00:03
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.
00:13
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.
00:36
And he's 22.
00:37
That's the crazy part.
00:39
Oh, and also he owns a company that he started, which is worth... 1.8 billion. With a B. Yeah. And in other news, his name is Ethan Thornton.
00:51
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.
01:16
And what's happening, I think, in the military industrial aerospace world is this coming together of young entrepreneurial patriots Yeah. Who are dedicated to building the arsenal that they believe we need to fight and prevail in an asymmetrical war.
01:47
This conflict seems inevitable. We don't know when, but somewhere between China and Taiwan, well, I guess is the straight.
02:00
Yeah. But it just seems inevitable that things are gonna get spicy.
02:08
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. Way more than your average 50-year-old. Or 63, maybe. Yeah.
02:24
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, so quickly that our whole playbook has not quite been rendered completely obsolete, but kind of.
02:51
It's getting there for sure. Everything is about unmanned vehicles and unmanned deliverables of payloads and whatnot.
03:01
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.
03:29
And this is the way it's spinning. And at this moment, we are behind in this race.
03:35
Yeah. You're going to have a hard time balancing a lot of what you hear with the fact that it's coming from...
03:43
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.
03:51
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.
04:08
This is the future of what our arsenal is destined to become because we're not going to outmanufacture China. They made a thousand ships last year. We made three. Yep.
04:19
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.
04:37
And I'm not betting against him.
04:39
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. I love that.
04:53
He dropped out of MIT to build this company. Mock Industries. Mock is the name of the company. He was a Teal Fellow, which helped accelerate his rise.
05:05
The name of the episode is I Like a Lot of Problems.
05:09
And that's a direct quote from a guy.
05:13
You know, when he said it, it made me think of every great pitcher I've ever seen, especially the relief pitchers.
05:21
It's the bottom of the ninth. The bases are loaded.
05:25
You want the ball. Give me the ball. I can do this.
05:29
It ain't bragging if it's true.
05:32
Listen for yourself. See what you think. I like a lot of problems. Ethan Thornton, right after this.
05:40
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06:57
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07:06
I know your time is valuable, but I'm not quite sure how valuable. What was your morning like and what happens to you later today? That's a good question.
07:14
It varies a lot. Today, pretty nice. I woke up, ate some breakfast. What did I get up to?
07:22
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.
07:31
So you're still at that point where your metabolism, it doesn't really matter what you eat.
07:35
Yeah, and I'll actually go days without eating on accident pretty often. Really? So like 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.
07:49
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...
08:01
yeah 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 um 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 was a fun couple meetings with my team and so just didn't realize until like midnight um and so ate a bunch last night um so i did that and then i got into work i 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 it's 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 a thousand pound payload about 1400 miles so The biggest vehicle we've shipped to date is 13 feet.
08:48
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 won 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. What's it called? It's called Atlas. 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 U.S. will have the ability to use unmanned systems to strike basically anywhere from things that aren't a centralized location.
09:22
And what are the ramifications that will result as a result from that eventuality that didn't exist
09:31
decades before it's a great question i think a ton and i think it's 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 like this is ukraine 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 of Russia's... Quadcopter is a drone with four... With four props.
10:08
Rotors, basically. Exactly. Sorry. And is this... Yeah, I'm going to do this a lot because I know how fast 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 today.
10:40
and I'm sure you're sick to death of being lumped into oh and he's 22 so I don't want to need to dwell on that but but dude you're you're 22 yeah yeah and so you're 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 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?
11:19
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.
11:42
It's strange in this time, but the guy who was just sitting here produced a movie called Young Washington.
11:51
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.
12:22
Yeah.
12:23
And they're doing the coolest stuff there is. And the most important.
12:27
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. You worried? Do I worry? Are you worried about the future?
12:41
I am. I think it's important to be institutionally optimistic about America, but not so institutionally optimistic that you have like 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, like 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.
13:13
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.
13:43
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 like 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.
14:14
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.
14:27
You see democracy be stressed when there's great power competition. You see democracy be stressed incredibly whenever there's radical technological change.
14:35
What was the first one you called peer what?
14:38
Great power competition with China and near-peer warfare.
14:40
Near-peer. Yes. I don't know the term. How'd that evolve? What's it mean?
14:44
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 now. Right. But it does mean that you exist in a geopolitical landscape of two parties that are actuating.
15:09
Is it fair to think of this as near pure when they made a thousand ships last year and we made three?
15:15
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 pure. I think if you assess certain aspects, we're far ahead. And if you assess others, we're far behind. So certainly like raw manufacturing horsepower, we're way behind. We're probably more behind than America's been since like the mid 1800s.
15:34
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.
15:49
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?
16:11
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.
16:42
And that's really what I found in Mach to do out of the gate.
16:46
Asymmetry through innovation is fancy talk for saying... Sorry, I apologize. No, man. Look, I don't want you to edit anything.
16:55
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. Yeah. Right? 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 board?
17:26
Exactly. And so look, I think the best way to think about exactly what I'm saying is I think by properly...
17:33
pushing as fast as possible on drone development. You can have things where if I spend a dollar in your China and 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.
17:50
So back to Ukraine, you're talking about these, would you call them quadcopters? Quadcopters. Right. So they're basically brought in 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?
18:08
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. And each one of those can go about 1,000 miles and disable a ship.
18:40
And those things cost hundreds of thousands to make compared to hundreds of millions, depending on the type of ship you're talking about.
18:45
Chuck, you got a pike in there somewhere? Yeah, it's near the end of the list, though.
18:50
Oh, yeah. So 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.
18:59
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.
19:05
Well, what's the old version of Pike look like? Okay, I'll pull it up. Yeah.
19:09
Because, you know, and you also mentioned Atlas. And I want...
19:13
How do I say this right?
19:16
Yes. 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, that's impossible. Did you ever read Ender's game? Oh, yeah, one of my favorite books. Oh, Orson Scott Card. Yes.
19:31
He has, I mean, there are a lot of books in, like, the Ender series. They're all incredible.
19:35
Dumb.
19:39
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20:17
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, hoodies, tees, denim, all built to be worn year after year. At American-Giant.com slash Mike. It's quality you can feel. And a true American success story you can be proud to support.
20:49
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20:58
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21:07
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. Third. He was a third.
21:18
And he basically has this facility.
21:21
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. Yes. He's basically the unknowing general in some intergalactic war. Yes.
21:38
Yeah, man. When did you read that?
21:41
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.
21:50
That's not a second grade book, dude.
21:52
Wow. It's a good book, though.
21:54
Yeah.
21:55
Oh, you know, somebody gave me Lord of the Flies in the sixth grade, which I read. It's another good book. Scared the hell out of me.
22:01
It's important to read both of those books. You shouldn't read Ender's Game without reading Lord of the Flies.
22:05
And you shouldn't 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. Yeah.
22:25
I think you need to think of it as physics and 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.
22:37
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 ideate products.
22:46
What's that thing do?
22:47
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.
23:03
It's generally the same architecture, and that 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. How big is this? That aircraft is about nine feet long. Okay.
23:21
That's important to point out, because if you don't have any... You ought to put like a Stretch Armstrong or some sort of thing next to it to give it some kind of scale. But it's only nine feet long.
23:30
yes i mean and it can hump a thousand pounds how far so it's it's a i shouldn't disclose exact payload it's smaller than a thousand pounds but a thousand miles um okay 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 two so the way we think about block two vehicles is full performance and so the block two will look very very very different than this one It actually, so this one took off from a runway, that one will use a solid rocket motor to launch, has folding wings, has folding tails. It's more of like a tube launched thing.
24:02
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 rate. 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 um i think block two will be done on about that timeline um block three once you're in manufacturing takes a bit longer and hopefully we compress that over time how much but how much time no how much money what do these things cost So the goal is hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that really depends.
24:53
A lot of your cost is in the jet engine. A lot of your cost is 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 sorry good 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 um up to still hundreds of thousands of dollars on the sophisticated end
25:37
How should I think about the Pike?
25:39
Is it the Pike or just Pike? I don't know. You tell me. You don't care. All right. I hereby christen it the Pike.
25:48
How should I think about it in terms of what it's comparable to? What's it replacing, if anything?
25:55
So we have different products that are different levels of novel. And so we have stuff like Glide that is like very, very different than anything that's existed before. Same applies for Stratus. And we can pull up pictures of these things. Yeah.
26:06
Yeah. Give me a Glide.
26:08
Hike, real quick, if you want me to stay on it.
26:10
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's quite similar to the existing cruise missiles we have. Ah. 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 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.
26:42
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. What's a cruise missile cost? So a Tomahawk, which is our main cruise missile, or a JASM costs on the order of like $2 to $3 million.
27:02
So my goal is to be about an order of magnitude cheaper than that.
27:05
By 10th, it sounds like. Yes, that's the goal.
27:09
That said, we won't be the only player on Pyke. The thing is, I think we could all make Pykes. GM could retool tomorrow to make Pykes, and I don't think we'll have enough. And so there are specific products where we really try to like change thinking and bring in like 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. The actual numbers are classified, but it's a massive number of cruise missiles. Do you know the number?
27:33
I know it's classified.
27:34
I don't have a clearance.
27:36
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 as a 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.
28:08
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?
28:28
Delivering straight. So we're our own prime. I hate the word prime. I never want to be a prime.
28:32
Subprime doesn't work.
28:34
But yes, we are our own prime with the government on our programs. Now, that said, we are a supplier to a number of those companies. So MOC's model, I view defense as like very much non-zero-sum. Like if we win, other players in the market win. At two levels. One level is like we're all on the same team, right? Like our job is to deliver 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 Pyke so Xplayer can't make something like Pyke. Past that, though, as a company, they're never going to allow there to be a monopoly, right?
29:08
The government has been 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 and to startups.
29:31
Gotcha.
29:32
Okay.
29:34
So who do you think of as a cohort? I mean, Lockheed's too big. Is it Anduril? What about Apex, people who are also manufacturing like those satellites at scale?
29:46
Yes.
29:46
I feel like everything you're saying is underpinned by an enthusiasm or a willingness or at least an ability
29:55
to just make a bunch of them like we need a lot of stuff which opens up the whole stockpiling question 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 platforms 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 in hundreds of thousands of units also within a matter of months.
30:29
Now, companies looking to do a similar thing, it's really us. Andrel is certainly a player there. Shield AI is a player there.
30:36
in like the multi-domain specifically in the air context it's kind of those three you have castellian on the hypersonic side you have sironic 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 each take a very different slice of the problem so like mock is much more manufacturing centric and we tend to start at a component and hardware level Andrel 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.
31:07
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.
31:28
So you're talking about speciality in like the whole pie. Did the pie get divvied up? Like, did you guys have a retreat somewhere and decide, 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?
31:46
It's definitely more of the latter. And I think we will compete with each other. So, like, Anderil has a competitive product called Barracuda, and we will compete. Now, I think that's a very good thing, and I don't think it's zero-sum competition.
31:59
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 U.S. 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 pretty obsessed with manufacturing and hardware engineering.
32:19
So credit where it's due. You're giving props to the government for encouraging the kind of competition that has got us to where we are. But...
32:30
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 F-35? 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?
33:12
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34:33
I think in certain ways, yes, in certain ways, no.
34:35
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...
34:55
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 was this narrative a while ago, which actually makes sense at first glance. That is, we don't want defense contractors to become wildly rich. Right.
35:18
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 enforce that was by setting basically a cost plus contract, which is you're responsible for delivering this.
35:31
You will get paid X percent of your costs on the program.
35:35
X percent of, so the cost isn't fixed. Yes. The government's willing to say, okay, maybe it costs a million more than you said it was going to cost for this missile. Yes. And your profit margin is the plus.
35:47
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.
36:08
Is this how we get the $20,000 toilet?
36:11
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.
36:52
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.
37:01
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.
37:08
That's good to some degree. You want specificity on the system you're giving to the warfighters, but it takes the engineers out of the loop. 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 here's my mission set. I need something that goes 1,400 miles carrying a 1,000-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.
37:39
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 position we're in today, which is where you've had a pretty sclerotic kind of...
37:55
defense industrial base that ships capabilities that look very, very similar on a multi-decade timeline.
38:00
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?
38:24
over the last four or five years? 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 MOC. 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.
38:56
So that's why I was going to MIT. I was on Air Force ROTC scholarship. I really wanted to go fly for like a decade and then go do these things.
39:03
As in you would be a pilot?
39:04
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.
39:35
And so the specific moment, kind of where I, in many ways, decided to start the company, as in drop out and do it full time, was that convoy rolling into Keeve. And just imagining how powerful some of the products that I really, really wanted to build would have been. If you have... excellent precision and can go hundreds of miles down range 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.
40:07
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 warfighting machine and they have to leave. Like they have to leave if that happens.
40:18
And yeah, at that point, you got a tool for that in your bag of tricks.
40:21
Yes.
40:22
We have a picture of that thing, whatever that is. Yeah, what's that called? No, no, we probably don't.
40:26
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.
40:34
How many engineers working for you?
40:37
It's probably close to 220 now. How many total employees? About 400.
40:43
So you're in high school. You want to fly.
40:46
You're looking at the Ukraine thing, spin out. You got some sort of scholarship to MIT, I guess, at this point. You were a Teal Fellow? I was.
40:54
That was actually after I'd started the company. So basically, I grew up, I really wanted to be a doctor, actually. So I really wanted to be a neuroscientist, neurosurgeon.
41:03
You don't know what the hell to do with yourself, do you? I mean, really?
41:06
I'd gotten a research opportunity summer coming out of my sophomore year, and I was all in. That was the path I was going to be on. This high school? This high school. Texas? Yes. What town? This 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 a knife-making business.
41:35
Yeah. I love it.
41:37
I just love it. All right. I mean, oh 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? Boredom. Boredom. Yeah. You get bored and you got to like this manufacturing itch. You got to make something.
42:00
yeah i i don't think i've ever been bored i just find things to do quite quickly um and yeah when covet happened i was like the thing to do so i started doing that and that got me obsessed with like mechanical and aerospace engineering um 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 uh let's say company is like my buddies and i like making knives Not anything special. Doing like knives and furniture and stuff.
42:26
Well, there's your name right there, man. Knives and furniture and stuff on a big old billboard, right? Put it down by the Stuckys in between the Target, the Costco. Knives and furniture and stuff. All right, so you're making... What kind of furniture are you making?
42:41
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 loved making knives. So I'd make like kitchen knives. I made throwing axes. Um, 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 Warren Crane starts and I, I'd use that money to basically fund like some engineering projects on like stuff that I.
43:07
Your knife and furniture money. Yes, yes. And stuff. Don't forget the stuff. Never forget the stuff. Yeah, you know, 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.
43:25
No bad parts of the stuff. It was just stuff.
43:28
Weapons.
43:30
So, I mean, I guess technically a knife. Well, a knife is a tool. Anything can be a weapon, I suppose. But what was the first weapon you ever made?
43:40
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.
43:57
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 of 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.
44:21
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.
44:29
And so can you just tell me 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 a like an inciting incident that made you just completely derail your whole trajectory?
44:44
Yeah, I think one on like the tech side is 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 Zelensky 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.
45:33
you see it as a fairly black and white proposition?
45:36
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 a massive amount of corruption. There's nuance to the geopolitical state that 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.
46:06
And so, yeah, I see it as black and white as much as there is black and white in the world.
46:10
Yeah. You have a team in Ukraine.
46:14
Yes, I have like a few people.
46:17
We shouldn't go down the Ukraine path.
46:19
Hopefully we can sit down in like a year and discuss.
46:22
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, this happened and that impacts stuff you can share.
46:37
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48:05
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48:17
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 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.
48:38
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 was very fair. There are like bad sides to doing that. There are good sides to doing that. But the key thing is for us as 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.
49:03
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 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 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.
49:48
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.
50:00
Um, 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.
50:18
Um, who bet on you?
50:21
Like who's the, I don't know, the mentor, the, because the last valuation I saw mock is creeping up on $2 billion.
50:30
It is.
50:31
I think I said it. It's a good emergent accident from, I think, doing the right thing.
50:36
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?
50:53
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.
51:15
But yeah, I mean, I'm super grateful. Bedrock, Jeff Lewis bet, 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.
51:47
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 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 the state of the world and how much conflict there is. That is why I started the company is because I do think we're going into this time of great power competition and with that, more instability in the world.
52:24
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.
52:32
I read that article, by the way.
52:34
Which one? 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.
52:52
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.
53:03
And honestly, I mean, that's such a...
53:07
That's such a patriotic thing to say.
53:10
Thank you. That I think, well, you answered the question.
53:14
You take that as a compliment because it must be true.
53:18
So then talk about your patriotism. Why do you give a damn?
53:23
That's a great question.
53:25
I believe very, very, very deeply in as much sovereignty for every individual in society as possible.
53:32
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. 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.
54:09
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. What do you think would have happened?
54:28
I think you would have seen... Caligula with a nuke.
54:34
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 to 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...
54:57
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.
55:30
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 some 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.
56:01
And so I think we need to just view American democracy through that lens to the greatest degree possible.
56:06
How do you explain whatever moment socialism is having right now?
56:11
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.
56:45
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.
57:16
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 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 just net abundance to increase. But I think we need to fix that. And then I think there's...
57:42
the separate sense, which is like, how do people feel about their agency?
57:46
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 is 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.
58:16
No, but it's also true, I think, that what's the difference between not having agency And not believing you have agency.
58:25
No difference. Correct.
58:26
And I think there are structural reasons that people make people believe they don't have agency.
58:30
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 election were fair?
58:50
I'd argue neither.
58:52
No, no. There is no door.
58:55
It's only the curtain or the box.
58:59
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.
59:10
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.
59:22
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.
59:38
It's a good, I mean, it's not exactly what I asked, but it's great. Sorry, I might have misunderstood the question.
59:42
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...
60:04
that widespread mischief is afoot. We have to get rid of that.
60:07
For sure, but widespread mischief can also become afoot.
60:11
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.
60:17
Yeah, la la la, head in the sand.
60:18
Yes, 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.
60:37
Let's say you're Russia right now and you have a dictatorship that is a very unstable system because Putin is gonna 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, right?
61:12
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.
61:35
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.
61:53
And so when I think about the general collapse of trust in our key institutions, whether it's journalism, politics, media, government, and so forth, 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.
62:28
That makes me want to cheat on my taxes.
62:31
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.
62:56
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 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.
63:14
It's not just, oh no, The Chinese are going for Taiwan.
63:19
It's that, and I want to ask you about that. That's external.
63:23
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.
63:34
It'd be awesome if you did.
63:37
Hopefully it needs to be a tool for starters and not a weapon. 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. A1 problem, graft. A2 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.
64:11
But we need to vote principally, I think, in the near term against those two things. Now...
64:16
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. And there needs to be very thoughtful policy written around that. And that's half. And then we also live in a capitalist system.
64:28
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 talking 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's 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, we're optimistic. It doesn't matter.
64:57
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 has existed is there is there any period in the history of the species that you would rather be alive than now No, I'd rather be alive now.
65:27
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 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.
65:44
Chuck, what have you found here? You seem very excited with some action. That's his website. That's Block Industries' website.
65:50
So I figured it was okay to put it up.
65:51
Yeah, go for it. What are we looking at there, man?
65:55
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 if you want.
66:02
Yeah, you know what? Let's just do that, and then we'll have checked that box, and then we can jump into AI and some other things. I just can't wait to get your thoughts.
66:11
Tell me when to stop.
66:12
Yeah, so this is Viper.
66:15
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.
66:23
There we go.
66:25
So Viper gimbals the engine exhaust to take off vertically.
66:28
So this is one of our first two products. Why is that important, vertical takeoff?
66:32
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 these things ourselves, 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.
67:04
What's its primary application?
67:06
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.
67:22
So if I shoot a bullet out of my gun or if I launch 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.
67:35
Now, this flies about 10 times further than an artillery shell with the same warhead, and then 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 will follow the same general principle of vertical takeoff, eventually vertical landing, surface to surface, surface to air, and likely dropping things.
67:56
And you're making these down the street here?
67:58
we are yeah um and yeah yeah it's so great dude um glide what's glide yeah glide glide we talk less about but it's a very long range uh munition that's the best way to say it so it's very low cost and can put fires hundreds to thousands of miles down range
68:20
All right. But we don't talk a lot about the Glide. We don't talk a lot about Glide.
68:24
All right. What else are you going to show? That's Glide also? That's Glide. Okay. I'll keep going then.
68:29
Stratus is one of my favorite products. Yeah, so to go back, what were your things?
68:34
You were like balloons? 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.
68:53
Hydrogen sucks, just generally.
68:55
I mean, I always thought it was, you know, a big part of the sun and whatnot. Kind of key to the, you know, photosynthesis.
69:02
You don't have a lot of hydrogen in us. I like methane more than hydrogen. It's four hydrogens and a carbon. That's a better way to store hydrogen.
69:11
I really... I don't want to hijack the flow, but like when you realized, it's 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.
69:27
Yeah.
69:28
Uh, yeah. How do you like, where do you put that disappointment?
69:31
So one, we'd always known that the performance of hydrogen would be a lot worse than like Viper, which runs on like Jet 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 aluminum fuel yeah you like coat aluminum so that when you put it in water it creates hydrogen so we actually built an aluminum reactor um 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.
70:22
It wants to explode, it wants to escape, it wants to break all your metals.
70:26
You just can't trust a hydrogen molecule.
70:29
Yes, you can't, you can't. You want to. Especially a lot of them.
70:35
So you go, okay, no, I'm not going to do this.
70:38
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 in range. But it's just, it's such a research bet that it doesn't make sense on a time frame.
70:55
Let somebody else do it. You've got balloons to build.
70:58
Yes. Lots of balloons.
71:00
So this thing is called a what? Stratus. That's the Stratus. All right. What's it do?
71:04
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 60,000 feet 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 loader in place.
71:25
I'm sorry, I'm not with you.
71:27
so stratus tactical one way one way you can control the way winds cross action 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 ones so stratus tactical is designed to be as cheap as possible and make tens of millions of them to go in that way um now you can go that way for thousands of miles if you want to so what's it carrying So it really depends. You can carry a lot. And so this is one of those examples I've talked about where like 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.
72:01
It's 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.
72:12
And they're very cheap. To shoot a balloon down, we've taken Stratus up to like 120,000 feet. 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.
72:24
What kind of missile would you use to take that out?
72:26
So you'd use a big surface-to-air missile, like S-300, S-400 Russian missile.
72:30
Oh, those things, I mean, they cost millions, don't they?
72:33
Yes, hundreds of thousands of dollars being like generous, assuming they design a better missile to take these things out.
72:38
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 costs a few thousand dollars and it's carrying something into my space. I don't want it there.
72:55
And in order to make it go away, I have to blow a $2 million missile.
72:59
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.
73:11
A freaking balloon, dude. This is old, old technology.
73:16
I mean, it's a balloon. It's like, okay.
73:19
Weirdly enough, though, this has been the hardest thing we've ever engineered as a company.
73:23
Why?
73:25
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. What?
73:35
Can't you call DuPont or something?
73:39
Tactical is an easier plastics problem.
73:41
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.
73:54
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, you can talk everywhere.
74:04
yeah would you think what was it richard branson went around the world in the balloon or something or yeah he did some balloony thing yeah have you met him i have not you want to yeah i'd love to richard not here. He couldn't make it. What's next, Chuck? By the way, what we're looking at, if you're not watching this on YouTube, and you should be, is Mock's website. You could follow along on Mock's website as you listen. I guess you could.
74:35
I want to be clear. We hate releasing PowerPoints and renders. The products you'll see have flown a lot. Most of them will be hitting rate production, and a few of them Battlefield used this year. So this is kind of the stuff we've already done or in the process of doing.
74:50
Why do you hate doing that? I mean, that's kind of an industry thing, isn't it?
74:54
It is. And there are times where you have to do it. So like Atlas, we released a render. Um, we had to announce that, 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 going to go and do, no one's going to believe you and they shouldn't believe you. And so I think when you're a young company, you need to show, not tell is the catchphrase. Sure.
75:17
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.
75:29
But right now the key focus is on the long-range missile portion. interesting is that all of them there's two more all right let's see yeah and this is the like everything all at once article actually being super fair um but we have stuff to do um 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.
76:05
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.
76:12
That's your factory in Huntington? Yes.
76:15
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 we'll announce in a few weeks.
76:29
You know what I did in Victorville?
76:31
I went to an ostrich ranch.
76:32
Whoa.
76:33
Different experiences.
76:35
Well, I'll tell you, both are horrifying. You know, the ostrich is a heck of a mechanized, weaponized dinosaur, really. It's quite the bird. No, there's so many. Their breastplate is like two and a half inches thick. Like a 38 slug bounces off it.
76:49
That's crazy.
76:50
They can go from zero 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.
77:02
And just rip, you know, their cassowaries, their claws are 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's a metal belt buckle. He was kicked by one of his own ostriches. If it weren't for his belt buckle, he'd have been disemboweled.
77:30
My job was to put a sock over their heads, like to run in, right? And then they lead them off to a farm where you eat them and whatnot. I'm just saying, you and I pretty much do the same thing. Yeah, I think so.
77:42
I've done some similar stuff to that. No ostriches involved. Did you watch Dirty Jobs growing up? I did. I did. A little bit, not a ton. But it's awesome to highlight. There's so many things like that that keep our society together that people just forget about that are just so important to do. And if people weren't willing to do them, everything would fall apart. And so highlighting those people is just so, it's incredible.
78:05
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 investor meeting or something. Are you and Tony Stark have drinks at six 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 just identity in general. I'm really interested in how you grew up. Before it was knives and furniture and stuff and you said like auto shop.
78:43
Who inspired in you the desire to tinker?
78:45
Yeah, it's been a lot of people. I think one guy should highlight this probably had the biggest role as 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.
79:04
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 stepped up at a young age and crushed it. What was he growing? 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. What was his name?
79:36
so he his name's ralph he and i are still close friends he's an awesome dude he still farms um 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 eight 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 and So he's one of the first like organic farmers in Texas.
80:23
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. You have all these lace wings shipped on these cards. It's like got like 2000 acres to drop these cards over. So actually wired explain what a lace wing is. 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 lacewings all over the farm.
80:57
Your mom was a bombardier, basically. She was. She was.
81:02
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 kid aircraft. So like experimental aircraft that they'd build. So he has three sons, Ralph, Shelley, and then Nathan's the oldest. My mom, Tamara's 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.
81:35
They got really into aerospace engineering, and then they built another plane, and they just kind of kept doing that.
81:40
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'd go check wells and I'd help them fix stuff in the morning. So we wake up at four, 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 bomb one time. We went and got Tannerite and then put a bunch of gasoline on it. I don't know if you know a thermobaric bomb.
82:08
It's a type of bomb that's... Well, I know Tannerite. I did blow up some of that once on a place called Demolition Ranch, which is actually in... Oh, yes, in Bernie. Yes.
82:18
Wait a minute. Demolition Ranch isn't Bernie. It is. You're from Bernie. Yes.
82:22
Taylor, were you in Bernie? Yeah. We shot that?
82:24
Yeah, Demolition Ranch for somebody who's got to do it.
82:26
Yep. Demolition ranch for somebody's got to do it.
82:29
All right. See, my theory of unification, Mike's theory, 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.
82:53
I love this. I don't know if I should get into this, so cut this out if I shouldn't.
82:57
I assure you, you should.
82:59
Well, we'll see.
83:03
If one...
83:04
I probably shouldn't. Okay, you will cut it out. You'll cut it out if it's bad. Okay. Can you do that? Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, perfect.
83:11
I think you're describing what Mike did on this show. I literally think I did this. This is Demolition Ranch. This is just sort of the, you know, little clips of everything that happens on the show.
83:22
That's incredible.
83:23
It was great. Yeah. And you were shooting Tannerite.
83:27
Yeah.
83:28
Yeah, you can scrub forward and find that. But we definitely... It's very... It's fun. It's volatile.
83:34
And if you make a thermobaric bomb out of it, it's a lot more.
83:37
See, there you go. That's a bridge too far. What makes a bomb thermobaric?
83:42
What I was describing, and I probably shouldn't get into the details too much. Why not, man? Well, I don't want other people building bombs. Don't do this at home.
83:49
Oh, please. What do you mean, oh, please?
83:53
Your instincts are right, Ethan. Don't talk about it.
83:55
No, no, they're not. Look, here's the thing, Chuck. That's incredible. Well, we were just trying to use Demolition Ranch to make a ridiculous movie trailer.
84:05
Because what else do you do?
84:09
So I'm not saying people should do that either. But here's what's different. Anybody anywhere today who has any inkling, any, any, a modicum of curiosity...
84:20
I mean, you can go to YouTube to figure out how to.
84:23
Very true.
84:24
That's a great point. I don't think it is a great point.
84:29
It's a kind of asymmetry. It's informational asymmetry. And now for the first time in the history of the species, we're drinking from a fire hose.
84:38
I have, look, it's all right here, man.
84:41
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 it is how can you keep a secret in 2026 i think it's really hard to and some secrets absolutely need to be kept but
85:07
Most things will just be found out. And that's where, specifically in the context of defense, the most important thing is speed.
85:13
The most important thing is speed.
85:15
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 like 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. 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.
85:45
And then you're touching on something that's
85:48
extremely extremely important which is this information firehose and there will be excellent portions to that but if we're not careful there will also be very bad downsides to that 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 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?
86:23
Who has more?
86:25
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. I'm looking at your list of tools.
86:47
We saw the Viper, the Stratus? Yes. Glide, Dart, Pike, and Atlas.
86:56
One, two, three, four, five, six. Do you think of these in terms of a hierarchy? Is there something you think could be most consequential to the future?
87:05
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.
87:27
Assuming we agree that it's the right solution, how many should you have stockpiled?
87:32
A lot, a lot.
87:35
But I don't think it's as much as people think. So 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 Shahid is this like Ukrainian or this Iranian triangle that China copied, that the U.S. has copied, that Russia has copied, that Ukraine has copied.
88:08
China will make, like if they wanted to, they could make 100 million Shahids a month.
88:13
Like I truly believe this. C-H-I-A-D. That's how it is.
88:17
S-H-A-D. I don't know. I suck at spelling. I apologize. But Shawhead. Shawhead. 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 scaled 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.
88:45
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 shy 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.
89:06
There's an Iranian shot.
89:09
What's it do?
89:10
So it takes off and flies a long ways and then nosedives and delivers a warhead.
89:18
And the U.S. makes these, and it's important that the U.S. makes these right now. And we actually helped make the U.S. version of this. But this is like a transient thing. Like, we can't be making this in three years. And so on engineering, 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 would 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.
89:53
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.
90:06
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.
90:14
Yeah.
90:16
What's happened?
90:19
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 a reserve currency. That probably could have happened anyway, but 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.
90:55
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
91:26
But does it bother you, for instance, and this is way outside of your day job, but in 1980, I think like 82% or 83% of all the clothing that all the Americans wore was made here. Yeah. And today it's like less than 2%.
91:43
So, hey, how about furniture and stuff? There was a time 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.
91:58
Not all of it, but so much of it is gone. I just wonder if that's representative...
92:03
Not specifically, but just as a larger sort of ethos.
92:09
So I think a lot of things 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. Again, I'm libertarian. I don't believe in a massive government, but 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 F-35, a lot of those parts actually come out of China is completely, completely broken.
92:40
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.
92:58
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
93:18
What about independence? From energy?
93:24
We met at Alex Epstein's energy conference. You've known Alex a while? Yeah, he's a great guy. 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. And now it's going to be critical minerals. It's going to be polymetallic nodules. Taylor here just got back from the Cook Islands.
93:55
We're up to our neck in this endeavor to get these things off the ocean floor.
94:00
Copper, cobalt, manganese, you know, all of this stuff. So it like, how do you think about that stuff?
94:06
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. 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.
94:39
Now, if you're gonna 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.
94:58
You can't just let everything go.
95:01
We can have this discussion like topic by topic. Look, I think on the timber side is where people 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 a general statement. I made a lot of black walnut furniture, and I think we should probably cut down black walnut. But if we're talking about framing houses, I think that is probably, if Canada's better at that, trust Canada to do that in a free trade sense.
95:34
Now, don't incentivize Canada to do that, but just leave it up to capitalism. Because the government is a horrible allocator of capital, and I will say that until I'm blue in the face. If you try to solve all of these problems with...
95:45
specific tariff approaches or investment approaches, I think you push more towards nationalism in a way that I don't think is good.
95:51
So not a top-down solution guy in general with the obvious caveat of defense.
95:58
Yes, which I think many folks will take as 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. But defense is just inherently different. It is the monopoly on lethality that it is the government's 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.
96:29
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 somewhat of a top-down government approach. I don't believe in nationalization. I just believe in 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.
97:02
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.
97:18
Right. Suddenly things make sense to make in the U.S. 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.
97:47
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... Yeah, it's a good question.
97:58
Look, I think... Yeah, let's just go down the list. I think one specific data centers in space point... I think AI 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 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?
98:32
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 and technology.
98:42
I was going to say, are you bullish on SpaceX?
98:45
I am, but mostly just because I'm bullish on America.
98:49
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 50-50 on. And it sounds like this is a cop-out. I promise I'm willing to share controversial takes I have. But this is one where I think the history is not written yet. And I think it's largely dependent on 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.
99:21
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.
99:28
I'm going to suggest tangentially that you are a betting man.
99:33
Oh, I certainly am. I just bet on things that I can control and know about. Okay.
99:37
All right. Just so we're clear on that. Let me tell you what has happened for me, because just selfishly, I'd like to get your take on the idea.
99:47
I think Larry Fink believes at BlackRock and certainly others that we're looking at a $10 trillion infrastructure build out in the next 8 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.
100:18
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 the case by AI itself, and it's working, says him.
100:39
What say you?
100:41
OK, one, I don't trust any numbers coming out of China. I think it could be 50 percent, could be 85 percent. 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.
101:13
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 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.
101:45
And I think right now the path we're on is quite dystopian in many ways. And so I think...
101:51
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.
102:16
Doesn't it rhyme with so much Second Amendment thinking? I mean, isn't...
102:22
You corrected me earlier. I said these weapons. You said tools.
102:27
Well, I mean, we got 330 million guns from sea to shining sea. That's just the way it is. You're not going to put the poop back in that goose. No way, no how. So what do we do?
102:39
How do we educate? Does that translate to this AI genie?
102:43
Wow. Very, very good. This is fantastic.
102:46
I love feedback, man.
102:48
How many good questions have I asked Chuck? It's plenty. At least three.
102:52
He's freaked out because now we're at maybe an hour 45 minutes or something like that. 140. Yeah, let's say 145. I love it, dude.
103:00
I just love it. Just keep going. I'm so interested.
103:04
So...
103:06
I will say I have ideas about the future, but there are no more than ideas. And they will be controversial, and I think any time you talk about the adoption of a new technology will be controversial in some way. 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 you all are.
103:25
They will.
103:25
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, and society. And so these are my ideas. They will probably change.
103:44
Interesting juxtaposition, by the way. Purpose and happiness.
103:49
I wonder if you can have one without the other, but go ahead.
103:52
I'm 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.
103:59
And so I think, look, there's a future where AI pretty immediately cures cancer. There's a future where AI 100x 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 AI 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.
104:31
I hate doing the dishes. I hate doing laundry I think AI 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 wargame the future that might happen based on the incentives of each of these. And they have different power in different ways. So it is really only companies that get to choose if they ship a product that is good for people or bad for people.
105:02
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?
105:35
Food, clothing, shelter, basic medical care. Exactly.
105:38
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?
106:09
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 the financial engine of a country.
106:20
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 a very, very scary trap. Now, do I believe in government regulation of AI? Absolutely. Should AI be able to tell anyone how to 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.
106:55
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 sum capitalism. And I'm not monarch, like I'm not anarcho-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 on like a 12 month time frame.
107:28
I think usually when we see these technologies, it causes massive job creation.
107:32
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.
108:04
A thousand years or five? I think it's a lot sooner than that, but I think we can all agree on a thousand years.
108:10
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 principles.
108:17
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 a hundred even. or really any period outside of your time and probably your kid's time on the planet, and 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.
108:48
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.
109:20
I think as a company, ship excellent products. As an investor, invest in companies that ship excellent products. And if the first group is going to act correctly, the companies that win will be the ones that ship good products for humanity. So this is not like breaking the capitalist framework. Build good products for humanity and count that people will buy them and not regulate them out, which I think they have the right to regulate out bad products.
109:43
And then on the political side, That's why I like Teddy Roosevelt. I think politics has to change massively around new technology. He stepped up in the early 1900s, and the world had shifted a lot. You had this idea of a multi-state corporation that could form of 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.
110:24
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.
110:38
But we have the opportunity to do this right on the AI side. And so on the political side, step up, be a good human being who writes thoughtful regulation that is best for this group.
110:49
The people. The people. And that's where the graft comes in. And you also need competence because these things are quite opaque. These answers are rarely obvious.
110:57
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 to clean this up. Yeah.
111:15
And so I think 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 way.
111:38
And maybe and maybe they shouldn't, you know, stay in office 60 years.
111:43
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.
111:54
Five questions. Speaking of AI, I've started to do this just to see what comes out, but we ask the AI, you know, the AI.
112:02
Is that all right to call it the AI? Sure. Or just AI.
112:06
Five questions. Ethan Thornton has never been asked. Uh-oh.
112:10
If you were born in 1925 instead of 2005, what do you think you'd be building right now?
112:17
I definitely would have started building...
112:20
OK, well, 1920, I would have been 18 in 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.
112:35
What skill did you learn on the farm that investors in Silicon Valley simply don't understand?
112:41
Great question. Great question.
112:43
That AI kicks ass, doesn't it? It does.
112:45
It's pretty good. But to be fair, you did say, if Mike Rowe were asking, what would he say? So they, you know, what I'm looking for is a little credit. Yeah, yeah.
112:55
Not all of it. It's all you.
112:58
I think things break.
113:01
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.
113:14
Was that the big Ralph lesson for you?
113:16
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, like, literally make your life hell and become, like, unthinkable decisions to make.
113:35
Sidebar, but isn't it? It's such a hell of a thing that, what, 2% of the population is feeding 330 million people three times a day.
113:44
And the tech...
113:46
And the miracle of modern agriculture is so misunderstood and having such an unintended, deleterious effect on the farmers.
113:57
Tell Ralphie's welcome here any time. I'd love to pick his brain on that one. He'd love that. I mean, what a miracle.
114:03
What a miracle your pop has seen evolve. Absolutely.
114:08
Absolutely. And we need to keep doing it.
114:11
Things didn't freeze in 1980.
114:14
So we need to keep shipping excellent tech that makes it easier and easier.
114:19
What would make a 21-year-old Ethan Thornton reject a job offer from today's Ethan Thornton?
114:27
what would I have rejected or what do I think I do today that I would have rejected?
114:31
What would make you reject a job offer from you today?
114:38
You're applying for a job and it's you sitting there.
114:42
I like working on a lot of things at the same time. I just 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.
115:01
I think that's probably the biggest. So it's back to the notion of just give me the problem. Don't tell me how to fix it.
115:08
Yes. Just give me the problem and give me enough runway.
115:13
Although apparently you don't need one of those anymore. Well, with all that vertical taken off.
115:18
you want to figure it out 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 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 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.
115:51
I think we need to be patriotic about America for what it does excellently well, and we need to push to what it doesn't.
115:56
That's a great answer. That is a great, great answer.
116:00
Wow. That's very good. If you could force every member of Congress to spend one month working somewhere, where would you send them?
116:09
I mean, it would be fun to work with them.
116:16
What are you reading right now?
116:19
When's the last time you read something for fun?
116:22
I like everything 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 are excited about it.
116:33
I think you're asymmetrical in that one.
116:36
Well, I think I'm less afraid to be wrong. When I started Mock, I told Ashton, who co-founded the company with me, I told our investors, there's a 99.99% chance this goes wrong. Now we're going to execute with a lot of work ethic and be super thoughtful, and I hope to succeed. But I think you reach that point in life by being completely unafraid to 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.
117:29
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 world view, a world model where that is not the case.
117:40
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 for a day or two but to answer your question on the reading portion I'm about to start a book called Power in 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.
118:11
Ah, who told you?
118:14
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 conversation. Not do she at all, man. No, this is good.
118:23
No, way to land the plane, Ethan. Thank you. Everybody likes you.
118:26
I'm not buying a Ferrari. I drive like my dad's old F-150. 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 MIMS, 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 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.
119:00
three people who you most admire that you're not related to that I'm not related to.
119:05
Um, so I think a one is my co-founder, Ashton.
119:13
So he and I played football together at MIT. He dropped out of MIT around the time I did when we had nothing as a company. And I think it's easy to take the risks I was describing when you're CEO of the company. You can chart your own path and 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 you're not at the wheel and where you have all the downsides to taking the risk with significantly fewer of the upsides. Sure. And so I think it was just an incredible filter for like mission alignment.
119:46
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.
119:55
Do you feel like he was betting on you?
119:58
No, no, I don't think so. No, he wouldn't have joined if he didn't think I was competent. But I think I could have been working on like bullshit. Yeah. Sass and like he wouldn't have joined. No, I think he really, really wanted to do what was right and was willing to do a lot to make that happen.
120:16
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.
120:24
I mean, that's a Yeah, good dude. I mean, look, if he's as important to you as he is today, think of where you guys will be.
120:34
School. That's cool. Yeah, that's all you can ask for in life is like, build things together as friends over decades.
120:40
Well, let's leave it there. Speaking of building, I had no idea you were in the knife thing, but we chatted briefly before we came on, and you asked me about my friend Josh, who makes knives.
120:50
Thank you.
120:50
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.
120:57
I thought you were about to just show me. This is incredible. No, no, no, no.
121:00
Thank you so much. 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. Incredible. Here's the other thing he did.
121:20
He made...
121:22
a knife for my foundation and he's given like 10% of every sale in perpetuity back to micro works. Wow. Yeah. It's like, I don't know, it's over $200,000, but he's cranking these things out now.
121:39
And that thing is basically, you could be a surgeon. It is. So sharp. It's ridiculously sharp.
121:48
And please don't cut yourself on the air. It shaves. That's very impressive. Yeah, it does. That's incredible. Yep. It's called The Rocker. That's the new one. It's a wouldn't handle traditions thing. It's great. And please take it with my compliments. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
122:02
Take it with his compliments. Buddy.
122:04
I'm rooting for you.
122:06
I'm rooting for all of us. And I'm just so glad you're on the case.
122:11
I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. Anytime.
122:23
Well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead, but please, pretty frickin' please, please, please, subscribe.
