Relentless
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?
01:13:48 · Sam D'Amico
[01:13:48] S0: And I would say a big part of the story too is, American... Let's call it American policy minds. I think as you go west, you're more mysterious and unknowable to DC. So if you go to California, they think we're a bunch of wackos and hippies. But if you go to but if you go to if you go to China, it's like unknowable. You think of like a totalitarian, like, you know, monolith, even though it's like each individual city is run totally differently by different, like, different different people and like it's a it's a very... It's much more diverse place than people think. And so I think the like not understanding how China works is a systemic problem both in DC and for Western technologists as well. Like, you could argue that, like, one of Elon's biggest assets is that he actually understands how China works. He understands how to manufacture stuff at scale in China. And, like, I would also argue that a lot of people, and I don't wanna call out, you know, some of our friends and stuff like that, but basically it's like people being like, well, I don't need to learn that because they're bad or something like that. And it's like, China's an amazing place with a lot of great people, and you can learn how to make make stuff at scale there. And I would strongly encourage people to go visit and like, you know, learn learn how this stuff works because it's like, I don't think it... I think people... It hasn't dawned on enough people how America is not the center of the known universe for technology in the physical world anymore. Now, think we still are in the digital world, but in the physical world, that's not the case. And there is like core technologies and ways of doing things and like the the the idea of like your engineers are next to your manufacturing line. Like, lot of this stuff is like, we kind of talk about it in the abstract and kind of like the the Gundo sort of context. And like, obviously, there's well intentioned people trying to do this in The United States, but the scale of the operation and the like understanding of how stuff works, it's like, in some sense, it's like, I just strongly encourage people who, like, want to learn how to build advanced stuff to, like, go there and build advanced stuff there. Absorb the tacit knowledge that is, you know, it's very hard to gain that tacit knowledge in The United States.