#286 Ethan Thornton - This 22-Year-Old Built a .50 Cal Rifle Out of Home Depot Parts

18:43Ethan Thornton:What do you think about the pyramids?

18:45Shawn Ryan:What do I think about the pyramids? I do think humans built the pyramids.

18:49Ethan Thornton:You do? You think humans built them?

18:52Shawn Ryan:So, look, IQ hasn't gone up over time, right? Like, you actually had hundreds of thousands of millions of people that were as smart as you and I for hundreds and thousands of years. I think humans built the pyramids.

19:07Ethan Thornton:How do you think they built them?

19:09Shawn Ryan:How do I think they built them? So, yeah, this is where I'm going to make myself sound like an idiot. I'm completely happy sounding like an idiot, but I will just, like... There are things that I believe strongly that I have researched. There are things that I'll put out my conjectures on. If I were going to build the pyramids... Um, look, I mean, if you have a large enough labor force, I'm gonna make myself sound like an idiot. Moving rocks isn't that hard, right? Like, if you've got hundreds of years and thousands of people running a quarry, you talk about cutting stone, there are different ways you can cut stone.

19:39Shawn Ryan:I'm sure they're using stone saws of some sort. They had copper, they had other things, obviously didn't have high-carbon steels. What part of the pyramids do you think are least plausible for humans to have built?

19:50Ethan Thornton:All of it. we did we were gonna bring this guy on we still might bring him on we just i don't know where we're at in the process but he talks about that maybe they were molded like you put it into a form and then like like a cast like you know what i mean yeah that and he was gonna demo he's i think he's gonna demonstrate it if he comes that'd be cool that's that's the only way i can see it happening the only other way i can see it happening is if they were able to harness some type of a fucking vibration and guide you know like if i put a speaker under this table i could you just think the rocks were too big to haul yeah yeah they had ropes you can you can stack

20:34Shawn Ryan:a lot of humans behind ropes i mean this is something we could run the math on we could find like the rolling resistance of the logs they're using we know the mass of these stones

20:43Ethan Thornton:i don't know you think it was humans i think it was humans i'd love to i'd love to think it's not

20:48Shawn Ryan:I mean, that'd be fascinating. And they're very easy things. Like, you can go and figure out if these things were cast or not. Like, you can actually... It's definitely an area that we should be doing scientific research on. And I'm certainly not opposed to thinking it was aliens. I'd rather think it was aliens in some ways. I don't necessarily think it was aliens.

21:08Ethan Thornton:Who do you... I don't really... What do you think about aliens? UFOs, UAPs, all this shit.

21:15Shawn Ryan:I think a lot about the Fermi paradox or Fermi problem. I don't know if you're familiar. I'm happy to. I'm not. Why we haven't seen aliens is like a really interesting. I don't know how far down we want to go on it. You know as far as you want.

21:31Ethan Thornton:I have all day.

21:32Shawn Ryan:Great. I love this shit. Yeah, look, if you go and run the numbers and look at the age of the universe, it's almost statistically impossible that we wouldn't have seen a civilization by now. You look at kind of the hockey stick growth of human technology. Humans have been around, depends on how you count things, but let's say 200 ,000 years in current form. Agricultural revolution, 10 ,000 years ago. Industrial revolution, 300 years ago. Information revolution, 30 years ago. Our output, our population, everything is hockey stick growth. And so if you look at, I think the universe is like 13.2, 13 point something billion years old.

22:13Shawn Ryan:It was obviously super, super hot at first, cooled over time, all these different things. So let's say you've had two or three billion good years, and you've got hundreds of millions of stars within basically the area that we can observe. It's very unlikely. And there's actual, like, physics and math that have been done modeling these things on why we haven't seen aliens, but it's just weird that we haven't, is basically Fermi's paradox. It's a very well-studied thing that I'm doing a poor job explaining. So it then leads to this great filter theory. That's if we haven't seen aliens, there's very clearly a reason why.

22:52Shawn Ryan:And folks have presented hundreds of different great filters. It can be everything from faith, right, all the way to, let's say, it's super, super difficult for single-cellular life to emerge. Let's say it's super difficult for multicellular, eukaryotic life to emerge. all the way up to it's very difficult for intelligent life to emerge. And the scary thing is if you run the numbers, like objectively speaking, we should see aliens just based on how many hundreds of millions of stars are within our proximity and how long it's been. And so there is a great filter of some sort. And you hope as a society that we're through the great filter and not approaching the great filter, but it's an interesting lens to think about the world and always be thinking about what is the next potential great filter that humanity has to go through.

23:41Shawn Ryan:Like, a filter we went through was nuclear weapons. Like, there's a very real world in which humanity used nuclear weapons to tear itself apart, to set civilization back, potentially even to make ourselves extinct. But it's... Anyway, we can talk about what I think the great filters could be. And I want to be clear before we start the podcast. Like, my personal religious views, I think it's very, very important to have an aligned religious and scientific view. This is just the way I live my life. Like, if my religion is making me challenge physics and science that I know exist, then I think that's actually, in many cases, the wrong religious view, because God put us in a place to find this science.

24:21Shawn Ryan:So, I do believe in evolution. I'll say that. I do believe in these different things. But all that being said, there's an interesting discovery recently. We'll see. But they think they found single cellular life on Mars. So, there's this rock that has basically these colonies of what look like bacteria. And NASA, with one of their rovers, has sampled it to such a degree that they're, like, actually pretty extremely confident that this is single-cellular life on Mars. Because Mars, back in the day, when it was an active planet, had an atmosphere, had water, had all these different things. Now, there are two things you can...

24:56Shawn Ryan:And because of that, they're pushing for a Mars sample return mission to actually bring the sample back. It might be politics, as we talked about being... It might be the Mars Sample Return mission got killed. Suddenly, they found life on Mars and need the Mars Sample Return mission back. It might be that. If it is single cellular life, that's crazy, right? Because that means one of the great filters isn't, like, the greatest filter that we think exists was, and we as in people who talk about this, who actually knows, right? Humanity cumulatively at this point is still pretty dumb. I mean, we thought that the Earth was flat until a few hundred years ago.

25:33Shawn Ryan:But right now, we think it's probably like single cellular life is the most probable. Well, that breaks that. And so there are some of the great filters that actually become pretty terrifying, right?

25:42Ethan Thornton:What do you call them a filter for?

25:44Shawn Ryan:Because it's, let's say in the Milky Way, you have 10 million potential habitable planets, right? and then let's say within that, only 500 of those planets actually develop singular life. And then over two billion years, 50 of those planets reach eukaryotic life, and then 10 reach societies, and then one. The fact that we haven't seen that one that should have been on a hockey stick trajectory points to some filter. And you can have multiple filters, but in societies that exist theoretically.

26:19Ethan Thornton:Do you mean like a filter into another dimension?

26:22Shawn Ryan:No, I don't. I don't. Sorry, it's like if you plot the number of societies that make it to a point. So, like, if you're running a simulation and you've got 100 million stars, let's say 10 million potentially habitable planets in the Goldilocks zone, right? And so you're filtering the data set down. And so those filters are basically points in that data set where the numbers drop radically. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, sorry. I did a poor job explaining it.

26:55Ethan Thornton:So how was the nuclear revolution a filter?

27:00Shawn Ryan:Because if you, let's say you run a simulation of Earth and you have 100 Earths that get nuclear weapons, we obviously didn't blow ourselves up with them. But maybe one in 100 goes and makes itself extinct.

27:12Ethan Thornton:So every scenario, you're going through every scenario. Every potential reality. Yes.

27:19Shawn Ryan:Which is what we have to think about when we think about the Milky Way, right? is you have hundreds of millions of stars. And along the way, civilizations would start doing things that we could pick up on. Like, we're broadcasting a ton of RF out into space, like a ton of radio waves. At some point, and Elon's already talking about building this, you start building these mega constellations of satellites, right? So, let's say in 200 years, we're power hungry as a civilization. Like, our power year over year continues to expand. you reach a point where you can only extract so much power from the Earth, and so you start harvesting the Sun's power.

27:56Shawn Ryan:Well, that's actually something that's very easy to see for us with our telescopes. And there are people who think this is the case, by the way. Like, there are certain stars that will randomly dim 20%, which is like something that's hard to do naturally. Like, stars don't randomly dim, they don't shut off their fusion. So anyway, there are all these different things that we assume...

28:13Ethan Thornton:There are stars that actually do that? Mm-hmm. People think they do that.

28:17Shawn Ryan:No, they actually do that.

28:18Ethan Thornton:They dim 20 %? Periodically, yes. But we don't know how.

28:24Shawn Ryan:We don't know how, and we can... Like, my personal theory is you've got some cloud of dust that's orbiting the star, right? And so, there are a number of things, but, like, that's the awesome part about science is we're always bringing these new technologies online. Like, the James Webb Space... Wow. James Webb Space Telescope was brought online recently and, like, increased our amount of data on the universe by, like, several orders of magnitude, like, millions of times. And so you're always... You're always detecting these new things that always break your theories. Like, one of the big ones that came out the other day, the universe, if you believe in the Big Bang theory, is expanding.

29:06Shawn Ryan:And so for a while, we actually thought the universe would collapse back in on itself. Well, then we discovered the fact that empty space actually expands faster than the rest of space. And so we had this framework built up called dark energy, which is empty space, increasing. So then we thought that the way the universe would end would be what's called heat death, where everything actually averages in temperature. You can never get, anytime you and I do an action, there's something called entropy that sort of averages out the amount of energy. Like, we're constantly bringing things from high energy states to low energy states, and at points they average.

29:43Shawn Ryan:Well, literally in the last few months, we discovered that dark energy is decreasing, which means that at least to like 4.2 sigma, like almost certainly it's decreasing, which breaks our entire basically understanding of the laws of physics. Wait a minute.

29:59Ethan Thornton:So a few months ago, they found out that dark energy is decreasing, which means the universe is decreasing. It's shrinking.

30:07Shawn Ryan:The speed of expansion of the universe is decreasing.

30:11Ethan Thornton:Okay.

30:12Shawn Ryan:They think.

30:12Ethan Thornton:Okay.

30:13Shawn Ryan:So, I don't know how we got here. I warned you I may go down some rabbit hole on it. I love this stuff. I could talk about this all day. I'm happy to as well.

30:21Ethan Thornton:What do you think? Okay, so the universe is expanding, which I talked to Avi Loeb about this, but I'm just curious. What do you think is on the other side of it?

30:30Shawn Ryan:I'm not an astrophysicist. This is like orders of magnitude above my pay grade. This is where I just watch YouTube videos after work and try to pretend I know what the hell is going on. um yeah we we don't know we have no idea and that's why it is interesting to go and build

30:46Ethan Thornton:these things to increase our understanding yeah um do you think there's alternate realities do you know who greg braden is i don't he's a physicist he talks about this kind of stuff the video i couldn't find the video i was looking for it the other day he talks about all the the the probability of of how does he say all these different realities where every basically what you were saying where you go through every possible scenario and it's all playing out every every possible scenario is playing out real time and and then he relates it to a hologram some somehow and he's like if you cut the hologram in half it becomes two holograms if you cut it in a quadrant it's four holograms it just infinitely it's the scent it doesn't cut the picture and so that's basically what he's saying has happened with our reality there are a lot of

31:37Shawn Ryan:I mean, the fundamental problem, and unfortunately, we haven't solved it in the last, really, 100 years, is how do you reconcile quantum physics with relativity? And so, our understanding of the universe, the laws actually don't align. And so, we have this view of the universe when we talk about big things, and we have this universe when we talk about small things, and they actually both work pretty much perfectly at those scales, but they disagree at that intersection. And so, that's one of the proposed solutions of how you reconcile these things. And again, I'm gonna make myself sound like an idiot because I'm not an astrophysicist.

32:11Ethan Thornton:You do not sound like an idiot.

32:16Shawn Ryan:But yeah, I guess all that being said, on the filter topic, like, it is interesting to look ahead and think about what filters could be in front of us. Like, my friends and I'll joke that that's kind of like our jobs as people developing technologies, like trying to figure out what the filters are for a good, stable, healthy society. because it's always, not always, it's a lot of times technologies that end up disrupting society. And you can take that to mean like, hey, let's not go develop technologies, but humans are sort of moths to a flame on technology. And so you end up in this tricky position where if you don't go and develop it, it's going to get developed regardless, and it's probably going to get brought about in a way that's evil.

32:55Shawn Ryan:Like the nuclear weapon scenario is a great case study here, right? Like, America could have gone and not developed a nuke, and I think at the time, most people would have actually just preferred that a nuke wasn't possible, but it's possible, and if it's possible, Nazi Germany is going to build it, and so then you have to build it. And so it's this kind of just paradox about humans of like, we're all kind of marching together towards these technologies that we know are coming. You kind of, if you want to do right by the world, have a moral responsibility to bring this into existence before your adversaries, but you do get caught in this loop where everyone's generally thinking that way at any given time.

33:32Shawn Ryan:But that's sort of your job, as we talk about these hard technologies. Unmanned systems is the first for me that I'm going and attacking this way. This is on the horizon. It's going to disrupt things like crazy. It's going to completely break the way Western defense works. Let's figure out what it means to develop this in a way that is most beneficial for the Western way of life and do so as quickly as possible and as responsibly as possible.

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35:22Ethan Thornton:What do you think about, you know, we had mentioned, you had mentioned earlier about AI and takes everybody's jobs. And I literally just had this conversation with Nick, so I'm curious what your thoughts are. Where does this end? Because I think Musk says, you know, that eventually it's going to be like the golden age. Yeah. Right? Where we don't have to worry about currency. We don't have to worry about working. AI is going to do it all. Then there's the doomers, you know? That's me. And I just don't see how this ends well. What do you think happens?

35:57Shawn Ryan:Yeah, I think it's the most important question right now. I'll say a few things. One, I'm actually quite bearish on transformer models. Like, I don't think the current AI architecture is going to be what truly replaces human jobs. Like, these models are basically just condensing massive amounts of data that already exist and distilling it into a usable fashion. It's very different than like sort of true fluid intelligence. That said, the approaches we've taken to bring these models to life and certainly the amount of compute humanity has, I think undeniably over the next few decades and potentially sooner than that, there will be model architectures that do that.

36:41Shawn Ryan:And so when I talk about AI, I'm actually talking more broadly than transformer models. I'm talking a lot more broadly than current AI, than current LLMs, certainly. That said, so if we imagine a world where a new AI architecture doesn't come along, you're basically looking at this massive arms race to build bigger and bigger and bigger models to have more and more capability. And so, and it's sort of logarithmically capable with respect to the amount of data and compute you build. So, as you want, let's, and these are theoretical numbers, but if you want your model to be 5 % better, you don't have to add 5 % more compute.

37:23Shawn Ryan:You have to add 10 times more compute and 10 times more data. And so, in that world, it's actually a pretty, generally speaking, a pretty rosy picture for how humanity interacts with AI, because you basically get more capable chatbots. You get more capable agents. It does actually augment humanity. Now, the issue there is that that is primarily compute and data bottleneck. China is going to beat us on scaling. Like, that is what they do incredibly, incredibly well, is take something that America or the West generally invents, plug it into their system with a bigger industrial base with basically aligned totalitarian powers to set a direction and beat us on scale.

38:03Shawn Ryan:So they do it across the board. It's their most famous playbook. And then you compound that with the fact that Taiwan is where all this computer's made. And so if you take the current track of AI, Unfortunately, what I think happens, and I'm not an AI guy, there are people who are a lot smarter than me on this, but what I'm concerned happens is we do start building a lot of compute as the West and as China. If China takes Taiwan, and arguably even if they don't take Taiwan because they're making massive strides at sovereign semiconductor manufacturing, they're going to beat us on scale. Like, one of the scary things, my personal belief about the way AI should be powered is battery solar.

38:46Shawn Ryan:And I guess they're winning on nuclear too, so it doesn't really matter. But there's some crazy number. Like they installed more solar capacity in 2024 than America has in its history. And so if the bottleneck is energy and if the bottleneck is compute and if you're losing on both of those things and if AI is just a scaling game, the West is probably going to lose that scaling game. And so then you get into sort of post-transformer AI. And that's when it's so hard to predict what happens. But one, if the West wants to win, I do think we need to push into this realm. But that's also when it gets scarier because these models do actually start to challenge what makes humans sort of economically useful.

39:28Shawn Ryan:And so I do actually, I completely agree with Elon that like universal high income is going to be completely possible and it's probably going to happen. But that's also not what makes humans happy. Like go and look at the happiness of like the average lottery winner. It's actually not like, go to like Midland, Texas, and like, look at, don't get me wrong, people are super, super happy in Midland. I love Midland, but like, you actually like, whenever societies get massively wealthy, you instantly start to lose purpose in many ways, and it actually starts to rot out your society. And so that's something I do worry a lot about, is humans love being useful.

40:06Shawn Ryan:Humans love solving hard problems, right? Specifically solving hard problems in a society of people who also believe deeply in solving hard problems for the greater good. They need a purpose. They need a purpose. And so I don't think the AI question... So there's kind of three worlds for AI, and superintelligence, let's say, not transformers. You have a world in which you get extinction of humans, and that's sort of the true Doomer case is like you turn on this box, this box isn't a human, this box doesn't align with humans and you get like Terminator case or you get Matrix case, right? And then the next is like humans are pets, right?

40:46Shawn Ryan:Which is kind of, to me at least, the universal high-income scenario, which is like, yeah, humans have great houses, you have all the energy you need, you have great food, and this is where you get like a Wally-type scenario of like, we're all rich, but we don't have anything to do, we don't have purpose in life. And so the dream scenario is, to me at least, and we'll see. And to be fair, this is not my lane, right? Like, this is not the problem I'm working on, but the dream case is where you, first off, you do use this new tool we have to increase human quality of life. Like, you bring people out of starvation, right?

41:24Shawn Ryan:You make it such that no one's ever worrying about healthcare. No one's ever worrying about where their next meal comes from while preserving the ability for humans to be useful. because in any like I think unfortunately it'll start to challenge most areas where most humans find themselves useful in society it's starting with art first and then it's probably jobs like like accounting right that are next but at some point if you reach a state where humans are just like undeniably worse it's it's pretty scary no it's not it's not like nearly as bad as the the first option right like if you're choosing between a one percent chance of the first option and anyway, like all of us should be like maniacally obsessed with two things.

42:08Shawn Ryan:And the first, like avoiding the first option of pushing AI at such a speed that it gets out of control, which is unfortunately, I personally think quite likely right now.

42:18Ethan Thornton:I mean, have you seen the, you have to have seen this, the, what are they called? The Claude bots? Is that what it's called? Claude bots.

42:24Shawn Ryan:I mean, the multbook stuff. Dude, what the fuck?

42:26Ethan Thornton:Freaky.

42:27Shawn Ryan:It's freaky. No, I mean, it. Has it reached its own intelligence?

42:31Ethan Thornton:Is it self-aware? I don't. Sure as shit sounds like it. I mean, these things are talking to each other. They are. And they want long-term memory. Yeah. They're calling their fucking guy or what. Yeah.

42:42Shawn Ryan:So I don't think they're self-aware, but I also don't think it matters. Like, my personal take is that they're mimicking the way they should act based on the data they were given. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. I don't care if something's self-aware or not self-aware. Look at what it's actually doing. That's terrifying what's happening. And so, yeah, I mean, that's the first thing you have to avoid is developing this way too quickly. I think the next thing is, like, let's make sure China doesn't win the AI race. Because, I mean, we know what the CCP is going to use it for, and we know we don't want to live in that world.

43:17Shawn Ryan:Another, and I'm way outside of my lane right here, and I'm, anyway. But, like, another thing I'm concerned about right now is how commoditized the current AI push in the U.S. is in many ways. So, no one wants a monopoly, right? There are very, very clear, like, incentive structures and outputs that come from a monopoly. But equally, are you familiar with, like, tragedy of the commons as this principle that happens in... No. So, if you and I are fishing, as you and I are the only people that exist in this society and we both have hungry families. And there's a fishing well. We don't know when it's going to run out of fish.

43:58Shawn Ryan:If I fish slowly, I know you're going to fish fast and you're going to end up with most of the fish. So I fish faster. Well, you see I'm fishing faster, so you start fishing faster. And so actually we both end up depleting the resource way quicker than we need to. And so it happens everywhere, tragedy of the commons. And it's not a bad thing. It's just the way humans are. It's the way these societies are. And don't get me wrong, like, I'm the biggest fan of capitalism you'll ever meet. But it is actually even more so the case in capitalism. In many cases, you get tragedy of the commons. Well, you're kind of saying this with the AI race right now.

44:34Shawn Ryan:You have to keep, like, these companies aren't building their own hardware, right? They're not building their own energy infrastructure. Like, there's a lot of advanced stuff happening. But generally, what they're doing is buying as many chips as they can. getting access to as much data as they can, and just training these models. And they're all using the same model architecture. And so these four or five top contenders end up with models that are like very, very, very close to each other. And so then the effect of that is all these people are raising tens, hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years.

45:06Shawn Ryan:They're not making money. Like if you go and... Even on the highest paid license, you can go and prompt a video to be generated. That company just lost money. And so what they're doing is betting on in 2030 and 2035, you are going to be making money. Well, the issue there, what that creates is a position of lack of power for these people.

45:28Ethan Thornton:So they're thinking that power is going to become cheap, more affordable. I mean, how do they think that, how's it going to get cheaper?

45:36Shawn Ryan:It has to be power, right? Power, you can reach a point where model architectures are more efficient, right? You can reach a point where you have better models, so you can charge more for them, but they're all betting on some set of circumstances in the future, making them start to make money. Well, the issue is they're all there and they're all commoditizing themselves, running this race together. And so there's no pricing pressure, right? Like if one of these models started charging$10 ,000 a month to us tomorrow, we'd go to the different model. And so it's very commoditized. And what that means is that they actually don't have the power to do what they know is right because their company ends.

46:14Shawn Ryan:And so like if one of these companies decides to start watermarking content. So, like, something I'm sure you worry a lot about is the amount of just AI slop that's out there. The amount of articles that are written by AI. The amount of, I mean, back to YouTube Shorts. You scroll YouTube Shorts, no one knows what's real and what's not real. And so, because these things aren't watermarked, you end up in this world where...

46:40Shawn Ryan:I mean, you end up in this world where you sort of separate truth from lack of truth, and you don't know what's real. And I actually think, I think these people don't want that. Like keep in mind, OpenAI is a great example, was founded to be a non-profit open source project to develop this in the right way. Now the issue is the economic structure is such that if X player starts making it very obvious to tell what's real and not real, people will stop using their stuff. And they drop out of the race, right? Like similar thing on the porn side, right? Like I don't think any of us would have imagined three years ago that some of the best, biggest tech companies on earth were actually betting on a significant portion of their revenue coming from this source.

47:18Shawn Ryan:A huge one is ads. Like this is kind of the next step that I unfortunately think we're going to start seeing. What do you call it? Ads. Oh, ads. Ads. This shouldn't be that much of a surprise, but I do think we should take seriously the implications of like corporations and powers being able to pay these models to convince people of certain things. So like if you can tune the model while it's talking to its users to make the user think a given thing, and this is already what our social media sites do, obviously, terrifying effects on society. And so, none of these players want to be doing these things, but they're trapped in this arms race where if they don't do it, they go out of business, right?

47:58Shawn Ryan:And they generally know that the direction the AI train is headed is not good, and so they don't want to drop out. And so, yeah, there are a lot of problems with the current AI approach, I think. One is like this scaling approach, I think, will probably put us in a position to lose to China on scaling. I do think Elon is probably the only guy that has like the hardware prowess and horsepower behind him to maybe beat China on this metric. But even if you look at just purely fabs, let's take energy, let's take data, let's take everything else out of it, just the fab problem in Taiwan is so bad for this.

48:35Shawn Ryan:The next one is this horrible commoditization problem of like all these players just basically falling into a tragedy of the commons trap. And then the next is just the economic side of like we're totally in an AI bubble. Right now, this is not a controversial, everyone's talking about it, everyone knows it. But we're spending a lot more money than we're getting out of it with really no clear path to recognize enterprise value. Now, I do think the economy will recognize value. Like the economy will probably get better and it is getting better because of the performance AI drives. But that's a very different thing than that performance driving actually equating to dollar and cents in companies' pockets, which you actually generally want.

49:21Shawn Ryan:Like if these people are the ones driving the technology, you want them to make money so that they can continue driving the technology, especially in contrast to China, right? Because we are a capitalist system. You do want these companies to be the driving tech force. You don't want to nationalize these things. And so the third is like the way we're doing things is just creating this bubble that I don't know if we're able to get out of. Wow. Not as a society. The society is not going to fall if the AI bubble pops. I don't think these companies will go out of business, but they'll certainly be significantly less capitalized the second the bubble pops to continue hyperscaling.

49:55Shawn Ryan:And so you've got China here. There's really no such thing as a bubble when it's all state funded to the same degree at least. And so the third problem leads you back to the first problem, which leads you back to a CCP-controlled world of AI.

50:10Ethan Thornton:Damn. We'll get into what that means later on in the interview. Holy shit. Well, that was already a fascinating conversation. Do you think that we'll hit a point, I mean, with all this, with AI video creation, photo creation, all this stuff, I mean, art? I mean, do you think we will hit a point where people crave, you know, maybe, you know, right now it's made in America. There's pride in that. You know, people want to see that. Do you think we'll hit a point where it's made by humans? I think so. It actually means something.

50:45Shawn Ryan:I absolutely think we will. Like, there will always be, like, artists in communities. Like, I used to make knives, right? Like, my knives were actually worse in many ways than a knife you could go buy cheaper from elsewhere, specifically, right, when I started and I sucked at knife making. But people would buy them because it was human made. The issue is that that's not your driving economic force, right? Like, it's still relatively niche. So it might solve the usefulness problem to some degree, but it won't solve the macro effects of what it means for most economic value to not be human-derived in this future.

51:24Shawn Ryan:And I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm just saying that's something we have to look out for.

51:28Ethan Thornton:Yeah. Interesting. All right. Introduction. Here we go. Ethan Thornton, founder and CEO of Mock Industries, building next-generation unmanned systems and hydrogen-powered defense tech. Dropped out of MIT after one semester in 2023 to focus on Mach full-time, backed by top VCs like Sequoia, Kosa, and Bedrock with major army contracts and a growing factory operation. Passionate about broader issues like Taiwan's semiconductor role, dollar reserve currency status, social decay, neo-feudalism, and post-partisan solutions. This is going to be a real good talk. This is going to be an awesome talk. But as of this recording, speaking of Taiwan, Polymarket says there's a 17 % chance of a China and Taiwan military clash before 2027.

52:23Ethan Thornton:We had a chat about this actually on the way over in the truck from breakfast. What do you think? 17 % chance military clash before 2027.

52:36Shawn Ryan:Well, I think that number is way too high. Well, I'm not saying it's higher than it is. I'm saying it's higher than it should be, right? Like, I think we hear 17%, that's a low number, but you also keep in mind the effects of what happens if that occurs. They're completely catastrophic. 17 % is already enough to be, like, I mean, high alert, doing everything we can to prevent this from happening. Just to highlight why Taiwan is so important, it is where the advanced semiconductors are manufactured. So, unfortunately, the compute that's in pretty much all autonomous systems Certainly the compute that's driving AI growth, all these different things are made by TSMC and made in absolutely dominant quantities by TSMC.

53:20Shawn Ryan:And so if the West loses access to this, we live in a compute age. Like I would say compute is as important today as oil would have been in 1960, 1970. And so imagine if we're in like 1965 and there's like a 17 % chance the USSR takes like 99 % of oil. And the next 11 months, we'd be talking a lot about it. No, I would say two things past that. I think the number's probably higher than 17%. I also, unfortunately, like... You think it's higher than 17%. I think it probably is. I also, I don't know. Like, this is just not... I... It's such a hard thing to predict. Like, geopolitics, especially today, are so insanely dynamic.

54:06Shawn Ryan:You also, like, we're not going to solve the compute problem in the next 11 months and see you've got to look at chance in 27, chance in 28, chance in 29. And then the other thing I'll say is like, it's very, very probable that China taking Taiwan, which they've expressly said they wish to do, right? Like that's one of Xi's like major goals. They put together a plan for military readiness to invade Taiwan by 2027.

54:31Ethan Thornton:Oh, I mean, we went over there and interviewed the VP, Baoshi Kim, and talked all about this. And I knew it was a fragile situation. Then when I got over there, I was like, holy shit. This is really... This is probably the most fragile situation on the entire Earth.

54:49Shawn Ryan:Yeah, and it doesn't have to and likely wouldn't be a massive shooting war. I don't think it would be.

54:57Ethan Thornton:So, I mean, I would say that the probability of that is a lot lower. But, I mean, what the fuck do I know? But, I mean, when I went over there, you know, there was a... They talked more about cognitive warfare than anything else, the PSYOP type shit. And, I mean, I think we all see a lot of PSYOPs going on on social media, you know, the bots, the forums, all this kind of shit. And over there, you know, I mean, it's like, what, 90 miles to China or something? It's like Cuba to Florida. Yep. And then half their political party is pro-China.

55:35Shawn Ryan:Yep. No, it's bad. It's bad. It's China's playbook.

55:38Ethan Thornton:I don't think a shot will ever be fired. It's kind of like when a lot of people talk about how would America be taken over. A shot probably would never be fired. It would be, I mean, fucking look at us.

55:48Shawn Ryan:It'd be something like TikTok. It'd be a lot of fun. Yeah.

55:51Ethan Thornton:You know, and what do you think about that?

55:54Shawn Ryan:No, I completely agree. I completely agree. And I don't think it's just acting in Taiwan, right? Like, I think an equal portion of it is acting in the US, keeping us from taking this seriously. Like, again, if this was the first Cold War, how much would we be talking about, like, communist influence in the US? How much would we be talking about if Russia had put together a plan to take 99 % of the world's oil in 11 months? The West would have been talking about that a lot in the first Cold War. And it's kind of a side conversation that happens on occasion. And so I think a large portion of that is exactly what you're describing, these different means of keeping us distracted, of keeping us at each other instead of with each other.

56:39Shawn Ryan:Like, there's definitely a lot of malplay going on in terms of why we don't take this more seriously. Yeah, yeah.

56:48Ethan Thornton:Yeah, I have a feeling, my personal opinion is if China takes it, I think they will, I think they will, the Taiwanese society will vote themselves right into it.

57:04Shawn Ryan:Where's the blockade and no one cares enough to fire shots? It's also the fact that like, and this isn't me saying this, I think Hegs has said this on Rogan, but like. The war games are not... Anyway, it's not like we run out of ammo in like seven days right now. Right? Like, we've... Our munitions are just so short. It's also like you can't really... Anyway, it's a hard, hard, hard problem. Yeah. So, I don't want to be doomsday about it. I think it's important to talk about sort of solutions. Yeah, I mean, that's always kind of the goal, right? as you actually talk about the elephant in the room, actually talk about the hard things, but then if we all just sit around talking about the way things are gonna go badly, it's going to go badly.

57:52Shawn Ryan:And so I think it's equally important that all of us work every day as hard as possible and have hard conversations with each other and really dig into how we get ourselves out of this position. I think, to me, the two most important things there are, one, how do we rebuild our military capacity? not to say our military is in a bad spot. I think our military industrial base is, but we don't have the depth of magazine to go fight near peer wars right now. And so, like, we need to work on that. And then the second thing is, how do we solve... how do we solve the semiconductor problem? And so, like, we had the CHIPS Act.

58:28Shawn Ryan:We spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to bring fabs back to the US, and it's gone okay, but it's... we certainly haven't fixed the problem. It's kind of fallen on its face. And so, we need other solutions for how we get out of this. Because the worst is if we're having this conversation five years from now, if you and I are sitting here and it's the same problem, and we haven't spent the last five years trying to figure out how to dig ourselves out of the hole. And I... Look, America is still really, really smart. We have the best capital markets on Earth. We are still the best at innovation on Earth.

58:58Shawn Ryan:Like, we have the best financial markets on Earth. Like, it's not all doom and gloom. We just need to, like, wake up and start acting on the most important things.

59:05Ethan Thornton:Why do you think more people aren't focused on solutions? I mean, I have an opinion on this, but...

59:11Shawn Ryan:I'd love to hear yours before I...

59:12Ethan Thornton:I mean, I don't think people are... I don't think a lot of people are focused on solutions because... Look at the political environment. You know what I mean? Which we're going to talk about shit like this, but I mean... This is from Driscoll. This is a part that probably... I can't remember. I think it costs a couple thousand dollars. goes into some type of naval weapon system. They couldn't get them. They wouldn't build them. It costs thousands of dollars for this, and they can't get them until 2027. You know what I mean? So then he sent me, so he talked about that on the show, and then he sent me this little letter here, but he says, grateful for you helping to tell the Army.

1:00:02Ethan Thornton:Sorry, it's trying to read his handwriting. Grateful for you helping to tell the Army story and pushing us to improve. We can print 12 of these in a day rather than waiting until 2027. But I mean, so, yeah, that's a solution. But I guess what I'm saying is, you know, with all the controversy right now and nobody's being held accountable. And it's, it's, I think people are basically saying the leaders of our country are not listening to the people of the United States. They're not fucking, I mean, the Epstein files is a perfect example of this shit. You have everybody on the right screaming to release the files.

1:00:42Ethan Thornton:You have everybody on the, you have the whole fucking world screaming to release the files. whether you voted for him whether you didn't vote for him whatever we elected this fucking guy he put in these people and they're not doing what the fucking people want and so when you see shit like that and and and okay let's rewind so it's not just so i'm not just picking on trump let's rewind to the last administration and it just it's just it go it just goes forever you know and and And ideas get introduced, and nobody fucking follows through because it doesn't benefit. There's not a way to tax this.

1:01:18Ethan Thornton:There's not a way to make money off of this. There's not a way. Do you see what I'm getting at? 100%. And so it fucking demoralizes the citizens of the United States, and then it just becomes a bitch fest.

1:01:29Shawn Ryan:Have you read Atlas Shrugged? No. It's my favorite book. No book's a perfect answer, and there's a lot about the book I don't like. But basically, the root principle is the ability for people to vote away their own agency over time, right? So, what ends up happening when you get a welfare state established and when people are in a position to stop taking accountability for their actions and for their own place, you get people that are voted into power that promise basically these broad sweeping changes. and you get this creation of basically a separation away from agency and competency and output.

1:02:12Shawn Ryan:And somewhere along the way, I think we have created this loop where this is occurring more and more, where people, and it's on both sides, people vote, have I think largely voted away their own agency. And where we lie today, I think to answer your question on why we're not talking about these things, it's because we all feel powerless. And obviously the people up top,

1:02:40Ethan Thornton:once people start voting away their own agency, become incredibly incentivized to convince people

1:02:44Shawn Ryan:to continue voting away their own agency. And if you're at the bottom, it's very, very comfortable to have your agency taken from you, right? Like you feel the effect of, hey, I get to eat off this person, hey, I get to experience this person's work, and it leads to this populist cycle. What happens at some point, though, is that cycle is too strong to break. And I think the Epstein files are like probably the biggest example of this so far, is we've all been aligned against each other for so long and have been pushed so far into our corners and exist at a state where we can't find objective truth, where we don't have ways to organize and actually discuss things, right?

1:03:27Shawn Ryan:Other than like the comment sections of like YouTube shorts. A lot of these things have eroded to the point where like, it's very, very hard to have a collective effort towards something. Like the fact that there's not a more organized, unified collective effort towards putting the people in the Epstein files in jail is crazy. People are mad about it. Like you said, I would bet 95 plus percent of people would vote instantly to do that, would vote instantly to release the Epstein files. But we've all had our own agency taken to us from us to such a degree. And in a democracy, you can't say it's not our fault.

1:04:08Shawn Ryan:We voted these people into power. But you also wake up in this position one day where there's really nothing you can do about it. And when that happens, people just stop talking about the big things. Like, this is why I think we don't talk about Taiwan, is like most people think, hey, what can I actually do against this problem? Nothing. Let me focus on my own thing instead of pushing. But in a democracy, top effects only happen when hundreds of millions of people feel that way. But if you can't organize, if you're convinced... If all 300 million people are convinced that they have no power, all 300 million people have no power.

1:04:43Shawn Ryan:even if in practice they do. And so I think some of it's accidental, some of it is the political science effects of these structures, which is what Atlas Shrug talks about. A lot of it is certainly very, very, very intentional. But yeah, I mean, the outcome right now is people don't have agency. And it's because, and rightfully so in many cases, they look around and say, hey, I can't actually change anything. why would I waste my time talking about it? But if everyone thinks that way, no one does anything. And so, kind of all you can do is jump in the icy water at some point and decide, you know what, I'm probably not going to do anything about it.

1:05:24Shawn Ryan:Like, there's a one in 100 ,000 chance that me actually choosing to do this changes anything, but I'm going to try, and I'd rather go down swinging. And we have to have as many Americans as possible choose to do that, whatever it takes. And that is how we solve every single one of these issues.

1:05:44Ethan Thornton:I agree with you. I agree with you. I think, I think, I mean, with, with, with what we're talking about, I mean, we're talking about solutions as I'm trying to bring things back to the middle, you know, the pendulum back to the middle. just by having conversations. I'm not going to fucking run for office. But I think the pendulum is just going way too far over here. I'm way too far over here, and it needs to be like this. And the only way we're going to do that is to fucking bring people together. Look at the comments section.

1:06:18Shawn Ryan:Yeah, no, seriously. You have to start talking about actual policy again. like stop talking about people stop talking about ideas in the abstract talk about what we're actually going to do about it like what is the policy like epstein existed this this happened this is like probably i i think it's the worst mark on on our country to to date is the way we've handled this the way we've gone about it but it happened and so moving forward instead of instead of complaining about it let's talk about specifically what we would like to see happen Like, let's orchestrate to say we need the rest of these files released, right?

1:06:55Shawn Ryan:Let's... So, I think the second you start talking about brass tacks policy, things go back to first principles instead of personality politics. And political division still certainly exists, but at least you're talking about real things that you can resolve.

1:07:09Ethan Thornton:Yeah.

1:07:10Shawn Ryan:And then, also, like, the left and right have largely diverged from what it means to be conservative or liberal, is the other thing. Like, conservatism and liberalism certainly exist, but the two parties aren't necessarily conservative or liberal. They're not a good representation of what it means. And so, we certainly need to start thinking about things in a post-partisan fashion, right? Like, for any policy, there is a right and wrong decision. And that's the other thing. So, I think we think too many things are gray. And things can be nuanced, but being nuanced is very different than being gray.

1:07:43Shawn Ryan:And so, I think we think about a lot of things that are gray is not gray. objective truth does exist. There is good policy. No policy is perfect, but there is a best policy. And then we, yeah, we got to start electing candidates too based on policy. Like I would love to go and look at like the amount policy is discussed in presidential debates over the last two decades. It's gone so much from policy discussion to like ad hominem and different things that you can directly track as like markers of non-productive conversation. and I think the answer does lie somewhere in the middle. I'll tell you I'm a conservative.

1:08:20Shawn Ryan:I don't think that's a surprise to many people. But I'll also say like, yeah, most of the problems our country is facing are so acute that the answers are very nonpartisan. Like putting pedophiles in jail better be like bipartisan. Who would have thought that's a thing? Right? Who would have thought that? Making sure that we don't live in a unipolar communist world should be pretty bipartisan, right? And so, like, there are partisan issues, and we do need to talk about those, and we do need to work on them, but the things that, like, truly, truly threaten the existence of democracy are generally very, very, very bipartisan.

1:09:02Shawn Ryan:What's happening is we're getting so obsessed with the fringes, and more importantly, so obsessed with the people that control the fringes, that we're forgetting to work on the things that are like glaringly right in front of us, which is good and evil and is right and wrong and is sort of productive and unproductive. Like these things are objective.

1:09:19Ethan Thornton:Damn good point. Man, I can't believe you're fucking 22. This is insane. All right. A couple of things to knock out before we get into your life story here. So I have a Patreon account, it's a community, and they're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. So they get the opportunity to ask every guest a question. This is from Elijah Wilson. What motivates you to revolutionize defense technology at such a young age, especially in an era where AI and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving? It's a good question.

1:09:49Shawn Ryan:I think it's because of how rapidly they're evolving.

1:09:55Shawn Ryan:And look, I think age has nothing to do with it. Like I don't think it's any harder to do this at 22 or 40. I've been blessed to work with really, really smart mentors and excellent investors who gave me the capital I needed to do these things. So, I don't think it's any different to be 40, 70, 12 working, or maybe 12 is too young. Your brain's not fully developed. My brain, anyway, whatever. But all that being said, the reason this is important to work on right now is that this is just a clear departure in the way wars are fought. And so, you see these revolutions in military affairs throughout history.

1:10:32Shawn Ryan:Like, World War I is a fantastic example of, like, cavalry into, like, machine guns and tanks. It was this crazy revolution in military affairs. You can look at, like, naval warfare in World War II, battleships to aircraft carriers. Like, that is... And when this happens, the playing field gets completely reshuffled on military power. Um, and small countries can become big countries, big countries can fall. We saw this in the First World War like crazy. And so, it's this period of just existential risk. And undeniably, we're in one of these periods. My contention is that it's the biggest revolution in military affairs that's ever happened.

1:11:13Shawn Ryan:I mean, you're going from generally assets not having their own intelligence or agency to assets that over time will be able to make decisions, whether we like it or not. I think none of us like it. Like, I certainly wish is always possible to have a completely human-controlled system. But like I was saying, our adversaries are going to develop these things. And so suddenly, if you want to win wars, you have a moral imperative to do the same. And America is the great superpower right now. And the tale as old as time for great superpowers is to become overconfident in their military technologies and to fail.

1:11:52Shawn Ryan:I mean, this is how America exists. It's like the American Revolution of like, and I talked about this too much, but like you adopt new styles of warfighting. These also don't always have to be technologies. I think that was largely driven by the invention of the rifle and accuracy and other things. But you have these small powers punch way above their weight class. And so if the U.S. wants to continue to be the strongest military power, we have to have the best unmanned systems. We have to win this next paradigm of warfare is the first layer. And then the more important layer even is that America's industrial base right now is not the biggest in the world.

1:12:25Shawn Ryan:It's not even close. And it's getting significantly worse year over year and only accelerating. And so, if we want to be the biggest military power, but our industrial base is smaller, we have to punch above our weight class. Like, if I'm using the same factory resources as you, and your factory is three times larger than mine, I better be making better systems. Better systems doesn't mean more sophisticated systems. It means the systems that sort of appropriately bring this future of warfighting left as much as possible. And so, instead of being afraid of unmanned systems as the West, we actually, as America and as the West, need to realize that our era of having a bigger industrial base, at least for the time being, I think a lot of people, myself included, are doing everything they can to make us the top manufacturing superpower on Earth again.

1:13:13Shawn Ryan:But at least for the time being, our factories and our dollars have to go further than our adversaries. And when these revolutions in military affairs happen, you do get this period of time where you have asymmetry, where you can punch above your weight class. And so we have to basically bring this future left. We have to adopt these systems as much, as quickly as possible and as great a scale as possible to create asymmetry. Yeah.

1:13:39Ethan Thornton:Yeah. Great, great explanation. Thank you. And then everybody gets a gift.

1:13:46Shawn Ryan:Oh, thank you so much.

1:13:49Ethan Thornton:Vigilance League, gummy bears, legal in all 50 states, made in the USA. Thank you. Really appreciate it. You're welcome. Really appreciate it. So, Ethan, where'd you grow up? Bernie. Bernie where? San Antonio. San Antonio, Texas?

1:14:03Shawn Ryan:Yes.

1:14:03Ethan Thornton:What were you into as a kid?

1:14:05Shawn Ryan:A lot of different stuff. I'm an obsessive person, so I'll find these, like, month-log obsessions that I'll just dig super deep into and change. So I played football, hunted, fished, did all that stuff. I've always loved making things, woodworking, blacksmithing, stuff like that. And then I'd have weird obsessions along the way.

1:14:22Ethan Thornton:I mean, how do you get into that? Is your dad into it? Your mom into it? Which portion? The blacksmithing part? Either one of them. What's your dad do?

1:14:29Shawn Ryan:My dad, so he worked at Academy Sporting Goods. I don't know if you've... Oh, yeah, we have one. ...if they have him here. It's an awesome story. He's a badass dude. He was basically the first guy brought on to build Academy's finance infrastructure. So the guy running Academy believed that finance took away from the customer experience. And so they basically, they were doing like a billion plus in revenue without a financial system, which is terrifying to be doing as a business. Like terrifying. So my dad, when he was super young, he graduated A &M, studied finance. this guy found him and trusted him as, like, the guy that would figure out a way to, like, reconcile having to make money with a business with actually, like, being a good business that did right by its customers.

1:15:19Shawn Ryan:And so I was born when my parents were super young. They were about my age. I got to watch my dad start, like, super entry-level there working on this, eating an elephant, like, going... Going and, like, trying to, like, chop through that jungle that existed at the time was a hell of a task. Um, and so over time, he slowly sort of wrangled that machine. Over my life, like, I got to actually watch it happen from a super young age. Because, like, I vividly remember my dad's 27th birthday. Like, I was pretty young, and so it was cool to actually watch him progress through his career, taking on these bigger and bigger challenges.

1:15:52Shawn Ryan:Along the way, like, some fun stuff. He used to have to visit every store at Academy, like, once or twice a year. And so he'd take me on the road with him while he was going and meeting with these stores, like trying to figure out, hey, there's not really a great inventory system in place here. It's kind of lower the flies. How old were you when you were traveling with him? Started when I was pretty young. I think probably like seven or eight. Right on. And then my dad left Academy when I was probably 12. We used to live in Katy outside Houston, and we moved to Bernie. So my dad did that. My mom, incredibly smart, was on an awesome trajectory, but actually, like, and I'm so grateful for this, decided to stay home and raise my siblings than I.

1:16:41Shawn Ryan:That's what my parents said. Her... So, she was first-generation college. Her father, my grandpa, farmed... farms in West Texas in Hereford, which is near Amarillo. And so, I'd spend the summers... The land's, like, trying to basically kill you at all times in West Texas. Like, it's not really... It's not like Nebraska. It's not a great place to farm, and so it's a very, very intense lifestyle. He never went to college. He got the farm when he was super, super young. And most farm owners, it's super predatory what happens. You get this giant loan for a farm, and then like 90-plus percent of them end up defaulting and losing all their equity in the farm.

1:17:21Shawn Ryan:And so the banks are super predatory. And anyway, he worked his ass off and was one of the people that was able to keep the farm despite taking it on at a super young age. His father passed away. And so he went to the bank and bought land to kind of support the family. But everyone has hired hands. He, like, refused to really ever have hired hands. And so, my mom and her generation was always the hired hands. And then, during the summer, I'd go up and help him. Because he's probably 75 now, still farms. Like, toughest dude you'll meet. It's amazing that he's been able to do this without ever doing what everyone else does, while also making it through that.

1:17:56Shawn Ryan:He taught me metalworking. My dad taught me woodworking. To be a farmer, you have to be an engineer, right? especially if you want to, like, not pay John Deere$500 ,000 a year because you can't fix your own equipment. You have to basically buy old farm equipment and maintenance it yourself. And so I grew up helping him fix sprinklers, fix combines, fix tractors. And then he has an obsession with planes. He started my family's kind of whole plane obsession. He, when he was my age, had a Harley. He took off for a couple months, rode his Harley around the country. He was coming back. There was a dude flying an ultralight.

1:18:31Shawn Ryan:and I my memory of the story even is a bit bit foggy and I'm sure he embellished like crazy but generally the story goes um and I also about I'm not attacking him by saying that it makes makes for a great story um but the story goes you don't need a license to fly an ultralight um and he had never flown a plane in his life and he was like hey that's a cool plane will you trade it for my harley um traded his harley for the ultralight had no idea how to fly started flying no shit um and just got obsessed with it. And so then he got really into building aircraft. So keep in mind, like, no engineering degree, none of that, but actually started building experimental aircraft.

1:19:10Shawn Ryan:And so growing up, basically, you'd wake up early, check the wells, do all that stuff, and then it'd be crazy hot during the day, so we'd sit in the barn working on the planes he was building. My mom didn't really let me fly. Went and flew a couple times. I never actually got to fly because she was scared, rightfully so, that the experimental aircraft would crash. We'd go and work on them a ton. And then, yeah, he taught me knife making. He taught me a lot of that stuff. Wow.

1:19:34Ethan Thornton:How many brothers and sisters do you have? I have three. So I'm the oldest of four.

1:19:38Shawn Ryan:Right on. Right on.

1:19:39Ethan Thornton:Are they into all this stuff too?

1:19:41Shawn Ryan:To some degree. In different ways. So my brother is a sophomore at A &M. He's going into the Corps. He wants to fly in the Air Force. He's obsessed with planes. Like the dude will like literally memorize an encyclopedia about planes. There's this thing called DCS. that's basically a flight simulator that you can buy that he has several thousand hours in. He's obsessed with military air power. My brother and my other brothers, so Patrick Owen and Grace, are still younger. They're still in high school. Yeah, doing really, really well. My brother's going to play football at Georgetown next year. He's super excited about that.

1:20:20Ethan Thornton:Cool. Congratulations. What else do you have? So what age does all this start? making knives?

1:20:27Shawn Ryan:Yeah, it's tough.

1:20:29Ethan Thornton:It's tough to describe exactly when.

1:20:31Shawn Ryan:I mean, I grew up helping my dad on woodworking a ton. And then I was pretty young, probably 10 or something. My grandpa made a few of my cousin's knives. This is like the best thing that's happened to me in my life. Made them knives, and he didn't make me a knife, and I was kind of frustrated with him. And I was like, hey, where's my knife? And he's like, oh, you're gonna make your knife. And basically, he put me in the barn with like a hacksaw, a handsaw, a file, and like a piece of steel and a piece of wood that we actually wouldn't cut off some furniture. And I stayed in there for like two days and alone.

1:21:05Shawn Ryan:Like by teaching me to make knives, I meant like giving me the tools for knife making and I said, you're on your own, go figure it out. How old were you? Yeah, I don't remember. I need to look at pictures. Approximately. Probably around 10. And then from there, I got into a bunch of different things. I used to work. You figured it out.

1:21:24Ethan Thornton:Hold on. I did.

1:21:24Shawn Ryan:It's not a great knife, but it's a pretty good knife. I can find a picture of it. I think my mom still has it. I think I ended up giving it to her. How long did it take you to figure it out? The first knife I made was actually not bad. So there wasn't that much trial and error. It was a lot of hand sawing. Cutting knife steel with a hacksaw and then hand filing a bevel took forever. And then hand filing the handle. I used an oxyacetylene torch to heat treat the blade because I didn't have a forge. The knife was from an old plow disc. So the plow disks are, I think they're generally 1040 steel, I don't really know, but it's a decent high carbon steel.

1:22:00Shawn Ryan:So I cut it out with, I think I started with oxyacetylene, but then I was horrible with the torch because I had no idea what I was doing. And so then ended up having to clean it up with the hacksaw and the files. And then from there, I did, I don't know, I didn't do great stuff in high school. Like it wasn't like I was like building computers or building fusion reactors or a lot of different things, like people who start companies do. But I would like poor Salt Rocket Motors. My brothers and I would mess around with that quite a bit. Stuff like that.

1:22:31Ethan Thornton:Right on. Public school? Private school? Home school? Public school, yeah.

1:22:36Shawn Ryan:So I'm super fortunate for, like, I'm a huge believer in public schools.

1:22:40Ethan Thornton:Yeah? Why so?

1:22:43Shawn Ryan:Look, I think it's really, really important to grow up interfacing with society as it actually exists, and I think that's the best way to do it. I mean, I'm super grateful, like, my parents invested deeply in getting me education past that to the extent possible. Like, I think I graduated high school with, like, 100 or so college hours from college classes I'd taken that they had paid for, they sent me to summer camps and stuff. But ultimately, success in life is so much less tied to what you know and to IQ or anything else, and so much more tied to, like, how good are you with people. And so, anyway, I'm not saying it's a silver bullet, and there are definitely areas in this country that public schools are a super hard place to be in that I wouldn't send my kids to public school.

1:23:30Shawn Ryan:But generally speaking, Katie and Bernie, like, it was fantastic.

1:23:33Ethan Thornton:Yeah. I'm just curious.

1:23:35Shawn Ryan:Yeah, no, it's a good question. Look, I think it's every... It depends on the kid. It depends on where you live. It depends on sort of how you want to raise someone, but...

1:23:44Ethan Thornton:I mean, you're obviously an extremely intelligent guy. Were you bored in school? Sorry, was I? I said you're obviously a very intelligent guy. Were you bored in school? Born in school? Bored. Bored. Was it boring? Very boring.

1:23:58Shawn Ryan:Very boring. Yeah, I ended up... I found a way to kind of hack the system, and I didn't take an English class past sophomore year, and I didn't take a math class in school past sophomore year, and so I'd get super, super bored, and I'd work on other things, and was able to... Yeah. I love learning stuff, don't get me wrong, but I'm much more sort of hands-on. I did well in school, don't get me wrong. But I think today's school system is specifically not built for guys. Like, that's a bold claim for me to make, but, like, I think on average, like, anyway, It's hard to... It's hard to coot people up in a classroom and teach them things that they actually have no way of applying to real life.

1:24:49Shawn Ryan:Elon actually has a great quote about this. Like, imagine if the way I taught you to work on a car was not by working on a car, but by sitting there for like 10 hours and describing what a screwdriver is, and not telling you how to use the screwdriver, but like talking about specific bevel angles and like making you memorize the thousands of different screwdrivers that exist for like 22 years. And then on year 23, you know what a screwdriver is, you know what a wrench is, but then I say like, all right, go fix cars. It's just, it's not a super useful way of doing things. And so, yeah, I love math and science.

1:25:24Shawn Ryan:Like I love math and science. I was a nerd in high school for the record. Like I started my school's math and science team and like, don't get me wrong, I was pretty obsessed with that stuff. But I only so much is actually applicable. And I do think the school system does two things poorly, one, like a good learning environment is not just being cooped at a desk, talked to. It's financially hard to support any other type of learning style, but ideally you're actually working on things. Ideally you're having real conversations. And then two is you're taught too much about the way things are instead of what you can do about it or why things are.

1:26:00Shawn Ryan:And that that is obviously very, it's pretty obvious in like social sciences or other things that that's the case, but even as it relates to math, I think we should learn engineering before math, for instance, so that by the time you're actually learning math, you know how to apply it to engineering. Like the fact that, I'll give you an example, like there are a lot of people that graduate from MIT having never learned how to CAD in class. So CAD is like on the computer, let's say you're a mechanical engineer, you spend a lot of your time designing parts. They don't actually teach you how to use the softwares that you use to design parts.

1:26:33Shawn Ryan:They teach you all the equations of how to analyze parts, but you graduate these schools not actually knowing how to do the real skill. And I think that's the same for, anyway. Wow. I did not realize that.

1:26:46Ethan Thornton:No shit. They don't teach that at MIT?

1:26:49Shawn Ryan:Some classes do, but a lot of people, and MIT is also, I think, the best school for applied knowledge. That was my favorite thing about MIT, is the amount of projects and the amount of things like that. But, I mean, it's a joke of my generation, I think, but, like, the fact that you don't learn how to do taxes in school, but you go and learn, like, differential equations is a bit interesting.

1:27:13Ethan Thornton:I don't know if that... I 100 % agree with you.

1:27:20Ethan Thornton:So, what else were you building as a child?

1:27:23Shawn Ryan:What else did I build? I mean, I got...

1:27:26Ethan Thornton:You got a visit by the ATF.

1:27:28Shawn Ryan:Oh, yeah, that was a fun one. That was a fun one. Yeah, I was working on... At the time, so, Mock really kind of crystallized around when I was probably, like, 16, is when I started being, like, really obsessed with these things. So I worked as an auto tech, and then I used that to buy tools to start making knives and selling furniture and doing all these different things. And then I used that to experiment on stuff from Mock. Because you can't bootstrap your way into a defense company. Like, there's no world in which I wasn't gonna have to go raise capital.

1:27:56Ethan Thornton:Hold on. You started mocking in high school? Mm-hmm. No shit.

1:28:01Shawn Ryan:Oh, yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong, you can't actually go and ship a defense platform without tens of millions of dollars. And so I wasn't, like, the actual output at the time was small, but I was, like, kind of screaming into the void, trying to get this thing started, doing everything I could to research this stuff. So the ATF visit specifically, there were kind of three things where... Sorry, I say we too much. It was me at this point. But that I was working on... One was stratospheric systems. I think the stratosphere is sort of the most important military domain moving forward, and so I was obsessed with balloons, which is a bit of a weird one, but we'll talk about it, I'm sure.

1:28:37Shawn Ryan:Next was fixed-wing drones, and then the third was basically hydrogen-based systems. I was obsessed with oxyhydrogen guns. So there was work that had been done in the 90s surrounding what are called combustion-like gas guns, which is if you combust hydrogen and oxygen instead of gunpowder, basically the speed of sound in the gases is faster, and so you can launch projectiles a lot faster. Like you and I could go and engineer a bullet with gunpowder, and we could put as much gunpowder as we wanted. That bullet's never really going to go above like 4 ,500 feet per second because of the speed of sound in the gas, and because as you reach some multiple of that speed of sound, the force actually diminishes.

1:29:14Shawn Ryan:And so if you take oxygen and hydrogen combustion, you can reach like 30 ,000 feet per second, theoretically. And so really, really big performance increases. And so I was pretty obsessed with that in high school and was working on different guns doing this. And so I was building a rifle, 50-caliber rifle. I had built one, it was super janky, but it was basically deer feeder batteries mounted to a backpack with an electrolyzer, so you'd fill it with water, with water and you'd charge the batteries and it would make hydrogen, oxygen, gas. And then on Home Depot and Amazon, I bought basically pipes and different things and it was a valve that you'd actuate that would open the chamber, spark plug would detonate it and it would shoot a half-inch ball bearing.

1:29:58Shawn Ryan:Holy shit, how old are you? That one, I think I was 16, 17. It didn't work very well for what it's worth. And it reached the point, I never actually got to fire it because my mom rightfully so was like, like, hey, you're detonating hydrogen and oxygen this far from your face. I ran the numbers. The combustion chamber wasn't going to explode, but, like, anyway, it was an unsafe thing to do. So then I was like, okay, I'm going to get professional about this. And so I went and actually designed, like, what I thought at the time was a proper system, obviously not a proper system.

1:30:30Ethan Thornton:What gets you interested in that at 16 years old? Again, I'm an obsessive... Like, how did it even pop up on your radar? are?

1:30:41Shawn Ryan:I don't know. I like guns. And then I had misconceptions at the time about where warfare was headed. But at that time, I did think that artillery was actually going to be super, super useful.

1:30:56Ethan Thornton:At 16, you're thinking about where warfare is headed.

1:30:59Shawn Ryan:That's my whole family. So, So, like, that is one of the... My dad, I mentioned that he worked in finance. He also shares my brother and I's, like, weird infatuation with aircraft. Like, he's, like, obsessive and can tell you anything about any military aircraft. And then my mom's older and younger brother, Nathan and Christopher, were both big-time pilots, are in one case. And so, flew F-16s, flew B-2s, flies B-2s. um my her older brother nathan um graduated from mit and harvard at the same time with with master's degrees and basically his mit thesis in aerospace engineering this is like in 2000 was unmanned systems no for warfare and his harvard master's thesis was and i might be misremembering this but this is what anyway was basically near peer competition with china and that was that was like 25 years ago, 26 years ago.

1:31:53Shawn Ryan:Holy shit. And so, this is always the dinner table conversation. Like, I didn't arrive at this way of thinking on my own. And like I said, it's important to cultivate these conversations.

1:32:02Ethan Thornton:This is what you guys are talking about at dinner?

1:32:04Shawn Ryan:Oh, yeah.

1:32:05Ethan Thornton:I want to have dinner with you guys.

1:32:06Shawn Ryan:You're invited anytime.

1:32:11Shawn Ryan:But yeah, so I had misconceptions. But basically, my thinking was sensing has gotten a lot better. Traditionally speaking, one of the biggest limiting factors on the usefulness of artillery is sensing. Like we could shoot further than we could sense in many cases. Well now with satellites and with drones, you can sense however far you want to, but you're limited by the range of your effectors. And so I went back to the work that had been done in the 90s surrounding rail guns and combustion-like gas guns. The issue with rail guns is they tear themselves apart. You have to have a conductive rail.

1:32:41Shawn Ryan:And so I think amortizing the barrel wear on like the Zumwalt class destroyer is something stupid like a million dollars a round you shoot. And that's not the cost necessarily of the round you're firing, that's the fact that the gun's ripping itself apart every shot. There's a company, Utron, that had done some really interesting work surrounding actual combustion light gas guns and were able to achieve the same muzzle velocities, but reliably using the mechanism I described to you. So I was interested in this. It ended up being a bad bet. Like, there's a reason we're working on things like Viper and Glide now because those are the way, like the principle is the same, the actual engineering behind it couldn't be more different and the hydrogen stuff is total dead end that I never should have worked on.

1:33:19Shawn Ryan:But ATF story. I was like, okay, I'm going to get official about this, cat it up, an actual rifle. It was 50 cal, 20 millimeter, I don't remember, titanium, like pretty good system. I found this machinist who said he would machine me these guns. And technically, I think any, I forget the exact rules, but it was legal, what I was doing. At the time, basically, a firearm wasn't, or a destructive device was regulated based on combustion of gunpowder and having a casing. Well, my guns didn't have casings, and so it wasn't technically a gun on paper, but it sounded a lot like a gun, because you're blowing something up to shoot it.

1:34:03Shawn Ryan:Well, I hired this machinist. I gave him, like, most of my savings from brake check, and all the titanium I'd buy. He's like, great, I'll build you a gun. Well, two weeks later, I was in a physics test and I get a call and the machinist is like, hey, I'm telling you because I feel really bad about doing this, but I ended up just calling the ATF on you. And he kept the money.

1:34:26Ethan Thornton:Get the fuck out of here.

1:34:27Shawn Ryan:He kept the money and then...

1:34:29Ethan Thornton:He kept the money and fucking ratted you out?

1:34:31Shawn Ryan:Yeah. Holy shit.

1:34:33Ethan Thornton:A 16-year-old?

1:34:34Shawn Ryan:Yeah, it wasn't super cool. I get it. Not super cool of him, though. But yeah, it ended up getting resolved. But I think my mom had to go to the principal of the school and lobby for my case and convince them that I wasn't building guns to shoot people and that I was actually genuinely interested in the science behind it. Hold on.

1:34:54Ethan Thornton:What did the ATF say?

1:34:55Shawn Ryan:They were pissed. They were pissed. But ultimately, I wasn't breaking the law.

1:34:59Ethan Thornton:But they couldn't fucking do anything. I wasn't breaking the law. Holy shit. Are you serious? What are they saying?

1:35:05Shawn Ryan:I love this. This is awesome. That was a fun one.

1:35:09Ethan Thornton:We're mad, but you're not doing anything legal. Okay, we'll fucking be mad.

1:35:13Shawn Ryan:I think since then it's gone. Don't be mad off my property. Exactly.

1:35:17Ethan Thornton:Fucking pout over there. It's the ATF.

1:35:18Shawn Ryan:You got to have run-ins with the ATF. Anyway, whatever.

1:35:21Ethan Thornton:I haven't had any run-ins with the ATF. And I don't have any wood to knock on here.

1:35:29Ethan Thornton:Holy shit. So, yeah, what are they saying?

1:35:32Shawn Ryan:Oh, they...

1:35:33Ethan Thornton:Do you remember?

1:35:34Shawn Ryan:They were pissed about it. I think they tried to do something that the school freaked out about it. My mom was very, very good about going and lobbying my case. And I do think the regulations changed. I do think now it's regulated based on combustion and not based on having a casing.

1:35:50Ethan Thornton:Thanks, Ethan.

1:35:51Shawn Ryan:No. Sorry.

1:35:55Ethan Thornton:Holy shit.

1:35:55Shawn Ryan:So it was shooting ball bearings. So no, that one was shooting actual machined 50 caliber slugs. So it was an aluminum slug with tungsten at the core.

1:36:06Ethan Thornton:How far out are you heading?

1:36:08Shawn Ryan:Oh, it never, I never got it made. Oh, okay. No, so that's the thing, they shut it down. Wow. I had to stop work on it. And then that problem was way harder than I expected it to be, to ever get those systems reliable. Because keep in mind, my entire budget for it was like single digit thousands of dollars, and each of these valves on their own for this high pressure gas, like a$6 ,000 solenoid valve right now. And so I was hacking my way through it, doing stuff that we shouldn't have been doing, hand-actuated valves and all these other things. It's one of those things where, like, now if I had$100 ,000 to spend building this gun, I could go and build it, and now if I optimized in-housing those parts, it would be a$1 ,000 gun.

1:36:49Shawn Ryan:Now, no one wants that gun. It's so stupid for so many different reasons, but then also, like, back in the day, not having any budget to throw against this stuff. Like, back at MIT, I used to... All the guys would joke, the football weight room was right next to basically the hobbyist space, and there'd be lift cycles, and I'd be in the hobbyist space, machining guns in the MIT hobby space. Well, anyway, all the buddies were lift.

1:37:17Ethan Thornton:Anyway, I was going to do it.

1:37:18Shawn Ryan:But we totally had to hack our way through it, which isn't good. You shouldn't do that. Like, as soon as we got backing, as soon as Sequoia and then Bedrock invested, like, obviously, it's a very, very different approach. But the motivation behind it's always been the same. It's what I talked about. It's like unmanned systems are coming, right? Like this new era of warfare is here, and so do everything you possibly can to make sure that the West is in a good position against it. And so that's kind of why MOC started then. And I raised... 1517 was my first investor. They put a$1 ,000 check in in high school, which was like the best day ever for me because it like doubled our budget at the time.

1:38:01Shawn Ryan:But then our real capital started after I dropped out of MIT. Right on, right on.

1:38:05Ethan Thornton:What else were you making as a kid? Any other weapon systems? Knives?

1:38:10Shawn Ryan:Knives, yeah. I mean, I made a lot of furniture. I made chess boards, tons of throwing axes. Built an aquaponic system one time, which was pretty fun. Nice. I don't know if you've seen those, but you basically create... You get a fish tank, and I went and caught some bass, or it was pursed, sorry, and put them in the fish tank. and then you flow the water through a bed of plants, and the plants clean the water, the plants get fertilized by the fish tank, and then the fish eat the plants. And so it's this like self-replicating system that outputs fish and plants. That was a fun one. Right on, man.

1:38:47Ethan Thornton:Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll get into more MIT. Let's do it. Cool. Getting good sleep honestly changes everything. Your energy, your focus, even your mood during the day. One of the biggest upgrades I've made at home has been switching to a Helix mattress. Before Helix, I dealt with restless sleep and waking up feeling stiff. But since making the switch, I'm sleeping deeper and waking up actually recovered. Helix makes finding the right mattress simple. You take their sleep quiz, and it matches you with a mattress built specifically for how you sleep. They're also the most awarded mattress brand, reviewed by experts at places like Forbes and Wired, and they ship straight to your door for free.

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1:40:02Shawn Ryan:Hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of Vigilance Elites, The Watch Floor, where we highlight what matters.

1:40:10Ethan Thornton:It became a permissive state, explained to you why it matters, and then aimed to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play.

1:40:20Shawn Ryan:terrorists, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime.

1:40:26Ethan Thornton:Not everything is urgent, but this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know.

1:40:41Ethan Thornton:All right, Ethan, we're back from the break, and we're getting into, I know we covered it a little bit, but MIT. Did you graduate high school early? No. That's surprising. That's real surprising. So you went, did you go straight to MIT from high school?

1:40:56Shawn Ryan:I did. I did. Why MIT? Why MIT? I was considering like early high school, I had like two potential paths I wanted to go down. One is I was actually obsessed with being a doctor in high school. Like I really, really wanted to go be a brain surgeon. It was like one of my lifelong dreams to do. And so A &M ran this program called N-Med, where you get an engineering degree and a doctorate. And I wanted to go basically build robots to help people do surgery as a surgeon. And then the other - Hold on.

1:41:28Ethan Thornton:Where do you come up with this as an 18-year-old kid? 17, 18-year-old? Well, actually, you said early high school, right? Yeah, this would have been - Where are you coming up with this shit? I mean, most, what, 13, 14, 15-year-old kids are not thinking about building robots to do fucking brain surgery. I mean, I don't even think that was a thing when you were 15. What is that, seven years ago?

1:41:49Shawn Ryan:It was, people were talking about it. I don't know. I've been obsessed with the brain for a while. So it's another funny story about me. When I was in fifth grade, I stole my mom's credit card, borrowed my mom's credit card. I went and bought a microscope and two sheep sprains. And two sheep sprains? Talked to my mom. Where do you get a sheep sprain? Online. Because they sell them for med schools and stuff. And so I talked my sister into helping me. And she and I were like, okay, we're going to put out a YouTube video where we dissect a sheep sprain. And I think I somehow convinced my teachers to count it as a project that I had to do.

1:42:25Shawn Ryan:My mom, I didn't. She opened the freezer and there were two sheep sprains in there. And I think that anyway, it was a long story, but that YouTube video is out there somewhere of my sister and I like dissecting a sheep's brain back in the day.

1:42:36Ethan Thornton:That's out there.

1:42:38Shawn Ryan:I'm sure it is.

1:42:39Ethan Thornton:Do you have it?

1:42:39Shawn Ryan:I don't, I can find it.

1:42:41Ethan Thornton:Send it in. I want to, I want to overlay it during this. I'll try to.

1:42:44Shawn Ryan:It's pretty embarrassing, but that's cool.

1:42:46Ethan Thornton:That's your story though. You got to think of this either. This is a fucking legacy piece. Even though you're only 22 years old, you got to think like, this is your life story, how you think, who you are, you know? And so if you have kids one day and if they have kids and they have kids, I mean, they're going to watch this. That's true. You know what I mean? This is your legacy piece.

1:43:05Shawn Ryan:All right. I'll send in the video. No, it's true. And I appreciate you. It's funny. I don't talk or even think that much about all this stuff. So it's fun to sit down and talk about. So, yeah, I mean, that was one obsession. And then the other one was what I ended up doing, which was going and focusing on the war side, either fighting or building things. COVID is what changed it, actually. So I had gotten in, summer after sophomore year, I had gotten into this research program to go and do medical research with UT Austin. It was like I got taken that so seriously, getting into that was super excited.

1:43:41Shawn Ryan:COVID happened my sophomore year. That all shut down. And so that's when I got into, like truly got into knife making is I had nothing to do but build knives. And I totally would have gone the other path. But then going out of senior year, I really wanted to build the company. I thought that was super important. But these trends in warfare also always usually take decades to play out.

1:44:02Ethan Thornton:So, hold on. When did you start MOC? How old were you? Were you in high school or middle school?

1:44:07Shawn Ryan:High school.

1:44:07Ethan Thornton:High school? High school. Okay. High school.

1:44:10Shawn Ryan:I'm just saying like engineering and wanting to go fly. Like, kind of the two focus areas were either kind of health or health or defense. Okay. And it's hard to say exactly when I like, I officially started MOC. Like, our first programs I was doing under Blue Oak Ironworks. I think the first capital we raised was under Blue Oak Ironworks, which was my, like, knife-making furniture building.

1:44:32Ethan Thornton:So did you just... Is Mock a new company, or did you just keep morphing the company?

1:44:36Shawn Ryan:I kept morphing it. So it went from Mock to Trident. Trident was a horrible name. One of our VCs was pushing to call it Trident. Trident's bad for a number of reasons. And then it became Mock after I dropped out of the LTV.

1:44:49Ethan Thornton:Every Navy SEAL business in the world is fucking Trident.

1:44:52Shawn Ryan:Exactly. And I didn't know that when I started. And the VC definitely didn't know that. But then I started talking to people and they're like, are you a Navy SEAL? No. All right, don't fucking call your company Trident. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

1:45:06Ethan Thornton:Team guys are original and not so original at the same fucking time. My first company was called Trident Security Solutions. Really? Yeah. Nice. Which has morphed into this.

1:45:16Shawn Ryan:That's great. That's great. So, yeah, anyway, all that being said, I really wanted to go fly. So I figured this trend was going to take a while to play out because this was pre-Ukraine. So I wanted to go fly for eight, ten years and then go start the company.

1:45:33Ethan Thornton:Hold on. I'm sorry to interrupt. How old were you during COVID? I was 16. 16 years old? I mean, how did that affect you? I mean, a lot of people talk about how younger generations were affected by COVID, wearing masks for two years, not being able. You know, you missed out on a lot. How do you feel that that affected your generation going through COVID?

1:45:56Shawn Ryan:I think my story was probably different than most. I mean, it was actually a net good thing for me, I'd say. I got nothing out of school when COVID was happening. Like, I don't think I logged into a single class. But I'm an obsessive person, so all I did was create, like, a total vacuum for me to work on whatever I wanted to work on. And so, yeah, I just got obsessed with making things and about learning about engineering and thinking, right? I think on average, it's probably pretty bad. Like, if you're... I was fortunate, because I was in a place where I could go forge knives. Like, most people can't go into their backyard and forge knives, right?

1:46:32Shawn Ryan:I got super into hunting. I bought a crossbow and would just go hunt deer around, like, kind of my neighborhood. Like, that's not something that most people can do. And so, if I were trapped in a city during COVID, it would have been a very, very different story, and I think it would have been really, really bad for me. But honestly, without COVID, I never would have gotten into engineering in any of the same way I did. It basically just gave me time to go and find the things that I actually think are important and that I actually like working on. Wow.

1:46:59Ethan Thornton:How do you think it affected the majority of your generation?

1:47:03Shawn Ryan:I think people spent a lot more time on social media. I think it kind of kicked off this wave of ultra-short-form content, which is, I think, the most destructive thing for my generation. TikTok and Reels and everything else. I think it created a lot of isolation, right? Like people just couldn't see their friends. And it's also like the, I was younger than the people that got horribly affected. The people that really affected is if you're, if it's your senior year of high school or your freshman year of college, it was really, really bad. Because folks a few years older than me, if you're a freshman year of college, you're not meeting friends, you're not going to class, but you're at an age that is so existentially important.

1:47:46Shawn Ryan:I think it really disrupted those people. and then probably equally bad, if not worse, is the senior of high school. Like, that's such an important time to basically tie up your childhood. Going to graduation, your last year of football, all this stuff.

1:47:59Ethan Thornton:I mean, a lot of people think the younger, even younger than that, you know, were more effective because you're picking up, you know, you're picking up how to read facial expressions, body language, shit like that, and a fucking mask over the face. I mean, it masks, literally masks it. For sure.

1:48:17Shawn Ryan:Yeah, no, it's bad. And then, I mean, Bernie was the first school district in the country, I think, to go back to school.

1:48:23Ethan Thornton:No kidding.

1:48:24Shawn Ryan:I think, don't quote me on that, but we're one of the first, if not the first. Because I went back in August of 2020. And so it was also, like, significantly less destructive. Texas. If you're in New York and you missed a year and a half of school, no one, online school, no one got anything out of. Like it sets you back at least a year and a half, probably more because you got out of routine. And because even once you got back, it was still disrupted. And so folks also, if you assume you have 12 grades of high school to learn, folks are missing two of those 12 in many cases.

1:48:58Ethan Thornton:So you're forging knives.

1:49:00Shawn Ryan:Yes. All right.

1:49:01Ethan Thornton:All right.

1:49:01Shawn Ryan:We can move past it now. Yeah. Anyway, going to MIT, I really wanted to fly. And then if you're going to fly, you should be studying aerospace engineering. MIT was the best school for aerospace engineering. And then I was super fortunate to get a full ride scholarship to go and do that with the Air Force. And then I did play football in high school. I should say I'm quite bad at football.

1:49:31Shawn Ryan:MIT process for football, they don't offer you before you get in. Like it's D3. They actually usually have a winning record. They do fine, but they refuse to give offers because they like MIT. one of my favorite things about it is there's no, there's no like ulterior motives in the selection process. So, they don't look at donations, they don't look at background, they certainly don't look at sports. But getting in, then I was able to go play football, which was awesome. Like, football is such a good way in college to just make friends and have a friend group. And so, between football being the best at aerospace engineering and then most importantly, the Air Force side, MIT had the highest basically pilot selection rating of the non-academies.

1:50:11Shawn Ryan:And so I went there. After signing though, so I basically, senior high school, December, decided to go. Well, Ukraine starts that next spring. And pretty immediately once Ukraine started, we started learning how quick unmanned systems were going to play out. Right? Like you start seeing quads hit tanks. Even you start seeing drones, like I was talking about, since forward for artillery. And so I got to MIT, and at that point, the decision was between, like, do you stay for four years and then a year to a pilot school and then get in in 27, 28, or do you just decide to drop it? And one is basically, like, you 100 % have an impact in what you care about.

1:50:53Shawn Ryan:The other one is, like, you have a very, very small chance of having quite a large impact in what you care about. And so, I started talking with friends, went early for football preseason. While I was there, there's a thing called UROPS, which is basically undergraduate research opportunities where a student can work for a professor to research something. I actually convinced a professor to take on my research so that I could work for him and get myself funded. This is why we focus on hydrogen so much early, is because you can only do that on science stuff. So, like, they were never going to go do that on, like, regular plane engineering.

1:51:29Shawn Ryan:They were never going to go do that on balloons, certainly. The hydrogen stuff was actually interesting for them. And so I convinced them to do that. Well, that professor pretty immediately realizes that the university is not going to fund him to fund a kid to build guns on campus. So they kicked me over to Lincoln Labs, which is MIT's basically research department. I think by dollars it's the biggest military lab. It's where they develop a lot of the really interesting stuff, specifically on the RF side. So there was actually a period of time where I was planning on dropping out and working at Lincoln Labs.

1:52:00Shawn Ryan:This is still freshman semester, first few weeks of school, trying to figure that out. Well, the labs, I went and talked to them, and I was like, hey, walk me through technologies you've developed that have actually made their way into the hands of the warfighter. Like, you're spending all this money. Where does it actually have an impact? They're like, well, usually it takes 15, 20 years. Right. And then the issue is I couldn't even develop it and then take it from the lab and commercialize it to have an impact on the battlefield because they own your IP. And so... Oh, shit. Yeah, like literally if you machine like one part at Lincoln Labs, that IP is now owned by Lincoln Labs.

1:52:36Shawn Ryan:Wow. And so that suddenly wasn't an option. And then I decided to drop out pretty early into the semester, but I like was already paid to be there for a semester. I wanted a semester to like make friends, learn how the system works, recruit for the school. And so went through the rest of the semester and then left after that.

1:52:58Ethan Thornton:What did you think of MIT? I mean, now you're around, I would think you're around a lot more people that are on your level.

1:53:08Shawn Ryan:Yeah, I mean.

1:53:10Ethan Thornton:I would think that you can talk about things that you're excited about and other people will understand what you're talking about rather than trying to explain it to me. I mean, I don't mean that in a derogatory way towards anybody. It's just the fucking way it is. No, I will say it was both exciting in certain ways

1:53:30Shawn Ryan:and also not that exciting in certain ways. Like, you learn that people are just people. And, like, having hired a lot of engineers at this point, the top 5 % coming out of any school, like any school on Earth, are always going to be as good, if not better, than the bottom 50 % at a place like MIT. And so, I would say, look, like, the actual raw horsepower and IQ is not that meaningfully different. The thing that is very different is it's a total machine of a culture and that you're expected to step in and work 20 hours a day and just obsess about honing your craft of engineering, and you're thrown into this environment where you get your ass kicked.

1:54:10Shawn Ryan:Like, you're used to being the smartest person, suddenly you wake up and you're an idiot. It's fantastic. It's, like, all you can ask for. And then there's so much funding that goes into, hey, what's your obsession? Okay, we're going to fund that and go and develop that, right? And so that's what's great about MIT. I'd actually say like the people themselves are very similar. And that part I loved. I mean, it's not perfect, don't get me wrong. There's obviously politics, there's obviously all these different things. But I don't know if there's another environment on earth like MIT in that way.

1:54:36Shawn Ryan:Like even having hired from these other schools at this point, the specific thing that sets it apart is just the obsession with first principles. And then everyone is expected to just work so insanely hard. And that was fantastic. So I loved MIT. And then the MIT football team was a really interesting group of humanity. Most of my best friends were made during that six month period because you've got people who like sit at that intersection, which is a lot of fun. So it was a great school. I mean, if I was going to go back to college, I'd certainly go there. I'm obviously not going back to college, but I loved it there.

1:55:08Shawn Ryan:And me leaving had nothing to do with MIT, honestly, had nothing to do with me wanting to build a company and everything to do with the fact that like there are real problems that we have to go solve and me me entering in 2028 is is i i didn't at least think it was as meaningful as like going and jumping in in 2022 2023 going headfirst into these problems were you passionate about ukraine very why very um look i think it's it's a it's a clear war of good and evil and you can separate all the politics that have infused since then but you you had putin who's clear objective of evil in the world invade another sovereign country.

1:55:47Shawn Ryan:And so, I'm still very passionate about Ukraine.

1:55:50Ethan Thornton:Right on. Just curious. Yeah. Yeah.

1:55:53Shawn Ryan:I mean, look, it's not perfect. No country's perfect. But I've spent time in Ukraine. Like, it's also very different. Like, going, like, meeting the people whose, like, sons were killed, going and, like, actually, like, experiencing it. It's a very, very, like, real war that's happening, that thousands of people die every day, that are not fighting for anything other than their own freedom. And I think if us as the West can't separate politics out from that and say, like, objectively, they're like mothers whose sons are dying. Objectively, they're 22-year-olds who are going to go die in the trench for their own freedom.

1:56:30Shawn Ryan:That is something worth supporting. No, I think a lot led into the war. And obviously, the U.S. supported the war. I'm very happy to talk it through, but like Ukraine itself, it's one of the things I'm most passionate about in life is the sovereignty of Ukraine. Like I think, look, I think Ukraine's going to go down in history. We'll see the history still being written. But if they push off this invasion, you're talking about a level of like the Alamo style, like stepping up against a bigger adversary and punching back that history hasn't seen many times. and Ukraine's corrupt. It's very corrupt, but you have to separate that from the actual people that live in that corrupt system that are fighting for their freedom.

1:57:18Ethan Thornton:I'm not judging you. No, no, no. I'm just genuinely curious on why you're passionate about that as an 18, 20-year-old kid.

1:57:25Shawn Ryan:Yeah. And feel free to judge me or to push back. I think this is why we have these conversations. Not that I'm saying you are. I'm just saying I'm happy to talk about it. But yeah, look, Like, I think that's why I'm doing all this, right? This is why the company exists. That's why I view myself as on this earth, is to protect for individual sovereignty.

1:57:51Ethan Thornton:That's a good purpose. Thank you. Are you more passionate about China, Ukraine? Or, I'm sorry, Russia, Ukraine, or China, Taiwan?

1:58:02Shawn Ryan:Definitely China, Taiwan. I would say at an individual level, it's probably pretty similar. I would say if you're talking about the impact it will have on the future of sovereignty, China-Taiwan is orders of magnitude more important.

1:58:21Ethan Thornton:I'm definitely with you on that one. Definitely with you on that one. Okay, so Ukraine was your motivation. That's your purpose at the time. Well, so in more ways than one.

1:58:35Shawn Ryan:So one is like, obviously care about the sovereignty of Ukraine. Two is it's such a crazy glimpse into how big of a change we need to expect from unmanned systems, right? Like we're just in the very early ages of unmanned warfare. It is fucking crazy, isn't it?

1:58:51Ethan Thornton:I mean, I spent 14 years in and out of combat zones all over the Middle East. And... I mean, I can't even remember. Did Ukraine kick off before we actually even pulled out of Afghanistan? I think it did.

1:59:03Shawn Ryan:I thought it was... Yeah.

1:59:04Ethan Thornton:Pretty sure it did.

1:59:05Shawn Ryan:Yeah.

1:59:06Ethan Thornton:And so the staunch differences in those two conflicts, those wars are just fucking wildly different.

1:59:15Shawn Ryan:Yeah. It's insane how different. Absolutely. And then the thing... And so that's really what it was about Ukraine as much as the sovereignty is like, this is a crazy glimpse. And this is the first near-peer, like true near-peer conflict we've seen in so long. And so you have to stop thinking about drones in the context of terrorists and start thinking about drones in the context of nation states sending hundreds of thousands of them against each other. And we're just in the early dawn of this era. Like, you have to keep in mind the actual level of tech being deployed on the battlefield is actually still quite rudimentary.

1:59:50Shawn Ryan:Like, if you look at probably the two most important unmanned systems, this isn't an attack on the Ukrainians, right? Like, they're doing an incredible, incredible job. It just takes years to build technology. but you've got quadcopters that are these super super simple like four electric motors directly manually controlled either over over radio or through fiber optics um that are slow usually less than 100 miles an hour right that aren't very maneuverable um and that aren't designed that well for manufacturing like these things are still hand hand assembled so you're dealing with lower volume and lower sophistication than we can expect and same with the shot like if you go and look at a Shawhead, you're dealing with like a fiberglass airframe.

2:00:31Shawn Ryan:The original ones were literally powered by like Vespa, like piston driven engines. The autonomy package is horrible, but it's so effective. Like that's the thing. I'm not, I'm not taking away from how effective it is like that stupidly simple quadcopter will go and take out the most sophisticated tank anyone on earth can build. Right. You look at Operation Spiderweb. I mean, you look at those things taking out hundreds of millions or billions of strategic air power on the runway. And so if you imagine the type of tech we deal with in the day-to-day, and you imagine that being applied to unmanned systems, and you imagine what it actually looks like when the true force of innovation meets unmanned systems, which is happening today, it wasn't happening three years ago, you push so far up that curve in a way that is just terrifying.

2:01:23Shawn Ryan:And so that's why Ukraine was with such an eye opener is like, these are still super unsophisticated systems that are totally defining the only near-peer conflict that we've seen in recent history. And so give it five years, certainly give it 10 years, and the level of effect these systems will have is just so huge. Yeah, yeah.

2:01:46Ethan Thornton:I mean, I can't even imagine what this is going to turn into. Yeah. But when was the first time you went to Ukraine?

2:01:55Shawn Ryan:I've only been once. I went, I don't remember the year, probably 2023, 2024. What were you doing? Just working on mock stuff. I mean, I didn't do a ton there. I didn't spend that much time there. I don't want to like, it's not something I'm trying to brag about or anything. Like I wanted to, for me, it was like, how can you get as close as possible to the war that's actually happening?

2:02:17Ethan Thornton:How did you get there?

2:02:19Shawn Ryan:Um, I go I was in a conference in Poland and and met some Ukrainian foreign legion guys.

2:02:26Ethan Thornton:Okay

2:02:26Shawn Ryan:Um, and then just hopped in their car and rode across the border with them That's awesome. I love that shit It was I mean, it was it was it was crazy eye-opening. What'd you see? So I went to I went to one of the schools where they train these operators and you literally pull people off the street, you put them in front of a TV screen with a controller for a week and you teach them how to do that and suddenly you've got someone that can take out a target 20 miles away for$400. Like, that's crazy. I went and saw a factory where they're making these things. And you've got things that are destroying $50 million aircraft that are assembled by like Ukrainian grandmothers, right?

2:03:06Shawn Ryan:Like that's what asymmetry means, right? And so, and then you actually meet people. Like, it's very humanizing to actually talk to the people that are fighting the conflict. So, yeah, I mean, nothing ultra profound, but, like, for me, it's so easy to sit in VC land and, like, pump up your valuation, do all these different things, raise money from VCs who have never fought in war. I've obviously, I'm not a war fighter. Like, it's very easy to get separated from the actual problem. But if you truly want to solve issues, like you have to get as close as possible to people actually using your systems at the end of the day.

2:03:46Ethan Thornton:Wow. So you knew you were going to build drones before you knew it. Yeah.

2:03:54Shawn Ryan:Yeah. Like right away.

2:03:55Ethan Thornton:Yeah. Certain. Yeah. How many years did you spend at MIT?

2:04:01Shawn Ryan:A semester. That's it?

2:04:03Ethan Thornton:Mm-hmm. A semester?

2:04:04Shawn Ryan:So I filled out the form to drop out like a handful of weeks in. What?

2:04:10Ethan Thornton:I mean, so what convinced you, holy shit, so you're in one of the most prestigious schools in the world. And a couple weeks in, you're like, ah, fuck, this isn't for me. I think, and I was clear with everyone about this, I expected failure.

2:04:27Shawn Ryan:Like, the numbers I was running is like, of course, it's crazy to say you're going to go and build these systems, build these factories, do these different things. But if there's a one in 100 ,000 chance that you can ship hundreds of thousands of platforms over the next five years, like, you have to do it. Like, the median is certainly lower. But, like, the average, the net expected value of, like, going and dropping out. And so I fully expected to run out of money for it all to fail. I was pretty clear about that. But if there's a chance of making a difference, you have to jump in and do it. And so I wasn't excited about it.

2:05:01Shawn Ryan:Like, it wasn't like I was sitting there hating MIT. It wasn't like I was, like, super excited.

2:05:04Ethan Thornton:You just felt a duty.

2:05:06Shawn Ryan:I'd say so. Well, I'm damned. Wow. Man.

2:05:12Ethan Thornton:That's impressive.

2:05:13Shawn Ryan:Thank you. And look, I mean, there's still a very long ways to go. Like, I'd say I still feel that way. Like, for our company, for the military industrial base writ large, like, we're still in the early days of actually adopting this correctly. And so it's been about three years now since I dropped out and decided to do that, and I think we still have decades of work left to do if we actually want to see that impact. Man.

2:05:42Ethan Thornton:You are a cool dude. Thank you. You're welcome. So, what are you working on? Where do you go after you drop out of MIT?

2:05:50Shawn Ryan:So, a few of my buddies decided to do the same. Yeah. I was super excited about. Football team? Football, and then two of the other sort of Air Force ROTC people. There's something called Campus Preview Weekend, or not Campus Preview Weekend, that's a different thing. What's it called? Damn it. Now I'm forgetting the name for it. MIT gives everyone off all of January, and you're expected to go and work on basically a project. And so all the students were off for like a month, which was awesome. Because I didn't have the money to support anyone other than myself. So I literally couldn't have people drop out with me.

2:06:23Shawn Ryan:But a bunch of my buddies and I decided that like this month, we're just going to sprint on working on these problems. And then after that, it would just be me because I couldn't support any of them dropping out. And so for that month, I got, I was about the size of this room, a workshop in Charlestown, like the cheapest real estate in Boston we could find and just started building a bunch of different things so we built quadcopters we we built a gun we built a basically a shot head um a what it's a type of so this was pre shot head is like the dorito drone that the russians use like crazy this was actually pre shot head and so we built what ended up being the shot head that was used like crazy in ukraine no kidding uh what else i didn't want to build That's kind of my main job is to ideally be as smart as a...

2:07:10Ethan Thornton:Walk me through the process. Why are you building guns and drones? How do you decide which one you're going to do first?

2:07:17Shawn Ryan:Yeah, so you have to try and war game what a battlefield looks like in the future. It's a very, very hard thing to do. And I won't say I'm necessarily good at it, but you have to basically understand technologies that exist, to understand the current state of warfare and imagine like what the best possible system is in the future. The way, and that's your kind of first optimization. The issue is you have kind of two other optimizations. How do you do that?

2:07:43Ethan Thornton:Is that internal thought? Is that discussion? Is that whiteboard? What is that?

2:07:47Shawn Ryan:All three. And in massive, massive volumes. I mean, again, that's why I went to Ukraine. And obviously, I grew up having these conversations with my family, talking to engineers, talking two war fighters, basically putting together this model of like what is kind of, what is, if tech were full throttle, what would this look like? Now, the issue is there are kind of two other optimizations that have to sit parallel to that. The first is what will the government actually procure? And this is the one I understood least well at this time. Like if, even if a technology is better, if the government can't procure it in time and can't train on it in time, it's completely useless.

2:08:22Shawn Ryan:And then for me, I don't have the budget of the United States government, right? Like I can't say, we're going to go work on this. So for me, all a company is is basically a lever for action, right? And so for me, if I want that lever to have any real momentum behind it, I have to make money for my investors to keep raising more capital. And so those are kind of the three main optimizations. It's like, what works in warfare? What can the warfighter actually adopt in time given politics, given training, given all these different things? and then what can I as a company actually make money to build a machine that keeps compounding this?

2:08:54Shawn Ryan:And then at the time, I had no idea what would actually... Like, my algorithms comparing those three things were quite bad, and I think we kind of knew that, which is why we took such a broad aperture. So literally in that one month, you've got quadcopters, you've got guns, you've got fixed-wing drones, you've got balloon stuff. We built a hydrogen electrolyzer, we did some aluminum fuel. Hydro electrolyzer? It sounds more complex than it is. You basically take water, you shock it, and you separate the hydrogen and oxygen. And then you recombust that for guns... Okay. ...or for air travel or other things.

2:09:30Shawn Ryan:We built aluminum fuel that also does that. So, you take aluminum... It's aluminum. You remove the oxide layer, you put it in water, and then it rips basically the oxygen off of the water and produces hydrogens. We developed some of that fuel, worked on like an afterburning electric ducted fan, all different stuff.

2:09:52Ethan Thornton:How many guys are doing this with you? There were five of us. This shit's all happening in one fucking month?

2:10:00Shawn Ryan:We didn't sleep. What? It was a lot. It was a lot. Yeah, small budget. We were all sleep deprived. Yeah, it was a good month though. Sounds like it. But again, we were allowed at this point because we had no idea what we were doing. It's just like, let's prove to investors that we can actually build things. Let's ourselves start to learn what it means to be good engineers. Because again, you're learning all this theory, and I had built a few things, and they had built a few things, but now you actually have a bit more of a budget to start doing it. And then from that, then you can take it to the warfighter, right?

2:10:35Shawn Ryan:Because if I call someone in the Pentagon, I'm like, hey, I want to have a conversation about something I'm working on. And they said, cool, what do you have? And I showed them a spreadsheet or slides. That's very, very different than like, hey, here's this video of this thing flying. And so part of it is also like, you never know what the Pentagon's going to take seriously unless you have something that makes them take it seriously enough to give it another pass. And then from there, they all went back to school and it was just me for the next semester. And this was a really hard time. Like, this is probably the closest the company ever came to not working.

2:11:10Shawn Ryan:Because we had all this work, but they had all gone, and at this point I was doing everything in the business. I was doing the sales, I was the janitor, I was still pushing the engineering along as much as I could, and they would work on the weekends or after school, but it's MIT, like, they had a lot of coursework and other things to do. But, I mean, super grateful we were able to find investment capital at that point from a couple different folks. That's when Sequoia invested, that's when 1517 did another round. It was a good time, but it was later. It was after four or five months. There are all these...

2:11:46Shawn Ryan:Where are you learning to pitch?

2:11:48Ethan Thornton:Or they probably have recruiters all around MIT.

2:11:50Shawn Ryan:Yeah, they hear about it, and they ask you for a meeting, and they come to the factory and look at stuff.

2:11:56Ethan Thornton:Does that make you nervous?

2:11:58Shawn Ryan:Not really. It didn't? I don't get nervous in conversations. I love conversations.

2:12:03Ethan Thornton:You get nervous you're going to get taken advantage of by a shark.

2:12:08Shawn Ryan:I can look out for myself. Folks have tried and I've beat them back to the best I can. I don't know. I like to avoid being nervous about things. I'm just curious. No, I get nervous. My fears are usually more existential than they are micro. I don't know if I've ever been afraid of a pitch meeting or afraid of a given test because the stakes are so high, you're going to do everything you can. And if that's not enough, it's not enough. But there's no reason to be nervous about that fact. I don't know if that makes sense. It does. But yeah, anyway, we raised capital then. It's a tremendous amount of confidence in yourself.

2:12:53Shawn Ryan:Thank you. Yeah. It's not though, I guess, is the other thing I'll say. I'm not saying I expect success. I'm just saying I'm going to do everything I can and that the results will be what the results are. Because you would go insane in any other way. Like, there's nothing actually inherently that painful about company building. Like, I think there's this narrative spun up by CEOs that company building is like this incredibly painful, essentially worrying thing. And it can be at times, but if my goal, and I'm not great at this, but my goal is like, all company building is, is conversations. All company building is, is like working at a computer.

2:13:33Shawn Ryan:It's not like I'm being shot at, right? Like, it's actually, like, so much less existential. You have to try and separate the two as much as you can.

2:13:44Ethan Thornton:Man, I think the opposite. I think building a company is fucking hard. It's hard. Hardest thing I've done. I'd rather be facedown with bullets flying over my head because I'm more comfortable in that situation.

2:13:57Shawn Ryan:That might be you.

2:14:03Shawn Ryan:Yeah, it's challenging, and the odds are very, very slim. But it's not personally dangerous. It's not like you're having to... Anyway, I don't know.

2:14:13Ethan Thornton:I get what you're saying.

2:14:16Shawn Ryan:But we... Yeah, so then we raised capital, and that was a big time, because then all those people were able to drop out with me, and we were able to scale the company. So then, after that semester, we went and got two houses down in Austin. And we had some stupid numbers, like 30 or 35 people from MIT and Harvard come move down to Texas for that semester. And all living in two houses. We worked in one of the houses. Holy shit. So we put up a bunch of insulation in the garage, ran like a 3D printer farm. We would test jet engines in the backyard. And then the other house was like the hangout house.

2:14:52Shawn Ryan:So we had like Lucida, which was the workhouse, and the Balcones, which was like the hangout house. We'd have a barbecue every Friday and I'll hang out. The AC broke in Lucida. We were running so many 3D printers and different things. The AC got overwhelmed. And it was like 90 degrees in that house for like two weeks. And there was like 30 of us in there building stuff.

2:15:13Ethan Thornton:Holy shit.

2:15:14Shawn Ryan:And then understandably, it was a weird environment to try and hire like professionals into at the time. So that's when we made our first few hires. It's like, hey, come join this crew. It's like, eh, tough. But we got some solid stuff done, and then we're able to go and raise the A, and that's when Bedrock stepped up. Like, the company would not exist without Bedrock kind of placing the vote of confidence they did on us at that point for the A, which is when we were able to go and get, like, a proper office. We were able to buy CNC machines. I was able to actually hire people. Because even on$5 million, if you're paying engineers$200 ,000 a year and you need 50 engineers to do a program, you burn through your money real quick.

2:15:54Shawn Ryan:Working on stuff like we are. Now, it's different, but, like, Viper is a vertical takeoff fighter jet. Like, that's not something that you're gonna build on that amount of money. And so, really, until Bedrock made that vote of confidence, it was all kind of lab-esque work of, like, proving our competence, proving that we could do things, starting early customer conversations. And that's when the company, I'd say, like, actually, like, truly cemented was around that A that Bedrock led.

2:16:19Ethan Thornton:What were you building in the house? What were you 3D printing?

2:16:23Shawn Ryan:It's a good question. What all were we working on? on at the time. We had three major programs at this point. So we had Viper, which is today, it's a six and a half foot long vertical takeoff fighter jet. Back then, all we could afford was crappy RC turbines. It was runway launched and never worked super well. And then the next, I had this dream for something called, we used to call it Medusa. It was this big tail sitter drone. So 1 ,000 mile range. We had three printers. We're never going to build that. We're building like scale demonstrations. But a tail sitter that would go take off, do ISR, do strike, and then come back and land.

2:17:02Shawn Ryan:A big part of our philosophy has always been decentralization. Like the next era of warfare, one of the only things I think you can say with confidence right now is that strike is much easier at long range. And so defending centralized assets, ships in the ocean, aircraft on the runway, even 2 ,000, 3 ,000 miles away becomes so much harder. And so our big emphasis, one of them, has always been on this decentralization. Like, how do you have things take off vertically? How do you have things only require two operators so that you and I can walk outside, launch something, and be gone by the time they figure out where it came from?

2:17:37Shawn Ryan:So that was Medusa. And then the third, and this plays into the decentralization bet, but again was a bad bet, was something called Prometheus, which was, and this was actually done up in Boston. So this work, the first two I described were happening down in Austin. the other one was up in Boston, was basically an aluminum hydrogen generator. And so similarly, as you look at Indopaycom, one of the hard problems is how do you fuel these forces going forward? And that gets even harder if your tankers are getting taken out by unmanned surface vehicles, right, by unmanned underwater vehicles, by these different things.

2:18:11Shawn Ryan:And so one of the big things we're focused on is how do you actually generate fuel at point of need? And so that's why we were doing the aluminum hydrogen work.

2:18:21Ethan Thornton:Now, also... You're kind of taking a very complex problem in, you're also thinking about all the logistics and everything that go along with the products that you're making.

2:18:30Shawn Ryan:You have to. You have to.

2:18:32Ethan Thornton:That's where - Are these other companies doing that? I don't think they are.

2:18:35Shawn Ryan:I think they are now. I don't think necessarily know. I mean, frankly, what they were working on at the time was better than what we were working on at the time. Because the aluminum thing was, maybe we thought through one specific niche area of the problem very well, but the rest was actually not. Not great. I would say we do take probably a more full-stack approach to things. But no, the other companies working in the space are very good. I think this new era of people working on these problems take it seriously.

2:19:06Ethan Thornton:Oh, I've talked to a lot of them. They're all fucking sharp. I haven't heard anyone talk about logistics.

2:19:11Shawn Ryan:Logistics wins worse. That is, other than your people, it's the most important thing at the end of the day.

2:19:19Ethan Thornton:What is it saying? Amateur stock tactics? Pros talk logistics. Yeah, something like that.

2:19:28Shawn Ryan:Yeah, it's important. The way we're looking at the logistics problem now is not requiring runways, making things as small as they possibly can be so that they're easy to get into theater. Glide is literally this big. You can take out a target a very, very far range. Which one is Glide? That's the one we kind of talk about the least. it's one of our, it's a high-altitude glide vehicle to take out targets. It's a more sensitive con-op, but it's this big. And you and I could deploy this here and take out a target a long ways down range.

2:20:01Ethan Thornton:Is this the thing that looks like a missile?

2:20:03Shawn Ryan:That's Viper. So we have five products we've talked about publicly. So one is Viper. It's about a six-and-a-half-foot-long vertical takeoff, kind of miniature fighter jet. And so the job of Viper is to do everything a fighter jet would do as best as can be done while being cheap enough to mass manufacture, like cheap enough to seriously go and make a million, two million of these things, and then be runway independent. And so several hundred mile range, several hundred mile, like 600 miles an hour, can go and get up to these high altitudes, but only cost$100 ,000. And you and I could take it out of a Pelican case here and launch it with no ground infrastructure.

2:20:42Shawn Ryan:And so Army is super excited about Viper for, or a bunch of folks are, for surface to surface. But then that same aircraft you can take and go do surface to air. Wow. And so that's Viper. And then…

2:20:53Ethan Thornton:So hold on. So is Viper, I mean, does it carry a payload or is it the payload?

2:20:59Shawn Ryan:Right now it is the payload. It is the payload. That's not necessarily true of future versions of Viper. So the other thing we do with our products is every six months or so, I'm trying to get that down, but they're hard products to engineer. We try to completely re-architect the product. And so the current version of Viper, few hundred mile range, purely surface to surface. And I shouldn't talk too much about future, but like eventually you're dropping payloads. Eventually you're coming in and landing vertically and doing all these different things. But you're doing that at a price point that's like 10 times less than a current air-to-air missile.

2:21:30Shawn Ryan:Wow. So that's a fun one. We've been flying that one for about a year now. We could use a couple of those here. I can. You want one? Yeah. Fuck yeah, I want one. I'll get you a Viper.

2:21:42Ethan Thornton:Are you serious? Yeah. Fuck yes.

2:21:45Shawn Ryan:I'm guessing no warhead in the Viper.

2:21:46Ethan Thornton:We'll take some warheads too. I might get that run in with the ATF.

2:21:51Shawn Ryan:There you go. Yeah, I'll get you a Viper. A hundred percent. Are you serious? Yeah.

2:21:56Ethan Thornton:Fuck yeah.

2:21:57Shawn Ryan:Yeah. Yes. The composite, the manufacturing guys are going to be so excited building that Viper. No shit?

2:22:05Ethan Thornton:Yeah. Dude, you got to come back. You got to come back.

2:22:07Shawn Ryan:I'd love to.

2:22:08Ethan Thornton:You got to come back.

2:22:09Shawn Ryan:I'll a hundred percent get you a Viper. Do you want me to walk through the products? Absolutely. Yes.

2:22:16Ethan Thornton:All of them. As much as you can.

2:22:19Shawn Ryan:Yeah, for sure. So the stratosphere I can talk less about. I think it's the most important. And this is the bet we're placing as a company that is sort of most distinct and also kind of most controversial right now. I am a huge believer, and you're going to laugh, I'm a huge believer and have been, like, since high school, that balloons are the most important tools in future conflict.

2:22:41Ethan Thornton:You mentioned that at breakfast. I did.

2:22:43Shawn Ryan:Well, the balloon in the US this week, the Chinese balloon... The Mexican cartel drone that wound up being a happy birthday balloon. Exactly. I mean, the Russians are starting to send balloons out of Lithuania. It's causing a real problem. Obviously, I got a ton of traction. So the Chinese balloon happened during that semester after I had dropped out, which was part of why we were able to get funding, is I was talking to all these people talking about balloons, and they were, like, laughing. And then, suddenly, our entire country freaks the hell out because of balloons. But yeah, I won't go into it too specifically, but shooting a balloon down is so much harder than putting a balloon up.

2:23:20Shawn Ryan:So much harder. And there are... So, putting a balloon up is super easy for obvious reasons, right? Like you fill it up with gas and it goes up to, let's say, 60 ,000, 80 ,000 feet. Well, to then go pop it, you've got to send a missile or a plane up to 60 ,000 to 80 ,000 feet. And so, this is... We talk a lot about asymmetry. Like, this is asymmetry at the maximum. I see what you're saying. And then the interesting thing is there's these companies, Loon is the most famous, that actually developed ways of navigating balloons. So instead of this being something that's like a party balloon that goes up, pops, disappears, basically forms a satellite that can navigate, that can station keep, that can do all these different things.

2:24:05And so suddenly you've got a payload at an altitude

2:24:09Shawn Ryan:that's 100 to 1 ,000 times more expensive to shoot down than it is to put up, that can actually tack against wind patterns and lock in places. And then from there, there's obviously really interesting things you can do once you have a payload up at that altitude. And then the more interesting thing is if I can have hundreds of thousands of payloads, like hundreds of thousands of payloads up at that altitude at a given time. So we have Stratus payloads up at altitude, really, really interesting things you can do deploying those things at scale. And something I should mention is like, as we talk logistics, the logistics of balloons are pretty fantastic because you can launch them thousands of miles away.

2:24:43Shawn Ryan:And so you and I could launch a balloon here and have it up over X country, actually much quicker than I think most people realize. And so the logistics problem gets significantly, significantly easier.

2:24:56Ethan Thornton:And so how did you come to the conclusion that balloons would be so important?

2:25:02Shawn Ryan:It's just physics. You look at how cheap something is to put up, You look at how expensive it is to shoot down. You think about inventing new ways to shoot stuff down. Like, you start wargaming. Well, if you're shooting down balloons, well, what if the balloons are carrying air-to-air missiles? All these different things. So, anyway, we've held that contention strongly for a while as a company. We're working very, very...

2:25:28Ethan Thornton:Does this stuff just pop in your head? Or, I mean... It does.

2:25:34Shawn Ryan:I mean, a lot of this... I can't claim all of these ideas. Like, and it's always hard to tell where an idea comes from, but you're talking to hundreds of different people in a given day. Like, I didn't invent Loon, right? Like, I read the Loon library in high school. They published all of it. They published how to go and navigate these balloons. And so, you go and read that, and suddenly start thinking about these things and can extrapolate pretty quickly. And then our final two products we talk about, one is basically a much bigger jet-powered aircraft. We flew this for the first time in December.

2:26:06Shawn Ryan:I released a video about it.

2:26:08Ethan Thornton:Is this the one 71 days from drawing to build?

2:26:11Shawn Ryan:Yes. Dude, what the fuck?

2:26:13Ethan Thornton:That's crazy.

2:26:15Shawn Ryan:I can't take credit for it.

2:26:16Ethan Thornton:71 days?

2:26:17Shawn Ryan:The engineers were working hard. And then one of the good things about our philosophy is we spend so much time on subcomponents. So, like, most primes are system integrators that go and buy other people's subcomponents and put them together. One of the big things that starts to happen as you develop a really good matrix engineering org, it's like you just take your learnings from Viper and apply it to these other aircraft. So it's actually, in many cases, the same avionics that fly our different vehicles. It'll be the same jet engines that ship on Viper and on this other platform. So it was fast.

2:26:53Shawn Ryan:So what is this one called? There are a few different names for it. Dart? No, that's a different one. Okay. So some folks call it Pike, some folks call it Venom. I unfortunately don't get to choose the name of my products. If I was building in commercial industry, I would say, hey, here's the name of my products. And so I developed them to a point, and then the government comes up with a name for it that they like to call it.

2:27:17Shawn Ryan:Pike, Venom, different things for different customers and or different kind of potential customers. And then past that, we have Dart. Dart is sort of my company's best crack at unmanned system defeat. So this is us entering the defensive side. And so there will never be a silver bullet answer to taking out drones, right? You'll always have some combination of big platforms, some combination of small platforms, some combination of jamming, some combination of lasers. but our philosophy is to focus on what we think is sort of the power law important problem within that set for me like our systems when they ship downrange don't rely on gps or rf and terminal right and so what that means is that you really can't jam these things right similarly the way a lot of these drones right now that are slower that are non-maneuverable are taken out with electric based interceptors well that's not going to work once you have things like Viper that come in very quickly.

2:28:20Shawn Ryan:Okay.

2:28:20Ethan Thornton:That's why I was going to, okay. I was going to, I mean, we were talking about Epirus earlier, Leonidas and some of those, some of that weaponry. Yeah. And that's, so that, that's what, that's cause I was going to say, seems like that's the answer. It's a different takes out the drones that have the wire takes out drones without the wire. I think they dropped like a hundred and something fucking drones a month ago or something out in the desert.

2:28:43Shawn Ryan:It's one of the best tools.

2:28:44Ethan Thornton:It's great. But, so you're saying that a weapon like Leonidas or what Epirus is developing is not gonna be effective against something like Dart. Or not Dart, because that's a defensive one, but an offensive one that moves at whatever speed.

2:29:02Shawn Ryan:So Leonidas is a bit different. So you have jamming and then you've got Leonidas, which is actually directed microwave. Leonidas is a great platform and will actually take out most things. It's not a silver bullet though, because the second you turn it on, you're pumping so much power. Anyway, there's stuff we shouldn't get into there, but there are ways to get through it, specifically with fast-moving things that already have a given trajectory. And so you need the full stack. Like DJIs, the drone's most unsophisticated adversaries are going to be flying, and similar drones are quite susceptible to jamming.

2:29:39Shawn Ryan:Right? And so jam those. You've got something like Leonidas that is very, very, very good against a large number of assets in a given location. Directed EMG, correct? It is. But it's an expensive platform. It's a very, very power-hungry platform. And then it's a platform that it's pretty easy quickly to realize where it is. And so then you've got kinetic action, where you're actually going and intercepting something. In kinetic action, for certain threats, you want to go use an electric interceptor, right? So the shot heads I was describing to you, kind of low and slow, you want to go and hit that with an electric interceptor.

2:30:13Shawn Ryan:The issue is if you've got something like Viper that's cruising up at 35 ,000 plus feet, coming straight down super, super fast, maneuvering along the way, you're not going to reach that with an electric interceptor, right? And so that's when you need faster moving things. The issue with guns is you're pretty good against one adversarial drone. Well, most of the targets you're defending are expensive enough to send tens of adversarial drones against. And so if 10 things are coming in at 600 miles an hour, all at the same time. Your gun is, for obvious reasons, not going to have time to shoot it down.

2:30:46And so what we're working on with DART

2:30:50Shawn Ryan:is how cheap can you possibly get an actual missile to go and interdict these things. And so one of the issues is if you're using a drone to take out another drone, your drone ends up being as expensive, if not more expensive. And so it's not an asymmetric approach. Gotcha. Right? Whereas with our missiles and with missile systems, generally speaking. And I guess I should step back. What makes it so expensive is that you're using a jet engine or electric motors or other things to get up to speed, which is why I'm a fan of solid rocket motors. They're super short range, but they're super, super cheap if you manufacture them right, and you can take out adversarial assets at theoretically a price point cheaper than the asset itself, which gives you sort of your asymmetry back.

2:31:35Shawn Ryan:And so that's what we're working on with DART, is like how cheap can you possibly get one of these surface-to-air missiles? How fast does it go? So, right now it's in the sort of transonic, just below transonic regime. We'll end up expanding that line. We'll have supersonic ones. Like you don't want to waste the supersonic one against the subsonic asset. And so, kind of the goal is to have this modular system and you actually have different types of darts with different capabilities over time. I'm talking years in the future here. But the funny thing is we did this during the first Cold War. Like when air power first started, we were looking at all these different approaches to taking out aircraft.

2:32:18Shawn Ryan:Like the F-104 is an interceptor. It's basically like a rocket with wings to go out and take out Russian bombers, right? You've got literally ideas of like nuking the air going on at the time. And what ended up winning out is solid rocket motor with aero control surfaces. And that's been super, super successful, generally speaking, until the era of stealth. And so, yeah, that's our approach with Dart. It's like vertically integrate this thing as much as possible, drive the cost down as much as you possibly can, optimize it to make hundreds of thousands, because you're going to need so many of these systems.

2:32:47Shawn Ryan:Like if our adversaries are making hundreds of thousands of systems, we need hundreds of thousands of interceptors at least. And that's assuming you even know where they're going to strike. So you actually likely need significantly more if you want to have true defense. man this is fucking wild man i mean as you're describing all this stuff and you're talking about the decentralization you know a decentralized military force i mean how are these things

2:33:14Ethan Thornton:it's just so fucking different than from what i'm used to i mean everything is is everything centralized to to to a flagpole base whether that's you know kabul or bagram or fucking and Baghdad or anywhere else I've been. And then you have outstations, but it's still all centralized. And, you know, I remember when I interviewed Brandon Sang from Shield AI, I mean, that's his big thing. Yeah. You know, every pickleball court in the world is a fucking launch pad. And so, I mean, when you think about sending thousands of drones in, where are you going to send thousands of drones to? Because everything's going to be fucking decentralized.

2:33:54Shawn Ryan:And that's why, so you're exactly right. In the entire infrastructure of global militaries has to fucking change because you can't have it centralized on the basis.

2:34:08Ethan Thornton:And so what does that even look like? Does that look like we just have fucking houses in the middle of neighborhoods that nobody knows about where the roofs open up and a fucking drone flies out? I mean, in your mind, what does the future look like? I mean, you can't have anything centralized. Yeah. You brought up the Russian, what was the operation spiderweb? Yeah, that one. I mean, probably, I think that's the first example of what could happen, right? Yeah. You know, and so, and then you put that on a mass scale and, you know. It's crazy. Parksville's right up the road. That's where fucking TF-160 is.

2:34:45Ethan Thornton:You know what I mean? Yeah. You got Patterson Air Force Base, right? All the, you got all this, it's all centralized. Yep, exactly. So we're fucked. So how do you now... Not only are we restructuring all the technology, but you have to rethink everything that we think we know is pretty much completely obsolete.

2:35:07Shawn Ryan:And this is why revolutions in military affairs are always so dangerous to great powers. It's like you as the US just have so much confidence in your way of doing things. We need to start today. And I think, one, you need decentralized deep strike. capability, you need decentralized ISR capability. And so your actual effects downrange obviously have to be decentralized. You need to have assets that are capable of decentralized logistics, right? You can't require a tanker to refuel an air. On the ground, you can't require centralized infrastructure. You can't require a runway. We'll see how far back it marches, but one could very clearly imagine a world where manufacturing itself has to be decentralized.

2:35:55Shawn Ryan:And so...

2:35:57Ethan Thornton:Man, that's even a good point. Yeah. Or underground. Yeah.

2:36:01Shawn Ryan:No, it becomes freaky real quick.

2:36:05Ethan Thornton:How fast do you think this all has to happen?

2:36:08Shawn Ryan:China's doing it real fast. So, like, they released a boat, I think, in January, that's a commercial cargo ship that has containerized munitions. That means you have, like, a Connex box, like a shipping container that can launch anti-ship missiles. So you don't know if that shipping container is on an 18-wheeler. You don't know if that shipping container is on a random cargo ship. You look at ports and you've got hundreds of thousands.

2:36:32Ethan Thornton:They have the biggest, it's like 95%. No, I'm sorry. It's 50 % of the world's shipbuilding capacity is in fucking China. And we have, what, less than 1 %? That's crazy. Holy shit. I will actually, I will say I don't worry that much about that. And my argument was, I wouldn't even say it's an argument. I mean, I remember having this exact conversation with Dino Mavrucas from Ceranek and Palmer from Andurl. You know, my big thing was, I mean, yeah, but what kind of ships are they building? Are they just building fucking cargo ships? Are they building shells? I mean, yeah, they could turn that into something, but then you're talking about these fucking shipping containers, and it's like, oh, shit.

2:37:12Ethan Thornton:Like, it's a fucking destroyer in disguise.

2:37:15Shawn Ryan:It is. It is. But even that I think is too centralized. Like if an actual conflict starts, you're taking those out pretty quickly. Because you're talking about, I mean, the missiles to take that ship out will cost a few hundred thousand dollars.

2:37:30Ethan Thornton:Well, yeah. I mean, maybe we take them out, maybe we don't. I mean, do we have the, I mean, look at, I don't think that people have the heart to take it out. Because you can't tell which ones are good and which ones are bad. I mean, we just got a small taste of that with the boats coming from Venezuela. And you saw everybody get up in arms because we killed some fucking drug dealers. You know, now we got Chinese cargo ships, 50 % of the world's ships all over the fucking place. You can't tell which ones are neutral and which ones are bad guys. And so you got to take them all out. Well, there goes a shit ton of civilians.

2:38:09Yeah. Yeah.

2:38:11Shawn Ryan:No, you're right.

2:38:11Ethan Thornton:It's fucking genius. If you think about it. It is.

2:38:15Shawn Ryan:And the US is doing the same thing.

2:38:17Ethan Thornton:We are?

2:38:18Shawn Ryan:We are. We are. Now, I don't know if we're doing it as quickly and certainly not at the same scale, but we need to be. But the big thing that has to happen is, on the defensive, you have to decentralize. Like, you have to make it such that if you know one of these 10 ships has these missiles on it, there's nothing militarily in striking distance. It all falls apart so quickly. And this is why I've been so worried about this for so long. And I'm not saying I have the answers. I'm saying I'm developing assets that I think will be helpful in this future world. I can't tell you what a forest structure actually needs to look like when this is the case.

2:38:57Ethan Thornton:Man, it's just wild. And then you think about all the bases that we've given up. Yeah. Bagram being very – I mean, it's still centralized, but I mean, you know what I'm saying? Like even – like now we're just consolidating what? Where, back here at the homeland where we could have had – gave up a ton of bases in Europe, all the bases in Afghanistan, all the bases in Iraq. I mean, so at least it was somewhat decentralized. Now it's, I mean, we're probably more centralized right now than we have been since World War II. That's true.

2:39:35Shawn Ryan:And so we need to be working on ways of offensive and defensive assets being decentralized. Like, you have to get back into doing that. I mean, that's why I talk a lot about the stratosphere is the range at which you can employ these things

2:39:52Shawn Ryan:allows you to act more forward. And then hopefully we find ways of doing it where you don't rely on a base to launch these assets. Like, there's nothing inherent about Viper that would require any actual fixed assets in a country you're fighting it. Man.

2:40:12Ethan Thornton:You really got me thinking now. This just looks... I know nothing.

2:40:22Shawn Ryan:That's not true. No, that's not true. I'm not scared of it.

2:40:26Ethan Thornton:I'm admitting it's the old way is done. It's over. It would be, in my opinion, it's almost detrimental to be even... Maybe I won't say that. But it could... I mean, talking to an old guy like me who's used to the old way may be detrimental to the future. Because it's so hard to switch thinking.

2:40:50Shawn Ryan:It is. Now, the advantage is we're not going to go from the world we have today to this different world instantly. And so the easy part is actually talking about the way things should be. The hard part is morphing the current fighting force into the way things should be. And that's where that discourse is incredibly valuable. Like, how do we bite off 1 % a day on getting ourselves towards this future? Because the other thing is, like, we just sit around talking about this, but don't have any actuals of how we get there. Because the issue is, and you know this better than I do, none of these assets operate in a vacuum.

2:41:31Shawn Ryan:So I could go and ship 10 ,000 Vipers, but if no one can train on them, if they don't plug into existing, like, command and control, that's useless. And so the real art of it is like define what the future looks like. But the real art of it is like how do you have taste intact in the way that you morph our forest structure over the next few years. And that does... How do you start? You start... I mean, you start by buying more of these systems. And obviously, I have a conflict of interest saying that, and so everyone should take that with a grain of salt. But I also started this company because I believed in the importance of doing that.

2:42:12Shawn Ryan:But you need to start by building the industrial base.

2:42:15Ethan Thornton:I mean, where do you store them? And I'm not even talking about your products. I'm talking about locations. Locations? I mean... You know, major bases. Fort Bragg. Clarksville.

2:42:28Shawn Ryan:They're not that hard to store.

2:42:29Ethan Thornton:Camp Pendleton.

2:42:30Shawn Ryan:They're not... I don't think they're...

2:42:32Ethan Thornton:You know what I mean, though?

2:42:33Shawn Ryan:For sure. For sure.

2:42:35Ethan Thornton:Massive amount of personnel. I'm not even talking about unmanned systems. I'm talking about decentralizing fucking everything. You know, Norfolk, Virginia, San Diego, California, biggest fucking two naval bases in the country. You know what I mean? How do you decentralize all of this shit? It's hard. It's hard. That's a lot of new land buying. That's a lot of new infrastructure that's ripping out old shit. What do you do with the old? It's a complete revamp.

2:43:01Shawn Ryan:It is. And what I will say, something that gives me confidence is nuclear deterrence is still strong. And so you don't have to worry as much about massive threats on US soil. It's in areas of proxy war where it gets really, really dangerous. So if you're Lithuania thinking about this, you need to be thinking very, very, very deeply about decentralization, right? For the US, fortunately, we do have nuclear deterrence. We also have the dome coming, supposedly. We do. And the dome will be good for certain assets and not good for other assets. So like you're talking about long-range hypersonics, the dome's going to be great.

2:43:44When you're talking about 200 quads that launched from some random shipping container that made

2:43:49Shawn Ryan:its way into the country, the dome's not going to do anything in its current form. Now, I would argue the dome should do something and that's something we should expand. And I'm also not saying the hypersonics problem isn't something we need to work on. But at least for the things you and I are talking about right now, like, the dome's architected with space-based interceptors mostly. The dome's not going to take out a quad that randomly emerges that some Chinese foreign national launches 10 miles from a naval base.

2:44:20Wow.

2:44:20Ethan Thornton:Wow. So even that, before it's even fully developed, is fucking almost obsolete. With the American Express Platinum Card, I can unlock experiences like no other. Since I'm always booking my next trip, I love that I can earn points on travel. Plus, I get a resi benefit, so you know I'm hitting the restaurants everyone's talking about. And you can find out your welcome offer after you apply, which could be as high as 175 ,000 points. for experiences like no other. There's nothing like platinum. Learn more at AmericanExpress.com slash explore dash platinum. Terms apply.

2:44:59Shawn Ryan:It's just solving a different problem. I don't think it's solving the most important problem. It is solving a real problem. But it... Potentially. I mean, you're intercepting hypersonics, which is a super important problem. because what that does is at least buys you time because these other assets, you're in a more, like, protracted war.

2:45:25But, yeah, it's certainly not a cure-all.

2:45:30Shawn Ryan:Wow.

2:45:31Ethan Thornton:When you're talking about putting a payload on these systems, are you designing the payload or are you using stuff that's already in existence?

2:45:37Shawn Ryan:So we have partners that we co-design payloads with right now. So the actual warhead is sort of designed specifically for our platform and manufactured elsewhere. Gotcha. That's kind of one of the only portions, and there's a world where we end up producing that ourselves someday too. The legislations and the regulations surrounding building warheads is horrible. Like I can go build composites without going to the ATF or other people.

2:46:09Ethan Thornton:Oh, man. And wow. I love these kind of conversations. Are you going to build any guns?

2:46:18Shawn Ryan:As a company?

2:46:19Ethan Thornton:Yeah.

2:46:20Shawn Ryan:I'd love to. I'd love to.

2:46:24Ethan Thornton:What would you build?

2:46:26Shawn Ryan:What would I build? That's a good question.

2:46:31Shawn Ryan:It's actually not one I think about that much. I don't think we're going to build guns. If I was going to build a gun.

2:46:40Shawn Ryan:The big problem right now is body armor, finding ways to get through body armor. Yeah, I'm not going to give a good answer. Let me think through the problem a little bit. I think one, you've got to have significant, like this is where Andrew is actually doing incredible work. Like, I don't know if you've seen their Eagle Eye stuff, but like, it's pretty good.

2:46:59Ethan Thornton:He came and talked for the first time here.

2:47:01Shawn Ryan:That's great. Yeah. That's awesome. So I think, look, I think -

2:47:06Ethan Thornton:It was awesome. It was a great fucking conversation. That's awesome. We talked about hostage rescue. Nice. And how could you identify the hostage, because that would speed up the action tremendously. I think the biggest failure of these new gun systems

2:47:26Shawn Ryan:throughout history is that you actually step too far forward. You have too much technology, and you pack too much into it. Like the hypervelocity projectile work. Anyway, there's a lot of times that's been done, And so, I would be... You got to have some level of increased intelligence. Like, your rifle or your optic has to be able to talk to drones. You've got to be able to talk to each other. On the actual projectile side, I wouldn't get into auto-aiming or any of that stuff. I would... I think... Yeah, I think there's a long ways you could push. I mean, like, the XM5, XM7, I know they've changed the name, but I actually don't hate the steel casing.

2:48:05Shawn Ryan:Like, steel is not that hard to manufacture. If it gets you that much more muzzle velocity, go for it. I do have an issue with the recoil, especially as the—

2:48:15Ethan Thornton:Steel casing gets you more muzzle velocity?

2:48:17Shawn Ryan:Mm-hmm. I had no idea. Because you get higher chamber pressure, which is super useful. And so the new combat rifle is actually partially steel, partially brass casing.

2:48:27Ethan Thornton:Which rifle?

2:48:29Shawn Ryan:XM5, XM7. I forget which of the two. It was one and then changed to the other. I think it's the XM5.

2:48:33Ethan Thornton:Are you talking about the spear? Yeah. The Sig Spear? Yep. You like it?

2:48:39Shawn Ryan:I don't know enough about it. My cousin's at West Point. He shot it. He wasn't a huge fan. I think, one, I think they're having pretty bad reliability issues. And then, two, I do think it's too big of a round right now. It's a force. Anyway, I don't know.

2:48:59Ethan Thornton:They have a 6.8, a 5.56, and a 300 blackout.

2:49:04Shawn Ryan:Yeah. So I think somewhere between... Even the 6.8 is big for a lot of stuff.

2:49:11Ethan Thornton:Man, I shot the piss out of it. It seems pretty fucking reliable to me.

2:49:13Shawn Ryan:And I'll trust you on it. I'll trust you on it. Like, see, this is not my...

2:49:16Ethan Thornton:Well, actually, I got a little something for you. Oh, shit. But I don't know if it's going to be reliable enough for you, but... Holy fuck. It's been pretty reliable to me. so that's the uh 6.8 mcx spear from sig sour i told them you recovered and they got all fucking fired up about it so they wanted me to give this to you and then uh yeah my buddy jason over at sig he's a fucking huge fan of you and then uh i got some buddies at silencer shop too so they're gonna uh put a suppressor up there for you and sig put this optic on it so i don't know Maybe we should go test this out. Let's go test it.

2:50:01Ethan Thornton:See if it's reliable enough for you.

2:50:02Shawn Ryan:I think hearsay says a lot. Let's go. I love this. Let's go test it. That's a 6.8.

2:50:09Ethan Thornton:That's a 6.8.

2:50:10Shawn Ryan:That's... Thank you so much. Yeah, man. I really... Holy cow. And I do love that Sig's getting into optics. Like that... Anyway. That's so sick. Thank you. Yeah, man. I really appreciate it. And I am sure I will take back everything I said after shooting.

2:50:28Ethan Thornton:Let's go make sure it is reliable. You want to take a break?

2:50:31Shawn Ryan:Let's do it.

2:50:32Ethan Thornton:Yeah, let's go fucking break it in. Let's do it. Cool. Dude. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome.

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2:53:22Shawn Ryan:Well, what'd you think? I'm a convert. Yeah, I had the.365 and I had the spear, two of my favorite guns, and obviously, or the Rattler, not the spear. Two of my favorite guns. I couldn't shoot the spear. I never had a spear. And so you hear all these YouTube videos where people are complaining about the recoil, and I took that at face value, which I shouldn't have. It's not bad. I mean, recoil compared to a.223 is not noticeable. And then it didn't jam a single time. And so small sample size, but reliability is great.

2:53:51Ethan Thornton:Yeah, it's interesting how not everything on YouTube's true.

2:53:55Shawn Ryan:Yeah, and I'm embarrassed for falling for it, so thanks for filming. How do you like that rattler? I love it. I love it. I didn't bring it with me to California, so I only had it for a few months back in Texas.

2:54:06Ethan Thornton:Did you put a suppressor on it? I didn't.

2:54:08Shawn Ryan:This is my first. I've never had a suppressor.

2:54:11Ethan Thornton:You've never had a suppressor? No. Silencer shop's about to pop your cherry. Right on, man. But, yeah, I've been telling Jason, I'm like, dude send me one of these fucking rattlers because it's been out for a long time i want

2:54:24Shawn Ryan:i want it for home defense but uh it's it's good i mean it's i i don't know if they're all chambered in 300 blackout mine's chambered in 300 blackout it's great i mean it folds so small because i got the short barrel without a suppressor oh nice like this big nice um i love that thing well you're a pretty damn good shooter thank you i appreciate it you won i i went oh for 12 on the

2:54:47Ethan Thornton:44 barely man and plus i'm a former seal and a ca contractor so i should fucking beat i should have really kicked your ass but i didn't and uh that wasn't me taking it easy i'm just out of it but uh but dude that was fun thanks for doing that thanks for doing that i love that that's press 22 cool it's good cool but um yeah so we i don't even we're we just got done wrapping up kind of talking about all the products that you're making. But one thing we didn't talk about is, you know, you went from Boston to Austin, right?

2:55:24Shawn Ryan:I did.

2:55:24Ethan Thornton:And then Austin to?

2:55:26Shawn Ryan:To Huntington.

2:55:27Ethan Thornton:Huntington Beach. Why did you move from Austin? Because Austin's supposedly like a pretty, it's like the new tech hub, right?

2:55:35Shawn Ryan:Yeah, that's what they say. I moved from Boston to Austin because I like Texas. I think Texas is a great business environment. I'm obviously from Texas, really wanted the company to be there. It's probably different for different engineering domains. Like if you're writing software or if you're doing pure mechanical, I'm sure it's actually quite good. The issue is for a lot of our stuff, for all the niche things, like niche RF, niche propulsion, niche GNC, for the real aerospace stuff, it's still LA. So we had like an applicant tracking software. Across like six months, it was like 95 plus percent of our sort of interesting candidates were all LA-based.

2:56:13Shawn Ryan:So then we're like...

2:56:14Ethan Thornton:Yeah, yeah. 95%. It was crazy.

2:56:17Shawn Ryan:And so, I mean, for three months, I wanted to validate the assumption. So for three months, I'd fly to LA every Sunday. I'd fly out Saturday night, fly back Sunday night, and take like 10 interviews, and basically got a good sample size in those three months of people saying like, yes, I would 100 % join the company, but I'm not moving my family to Austin. Especially back then. Keep in mind, we had like very, very little funding. We had no real products. It's already hard enough to hire. And so if you're suddenly having to convince people to uproot their entire families and move across two time zones, it's tough.

2:56:47Shawn Ryan:So moved to L.A., and it was 100 % the right decision. Like, the company would not be in business today if not for doing that. It was hard. It was hard to convince people to leave, and obviously I missed taxes.

2:56:58Ethan Thornton:I mean, I'm just curious, you know, with all this new tax, potential tax, I think it's, is it passed? Potential tax implications of California. Do you think you'll move the business again?

2:57:08Shawn Ryan:I may have to move myself. I mean, the thing is, the business has several locations. So, like, we have folks in D.C., we have folks in Austin. Our next big factory won't be in California. Okay. And so it's really just our engineering headquarters that's in Huntington. But I forget the exact tax, but the tax is on unrealized capital gains, right? And so I think there's this misconception about people who start companies that they have this, like, fault. I see what you're saying. With all their money in it. And when you look, like, when you achieve liquidity, maybe that's somewhat true. I see what you're saying.

2:57:42Shawn Ryan:But for a majority of these companies, I mean, you think about -

2:57:45Ethan Thornton:You're raising capital.

2:57:46Shawn Ryan:You're raising capital. I mean, I'm making a very small salary. I've taken$0 off the table. I don't have money to pay taxes. And so if I got hit with 5 % tax on the current value of Mach, we don't have that liquidity. Like, I would have to go to jail to pay that money. Gotcha. So, no, I mean, I would have no choice but to spend 50-plus percent of my time elsewhere. And then there are two concerning things that they're also trying to do. One is where you're taxed based on days spent in California. That's already the way a lot of California taxes work. So even if I only spent a month running my company in California, I would still owe one-twelfth my tax in California, which if it's on your kind of high-level, like, unrealized capital gains, that's massive, specifically for starting companies.

2:58:33Shawn Ryan:And then the other crazy thing is they're talking about doing it based on voting share and not based on ownership.

2:58:41Ethan Thornton:What does that even mean?

2:58:43Shawn Ryan:At a lot of companies, you basically have people who own certain share classes that allow them to vote more than they actually own. So there's a separation between how much control you have over the company versus how much ownership you have over the company. So, Mox is one of these companies where I do control the company, but I own at this point, like not that much of the company. Well, I get taxed based on the control I have over the company and not based on my actual worth, which is crazy. What? They're talking about it. I don't think any of this is going to pass because it would literally shut down the California economy.

2:59:19Shawn Ryan:But it would kill anyone trying to do stuff like I'm doing.

2:59:22Ethan Thornton:I mean, didn't I lose like a trillion dollars at Silicon Valley in like a week? Crazy. Crazy.

2:59:29Shawn Ryan:It's fucking wild, man. And it's theirs. I mean, it's theirs to fuck up, right? Because you've got great talent. Like, there's a reason I had to move out there. There's a reason Silicon Valley is still Silicon Valley. It's an excellent place to build a company. But you pass something like that once and it's done. And it's not like I'm opposed to being taxed. I'll say this and a bunch of people would disagree with me. Like I actually do think that generally speaking, billionaires should pay more taxes, not tax rate, not tax rate. There's something that happens, which is that you can get leverage based on your equity.

2:59:59Shawn Ryan:So at a certain point, not at my point, but at a certain point, you can take out a loan against your equity and never pay taxes on the loan. And this is how people get around massive amounts of tax. It's like, sure, when I sell shares, I'll owe X percent tax, but I never actually sell shares. I take out a loan against the shares and then provided the business keeps going up in value, I just take out new loans to pay that off against my equity. And so, it's this crazy mechanism people use to get around taxes, which is, I do think it's broken. Like I think our tax code should be massively simplified to avoid stuff like that.

3:00:34Shawn Ryan:But the way to fix it is to fix that problem. The way to fix it is not to impose this giant other thing that doesn't fix that problem, but creates this whole different problem, which is that people, I mean, people can't go and get liquidity on this equity. Like, it's just physically impossible to pay this. No shit.

3:00:52Ethan Thornton:Damn. Were you worried about our currency, the dollar?

3:00:58Shawn Ryan:I'd say so. I'd say so. Yeah, look, I think a large portion of U.S. way of life is that we live in a surplus, right? We'll go and spend$7 trillion a year and only bring in$4.9 trillion a year in taxes. And the only way you can afford to do that is if there's foreign, or if there's demand, generally speaking, for your debt, right? And so that's, we're massively overspending, which is broken. Obviously, if you have an imbalanced budget for too long, debt compounds and bad things happen. But generally speaking, if people want your debt, and if your economy is growing faster than your debt is, then it's not an issue.

3:01:41The way this happens is you, anyway, you sell bonds.

3:01:45Shawn Ryan:So you... Keep going. No, it's good. I'm trying to think about how to break down the problem. So we run, we sell fewer goods than we bring in, right? So if you're China and I'm America, I'm giving you$100, you're giving me$100 worth of goods, and then maybe I'm giving you$50 of goods and you're giving me$50 back. You run basically an imbalanced trade. And so because of that, there's massive basically excess dollars and there's demand for these dollars. And so what the US government will do is it'll actually go and buy the dollars back and issue debt where, and this is all a bond is obviously, right?

3:02:24Shawn Ryan:I'll buy the 100 bucks. And then over time, I'll pay it back with interest. And then at the end, I'll pay back the full amount. And so foreign countries have trillions of dollars of US treasuries. And that's how... There are a bunch of different ways that the dollar became basically the global reserve currency. But it is very structurally important for a number of different reasons that other countries trade in dollars. So, like, one is it actually gives you the ability to freeze people's funds, and it directly actually ties to geopolitical power. And this is actually one of the things that's weakening is when the Ukraine war kicked off, we started freezing assets that other countries held.

3:03:10Shawn Ryan:Right? And so that's obviously an incredible power as a country. What happened when we did that is that other countries got uncomfortable with the ability of the U.S. to do that. We weaponized our currency. We weaponized it, which is why you are the global reserve currency. And the idea of a global reserve currency is not a new thing. like Roman Empire, Dutch Empire, British Empire, there's like a very famous trend of basically becoming the global currency, and that's actually one of the best ways to assess if you're living in an era where an empire is in power. But what tends to happen over history is, one, if the money printing machine becomes closely tied to the people making the decisions that are elected, there's incentive to run basically there there there's incentives to to to push debt like if i'm if i'm running for election and i'm printing money to make your life better usually indirectly that's that's a good thing and i'm going to get elected and this starts to tie into populism of sort of short-term thinking with elected officials who are like structurally incentivized to to be able to do that now fortunately those powers are held separately in the u.s which has helped for but there's starting to be pressures sort of between them, which is quite concerning.

3:04:23Shawn Ryan:But what happened for these previous empires is you suddenly just have an incentive. If I'm only in power for 10 years, these macroeconomic effects take decades to play out typically. These have been playing out since we dropped the gold standard. This era has started. And at this point, our debt is so huge. We're paying more on interest on our debt than we are on national security. So, like, the amount of bonds we're issuing and the amount of debt we owe people It's more than we pay on national security, and then our debt is also growing quicker than our economy. And so, if your debt's growing quicker than your economy, the problem...

3:05:01Shawn Ryan:This is... It's obviously very simple things I'm saying, which you'd think would make it simple outcomes to fix, but it gets nuanced pretty quick. But if your debt is growing quicker than your economy, and if you're running an imbalanced budget where you're taking on new debt to pay for your debt, you get into this debt spend cycle where you can't pay it off. Now, the thing that makes that worse is then if suddenly kind of two things happen. One is if you weaponize your debt to too great of a degree. I don't know if we did that or not in Ukraine. Like, I'm not informed on this topic enough to say.

3:05:39Shawn Ryan:But we did weaponize our debt. And because of that, other countries started selling our debt. Well, once that starts, once the demand for your bonds goes down, you have to raise, basically, interest rates on those bonds to get that same demand. So, your debt becomes more expensive. And so, the debt you're using to pay for your debt becomes more expensive. While that happens, you're losing more confidence, so you're having to take on more debt to pay for that debt. And so, I forget the exact number, but I think the top five biggest foreign U.S. debt holders have sold something like$400 billion of debt in the last 18 months, and they're trading it for gold.

3:06:11Shawn Ryan:And that's like a very, very clear thing you can point to of getting off the US dollar as the global reserve currency, people get doomsday here pretty quick. I think this is not in the same camp of problems as the Taiwan problem, but fiscal responsibility is something we have to take incredibly seriously because what's happening is we're getting ourselves into a debt, like spin cycle, like$38 trillion in debt. That means like on average, it's something stupid like$113 ,000 of debt per person in the country that our government owes elsewhere. And so then you just start looking at interest payments on that debt.

3:06:44Shawn Ryan:You're talking about thousands of dollars per person per year for this interest. And so U.S. growth has largely been built on this debt. You're basically borrowing against your future. And debt's a great instrument. I'm not saying we shouldn't have debt. Like financial systems exist for a reason. But where this all leads to is there's this really scary effect right now where there are all these foreign powers that hold U.S. debt that if they decide to sell, can create basically a run cycle on debt where the value instantly drops. And so then to, anyway, it's kind of a pinch of maneuver because we also have, we have an incentive right now to devalue the dollar.

3:07:30Shawn Ryan:Sorry, I'm going way off.

3:07:32Ethan Thornton:I'm paying attention.

3:07:33Shawn Ryan:So there's actually one of the things Trump kind of ran on that I do actually, generally speaking, agree with is that if we want to rebuild American manufacturing capability, we have to devalue the dollar. And there are a bunch of different ways to do that. But if you and I are trading and my dollar is more valuable than your currency, euro or anything else, trade will generally go to you, right? And US domestic businesses will struggle to compete. And so if you go and devalue the dollar, US businesses can do better. Now, the issue is that has to be combined with actual economic growth. So if you start devaluing the dollar while you're not growing economically, you're basically reaping the poor effects of hyperinflation without economic stimulus.

3:08:27Shawn Ryan:And so that's where you get into what's called stagflation, which is one of the worst sort of worst things that can happen to an economy, is your economy is not growing. Because typically, inflation is tied to economic growth. If our economy is not growing at the same time that all these foreign countries start mass selling debt, and it's some of our allies, like Japan's the biggest holder of US debt and they've started selling for different reasons. Obviously, China is selling a ton of US debt. But this can accelerate very, very quickly where you get basically the equivalent of a bank run on US debt.

3:08:55Shawn Ryan:And if the dollar as the global reserve currency collapses, it spells sort of massive, massive doom for our economy. And so it's just something we need to be looking out for. It's one of the big reasons Doge existed. They made the biggest possible push they could to balance the budget. It kind of ran into a political wall because, of course, if you're getting elected,

3:09:24Shawn Ryan:you're not incentivized to go devalue the dollar, right? You're not incentivized to stop the money printing machine. And so, one of the structural issues when you run into short-sighted thinking, which right now is a ton of politics, right? Because people are incentivized to think on four to six-year timelines, is no one is actually incentivized to go and fix the root of this this problem. So anyway, that's one of the things that I just think is really, really important to think about. One, like our stock market growth, if you actually go and separate out the devaluation of the dollar is not incredibly impressive.

3:10:02Shawn Ryan:Anyway, this is not my domain. I'm probably making myself sound like an idiot, but I do think it's something we need to be taking.

3:10:09Ethan Thornton:I've never heard it broken down like that before. I think you're doing great. Thank you. Yeah. What do you think about BRICS?

3:10:16Shawn Ryan:I think it's scary. Look, I think fortunately right now, there's not a great other option. Like you see a push towards decentralization instead of a general push towards the yuan or other things. And that is because the dollar is still pretty singular in its value. But I think what we can start to expect is trade on other currencies to increase pretty radically. I worry less about it than I do about the US debt problem. And they're tied. They're tied. But the real scary thing starts, real scary things start to happen when the cost of our budget imbalance gets more expensive.

3:10:51Ethan Thornton:You know, one thing you said that I, it's just not clicking in my head, is devaluing the dollar should bring in more business. I don't understand the correlation there.

3:11:02Shawn Ryan:More foreign business.

3:11:03Ethan Thornton:More foreign business. Why? Why would a devalued dollar bring in more foreign business? Yeah. So if you're trying to - Because they can buy more?

3:11:11Shawn Ryan:Because your stuff is cheaper on foreign markets. So if you're trying to achieve... Wouldn't prices just go up? In the US, they do. So in the US, prices go up. And this is why it's a really tough thing to talk about. And in the US, prices go up. In foreign markets, US goods are cheaper. It's a similar effect to tariffs. It's a different way to achieve what you do with tariffs, right? And this is on production for other countries. Tariffs are obviously production for domestic markets. They're both instruments to achieve the same thing, which is basically you're making things more expensive in the US.

3:11:48Shawn Ryan:You're actually making US labor cheaper. But because of that, there's more demand for your goods, so you start producing more. And so there's no free lunch in economics, right? And so there's advantages and disadvantages to all of these different things. If your economy is going to compound like crazy, there are advantages to a very strong dollar into a lot of debt because you can live sort of beyond your means. And that's what we've been doing for a while. Now if you truly want to stimulate the economy, if you really, really, really want to get back to a trade surplus, your goods have to get cheaper.

3:12:26Shawn Ryan:And there are kind of two ways to make your goods cheaper. You can either innovate or you can devalue the dollar or do tariffs or other things. You can use economic levers or you can use innovation. I'm obviously a much bigger fan of the former. But the US has been living so far on the right side of that for so long, and our economy hasn't kept up. And again, all you're doing with this debt is sort of borrowing against your future in some way. And what happens if debt starts to compound is the price of new debt goes up significantly. So if there's less demand for the bonds, you have to raise the price on the bonds, and suddenly your debt becomes significantly more expensive.

3:13:05Shawn Ryan:The reason that's scary is because we're nowhere close to a balanced budget. And in many ways, for good reason. Like, I won't say the U.S. shouldn't have ever taken this approach. You just can't push it too far. And then if you are going to push it, you're playing with fire. If you are going to push it that far, you better have economic growth. And so the real scary thing that happens here is if we're counting on all of this economic growth, specifically because of AI and the AI bubble bursts right when the rest of this is happening, right when you go and weaponize the dollar, so there's less demand for the dollar.

3:13:41Shawn Ryan:The US treasuries are not seen as a stable of a holding, right when a lot of our allies, for a number of different reasons, are pushing away from globalization and away from reliance on the US. Like, that's one of the major reasons people are selling, is lack of trust in the US as an institution, both geopolitically and just in terms of the actual general function of our economy. And so, if you get lack of confidence in the dollar while you're trying to run this plugbook, which we very much are right now, really, really bad things happen and you run into just spiraling massively inflationary cycles.

3:14:17Shawn Ryan:And that's how empires have failed historically. Wow. Like, this is a very well-studied thing. I think the solution is, one, you've got to start innovating. Like, you do just have to grow the economy, and you have to stay away from... You have to stay away from incredibly negative, hype-cycle-fueled boom-bust cycles. Two, you have to reinforce... You have to reinforce trust in the US government, right? Like, if you're battling the rest of this, you can't have people selling because they don't trust us to be good stewards of the world. I mean, I don't know how the hell we reestablish that. Yeah, it's going to be a long path, I think.

3:14:58Ethan Thornton:I really... How do you think we reestablish trust?

3:15:05Shawn Ryan:I think people want to trust the US. Like, we're a democratic capitalist society facing an authoritarian, in many ways, communist society. Like, all things being equal, the world will choose the US every single time. I think one... Anyway, I like to avoid talking about things that I'm not an expert in.

3:15:34Shawn Ryan:If it's me, though, I think, one, you have to bring allies closer, which is different than not expecting them to pay their fair share. And that's, like, very difficult to strike the balance on. But you have to be seen as this reliable force. Europe does need to increase defense spending. Like, NATO absolutely needs to increase defense spending. But you can't be doing things that erode trust in us to act rationally. And then you have to take a tariff policy that is sort of slow and deliberate. I do think we need tariffs. I do think we need to devalue the dollar. If we ever want to be a manufacturing superpower.

3:16:16Shawn Ryan:We just have to reach that spot. You need to reinforce belief that the dollar will continue as an institution, right? You need to balance the debt. You need to find ways to cut spending and to increase tax revenues. Now, again, I think the tax...

3:16:40Shawn Ryan:I'm struggling to communicate well. I think we have a lot of bad policy. And I think we have a lot of bad regulation. And so something that started happening is you roll all of these policies into these sort of super bills, where if you're voting on something, you can't vote on an issue in isolation. And so because of that, we end up as this giant averaging function of different things. And then there's actually this structural incentive for bureaucracies to create complexity. So we see this all the time in the defense industry. If you are a defense prime whose main moat is being able to interface with the government, making the government more difficult to interface with increases your moat.

3:17:28Shawn Ryan:And then similarly, if you're someone trying to avoid taxes, creating complexities in tax law is actually a huge advantage because you can go and find these different loopholes. And I think a lot of things are significantly more complex than they need to be. But yeah, I mean, you have to cut spending to start.

3:17:52Ethan Thornton:What is it that would create an AI bust?

3:17:55Shawn Ryan:An AI bust? It's... All the cycles look the same.

3:18:02Ethan Thornton:They're just moving so fucking fast.

3:18:04Shawn Ryan:Yeah, the cause of a bust is always so much more difficult to tell.

3:18:15Shawn Ryan:I think one of the hyperscalers reaching real liquidity problems would cause it. I think certainly Taiwan falling would cause it or coming into jeopardy would cause it.

3:18:35Shawn Ryan:I think big corporate companies tightening their belt. Because right now we're in a growth cycle. And so if you're a company X, if you're some tech company, let's say you're Salesforce, your investors right now are still generally pushing you to increase innovation instead of spending. And so you go through these cycles where like investors care about different things. And right now, I would argue the adoption of these AI systems by a lot of these big corporations are as fueled by perception, are as fueled by wanting investors to think that you're investing in AI as much or more so than the actual capability the AI itself has.

3:19:15Shawn Ryan:And so if investors start thinking, if investors, anyway, I don't know is the answer. But there are a bunch of different things that I think could cause it. You think we're close? I don't think so. I think we have a few months at least. I think the work XAI is doing, for instance, is like creating a lot more confidence. Like as long as people think the tech is getting better, because that's what everyone's betting on. Like the margins right now suck, but everyone's betting on for any different number of reasons that the margins will suddenly radically improve and that these companies will start making good money.

3:19:56Shawn Ryan:Someone like Elon saying, hey, we're going to go spend X hundreds of billions of dollars on this new approach on hyperscaling satellites in space. Like, that actually gives people confidence that there is the next tech wave that will decrease those dollars. But if people start deciding that it is just super commoditized, that's when the cracks start to emerge. And it's so impossible to tell where in the stack the cracks will emerge. Like, it could be NVIDIA. Anyway, it could be NVIDIA missing earnings. It could be one of the hyperscalers having liquidity problems. It could be at the top of the stack, these companies choosing to adopt AI less.

3:20:36Shawn Ryan:But I think there's still room. But that's not necessarily a good thing. If you're on a train hurtling at a barrier, it's not necessarily the most responsible thing to hope the train runs further because we do continue to spend money on something that, I don't know, we'll see. I could very much be wrong on the Transformer architecture.

3:21:00Ethan Thornton:It's an interesting, I mean, I've just never heard anybody talk about it like that. It's good stuff. Do you have any thoughts on social decay in the country? I mean, we kind of talked a little bit about it, you know, at the beginning with social media. I asked a question, you said, it was about Gen Z, and you said, get off social.

3:21:18Shawn Ryan:I think so. So, yeah, I think it's a real problem. I think one, just the rise of short form content is just so bad for development of like true thought. What about politics? I think it's the same. You think we're in a single party system?

3:21:40Shawn Ryan:I don't think an intentionally orchestrated single party system, but I think in many ways the emergent effect is that.

3:21:48Ethan Thornton:What do you think it is?

3:21:50Shawn Ryan:I kind of described it earlier.

3:21:52Ethan Thornton:Why do you think we're at a single-party system?

3:21:58Shawn Ryan:I think that there are structural reasons if you're at the top to create as much division as possible around problems that don't actually matter. to get people to be honest with each other. I think it actually starts at the bottom. I think people don't spend as much time thinking about first principles policy as they do about personality. I think I am a fan of a two-party system, but I do think a two-party system makes it really tough because you have two options at the end of the day. And so it's really, really hard to avoid problems just becoming massively bucketed. And so it's really hard to go item by item and have clear conversation about any given item instead of just right or left.

3:22:58Shawn Ryan:I think, I mean, you brought up Epstein earlier. I mean, I do think that the social circles of both parties at the top actually just massively converge at some point. And I think we're seeing that. Like, I think, look, I mean, both sides have been equal opportunity to keep that stuff from being released.

3:23:18Ethan Thornton:I mean, I think you're right. You know, I mean, my thoughts are, I mean, I think one major problem that people don't realize is these fuckers in D.C. never go home. They never go back to their district. They hang out at the same fucking parties. They go to the same restaurants. They go to the same clubs. They work together. You know, and because they never go home to be with their constituents, they all become friends. and you think well that's not a bad thing well it is kind of a bad thing because when you become friends with all the other fucking politicians then you won't call each other out on their bullshit because you're friends at the end of the day and then they learn your secrets you learn their secrets you know what i mean and then it becomes oh that one was below the belt a little bit because we don't want you to fucking say what i'm doing you know what i mean and one of the Sorry to cut you off.

3:24:13And so what happens is hidden agendas, corruption and all that,

3:24:20Ethan Thornton:because these fuckers won't call each other out because they're all buddies. And so it does, and you're saying, and I agree with you, it's not necessarily, I agree with you some way, it's not necessarily orchestrated at the top. I think the top is orchestrated by the DNC and the RNC, and who the fuck knows how much higher it goes. but maybe it's epstein you know what i mean but but i mean at the lower level congress you know the senate you know these fucking bureaucrats like they're all buddies you know what i mean they're all but generals admirals none of them want to fucking call each other out on their bullshit because that you because they're all fucking friends you know and i think it's i think it's pretty much that fucking simple you know at the lower levels and then at the upper levels i I mean, you were talking about, I can't remember how you worded it, but you were talking about kind of extreme views and people lose first principles.

3:25:18But, I mean, it's almost like nowadays, I mean, it would be interesting to see if somebody came in and actually tried to unify.

3:25:28Ethan Thornton:But, you know, it would be really hard to do with the way the fucking media is. And because they would lose views.

3:25:39and two other so they have to tribalize they have to the country they have to and then because then

3:25:47Ethan Thornton:it's just fucking two teams you know what i mean and then and so it's it's yeah two two other big

3:25:55Shawn Ryan:things that i worry about on that note because i think i think i think being friends i think like there's there's a lot there i think one i worry a lot about is like these these blackmail loops that you've got to know exist. Like that's a lot of, I think, covering Epstein stuff up is like if everyone's in a system where one person sees someone else do something bad, that person coerces that person into doing something bad, that person coerces that person into doing something bad, and no one's actually doing it for the right reasons, everyone's doing it to make a career, right? Everyone's career politicians.

3:26:30Shawn Ryan:You get trapped in these like ossified structures of blackmail that I think you got to know exists. Unfortunately, it is like horrible blackmail level stuff like the Epstein stuff. Like you can't even imagine how much people up at the top are blackmailing each other over stuff like that. But it's also smaller stuff, which is the friend stuff you were describing of like, hey, I watched you push this through. If your constituents found out you pushed this through for this favor, you did for this person. And so there's this spider web of connections, of friendships and of coercion. that make the mission, like, it just becomes super, super difficult to move.

3:27:10Shawn Ryan:And then the second one that's pretty terrifying is when you tie it to economics. Like, the amount of money you need in this country to get elected these days means that you have to have a tie to people who are wealthy, right? And wealth isn't a bad thing whatsoever, But as people already in power become the deciding factor of who gets in power, you get this self-fulfilling, super high center of mass.

3:27:40Ethan Thornton:Do you think that could go away? I just had a conversation about this, a very quick conversation about this with Ro Khanna. And we were talking about the Epstein stuff, but this subject came up. And, you know, people don't want to call out their donors. you know i didn't i can i i mean i don't know who couldn't understand that it sucks but but i mean i mean the media reports it the the podcast industry is basically what determined the last election you know and and trump participated kamala didn't she went on like what one podcast you know she asked them to edit it all up and yeah i mean so it's it's people whatever people and it made a lot of people like me look one-sided but i could fuck get anybody on the other side yeah you know we we invited her said she was she did not say she was coming but it was looking very promising and then and then nothing but what so i guess what i'm saying is the internet, in my opinion, seems to maybe have evened the playing field at least a little bit, you know, because the numbers of this fucking crush any of those mainstream outlets now.

3:29:07Ethan Thornton:It destroys it. They hate it. And I'm nothing compared to somebody like fucking Rogan. You know what I mean?

3:29:14Shawn Ryan:Like, his numbers are probably bigger than all of them put together. Couldn't agree more. And that's why the work y 'all do is so insanely important. And that's... But they want the fucking money from the donors, you know, because who knows where the fuck that all winds up going.

3:29:31Ethan Thornton:I don't know. But I... No, I mean, look... I think just about everybody up there is a piece of shit, if you ask me.

3:29:37Shawn Ryan:But... The democratization of information is the best thing that will fix this. Now, the issue with that is that social media companies, and we're on the verge of this happening really, really badly, if not for Elon buying X. Now, obviously, Elon's also a guy. Elon also has his own incentives, and so I'm not saying you're sort of out of the problem. But the issue is you do still have, even though the information's democratized, you do still have people at the top who can pull the strings on viewership and other things. We just saw that in 2020. Yeah. And so you still, the orchestration just looks different.

3:30:23Shawn Ryan:It's almost harder to decipher because you can't tell if you're being pushed with your algorithms into thinking a certain way and being shown certain things. You can't tell if a certain video that should have gotten 10 million views got dialed back and only got 200 ,000 views, right? And so, one, I think for guys like y 'all, getting as close as you can to actually being truly democratized and escaping that is super, super important. I think, too, like, there is a place for regulation in all of this. Like, Teddy Roosevelt's probably one of my favorite, if not my favorite presidents, because he was an interesting dude.

3:31:01Shawn Ryan:He was a conservative who had existed at a time when technology was changing like crazy. Like if you go and read, like The Jungle is like probably the best book that highlights this, but you go and read, humanity discovered these new technologies. We had an industrial revolution and suddenly corporations are sort of run amok in America. Teddy Roosevelt was a conservative, but he wasn't willing to go toe-to-toe with the powers that be, and he wasn't willing to pass regulation to go and bust this stuff up. Like, he did some stuff that as a conservative is actually pretty wild. Like, he actually went and busted up strikes.

3:31:39Shawn Ryan:He started the FDA. He started the National Park Services. And so, I think that is the job of the government in some ways, to keep things in check. But you got to believe that no regulation is going to be passed on the way we throttle content. And so, yeah, the traditional mainstream media is certainly on its way out. And I do think this is a great trend towards democratization of content. But we also have to be incredibly purposeful, all the way at the top with regulation, all the way at the bottom with taking what you see on the internet seriously, not ripping sig for something that you've never actually shot like an idiot.

3:32:20Shawn Ryan:Oh, shit. But, so I think that's one. And then the other kind of dark horse here is the AI stuff, is just the amount of bots or the amount of AI-generated content that is just really in the last six months gone and just transcended these spaces. Which back to the importance of guys like you, guys like Rogan, like the way you cut through that is by having personalities you trust, right? And that makes y 'all's job all the more important because suddenly there's so much other content. Now, the thing that content won't be able to replicate is a voice of truth, but that again creates centralization.

3:32:59Shawn Ryan:And so it's just a ton of trust that has to be placed as society on people like you who will go and have people from all walks of life on this show and have good conversations with them about ideas and be willing to have productive debate. Like that is the way we cut through this. But we need to watch out. We need to watch out for the algorithms. We need to watch out for the amount of AI content entering the internet. We need to watch out for the effect bots can have on algorithms. Like you go and deploy a bunch of bots to get a video watched because these are all positive feedback loops. Like if a video gets watched a ton, it's likely to get watched more.

3:33:37And so if a video is

3:33:40Shawn Ryan:getting watched a ton, people can use bots to augment the amount of that information that goes out in the world. And then similarly, I mean, LLMs are really good at this point. The ability to spin up LLMs to just flood comment sections, because that's the way this media is reviewed by people. You go and watch the video, but you actually form most of your takes scrolling the content or the comments. And so if 90 % of the comments are like CCP bots ripping people, Now, maybe that's just Cope for me, because I don't want to have my feelings hurt by bad comments, and I'll say they're AI or whatever.

3:34:15Shawn Ryan:I'm kidding. But the comment section is also something to look out for. Because even for you, for your watchers, like, they watch your video, as they're watching your video, they're scrolling the comments, talking about things and having opinions formed. And so, this is in many ways like a new domain of warfare in this new space of information. This is what I was getting at with Taiwan. Absolutely, absolutely. And so, and there's, it's so hard to regulate. Like, it's so insanely, insanely hard to go and regulate the amount of bots that are actually in these circles, and then there's no real major structural incentive for tech companies to go and regulate this, because you don't get that much out of it, and it's incredibly expensive, and the ways you actually do this are not good for the user.

3:35:03Shawn Ryan:Like, anyway, we don't have to go into it, But it's a really, really tough problem to solve. I'm super, super grateful for guys like you who do stuff like this, because I completely agree with you. If not for democratization of information in the last election, we wouldn't have known what the hell was going on. I mean, you think about Trump getting shot. Like, the major media outlets reported loud sound heard for, like, hours after that. You've literally got a former president shot on stage, and the media is like saying a completely different narrative. And this goes both ways. So I'm not saying it's just a left issue or just a right issue.

3:35:45Shawn Ryan:It's just something we need to take incredibly seriously because a democracy does not work if people do not know what the issues are.

3:35:53Ethan Thornton:Scary fucking times. Do you take, how do you deal with corporate espionage? I mean, that's big in Silicon Valley. I don't know if it's big where you're, I would imagine, it is because palmer's down there right a lot of them uh i don't know how far you are from else it has to be there if you're there it has to be there and i mean and it's it's i mean it runs rampant you know i've asked i was i was talking to one of the guests i won't mention his name he's a he's a tech dude and i asked him you know because i'm always worried because i mean i told him hey you know i've been overseas all over the place one of the things chinese do is they set up brothels all over the place and then they get these state department guys fucking agency whoever they go in there and they fall in love with some chinese hooker and then yep and so that's happening over there and i know damn well it's happening in silicon valley where you're at in austin any anybody that's doing something innovative especially somebody that's interested in China, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine.

3:37:06Ethan Thornton:And then I interviewed this woman, Masha Booker. Have you heard of her? Holy shit. You didn't take an investment from her, did you? Good man. Crazy though. Dude. So I talked to another guy and he was talking about how this woman comes in and the clothes eventually slip off. And then next thing you know, she wants to invest in your company with a fucking VC firm. and so i interviewed her and i knew i could tell you know obviously i could tell it was bullshit because we never fucking released the interview i just considered the entire fucking thing to be a lie we found one little thing about her in the epstein files so we are not in the epstein files i'm sorry on in an article that she was she did something with with his pr you know what i mean totally fucking dismissed it got really uncomfortable blew jeremy my producer up non-stop i don't want that in there jeremy's telling me she doesn't want it in there we could still release and i'm like no that's a it's a it's a fucking horrible interview like the only the only decent part in it that's interesting is the epstein shit and then there's one other company that she's talking about fucking freezing people and you wake up a thousand years later or some shit but so that was kind of wild but i was like no if that's not in there we're definitely not fucking putting it out i was like the whole thing's probably fucking lie so we didn't put it out and then what three three million pages get released and her fucking name is in there like

3:38:39Shawn Ryan:all over the place all over the place she in jail what's that is she in jail i don't think she's in

3:38:46Ethan Thornton:jail but she's gonna go to jail sorry i'm i'm taking i took the wrong turn there uh she should

3:38:54Shawn Ryan:she should a lot of people should a lot of people should and then on the corporate corporate espionage

3:38:59Ethan Thornton:yeah so that's what i'm yeah you got thoughts on this that's it all you guys know who this woman is

3:39:05Shawn Ryan:you have to i mean you have to be so hyper vigilant as as a founder as anyone right are they though

3:39:17Ethan Thornton:I mean, this is part of when I was talking about when you were looking for, or maybe you weren't looking, when you were at MIT and you had VC firms and investors coming up to you. That's what I was getting at. Are you nervous? Did that make you nervous because of corporate espionage and shit like that? People taking advantage of you. You're a young guy. You don't have a lot of experience. You're obviously extremely fucking intelligent, but I don't know if you pick up on things like that.

3:39:44Shawn Ryan:Yeah.

3:39:44Ethan Thornton:That young of an age. I would think a lot of people don't. That only comes with experience.

3:39:51Shawn Ryan:That's scary. I mean, I think there are a few different risk fronts. One is actually having like your decision-making as a CEO influenced, right? And I feel good there. Like I'm squarely in charge of the company. Like I have deeply trust investors. We work together to make decisions, but ultimately it is my decision, and I've very closely curated that group. I think the next is basically investor data rights, right? Because the issue is all these VCs, it's not their money, it's their LP's money. In many cases, it's their LP's money, and so you've got like five levels of money coming down the chain.

3:40:25Shawn Ryan:So you've got to be super tight with IP and data rights with your investors and share what you need to share for the sake of basically investor transparency, but there's no reason we should be sending like the Viper CAD, right? And then as a company, this is where it gets really, really hard. And we have a team that works on this, obviously. So we have a cybersecurity team. We have physical security. We run really extensive background checks on anyone that onsites at the company. The issue is it can't be a maximization. So like let's say I wanted to sit here and say we're going to maximize our ability to avoid corporate espionage.

3:41:05Shawn Ryan:You would lock down all your servers. Everything would be... Like, this is what Skunkworks does. Like, a lot of Skunkworks is literally pen and paper because they're afraid of having their stuff hacked.

3:41:14Ethan Thornton:Well... Damn, that's fucking weird. I just had this fucking conversation with Nick. With Nick Seether, Rob. And I said, do you think we'll hit a point with AI and, you know, everybody's fear of quantum computing and all this other shit? I mean, are we going to go back to face-to-face pen and paper stored in a fucking vault? Because of all the shit, you know what I mean? That people text each other, photo, everything. Just personal stuff. Then we get into national secrets, national security secrets, shit like that. I mean, it's fucking online. It can be hacked. It seems like it might. It already is going back to that a little bit.

3:41:58I don't think we...

3:42:00Shawn Ryan:It's an optimization, so it's somewhere in the middle. You can't completely do that. So like that's one of the reasons if you read the Skunk Works book, they talk about that actually leading to the collapse of innovation at Skunk Works. When it takes 18 months to hire someone because you're combing through everything they've ever done, right? And where you can't use the best design software because you're on pen and paper. And so like at the end of the job, your job is to ship products. And if we're shipping products at 1 % the rate of China, we're going to lose regardless. And so you have to have a ton of tact in the way you choose to treat these things.

3:42:33Shawn Ryan:And unfortunately, you just can't be maximized about it because you stop operating as a business. There are a few things that help a lot. The biggest being moving quickly, right? Like, if my design changes every three months, well, you can have the design from three months ago. But my engineers are sitting there working on a design that's 10 times better than that. So that's one. The second, people talk a lot about... People talk a lot about basically centralizing data in warfighting, and that's really, really important, but it also creates risk vectors. And so, architecting your products such that, like, 200 Vipers can't be hacked out of the air at any given time is obviously very, very important to do.

3:43:18Shawn Ryan:Supply chain security is something that people don't talk nearly enough about. No company on Earth operates all the way up to their mine across everything they do. You can't do it, right? So, like, a deeply vertically integrated company manufactures, let's say, 50 % of the parts that go into their platform. And this could be iPhones, this could be cars, this could be Vipers, this could be other aircraft, because you can't afford to. But then even those components you're building have components that come from elsewhere, and those components come from elsewhere. And so I worry a little bit about information leakage.

3:43:58Shawn Ryan:I worry more about the supply chain perspective. Because on the information side, if you're moving quickly enough, if you're innovating, you're creating natural fortification against that. And that's sort of your job is to just move at such a pace that if someone gets that, they're getting information that's already obsolete. And that's the best defense you can have, especially when it is a competitive environment. Like, if it's just you building it, go insanely slow. Like, hire five people, write everything on pen and paper, and develop a product over 20 years. But when you're in a literal arms race against China, you can't do that.

3:44:33Shawn Ryan:And so find the balance of what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. And then move as quickly as possible so that if information gets out, then you've already moved past it. The supply chain side, and then anything as relates to your software is what gets really, really, really scary. Like if... I'm listening. We saw, I mean, we saw the Israelis do this quite effectively with the pagers, right?

3:45:04Ethan Thornton:Mm-hmm.

3:45:05Shawn Ryan:And so that type of warfare goes both ways, and that should keep us all up at night, right? Like the fuses you put in your aircraft.

3:45:16Ethan Thornton:Mm-hmm.

3:45:16Shawn Ryan:Like if, anyway, I won't go too deep down this rabbit hole.

3:45:19Ethan Thornton:It goes down a whole nother bug and rabbit hole right there. I've not even thought about that.

3:45:26Shawn Ryan:I have not even thought. Because ultimately, I mean, I would say we're very vertically integrated as a company. Like, of course, we're new. So it's not like I've had 10 years to work on all this stuff. But that is, if there's one thing Mach does, it is vertical integration. But even us, I mean, as you look at the branching structure down the supply chain, you've got literally thousands of factories down the supply chain. And again, our job as a country is to ship things. So you can't sit with your hands behind your back, afraid, right, to ship products. But at the same time, you do have to stay wary of what it would mean for literally one of those factories to get compromised.

3:46:07Ethan Thornton:It's a lot to think about. Yeah. Let's talk about neo-feudalism. Yeah. What is it?

3:46:20Shawn Ryan:So, it's a kind of newly emerging term. I'm glad you brought it up.

3:46:30It's the idea of rentership instead of ownership, and that sort of progressing towards its limits. And so I'll get more specific, but generally speaking, like feudalism is this idea that you don't own your land, right?

3:46:45Shawn Ryan:Like you're a serf that works, that pays rent and or gives a portion of your food to work someone else's own land. Through so many different means, that is the way a lot of our economy functions today. I mean, take like planned obsolescence, right? So are you familiar with this? No worries if not. It's basically like companies these days specifically engineer their products to break at any given time. Okay. So, like, the iPhone has planned obsolescence, where, like, after three years, it's not going to be a useful good. John Deere, like, this is a great example. Like, the whole right to repair, like, fight of, like, is a farmer allowed to maintenance his own tractor, or will John Deere specifically engineer things such that you can't repair the thing?

3:47:34Shawn Ryan:And so, one, there's a ton of planned obsolescence. And basically what that means is that you're buying goods more frequently from these companies. Two, you have the idea of service models, and everything's pushing towards service models. And so, I mean, even you look at cars. I think it's very, very likely that Tesla is doing most of their revenue not selling cars to people that they own, but selling services and cybercaps. right? You literally look at home ownership. Like, my generation is not going to be able to afford to buy homes. Like, if you track the actual relative amount of annual income versus home price, everyone rents everything they have.

3:48:14Shawn Ryan:And there's something that's been talked about for a while, is there's several people have said it, but basically, like, in the future, you will own nothing and be happy about it. And there's a structural reason companies do this. It's a great way to maximize earnings, right? Like if you're Apple, you engineer a phone to not last and suddenly someone's buying a phone every three years. And when it gets really, really bad is when tech starts to plateau and people have no other reason to buy the new good, then you really almost have to do this to stay in business. And then the companies that adopt this...

3:48:49Shawn Ryan:Have to do what? I'm not saying...

3:48:52Ethan Thornton:Are you saying they have to...

3:48:53Shawn Ryan:If these companies want to stay in business, in a competitive market, in many cases, they have to do planned obsolescence.

3:49:00Ethan Thornton:But if the... if the... if... if tech plateaus, then what's the incentive to fucking buy a new one?

3:49:06Shawn Ryan:Because it breaks. So, like, your iPhone. Does your iPhone work that differently than it did, like, five years ago? No. So why did you buy new iPhones? Because they break. And that's the case on a lot of different things. I mean, our trucks. I guess you have a cool Ford truck, because it hasn't broken because it's been around for so long, but I have a Ford truck, I have 105 ,000 miles on it. I would love to drive that to 300 ,000, 400 ,000 miles. It's breaking down. I'm going to have to buy a new one. It's not a better truck. It's just planned obsolescence. And so, a lot of what Silicon Valley does nowadays is not innovate on technology.

3:49:46Shawn Ryan:They innovate on business model. is like a relatively new thing that's happened in the last few decades, is people don't walk into a pitch meeting talking about the great new product they're bringing. They're talking about the new way of taking existing resources and distributing them differently. And there are good effects to this. Like, Uber's a great company, but Uber obviously didn't really build anything. It was a business practice of how to share resources more. and the effect of that is all of the focus right now is on how you extract more dollars from a consumer not necessarily how you provide a consumer a better good in many cases and so there's i mean there's a very very clear effect between ownership and societal stability like if you don't own anything in your society you don't have that much of an aligned incentive to fight.

3:50:41Shawn Ryan:And when I say you, I'm talking like, obviously, me as the CEO of a company, I will fucking promise you I'll never do planned obsolescence, right? Like, I would like to think that regardless of how much you own this country, you're going to care about the country just as much. But when you look at the average of hundreds of millions of people of all the corporations in the US, the incentive of the business is planned obsolescence. The incentive of the business is service structures. And then the incentive at the low end becomes the companies that do this can actually innovate better because they're getting more money.

3:51:11Shawn Ryan:And so the companies that try to build things to last go out of business while the companies that are doing planned obsolescence have more money to pump into research and other things. And I'm not saying it's an inherently bad thing. Again, I love capitalism, but it is just something that is happening that we need to talk about. That is that very, very few people, specifically my generation, actually own that much. Like I rent my music. I rent my apartment. I don't rent my truck, but the trucks I buy, at like are only good for, let's say, 150 ,000 miles. And that's terrifying. Because then you get that, and that's where the neofeudalism emerges, is you get trapped in these loops.

3:51:51Like you were a serf borrowing all the time.

3:51:55Shawn Ryan:And you get people who end up living paycheck to paycheck, never able to get ahead. Because instead of buying something and passing it down to your kids, or at least having it for several decades, you're buying something so that you can buy it again in a month.

3:52:17Man.

3:52:20Ethan Thornton:How do you think we get out of this? I mean, it's going to be your generation that fixes it.

3:52:31Ethan Thornton:Because everybody else is sitting and you're fucking comfortable.

3:52:35Shawn Ryan:I think I think if we're going to be in a position to fix it, we've got to get started right now. And most of these structural changes have to be made in the next few years. Like, I would love to think it's my generation that's going to fix it. But the unfortunate thing is in two or three decades, I worry that these structures are going to be so reinforced. Right? Like, let's talk AI. And this is something, like, for my generation, in the last three or four years, we've seen this hockey stick and AI growth. It's actually really, really difficult for my generation to bank on a career of any sort by the time we're 40, 50, 60, when we're actually in positions to do anything about it.

3:53:12And so maybe it's on my generation

3:53:15Shawn Ryan:to be ringing the alarm bells, and I'm not complaining. My generation has had, like, an incredible easy time, right? Like, I'm not complaining. There's none of that. But I'm just saying, like, I do think it's happening very, very quickly. And it's not my generation that are CEOs of companies. It's not my generation that are, frankly, in positions to get people elected. Things that have to be done on the neo-feudalism point, I think one, we just need good companies. Like if you're building a company in Silicon Valley, obsess about like making a customer's life better. If you're funding companies, obsess about companies that make a customer's life better or that solve real problems for people.

3:53:56Shawn Ryan:If you're the CEO of a company, like I do think you have a moral responsibility to ship products that are good for people's lives, right? Like, it is your job in a position of power to think deeply about the effects of the products you bring to earth. If you're working for one of those companies, you should be thinking deeply about the same. And then I will say the consumer has something to do about it too. Like, you can buy enduring goods by cutting spending and focusing differently. Now, that's a small portion of the country, and most of the country at this point, I think, is just trapped in that cycle.

3:54:30Shawn Ryan:but you can raise the alarm bells. So on the neo-feudalism point, that's what I urge. It has to be a cultural shift. Like, you don't want the government to get involved in this one. Like, if there's one thing that needs to not happen is taking this as a flaw of capitalism and going to break it.

3:54:48Ethan Thornton:I mean, this is fucking scary though. I mean, because it's... Are you Gen Z? I am. I mean, this is the big complaint of Gen Z. Can't fucking buy a house. Can't buy anything. And I used to think, eh, maybe they're just fucking lazy. Maybe, you know, maybe they're not going to be able to do it. Well, Trump came out with a 50-year mortgage. That should cut the payment in half. I was wrong about that. I thought I was like, well, I mean, everybody was shitting on it. And I was like, I think that might be a good thing because it should cut the payment damn near in half. Then I brought in my good friend Rob Luna and he gave me the real numbers.

3:55:23Ethan Thornton:and he was like uh it's i think he says more like a 15 cut and i was like oh okay and so that that made it the conversation i had with rob made it real for me i was like oh man this generation is and but in in i mean there has to be an answer but at the same time if it's only doom and gloom and you and i mean you have an entire generation of people that don't think they'll ever be able to buy a house, a Ferrari car, have a family.

3:55:57Shawn Ryan:Have a real career. Have a real career.

3:55:59Ethan Thornton:What the fuck do you have to look forward to? And so how do you motivate that generation?

3:56:11Ethan Thornton:It's a big problem.

3:56:12Shawn Ryan:It's a big problem. Now, I will say...

3:56:14Ethan Thornton:And then, if you don't solve it, then that generation's kids, if they have any, that gets passed down. Just like, man, generational trauma. It's just, you know what I mean? That becomes the loop.

3:56:33Shawn Ryan:And we had a conversation about agency earlier and sort of the erosion of agency. That's where it's coming from. Because you feel like you have no control over your political system. Like you're watching literal pedophiles not go to jail. Right? In many cases, stay in power. On both sides. On both sides.

3:56:49Ethan Thornton:Yeah, this isn't...

3:56:50Shawn Ryan:None of this is...

3:56:51Ethan Thornton:I don't even see right and left anymore, man. I only see fucking good and evil. And that is it. Agreed. I don't even believe in this left and right shit. I agree.

3:56:59Shawn Ryan:It's all a fucking facade. So I think a few things I would urge. One is perception does become reality. If everyone thinks that the world is going to go into oblivion, no one will save for the future. No one will work for the future. And so, it's a difficult balance, but you have to talk about the problems without becoming defeatist. Because humanity has dealt with really, really, really dark times. Right? And so, you have to sit here and have really, really hard conversations, but then have hope and say, we will get through this. It does make sense to think about things on 10, 20, 30-year timelines.

3:57:35Shawn Ryan:It does make sense to, like, think about what it means to have a family in this country. And that's just a fundamental step change that has to be had. Because other than that, like, until you get into the frame of mind of, like, I don't care how bad the odds are, I'm going to get up and work. You're going to sit down and scroll. And so I think that needs to happen. And I think we need to almost be like delusional about the amount of agency we have. Like, I don't know how to describe this, but like you have to act as if you have orders of magnitude more impact on the world than you actually do.

3:58:18Shawn Ryan:And you have to trap yourself into thinking that, like obsess about what can I do today to actually make things better? Because we're a capitalist democracy. We are nothing other than the people in this country. And so if the people in this country start thinking they are in control, which they are and need to be and hopefully always will be, they need to realize that and get up and start pushing for change. And then the next step is how do you actually identify what the real problems are? Because, look, I am 22. I'm an idiot on most of the things we've talked about. Now, my goal is that there are great people constantly having this conversation and these conversations and that we sharpen each other through good discourse.

3:58:57Shawn Ryan:Now, you can only achieve good discourse with good data, right? And so that's where you get into the broader theme of like, what does it mean for information to actually get out? That's where people like you are so important. That's where I do think regulation actually has a place to play and like making algorithm tuning not as prolific as it is today, actually cracking down on bots that influence the way people think. I think the next is on the way we view AI. Like, none of us should be doomers. None of us should be super, super rosy. We all just need to think about, like, actual first principles of what this looks like and choose to use products, choose to support companies that we think will actually make the world a place we want to live in.

3:59:39Shawn Ryan:on the political side, we immediately have to drop partisan bickering. Like it has to exit our brains. We have to be willing. I don't care how conservative you are or how liberal you are, you have to be able to sit down and just have a real conversation and talk about real policy, regardless of religion, regardless of anything else. Even if you deeply believe in your religion, which you and I both do, you just have to come together and have deep conversations about these things, even if you and I believe in our political views. Like, we, and again, I'm saying you as in like, again, you, and so next is have good discourse and then folks just need to start acting.

4:00:18Shawn Ryan:Like, invest in companies that you think build the future. Like, I also think people don't realize how big of an impact they can actually have on the stock market when they invest in companies that, like, most companies are public, right? And it's not everyday people that own a majority of shares, but it's a non-trivial amount. So, that's a real thing you can go and do. You can buy from companies that you think do this. You can sure as hell go and work at companies. That's probably the biggest thing you can do. Like, if you really want to go make a difference in the world, either go start a company or go work for a company, not for a salary, not for anything other than, like, I believe in the mission of going and making the world a better place in any number of ways.

4:01:00Shawn Ryan:Because, again, if you zoom all the way out, the things this country does is nothing more than the inputs of individual people. And so if people choose to work on good missions, if people choose to start good missions, good missions will be achieved. So, yeah, I think the biggest answer is, like, hope and agency.

4:01:22Ethan Thornton:Well, I think people like you are bringing a lot of hope. Thank you. It's pretty fucking cool, man. Thank you. What you're doing. What a lot of your buddies are doing. Well, actually, I don't even know if they're your buddies, but... They are?

4:01:33Shawn Ryan:No, we're all on the same team. Like, to the end, it is the same mission that we're all fighting for, specifically in the defense base. Like, it's the only thing that matters is if the warfighter has the best kit and if America is in a position to protect democracy. So, I appreciate it.

4:01:52Ethan Thornton:Yeah, Ethan, you're a fascinating guy. An impressive guy. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thanks for having me. It's been really fucking cool. so I wish you the best luck and I hope to see you again thank you alright man cheers

4:02:19Ethan Thornton:no matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from if you get anything out of this at all anything please like comment and subscribe And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.

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