Relentless

Casey Handmer, Australian-born engineer, entrepreneur, writer, and Terraform Industries founder, explores Elon Musk’s edge in building ambitious companies. They discuss lunar mass drivers, orbital AI data centers, Starship’s industrial scale, synthetic fuel manufacturing, and the regulatory barriers slowing infrastructure on Earth. The conversation also examines founder advantages, governance, taxation, AI’s economic upheaval, and why competition may force governments to move faster.

Chris Power, founder and CEO of Hadrian, is rebuilding American manufacturing with automated, software-powered factories. He discusses GPU-style facilities for high-mix production, betting on capacity before contracts, surviving catastrophic equipment failures, and financing rapid expansion. He also explores modular teams, defense-driven opportunities, organizational bottlenecks, and earning trust through honest execution.

Bernt Børnich, founder and CEO of humanoid robotics company 1X, discusses the race to manufacture 50,000 robots. He explores scaling beyond prototypes, testing NEO in homes, building trust and safety, and using foundation models for general intelligence. He also covers simpler hardware, fleet learning, robot companions, and the relentless challenges of turning ambitious robotics into reality.

Keller Cliffton, co-founder and CEO of Zipline, is building autonomous drone delivery at unprecedented scale. He discusses Uber’s surprise demand for one million daily deliveries, the manufacturing and infrastructure challenge ahead, and why robotics may be essential for the future of logistics. He also explores hard-tech leadership, medical delivery as a beachhead, and a quieter, less congested vision for cities.

Ethan Thornton, founder and CEO of defense-tech company Mach Industries, discusses producing thousands of solid rocket motors and building defense manufacturing from scratch. He explores explosive handling, automation, flexible factories, vertical integration, rapid hardware iteration, customer testing, and scaling from prototype to production. He also shares lessons on acquisitions, parallel programs, relocating for talent, killing weak bets, and leading through uncertainty.

Olaf Hichwa, Co-founder and CTO of Neros who led design of their new factory, talks scaling production to a million drones a year. He describes building a production line from scratch, ruthless design tradeoffs to ship at scale, and practical interceptor designs. He also covers operator-first autonomy, lessons from frontline footage, and why U.S. manufacturing capacity matters.

Sam Altman, Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI and AI-focused entrepreneur and investor. He explores how AI shrinks startup timelines and enables radical new 10-week projects. He describes rapid office-productivity startups, betting on compute, trusting exponential growth in people and models, operating through chaos, and why this work feels urgently important globally.

Isaiah Taylor, Founder and CEO of Valar Atomics — building modular nuclear reactors for rapid, safe, large-scale deployment. He compares reactor scale-up to SpaceX manufacturing. He explains why building beats paper design, why steel can outpace engineers, and how relentless iteration, vertical integration, and wartime urgency unlock mass production of simple, safe reactors.

Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport and logistics veteran, unpacks the hidden mechanics of global trade. He traces spice-driven voyages and East India Company roots. He examines tariff fraud, paper titles like bills of lading, and how maritime chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz shape modern supply chains.

Scott Nolan, founder and CEO of General Matter, a founder scaling nuclear fuel and advanced energy supply chains. Chris Wright, U.S. Secretary of Energy leading national energy and permitting reform. They discuss powering the AI data center boom. Topics include restarting nuclear innovation and test reactors. They cover natural gas as the near-term workhorse and the need for dispatchable baseload power. Permitting and industrial-scale manufacturing are explored.