# AI-Driven Defense Tech and Supply Chain Resilience

**Podcast:** Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
**Published:** 2026-05-18

## Transcript

So think about this.
Last year, Ukraine produced 4 million FPV drones.
Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world.
China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drones.
Would you say that right now, China is now the supreme conventional military power on Earth, given its ability to manufacture and deploy drones in the quantity and quality that you just described?
I don't think we have all the information to claim that, but...
We cannot count it out.
And that alone should be, you know, a big warning sign.
And as I say, at some point in my life, I went from making cameras that fling treats to pets to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers.
So that's a short story.
And when you think about what your nation, what your compatriots are going through, you realize that that's the...
only morally right thing to do is to fight back and it is immoral not to fight back and then that the choice becomes very clear welcome to lane space um i'm brandon i normally do science podcasts but today we're gonna do something a little bit different i'm joined by uh noah smith of no opinion on uh subsec and twitter uh and he has lots of interesting things to say about drones and uh as a guest we have yaroslav ajnuk founder of The Fourth Law and several other drone-related startups.
But yeah, to get started.
So it is February 23rd, 2022.
You are running a pet startup.
You are connecting pets with their owners.
Let's go ahead and just a little bit of background.
How did you get started in tech?
And what were you working on before the Ukrainian war started?
Yeah, good to be here.
Thank you.
On February 23rd, late in the evening, I think like 11 p.m.
Kyiv time, my wife and I, we landed in Kyiv.
Actually, then she was a fiancé.
And we came from Lviv where we were looking at a church where our wedding should have taken place.
And we got into this cab.
Riding from airport to our home.
And the driver's like, you crazy.
Like, everyone's leaving Kiev.
Why do you come?
Like, what?
Nothing's going to happen.
Like, dude, chill.
And then obviously, eight minutes later, or eight hours later, the bombs fell in the city.
It was quite surreal.
We probably landed on the last flight that landed in Kiev, one of those last flights.
But yeah, you know, my background, I'm a tech guy, studied applied mathematics in Kyiv Polytechnics, born and raised in Kyiv.
Parents, you know, old PhDs from academia and grandparents too, like everything, you know, from linguistics to nuclear physics.
And I'm an entrepreneur, so I build a bunch of companies.
PetCube is the one you were referencing.
So I lived in San Francisco 2014 to 2020.
I'm building PetCube, which is one of the leading pet device companies in the world, selling lots of pet cameras.
And then, yeah, as I say, at some point in my life, I went from making cameras that fling treats to pets to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers.
So that's the short story.
Yeah.
So February 24th, I guess a few hours after you go to check out your wedding chapel, what do you do?
Well, we had a plan for the situation.
So my parents and family live in Kiev and we're like, okay, this has actually started.
The worst has come true.
And so we basically packed our belongings and got in the car and spent 17 hours riding west.
And that was, I'm pretty sure most people in our audience watched at least one apocalyptic movie in their life.
So that was exactly like that, like felt exactly like that.
I, you know, missiles are falling.
It's like there was smoke in Kiev.
Like, you know, my dad and I went like to central part of the cities, probably like 800 meters from presidential office to pick some stuff in his workplace.
He's like the head of an academic institution, so he had to get some of the things with him.
And super surreal.
Like the streets are empty.
Like the gas stations are out of gas.
Like we found some gas station.
We didn't have like spare canisters with us.
So we're like, we figured out like the car was diesel.
So like we figured out.
If it's diesel, you can actually store it in plastic canisters.
And we bought some window wash for the cars.
We poured it out of the canisters and we poured the diesel into that.
Yeah, so it was like that.
And then helping friends get out, like my friend and his dog, we found my brother was also riding.
in a separate car.
We found a place for my friend who didn't have a car.
It was like, yeah, it was like totally surreal.
Wow.
And we didn't know, you know, of course, then you didn't know this will last for so long.
You didn't know whether Kiev will be able to, whether UConn will be able to defend Kiev.
And it was like, yeah, very little information and very little insight into future.
What are your thoughts with regards to how do you defend Ukraine?
So you eventually start building drones.
What is the process to get from there to, you know, from where you were building, you know, devices to connect owners with pets to building drones?
And what other things did you do to help the war effort in the process?
Yeah.
It's definitely non-trivial, right?
I didn't get any military education when I was a student.
Normally, in Ukraine, you would go to this military school, even if you're getting higher education in any other sphere.
I decided to skip that, which is an unusual way to go.
And I never thought that I will be somehow engaged in a war effort.
Like, what is war?
Of course, wars are over.
It's the end of history.
So one thing you got to understand about, like, many Ukrainians, and like, I guess it's also true about most of the people I met here in the U.S., that who you are in terms of your nationality is a big part of your identity.
So when that gets under attack, it's something deeper than just the country you live in gets under attack, right?
And so day one, I figured I'm going to fight back with everything I can, right?
But I didn't think on day one that I'm actually going to do weapons.
And, you know, a bunch of things.
We're reaching out to a number of American...
Congress people and centers, and just advocating for support of Ukraine, for voting for land lease, which has happened in May 2022, but didn't actually work as expected.
We helped start Brave One, which is now a very important defense innovation cluster, sort of like a DIU here in the US.
We helped start a fund called D3.
started or co-started by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google.
So a bunch of these odd things, but then eventually I was like, okay, by 2023, it was obvious this thing, A, is going to last a lot more time, and B, that the whole world is shifting.
There's going to be a new arms race that the warfare is redefined by drones as platforms.
And for the first time in history, you have a platform that is software defined that can increase your battlefield capabilities, you know, in a step change just overnight.
So it's like if you were able to push a software update and get all of your Roman Legionnaires new helmet, you know, that has never been.
possible before.
It's the first time in the history of war this is possible.
So all of that, many other things like supply chain fertilization and the impact that AI is going to have on all of this, all these things have become evident to me in 2003.
And it's like, okay, I should do what I do best or what I know how to do best.
Start a tech company and sort of leverage the global techno-capitalist machine to provide to Ukraine and the free world.
So that's literally the mission of the company, you know, increased defensibility of Ukraine and the free world.
And then there was some sort of soul searching and like asking yourself is like, okay, am I actually, I know nothing about weapons.
Am I actually like ready to make, you know, things that other people use to kill other bad people.
And when you think about what your nation, what your, you know, compatriots are going through.
I think about all the terror of places like Bucha, the occupied cities in the East and South, the abducted children, the raped women, all the economic damage that's being done, and the intention to destroy a whole nation, to genocide the people of Ukraine.
You realize that that's the...
only morally right thing to do is to fight back and it is immoral not to fight back and then that the choice becomes very clear um and look we're we're just passing the ammunition we're not doing the actual job the actual fighters and defenders and heroes are people in in the armed forces we're just support okay i have so many questions um actually I know you seem to have a question.
Do you want to ask anything?
No, no.
I'm just listening.
Go ahead.
Cool.
Yeah.
I do want to talk about some of, let's say, the moral issues, like you just said.
I think there are no issues there.
Yeah.
What would an example of a moral question be?
Well, no.
I mean, okay.
As you just said, you are creating the tools, but others are using them.
Yeah.
You know, I was maybe thinking of having this conversation later, but one of the questions is like, is it actually, you know, you are going to be building them for your homeland, which you are building for your homeland, which is, I think, very strong, morally defensible position.
But this technology is not going to stay with you, right?
This, you know, you will probably be selling these to other people.
Yeah.
So, you know, the future is really where the moral issues may come into play.
But...
Yeah, this question becomes easier and more complete if we ask this not about a particular technology or particular weapon.
If we think that this question actually applies to any kind of technology, right?
So, knife or fire.
You can use knife to do surgery and save people's lives, or you can use it as a weapon to take people's lives.
Cut tomatoes, too.
Cut tomatoes, too.
Yes, knife.
It's in Japan, sword and knife, they call the same word.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's like, it's with any technology, large language models, right?
Look at how powerful they are, and yet they're available to anyone in North Korea or in Russia.
So that's one side of the argument.
The other side is, as a maker, what is your responsibility for how the tools you're creating will be used?
There's definitely some responsibility, right?
Then, you know, how should the decision process look like?
Should you, like, try to calculate all the possible scenarios before starting?
Do you work on something?
Or do you create something that is needed now to save people's lives?
And then think about addressing the unwanted edge cases later.
In an ideal world where there is like, okay, it's not ideal world.
In a mythical world where there is some one governing party.
and it gets to decide everything, and there is no other country that can decide on their own, you could say, well, we need to calculate for all the consequences and only then maybe build this building by replacing this park because maybe we need this park in the city, right?
So that kind of situation.
But when you're in a situation where you're in a forest in front of a wolf, you know?
You're first going to deal with a wolf that wants to eat you, and then you're going to go consult Greenpeace.
So that's the kind of situation that Ukraine is in.
Okay, fair enough.
Because this is a tech podcast, I did want to spend some time talking about the tech that you've developed and what you've been working on.
Can you explain, I guess, first of all, the problem that you were trying to solve from a technical standpoint?
And then maybe go into some of the solutions and some of the design process that led you from designing little laser-guided, guiding lasers with an iPhone versus dubbing drones.
Sure.
Well, it's all happened that my partners and I, we serve.
So I started one company called The Fourth Law, and its goal was and is.
to make massively scalable on-drone autonomy.
And then in parallel with that, together with my PackCube co-founders, partners, and friends, we started another company called Oz Systems, which was focused on making thermal cameras.
Thermal cameras are seeing thermal radiation and are used to see at night.
And we're now sort of, those companies are getting close and close it together and we're probably going to merge them.
And this group of companies is currently the leading team in undrawn AI and thermal imaging on the Ukrainian battlefield.
And likely one of the leading, if not the leading in the world.
So we have these like three sort of business units, which are, cameras, drone autonomy, and drones.
So the cameras and drone autonomy sell daytime and nighttime cameras and different types of drone autonomous modules to other drone manufacturers, over 200 drone manufacturers in Ukraine.
And then the UAV business unit sells the drones themselves to the armed forces of Ukraine, Ukrainian government.
There are different types of There's a sort of front strike, as we call them.
So those are sort of FPV strike drones and the bombers.
And then interceptors.
And there are different kinds of interceptors.
We do Shahan interceptors and we do ISR interceptors.
We don't do the deep strike.
What's an ISR interceptor?
ISR stands for Intelligent Surveillance Reconnaissance.
And those are basically drones which Russians are using to...
watch over positions and then communicate where targets are.
It's a reconnaissance.
Yeah, ISR is sort of a classical term for reconnaissance drone.
Are all of these battery-powered drones that you just described?
Because I know that the sort of deep strike drones still have some sort of internal combustion engine.
Yeah, internal combustion engine.
Are all the things you're talking about battery-powered?
Yeah, what we're working on is all battery-powered, right?
We don't do the deep strikes, right?
And then in terms of autonomy...
You can catch a Shahed with a battery-powered thing.
It's not too fast to catch.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
Shahed interceptor, like ours, it's called Xerov.
It goes up to 326 kilometers per hour.
For reference, how fast is a Shahed?
Eight, like in terminal phase, it could be...
280, but in cruise phase, it's like 220-ish.
Yeah, and sorry, I'm not like, you know, you can convert that into miles if you're interested.
Multiply by two-thirds, point six.
Yeah, that's easy.
Yeah, I was saying that for autonomy modules, right, we make systems, autonomous systems for frontline, for interceptors, and some deep strikes as well, and then different levels of autonomy.
from terminal guidance, which is like last 500 meters give or take, to autonomous bombing, to autonomous target detection, to autonomous navigation, and all of that across day and night, different trains, different time of the year, different platforms like quadcopters and fixed wing, and maybe some other platforms.
So it's quite a wide variety of products.
We also have our own simulation.
We have our own training school for the warfighters.
And we're about to start construction of two semiconductor plants to make sensors for thermal cameras.
So that's super exciting for me as a computer science guy.
It's doing semiconductors.
Super cool.
But in terms of core drone...
technologies.
One is an FPP replacement without fiber optics, and the other is a signal tracking.
Yeah, with or without fiber optics.
Fiber optics is just like a communication module.
You can use classical analog video link and radio link.
Those would be two separate radios.
You can do digital, or you can do fiber optic, and then fiber optic.
It has its own advantages, but also adds weight and decreases the distance and decreases how fast you can turn and move with a drone.
Do you need AI for fiber optic drones?
You can use AI for fiber optic drones.
AI replaces a human, right?
Fiber optic is...
making your communication link more resilient.
So those are slightly different goals.
Like, if you want, you can have AI controlling hundreds of fiber optic drones instead of having 100 operators for each.
Okay, so I guess I thought that the key reason that people moved to fiber optic drones was for electronic.
countermeasures, or I guess to counter those.
Yeah, I think that's a correct assessment from sort of a public awareness standpoint.
In practice, it's somewhat more difficult because besides electronic countermeasures, you have these issues of a radio horizon for FPV drones, which means that, you know, as I believe, Earth is round.
Some people disagree.
But basically, if you fly a drone and you have a land station over here and a drone flying over here, if your drone is flying high, you have good direct radio visibility.
If your drone goes low, and usually Russian infantry and vehicles, they're on the ground.
You want to hit them.
You need to go low.
Lower you go.
Maybe you'll get behind a hill or behind a forest, and if you're far enough, you'll just get behind the curvature of the earth.
You get into what's called a radio shadow.
And then that is a real bummer because for the last 60 or 20 meters, you won't be able to see anything, and it will be very difficult to hit the target.
So to counter that...
And then the distances that these FPV drones act on, they can be quite large.
So, for example, here in the U.S., there was this drone dominance program competition.
And in drone dominance, the furthest distance was about 10 kilometers.
What was drone dominance?
What was that competition?
Drone dominance is a program started by the U.S.
government to...
accelerate the development of drone technology here in the US.
And the longest range thing they were using was 10 kilometers.
It was 10 kilometers, right.
In Ukraine, like, if your drone doesn't fly at least 20, 25, it just, no one's interested in it.
And the usual hits are happening, it was like, okay, many hits are happening between 30 and 40 kilometers.
And that's what expected from a regular 10-inch FPV drone.
So at that distance, even at altitudes of like 60 to 100 meters, you might start losing the link.
Some of the earlier AI technology that was fielded in FPV drone was this terminal guidance technology that was the first product that we ever launched that helped you as an operator, once you see the target from 200, 300, 500 meters, you lock onto the target and then it just drives the drone towards the target no matter what, even after you lost the visual connection.
So optic fiber solves that.
However, If you want to go like 20 kilometers with optic fiber, that will add an extra three kilos of useful weight to your drone.
So the cable that you have to unspool as you go weighs.
Yeah, so first the spool is about 800 grams, a bit less than a kilo, and then think about 10 kilometer optic fiber is another kilo, something like that.
So yeah, so that takes away from your useful mass.
And then now you have like, you need a 15 inch drone and it can only carry maybe one or two kilos of explosives.
If you want to go, you know, 20 kilometers, if you want to go to 30 or 40, like 30 is probably max, 40 is like very problematic on optic fiber.
And then the problem with optic fiber is it's actually getting super expensive.
So, and you know why?
Because of all the data centers for AI.
It's literally the same optic fiber that's being used there.
So when Ukrainians and Russians come to Chinese factories to buy the optic fiber, they're like, we're out.
We sold it out to the Americans.
That's the craziest thing.
So optic fiber went up in price from like $4 per kilometer to like $32 per kilometer in a few months in the beginning of this year.
So Claude Code is stopping the Russian drone effort here.
And Ukrainian as well.
And Ukrainian.
But I read somewhere that the Russians had grown more dependent on fiber optic drones relative to the Ukrainians, and that's one reason why the Ukrainians have sort of regained the initiative in drones recently.
How accurate is that?
The Russians were the first ones to scale that, I think, by...
As of now, Ukraine has caught up.
I think as of maybe three months ago, Ukraine has mostly caught up on fiber optic.
What percent of damage would you say, in terms of FPV drone damage, would you say is now fiber optic versus autonomous?
For our audience, I actually cannot answer that question.
I know the answer, but I would not disclose that.
But for our audience, I think another interesting fact is out of all the casualties on the front line, between 70% and 80% are done by FPV drones.
Right.
FPV drones are the new universal weapon of warfare.
Yeah.
Land warfare.
They used to say that artillery is a god of war because artillery used to cause like 80% of casualties.
And now on that...
ranking, FPV drones rule.
FPV drones are the god of war.
Sort of.
Dethroned artillery.
But it's not to say that artillery is not useful, is not needed.
Like all of these systems are needed.
Maybe except cavalry, although Russians still use it.
I don't know.
Have you seen the videos of Russians using...
mules, and horses.
What is the usefulness of a tank in the modern?
That's where we need Greenpeace to say a word, but they're silent.
Fair.
What's the use of a tank on the modern battlefield?
Diminishing.
Diminishing.
However, I think there might be technologies which will revive the tank.
Look, tank still provides you armor, and armor is important.
You still need to...
You know, armor and firepower, right?
Like you can be an armor, personal carrier that provides you armor.
The challenge that currently exists is armor is not very well protected against incoming drones.
However, there are ways to protect it.
We were previously talking about this before the podcast, the CEO of Raymetal.
recently sort of ridiculed Ukrainian drone industry saying that there is nothing interesting there, no real innovation, no interest in, you know, compared to like Raymetal or Boeing.
And it's all made by housewives.
There was like, obviously, a ton of memes about this, people ridiculing the CEO of Raymetal.
And one of the best quotes I heard on this topic is from my friend.
Alexey Babenko, who's the head of and founder of Vary Drone, which is one of the largest manufacturers of FPV drones.
They're our partner.
They're using our autonomy.
So he said that the drones we manufacture in one day will be more than enough to destroy all the tanks rain metal manufacturers in a year.
And then, yeah, cost-wise, of course, a drone is like $500 and a rain metal tank is probably $5 million-ish or maybe more.
Don't mess with those housewives.
Yeah, drone wives.
Drone wives.
And that's it.
So there's a classic saying that everyone always fights the last war.
Yeah.
How did, so from your standpoint, how did we get to the point where tanks became irrelevant in, at least for now?
in a matter of just a few years?
Well, look, I think it's the same way.
How do we get to the point that calculators become irrelevant?
Well, now we have iPhones.
Why would you need a calculator?
Technology progresses and its influence grows non-linearly.
It's all exponential.
So I can tell you that full autonomy, when you put it on a drone, If you think about a tank and a drone, it's not a direct comparison, but even a drone and an artillery shell or cost per kill, an artillery shell for one .55 caliber, which is a standard NATO caliber, currently market price is about $4,000 per piece.
So compare that to, say, $400 per drone.
That's 10 times more expensive.
Account for the amortization of the artillery gun.
And for how vulnerable it is and what is the sort of tactical capabilities it gives you as compared to a drone, you'll figure out that an FPV drone is maybe three orders of magnitude, more versatile, more useful, more capable than the artillery.
And many of them, and classic artillery, many of them, because there are different types of artillery, not just like one to one to 55.
You have mortars, you have all of that.
But give or take, roughly, three years of magnitude maybe.
Again, it doesn't have that firepower.
It's not one-on-one comparison.
Now, take that FPV drone.
When you put full autonomy on that FPV drone, which can be not very expensive, like systems that we're producing, they're like hundreds of dollars of pure bomb costs.
Justin, you said full autonomy, but just a second ago, you were saying that the autonomy here is guidance, right?
It's not decision-making.
No, I was saying that that's the first and sort of easiest pieces of autonomy that was fielded by us.
But if you add full autonomy to a drone...
I think he's asking, for the listeners, can you explain what the term full autonomy means?
Yeah, so basically, I think a good way to think about an FPV drone is like an iPhone of warfare.
It's very inexpensive, very mass-producible, very versatile.
You don't need a bunch of other things when you have an iPhone in your pocket.
You don't need an MP3 player, you don't need a calculator, you don't need other things.
So after you run as an iPhone, or like, okay, Apple, please don't sue me, as a smartphone.
And then when you add autonomy to it, it sort of becomes like Uber.
Right sharing, okay?
So what it means is instead of actually being a trained pilot who has this complex remote controller device, which requires a couple months of training to actually pilot a drone, and then having to pilot it for 30 minutes flying towards a target, et cetera, et cetera, now you basically, you have your smartphone, you have a drone, You pick your smartphone, you say, we are here, the bad guys are here, go and get them.
And the drone goes up, flies in a given direction, localizes itself on the map, finds the dedicated area where the bad guys are supposed to be, sees the bad guys, bombs them, returns, watches, does a damage assessment, returns back, sits down.
Then you can pick it up and watch the video if you didn't have the radio link, right?
That's a bomber drone.
That's full autonomy for a bomber drone, right?
So you're saying that no human decisions made in this entire process?
That's not what we call it.
A human decision was made at the beginning of the process, the same way as you would fire an artillery.
When you fire an artillery, you don't stop at like 500 meters away from a target and ask it whether you want to strike or not.
So that's exactly, human decisions always made at some point, right?
So when you do that, that's full autonomy.
And such full autonomy is happening as we speak.
And such full autonomy increases the capabilities of an FPV drone, which is already like three orders more powerful than an artillery shell.
Full autonomy increases its capabilities by four orders of magnitude.
Because now you can have 100 times as many people who can use it because you don't need to train those people.
And this is important.
You can have 10 times mission success rate, and you can have 10 times utility per drone because now, instead of being one-way kamikaze, it can be a bomber.
No, wait.
You said 10 times mission success rate, which means that fully autonomous bomber drones succeed in their missions 10 times more often than human-piloted bomber drones do.
That's an important thing to know.
Okay, but maybe to push back on that.
They're superhuman.
10x superhuman.
They're not vulnerable to electronic warfare.
They don't care about the radio horizon.
They don't lose track during navigation.
They are not susceptible to human error when an artillery shell or other drone blows up besides you and you're like, hell no, I'm getting out of here.
That doesn't happen to an autonomous drone.
We have one of the brigades that's using our drones with just first level autonomy.
They're literally sad that their success rate...
What's first level autonomy?
First level autonomy is just the terminal guidance.
By the way, we have a video of that.
Terminal guidance means a human gets it nearby and then the AI takes over.
The human flies it all the way, like 30 kilometers towards the target.
Obviously, the target was...
probably given to that human by someone who's flying some ISR drone, some reconnaissance drone, right?
So all the way through the target, and once you see the target from the distance of 500 meters, you do target lock, and from there, drone flies it almost.
So just that feature alone, it has increased the guy's call sign is GROM.
So it has increased his mission success rate, like precision, yeah, mission success rate from 20% to 71%.
And it also increased his kill zone from 3 kilometers to 10 kilometers, which means there is a certain area around the front line which is designated kill zone.
Whenever an enemy goes into that area, it's almost guaranteed to be destroyed by a drone.
And then obviously the drones are not launched from like the zero line.
They're usually launched from like minus 10 kilometers.
What is the zero line?
Zero line is...
Sort of an imaginary line of control of two conflicting forces.
Okay.
It's important to explain these things to a lot of the listeners who are not familiar with warfare.
Absolutely.
So you said that level one autonomy, in other words, just terminal guidance, just like human gets it.
to the finish line and then it goes over the finish line, increases mission success from 20-something percent to 71 percent or something like that?
And increases the kill zone from three kilometers to 10 kilometers.
So on both parameters...
Actually, real quick, can we define mission success and maybe in a way, what are the failure modes of missions?
Yeah.
I have a guess about mission success.
I mean, well, yeah, but I could...
Get them.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, but that's a very good question, in fact, because even if you fly into the target, Well, first, a target can be damaged or destroyed.
Those are two different modes.
Then there can be different targets.
You know, a sole infantryman is one kind of target.
A dugout, where there are some enemies there, is another kind of target.
And some mechanical equipment is another type of target.
Radio emitting equipment, which often the targets that the military want to get...
More than anything else is some enemy radio tower or something like that, or some small radio dish that really makes life difficult in that area and that combat area.
So those are different targets, right?
It can be destroyed, it can be damaged.
Then sometimes the drone hits but doesn't explode.
Like, that happens.
And then there are other failure modes.
You didn't even reach the target because you were A.
jammed by electronic warfare.
B, you lost the control over drone because of the radio horizon.
C, you were jammed by a different type of electronic warfare that happens way before you hit the target area.
It's impacting your video receiver.
So it's like jamming on video or jamming on control are two different types of jamming.
then something malfunctioned on a drone, just a mechanical malfunction, maybe like a motor broke or like whatever.
So all of those are different failure amounts.
Or maybe you got lost, you're navigating to your target.
That happens too.
Okay.
And so the...
So level one autonomy, basically, you manage to point in a direction, you go there, and then the last mile is the drone taking over.
So we define this, I define that, but it sort of got picked up by the industry.
We define five levels of autonomy.
So level one is terminal guidance.
It's what we just discussed.
Level two is bombing.
Level three is autonomous target detection and engagement decision.
Level four is autonomous navigation.
Level five is autonomous takeoff and landing.
Those are good things to know.
Those are five levels of autonomy.
Now, if you want...
Yeah, sorry.
Let me finish with the theoretical part.
What is Tesla running out right now?
Tesla?
Well, that's a very good point.
It was inspired by the levels of self-driving autonomy.
Waymo is level five, right?
You just tell it where you want to go, it picks you up.
I think if you look at the classic definitions of self-driving cars, Waymo is still level four because it still requires even remote, but still human control.
If Waymo gets in trouble, there is an operator who takes over and resolves this.
So that would still be level four.
It doesn't map directly, but it's also five levels.
Can I interject a question?
So in terms of an FPV drone, that's like a suicide drone that'll just blow itself up, killing something.
How do you know what it hit?
Like, does it just transmit back or do you sort of like lose track of it and hope it hit?
Like what?
What happens to that?
That's a great question.
So the current battlefield in Ukraine, it's saturated with different types of drones.
So obviously you have all the FPV drones, and last year alone, Ukraine manufactured about 4 million of these, and then Russia's maybe like 20% less than that.
And for this year, the publicly voiced target was 7 million on the Ukrainian side.
So it's like serious numbers.
We're getting serious numbers here.
And then besides those, there are different reconnaissance drones, ISR as we call them, and there are sort of tactical level ISR where both Ukrainians and Russians usually use Mavic drone by DJI.
And then there are a bunch of locally produced drones, which are sort of fixed wing drones that can stay.
in the air for much longer than Mavic, maybe like half an hour.
And then, you know, there are drones that can stay for many hours or even up to a day.
And those drones are more expensive, have more expensive cameras, et cetera, et cetera.
We hunt those drones that Russians launch, Russians hunt our drones and so on.
But ideally, ideally, when you are a group of soldiers operating an FPV, you'll have someone in your company or someone in your platoon who has an ISR asset.
They will do target designation for you.
They'll say, oh, there's a Russian vehicle over there.
Go and get them.
And you go there, you get it, and they're like, okay.
Those guys are watching.
They have their own drones in the sky.
They have a car sale of drones because one Mavic cannot stay more than 30 minutes.
They're constantly surveilling the battlefield.
Almost every spot on the battlefield.
But it's not always the case.
Sometimes you will not have a surveillance essence, so then you would launch another FPV just to confirm that there was a hit.
And then if you see there was a hit...
And you're not sure if it completely destroyed, you maybe hit again for good measure.
You double tap.
Yeah.
So that's how it works.
But I was about to give you another sort of piece of taxonomy.
So you have five levels of autonomy, right?
And then you have sort of eight dimensions of autonomous battlefield.
So what is eight dimensions?
It's crucial to understand how...
autonomy evolves in a modern battlefield environment.
So dimension number one is level of autonomy.
What are the capabilities that your asset has?
Dimension number two is a platform you're operating on.
So it can be a quadcopter, a fixed-wing drone, different types of maybe like a long-range drone or short-range drone, but it can also be a missile.
You're going to have autonomy even on an artillery shell.
or a ground vehicle or a sea vehicle.
So all of those are different platforms.
Level three would be domain.
So is it ground to ground or ground to air as an interception, ground to sea or sea to air?
There are all the nuances with different domains.
Then level four would be higher levels of autonomy, such as swarming, drone carriers, drone nests, et cetera.
And now when you're saying level, you're talking about dimensions, not about the autonomy.
Oh, yeah, sorry.
Yeah, I mean dimension.
Yeah, I used to say dimension.
I was supposed to say dimension.
I say dimension because each of them works with another, right?
So you might have like a third level autonomy.
fixed wing drone, operating in land to air, and stuff like that, right?
And then operating in a swarm or operating from a nest, right?
Then you have sort of dimension number five is environment.
So is it day or night?
Is it summer or winter?
Is it humid, cold, dry?
What kind of target is it?
Is your target hiding in a forest or is it behind a hill or within buildings?
So all of that is environment.
Then you have dimension number six is command and control.
How are you dealing with tens of thousands of those assets around the battlefield?
How are you coordinating that on the higher levels of command?
Are you collecting data?
All that.
Dimension number seven would be infrastructure.
So things like simulation, data collection tools, security, deployment mechanisms, et cetera.
So all those systems have to be developed separately and integrated with all the others.
And finally, dimension number eight is sort of distribution.
Have you deployed 100 of these systems or 100,000 of these systems?
Because those are two very different ballgames.
So that...
Now, it gives you a more broad overview of how autonomy propagates across the battle space.
So, as someone who has done machine learning and had gone out of distribution and had things go horribly wrong, you were talking several of these kind of axes of thinking about drone warfare seem like they could be very susceptible to some sort of distribution shift if you start making things autonomous.
Like what?
Well, I mean, first of all, I'm very interested in sort of kinds of scenarios that you're thinking about.
Yeah.
I mean, like the most obvious one is you, if I assume these are, you know, computer vision guided systems for at least the last mile, you know, how do you ensure that, oh, well, like, you now have some fog rolling or something and you, you know, the drones just attack the wrong thing or maybe.
I mean, it probably will not turn around and fly back and attack you.
The same question, how do you assure that your mortar fire hits the right thing?
Well, I was like, mortar fire, give or take, half a kilometer could be, you know, plus or minus.
So maybe you fire one and then you fire another.
So drones are actually much better in being precise in those scenarios.
And I think, you know, to your point, I think five to 10 years from now, it will be immoral to use weapons without AI.
Because weapons without AI will be more likely to cause collateral damage or unwanted damage.
Same way, it will be immoral to drive your own car manually on a public road.
Because it's more likely to cause unwanted damage.
Wow.
I never considered that might be...
Really?
That's definitely coming.
Anyway.
No, but that's an obvious thought.
I agree with you.
No, I mean, obviously they're not going to let you drive once most of the cars on the road get on.
That one I believe.
You were talking about drones, right?
Or the weapons, right?
Friendly fire and collateral damage and stuff like that is all minimized with AI.
But, okay, so here's my question.
Take all, let's go to level six autonomy.
Let's take all of the, you know, target selection.
Let's take all the battlefield data, integrate it into one big AI and have that big AI basically be in command of the battlefield and agentically do target selection.
That's a general.
It's you've cut humans out of the loop, except maybe as dexterous robots, you know, repairing drones and fastening things to drones, or maybe something like that.
Cause you don't have those robots yet.
How soon are we there?
AI general.
Wow.
The most important thing to ask ourselves is who will be faster to that, us or our adversaries?
I assume us, but how fast will we be to that?
I hope us.
I hope so too.
But how fast can we, like when are we looking at that in terms of like Horizons years?
You know, like technically it could be done now.
The question is, of course, there's some engineering work to be done.
The bigger challenge is deployment, right?
So, okay, technically, you know, like Operation in Iran, right?
They, you know, publicly it was claimed that I think the volunteer system was used for target designation, et cetera, et cetera.
So it is not exactly as you say, the AI makes all the decisions, but basically...
AI goes through all the data you have, gives you these 1,027 different targets, and says you to confirm, please press OK.
And you look at the targets and you're like, yeah, sounds right, press OK.
So I think that's where we are now already, or we were a couple weeks ago as we're recording this on April 10th.
Another question is, you know, how massively deployable it is.
Is it like every decision being made like that?
Or is it like just some of the decisions made like that?
And then different levels of command and control, you know, there you have like the platoon, the company lever, the battalion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But, you know, the tricky thing here, when we get into that territory, the tricky thing is, If your enemy is getting advantage of being a thousand times faster than yourself by deploying such systems, you know, what do you do?
So you got to...
If the enemy is a thousand times faster than you, deploying those systems?
Like if enemy starts deploying level six autonomy, as you call it, and you have not started doing that.
You're in trouble.
Yes.
Exactly.
So you have to catch up.
So my point is that it is very important to think about the safety of these systems, but that thinking should not slow you down in developing them because they are critical for your existential survival, right?
And like one person who doesn't think, doesn't get to think about the ethics of the war is that person.
that person surely doesn't get to think about it.
What would be the safety risk of such a system?
Well, of course.
Friendly fire.
Just strong decisions, right?
Oh, I see.
You know, maybe, you know, these decisions...
These decisions will not only be made about...
drones, they are likely to be made about what the humans should do on your side as well.
And then obviously some environments are more like Ukrainian-Russian war where you have this...
You have to choose to risk lives.
It will have to choose to sacrifice human lives on your side.
Of course.
And then some environments are just like dead zones and...
There are no civilians.
There are virtually no civilians close to the front line because like super dangerous.
Everyone has evacuated from there.
But there are other environments which are more like, okay, there's a counter-terrorist operation.
There's like a group of terrorists or a group of civilians or like the recent operations in Iran.
I imagine that the US and Israeli forces do not want to harm civilians.
They only targeted the military targets there, right?
In those situations, it's a different level of responsibility for that decision-making as well.
And then there are just such a big variety of those military missions.
And I'm not even well-informed or well-educated in military science to tell you about all those scenarios.
We would need to put some general besides me, and maybe a Ukrainian general and an American general would have told you very different stories about these things.
Got it.
Can I ask a few more questions?
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
So in 2013, I wrote one of my first paid articles ever was about how the era of drones will change human society.
I was just sitting around bored thinking about things.
You were way ahead of your time.
And I said, I said, the following will happen.
This article is real.
I've read it.
I said, small, autonomous suicide drones will.
cleanse the battlefield of human infantry.
Human infantry will not be able to stand against swarms of AI-powered suicide drones.
That was, you know, I didn't even know about, you know, like AlexNet at the time, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
He's just an avid sci-fi reader.
I'm an avid sci-fi reader, but also, like, it's not, like, there will be a way to do that.
It's a nonlinear, multidimensional search problem, and you get enough compute.
You'll find some search algorithm that will get you there.
And so, yeah, I think that one sentence describes the bitter lesson.
It's just like, it's a multidimensional search space.
You search it somehow.
I don't know.
Figure out, get a grad student, make a search algorithm.
It's not that hard.
Anyway, but I guess the point is that human infantry on the battlefield will be gone.
And I wrote that in 2013.
Many people on social media laughed at me for that, called me hysterical.
said things like electronic warfare will knock all the drones out of the sky.
You know, like you need humans to hold ground.
That's something you still hear from a lot of people on social media today.
I feel that this article that I've written has never been directionally wrong.
It has gotten more and more right steadily over time.
And that we're very close, reading the battlefield reports from Ukraine, where, you know, human infantry are basically like a few guys hiding in dugouts for months.
That's on the Ukrainian side.
On the Russian side, that's just like a Zerg rush.
There's Zerg rush and then they just die.
But they have some guys in dugouts too, right?
Like hiding in dugouts for months?
Yeah, they have.
Okay.
But what are those guys doing in the dugouts?
Providing frontline reconnaissance?
What are they doing?
Well, if there is a guy in a dugout with some bullets and automatic weapon, the other guy cannot.
come and take that dugout.
So they're establishing control over tertiary.
I see.
So there still is a use for human infantry on the battlefield as of today.
How long will that last?
I think it will last for a while.
This is funny.
There's this whole layer of the modern culture, a modern Ukrainian culture built around the war-related stuff.
So there is this punk rock band that is called SZC, I guess in English that would be, which stands short for like a deserter or something like that.
So anyhow, this band has a song titled 2030.
It's basically about the year 2030 and the war still goes on.
It's like whatever, third world war or whatever.
And they basically, they sing about the AI and like cybers and everything, but the simple infantry is still needed and we're still like getting cold in those dugouts and we're still doing our job.
That's sort of the theme of the song.
And it seems like that's actually what's going to happen.
Brown robots will not replace humans in the dugouts soon.
You know, I'm very much interested in following the whole humanoid robot theme.
What about it like a dog?
Dog robot?
Or just mobile control platforms or something.
Anything evolves into a crab.
There is a lot of utility in humanoid robots because the world is designed around humanoids.
So I would not like 100% disqualify the possibility that I know sometimes 10 years into the future, humanoid robots will be actually fighting.
So that's an actual Terminator kind of scenario.
In the first Terminator movie, you look at what they've got on the battlefield, they've got flying bomber drones and humanoid robots.
Yeah.
And look, the cost of large language models, of running them, is getting so low, you can have basically an inexpensive computer running what was a state-of-the-art model a year and a half ago.
running it locally on a device with an open source model, which also means that the Chinese can have it, the Russians can have it, the North Koreans can have it, etc.
So that is already possible.
And when we're looking at the acceleration of the neural nets, if not the acceleration of the large language models, I would have said that...
You know, I don't think that humanoid robots will be able to be useful in the battlefield earlier than in 10 years.
But, you know, if you account for the exponential, it might be, you know, five years or so.
The problem with all of the autonomous systems, and it's like starts with self-driving cars and even with all the AI, like modern day AI agents, to make them really...
useful, you have to solve such a long tale of edge cases that it's really difficult to make them useful.
Like we were promised, you know, sub-rambling cars, what, like 2007, Sebastian Truman, Google, and even before that, all the challenges, everything.
And Elon, of course, told us it's going to be, you know, one year from 2014.
And now we still don't have self-driving Teslas everywhere.
We have Waymos and SF and some other places, but they're still not perfect.
So I think I expect something similar from self-flying drones and fully autonomous drones.
And we saw that firsthand as with each level of autonomy that we're adding.
There is a very wide distance between a prototype and something that is ready to be scaled to millions of units and something that has been scaled to millions of units.
But the race with AI coding tools is just insane.
So things might accelerate very fast, faster than we can imagine.
So I think your point is that Due to this long tail behavior, level one autonomy, as you've defined it, is actually very natural.
You basically are just solving an image recognition and tracking system.
Yeah, it's actually interesting that you say it that way.
And I thought about this the very same way.
And we have this joke that there are like 200 companies in Ukraine which are trying to solve last mile targeting or terminal guidance.
It seems like we're like the only company that actually solved that.
I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's at least something that you imagine.
Like us and Eric Schmidt.
Eric Schmidt's companies are pretty good.
I actually have lots of respect to what they're doing.
And they have been practically influential and helpful on the battlefield.
And they have good engineering.
I wasn't saying it's trivial.
I'm just saying this is something naturally adaptive based upon things that we know work well.
But some of the other domains where you do have to make decisions and you have a long tail become much harder and you worry about edge cases more.
The more complex behavior you're trying to simulate, the more edge cases there are, the more ways to do it wrong there are.
And then there are different approaches.
It's like if you think about, if you read academic papers about robotics, right, you sort of, the robot is represented as something that has the sort of sensor input, and then you have three levels of sort of logics or decision-making, which are perception, planning, and control, and then you have actuators as output.
So, you know, three neural nets, you would do perception, output, and control all with classic logics.
Then with AlexNet and computer vision, you could do perception with neural nets and the rest with logic.
You cannot currently do...
each of those separately with neural nets, each of those separately with logics, or you can just have one huge neural net that just takes lots of sensory data.
It's not just pixels.
It could be sound, it could be accelerometer, it could be everything as input and just outputs the controls.
And some of the self-driving car companies are doing that or experimenting between different ways of doing that.
So you can also think about that.
And the way you implement those features also influences how much degrees of freedom the system would have, right?
Like control, you can do it, classical algorithmic control with common filters and PAD controllers, et cetera.
Or you can do a neural net that was trained in a gym with a reinforcement learning, et cetera.
And those would be two different behaviors of a system.
Yeah.
Okay.
Maybe my point was just much more high level.
If you go high level, you can try to have whatever, like Fei-Fei Li and folks who are doing physical world models, right, physical intelligence, that are trying to make these big models and sort of understand the world.
And then supposedly you have such a model and you can tell a drone, okay, like...
go over that hill and like find the bad guys and then get them or make me a video and make me a photo of the guy smiling and get back to me.
All right.
That's one way.
Another way you have like these subsystems, like one is navigation, another is finding the person, another is like getting to them to take a photo.
And those are, again, very different behaviors.
And then it's not that one is necessarily better than the other, and we might have more technological ability to do one or another.
But all of those systems will exist.
And then, again, you should always keep in mind that it's not only the good guys that are developing these systems, the bad guys are developing these systems as well.
I guess where I'm going with this, back to Noah's original thought with the end of the soldier.
So in order to replace...
Or at least the end of the Rifleman.
The end of the Rifleman, yeah.
Yeah, I'm not seeing that very close.
And it was like, you know, as much as I'm a lover of sci-fi and all of that and a technologist, the more I try to be...
I try to have certain humility about these things and like the military...
domain and there was just so much human history and blood and tears dedicated to sort of understanding this art of war and perfecting it and so on.
There is so much knowledge in there that...
I don't feel like I even started to comprehend a lot of that.
But one thing that I really understood is that even though drones are now making 80% of the casualties, you go to the actual officers, you talk to the actual brigade commanders, core commanders, and they explain to you how all of it fits together, how when you're...
thinking about an operation that involves a couple thousand people to, you know, get this piece of land out of the enemy's hands, de-occupy it.
How it is so complex.
It involves, you know, dozens of different types of drones and then land operations and reconstitucing operations, psychological operations and aviations and tanks and logistics.
all kinds of these different assets.
So, modern warfare is really very complex.
And the fact that the drones are the latest, coolest thing, and then the AI is essentially the latest, coolest thing, doesn't mean that now it's that and only that, right?
So, yeah, whoever's looking into that, I think should realize that it's not just what the press talks about, that the reality is much more difficult, much more complex.
Let's talk about China and China's manufacturing capabilities.
So suppose that someone, like suppose the United States went to war with China.
I hope not.
I hope not as well.
But suppose that drones were very essential to that war of all the types of drones that we're talking about here.
And that suppose that China said, all right, well, you need X and Y and Z to make those drones to fight us.
And we control the production of X and Y and Z.
So we're just going to cut you right off.
And now you have no drones.
I know that a number of countries, including Ukraine and Taiwan, have been making moves to China-proof their drone productions that China couldn't do that.
Examples of things they might be able to cut off might include rare earths, fiber optic cable that you were talking about before, various other things that were, even if they don't control 100% of the production, they control enough of the production that would be extremely expensive to produce it without relying on Chinese sources, or the market's fragmented enough, et cetera.
What do you see as China's key bottlenecks and how easy are those to overcome in terms of China-proofing drone production in case of a war against China?
Yeah, well, let me start with saying that although China does not sell directly to Ukraine and it does sell directly to Russia, a lot of Ukrainian supply chains they start in China, right?
And we're not in a conflict with China, and we would not want to be in a conflict with China.
And we would hope that China stays in neutral power between Ukraine and Russia and the US as well.
That said, the scenario that you're describing, everything is much, much, much worse.
So think about this.
Last year, Ukraine produced 4 million FPV drones.
Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world.
China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drones.
China can make them not drones with propellers, but fixed-wing drones, which go not 40 kilometers far, but maybe 200 or 300 kilometers inland.
Slightly more expensive.
With internal combustion?
No, no, no.
Battery-powered fixed-wing drones.
Yeah, yeah, battery.
What's the propulsion system on those propellers?
Yeah.
I just don't know how that works.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you have that.
They can also make them all fully autonomous.
They have DGI, the world's most advanced drone company.
They can make them fully autonomous without GPS, without anything.
And then they can put those drones on, you know, maybe tens of thousands of fully autonomous underwater submarines, or maybe not even that, just on shipping containers.
and, you know, barges that ship goods, freight ships.
And then they show up with, you know, millions of drones packed onto those sea vessels.
They show up to any coastline in the world, be it Taiwan or be it California.
And they have millions of long-range impactors targeted at a piece of land.
What do you do with that?
There are not enough hunter submarines.
There are not enough anti-ship missiles, anti-ship planes.
They can produce these assets in tens of thousands of factories because they're so simple to produce that even if the FBI director...
picks a phone, calls to the president of the United States, says, hey, the scenario Yaroslav was warning us about is beginning to unfold.
We need to do a preemptive strike.
You wouldn't have enough assets to do preemptive strikes because there can be like tens of thousands of places where these things are being manufactured.
And then, so to counteract a scenario like that, we would need to have, like a similar amount of mass.
You mean a similar number of drones.
Yes, to intercept that, like other in sea or in the air, et cetera, at a similar cost, right?
So economics should work out.
I'll tell you that currently, we in the West and we in the United States, we don't have the technology to do that.
We don't have...
What technologies, key technologies do we lack?
Like autonomy, mass drone manufacturing, stuff like that.
We lack autonomy technology?
Well, I think so.
Because our computer vision algorithms are not as good?
It's not only about the computer vision algorithms.
It's like, if a group of companies by Eric Schmidt founded two or three years ago, and my small, small startup, maybe not as small, but also founded three years ago, are sort of two of the leading companies in the world.
a couple others who are capable of something like that, but not really on small drones.
I do think we were behind China in technology.
So we lack technology, we lack mass manufacturing capacity, we lack the components, and we lack the rare earth materials.
So there are four layers in which we're behind this challenge.
And that's why it is my point that we in the West, and especially in the States, we should be, far more smart people working in defense, and it should be more funding if we want to keep the resemblance of our good past life.
That's really important.
Would you say that right now, as things stand, in conventional terms, not abstracting from strategic nuclear weapons, but in conventional terms, would you say that China...
is now the supreme conventional military power on Earth, given its ability to manufacture and deploy drones in the quantity and quality that you just described.
Look, I don't think we have all the information to claim that, but we cannot count it out.
And that alone should be, you know, a big warning sign.
We have not seen Chinese drones in action.
We've seen some of the Iranian drone in action and Russian drones in action.
not Chinese really, not seeing Chinese forces in action.
Obviously, you know, hopefully this never happens, but the conflict of a scale, US, China, there are many sort of classical assets that, you know, we should not discount as we just discussed.
We should not discount artillery in the land war.
We should not discount, you know, air carrying groups and, you know, the, the, the air force and long range missiles.
and electronic warfare and satellites, et cetera.
But then there are also things that, you know, at least we as a general public don't really know about China.
I'm sure there's a lot of information that the US intelligence has about the Chinese capabilities.
But yeah, I think if you get back to the scenario that I just described, and if you take that like sort of to the maximum, You basically see that whoever has bigger manufacturing capacity, that side wins.
That's just a typical law of conventional warfare and has been forever.
Sort of.
Do you read Noah's blog?
Not as often as I would like, but I read Noah's axe.
It's not necessary.
It's a theme.
Don't read my axe.
Yeah.
It's just for a judge.
He has no opinion.
It's just judge.
No opinion.
But, okay, so here's the...
I guess there's two questions here.
The question of could the United States and other countries allied with the United States even develop supply chains that are independent of China to make any of these drones?
And the second question is, could they do it in sufficient mass?
And so I think the answer to the question of can they do it in sufficient mass is today, no.
But in an extended, prolonged war situation, things change a lot.
You know, all the development restrictions that we put on new factories go out the window and a sense of urgency.
You know, I mean, Ukraine obviously wasn't making all these drones before the war.
And so if America had the same kind of urgency that Ukraine has now, you know, things would happen, things would move.
And of course, America has allies too, or had allies until recently and may have them again in the future.
But America...
has or had allies that would also scale up very quickly, like Japan and, you know, European countries, if we ever ally with them again, et cetera.
And so a lot of things could then change in terms of the actual mass.
So in terms of looking at China and saying they have all these factories today and looking at the history of conventional warfare, you know, America had very few military factors, very little defense production capability on the eve of World War II and ended up easily outproducing everyone else.
Maybe not easily.
Yeah.
Not easily, but, I mean, by a long time.
Also an added benefit of not being attacked.
That's right.
That's right.
That helps.
Yeah.
And so, who knows how secure they are now, but, or what, you know, we're cyber-gaming.
Yeah, no, look, I totally agree with your sentiment.
I like, and I'm not as, I'm even less doomerish than you are, or as it seems to me, you're.
a little bit doomerish, but like in the longterm, you're bullish.
I'm not doomerish.
I'm thinking about the, I'm thinking about what we need to do.
You know, I'm not, I'm not thinking like, oh, we're doomed.
That's not my point.
It's never useful saying that.
Um, if you're doomed, then just don't go on podcasts, um, you know, go pet a rabbit and play a video game or something.
It's anyway, no, if you're, we're not doomed, but, um, but, uh, I'm saying step one.
What are the key choke points that we need tomorrow, besides rare earths, which we already know, what are the other key choke points that the West needs to free itself from Chinese supply chains on in order to manufacture even one drone free of Chinese supply chains?
There are companies here who are doing that.
We have good friends, a company called Neros.
I know they're down in El Segundo or whatever, like somewhere in South California.
What are the most pressing choke points besides rare earths that everyone talks about?
Yeah, that's one of the pieces that we do, thermal cameras.
That's actually a big one.
Thermal cameras.
Yeah.
Then the motors, you need...
Even after you have the magnets, then you turn them into a really good motor.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You need these special magnets, and then that's sort of your rare earth component.
Right.
Rare earth is not that, oh, there are these methyls that only...
for some reason God only put them under the Chinese territory and not under any others.
No, they're distributed.
There are plenty of them around Earth.
It's about the refining capabilities and investing into that and so on.
And then, frankly, at some point, we don't have that many humans.
That's where the humanoid robots help.
China is a big populous country.
The population of the United West is...
comparable to that, but the population of the US is much slower than that.
And I definitely think that, you know, the whole West should get their act together because, you know, there's always victory where there is union agreement.
Yes.
So I think we, as the free nations of the world, we should get their act together because freedom is what unites us.
And I'm also pretty mad at what's happening in the European Union.
And I think that current US administration is the best thing that has ever happened to Europe since World War II, probably.
or since post-World War II, because World War II wasn't the best thing.
Trump withdrawing the image of omnipotent American support forced the Europeans to get their butts in gear, unite, and think about their defense.
Yeah, and also doing that not in a nice way.
When J.D.
Vance came to Munich Forum one year ago, he wasn't super nice, like, oh, please, our European friends, please, could you please increase your defense spending?
He was somewhat pushy, let's put it that way.
And I think that was a necessary measure.
Like, I've been thinking about that.
Could it be, maybe he could have been nicer.
I was like, no, because like the voters of European leaders, the European countries would have not understood this.
They would not get the message.
And now I think the message was gotten across, but Europe is still sort of...
slow to wake up.
I would put it that way.
Things are getting better, but I'm not happy about the speed of how they're getting better.
So when I would go to some of the European capitals, I would get back pretty depressed from talking to their military officials and their entrepreneurs, et cetera.
Here, I've been in the US for the last month or so.
I'm not depressed.
I'm actually excited.
I still think you should 10x the effort.
in sort of making sure that you remain the strongest power in the world and you can defend your values, et cetera.
But I'm very optimistic and definitely once we are in danger, I think we're just like lots of very smart people in the West who can figure these things out.
But...
People in China are also extremely smart.
It's very different from even the Cold War sort of situation.
Like Soviet Union was economically a very declining power.
China's not like that.
And then if we look at, you know, electric car race, I think they're ahead of the US and ahead of the whole world, definitely ahead of Europe, which used to be sort of a car superpower.
When you look at AI, I think they're almost where we are, maybe slightly behind.
When you look at humanoid robotics, I would argue that they're ahead.
And in many other, like medicine and biosciences, there's lots of interesting things there.
And in consumer space, there are lots of interesting things there.
I don't know if you heard this podcast called 996.
I don't know if it's still airing or not.
There used to be a fantastic podcast by some American Chinese businessman, maybe venture funds.
About the Chinese economy?
About China from a sort of tech venture point of view.
So, and I lived in China for maybe four months and I visited a couple of times.
Like, even WeChat is like such a more advanced app than anything we have in the West.
Um, so we, it's very important not to be too arrogant.
And I think we're guilty of that.
Like definitely in the U S uh, you know, sometimes we tend to be too arrogant.
Like I think like humility helps always, at least to me personally.
Um, yeah.
And then I think like, we don't have to, we don't have to obviously be enemies.
So, um, you know, like with Ukraine and Russia is like, Russia came to kill all of these people and get all of this territory.
With China and the U.S., it's not like that.
And thanks God it's not like that, right?
Well, it might be with China and Taiwan.
Maybe.
Hopefully not, yeah.
Hopefully not.
China has their own problems probably with human rights, et cetera.
But hopefully it's still not beyond the fixing point.
Hopefully.
Hopefully.
But we should be armed, right?
We should be ready to whatever.
And then that alone decreases the probability of any conflict.
If you're weak, you're basically provoking the conflict.
The problem with Europe these days is that like last year, Ukraine and Russia went in drone technology of 2025 year to drone technology of 2026.
Europe went from winter of 2022 to spring of 2022.
So the gap, Europe didn't even make one year of progress.
In the U.S., I would argue, made less than a year of progress as well in the last year.
So the gap, the technological gap, is getting wider and wider and wider.
And at some point, like, I'm looking at polls.
Polish Poles who are like very close to us and close to Russia.
Polish people, not surveys.
Sorry, yeah, yeah.
Sorry, not my first language.
When I'm looking at the Poles, what are they saying?
Yeah, well, Polish people, Poles.
No, Poles, no, that's the right word.
Yeah, yeah.
So I'm looking at them and they bought like 100 tanks and four submarines.
I was like, dudes, you don't have like 1,000 people who know how to operate an FPV.
What the hell are you doing?
So Poland is not preparing for war correctly.
From what I can see, they're not doing it right.
And the problem is they'll be in a situation where they're so proud of their winged gussars and their cavalry, and the enemy is attacking with airplanes and tanks.
That's literally like the gap is getting wider between Russia and Poland.
That happened in 1939.
I don't want that to happen again.
All right.
So, so the Europeans need to wake up more.
If you were advising America's defense establishment, which you might be doing in real life, but if you were saying things on a podcast that might be heard by some people connected to that defense establishment, then you may or may not be, what are like the, besides more funding, we know more funding.
that'll be necessary for anything, literally anything.
But so what are the top priorities policy-wise for America to increase its readiness right now?
And let's say three to five priorities.
Yeah, well, look, I really like this quote.
I think it's by Arthur C.
Clarke that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
And just the same way as Silicon Valley as this sort of...
future location for all things tech.
Kiev and Ukraine is sort of the defense valley.
It's the point where the future of defense has already arrived.
And there is a ton of things to learn from that, starting with particular, you know, hundreds of companies in very particular fields to the battlefield experience.
From battlefield commanders of every level, starting from soldier or surgeon to platoon level commander to brigade level commander, special forces and intelligence, all of that, to how the government organizes the infrastructure and the playing ground for all these businesses to flourish, et cetera.
So I would definitely look into...
much tighter integration and exchanging the experience and so on.
That would be one thing.
You know, I think reform and procurement would be another thing, and I think that's what is currently being done with drone dominance.
I think Pete Hexet is leading that and maybe some other people in the administration.
I think that's extremely sort of powerful and right thing to do, and they should scale that big times.
Well, obviously, you know, any sort of military person would say, well, yes, okay, you're fine, cool.
But, you know, Ukraine and its war theater is very, very much different from, you know, potential scenarios that U.S.
might have to fight.
And yes, I agree.
But there is still so much to learn, even like from the sea warfare that Ukraine is doing and long range drones like these Shahads that unfortunately damage some of the American equipment in the Middle East, they can fly up to 2000 kilometers.
So like if you think about in the Pacific region, like...
2,000 kilometers, that covers a lot of land with all the islands and aircraft carriers.
I think America is learning that lesson right now in Iran, in the Middle East.
Well, you would think so, but then, I mean, I'm not sure.
It's like there was so many chances to learn that lesson from Ukraine before, and I don't think it was fully learned, so I'm not sure how fully learned the Middle East lessons were.
Perhaps losing a war to a minor power will teach America.
Although their economic weapon will be the most important and decisive by far, but still some of our bases were supposedly, allegedly rendered unusable by their Shahed type drones.
Yeah, look, I think there are so many lessons to be taken from this, like Russia and much bigger power attacking Ukraine, you know, given the same logic that we discussed, whoever has more protection capacity should win.
But then...
Russia didn't achieve victory in Ukraine, and then the US didn't get full victory in Iran, probably achieved some of the goals, but probably not all of them.
So that also, you can flip that.
When you say, okay, what if China has so much more capacity than the US?
What if they attack us for whatever reason?
How can we hold them back if we don't have the rare earths?
Well, as the Ukrainian and Iranian examples show, You actually can hold back something like that, even if you're a less capable party.
Well, those examples did rely on Chinese supply chains, though.
Partially, yes.
But then if you think about Ukraine in February 2022 to, you know, first half year or year, wasn't much reliance on Chinese supply chain.
We were just relying on whatever we've got.
So that's one side of things.
Another side of things is...
is basically how much suffering can you withstand along multiple axis.
It's not just the military axis.
It's also like the economic axis and the political axis, I would argue.
So like one of the reasons why wars stop or start is because the political pressure on the leadership internally in the country is so high that you just have to stop that, right?
So I think that differs big times from whether you were the one who's seen by the population as the party which started the conflict or the one who was attacked.
That's one part.
Another, just by overall state of the society.
Like, and one thing I'm worried about in Europe now, that...
people are not ready to fight even if they're attacked.
Like when people are asked about that, they're like, oh, I'm just going to move somewhere where there's like less, there's no war.
So that's a challenge and that's what makes Europe weaker right now.
And, you know, the US didn't really have to ever, I think, fight a foreign war on its own turf.
I hope that never happens, but in case that would have happened.
I don't know what would be, you know, how would the rich cities of East or West Coast, how would people behave?
Like, would all the Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley VCs, you know, mobilize and really start working on defense stuff?
I would love to think so.
Like, that's the way I think about the American spirit.
The way we did in World War II.
In a way, but look, it wasn't that clear in World War II.
Churchill famously said America will always make the right decision after trying all the wrong ones.
One could argue that there is this USA that lives in popular culture and was created by Hollywood's cool dudes that will always come and do the right thing.
If you look at international politics...
It doesn't necessarily always look like that.
The Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gave all of its nuclear weapons the second worst, third largest nuclear arsenal because the US and Russia and the others.
were very persuasive and they're like, yeah, just give it away.
We guarantee you security.
And they're like, oh, it's not guarantees.
It's assurances.
We use the word assurances.
So therefore, we didn't promise you much.
You just give it away for free.
And then like Russia attacks and like no reaction.
So the whole world, like 2022, the whole world looks at it and is like.
oh, okay, so maybe we should get nukes.
So like my prediction, next couple decades, a lot more countries will be working their own nukes.
They really should.
I'm consistently advocated for specifically Japan, South Korea, and Poland to get nukes.
But obviously, Ukraine should as well.
Someone could argue that if a country currently doesn't work on their own nuclear program, they're doing a disservice to their country and the government should be fired.
Like, because it seems like from the recent world history that that is like the only way to actually provide credible deterrence.
All right.
So I guess, I think like in Europe, people are not quite sure how will America behave.
Will it behave as the Hollywood hero?
Or will it behave pragmatically as it did at the beginning of World War II or as it did when Ukraine was attacked by Russia and the U.S.
just decided to sort of push the Budapest memorandum aside because, of course, Russia is nuclear power and we don't want to mess with it.
Everyone says Russia's behind right now in the drone war.
But that wasn't true a year ago.
So a year ago, people were saying either Russia was ahead or they're at parity.
or maybe a year and a half ago.
Russia has more people, four times as many people about, or more.
Yeah, I think give or take, yeah.
30 versus like 120-ish, yeah.
Yeah.
So four times as many people, more help from China.
Like economy is like 10, 20 times bigger.
A lot of oil money that Ukraine just doesn't have.
More direct help from China than Ukraine is getting.
So Russia just has this massive advantage in scaling against Ukraine itself.
Ukraine has financial assistance from the EU, but right now Ukraine is ahead in the drone race.
I'm not sure about that, by the way.
Okay.
Well, that was going to be my next question.
Is that true?
And if it is true, how long before Russia manages to pivot, course correct, and regain the lead?
For my own curiosity, can we define drone race?
Yeah, look, I think it's also for our listeners, it's helpful to understand that there are at least 30 different types, categories of drones, right?
Like you have, first you have like different domains, you have flying drones, ground vehicles, and you have sea vehicles and you have undersea vehicles, right?
Then for each of those domains, you have multiple use cases.
Logistics, evacuation, mining, demining.
Yeah, like maybe something else.
For aerial, you have reconnaissance, front strike, mid strike, deep strike, mining, demining, radio repeating, kamikaze and bombing, ISR, different types of surveillance.
So tactical surveillance, operational level surveillance.
maybe strategic level surveillance at some point.
Logistics also with aerial drones, for sea drones, same thing.
So in each of those categories, you have dozens, sometimes over 100 companies and products which compete.
So that's the current Ukrainian battlefield.
From the Russian side, It's less of a zoo, as we say.
So they, in each category, they usually have one, two, maybe three products.
And then they scale it sort of in a centralized fashion.
And then, so when you talk about whether we are behind or who's behind or ahead in drone warfare, you got to analyze that.
It's asymmetric.
Area by area, right?
So if you're like talking about that front strike, I would argue that Ukraine has gotten ahead recently after scaling the fiber optic.
Before that, Russia was slightly ahead.
So Ukraine got ahead.
With mid-strikes, something like 40 to 200 kilometers.
It's hard for me to judge.
At some point, Russia was ahead.
I think maybe we're getting ahead as well.
And Deep Strike, we recently got ahead.
So we were doing more damage to Russia with Deep Strike drones than they're doing to us.
In Sea drones, we're consistently ahead, always were ahead.
In Ground drones, I think we're ahead.
Yeah, I think like on like...
Where are they still ahead?
In general, I think we're ahead.
Where they are still ahead?
I think in certain parts of the components, like GPS-free navigation like these CRPA antennas, they're pretty good.
They have these winged bombs that they drop from their bomber planes.
I forgot the English name for it.
Glide bomb?
Yeah, sort of, yeah.
So they're ahead on that side, and it's difficult to protect from those.
What's the range of that?
It can be pretty big.
I think it can be up to 80 kilometers.
Yeah, and then obviously the range...
From a fighter plane, like a strike?
Yeah, the range is a very iffy subject here because the range is like...
basically the distance from where you drop the bomb to where it lands, but also you drop it from a fighter plane, and then fighter planes are susceptible to aerial interceptor missiles.
So on our side, we have our own fighter planes, and we have the ground anti-air systems.
And then those two S's, they have their radars and radar fields.
And then, you know, depending on the enemy tactics, you can...
you know, calculate how big is the aerial area that you cover with those assets.
And look, you know, I'm not a professional military guy, so I'm covering these topics in layman terms.
Don't quote me on this.
I'm just trying this to make this as understandable to an average listener as possible.
Helicopters.
I've recently seen reports of drones taking out helicopters in the air, and that this is new.
Yeah.
Is that new?
Is that going to be a big deal?
Is that going to eventually get rid of helicopters the way drones are getting rid of tanks in the battlefield?
Yeah, look, helicopters are also versatile assets.
Front strike helicopters, I think we're going to be seeing fewer and fewer of them.
These few Russian helicopters that Ukraine has intercepted with drones were more like...
edge cases than a systematic sort of helicopter hunting campaign, I think it is possible to turn it into a systematic countermeasure against helicopters.
Will those be battery-powered drones themselves?
Yeah, potentially.
There are so many different scenarios.
You can have large aerial drone carriers carrying interceptor drones.
that then go hit the helicopters for example or or you can have um battery-powered interceptor drones but not of a uh missile with a propeller type uh as many of these well-known drones like sting or p1 sun uh they look like basically a missile with a quad quadcopter uh behind it uh but you you can also have uh plane or like fixed wing like aerial interceptors.
Does anyone have like a little like drone that flies super low under the helicopter and like shoots it from underneath?
I mean like in theory you can imagine that but it's just like a drone that carries surface to air missiles somehow.
Yeah, I don't think that's very practical because whatever you have going on land will be just super slow and not fast enough to be able to hunt down a helicopter.
I mean, like in the air, is there a drone capable of carrying a small surface-to-air missile that can like skim, you know, low and then launch its little missile, like a flying missile platform?
Yeah, in theory, but like a big part of a mission like that is not just kinetically getting to a helicopter, but also identifying it.
I know either by means of first radar and then visually and placing the asset you have, the interception asset you have in the right place in the right time.
So the combination of those things, it's much more complex than just, you know, how can we strike it like from behind or from below?
But then helicopters are not, that does not mean they're becoming like completely useless.
For example, helicopters are used to intercept deep strike drones.
Like Ukraine uses a lot of helicopters to shoot down Shahids.
And Russia uses helicopters to shoot down our deep strike drones.
A lot of people talk...
Oh, so some ideas about drone countermeasures, things people do technologically to try to shoot down FPV drones or bomber drones or whatever.
dumb question that I probably already know the answer to, but for the listeners, why can't you use a shotgun?
Shoot down drones that are coming after you.
When you have like a guy, why can't you shoot a gun?
That's the main weapon that people use against him.
Why aren't they very good?
They're pretty good.
Like, they're all like...
hundreds maybe thousands of cases of drones being shut down with shotguns both by definitely thousands but both by ukrainians and russians all right doing like statistics so like what is the percentage of ukraine fpv drones that didn't accomplish the mission because they were shut down by shotgun got it so if i'm a guy with a shotgun i'm walking around fpv drone comes for me um i don't recommend that No, I don't plan on it.
But I'm saying suppose that were the case.
Or suppose there is a guy, he's not me.
He's dumber than me.
He's got a shotgun, he's walking around.
FPV drone is sent.
Someone says, okay, there's a guy walking around, kill him, FPV drone, go.
FPV drone goes after him and he has a shotgun.
What are his chances of using that shotgun to shoot down the drone before the drone gets him?
Are you allowed to say that?
Depending how good you are with a shotgun.
I'll tell you, I was talking to some Ukrainian pilot group, and they told me there was this Russian guy.
He was just like, Rambo.
He shot down seven FPV drones.
They couldn't get him.
They finally got him, but it was nothing they've seen before.
Your average non-Rambo.
Average non-Rambo will just die.
So there's like very low chance that they'll be able to use a shotgun to shoot down the drones.
Yeah, rather low chance.
Well, that was the kind of question I was getting at.
And there's no sort of portable electronic countermeasure that can get FPV drones if you're just holding it.
Very effective.
There are plenty of, it just depends on, it's always like electronic countermeasures are used all across the front line.
The tricky thing is electronic countermeasures.
cover certain uh radio electronic bands of frequencies let me see my question each side tries to tries to find a frequency that let me see my question is there a man portable system that will give me a greater than 50 chance of living if an fpv drone specifically targets me to come kill me right now Well, look, if your system jams the frequency the drone works on and the drone doesn't have optic fiber or a last mile autonomy, then you have 100% chance that it will not fly towards you.
But then what is the chance to not have a drone that can either use different frequency or autonomy or fiber optic?
Well, that depends on the area you're in and who's your adversary in that area, in that zone.
Okay.
Well, let's, I guess this question was maybe too dumb that I was trying to ask.
No, it's a great question.
There are no dumb questions here.
And it's just like my answers, if you feel the common theme here is that things in practice and war, things are way, way, way more complex than they seem.
Okay.
But so I want like, I want...
You know, I've read tons of things that say that basically if you're walking around in the open and drones come for you, you're not 100% dead, but you're probably dead.
And I've read a bunch of things that say that.
I want listeners to understand why, like, you know, people who are paying a tiny bit of attention to this debate, to this issue from far away, intermittently in America, who don't, I think, don't understand the weakness of our military.
against this kind of attack, against drone attack, have a lot of mechanisms, psychological mechanisms by which they cope with the mental idea of drones.
I would like to bust those mechanisms by explaining why drones defeat human infantry on the battlefield.
Yeah, I mean, it's just like a guided bomb flying at you, and it knows exactly where you are, right?
It's not that it's the ultimate weapon, but I think one of the things that went viral in the Ukrainian defense tech bubble, even before the words of the CEO of RainMetal, was some American tank, battle tank pilot, who was interviewed and he was asked whether he's afraid of FPV drones.
And he's like, no, our tanks are strong.
And that went viral among Ukrainians because they're like, dude, you have no idea what you're talking about.
Like, don't mess with those drones.
Like, you know, Abrams tank, great tank, but against an FV drone, sorry, dude, but it's not going to work.
I was like, maybe not from one drone, but like a dozen drones, we'll take it out.
So, yeah, but there is hope.
You just have to have kinetic countermeasures.
Interesting thing.
Kinetic countermeasures means a thing that shoots down the drone.
Well, it can mean many things.
So if you go to Ukrainian East and sort of territories close to the front lines, I think like about 50 kilometers in from the front line, all the roads are covered by fishnets.
So you literally, you ride in the corridor of fishnets.
And that's the mechanical countermeasure against the drone.
You count that as a kinetic countermeasure?
Well, mechanical.
Okay, okay, got it.
I don't know all the jargon, so it's, I'm, you know, whatever.
Then the tanks, if you look at Russian tanks, and sometimes Ukrainian tanks or equipment, they all look like porcupines.
They have these long, sticking, I don't know, poles.
We talked about poles already.
Different kind of poles.
Different kind of poles.
Yeah.
And that's the way to protect from drone.
That's a way to make the drone detonate maybe half a meter or a meter away from the actual shell of the tank.
Or, yeah, sometimes there are like nets on top of these tanks, just welded some extra sort of equipment.
Then, of course, there are...
guns that, like, what both Russians and Ukrainians are beginning to experiment with is kind of interceptor drone, anti-FPV interceptor drone, which you put on top of something like a gun, like harpoon sort of thing.
And when you see, like, a drone coming at you, maybe you can notice or hear it from 200 meters or 100 meters, so you have a couple of seconds.
And you grab that thing, you point it, and you fire it.
And then on board, it has certain AI that helps it to guide the small drone towards an attacking drone and intercept it that way.
So those are the things that are being developed.
We're working on some of these things as well.
And then you can imagine an armor with hundreds of drones on top of it, which are protector drones, sort of like active armor.
Whenever they see a drone coming at you, they take off.
That's cool.
What about the kind of things that the Germans are building, which is basically like a big truck with some sort of automated shotgun on it?
Yeah, like they have Skynix.
It's by Ryan Mittal, by the guy whom we mentioned today.
Skynix is considered to be an okay weapon.
Their shots are quite expensive, though.
So I'll tell you this different story about...
It's about cost to fire each shot.
Yeah, cost to effect in a sort of more abstract way.
So I was, last year, I was speaking at a Land Euro conference.
It's the biggest USA Army conference in Europe called Land Euro.
And there was an expo there.
There was like a Raytheon RTX booth there.
And Raytheon is an amazing company.
Gosh, we love Raytheon.
They're making Patriots.
Patriots are the best.
And they make a bunch of other things.
And they have this laser gun.
That's what I was going to ask about next year.
Yeah.
So laser thing.
It's like they have two variations, 10 kilowatt laser and 20 kilowatt laser.
I'm like, okay.
10kW laser, tell me about it.
It's like, can it take down an FPV drone?
Like, yes, of course it can.
I'm like, okay, cool.
How much time does it take to take down an FPV drone?
And they're like, well, maybe three seconds.
I'm like, hmm, three seconds, that's like a lot of time.
But okay, maybe fine.
And what if FPV drone tries to evade, right?
And it's like, well, we will retarget it again.
And it's like, and then three seconds start again.
Yeah, okay.
Well, can it take down, like, A dozen FPV drones.
They're like, yeah, for sure.
I'm like, okay, a dozen FPV drones, 30 seconds, maybe yes, two kilometers, maybe yes, maybe no.
And I'm like, okay, how much does it cost?
And this is something like $3 million or something like that.
And I'm like, okay, $3 million.
So that is 6,000 FPV drones.
I doubt this thing will be able to handle 6,000 FPV drones or even 600 FPV drones coming at it at the same time.
So you have this kind of economic.
And, you know, this product may not be necessarily a product against an FPV drone or against an FPV drone in an active battlefield environment.
It might be guarding a stadium in a peaceful country.
And then, you know, some random dudes launch a couple drones above a stadium, shoot them down.
okay, everyone's happy, although the drone will fall down, maybe fall on someone's head.
That wouldn't be cool.
So you would want something like catching bad drones with a net above a stadium or something like that.
Whatever.
My point is the economics matters.
If you sent them one by one, it wouldn't, you know, it would just be pew, pew, pew, pew.
But if you sent a mass of 6,000, it wouldn't.
Of course, yeah.
What about just like a more powerful laser, like a hundred, you know, kilowatt laser or something?
They wouldn't need to spend...
No, that's worse.
You need less powerful laser that achieves the same effect.
More powerful laser would be more expensive, heavier, more difficult to transport.
It will be more difficult to make many of them.
And therefore, you wouldn't be able to cover a long front line and it would be super expensive to replace if it gets damaged, all of those issues.
So the reason why FPV drones or iPhones become so popular is because they're small and everyone can have one.
And so is with the countermeasures.
So that's, you were asking me about sort of policy advice.
So that's like another sort of mental shift that you got to go through.
It's no longer about an aircraft carrier that costs whatever $14 billion and takes forever to build.
It's about mass that you can iterate on very quickly, you can upgrade it, everyone can operate it, and then that mass, when it is combined, or the technologies, when they're extrapolated from one domain to another domain, they add up, right, as it happens with software.
So I think that's important.
Can I ask a follow-up question?
So Russia is not necessarily the smartest army you could be fighting.
What would happen if your adversary was smarter?
Do you think things would change meaningfully?
Look, I don't know if I fully agree with not the smartest army.
Who is the smartest army?
That's a great question.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think that those are like very dangerous assumptions to make.
Who is the smartest army in World War I?
Define smart.
Why do you think so?
Why do you think Russia is not the smartest army?
Okay, I mean, maybe this is just my own, you know, information bubble.
Maybe I agree with you.
I'm just like, I'm naturally wired now to challenge those assumptions.
Okay, no, no, that's a really good point.
I guess when I...
For my information bubble, it seems like Russia's strategy has largely been to just throw resources.
Well, you're living in a Western propaganda information bubble, of course, like as am I.
Like we're all rooting for Ukraine to win, right?
But yeah, sorry, gone.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, but, you know, going back to this, granted, there's a history of large powers failing to take over smaller, you know, strategically, you know.
David and Goliath.
They fail a lot more now than they used to.
The success rate of taking places over has gone way down.
Yeah, and certainly, yeah, but regardless, it does, I do wonder, like, if Russia had not essentially assumed victory early on.
They're super stupid, of course.
Like, they were marching at Kiev with their parade costumes and, like, you know, they were thinking they're going to have a parade in Kiev in a few days.
Like, that was super stupid.
Lots of stupid things that are like, they have no regard, no care for human life.
They're sending those Russian folks just like without armor, with anything like folks on crutches, like sending them to stormy kind of positions.
I have actually a good friend.
He's American.
He's from Seattle.
He's served.
had been in Special Forces here in the US, had been in maybe three deployments, and then went to Ukraine and volunteered.
And he's been fighting since like 2022.
He's a very good friend of mine.
So at some point he's been texting me and he's like, okay, I'm near Pokrovsk.
And I was like, not Pokrovsk, it was, gosh, the other city, Chasivyar.
And he's like, okay, so what Russians are doing...
They're just creating so much work for all the psychologists who are going to heal those Ukrainian, whatever, riflemen or machine gunmen who are just like shooting at the Russians who are like going nonstop.
Right?
So it's like causing, our Russians are causing psychological trauma on Ukrainians because they're dying in such a stupid way.
So that is indeed stupid of sort of Russian higher command, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But then that's the resource they have.
If you've got Zerglings, you use your Zerglings.
That's their strategy.
That's their way of strategy.
Did you ever play Zerg?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Back in the day, that's what you do?
If you play StarCraft, that's how Zergs win, right?
Are Ukrainians the Terrans?
I don't know.
I hope we will become Protos soon.
I'm working on that.
I'm working on that.
I feel like the Protos have fairly bad political management at the top.
I wish Protos with a speed closer to humans or tyrants, whatever it is.
Hopefully we can do Protos technology with Zerg speed.
That would be the best.
I think that's what the housewives are working on.
In fact, you cannot beat those housewives.
Do not oppose Ukrainian housewives.
Do not mess with Ukrainian housewives, for sure.
Two final questions.
First one, you started out by telling us a story about going to a chapel on February 23rd.
Yeah.
Were you able to get married there?
And yeah, can you finish that story?
We actually, we did get married, but we...
postpone the wedding as social event until the war is over.
Okay, cool.
And then last question.
What do you want our audience to take away?
If you have one point you want to want them to walk away with, what would it be?
You want peace, be prepared to war.
Gotta invest in defense and security.
All right.
Thanks.
Thank you for talking with us.
Thank you.
And thank you, Noah, for all the great questions.
Absolutely.
Great.
Yeah, great to...
Yeah, that was fantastic.
Thanks so much.
Awesome.
Thanks.