Hardpoints

VALOR Media Network
  • 5.0 (6)
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Every week, former fighter pilots and current entrepreneurs Neal Rickner & Mike Smith provide unfiltered insights into the biggest stories in startups, energy, and national security.

  1. 4d ago

    The Navy Kept a Carrier at Sea for 260 Days. Trump Says That Wasn't Long Enough.

    The USS Abraham Lincoln left San Diego last November for a routine six-month deployment. It has now been at sea more than 260 days with no return date, sailors have reportedly tried to go overboard, and Senator Blumenthal's letter to Navy leadership says the ship has gone more than 200 days without a single port call. Asked about it this week, President Trump said the deployment wasn't nearly long enough. Mike, who flew F/A-18s off carriers for the Navy, walks through what that actually means day to day: flight deck crews working fourteen-to-sixteen-hour shifts in 110-degree heat, hauling thousand-pound bombs by hand, in one of the most dangerous working environments on the planet. Below deck, sailors running the engineering spaces climb ten flights of stairs just for a few minutes of fresh air, and most never see daylight for months at a time. Mike doesn't hedge on the comparison: sailors on the Lincoln are working harder, in worse conditions, than the president criticizing them ever has in his life. Neal pushes the conversation toward the strategic question underneath the human one. The military can surge, but surging for what? With the Gerald Ford having just finished a similarly grueling 326-day deployment last year, and GAO reporting that only about 4 of the Navy's 11 carriers are reliably deployable at any given time, this isn't a one-off emergency—it's a pattern. And if the fleet and its people are being burned down responding to wars of choice, Neal's question lands hard: what happens when a real emergency shows up and there's nothing left in reserve? The two find real disagreement over where the failure actually sits. Mike aims his anger at senior military leadership—admirals who won't say no to unsustainable orders because their careers depend on saying yes. Neal reframes it as an incentive structure that goes back generations, from body counts in Vietnam to endless surges in Afghanistan, where nobody in uniform is rewarded for telling a civilian boss the mission as designed can't be done. Both agree the deeper rot goes back decades: optimal manning cuts, the LCS acquisition disaster, and a shipbuilding budget that's doubled in twenty years while the fleet has shrunk. Goods, bads, and others: Mike finally finishes his backyard patio project and calls out a broader failure of long-term national strategy—from shipbuilding to AI to renewable energy—while also flagging new partnership interest at Aclymate. Neal celebrates a big new contract for Heirloom, is frustrated by the administration blocking billions in grid modernization grants, and shares a genuinely inspiring afternoon watching teenagers use AI to build real apps and books through the Dragon Kim Foundation. Plus reader mail on the show's value and a sharp bit of irony about the airport named for the man who fired the air traffic controllers. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

  2. 6d ago

    America's Nuclear Reactor Made Zero Watts of Power. Welcome to the Golden Era?

    On June 4th, a reactor at Idaho National Lab hit something called "zero power criticality"—energy in equaled energy out. The plant won't produce a single usable watt until at least 2027, yet the Department of Energy is calling this the start of nuclear's golden era. At the same time, that same DOE is blocking wind farm permits that could be generating power right now. Mike and Neal spend the episode separating the real technology from the press release. Fusion—the "limitless energy" version everyone gets excited about—has been ten to twenty years away for the last thirty years, and this test doesn't change that math. Fission is the one that actually exists, but the new reactor designs the administration is betting on need uranium enriched well beyond what current regulation and fuel supply chains support—the same enrichment thresholds that turned Iran into a decades-long international crisis. Every nuclear project ever built has come in over cost and behind schedule, and somehow the industry still doesn't publish the one number that would tell you if it's worth it: levelized cost of electricity. Mike makes the case—backed by his grandfather's decades in the nuclear program going back to the Manhattan Project—that the economics simply favor renewables now: batteries and solar get cheaper the more you deploy them, while nuclear and gas get more expensive the more fuel they burn. Neal, who runs the wind company Airloom, pushes back on how much of this is really strategy versus picking favorites, and flags that Vestas just posted 60-plus percent sales growth, mostly overseas, while the US share of the global wind market keeps shrinking. Goods, bads, and others: the world deployed 112 gigawatts of batteries in 2025, ten times the pace of four years ago—unambiguously good news for anyone who wants gas turbines to lose. Lake Mead just hit its lowest water level ever recorded, and the states that rely on it are still stalling. On the other side, General Dynamics landed a $76 billion contract to keep Virginia- and Columbia-class submarine production moving after years of delay. Neal's got a 162-year-old bottle of Guinness pulled from a shipwreck that people are now trying to recreate, a warning for Trump to stay out of FIFA's business, and an IAEA operation removing nuclear material from a clandestine site in Syria that's equal parts relief and "wait, how long has that been there?" Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

  3. Aug 13

    You Are Not the President: What Tuesday's DCA Incident Actually Tells Regular Flyers About Their Safety

    A missed radio call at Reagan National this week put the president's helicopter in a near miss with a commercial jet. Nobody died. Nobody even remembers it happened by Thursday. Mike and Neal use that as the doorway into a bigger question: is the airspace tens of thousands of Americans fly through every day actually safe, and does it have the margin it's supposed to have? The mechanics get real fast. DCA sits inside the most complex Class Bravo airspace in the country, crammed next to military routes, the Pentagon, and a runway approach that's seconds, not minutes, from some of the most sensitive airspace in America. Mike walks through the Swiss cheese model of safety: disaster only happens when every single safeguard fails at once. In March, they all lined up at LaGuardia, when an Air Canada Express jet collided with a fire truck on the runway and killed both pilots. The country is short somewhere between 2,000 and 3,500 certified air traffic controllers depending on whose numbers you believe, and Mike argues the government's revised, lower shortage estimate doesn't match what he's hearing from an air traffic controller in his own family. Neal and Mike dig into why voice-based air traffic control, largely unchanged since the mid-20th century, still governs a system flying far more airplanes than it did decades ago, and make the case for digital handoffs and heads-up-display-style warnings as an overdue fix. They land on a hard question: does anything actually change until the death toll gets high enough that Americans stop shrugging it off? Founder and operator angle: Neal riffs on why the eVTOL air-taxi boom and drone delivery announcements like DoorDash's new FAA approval look flashy in a demo but fall apart on unit economics once you run the numbers, a pattern he sees repeating across hyped hardware categories. They also cover Elon Musk's ketamine use and the double standard around military drug and grooming rules, prompted by a reader mailbag question about the Panama Canal and Middle East influence. Goods, bads, and others: Mike's excited for Acclimate's sustainability conference in Winter Park this September, disappointed the Orioles didn't make a deadline move and traded away catcher Adley Rutschman, and watching the record-strength El Niño building in the Pacific with real concern for how it'll shape winter snowpack and 2027 temperatures. Neal's happy Arrowhead Stadium got its name back in Kansas City, alarmed that 80% of key US missile interceptors were reportedly spent during the Iran war, and skeptical DoorDash's new drone delivery approval will pencil out economically.

  4. Aug 6

    Nine Carriers vs. None: Why China Builds Ships 230 Times Faster Than We Do — And Who's Actually Fixing It

    China's naval intelligence assessment puts Beijing's shipbuilding capacity at 230 times America's. They already have 370 warships to America's 287, climbing to 475 by 2035. America is projected to hit roughly 317. The Navy's own cost review confirms the newest Ford-class carrier is running 18 to 26 months late. And a company that didn't exist three years ago just got valued at ten billion dollars building warships in a cornfield in Louisiana. Mike and Neal open on how America got here: decades of treating industrial capacity as something to outsource while China spent twenty years making maritime industry a national priority. From there, they get into the real fight—whether the Navy's fixation on eleven supercarriers is even the right math. Mike makes the case for fewer supercarriers and hundreds more smaller, distributed ships, pointing to the roughly one hundred carriers, mostly light and escort carriers, that the US fielded by the end of World War II. Neal pushes on what a blue-water Navy actually requires, and whether America's industrial base can support either vision. The founder-and-operator angle comes through Saronic, the Austin-based shipbuilder that just raised a nearly two-billion-dollar Series D to build outside the legacy prime contractors, in Franklin, Louisiana. Mike and Neal use it to dig into the real lever here: contract structure. They walk through why cost-plus contracting incentivizes expensive, slow-moving builds, why the SpaceX comparison only partly holds, and Mike's blunter proposal—fixed-price contracts with real financial consequences for missed deadlines, or nationalize the yards outright. Goods, bads, and others: Mike celebrates a four-day backpacking trip with his kids in Colorado's Flat Tops, flags a slow sales month as the cost of being an early-stage CEO, and connects the war in Ukraine to a proxy fight between fossil fuels and renewables. Neal marks China dropping below fifty percent coal-generated electricity for the first time, vents about a speed-trap ticket, and raises the eyebrow-worthy detail that AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic found ways out of supposedly isolated red-team test environments. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

  5. Aug 4

    Oil Executives Cashed Out $400 Million Since the Iran War Began. Who Picks Up the Tab?

    Oil and gas executives have sold nearly $400 million of their own company stock since the Iran war started. The ConocoPhillips CEO alone sold $80 million in two separate transactions in March. Another executive sold just over $11 million one day before his company's stock hit an all-time high. Crude jumped from $65 a barrel before the war to over $100 as the Strait of Hormuz, the passage for roughly 20 percent of the world's oil supply, closed and reopened and closed again. Mike and Neal break down what these sales actually signal. Executives sit on more information than anyone else in the market, and dumping shares at the peak is a tell, not just portfolio rebalancing. The two walk through how CEO pay shifted toward stock and options starting in the nineties to align incentives with company value, and why cashing out that equity while still running the company undercuts the entire point of the arrangement. Mike argues executives shouldn't be able to sell at all until they leave the company. Neal isn't ready to go that far but agrees the optics are bad. The debate that follows is about risk versus reward. Democrats are pushing a windfall tax on war profits with zero Republican support. Mike uses the Texas ERCOT electricity market as a counterexample, where the chance of a huge payout during a crunch drives real investment in resilience. The through line: reward should track risk, and oil majors that have been around for decades aren't exactly taking on new risk to earn this windfall. Mike floats a different idea, a national security tax tied specifically to oil price spikes caused by conflict, arguing that if the military is footing the bill to keep shipping lanes open, the companies profiting from that protection should help fund it. Neal ties it back to building Heirloom, where he thinks constantly about how equity incentives are supposed to work, and the gap between that theory and what oil executives just did with their own shares. Goods, bads, and others: Mike highlights a push to hold drone and strike operators legally accountable for unlawful killings, and calls out the tariffs on Canada over wildfire smoke as a betrayal of an ally that showed up for American wildfires. Neal defends the Blue Angels pilot who buzzed a crowd low and fast, Mike disagrees hard, and both flag the mounting off-balance-sheet debt behind the AI data center buildout as a risk worth watching closely. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com

  6. Jul 16

    China Is Building the Factory. America Built the Chatbot. Are We Winning the Wrong Race?

    China is installing five times more industrial robots than the United States and running fully automated dark factories with no human workers. American AI companies are worth trillions and produce the world's most capable models. Those two facts aren't in tension. They're the point. Mike and Neal work through the core distinction that gets lost in most AI coverage: the US is winning on model capability, but China is winning on integration. Its fifteenth five-year plan explicitly prioritizes humanoid robotics and AI-enabled manufacturing the same way the fourteenth plan prioritized EVs, batteries, and solar, categories where China now leads the world. The hosts ask whether a service-based, knowledge-worker economy can turn LLM dominance into military and industrial advantage before China's factory learning loop closes the gap. The military angle gets real attention. AI-enabled machines in Chinese factories are learning generative tasks every day, and that learning transfers. The autonomous OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, act, can be compressed by the same systems optimizing production lines. Neal makes the case that America's focus on model quality and knowledge work leaves us behind on the AI-hardware integration race that actually determines battlefield capability. Mike pushes back with a point about cutting-edge recursive AI, where models train themselves and agent fleets multiply individual productivity, and asks whether that compounding effect eventually closes the gap in the physical world too. The civil liberties thread runs through all of it. China's censorship constraints limit LLM capability and openness by design. The US has its own version of the problem: the federal government has moved against Anthropic specifically while leaving comparable companies largely untouched, raising the question of whether the regulation reflects national security judgment or political targeting. Goods, bads, and others: Mike flags a study projecting up to $121 billion in unnecessary energy costs from the Trump administration's constraints on wind and solar development through 2033, and connects Iranian jellyfish drone swarms to what happens when algorithmic targeting meets commodity hardware. Neal celebrates a skateboarder who crossed the country in 39 days, objects loudly to $75 caviar tater tots at World Cup venues, and shares the story of Merlin, a duck in a Mexico jersey who's become a bigger star than the Mexican president. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

  7. Jul 9

    Europe Is Cooking and Its Grid Is Shutting Down. Do We Know What's Coming?

    Thirteen hundred people are dead across Europe. Train tracks in Leipzig melted, suspending service. France's nuclear reactors are shutting down—not because of an attack or accident, but because the rivers that cool them have become too warm to do the job. The US has issued 31 emergency grid orders in the last six months. The infrastructure that supports modern life was engineered for a climate that no longer exists. Mike and Neal open by examining the engineering problem underlying all of this: when you build to a hundred-year standard, you assume the past predicts the future. It doesn't anymore. Every thermal power source—nuclear, coal, and combined-cycle gas—depends on water cooling that is now routinely outside its operating specifications. The case for renewables actually gets stronger as temperatures rise, but only if the grid can absorb the additional load. Meanwhile, 90 percent of Americans have air conditioning. Only 20 percent of European buildings do. That gap is more than a comfort issue—it's a grid resilience issue. The hosts explore what adaptation actually looks like compared with mitigation, why Europe has historically overinvested in the latter while underinvesting in the former, and what the US does better—and worse—by comparison. The California-versus-Texas contrast receives particular attention: two states that achieved similar levels of renewable energy penetration through completely different policy approaches—one driven by government incentives, the other by deregulated market pressure and significant human cost. Mike argues the Texas model is more durable with just a bit more regulation. Neal contends that free markets work, but only when they operate within clear boundaries. The founder-and-operator perspective carries over into contract law. Service-level agreements (SLAs) requiring 99.999 percent uptime drive enormous grid investments to support data centers that could probably tolerate 99 percent uptime. Mike asks whether AI computing should be explicitly deprioritized in favor of human life during extreme heat emergencies. That reframing has significant implications for public policy and infrastructure investment. Goods, bads, and others: Mike celebrates World Cup tourists discovering America through Waffle House and Texas barbecue, criticizes Marine Lt. Gen. Massiello for testimony that sounded more like advocacy for the F-35 than an objective assessment, and views Ukraine's escalating drone campaign against Russian energy infrastructure with cautious optimism. Neal salutes Canada, commemorates the tortoises of Guernsey escaping the heat as an accidental metaphor for the entire episode, and highlights newly documented research linking GLP-1 drugs to reduced violent behavior—a policy question that few people are prepared to address. Got a take? Email us at hardpoints.show@gmail.com. Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

  8. Jul 2

    SpaceX Can Drop Tungsten Telephone Poles from Orbit. Who Controls That Power?

    Getting one kilogram to low Earth orbit cost $54,000 on the Space Shuttle. Falcon 9 brought it to roughly $2,500. Starship targets under $200. That 500x reduction is not a footnote to the SpaceX IPO story. It is the story. Mike and Neal work through what that number actually unlocks. Orbital kinetic bombardment, the "rods from God" concept, has existed on paper for decades: tungsten telephone poles deorbited from a satellite platform, no explosives, traveling at Mach 10, with the penetrating force of a small nuclear weapon. The only thing that made it impractical was cost. Starship changes that math. The same cost curve that makes Starlink's satellite mesh possible also makes a space-based Golden Dome more technically believable than it was six months ago, and puts genuinely new offensive capability within reach of whoever controls the platform. That last part is the problem. SpaceX just raised $75 billion on a $1.7 trillion valuation with roughly 4 to 5 percent of equity held by the public and 82 to 85 percent of voting power held by one person. The SEC changed its own listing rules to allow it. The same person previously threatened to cut Starlink access to Ukraine mid-war. Mike walks through the governance failures in detail, from security clearance standards to the complete absence of checks on erratic behavior, and asks what it means for national security to be sole-sourced to a privately controlled company with no one telling the founder no. The conversation also covers why the launch business itself is structurally underpriced, what reusable rockets actually changed about the economics of getting mass to orbit, and why the closest private sector competitor just blew up on the launch pad and is probably a decade behind. Goods, bads, and others: Mike breaks down Ukraine's drone point system, where operators earn credits toward better hardware by hitting higher-value targets, turning battlefield incentives into something closer to a flat startup org chart. He also flags Europe's record-breaking heat dome and what it means that the continent with no air conditioning is now the fastest-warming on earth. Neal is fully captured by World Cup ceremony despite not watching soccer, calls out the Iran outcome plainly as getting nothing for the cost, and shares a Ukrainian drone warfare officer's message at Euro Satory: stop building tanks. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

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5
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6 Ratings

About

Every week, former fighter pilots and current entrepreneurs Neal Rickner & Mike Smith provide unfiltered insights into the biggest stories in startups, energy, and national security.

Information

  • Creator
    VALOR Media Network
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    58
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025
  • Show Website
    Hardpoints