Relentless
Ti Morse
20 episodes
SpaceX has no competition — Saurav Shroff, Starpath
28 Oct · 58 min
- Saurav Shroff argues the launch market is effectively a monopoly because SpaceX has little incentive to sell launch to rivals.
- Shroff says Starpath will build its own launch company if no rival sells launch by a set date, since AI data satellites need far cheaper rockets than Falcon Nine.
Why Elon Outcompetes Everyone | Casey Handmer, Terraform Industries
30 Sept · 1 h 15 min
- Casey Handmer, Terraform Industries CEO, argues Starship will cut launch costs enough that AI compute will converge on cheap solar-powered hardware in space.
- Handmer says permitting delays make California infrastructure so slow and costly that the people needed to build it lose interest, citing the California Aqueduct's lost capacity.
How to Dominate Manufacturing in the US | Chris Power, Hadrian
21 Sept · 1 h 19 min
- Hadrian CEO Chris Power argues US contract manufacturing has no existing capacity, so companies must build about 50 percent more than future sales capacity before any contract arrives.
- Power says every CapEx bet stays company-killing until roughly $50bn in scale, and puts Hadrian's company-death risk still near 80 percent.
Manufacturing 50,000 Humanoid Robots Next Year | Bernt Børnich, 1X
18 Sept · 43 min
- 1X plans to ramp its humanoid output in quality-gated steps, with a Hayward plant ramping to about 10,000 units and a San Carlos plant targeting 110,000 units a year at full capacity.
- Bernt Børnich argues production is far harder than prototyping because rare faults only surface at larger volumes, and 1X is aiming for 50,000 robots by the end of next year to feed its data loop.
1 Million Drone Deliveries a Day by 2028 | Keller Cliffton, Zipline
14 Sept · 41 min
- Zipline aims to make a million deliveries a day within two and a half years, after Uber agreed to take all of the capacity Zipline had planned.
- Keller Cliffton says Zipline's factory must grow five to ten times bigger than first planned, a shift that makes hardware scale the central bet.
Starting a Solid Rocket Motor Factory from Scratch | Ethan Thornton, Mach Industries
2 Sept · 1 h 50 min
- Mach Industries is retrofitting about 200 rented bunkers and opening a second energetics factory roughly twice the size of its 117,000-square-foot desert plant.
- Ethan Thornton says Mach bought design lab X Squadron because licensing solid rocket motor technology would have taken years, and about half its revenue now comes from selling components to primes.
Manufacturing 1 million drones a year | Olaf Hichwa, Neros
11 Aug · 1 h 6 min
- Neros says its new 250,000-square-foot factory is on track for 130,000 drones a year by December and a million a year by around 2028.
- Olaf Hichwa, Neros co-founder and CTO, says Neros builds more drones in a week than any other American drone company builds in a month.
Sam Altman - How to Start a Startup
25 Jul · 1 h 10 min
- Sam Altman tells Ti Morse that AI has made small teams faster and more powerful, so startups gain their biggest edge when the ground shifts most.
- Altman says most founders chase easy wins with AI agents in enterprise verticals, and he is surprised more people do not attempt ambitious projects that assume scaling continues.
Manufacturing 1,000s of Nuclear Reactors | Isaiah Taylor, Valar Atomics
1 Jul · 1 h 32 min
- Valar Atomics CEO Isaiah Taylor says the company will treat reactors like SpaceX treats rockets, building one easily replicable design and then switching on reactor after reactor.
- Taylor says Valar owns the full scope of its project because fragmented responsibilities across design, construction, operations and regulators leave no one incentivised to cut costs.
Pablo Escobar was a logistics guy — Ryan Petersen
26 May · 53 min
- Ryan Petersen, Flexport's CEO, says tariffs near 35% give merchants a huge incentive to understate goods' value, with much of the cheating tied to Chinese sellers on Amazon.
- Petersen says a legal gap letting foreign firms import without a US entity makes enforcement an honour system, and he proposes requiring a US entity, bank account and know-your-customer checks.
How we're going to power the AI data center buildout | Energy Sec. Chris Wright & Scott Nolan
23 May · 1 h 3 min
- Energy Secretary Chris Wright says the US energy stall was a policy choice, and the Trump administration is reversing it by stopping coal plant closures.
- Scott Nolan says AI and electric vehicles now demand more power than the US produces, and he proposes data centers generate 10% more than they consume to win communities.
The Manufacturing Startup That's Outcompeting China | Jim Belosic, SendCutSend | Round II
19 May · 1 h 2 min
- SendCutSend CEO Jim Belosic says it can meet or beat China on only 20 to 25% of its parts and wants that to reach 100%.
- Belosic says the company raised about $110m while giving up only 10%, arguing that a larger early raise would have cost 50% or 70%.
How to Start a Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey
5 May · 1 h 5 min
- Lulu Cheng Meservey argues that recruiting the first few members is the hardest task for a founder, because the idea still looks crazy.
- Lulu Cheng Meservey says a founder should judge the net result of their conduct rather than any single mistake, and that removing disruptive people early is wise.
Why Elon Outcompetes Everyone | Eric Jorgenson
16 Apr · 1 h 29 min
- Eric Jorgenson, author of The Book of Elon, argues Musk's mission, timing, first-principles thinking and speed multiply each other, making him far more effective than peers.
- Musk reportedly put each of Tesla and SpaceX at roughly a 10% chance of success, and Jorgenson says he overestimated the odds while using short timelines to drive faster work.
How Brian Armstrong Built Coinbase
23 Mar · 1 h 54 min
- Brian Armstrong tells Ti Morse on Relentless that he now prefers running Coinbase in wartime, reversing his earlier belief that he was a peacetime CEO.
- Armstrong says Coinbase's custody crisis was solved in about sixty days by migrating funds to a new cold storage system, after a hack threatened insolvency.
Peter Beck — We're scaling Electron faster than SpaceX scaled Falcon 9
16 Mar · 1 h 5 min
- Peter Beck says Rocket Lab's Electron launch cadence has grown faster than SpaceX's Falcon 9 did, with customer readiness rather than factory capacity as the real limit.
- Beck says the company was built on the principle that it could never outspend competitors, citing Virgin Orbit's $1.2bn against Electron's $80m as a failure.
Manufacturing 1 million drones a year | Soren Monroe-Anderson, Neros
12 Mar · 1 h 42 min
- Neros flew over a US military jammer, hovered for about ten minutes, and beat the jamming, with soldiers then shown a jar of Smucker's strawberry jam as payload.
- Neros moved into a 250,000 square foot factory, aiming to become the first American drone company able to build a million drones a year.
What if Russia stopped selling uranium to the US tomorrow | Scott Nolan, General Matter
9 Mar · 1 h 34 min
- Scott Nolan of General Matter says a cutoff of Russian enriched uranium would force utilities to scramble, raising prices and risking brownouts, since enrichment capacity cannot ramp overnight.
- A Congressional ban on Russian uranium imports takes effect January 1, 2028, and Nolan says the bipartisan law is unlikely to be reversed.
The US vs. China Manufacturing Debate
27 Feb · 1 h 17 min
- Ti Morse frames the debate by noting the US produced roughly 30% of world manufactured goods in the 1980s but about 16% today, while China rose to nearly 30%.
- Sam D'Amico argues California's environmental laws make chemistry with metal effectively illegal, blocking production of the electric stack, and says the AI data center boom offers a chance to onshore advanced electronics because racks are tariff-exempt.
Space Datacenters | Baiju Bhatt, Aetherflux
22 Feb · 1 h 26 min
- Aetherflux pivoted from power beaming to orbital data centers that pair solar panels with GPUs, because beaming power loses energy in conversion.
- Bhatt argues orbital chips could accelerate AI infrastructure, since bringing a ground data center online takes five to eight years.