The future of war has been evolving before our eyes in Ukraine, yet the west still plans to fight the last war. In this special episode, guest host Noah Smith (@noahpinion) and Brandon Anderson sit down with Yaroslav Azhnyuk (@YaroslavAzhnyuk), a serial tech founder who went from building PetCube to founding The Fourth Law, one of the world’s most advanced AI-guided drone companies. Over two hours we cover the technology, tactics, and geopolitics of drone warfare, and why the modern battlefield has already left the West behind:

* Yaroslav’s personal history and the Ukraine war [00:01:04 – 00:14:01]

* The modern drone tech stack: why FPV drones are the new god of war, the future of the rifleman, fiber optic vs. AI, five levels of autonomy, and the eight dimensions of the autonomous battlefield [00:14:01 – 01:05:13]

* The geopolitics and economics of drones: China’s manufacturing advantage, the drone race, Western defense readiness, countermeasures, and why the gap is widening [01:05:13 – 01:58:57]

For those looking for Noah Smith’s commentary, it really gets going around the 00:51:31 mark.

Yaroslav Azhnyuk / The Fourth Law:

* X: https://x.com/YaroslavAzhnyuk

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaroslavazhnyuk/

* The Fourth Law: https://thefourthlaw.ai

Noah Smith:

* Substack: Noah Smith

* X: https://x.com/noahpinion

Timestamps

00:00:00 Cold Open: China’s 4 Billion Drones and the Cameras-to-Explosives Pipeline

00:01:04 Introduction: Brandon, Noah Smith, and Yaroslav Azhnyuk

00:05:41 From Tech Entrepreneur to Defense: PetCube, Brave One, and the D3 Fund

00:10:42 The Ethics of Building Weapons: Dual-Use Technology and the Wolf at the Door

00:14:01 The Tech Stack: Cameras, Autonomy Modules, Interceptors, and a Semiconductor Fab

00:18:47 Fiber Optic vs. AI: The Radio Horizon Problem and $32/km Cable

00:25:32 FPV Drones: The New God of War — 70–80% of Frontline Casualties

00:28:28 The Five Levels of Drone Autonomy: From Terminal Guidance to Full Autonomy

00:41:37 The Eight Dimensions of the Autonomous Battlefield

00:45:32 AI Safety and the Morality of Autonomous Weapons

00:51:31 The End of the Rifleman? Noah’s 2013 Prediction vs. Battlefield Reality

01:05:13 China’s Manufacturing Advantage and Western Vulnerabilities

01:24:21 Policy Advice for Western Defense: Defense Valley and the Widening Gap

01:32:54 The Drone Race: Who’s Ahead, Category by Category

01:41:57 Countermeasures: Shotguns, Jammers, Lasers, and Fishnets

01:58:19 The Wedding and Final Takeaway: Be Prepared for War

Transcript

Cold Open: China, FPV Drones, and the New Warning Sign

Yaroslav [00:00:00]: 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.

Noah [00:00:10]: 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?

Yaroslav [00:00:20]: I don’t think we have all the information to claim that but we cannot count it out, and that alone should be a big warning sign. 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. And when you think about what your nation, what your patriots are going through, you realize that’s the only morally right thing to do is to fight back, and it is immoral not to fight back, and then the choice becomes very clear.

Introduction: Yaroslav Azhnyuk, Petcube, and the Last Flight into Kyiv

Brandon [00:01:04]: Welcome to Latent Space. I’m Brandon. I normally do science podcasts, but today we’re going to do something a little bit different. I’m joined by Noah Smith of Noahpinion on Substack and Twitter. And he has lots of interesting things to say about drones. And as a guest, we have Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder of The Fourth Law and several other, drone-related startups. To get started, it is February 23rd, 2022. You are running a pet startup. You’re connecting pets with their owners. Let’s go in just a little bit of background. How did you get started in tech, and what were you working on before the Ukrainian war started?

Yaroslav [00:01:50]: Good to be here. Thank you. On February 23rd, late in the evening, 11:00 PM Kyiv time, my wife and I landed in Kyiv. Actually, then she was a fiance. We came from Lviv, where we were looking at a church, where our wedding should have taken place. And we got into this cab ride from the airport to our home, and the driver was like, “You crazy. Like, everyone’s leaving Kyiv. Why do you come?” We’re like, “What? Nothing’s going to happen. 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 Kyiv, or one of those last flights. My background, I’m a tech guy. Studied applied mathematics in Kyiv Polytechnics, born and raised in Kyiv. My parents are old PhDs from academia, and grandparents too. Like, everything, from linguistics to nuclear physics. And I’m an entrepreneur, so I’ve built a bunch of companies. Petcube is the one you were referencing. So I lived in San Francisco 2014 to 2020, 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.

February 24th: Leaving Kyiv as the Invasion Begins

Noah [00:03:28]: February 24th, I guess a few hours after you, go to check out your wedding chapel, what do you do?

Yaroslav [00:03:37]: We had a plan for this situation. So my parents and family live in Kyiv, 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 driving west. And that was 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. Missiles are falling. Like, there was smoke in Kyiv. Like, my dad and I went, like, to central part of the cities. It’s probably, like

Yaroslav [00:04:20]: 800 meters from presidential office, to pick some stuff up at his workplace. Because 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, like, helping friends get out, like my friend and his dog. Like, we found Like, my brother was also, like, 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. And we didn’t know of course, and you didn’t know this will last for so long. You didn’t know whether Ukraine will be able to defend Kyiv. And it was like, yeah, very little information and very little insight into future.

From Pet Cameras to Defense Tech: Building for Ukraine and the Free World

Noah [00:05:42]: What are your thoughts with regards to how do you, defend, Ukraine? So you eventually start building drones Like, what is the process to get from there from where you were building, devices that connect owners with pets to building drones, and what other things did you do to help the war effort in the process?

Yaroslav [00:06:07]: It’s definitely non-trivial, right? Like, I didn’t go, to I didn’t get any, like, military education when I was a student. Like, normally, in Ukraine, you would, you would go to like, this military school even if you’re getting higher education in any other, sphere. I decided to skip that which is like, 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 US, that your 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 I Day one, I figured I’m going to 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 a bunch of things. We were reaching out to a number of American, congresspeople and senators, and basically advocating for support of Ukraine, for voting for lend 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. It’s like, it was 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 and that 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, in a 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 a new helmet? That has never been possible before. It’s the first time in the history of war this is possible. So all of that and many other things like, supply chain fragilization, and the impact that AI is going to have on all of this all these things have become evident to me in 2023, 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, defensibility to Ukraine and the free world.” So that’s literally the mission of the company, increase defensibility of Ukraine and the free world. And then there was some sort of soul-searching and like, asking yourself. It’s like, “Okay, am I Actually, I know nothing about weapons. Am I actually, like, ready to make, things that other people use to kill other bad people?”

Yaroslav [00:09:36]: When you think about what your nation, what your Compatriots are going through And 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’s the only morally right thing to do is to fight back, and it is immoral not to fight back. And then the choice becomes very clear. And look, we’re just passing the ammunition. We’re not doing the actual job. The actual fighters and defenders and heroes are people in the armed forces. We’re just support.

The Moral Question: Weapons, Responsibility, and Fighting Back

Noah [00:10:33]: I have so many questions. Actually, I know you seem to have a question. Do you want to ask anything?

Yaroslav [00:10:38]: No, I’m just listening. Go ahead.

Noah [00:10:40]: I do want to talk about, some of let’s say, the moral issues, like you just said. You end

Yaroslav [00:10:50]: I think there are no issues there.

Yaroslav [00:10:52]: What would an example of a moral question be in this case?

Noah [00:10:55]: No, I mean Okay. As you just said, you are creating the tools, but others are using them.

Noah [00:11:05]: I was maybe thinking of having this conversation later, but one of the questions is like, is it actually you are going to be building them for your homeland, which you are building it for your homeland, which is I think, very a strong morally defensible position, but this technology is not going to stay with you, right?

Noah [00:11:26]: This you will probably be selling these to other people Yeah. So the future is really where the moral issues may come into play

Yaroslav [00:11:38]: The 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.

Noah [00:12:06]: Cut tomatoes, too.

Yaroslav [00:12:08]: Cut tomatoes too.

Noah [00:12:09]: Yes, knife.

Yaroslav [00:12:09]: That’s helpful.

Noah [00:12:10]: In Japan, sword and knife, they, call the same word.

Yaroslav [00:12:14]: 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.

Yaroslav [00:12:29]: 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 How should the decision process look like? Should you, like, try to calculate all the possible scenarios before starting to 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 ideal world where there’s like, or 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 first going to deal with the wolf that wants to eat you, and then you’re going to go consult Greenpeace. So that’s kind of situation that Ukraine is in.

The Fourth Law, Odd Systems, and Ukraine’s Drone Stack

Noah [00:13:59]: Enough. Because this is a tech podcast, I did want to spend some time talking about, sort of the tech in that you’ve developed and what you’ve been working on. So can you explain, I guess, first of all, like, the problem that you were trying to solve from a technical standpoint? And I think, and then maybe, like, go into some of the solutions and some of the design process that led you from designing, little laser-guided, guiding lasers with a with an iPhone versus Having drones.

Yaroslav [00:14:34]: Like, it so happened, that my partners and I, we sort of 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, Petcube co-founders, partners, and friends, we started another company called Odd Systems Which, was focused on making thermal cameras. Cameras, thermal cameras are seeing thermal radiation and are used to see at night. And we’re now sort of those companies are getting closer and closer together and we’re probably going to merge them. And this group of companies is currently the leading, team in on-drone 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. And there are different types of drones. Those are 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 Shahed interceptors and we do ISR interceptors. We don’t do the deep strike-

FPV Drones, Interceptors, and Battery-Powered Warfare

Noah [00:16:32]: What’s an ISR interceptor?

Yaroslav [00:16:33]: ISR is stands for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and those are basically drones which are which, Russians are using to watch over positions and then communicate where, the targets are coming.

Noah [00:16:48]: It’s a reconnaissance.

Yaroslav [00:16:48]: That’s, the ISR is sort of a classical term for a for a reconnaissance drone.

Noah [00:16:53]: Are all of these battery-powered drones that you just described? ‘Cause I know that the sort of deep strike drones still have, like Some sort of

Yaroslav [00:17:01]: Internal combustion engine?

Noah [00:17:02]: Internal combustion engine. Are all the things you’re talking about battery-powered?

Yaroslav [00:17:06]: What we’re working on is all battery-powered, right? We don’t do the deep strikes, right? And then in terms of autonomy-

Noah [00:17:12]: You can catch a Shahed with a battery-powered thing. It’s not Fast to catch.

Yaroslav [00:17:17]: No, absolutely. Look, Shahed interceptor, like ours, it’s called Zero, it goes up to 326 kilometers per hour.

Noah [00:17:26]: For reference, how fast is a Shahed?

Yaroslav [00:17:28]: Eight, like, in internal phase it could be 280, but in cruise phase it’s, like, 220-ish.

Yaroslav [00:17:36]: Yeah. And sorry, I’m not like you can convert that into miles if you’re interested.

Noah [00:17:41]: No, that’s fine.

Noah [00:17:41]: Multiply by two thirds or point six or something.

Yaroslav [00:17:44]: That’s easy. Yeah, I was saying that for autonomy modules, right, we, -We make systems, autonomous systems for frontline, for interceptors and some for deep strikes as well, and then different levels of autonomy. So from terminal guidance, which is like lasts 500 meters, give or take, to autonomous bombing, to autonomous target detection, to autonomous navigation and all of that across day and night, different terrains, 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 like our own simulation. We have our own training school for the war fighters. 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 is Doing semiconductors. Super cool.

Noah [00:18:49]: Like in terms of kind of core drone technologies, you basically are one is an FPV replacement without fiber optics, and the other is

Yaroslav [00:18:59]: You

Noah [00:18:59]: Signal tracking with interceptors

Yaroslav [00:19:00]: With or without fiber optics. Fiber optics Is just like, sort of a communication module.

Yaroslav [00:19:05]: You can, 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 Has its own advantages but also adds weight and decreases, the distance and decreases, how fast you can, sort of turn and With a drone. Yeah.

Noah [00:19:33]: Do you need AI for fiber optic drones?

Yaroslav [00:19:36]: Like 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.

Fiber Optics, Radio Horizons, and Terminal Guidance

Noah [00:20:03]: I guess I thought that the key reason that people moved to fiber optic drones was for like electronic, countermeasures. Or I guess to counter those.

Yaroslav [00:20:13]: 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 as

Yaroslav [00:20:36]: 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

Yaroslav [00:20:49]: 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 and 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, be it 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 what-- And then the distances that these FPV drones, act on they’re, they can be quite large. So for example, here in the US there was this drone dominance program competition, and in drone dominance the furthest distance was about 10 kilometers.

Noah [00:21:44]: What was drone dominance? What was that competition?

Yaroslav [00:21:47]: Drone, the drone dominance is a is a program started, by the US government, to accelerate the development of drone technology here in the US.

Noah [00:21:57]: Got it. And the longest range thing they were using was 10 kilometers.

Yaroslav [00:22:00]: 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. So 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 two, three, 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

Noah [00:23:12]: ‘Cause the cable that you have to unspool as you go weighs.

Noah [00:23:15]: It is heavy.

Yaroslav [00:23:15]: At first, like the spool is about 800 grams, so a bit less than a kilo, and then, and then think about 10, 10 kilometer optic fiber is another kilo, something like that. 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, 20 kilometers. If you want to go to 30 or 40, like 30 is probably max. 40 is like very problem problematic on optic fiber. And then the problem with optic fiber is it’s actually getting super expensive. So and why? Because of all the data centers for AI. That’s literally the same optic fiber-

Noah [00:24:01]: We’re running out of centers

Yaroslav [00:24:02]: That’s being used there.

Yaroslav [00:24:02]: Like 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. And I’ve

Brandon [00:24:26]: Claude Code is stopping the Russian drone effort here.

Yaroslav [00:24:30]: Ukrainian as well. Yeah.

Brandon [00:24:31]: 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.

Brandon [00:24:42]: How accurate’s that?

Yaroslav [00:24:43]: The Russians were the first ones to scale that. I think by as of now, Ukraine has caught up. I think, like, as of maybe three months ago, Ukraine is mostly caught up on fiber optic. Yeah.

Brandon [00:24:57]: What percent of damage would you say is in terms of FPV drone damage would you say is now fiber optic versus, like autonomous?

FPVs as the New God of War: Tanks, Artillery, and Cost per Kill

Yaroslav [00:25:07]: For our, for our audience, I actually, I cannot answer that question. Like, it’s like 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.

Brandon [00:25:30]: FPV drones are the new weapon of universal weapon of warfare.

Yaroslav [00:25:34]: It’s

Brandon [00:25:35]: Land warfare, anyway

Yaroslav [00:25:35]: 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-

Brandon [00:25:46]: FPV

Yaroslav [00:25:47]: FPV drones rule.

Brandon [00:25:48]: FPV drones are the god of war.

Yaroslav [00:25:51]: 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 know, have you seen the videos of Russians using mules and horses?

Brandon [00:26:09]: What is the usefulness-

Yaroslav [00:26:10]: It’

Brandon [00:26:10]: Of a tank in the in the modern-

Yaroslav [00:26:11]: That’s where we need Greenpeace to say a word, but they’re silent. Yeah.

Brandon [00:26:15]: What’s the use of a tank on the modern battlefield?

Yaroslav [00:26:21]: It’s diminishing.

Brandon [00:26:22]: Diminishing.

Yaroslav [00:26:22]: However, I think there might be technologies which will, revive the tank. Look, tank still provides you armor, and armor is important. Like, you still need to 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 do to protect it. We were previously talking about this before the podcast. The CEO of Rheinmetall, recently sort of ridiculed, Ukrainian drone industry, saying that like, there is nothing interesting there, no real innovation, no to stand Compared to like, Rheinmetall or Boeing, and it’s all made by housewives. There was like, obviously a ton of memes about this people ridiculing the CEO of Rheinmetall. 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 VIARI 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 Rheinmetall manufactures in a year.

Yaroslav [00:27:52]: Then, yeah, cost-wise, of course, a drone is like, $500 and a Rheinmetall tank is what, probably 5 million-ish or maybe more.

Brandon [00:28:00]: Don’t mess with those housewives.

Yaroslav [00:28:03]: Drone wives.

Brandon [00:28:04]: Drone wives.

Yaroslav [00:28:06]: That’s it.

Noah [00:28:06]: There’s a classic saying that everyone always fights the last war.

Noah [00:28:12]: Yet do 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?

Yaroslav [00:28:24]: Look, I think it’s the same way, how do we get to the point that calculators become irrelevant?

Yaroslav [00:28:31]: Now we have iPhones. Like, 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 Look, so if you, if you think about a tank and a like, it’s not a direct comparison, but even, like, a drone and a artillery shell or like, sort of cost per kill, an artillery shell for 155 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 artillery and many of than a classic artillery. Many of Because there are different types of artillery. Not just, like, one 155. You have mortars, you have all that. But give or take, roughly three orders of magnitude maybe. Again, it doesn’t have that firepower. It’s not one-to-one comparison still.

Yaroslav [00:29:53]: 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 are like, in hundreds of dollars of pure bomb

Full Autonomy: From Human Pilots to Smartphone-Directed Drone Missions

Noah [00:30:06]: Just interrupt. You said full autonomy Just a second ago you were saying that the autonomy here is guidance, right? It’s not decision-making.

Yaroslav [00:30:14]: No, I was I was saying that’s the f-First and sort of easiest pieces of autonomy that was fielded by us. But if you, if you add full autonomy to a drone

Brandon [00:30:24]: He, I think he’s asking what does it can you, for the listeners, can you explain What the term full autonomy means?

Yaroslav [00:30:29]: Basically, I think a good way to think about an FPV drone is like an iPhone of warfare. It’s, like, very inexpensive, very mass producible, very versatile. You don’t need a bunch of other things when you have a iPhone in your pocket. You don’t have, need an MP3 player, you don’t need a calculator, don’t need other things. All right? So FPV drone is an iPhone. Or like, okay, Apple please don’t sue me, is a smartphone. And then, when you add autonomy to it sort of becomes like Uber or ride 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 the drone, and then having to pilot it for 30 minutes, flying towards the 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 they, the bad guys are supposed to be sees the bad guys, bombs them, return, like, watches, so does a damage assessment, returns back, sits down, and then you can pick it up and watch the video if you didn’t have the radio link, right?

Noah [00:31:59]: That’s a bomber drone.

Yaroslav [00:32:00]: That’s full autonomy for a bomber drone, right?

Noah [00:32:03]: You’re saying that no human decision is made in this entire process?

Brandon [00:32:06]: That’s not, that’s not what he’s saying.

Yaroslav [00:32:07]: A human decision was made at the beginning of the process-

Noah [00:32:09]: I get it. I get it

Yaroslav [00:32:09]: The same way as you would fire an artillery.

Yaroslav [00:32:12]: 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. That’s exactly, a human decision is always made at some point. So when you do 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’s, it can be a bomber.

Brandon [00:33:05]: Now wait, let’s, 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.

Noah [00:33:17]: Maybe, to push back on

Brandon [00:33:19]: They’re super, they’re superhuman. They’re, they’ 10X superhuman.

Yaroslav [00:33:22]: 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,”like, “I’m getting out of here.” Right? That doesn’t happen to an autonomous drone. Like, all of those things. Like, we have, like, one of the brigades that’s using our drones with just first level autonomy They literally said that their success rates-

Brandon [00:33:53]: What’s first level autonomy?

Yaroslav [00:33:54]: First level autonomy is just the terminal guidance.

Yaroslav [00:33:57]: By the way, we have video of that. We can watch that.

Brandon [00:33:59]: Terminal guidance means a human gets it nearby and then the AI takes over.

Yaroslav [00:34:03]: The human flies it all the way, like 30 kilometers towards the target, and 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 to the target, and once you see the target from a distance of 500 meters, you do target lock, and from there drone flies autonomous. So just that feature alone, it has increased the guy’s, his call sign is Grom, so it has increased his, mission success rate, like precision of mission, yeah, mission success rate from 20% to 71%, and it also increased his kill zone from three kilometers to 10 kilometers, which means there’s certain area around the front line which is designated kill zone. Whenever enemy goes into that area, it’s almost guaranteed to be 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 kilometer-

Mission Success, Failure Modes, and the Five Levels of Autonomy

Brandon [00:35:03]: What is a zero line?

Yaroslav [00:35:05]: Zero line is sort of an imaginary line of control, of two conflicting forces.

Brandon [00:35:14]: It’s important to explain these things to a lot of the listeners who are

Yaroslav [00:35:17]: Thank you for asking

Brandon [00:35:18]: Familiar with warfare.

Noah [00:35:20]: Myself.

Noah [00:35:20]: I’m one of those listeners.

Brandon [00:35:20]: 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%, or something like that.

Yaroslav [00:35:33]: Increases the kill zone

Brandon [00:35:34]: Increases the kill zone

Yaroslav [00:35:34]: Three kilometers to 10 kilometers.

Brandon [00:35:36]: Got it.

Yaroslav [00:35:36]: On both parameters-

Brandon [00:35:37]: What is full autonomy, dude? And

Noah [00:35:38]: Actually on real quick, can we define mission success and like, maybe in a way, what are the failure modes of missions?

Brandon [00:35:44]: I have a guess what mission success is.

Noah [00:35:46]: But I could

Brandon [00:35:47]: Get ‘em.

Yaroslav [00:35:49]: No, but that’s a very good question, in fact, because, even if you fly into the target, well, first the target can be damaged or destroyed. Those are two different modes. Then there can be different targets. A sole infantryman is one kind of target. A dugout where supposed there are some, enemies there is another kind of target, and a some mechanical equipment is another type of target. Radio emitting equipment, which, like, often, like, the targets that the military want to get more than anything else is the some enemy radio tower or something like that or some small radio dish that really makes life difficult in that area, in that combat area. So those are different targets, right? It can be destroyed, 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 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 modes. Yeah, or maybe you got lost, you’re navigate navigating to your, to your target. That happens, too.

Noah [00:37:41]: The Level one autonomy, basically you manage to point in a direction.

Noah [00:37:49]: You go there, and then the last mile The drone taking over.

Yaroslav [00:37:52]: We define this like, 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. And level five is autonomous takeoff and landing.

Noah [00:38:15]: Those are good things to know

Yaroslav [00:38:16]: Those are five levels of autonomy. Now, if you

Noah [00:38:19]: I have a question for you.

Yaroslav [00:38:19]: Sorry. Like, let me finish with

Noah [00:38:21]: Sorry

Yaroslav [00:38:21]: Theoretical part.

Noah [00:38:23]: What is Tesla running at right now?

Yaroslav [00:38:25]: Tesla?

Noah [00:38:25]: No, sorry.

Yaroslav [00:38:26]: That’s very good point. Like, it’s exactly, it was inspired by the levels of self-driving autonomy.

Noah [00:38:32]: Waymo’s level five, right?

Noah [00:38:35]: You just tell it where you want to go, it picks you up, and then you go there.

Yaroslav [00:38:36]: I think, like, if you, if you look at the classic definitions of self-driving cars, Waymo is still, like, level four because it still requires even remote, but still, like, human control. It’s like if Waymo gets in trouble, there is an operator who takes over and resolves this. So that would still be a level four. It doesn’t map directly, but it’s also five levels.

Brandon [00:38:58]: Can I, can I interject a question here? In terms of an FPV drone that’s like a suicide drone that’ll just blow itself up killing something, how do 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 happens to that?

Yaroslav [00:39:16]: That’s a great question. So

Brandon [00:39:18]: You need another drone

Yaroslav [00:39:19]: Like, the current battlefield in Ukraine is 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 Ukrainian side. So it’s, like, serious numbers. We’re getting in 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 we, 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, there are drones that can stay for many hours or even up to a day. And those drones have, are more expensive, have more expensive cameras, et cetera, et cetera. We hunt those drones that Russians launch. The Russians hunt our drones, and so on. But 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 that will do target designation for you. They’ll say, “Oh, like, there’s a Russian vehicle over there. Go and get him.”and you go there, you get it, and they’re like, “Okay, confirmed.”

Battlefield Surveillance and the Eight Dimensions of Autonomy

Brandon [00:40:57]: Those guys are watching. They have their own drones in the sky.

Yaroslav [00:40:59]: Target destroyed. They have, like, a carousel of drones because One Mavic cannot stay more than 30 minutes. It

Brandon [00:41:06]: They’re constantly surveilling the battlefield.

Yaroslav [00:41:07]: Almost every spot on the battlefield.

Yaroslav [00:41:11]: It’s not always the case. Sometimes you will not have a surveillance asset, so then you would launch another FPV just to confirm that there was a hit. Then if you see there was a hit and you’re not sure if it completely destroyed, you maybe hit again for good measure.

Brandon [00:41:26]: You double tap.

Yaroslav [00:41:28]: 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? 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 the 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 can 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 it’s ground to ground or ground to air as an intersection, or ground to sea or sea to air. They’re all, like, all the nuances with different domains. Then level four, would be higher levels of autonomy, such as swarming, drone carriers, drone nests, et cetera.

Brandon [00:42:39]: Now when you’re saying level, you’re talking about dimensions, not about-

Yaroslav [00:42:42]: Sorry. Yeah

Brandon [00:42:43]: Autonomy levels. So dimension four.

Yaroslav [00:42:43]: The dimension. Yeah, I used to say I was supposed to say dimension. I say dimension because each of them works with another, right? So you might have, like 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 or like, tens of thousands of those assets around the battlefield? How are you coordinating that on the higher levels of command? How are you collecting data? All that.

Yaroslav [00:43:44]: 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 integrate 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 gives you a more broad overview of how autonomy propagates across the battle space.

Targeting, Human Responsibility, and Rules of Engagement

Noah [00:44:23]: 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.

Yaroslav [00:44:41]: Like what?

Noah [00:44:41]: I mean Well, first of

Yaroslav [00:44:43]: If the I’m very interested Sort of sort of kinds of scenarios that you’re thinking about.

Noah [00:44:48]: Like the most obvious one is you, if I assume these are computer vision guided systems for at least the last mile, how do you ensure that oh, well, like you now have some fog roll in or something, and you, the drones just attack the wrong thing? Or maybe, it probably will not turn around and fly back and attack you, but you

Yaroslav [00:45:10]: Same, the same, the same question, how do you ensure that your mortar fire hits the right thing? Well, it’s like mortar fire, give or take half a kilometer could be 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, to your point, I think five to 10 years from now it will be immoral to use weapons without AI.

Yaroslav [00:45:44]: ‘Cause 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.

Noah [00:46:02]: Wow, I never considered that might

Brandon [00:46:04]: Really? That’s definitely coming.

Yaroslav [00:46:07]: Anyway.

Brandon [00:46:07]: No, but that’ I don’t know, it’s an obvious, an obvious thought. I agree with you.

Brandon [00:46:12]: I, No, they, obviously they’re not going to let you drive once most of the cars on the road are autonomous.

Noah [00:46:17]: No, that one, don’t I believe.

Yaroslav [00:46:19]: No, I think you were you were talking about drones, right?

Brandon [00:46:21]: The drones, right. Cool.

Yaroslav [00:46:22]: The weapons, right?

Brandon [00:46:23]: Friendly fire and collateral damage and stuff like that is all minimized with AI.

Brandon [00:46:27]: Here’s my question. Take all let’s go to level six autonomy. Let’s take all of the 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.

Yaroslav [00:46:44]: Be the general, right?

Brandon [00:46:44]: It’s a general. It’s, you’ve cut humans out of the loop except maybe as dexterous robots, repairing drones and fastening things to drones or maybe something like that because you don’t have those robots yet. How soon are we there? AI general.

Yaroslav [00:46:58]: The most important thing to ask ourselves is who will be faster to that us or our adversaries?

Brandon [00:47:07]: I assume us, but how fast will we be to that? I hope us.

Yaroslav [00:47:11]: I hope so too.

Brandon [00:47:12]: How fast can we Like when are we looking at that in terms of like horizons years?

Yaroslav [00:47:18]: 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 Like operation in Iran, right? They, the publicly, it was claimed that I think Palantir 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 Okay.” And you look at the targets and you’re like, “Yeah, sounds right. Press Okay.”so that’s, 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 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. There you have, like, the platoon, the company level, the battalion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the tricky thing here when we get into that territory, the tricky thing is If your enemy is getting advantage of being Thousand times faster than yourself by deploying such systems What do you do?

Yaroslav [00:49:10]: You got to-

Brandon [00:49:12]: The if the enemy is a thousand times faster than you at deploying those systems?

Yaroslav [00:49:16]: Like, if enemy starts deploying level six autonomy, as you call And you have not started doing

Brandon [00:49:22]: You’re in trouble

Yaroslav [00:49:23]: 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 a dead person. That person surely doesn’t get to think about that.

Brandon [00:49:52]: What would be the safety risk of such a system?

Yaroslav [00:49:55]: Of course-

Brandon [00:49:56]: Friendly fire?

Yaroslav [00:49:56]: Just wrong decisions, right?

Brandon [00:49:59]: I see.

Yaroslav [00:49:59]: Maybe, these decisions-

AI Command Decisions, Dead Zones, and Complex Battlefields

Brandon [00:50:06]: Skynet AI decides it’s going to use

Yaroslav [00:50:08]: No, these-

Brandon [00:50:08]: Drone army to kill us

Yaroslav [00:50:09]: Decisions will not only be made about drones. They are likely to made about what the humans should do on your side as well. Then obviously some environments are more like Ukrainian-Russian war, where you have

Brandon [00:50:26]: It will have to choose to risk lives. It will have to choose to sacrifice human lives-

Yaroslav [00:50:28]: Of course

Brandon [00:50:29]: On your side.

Yaroslav [00:50:29]: Of course. And then some environments are just, like, dead, like, dead zones and there are no civilians there, or 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 counterterrorist operation. There’s, like, a group of terrorists or a group of civilians. Or like, it’s 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? So in those situations, it’s a different level of responsibility for that decision-making as well. And then there is just such a big variety of those military missions, and I’m not even, like, 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 Ukraine general and American general would have told you very different stories about these things.

Brandon [00:51:34]: Got it. Can I ask a few more questions? 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.

Yaroslav [00:51:54]: You were way ahead of your time.

Brandon [00:51:55]: I said, I said, “The following will happen.”

Yaroslav [00:51:57]: It’s, this article is real. I’ve read it.

Yaroslav [00:51:58]: It’s actually-

Brandon [00:51:59]: 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 I didn’t even know about, like, AlexNet at the time, I think.

Yaroslav [00:52:19]: You’re just an avid sci-fi reader.

Brandon [00:52:23]: 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 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

Brandon [00:52:38]: I, yeah, I think that one sentence describes the bitter lesson right there.

Brandon [00:52:41]: It’s just like it’s a multidimensional search space. You search it somehow. I don’t know. Figure out some get a grad student-

Yaroslav [00:52:47]: Sooner or later

Brandon [00:52:47]: To make a search algorithm.

Brandon [00:52:48]: It’s not that hard. Anyway, so but then, but I guess the point is The point is that human infantry on the battlefield will be will be gone at the end. 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.”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 reading the battlefield reports from Ukraine, where, human infantry are basically guy, like a few guys hiding in dugouts for months, and I’m not sure what they’re doing.

Yaroslav [00:53:35]: That’s on Ukraine’s side. On the Russian side, that’s just like a zerg rush.

Brandon [00:53:38]: The zerg rush, and then they just die. Then, but they have some guys in dugouts too, right? Like hiding in dugouts for months.

Yaroslav [00:53:45]: They have. Yeah.

Brandon [00:53:45]: Like, but that like, what are those guys doing in the dugouts? Are providing, like, frontline, like, reconnaissance? Like, what are they doing?

Yaroslav [00:53:54]: If there is a guy in a dugout with some bullets and automatic weapon, the other guy cannot come and take the that dugout. That’

Brandon [00:54:07]: I see

Yaroslav [00:54:08]: They are they’re establishing control over territory.

Brandon [00:54:10]: I see. So that is so there still is a use for human infantry on the battlefield as of today.

Yaroslav [00:54:15]: Like

Brandon [00:54:15]: How long will that last?

Yaroslav [00:54:17]: I think it will last for a while. This is funny. There’s this whole Layer of the modern culture, a modern Ukraine 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 as like the whatever, third world war or whatever. And they basically, they, sang about the AI and like cyborgs 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. There are

Ground Robots, Simulation, and the Limits of World Models

Brandon [00:55:30]: Ground robots will not replace humans in the dugouts soon.

Yaroslav [00:55:34]: I’m very much interested in following the whole humanoid robot theme and

Brandon [00:55:39]: What about like a dog robot?

Noah [00:55:41]: Or just mobile controlled platforms or something.

Brandon [00:55:44]: Spider robot, yeah.

Brandon [00:55:45]: Everything evolves into a crab.

Brandon [00:55:46]: You build a crab robot.

Yaroslav [00:55:47]: A humanoid-

Noah [00:55:48]: The carcinization of warfare.

Yaroslav [00:55:51]: 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 sometimes 10 years in the future, humanoid robots, will be actually fighting. So that’s an actual Terminator kind of scenario.

Brandon [00:56:14]: Yeah, in the first Terminator movie, you look at what they’ve got on the battlefield, they’ve got flying bomber drones and humanoid robots.

Yaroslav [00:56:20]: 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, et cetera. So that is already possible. And with when we’re looking at the acceleration of the neural nets, I would’ve, if not the acceleration of the large language models, I would’ve said that I don’t think that humanoid robots will be able to be useful in the battlefield earlier than in 10 years. But if you account for the exponential, it might be 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 tail of edge cases, that it’s really difficult to make them useful. Like we were promised, self-driving cars, what, like 2007, Sebastian Thrun and Google, and even before that all the challenges, everything. And Elon of course told us it’s going to be one year from 2014, and now we still don’t have self-driving Teslas everywhere. We have Waymos in SF and some other places, but they’re still, like, 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 like AI coding tools is just insane. So things might accelerate very fast, faster than we can imagine.

Noah [00:58:46]: I think your point is that with due to this long tail behavior Level one autonomy as you’ve defined it, is actually very natural. Like you basically are just solving an image recognition and tracking system.

Yaroslav [00:59:02]: 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 because even that problem-

Noah [00:59:22]: I’m not saying it’s, I’m not saying it’s trivial, but it’s at least something that you imagine given our current state.

Yaroslav [00:59:26]: Like us and Eric Schmidt, like Eric Schmidt’s companies are pretty good.

Yaroslav [00:59:29]: Like, I actually have lots of respect to what they’re doing, and they’re, they have been practically influential and helpful on the battlefield, and they have good engineering.

Noah [00:59:38]: I wasn’t, I wasn’t saying it’s trivial. I’m just saying this is a something naturally adaptive based upon things that we know work, well. But some of the other domains that where you do have to make decisions and you have a long tail become much harder, and you worry about edge cases more.

Yaroslav [00:59:57]: Like the more, the more complex behavior you’re trying to simulate, the more edge cases there are right? 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 pre-neural nets, you would do perception output and control all with classic logics, right? 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. Could be sound, could be accelerometer, could be everything, as input, and just outputs the controls. And some of the self-driving car companies are doing that or like, experimenting between different ways of doing that. So you can also, like, 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 filter, 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.

Noah [01:01:53]: I-- Maybe my point was just much more high level. It’

Yaroslav [01:01:56]: Or you can If you go even like, if you go high level, you can, you can like train to like have whatever, like Feifei Li and folks who are doing like physical, sort

Brandon [01:02:08]: World models

Yaroslav [01:02:08]: World models, right, physical intelligence, they’re trying to make these big models and sort of understand the world and then supposedly you have such 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, make me a photo of the guy smiling and get back to me.” 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 only the not only the good guys that are developing these systems, the bad guys are developing these systems as well.

China’s Drone Supply Chain and the West’s Manufacturing Gap

Noah [01:03:00]: I guess where I’m going with this back to Noah’s original thought with the end of the end of the soldier. And so in order to replace-

Brandon [01:03:10]: Or at least the end of the rifleman.

Noah [01:03:11]: Or the end of the rifleman, yeah.

Yaroslav [01:03:13]: I’m not seeing that very close, and it was like I’m, as much as I’m a lover of sci-fi and all of that and a technologist, the more I try to be

Yaroslav [01:03:27]: Like the 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 eighty percent of the casualties, you go to the actual officers, you talk to the actual, like, brigade commanders, corps 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 get this piece of land, out of the enemy’s hands, deoccu deoccupy it, how it is so complex, it involves, dozens of different types of drones and then land operations and reconnaissance operations, psychological operations and then aviations and tanks and logistics and 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 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.

Brandon [01:05:17]: Let’s talk about China and China’s manufacturing capabilities. So suppose that someone, like suppose the United States went to war with China. And

Yaroslav [01:05:26]: I hope not.

Brandon [01:05:27]: I hope not as well. And then 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.”

Brandon [01:05:47]: 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 where even if they don’t control one hundred percent 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?

Yaroslav [01:06:30]: Let me start with a 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?

Yaroslav [01:06:49]: We’re not in a conflict with China, and we would not want to be in a conflict with China. And we’d hope that China stays a neutral power between Ukraine and Russia and the US as well. That said, the scenario that you’re describing, everything is much worse.

Yaroslav [01:07:11]: Think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced four million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world.

Yaroslav [01:07:19]: China can produce four billion of these FPV drones.

Yaroslav [01:07:23]: China can make them not drones with propellers, but fixed-wing drones, which go not forty kilometers far, but maybe two to three hundred kilometers inland. Slightly more expensive.

Brandon [01:07:34]: With internal combustion

Yaroslav [01:07:36]: No. With

Brandon [01:07:36]: Battery-powered fixed-wing drones.

Yaroslav [01:07:38]: Battery, yeah.

Brandon [01:07:39]: What’s the propulsion system on those propellers?

Brandon [01:07:43]: I don’t-- I just don’t know how that works.

Yaroslav [01:07:44]: You have that. They can also make them all fully autonomous. They have DJI, the world’s most advanced drone company. They can make them fully autonomous without GPS, without anything. Then they can put those drones on maybe tens of thousands of fully autonomous underwater submarines, or maybe not even that just on shipping containers and barges that ship goods or freight ships. And then they show up with 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 at a piece of land.

Yaroslav [01:08:38]: What do you do with that? There are not enough hunter submarines. There are not enough anti

Brandon [01:08:46]: Ship missiles.

Yaroslav [01:08:47]: Anti-ship missiles, anti-ship, planes. They can produce these assets, on in tens of thousands of factories because they’re so simple to produce that even the 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

Brandon [01:09:39]: You mean a similar number of drones.

Yaroslav [01:09:41]: Yes, to intercept that like either in sea or in 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

Four Layers Behind China: Technology, Manufacturing, Components, and Rare Earths

Brandon [01:10:01]: What technologies, key technologies do we lack?

Yaroslav [01:10:03]: Like autonomy, mass drone manufacturing, stuff like that.

Brandon [01:10:06]: We lack autonomy technology?

Yaroslav [01:10:09]: I think so.

Brandon [01:10:10]: Because our computer vision algorithms are not as good?

Yaroslav [01:10:12]: It’s not only about the computer vision algorithms. It’s like the like if a group of companies by Eric Schmidt founded two, three years ago and my small startup, was like maybe not as small, but it’s also founded three years ago, are sort of two of the leading companies in the world, and maybe a couple others who are capable of something like that but not really on small drones. I do think we’ll, 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 in the West, and especially in the United States, we should, there should be far more smarter people working in defense, and there should be more funding, if we want to keep the resemblance of our good past life.

Brandon [01:11:14]: 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?

Yaroslav [01:11:35]: Look, I don’t, I don’t think we have all the information to claim that but

Yaroslav [01:11:41]: We cannot count it out, and that alone should be 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 seen Chinese forces in action. Obviously, hopefully, this never happens, but the conflict of a scale US, China, there are many Sort of classical assets that we should not discount. As we just discussed, we should not discount artillery in the land war, we should not discount, air-carrying groups and the air force, and long-range missiles and electronic warfare and satellites, et cetera. But then there are also things that we, 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. -I think if you, 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.

Brandon [01:13:03]: That’s just a typical law of conventional warfare Has been forever.

Yaroslav [01:13:07]: Sort of.

Noah [01:13:07]: Do you read Noah’s blog?

Yaroslav [01:13:09]: I not as often as I would like. But I read Noah’s, X.

Brandon [01:13:15]: It’s not necessary.

Noah [01:13:15]: It’s a theme where

Brandon [01:13:16]: Don’t read my X.

Brandon [01:13:19]: It’s just for

Noah [01:13:19]: He doesn’t, he has no opinion about certain things. Yeah

Brandon [01:13:22]: It’s just jokes.

Yaroslav [01:13:22]: No opinion. Okay.

Brandon [01:13:22]: 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 a extended, prolonged war situation, things change a lot. And all the development restrictions that we put on new factories go out the window, and a sense of urgency. Ukraine obviously wasn’t making all these drones before the war.

Yaroslav [01:14:04]: Of course.

Brandon [01:14:04]: So if America had the same kind of urgency that Ukraine has now, 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 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 I, in terms of looking at China and saying they have all these factories today, and looking at the history of conventional warfare, America had very few military very little defense production capability on the eve of World War II, and ended up easily outproducing everyone else, even the Soviet Union.

Yaroslav [01:14:47]: Maybe not easily. Yeah.

Brandon [01:14:49]: Not easily, but by a long, a long shot.

Yaroslav [01:14:51]: Also the added benefit of not being attacked.

Brandon [01:14:54]: That’s right. That’s right.

Yaroslav [01:14:54]: That helps.

Brandon [01:14:55]: Who knows how Secure they are now, but or what, where cyber influence

Yaroslav [01:15:03]: No, look, I totally agree with your sentiment. I like, and I’m not as y, I’m even less doomerish than you are. Or as it seems to me, you’re a little bit doomerish, but like, in the long term, you’re bullish.

Choke Points, Europe’s Wake-Up Call, and Defense Industrial Policy

Brandon [01:15:17]: I’m not, I’m not doomerish. I’m thinking about the I’m thinking about what we need to do.

Brandon [01:15:21]: I’m not, I’m not thinking like, “Oh, we’re doomed.” That’s not my point. It’s never useful saying that. If you’re doomed, then just don’t go on podcasts.

Brandon [01:15:28]: Go pet a rabbit and play a video game or something. It’s Anyway, no, if you’re, we’re not doomed, but I’m saying step one, how, 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 Chinese supply chains?

Yaroslav [01:15:54]: There are companies here who are doing that like our, we have, good friends, a company called Neuros. I know they’re, down in El Segundo or whatever, like somewhere on South California.

Brandon [01:16:05]: What are the most pressing choke points besides rare earths that everyone talks about?

Yaroslav [01:16:09]: That’s one of the pieces that we do, thermal cameras. That’s like actually a big one.

Brandon [01:16:16]: Thermal cameras.

Yaroslav [01:16:17]: Then, like, the motors. Like you need The special-

Brandon [01:16:25]: Even after you have the magnets, then you turn them into a really good motor.

Yaroslav [01:16:28]: You have, you need these special magnets, and then that’s sort of your rare earth component.

Brandon [01:16:34]: That’s, that’

Yaroslav [01:16:34]: Like rare earth is not that oh, like there are these metals that only for some reason, God only put them under the Chinese territory and not under any others. No, like they’re distributed. There are plenty of them around Earth. It’s about the refining capabilities and like, investing into that and so on. And then, like, frankly, at some point, we don’t have that many humans. Like, that’s where the humanoid robots help. Like China is a big populous country. The population of like, United West is comparable to that but the population of the US is much lower than that. And I definitely think that the whole West should get their act together, because, ubi semper victoria, ibi concordia. There’s always victory where there is union.

Brandon [01:17:27]: Agreement.

Yaroslav [01:17:27]: Agreement, yes.

Yaroslav [01:17:31]: I think we sort of as the free nations of the world, we should get their act together because freedom is what unites us. And I’m also, like, 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.

Brandon [01:17:59]: Trump withdrawing the image of omnipotent American support forced the Europeans to get their butts in gear, unite Develop their defense industries.

Yaroslav [01:18:07]: Also, like, doing that not in a nice way, right? Like when JD Vance came to Munich, Forum one year ago, he wasn’t, like, 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 that I think that was a necessary measure. Like, I’ve been, I’ve been thinking about that. Could it, could it have been he, 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 ofSlow 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, when I, like, when I would go to some of the European capitals, I would get back pretty depressed from like, 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, I’m actually excited. I still think you should, like, 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 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 they’re ahead. And in many other, like, in like medicine and sort of biosciences, there are lots of interesting things there, and like, 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.

Humility About China, Taiwan, and Deterrence

Brandon [01:20:55]: About the Chinese economy?

Yaroslav [01:20:56]: 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 times. Like, even WeChat is like, such a more advanced app than anything we have in the West. So we, it’s very important not to be too arrogant, and I think we’re guilty of that like, definitely in the US. Sometimes we tend to be too arrogant. Like, I think, like, humility helps always, at least to me personally. And then I think, like, we don’t have to we don’t have to obviously be enemies. So Like with Ukraine and Russia, it’s like Russia came to kill all of these people and get all this territory. With China and the US, it’s not like that and thanks God it’s not like that right?

Brandon [01:21:54]: It might be with China and Taiwan. Maybe.

Yaroslav [01:21:57]: Hopefully not. Yeah. It’s

Brandon [01:21:59]: Hopefully not

Yaroslav [01:22:00]: It’s like China has their own, problems probably with human rights, et cetera. But hopefully, it’s still not beyond the fixing point.

Brandon [01:22:13]: Hopefully. Hopefully.

Yaroslav [01:22:14]: We should, we should be armed, right? We should, 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. The and the US, 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 who are like, very close to us and close to Russia.

Brandon [01:23:06]: Polish people-

Yaroslav [01:23:07]: Polish people

Brandon [01:23:08]: Not surveys.

Yaroslav [01:23:09]: Not, yeah. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah. That’s what I meant. Sorry, not my first language.

Brandon [01:23:12]: When I’m looking at the polls, what do they, what do they say?

Yaroslav [01:23:15]: Polish people. Polls.

Brandon [01:23:16]: No, it’s the right word.

Brandon [01:23:18]: You’re just thinking about-

Yaroslav [01:23:20]: No, we.

Yaroslav [01:23:20]: I’m looking at them, and they bought like 100 tanks and four submarines. It’s like, dudes, you don’t have, like, 1,000 people who know how to operate an FPV. What the hell you’re doing?

Brandon [01:23:30]: Poland is not preparing for war correctly.

Yaroslav [01:23:33]: From what I can

Brandon [01:23:36]: They’re doing a very bad job

Yaroslav [01:23:36]: They’re not doing it right. And the problem is they’ll be in a situation where, they’re so proud of their winged hussars and like, their cavalry, and the enemy is attacking with airplanes and tanks. That’s literally like the gap is getting wider between Russia and Poland.

Brandon [01:23:57]: That happened in 1939.

Yaroslav [01:24:01]: I don’t want that to happen again.

What America Should Learn from Ukraine’s Defense Valley

Brandon [01:24:03]: All right, 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 which you may or may not be what are like, the besides more funding, 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.

Yaroslav [01:24:38]: 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 ofFuture location for all things tech. Kyiv 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, hundreds of companies in very particular fields, to the battlefield experience, from battlefield commanders of every level, starting from soldiers, surgeon to platoon level commander to brigade level commander, special forces and intelligence, all of that to how the government, organizes, the sort of the infrastructure and sort of 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.

Yaroslav [01:26:03]: 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 Hegseth 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.

Yaroslav [01:26:26]: Obviously, any sort of military person would say, “Well, yes, okay, Yar, you’re fine, cool,”but Ukraine and its war theater is very much different from 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 then long strain, long range drones like these Shaheds that unfortunately damaged some of the American equipment in the Middle East. They can fly up to two thousand kilometers. So like, if you think about in the Pacific region, like two thousand kilometers, that covers a lot of land with all the like, islands and aircraft carriers, et cetera.

Brandon [01:27:16]: I think America is learning that lesson right now in Iran, in the Middle East.

Yaroslav [01:27:20]: You would think so but then, 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 like, fully learned, so I’m not sure how fully learned the Middle East lessons were.

Brandon [01:27:34]: Perhaps losing a war to a minor power will teach America.

Yaroslav [01:27:38]: You can, you

Brandon [01:27:39]: Although the 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.

Yaroslav [01:27:51]: Look, I think, there are so many lessons to be taken from this like Russia, a much bigger power attacking Ukraine. Given the same logic that we discussed, whoever has more production capacity should win. But then Russia didn’t achieve victory in Ukraine, and then the US didn’t get, like, full victory in Iran. Probably achieved some of the goals, but probably not all of them. So that also, you can flip that. Like 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 Ukraine and Iranian examples show, you actually can hold back something like that even if you’re a less capable, party.

Brandon [01:28:42]: Well, those examples did rely on Chinese supply chains, though.

Yaroslav [01:28:47]: Partially, yes. But then if you think about Ukraine in February twenty-two, twenty-two to first half a year or a 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 basically how much suffering can you withstand along multiple axes? It’s not just the military axis, it’s also, like, the economic axis and the political axis, I would, 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 to 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 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 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, mobilize and really start working on defense stuff? I would love to think so. I like-- That’s the way I think about the American spirit.

The Nuclear Lesson: Budapest, Deterrence, and the World After 2022

Brandon [01:30:49]: The way we did in World War II.

Yaroslav [01:30:53]: In a way, but look, like it wasn’t that clear in World War II, and like Churchill was like famously said, “America will always make the right decision after trying all the wrong ones,”right? And it’s like one could argue that there is this sort of this USA that lives in popular culture and was sort of created by Hollywood as like cool dudes that will always come and do the right thing, right? And then if you, if you look at like, international politics

Yaroslav [01:31:21]: It doesn’t necessarily always look like that. Like the Budapest Memorandum, like 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 gave 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.

Brandon [01:32:02]: They really should. I’ve, I’m consistently advocated for specifically Japan, South Korea, and Poland to get nukes. But obviously Ukraine should as well, but can’t

Yaroslav [01:32:11]: 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 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, with when Ukraine was attacked by Russia and the US just decided to sort of push the Budapest Memorandum, aside because of course Russia’s a nuclear power and like we don’t want to mess with it.

The Drone Race: Where Ukraine, Russia, and the West Stand

Brandon [01:32:59]: Everyone says Russia’s behind right now in the drone war.

Yaroslav [01:33:04]: True. Okay.

Brandon [01:33:04]: 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.

Brandon [01:33:12]: Russia has more people, four times as many people about, or more.

Yaroslav [01:33:17]: I think give or take, yeah. 30 versus like 120-ish. Yeah.

Brandon [01:33:21]: Four times as many people.

Brandon [01:33:27]: More help from China.

Yaroslav [01:33:28]: Like economy is like 10, 10- 20 times bigger, I don’t know. A lot bigger.

Brandon [01:33:33]: A lot of oil money, a lot of oil money, that Ukraine just doesn’t have. More direct help from China than Ukraine is getting.

Brandon [01:33:41]: 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

Yaroslav [01:33:54]: I’m not sure about that by the way.

Brandon [01:33:56]: Is that I was 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?

Noah [01:34:05]: Sorry. For my own curiosity, can we define drone race?

Yaroslav [01:34:09]: Look, I think it’s also for our listeners It’s helpful to understand that there are

Yaroslav [01:34:17]: At least 30 different types, categories of drones, right? Like you have If you, if you, 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. Like for ground vehicles, you have logistics, evacuation, mining, de-mining

Yaroslav [01:34:48]: Like maybe something else. For aerial, you have reconnaissance, front strike, mid strike, deep strike, mining, de-mining, radio repeating, kamikaze and bombing, ISR, different types of surveillance, so tactical surveillance, operational level surveillance, maybe strategic level surveilla surveillance at some point.

Yaroslav [01:35:17]: 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 to 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

Brandon [01:36:04]: It’s asymmetric, so it’s hard to compare

Yaroslav [01:36:05]: Sort of area by area, right? So if you’re like talking about their front strike, I would argue that Ukraine has gotten ahead recently with after scaling the fiber optic. Before that Russia was slightly ahead. So Ukraine got ahead. With like mid strikes, so say something like 40 to 200 kilometers

Yaroslav [01:36:35]: 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 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

Brandon [01:37:00]: Where are they still ahead?

Yaroslav [01:37:01]: In general, I think we’re ahead. Where they, where they are still ahead? I think in certain parts, -Of the components, like A GPS free or navigation like these CRPA antennas are pretty good. They have, these, winged, bombs that they drop from their bomber planes.

Yaroslav [01:37:33]: I forgot the English name for it.

Brandon [01:37:34]: Glide bomb?

Yaroslav [01:37:35]: Sort of. Yeah. So they’re ahead on that side, and it’s like it’s difficult to protect from those.

Brandon [01:37:42]: What’s the range of that?

Yaroslav [01:37:45]: It can be pretty big. I think it’s like, can be up to 80 kilometers. Then obviously the range-

Brandon [01:37:52]: From like a fighter plane, like a strike?

Yaroslav [01:37:54]: The range is a very iffy subject here because the range is

Yaroslav [01:38:01]: 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, and then those two assets, they have their radars and radar fields. And then, depending on the enemy tactics, you can, calculate how big is the aerial area that you cover with those assets. And look, I’m not a professional military guy, so I’m covering these topics in a 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.

Brandon [01:38:50]: Helicopters. I’ve recently seen reports of drones taking out helicopters in the air, and that this is new.

Brandon [01:39:00]: Is that new? Is that going to be a big deal? Is that going to incre like, is that going to eventually get rid of helicopters the way drones are getting rid of tanks in the battlefield?

Helicopters, Drone Carriers, and Future Air Defense

Yaroslav [01:39:10]: 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’s 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.

Brandon [01:39:38]: What kind of Will those be battery powered drones themselves, do you think?

Yaroslav [01:39:41]: Potentially. And there are like so many different scenarios. Like you can have large aerial drone carriers carrying interceptor drones.

Brandon [01:39:54]: That then go hit the helicopters.

Yaroslav [01:39:56]: For example. Or you can have, battery powered interceptor drones, but not of a missile with a propeller type, as many of these well-known drones like Stinger or P-One Sun. They look like basically a missile with a quadcopter, behind it. But you can also have a plane or like fixed wing like, aerial interceptors.

Brandon [01:40:25]: Does anyone, does anyone have like a little like, drone that flies super low under the helicopter and like shoots it from underneath?

Yaroslav [01:40:33]: Like in theory you can imagine that but it’s just

Brandon [01:40:37]: Or like surface, a drone that carries surface-to-air missiles somehow.

Yaroslav [01:40:40]: 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.

Brandon [01:40:50]: I mean like in the in the air. Is it, is are is there a drone capable of carrying a small surface-to-air missile that can like skim, low and then launch its little missile, like a flying missile platform or something?

Yaroslav [01:41:00]: In theory, but like a big part of a mission like that is not just kinetically getting to a helicopter, but also identifying it, 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 is much more complex than just, 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. Like for example, helicopters are used to intercept, deep strike drones. Like Ukraine uses a lot of helicopters to shoot down Shaheds.

Yaroslav [01:41:44]: Russia uses helicopters to shoot down our deep strike drones.

Counter-Drone Systems: Shotguns, EW, and Surviving FPVs

Brandon [01:41:50]: 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.

Brandon [01:42:03]: 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 Why can’t you just shoot the thing?

Yaroslav [01:42:11]: That’s the main, weapon that people use against them.

Brandon [01:42:15]: Why aren’t they very good?

Yaroslav [01:42:17]: They’re pretty good. Like there are there are like hundreds, maybe thousands of cases of drones being shut down with shotguns, both by definitely thousands, but both by Ukrainians and Russians. There’s even like statistics of

Brandon [01:42:29]: Got it

Yaroslav [01:42:29]: What is the percentage of Ukraine FPV drones that didn’t accomplish the mission because they were shut down by a shotgun.

Brandon [01:42:35]: Got it. So if I’m a guy with a shotgun, I’m walking around, FPV drone comes for me

Yaroslav [01:42:40]: I don’t recommend that.

Brandon [01:42:42]: No. I don’t plan on it.

Brandon [01:42:44]: I’m saying suppose that were the case. In or suppose there’s a there is a guy, he’s not me.

Brandon [01:42:50]: He’s dumber than me, okay? 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.”

Brandon [01:43:00]: FPV drone goes after him. And he has a shotgun.

Brandon [01:43:03]: What are his chances of using that shotgun to shoot down the drone before the drone gets him? Can Is Are you allowed to say that?

Yaroslav [01:43:08]: Depending how good you are with a shotgun. I’ll tell

Brandon [01:43:11]: Random dude

Yaroslav [01:43:11]: Like I was I was talking to some Ukraine pilot group, and they told me like there was this Russian guy. He was just likeRambo.

Yaroslav [01:43:20]: He’s like, he like, he shot down like seven FPV drones. They couldn’t, they couldn’t get him. They finally got him, but it was like nothing they’ve seen before, right?

Brandon [01:43:30]: Got it.

Brandon [01:43:30]: Your average non-Rambo.

Yaroslav [01:43:32]: Average non-Rambo will just die.

Brandon [01:43:34]: Will just die. So there’s like very low chance that they’ll be able to use a shotgun to shoot down the drones.

Yaroslav [01:43:38]: Rather low chance. Yeah.

Brandon [01:43:39]: Got it. Well, that was the kind of question I was getting at and there’s no, there’s no sort of portable electronic countermeasure that can get FPV drones if you’re just holding it, very effectively.

Yaroslav [01:43:50]: 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, radio electronic bands of frequencies.

Brandon [01:44:06]: Let me simplify my question. Sorry.

Yaroslav [01:44:07]: Like each side tries to tries to find frequency Will not be covered.

Brandon [01:44:10]: Let me simplify 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?

Yaroslav [01:44:21]: 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, it will not fly towards you. But then what is the chance to not have drone that can either use different frequency or autonomy or fiber optic? Well, that depends on the on the area you’re in and who’s your adversary in that area, in that zone.

Brandon [01:44:51]: Let’s I guess this question was maybe too dumb that I was trying to ask.

Yaroslav [01:44:57]: No, it’s a great question. There are no dumb questions here, and it is just like my answers, if you feel the common theme here, is that things in practice, in war, things are way more complex than they seem.

Brandon [01:45:11]: What, but so I want, like, I want I’ve read tons of things that say that basically if you’re walking around in the open and drones come for 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, 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.

Yaroslav [01:45:48]: I think there was I

Brandon [01:45:49]: 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 in human infantry on the battlefield.

Yaroslav [01:46:01]: It’s just 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 like one of the things that went viral in Ukrainian defense tech bubble, even before the words of the CEO of Rheinmetall, was some American, tank, battle tank pilot, who was interviewed and he was he was asked whether he’s afraid of FPV drones, and he’s like, “No, it’s like we have 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, Abrams tank, great tank, but against an FPV drone, sorry, dude, but it’

Brandon [01:46:54]: Not just deadly

Yaroslav [01:46:54]: Not going to work.

Brandon [01:46:55]: Deadly.

Yaroslav [01:46:55]: No, I was like, maybe not from one drone, but like a dozen drones will take it out. So yeah. But there is hope. So you just have to have kinetic countermeasures. Interesting thing-

Brandon [01:47:10]: Kinetic countermeasure means a thing that shoots down the drone.

Yaroslav [01:47:13]: Can mean many things. So if you, 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 fish nets.

Yaroslav [01:47:31]: You literally, you ride in a corridor of fish nets, and that’s the mechanical countermeasure against the drone.

Brandon [01:47:39]: You count that as a kinetic countermeasure?

Yaroslav [01:47:41]: Mechanical. It says mechanical. Yeah.

Brandon [01:47:42]: Got it. Got it.

Brandon [01:47:43]: I don’t know all the jargon, so it’s, I’m, I’

Yaroslav [01:47:45]: Whatever.

Brandon [01:47:45]: What I’m talking about.

Yaroslav [01:47:46]: 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 on this podcast.

Brandon [01:48:05]: Different kind of poles.

Yaroslav [01:48:05]: Different kind of poles.

Brandon [01:48:06]: A third kind of poles.

Yaroslav [01:48:06]: That’s the way to protect from drone. That’s to make to that’s the 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 on some extra, sort of equipment. Then of course, there are guns That

Yaroslav [01:48:35]: Like what both Russians and Ukraine or 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 onboard 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 and like, we’re working on some of these things as well, and then you can imagine like an armor with -Hundreds on of drones on top of it, which are protector drones. They’re sort of like active armor. Whenever they see a drone-

Brandon [01:49:27]: Huh

Yaroslav [01:49:27]: Coming at you, they, like, take off.

Lasers, Skynex, and the Cost-to-Effect Problem

Brandon [01:49:29]: That’s cool. What about, what about the kind of things that the Germans are building, which is basically like a big truck with a some sort of automated shotgun on it?

Yaroslav [01:49:40]: Like they have Skynex. It’s, by Rheinmetall, by the guy whom we mentioned today. Skynex is considered to be an okay weapon. Their shots are quite expensive though. So I’ll tell you this different story, about

Brandon [01:50:00]: It’s about cost to fire each shot really and stuff.

Yaroslav [01:50:03]: Cost to effect in a sort of a more abstract way. So I was last year I was speaking at Land Europe Conference. It’s the biggest USAA, USA Army, conference in Europe, called Land Europe. And There was an expo there, and there was like a Raytheon, a 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 had this laser gun project there basically.

Brandon [01:50:44]: That’s what I was going to ask about next is laser.

Yaroslav [01:50:46]: Laser thing was like they have it in two variations, two kilowatt, sorry, 10 kilowatt laser and 20 kilowatt laser. I’m like, “Okay, 10 kilowatt laser, tell me about it.” He’s like, “Can it take down an FPV drone?” I’m 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, “three seconds. That’s like a lot of time. But okay, maybe fine. And what if FPV drone tries to evade, right?” And he’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 he said something like $3 million or something like that.

Yaroslav [01:51:44]: I’m like, “Okay, $3 million. So that is 6,000 FPV drones.

Yaroslav [01:51:51]: 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 this product may not be necessarily a product against an FPV drone. It might Or against an FPV drone in an active battlefield environment. It might be guarding a stadium in a peaceful country. And then, 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. But whatever.

Yaroslav [01:52:33]: My point is the economics matters

Brandon [01:52:35]: You’re talking about the 6,000 drones. If you sent them one by one, it wouldn’t, it would just be pew.

Yaroslav [01:52:40]: But who would send them one by one?

Brandon [01:52:40]: If you sent a mass of 6,000, it wouldn’

Yaroslav [01:52:42]: Of course, yeah.

Brandon [01:52:46]: What about just like a more powerful laser, like 100, kilowatt laser or something that wouldn’t need to spend, that would

Yaroslav [01:52:51]: No, that’s worse. You need less powerful laser that achieves the same effect.

Brandon [01:52:56]: For cost of the system.

Yaroslav [01:52:56]: A more powerful, yeah, a 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 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 is 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 like one domain to another domain, they add up, right, as it happens with software. So I think that’s important.

Noah [01:54:14]: Can I ask a follow-up question? So Russia is not necessarily the smartest army you could be fighting. What would happen if you, your adversary was smarter? Do you think things would change meaningfully?

Yaroslav [01:54:31]: Look, I don’t know if I fully agree with not the smartest army. Who is the smartest army?

Brandon [01:54:37]: Ukraine?

Noah [01:54:38]: That’s a great question.

Yaroslav [01:54:40]: I don’t know. I don’t know.

Yaroslav [01:54:43]: I think those are like, very dangerous assumptions to make.

Brandon [01:54:48]: Who was the smartest army in World War I?

Yaroslav [01:54:51]: Like, well, define smart.

Russia’s Strategy, Western Assumptions, and Preparing for War

Brandon [01:54:53]: The United States. Yeah.

Yaroslav [01:54:53]: Why do you think so?

Yaroslav [01:54:55]: Why do you think Russia is not the smartest army?

Noah [01:54:56]: Maybe this is just my own, information bubble.

Yaroslav [01:55:00]: I’m just like, maybe I agree with you. But I’m just like, I’m naturally wired To challenge those assumptions.

Noah [01:55:06]: No, that’s a that’s a really good point. I guess, when I, from my information bubble, it seems like Russia’s strategy has largely been to just throw resources, people-

Yaroslav [01:55:17]: You are living in a Western propaganda Information bubble, of course.

Yaroslav [01:55:21]: Like, as am I.

Yaroslav [01:55:22]: Like, because we’re all rooting Ukraine to win, right? Sorry, go on.

Noah [01:55:26]: In but going back to this granted there’s a history of large powers failing to take over smaller, -Strategically, you

Yaroslav [01:55:38]: Divide and Goliath

Noah [01:55:40]: They, this

Brandon [01:55:40]: They fail a lot more now than they used to. The success rate of taking-

Noah [01:55:44]: That’s true

Brandon [01:55:44]: Places over has gone way down.

Noah [01:55:46]: Certainly, yeah. But regardless, it does, I do wonder, like, if Russia had not essentially assumed victory early It may have different, yeah

Yaroslav [01:55:56]: I, like, they’re super stupid, of course.

Yaroslav [01:55:58]: Like, they were marching at With their parade, costumes and like, they were thinking they’re going to have a parade in Kyiv in a few days. Like, that was super stupid. And like, there were 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, without anything, like folks on crutches, like sending them to storm Ukrainian positions. And it’s

Brandon [01:56:23]: They’re the Zerg.

Noah [01:56:23]: You think at this point there’s

Yaroslav [01:56:24]: I have, like, I have actually a good friend. He’s American. He’s from Seattle. He’s, served, had been in the Special Forces here in the US, had been in maybe three deployments, and then went to Ukraine, volunteered.

Yaroslav [01:56:39]: He’s been fighting since, like, 2022. He’s a very good friend of mine. So at some point he’s like, he’s been texting me, and he’s like, “Okay, I’m near Pokrovsk,”and sorry, not Pokrovsk. It was gosh, the other city, Chasiv Yar.

Yaroslav [01:56:55]: It, and he’s like, “Okay, so what Russians are doing, they’re just creating so much work for all the 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, or Russians are causing psychological trauma on Ukrainians because they’re dying in such stupid way.

Noah [01:57:26]: Jeez

Yaroslav [01:57:26]: That is indeed stupid of sort of Russian higher command, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But then that’s the resource they have. And

Brandon [01:57:38]: If you’ve got, if you’ve got Zerglings, you use your Zerglings.

Yaroslav [01:57:40]: That’s the way. That’s their strategy. That’s their way of strategy, right?

Brandon [01:57:43]: If you’re going to play Back in the That’s what you do.

Yaroslav [01:57:46]: If you play StarCraft, that’s how Zergs win.

Brandon [01:57:48]: Are Ukrainians the Terrans?

Yaroslav [01:57:52]: I don’t know. I hope we will become Protoss soon.

Yaroslav [01:57:57]: I’m working on that. I’m working on that.

Brandon [01:58:02]: Protoss had fairly bad political management at the top

Yaroslav [01:58:04]: I wish Protoss with a speed closer to like, humans or Terrans, whatever it is. Hopefully we can do Protoss technology with a Zerg speed. That would be the best. I think that’s what the housewives are working on in fact.

Brandon [01:58:20]: You cannot beat those housewives. Do not oppose Ukrainian housewives.

Yaroslav [01:58:23]: Do not mess with Ukrainian housewives, for sure. Yeah.

Noah [01:58:26]: Two final questions. First one, you started out by telling us a story about going to a chapel on February 23rd.

Noah [01:58:34]: Were you able to get married there? Can you finish that story?

Yaroslav [01:58:40]: We actually, we did get married, but we postponed the wedding as a social event, until the war is over.

Noah [01:58:49]: Then last question, what do you want our audience to take away? If you have one point you want them to walk away with what would it be?

Yaroslav [01:58:58]: You want peace, be prepared for war. Got to invest in defense and security.

Noah [01:59:04]: All right. Thanks. Thank you for talking with us.

Yaroslav [01:59:06]: Thank you.

Noah [01:59:07]: Thank you, Noah, for all the great questions.

Yaroslav [01:59:11]: No, it was fantastic.

Yaroslav [01:59:12]: Thanks so much.

Brandon [01:59:13]: Really fun.

Noah [01:59:13]: Awesome. Thanks.

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The Autonomous Drone Tech Stack & Economics of Drones — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Guest Host Noah Smith, Noahpinion

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

The Autonomous Drone Tech Stack & Economics of Drones — Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law & Guest Host Noah Smith, Noahpinion