“KILL Chain!” - Navy SEAL Drone Expert on $4.5 Quadrillion Op, Anthropic & Pentagon | B. Tseng • 409
Julian Dorey · 15 Apr 2026 · 3h 8m
Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
A former Navy SEAL turned defense-tech founder walks through his path from the Naval Academy and a soul-crushing rejection from SEAL selection, through hell week and multiple Afghanistan deployments as a platoon commander and later as a liaison officer attached to the unit that killed Bin Laden, to founding a company building AI-piloted drones and fighter jets. He describes the mechanics of village-clearance operations, green-on-blue threats, and the medical hazards of BUDS training, then pivots to explaining how his company's autonomous aircraft operate without GPS or communications in the Russia-Ukraine war and against drug traffickers in the Caribbean, and how a new AI-piloted jet is meant to deter China by making American air power cheap, distributed, and hard to target. Throughout, the host and guest discuss the ethics of lethal autonomy, insisting humans must always make the final call on force, while also debating whether the Pentagon and AI labs can be trusted stewards of increasingly powerful technology. The conversation moves between personal reflection on leadership, family history tied to wartime China, and a broader argument that warfare's fundamental principles are being reshaped by cheap, scalable autonomous systems rather than replaced outright. It closes with reflections on entrepreneurial resilience and the emotional cost of building a defense company for over a decade.
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Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Path to Naval Academy and BUDS rejection
- Leadership lessons on a Navy ship
- Hell week and physical breakdowns in BUDS
- Liaison officer with the unit that killed Bin Laden
- Village clearance operations in Afghanistan
- Green-on-blue threats and force protection
- Doubts about the Afghanistan war's winnability
- Leaving the SEALs for Harvard Business School
- Founding Shield AI and the case for autonomous warfare
- VBAT drone operations in Ukraine and drug interdiction
- The X-BAT AI-piloted fighter jet and deterring China
- AI safety, human control over lethal force, and trust in the Pentagon
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“You're not building the Antichrist, are you? I hear that's what they're doing with AI now.”
“anything I did afterwards I was going to be number one at.”
“my mentality going into it was I'm going to die before I quit”
“if you had 10 million drones, um you're the number of the way that you deploy personnel and employ personnel is going to be very different than it is today”