Ti Morse
@ti_morse • 21,747 subscribers
Interviewing the greats @Relentless | Forward Deployed Podcaster
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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 Morse5,074,543 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
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 Morse526,225 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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 Morse516,487 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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 Morse103,729 Aufrufe • vor 19 Tagen
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 Morse314,725 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Morse436,414 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Building nuclear reactors that are easy to replicate is a SpaceX style problem: "What we're trying to do here is build a reactor which is easy to replicate. It's a little different from mass manufacturing. Different from a Tesla style problem, more like a SpaceX style problem. You have a complicated vehicle that you need to get really good at building and deploying in a repeatable fashion. When I first started the company, we didn't have a size in mind for the first reactor. It was very explicit. We told the team we don't know how big the reactor is going to be. We don't know how powerful it's going to be. We didn't know those numbers until a year to 18 months into the company. We told ourselves we are going to discover the power level through the manufacturing process. Our instinct was as long as that number turns out to be somewhere above 15 megawatts, we should be pretty good for mass production. If you're under 15 megawatts, it's pretty hard to scale the right way. You just end up doing so many different pieces of operations that it becomes more complicated. But our feeling is above the 15 megawatt break point, you have something that can really scale. And we think this reactor ends up somewhere around 25 megawatts. 25 megawatts being the sort of scale factor where if you want a gigawatt, you just build 40 of them. The next challenge for us as we turn this on and turn the next one on is how do we get to the place where we're turning on one reactor every day and then multiple reactors every day. That's how we're going to climb into the gigawatts."
Ti Morse56,257 Aufrufe • vor 18 Tagen
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 Morse110,450 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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 Morse227,647 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
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 Morse186,645 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
![“People have an overwhelming bias to just do the thing they feel like they’re supposed to do.” “[As a founder], it’s your job to look inside your mental dictionary of language and identify 500 to 1000 words in the right order that are going to jailbreak people and reprogram them to come and join you off the path.” “It’s very doable. It’s been done to convince an entire nation to continue fighting a war. It’s been done to convince racists to consider the possibility of allowing civil rights. It’s been done to inspire a nation to go to the moon.” “These things, we’ve seen them, we just don’t really recognize them for what they are, which is packaging 1000 words in the right order, in combination with the right curation, and delivering them such that they jailbreak people at scale.” Lulu Cheng Meservey](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2053576399945072830/amplify_video_thumb/2053571257929760768/img/opmhjlSAH_Th7m2y.jpg)
“People have an overwhelming bias to just do the thing they feel like they’re supposed to do.” “[As a founder], it’s your job to look inside your mental dictionary of language and identify 500 to 1000 words in the right order that are going to jailbreak people and reprogram them to come and join you off the path.” “It’s very doable. It’s been done to convince an entire nation to continue fighting a war. It’s been done to convince racists to consider the possibility of allowing civil rights. It’s been done to inspire a nation to go to the moon.” “These things, we’ve seen them, we just don’t really recognize them for what they are, which is packaging 1000 words in the right order, in combination with the right curation, and delivering them such that they jailbreak people at scale.” Lulu Cheng Meservey
Ti Morse105,780 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
"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 Morse109,995 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Morse126,252 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
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 Morse295,844 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten
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 Morse160,056 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
My second interview with Jim Belosic, Founder of sendcutsend. 0:15 Beating China in manufacturing requires scale 1:10 Automation is not a magic bullet 2:12 Scaling profitably 4:31 Delivering a great customer experience 8:44 Why SCS raised $110M 11:20 Expectations are promises 15:33 Increasing speed and capacity 18:46 Focusing on customers 22:20 Frugality and generosity 25:06 Creating The Anything Factory 26:33 3pm is the new midnight 27:49 Figuring out the next bottleneck 30:37 Finding buildings with enough power 35:21 Lowering prices 37:36 Gambling to turn on factories faster 39:03 Aim for perfection and you’ll end up at excellence 40:04 Maintaining a maniacal sense of urgency through impatience 41:30 Seeding SCS DNA at new factories 43:08 Solving challenges 45:32 Finding great capital partners 48:40 Focus on customer pain 51:59 Learning from Home Depot 54:16 Bringing manufacturing back to America 55:11 Building capacity creates demand 57:01 Handling demand surges 58:21 Being default skeptical and sensing bullsh*t 1:00:27 Getting back to building
Ti Morse72,258 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
.Lulu Cheng Meservey on Elon going direct: "One thing that always comes up is people say: you advocate for going direct, but look at Elon...he makes so many mistakes and puts his foot in his mouth. The answer is: you have to look at the net result. You can't look at one tweet in isolation or one incident. There's nothing that gets built, not an audience, not a movement, not a company — there's nothing that doesn't get built with some errors along the way. You just have to bake it in."
Ti Morse80,875 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
My first interview with Ali Ansari, Founder & CEO of micro1. 1:10 Continuous model improvement 2:42 Starting with an AI recruiting tool 5:42 Moving into the human data space 7:19 The Human Happiness Index 13:32 Creating a real world robotics dataset 17:03 Hiring hundreds of doctors & lawyers in a week 20:15 Providing a world class white glove service 22:15 Hiring for agency & risk taking 26:03 High velocity on two way decisions 27:35 Going all-in on data 28:52 Structuring incentives 38:18 Leadership & staying in the details 40:10 Losing their biggest customer right before an investor pitch 43:24 Becoming risk averse after an existential crisis 50:45 Taking action as fast as possible when you feel the urge to act 56:12 What it felt like growing revenue 30x in a year 1:00:48 Staying focused & limiting new projects 1:02:30 Predicting what the big AI labs will want 1:06:50 Creating a model to predict timelines 1:12:23 Hiring as a last resort 1:18:25 Taking big bold bets 1:28:49 Long-horizon tasks
Ti Morse147,929 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
"We built up scaffolding of environmental laws from the 1960s onward that have basically made it illegal to do stuff. California, bit by bit, has restricted what I call chemistry at a foundational level. Where now it's basically illegal to do chemistry with metals. And if it's illegal to do chemistry with metals, you can't build anything with the electric stack. California was an industrial superpower. We built half the world's battleships at one point. We built the Kaiser shipyards. The bridge super structures for aircraft carriers were built right around here. California really prided itself on being at the forefront of the EV revolution and the solar revolution. But because of past reckless environmental stuff, we've built laws that have effectively banned us from being able to compete...despite a lot of the best engineers in these technologies being here." Sam D'Amico Aaron Slodov
Ti Morse104,455 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten