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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe · 497: Ethan Thornton—I Like a Lotta Problems · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

But I'm sitting there and I'm watching the war in Ukraine play out.

And it just made it so painfully obvious how powerful this asymmetry can be.

Like the Ukrainians, by every single account, should have lost that war.

And they used excellent strategy and very, very quickly built an industrial base that shipped asymmetric systems

to radically change the course of that war.

And so like the specific moment, kind of where I, in many ways, decided to start the company, as in like drop out and do it full time, was that convoy rolling into Kiev.

And just imagining how powerful some of the products that I really, really wanted to build would have been.

Like if you have...

Excellent precision and can go hundreds of miles down range for like ten twenty thousand dollars I literally imagine a world where you could take out the engine block of every car in that convoy Not kill a Russian soldier who in many cases are being forced to be there So you actually do to some degree want to minimize?

Collateral to the greatest degree and so you don't really even have to kill anyone You just like shut down their warfighting just and they have to leave like they they have to leave if that happens And yeah in that we got a tool for that in your bag of tricks.

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.

It's probably close to 220 now.

About 400.

That was actually after I'd started the company.

So basically, path.

I grew up, I really wanted to be a doctor, actually.

So I really wanted to be a neuroscientist, neurosurgeon.

I'd gotten a research kind of opportunity summer coming out of my sophomore year, and I was like all in.

Like that was the path I was going to be on.

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