Relentless
00:19:00 · Sam D'Amico, Ty Morse
And I I said this earlier, it's like, it's incredibly important to tie the... Like the factory and the engineers need to basically be in sync. And this is the superpower that companies like BYD bring to bear. Like, literally the factory and the engineering office are like in the same facility in most cases. Like, maybe it's a couple buildings away, but it's not it's not across town. [00:19:21] S2: It's in the same campus.
00:19:22 · Sam D'Amico
[00:19:22] S0: It's in the same campus. And there's all of that tacit knowledge of like, yeah, can't really design it that way because this doesn't fit kind of thing. Well, that's like immediately short circuited and the context is already present. And in The US we decided, oh, you got to, like, go do a bake off with a bunch of governors and, like, I mean, you're gonna watch me, you know, be a hypocrite on this whenever I I open a US factory at some point. But it's like, okay, I gotta go, I gotta go... I'm trying to make a stereotypical Republican governor name, but basically, like, I gotta base... I gotta basically, like, go to some red state, tell them how much I love Donald Trump, you know, all this other stuff. And then I get my tax breaks, and I get my free campus, and I get all this stuff. Meanwhile, my engineers are over in Hipsterville in California, and they don't wanna move over there. They don't wanna move to, you know, real Midwestern small town that I am re... Trademark re industrializing. And so this is actually a... I think this is actually a problem. So it's like, think there's like two solutions. One of which is like, we should convince some smart engineers to go move to move to move to these actually kind of awesome Midwestern towns in Ohio. And like, if we can basically rebuild those, it's like, they're gonna be great places to live for smart people because those smart people lived there before. Like, these were walkable communities with, like, you know, with great amenities and, like... And and again, the engineers were next to the factory. The flip side is, like, where would I do it today? Well, where are the smartest engineers on the planet right now? The Bay Area. So you should put it in the Bay Area. How do you do that? Well, there's a guy who successfully expanded a factory in the Bay Area by putting a tent in the parking lot because that was the only way you can get around all the permit constraints and all this other stuff of like needing... I need to... You need to expand the facility in Fremont. So I think that basically the way I'm approaching it from my perspective is the the YIMBY movement was a good start for like, let's unlock housing production to like make it so it's actually affordable to live in places like the... In the most popular places to live on the planet.
00:21:18 · Sam D'Amico, Ty Morse
But there's going to need to be an industrial movement that is kind of its counterpart. If we want to be able to like, you know, make this stuff work and that that movement is gonna need to be kind of like a, yeah, it's okay to build a factory now. And the contrarian take is that like, okay, we basically built up scaffolding of like environmental laws from the sixties onward that have basically made it illegal to do stuff. I'll give you an example of, like, California bit by bit has restricted what I would basically call chemistry at, like, a foundational level where it's, like, basically illegal to do chemistry with metal. And if it's illegal to do chemistry with metals, you can't build anything with the electric stack because fundamentally electric stack, that's batteries. Also, if you wanna coat any metal, like, you wanna anodize anything, yeah, good luck. You gotta do that in... You gotta do that over in Reno. Can [00:22:05] S2: you explain what you mean by California made chemistry with metals illegal?
00:22:08 · Sam D'Amico
[00:22:08] S0: Yeah. So, basically, California was an industrial superpower. We built, like, I don't know, what, like half the world's battleships at one point. We built like the like Kaiser shipyards. Like, we had all this awesome stuff going on. Also, whole facility, by the way, like this was all... This is the center of like manufacturing of like like the bridge superstructures for aircraft carriers were built like right around here and stuff like that. Awesome, awesome, you know, industrial, you know, industrial spot. But obviously, if you do chemistry with metal, it does cause pollution. And so, there are sites throughout the Bay Area, and this is like within human memory, that have like trichloroethylene contamination. Like the Google campus, there are, I think, Teflon barriers below some of the buildings because essentially they're like the like the polluted pollution from both metal, like metalworking and semiconductor production. Because we also used to have tons of fab... All the... Of the fabs were here too. And effectively, that that pollution is still with us today. And you see controversies ranging from, like, Hunters Point hasn't put new housing in where the old naval shipyard because they keep finding, like, little radium painted, markers that were, like, on, like, if you worked on an aircraft carrier at night, you'd basically put these little glowing green dots on you so that you don't get hit by, you know, you know, like a plane landing or whatever. They go find one of these and then, like, that shuts down housing production for, five years. And so... But basically because of the past memory of, like, you know, I would argue kind of reckless environmental stuff. We put in a bunch of scaffolding of new laws, and these were all well intentioned and we built them over many years, but now it's effectively illegal to do chemistry with metal. And so... And if you... And and so that seemed fine, you know, back, you know, you know, back into the nineties and two thousands. It's like, hey, we're we're we're... There still was consumer electronics manufacturing in the Bay Area. Like, the... Like, Google Glass, for instance, was like a consumer device manufactured in California, they had a flex that said, they they have they have flex on the box.
00:24:06 · Sam D'Amico
Was like, designed by Google assembled in California to basically tell Apple like, you know, you know, we know and I've been in that factory. It was pretty cool to actually see an American factory building the most advanced consumer electronics device at the time and they did a good job. But where were the plastics injection molded? I think it was China. Yeah. Where were, where were the flex circuits made? I think that... Yeah. Like, it was... It's like you think of like... You think of all the core components. Where was I going for camera module manufacturing? Yantai, China. So, like, you could already see the component, the the most advanced pieces of that were getting pulled out. Where were the chips packaged? Probably Malaysia. And so we built these global supply chains over the years for, you know, again, well in touch with reasons, but, then when the EV revolution hit, when like, basically it became very obvious that like everything will be built like a smartphone. Everything will be with the electric stack. It'll be like, it doesn't matter if it's an iPhone or a BYD Han EV or a, or even, like, most of the, like, actuators and stuff in, like, Starship. You could argue Starship is, like, much more an electric vehicle than any rocket prior to it. And so all of these things use the electric stack. And California really prides itself on being in the forefront of... Well, it wasn't the forefront of the EV revolution. It wasn't the forefront of the solar revolution. It was like like all of these technologies were kind of, like, really scaled here. And we've like built scaffolding of environmental laws over the past fifty years that have effectively banned us being able to compete at a vertically integrated level, with these techno... Like on these technologies despite, you know, a lot of the best engineers in these technologies being here.
00:25:42 · Ty Morse, Aaron Slodov, Sam D'Amico
[00:25:42] S2: Aaron, the first, like, two factories, I believe, with Tesla were here in The United States. And then when Elon went to China, the Shanghai factory was, like, the fastest ramp of any factory that he'd ever built. And I remember him saying that the Chinese were just significantly better Mhmm. At basically producing these cars in that factory. Like, that factory is just fundamentally more efficient. So what does that kind of say to you, and, like, how do you think about that? [00:26:06] S1: I mean, you can't refute it, really. The the way that I think about that is, you hear him kind of talking in most of his appearances about manufacturing about, you know, just, like, the level of urgency and seriousness that they have about what they do. And, you know, that's honestly kind of like a moral dilemma in some ways for for Americans because we we really like to... You know, with, like, environmental laws like this, these are all reactionary snapshots of something that happened in time, and we don't revisit those things. And we don't do it in, a more proactive way. It's everything is always reactive, And this is like And [00:26:52] S0: it's also how our legal system works too. [00:26:53] S1: Exactly. Yeah. Like Americans are they don't really do anything until they have to. And then we [00:26:59] S0: do it the best.