This week Chris sits down with Adam Blake, Co-founder and CEO of Mavria. Adam spent a little more than a year leading the DOGE team inside the Department of Energy. He has been a private person for 15 years, and last week he broke his silence with a tweet that got over 2 million views.
Chris has known Adam since 2004. They met shortly after Chris arrived at TCU, and the school paper named Adam Entrepreneur of the Year for the real estate he was buying around campus. One lunch with him at a Chipotle changed the trajectory of Chris' life.
Adam went on to build a commercial solar company that did around 2,000 projects across 17 states, then sold a software company to Vista Equity Partners. In early 2025 a friend called about DOGE. Within about a week he was on a plane to DC, and two weeks after that he was sitting in the West Wing with Elon Musk and the Secretary of Energy.
The executive order that set a goal of three new nuclear reactors going critical by July 4th, 2026 put his team in charge of making it happen. Everyone thought it was impossible. It got done. Along the way he got death threats over an anonymous quote that the chairman of the NRC later denied under oath.
Now he is building Mavria with two of the people who were in those rooms with him, backed by a $30M pre-seed from a single investor. His view is simple. AI is power, and America has to build a lot more of it.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(01:18) Why He Decided to Speak Publicly Now
(04:37) From Campus Real Estate to Brightergy to Zego
(09:03) The Week That Took Him From Coronado to the West Wing
(13:02) What DOGE Was Actually There to Do
(19:52) Inside the DOGE Team, Working Under Elon
(24:53) Why He Calls Washington the Hunger Games
(28:08) The Tijuana Sewage Crisis Nobody Has Fixed
(31:45) Three New Reactors by July 4, 2026
(35:02) Death Threats Over a Story That Was Never True
(41:52) Why Fear Is Not a Strategy on AI
(49:09) Why It Takes a Decade to Plug Into the Grid
(55:30) Winning Back Public Trust on Data Centers
(1:02:29) Spec Builds, Modular Factories, Smaller Data Centers
(1:08:52) Why Big Tech Should Behave Like a Nation State
(1:14:15) Inside Mavria, His New Infrastructure Company
(1:19:45) Loving the Country More, Hating Politics More
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