Relentless
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.
00:29:36 · Sam D'Amico
[00:29:36] S0: I mean, you go to BYD and then you have a very integrated campus where it's like, oh, like, they have much of the dependencies of the electric stack all in house in a lot of cases. Now, they they also go to sub suppliers. They also do do all sorts stuff, but like, you have the optionality of being able to go full vertical. And then you see, like, the the... Like, you see what Elon's been doing lately, especially with, Starlink and and and and and stuff like that. And you're like, okay, this guy is trying to go full vertical where he has his own industrial concern. Now, I would argue you need to start from demand and pull everything up because you can't finance this with venture dollars. Like, I I don't think you can... No. Some of our friends have successfully financed large manufacturing concerns with venture dollars, but, but, like, you're... That's not gonna... Like, that's not the way that the capital markets work in The United States. And there's actually... I think one of the other pieces of kind of deindustrialization that people forget is we didn't have national bank branches in, in the, like, you know, like, in in 1900 or whatever, like, when, you know, this facility was built. But if you had a local bank in your town, it could only invest in, like, the the the the crazy people in the town. And so it was a lot actually, in some ways, easier to get capital because the markets weren't as mature. So they're like, I guess we have to invest in, you know, stove guy and injection molding guy because they're the only game in town doing doing stuff that actually can, you know, make me returns. Now, we've replaced some of those systems with ever bigger venture funds that are kind of more like private equity firms, especially at the top level. But, like, I I think that you see, like, what Palmer Luckey doing with Arabora and all sorts of stuff. It's like, there's definitely a reaction to to, like, we we we we forgot how to do the capital market side of this thing. But there's another thing that I I think is really important to just highlight is we're in an AI boom right now. And I think it's like there's an enormous opportunity from the AI boom and people are missing what it is. So the the missing pieces, people think, oh, we can onshore stuff because we can get humanoid robots and, like, it's gonna magically solve these things.
00:31:28 · Sam D'Amico, Aaron Slodov, Ty Morse
It's like, you can just automate the factories, whatever. You know, you know, honestly, that's stupid because you look at what... How Starlink onshore their consumer electronics line into the millions of units, it was a manual production line that they'd later automated. Like Elon's little algorithm or whatever, says the last step is automating. Like, he learned that the hard way because he laid out an automated line at Tesla the wrong way. [00:31:50] S1: And almost killed [00:31:51] S0: the company. And almost killed the company. And so... But the point is, like, you you can actually start manual with final assembly and be totally fine, and this stuff works. So so going back to the AI boom, we're miss... What we're clearly missing. Currently, are building... Like, the hyperscalers are ordering tens of thousands of units of, like, let's call it 3 to $4,000,000 data center racks. And these things have, like, you know, hundreds of GPUs in them in some cases, like a 100 GPUs, some... Something kind of crazy. They've got all of the various pieces. They've got energy storage built in. They've got, like, they've got all of these different, like, they've got advanced power supplies. They've had the full electric stack at the most advanced node. They have all this photonic stuff. They have, like, all of these key technologies, and the demand is there. The... And the demand is they're installing it in The United States. [00:32:46] S1: And... Until until all these states shut it down. [00:32:48] S2: Well, then... And then...