497: Ethan Thornton—I Like a Lotta Problems

Summary

Podcast Summary

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

Episode 497: “Ethan Thornton—I Like a Lotta Problems”

Date: August 4, 2026
Guest: Ethan Thornton, Founder & CEO of Mock Industries

---

Overview

In this episode, Mike Rowe is joined by 22-year-old entrepreneur Ethan Thornton, the prodigious founder of Mock Industries—a defense tech company at the forefront of unmanned military systems, now valued at nearly $2 billion. The conversation ranges from the evolution of modern warfare, American manufacturing, patriotism, AI, and tech innovation, to Ethan’s extraordinary personal journey from forging knives during COVID lockdown to leading a game-changing defense manufacturer. The episode is a dense, inspiring, and sometimes sobering exploration of how young innovators like Ethan are shaping the future of national security and American industry.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ethan Thornton’s Background & Mock Industries

• Early Life & Motivations
  • Grew up in small-town Texas, inspired by a family legacy of farmers and tinkerers (78:45).
  • Started out wanting to be a neuroscientist, then an Air Force pilot, forged knives during COVID (41:35).
  • Attributes much to his grandfather (“Ralph”), a self-made West Texas farmer and aviation buff (78:45–80:57).
• Entrepreneurial Spark
  • Founded Mock Industries after watching Ukraine use asymmetrical warfare to defend itself, realizing the power and necessity of unmanned systems (39:03; 44:44).
  • Dropped out of MIT, became a Thiel Fellow, and built Mock with backing from major VC firms (4:52; 40:53; 50:53).

2. The New Era of Warfare & Innovation

• Changing Rules of Engagement
  • Unmanned vehicles and decentralized strike capabilities have made traditional defense arsenals outdated (2:53; 9:04).
  • Emphasis on innovation over brute manufacturing—“Asymmetry through innovation” (16:46).
• Ukraine War as a Case Study
  • Ukraine’s use of affordable drones (quadcopters) to disable expensive Russian assets changed Ethan’s trajectory (9:32; 18:08).
  • Success lies in making assets that are cheap, effective, and replaceable (17:25; 18:08).
• Product Lineup (Pike, Viper, Stratus, Dart, Glide, Atlas)
  • Pike: Cost-effective cruise missile, launched from shipping containers, range of 1,000 miles (18:08–23:34).
  • Viper: Vertical takeoff munition, avoids runways, hard to counterattack (66:12–67:56).
  • Stratus: High-altitude balloon for sensing/comm, hard/expensive to shoot down, loiters for days (71:01–73:19).
  • Dart: Missile designed to intercept low-cost munitions like Viper and Glide (75:36–76:12).
• Speed & Adaptability
  • The key to success is fast iterative development and manufacturing flexibility, not scale alone (85:02; 86:25).
  • “Speed is the most important thing... If I can develop a product faster than the adversary... that’s the best way to win.” (85:02)

3. America’s Manufacturing & Defense Industry

• Falling Behind on Production
  • China out-manufactures the U.S. dramatically (made 1,000 ships to US’s 3 last year) (4:19; 15:09).
  • The solution isn’t to “out-Chin” China, but to lead through rapid innovation and adaptable, distributed manufacturing in America (16:11–17:25; 89:08).
• Government Contracts & Incentives
  • Critiques the “cost-plus” contracting model for incentivizing waste (35:44).
  • Advocates for “firm fixed price” contracts to spur efficiency and innovation (36:08).
• Competition & Collaboration
  • Most revenue comes from selling components (jet engines, rocket motors, etc.) to both the government and primes (Lockheed, Raytheon, etc.) as well as competitors (29:32; 30:00).
  • Non-zero sum approach: “If we win, other players in the market win too... Our job is to deliver a capability that secures warfighter safety and makes sure we win as a country.” (28:32–29:32)
  • Diverse cohort (Anduril, SHIELD AI, Apex), each with distinct strengths and focus areas (30:00–31:28).

4. Society, Patriotism, and the American Model

• Optimism vs. Realism
  • “It’s important to be institutionally optimistic about America, but not so optimistic that you fail to realize the risks.” (12:41)
  • Warns against both defeatism and blind optimism; advocates honest, agency-driven democracy (13:41; 57:46).
• Patriotism Defined
  • “I believe very, very, very deeply in as much sovereignty for every individual in society as possible. I think it is our job as a democracy… to give people as much freedom as they possibly can.” (53:22)
  • American exceptionalism rooted in self-critique and commitment to betterment (“America is unique in that we obsess about our goodness...”). (54:26)
• Socialism, Agency, and Capitalism
  • Recognizes the need for safety nets but fears centralization and loss of personal agency (56:11; 105:02).
  • “When enough people feel like they don’t have agency, they actually lose their agency.” (57:46)
• Trust in Democracy & Institutions
  • Sees institutional trust as fundamental to a healthy republic; fears graft and incompetence more than external threats (61:34–63:37).

5. AI, Technology, and the Future

• AI Parallels & Dangers
  • AI has massive upside but is deeply misunderstood and feared in the U.S. compared to China (100:41).
  • Warns against a “Manhattan Project” approach—AI isn’t an atom bomb and shouldn’t be nationalized (105:02–107:53).
  • Advocates for “thoughtful regulation” and for CEOs to be “afraid to ship products that make the world a worse place” (109:33).
• AI in Warfare & Society
  • As with military tech, “speed matters”—adversaries will copy, so out-innovate (85:02).
  • AI will make some jobs disappear but create many others; long term, nearly every job could be automated (108:04–108:48).
  • Push for policy, company leadership, and public participation that channel AI into equitable, sovereignty-enhancing directions (109:32–110:50).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“This is the future of what our arsenal is destined to become. Because we’re not going to out-manufacture China... Unless we perfect and mass produce what you’re about to see.”
— Mike Rowe (04:19)

“I like a lot of problems.”
— Ethan Thornton (05:32; episode title)

“Asymmetry through innovation is... if I spend a dollar and you spend $10, I have the advantage.”
— Ethan Thornton (17:25)

“If technology... can be replicated that quickly, isn’t that bringing us back to a basic manufacturing challenge? Who has more? ...It’s who has more faster.”
— Thornton (85:57–86:25)

“I believe very, very deeply in as much sovereignty for every individual in society as possible... That is what American democracy was invented to guarantee.”
— Ethan Thornton (53:22)

“We can’t fall into a socialist headspace... We should live in a society where people get a vote. But we can’t be so pessimistic... that we surrender our individual sovereignty.”
— Ethan Thornton (105:34–105:37)

“It’s important to be institutionally optimistic... but not so optimistic you fail to realize the risks that are present.”
— Ethan Thornton (12:41)

“Speed is the most important thing in our industry. If I can develop a product faster, even if the adversary watches, that’s the best way to win.”
— Ethan Thornton (85:00)

“Vote for people you trust... We’ve forgotten the idea of like a positive sum policy that’s best for the country.”
— Ethan Thornton (111:37)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:03–06:00: Introductions, Ethan’s bio, American defense context
• 07:12–11:42: Ethan’s morning, Mock Industries’ Atlas project, future of warfare
• 12:41–15:49: American optimism/realism, peer competition with China
• 16:11–17:50: Asymmetry through innovation; “Dollar vs. $10” analogy
• 18:08–23:40: Pike missile, cost/effectiveness, Ukraine case study, prototyping cycles
• 28:08–32:20: Collaboration vs. competition, primes, Anduril/SHIELD/Apex comparison
• 35:34–38:00: Government contract mal-incentives (cost-plus contracts)
• 39:03–44:44: Ukraine war influence, Ethan’s pivot from MIT and Air Force path
• 53:22–56:06: Deep dive on patriotism, American constitutional values
• 61:34–63:37: Loss of trust in institutions, fraught public discourse
• 66:01–76:12: Mock’s product walkthrough (Viper, Stratus, Pike, Dart)
• 85:00–86:25: Information firehose, speed, manufacturing flexibility
• 97:57–107:53: AI, tech optimism, legislative challenges, theoretical futures
• 112:05–116:00: AI-generated questions: personal reflections, unexpected answers

---

Ethan’s Personal Reflections & Advice

• On Agency:
  “When enough people feel like they don’t have agency, they actually lose their agency.” (57:46)
• On Risk & Failure:
  “When I started Mock, I told investors, ‘There’s a 99.99% chance this goes wrong. But we’ll do it anyway.’” (116:36)
• On Mission-Driven Work:
  “I think all you can ask for in life is to build things together as friends over decades.” (120:35)

---

Final Thoughts

Mike Rowe concludes by affirming his optimism in “seeing more of these bells and whistles”—and more importantly, in the new generation of entrepreneurial, patriotic problem-solvers like Ethan Thornton. Thornton urges for thoughtful regulation, trust in democracy, and the channeling of American innovation toward good, warning against embracing pessimism or centralization in the face of accelerating technological change. The episode is simultaneously a wake-up call and an inspiring glimpse into a future in which youthful ingenuity, hard work, and old-fashioned patriotism could again define American leadership and security.

---

For More:

• Explore Mock Industries’ products at their website.
• Further reading: Power and Progress (Ethan’s forthcoming book pick).
• Knife from Josh Smith’s Montana Knife Company presented to Ethan at the close, symbolizing American manufacturing spirit (121:00).

---

For those who haven’t listened, this episode delivers an inspiring, complex, and timely conversation on technology, defense, and the human spirit’s drive to solve big problems. Well worth your attention.

Transcript

[Mike Rowe]

Hello, friends. It's the way I heard it. My guest today will give you hope for the future or scare the hell out of you. I can't decide. He's inspirational. He's dealing with absolute mortal stakes, creating completely consequential tools, slash weapons that are going to determine, in all likelihood, the fate of the world, or at least play a pretty big role in it. And he's 22.

[Mark]

That's the crazy part. Oh, and also he owns a company that he started which is worth 1.8

[Mike Rowe]

billion with a B. Yeah. And in other news, his name is Ethan Thornton, and it's a name you're going to want to remember. He's been getting a fair amount of press here of late for all the reasons I just mentioned, in no particular order, but if you look at all of it on the page, that's one thing, when you see this guy speak, as we did at an energy conference about four months ago, it's another thing altogether. And what's happening, I think, is in the military, industrial aerospace world, is this coming together of young entrepreneurial patriots.

[Mark]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Who are dedicated to building the arsenal that they believe we need to fight and prevail in an asymmetrical war. This conflict seems inevitable. We don't know when, but somewhere between China and Taiwan. Well, I guess is the straight. Yeah. But it just seems inevitable that things are going to get spicy.

[Mark]

And whether it's inevitable or not, we still have to prepare for it. And he has a lot of knowledge in this area. Way more than your average 22 year old. I would say.

[Mike Rowe]

Way more than your average 50 year old.

[Mark]

Or 63, maybe.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. Or look, I'd say way more even than people who are firmly entrenched in this industry. What's really happening, I think, is that the rules of engagement have changed so quickly.

[Mark]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

So quickly that our whole playbook has not quite been rendered completely obsolete, but kind of.

[Mark]

It's getting there, for sure.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Mark]

Everything is about unmanned vehicles and unmanned deliverables of payloads and whatnot.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. And look, it's easy to look at all this and go, oh, God, here we go. It's the Terminator. Or, oh, man. Why are we accelerating into this future that just seems so uncertain and so scary? But I think that's the wrong way to say it. This is inevitable. We can't stop progress and we can't stop the world from spinning. And this is the way it's spinning.

[Mark]

And at this moment, we are behind in this race.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. You're going to have a hard Time balancing a lot of what you hear with the fact that it's coming from a guy. And I hate to make it about this, and I'm sure it annoys him, but it's both amazing and inspiring that he's 22.

[Mark]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And he has the attention of the Pentagon. He has the attention of Sequoia, a giant venture firm who's put a lot of money behind the tools he's created. You'll see those tools. He'll talk about them. He'll show them to you. This is the future of what our arsenal is destined to become. Because we're not going to out manufacture china. They made a thousand chips last year. We made three.

[Mark]

Yep.

[Mike Rowe]

We're not going to catch up this way. And we're not going to win the next conflict. Or more importantly, as Ethan will tell you, we're not going to be able to prevent the next conflict unless we perfect and mass produce what you're about to see. And I'm not betting against him.

[Mark]

No. And you know what I love about this guy more than anything else, and I know you already know, and that is that he is a patriot. He's 22 and he loves this country and he wants to help this country be the best that it can be.

[Mike Rowe]

I love that he dropped out of MIT to build this company, Mock Industries. Mock is the name of the company. He was a Thiel fellow, which helped accelerate his rise. The name of the episode is I like a lot of problems. And that's a direct quote from a guy. You know, when he said it, it made me think of every great pitcher I've ever seen, especially the relief pitchers. It's the bottom of the ninth. The bases are loaded. You want the ball?

[Mark]

Yep.

[Mike Rowe]

Give me the ball. I can do this. It ain't bragging if it's true.

[Mark]

Yep.

[Mike Rowe]

Listen for yourself, see what you think. I like a lot of problems. Ethan Thornton. Right after this. In a recent survey conducted by me, it was determined that the only employers who don't use ZipRecruiter are those employers who actually enjoy the process of interviewing hundreds of people before finding one that may or may not work out. In a subsequent survey also conducted by me, it was determined that those employers do not exist. So if you're an employer struggling to hire today, your course of action is simple. Post a job for [e-mail] ro these guys have proven themselves a million times over, but by helping countless employers, myself included, get through the hiring process faster and more effectively than ever before. And now they have a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested, passionate and qualified candidates first that saves hours of time and helps people like me find candidates who can function in a non traditional environment like microworks. In other words, ZipRecruiter worked for for me. They'll probably work for you. Post a job for [e-mail] row watch what happens. Odds are you'll find a great fit for your company in just 24 hours or less. Ziprecruiter.com ro ziprecruiter.com ro. I know your time is valuable, but I'm not quite sure how valuable. Like what's the, what was your morning like and what happens to you later today?

[Ethan Thornton]

It's a good question. It varies a lot. Today pretty nice. I woke up, ate some breakfast. What do I get up to? I ate a Starbucks, which was kind of weird, but it was on the drive in and was the easiest. I got like a sausage and egg sandwich. It's pretty solid.

[Mike Rowe]

So you're still at that point where your metabolism, it doesn't really matter what you eat.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, and I'll actually go days without eating on accident pretty often. So yesterday it was like midnight and I was like crap, I haven't eaten today. So then I ate like a whole pepperoni cheese pizza at like midnight, which was fun.

[Mike Rowe]

Why? Why typically does it like explain to me the circumstances by which you could simply forget to eat? Because I'm assuming you're not hungry while you're forgetting. You're so focused, preoccupied on whatever the situation is.

[Ethan Thornton]

I just get really excited about stuff and I'll just like get into it and like have my head down and then wake up. And so there'll be days where I eat like five meals. Recovering from that, this is kind of one of those days. And then yeah, yesterday it was a fun couple meetings with my team and so just didn't realize until like midnight. So ate a bunch last night. So I did that and then I got into work. It's been like a lot of engineering stuff today. So we're standing up a new program. We announced it last week for the Navy. Basically like 40 foot wingspan, near vertical takeoff aircraft. So basically the goal is within the area, helicopter takes off, take off within that area. And I'll get to why we don't just take off vertically and then carry 1000 pound payload, about 1400 miles. So the biggest vehicle we've shipped to date is 13ft. We got asked to bid on this. I frankly didn't really expect to Win on it. But we did a lot of work to get an architecture together. I'm super excited for. We just want it. So now we're standing up all the functions to go and deliver on that. That's a lot of work right now. That aircraft is super exciting, though. So, like, when you think about. It's called Atlas.

[Mike Rowe]

Okay.

[Ethan Thornton]

When you think about the future of warfare, I think that the key thing to understand is that there will be massive decentralized strike capability, so adversaries and the US Will have the ability to use unmanned systems to strike basically anywhere from things that aren't a centralized location.

[Mike Rowe]

And what are the ramifications that will result as a result from that eventuality that didn't exist decades before?

[Ethan Thornton]

It's a great question, I think a ton, and I think it's important to discuss and get into each of those. I think the first is that centralized assets are a lot more at risk. And we see this. I mean, we see this a lot. This is Ukraine's Playbook 101. Right. So Operation Spiderweb, probably about a year and a half ago now, Russia had their strategic bombers in Russia, basically their airfields. Ukraine snuck a couple of shipping containers into Russia and launched quadcopters from those shipping containers and knocked out, who knows the actual number, but a significant portion

[Mike Rowe]

of Russia quadcopter is a drone with four.

[Ethan Thornton]

With four props.

[Mike Rowe]

Rotors, basically.

[Ethan Thornton]

Exactly.

[Mike Rowe]

Sorry. Yeah, I'm going to do this a lot because I know how fast your. Your mind works, and I really want people to understand. I mean, look, we're going to hit manufacturing, obviously, certainly asymmetrical warfare. I think it's really important for people to kind of understand. But mostly, dude, I just want to understand from a manufacturing standpoint how your brain works and how you came to this. And I will have introduced you properly in a preamble. And I'm sure you're sick to death of being lumped into. Oh, Andy's 22, so I don't want to need to dwell on that. But, dude, you're 22. Yeah, yeah. And so you're having the most consequential conversations that I think are going on today in our country. You are at the. You're at the big boy pants table, dude. And I'm just so interested to know not just what you're doing and why and how, but through what kind of lens do you view it?

[Ethan Thornton]

It's a great question. So, first off, look, I don't think age has much to do with it, and I think there are Folks who brag about getting things done at a certain age, and then there are folks who get discredited about doing further things at a certain age. And I just. I try to avoid that being in the calculus. Right. Like, I like to show up and exist based on merit of what I've done and what I look to do and what's happening today. But I do understand it's a bit strange my age. And so it is something that gets talked about.

[Mike Rowe]

It's strange in this time. But the guy who was just sitting here produced a movie called Young Washington. And what you're really struck by, you know, when you go back a few generations, or in this case, a couple centuries, that cat was 21 years old, you know, when he was in the thick of the French and Indian War, which led to the Seven Years War, which of course led to the Revolution and the first real world war in modern times. And so, yeah, I'm not freaked out by any stretch that you're young. I hope we're entering a new time because so many people that I've talked to in the last year are south of 40, and they're doing the coolest stuff there is and the most important.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah. And I think, look, I think there are folks who will be 70 to do these things. I think there will be folks who are 20 to do these things. I think it's just. I hope we exist in a future where, like, these things can happen regardless.

[Mike Rowe]

You worried about.

[Ethan Thornton]

Do I worry?

[Mike Rowe]

Are you worried about the future?

[Ethan Thornton]

I am. I think it's important to be institutionally optimistic about America, but not so institutionally optimistic that you fail to realize the risks that are present. I think it's a balance, and I think if you fall on either end of that balance, it can be quite dangerous. So what I mean by that is, like, American democracy is unique because it was set up to be very, very dynamic and actually in many ways most specifically touched on with the Second Amendment, actually set up to have a feedback loop on making sure that it changes at the right rate. And we're just talking Washington. If you went back and installed American democracy back then, I think it would make our Founding Fathers throw up. But similarly, if you went and installed the government that existed back then, today, it wouldn't work. And so democracy has to be this living, breathing thing that adopts as society changes, but ideally gets better over time. And I think that has been the track of American democracy for the last 250 years. You really have to track the climate here, not the weather, because you can swing wildly up and down, but generally it has been a massive success story of a group of people governing themselves and having extreme agency on fixing and ideally looking ahead to preemptively fix a lot of the problems we're facing. So, yes, I have significant concerns about the future, but I think it's important to balance that with the fact that I believe very, very deeply in representative democracy and in capitalism to be the best system to solve those problems. Now, I think talking through the problems I'm concerned about, one is near peer competition with China. I think I've discussed that at length. I think second one is the invention of machine intelligence. And of course there's the LLM perspective here, there's the physical intelligence perspective here. We as a company through autonomous warfare systems, play in this world. But you see democracy be stressed when there's great power competition. You see democracy be stressed incredibly whenever there's radical technological change.

[Mike Rowe]

Was the first one you called peer what?

[Ethan Thornton]

Great power competition with China, near peer warfare.

[Mike Rowe]

Near peer, yes. I don't know the term. How'd that evolve? What's it mean?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, absolutely. It basically means another country existing that you are generally somewhat adversarial to that has similar powers to your own. And so we haven't had this since the 90s. Soviet Union was one, obviously we had a number of them in the 40s. Right now, China is that. And that doesn't mean you necessarily go to war. Right. But it does mean that you exist in a geopolitical landscape of two parties that are actuated.

[Mike Rowe]

Is it fair to think of this as near peer when they made a thousand ships last year and we made three?

[Ethan Thornton]

It's a good question. I think we'll get into how I think we solve this. And I do have institutional confidence, actually. So I think it is near peer. I think if you assess certain aspects, we are far ahead, and if you assess others, we're far behind. So certainly, like raw manufacturing horsepower, we're way behind. Were probably more behind than America's been since like the mid-1800s. That said, if you assess on innovation, if you look at the technologies that define the world today, and then you look at America's work shaping the technologies that will likely define tomorrow, we are ahead. And so it really, I think your confidence depends on which of those two things you think is important.

[Mike Rowe]

If I understand your thesis, you've weighed and measured the geopolitical manufacturing capabilities and concluded that there's just no way we're going to catch up. So we have to out innovate and to the extent that that means autonomous weaponry. Right. I mean, what other way is there?

[Ethan Thornton]

Absolutely. And I want to be clear. I think in two decades we are moving more atoms than China. And I don't think you achieve that by making China move fewer atoms. I deeply believe in innovation as the means of fixing America's manufacturing problem as well. And so we're happy to talk about that on some timeline. We do have to produce more. Now, the issue is it takes a while to build a supply chain. It takes longer to build a labor force. And we're behind China in that regard. And so, yes, in the absolute near term, as you talk about hardened military power, I think the goal needs to be asymmetry through innovation. And that's really what I found in mock to do out of the gate.

[Mike Rowe]

Asymmetry through innovation is fancy talk for

[Ethan Thornton]

saying, sorry, I apologize.

[Mike Rowe]

No, man, look, I don't want you to edit anything. It's really important, I think, for people to understand how your process works. But for the average person, asymmetrical innovation. So we maybe talk about that in terms of survivability vis a vis weapons systems. Because I mentioned ships, but ships, who cares what kind of ships? Exactly. And how much do those ships cost? And if things get kinetic, how much does it cost me to take one of those ships off the. Off the board?

[Ethan Thornton]

Exactly. And so look, I think the best way to think about exactly what I'm saying is I think by properly pushing as fast as possible on drone development, you can have things where if I spend a dollar and you're trying, you spend $10. I have the advantage on the battlefield. And so innovation is pushing on drones. Asymmetry is my dollar gets further than your dollar, which correlates to my machine. My operator gets further than your operator.

[Mike Rowe]

So back to Ukraine, you're talking about these, would you call them quad.

[Ethan Thornton]

Quadcopters.

[Mike Rowe]

Right. So they're basically brought internally. Right. And unloaded from a container and they're up and deployed. And how much do those things cost and what are they taking off the board?

[Ethan Thornton]

Absolutely. So we don't know the exact numbers, but it was on the order of 100 to 200 quadcopters and several billion dollars of Russian, basically strategic bombers. And those quadcopters probably cost on the order of a few thousand dollars apiece. And you see similar things. So like one of the products we're working on as a company, it's called pike, it's a long range, basically long range cruise missile. Now the interesting thing is we can fit a lot of them into a shipping container, into a 20 foot shipping container container. And each one of those can go about a thousand miles and disable a ship. And those things cost hundreds of thousands to make compared to hundreds of millions depending on the type of ship.

[Mike Rowe]

Chuck, you got a pike in there somewhere?

[Mark]

Yeah. It's near the end of the list, though.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, yeah. So you've. We've got some photos from the specific things you're making, but I'm not sure what I'm allowed to show people around.

[Ethan Thornton]

I think anything you have we can show. Some of it might be outdated. So I don't think we've released the new version of pike yet.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, what's the old version of pike look like? Okay, I'll pull it up here. Because, you know, and you also mentioned Atlas. And I want. How do I say this right?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

I don't want people to think in terms of video games, but by the same token, I mean, what are we doing here? I mean, it's impossible. Did you ever read Ender's, Ender's Game?

[Ethan Thornton]

One of my favorite books.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, Orson Scott Card.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes, he has. I mean, there are a lot of books in like, the Ender series. They're all incredible

[Mike Rowe]

dumb. I want to thank my friends at American Giant for continuing to prove that high quality clothing can still be made in these United States for a fair price. They've been at it now for 15 years, so clearly they know what they're doing. And what are they doing exactly? Well, they're sourcing locally grown cotton and they're building their factories in towns across the nation where they can find and hire a local labor force that cares about making a quality product. It's simple. It's not easy, but it is simple. Consequently, when you buy a piece of clothing from American Giant, you're not just buying a sweatshirt or a T shirt or another pair of jeans. You're investing in a local supply chain. I want to thank them also for putting the Microworks logo on a limited line of tees and sweatshirts and then donating the proceeds to my foundation. I appreciate that a lot. We're using that money to fund our next round of work ethic scholarships. And I am grateful. Check out the high quality staples on hoodies, tees, denim, all built to be worn year after [e-mail] Mike. It's quality you could feel and a true American success story you can be proud to support. Use code Mike. Get 20% off your first order at american-giant.com Mike. American-giant.comMike. american Giant. American made. American Giant. American made. Ender was, if I remember, sometime in the future you're only allowed two kids. He was a twin, right? So he was a third.

[Ethan Thornton]

Third.

[Mike Rowe]

They called him a third. And he basically has this facility. He's just unbeatable at a very specific kind of video game. And there's like some big giant national competition, but of course, it's not actually a game at all.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

He's. He's. He's basically the unknowing general in some intergalactic war.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, man. When did you read that?

[Ethan Thornton]

I think I've probably read that book like five times. So I read it first time, I think, like second or third grade, and then I've read it a few more times.

[Mike Rowe]

That's not a second grade book, dude. Wow.

[Ethan Thornton]

Good book, though.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. You know, somebody gave me Lord of the Flies in the sixth grade, which I read.

[Ethan Thornton]

And it's another good book.

[Mike Rowe]

Scared the hell out of me.

[Ethan Thornton]

It's important to read both of those books. You shouldn't read Ender's Game without reading Lord of the Flies, and you shouldn't

[Mike Rowe]

read either one until you're out of high school. But whatever. So you're making. Do you see the point that I'm fumbling around to make? It's like this is not a game, but to think about it in terms of winning is very much gamesmanship.

[Ethan Thornton]

I think you need to think of it as physics and of sort of economic warfare. We do war games. So the military war games, we war game as a company. And yes, you're like running these cases on both strategy and technology. And I see a large portion of my job today is hopefully having a good understanding. Definitely not a perfect understanding, but a good understanding of those things to idea products.

[Mike Rowe]

What's that thing do?

[Ethan Thornton]

So this is the asset I was describing. That we will be able to launch from a shipping container and go about a thousand miles and disable a ship or hit another target. Now this is the old version. So the way we build aircraft is we build the first aircraft which just flies. It's generally the same architecture. And that proves. Proves to the customer that you can fly it and then proves to ourselves that we know how to fly that architecture. And these each happen in like three months. So we designed this. We went from program kickoff to flight in 71 days on this aircraft.

[Mike Rowe]

How big is this? I cannot.

[Ethan Thornton]

That aircraft is about nine feet long.

[Mike Rowe]

Okay, that's important to point out because if you don't have Any like, you know, you ought to put like a Stretch Armstrong or some sort of thing next to it to give it some kind of scale. Yes, but it's only nine feet long.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

I mean, and it can hump a thousand pounds. How far?

[Ethan Thornton]

So it's, it's a, I shouldn't disclose exact payload. It's smaller than £1,000, but 1,000 miles.

[Mike Rowe]

Okay.

[Ethan Thornton]

And so now the one we are assembling right now on our factory to fly in the next few weeks, which I'm pretty excited about, is the Block 2. So the way we think about Block 2 vehicles is full performance. And so the Block 2 will look very, very, very different than this one. It actually. So this one took off from a Runway. That one will use solid rocket motor to launch as folding wings, as folding tails. It's more of like a tube launched thing. So block two is when you can do first kind of full performance. These actually work on the battlefield. And then generally you do a third redesign, which is when you bring it into rate manufacturing. When you're in the prototyping process, you don't want to obsess too much about rates. You want to make sure you're like not breaking any manufacturing principles, but you don't want to be obsessing about like every single bolt the same way you would be when you're mass manufacturing. So the second one is important because we can actually start selling it. It's just more expensive to produce. More importantly, we can start deploying it on the battlefield and having an impact. And then the third one, and generally like the goal is to do these every three months. I think block two will be done on about that timeline. Block three, once you're in manufacturing, takes a bit longer and hopefully we compress that over time.

[Mike Rowe]

How much?

[Ethan Thornton]

But how much time?

[Mike Rowe]

No, how much money? What do those things cost?

[Ethan Thornton]

So the goal is hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that really depends. A lot of your costs in the jet engine, a lot of your costs in the solid rocket motor that launches it. The actual airframe itself is very cheap. And then most of your cost is in the avionics and warhead. So for certain applications, you have super, super simple avionics for applications. So like if the adversary is not jamming you, if you can access gps, then your avionics are super simple. If you're fighting China and they're jamming you and they are like other things we probably shouldn't talk about. Like, then your avionics get significantly more sophisticated. So you basically.

[Mike Rowe]

Sorry. Good.

[Ethan Thornton]

No, you're good. So you have anywhere from like on the low end. I think we could probably get this thing down to like 200k. Don't quote me on that. We aren't done with the third one yet, so I don't know yet. Up to still hundreds of thousands of dollars on the sophisticated end.

[Mike Rowe]

How should I think about the pike? Is it the pike or just pike? I don't know.

[Ethan Thornton]

You tell me.

[Mike Rowe]

You don't care? All right, I hereby christen it the Pike. How should I think about it in terms of what it's comparable to? What's it replacing, if anything?

[Ethan Thornton]

So we have different products that are different levels of novel and so we have stuff like Glide that is very, very different than anything that's existed before. Same applies for Stratus and we can pull up pictures of these things.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, yeah. Give me a glide

[Ethan Thornton]

real quick if you want me to stay on it.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ethan Thornton]

Is quite similar to the existing cruise missiles we have. So cruise missiles, I think are going to be one of the most important tools in a potential near peer conflict. Russia or China. Now, I actually don't expect us to go to war with China. This is like a very important thing for me to say. I think from in terms of how it guides my thinking, I think we will be in basically a great power competition, basically a cold war with China for the next few decades. I see our job is not to win a war against China, it is to be able to win a war against China such that we can deter a war with China. And same goes for Russia, same goes for other countries. So this one specifically, I think we're going to need hundreds of thousands of cruise missiles. This is not an area we will be the only player. There are other companies building good cruise missiles.

[Mike Rowe]

What's a cruise missile cost?

[Ethan Thornton]

So a Tomahawk, which is our main cruise missile or a Jassm costs on the order of like 2 to 3 million dollars. So my goal is to be about an order of magnitude cheaper than that.

[Mike Rowe]

By 10th sounds like.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes, that's the goal. And that said, like, we won't be the only player on Pike. The thing is, I think we could all make pikes. Like GM could retool tomorrow to make pikes and I don't think we'll have enough. And so there are specific products where we really try to change thinking and bring in a completely new style of war. And there's stuff like this where it's very clear we're going to need cruise missiles. We've shot a lot of Our cruise missiles that the actual numbers are classified, but it's a massive number of cruise missiles.

[Mike Rowe]

Do you know the number? I know it's classified, but I don't have a clearance.

[Ethan Thornton]

I generally know the contours of the number. It's bad. We need a lot more cruise missiles and we need to replenish that arsenal. And so we really, in like the next two years to country, we need to get about 100 times better at producing cruise missiles. And so pike for us will be a large portion of that. More importantly, arguably, we make the jet engine for it and we make the solid rocket motor for it. And there really aren't good suppliers for either of those. So right now, if we wanted to go and buy those two, it'd take like a year to get delivery. And so we'll also sell those jet engines and solid rocket motors to other companies to help them win.

[Mike Rowe]

This is a bit of a sidebar, but I really want to, like, how do you work with the primes? What kind of layer cake are we talking about? Because I think of Lockheed and I think of General Dynamics and I think of, I don't know, Raytheon and L3, the usual suspects. And they're doing what they do. Are you delivering to them? Are you delivering straight to the feds?

[Ethan Thornton]

Delivering straight. So we're our own prime. I hate the word prime. I never want to be a prime.

[Mike Rowe]

Subprime. Subprime doesn't work.

[Ethan Thornton]

But yes, we are our own prime with the government on. On our programs. Now, that said, we are a supplier to a number of those companies. So Mock's model, I view defense is like very much non zero sum. Like, if we win, other players in the market win two levels. One level is like, we're all on the same team. Right. Like, our job is to deliver a capability that secures warfighter safety and make sure we win as a country. And so I think there's like no room for the zero sum thinking of, like, I'm making Pike. So X player can't make something like pike past that, though, as a company, they're never going to allow there to be a monopoly. Right. The government has been like, very intentional to make sure that there are several players capable of delivering most things that exist for those two reasons. We spend a lot of effort actually building components to help other people win. So we sell jet engines, we sell solid rocket motors, we sell testing services. And so actually about half of our revenue as a company comes from selling components to these primes.

[Mike Rowe]

Gotcha.

[Ethan Thornton]

And to startups.

[Mike Rowe]

Okay, so who do you think of as a cohort? I mean Lockheed's too big. Is it Anduril? Is it? What about Apex? People who are also manufacturing like those satellites at scale?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

I feel like everything you're saying is underpinned by an enthusiasm or a willingness or at least an ability to just make a bunch of them. Like we need a lot of stuff. Which opens up the whole stockpiling question.

[Ethan Thornton]

It does, it absolutely does. So I mean to answer your first question for us, they're the Primes and we're a very, very, very different business than the primes. And so the Primes have architected their companies to be excellent at shipping large on multi decade schedules. That is not what we look to be excellent at. Right. We look to be excellent at making the unmanned systems that are asymmetric in warfare and designing those in a matter of months and getting them into production at hundreds of thousands of units also within a matter of months. Now companies looking to do a similar thing. It's really us. Anduril's certainly a player there. SHIELD AI is a player there. In like the multi domain, specifically in air context, it's kind of those three. You have Castellan on the hypersonic side, you have Saronic on the naval boat side, you have Apex on the satellite side. As relates to what we do, it's kind of R3, which I think is really important. I think you want several players in this space and then we'll each take a very different slice of the problem. So like Mach is much more manufacturing centric and we tend to start at a component and hardware level. Anduril is a lot more kind of battlefield OS centric around Lattice. They actually acquire a lot of the companies that build their hardware end up buying most of their components. So those are actually like complementary in the long term is kind of the goal. And then SHIELD sits somewhere in the middle of that stack. They're very specific about which aircraft they build. Really they've built two aircraft to date, which is obviously different than the other two players. And they're really good on the single drone pilot side. So if that makes sense. Like the actual drone that's being flown is a different software than the thing that flies thousands of drones.

[Mike Rowe]

So you're talking about specialty in like the whole pie. Did the pie get divvied up? Like did you guys have a retreat somewhere and say okay look, we're going to focus on this, you do this or is it really just your own core competencies kind of rising to whatever the Medium is.

[Ethan Thornton]

It's definitely more of the latter. And I think we will compete with each other. So, like, Anduril has a competitive product called Barracuda and we will compete.

[Mark]

Now.

[Ethan Thornton]

I think that's a very good thing. And I don't think it's zero sum competition. So one. Like, it is actually important that you still have at least two players in each of these categories that are competing to make sure the US Always has the ability to buy what is best and that you don't get a monopoly. And then, yeah, really. I think the businesses are built around the competencies of the early team that founded them. I'm like, pretty obsessed with manufacturing and hardware engineering, so credit where it's due.

[Mike Rowe]

You're giving props to the government for encouraging the kind of competition that has got us to where we are. But it feels like you're also saying, like, somebody moved our cheese, man, when we were sleeping. Like, the rules changed pretty quick. And when I think of the way appropriations work and the calcification that can happen when it comes to. I'm just making stuff up. But how do you make an F35? How much does that cost? How much time does it take? How much congressional, you know, stuff is attached, how much money's flying around, how many people are getting elected? And how do you think the system, as it's existed is disincentivizing the very mobility you're espousing? If I only had 60 seconds to tell you why I subscribed to Good Ranchers, which is pretty much the case, I guess I'd start with Integrity. They source the best tasting meat I've ever eaten exclusively from ranches in the United States, no exceptions. Their whole company is based on American meat delivered from American Ranchers straight to your American door. And that alone, in my opinion, is reason enough to at least try them. Our grocery stores are filled today with imported meat, deceptively labeled, and Good Ranchers is the best way to know exactly what you're getting. And then, of course, there's the value. For a limited time, you can get $50 off your first Good Rancher's order. That means you can build your own box starting as low as $129. Just visit goodranchers.com Roe get $50 off anything on their site. That's goodranchers.com Roe for $50 off. You'll also get double the free meat with every order on top of the $50 off. When you start a plan today, which I hope you'll consider [e-mail] Roe American meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get good ranchers. Now

[Ethan Thornton]

I think in certain ways, yes. In certain ways, no. So I think on the like, we need multiple companies perspective, no. So like the Secretary of Defense walked up in the 90s and basically said, we need consolidation. We have hundreds of companies, we need consolidation. But they only push it as far as like five or six companies. And I think that is the most consolidated we'll see. And so I think five or six is probably even maybe on the order of the right number of like actual big integrators. But you definitely don't want to go below that. And I think that the Pentagon has understood that and continues to understand that. I think the biggest difference is cost plus contracting. Right. So there's this narrative a while ago which actually makes sense at first glance, that is, we don't want defense contractors to become wildly rich selling stuff to the taxpayer. And that's like a great thesis. And I completely agree with, with sort of the contours of that thesis. The way they enforced that was by setting basically a cost plus contract, which is, you're responsible for delivering this. You will get paid X percent of your cost on the program.

[Mike Rowe]

So X percent of. So the cost isn't fixed. Yes. The government's willing to say, okay, maybe it cost a million more than you said it was going to cost for this missile.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

And your profit margin is the plus.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes, Your profit margin is fixed. Regardless of if you spend 500 million or a billion or 1.5 billion, you're taking, let's say a 20% cut. Okay, well the incentive structure, if you're a company in that. Now ideally a lot of us want to actuate our companies differently, but these are public companies. Over multi decade timelines, these companies end up spending a lot more money than they need to. Because by spending more money, they make more money.

[Mike Rowe]

Is this how we get the $20,000 toilet?

[Ethan Thornton]

It is exactly how we get the $20,000 toilet. And so you need firm fixed price. You need like this costs X and if I fail to deliver it at X, I eat that cost. If I think it costs $400,000 and it costs $450,000, I go out of business. But if it costs $200,000, I make that money and I get to reinvest it into feeding that tech engine, which is also how you get innovation. Right. It's very, very hard to innovate as a company when Your margins are small. And so what you want is a bunch of companies competing on a mission set. The best company winning that mission set based on price and capability, and then that company having more capital to pump into, continuing to innovate on the next mission set. So that's the most important difference. I think the second one is the way these programs used to run is the Pentagon would write like thousands of pages of requirements, right? They wouldn't really even tell you the mission. They'd say you need to design a vehicle that looks like this and in many cases it'd be quite specific. That's good to some degree. You want specificity on the system you're giving to the war fighters, but it takes the engineers out of the loop, right? And so you're paying this company to engineer you a product, but you're telling them exactly how to do it. And so what they've moved towards, which I love is, is here's my mission set. I need something that goes 1400 miles carrying a thousand pound payload that costs this much, that is this survivable, that then allows my engineers to figure it out, to figure it out. And you end up shipping something that is like wildly different and in many cases a bit strange compared to what you'd expect. We'll be right on some of those bets and we'll win those contracts. We'll be wrong on some of those bets and someone else will engineer a better solution and they'll win those contracts. And that's really how you get innovation and that's how you don't end up in a perspective like a position we're in today, which is where you've had a pretty sclerotic kind of defense industrial base that ships capabilities that look very, very similar on a multi decade timeline.

[Mike Rowe]

Right? That's inertia. And over time, I guess if it's taking you in the right direction, it's your friend. But again, it just feels like all the old rules are exactly that. What did it feel like watching the Ukraine thing spin out from your perspective, seeing the tech, what surprised you over the last four or five years?

[Ethan Thornton]

That's a great question. I haven't been surprised by the technologies that ended up being important, but I've been very surprised by just how important they are and how excellent the Ukrainians are at implementing them very, very, very successfully. So I was in high school when the Ukraine war started. I was a senior in high school. I've been working on a lot of things that became mock. So like I had this thesis that these Unmanned systems were going to be incredibly important and some idea of what I thought they'd look like. But I thought, as is usually the case, that this would take decades to propagate. So that's why I was going to mit. I was on Air Force roti scholarship. I really wanted to go fly for like a decade and then go do these things.

[Mike Rowe]

As in you would be a pilot?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes. So I went on Air Force ROTC scholarship. I'm still very disappointed that I didn't get to fly. Like, I would have loved to have been born 10 years earlier and have gotten to go do that. But I'm sitting there and I'm watching the war in Ukraine play out, and it just made it so painfully obvious how powerful this asymmetry can be. Like, the Ukrainians by every single account should have lost that war. And they used excellent strategy and very, very quickly built an industrial base that shipped asymmetric systems to radically change the course of that war. And so, like, the specific moment kind of where I in many ways decided to start the company, as in, like drop out and do it full time, was that convoy rolling into Keith and just imagining how powerful some of the products that I really, really wanted to build would have been. Like, if you have excellent precision and can go hundreds of miles downrange for like 10, $20,000, I literally imagine a world where you could take out the engine block of every car in that convoy, not kill a Russian soldier who in many cases are being forced to be there. So you actually do, to some degree, want to minimize collateral to the greatest degree. And so you don't really even have to kill anyone. You just like, shut down their war fighters and they have to leave. Like, they, they have to leave if that happens. And yeah, that.

[Mike Rowe]

Got a tool for that in your bag of tricks? Yes, we have a picture of that thing.

[Ethan Thornton]

No, no, no, we don't have that. But I mean, that's one of the missions, right? And this is what the Pentagon does now is like, here's a mission, go engineer a system around it.

[Mike Rowe]

How many engineers working for you?

[Ethan Thornton]

It's probably close to 220 now.

[Mike Rowe]

How many total employees?

[Ethan Thornton]

About 400.

[Mike Rowe]

So you're in high school, you want to fly, you're looking at the Ukraine thing spin out. You got some sort of scholarship to mit. I guess at this point you're a teal fellow.

[Ethan Thornton]

I was. That was actually after I'd started the company. So basically, path I grew up, I really wanted to be a doctor, actually. So I'd really wanted to be a neuroscientist, neurosurgeon.

[Mike Rowe]

You don't know what the hell to do with yourself, do you? I mean, really.

[Ethan Thornton]

I'd done. I'd gotten a research kind of opportunity, summer coming out of my sophomore year, and I was like, all in. Like, that was the path I was going to be on.

[Mike Rowe]

This high school.

[Ethan Thornton]

This high school, Texas. Yes. What town this would have been. So it was at. It would have been in San Antonio. I was growing up In Barney, about 30 minutes from San Antonio. But then Covid happened and everything shut down. So then I was super bored, Dug a hole in the ground, got some coal, started forging knives, and then kind of turned that into like a knife making business.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, I love it. I just love it. All right. I mean, gosh. I mean, this is so many unintended, consequential moments. I mean, this is. So you're a product of the war in Ukraine, Covid, and I guess some. What is it?

[Mark]

Boredom.

[Mike Rowe]

Boredom, yeah. You get bored and you got a, like this manufacturing itch. You got to make something.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, I don't think I've ever been bored. I just find things to do quite quickly. And yeah, when Covid happened, that was like the thing to do. So I started doing that. And that got me obsessed with, like, mechanical and aerospace engineering. I had a bunch of family members in defense, so this wasn't like a new thing I was thinking about. But yeah, I started a company. Say company is like my buddies, and I like making knives. It's not. Not anything special doing, like, knives and furniture and stuff. And then.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, there's your name right there, man. Knives and furniture and stuff on a big old billboard, right. Put it down by the stuckies. In between the target, the Costco knives and furniture and stuff. All right, so you're making. What kind of furniture you make?

[Ethan Thornton]

I was kind of bad at making furniture. I'd make, like. I'd make tables. I made some bar stools, a lot of cutting boards. It was mostly knives. I really love making knives. So I'd make like kitchen knives. I made throwing axes. Some one off person would hire me to design them a sword, and I'd make that on occasion. But I like kitchen knives a lot. And so. Yeah, and then war in Ukraine starts, and I'd use that money to basically fund, like, some engineering projects on, like, stuff that I.

[Mike Rowe]

Your knife and furniture. Money.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

Okay. It's tough.

[Ethan Thornton]

Don't forget the stuff.

[Mike Rowe]

Never forget the stuff. Yeah. You know what? I'm going to dig a little Deeper into the stuff. It's a good point, Chuck. It's some troubling little parenthetical you've got in your title there.

[Ethan Thornton]

No bad parts of the stuff. It was just stuff.

[Mike Rowe]

Weapons. So I mean, I guess technically a knife. Well, a knife is a tool. Anything could be a weapon, I suppose. But what was the first weapon you ever made?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, it would have been. And I've talked a lot about this, but like, I made this, like the hydrogen bet we should talk about is really stupid. I worked on hydrogen for a while, but I made this hydrogen powered, basically shoulder cannon thing and then started making like balloons and drones and stuff after that. The hydrogen thing, basically, I had three interests at that time. It was hydrogen balloons and fixed wing aircraft. When I got to mit, so I guess that spring, my senior year, war in Ukraine starts and it's like, okay, I decided to not do the med school path, go full bore on this. Was going to join the Air Force, had a scholarship to go do that. And then the war in Ukraine really gets going. And I realized just how important these unmanned systems would be from the context of how good they were for the Ukrainians, but also how bad they could be if the US doesn't adopt unmanned warfare very, very, very quickly. And so can you just tell me

[Mike Rowe]

about that moment real quick? Because it seems like if you walk that back, was there a day, was there a newscast, was there a headline, was there an inciting incident that made you just completely derail your whole trajectory?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, I think one on the tech side was that convoy I described. And realizing just how fragile stuff like this was going to be in the future, one realizing how easy it would be to counter, which is the positive side, the bad side being if we don't figure out how to secure these things, how bad it could be for us as a country. And then from sort of an emotional and motivational standpoint, I mean, it was the fact that like the war in Ukraine is probably the closest we've come to a good and evil fight in a very, very long time. There's a picture, it was like Zelenskyy with his face painted, hanging out with his wife and kids and just thinking about everything he's going through, and then thinking about everything the Ukrainian people are going through, trying to secure their freedom is like a very shocking reminder that good and evil still exists in the world. And that it is very, very, very important to make sure that we can provide sovereignty for the good in the coming decades.

[Mike Rowe]

And you see it as a fairly

[Ethan Thornton]

black and white proposition that conflict specifically. Yeah, look, I don't think any conflict is black and white. I spent a good bit of time in Ukraine. We have a full time team working in Ukraine. There's certainly corruption in Ukraine. There's a lot of corruption. It's a former USSR country. There's. There's a massive amount of corruption. There's nuance to the geopolitical state that like made Putin somewhat backed into a corner, but that in no way excuses invading a sovereign country that has a well functioning democracy that is good to its citizens. And so yeah, I see it as black and white as much as there is black and white in the world.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. You have a team in Ukraine?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes, I have like few people. We shouldn't go down the Ukraine path. Hopefully we can sit down in like a year and discuss.

[Mike Rowe]

It's fine, man. It's really a. It's so fluid. It's all so fluid. Is that another part of your morning? Like maybe during a breakfast you forget to eat, you get some memo saying this happened and that impacts stuff. You can share. Do do do do do do do do do do. The problem with blaming our public school system for falling test scores and climbing illiteracy rates is that blame doesn't do anything to fix the problem. The data is crystal clear. Our public schools are failing this generation of kids and concerned parents are looking for new ways to give their kids a leg up. Who can blame them? That's why K12's career in college prep program is growing in popularity month after month. This is tuition free online public education that actually prepares students for lucrative careers in construction, health care, cybersecurity, lots of other fields that are expanding exponentially every day. This is an ingenious way for students to get the industry certifications they need to hit the ground running and it allows them to earn college credits along the way. Whether they want to head to a university or just jump straight into a high demand trade, doesn't really matter. K12's career in college prep gives them something a diploma can no longer guarantee. A head start. It's practical, it's smart, it works. It's long overdue. Give your student the opportunity to explore the right fit for them right now with K12's career and college prep. Go to K12.comRoe to learn more. That's the letter K the number 12.comRoe the letter K the number 12.

[Ethan Thornton]

Not really. I talk to my people and I try to have people own like a very clear thing in the company. So sometimes it'll be yeah, we have pike flight coming up. This news on, on Atlas. There's an article that came out today actually that I think was pretty hilarious and it was a good article. It basically said like Ethan Thornton is trying to do everything all at once. Not a point of pride for me, but I think if you're trying to get a lot done in the world, you do have to operate like that to some degree. And the article is very fair. There are like bad sides to doing that. There are good sides to doing that. But the key thing is for us, a company, we have no choice but to do that if we want to get done what we need to get done. And if you're going to do that well, you just have to really trust your people. You have to find the right people, you have to empower them deeply. You have to get feedback from them and give them feedback. I think there have been times at the company where we've done that quite poorly. Like you have to keep in mind I went from like auto tech funded the defense business or the knife furniture and stuff, but I went from like my only job ever being like an auto tech to like $85 million investment to like go build a company. And there's like a period where I was very bad at building a company. I'm certainly not perfect and I have a very long ways to go. I think we've gotten better though sort of the trust and empowerment portion. And today what that looks like for me is I'm not critical path on anything. And that's by design. If I were to have to disappear for two weeks to do X, like the company would run well. And so in that world your job basically becomes one set, like a very clear direction for the company. So have like a clear view of the world as exists today and then try to propagate that into the world as will exist in a few years and then try to do that. To say here are the technologies we really, really need to make sure go right. So that's a portion of my job. Another portion of my job is kind of just to accelerate the work that's happening is hiring excellent people, this is raising more capital, this is adding new products. And then the management portion, if you do your job right, becomes quite light once you've built trust with people and it's like a year long period of building trust with someone who bet on you.

[Mike Rowe]

Like who's the, I don't know, the mentor. The last valuation I saw, Mark is creeping up on $2 billion.

[Ethan Thornton]

It is, it's a Good. I think I said it. It's a good, like, emergent accident from, I think, doing the right thing.

[Mike Rowe]

That's a better question. Have the headlines made your thesis more relevant than you thought they were going to be? Or is it an enthusiasm on the investor side anyway to just have a seat at a consequential table?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, absolutely. Look, no one exists in a vacuum. Like, if investors hadn't bet on us, we wouldn't be anywhere. And a number of excellent investors, I'm super grateful. Did bet on us. Now, those people are good investors because they bet on the right things. And so I like to think we've executed well with that capital. If we had gone and burned the first $85 million, we wouldn't have gotten the next X and X and X. But, yeah, I mean, I'm super grateful. Bedrock Jeff Lewis bet it was Sequoia bet super early and then Khosla bet very early. And then since then, we've been super fortunate to bring on more firms and sort of expand that circle. People bet too, right? Like, anyone who joins a company and puts their career on the line to do that is making a massive bet. And look, I think anyone who works at a company like Mock is not doing it because it's a job. Like, betting on a job is one thing when someone can find a new job, but, like, you're asking someone to pick up. Like, this is my mission for the next two decades. Like, when I'm sitting down to rest 20 years from today, hanging out with family and thinking back about my life, like, this is. This is when I did the best work I've ever done. And so you're asking folks to make that bet. I'm super grateful that many, many excellent people have made that bet on the headline piece. Look, I think it is my job to have a good understanding of where things will go. And so I haven't been massively surprised by how important drones have become, unfortunately, about, like, the state of the world and how much conflict there is. Like, that is why I started the company is because I do think we' going into this time of great power competition and with that, more instability in the world. Now, I'm not a pessimist about that, right? I'm an optimist. I think America will get through this, but I think we need to work incredibly, incredibly hard to get through this.

[Mike Rowe]

I read that article, by the way.

[Ethan Thornton]

Which one?

[Mike Rowe]

The one you mentioned that came out today. Oh, yeah. And I don't want to conflate it with one I read earlier I'm not sure where you said it, but it was something along the lines of, obviously, you want to win, you've assumed risk, you're playing in a huge financial market, but if you don't, you were very sanguine about it. You're like, look, I just want somebody to win on our side who sees it the way I see it. And honestly, I mean, that's such a patriotic thing to say that.

[Ethan Thornton]

Thank you.

[Mike Rowe]

That I think. Well, you answered the question. And, you know, you take that as a compliment because it must be true. So then talk about your patriotism. Why do you give a damn?

[Ethan Thornton]

That's a great question. I believe very, very, very deeply in as much sovereignty for every individual in society as possible. I think it is our job as a democracy, and I think capitalism is a tool of this to give people as much freedom as they possibly can. And I think throughout human history, the American Constitution has done the best job of doing that. Now, it's still imperfect. That's why it is changeable. That's why we should each work every day to make it better. It's certainly not completely secure. Like we could wake up in 50 years and that not be the case. Again, why we should fight so hard for it. But I think America is pretty singular. I think the other folks that have done it very, very right did it largely because of the American model of getting it right the first time. I think, like, my favorite example of this is, like, Post World War II, America has the nuke, right? No one else has the nuke. I think if you give that nuke to the Roman Empire, if you give that to the Spartans, if you give that to, like, most other powers that have existed throughout human history, I think you get a very different result.

[Mike Rowe]

What do you think would have happened?

[Ethan Thornton]

I think. I think you would have seen Caligula with a nuke. I think it's dangerous, right? I think someone would have made a very good case to go and invade the ussr. I think someone made a very, very good case to make the entire world America. And I think you have to do that some degree as a great power. Like, you have to accept your responsibility as the great power on Earth, because otherwise you won't be the great power for long. I think, to boil it down, like America is, we're very, very unique in that we obsess about our goodness. And I think most of our greatness does come from that fact. I think our allies fight alongside us. I think every citizen in America, to the degree they're patriotic, fights because we're good and not for anything else. And I think that is actually a very, very, very important thing to maintain in the coming decades. We absolutely can't forget that. So like an example here, I think many people are starting to use make a case for capitalism because it's the most financially efficient engine. And I do believe that to be true. But that's actually not why we have capitalism. The reason we have capitalism is because it provides significantly more personal sovereignty to the individual than socialism or communism or other things. Now I should balance that. I don't believe in like anarchical capitalism, right. I believe in a well regulated capitalist market that creates positive sum environments and make sure bad monopolies don't exist. But I think provided thoughtful regulation, good regulation is built behind that. I think capitalism is both of those things, but the argument for it to exist is the former. And so I think we need to just view American democracy through that lens to the greatest degree possible.

[Mike Rowe]

How do you explain whatever moment socialism is having right now?

[Ethan Thornton]

I think it's very understandable and I think we'll see a lot more of it. So one again, I do believe in thoughtful policy. So one, I think as a country builds abundance, you do have a responsibility to create a safety net around that abundance to a certain degree. Like things that we count as rights today weren't rights 200 years ago. The reason for that is if we had tried to install them as rights 200 years ago, everything would have broken. But today it is the basically cost, which is you grow less quickly as an economy is worth having a social net for people. So like I will say that is a portion of my belief on the political matrix I sit certainly low, but not all the way low on the libertarian scale. That said, I think a push for socialism comes from a crisis of agency when people feel like they can pull themselves up from the bootstraps. And I think the feel is important here and the actual ability to do so is important here. I think both have to be true for an argument for capitalism to be made by the vast majority of America. And so I think first and foremost we're having a crisis of agency in many ways. And I think portions of this are true because it is harder to do so than I think it was 50 years ago. If you track like the cost of a house compared to the average salary, it's wildly hard to do so. And so one, I think we have to fix that now. I will not argue fixing that via the government. I think we need to fix that with excellent technology that makes it cheaper to build houses. That allows like just net abundance to increase. But I think we need to fix that. And then I think there's the separate sense, which is like, how do people feel about their agency?

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Ethan Thornton]

And I think that's also where we're having a crisis right now. So one, I think a lot more people need to be significantly more optimistic. Like in a capitalist democracy, if people stop being optimistic, the entire thing breaks down. So the existence of optimism creates optimism. And when enough people feel like they don't have agency, they actually lose their agency. And so it's a paradoxical thing. And I would never tell someone who's working two jobs and as a single mother with three kids, like, hey, you just have to be optimistic. That's not the answer. We need to fix a lot.

[Mike Rowe]

No, but it's also true, I think that what's the difference between not having agency and not believing you have agency?

[Ethan Thornton]

No difference.

[Mike Rowe]

Correct.

[Ethan Thornton]

And I think there are structural reasons that people make people believe they don't have agency.

[Mike Rowe]

Would you rather be living in a country where the majority of citizens believe the results of an election, of a fair election are fraudulent, or in a country where the majority of its citizens believe the results of a fraudulent effect election were fair?

[Ethan Thornton]

I'd argue neither.

[Mike Rowe]

No, no, no. There is no door, it's only the curtain or the box.

[Ethan Thornton]

I would rather live in the country where the elections are fair, but people don't think they're fair and then work to show the truth that the elections are fair. And this is where if you actually think the elections are fair, it is extremely evil to spread discourse that the elections might not be fair. This is not like a partisan thing, like both parties are completely involved in doing this. But if elections just become unfair, there's also like, there's no way to fix that system. Like that is an immediately broken system. And so first and foremost you need to make sure elections are fair. And then you have to show the truth about that. And that could be politicians, that could be anyone.

[Mike Rowe]

It's a good. I mean, it's not exactly what I ask, but it's a great.

[Ethan Thornton]

Sorry, I might have misunderstood the question.

[Mike Rowe]

No, no, you didn't. You just are so self possessed that you know, the correct answer should be given irrespective of the query, which is exactly right. That's what should be happening. We should be taking steps to absolutely debunk any threat, any belief that something that widespread mischief is afoot. We have to get rid of that for sure.

[Ethan Thornton]

But widespread mischief can also become afoot. And so you also like, it is also bad for everyone to go around saying, you know what? The elections are fair, the elections are fair, the elections are fair.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, la la la. Head in the sand.

[Ethan Thornton]

You need to dig in on which ways the elections might not be fair and fix those, but don't spread conspiracy theories. And if you're anyway, don't spread ideas that it might not be fair if it is fair. So I think both have to be true. This is just democracy. I think, like any power system is inherently unstable. Let's say you're Russia right now and you have a dictatorship. That is a very unstable system because Putin is going to die someday and he will be replaced by someone. And there is a high, high, high level of variance when that happens. And he will die and be replaced someday. And so a lot of people make the argument for like benevolent monarchy. Well, it turns out that is a very unstable system. And so first of all, you want a somewhat stable system, but democracy is also deeply, deeply, deeply unstable. Like the second, the citizens in a democracy either don't believe in their own agency, like they think they have no ability to influence politics, or stop caring. Democracy fails pretty immediately. The issue is it's very hard for an individual to have agency in the system. If 399 million people think they don't have agency and one person thinks they have agency, then the system breaks. And so you actually want as many people as possible to believe that they have the most agency possible. And when enough people believe that, they get agency.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm going to make this relevant to what you do in your day job, really, because I think you know so much of what is awry at the moment. It's trust. And trust in the military industrial complex has been a thing that people have been sweating ever since. Who is it? Eisenhower warned us of it. Right. And so when I think about the general collapse of trust in our key institutions, right? Whether it's journalism, politics, media, government and so forth, like I think I can put it all under the fraud umbrella. People right now are feeling like, you know what, man, I pay an awful lot of taxes and I live in California and it's a lot, but I'll do it and I'll eat my peas. But please don't tell me stories about, you know, these billion dollar boondoggles and all this incredible graft that's going on that makes me want to cheat on my taxes. You know, it makes me feel righteous for thinking that maybe, look, if this is the way I have to fight. So if that kind of thinking, you know, infects our elections, if it infects the way we think about our defense, then what I'm getting at is it infects the thing that you started this conversation by saying was paramount to you, and that's sovereignty. So I feel like when I listen to you talk, man, I feel very optimistic and I'm glad you're on the case because we need. I want to see more of these bells and whistles, Chuck. I want to. I want people to understand exactly what he's building. But I also want to try and make the point that you're fighting against something bigger. It's not just, oh, no, the Chinese are going for Taiwan. It's that. And I want to ask you about that. That's external. It's the rot that's happening right now that scares the bejesus out of me. And I don't know if you got a weapon in your bag of tricks to fix that. It'd be awesome if you did.

[Ethan Thornton]

Hopefully it's. It needs to be a tool, for starters, and not a web. I think it really, really comes down to people like you actually having me on and then hopefully also pushing this to the greatest degree that, like, we have agency. We live in a democracy. We live in a capitalist system. I completely agree with you. A one problem graft, a two, problem competence. And there's a crisis of both in government. And so we live in a democracy. We can vote, we can talk a lot and create discourse that gets other people to vote, but we need to vote principally, I think, in the near term against those two things. Now, there's probably things that come lower than that. Like, we need to figure out how we're going to deal with AI as a country. There needs to be very thoughtful policy written around that, and that's half. And then we also live in a capitalist system. And you and I can work on and invest in and found companies that we think need to exist in that capitalist system. And so I think that the biggest thing is actually folks like you, folks like Sean, who I went on the other day, like Sean Ryan, about the level that we actually have power in this system. And it's, it's. The answer is somewhere in the middle. And I think it often is. There is a massive amount of graft and there's a massive level of incompetence. We shouldn't shy away from that and be like, ah, we're optimistic. It doesn't matter. This isn't here. We need to go and find it. And we need to be like very, very, very objective about where it exists and vote it out on the same side. Things aren't doomsday. Like, we are still the most powerful country on Earth. We have one of the better functioning democracies on Earth. If you look at history, things are better in 2026 than they've basically been for like the hundreds of thousands of years that humanity existed.

[Mike Rowe]

Where is it? Is there any period in the history of the species that you would rather be alive than now?

[Ethan Thornton]

No, I'd rather be alive now. I think our democracy has been functioning in more healthy of a state before, but I think we're a few years of really hard work away from being functioning healthier than we ever have been. And the tech that exists today is significantly more exciting than it ever has been. So no, I'd rather be alive today.

[Mike Rowe]

Chuck, what have you found here? You seem very excited with some action.

[Mark]

That's his website. That's Bulk industries website. So I figured it was okay to put it up.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, go for it.

[Mike Rowe]

What are we looking at there, man?

[Ethan Thornton]

That's just one of our. That's not one of the six products. It's a product we kind of showed a video of. We can scroll down and I can go product by product.

[Mike Rowe]

All right, yeah, you know what, let's just do that. And then we'll have check that box and then we can jump into AI and some other things.

[Ethan Thornton]

Perfect.

[Mike Rowe]

I just can't wait to get your.

[Mark]

Tell me when to stop.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah. So this is Viper.

[Mark]

Okay.

[Ethan Thornton]

Viper is about a six and a half foot long. Please take off. Sorry, maybe scroll down a little more. I haven't been on this website in a while. There we go. So Viper gimbals the engine exhaust to take off vertically. So this is one of our first two products.

[Mike Rowe]

Why is that important? Vertical takeoff?

[Ethan Thornton]

Because when everyone can strike everywhere with drones, a Runway gets taken out in the first minutes of a conflict. And so what you really need is to be able to deploy this from anywhere very, very, very quickly. And the interesting thing here is you and I could deploy this things ourself. And by the time it launches, there's nothing to shoot back against. It literally launches out of the case it comes in. And so we want an army contract to go build Viper. We've been flying it for close to a year and a half now. Goal is to bring it into production within the next 12 months, likely a lot sooner than that.

[Mike Rowe]

What's its primary application?

[Ethan Thornton]

So we iterate on vehicles a lot. So Its application will expand over time. So first application is surface to surface strike the same way. One would think about artillery again, though, artillery, once you launch it, has something that can be back targeted, Right? So if I shoot a bullet out of my gun or if I launch like a missile out of my artillery system, someone can take that out with the drone quite quickly. Whereas with this, by the time I launch something, there's nothing to shoot back against. Now, this flies about 10 times further than an artillery shell with the same warhead. And then it. It actually costs the same amount as a guided artillery shell. So I'm pretty excited about this. Now, this use case will expand over time, and these aircraft will look quite different. But we'll follow the same general principle of vertical takeoff eventually vertical landing, surface to surface, surface to air, and likely dropping things.

[Mike Rowe]

And you're making these down the street.

[Ethan Thornton]

Here we are. Yeah. And. Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

It's so great, dude. Oh, glide. What's glide?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, glide. Glide, we talk less about, but it's a very long range munition. It's the best way to say it. So it's very low cost and can put fires hundreds to thousands of miles downrange.

[Mike Rowe]

All right, but we don't talk a lot about the glide.

[Ethan Thornton]

We don't talk a lot about glide.

[Mike Rowe]

All right, what else you got?

[Mark]

That's glide also.

[Ethan Thornton]

That's glide.

[Mark]

Okay, I'll keep going then.

[Ethan Thornton]

Stratus.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, yeah. So to go back, you were like, what were your things? You were like balloons.

[Ethan Thornton]

Balloons. Fixed wing aircraft. And hydrogen. Now, hydrogen was stupid, but it got a lot of attention early on because it was different. So, like, MIT was willing to help me do research on it. The military was, like, eager to do research on it. But, like, very quickly, once we had the capital to ship products, didn't make sense to work on. And some of my assumptions about hydrogen were quite wrong. Hydrogen sucks. Just generally.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I mean, I always thought it was, you know, a big part of the sun and whatnot. Kind of key to the. You know,

[Ethan Thornton]

I like methane more than hydrogen for hydrogens and a carbon. That's. That's a better way to store hydrogen. I really.

[Mike Rowe]

I don't want to hijack the flow, but, like, when you realized. So, like, MIT is betting on you. You're betting on hydrogen. I'm sure money's changing hands and promises are made and hopes and dreams and stuff. And then you realize you're just. You're just going down the wrong road.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah. How do you, like, where do you put that disappointment?

[Ethan Thornton]

So one we'd always known that the performance of hydrogen would be a lot worse than like viper, which runs on like jed a. That was actually never the goal. The really interesting thing about hydrogen is you can actually make it in the field. So if you imagine a world where all your ships are getting shot, where the grid is down, where all your oil storage drums are being blown up, is actually quite useful to have a source of combustion that you can generate in the field. That. That principle is still true. So we were able to make hydrogen from water through electrolysis. And then we also had this aluminum fuel that was a lot more energy dense than gasoline.

[Mike Rowe]

Aluminum fuel?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah. You, like, coat aluminum so that when you put it in water, it creates hydrogen. So we actually built an aluminum reactor that would make a bunch of hydrogen way back in the day. All that being said, we did it and the performance was what we expected it to be. And it's difficult to manage. Like, it wants to explode, it wants to escape, it wants to break all your metals.

[Mark]

You just.

[Mike Rowe]

You just can't trust a hydrogen molecule.

[Ethan Thornton]

You can't, you can't. You want to, especially a lot of them.

[Mike Rowe]

So you go, okay, no, I'm not gonna. Yeah, I'm not gonna do this.

[Ethan Thornton]

Really what it came down to was I think the timeline that matters, and I've thought this for a while is like, 2027, 2028. One could make hydrogen make sense for those applications. You can solve the safety problems, you can solve the cost problems, you can make performance and range. But it's just, it's such a research bet that it doesn't make sense on a time frame.

[Mike Rowe]

Let somebody else do it. You got balloons to build?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes, lots of balloons.

[Mike Rowe]

So this thing is called a what?

[Mark]

Which one?

[Ethan Thornton]

Stratus.

[Mike Rowe]

That's the Stratus. All right. What's it do?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah. So Stratus and we have two different versions of Stratus. This is the tactical version, which is the short range version. Basically, Stratus goes up to about 60,000ft and gets in a certain wind layer to go a certain direction. So Stratus tactical is kind of one way. Stratus strategic, which we're still working on, is two way and can actually loiter in place.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm sorry, I'm not with you.

[Ethan Thornton]

So strategic tactical, one way.

[Mike Rowe]

One way.

[Ethan Thornton]

You can control the way winds cross hatch altitude. So you may have a wind going this way and a wind going this way. And if you can change your altitude, you can actually draw a line in those wins. So Stratus tactical is Designed to be as cheap as possible and make tens of millions of them to go in that way. Now, you can go that way for thousands of miles if you want to.

[Mike Rowe]

So what's it carrying?

[Ethan Thornton]

So it really depends. You can carry a lot. And so this is one of those examples I've talked about where you give a mission set and then you optimize the engineering and you get a platform that looks, like, wildly different than one would expect is probably the clearest example. So, like, balloons are kind of weird, but they're really, really cool. And that they are at very high altitude and on radar, they're very hard to see. And they're very cheap to shoot a balloon down. We've taken stratus up to, like, 120,000ft to shoot this thing down. It's like a few thousand dollars to put up. Could be a lot cheaper as we hit rate manufacturing. To shoot it down is hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[Mike Rowe]

What kind of missile would you use to take that out?

[Ethan Thornton]

So you'd use a big surface air missile, like S3 hundreds, 400 Russian missile.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, those things. I mean, they cost millions, don't they?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes. Hundreds of thousands of dollars being, like, generous, assuming they design a better missile to take this.

[Mike Rowe]

These things out. So this is, again, not to belabor the point, but if people are trying to follow along the asymmetry that Ethan's talking about, I mean, that's a great example. That thing cost a few thousand dollars, and it's carrying something into my space. I don't want it there. And in order to make it go away, I have to blow a $2 million missile.

[Ethan Thornton]

And folks who are very deep in defense will hear me say this, and we'll think of a bunch of other ways to shoot this thing down. I promise. We've thought about those and hardened against those. It's a very hard thing to shoot down. And then you carry, basically sensors and communications.

[Mike Rowe]

So a freaking balloon, dude. Like, you know, this is old, old technology. I mean, it's a balloon. It's. It's like, okay.

[Ethan Thornton]

Weirdly enough, though, this has been the hardest thing we've ever engineered as a company.

[Mike Rowe]

Why?

[Ethan Thornton]

The stratosphere likes to kill things. You want a really cheap, really reliable system. We had to design our own plastic for the strategic version of the balloon.

[Mike Rowe]

What? Can't you call dupont or something?

[Ethan Thornton]

Tactical is an easier plastics problem. When you want something to be able to expand a lot and be at high altitude and be in the sun and do a bunch of other things anyway, Harder than you Think old technology. It was not possible to do this with balloons, though, until like probably 10 years ago. And so the really interesting thing though is if you can put enough of these up, it can sort of form the backbone of your force structure in many ways, because you can sense everywhere and talk everywhere. Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Would you think, what was it? Richard Branson went around the world in a balloon or something or. Yeah, he did some balloon thing.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Have you met him?

[Ethan Thornton]

I have not.

[Mike Rowe]

You want to?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, I'd love to.

[Mike Rowe]

Richard, come on in here. Sorry, he's not here. What's. He couldn't make it. What's next, Chuck? All right. By the way, what we're looking at, if you're not watching this on YouTube, and you should be, is Mark's website.

[Mark]

You could follow along on Mock's website.

[Mike Rowe]

I guess you could.

[Mark]

To screen experience.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Ethan Thornton]

And I want to be clear. We hate releasing PowerPoints and renders. So, like the products you'll see have flown a lot and most of them will be hitting rate production and a few of them battlefield use this year. So this is kind of the stuff we've already done or in the process of doing.

[Mike Rowe]

Why do you hate doing that? I mean, that's kind of an industry thing, isn't it?

[Ethan Thornton]

It is, and there are times where you have to do it. So like Atlas, we released a render. We had to announce that contract and we wanted to announce that contract to go and build it. I think you, you need to build the right to do that. If you've never built anything and you're like, here's all this cool stuff I'm gonna go and do. No one's gonna believe you and they shouldn't believe you. And so I think when you're a young company, you need to show not. Not tell is the catchphrase.

[Mike Rowe]

Sure.

[Ethan Thornton]

A lot. This is Pike. Now this pike, as I mentioned, looks vastly different than the next Pike. This was basically the ground based demonstrator. Now one could go build other aircraft that look quite similar. That I think will be very interesting. But right now the key focus is on the long range missile portion.

[Mike Rowe]

Interesting is that all of them.

[Ethan Thornton]

There's two more.

[Mike Rowe]

All right, let's see.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, and this is the like everything all at once article actually being super fair. But we have stuff to do and so. And the programs are going well, we're on time, we're on budget. So this is Dart. Now, Dart is my best answer, and I don't think it's a perfect answer, but my best answer to shooting down things Like Glide and Viper. And so Dart will come out about six months after those products, because I expect our adversaries to copy those products and hopefully look to counter the copies that emerge. So this is as cheap as you can possibly make a missile that can still intercept things that are as sophisticated as Viper and Glide.

[Mike Rowe]

That's your factory in Huntington?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes. So we have a few factories. We have vehicle factory in Huntington, and then we make our jet engines in San Luis Obispo. Warheads and energetics. So our solid rocket motors and stuff is up in Victorville. And then we're opening a big factory that will announce in a few weeks.

[Mike Rowe]

You know what I did in Victorville? I went to an ostrich ranch.

[Ethan Thornton]

Whoa. Different experiences.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I'll tell you, both are horrifying. You know, the ostrich is a heck of a mechanized, weaponized dinosaur.

[Ethan Thornton]

Really quite the bird.

[Mike Rowe]

No, there's so many. Their breastplate is, like, two and a half inches thick. Like, a.38 slug bounces off it.

[Ethan Thornton]

That's crazy.

[Mike Rowe]

They can go from 0 to 38, 39 miles an hour in, like, five steps. I watched one tear the door off a pickup truck. Somebody left it open, and it charged the door. It just ripped. You know, they're cassowaries. Their claws are, like, just talons. The guy that introduced me to his ostriches up there, his name was Doug. He had this big, like, this rodeo belt buckle, and it was cleaved. Like, not entirely, but three quarters of it going straight down was just, like, pulled apart. It was a metal belt bucket. He was kicked by one of his own ostriches. If it weren't for his belt buckle, he'd have been disemboweled. My job was to put a sock over their heads, like, to run in, right? And then they lead him off to a farm where, you know, where you eat them and whatnot. I'm just saying it's pretty much. You and I pretty much do the same thing.

[Ethan Thornton]

I think about similar stuff to that. No ostriches involved.

[Mike Rowe]

Did you watch Dirty Jobs growing up?

[Ethan Thornton]

I did. I did a little bit. Not a ton, but it was. It's awesome to highlight. Like, there's so many things like that that, like, keep our society together, that people just forget about that, like, are just so important to do. And, like, if people weren't willing to do them, everything would fall apart. And so highlighting those people is just so. It's incredible.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, thanks. And I want to kind of pivot and, like, drill down on some of these other things. I know you've got like, what do you got, like investor meeting or something. Are you and Tony Stark have drinks at 6 or something. I don't want to keep you, but since you invoked work ethic and you know, I asked you before about patriotism and the country and you mentioned sovereignty and. Sovereignty and just identity in general. How does like I'm really interested in how you grew up. Before it was knives and furniture and stuff and you know, you said like auto shop. Like who inspired in you the desire to tinker?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, it's been a lot of people. I think one guy I should highlight this probably had the biggest role is my grandpa. So he was, he is a farmer in west Texas, so in Hereford near Amarillo. And he was, who's actually headed off, headed off to college and his father passed away and he took over the family farm. And for anyone who's not farmed in west Texas, the land just wants to kill you all the time. It's like probably not an area humans should be farming. And a lot of people fail at it. And he, he stepped up at a young age and crushed it.

[Mike Rowe]

What was he growing?

[Ethan Thornton]

All kinds of stuff. He and I are pretty similar in a lot of ways. So we experimented with soybeans. He grew like 20 foot tall corn so that he could get like the husks for tamales. He grew blue corn. He used to run a couple thousand head of cattle, sugar beets, all kinds. He like experiments all the time.

[Mike Rowe]

What was his name?

[Ethan Thornton]

So he, his name's Ralph. He and I are still close friends. He's an awesome dude. He still farms. He's probably pushing 75 now. So one, just from a work ethic perspective, like it was amazing what he did for, for his family at a young age. Two, he's obsessed with aviation. So he, I've told this story before. He probably fabricated it a decent degree. And then he told it to me when I was like 8. And I'm sure I'm going to fabricate it more. But he, when he was like 21, took off on like a three week ride around the country on his Harley. And he's coming back into town and he sees this dude flying an ultralight, which is a very small aircraft, basically a kite with a motor strapped to it that you don't need a license to fly. I mean he trades this dude, his bike for the ultralight and gets really, really into flying ultralights. My mom actually growing up. So he's one of the first like organic farmers in Texas. He like kind of helped Create that push. And he couldn't spray pesticide, and he needed to kill all these bugs. So he found a supplier for lace wings down in, like, Mexico. And he'd have all these lace wings shipped on these cards. So I got like 2000 acres to drop these cards over. So actually wired.

[Mike Rowe]

Explain what a lace wing is.

[Ethan Thornton]

It's a small bug. It looks like a big fly that, like, eats aphids and other bad bugs that destroy your crops. So he actually wired a car seat to the back of the ultralight and put my mom in it when she was like, six. And they would fly around the farm, dropping these cards of lace wings all over the farm.

[Mike Rowe]

And so your mom was a bombardier, basically.

[Ethan Thornton]

She was. She was. And then she actually, in many ways, started my family's obsession with aerospace. So she got, based on a lot of that really, really, really into wanting to fly. And the rest of the family, because of that, really, really wanted to fly. And so they started building kit aircraft. So like, experimental aircraft that they build. So he has three, three sons. Ralph, Shelly, and then Nathan's the oldest. My mom, Tamara is middle. And then Christopher's the youngest. And when they were in high school, they built this plane. And he had no college degree. It's, like, amazing what he's been able to do. One of the smartest people I know, they built this plane. They got really into aerospace engineering, and then they built another plane, and they just kind of kept doing that. That's kind of where my family's love for aviation came from. And then I, growing up, would spend a few weeks on the farm every summer, and we go check wells, and I'd help them fix stuff in the morning. So we wake up at 4, go do all that. And then by like noon, It'd be like 110 outside. So we'd mess around in the barn and work on stuff. So either help him build planes, go play Call of Duty. Go. I mean, we built a. Like a bomb one time. We went and got tannerite and then put a bunch of gasoline on it. I don't know if, you know, like a thermobaric bomb. It's a type of bomb.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, I know tannerite. I did blow up some of that once on a place called Demolition Ranch,

[Ethan Thornton]

which is actually in Bernie. Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

Wait a minute. Demolition Ranch is in Bernie?

[Ethan Thornton]

It is.

[Mike Rowe]

You're from Bernie?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

Taylor. Were you in Bernie? Yeah, we shot that. Yeah.

[Ethan Thornton]

Demolition Ranch for somebody's got to do it.

[Mark]

Yep. Demolition Ranch for somebody's got to do it.

[Mike Rowe]

All Right. See, my theory of unification. Mike's. The mtu. Mike's theory of unification is that if I talk to anybody long enough, we're going to stumble across some impossible triangulation. The fact that I've been to your hometown to blow things up and the fact that that's coming out because you just casually mentioned tannerite, as people do when they talk. But please continue. I love this.

[Ethan Thornton]

I don't know if I should get into this, so cut this out. If I shouldn't, I assure you, you should. Well, we'll see if one probably shouldn't, but. Okay, you'll cut it out. You'll cut it out if it's bad.

[Mark]

Okay.

[Ethan Thornton]

Okay. Can you do that?

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, yeah.

[Mark]

Yeah.

[Ethan Thornton]

Okay, perfect.

[Mark]

I think you're describing what Mike did on this show.

[Mike Rowe]

I literally think I did this.

[Mark]

This is a demolition ranch. This is just sort of the, you know, a little clips of everything that happens on the show.

[Ethan Thornton]

It's incredible. It was great.

[Mark]

Yeah. And you were shooting tannerite.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah, yeah. You can scrub forward and find that. But we definitely. Yeah, it's very.

[Ethan Thornton]

It's fun. It's volatile, and if you make a thermobaric bomb out of it, it's a lot more.

[Mike Rowe]

See, there you go. There we go. So what? That's a bridge too far. What makes a bomb thermobaric?

[Ethan Thornton]

What I was describing, and I probably shouldn't get into the details too much.

[Mike Rowe]

Why not, man?

[Ethan Thornton]

You could. Well, I don't want other people building bombs. Don't do this at home.

[Mike Rowe]

Oh, please.

[Mark]

Yeah. What do you mean, oh, please? Yeah, just. Your instincts are right. Ethan, don't talk.

[Mike Rowe]

No, no, they're not. Look, here's the thing, Chuck. Look. See, that's. That's incredible. That is the. Well, we were just trying to use Demolition Ranch to make a ridiculous movie trailer and. Because what else would. What else do you do when you. Right, so I'm not saying people should do that either, but here's what's different. Like anybody, anywhere today who has any inkling, any. Any. A modicum of curiosity. I mean, you go to. You can go to YouTube to figure out how to.

[Ethan Thornton]

That's a great point.

[Mark]

Yeah, I don't think it is a great point.

[Mike Rowe]

It's a kind of asymmetry. It's informational asymmetry.

[Ethan Thornton]

It is.

[Mike Rowe]

And now for the first time in the history of the species, we're drinking from a fire hose. I have. Look, it's all right here, man. 98% of everything that humans have figured out is Accessible if you've got an iPhone or an Internet connection. And so, you know, that's probably relevant in some ways to what you do. Like, how do you hide all this stuff under a bushel? How do you.

[Ethan Thornton]

It is.

[Mike Rowe]

How can you keep a secret? 2026.

[Ethan Thornton]

I think it's really hard to. And some secrets absolutely need to be kept, but most things will just be found out. And that's where specifically in the context of defense, the most important thing is speed. The most important thing is speed. If I can develop a product faster than the adversary, even if they watch me develop it, and they can't replicate that, and by the time they do replicate that, I have a countermeasure out, that's the best way to win. And this is the way a lot of companies like this is. One of the ways that Skunk Works regressed is they kept everything on pen and paper behind all these skiffs. It took two years to hire someone for the company.

[Mike Rowe]

Right.

[Ethan Thornton]

So you kind of have to make a conscious choice between speed and extreme secrecy. Now, you can execute speed with extreme secrecy on some things, and we certainly do that. I definitely think speed is the right outcome. And then you're touching on something that's extremely, extremely important, which is this information. Fire hose. And there will be excellent portions to that. But if we're not careful, there will also be very bad downsides to that.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, your point earlier was the minute you send any of these things into the fray, they're going to be captured, they're going to be duplicated, they're going to be autopsied. And to your point, right, so then now it's back to manufacturing. Like, if the innovation and the associated tech can be replicated that quickly, isn't that bringing us back to a basic manufacturing challenge? Who has more?

[Ethan Thornton]

I think it's who has more faster. I don't think it's scale manufacturing. I think it's flexibility of that manufacturing. So the thing we see in Ukraine is that the assets that are winning that war change every three to six months. And so one, I do think it is possible to engineer at such a speed. The engineering is still very, very, very important.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm looking at your list of tools. We saw the Viper, the Stratus.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

Glide Dart, pike and Atlas. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Do you think of these in terms of a hierarchy? Is there something you. You think could be most consequential to the future?

[Ethan Thornton]

I think so, but I think things are different on different timelines. So, like, one of our things is I refuse to work on an aircraft that I don't see a world in which it could win a war. I think they're all very, very, very important. They're just like Viper and Glide are, like, the most important right now. I think on some timeline, Atlas will be incredibly important. And these things take time to engineer. And so if you want to have the right solution 12 months from now, you have to start today.

[Mike Rowe]

Assuming we agree that it's the right solution, how many should you have stockpiled?

[Ethan Thornton]

A lot. A lot. But I don't think it's as much as people think.

[Mark]

So.

[Ethan Thornton]

And this is, like, not something I would say if I were just trying to build a giant business, but, like, you need a lot. And if you look at Ukraine war, I think they're making 11 million a year. And so it's probably on that number, which is certainly a lot. But China will be able to make significantly more than that. You need the stockpile of the right thing. And I think this is the key point. If I can drive home, like, one thing, it is China will make more. So the shahed is this, like, Ukrainian or this Iranian triangle that China copied, that the US has copied, that Russia's copied, that Ukraine is copying. China will make. They, like, if they wanted to, they could make 100 million shaheds a month. Like, I truly believe this.

[Mike Rowe]

C H I A D. So is

[Ethan Thornton]

S H a D? I don't know. I suck at spelling. I apologize. But shah head with a shot head, okay, they'll be able to do the same with quadcopters. They'll be able to do the same with cruise missiles. If we make it a pure scale manufacturing problem, China will win. The two things America continues to have the advantage on are innovation, specifically taste on what the next big product will be. And this applies to every industry. But I think it's quite important in defense. And one shot head can be taken down by something about 10 times cheaper if that thing is architected correctly. So if. If China's stockpiling shot heads, you better stockpile that thing. But you can spend 10 times less, and that's, like, critical for us to do so. And then the other piece is flexibility of manufacturing. I think folks often think about, there we go, there's Iranian shot head.

[Mike Rowe]

What's it do?

[Ethan Thornton]

So it takes off and flies. Flies a long ways, and then nose dives and delivers warhead. And the US Makes these. And it's important in the US Makes these right now. And we actually help make the US Version of this. But this is like a transient thing, like we can't be making this in three years and so on. On engineering you need, you need to build products that provide asymmetry. And then on manufacturing, you have to be able to keep pace with that innovation. So like, someone could have the full design for Viper today, and I truly believe I could send them the CAD file and it would be 18 months before they could produce it at scale. If they really compressed that, it'd be like six to nine months. What you need to do is build a manufacturing machine that can switch from product to product in a few weeks.

[Mike Rowe]

You mentioned the Second World War earlier, and I forget the context in which exactly you brought it up. It made me think about our country's relationship with making things broadly. And it seemed to be. I wasn't alive then and obviously you weren't either, but it seemed to be about the healthiest it had ever been.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

What's happened?

[Ethan Thornton]

So I can tell you what happened. I can't tell you if what happened was good or bad. So what happened is Post World War II, we pushed into things that are generally considered higher paying and like, as an economy, not as individuals, and then created massive globalization and outsourced most of that manufacturing to other countries. Now it's probably above my pay grade today. If that was the right call, like we got the dollar as the reserve currency, that probably could have happened anyway, but that was, that was key. And then we didn't do a lot of things in the US that require someone to sit at a desk for like 15 hours a day and do these things. And GDP actually increased because of it. We favored increase in GDP. Well, because of that, our internal manufacturing base rotted like crazy very, very quickly. And so that's the position we're in today. Now, there are advantages of that and there are disadvantages of that. And I don't really know. I do believe in free global trade and I don't agree with massive protectionism. I think the balance is somewhere in the middle. You need to be able to make things as a country, but you also shouldn't be terrified to outsource things to countries that are allies to you.

[Mike Rowe]

But does it bother you? For instance, and this is way outside of your, your day job, but you know, in 1980, I think like 82 or 83% of all the clothing that all the Americans wore. War was made here.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

And today it's like less than 2%. So hey, how about furniture and stuff? You know, there was a time we were, we were like the Furniture capital of the world. I mean, you can go through these old factories like Stickley and down in North Carolina and so many other places up in New England. Not all of it, but so much of it is gone. I just wonder if that's representative. You know, not specifically, but just as a larger sort of.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Ethos.

[Ethan Thornton]

So I think a lot of things are. I'm quite confident on. So one is we could have handled that transition better for the people that made those things. When we made that choice as a country, I think a lot of people got screwed in that process, and I think that is a huge, huge, huge failure of our policymakers and our CEOs. Like, I, again, I'm libertarian. I don't believe in a massive government. But, like, that could have been done better. I think the next is, you can't do that on defense. The fact that when you look at the F35, a lot of those parts actually come out of China is completely, completely broken. And so, one, we could have done it better. Two, should have come out of. Shouldn't have happened to defense. Like, we should have been very, very careful about making sure this doesn't happen in defense. Now, I want to see a world, and I'm optimistic about seeing a world in two decades where America moves more atoms than any other country on Earth. But you also can't be religious about it. You can't say, like, we absolutely have to make 100 of clothes here. We absolutely have to make 100 of furniture here. I do believe that capitalism is a powerful machine and that, like, there are countries that will be better at making these things and that we will want to make these things. I think it's really, really, really important that we own manufacturing. On new technologies.

[Mike Rowe]

What about independence, like, for the. I mean, from. From energy? I mean, we met at Alex Epstein's energy conference. You've known Alex a while.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, he's a great guy.

[Mike Rowe]

I think he's a really important voice, too. I think he's occupied an essential piece of real estate where he can articulate some of these larger ideas. But it's not just energy. It could be timber. We have more timber than anybody. We import more timber than anybody, you know, and now it's going to be critical minerals. It's going to be polymetallic nodules. You know, Taylor here just got back from the Cook Islands. We're up to our neck in this endeavor to get these things off the ocean floor. Copper, cobalt, manganese, you know, all of this stuff. So it. Like, how do you think about that stuff.

[Ethan Thornton]

It's a great question and I think everyone will be pissed off about my answer and that's probably fine. Look, I think it sits somewhere in the middle depending on which manufacturing process you're talking about. About one, I don't want to be like nationalistic, mercantile about it. Like I think the government is generally a horrible allocator of capital. So I don't want, and this is one of the things Alex pushes for is like the government should not say this is super, super important. Let's invest deeply in this outside of the context of defense. The government needs to do that in defense. But for most things I do believe in capitalism. I do believe that like all boats rise together in free trade. Now if you're going to execute free trade whatsoever, you need a strong military. Right. You absolutely need a strong military to make sure that the powers you're trusting to produce your things don't become misaligned. And there is also in that context of hard power, economic sanctions, tariffs, other things you need to apply to maintain your own sovereignty. You can't just let everything go. We can have this discussion like topic by topic. Look, I think on the timber side is where people will probably disagree with me. I think it's fine to import timber. If it's cheaper to import timber than it is to cut down trees here, I think that's probably fine. And I think the people that currently do that we should make sure have a very, very important role doing something else. Now this isn't like a general statement. Like I made like a lot of black walnut furniture and like I think we should probably cut down black walnut. But if we're talking about like framing houses, I think that is probably if Canada is better at that. Trust Canada to do that in a free trade sense. Now don't incentivize Canada to do that, but just like leave it up to capitalism because the government is a horrible allocator of capital. And I will say that till I'm blue in the face. If you try to solve all these problems with specific tariff approaches or investment approaches, I think you push more towards nationalism in a way that I don't think is good.

[Mike Rowe]

So not a top down solution guy in general. With the obvious caveat of defense.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes. Which I think many folks will take is I'm saying that because I'm a defense company and that's fair to say. I think I also founded a defense company because I believe in the importance of defense. Defense. But like defense is just inherently different. Like it is the monopoly on Lethality that it is the government's like requirement to own. And I think defense is a much wider window. Right. Defense isn't just like make me a viper. Defense is also critical. Minerals defense is also certainly energy plays into this. Like we need sovereignty on energy. We can't get pulled into wars over energy. And so look, I think it's somewhere in the middle. I think general, yeah, general principles for things where the government is the customer that are absolutely required to have ownership on. For sovereignty, which is mostly defense, but a few other things. I think I do believe in like somewhat of a top down government approach. Now. I don't believe in nationalization, I just believe in like thoughtful policy. I think it is very important and I don't think the government should do this and I don't think the government has to do this. But I think it's really, really important that we manufacture the next wave of technologies. I think technology will be an order of magnitude 10 times more important in the next decade than it's been in the last few decades. And even if you look at the manufacturing problem, if America gets really, really, really good at building high production automated factories, a lot of this gets easier, right? Suddenly things make sense to make in the US again. Now that is how I think we need to move more atoms as a country is by innovating our way into efficiency which then correlates to the people who work in those factories because you will still need people in those factories making more money. But if you try to force that top down from a government perspective without that innovation, and the government is horrible at driving innovation. It's not a knock on our government specifically. It's just the nature of big institutions. I don't think you'll end up with that and I think you'll end up falling behind other countries that have thoughtful policy.

[Mike Rowe]

What do you think is going to happen that no one is thinking about? I mean is Elon going to put data centers in space in orbit? Are we going to.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yeah, it's a good question. Look, I think. Yeah, let's just go, let's go down the list. I think one specific data centers in space point. I think I will accelerate in the amount of compute we need and I think that acceleration will be exponential. Now I don't personally know if that will be in space or terrestrial. A lot of people like poke at Elon and he's like, he hasn't thought about the thermal rejection problem from satellites. I guarantee you there are some pretty excellent SpaceX engineers, many of whom I know And I'm friends with working on that specific problem and that's solved. I think the fundamental question that unlocks data centers in space is how cheap is starship? Like, if starship is too expensive, makes no sense. If starship launches all the time and it's insanely cheap, makes sense. Like, I think a general rule is like, don't bet against Elon on big infrastructure.

[Mike Rowe]

I was going to say, are you like, are you bullish on SpaceX?

[Ethan Thornton]

I am, but mostly just because I'm bullish on America. I think it's an excellent company. I have a lot of friends that work there. If I were a betting man, I would probably put 5050 on. And it sounds like this is a cop out. I promise. I'm like, willing to share controversial takes I have. But this is one where like, I think the history is not written yet. And I think it's largely dependent on how, how these people actuate. I think both futures are possible. On some timeline, you will see data centers in space. Like if we zoom forward 50 years, you'll see like a Dyson sphere of hundreds of millions of satellites, like extracting energy directly from the sun to run giga clusters. And so I don't know if it's too early, but it's going to happen. And then you're also going to see a ton of terrestrial compute. That's where I fall on that specific problem.

[Mike Rowe]

I'm going to suggest tangentially that you are a betting man.

[Ethan Thornton]

Oh, I certainly am. I just bet on things that I can control and know about.

[Mike Rowe]

Okay. All right. Just so we're clear on that, let me tell you kind of what has happened for me because just selfishly, I'd like to get your take on the idea. I think Larry Fink believes at BlackRock and certainly others that we're looking at a $10 trillion infrastructure build out in the next eight to 10 years. 10 trillion. A lot of that's being fueled by AI and that's going to require data centers. Now the public opinion around AI and data centers is about 75% negative in this country right now. In China, it's about 85% positive. And I just had lunch with a senator who walked me through what sounds like a very coordinated attempt to manipulate public opinion in this country. That's happening on social media, that's being driven in many parts, in cases by AI itself. And it's working. Says him. What say you?

[Ethan Thornton]

Okay, one, I don't trust any numbers coming out of China. I think it could be 50, could be 85%, regardless. There's a ton of propaganda fueling it. I don't want to become that. It's probably the biggest takeaway, I think. Yeah, I think it's generally very, very true that people are pessimistic about AI And I think they should be like, we should live in a society where people get a vote. And this is where there's nuance to it. If we as a country say AI is bad, we're not doing AI, then China will exponentially increase their economy. So will every other country on Earth. And one, we'll lose global power, but two, we just won't see surplus. That I do think is possible through AI. And that's a broader point. Like, technology is not good or evil. Every technology that's ever existed should be terrifying the second it's brought about. We should have been terrified about, like, the railroad and steel. They built the biggest monopolies ever that, if not for Teddy Roosevelt, might have torn our country apart. And so I don't think any technology is different in this way. It should be terrifying. But ultimately, it can be good or evil. And I think we need to work together to make sure we make it good. And I think right now, the path we're on is quite dystopian in many ways. And so I think it is important that we push back on that in the right ways now. I think it is important that that pushback goes towards fixing it to be right and not just denying that the future is going to happen. We'll wake up in two decades, and AI will be incredibly, incredibly, incredibly important for the way the world lives, their lives. And so we can't say, like, America's not doing AI that's the wrong approach for a number of reasons, but we absolutely should say, like, here's the good future. Let's make sure it happens.

[Mark]

Isn't it.

[Mike Rowe]

Doesn't it rhyme with so much Second Amendment thinking? I mean, isn't. You corrected me earlier. I said these weapons, you said tools. Well, I mean, we got 330 million guns from sea to shining sea. That's just the way it is. You're not gonna put the poop back in that goose. No way, no how. So what do we do? How do we educate? Does that translate to this AI Genie. Wow.

[Ethan Thornton]

Very, very good. This is fantastic.

[Mike Rowe]

I love feedback. Matt, if you're keeping track, how many good questions have I asked Chuck?

[Mark]

It's plenty.

[Mike Rowe]

At least. At least he's freaked out because now we're at maybe an hour, 45 minutes or something.

[Mark]

Like 140. Yeah, let's say 145.

[Mike Rowe]

I love it, dude. I just love it. Just keep going. I'm so interested.

[Ethan Thornton]

So I will say I, I have ideas about the future, but they are no more than ideas and they'll be controversial. And I think anytime you talk about the adoption of a new technology will be controversial. Controversial in some ways. So hopefully a lot of people watch this and I'm sure a lot of them will dislike what I'm saying. I actually want you all to leave comments, whoever y' all are.

[Mike Rowe]

They will.

[Ethan Thornton]

I know they will. I'm asking them to. I will read them. I am trying to form my opinion here. I'm not forming my opinion based on anything other than like what is the objective truth about what is best for like life, liberty and the pursuit of purpose or happiness, whatever word you use there in society. And so these are my ideas. They will probably change.

[Mike Rowe]

Interesting juxtaposition by the way. Purpose and happiness. I wonder if you can have one without the other, but go ahead.

[Ethan Thornton]

Happy to touch on that portion too. But look, I think one, we need a future that is exciting for people in the right way. And so I think, look, there's a future where I pretty immediately cures cancer. There's a future where i100x is the global economy and everyone has surplus and everyone can like put their kids through college and like no one has to work two jobs to live. Those are two pretty long term ones. I think there's a world where pretty quickly I can disseminate information incredibly well such that I don't have an advantage over someone looking on their laptop to consume information. Given that you and I are talking to congressmen and senators like, I think it could create a lot more clarity in society. I mean, minor stuff. I hate doing the dishes, I hate doing laundry. I think I could fix that pretty quickly. And so I think there is a good future to be had. Now what I'm scared of and first of all I should outline the framework. I think you basically have the population, I think you basically have companies. And then I think you have the government. And I think it's important to war game the future that might happen based on the incentives of each of these and they have different power in different ways. So like it is really only companies that get to choose if they ship a product that is like good for people or bad for people.

[Mike Rowe]

People.

[Ethan Thornton]

And I think it is the responsibility for any CEO to ship a product that makes the world a better place. Now on the population side, I worry that a trap of thinking in AI is going to be massive socialism. Like it is very, very, very likely that we push for socialism UBI these different things to exist in the post AI world. It's probably part of a longer conversation. I do think we will see the safety net that I described increase radically. Like I think no one will have to worry about are you comfortable in life? Can you have a house, can you afford treatment for your children?

[Mike Rowe]

Food, clothing, shelter, basic medical care.

[Ethan Thornton]

Exactly. I think in an AI world, those in any case I think likely will and absolutely should increase. But you can't consolidate power to get that right. Like socialism is a trap towards communism. If you push it too far, it is a trap towards authoritarianism. And I think if we get so scared about the future of AI that we centralize its power and this could be nationalization of the AI project. I think this is another important distinction. I early in life and I think a lot of people equate AI to the nuke. We had the Manhattan Project for the nuke. Why not have that Manhattan Project for AI? I think there are certain portions of the defense aspect that that should happen on. The difference is the nuke doesn't tell you your information and the nuke isn't like the financial engine of a country. A world in which the government nationalizes AI is a world in which like the First Amendment doesn't exist and capitalism doesn't exist. And it's, it's a very, very scary trap. Now, do I believe in government regulation of AI? Absolutely. Should AI be able to tell anyone how to like design a chemical weapon or hack X? Absolutely not. And so again, thoughtful policy needs to be written somewhere between those two. But we just need to make sure that we do not become so pessimistic about the future that we push for socialism. Because the things we're trying to see, which is more sovereignty financially, we'll see completely erode as relates to basically everything else in life. And so this is why I like capitalism. The second argument I outlined for capitalism is it keeps power in a sovereign place with the people who build and work for and generally with the public, well regulated, positive, some capitalism. And I'm not monarch, like I'm not anarchical capitalist. So one, I think it is the job of CEOs to ship good products, like ship a product that is good for humanity. I don't believe in massive job loss unlike a 12 month time frame. I think usually when we see these technologies it causes massive job creation. And so I think we'll see overall massive job creation. I think we'll see some job loss in specific industries. I think we will reach a point though where massive job loss happens to absolutely everyone. And I think there's this cognitive trap that you can fall into as a CEO or exec of this company. It's like everyone will lose their jobs except for me because I'm the CEO of this company. That's just not true. Like you'll reach a spot where these things and this sounds absolutely insane and I warned you people are going to disagree with me on this. But in the next thousand years there will be machine intelligence that is smart enough to do everyone's job better. And so everyone faces potential job loss.

[Mike Rowe]

Thousand years or five.

[Ethan Thornton]

I think it's a lot sooner than that. But I think we can all agree on a thousand years. I'm trying to be like, I think we need to just be like post partisan and just like talk about issues in such a way that like regardless of your background, it makes sense from first partisan.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, your point earlier about speed I think is really well taken here. It's very cushy and philosophical to kind of sit back and stroke your chin and look a thousand years down the line or 100 even or really any period outside of your time and probably your kids time on the planet and you know, go ah, yeah, this, probably this. But the speed with which this is happening has not given the average Joe enough time. He's drinking from a fire hose.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes he is. And I was being super wordy there and I can like distill down for each of those three groups what I think needs to happen. Okay, so I think, I think for the population it's like vote for thoughtful AI regulation that creates the world you want to see and push back hard on bad AI, of which I think there's like a lot. And it's probably going to get worse. And that is our job. I think we can't fall into like a socialist headspace there. I do think it is fair to fight for some level of that safety net increasing but don't favor nationalization because we'll lose all of our sovereignty. I think as a company, ship excellent products, as an investor, invest in companies that ship excellent products. And if the first, if the first group is going to act correctly, the companies that win will be the ones that ship good products for humanity.

[Mike Rowe]

Sure.

[Ethan Thornton]

So this is not like breaking the capitalist framework like build good products for humanity and count that people will like buy them and not regulate them out, which I think they have the right to regulate out bad products and then on the political side is why I like Teddy Roosevelt. I think politics has to change massively around new technology and Right. He stepped up early 1900s and the world had shifted a lot. Right. You had this idea of a multi state corporation that could form a monopoly. You had for the first time like massive environmental and health degradation through this stuff. And like he was balanced somewhere in the middle of going and installing very, very thoughtful policy that changed government within the Constitution, didn't break the Constitution, reinforced the constitution by changing government to work with the times of today. I think we could have done a much better job at this. In the era of social media, all three groups. I think a lot of the problems we see today are because we're each fed completely different algorithms and it's just a main line of dopamine into our arms that also can destroy the rest of our lives. So if I could rewind 20 years, I think we should have done things quite differently. But we have the opportunity to do this right on the AI side and so on the political side, like step up, be a good human being who writes thoughtful regulation that is best for this group.

[Mike Rowe]

The people, the people.

[Ethan Thornton]

And that's where the graft comes in. And you also need competence because these things are quite opaque. These, these answers are rarely obvious.

[Mike Rowe]

And if that group doesn't trust that group and that group in the middle, the manufacturers, well, they'll let the market sort that out and they'll sell whatever product is good for the next quarter. And so it's just back to fraud. We have to somehow, somehow there has to be a tool. Yeah. And so I think clean this up,

[Ethan Thornton]

Vote for people you trust. And I think we've forgotten the idea of voting for someone who's just good. Right. Like we vote when a policy like aligns with the policy that's best for us. I think we've forgotten the idea of like a positive sum policy that's best for the country. And then we certainly forgotten the idea that like politicians should be good people you can trust because there will always be back rooms and you have to trust your leader to behave the right

[Mike Rowe]

way and maybe, and maybe they shouldn't, you know, stay in office 60 years.

[Ethan Thornton]

I think that's different. I think it'd be hard for me to disqualify anyone based on age. But as a general rule I probably agree without, sorry with being way too nebulous. That's my answer.

[Mike Rowe]

Five questions. Speaking of AI, so I just, I've started to do this just to see what comes out. But we asked the AI, you know, the AI. Is it all right to call it the AI, sure.

[Mark]

Or just AI?

[Mike Rowe]

5 questions Ethan Thornton has never been asked. If you were born in 1925 instead of 2005, what do you think you'd be building right now?

[Ethan Thornton]

I definitely would have started building. Okay, well, 1920, I would have been 18 and 1938. So I think I would have stayed with like the Air Force style trajectory I was on. If I were doing what I'm doing today, I think I would definitely be building aircraft.

[Mike Rowe]

What skill did you learn on the farm that investors in Silicon Valley simply don't understand?

[Ethan Thornton]

Great question, great question.

[Mark]

That AI kicks ass.

[Mike Rowe]

It does. It's pretty good. But to be fair, you did say, if Mike Rowe were asking, what would he say? So they, you know.

[Mark]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

What I'm looking for is a little credit.

[Mark]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Rowe]

Not all of it.

[Mark]

It's all you.

[Ethan Thornton]

But I think things break. I think when you're on the front end of the tech cycle, you have this like, very optimistic view of technology. You're like an investor in this lab and everything's pristine. And then you're dealing with like 50 year old farm equipment and it's deeply broken.

[Mike Rowe]

Was that the big RALPH lesson for you?

[Ethan Thornton]

The one that investors I think would understand least? Certainly, yeah. I think there are many, many RALPH lessons, but that one I think is big. And then, like, it becomes much easier to advocate for something like planned obsolescence when you're on the investor side. I think when you're on the farmer side, things like that literally make your life hell and become like, unthinkable decisions to make.

[Mike Rowe]

Sidebar. But isn't it such a hell of a thing that, what, 2% of the population is feeding 330 million people three times a day? And the tech and the miracle of modern agriculture is so misunderstood and having such a unintended, deleterious effect on the farmers. I tell Ralph he's welcome here anytime. I'd love to pick his brain on that one.

[Ethan Thornton]

He'd love that.

[Mike Rowe]

I mean, what a miracle. What a miracle. Your. Your pop has seen evolve.

[Ethan Thornton]

Absolutely, absolutely. And we need to keep doing it. Like we. Things didn't freeze in 1980. So like, we need to, we need to keep shipping. Yeah, excellent tech that makes it easier and easier.

[Mike Rowe]

What would make a 21 year old Ethan Thorton reject a job offer from today's Ethan Thornton?

[Ethan Thornton]

What would I have rejected or what do I think I do today that I would have Rejected.

[Mike Rowe]

What would make you reject a job offer from you? Today you're applying for a job, and it's you sitting there.

[Ethan Thornton]

I like working on a lot of things that same time. That is, like, the way my brain has always worked. I like having, like, 10 lines in the water and, like, comparing line to line, and I find that I end up doing. Doing better on those things. I would have really struggled to be like, this is the specific aircraft you're working on for the next 12 months. I think that's probably the biggest.

[Mike Rowe]

So it's back to the notion of just give me the problem, don't tell me how to fix it.

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes.

[Mike Rowe]

Just give me the problem and give me enough Runway. Although apparently you're. You don't need one of those anymore, what with all that vertical taking off. You want to figure it out?

[Ethan Thornton]

Yes. I think we're good at giving folks the problem. So, like, I think on the engineering side, we have plenty of problems to give folks. Folks have problems to work on. I think it's much more. I like a lot of problems kind of in parallel.

[Mike Rowe]

I like a lot of. Write that down, would you? I love that. What's the biggest misconception people have about patriotism among your generation? Wow.

[Ethan Thornton]

Okay, so, first off, I think the biggest misconception we have about patriotism generally is that we are patriotic about America because it's America. I think we need to be patriotic about America for what it does excellently well, and we need to push to. That's what it does well.

[Mark]

That's a great answer. That is a great, great answer.

[Mike Rowe]

Wow. That's very good. If you could force every member of Congress to spend one month working somewhere, where would you send them?

[Ethan Thornton]

I mean, it would be fun to. To work with them.

[Mike Rowe]

What are you reading right now? When's the last time you read something for fun?

[Ethan Thornton]

I like everything I. I do. So, like, I think anything I read is for fun. I hate balance. I hate, like, doing things I don't think are fun. And I think it's important to, like, set yourself on a trajectory where you. Or excited about it.

[Mike Rowe]

So I think you're asymmetrical in that way.

[Ethan Thornton]

Well, I think I'm just. I'm less. Less afraid to be wrong. Like, when I started Mock, I told Ashton, who co founded the company with me. I told our investors, like, there's a 99.99% chance this goes. This goes wrong. Now we're going to execute with a lot of work ethic and, like, be super thoughtful, and I hope to succeed. But like, I think you, you reach that point in life by being completely unafraid to like, break the mold of the way most people live. Like, if you hate your job, quit. And that is easier for me to say than it is for a lot of people to say. And I think that is a problem that we need to fix. So again, I'm not like, this goes for me and I was very fortunate to have an incredible background and I want to work really, really hard to have more people have that luxury. But I think, yeah, a lot of people are trapped economically into doing work they don't like on the day to day to survive. I hope that is not the case in two decades. And if there's like a single thing that should be a case for optimism on AI, it is that like, one can very clearly draw a worldview, a world model where that is not the case. But yeah, I mean, I've been fortunate to have to be comfortable enough to like be able to drop out of MIT and like live in the office for like nine months and be like hell or high water. I will be doing something that is aligned and forget to eat.

[Mike Rowe]

Forget to eat for a day or two.

[Ethan Thornton]

But to answer your question on the reading portion, I'm about to start a book called Power and Progress. I haven't read it yet. I just ordered it. So I know nothing about it, but I was told by someone that it is an excellent tale of basically how technologies are brought to humanity.

[Mike Rowe]

Who told you?

[Ethan Thornton]

The guy that told me was. His name is Benedetto and he is the CEO of Ferrari. And this is going to make me sound super pretentious on the last.

[Mike Rowe]

Not douchey at all, man. No, this is good. No way to land the plane. Ethan, everybody, everybody likes you.

[Ethan Thornton]

I'm not buying a Ferrari. I drive like my dad's old F150. I was talking to him and he's like an incredibly thoughtful guy who's done a lot before joining Ferrari. So like actually largely like incredible background getting to where he is. And he invented like MEM semiconductors, has done a lot of cool things. And we were talking about similar conversation to you and I are having. What does it mean to bring technology to humanity the right way? I think history is, is incredibly, incredibly important as you look to operate. And so I want to learn as much as I can about when it's gone very, very well and when it's gone poorly.

[Mike Rowe]

Three people who you most admire that

[Ethan Thornton]

you're not related to, that I'm not related to. So I think A1 is my co founder, Ashton. Like, so he and I played football together at mit. He dropped out of MIT around the time I did when we had, like, nothing as a company. And I think it's. It's easy to take the risks I was describing when you're, like, CEO of the company. Right. Like, you can chart your own path, and, like, ultimately you kind of live or die by the path, so it's very, very easy to take that risk. I think it is so much harder to take that risk when you're, like, you're not at the wheel and where you have all the downsides to taking the risk with significantly fewer of the upsides.

[Mike Rowe]

Sure.

[Ethan Thornton]

And so I think it was just an incredible filter for, like, mission alignment. Like, that dude walked through a ton in the last few years that I think most people would have been, like, walked away from. And so incredibly, incredibly tough.

[Mike Rowe]

Do you feel like he was betting on you?

[Ethan Thornton]

No. No, I don't think so. Now, he wouldn't have joined if he didn't think I was competent, but I think I could have been working on, like, bullshit.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Ethan Thornton]

Sass. And, like, he. He wouldn't have joined. No, I think he really, really wanted to do what. What was right and was willing to do a lot to make that happen.

[Mike Rowe]

You know what? Let's just leave it there. Never mind the other two. That's such a great answer, man. He's your friend, he's your partner. I mean, that's a. Yeah, that's gonna. I mean, look, if he's as important to you as he is today, think of where you guys will be.

[Ethan Thornton]

School.

[Mark]

Yeah.

[Ethan Thornton]

That's all you can ask for in life is, like, build things together as friends over decades.

[Mike Rowe]

Well, let's leave it there. Speaking of building, I had no idea you were into the knife thing, but we chatted briefly before we came on, and you asked me about my friend Josh who makes knives.

[Ethan Thornton]

Thank you.

[Mike Rowe]

And I'm like, you know, so here, take a look at this thing, and as you open it up, I'll just remind you I really, really appreciate it.

[Ethan Thornton]

I thought you were about to just show me. This is incredible.

[Mike Rowe]

No, no, no.

[Ethan Thornton]

Thank you so much.

[Mike Rowe]

Just know this is a former lineman who now has maybe the dominant brand in the country. And he's doing it all in Missoula. Started in his garage, and now he's got, I don't know, I think 120 people working for him. But. Oh, here's the other thing he did. He made a knife for my foundation. And he's given, like, 10% of every sale in perpetuity back to Microworks. Wow. Yeah, it's like. I don't know, it's over $200,000, but he's cranking these things out now. And that thing is basically. It's a. You could be a surgeon.

[Ethan Thornton]

It is so sharp.

[Mike Rowe]

It's ridiculously sharp. And please don't cut yourself on the air. I don't.

[Ethan Thornton]

It shaves. That's very impressive.

[Mike Rowe]

Yeah.

[Ethan Thornton]

That's incredible.

[Mike Rowe]

Yep. It's called the. The rocker. That's the new one. It's a wooden handle, traditions thing. It's great. And please take it with my compliments.

[Ethan Thornton]

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

[Mike Rowe]

Take with his compliments, buddy. I'm rooting for you. I'm rooting for all of us. And I'm just so. I'm just so glad you're on the case.

[Ethan Thornton]

I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on.

[Mike Rowe]

Anytime. If you like what you heard and even if you don't? Won't you please? Won't you please, pretty please? Pretty please subscribe? Well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead? But please, pretty freaking please, please subs. Oh, please subscribe.