Explore every episode of the podcast Relentless

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.

The history of Alzheimer’s research, structuring Babylon to survive many failures, filtering for missionaries vs mercenaries.

micro1 is one of the fastest growing startups in the AI training data / human intelligence space. We talked about what it's like hiring hundreds of doctors and lawyers in a week, how they're collecting real world data for robotics, and what it was like losing their biggest customer.

My first interview with Ed Mehr, Co-Founder & CEO of Machina.

What went wrong with early prototypes, rapid design iteration, why hardware companies require complex capital structures.

Production hell, why simplicity is so important, pain as a moat.

How Elon deals w fires, how xAI built their Colossus data center in 122 days, and why it's important to challenge requirements.

My first interview with Shuo Wang, Co-Founder & CRO of Deel.

My first interview with Keller Cliffton, co-founder & CEO of Zipline.

My first interview with Ian Brooke, founder & CEO of Astro Mechanica.

Laurence Allen is Co-Founder & CEO of Terranova.

My first interview with Zach Dell & Justin Lopas, the Co-Founders of Base Power Company.

My first interview with Clem Delangue, Co-Founder & CEO of Hugging Face.

My first interview with Ben Wilson, creator of How To Take Over The World.

My first interview with Lada Nuzhna, Founder & CEO of General Control. General Control engineers epigenetic medicines for age-related diseases.

My first interview with Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital.

Sat down with Joshua Browder, founder & CEO of DoNotPay, for the first ever Relentless shoot at night overlooking San Francisco.

My first interview with Ariana Thacker, cofounder & CEO of Moldco.

My first interview with Max Lobovsky, cofounder & CEO of Formlabs.

My first interview with David Zagaynov, co-founder & CEO of Poseidon.

Shinkei is building fish harvesting robots with the goal of reshoring America's seafood supply chain while radically improving the quality & shelf life of the fish we consume. Their Poseidon robot is scaling the traditional Japanese ike-jime method for killing fish which is humane and preserves texture, flavor, and freshness.

First interview with Justin Fiaschetti, cofounder & CEO at Inversion. Inversion is building autonomous re-entry vehicles that enable precision cargo delivery from space in under an hour.

First interview with Saurav Shroff, co-founder & CEO of Starpath.

First interview with Kyle Doerksen, founder & CEO of Future Motion, the creator of Onewheel.

First interview with Mitch Lee, cofounder & CEO of Arc Boats.

First interview with Bryon Hargis, cofounder & CEO of Castelion.

First interview with Alexis Rivas, cofounder & CEO of Cover.

First interview with Pari Singh, founder & CEO of Flow.

First interview with Jim Belosic, founder & CEO of SendCutSend.

This is a *mostly* hard tech roundtable that we shot on a ferry in San Francisco with Sam D'Amico, Jason Carman, Will O'Brien, Michael LaFramboise, and Laurence Allen.

Bernt is building humanoid robots for your home.

Creating Planet - Story's first short film, building the Nike for technology, starting work on a trilogy.

Flying drones in GPS-denied environments.

Ride alongs, police chases, alcoholism in China. "We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy."

Space cannons, getting to Mach 25, history of German weapons.

Embryo screening, genetic diseases, moral panic around reproductive technology.

Directed energy weapons, drone swarms, future of warfare.