Relentless
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.
00:26:59 · Sam D'Amico, Aaron Slodov
[00:26:59] S0: do it the best. [00:26:59] S1: Exactly. So this this is kind of like the the way I think about this is like, yeah, Elon is very, like, enamored by how good they are at this because we we aren't doing the same. Right? Like, we don't have, we don't have that same level of urgency. Right? And financialization of everything has really, driven us to chase, you know, the higher levels of this. And I think that where... Don't necessarily disagree with the electric stack, but I think in a lot of my work, right, we work with a lot of the largest, like, OEMs and manufacturers on the planet. And it's it's a constant like whack a mole game of where do you want to do your final assembly of the thing. And then it's kind of like now I need to assemble, you know, a bill of materials of what's going into this. And then I have to go like build the supply chain and chase all those components around so that I can assemble it efficiently somewhere. And all of the, like, everything that's, you know, kind of, like, ramping to a higher level of technology requires all these components that we have just, you know, totally shit the bed on hands down everywhere. And so my job now at Atomic is finding, right, like all of these places where the lower level componentry like metals and plastics have to chase the electric stack components around to get assembled somewhere else. So... [00:28:34] S0: I've seen delays on on modules where it's like we we need the enclosure for our battery pack was a was a long lead time versus the welding of the cells, which is like crazy.
00:28:34 · Sam D'Amico, Aaron Slodov
[00:28:34] S0: I've seen delays on on modules where it's like we we need the enclosure for our battery pack was a was a long lead time versus the welding of the cells, which is like crazy. [00:28:43] S1: Yeah. And like in in cars, the two longest lead time single components on a car are the bumper and, like where your doors close into the car, the sheet metal piece, those come out of molds. So one comes out of a sheet metal stamping die and the, you know, the bumper is injection molded. There were there were stories, back in the early days of Tesla of them getting their bumper molds cut in Japan and flying them to California on seven forty seven's just to cut two weeks off of like production time. If that gives you an indication of just like the lower level components and how urgent they are right to like get something final assembled somewhere. So, yeah, I mean it's like supply chains are a game of whack a mole because of the the way we've constructed them like this, and we are to kind of blame for that because we built them intentionally that way.