Hardpoints

Louisville Slugger, the official bat of Major League Baseball, sits under a company controlled by a Chinese-led investor group. So does Arc’teryx. Isaac Stone Fish makes a living tracking exactly this kind of exposure, and he says most founders have more of it than they think.

Mike and Neal sit down with Isaac, founder and CEO of Strategy Risks and author of America Second: How America’s Elites Are Making China Stronger. Isaac spent seven years in China as a journalist. He explains what the Communist Party actually wants (control, not stability), why every Chinese company has to stay on its good side, and why the People’s Liberation Army is the party’s armed wing rather than a national military.

Then he gets practical. His China-exposure framework has four parts: supply chain, partnerships and politics, business fundamentals like investors and joint ventures, and regional ties like Xinjiang and Tibet. Mike brings the view from Aclymate, where supply chains for promotional products and branded merchandise run through Asia, and asks what a small importer should actually worry about. Isaac walks through the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, why a $4 million shipment stopped at port can make or break a company, and why a Chinese investor who’s harmless at Series A can become a real problem by Series C, once a federal grant is on the table. Neal, who runs Airloom, pushes on whether energy counts as a sensitive sector (Isaac says yes). They also cover how universities get entangled and whether there’s any ethical way to do business with the party at all.

In the mailbag, @heathershoe7429 asks about reports that the president will invade Iran after the midterms. Mike and Neal explain why they think a limited escalation is far likelier than an invasion of a country that size.

Goods, Bads, and Others: Mike enjoys a quiet weekend and a Broncos win, worries about the 82nd Airborne’s extended deployment, and takes on Palmer Luckey’s new cloned-dog startup, Warhound, which raised $200 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. Neal likes that troops get a day off to vote, notes that oil and gas profits are soaring, and admits his wife caught him talking to his AI.

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Every military satellite America owns launches with all the fuel it will ever have. When the tank runs dry, a satellite worth hundreds of millions of dollars becomes space junk. This week, Mike and Neal take a question from listener Aimee D. about whether the Space Force is sustainable, and the answer starts with a surprisingly thin supply chain: hydrazine, the main satellite fuel, comes from a single small plant in Louisiana.

Neal walks through why fuel is the real limit on a satellite’s life, from Landsat 7 running low to the $500 million geostationary satellites that sit over one spot for years. Then comes the main event. The U.S. demonstrated in-orbit refueling back in 2007, but NASA canceled OSAM-1, its big follow-on mission, in 2024. Meanwhile, China appears to have pulled off the first satellite-to-satellite refueling in geosynchronous orbit, roughly 22,000 miles up. Mike and Neal argue about how a country falls behind on something it invented, why the same technology can work as a tow truck or a hijacker, and whether the smarter bet is expensive satellites you can refuel or cheap ones you simply replace.

They also dig into what this means for the startup economy. Mike sees a golden age of space startups, driven by cheaper launches, autonomy, and venture funds flush with cash. Neal, who runs a hardware company, expects a cycle of wreckage first. And Mike makes the case that space is a commons, where debris is pollution and nobody has a plan to pay for the cleanup.

In the mailbag, @viveksmom asks whether someone can be an asset without knowing it, and @dodgingrain3695 argues that gas prices and the November midterms are driving the White House.

In Goods, Bads, and Others, Mike’s good is the Financial Times reporting on the collapse of diesel cars in Europe, his bad is the Ramaswamy campaign ad in Ohio’s governor race featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother, and his other is the Colorado ballot measures on transgender youth. Neal’s good is the Brewers sweeping the Dodgers on their way to the World Series, his bad is the worsening situation in the Strait of Hormuz, and his other is two elections in one week: Brazil’s runoff and Israel’s vote.

Mike Smith runs Aclymate, a climate platform for businesses without a sustainability department. Neal Rickner runs Airloom, an emerging energy company. Send questions and comments to hardpoints.show@gmail.com, follow wherever you get your podcasts, and share the show with someone who would appreciate it. Hardpoints is brought to you by the Valor Media Network.

Ukraine is hitting Russian oil refineries more than 3,000 kilometers inside Russia with a drone that costs about $55,000. Last weekend, the president of the United States told Zelensky to stop. Ukraine went along for three days. Then Russia answered with 39 ballistic missiles aimed at Ukraine’s power grid, and Zelensky says the block on refinery strikes is over.

This week, Mike Smith of Aclymate and Neal Rickner of Airloom pick up where last week’s diesel episode left off. Diesel hit a record this fall, the midterms are three weeks away, and the White House is easing sanctions on Russian diesel while leaning on Ukraine to stop hitting Russian refineries. Washington has stopped paying for this war, but it still controls Patriot sales, intelligence sharing, and a Starlink network owned by the richest man in the world. So what leverage does Trump actually have left — and is Zelensky wrong to ignore him?

Neal makes Trump’s case first — the US still holds the three levers that matter most to Ukraine, and Zelensky is gambling that Trump won’t pull them. Mike argues the opposite. In his read, Trump has given away his carrots, has few sticks, and has backed himself into a corner, while Zelensky has the support of his people and a European backstop that keeps getting stronger. They end up disagreeing about who is really cornered. They also look at what’s actually flying and what it’s hitting. The Ukrainian drone is built from foam, plywood, and carbon fiber — effectively a cruise missile for the price of a used car — and Mike explains why refineries make such good targets at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. On the other side, Russia is going after power plants and substations as winter arrives, and Mike makes the case that it isn’t breaking anyone’s will.

In the mailbag, Amy D. asks about Space Force and the fuel it needs — a follow-up is coming. A reader from CIR Daily Updates also weighs in on last week’s episode, arguing the diesel deal may be less than the headline suggests, with no US buyer publicly committed and pump prices not moving. Their full analysis is on Cathrop Briefs. In Goods, Bads, and Others, Mike covers EVs gaining ground around the world, the rollback of PEPFAR, and Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centers. Neal covers Anne Carson’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the loss of Sergeant Major Anderson, and the UK prime minister saying it’s clear Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum.

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A new Treasury license allows Russian diesel to be sold into the United States through April 7, 2027, after a phone call between President Trump and Vladimir Putin. The first announced shipment is 300,000 tons, about 2.25 million barrels. America uses about 3.7 million barrels of diesel a day, so the headline deal covers less than one day of demand. It comes from a country whose own fuel exports are collapsing under Ukrainian drone strikes on its refineries. This week, Mike and Neal ask what the deal is really for.

Mike starts with why diesel hurts so much: Russia and Ukraine are bombing each other’s energy infrastructure, and diesel runs the hay trucks, cattle operations and grocery supply chains the working economy depends on. It also reaches your plane ticket, because diesel and jet fuel come from the same part of the barrel. Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford puts the rise in farm input costs at $15 billion since February, with diesel roughly double.

Neal presses on the numbers and the motive. If the volume is this small, what did Russia give up? Mike’s answer is nothing, and he reads the deal as a political move ahead of the midterms that also leans on Ukraine’s president. Republican senators Collins, Curtis, Murkowski and Tillis have joined Democrats in objecting, and Mike asks why Congress is stopping at statements when it has levers to pull. Neal asks why the first call isn’t to Canada, our closest energy partner, and both hosts agree you phone your friend before your adversary.

Mike then pulls on a thread most coverage misses: the transshipment points that move Russian oil out of the Arctic, and his worry that the deal could widen the war. They close on a more generous reading, that the deal is a backroom trade to ease Iran’s pressure on the Strait of Hormuz. Neal says he would back that. Mike hopes it’s true but sees a simpler explanation.

In the mailbag, a listener says the F-35’s $1 trillion price tag covers 50 years of fuel, manpower and spares. Mike says the latest projection is closer to $2 trillion and argues that spending defense dollars well is how you look out for the little guy. Another listener asks whether data center water use is exaggerated and whether you could bury the buildings. Neal says the closed-loop and underground ideas have merit, while Mike says the heat, the noise and the power plants feeding them do not go away.

In Goods, Bads, and Others, Mike’s good is wind and solar gaining ground in Europe’s power mix, his bad is a surprise week of prep for a garage sale, and his other is a Dodgers title run that he fears could push baseball into a labor fight. Neal’s good is the Blue Angels turning 80, his bad is what high diesel prices are doing to farmers, and his other is playoff baseball.

Hosts Mike Smith, a former Navy F/A-18 pilot and CEO of Aclymate, and Neal Rickner, a former Marine Corps F/A-18 pilot and CEO of Airloom, unpack energy, national security, and the startup economy.

Questions or comments? Email hardpoints.show@gmail.com and we may feature yours on a future episode. Hardpoints is brought to you by the Valor Media Network.

Local opposition blocked or delayed an estimated $130 billion in data center projects in the first three months of 2026 alone. In Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, a developer tried to change that math by mailing every household a letter offering $10,000 if its 15-building data center campus gets built. The median household income there is about $60,000, and plenty of residents are still saying no.

This week, Mike and Neal ask whether paying your neighbors is the future of how America builds big things, or proof that some things can’t be bought. Neal draws on his time winning over communities for an energy project on the Big Island of Hawaii, where showing up early and often did what money never could. Mike argues that the fear of loss runs deeper than any check — and that a payout offered after the township already voted no was always going to look like a bribe.

They get into why people really object (power bills, water, secrecy, and distrust of the billionaires behind the projects), how wind developers pay their neighbors, and what a “pay your own way” power deal like Google’s with Xcel Energy in Minnesota looks like. They also cover why one township’s fight lands on a regional grid, and why the national security race for AI needs boundaries — not a stop sign.

In the mailbag, a listener asks about the U.S. military buildup in Palau. Neal shares what he saw landing on islands across the Western Pacific as a Marine in 2002, and why infrastructure out there matters in the competition with China. In Goods, Bads, and Others, Mike’s good is a political ad he recorded that has people recognizing him, his bad is $20 million in Homeland Security money going to ads featuring the president, and his other is Peter Thiel’s comments on evil and competence. Neal’s good is the return of Ali G, his bad is heating oil bills expected to jump more than 30% this winter, and his other is the Navy’s birthday.

Hosts Mike Smith, a former Navy F/A-18 pilot and CEO of Aclymate, and Neal Rickner, a former Marine Corps F/A-18 pilot and CEO of Airloom, unpack energy, national security, and the startup economy.

Questions or comments? Email hardpoints.show@gmail.com and we may feature yours on a future episode.

Hardpoints is brought to you by the Valor Media Network.

The Pentagon is asking for $54.6 billion for autonomous warfare next year — up from about $226 million this year. That same week, Secretary Hegseth announces a new four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, the 12th combatant command in American history, and Ukraine says drones caused nearly all of the roughly 35,000 Russian casualties it counted in March. Mike and Neal ask whether the United States is finally admitting that the next century of war belongs to machines, and whether a new four-star command is the right way to get there.

They walk through what was announced at Quantico — a command with service-like authorities, new drone career fields in the Army, Navy, and Air Force, an interim team called Project Agincourt, and a future-warfare panel co-led by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich. They also dig into the cost math behind it all — cheap drones against expensive interceptors, tanks pulling back from the front, and why quantity now matters as much as quality.

Neal sees a necessary break from the old system, pointing to the SOCOM model of giving a new mission its own budget and buying power so it can't lose every fight to the next fighter jet or ship. Mike likes the direction but worries a twelfth command adds bureaucracy, and he wants the new four-star to start by getting close to the fight in Ukraine, where tactics are being written in real time. For Mike, the real test is whether the command can change how the Army and Navy fight, not just run its own program. Both hosts flag the conflict of interest in putting people whose companies do business with the Pentagon on the panel that shapes its future. Still, Mike, who runs Aclymate, and Neal, who runs Airloom, take the founder's view — launch it, bring in smart people, and iterate — while keeping a healthy dose of skepticism about who is writing the rules.

In the listener mailbag, one commenter argues the U.S. is simply turning up the heat on Canada until it comes to the table, and another wonders whether China is safer than American AI executives. Mike and Neal push back on both — covering what it costs to treat an ally like an adversary, why China is not the safer bet, and why Mike would hold AI developers to a strict liability standard. In goods, bads, and others, Mike cheers a Michigan credit union for parting ways with its CEO after an AI-edited "Lake America" sweatshirt photo, groans at Senator Eric Schmitt's perjury accusation against Jack Smith and the Hawks versus Hawkeyes moment that followed, and tracks private investment in nature growing fivefold to more than $14 billion a year. Neal salutes seven F-22 pilots awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, six of them for Operation Midnight Hammer, laments the Ratepayer Protection Act stalling in the Senate after passing the House 417 to 3, and reflects on the last U.S. troops leaving Iraq after 23 years.

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Anduril's valuation doubled from $30.5 billion to $61 billion in under a year, and the company is reportedly in talks with investors at close to $100 billion. Its revenue more than doubled to $2.2 billion last year, but $100 billion works out to roughly 45 times that number, while the traditional defense primes trade at low single-digit multiples. Anduril's own CEO, Brian Schimpf, says there is a bit of a bubble. Mike and Neal agree. The real question is what happens to the Pentagon, and to the taxpayer, when it pops.

The conversation starts with who these companies actually are. Anduril was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, who had just been fired from Facebook after selling Oculus, along with co-founders who came out of Palantir. It is named after a sword from The Lord of the Rings. It began with border security and now builds the Lattice battlefield software platform along with drones, interceptors, and missiles. Mach Industries is a very different company. Ethan Thornton founded it in 2023 after dropping out of MIT at 19, and it builds five autonomous systems, from a vertical takeoff jet drone to a cheap counter-drone interceptor. Mach's valuation went from $470 million in June 2025 to $3.7 billion this month, and it does not disclose revenue.

How did we get here? Mike and Neal trace the Pentagon's path from hundreds of prime contractors in World War II to a handful, and what that did to competition and cost. Fighter programs take decades, and the F-35 keeps growing past a trillion dollars. Mike calls it regulatory capture. Neal adds that the primes got brilliant at building exquisite, expensive hardware just as software became the more important half of the fight, and startups could iterate faster than Boeing or Northrop ever could. Add Silicon Valley's change of heart — from the Google employee revolt over defense work to founders who now want to build for the military — and the Pentagon's attempt to play matchmaker through the Defense Innovation Unit, and the opening for a new kind of prime is obvious. Both hosts give Secretary Hegseth credit for going after how acquisition programs are run, even as they disagree about almost everything that follows.

Then the money. Defense tech venture funding hit $12.3 billion in the first half of the year by one PitchBook count, more than all of last year. Anduril is growing fast and guiding to roughly double its revenue again, but it is still losing money. Neal brings the founder's view. As the CEO of Airloom, he has given and received the same advice — Uncle Sam is both the best and worst customer, with big contracts but lumpy revenue that startups cannot wait two years for. A dual-use company can raise private capital and win defense dollars, and each helps the other. It also has a civilian market to fall back on if it never becomes a program of record. Mike, the founder of Aclymate, remembers a veterans founder meetup where dual use was the whole play, and notes that companies now go straight to defense. He asks what the dual-use story is for a battlefield sensor fusion company.

That is where the two split. Mike is skeptical of how the neo primes got where they are. He points to insider connections and no-bid contracts, and to companies that used to say "if we build it, they will come" now asking for money up front. In his view, they are starting to behave like the old cartel, with venture capital pushing toward a few winners and everyone else acquired or wiped out. He says he knows good people at Anduril and does not know Luckey personally, but the pattern reminds him of past eras of confident outsiders who did not understand the underlying systems. Neal reads the motives more generously. He sees real patriotism and a technologist solving a real problem, and in his own experience in the trenches, he has watched people win on merit and questionable technology lose. His argument is that America fell behind on defense innovation, private capital showed up, entrepreneurs followed, and the warfighter gets better technology as a result. They agree on the essentials — there is a bubble, and the status quo was never acceptable.

So what should happen instead? Mike wants the Pentagon to open the playing field so venture capital cannot squeeze the market. That means giving the services more discretion to buy every year and keeping enough competition that margins get squeezed instead of exploding. Neal wants the Pentagon agile enough to bet heavily on Mach and Anduril today and on something completely different next year. The shared answer is a wider field, more frequent purchasing from more suppliers, programs that can change direction, and dual-use companies that can survive if Washington does not buy on a straight line.

In the mailbag, a viewer in Nottingham asks whether Mike and Neal miss flying the F/A-18. Mike says it was a blast, but he has filled out that part of his life. Neal says he misses it and would have flown until the day he died. An electrician of 40 years says nearly every electrical device is made in China. Mike pushes back — the United States is still the number two manufacturing power, and the higher-end the product, the more likely it is built here.

Goods, bads, and others — Mike's good is $1.9 billion from the Department of Energy for 31 grid projects across 26 states, which he credits to Secretary Wright as a key unlock for American energy security. His bad is ProPublica's reporting on Senator Susan Collins and a defense contractor's $150,000 donation, routed through a shell company, to a pro-Collins super PAC. Collins denies wrongdoing, and Mike uses the story to argue for deeper reform of how defense acquisition and funding work. His other is the Pentagon's new wargame-style evaluation for officers seeking their first star, which he calls a reasonable start while arguing the military needs to do far more to develop strategic thinkers. Neal's good is Mexico's energy ministry projecting 80 percent wind growth by 2030, to 15 gigawatts, while American wind slows down. His bad is the Wall Street Journal report that President Trump rejected Iran's seven-day ceasefire proposal and expects to resume bombing after the midterms. His other is the Pentagon asking industry how fast it can build more weapons, a reminder that the country is not ready for the next conflict.

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The price of keeping the lights on in America's largest grid went from $29 a megawatt-day to $329 in two years. Utilities have already asked regulators for billions in rate hikes this year alone. And on September 16, the House of Representatives did something Congress almost never does: it passed a bill to address it, 417 to 3. Mike and Neal break down the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would require state utility commissions to consider making large data centers (100 megawatts or more at a single site) pay the full cost of the grid upgrades built to serve them, instead of spreading that cost across everyone else's electric bill. It sounds like a fix. It passed almost unanimously. And it barely does anything. The bill only requires states to consider a standard that most of them already have in some form, and one day after House passage, Senator Martin Heinrich blocked it in the Senate, arguing it doesn't go far enough and amounts to taking tech companies at their word. Mike and Neal dig into what's actually driving the price spike, the data center and AI boom eating up nearly 40% of capacity charges in PJM's last auction, and why a near-unanimous vote in an election year should make you more suspicious, not less. Mike, who runs Aclymate, makes the case that this is capitalism's weak spot: margin always gets found somewhere, and it's usually found by squeezing public goods like the grid. Neal, who runs Airloom, pushes back on writing off the bill entirely, pointing out that exit-fee liability protections are genuinely useful and have saved communities from getting stuck holding the bag when a company walks away mid-build. They also get into the wave of state-level data center moratoriums in New York and Texas, and why Congress moving fast on a toothless bill while slow-walking real reform is the actual story here. Plus: Goods, Bads, and Others covering Mike's sustainability conference, EPA rollbacks, Thomas Massie's impeachment articles against Pete Hegseth, DOE geothermal funding, rising diesel prices tied to the Ukraine war, and Canada's growing defense-tech independence from the US. And in the mailbag, listener questions on Canada's Trans Mountain pipeline and whether Canada actually needs F-35s for northern defense. Got a question or comment? Email us at hardpoints.show@gmail.com.

A $20,000 drone just took out 4% of the world's oil supply, and two days later American diesel crossed $6 a gallon for the first time in history. Mike and Neal break down how a strike on Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline — the kingdom's main workaround for the still-closed Strait of Hormuz — turned into a real cost at the pump for American truckers, and soon for everyone buying anything that rides on a truck.

The strategic question underneath the headline: the White House wants to invoke a 1950s wartime production law to build out US refining capacity. Mike and Neal dig into why that fixes the wrong timeline. New refineries take years to permit and build, oil executives know the current price spike is likely temporary, and nobody is going to sink billions into a 25-year asset to solve an 18-month problem. They trace the chain back further, too — to the power vacuum in Iraq that let armed groups operate freely enough to launch a drone strike hundreds of miles into Saudi territory in the first place.

The real debate of the episode is bigger than one pipeline. Neal, a former Marine and current energy founder, argues the national security case for domestic energy production over Middle East entanglement. Mike, whose company Aclymate helps businesses without in-house sustainability teams track and cut their own emissions, pushes the same conclusion from a different angle: energy independence and climate progress aren't in tension — they're the same fix wearing different hats. Both agree the real story of the week isn't the pipeline attack. It's that EV sales just hit record highs in 50 countries while the US keeps arguing about refineries.

In Goods, Bads, and Others: Mike is buried under a sustainability industry summit he's hosting in Denver this week (and hoping to survive a weekend backpacking trip with 15 Boy Scouts right after). His bad goes to the treatment of political refugees in immigration detention, and his other flags BlackRock's public acknowledgment that markets aren't pricing in climate risk — paired with skepticism about whether the money will actually follow the words. Neal's good is the EU stepping up with a new air and missile defense package for Ukraine, his bad is the end of "duration of status" protections for international students, and his other is Amazon suspending a cargo carrier partnership after a fatal runway crash.

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At 12:01 AM on September 8, Canada's counter-tariffs went live — roughly 700 American products tiered at 15, 25, and 50 percent, covering nearly 28 billion Canadian dollars in goods, with steel and aluminum doubling from 25 to 50 percent. It started in July when the US reached for Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 — a statute that had sat unused for 96 years — to hit Canada with 50 percent duties on alcohol, dairy, and motor vehicles, plus an annex that quietly reaches into cement, plywood, cosmetics, and wigs. Hockey equipment got caught in the alcohol annex. But here's the part nobody's talking about: the American list explicitly carves out energy, potash, critical minerals, and fish.

Mike and Neal spend this episode reading the exemptions instead of the headlines, asking what it means that Washington tariffed wigs and hockey sticks while leaving 4.5 million barrels of Canadian crude untouched. Mike walks through the mechanics of Section 338 and argues the exemption list is itself a confession — Canada supplies well over half of US crude imports, and Midwest refineries are built specifically to run the heavy sour crude that comes down from Alberta. Switching that feedstock means capital projects, not phone calls. With diesel prices near record highs and a midterm election on the horizon, exempting oil wasn't generosity — it was math. Neal, who runs an energy company, pushes back that tariffing hockey sticks is theater while tariffing 4.5 million barrels a day is a decision with a body count in gasoline prices — and the US blinked on the one lever that actually hurts.

From there the conversation moves to defense. Reporting on the collapsed trade talks says Washington wanted Canada to finish its F-35 buy, purchase American radar aircraft for Golden Dome, and grant the US right of first refusal on Canadian critical minerals. Canada has funded only 16 of its planned 88 F-35As and set no timeline on the rest, while Saab pitches a mixed fleet built partly in Canada. Mike and Neal talk through what that means for NORAD — an alliance built on shared aircraft and shared radar coverage across the pole — and why degrading that interoperability is far easier than rebuilding it. They close on the number that matters most: Canada's economy grew at a 3.3 percent annualized rate in the second quarter, more than double the 1.5 percent US rate, while Prime Minister Carney's support keeps climbing and Canada builds a new pipeline to sell its oil to Asia instead. Mike argues the pressure campaign may be building the very competitor it was meant to break — that Canada now has what America used to have: reliability. The founder read here isn't investment advice — it's a warning that a North American supply chain that used to be one market is quietly becoming two.

In the mailbag, Mike and Neal take on a listener pushing back on shutting down a dedicated drone training unit — arguing that real war, not simulation, is still the best teacher for drone warfare — and share a lighter note on chasing better weather this fall. For Goods, Bads, and Others, Mike's good is the record year for solar, which met 75 percent of new US electricity demand growth in 2025 while fossil generation actually fell; his bad is a second sabotage attempt on Germany's power grid alongside European gas prices hitting their highest level since 2023; and his other is the chaos of an office move layered on top of an already packed fall schedule. Neal's good is the Army opening its live-fire test ranges to private industry so drone and electronic warfare tech can be tested at the pace war actually moves; his bad is South Korea's Navy turning to a humanoid robot helmsman because it can't recruit enough sailors; and his other is the eyebrow-raising jobs report showing 98 percent of August's job gains went to women.

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Nine days before this recording, the White House declared a national emergency over the American power grid—not about blackouts, but about who built the equipment. Mike and Neal dig into the executive order banning foreign-made grid hardware, and the twist that makes it interesting: the two technologies growing fastest on the grid right now, utility-scale batteries and inverters, sit squarely in the supply chain the order restricts. Neal, who's building Airloom around exactly this kind of supply chain risk, makes the case that this order is a real improvement over its failed 2020 predecessor, with a vendor pre-qualification process, a mitigation pathway, and reliability safeguards the last version lacked. Mike agrees the threat is real, pointing to documented cases of embedded communications equipment in Chinese-made inverters, but pushes back hard on where the authority lands: one Cabinet secretary now decides which hardware stays on the grid, with no funding attached and no guarantee it outlasts this administration.

The two spend real time on the order's central contradiction: it declares an emergency over AI-driven electricity demand, then restricts the fastest-growing source of new capacity meeting that demand. California just crossed a real milestone here, generating more than half its power from solar for an entire month in May, largely because batteries are shifting that supply into the evening. Mike and Neal disagree on how much of this is legitimate security policy versus a play that quietly favors gas. They close on where the founder opportunity actually lives: American-made transformer and inverter manufacturing, provenance and firmware attestation software, and the flexible supply chains the solar industry already learned to build through a decade of policy whiplash.

In the mailbag, a comment on the Army's drone school segment sparks a conversation about why decentralized decision-making is winning in Ukraine. Then Goods, Bads, and Others: Mike commends Army Secretary Dan Driscoll for resigning over a clash with Pete Hegseth, is furious about a Naval Academy midshipman's mother being detained by ICE, and is watching the stalled state of the war with Iran. Neal highlights carbon-capturing fungi as a real climate opportunity, calls out the hidden cost of local news dying under social media, and reflects on Aaron Rodgers' retirement as a window into how hard transitions out of a defining career really are.

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West Point just fired the only climate scientist on its faculty. Seventeen years of uniformly outstanding reviews, tenure, a grant to research weather systems for troop protection, and Dr. Adam Kalkstein still lost his job this spring after refusing an order to scrub human causes of climate change from his curriculum. Mike and Neal dig into the lawsuit, the meeting where a two-star general reportedly stormed out of the room, and what it says about where the service academies are headed.

This one goes beyond a single professor. Mike and Neal unpack why climate change might be the single largest threat multiplier facing national security right now, driving crop failures, water scarcity, and the kind of mass migration that destabilizes governments from Syria to the Sahel. Neal draws on his own time landing in the Pacific and watching entire islands disappear underwater. Mike pulls from a paper he wrote on climate and national security years before this became a live political fight. The question underneath all of it: if young officers aren't allowed to learn the full picture, how are they supposed to make good decisions when the stakes are highest?

From there the conversation turns to what actually makes a good warfighter. Is it push ups, or is it the ability to think critically with incomplete information and decentralized authority, the very thing that's supposedly made the US military different from centralized command structures like Russia's or Germany's? Neal brings in his own experience on the ground in Ramadi, where junior enlisted leaders were making real battlefield calls with the kind of context that only comes from real education. Mike makes the case that hollowing out the officer corps' capacity to think strategically is its own long-term national security risk, separate from anything about ideology. As someone building a carbon accounting company, Mike has a direct stake in how seriously institutions treat climate data, and that shows up in how bluntly he pushes back on the idea that this is a fair fight between two equally valid opinions. Neal takes the opposite lane, arguing the better fix for bad ideas is always more speech, not censorship, even when the speech in question is bad faith.

The mailbag gets loud this week. Two listeners weigh in on the Abraham Lincoln deployment story from a previous episode, arguing sailors going overboard is just something that happens. Mike and Neal, both combat veterans, aren't having it, and make the case that dismissing anyone's breaking point, whether it's a ten month deployment without a port call or thirteen months on a mountainside in Kandahar, is exactly the wrong lesson to take from military service.

Goods, Bads, and Others this week: Mike's Orioles are creeping back toward a wild card spot, the Potsdam Institute confirms global warming has nearly doubled its pace over the last decade, and the new US-Venezuela oil deal raises real questions about propping up an unelected government for the sake of energy access. Neal covers a DOE loan to shore up Puerto Rico's grid, steep new Colorado River cuts hitting Arizona hardest, and Iceland's surprise vote against reopening EU accession talks.

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Mike and Neal open episode 63 with a contradiction that should worry anyone paying attention to how the Pentagon actually works: the Army stood up a unit in January with one job—fly to Kyiv, learn how Ukraine actually fights a drone war, and bring the lessons home. Eight months later, that unit—the Unmanned Assault Battalion under the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vicenza, Italy—is being folded back into a standard airborne infantry battalion. At the same time, Secretary Hegseth is ordering every Army division to field a thousand drones and canceling the 42-ton M10 Booker to help pay for it, while pushing to replace crewed attack helicopters with drone swarms. Mike and Neal spend the episode asking how both things can be true at once.

Mike lays out the case bluntly: this is not a resourcing problem, it's a leadership failure. The two generals who championed the drone unit and personally met with Ukrainian commanders have both since been pushed out. Mike compares it to how the Navy handled a similar crisis during Vietnam, when a small group of junior officers built Top Gun out of a trailer and rewrote air-to-air combat doctrine. His point: if the Army needs the airborne battalion back on its core mission, fine—but pull the fifteen best people out first and stand up a real center of excellence. Nobody is doing that.

Neal pushes back with a founder's read on the situation, drawing on his own experience running Airloom, an emerging energy company navigating fast-moving hardware cycles. He agrees the money side is smart: canceling a vehicle nobody wanted to fund a capability everybody needs is good instinct. But speed without doctrine is how you end up with expensive hardware and no idea how to fight with it, and Ukraine is proving that lesson gets rewritten daily, not annually. The two go deep on why doctrine matters as much as the hardware itself, using the Marine Corps' MAGTF model as the throughline: assets only work together because units train together and share doctrine, not because the equipment showed up on time.

Neal draws on his own year as a forward air controller in an infantry battalion, where nobody had been trained to fly the three drones they were issued, and all three were destroyed before ever reaching Iraq. That personal detail becomes the strongest argument in the episode for why handing drones to units without dedicated, trained operators is a recipe for wasted equipment and worse outcomes. The conversation also digs into the harder tradeoff nobody in the Pentagon seems to be resolving yet—whether attack helicopters can really be replaced by cheap drone swarms—with Neal defending the sheer massed firepower a helicopter brings to a ground fight in a way no drone currently matches. They also touch on the industrial side of this shift, referencing the Replicator initiative and the reality that the US is still only on track to produce a fraction of the drones it will eventually need, and that flexible, modular platforms—not the flashiest single drone—are what actually win production races.

Goods, Bads, and Others this week: Mike's good is a weekend with his nephew and in-laws; his bad is West Point firing its only climate scientist for stating basic climate science; and his other is the USS Abraham Lincoln finally getting a port call after a brutal deployment, landing in Pattaya, Thailand, which Mike does not expect to end quietly. Neal's good is a federal judge blocking an attempt to restrict mail-in voting through the Postal Service; his bad is a reported push to strip the USS Doris Miller name from a carrier still under construction; and his other is the catastrophic glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border, with the death toll climbing past five hundred and still rising.

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America just crossed $40 trillion in national debt for the first time in history—and the number that should really worry you isn't the debt itself. It's what's already more expensive than the entire military. Last year, the US spent $882 billion just on interest payments—more than the $874 billion spent on total national defense.

In this episode, former F/A-18 pilots turned energy and climate-tech founders Mike and Neal break down what's actually driving the $40 trillion milestone: debt held by the public just passed 100% of GDP for the first time since WWII, and CBO projects annual deficits roughly doubling by 2036. They walk through the real difference between debt and deficits, unpack why mandatory spending—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid—now eats up the majority of the federal budget, and explain why "cutting government spending" really means fighting over a shrinking discretionary slice that's already split with defense.

Mike makes the case that defense spending has outpaced inflation for his entire adult life, yet the US now fields the smallest Navy and Air Force it's had in generations: more money going in, less capability coming out. The conversation moves through Moody's credit downgrade and what it signals about America's fiscal credibility, the privilege (and limits) of the dollar's reserve-currency status, and a real disagreement between Mike and Neal about whether the US can grow, tax, or cut its way out of the hole—or whether the political will to do any of it even exists.

Plus: a reader mailbag on the USS Abraham Lincoln episode and the nuclear power debate, a controversial Army reenlistment incentive tied to the GTA VI release date, and a Chinese humanoid robot that just broke Usain Bolt's 100-meter world record.

Hardpoints is brought to you by the Valor Media Network. Questions or comments? Email hardpoints.show@gmail.com.

The USS Abraham Lincoln left San Diego last November for a routine six-month deployment. It has now been at sea more than 260 days with no return date, sailors have reportedly tried to go overboard, and Senator Blumenthal's letter to Navy leadership says the ship has gone more than 200 days without a single port call. Asked about it this week, President Trump said the deployment wasn't nearly long enough. Mike, who flew F/A-18s off carriers for the Navy, walks through what that actually means day to day: flight deck crews working fourteen-to-sixteen-hour shifts in 110-degree heat, hauling thousand-pound bombs by hand, in one of the most dangerous working environments on the planet. Below deck, sailors running the engineering spaces climb ten flights of stairs just for a few minutes of fresh air, and most never see daylight for months at a time. Mike doesn't hedge on the comparison: sailors on the Lincoln are working harder, in worse conditions, than the president criticizing them ever has in his life.

Neal pushes the conversation toward the strategic question underneath the human one. The military can surge, but surging for what? With the Gerald Ford having just finished a similarly grueling 326-day deployment last year, and GAO reporting that only about 4 of the Navy's 11 carriers are reliably deployable at any given time, this isn't a one-off emergency—it's a pattern. And if the fleet and its people are being burned down responding to wars of choice, Neal's question lands hard: what happens when a real emergency shows up and there's nothing left in reserve?

The two find real disagreement over where the failure actually sits. Mike aims his anger at senior military leadership—admirals who won't say no to unsustainable orders because their careers depend on saying yes. Neal reframes it as an incentive structure that goes back generations, from body counts in Vietnam to endless surges in Afghanistan, where nobody in uniform is rewarded for telling a civilian boss the mission as designed can't be done. Both agree the deeper rot goes back decades: optimal manning cuts, the LCS acquisition disaster, and a shipbuilding budget that's doubled in twenty years while the fleet has shrunk.

Goods, bads, and others: Mike finally finishes his backyard patio project and calls out a broader failure of long-term national strategy—from shipbuilding to AI to renewable energy—while also flagging new partnership interest at Aclymate. Neal celebrates a big new contract for Heirloom, is frustrated by the administration blocking billions in grid modernization grants, and shares a genuinely inspiring afternoon watching teenagers use AI to build real apps and books through the Dragon Kim Foundation. Plus reader mail on the show's value and a sharp bit of irony about the airport named for the man who fired the air traffic controllers.

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On June 4th, a reactor at Idaho National Lab hit something called "zero power criticality"—energy in equaled energy out. The plant won't produce a single usable watt until at least 2027, yet the Department of Energy is calling this the start of nuclear's golden era. At the same time, that same DOE is blocking wind farm permits that could be generating power right now. Mike and Neal spend the episode separating the real technology from the press release.

Fusion—the "limitless energy" version everyone gets excited about—has been ten to twenty years away for the last thirty years, and this test doesn't change that math. Fission is the one that actually exists, but the new reactor designs the administration is betting on need uranium enriched well beyond what current regulation and fuel supply chains support—the same enrichment thresholds that turned Iran into a decades-long international crisis. Every nuclear project ever built has come in over cost and behind schedule, and somehow the industry still doesn't publish the one number that would tell you if it's worth it: levelized cost of electricity.

Mike makes the case—backed by his grandfather's decades in the nuclear program going back to the Manhattan Project—that the economics simply favor renewables now: batteries and solar get cheaper the more you deploy them, while nuclear and gas get more expensive the more fuel they burn. Neal, who runs the wind company Airloom, pushes back on how much of this is really strategy versus picking favorites, and flags that Vestas just posted 60-plus percent sales growth, mostly overseas, while the US share of the global wind market keeps shrinking.

Goods, bads, and others: the world deployed 112 gigawatts of batteries in 2025, ten times the pace of four years ago—unambiguously good news for anyone who wants gas turbines to lose. Lake Mead just hit its lowest water level ever recorded, and the states that rely on it are still stalling. On the other side, General Dynamics landed a $76 billion contract to keep Virginia- and Columbia-class submarine production moving after years of delay. Neal's got a 162-year-old bottle of Guinness pulled from a shipwreck that people are now trying to recreate, a warning for Trump to stay out of FIFA's business, and an IAEA operation removing nuclear material from a clandestine site in Syria that's equal parts relief and "wait, how long has that been there?"

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A missed radio call at Reagan National this week put the president's helicopter in a near miss with a commercial jet. Nobody died. Nobody even remembers it happened by Thursday. Mike and Neal use that as the doorway into a bigger question: is the airspace tens of thousands of Americans fly through every day actually safe, and does it have the margin it's supposed to have? The mechanics get real fast. DCA sits inside the most complex Class Bravo airspace in the country, crammed next to military routes, the Pentagon, and a runway approach that's seconds, not minutes, from some of the most sensitive airspace in America. Mike walks through the Swiss cheese model of safety: disaster only happens when every single safeguard fails at once. In March, they all lined up at LaGuardia, when an Air Canada Express jet collided with a fire truck on the runway and killed both pilots. The country is short somewhere between 2,000 and 3,500 certified air traffic controllers depending on whose numbers you believe, and Mike argues the government's revised, lower shortage estimate doesn't match what he's hearing from an air traffic controller in his own family. Neal and Mike dig into why voice-based air traffic control, largely unchanged since the mid-20th century, still governs a system flying far more airplanes than it did decades ago, and make the case for digital handoffs and heads-up-display-style warnings as an overdue fix. They land on a hard question: does anything actually change until the death toll gets high enough that Americans stop shrugging it off?

Founder and operator angle: Neal riffs on why the eVTOL air-taxi boom and drone delivery announcements like DoorDash's new FAA approval look flashy in a demo but fall apart on unit economics once you run the numbers, a pattern he sees repeating across hyped hardware categories. They also cover Elon Musk's ketamine use and the double standard around military drug and grooming rules, prompted by a reader mailbag question about the Panama Canal and Middle East influence.

Goods, bads, and others: Mike's excited for Acclimate's sustainability conference in Winter Park this September, disappointed the Orioles didn't make a deadline move and traded away catcher Adley Rutschman, and watching the record-strength El Niño building in the Pacific with real concern for how it'll shape winter snowpack and 2027 temperatures. Neal's happy Arrowhead Stadium got its name back in Kansas City, alarmed that 80% of key US missile interceptors were reportedly spent during the Iran war, and skeptical DoorDash's new drone delivery approval will pencil out economically.

China's naval intelligence assessment puts Beijing's shipbuilding capacity at 230 times America's. They already have 370 warships to America's 287, climbing to 475 by 2035. America is projected to hit roughly 317. The Navy's own cost review confirms the newest Ford-class carrier is running 18 to 26 months late. And a company that didn't exist three years ago just got valued at ten billion dollars building warships in a cornfield in Louisiana. Mike and Neal open on how America got here: decades of treating industrial capacity as something to outsource while China spent twenty years making maritime industry a national priority. From there, they get into the real fight—whether the Navy's fixation on eleven supercarriers is even the right math. Mike makes the case for fewer supercarriers and hundreds more smaller, distributed ships, pointing to the roughly one hundred carriers, mostly light and escort carriers, that the US fielded by the end of World War II. Neal pushes on what a blue-water Navy actually requires, and whether America's industrial base can support either vision. The founder-and-operator angle comes through Saronic, the Austin-based shipbuilder that just raised a nearly two-billion-dollar Series D to build outside the legacy prime contractors, in Franklin, Louisiana. Mike and Neal use it to dig into the real lever here: contract structure. They walk through why cost-plus contracting incentivizes expensive, slow-moving builds, why the SpaceX comparison only partly holds, and Mike's blunter proposal—fixed-price contracts with real financial consequences for missed deadlines, or nationalize the yards outright.

Goods, bads, and others: Mike celebrates a four-day backpacking trip with his kids in Colorado's Flat Tops, flags a slow sales month as the cost of being an early-stage CEO, and connects the war in Ukraine to a proxy fight between fossil fuels and renewables. Neal marks China dropping below fifty percent coal-generated electricity for the first time, vents about a speed-trap ticket, and raises the eyebrow-worthy detail that AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic found ways out of supposedly isolated red-team test environments.

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Oil and gas executives have sold nearly $400 million of their own company stock since the Iran war started. The ConocoPhillips CEO alone sold $80 million in two separate transactions in March. Another executive sold just over $11 million one day before his company's stock hit an all-time high. Crude jumped from $65 a barrel before the war to over $100 as the Strait of Hormuz, the passage for roughly 20 percent of the world's oil supply, closed and reopened and closed again.

Mike and Neal break down what these sales actually signal. Executives sit on more information than anyone else in the market, and dumping shares at the peak is a tell, not just portfolio rebalancing. The two walk through how CEO pay shifted toward stock and options starting in the nineties to align incentives with company value, and why cashing out that equity while still running the company undercuts the entire point of the arrangement. Mike argues executives shouldn't be able to sell at all until they leave the company. Neal isn't ready to go that far but agrees the optics are bad.

The debate that follows is about risk versus reward. Democrats are pushing a windfall tax on war profits with zero Republican support. Mike uses the Texas ERCOT electricity market as a counterexample, where the chance of a huge payout during a crunch drives real investment in resilience. The through line: reward should track risk, and oil majors that have been around for decades aren't exactly taking on new risk to earn this windfall. Mike floats a different idea, a national security tax tied specifically to oil price spikes caused by conflict, arguing that if the military is footing the bill to keep shipping lanes open, the companies profiting from that protection should help fund it. Neal ties it back to building Heirloom, where he thinks constantly about how equity incentives are supposed to work, and the gap between that theory and what oil executives just did with their own shares.

Goods, bads, and others: Mike highlights a push to hold drone and strike operators legally accountable for unlawful killings, and calls out the tariffs on Canada over wildfire smoke as a betrayal of an ally that showed up for American wildfires. Neal defends the Blue Angels pilot who buzzed a crowd low and fast, Mike disagrees hard, and both flag the mounting off-balance-sheet debt behind the AI data center buildout as a risk worth watching closely.

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China is installing five times more industrial robots than the United States and running fully automated dark factories with no human workers. American AI companies are worth trillions and produce the world's most capable models. Those two facts aren't in tension. They're the point. Mike and Neal work through the core distinction that gets lost in most AI coverage: the US is winning on model capability, but China is winning on integration. Its fifteenth five-year plan explicitly prioritizes humanoid robotics and AI-enabled manufacturing the same way the fourteenth plan prioritized EVs, batteries, and solar, categories where China now leads the world. The hosts ask whether a service-based, knowledge-worker economy can turn LLM dominance into military and industrial advantage before China's factory learning loop closes the gap.

The military angle gets real attention. AI-enabled machines in Chinese factories are learning generative tasks every day, and that learning transfers. The autonomous OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, act, can be compressed by the same systems optimizing production lines. Neal makes the case that America's focus on model quality and knowledge work leaves us behind on the AI-hardware integration race that actually determines battlefield capability. Mike pushes back with a point about cutting-edge recursive AI, where models train themselves and agent fleets multiply individual productivity, and asks whether that compounding effect eventually closes the gap in the physical world too.

The civil liberties thread runs through all of it. China's censorship constraints limit LLM capability and openness by design. The US has its own version of the problem: the federal government has moved against Anthropic specifically while leaving comparable companies largely untouched, raising the question of whether the regulation reflects national security judgment or political targeting.

Goods, bads, and others: Mike flags a study projecting up to $121 billion in unnecessary energy costs from the Trump administration's constraints on wind and solar development through 2033, and connects Iranian jellyfish drone swarms to what happens when algorithmic targeting meets commodity hardware. Neal celebrates a skateboarder who crossed the country in 39 days, objects loudly to $75 caviar tater tots at World Cup venues, and shares the story of Merlin, a duck in a Mexico jersey who's become a bigger star than the Mexican president.

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