Relentless
00:56:02 · Sam D'Amico
[00:56:02] S0: know, you work at an advanced engineering facility Yeah. Basically. Right. And you and you... And maybe you're a service tech for robots. Like, that's the that's the, like, the... It's it's a cool job. Actually, is the other point is people misunderstand. It's like factories like this were like emitting pollution and all their stuff because like that's what you did. What does a consumer electronics factory emit? It's like an Amazon warehouse. And by the way, we allow those in our... Like, we have figured out how to streamline permitting for for for stuff that like allows the consumer economy to work. Like, all of that stuff just works as is today. Like, there's no issues. And and because, like, if we got rid of that, there would be a consumer rebellion. And so, you know, where these former factories in literally in the dog patch in San Francisco, well, of them are Amazon warehouses, some of them are cloud kitchens. We're all... We're all all okay with that stuff. And, like, literally a consumer electronics factory, same same industrial profile. And I think this is very misunderstood by kind of the regulatory, like, I think the people who know know, but it's like, this is misunderstood by like the regulatory apparatus, and we have to kind of update the priors there in a in a key way. Because like, could have consumer electronics factories all over the place here. Then the next bottleneck is, well, if you want to employ people making $30 an hour in San Francisco, you need to figure out where the housing is, and you'd have to put some housing here. And if you go to a... So so for instance, like, you walk outside of BYD's headquarters and you you you see all of the vehicles they make, like, you know, in the parking lot or whatever, like, it's showing up in a lineup. It's pretty cool. But directly across high rise housing for the workforce and looks super nice, pretty good amenities, all that sort of stuff. And, like, that is the case across every factory in China. They will basically go and say like, okay, there's a housing development or a dorm or whatever, depending on different levels of, you know, luxury and stuff like that, with the manufacturing facility. And there's only one case I know of of this happening in The US right now that's, like, recent. It's just Starbase.
00:57:55 · Ty Morse
[00:57:55] S2: Yep. And so And I was there, like,
00:57:57 · Sam D'Amico
[00:57:57] S0: probably They're building they're building a mid rise apartment buildings in Starbase. And so I think the level of seriousness is you need to treat this as a full system solve. And the full system solve includes the built environment and and making sure that we streamline that. And we should treat... And and there's actually... We've already have precedents for how to do this in a way that works. It's called like how we've enabled a huge build out of like Amazon warehouses and and, I mean, arguably data centers as well. It's like Amazon warehouses, data centers, and, like, cloud kitchen type stuff. Those have no problem. There's another thing that to also look at that's super important is there's actually a part of The United States that has not de industrialized, and it's the consumer goods economy. It's like your potato chip bag... Like your your bag of potato chips, your Pringles can, your Gillette razor, like, the stuff that you see in CVS and also our food supply chain and stuff like that, you can't really move it very easily. And it automated in the sixties before we had any of the outsourcing boom. And so, like, I I was told by, I was... I think I think Drew Baglino said this on another panel around, but basically, it was like, there's really good talent if you pull them out of the consumer goods industry in advanced manufacturing. And though that talent was a great source for Tesla making battery cells, for instance. And so I think there's things that we we we can look at as examples of like, well, clearly you can build facilities on the scale and operational complexity of a factory in cities like San Francisco today. And it's like, look at Amazon, look at the cloud kitchens, look at all this other stuff. And the second thing is like, where's the talent to staff them? And it's like, well, who's bagging the potato chips? And maybe you can cross train them to actually make chips. I don't know.
00:59:42 · Ty Morse
[00:59:42] S2: Sam, when we were talking off camera, you mentioned something very interesting that I wanna touch on. Does Apple export files? Or if not, what do they export?
00:59:50 · Sam D'Amico
[00:59:50] S0: So there is... There was a picture that was sent or was posted on Twitter, I think, a couple years ago, and it kinda made its rounds around the office when I was at when I was at Facebook, with a company formerly known as Facebook. And it showed United's top... It was like, a conference like that. It showed United's top customers. And the number one customer for United was Apple, and it was like to the tune of like a $100,000,000 or like, it was order of magnitude like a $100,000,000 in basically business... Exclusively business class travel spend that they were, you know, spending on their engineers, getting them getting them to go all over the world. So I would actually argue that what Apple exports is engineering expertise often in person, and they actually bring to bear a lot of the automation hardware, that ends up powering their factories much more than you would expect. Like Foxconn, in many cases, kind of supplies a room that Apple fills and a labor force that that that works than Apple actually, you know, exporting concepts to Foxconn where they then design it. Like, it's much more of a Centimeters model than a... What a contract manufacturer model than a JDM or joint development model than you would think for a lot, especially for their primary programs and stuff like that. So yes, while you're exporting files, the factory has been micromanaged by Apple to such a degree that it is effectively an Apple facility. The other thing is, where do they invent the process steps required to build these products that are so crazy? Like, I'll give an example of, like, I would be so jealous to be able to basically do this sort of, like, this sort of, like, ceramic to to, metal, like, like interface where there's no gap, you know, I'm jealous because I have a product that does something similar and we, we, we have, we have silicone on, on, on the gap like appliances would. But like Apple likely pioneered processes for all of their various, especially cosmetic services at their ID offices in Cupertino. And what I've been told is at those at those offices, which are restricted to even like, you know, it's the inner core of the Apple Brain Trust. They've got copies of like every core process machine that they end up tuning to figure out how to make them work.
01:02:00 · Sam D'Amico, Ty Morse
So it's interesting that like you could think of manufacturing reinforcement learning, but like Apple ends up doing a lot of that core work and kind of building, getting those core weights themselves and then pushing it through a scaling partner. So it's really like, yeah, they're not exporting files, they're exporting engineers. [01:02:18] S2: Google intended to basically reshor consumer electronics with Google Glass and Motorola. What attempts outside of Elon and his companies have been made to basically reshor consumer electronics?