$30K Drones vs $4M Missiles: Can the US Win This War? - The Story

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast, Guaranteed Human. Thank you for listening to Tech Stuff. This episode was supported by Claude Tranthropic. Claude is now inside the tools you already use, a browsing agent in Chrome, a sidebar in Excel and PowerPoint, and co-work for autonomous file work on your desktop. Connect Google Workspace Slack and more, so Claude always has context. It's not just a chat window anymore. It's wherever your work happens. Try Claude for free at claw.ai-slash-techstuff. And now for a quick break from our sponsor, Vital Proteins. And it is vital. Collagen Peptides is a wellness supplement that supports healthy hair, skin, nails, bones, and joints. When we hit 30, our body's collagen production starts to drop, and that's when Vital Protein steps in. There are conic blue tubers everywhere. People love Vital Proteins, in part because it's so easy. Just mix it into your coffee, tea, or smoothie, and you're good to go. And now you can get 20% off your next order at Vital Proteins.com

1:00by using promo code techstuff20 at checkout. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan and the ones you don't. The moment you're working from a cafe and realize every outlet's taken, the times you're deep in your flow and can't be interrupted by an auto update. That's why Dell builds tech that adapts to you. Built with long-lasting battery and built in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it. Find technology built for the way you work at Dell.com slash XPS. Built for you. We got a club five, 20 with Jeff T gonging the gang. Don't call me a white girl.

2:01Mona will be there, keep your positive sweetie with Crista Renee. We got Reality with the King with Carlos King. And yes, drink champs will be in the building. No, no. No, no. OK. Plus you know we're going to have a lot of guests. So you need to join us and we got the Black Effect Market Place, the Pitch your Podcasts, and everything you expect from the Black Effect Podcasts Festival. Tikka's on sale right now. Go get your other blackeffect.com slash podcast festival. Play yourself, okay? Pull up. Welcome to Tech Stuff. Our guest today is Ben C. Solomon, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and filmmaker who reports on combat zones and international crises. His work has appeared at the New York Times, on Vice and in the Wall Street Journal, and a recent Instagram

3:02video of Ben's really caught my attention. The way that the Iranians have designed current status of this war, it won't be about who has the biggest guns. It'll be about who can afford to keep pulling the trigger. It had the following caption, just follow the money. In the first few days of this conflict, the U.S. has fired over 800 Patriot missiles. They cost about $4 million per missile. An Iranian Shahedron costs about $30,000 to make. So how's this going to work? How indeed? Ben, welcome. Thanks, thanks for having me. So you asked the question, what's the answer? You know, I don't think there's still a clear guideline for the Americans. I think that when the fighting started, it was pretty obvious that the American military thought that this was going to be a pretty fast process. Have I heard that one before? It's kind of played out to a lot of complicated ways for the way that the military works.

4:05I think that a lot of the advisors in the Pentagon had been advising against this and a lot of the mechanisms that they have for defending against the attacks that they probably expected are, in fact, ready, but the attacks they didn't expect are the ones that are coming now. That's really drones. Because of that, it's become a really financially imbalanced fight. That's where their problems are now. How is it they didn't expect drones? Because the Iranians famously have been manufacturing shahead drones, which is showing up on the battlefield in Ukraine for the Russians, for the last three or four years. So Iran, even as a reader of the newspaper, you know that they have a big drone manufacturing capability. Well, you know, I can't speak to the American military manufacturing and what maybe they did or didn't expect, but what we can deduce from the way that it's played out over the past few weeks is that they really, even if they had thought about your head drones, they didn't plan for it to go for more than a few days. And because of that, what we're seeing is real imbalance in arms.

5:07The shahead drones are about $30,000 each, $20,000, $30,000, they're really basic, they're really easy to make. And for someone like me who's been working and covering Ukraine for many years now, you see them all the time. I mean, they are, if you are a Ukrainian living in the city, you know it. Well, you know the sound, it's haunting, it sounds like a buzzing in the air and it happens every few nights that these things are crashing in. What do they look like? They're kind of, you know, they're fiberglass hull. They're about, I don't know, like the size of maybe like half of like a car. They are pretty basic in the front. They have a long tube. And in the back is a engine that is, it's basically the Iranian who developed, the Iranian military forces who developed it, like reverse engineered a, what is basically the engine of a VW beetle. It's about a 200 horsepower engine that they apparently found in a different arms or a different, a different small aircraft, a German aircraft. And then a reverse engineer this thing to be a small and powerful engine that can fly

6:09hundreds of miles. So it's loud, it's buzzing and annoying and it's a really cheap and basic. It's not a really complicated piece of tech, it's really low tech. So in fact, it's like super simple and their ability over the past three years since it's kind of been most prevalent in Ukraine to perfect it is really why this conflict is as complicated as it is right now. These drones cost I think about $30,000 to make and they're known as suicide drones. And what the Iranians have been doing is flying them basically at the Gulf and to Israel. And the core of your story is that the price of shooting these out of the air is unsustainable both financially and in terms of missiles applies. Yeah, so a shed drone, like you said, it's about $30,000, simple, basic structure. And the American defenses that are going up against it are a couple of different air defense systems, all of which are the most advanced in the world, unbelievably well put together,

7:12but also stupidly expensive. The Patriot missile system fires a projectile. It's about $4 million. The NASAM's air defense system is about $1 million. These are the best of the best air defense technologies. So when you want to shoot something down, that's what you want. And that's why the Ukrainians have been pushing the Americans to get it for many years. That's why many other nations are hoping to make them or copy them in some way. But because they're so expensive, Iran is taking advantage of that. It is so easy for them to fire as many drones as they possibly can, $30,000 shots. And to take it down, the Americans have to at this point fire $4 million shots. It doesn't add up. And to top it all off, we only can make the American military, it can only make about 600 Patriot missiles a year. Their production line, which is slow and procedural, means that they have to really like preserve it in ways. That's why it's been so complicated selling it and giving it to the Ukrainians. And it's why now, after the first week of this war, it was said that something like 200

8:13or 300 of them had already been fired. It's about half the stock of a year and a lot of the stock that they probably have even ready. So I think very quickly they realized this is not going to last as long as they need. And they got to figure out something else. And now I think they're scrambling. I want to ask you about what the options are on the figuring out something else. But before we get there, why did the Iranians develop this drone? So the Shahedron is, so Shahed is, it translates to martyr. It's like a suicide drone. I think originally it was, I don't know for sure, but the first early days of it and when it kind of came to its biggest prevalence was in Ukraine. The Russians started using it to basically do the exact same technique that the Iranians are doing now, which is to overwhelm the system with the tax. In terms of trying to make the best weapon or the most effective weapon, this is not that. This is just one that you can make cheap, fast and easy. And the idea is to just overload anything you fired at. If you fire 50 of these things, a couple of them are going to get through and they're

9:14going to do some damage. They are accurate to a point. They're not the most accurate, but they're not the worst. And over the past three years, the Russians have been using them non-stop. The chart that we've seen of just how many of these things have gone up in the past few years just keeps going up and up and up for the Russian usage in Ukraine. And it's really kind of perfected the system of how you can totally overwhelm air defenses. The Iranians, it's unclear as to how and why they put it together, but they're very proud of the system. It's become folklore, it's become so widely used, it's become so effective that people are really proud of it in the Iranian military, and as well they should be. They've really kind of used a scrappy small system that subverts and uses asymmetrical warfare, the idea that we are a weaker system and we know we don't have the same amount of arms and power as you, but if we can find a scrappy way to make it heard for you, then we win. And that's really what these drones are doing. I remember in 2001 I was a high school debater and one of the debate topics was about the

10:21war in Afghanistan and I found this great quote that I rolled out with enthusiasm which was some Taliban spokesperson who said the Americans have the watches but the Taliban have the time fast forward 20 years years and the Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan. And that sense of the watches and the time, you can't help thinking about it when you think about this story. Yeah, I think about that quote a lot too. It's widely known, it's well documented, it's something that kind of has kind of become the most prevalent takeaway from that conflict. And I think the core of it is exactly what we're seeing today, which is asymmetrical warfare. It's this idea that one side's big and powerful and it's got patriot missiles, millions of dollars to keep making them, what do you have? What is the thing that you are able to do that the other side can't and how can you make it painful for them? But these drones, they've really kind of gained the economic system of war. These drones are able to just keep firing and keep attacking and keep just pushing more

11:21and more problems into the hands of the defenses. If you think about it, when the Iranian military fires a drone off, they win. No matter what happens, they win. Either it gets shot down and cost the Americans billions of dollars or they're hidden something and making damage. So any time one of these fires, they win and that's kind of why this is such an effective tool right now. Now we're recording this a few days before I will air, it's Thursday the 12th of March today. But I'm curious, are we seeing the Americans and the Gulf nations having to start making hard choices about what to intercept already, is that something which is going to make come in the next days? Well, it's unclear when and how, right now, there was a report from, I can't remember, I think it was a Washington Post that had some sources inside the Pentagon that were saying that they are going to start very soon having to make tough choices about what to defend and what not to. Now this is not to say that the rate of drones that are being fired is at the same rate that it was at the beginning of the war. It's not. The Americans response to this is to hit launch sites and it's been effective.

12:25The amount of drones that are flying out has gone down about 80 something percent. Like there's just not as many flying around. So the 80% down. 80% down. 80% of the launches, 80% of drones from Iran in the air has gone down significantly. So it's changed the way that I think Iranians are thinking about this too. They are also being judicious in the way that they're firing drones because the Americans do have a better view of where attacks can happen and how they can shut them down. I mean, the Americans are not losing the tactical fight right now by any means. They are attacking many, many sites and they're proud that you can see it on the sent com Twitter. They are filling the feed with all of the attacks they're doing and it is many and it's really hurting the Iranians. So they're not. It's not. It's not completely out that the Americans are having effective strikes on these targets. But still the way that the Iranians are able to fight, it's going to get more and more complicated and you see it now in the state of Hormuz. Well, I want to come to that. But let me ask you first, key difference here being the Americans have access to long

13:29range missiles and air power and that as do the Israelis and therefore they can knock out the launch sites of the Shahed drones in Iran, whereas the Ukrainians have not been able to successfully attach the launch sites of the Shahed drones in Russia. Fair? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. I mean, the Ukrainians are the most interesting part of the Shahed conversation by far. The Ukrainians have spent the past three years dealing with these things and spent the past three years creatively coming up with ways to stop them. That's ranged from taking 50-cal machine guns and World War II style shooting up in the night sky and trying to knock these things down to really high tech solutions creating interceptor drones, which are basically smaller, faster drones that have tracking systems on them that see the Shahed, which is fairly slow. The Shahed is not a fast weapon and chase it down the air and knock it out of the sky. And they are proving to be effective too and that's a tech that they're developing more and more.

14:30So for the Ukrainians, the Shahed drone is something that they've been dealing with all the time and not in a way that the Americans have, which is to say a lot of money, lots of support and lots of expensive missiles to shoot them down. They have to come up with scrappy low tech ways to destroy these things and again, they're not that hard to shoot down. They are slow, they're not that well made, they are meant to be a haunting slow device. So it's not that hard to shoot them down, but if there's hundreds of them, then you have to worry about it. You published an extraordinary video from Ukraine and I think you had access that I've never seen before to be able to shoot inside a drone targeting facility in Ukraine and meet some of the most senior figures in the Ukraine drone warfare department. One of whom said to you, with drones, the world will never be the same again. Other countries, understanding of drones, does not match what we understood in 2022. Yeah, and he's proving to be more and more right. I think that something that the Ukrainians pride themselves on is their ability to creatively

15:35find fighting solutions in a terrible situation without much support and kind of just with grassroots movements to make these things happen. The colonel that I talked to, he is somebody that has spent so much time perfecting drones making it a assembly line process, that this is someone that really knows how and what the complications of fighting are with them. And he was saying to us when we interviewed him, they need our help. The NATO needs us to come in and teach them what they know, because soon they're going to have this problem too. We shot that in November of last year, November 2025. And now, however many months later, in March, 2026, he's proving to be right more and more. And there's been reports that some of the Gulf nations are starting to enlist the Ukrainian drone expertise and bring them over. We haven't seen what that looks like yet. That was a tweet from President Zelensky a couple of days ago that said that that's happening. But it's something that I think that Ukrainians are proud of and want to be a part of.

16:35But it also brings into more questions about where this war will go. So much of the fighting in Ukraine has been localized to just those two nations. With this new fighting in Iran, how much of the Ukrainians will be involved and the NATO defense in the Gulf country's defense and more importantly, how much Russia will be involved in directing Iranians and how to use these shaheads in interesting ways, which is also some other reports that are coming out that we're seeing will mean a lot to the next stages of this fight. You mentioned Zelensky. I mean, I think he said that if I'm not mistaken, Ukrainian interceptor drones are now defending U.S. military interests in the Gulf and in Jordan. Right. Yeah. I mean, so far, the sources that I've been talking to who I'm in touch with in Ukraine, I haven't heard about what that looks like on the ground yet. I have no doubt that people are in motion and that the Ukrainians are a part of these next processes. But I think it's time we'll tell how involved Ukrainians will get in these processes and how the Gulf nations and for that matter, the America will react to their expertise

17:40in what will mean to them. There is a certain irony here. I think you guys widened, right? I mean, it's kind of extraordinary. I've spent the past three plus years covering this war in Ukraine and watching the American interest in it, American connection to that fight just really just drop off a cliff. When I first started reporting there in 2022, people were so passionate about this fight and the defense of Ukraine and what it meant to kind of stand up against Russia. And then over the years, it kind of dipped, it dipped politically to it, dipped most importantly financially. And with that dip, the Ukrainians have felt abandoned in many ways. And in that abandonment, they've had to figure out how to do it on their own. And that's where we're at now in terms of drones. So the fact that some of these nations are now turning to Ukraine and saying, hey, can you help us with this? What do you know about this? It's kind of a wild step. And as someone who's kind of covered closely and covered drones intensely and almost

18:45been killed by them, it's kind of amazing to me and kind of flabbergasting to know that the rest of the world is finally waking up to what Ukraine has been screaming now for years, which is drones are here and they're not going anywhere. The future of war will involve drones in every single way. And there's no going back from that. After the break, can defense tech companies actually keep up with the pace of war? Stay with us. Kara, I need to tell you about something I've been testing.

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23:55You're shaking him. Is that true or not true? It's very true. In fact, there was a video online circulating of one that had crashed in Iraq and some people were filming themselves picking it up and checking it out. But it's not even a secret. I mean, the Americans are proud of it. They were early stages of the war putting out press releases in videos and photos saying, here's our version of this tech. I don't think the problem for any of these governments and any of these militaries is that they don't believe the drones are important. I just don't think anybody has used it yet. I don't think anybody has applied it in ways that are useful except the Ukrainians, the Russians, and now the Iranians. I think the Americans are playing catch-up. I think a lot of NATO countries are also playing catch-up. But for the most part, like I was saying, these things are here to stay. And I don't think the Americans have any qualms about saying how important it is, saying how much they want to be a part of that game. To the point that there was New Zealand Day, that the sons of President Trump were investing in military drone technology companies.

25:00But it's incredible. There's no hiding that these things are happening. And I think anybody that is running companies that are involved with drones or thinking about drone defense knows that after this war, that everybody's going to be kind of jumping at this. Lauren Kahn, who is a former Pentagon policy adviser, has said, this is the first case in a long time, really since the early days of the Cold War, where the US has seen a capability produced by an adversary and decided it feels a gap and then decided to produce it. She's referring specifically to Shia drones. And how are they actually being used by the US? You know, it's unclear. I think that right now, in the early days of the war, in the early days of the fighting in Iran, they were used in kind of limited capacities in different strike sites. I don't think that the US military has a really clear plan for how they want to use them. They just know they want them. So there's not been a lot of reporting, a lot of understanding where they go. But what we do know is that the reporter you're talking about is absolutely right.

26:00These weapons are not simple things that are made kind of specific to one fight or another. There's something that is really going to be prevalent throughout the next stages of any kind of conflict. You see Shia head drones in Sudan. We heard about a drone strike in Congo yesterday. When I was in Sudan reporting a few years ago, it was one of the weirdest feelings to be worried about drones in a country that I had just left Ukraine a month before and now I'm in another country again worrying about conflict with drones. And I think that's going to be the common feeling for so long now. I think anywhere that there is people trying to kill each other, drones are a effective tool to do that. How do you looked into the very heavily venture-backed drone companies like Anderil in the US or Helsing in Europe? And whether they're drone technology, which is exciting investors from the Trump kids to Daniel Eck of Spotify, whether they're drone technology,

27:04which has been developed ultimately in a vacuum, is going to be competitive on the battlefield with the kind of home spun Ukrainian and Iranian technologies. Yeah, you know, the most experienced that I've had with the tech that is surrounding drones from the West was kind of maybe two years ago in Ukraine. We were covering the fighting around Chasaviar for the Wall Street Journal. And it was at a time when drones were becoming more and more prevalent. It wasn't what it is now, which is everything. It's like 80% of all strikes in Ukraine. But back then, it was really revving up and you were just starting to worry about it. And at the Wall Street Journal, we said, OK, well, how are we going to deal with this? What are the mechanisms to defend ourselves? And as a company, our security advisors, the best in the business, we're going out to different companies and saying, what do you got? And these companies will come back to us and we're like, oh, we got the jammer. This is the one. This is the perfect one. All you need to do is pay us $250,000. This jammer protects your drones all the way through.

28:05And that went to the bosses and Dow Jones was how do this is great. Now we can do this, bubble bath. And I would turn to the soldiers on the ground, these guys who have been living at it. And be like, oh, we're going to get this tech. It's expensive. It's nice. We got the good stuff. And they're like, oh, we just used that like last month. That doesn't work anymore. Yeah, that's so good. They used to work on this channel. Now they figured out how to use it on this channel. So yeah, it's not good anymore. Really, the people on the ground are moving at light speed at the way drones are changing. And anybody who says different, anybody who says that they have the answer is trying to sell you something. Because when you're in Ukraine and you see these drones and you see the ways that they adapt, and you hang out with drone makers, people that produce these things and kind of think about the best ways to use them. You find out really quickly that it's just a game of chess. They figured out how to stop this thing. How do we get around that? Yeah, they figured out how to stop that thing. How do we get around that? The Russians and the Ukrainians are pushing each other. And the most deadly way to get better and better

29:06at this tech. So I think a lot of these companies, because they are so well-funded, are going to figure stuff out. They're going to use different ways to progress the effectiveness and the deadliness of drones in ways that Ukrainians can't. But the real world experience that Ukrainians right have right now is second to none. One of the chilling but also fascinating things about modern warfare is social media videos of weapons caches. I remember the Heliskot, New Generation Cartel, a couple of years ago, did these videos of like their surface to our missiles and rocket launchers. And like they were basically all but saying, we are better equipped than the Mexican military in terms of our war fighting ability. The Ukrainians released a video of just this bunker full of naval drones. And there's like a kind of dolly shot where you just go up drone, off to drone, off to drone, off to drone. And they look kind of like mini speedboats or mini jet skis, except I assume they're underwater drones

30:07and their function. You mentioned the straight up hall moves earlier, which I want to come back to now, it is to attack ships. So naval drones are the next step in the most kind of interesting cat and mouse game of attack drones. There is a USBs on man's surface vessels, which you can think about just basically is like RC remote controlled boats with lots and lots of explosives on them. I mean, that's basically all it is. These are small, dynamic, really agile boats that just ram into ships and they're hard to shoot down and they're hard to kind of defend against. And now I think they were seeing a lot of talk about swarm tactics, which is same as with shaheads, just sending as many as you can so that how do you stop all of them? They're designed to hit oil tinkers because secondary explosions, and you can light the gas on fire, but also naval ships, coastal infrastructures, anything that it can kind of get its hands on. And then there's also talk about the UU vets, which is the, sorry, the unmanned underwater drones.

31:08These are the ones that are submersive like submarines. They can dive, they can go to really deep depths and kind of go under, they can drop mines. And some of the reporting is saying that a lot of them are being used to mine the straight of hormones right now, and they can also be used to attack ships in the middle of the night. We've yet to see just how effective these things are. I mean, we're hearing about the first strikes at these things, but what we do know is how they've already been used again in Ukraine. Again, the Ukrainians were some of the people that first started innovating with these kinds of drones. The Black Sea, where the Ukrainians had some of the most effective hits with naval drones, was some of their prime examples of how useful it was for them against the Russian fleets. These are just any way that you can decide to send big things with explosives on them that are fast, but simple enough that they can get around big defenses and big things trying to stop it. If you swarm them and you send a bunch of them, eventually one or two of them are going to get through. And that's what I think all of these militaries are now finding out for better or for worse.

32:09I mean, the extraordinary people talked all through last year about how the Ukraine Russia conflict is a testing ground or a petri dish or a foreshadowing of what the future of warfare will be. And the Trump decision to strike Iran has seems to have proven that everything people said about how the conflict in Ukraine will shape the future of warfare has come true and a pummeled adversary, but with access to this unmanned and relatively cheap and mass-producible drones under sea, surface sea and air, I mean, could drag United States into an unending conflict here. I think the, whatever the plan was and whatever the plan is in this fight, I think it's probably changing very rapidly. It's hard to know what it was, it's hard to know what it's going to look like in the future. But I think that what it looked like at the beginning, I saw a lot of similarities to the beginning

33:09of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. A big, powerful military rushing in with all of its might. Now, the biggest and most important comparison is that this American strikes on Iran are all precision strikes with no boots on the ground that we know of, whereas Ukraine was massive amounts of armies invading the nations. But at the same time, the similarities that are striking are just the amount of kind of the, what they had not considered going into it, how much they are learning on the fly and how much they are having things fail. The Americans thought that this was going to be easy. It's clear that they thought this was going to be fast and they thought they were going to do something that was really effective and then move on. That's something that we see from a lot of the way that Trump has approached a lot of these military actions over the past year. But now, it hasn't been. And it hasn't been easy to kind of set the goals. We still don't, we haven't really got a lot of clear answers from the American government as to what the goals are. And more importantly, it's unclear how it ends,

34:12unclear how the U.S. can stop this. And from everything that's happening, it's very clear that Iran is kind of holding a lot of the keys to what happens next. Today, the new Ayatollah announced he's going to continue blocking off this rate of hormones. This is incredibly important for the Americans to get back open to the entire global economy, rest on the ability to get gas moving again through this canal. So if it doesn't happen, what happens with the America? What do they do to respond? So at this point, and in the same way, the Russians forcing their thought they were going to take Kiev, what do they say? They were going to take it in a couple days. They didn't. Now, four years to make tiny advances at the cost of millions of soldiers dead to be able to get bits and pieces of the country. And even for them, it's still not clear where that war ends. These wars of attrition, they are terrible for everybody involved. And whatever happens next, this war in Iran, if it is anything like Russia,

35:15if it's anything like the way that that's turned out, it's going to be costly and painful for everybody on every side. And coming back to Ukraine, I mean, there was obviously partisans hiding in the forests in a second world war. And the partisans would ambush Soviet troops and Nazi troops and have victories and kept the conflict going and degraded both of those forces. Now you essentially can have partisans but who have range. Is that right? And what is the ability under pressure, under air power and a fire to continue to manufacture these drones for Iran? Like, is it conceivable that the U.S. could knock out the manufacturing capability just with air power? That's kind of the big question. We eight, nine months ago, we struck Iran and we hit the American military, hit military sites to try to knock out their nuclear capabilities. And then immediately claimed victory, saying we totally knocked it all out. We did everything, it's great, we're done. That, it's unclear if that's what that happened.

36:18We don't know what the Iranian military capabilities are. We don't know what their response can be and we don't know what they will do next. But a lot of the control rests in their ability to kind of withstand. As long as they withstand, they are winning. As long as they can keep the straight clothes, they are winning. As long as they can keep firing drones and keep causing the Americans to spend money, they are winning. This is a war of holding out. And the Russians, if we're making the comparison, are famous for holding out. This is the nation of Stalin, Brad. This is the nation of World War II that said, how many millions of people said their jets to fight off the Nazis and defeat the Nazis by numbers alone? The Americans, I don't think I'm not sure how much of the, we're able to withstand the pain in that sense on the midterms are coming. Gas prices are going to start increasing and it's unclear what Trump can do to kind of ease the pain of this next process.

37:19So the Iranian response and the Iranian military capabilities, it's a black box. We just don't know what they can and can't do. But I think we'll learn as we go. Just a close, Ben, and thank you. I know this is not directly your beat, but this is the tech stuff podcast. I had to ask you tech questions. What do you make of these Iranian strikes on the data centers in the Gulf? I think the Iranian attack plan right now is to touch on as many painful points they can. You see it most importantly in Saudi Arabia, they're attacking oil refineries with shahed drones. You see it at the different bases that they're attacking all around the Gulf region. And more importantly, if they can hit data centers, they know that this will cause disruptions to the global trade and the important parts that the American and Western governments are investing so deeply in. So again, like I think this all goes back to attrition. How much pain can the Iranian cause? And where can they cause it? And how are they gonna do that in a way that's cheap and can last a lot longer than the West can?

38:25Ben Solomon, thank you. Thanks. Kara, I need to tell you about something I've been testing. You know how I always bouncing between a dozen tabs and docs and tools when I'm researching episodes? That's literally my whole Tuesday. So, Claude now has this browsing agent called Claude Incroman. It actually navigates your tabs, pulls the information and takes actions across websites for you. But here's where I get wild. You pair that with co-work and now Claude's researching across the web and you can see that it's a big deal. Now Claude's researching across the web and working through your local files at the same time. Okay, wait, so it's not just reading stuff? It's actually doing things in the browser? Doing things. And then you layer on connectors, Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar Slack, and Claude just has all your context. No more copy-pasting background into every conversation. You already know what you're working on.

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