As an American drone buzzed overhead during a walk with a friend in Kurram Agency, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, my friend, utterly unbothered, turned to me and grinned. “See, there is so much talk for nothing.” Over almost two decades of drone attacks on Pakistan’s Tribal Areas, several humanitarian reports have been published, each of them attesting to the traumatization of people in the region from encounters with weaponized drones as the they hover, surveil, and bomb. Multiple accounts testify that the buzzing sound of weaponized drones overhead instigates psychological distress and anxiety. Yet, expressions of drone audition vary far more radically than humanitarian reports, or the news media, can account for. This paper does not ask whether drones definitively do or don’t traumatize, but instead: How should one understand these conflicting descriptions of the phenomenology of drone audition? Specifically, this paper engages the material and social world of my interlocutor and friend, Imran, to show that his account of drones—as so much talk for nothing—embeds a thick understanding of his past experiences as well as a future orientation towards a world that he would like to provoke into being. On the one hand, phenomenologies of the everyday in the Tribal Areas have a spatial and temporal depth acquired against the backdrop of multiple wars and conflicts. On the other hand, the twin universalizing discourses of liberal humanitarianism and liberal interventionism have saturated the social and political field structuring the terms through which the disparate social worlds of the Tribal Areas can be apprehended and made legible to broader publics. These conditions structure the terms of Imran’s coping with drone bombardment.