBAT beat the F-35, correct? No, no, no, no. The, no, no. So VBAT being the, and now VBAT XBAT can get confusing. V-BAT's the mini Reaper Predator. The expat in development, we're going to, we've got a subsystem prototype that's flying in 2026, full system prototype flying in 2027, going to production in 2029. The AI pilot for that aircraft, we're developing AI pilots for this next generation of uncrewed fighter jets. And so we have not gone up against F-35, but we've gone up against our F-16s and actual F-16s and F-16 versus F-16.

1:58:12Brandon Tseng: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 F-16 pilots. And yeah, we've, you know, AI pilot, like it wins. Crushes them. Yeah. So you ready to go take a look? Yeah. Yeah. And so we've got, you know, a model out there that excited to show you. It's really cool. Let's do it. Let's do it.

1:58:47All right, Brandon, what are we looking at here?

1:58:49Brandon Tseng:All right. So this is the Expat and the LRV, which is the launch recovery vehicle for the Expat. It's actually a scaled model. Believe it or not, this is only two-thirds the actual size to get it into trade shows and events. We are limited in terms of the actual size. But yeah, this is the aircraft that we are building currently. So, but yeah, this is our model that we take to events, help people understand what we're building, the capabilities and, you know, 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.

1:59:35Brandon Tseng:And now it's, like I've told you, I've been doing this now for 10 years. You get, it's hard, hard work, right? but I think this is, like, I get inspired by this thing. Like, I'm fired up to build this thing. I'm fired up to make it a reality for the warfighter. I think the capability is, it is absolutely strategic. It's going to make a huge impact. And it's like, who gets to work at the intersection of AI pilots and fighter aircraft and actually build an AI pilot fighter aircraft that doesn't require a runway? So, that's cool. Not very many people. Yeah. But so 2 ,100 nautical mile radius? With mission payload.

2:00:14Yeah. With mission payload.

2:00:15Brandon Tseng:So basically this thing can carry the same thing, same amount of payload as an F-18, F-35. It's carrying four AMRAAMs internal. It's got 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, I can, I'm 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 F-100 engine is the engine that is used in F-15s, F-16s. One of the really cool aspects about it is it is a 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.

2:01:17Brandon Tseng:So the F-22 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 and thrust vectoring, but basically what that enables is increased maneuverability, some low speed maneuvers. I was looking it up the other day. It enables something like, I want to call it like the Pugachev Cobra maneuver. It's something they may have shown in like Top Gun 2 when they're like, holy crap, what the hell is that? That type of stuff. So I know someone's got to check me and it's going to be some other maneuver, but like, you know the internet will sort it out yeah the internet will sort it out so is this how it is this how it launches yeah so it launches uh from this position and it also recovers from this position um one of the things we had uh so the lrv is also really cool um it's got this called a blast shield um but one of the things that they were discovering with f-35 when it was taking off from aircraft carriers because they have a vertical takeoff or short takeoff launch and land, but the engine was burning holes into the flight deck.

2:02:36Brandon Tseng:And so that was just like a massive problem with the aircraft. This meant to deflect when we go afterburner on it and just the heat that's being generated from the engine when we're taking off or when we're landing. So, So, but yeah, it launches, lands like a SpaceX rocket. Again, our head of aircraft, Armour Harris, I feel like he was just built for developing this aircraft, but worked as a principal engineer on the Falcon 9, launching land, and then was doing Starlink, Star Shield, working with Elon, and just wanted to work on the air layer and build next generation aircraft. So, yeah. That is amazing.

2:03:18Brandon Tseng:Yep. What is that hole in the front? So that's the intake up there. So air intake for the engine. And yeah, that's what it is. Not much more to it. Where do all the weaponry? So you've got internal and hard points on the other sides of the wings there. Those are the weapons bay for, again, carrying basically any weapon, any, you can carry lorazms, long range, anti-ship missiles. You can carry air-to-air missiles, air-to-ground missiles. You can carry bombs. Again, very much think of it as like, you know, the same thing that you would find on a fighter aircraft in terms of its weapon payload. The unique thing and like one of the differentiating things about this besides being vertical takeoff launch and land, but if I were to compare it to like some of the other new CCA capabilities that you're seeing built, those aircraft are using business jet engines, and so they can't generate the electrical power to run fifth-generation, sixth-generation sensor suites and electronic attack payloads.

2:04:25Brandon Tseng:And so electronic warfare being a massive aspect of the battlefield today, right? Jamming enemy GPS, jamming enemy communications, things that something like the F-18 still have your electronic attack abilities, and so you're still playing a role in the fight. You can act as comms relay. Yeah, this thing is sick. What do you mean electronic warfare? Like jamming capabilities? Yeah, jamming. Jamming, GPS jamming, the communications on other enemy platforms. Wow. One of the other cool things, so we like to say this thing hauls ass and sips gas, right? It can fly for 2 ,100 nautical miles with full mission payload.

2:05:08Brandon Tseng:But it's flying, cruising at 55 ,000 feet altitude, which is higher than any other aircraft in its class, right? And why is that important? It actually allows your air-to-air missiles, it improves the kinematics on them, which makes for, you know, the easiest way to say it is like longer range weapons. And so now your missiles can actually go further because they're, you know, they're actually, the air is less dense up there. They're not using as much gas when they're being fired. And I don't think a lot of people appreciate, but in air-to-air combat, air-to-air warfare, what matters is your sensor range.

2:05:49Brandon Tseng:What matters is the range of your missiles. It's not as cool as dogfighting is. It's not within visual range dogfighting anymore. F-35 is amazing because it can see everything before it gets seen, and it can attack those things. Same thing with this aircraft. That is crazy. Yeah. Powered by Hivemind. Hivemind being our AI pilot. Again, just been working on Hivemind for the past 10 years. And so the mission sets, like we were talking about in the studio, being like that library of checked out missions, but continue to work on classified, you know, classified level missions for air-to-air missions, air-to-ground missions for this aircraft.

2:06:34Wow. 55 ,000 feet. 2 ,100 miles, nautical miles with a payload. How fast does it go?

2:06:42Brandon Tseng:We're 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 signature goes up. People know, and this thing is meant to be pretty low observable in terms of what the enemy's looking for. So, yeah. So when it lands, it lands just like this? It lands just like this. Takes off, lands. Don't want to say, like, yeah, we took inspiration from, you know, SpaceX, you know, catching the thing. That's crazy. So it just, it lands like, it goes in reverse and just lands right here, hooked up, ready to roll again. We've got a lot of experience doing that with the VBAT.

2:07:28Brandon Tseng:And actually, believe it or not, VBAT's a harder thing to launch and land than something like this. because, like, and Armour will tell you, it's like, look, Falcon 9, you have all the thrust in the world, and, like, you put that thing wherever you want on the planet, centimeters. Like, VBAT, and, like, you have perfect weather conditions. VBAT, you're operating in the worst weather conditions. You don't have a lot of thrust. It's a big challenge. XBAT, you have an incredible amount of thrust. From, like, a technical challenge aspect, if this is VBAT and this is Falcon 9, you have XBAT, like, right, you know, next to Falcon 9.

2:07:59Brandon Tseng:Again, that multi-plane thrust vectoring allows us to put this thing, you know, wherever we need to put it. Wow. But yeah, no, it's, right, 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. Anywhere and everywhere. We're in a field here. You go into a forest clearing. We were joking around. You put this thing on a pickleball court if you want. Every pickleball court in the world is now your runway.

2:08:42Brandon Tseng:Damn. Yeah. That is awesome. Could you imagine a drone swarm of these bad boys coming after your ass? Yeah. No, this thing is... No, and that's what, look, we're very much working on the behaviors, the missions of multi-agent expats flying around, augmenting, you know, fighter pilots, 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 those, this is a cool thing to build. Like, you know. One of those moments. Yeah, yeah. If you want to be at the intersection of AI, national security, building cool jet aircraft, Shield AI is a great place to do it.

2:09:35Brandon Tseng:So no limit in terms of the ambition and the imagination here. Congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm excited to launch this thing on your show. I think that's a cool thing. I know a lot of people watch it. I think it's, you know, thanks for letting us bring it onto your property. I'm sure your neighbors were like, what the hell is this? They're really worried about it. What's Sean got going on right now? They're like, what the fuck is going on? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, man. Congrats. That is, this is the kind of stuff that just makes me proud to be an American. Like, that is the future of aerial warfare.

2:10:18That is incredible.

2:10:18Brandon Tseng:Yeah, it fundamentally will transform air warfare, right? Again, no more. Earth is our runway. AI piloted. It's a mean machine that I think, to the point of it's going to deter our adversaries by diplomacy another day. Yeah, I'll say. I'll say. Wow. Awesome. I want to see a launch. Yeah. Yeah. So, right. We'll bring you out to the, happy to bring you out to the first flight. I think it's only appropriate that you come out to that. I would love that. Cool. Thank you. Absolutely. No, thanks, Sean.

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2:11:17For decades, wars have been fought in silence. No bullets, no bombs, just influence. They're called psychological operations, psyops. What if it's all designed for you?

2:11:36Find out who's really pulling the strings. I'm Sean Ryan and this is Target Intelligence PSYOP, an Ironclad original. In this eight-part audio experience, we uncover the ghosts in the machine. Buy it today at PSYOPshow.com.

2:12:02I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us. And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world. And so one thing we've done here at Sean Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter. And the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targeter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign Superbad. She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan Show.

2:12:46and some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind-blowing. And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief. So it's going to be all things terrorists, how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to. And here's the best part. The newsletter is actually free. We're not going to spam you. It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two if we release two shows. The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that.

2:13:30But like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief. Sign up. Link's in the description or in the comments. We'll see you in the newsletter.

2:13:44All right, Brandon, we're back from the break. And what an amazing piece of machinery you've got out there. I can't wait to see the launch.

2:13:54Brandon Tseng:Yeah, it'll be sick. And the land. I'm fired up to see that thing land. Yeah. But, you know, one thing we didn't cover is the VBAT flew 130 sorties so far in Ukraine. Yeah. I mean, by the time this airs, probably a lot more. But yeah, one of the, again, things that I'm like super proud of having that mission impact, our Ukraine story is like, I think it's one, our results are unique. But the story is kind of interesting in that in 2020, the British pushed out a bunch of VBATs to the Ukrainians. We told them, hey, Hivemind, our AI pilot, it's not integrated yet. You're not going to like, if GPS or communications is jammed, like it's not going to work.

2:14:43Brandon Tseng:Because again, we had bought that company in late 21, and we were still in the integration process of the AI with the aircraft and making it a hardened capability. British gave it, they're like, look, we just want to get equipment assets out to the Ukrainians. There's a major push coming in the spring. And so they pushed out 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.

2:15:25Brandon Tseng:Went up against three, four days of every jammer. They had seven jammers, GPS communications, running max power, VBAT flying within 50 feet, no impact on it, right? Because we had integrated the AI pilot on board this time. They kind of strung us along here and said, look, like, all right, great that you passed the test. And this was unique. No one's ever passed this test. 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 said, okay, let's look, we're here to make mission impact.

2:16:06Brandon Tseng:First operation ever flew, GPS communications was jammed. I don't think people realize it. It's completely jammed in Ukraine on the battlefield. And so every mission that we've done, GPS and comms has been jammed. But our first mission that we did, actually fun, the interesting part of the story is like one of the interesting parts. One of the assumptions we made was that we asked them like, look, we're going to 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.

2:16:49Brandon Tseng:uh vbat starts flying in another direction right because of gps jamming um because we had assumed it was going to be available just for takeoff and what ends up happening is like six hours of our team driving through ukraine kind of like the movie interstellar when they're like going through the cornfields trying to capture the drone like that's what our team did they land it um ukraine was like yeah i didn't think it was going to work on the battlefield like well you guys gave us a bad assumption within 24 hours team worked it they came up with a software solution right it was just like basically changing an assumption um tested it in texas pushed the software update to ukraine next day we said hey give us you know we want to retake this mission execute the mission do fine on takeoff um executing the mission comms gps jam the entire time uh target an sa-11 Bukovell surface-to-air missile system.

2:17:43Brandon Tseng:Ukrainians call in HIMARS airburst round, destroys the Bukovell second, target a second SA-11 Bukovell 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 um president takes office and right stops you know funding which is you know again like i'm i'm fine with the decision as like an american taxpayer i understand it right as shield ai we're like oh my god we're at the finish line and then like um you know we're about to deliver capability thankfully europeans uh uh step up to the plate um they get vbat aircraft over there and then we go through training with the ukrainians january to march and since april they have been absolutely lethal with the system.

2:18:41And so, God, there was like a two-week period

2:18:46Brandon Tseng: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.

2:19:36Brandon Tseng: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 U.S. companies doing this. Like they are not having success in these GPS and comms jammed environments. It is a very hard problem.

2:20:12Brandon Tseng:I actually would say that there's only two companies in the world. I can't name the other company that's actually finding success there. It's a Ukrainian company in these environments. And that's from reporting from, you know, call it the warfighters out there in terms of like actually executing the ISR and targeting a mission. Now, tactically, when you're talking like fiber optic connected quadcopters, where the GPS, like where you're tethered to something and you can fight in the, you know, one to 10 kilometer range. Yes, there's like a lot of tactical innovations happening on that end, but at like the strategic operational level, I'm proud that Shield AI stands alone.

2:20:54Man, again, congratulations. Thank you. You know, a lot of hacking, you know, and so would this be a system that China could hack into, you know, if we were using it for an offensive?

2:21:10Brandon Tseng:Um, it'd be incredibly difficult. Like, it would be incredibly, incredibly, I wouldn't say it'd be tactically feasible to actually like execute, you'd have to be like proximal to the command station where these things you'd have to know where they were flying, whether it's VBAT, whether it's expat. And then you have to like, get through encryption. It's just not like the way to take out these systems are going to be kinetically using surface air missile systems. And that's actually like, look, we've lost VBATs to surface air missiles. missile systems in Ukraine. And I remember like, you know, we get a report back, hey, you know, S-300 shot down a V-Bat.

2:21:47Brandon Tseng:I'm 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. Now, when you're talking about jam communications and jam GPS, I mean, I would, I mean, you know, all the way back to the quadcopter, you know, all this autonomous stuff that can think on its own and conduct missions.

2:22:25I mean, is there any, do we need communication with these devices?

2:22:31Brandon Tseng:uh like if you want the best performance you're gonna want the communication is like very beneficial in the same way like if you like top it's like if we were a seal seal element if you were a fire team leader and i was a fire team leader if we have established communications we can operate much better together right if you're across a mountain ridge and you're saying hey brandon this is what i'm doing like i can then adjust my tactics behaviors on like what you're seeing what you're observing. 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.

2:23:08Brandon Tseng:And then you'll adjust your tactics, your behaviors, your mission based on, you know, new information coming through. And so the autonomous systems work the same way. Communications, when you're in a jammed environment, you can think of it as like Swiss cheese. Sometimes you can find pockets if you're only working with load, 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 interact like as a team better with each other.

2:23:42Oh, okay. I mean, yeah, that's a great point. So the jamming isn't only from human to machine, it is also from machine to machine when they're flying as a team. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I mean, what do you see these things... What is the expat going to replace? Um... Or is it just another weapon in our arsenal? Or is it replacing...?

2:24:09Brandon Tseng: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? It's going to replace drivers at some point in time. I don't think that happens for, you know, 20 plus years. So in the meantime, like it's just augmenting in like augmenting that human team, whether it's jet aircraft, whether it's basically mechanisms to deliver long range fires. So that could be, you know, anti-ship missiles launched from a ship. that could be, you know, fighter, bomber aircraft.

2:24:52Brandon Tseng:It's doing the same mission. It's that strike mission or a air to air mission just differently. And so that can be with human pilots augmenting them. And I think that's how it will go in the early days. And, you know, from there, yeah, if you extrapolate, you know, the rate of innovation around AI and autonomy, I think you get to like really interesting places again, then down the line where you start to replace some of these systems. Do you, I mean, is there going to be any, will these machines fly along in the meantime, in the interim before that happens, which I'm sure it will. Yep. I mean, will they co-mingle with human pilots?

2:25:36100%.

2:25:36Brandon Tseng:Yeah, they'll augment, they'll be part of that human machine team. They will augment the pilots. And that will be the first iteration, then the US military started experimenting with, okay, let's just have these systems run on their own and execute missions. I think the mission is going to dictate what the force requirement is. In the sense, you're going to see missions that dictate, hey, we want to send in a package, see what happens. and they can run certain missions independently and then certain missions as human-machine teams. Could you give me an example of what a mission set would look like where it is, you know, human pilots and expats together?

2:26:26Brandon Tseng:Yeah, I think it's good. Like, look, again, I think it's going to be the threat environment. And so if you're going up against, like, the worst threat environment imaginable, so I would say, like, you could imagine a strike mission where, you know, intelligence estimates that there's a limited number of surface-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.

2:27:06Brandon Tseng:We know they're mobile. we don't know exactly where they are, you might basically go stimulate that environment by sending unmanned systems first, things like the expat first. Got you. Got you. Is there any stealth capabilities to it? Um, it is. Its shape, its design is inherently low observable, meant to have a very small radar cross-section. Stealth is... There can be stealth coatings applied to it, but we want to get the capability out fast. And like one of the ways to do that is just like, not worry about the stealth aspect of the capability to start. Like true stealth coatings. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

2:27:48As far as DC is concerned, I mean, are our politicians on board with this?

2:27:56Brandon Tseng:Yeah. Are you getting a lot of... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they're very much, I think not only the politicians, but also senior DOD leadership. One, I think they're very much bought into the concept of collaborative combat aircraft, right? These uncrewed jets that are being built by lots of people. I think, you know, for us, the combination of Hivemind and Expat really stands out in the sense that, again, no one's ever seen an aircraft like this before. It's pretty unique. And then like it's 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.

2:28:41Brandon Tseng:Right. It fundamentally redefines how air warfare is executed when you start eliminating the need for runways. Everything has always been constrained by that one thing. And so I think politicians very much understand that. And absolutely, like the combatant commanders and senior military leaders understand that. And it's look, I think, yeah, they're excited about it. There's a there's a lot of enthusiasm support for the capability. The challenge is, is that no one had ever conceived of something like this. And so it's kind of like this unplanned product that you're like, wait a second. Like, okay, how do what impact does this have to, you know, the rest of our systems as this thing comes online?

2:29:32Brandon Tseng: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?

2:29:52Brandon Tseng:How fast can you manufacture these?

2:29:58Brandon Tseng:um we want to ramp to uh like we want this aircraft to be this generation's f-16 right i think there's something like 4 000 f-16s out there i think you're going to see more because lower costs lower life cycle costs ai piloted uh much easier to adopt and implement into a force structure um 2029 targeting 50 aircraft but ramping you know between 300 to 500 aircraft Again, it's, yeah, that's, right, and that's going to be done over a number of years to get to. But, and the demand for the aircraft is going to play a role in that. But it's the customer reception, right? We've gone public with it today.

2:30:39Brandon Tseng: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 strike power is no longer limited to an aircraft carrier, where you can have Marines on island chains with this type of, you know, organic capability. It just redefines so much as we think about air superiority and, like, how that's employed.

2:31:23Brandon Tseng:Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot to think about. Yeah, I would claim it's, like, you know, up to the point where, like, people, it's almost... I think it'll be as transformational as, like, when we decided to launch airplanes from ships, right? Like, right before World War II, someone had the crazy idea, like, hey, let's try to launch one of these airplane things off a ship, right? And then what did that do? That basically defined the military force structure of the United States for the next 80 years. So... Damn. Damn. Do you think we'll see these loitering for defense, loitering around FOBs, loitering around the border of the country?

2:32:06I mean...

2:32:07Brandon Tseng:Um, I don't know if there'll be loitering. Like, I think of it as like they'll be used as power projection in the same way that our aircraft carriers are used as power projection. And so I don't see them, right? When an adversary or a country is being belligerent to another country and the United States wants to do something, what do we do? We park an aircraft carrier off of its coast and we're flying sorties and saying, hey, check yourself before, you know, you wreck yourself. And I think that'll be similar. It's hard for me to see us using like that type of platform in terms of like local, you know, I say domestic, like air patrol, domestic border security outside of like, I don't know, the Caribbean Sea is a pretty interesting place right now.

2:32:59Brandon Tseng:But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Brandon, we'll wrap it up the interview. And, you know, one thing that I just want to ask is, you know, for Gen Z, for the upcoming generations, I mean, what inspiration do you have for them being somebody who's an innovator? Yeah, I think, 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 uh 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 uh why you know what do you what do you have to lose is my mentality.

2:34:12Brandon Tseng:And that would be my message for this next generation. Love that. Love that. Well, Brandon, I just want to say it was an honor to interview you, man. And just, wow. Congratulations. It's awesome what you're doing. Thanks, Sean. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on the show. Thanks for letting us bring in the expat to your facility and apologize for the complaints from the neighbors. No, no. I mean, it's like I said out there when you were giving me the tour of the aircraft. I mean, this is you, what you're doing, what you've built is... It just makes me proud as hell to be an American.

2:34:54So thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Cheers.

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