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Every week, former fighter pilots and current entrepreneurs Neal Rickner & Mike Smith provide unfiltered insights into the biggest stories in startups, energy, and national security.
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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. Got a question or a take? Send it to hardpoints.show@gmail.com and you might hear it on the next episode.
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. Got a question or a take on today's show? Send it to hardpoints.show@gmail.com and we might feature it on a future episode. Follow Hardpoints wherever you listen, and share it with someone who needs to hear both sides of this argument.
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. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
On June 4th, a reactor at Idaho National Lab hit something called "zero power criticality"—energy in equaled energy out. The plant won't produce a single usable watt until at least 2027, yet the Department of Energy is calling this the start of nuclear's golden era. At the same time, that same DOE is blocking wind farm permits that could be generating power right now. Mike and Neal spend the episode separating the real technology from the press release. Fusion—the "limitless energy" version everyone gets excited about—has been ten to twenty years away for the last thirty years, and this test doesn't change that math. Fission is the one that actually exists, but the new reactor designs the administration is betting on need uranium enriched well beyond what current regulation and fuel supply chains support—the same enrichment thresholds that turned Iran into a decades-long international crisis. Every nuclear project ever built has come in over cost and behind schedule, and somehow the industry still doesn't publish the one number that would tell you if it's worth it: levelized cost of electricity. Mike makes the case—backed by his grandfather's decades in the nuclear program going back to the Manhattan Project—that the economics simply favor renewables now: batteries and solar get cheaper the more you deploy them, while nuclear and gas get more expensive the more fuel they burn. Neal, who runs the wind company Airloom, pushes back on how much of this is really strategy versus picking favorites, and flags that Vestas just posted 60-plus percent sales growth, mostly overseas, while the US share of the global wind market keeps shrinking. Goods, bads, and others: the world deployed 112 gigawatts of batteries in 2025, ten times the pace of four years ago—unambiguously good news for anyone who wants gas turbines to lose. Lake Mead just hit its lowest water level ever recorded, and the states that rely on it are still stalling. On the other side, General Dynamics landed a $76 billion contract to keep Virginia- and Columbia-class submarine production moving after years of delay. Neal's got a 162-year-old bottle of Guinness pulled from a shipwreck that people are now trying to recreate, a warning for Trump to stay out of FIFA's business, and an IAEA operation removing nuclear material from a clandestine site in Syria that's equal parts relief and "wait, how long has that been there?" Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
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. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
Oil and gas executives have sold nearly $400 million of their own company stock since the Iran war started. The ConocoPhillips CEO alone sold $80 million in two separate transactions in March. Another executive sold just over $11 million one day before his company's stock hit an all-time high. Crude jumped from $65 a barrel before the war to over $100 as the Strait of Hormuz, the passage for roughly 20 percent of the world's oil supply, closed and reopened and closed again. Mike and Neal break down what these sales actually signal. Executives sit on more information than anyone else in the market, and dumping shares at the peak is a tell, not just portfolio rebalancing. The two walk through how CEO pay shifted toward stock and options starting in the nineties to align incentives with company value, and why cashing out that equity while still running the company undercuts the entire point of the arrangement. Mike argues executives shouldn't be able to sell at all until they leave the company. Neal isn't ready to go that far but agrees the optics are bad. The debate that follows is about risk versus reward. Democrats are pushing a windfall tax on war profits with zero Republican support. Mike uses the Texas ERCOT electricity market as a counterexample, where the chance of a huge payout during a crunch drives real investment in resilience. The through line: reward should track risk, and oil majors that have been around for decades aren't exactly taking on new risk to earn this windfall. Mike floats a different idea, a national security tax tied specifically to oil price spikes caused by conflict, arguing that if the military is footing the bill to keep shipping lanes open, the companies profiting from that protection should help fund it. Neal ties it back to building Heirloom, where he thinks constantly about how equity incentives are supposed to work, and the gap between that theory and what oil executives just did with their own shares. Goods, bads, and others: Mike highlights a push to hold drone and strike operators legally accountable for unlawful killings, and calls out the tariffs on Canada over wildfire smoke as a betrayal of an ally that showed up for American wildfires. Neal defends the Blue Angels pilot who buzzed a crowd low and fast, Mike disagrees hard, and both flag the mounting off-balance-sheet debt behind the AI data center buildout as a risk worth watching closely. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com
China is installing five times more industrial robots than the United States and running fully automated dark factories with no human workers. American AI companies are worth trillions and produce the world's most capable models. Those two facts aren't in tension. They're the point. Mike and Neal work through the core distinction that gets lost in most AI coverage: the US is winning on model capability, but China is winning on integration. Its fifteenth five-year plan explicitly prioritizes humanoid robotics and AI-enabled manufacturing the same way the fourteenth plan prioritized EVs, batteries, and solar, categories where China now leads the world. The hosts ask whether a service-based, knowledge-worker economy can turn LLM dominance into military and industrial advantage before China's factory learning loop closes the gap. The military angle gets real attention. AI-enabled machines in Chinese factories are learning generative tasks every day, and that learning transfers. The autonomous OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, act, can be compressed by the same systems optimizing production lines. Neal makes the case that America's focus on model quality and knowledge work leaves us behind on the AI-hardware integration race that actually determines battlefield capability. Mike pushes back with a point about cutting-edge recursive AI, where models train themselves and agent fleets multiply individual productivity, and asks whether that compounding effect eventually closes the gap in the physical world too. The civil liberties thread runs through all of it. China's censorship constraints limit LLM capability and openness by design. The US has its own version of the problem: the federal government has moved against Anthropic specifically while leaving comparable companies largely untouched, raising the question of whether the regulation reflects national security judgment or political targeting. Goods, bads, and others: Mike flags a study projecting up to $121 billion in unnecessary energy costs from the Trump administration's constraints on wind and solar development through 2033, and connects Iranian jellyfish drone swarms to what happens when algorithmic targeting meets commodity hardware. Neal celebrates a skateboarder who crossed the country in 39 days, objects loudly to $75 caviar tater tots at World Cup venues, and shares the story of Merlin, a duck in a Mexico jersey who's become a bigger star than the Mexican president. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
Thirteen hundred people are dead across Europe. Train tracks in Leipzig melted, suspending service. France's nuclear reactors are shutting down—not because of an attack or accident, but because the rivers that cool them have become too warm to do the job. The US has issued 31 emergency grid orders in the last six months. The infrastructure that supports modern life was engineered for a climate that no longer exists. Mike and Neal open by examining the engineering problem underlying all of this: when you build to a hundred-year standard, you assume the past predicts the future. It doesn't anymore. Every thermal power source—nuclear, coal, and combined-cycle gas—depends on water cooling that is now routinely outside its operating specifications. The case for renewables actually gets stronger as temperatures rise, but only if the grid can absorb the additional load. Meanwhile, 90 percent of Americans have air conditioning. Only 20 percent of European buildings do. That gap is more than a comfort issue—it's a grid resilience issue. The hosts explore what adaptation actually looks like compared with mitigation, why Europe has historically overinvested in the latter while underinvesting in the former, and what the US does better—and worse—by comparison. The California-versus-Texas contrast receives particular attention: two states that achieved similar levels of renewable energy penetration through completely different policy approaches—one driven by government incentives, the other by deregulated market pressure and significant human cost. Mike argues the Texas model is more durable with just a bit more regulation. Neal contends that free markets work, but only when they operate within clear boundaries. The founder-and-operator perspective carries over into contract law. Service-level agreements (SLAs) requiring 99.999 percent uptime drive enormous grid investments to support data centers that could probably tolerate 99 percent uptime. Mike asks whether AI computing should be explicitly deprioritized in favor of human life during extreme heat emergencies. That reframing has significant implications for public policy and infrastructure investment. Goods, bads, and others: Mike celebrates World Cup tourists discovering America through Waffle House and Texas barbecue, criticizes Marine Lt. Gen. Massiello for testimony that sounded more like advocacy for the F-35 than an objective assessment, and views Ukraine's escalating drone campaign against Russian energy infrastructure with cautious optimism. Neal salutes Canada, commemorates the tortoises of Guernsey escaping the heat as an accidental metaphor for the entire episode, and highlights newly documented research linking GLP-1 drugs to reduced violent behavior—a policy question that few people are prepared to address. Got a take? Email us at hardpoints.show@gmail.com. Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
Getting one kilogram to low Earth orbit cost $54,000 on the Space Shuttle. Falcon 9 brought it to roughly $2,500. Starship targets under $200. That 500x reduction is not a footnote to the SpaceX IPO story. It is the story. Mike and Neal work through what that number actually unlocks. Orbital kinetic bombardment, the "rods from God" concept, has existed on paper for decades: tungsten telephone poles deorbited from a satellite platform, no explosives, traveling at Mach 10, with the penetrating force of a small nuclear weapon. The only thing that made it impractical was cost. Starship changes that math. The same cost curve that makes Starlink's satellite mesh possible also makes a space-based Golden Dome more technically believable than it was six months ago, and puts genuinely new offensive capability within reach of whoever controls the platform. That last part is the problem. SpaceX just raised $75 billion on a $1.7 trillion valuation with roughly 4 to 5 percent of equity held by the public and 82 to 85 percent of voting power held by one person. The SEC changed its own listing rules to allow it. The same person previously threatened to cut Starlink access to Ukraine mid-war. Mike walks through the governance failures in detail, from security clearance standards to the complete absence of checks on erratic behavior, and asks what it means for national security to be sole-sourced to a privately controlled company with no one telling the founder no. The conversation also covers why the launch business itself is structurally underpriced, what reusable rockets actually changed about the economics of getting mass to orbit, and why the closest private sector competitor just blew up on the launch pad and is probably a decade behind. Goods, bads, and others: Mike breaks down Ukraine's drone point system, where operators earn credits toward better hardware by hitting higher-value targets, turning battlefield incentives into something closer to a flat startup org chart. He also flags Europe's record-breaking heat dome and what it means that the continent with no air conditioning is now the fastest-warming on earth. Neal is fully captured by World Cup ceremony despite not watching soccer, calls out the Iran outcome plainly as getting nothing for the cost, and shares a Ukrainian drone warfare officer's message at Euro Satory: stop building tanks. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
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: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode of Hardpoints, Mike and Neal turn to a story that's quietly fallen out of the headlines: Cuba. Ninety miles off the coast of Florida, 11 million people are living on an hour or two of electricity a day. Oil imports have collapsed from over 100,000 barrels a day to nearly zero in three months. Surgeries are postponed, neonatal wards are cycling off, and the US Navy is running what looks a lot like a blockade. The administration is giving Cuba the full Iran-meets-North-Korea treatment — sanctions on its energy, financial, and security sectors, and secondary sanctions on anyone trying to fill the vacuum left by a post-Maduro Venezuela. The president says the USS Abraham Lincoln will pull up 100 yards offshore and the island will simply say thank you. Southern Command says it isn't planning an invasion. So what's actually going on here — and is there an endgame, or just punishment? Mike and Neal trace the history (64 years of embargo, the Monroe Doctrine versus the "Trump Doctrine," the Venezuela playbook) and lay out the scenarios — from a friendly transition with a rebuilt grid, to a Somalia-style failed state 90 miles from Key West, with China's signals-intelligence sites and a tripling of Russian intelligence officers already on the island. Plus, the reader mailbag goes deep on how the military and FAA screen wind turbines from radar and whether turbine blades can actually be recycled — and the usual Goods, Bads & Others: clean energy investment passing double that of fossil fuels, a proposed $300B US investment in Iran, the Pacific drug-boat strikes, and an update from the Heirloom build.
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: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
In May, the Department of Energy issued six emergency orders to keep coal plants that were supposed to be retired running through the summer. One in Pennsylvania. One in Maryland. And on May 18th, PJM — the grid operator serving 65 million people from Illinois to New Jersey — was authorized to cut power to data centers to prevent a wider blackout. Fifty-seven Philadelphia schools went virtual because their buildings couldn't handle the heat. None of this made national news. Mike and Neal break down why it happened, who's responsible, and why the official explanation doesn't quite hold up. The short version: we didn't build the transmission infrastructure we needed, we've been retiring generation faster than we're replacing it, and then AI showed up and nobody — not even the AI companies — was ready for what it would demand from the grid. Anthropic is reportedly paying over a billion dollars a month just to borrow data center capacity. The data centers are now a baseload power draw, and the grid wasn't built for that. They also get into the policy contradiction that's making all of this worse: the same administration issuing emergency coal orders is the one that killed offshore wind leases and blocked hundreds of onshore wind projects on national security grounds. Cheap, reliable electricity is a strategic asset for onshoring manufacturing and building chips. Coal is one of the most expensive ways to produce it. Mike lays out why this is a de facto tariff against American-made products. Plus: Neal explains why Australia is about to start giving away free electricity in the middle of the day and what it means for the energy transition globally; India's solar leapfrog and why it's more exciting than people realize; a carbon capture plant just came online in California's Kern County; and Mike's bad — Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted Tina Peters' sentence and then showed up to his own censure hearing with duct tape across his mouth. It's episode 50. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com 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
Yesterday in Beijing, President Xi told President Trump directly: if Taiwan is not handled properly, the two countries will have — and he used the word — conflicts. That is the most direct statement any Chinese leader has made to an American president about Taiwan. Ever. Mike and Neal unpack why this moment matters and why most of the conversation about Taiwan skips the part that actually explains Chinese behavior. They trace the split back to 1949, walk through Nixon's one-China gambit, and explain why the US has spent 75 years pretending to believe something it doesn't. Then they get into the military reality: what an amphibious assault across 90 miles of open water actually looks like, where the US has real advantages and where the logistics become genuinely nightmarish, and why this fight — if it ever happens — would not look anything like Iraq. The energy angle gets serious attention too. Taiwan imports 97% of its energy. China's oil supply runs 80% through the Strait of Malacca. And the 90% of the world's advanced chip supply sitting on that island means a conflict there wouldn't just be a military event — it would be a $10 trillion hole in the global economy. Plus: Neal flags the new NERC cybersecurity standards that took effect today with zero grace period and a $1.5 million-a-day penalty, the administration's quiet kill of 200+ wind and solar projects through the Defense Siting Clearinghouse, and ICE activity in Neal's neighborhood — what he actually saw, and what it might mean. Mike is back from the PPAI conference with good news, and both hosts respond to listener mail from the Canada episodes, including TerryZanger7152 and his drunk uncle with a knife. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for months. Qatar's LNG complex took a direct hit in March and won't be back online for three to five years. Asian spot prices for natural gas are up 140%. And in the middle of all of it, China is exporting 68 gigawatts of solar technology in a single month while EV registrations in Europe jump 50% in the first full month of the shock. Mike and Neal lay out the argument that the Iran war may be the single most effective climate policy in history, not by design, but by accident. China spent its last five-year plan funding a hundred electric vehicle companies and building out the clean energy supply chain the rest of the world now desperately needs. The US, meanwhile, destroyed the oil markets it was trying to protect, handed China a willing customer base across Europe and the developing world, and left itself with no diplomatic off-ramp and no military path forward that the American people would accept. They also get into why domestic oil production is not going to save us, why the oil executives called to the White House told the administration they couldn't just drill their way out of this, and why the peak oil story is now about demand, not supply. Plus: Neal shares a promising development for Heirloom in the Arctic, where clean power options are almost nonexistent and NATO is paying close attention. Mike calls out the ongoing targeting of Senator Kelly as straight-up abuse of power, names the person doing it, and does not mince words. And both hosts respond directly to the Canadian listeners who made the last episode explode, including Mermaid Grace and Doug Noble, 1449. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
Four hundred thousand home insurance policies canceled in California since 2021. Twenty-nine percent of markets in the state are already showing slowed home sales because of it. That is not the start of a problem. That is the middle of one. What nobody is connecting loudly enough is what happens next. When insurance leaves a neighborhood, mortgages go with it. When mortgages go, property values fall. When property values fall, the tax base shrinks. And when the tax base shrinks, the municipalities that financed 70 percent of America's essential infrastructure through the $4.2 trillion muni bond market suddenly cannot service their debt. Mike and Neal trace that entire chain and ask whether we are already past the point of no return in some markets. They also get into the energy angle that makes this harder: the clean infrastructure we need to build to reduce the climate risk driving all of this is becoming harder to finance and insure at exactly the wrong moment. Mike talks about how Acclimate is building physical climate risk modeling into its software using the TCFD framework, and what that could mean for how companies and insurers price exposure. The startup opportunity in parametric insurance, climate risk disclosure, and resilience tech gets real attention here. Goods, bads, and others: Neal shares a standout LinkedIn moment for Heirloom, Mike calls out Denver entrepreneur Grant Gunnison and Zero Homes, and both hosts weigh in on what it means that we have likely already blown through the 1.5 degree warming threshold years ahead of schedule. The Strait of Hormuz, the end of the American century, and the California governor's debate round it out. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
Canada supplies 98% of America's natural gas imports, 93% of its electricity imports, and more than half of the oil it brings in from abroad. Three years ago, 5% of Canadians supported increasing trade with China. Today that number is 44%. That is not a slow drift. That is a break. So what happens to American energy security when you pick a fight with the country that keeps your lights on? Mike and Neal unpack the economics of Canadian oil, why the tar sands are not going anywhere soon, and why the infrastructure dependency runs so deep in both directions that even a fast pivot toward China would take years to execute. They also get into the bigger picture: the US is no longer the obvious anchor of the rules-based order, Canada knows it, and Beijing has been watching the whole thing with a very level head. Plus: a sub-two-hour marathon that still finished second, Trump's name on the currency and his face on the passport, the UAE quietly walking out of OPEC, and a special operator who bet on a raid he was running. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com. Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.
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Apple Podcasts rankings via the Mato Topic Intelligence Platform.
Observed September 8, 2026. Cached outside the daily freshness window; the positions keep the date they were taken on.
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