Hardpoints

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 [email protected] and we may feature yours on a future episode. Hardpoints is brought to you by the Valor Media Network.

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. Got a take? Email us: [email protected] Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

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. Got a question or a take on today's episode? Email the show at [email protected] — we read every one and might feature yours on a future episode. And if you're finding value in these conversations, share the show with someone who'd get something out of it too.

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

Three million Americans graduated this year into the worst entry-level job market in two decades. Graduate unemployment is running higher than it did at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis, and AI is quietly eating the exact tasks those first jobs used to be made of. Washington is floating the usual answers, universal basic income, federal job guarantees, retraining. But there is one old idea that speaks to all three crises at once, and it keeps coming back: national service. Mike and Neal make the case that the economic crisis (AI gutting entry-level work), the social crisis (29 percent of Gen Z report feeling isolated, versus 6 percent of boomers), and the civic crisis (a 250th anniversary almost nobody feels patriotic about) all point to the same fix. Let an 18-year-old come out of high school and serve, military, conservation, teaching, the energy build-out, their choice, and the country gets something real back while they get a start. Then they hit the hard part. Roughly 80 percent of Americans support national service, including a majority of Trump voters. The second you make it mandatory, that coalition collapses. Mike argues for a mandatory version with shared sacrifice across every class, because right now the wealthy and well connected never have skin in the game. Neal pushes back: voluntary, yes, but make every path count. They work through the real objections too, cost, government execution, displacement of private industry, and land on why none of them are fatal. The founder and operator angle runs underneath all of it: there is a staggering amount this country needs built and is not building. High speed rail, EV charging, renewable capacity, wildland firefighting crews, shipyards, munitions lines, low-cost drones, coastline and infrastructure repair. A national service cadre is one way to actually get after it. And there is a live political opening here, since most voters now believe the government has no plan to protect workers from AI. The hosts close on what should happen instead of another decade of nothing: a candidate who runs on this in the 2028 cycle, with incentives strong enough to pull in every income bracket, not just the kids who needed the paycheck. Goods, bads, and others: Mike likes that Australia looks to have hit peak emissions (down 2.1 percent, with EVs near 20 percent of the market) and is wary of the SpaceX IPO and its eye-watering revenue multiple. Neal cheers IBM tripling entry-level hiring while everyone else zags, flags Ebola getting ignored after the USAID cuts, and sits with the tech industry now drawing 273 applications per internship. Plus a mailbag on coal, our Canadian listeners, and the correct way to dress a hot dog. Got a take? Email us: [email protected] Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

Three million students graduated from American colleges this year and walked straight into the worst entry-level job market in two decades. Recent graduate unemployment is running higher than the peak of 2008. Tech internships are pulling 273 applications per posting. And the New York Fed just confirmed that computer science majors now have more trouble finding work than humanities majors. That last one should make heads explode on Reddit. Mike and Neal dig into whether AI is actually the culprit, or whether this is a messier story. Information sector payrolls have collapsed back to March 2021 levels, erasing four years of gains in 16 months. Salesforce is hiring almost nobody except salespeople. But overall unemployment sits near historic lows, which means the pain is concentrated, not widespread. The conversation gets into which part of that is AI doing its job, which part is big companies using AI as a fig leaf to cut payrolls they should have cut years ago, and what it means that the cost to start a company is now essentially zero at exactly the moment those same companies have stopped hiring junior talent. They also work through the question IBM is quietly asking that nobody else seems to be: if you stop hiring junior people today, where do your middle managers come from in ten years? Mike makes the case that the current downturn is a buying opportunity for companies that are serious, that Stanford CS grads available at a discount are rocket fuel if you have the nerve to hire them. Neal's hot take is that the class of 2026 is not the group he is actually worried about. The class of 2034 is. Plus: the Orioles are climbing, Antarctic krill are getting strip-mined to feed America's omega-3 habit, Blue Origin's New Glenn turned Cape Canaveral into something resembling a tactical nuclear detonation, New York City is going car-free on 50 streets for the World Cup, and a CIA officer with a top-secret clearance stashed $40 million in gold bars in his house. Neal also makes a case for prediction markets that Mike does not buy for a second. Got a take? Email us: [email protected] Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

The Pentagon declared an energy emergency. It's also burning through missiles at a record pace and asking for a 1,327% increase in Tomahawk procurement. So why is the same Pentagon quietly blocking 250 wind farms across 30 states — enough to power 15 million American homes — and calling it a national security measure? Mike and Neal break down the radar interference argument the Defense Department is using, why it almost never actually prevented a project from being built before now, and what's really going on. Along the way: what wind leases mean for small family farms that can't survive on cattle alone, why rural red-state economies are taking the hit, and how blocking the cheapest form of new electricity undermines the manufacturing reshoring that this administration says it wants. The national security justification is technically real. It's also being abused. And everyone — ratepayers, farmers, the military itself — is paying for it. Show Notes Topics covered: How the Pentagon's energy project clearinghouse actually works — and why it resolved nearly every conflict for 15 years before now The real radar interference problem: what's legitimate, what isn't, and why 250 simultaneous disapprovals fails the smell test Wind leases as a rural economic lifeline — why this hits family farms harder than any other energy policy Why wind is uniquely compatible with agricultural land compared to solar or fossil fuel development The manufacturing reshoring contradiction: you can't onshore industry without cheap, reliable electricity How abusing the national security justification erodes its credibility for when it actually matters The 36 gigawatt shortfall and why blocking land-based wind makes it worse Mailbag: Response to "We Accidentally Made China the Climate Superpower" — was it really an accident? The Max Afterburner comment Goods, Bads & Others: Mike: A stolen 36 hours in Napa with his wife / Apple and Amazon walking back 24/7 carbon-free electricity commitments / battery-powered container ships Neal: More Americans getting Memorial Day right / the DOJ's $1.8B "anti-weaponization" fund and what it means for January 6th defendants / his team's weekly 30-minute AI workflow session Chapters (approximate) 00:00 Intro 03:25 The Pentagon's wind farm blockade 07:40 The energy shortage nobody's talking about 08:09 Property rights and who actually owns this land 13:19 Rural economies and the family farm lifeline 19:11 The radar interference argument — what's real 26:38 Who gets hurt and why the military is kneecapping itself 29:16 Mailbag 32:53 Goods, Bads & Others