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

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.

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'd use that money to basically fund like some engineering projects on like stuff that I... Your knife and furniture money.

No bad parts of the stuff.

It was just stuff.

Yeah, it would have been.

And I've talked a lot about this, but like I made this like the hydrogen bet we should talk about is really stupid.

I worked on hydrogen for a while, but I made this hydrogen powered basically shoulder cannon thing and then started making like balloons and drones and stuff after that.

The hydrogen thing, basically, I had three interests at that time.

It was hydrogen, balloons, and fixed-wing aircraft.

When I got to MIT, so I guess that spring, my senior year 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.

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.

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.

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