Advertise on podcast: Relentless

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.