Relentless

Saurav is the Founder and CEO of Starpath — a space solar and AI data satellite startup based in LA.

Casey is the Founder of Terraform Industries. He's written a bunch of great essays on Elon's Mass Driver, Starship, the economics of space compute, Starmind, and how Elon operates

Chris is the Founder and CEO of Hadrian, one of the fastest growing manufacturing startups in the United States. Hadrian has opened six factories since it was founded in 2020 with the latest being 2.2 million square feet.

Bernt Børnich is the founder and CEO of 1X, a California-based humanoid robotics company. After years of developing NEO, its first home robot, 1X is preparing to manufacture and ship 50,000 units in 2027.

Keller is Co-Founder and CEO of Zipline — the biggest drone delivery startup in the world. A few weeks ago, Uber Eats partnered with Zipline to deliver 1 million packages a day within the next 2.5 years. This was significantly more demand than Zipline was planning for, so now they’re trying to rapidly open new factories and scale drone production.

Ethan Thornton is the founder and CEO of Mach Industries. Mach is an LA based defense tech startup working on solid rocket motors, high-altitude balloons, missiles, long-range precision strike drones, low-cost kinetic interceptors and multiple other programs which are not currently announced.

Olaf is Co-Founder & CTO of Neros. They just moved into a new 250,000 sq ft factory, expect to hit a 130,000-drone annual run rate by the end of the year, and plan to scale to 1 million drones a year by 2028.

Sam Altman is the Co-Founder & CEO of OpenAI.

Isaiah Taylor is the Founder of Valar Atomics. Valar just became the first startup in history to power an NVIDIA Blackwell with a nuclear reactor.

Timestamps:

0:32 Manufacturing nuclear reactors is a SpaceX style problem

2:58 Scaling from 1 reactor to 10

4:31 Why it’s so tempting to iterate on paper instead of actually building reactors

7:37 Having contact with reality - modular shielding

10:09 Steel is cheaper than software engineers

11:09 Why the idiot index is so high in nuclear

16:02 Becoming a nuclear company

18:57 It's important not to lie to yourself

21:55 Obsessing over critical path

24:54 Nuclear reactors are relatively simple

30:35 Safety is a function of iteration speed

30:55 Why Valar had to vertically integrate

35:01 Designing a Toyota Camry vs a Ferrari

38:07 Running through 1-way doors

41:13 Pulling rabbits out of a hat

46:13 Wartime mode

48:49 Being willing to do unreasonable things

51:20 How Elon injects urgency into his companies

56:56 Relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10x cheaper

58:32 What’s changed over the last 3yrs

1:00:51 Designing safe nuclear reactors

1:13:05 Learning from SpaceX - optimizing for scale

1:18:07 Having a high tolerance for looking dumb

1:19:50 How Palmer Luckey handles hit pieces

1:20:55 Inevitable time

1:25:26 Predicting unknown bottlenecks

1:28:08 Scaling

1:29:45 July 4th will be a rebirth for nuclear in the United States

Ryan Petersen is the Founder and CEO of Flexport.

Timestamps:

0:03 Pablo Escobar was a logistics guy

2:29 The explosion in tariff fraud

8:58 The Dutch East India Company

11:20 History of global trade

14:39 1,000x spice markup

17:53 The British East India Company

24:02 How the British got 20% of China addicted to opium

27:44 The Forbes family & opium trade

30:40 Jewish trading networks

37:33 It’s illegal to criticize the King of Thailand

38:58 Strait of Hormuz

45:58 Maritime chokepoints

This conversation on how we're going to power the AI data center buildout is between US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and Scott Nolan, Founder and CEO of General Matter.

Jim Belosic is the founder and CEO of SendCutSend.

Lulu is a PR & Comms expert who works with many of the best startup founders in the world.

Eric Jorgenson is the author of The Book of Elon.

My first interview with Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder & CEO of Coinbase.

My first interview with Peter Beck, Founder and CEO of Rocket Lab.

Neros just acquired a new 250k square foot factory which will allow them to ramp production to 1M drones a year.

This is my second interview with Soren Monroe-Anderson, Co-Founder and CEO of Neros.

The history of uranium enrichment, early days of SpaceX, how Peter Thiel thinks.

My first debate on manufacturing between Sam D'Amico, founder of Impulse Labs, and Aaron Slodov, founder of Atomic Industries.

Baiju Bhatt is Co-Founder of Robinhood and Founder of Aetherflux. We talked about the early days of Robinhood, how he thinks about design and failure, and his plan to build orbital data centers.