Relentless
01:07:55 · Ty Morse, Aaron Slodov, Sam D'Amico
[01:07:55] S2: Elon has mentioned that he basically believes that humanoids are going to be the biggest product ever created. How do you guys think the advent of humanoids is going to shift the balance of power and our ability to be the manufacturing powerhouse of the world? [01:08:09] S1: So I'm gonna just... I'm gonna put myself in in Elon's brain for a minute here. I don't [01:08:14] S0: wanna be there. [01:08:14] S1: I I mean, it's... In in... If you just go back to the the economic decision, right, and kind of like the urgency level, it is the only place that you can do this right now. Right? We don't have the end to end supply chains to to do that here now. So the worry that I have is that if I'm in Elon's brain and I think that getting, like, v one point o of a massive, like, Optimus, right, where it's, like, a 100,000 of these things, does that actually set up this kind of training ground where they can start learning and then self perpetuate and start replicating, basically. Whoever gets to that point first, it's game over. So do we want to hand all that over to China because they can do it? Because if we do, it's probably not a good decision. [01:09:08] S2: Yeah. And I think Elon has specifically talked about basically the humanoid supply chain doesn't exist, and so they're rebuilding it from scratch. Yeah.
01:09:08 · Ty Morse, Aaron Slodov
[01:09:08] S2: Yeah. And I think Elon has specifically talked about basically the humanoid supply chain doesn't exist, and so they're rebuilding it from scratch. Yeah. [01:09:16] S1: It's... I mean, it's a it's a really challenging place to be in because if you if you take all these language models, and other foundational models that are being architected right now, they need they need better scope. Atoms in... This is me talking now out of Elon, right? But, like, yeah. The world of atoms is the last frontier of of AI. And, yeah, I mean, like, we've seen a lot of really cool robot companies with, like, folding laundry and stuff, but, I I do think that this is a really critical decision, if not even maybe more critical than drone production at mass scale too. So, I I don't think it's a good place to to be right now.
01:09:16 · Aaron Slodov, Sam D'Amico
[01:09:16] S1: It's... I mean, it's a it's a really challenging place to be in because if you if you take all these language models, and other foundational models that are being architected right now, they need they need better scope. Atoms in... This is me talking now out of Elon, right? But, like, yeah. The world of atoms is the last frontier of of AI. And, yeah, I mean, like, we've seen a lot of really cool robot companies with, like, folding laundry and stuff, but, I I do think that this is a really critical decision, if not even maybe more critical than drone production at mass scale too. So, I I don't think it's a good place to to be right now. [01:10:00] S0: And I I would also argue that, like, we are seeing with the data center build out immense opportunity to, like, onshore the electric stack, onshore advanced chips, like all this other stuff. And we've excluded these products from the tariffs because there's a cross pressure of, well, if we tariffed it, we just build the data centers in Canada and Mexico and, like, you know, or in space or whatever. And so we literally are sitting on an opportunity to like pull in a bunch of capabilities. And I think it's kind of like the the battle between the invisible hand and like the great man theory is like the way to kind of think way to kind of think about it where it's like, I'm maybe... I I I'm not... I'm less of a believer in the great man theory and more in a belief that like you can just white knuckle shit and you should just do it.
01:10:00 · Sam D'Amico, Aaron Slodov
[01:10:00] S0: And I I would also argue that, like, we are seeing with the data center build out immense opportunity to, like, onshore the electric stack, onshore advanced chips, like all this other stuff. And we've excluded these products from the tariffs because there's a cross pressure of, well, if we tariffed it, we just build the data centers in Canada and Mexico and, like, you know, or in space or whatever. And so we literally are sitting on an opportunity to like pull in a bunch of capabilities. And I think it's kind of like the the battle between the invisible hand and like the great man theory is like the way to kind of think way to kind of think about it where it's like, I'm maybe... I I I'm not... I'm less of a believer in the great man theory and more in a belief that like you can just white knuckle shit and you should just do it. [01:10:43] S1: Yeah. I mean like if somebody came over here and gave each of us $10,000,000,000 to do something, it would be [01:10:48] S0: Yeah. We'd just do it. [01:10:49] S1: It would be amazing. [01:10:50] S0: Yeah. We'd just do it. [01:10:51] S1: Be like, oh, there's two more Elon.
01:10:52 · Sam D'Amico
[01:10:52] S0: But the but but the invisible hand ver... Yeah. The invisible the invisible hand versus just white knuckling it. Yeah. Know, it's like it's I think the I think the the situation here. So, yeah, I would, and and then the other piece is like, where are the capital markets right now? It's like the incentives are to build a software company. The incentives are like... And so and so... And it's weird because I have a strong theory that, you know, as someone who's written hundreds of thousands of lines of software over the past six months, thanks to these AI models, it's not slop, swear. Basically, like, we're now seeing the situation of, like, where's the physical moats? It's like, the fact that I've got a better temperature sensor on my stove than everyone else means that like, oh, I can... Like, I've got the first layer of autonomy for service cooking salt. And then you can start layering on this other stuff. It's like, am I really an energy storage battery company? I'm like, yeah. I guess that's true. But like, what are we actually doing here? And it's like, we're building the robot. Like, people stop calling robots robots when they work. And I think that basically The US is actually squandering some interesting opportunities even ahead of the humanoid side of like, well, why aren't we building the data center racks here? Why aren't we doing all this other stuff? We've essentially decided that that's not interesting, and it's not critical. And maybe the only thing that is interesting and critical is like low volume defense stuff. And thus, we don't have these capabilities. And then it's like... And then who's getting the wealth of reinforcement learning knowledge from building stuff? And it's, you know, it's it's it's the folks actually building the humanoid actuators for people like Optimus and and and Figure and all these other guys, and they're not here. So...
01:12:29 · Ty Morse, Aaron Slodov, Sam D'Amico
[01:12:29] S2: Let's end on Apple has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the past, you know, fifteen, twenty years basically building out the entire supply chain in China. How do we, as a nation, become comparatively competitive against that backdrop? [01:12:43] S1: So I will I will caveat that with... It wasn't really a forced error in some ways to to do that. They actually they did try to do some of it here. [01:12:56] S0: They did it here in the eighties. [01:12:58] S1: Yeah. And they they kind of had to do what they did, which is very unfortunate. And it's because of the systemic problems that we architected around making it easy for them to do what they wanted to do here. So, again, I think a huge amount of this will ultimately come down to, you know, good industrial policy. And I think, unfortunately, you can't just, like, unwind what they did. Right? Like, they did it. They have, all of the process and tacit knowledge behind that. And the question is, you know, at this point, do do we wanna answer back somehow? And, like, what form is that going to take? And how are we executing on it?