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.
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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
...to figure it out.
And you end up shipping something that is, like, wildly different and, in many cases, a bit strange compared to what you'd expect.
We'll be right on some of those bets and we'll win those contracts.
We'll be wrong on some of those bets and someone else will engineer a better solution and they'll win those contracts.
And that's really how you get innovation and that's how you don't end up in a position we're in today, which is where you've had a pretty sclerotic kind of
defense industrial base that ships capabilities that look very, very similar on a multi-decade timeline.
That's a great question.
I haven't been surprised by the technologies that ended up being important, but I've been very surprised by just how important they are and how excellent the Ukrainians are at implementing them very, very, very successfully.
So I was in high school when the Ukraine war started.
I was a senior in high school.
I've been working on
A lot of things that became mock.
So like I had this thesis that these unmanned systems were going to be incredibly important and some idea of what I thought they'd look like.
But I thought, as is usually the case, that this would take decades to propagate.
So that's why I was going to MIT.
I was on Air Force ROTC scholarship.
I really wanted to go fly for like a decade and then go do these things.
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.
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