Project Vanguard Podcast

I sat down with Dan Maxwell, one of four Army veterans who own Summit Point Leadership. Most of their work is training frontline leaders at rural electric co-ops, and Dan says you couldn’t ask for a better customer. I met Dan at Rice and pushed him into Al Danto’s acquisition class. Dan doesn’t sugarcoat what buying a company takes. He signed a personal guarantee, and he’ll tell you you’re “essent...

I sat down with Zach Federico, who runs the veterans task force at ALEC. He got there sideways. A commander walked into his rehearsal at Liberty University and offered to pay him to play music, which is how he wound up in the Virginia National Guard Band. He was a brand new executive assistant when a barely advertised roundtable packed out, and he turned that room into the first new ALEC task forc...

I sat down with Joe Jones, who joined the Coast Guard because of a TV commercial. He was a junior in a farming town in north central Kansas, saw Lou Gossett Jr. tell him to be part of the action, and got on the delayed enlistment program before he finished high school. He runs HR recruiting and corporate development at Canadian Solar now. The part I didn’t expect is how much of his week goes into...

I sat down with Megan Glancey. She spent about ten years in the Navy, most of it flying in Growlers, which are the electronic attack jets, and she develops utility-scale wind projects for Steelhead now. On her way out in 2022 she cut her own footage into one video and posted it with no plan attached, and it went everywhere, so she ended up with an audience she never went looking for. What she does...

I sat down with Jeff Risley, who grew up on a wheat farm in western Kansas and spent his career in public affairs with energy developers as clients. One of them asked him why nobody was looking out for the farmers across the table. They had the idea, he built it. Farmers have a group for wheat and one for corn. Now they have one for electrons, and his own family has oil and gas wells on the same g...

I sat down with Max Cormier and Wyatt Frasier, the guys behind Sitreps. If you’re a veteran in business you already know the meme page. What you might not know is that they turned that community into a recruiting firm that places vets into leadership roles at defense tech startups and private equity portfolio companies. We got into how that actually happened. It started as beer money from advertis...

I sat down with Jim Sardonia, who just won the first PowerVets Veterans Leadership Award from ACP, a program they run with us. When I asked him about it he barely talked about himself. He called it a team award and started telling me about his guys in the field, the ones out at two and three in the morning restarting turbines in feet of snow and twenty below. Jim spent seven years in the Air Force...

When Andy Davis first heard “energy security,” he thought what most people think. Oil. Nuclear. Geopolitics. A problem that lived somewhere far away, between governments. He had more reason than most to think that way. As an Army Ranger, he parachuted into Iraq on the night of the invasion and later spent ten days in a firefight on top of the Haditha Dam, one of the largest power-generating facili...

Most service members start thinking seriously about life after the uniform six months out. Jim Purekal started two years out. He networked, he sat down with people who had nothing in common with his career, and he treated the whole thing like a mission with a deadline. That discipline is how a retired Marine Corps major with twenty years in aviation ended up running Virginia legislative work for A...

About seven percent of Americans have served in the military. The number who actually make it from a uniform into a career that fits is smaller than it should be, and the people who fall through the cracks most often are not the officers with MBAs. They’re the junior enlisted. That’s the gap Marcus Barnes works in every day. Marcus is a Marine Corps veteran and the Energy Program Manager at NextOp...

Laura Gardner enlisted in the Army Reserves at 17. She was one of 11 kids, seven of whom served. She didn’t have a grand plan. She needed one. Her parents kept sending recruiters to her job at a pool supply store until she finally said yes. She started in postal operations, then switched her MOS to chemical warfare when she moved to Houston. After the military, she went into oil and gas, managing...

Energy has a messenger problem. Not a technology problem, not a cost problem, not even a policy problem at its core. The people doing the work and building the projects are winning. The people telling the story are struggling. Frank Macchiarola has spent 20 years on the advocacy side of energy, first at the American Petroleum Institute and now as Chief Advocacy Officer at American Clean Power. He...

Lourdes Spurlock spent six years in the Navy running nuclear reactors. She was one of a handful of women on board, trained by male mentors who held her to the same standard as everyone else, and she came out the other side with thick skin, dark humor, and zero idea how to have a normal conversation with civilian women. So she entered a pageant. Not because she wanted a crown. Because she needed to...

A lot of talk about energy stays stuck in the clouds. This conversation stays closer to the ground. I sit down with Nick Martocci, a Marine turned Army National Guard pilot turned renewable energy trainer, to talk about the part of the industry people often miss: the actual workforce behind it. Not the slogans. Not the social media food fight. The work. What comes through in this episode is how na...

The problem is not that America lacks energy resources. The problem is that we keep treating a long-horizon infrastructure challenge like a short-term political argument. In this conversation, Joshua Bice helps put a finer point on something Project Vanguard keeps coming back to: energy security is national security. Not as a bumper sticker. As a practical reality. When Josh talks about the projec...

A lot of veterans do not struggle because they lack discipline, grit, or work ethic. They struggle because the structure disappears, the signal gets noisy, and nobody gives them a clear map for what comes next. That is the real center of this conversation with Ken Webre , the Director of Business Development for W-Industries. Ken has spent decades in the electrical and power world, but what makes...

A lot of veterans leave the military knowing they can lead, solve problems, and operate under pressure, but not always knowing where those skills fit next. That is the center of this conversation with Jon Powers , the Co-Founder of Clean Capital. This episode is not just a walk through one man’s resume. It is a look at how military experience can turn into energy leadership, and why that matters f...

Most people argue energy like it’s a scoreboard. But the work lives somewhere else, out in the counties, across kitchen tables, inside contracts that feel longer than a deployment. In this episode, Rickey Stuchell breaks down the side of the industry that decides whether anything ever gets built. The land side. Energy parks are the new chess move Rickey describes a model that feels like a next-pha...

Most people think clean energy is about technology. It is not. Or at least not only that. It is about who understands systems, who can navigate policy, and who can bring unlikely groups into the same room. In this episode of Project Vanguard, I talk with Michael Dunn , a veteran who stumbled into clean energy through necessity, curiosity, and a relentless habit of saying yes. Michael did not set o...

Most energy arguments start in the wrong place. They start with identity, not systems. With labels, not failure modes. With confidence about outcomes, without much curiosity about what actually breaks when demand spikes or assumptions fail. In this episode, Kevin Doffing talks with John Szoka about energy from a less fashionable angle: how power systems really behave under pressure, and what that...

Most energy debates focus on the loudest question. This conversation focused on the one that actually matters. In my latest episode of Project Vanguard, I sat down with Ken Young to talk about how the grid really works when it’s under pressure. Not the headlines. Not the culture war version. The systems underneath it all. We talked about why grid failures don’t come from one bad decision or one ba...

Most people talk about veteran transition like it is a single leap. One decision, one résumé, one magic network connection, then the new life locks in. In the newest Project Vanguard episode, Kevin Doffing and John Broschak say the quiet part out loud: transition is a rough road, and the people who do best are the ones who stop waiting for perfect conditions and start building real momentum. John’...

Most energy conversations start with one assumption: we need to build more. More generation, more megawatts, more infrastructure. That matters, but it skips over a quieter truth hiding in plain sight. The fastest way to strengthen the grid isn’t always adding supply. It’s reducing waste. On the Project Vanguard Podcast, Air Force veteran and energy entrepreneur Alex Mouton explains why energy effi...

Renewable energy did not start as a partisan issue. And it does not need to be one now. That was one of the clearest messages from Jim Adams, a Coast Guard veteran and President of North American Operations at Natural Power, during his conversation on the Project Vanguard Podcast. Energy is infrastructure. It is reliability. It is national security. And when the conversation drifts into ideology i...

When I went on Ben Wilson’s Energy Right Podcast, he asked where my view of energy security comes from. For me, it started in Iraq, standing next to small generators and handing out diesel so families could keep food and medicine cold for a few hours. That experience changed how I see every conversation we have now about power plants, renewables, and the grid. Energy stopped being abstract. It bec...