Inevitable

Ashvin Dayal is Senior Vice President for Power and Climate at the Rockefeller Foundation , where he oversees the Global Energy Alliance (GEA), a multi-billion-dollar initiative backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, the IKEA Foundation, and the Bezos Earth Fund to expand access to clean, reliable electricity worldwide. In this episode of Inevitable , Dayal explains why energy access remains one of...

William Layden is Co-founder and CEO at Rune , a company building modular, behind-the-meter micro data centers that plug directly into solar and wind plants. These units operate on a fully electric, DC-to-DC architecture—bypassing the traditional grid and unlocking new economics for compute at renewable energy sites. In this episode of Inevitable, Layden explains how solar clipping and curtailment...

Varun Sivaram is Founder and CEO of Emerald AI , a company building software that makes AI data centers power flexible. As AI data centers become one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand, grid constraints are emerging as a critical bottleneck for compute deployment. In this episode, the conversation focuses on why power availability — not GPUs — is increasingly the limiting factor...

Eugene Kirpichov is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Work on Climate , a global community helping professionals take action on climate across industries and disciplines. Originally created to help people transition into climate-related careers, the organization is now evolving toward a deeper goal: empowering individuals to become climate leaders—people who transform their companies, sectors,...

Stu Landesberg is Co-founder and CEO of Seneca , a company developing autonomous aerial systems to detect and suppress wildfires before they grow out of control. Designed for rapid initial response, Seneca’s technology deploys robotic aircraft that launch within minutes, helping protect homes, infrastructure, and communities in fire-prone regions. In this episode of Inevitable, Landesberg shares w...

Augustus Doricko is Founder and CEO at Rainmaker , a company using cloud seeding, drones, and radar to increase rain and snow as water scarcity and drought intensify across the West. In this episode of Inevitable , the conversation focuses on why cloud seeding—often misunderstood as science fiction or geoengineering—has existed for decades and why it has only recently become possible to prove it a...

Philip Johnston is co-founder and CEO of Starcloud , a company building data centers in space to solve AI's power crisis. Starcloud has already launched the first NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit and is partnering with cloud providers like Crusoe to scale orbital computing infrastructure. As AI demand accelerates, data centers are running into a new bottleneck: access to reliable, affordable power. Grid...

Kurt Terrani is CEO of Standard Nuclear , a company focused on a part of nuclear energy that gets far less attention than reactor designs but can become the true bottleneck: fuel. In this episode, Kurt provides a nuclear fuels 101, walking through the front end of the fuel cycle from uranium processing and enrichment to fabrication. He explains in plain terms what makes TRISO fuel different, why i...

Aleks Gampel is COO and Co-founder at Cuby , a company rethinking how homes are built in the middle of a nationwide housing crisis. The cost of housing has soared while construction productivity has barely budged in decades, and today’s homes are still built through slow, wasteful, and carbon-intensive processes that aren’t designed for escalating climate risks. Instead of shipping prefab boxes ac...

Carrie von Muench is the COO and Co-Founder of Pacific Fusion , a company building the first pulser-driven inertial fusion system designed for net facility gain. Fusion has long promised limitless, carbon-free, dispatchable power, but only recently have breakthroughs—from ignition at the National Ignition Facility to major advances at Sandia and new high-efficiency pulse-power technology—shifted f...

Alex Modon is CEO and Co-founder of Unlimited Industries , a company transforming infrastructure development through AI-driven automation. Unlimited tackles one of the biggest bottlenecks in climate and industrial innovation: the outdated, risk-averse world of engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC). Traditional EPCs are often misaligned with the needs of first-of-a-kind projects. Unlimit...

Trey Lauderdale is the CEO and Founder of Atomic Canyon , a company bringing artificial intelligence into the nuclear energy sector. Atomic Canyon recently deployed the first commercial on-site generative AI system at a U.S. nuclear facility. While AI’s growth is creating massive demand for reliable, clean baseload power, Atomic Canyon explores the reverse question: does nuclear need AI just as mu...

Boris Sofman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bedrock Robotics , a company turning existing construction equipment into fully autonomous fleets through same-day hardware upfits. With over $80 million in funding from Eclipse, 8VC, NVIDIA Ventures, and former Waymo CEO John Krafcik, Bedrock is tackling a major bottleneck in the global economy: a massive construction labor shortage just as demand for dat...

Chase Lochmiller is the CEO and co-founder of Crusoe. If you’re a regular listener, Crusoe isn’t new to the pod. This summer, Cody sat down with Chase’s Co-founder and COO, Cully Cavness , during our live event in Austin. This latest episode was recorded live at the inaugural MCJ Summit in San Francisco at the beautiful Autodesk Gallery. Cody and Chase dive into how Crusoe is building data centers...

Juliann Edwards is Chief Development Officer at The Nuclear Company . The United States has 93 operating nuclear reactors providing about 20% of the nation’s electricity. After decades without new builds, Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia finally came online—despite cost overruns and delays that nearly derailed the project. Meanwhile, China has dozens of reactors under construction and is on pace to...

Steve Oldham is CEO of Captura . Captura develops Direct Ocean Capture (DOC) technology that removes CO₂ from seawater, triggering the ocean to draw more CO₂ from the air to rebalance. With CO₂ concentrations ~150× higher in seawater than air, Captura’s closed-loop process uses electrodialysis to create acid and base on site—no added chemicals, no waste—and can run largely on off-peak renewable en...

Ben Lamm is CEO and Co-founder of Colossal Biosciences , the world’s first de-extinction company. Colossal has raised more than $400 million at a valuation north of $10 billion to bring back extinct species using synthetic biology and genetic engineering. Just this year, the company unveiled the first dire wolves born in 12,000 years, created woolly mice with mammoth-like fur, and remains on track...

Dr. Stephen Beaton is Co-founder and CEO of Circularity Fuels , which develops compact reactors that turn waste carbon streams into high-value fuels and chemicals. Rather than compete with fossil fuels from the start, Stephen identified high-purity methane for lab-grown diamonds as a beachhead market—where Circularity’s product is 80–90% cheaper than incumbents while proving the core technology ne...

Marc Tarpenning is Co-founder of Tesla and a venture partner at Spero Ventures . In 2003, Marc and Martin Eberhard saw two signals: GM killed its beloved EV1, and Californians snapped up Toyota’s Prius despite its compromises. They realized the market was ready for an electric car that was better than gas, not worse. Their breakthrough: 7,000 off-the-shelf laptop batteries powering a sports car th...

Dr. Susan Hubbard is Deputy Director for Science and Technology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory , the largest of the U.S. Department of Energy’s multi-program science and energy labs. With more than 7,000 scientists and engineers, Oak Ridge is advancing innovation across nuclear energy, grid resilience, AI, quantum computing, isotopes, and advanced manufacturing. In this episode, Susan shares how...

Mitch Lee , CEO of Arc Boat Company , is bringing the Tesla playbook to boating. Arc’s quiet, software-powered electric boats—like the sold-out Arc Sport—deliver cleaner rides, zero fumes, and customizable wave settings. Mitch shares why electric makes more sense on water than land, how dockside charging already works, and why Arc builds full boats instead of motors. With $100M raised and an expan...

Katherine Boyle and Erin Price-Wright are General Partners at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) , leading the firm's American Dynamism practice. This episode explores how their team invests in companies tackling national imperatives—ranging from defense and manufacturing to energy and critical infrastructure. Katherine shares how American Dynamism emerged from portfolio patterns at a16z, while Erin descr...

Dr. Michael Mann is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as Director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, and Vice Provost for Climate Science Action and Policy. Dr. Mann first entered the public consciousness in the late 1990s with his "hockey stick graph," a reconstruction of Earth’s cl...

Dr. Mark Jacobson is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Atmosphere Energy Program at Stanford University, where he’s been one of the most vocal advocates for powering the world entirely with wind, water, and solar energy. No nuclear, no carbon capture, no fossil fuels of any kind. His research team has created 100% renewable energy roadmaps for all 50 U.S. state...

Suvi Sharma is the CEO and Co-Founder at SOLARCYCLE .  SOLARCYCLE is an emerging leader in the nascent category of solar panel recycling. The astounding ramp of solar panels deployed across the world rivals almost any technology adoption curve in history, and it's far from over. There were only five gigawatts of solar deployed globally between 2000 and 2005. By the end of 2025, a mere 20 years lat...