Valuetainment - August 06, 2025


Drone Warfare - How China Quietly DOMINATED The Industry


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

191.86208

Word count

1,391

Sentence count

105

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we re talking about drones and why the US is lagging behind other countries when it comes to drones, and why it s not even competing in the drone space. Why are we not making drones in America?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 How advanced do you think America is when it comes down to drones?
00:00:02.380 Whether it's commercial, war, military, how advanced do you think we are?
00:00:05.420 This is America.
00:00:06.520 We built the iPhone, we built Walmart, we built a lot of technology, we built a lot of great things.
00:00:10.700 What do you think we rank?
00:00:11.460 30% of the market, 50%, 20%?
00:00:13.700 What do you think we are?
00:00:14.540 We're making probably the best ones for military, for warfare.
00:00:17.460 We're seeing Ukraine and Russia. 0.98
00:00:19.020 Did you know 60 to 80% of the damages and casualties in the war between Russia and Ukraine was due to FPV drones?
00:00:27.700 Do you know 83,000 target strikes that Ukraine did in a single month, two-thirds of those strikes were through FPV drones?
00:00:35.080 This is today modern-day warfare.
00:00:37.220 Drones are important. 0.93
00:00:38.560 Do you know who owns apparently 70 up to 90% of the production in drones worldwide?
00:00:46.140 It's a company called DJI.
00:00:48.220 Some call it Digi, Digi, Digi, all these other ways they pronounce it.
00:00:52.320 That's who produces 70 to 90%.
00:00:54.740 And guess where they're based at of?
00:00:56.380 China.
00:00:56.820 And in America, we're not even competing in this space, and I mean at all.
00:01:01.260 We're talking single digits.
00:01:03.120 We're going to talk about that today.
00:01:09.680 If you get value out of this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel.
00:01:12.840 So check this out.
00:01:13.480 On June 6th, President Trump announces an executive order that he signed titled, Unleashing American Drone Dominance.
00:01:22.100 Unleashing.
00:01:22.580 Don't we do it already?
00:01:23.680 Aren't we pretty good at drones?
00:01:24.720 Do you know how many drone companies we have in America?
00:01:26.680 Roughly 500.
00:01:28.020 Lots of them are startups.
00:01:29.020 But 500 drone companies.
00:01:31.760 These 500 drone companies, how many total drones do you think we produce in America per year?
00:01:38.160 So 500?
00:01:39.240 If each do 10,000 a year, that's 5 million.
00:01:42.640 If each do 1,000 a year, that's 500,000.
00:01:46.320 Do you know how many we do?
00:01:47.100 We only produce 100,000 drones per year from the 500 companies.
00:01:52.260 What did you say?
00:01:53.020 That's right.
00:01:53.540 Only 100,000 drones from 500 companies.
00:01:55.360 How's that even possible?
00:01:56.320 You said something earlier that this company called DJI produces 70 to 90% of the numbers.
00:02:01.060 Does it really?
00:02:01.780 Let me give you some of the data.
00:02:03.080 Here you go with the numbers.
00:02:04.140 It tells us DJI does 70 to 90% of drones worldwide.
00:02:09.520 You know what number two is?
00:02:10.860 It's a company you've heard of before.
00:02:12.640 That company is called General Atomics.
00:02:14.820 They produce roughly 1 to 2% of the drones, and it's military grade.
00:02:19.340 You know what number three is?
00:02:20.460 Lockheed Martin.
00:02:21.580 You know what they do?
00:02:22.420 Less than 1%.
00:02:23.600 Number four is Northrop Grumman.
00:02:25.980 1%.
00:02:26.460 Then number five is Aeroviron Mint.
00:02:28.780 Guess what they are?
00:02:29.440 Also 1%.
00:02:30.340 So first place is 70 to 90%.
00:02:32.200 Everybody else is 1%, 1%, 1%. 0.96
00:02:34.240 Yes.
00:02:35.260 Why is that?
00:02:36.040 Why are we not competing in this space?
00:02:38.020 I mean, we do hear about investors like Peter Thiel supporting American drone companies
00:02:41.980 like Andruo, Unusual Machines.
00:02:44.180 You hear four different companies receive the DIU funding for field tests.
00:02:47.940 You got Dragoon and Aeroviron Mint tested in Alaska.
00:02:51.040 Two others tested drones in Ukraine.
00:02:53.200 Yet at the same time in Ukraine, you mean to tell me in drone, they're warfare innovations. 0.92
00:02:58.580 This guy named Oleksandr Yakovenko founded TAF Drones in response to Ukraine's need for
00:03:04.340 combat drones.
00:03:05.120 You know how many they produce?
00:03:06.100 They produce 1,000 drones a day.
00:03:09.580 A company, TAF, $500 each, what they produce.
00:03:15.060 Like I said earlier, 80% of Russian casualties were inflicted because of drones.
00:03:20.100 That's 1 million people through drones.
00:03:22.880 In June of 2025, 100 plus Ukrainian drones struck deep in Siberia.
00:03:27.940 Think about it, freezing cold, damaging 20 Russian warplanes.
00:03:32.420 The most significant attack on Russia's soil since World War II and Ukrainian drones versus
00:03:38.280 destruction ratio.
00:03:39.660 $500 drone versus $5 million Russian TOS-1 rocket launcher.
00:03:45.460 Think about that.
00:03:46.580 A $500 drone blew up a $5 million Russian TOS-1 rocket launcher?
00:03:51.900 Talk about a great rate of return when you're going against your enemies.
00:03:54.640 Now keep in mind, this place I'm talking about in Ukraine, it's one factory.
00:03:57.840 It's not 50 spots all across Ukraine, it's one place that produces $1,000 a day at $500
00:04:02.500 a piece.
00:04:03.200 And then when you think about the companies that we produce in America, when they're doing
00:04:06.600 their testing, one drone misses target by 80 feet, another one crashed immediately upon
00:04:10.500 launch, a third one collided with a nearby mountain, highlighted major gaps in reliability,
00:04:14.840 navigation of resilience.
00:04:16.240 And on top of that, in America, we have something called regulation, over-regulation.
00:04:20.740 Some regulation takes months.
00:04:22.640 FAA has got to come in and say, well, you know, you can't, you got to take your time.
00:04:25.960 So a lot of the startup projects in America have been just dumped and says, I don't even
00:04:29.780 want to mess with it.
00:04:31.120 I'm going abroad.
00:04:31.960 We're going to build this somewhere else because you're just too slow in America to be paying
00:04:35.400 attention to this.
00:04:36.240 And in the States, the incentive was more about building the bigger military drones, not
00:04:40.180 the smaller ones, versus DJI in Ukraine and other places are like, no, no, no, let's
00:04:44.120 focus on the smaller ones.
00:04:45.320 But you hear what a smaller one did what?
00:04:47.220 A $500 drone destroyed a $5 million Russian TOS-1 rocket launcher.
00:04:51.620 Are you kidding me?
00:04:52.140 And the ones that are produced in America, the pricing is much higher.
00:04:54.840 $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, a company that's working on one right now called Niros, a California
00:05:01.080 startup.
00:05:01.580 It's going to be around $2,000 per drone.
00:05:03.600 They're planning on producing 1,500 drones per month by hand, planning on scaling to 1 million
00:05:09.100 per year, which is a good thing if they're able to get there.
00:05:12.580 You know, it's crazy when you think about everything that's going on right now with China, Israel, 0.99
00:05:15.420 Hamas, Ukraine, Russia, all these wars.
00:05:17.400 And we're like, well, it's not going to happen to America.
00:05:19.000 But the reality is if you go back to 1944, okay, we're talking about World War II.
00:05:24.100 Do you know we were producing one B-24 bomber an hour?
00:05:28.160 $6.50 a month.
00:05:29.800 Look at the picture.
00:05:30.800 What you see in the picture, we produce one of those every 55 minutes.
00:05:34.460 $650 of those per month.
00:05:36.840 Why?
00:05:37.640 We were ready.
00:05:38.360 By the way, we didn't have five factories today like the General Dynamics and, you know,
00:05:42.120 Northrop Grumman and Raytheon.
00:05:43.440 We had 50 companies competing against each other, and America had this Ford Willow Run
00:05:48.700 plant in 1942 where it's like, we're going to get this done.
00:05:51.940 Innovation, speed, mobilization, wartime mentality, and now it's over-regulation.
00:05:58.720 It's taken 13 years to build a ship.
00:06:01.020 It's taken years to produce product.
00:06:02.940 We no longer had the urgency that we had before.
00:06:05.400 So I'm kind of glad that the president has something called unleashing American drone dominance.
00:06:11.440 Just imagine, say somebody decides to attack us.
00:06:15.100 You look up in the sky, we have 20 massive drones.
00:06:18.940 You see 300,000 drones up in the sky coming, like birds flocking.
00:06:22.620 And they just go to different properties and homes and military bases,
00:06:25.580 hitting a plane here, hitting a tank here, hitting a property here, hitting a base over here.
00:06:30.060 300,000 of them.
00:06:31.460 What do we do?
00:06:31.900 How do we fight against it?
00:06:33.020 Are we ready for it?
00:06:33.920 I saw a video where Morgan Freeman was the president, and his bodyguard is Gerard Butler.
00:06:38.400 And you see these drones all of a sudden coming up.
00:06:40.500 He grabs the president, throws him in the water, goes underwater so the drones don't get him.
00:06:46.040 You're watching the movie like, oh, this is just a movie.
00:06:48.820 Like this, it's already here.
00:06:50.880 Literally, like this, it's already here.
00:06:52.940 The only question is, are we the ones ready to protect ourselves, or is it happening around the world?
00:06:58.740 I hope we pay more attention to these drones, because warfare has changed in a major way.
00:07:02.880 If you got value out of this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel.
00:07:06.060 And if you got value out of this video, I did another video many years ago titled,
00:07:09.380 The History of Taxes and War.
00:07:11.100 If you've never seen it very interesting, click here to watch it.
00:07:13.840 Take care, everybody.
00:07:14.520 Bye-bye, bye-bye.