My second interview with @2112Power, Founder and CEO of @HadrianInc. 0:10 How to scale manufacturing in the US 1:42 Building ahead of contracts 4:21 Burn rate & execution risk 6:40 Bets that aren’t risky to you but are risky to everyone else 8:34 Scaling capacity 10:45 Operating with an 80% risk of death 13:10 Sprinting through 1-way doors 16:51 “Sometimes you gotta roll a hard 6” 18:37 Constructing a new factory 21:45 Learning how to build factories 28:14 Surviving company killing events 32:12 Radically pulling forward timelines 37:13 How financing changes as you scale from $1M revenue to $1B revenue 38:53 Growing from 725 to 1,325 employees in 4 months 43:00 Deciding which contracts to go after 45:33 What’s stopping you from growing faster? 50:02 “Just f*cking do it” 53:23 Designing the finance side of the business 56:51 Educating investors on manufacturing and capex heavy businesses 59:08 Deciding which competitive advantages to optimize for 1:02:08 Building trust with government partners 1:04:54 False doors 1:09:12 Figuring out the highest leverage activities 1:11:04 Investing in velocity 1:13:59 Energy management

My second interview with @BerntBornich, Founder and CEO of @1x_tech. 0:03 Shipping 50k humanoids in 2027 1:45 Cars vs humanoid robots 3:51 Living with a Neo 5:48 Automating tasks 9:14 Manufacturing ramp 11:54 Incorporating feedback 13:27 Sufficiently advanced engineering is art 14:58 Simplification 17:07 Keeping teams small 18:18 Understanding the machine 20:15 Designing for warmth 23:04 Creating delightful products 25:51 Creativity 28:50 Collecting real world data 31:14 World models 35:00 Teleoperation 36:23 Data is diversity bound 41:31 Chewing glass

My second interview with @Keller, Co-Founder and CEO of @Zipline. 0:11 Scaling to 1 million deliveries a day 4:08 Creating a magical customer experience 7:20 The Fermi Paradox for hardware companies 12:39 Staying ahead of the company 14:31 What won’t change as Zipline scales 17:37 Finding people who will tolerate a bad customer experience 20:51 Strangest challenges: nesting, hail, solar weather 24:12 Selling drones vs selling delivery 28:10 Limiting customer growth 31:46 Attacking the biggest constraint 37:07 Giving the Earth back to humans

My first interview with @EthanrThornton, Founder of @Mach_Industries. 0:09 Starting a solid rocket motor factory 11:00 Smoothing out the boom bust cycle in defense 15:53 Creating tight iteration loops 19:58 Block redesigns 23:39 Product iteration > performance 27:22 Opex vs Capex 30:17 Building a flexible organization 33:22 Investing in programs before there’s a contract 36:27 Asymmetric warfare 41:06 From R&D to scaling manufacturing 46:10 Starting a new project from scratch 48:31 Designing high output teams 53:13 Build more vehicles than you think you’ll need 58:11 Being a multi product company from day 1 1:00:26 Vertical integration 1:07:49 Acquisitions 1:11:24 Parallel pathing and sequencing 1:18:15 Why hydrogen was a bad bet 1:26:32 Making painful decisions 1:33:07 Refounding Mach in LA 1:35:25 Designing the company to scale 10x a year 1:39:03 Leadership failings 1:46:29 Bouncing back from failure

My second interview with @OHichwa, Co-Founder & CTO of @Neros_Tech. 0:38 Redesigning a production line from scratch 1:15 Building 1,200 drones per week 1:43 Drones cause 70% of all casualties in Ukraine 3:10 China sells millions of drones to Russia 6:40 Focusing on operators 9:12 Archer AI 11:18 Building for users, not the government 14:13 Creating multiple products in parallel 16:24 Bandit — drone interceptor 20:46 Why it’s important to build weapons systems 23:30 Russia is targeting civilian infrastructure 29:23 Manually shooting down drones 31:43 Learning from operator footage 34:21 Consumer photography drones 36:51 Choosing what to vertically integrate 39:33 Reality forces the Elon algorithm 41:32 The different levels of scale 45:31 Learning from Starlink 46:33 Engineering faster 48:00 Mass production vs prototyping 50:58 Working with the US Government 54:59 Manufacturing 1 million drones a year 56:56 Learning from Chinese drone companies 1:02:58 Taiwan

My first interview with @sama, Co-Founder of @OpenAI. 0:04 How to start a startup 3:30 Trusting exponentials 4:57 Operating in chaotic environments 6:12 Learning to enjoy painful experiences 8:03 Creating abundant intelligence 11:15 Keeping core suppliers on OpenAI’s timelines 12:10 Invention of the joint-stock company 15:30 The best CEOs aren’t sociopaths 16:46 We are in the singularity 18:09 AI authoritarianism vs liberty 19:24 Texting 300-400 people a day 20:32 Having a small number of deep beliefs about the future 21:41 Critical path 22:25 Thinking about what’s next 23:38 Getting on planes in marginal situations 28:16 Buying lots of compute 30:51 Ambition 34:00 Google shouldn’t have let OpenAI survive 37:54 Having his life shot through a cannon after the launch of ChatGPT 41:20 The growth of Codex 42:02 The Death Star tweet 44:46 Status games and desire to be useful 47:57 Not being ambitious enough on compute investments 50:26 Execution 51:45 Ask for what you want 54:11 First few weeks of OpenAI 55:15 Shutting down Sora to focus on Codex 57:44 Designing beautiful products 59:01 Getting addicted to TikTok 1:01:03 Inventing a new device 1:02:53 Try to get better at your strengths 1:05:57 Masa is an n of 1 1:07:11 Real trends vs fake trends

My third interview with @Isaiah_p_Taylor, Founder of @ValarAtomics. Valar just became the first startup in history to power an NVIDIA Blackwell with a nuclear reactor. 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

My first interview with Ryan Petersen (@typesfast), Founder of Flexport. 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

My first interview with US Secretary of Energy @SecretaryWright and @ScottNolan, Founder of @GeneralMatter. This conversation is on nuclear and how we're going to power the AI data center buildout. 0:07 Powering the AI data center boom 3:25 Biggest energy bottlenecks over the next five years 6:03 Ramping power generation before we have SMRs 16:06 Bridging the nuclear transition with natural gas 21:39 What if we’re underestimating how much power we’ll need for AI 27:10 Staying ahead of China 34:07 Why AI is hated + the fear of AI data centers driving up electricity prices 40:21 Increasing baseload capacity 42:50 Building hundreds of gigawatts by 2050 49:37 Copying the SpaceX playbook 53:14 Incentivizing founders to build ahead of demand 59:03 “If you want to build big things in America, come talk to the government”

My second interview with @JimBelosic, Founder of @SendCutSend. 0:15 Beating China in manufacturing requires scale 1:10 Automation is not a magic bullet 2:12 Scaling profitably 4:31 Delivering a great customer experience 8:44 Why SCS raised $110M 11:20 Expectations are promises 15:33 Increasing speed and capacity 18:46 Focusing on customers 22:20 Frugality and generosity 25:06 Creating The Anything Factory 26:33 3pm is the new midnight 27:49 Figuring out the next bottleneck 30:37 Finding buildings with enough power 35:21 Lowering prices 37:36 Gambling to turn on factories faster 39:03 Aim for perfection and you’ll end up at excellence 40:04 Maintaining a maniacal sense of urgency through impatience 41:30 Seeding SCS DNA at new factories 43:08 Solving challenges 45:32 Finding great capital partners 48:40 Focus on customer pain 51:59 Learning from Home Depot 54:16 Bringing manufacturing back to America 55:11 Building capacity creates demand 57:01 Handling demand surges 58:21 Being default skeptical and sensing bullsh*t 1:00:27 Getting back to building

My first interview with @lulumeservey, Founder of Rostra. 0:07 How to Destroy a Terrorist Group 3:01 What Makes a Great Cult Leader 4:42 Unleashing Palmer Luckey 7:34 Why Elon Is Unpredictable 10:41 Demanding a Hardcore Culture After the X Acquisition 13:41 How Napoleon Rallied Troops to Volunteer for a Suicide Mission 18:24 Choosing Who to Alienate 20:59 Picking Someone to Fight For 22:59 Deterrence and Shaping Incentives 25:19 Why Google Had an Activist Problem 29:12 Tyrant Mode: Stopping a Leaky Culture 32:11 Building Loyalty 35:58 Why Visuals Are So Powerful 37:40 Time to Train AlexNet: Jensen Huang and Inventing Metrics 39:36 Why People Root for You 42:15 Recruit Based on the Spirit Not the Letter 43:20 The Three Levels of Story 51:01 Secret Truths and Trusting Yourself 55:25 Cicero’s Impossible Trial 58:11 Offense vs Defense 1:03:44 The Roman Concept of Auctoritas

My first interview with @EricJorgenson, Author of The Book of Elon. 0:12 Why Elon outcompetes everyone 1:53 Not wanting to be CEO 6:15 Why there was a 1 in 100 chance of Tesla and SpaceX both succeeding 10:03 Thinking in lost future revenue 11:58 Living with a gun next to his bed 15:02 How Elon starts companies 19:23 Giving Larry Page an early demo of the Roadster 21:27 Why Elon calls people into the factory at 2am 25:01 The 20 people who execute Elon’s will autonomously - MrBeast clones 28:52 Working with Elon is doing a tour of duty 31:18 Creating a grand vision that people can believe in 36:42 How to thrive under Elon 37:30 The Algorithm - question every requirement, delete part or process, simplify and optimize, accelerate, automate 41:38 Setting up a tent factory in the Tesla Fremont parking lot 43:28 How Elon would play the game if he was born 300 years ago 45:10 Empathy for the individual vs empathy for the mission 46:57 Being feared vs being loved 48:38 The endless churn at Elon companies 50:49 Ruthlessness and having a willingness to be disliked 56:08 Creating enemies and chaos 58:37 Shifting SpaceX’s focus from Mars to building a base on the Moon 1:00:07 Justifying Tesla’s valuation by reseting the vision 1:02:21 The S-Curve of ambition - colonizing planets, Starlink, Terafab 1:04:44 Throwing billions of dollars behind new companies 1:06:22 A great team is just the sum of the individual vectors 1:11:09 The idiot index at an industry-scale 1:13:53 Why it’s critical for space companies to control launch 1:15:44 Thinking in limits 1:18:47 Expanding the vision until no one can measure it 1:23:41 Internalizing pain and dealing with setbacks 1:26:03 The evolution of Elon’s operating philosophy over the last 30 years 1:27:37 Effectiveness

My first interview with @Brian_Armstrong, Co-Founder and CEO of @Coinbase. 0:25 Crafting narratives 2:28 Bias towards action 4:06 Biggest calls in Coinbase’s history 5:53 Developing intuition for making big bets 7:30 Getting truth out of people 10:04 Being anti-authority 12:30 The 3 levels of communication 14:39 Practicing to pitch w Paul Graham in 2012 16:55 Working w Fred Ehrsam 20:33 Hashing out bad decisions in the early days 22:23 Having a scarcity mentality around people 23:31 Action produces information 27:34 “If you wait for perfect clarity, you’re never going to get anything done” 31:45 Uber vs Lyft in crypto 34:23 Building trust 36:30 Advancing the mission of Coinbase 38:33 Skillsets: fundraising, storytelling, recruiting, sales 40:10 Prediction markets and AI generated content 43:58 How he operates differently than other big startup CEOs 45:18 Solving his greatest fear 48:09 Burnout and running at a marathon pace 51:20 Experiencing pain 54:32 Hiking and getting out in nature 56:54 It’s always wartime 58:58 Defining moments of crisis 1:05:35 Finding the next marching post 1:07:18 Installing ideas in people’s minds 1:10:25 The power of bringing people together over dinner 1:13:00 Action produces action 1:14:10 Backing founders outside of Coinbase 1:15:45 Scheduling 4 week long-long vacations a year 1:18:35 Finding people who raise your energy 1:20:18 Leaving a trail of proof of work 1:23:03 Touching people emotionally 1:25:19 Why we built the Iron Bank of Braavos 1:26:38 Playing an infinite game 1:31:47 Selling brownies on The Silk Road 1:35:36 My philosophy for Relentless 1:38:35 Business is like playing Civilization 1:44:59 Bonding w Fred Ehrsam over video games 1:45:47 Never leave a meeting without next steps 1:49:06 How Coinbase makes acquisitions 1:50:30 Why Coinbase’s best acquisitions were people 1:52:00 Bitcoin is the new gold standard

My first interview with @Peter_J_Beck, Founder & CEO of @RocketLab. Rocket Lab is scaling launch cadence faster than SpaceX scaled Falcon 9. 0:44 The biggest bottleneck to increasing launch cadence and mass to orbit 1:25 Growth of new space startups 3:05 Why governments have been ineffective at scaling launch 3:53 Tall Poppy Syndrome 4:38 Starting Rocket Lab without having $100 million 7:24 Scaling Electron vs focusing on Neutron 9:17 Rocket Lab hustle 11:10 Creating a culture of “F*ck it, let’s do it” 11:40 Worst supplier experiences 13:54 Having an engine explode before an important meeting 18:52 Rocket Lab’s first mission to the moon 20:55 Chewing glass and forcing the outcome to be good 22:57 Similarities in how Elon and Peter operate 25:05 Elon time and how to structure timelines 27:13 Designing a culture where everyone runs towards the fire 28:44 Making the Ferrari of rockets — the importance of creating beautiful things 31:20 “You don’t need to equate a price tag to beauty” 32:12 Why Peter hates launch day 34:48 “After a launch failure this place is a morgue” 35:22 Moving forward after a failure 36:40 Transitioning from an R&D organization to scaling rocket production 38:07 Production hell with rockets 39:09 Taking learnings from Electron to Neutron 41:03 Having dinner with Elon 42:00 Keeping the hiring bar extraordinarily high 44:05 “My job is to fix sh*t” 44:56 Rocket Lab’s first NASA launch 45:55 “The great thing about America is anything is possible” 47:40 Coming to Silicon Valley — meeting with Vinod Khosla 51:22 Why he decided to take $RKLB public 54:12 Creating a company that will outlive you 55:41 Turning Rocket Lab into a profitable business 57:23 The best space companies will all build their own rockets 1:00:35 Scaling Neutron 1:01:32 Why they’re using carbon fiber instead of steel 1:02:56 “Going public was a great capital unlock” 1:04:10 The importance of relentless optimism

My second interview with @soren_ma, Co-Founder and CEO of @neros_tech. Neros just acquired a new 250k square foot factory which will allow them to ramp production to 1M drones a year. 0:50 New 250k square foot factory 5:13 How the Russia Ukraine war has evolved 8:51 Learning from the Starlink production ramp 12:37 Building a military spec drone 15:25 Prototypes vs production product 17:27 Creating a fully China-free drone 20:27 Scaling production capacity 25:53 Production hell vs supply chain hell 29:11 Timelines and urgency 34:08 Flyoff mode and PBAS 37:40 How Soren operates during a sprint 40:54 Shifting from building drones to company building 42:37 Leadership hiring 49:05 Focusing on execution 50:30 Defeating drone jammers 57:55 Oh sh*t moments 1:00:09 Refocusing on health and taking care of yourself 1:05:21 Measuring effectiveness by battle field results 1:13:04 Evolution of their testing process 1:16:05 Archer Fiber 1:17:55 Lifting up the entire drone industrial base 1:21:12 Building region-specific supply chains 1:23:49 How America can win over the coming decades 1:26:55 Are we going fast enough? 1:29:12 Choosing to work on lethal systems 1:32:35 Being pro-America 1:35:37 Future of warfare and autonomous systems

My first interview with @ScottNolan, Co-Founder and CEO of @GeneralMatter. 0:48 What if Russia stopped selling uranium to the US 4:47 The history of uranium enrichment 10:44 What if he was given $25 billion to turn on reactors as fast as possible 13:37 The US doesn’t have the capability to make fuel for Small Modular Reactors today 14:43 How Founders Fund decides to start companies 19:28 Why you shouldn’t start a company 26:02 Working at SpaceX in 2003 28:10 How Elon drove urgency in the early days of SpaceX 30:28 How it felt when the first three Falcon launches failed 32:41 Figuring out what to work on after leaving SpaceX 34:26 How Peter Thiel convinced him to join Founders Fund 38:53 The most unintuitive thing he learned from Peter Thiel 44:03 Lowering the cost of uranium enrichment 47:32 The idiot index for enrichment 50:18 Vertically integrating vs using existing supply chains 53:44 The idiot index for timelines 59:13 Taking risk to pull in schedule: current burn vs future revenue 1:02:44 Choosing where to put their first enrichment facility 1:05:42 Maintaining maniacal urgency with multi-decade timelines 1:09:10 How a war with China will impact our ability to produce energy 1:14:06 What conventional wisdom gets wrong about building this type of company 1:17:48 The AI data center boom requires nuclear 1:21:02 Why SpaceX switched from an ablative engine to a regeneratively cooled all metal engine 1:25:08 How Elon makes nonobvious decisions 1:29:59 Don’t focus on problems that are already getting solved

The US vs. China Manufacturing Debate My first debate between @sdamico, founder of @ImpulseLabs, and @aphysicist, founder of @atomic_inc. Timestamps: 0:39 Introductions 11:34 Is it possible to reverse America’s manufacturing decline? 16:37 Where would Sam invest $100M in a factory today? 21:28 How California made it illegal to do chemistry w metals 25:43 Elon on Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory 32:01 Using the data center boom to pull advanced capabilities onshore 36:51 Building Chinese level capacity in America 38:33 The US Gov hasn't incentivized companies to build base level capacity 42:54 Why space companies have to vertically integrate their supply chains 45:06 The advantage of building a Chinese supply chain 49:10 Why Apple manufactures all their products in China 59:42 Apple exports engineering expertise 1:02:19 Consumer electronics 1:07:55 How the advent of humanoid robots will shift the balance of power 1:12:29 Why Apple spent hundreds of billions building their supply chains in China

Why the Co-Founder of Robinhood is working on Data Centers in Space. My first interview w @BaijuBhatt, Co-Founder of @RobinhoodApp and Founder of @AetherfluxUSA. 0:05 Rock climbing w Jared Leto 5:46 Culture differences at Robinhood vs Aetherflux 15:57 Building a Shelby Daytona during Covid 23:44 The hair patterns of founders at different stages 28:16 Orbital data centers 38:22 Failures before Robinhood $HOOD 45:57 Hitting dead ends 51:39 Seeding Aetherflux with $10M 58:08 Willingness to be scrappy again 1:01:18 Starting from scratch in a new industry 1:08:26 The second company is just as hard as the first 1:12:16 Playing Magic the Gathering as a kid 1:17:32 Goblin mode vs Monk mode

My first interview with @sachaker, Founder & CEO of Babylon Biosciences. Babylon is on a quest to cure Alzheimer’s. 1:00 History of Alzheimer’s research 8:09 Why tackle this problem 12:22 Axon degeneration 13:57 Structuring Babylon to survive many failures 15:24 Self-financing Alzheimer’s moonshots 19:01 Viagra 19:59 Swanson linking and Raynaud syndrome 24:16 Most efficacious drugs for Alzheimer’s 27:29 Experience starting Babylon 31:34 Attracting mission aligned people 36:24 Filtering for missionaries vs mercenaries 41:07 Lack of agency causes burnout 46:02 Living without a phone to reduce distraction 49:31 Why the information to cure Alzheimer’s might already be out there 54:19 How AI changes things 55:36 Controversial science 1:03:11 Volunteering at memory clinics 1:04:28 Impact-per-dollar and being scrappy 1:07:55 Internalizing pain when you make a bad decision 1:09:26 Time to last embarrassment 1:10:51 Risk taking 1:12:57 What causes cognitive impairment 1:22:11 What keeps him up at night

My first interview with @aliansarinik, Founder & CEO of @micro1_ai. 1:10 Continuous model improvement 2:42 Starting with an AI recruiting tool 5:42 Moving into the human data space 7:19 The Human Happiness Index 13:32 Creating a real world robotics dataset 17:03 Hiring hundreds of doctors & lawyers in a week 20:15 Providing a world class white glove service 22:15 Hiring for agency & risk taking 26:03 High velocity on two way decisions 27:35 Going all-in on data 28:52 Structuring incentives 38:18 Leadership & staying in the details 40:10 Losing their biggest customer right before an investor pitch 43:24 Becoming risk averse after an existential crisis 50:45 Taking action as fast as possible when you feel the urge to act 56:12 What it felt like growing revenue 30x in a year 1:00:48 Staying focused & limiting new projects 1:02:30 Predicting what the big AI labs will want 1:06:50 Creating a model to predict timelines 1:12:23 Hiring as a last resort 1:18:25 Taking big bold bets 1:28:49 Long-horizon tasks