Hardpoints
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.
Episodes
September 10, 2026 • 50 mins
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 res...
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September 3, 2026 • 53 mins
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 wh...
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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 ai...
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August 27, 2026 • 51 mins
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 Nea...
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August 20, 2026 • 41 mins
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...
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August 18, 2026 • 50 mins
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 techno...
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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 comple...
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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...
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August 4, 2026 • 42 mins
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 su...
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July 16, 2026 • 48 mins
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 inte...
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July 9, 2026 • 39 mins
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 an...
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July 2, 2026 • 48 mins
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 pla...
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June 25, 2026 • 47 mins
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 on...
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June 18, 2026 • 46 mins
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 ...
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June 11, 2026 • 51 mins
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...
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June 4, 2026 • 42 mins
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 cou...
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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 almos...
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May 22, 2026 • 48 mins
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. T...
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May 15, 2026 • 44 mins
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 ...
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May 14, 2026 • 47 mins
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, t...
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