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How do you go from being the kid who couldn’t sit still in class to leading the machine shop for one of Elon Musk’s most ambitious ventures?
In this gripping and often jaw-dropping episode, I sit down with Jim Cooney—Head of the Machine Shop at Neuralink—for a raw and refreshingly honest conversation about resilience, reinvention, and the unconventional road to mastery in machining.
While Jim isn’t a shop owner (my usual guest profile), his story offers every bit of the leadership lessons, grit, and insight that Machine Shop Mastery is known for.
From his humble beginnings as a high school co-op student in Canada, Jim details how a lack of direction became fuel for a deeply hands-on journey into the world of machining. With stories of brutal old-school shop cultures, tools thrown across the room, and managers who trained with tough love (and zero patience), Jim paints a vivid picture of how adversity shaped his technical excellence and emotional resilience.
But what really sets this episode apart is Jim’s transition from traditional tool & die work to the heart of Silicon Valley innovation. His career path took him from automotive stamping in Ontario to leading critical manufacturing efforts at Tesla, Apollo Fusion, and now Neuralink. He shares what it’s like building high-stakes, high-tech parts under pressure—and how working insane hours during Tesla’s “production hell” made him sharper, faster, and more adaptable.
If you want a peek into the mindset and muscle it takes to thrive in a fast-paced, bleeding-edge manufacturing environment—or you're looking for inspiration on how to grow through adversity—this episode delivers in spades.
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