Ethan Thornton
speaker
1,249 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Ethan Thornton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe · 497: Ethan Thornton—I Like a Lotta Problems · 4 Aug 2026
podcast
Is this how we get the $20,000 toilet?
It is exactly how we get the $20,000 toilet.
And so you need firm fixed price.
You need like this costs X, and if I fail to deliver it at X, I eat that cost.
If I think it costs $400,000 and it costs $450,000, I go out of business.
but if it costs $200,000, I make that money and I get to reinvest it into feeding that tech engine, which is also how you get innovation, right?
It's very, very hard to innovate as a company when your margins are small.
And so what you want is a bunch of companies competing
on a mission set, the best company winning that mission set based on price and capability, and then that company having more capital to pump into continuing to innovate on the next mission set.
So that's the most important difference.
I think the second one is the way these programs used to run is the Pentagon would write like thousands of pages of requirements.
They wouldn't really even tell you the mission.
They'd say, you need to design a vehicle that looks like this.
And in many cases, it'd be quite specific.
That's good to some degree.
You want specificity on the system you're giving to the 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.
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