Most nineteen-year-olds who drop out of college do so because they can’t hack the coursework, or afford the tuition, or just prefer to play video games in their parents’ basement. Ethan Thornton dropped out for a slightly different reason: he wanted to build a better missile, and MIT was slowing him down. So, Ethan left the Ivy League, took a hundred-grand from Peter Thiel, and set out to disrupt the entire military-industrial complex before he was old enough to legally buy a beer. And I think he’s on the verge of doing that very thing.

Ethan grew up on a farm in Texas, working as an auto mechanic and hammering out custom kitchen knives to pay for his early engineering experiments. When he looked at the state of American manufacturing, he didn’t see a lack of apps or software; he saw a nation that had forgotten how to bend metal, spark welds, and build heavy things at scale.

Today, Ethan is 22, and his company, Mach Industries, is valued at nearly two billion dollars. They’re building the next generation of autonomous defense hardware, and a lot of people are paying very close attention, including those in the Pentagon. Mach’s weapons are inexpensive, (relatively) easy to mass-produce, and most of all, lethal. I heard him speak last year at an energy conference and immediately invited him on the podcast. This was the first blank square on his calendar, and I was honored that he spent a few hours chatting with me.

Pay attention. This kid is going places.

Our whole conversation is here – https://bit.ly/TWIHI497EthanThornton