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.
Hardpoints
Claim This Podcastby VALOR Media Network
5.0(7 reviews)
51 episodes
Updated Daily
Accepts GuestsHas SponsorsLocation 🇺🇸
69
Podcast Authority
BetaGoodBased on show quality, social media presence, reviews, charts, and more
Quality87
Social0
YouTube93
Engagement32
Podcast Overview
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.
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
4/16/2025
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69
Podcast Authority
BetaGoodBased on show quality, social media presence, reviews, charts, and more
Quality87
Social0
YouTube93
Engagement32
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10
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excellent
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Recent Episodes
July 2, 2026
SpaceX Can Drop Tungsten Telephone Poles from Orbit. Who Controls That Power?
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.
June 25, 2026
AI Is Erasing Entry-Level Jobs. National Service Might Be The Answer.
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.
June 18, 2026
11 Million People, No Power, 90 Miles Away: What's the Cuba Endgame?
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.
51 total episodes available
Recent guests on Hardpoints
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Alexander McCoy
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Neal
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Michael McNerney
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Michael O'Herlihy
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Daniel Kim
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Siggy Zerweckh
Guest
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Frequently asked questions
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- What is Hardpoints?
- How often does this podcast release new episodes?
This podcast updates daily.
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This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
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Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.
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