The next war will look VERY different, now that we have AI. Glenn speaks with Brandon Tseng, co-founder and president of Shield AI, a company making AI-powered drones and autonomous planes for the US Military. Brandon discusses his drone planes like the X-BAT, and also gives his take on new foreign weapons, like Putin’s new nuclear-powered cruise missile: "It sounds dumb."
Transcript
Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors
GLENN: The cofounder and president of Shield AI, Brandon Tseng is with us. He's a former Navy SEAL. How old are you? You look like you're 14. How old are you?
BRANDON: I'm 39.
GLENN: Thirty-nine. Anyway, you have -- you are making a huge the difference in the AI world, especially with defense. Especially well the expat. A new plane. Do you call them drones, or are they planes?
BRANDON: Expats are a vertical takeoff launch and land AI-piloted fighter jet. Sometimes when people think drones, they just think quad copters. Except, there's a whole world of drones.
GLENN: It's weird. You either think of the quad copters, or you just think of those gigantic gray drones.
BRANDON: Yeah. The Predators and Reapers, yeah.
GLENN: And we're not like that anymore, either. Right? Have we updated those?
BRANDON: No. So Shield AI builds a miniature version of said drone. That's also vertical takeoff launch and land. It's called the Vbat, weighs about 180 pounds. But it's meant to do the mission of these $40 million drones for a fraction of the cost. And so we've been using that with US forces, oh, man. Now, probably since 2019, but most recently, we've been working with the US Coast Guard. We've interdicted billions of drugs in the Caribbean. So you just set a record with the US Coast Guard, interdicting 20 tons --
GLENN: Are you blowing up the boats, or are you just --
BRANDON: Shield AI is not blowing up any boats. But, yeah, the Coast Guard is setting them on fire after the whole thing is said and done.
GLENN: Wow. So -- so let me -- let me go into the -- the future of warfare.
Because it -- it's a little freaky. And I don't even know. There's a story that just came out today. Because we're negotiating with Russia.
And Russia is always beating their chest. And they have something new.
This one, just sounds crazy. CNN, this morning. Putin claimed successful test of long range nuclear-powered cruise missile, amid diplomatic breakdown. And what this cruise missile is, you launch it. It's not just nuclear-tipped. It's nuclear-powered as well.
So the idea is, it would just stay up in space. And it will just stay up there until it's directed to hit something. Which I guess, you not only blow a city up.
But you also have the China syndrome happening at the same time. I don't even get it. What do you think of this weapon?
BRANDON: Yeah. It sounds crazy. It sounds dumb. It sounds overengineered. I mean, it actually reminds me of some of the things the US was doing in the '50s. I don't know if you know this. We had something called the Davey Crockett nuclear rocket. Which was a hand-held nuclear rocket launcher. They said, only a Navy rocket would be crazy enough to shoot this thing. Because you're firing a nuclear bomb over your shoulder. And you hope it goes far enough.
That's --
GLENN: 1950s were kind of scary.
BRANDON: Yeah. You can Wikipedia this stuff. It's in there. Kind of scary. Right with the nuclear-powered cruise missile. Fifteen hours. Like, okay. Now, why do you need it to be up in the air for 15 hours?
You're seeing where this thing is. It becomes an easier target for people to shoot down. And then to the point, now, what do you have if this thing actually blows up, at any point, whether we take it out, or they take it out. Now you have nuclear material over some area?
Like, again, something I could see. Some crazy scientist and engineers working on, something that I believe has near zero utility on the battlefield in any -- like, even -- even by the Russians.
GLENN: What about the hypersonic missiles now?
BRANDON: Yeah, no, the hypersonics are -- look, what I'm a big proponent of is first principles of warfare. So like mass, maneuver, speed is another principle of warfare. And so what the hypersonics are getting after is that first principle of the speed.
It's like, look, if you can hit your targets faster than they can react. There's something to do that. In that range, at that standoff, at that offset, that is something that is pretty interesting. Now, the challenge that the United States has had. Has been around to getting these to a feasible level.
And I know there's some efforts to bring down the cost of hypersonics. But it's also what makes it incredibly difficult, is when you start to go hypersonic. You know, multiple interdicts of Mach 1.0, to Mach 2, 3, 4. That is a hard, hard, hard, hard physics problem.
GLENN: Right.
You know, I've always felt like, whenever we saw something, you know, when you -- when you first saw the stealth bomber, we were probably on the second iteration. You know what I mean?
We were always -- we didn't always just show what we had.
Is that true anymore?
Do we have things that the world doesn't know, that --
BRANDON: I don't think we have too many things that the world doesn't know about.
Certainly, there are classified programs.
And I think the US does have a couple -- not technologies. You know, up its -- its sleeve. Just like, you know, concepts. Operating concepts.
Is what I would say. We still are like pretty good at.
And so what you're seeing today is in the military world.
You see a lot in the -- you know, just the consumer software world. Where industry is really leading, in this day and age.
So you see industry leading the customer, more than what I would say in the past, right?
In the '80s. '90s. Early 2000s. You would seat customer leading industry to what --
GLENN: We want to do this.
BRANDON: Yeah. Exactly.
GLENN: Are we -- are you concerned at all, with -- with AI and technology being so readily available, and cheap?
You know, everywhere.
That everybody can -- can do some really bad damage. You know, you don't have to be a -- you don't have to be the United States of America.
BRANDON: Yeah. Look, I think every new technology is a double-edged sword. It can produce a ton of value for the world. It can do a lot of value for the world. And at the same time, we put that technology into the wrong person's hands, it can do damage to the world. And so I think the same was true of the internet.
The same is true of now providing compute power into massive amount of compute power into someone's hand, just via an IPhone or an android phone. And so I don't look at AI -- like, I don't worry about AI and autonomy.
And I think it's wrong to prohibit the advancement of a technology, simply because, you know, some wrong can be done with it.
GLENN: Right.
BRANDON: There's a ton of things, where a lot of wrong, we've seen this.
A lot of things can be weaponized. Whether it's an airplane. Whether it's a car. Whether it's the internet. You name it.
But these technologies aren't bad for the sake of being a new technology.
GLENN: Yeah.
I've talked to the president about this several times. The one thing that freaks him out, keeps him up at night is nuclear world. He said, I rebuilt the nuclear arsenal. And he said, you don't even want to understand what we can do. He's like, it's -- it's always been bad. He said, it's -- it's colossally bad. And once it starts, it's over.
And he's really -- he does, I think -- what little sleep he does get, I think there are times where he has lost sleep over war on nuclear, with nuclear weapons.
Is there any of this new technology, is there anything about AI or any of this stuff that freaks you out, that you think, this is really scary, if it -- if it goes wrong or whatever?
BRANDON: Yeah. The way I think about it is, look, nuclear deterrence, has deterred nuclear war since we -- since 1945.
GLENN: Yes. Right. Yeah.
BRANDON: And that largely stopped world wars for the past 80-plus years.
GLENN: Right.
BRANDON: And so our conventional deterrence has been dominated by our aircraft carriers and our submarines in terms of how we deter large state-on-state conflicts in this day and age. It's with these -- along with the number of other, you know, levers that we pull. Economic levers. Diplomacy levers. But the military lever has been dominated by our aircraft carriers, our air power, and our submarines.
GLENN: Sure.
BRANDON: So where I see the world going. It's like AI and autonomy is enabling this next generation of deterrence. Because our legacy weapons systems, they're not as well-respected. Our aircraft carriers are not as respected as they once were. Right?
GLENN: I'm a sitting duck.
BRANDON: Yeah, when the enemy has antiship missiles that outrange what these carriers can launch with our jets.
And they have surface-to-air missile systems that can target any fuel tanker, like, that's when you see your conventional deterrence capabilities start to erode.
AI and autonomy is that massive unlock for the military, for our allies.
It enables, you know, the United States to feel millions of drones. You can't feel millions of drone pilots.
We don't have enough people.
Aren't enough people signing up.
What you can do is enable small groups of people to feel these drone swarms that I believe will be the most strategic conventional deterrence for the next 25 years. And again, that's why I started Shield AI. We have the tag line. The greatest victory requires no war.
It is about having such a dominant military that any adversary thinks twice before starting, either a straightforward conflict or an asymmetric one.
GLENN: Are you concerned about -- you know, Elon Musk says. And I don't know how true this is.
But Elon Musk says we are the new Grok.
I think it's five or six that is coming. Is 60 percent close to AGI. Are you concerned about AGI and ASI? And what that might mean?
BRANDON: I'm not concerned about AGI, but I'm an eternal optimist. And so I put that disclaimer out there. It's really hard to say what 60 percent of AGI means.
GLENN: Right.
BRANDON: What I do think is really interesting, really fascinating.
It's now what is possible in this day and age with AI and autonomy. And I'll share something cool that I looked up the other day, and why I'm an optimist around it.
I asked Grok 4, I said, "What was the economic impact of the internet from 2000 to 2025 on global GDP by a cumulative basis?" Its estimate was 134 trillion dollars' worth of economic value, attributed to that core underlying technology, being the internet.
A ton of value created for the world. I then asked it, what is the value of AI and autonomy going to be for the world from 2025 to 2050, estimated that. It's estimate -- maybe it's biased if it's AI estimating itself.
Was -- yeah. Yeah. Four and a half quadrillion dollars, forty times bigger than the internet. And so that world. Again, I'm a techno optimist. I get excited about that.
It's hard to really understand or fathom what that world looks like, but I think it's going to be a net positive for the world in a way that so many underlying core technologies of life have been.
Now, it doesn't mean that there's -- it's all sunshine and -- and rainbows. There's going to be some bad actors out there with it for sure.
GLENN: Yeah. Yeah. So last question, I hate to ask you this. But I have to ask you this: Being a guy who is in into drones, everything else. What we saw last year over New Jersey, what the hell was that?
BRANDON: I -- I don't understand know what it was in New Jersey.
But I don't like the idea that there was anybody able to fly drones at all.
GLENN: Yeah. Those were large too.
BRANDON: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if it was another state.
I don't know if people were pulling pranks. Like they've done in the past. I don't know what it was.
GLENN: But do you think it could have been us?
BRANDON: No. I think it was someone else. Is what I think it was.
GLENN: That's a little frightening.
BRANDON: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't know what it was though. So, yeah.
GLENN: Have you ruled out extraterrestrial.
BRANDON: I probably haven't paid enough attention to it. But, yeah. I don't know what it was.
GLENN: That's a little frightening. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
We'll be watching.
You bet.





