full 4-hour #video #interview with #Ethan-Thornton of #Mach-Industries, 3 weeks ago. The interviewer, Shawn Ryan, is this ex Navy SEAL dude who is into some bullshit about supernatural beings building the pyramids.
Thornton doesn’t really understand the Tragedy of the Commons, thinks it’s about companies making insufficient profits because of competition.
Atlas Shrugged is his favorite book.
His childhood summers were fixing old tractors and combines on the West Texas farm of his grandfather farm, who also had a hobby of building and flying experimental aircraft.
He got a visit from the ATF in high school after he started Mach at 16 because he built .50-calibre oxyhydrogen rifle #weaponry and had paid a machinist to build a better one.
“I think the stratosphere is sort of the most important military domain moving forward.”
Also as a teen he stole his mom’s credit card and bought a microscope and two sheep’s brains online to learn about neurosurgery.
He says he’s motivated by “individual sovereignty”, which is why he’s passionate about #Ukraine’s national sovereignty, but “China/Taiwan is orders of magnitude more important”.
“Decentralization” is also why Viper is vertical takeoff: so there’s no runway to bomb.
He envisions making up to 2 million Vipers and having them do everything a fighter jet can do, although right now it’s a kamikaze.
Ryan points out that decentralization means discarding the entire world military infrastructure of bases. Thornton points out that it means you can’t require a tanker to refuel. Containerized anti-ship missiles mean any container ship is a potential destroyer in disguise.
Thornton mentions Anduril’s "Eagle Eye".
At 2h48m Ryan presents him a rifle as a gift.
He says the company would not be in business today if he hadn’t moved from Austin to Huntington Beach, in Orange County, CA, where 95+% of the engineers he needed to hire lived (“niche RF, niche propulsion, niche GNC”).
Both Ryan and Thornton are fairly right-wing, but both agree that the US government has lost a lot of trust internationally and needs to regain it, in particular alluding to Trump and Vance’s shenanigans to increase European defense spending and to #Trump’s unpredictable #tariffs, but don’t see how that trust can be regained. Also interesting to hear Thornton express concern about and opposition to the “terrifying” “neofeudalist” planned obsolescence of iPhones, John Deere tractors, etc., which I normally think of as a left-wing concern.
on 02026-04-04#news #video #interview with MIT dropout #Ethan-Thornton of #Mach-Industries from 7 months ago. He suggests that priority targets for swarms of #drones would be cellphone towers, high-voltage transformers, and cranes in ports, in order to “stop your industrial machine”, war crimes similar to those Trump is threatening in Iran this week. Shows Stratus (balloon-based), Viper, and Glide. Thornton envisions coming out with new models every 6 months or every year, a sharp contrast to the one-week roundtrip touted in Ukraine. He’s also very focused on decentralizing #manufacturing because he expects it to be a target in war. #weaponry
on 02026-04-04#video #interview with on #Ethan-Thornton of "Mach Industries", a 22-year-old making #weaponry called Viper, Dart, and Stratus, and who thinks that balloons will be the key to future air warfare because of their asymmetry: 100× more costly to shoot down than to put up. He’s the one that took Venom (which he calls Pike) from concept to flight in 71 days. He blames the names on the government. He is mostly talking about wars with “hundreds of thousands” of #flying weapons, perhaps unaware that Ukraine and Russia build millions of #drones per year.
on 02026-04-04