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 months

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 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 and so one we could have done it better to 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

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.

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.

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 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.

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