Aug 26, 2026 · 1h 23m · david-senra
Building Defense Technologies to Protect Democracies | Torsten Reil, Helsing
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Torsten Reil, co-founder of defense tech unicorn Helsing, joins David Senra to explain how artificial intelligence, autonomous drone swarms, and sovereign manufacturing are rendering conventional military armor obsolete. Drawing from his background in computational biology and video games, Reil discusses scaling an audacious European defense champion to establish overwhelming deterrence and safeguard democratic nations.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. David holds 24.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
David as informed peer 4.3 Guest teaching 5.3 Guest disagreement 2.6 David pushing back 2.3
speaking balance: gold is David, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 21:40 Torsten rejects bureaucracy excuses and calls out European founder complacency
Torsten forcefully dismisses standard industry complaints about regulation, tax, and notary delays as lazy excuses, arguing that European tech stagnation stems purely from a lack of aggression.
Hardest push from David ▶ 59:48 David refuses Torsten's claim that founder hiring approval doesn't scaleWhen Torsten claims it is too difficult for founders to approve every hire at 1,300 employees, David directly interrupts and pushes back by citing Elon Musk personally approving the first 3,000 SpaceX hires.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 5:53 Torsten explains electronic jamming circumvention with fiber optics and visual AIWhen David admits he does not understand how systems bypass electronic warfare, Torsten systematically educates him on fiber optic tethering, GPS jamming, and AI visual terrain recognition.
David holds their own ▶ 58:00 David outlines Bending Spoons' 100-signal HR engineering algorithmDavid counters conventional recruitment talk with detailed knowledge from Luca Ferrari, explaining how Bending Spoons uses an engineering team to track 100 CV signals against multi-year employee performance.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | David as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | David pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Obsolescence of Tanks and Rise of Drone Warfare | 3 | 6 | 3 | 2 | David asks foundational questions regarding the future of tanks and drone classifications. Torsten educates on how modern drone reconnaissance and precision strikes make traditional heavy armor obsolete on the front line. | |
| The Battle of Materiel, Jamming, and Ground Robotics | 6 | 7 | 2 | 3 | David references the historical industrial conversion from Freedom's Forge to frame modern materiel competition. Torsten schools David on the technical realities of electronic warfare, fiber optic links, and AI-driven GPS-denied navigation. | |
| Founding Helsing: Defying European Taboos in Defense Tech | 4 | 6 | 3 | 2 | David asks about founding Helsing in early 2021 before the Ukraine invasion. Torsten details the intense European stigma around defense tech, including ESG debanking where defense was lumped with gambling and tobacco. | |
| High-Conviction Capital, Daniel Ek, and Never Selling | 6 | 3 | 4 | 1 | David brings in founder case studies like Scott Wu and Adam Foroughi to support high-conviction building. Both host and guest strongly agree in attacking the European founder trend of selling early to retire to Tuscany. | |
| Sponsor Break: Ramp and Deel | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Mid-roll commercial break for Ramp and Deel delivered as a solo sponsor monologue by the host. | |
| Protecting Democracies: Mission and Founder Aggression | 4 | 5 | 6 | 4 | Torsten aggressively dismisses European complaints about regulation and bureaucracy as mere excuses for a lack of founder ambition. David playfully calls Torsten out as one of the most disagreeable people he knows, which Torsten briefly denies before doubling down on his contrarian stance. | |
| Disrupting Defense: Programs of Record and Eurofighter AI | 4 | 7 | 2 | 2 | Torsten explains Helsing's high-risk strategy of targeting sovereign Programs of Record directly as a seed-stage startup. He breaks down how their AI won the Eurofighter electronic warfare contract against established defense primes. | |
| Project Centaur: Developing Superhuman Autonomous Fighter Jets | 5 | 8 | 3 | 3 | Torsten describes Project Centaur and the development of AI pilots capable of outflying human aces in real Saab Gripen jet combat trials. David drills down into the simulation speeds and aircraft manufacturer acquisition. | |
| Deterrence Ethics and the Cultural Shift in Germany | 4 | 6 | 3 | 2 | Torsten articulates the moral framework of defense deterrence and reflects on Germany's cultural shift away from strict post-war pacifism. He notes that journalists have ironically stopped probing ethical red lines since the war began. | |
| Mass Production, Smart Software, and Resilience Factories | 6 | 6 | 2 | 4 | David challenges Torsten on vertical integration and brings up historical parallels with Krupp family factories in World War II. Torsten explains Helsing's concept of distributed 'resilience factories' and software-compensated manufacturing tolerances. | |
| Sponsor Break: AppLovin | 7 | 4 | 3 | 6 | After an AppLovin ad, David pushes back against Torsten's hiring delegation by quoting Elon Musk approving the first 3,000 SpaceX hires. David also cites detailed notes on Luca Ferrari's data-driven HR algorithms at Bending Spoons. | |
| Interviewing for Effortlessness and Organic Cultural Values | 3 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Torsten explains his 10-minute hiring heuristic for detecting 'effortlessness' and high agency. He shares how Helsing's frontline deployments in Ukraine naturally generated authentic company core values like 'the truth is in the field.' | |
| Realities of Frontline Deployment in Ukraine and Human Nature | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | David asks what it felt like when Helsing's systems were first deployed in active combat. Torsten reflects on how real wartime operations shifted the company from lighthearted startup energy to sober, serious responsibility. | |
| Torsten's Origins: Neural Biology, NaturalMotion, and Rockstar Games | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | David connects Torsten's path to Demis Hassabis's gaming origins. Torsten recounts his 1999 Oxford biology PhD simulating neural networks, creating NaturalMotion, and partnering with Rockstar Games on Grand Theft Auto. | |
| The Outsider Advantage and Audacious North Stars | 6 | 5 | 3 | 2 | David draws analogies to Raymond Plank's tax insights at Apache Corporation. Torsten explains how outsider status allowed him to defy gaming industry pricing dogmas with 99-cent and free-to-play models, which translates to defense disruption. | |
| Creators Versus Commentators and Final Reflections | 3 | 4 | 4 | 1 | David prompts Torsten on his critique of social media commentary. Torsten argues that public commentators provide net-negative value and that ambitious founders hold the real leverage to improve society. |
Statements from this episode (29)
Reil: The era of military tanks is probably over
“And so I think the area of tanks is probably over.”
Reil: Drones can find and strike artillery 40-50 km away
“And for artillery systems as well, if artillery systems try to hide 40 to 50 kilometers away from the front, ah, to shoot, you can still find them with drones and you can attack them with drones.”
Reil: Helsing's HX-II strike drone is often AI-controlled
“And strike drones often travel over longer distances and like the HX-II, which is our drone quite often they're AI controlled.”
Reil: 100,000 strike drones would destroy 3,000 invading tanks within hours
“The deterrence that you get out of having a very large number of strike drones at your border, I think is, is pretty is pretty strong, and the reason is that if you turn up with tanks on the other side, let's say you turn up with 3000 tanks, 100,000 strike dro…”
Reil: Scaling military drone usage requires autonomous AI flight over manual operators
“If you really want scale drone usage, they have to fly autonomously. You want to have a human surveying them, looking at what they're doing, and being on or in the loop, but the drones themselves need to be AI controlled and autonomous. It's the only way to ge…”
Reil: Future warfare will be autonomous machine battles where humans cannot survive
“I think it's going to be a battle of materiel. It's machines versus machines. The reason for this is that the autonomous mass, as we call it, so the number of drones that can fly in a coordinated way is getting better and better, and it's going to be very hard…”
Reil: AI algorithms already enable robust GPS-free drone navigation on frontlines
“Pretty much the whole frontline is GPS jammed, so you can't use your GPS receiver, so you need to find a different way to navigate and know where you are. You either do that with a human trying to recognize where they are, just almost like a pilot of a plane d…”
Reil: Sending humans into battle will become unethical, forcing ground robot adoption
“And at the same time, if you want to have humans on the battlefield, I think it's going to be very difficult. And I think the trend is going to be, and I think people are realizing this, is that it's going to be unethical to send humans on a battlefield where …”
Reil: Banks grouped defense in the same bucket as porn and gambling
“Back then the defense of a country or of a democratic society was grouped for banks in the same bucket as pornography and gambling and smoking.”
Reil: Europe had no defense tech champions like Anduril or Palantir in 2021
“The US had companies like Andrew and Palantir that were very forward looking defense companies with a big focus on, AI, cheaper hardware, and abundant hardware and the idea of mass manufacturing, but Europe had nothing, and so we felt we have to do this”
Reil: Daniel Ek invested €100M of personal money into Helsing
“Very difficult to raise money in 21 for defense, like no VC wanted to talk to us, and we didn't even try in the end, so we just raised money from individuals, family offices, and then we were lucky that Daniel you know, put in a hundred million euros of his ow…”
Torsten Reil: Helsing will never sell the company
“We try really to keep the foot on the gas really aggressively, because we want to build a company that really matters, and we will never sell the company.”
Reil: 95% of company success comes from aggression and ambition
“I think it's 95% of a company's success is that. Everything else, like I said, is excuses. So regulation doesn't matter.”
Reil: Europe lacks breakout companies because founders lack aggression
“And then we sadly have a continent where we don't have breakout companies because people just lack the aggression.”
Reil: Helsing and Saab won German Eurofighter electronic warfare contract using AI
“We came in with an AI-based approach, deep learning-based approach that kind of recover that ability to interpret those radars, and it was a big technology jump, and we managed to win that program of record together with our partner Saab against, you know, a l…”
Reil: Helsing won a program of record 28 months after founding
“And this happened after two years and four months of founding the company. I think we became the fastest to go from founding to program off record.”
Helsing: AI took full control of Gripen fighter jet in dogfight test
“Last year we flew a real fighter jet and we flew the Saab Gripen over the Baltic Sea. And when I say we, our AI did and took full control of the plane in air combat against and another Gripen, which was human controlled. And so we flew three air combat scenari…”
Reil: Manned fighter jets will struggle against superhuman autonomous swarms
“Crude manned, you know, fighter jets were going to be very difficult to deploy in the future because you'll, you'll end up Facing these swarms of autonomous fighter jets with superhuman capabilities, and it's not science fiction.”
Helsing acquired Munich aircraft manufacturer to build autonomous fighter jet
“So, so we decided to acquire an aircraft manufacturer outside Munich, our outside Munich with its own runway hangars and full aircraft manufacturing capabilities and build our own fighter jet, which is now called the CA-I and then put Centaur on it. As the cor…”
Reil: Helsing Systems Are Currently Deployed at Scale in Ukraine
“We never set it up, honestly, to have the systems deployed at scale in Ukraine, which is what we have right now.”
Reil: Germany's defense budget is growing to over †150B by 2029
“It's also the country that has in absolute terms, probably now the biggest growing defense budget, going from fifty two billion euros last year to originally, I think, hundred and fifty three billion in 2029. I think it's gone up again to over one hundred and …”
Reil: Helsing manufactures up to 3,000 HX-2 strike drones monthly
“We had to go from dozens of HX-II per month to a baseline of 1000, and it can now search to In the small factory that we have to 3000 a month”
Reil: Helsing's CA-1 fighter jet can launch from public highways
“If you look at something like the like the CA-I our autonomous fighter jets, it's designed in such a way that it can take off from any kind of makeshift airstrip, which would be a road, an autobahn, a motorway, a highway, et cetera.”
Reil: Helsing closed a 1 billion framework contract in Germany
“We just closed a one billion framework contract in, in Germany”
Reil: The desire for conflict is partly hardwired and genetic
“I do think it's in human nature to have at least parts of the population that want to have conflict, that enjoy conflict, that want to you know, increase their sphere of influence sometimes You know, that is political. Sometimes it's geographical. Sometimes yo…”
Reil: Peace requires making aggression too expensive through deterrence
“In order for that not to dominate everything else, you need to make sure that the rest of the population is, is sufficiently protected so that it's too expensive to try And, you know, use force to take what you want. That's basically what it boils down to. And…”
Rockstar Games licensed NaturalMotion technology for GTA and Red Dead Redemption
“So then we started a long collaboration with Rockstar Games, who ended up using our technology in GTA IV, GTA V, Redemption, and a whole range of other games.”
Reil: Building Helsing Would Be Harder with Legacy Defense Backgrounds
“It would be much harder for us to build Helsing if the founder backgrounds had already been in defense companies. Just much harder. It's easier to be an outsider.”
Reil: Social media commentary is entirely worthless and net negative
“I think commentary is entirely worthless and it has almost, it has no positive contribution. The only thing that it does is It I think it drags some people down so it has a net negative benefit, and it obviously is, is encouraged through you know, the way the …”