Ti Morse
@ti_morse • 24,845 subscribers
Interviewing the greats @Relentless | Forward Deployed Podcaster
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Videos
My first interview w Sulaiman Khan Ghori, Member of Technical Staff xAI. 0:41 WTF is happening at xAI 1:46 Predicting future bottlenecks 3:05 Shredding conventional timelines 4:23 Experience joining xAI 9:23 Bootstrapping off the Tesla network 11:59 What is Macrohard 13:14 How Elon deals w fires 16:30 What it’s like working at xAI 20:33 Cybertruck bet with Elon 21:12 Using 80 mobile generators + battery packs to balance load at their data centers 22:45 How they built Colossus in 122 days 23:35 Work backwards & figure out the highest leverage thing you can be doing 25:51 How xAI hires 30:27 Challenging requirements 32:46 Experimentation 34:55 How Elon recalibrated his timeline estimates 39:15 AI engineers vs AI researchers 40:36 No one tells me ‘no’ 42:09 Everyone’s an engineer 44:06 Why fuzziness between teams is an advantage 48:25 Testing human emulators as employees 50:00 Biggest blunders 53:23 What a meeting w Elon is like 54:22 How Elon gives feedback 56:44 Figuring out ‘what is truth’ for Grokipedia 59:21 What happens when Elon sees wrong Grok outputs on X 1:00:08 What a surge feels like & operating in xAI’s war room 1:02:53 Making fidget spinners & 3D printers in his bedroom 1:08:48 Creating a liquid fuel rocket engine
Ti Morse5,083,593 views • 9 months ago
My first interview with Sam Altman, 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
Ti Morse971,721 views • 3 months ago
Set II is ready Elon Musk "First rule in government spending: Why build something once when you can build it twice for 3x the cost???" We built Set I in a studio near downtown Austin but the space was only available for a week so we had to tear it down last Friday. Like SpaceX, it would be completely unreasonable to expect the first rocket to make it to orbit so on Wednesday I rented an aircraft hanger 15 minutes from Giga Texas and we started construction on Set II. We finished it on Saturday night and can now record anytime in the next 30 days. The most entertaining outcome is the most likely. Let's make this happen. 🏴☠️
Ti Morse538,467 views • 4 months ago
My first interview with Ryan Petersen (Ryan Petersen), 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
Ti Morse520,531 views • 5 months ago
My first interview with Ethan Thornton, 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
Ti Morse179,075 views • 1 month ago
My second interview with Casey Handmer, Founder of Terraform Industries. 0:09 How the Mass Driver is going to work 2:54 Mass Driver vs scaling Starship 4:26 Economics of space compute vs building data centers on Earth 8:53 Why large scale projects are becoming illegal 14:26 Terafab 20:02 Starmind 26:19 Maximum scale as fast as possible 27:43 Luisiana launch tower buildout 30:13 Elon’s decade long company baking period 32:56 Firing teams 37:35 Starting companies 41:57 Being unfiltered publicly 42:52 DOGE 46:39 Deregulating without a major war 55:17 Founder-led companies are mini dictatorships 58:53 Taxes 1:03:26 Civilization hard resets 1:05:30 Starship scaling constraints 1:07:16 How Elon sets objectives 1:09:31 Universal high income
Ti Morse66,903 views • 23 days ago
Casey Handmer on why Starlink and Starmind are so valuable: "If you run the math: What is the revenue per watt of transmitted microwave power for Starlink? It's a billion times higher than space-based solar power. SpaceX is making money hand over fist with Starlink. So you take that model and say, we make lots of money transmitting data from your content delivery service like Netflix, but instead let's transmit tokens of some hyper intelligent model. Once you've got the hardware flying, what is the comparative value between your average Starlink bit versus your average Starmind bit? It's probably at least 1,000 times more valuable. It's not even in the same category. It will be interesting to see if economic demand for intelligence in the form of AI tokens can saturate. I suspect not."
Ti Morse64,304 views • 23 days ago
My second interview with Chris Power, Founder and CEO of Hadrian. 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
Ti Morse83,751 views • 1 month ago
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
Ti Morse439,147 views • 7 months ago
My first interview with Lulu Cheng Meservey, 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
Ti Morse316,581 views • 5 months ago
Ethan Thornton on manufacturing solid rocket motors: "It's very challenging because you're manufacturing millions of pounds of explosives. Essentially, that's what solid rocket motors are… By the time you light them, you don't really have any control. We basically just light it, and it either works or it doesn't. And when it doesn't work, it is usually quite kinetic. One of the things that's hard is you're getting all this precursor shipped to you. At scale, millions to tens of millions of pounds of explosives. So right now we're retrofitting about 200 bunkers that we're renting out to be able to store this stuff. The way we got here, we actually acquired a company called Exquadrum. I generally hate doing acquisitions. In this specific case, just the licensing to do this sort of stuff would have taken five years. Jet engines are plumbing, solid rocket motors are baking. You mix this dough. You pour it into the casing. It's a very specific arduous arts and craftsy process. One of the big things is how do you get every human out of the loop that you possibly can. We're aiming to be able to do hundreds of thousands a year in the coming two years or so. The single biggest rate limiting factor on production of systems like this will be warheads, and it will be solid rocket motors. Right now all the precursor for a lot of this stuff is made at one facility in the U.S. that's bought out like three years. So this isn't a build thing. This is a supply chain effort."
Ti Morse81,096 views • 1 month ago
My second interview with Bernt Bornich, Founder and CEO of 1X. 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
Ti Morse54,388 views • 1 month ago
The US vs. China Manufacturing Debate My first debate between Sam D'Amico, founder of Impulse, and Aaron Slodov, founder of Atomic Industries. 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
Ti Morse232,947 views • 7 months ago
My third interview with Isaiah Taylor - making nuclear reactors, Founder of Valar Atomics. 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
Ti Morse113,769 views • 3 months ago
My first interview with Shaun Maguire, Partner Sequoia Capital. 0:30 How Elon works 8:11 Execution speed 15:40 The 15 levels of mathematicians 25:52 How Shaun assesses founders 29:31 Starting the next Bell Labs 32:43 Why it was so hard to invest in SpaceX in 2019 36:26 Working at Neros 42:36 What Elon looks for in capital partners 44:43 Why people underestimate Boring Company 51:37 Stepping into the fire 56:00 Playing CS:GO competitively 1:03:56 Dropping out of high school 1:07:20 Getting renamed in 7th grade 1:14:02 Lord of the flies 1:21:23 How people like Gwynne Shotwell work with Elon 1:25:07 Why Elon is one of the greatest capital allocators of all time 1:30:59 Underestimating Jensen Huang
Ti Morse296,411 views • 11 months ago
My second interview with Soren Monroe-Anderson, Co-Founder and CEO of Neros Technologies. 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
Ti Morse187,992 views • 7 months ago
My first interview with Peter Beck, Founder & CEO of Rocket Lab. 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
Ti Morse166,588 views • 7 months ago
My first interview with Eric Jorgenson 📚 ☀️, 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
Ti Morse141,887 views • 6 months ago
My first interview with US Secretary of Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Scott Nolan, Founder of General Matter. 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”
Ti Morse112,974 views • 5 months ago
"There are three levels of story for a company. The first level is just literally: what are you even doing? Half of startup founders probably can't even articulate just that. Level two is: what does that represent? What is the upshot of you doing this successfully? Level three is: what is the shape of the dent in the universe and in society, if this works? For SpaceX, level one might be: we're building a rocket. Pretty cool, not maximum cool. Level two is: we're building a rocket to restore American space flight from the private sector to revive an industry that's been stagnant for decades. More inspiring, not final form. Level three would be: we're restoring space flight from America, humanity's last best hope, because we need to make mankind an interplanetary species."
Ti Morse110,534 views • 5 months ago