Relentless
00:14:01 · Aaron Slodov, Sam D'Amico, Ty Morse
[00:14:01] S1: Yeah. It's it's a... If you think about it like a stateful system, it's impossible to observe until you have high throughput, which is mass production, basically. So... [00:14:11] S0: And who's gonna fund you for that? [00:14:12] S1: Exactly. It's it's very hard to understand all the parameters basically until you do it. So that's why, you know, the Chinese machine is so efficient because they are just gathering more and more tribal knowledge and it's gonna snowball out of control, right, until basically, like, we'll get to this later, but the humanoid thing is an insane problem, if it actually plays out. [00:14:38] S2: What do you mean by that?
00:14:39 · Aaron Slodov
[00:14:39] S1: Well, we'll get there. We'll get there. But my like, basically, the whole the whole purpose and MO of re industrialized, right, is that, I would prefer if we could preserve as much of that knowledge as we can, encapsulate it, and then rebuild it here. Right? And be able to have these kind of like reinforcement feedback loops because we're building better brains and like compute. And it's, in my opinion, it's not necessarily that like we need to live in a unipolar world with a single industrial superpower, but like there has to be another option. And I also... I don't believe that, like, autarky is a necessity. Right? Like, you can't... Trade is actually a good thing. However, when you do actually have an adversary on the world stage, you you cannot continually empower them. So part part of my, you know, ethos about this is that we have insanely deep capital markets. Like, we have the talent. Right? And it's just... This is where it comes down to a lot of people criticize this in terms of, like, you know, communist, like, central planning, basically, where you need, you... You're going to need this kind of capacity one way or another for for medicine, for electronics, right, chips, all of this kind of stuff. We scrambled to to cover like EV supply chains and chips really fast because those were you know critical at that time and it really just turns out that it's all it's all critical. If you forget how to make anything it's bad, right? So ultimately my my whole worldview is that like the toolbox is here. We need we need the people to actually like do it while we're still kind of, you know, working with China and other industrialized nations to produce the things that we want to build.
00:16:36 · Ty Morse
[00:16:36] S2: And Sam, same kind of question of with this massive decline, do you think like, a, it's reversible and how do we do that? And then if you had a $100,000,000 to invest in a factory today, where would you decide to put it and why?
00:16:49 · Sam D'Amico
[00:16:49] S0: That's the great set of questions. So first thing is, is this reversible? I think there's a silver lining to like some of the stuff when... Actually, I'll disagree with your point of like it's all important. It's, I think you can distill kind of all of the next set of devices into what I would call, like, the electric stack. And so this is... And and if you want a 200 page reading on this, Packy and I put together a really long article about the electric slide, but basically it's lithium ion batteries, power electronics, embedded compute, and then electromagnetics. And I would also add a fifth column, which is like computer vision hardware. So like I've I've worked on camera modules and image sensors and stuff like that. So like... But basically anything from a Waymo to a robot to a stove of all things, you can use those those those technologies and actually make stuff stuff happen. And so, basically, the idea is like pick devices that kind of give you... Let you exercise all of those key, like those four to five key muscles. Make sure there's a portfolio of them, some like portfolio of them that you can then selectively onshore and that... And make sure the volumes are high enough that you can get at least one of every process machine needed in that entire supply chain onshore and at a 100% capacity. Because the problem is, like, if if if I need, five different types of injection molding machines and I'm using each one of them for, like, you know, 10,000 parts a year, well, I'm not gonna be able to fund those. Like, it's not gonna... It's not... It's not gonna actually make sense. The flip side is, like, the only industrialist in The United States that has actually successfully done this recently, Well, one, he doesn't share it, does it in his own ecosystem. But two, but two, he actually can bring the volume to bear to actually go and do this. Like Starlink has enough, enough customers that they can fully do a lights out manufacturing line for that, that, that system, and it makes financial sense to do so. That said, how did he actually do it onshore at the beginning? It was like pandemic era, probably a pain in the butt to go to Vietnam or China or something like that to go and do this. They went and did it in the parking lot in in LA. And I think that goes back to where I... Where I put my factory. And it's like, it's incredibly important.
00:19:00 · Sam D'Amico, Ty Morse
And I I said this earlier, it's like, it's incredibly important to tie the... Like the factory and the engineers need to basically be in sync. And this is the superpower that companies like BYD bring to bear. Like, literally the factory and the engineering office are like in the same facility in most cases. Like, maybe it's a couple buildings away, but it's not it's not across town. [00:19:21] S2: It's in the same campus.
00:19:22 · Sam D'Amico
[00:19:22] S0: It's in the same campus. And there's all of that tacit knowledge of like, yeah, can't really design it that way because this doesn't fit kind of thing. Well, that's like immediately short circuited and the context is already present. And in The US we decided, oh, you got to, like, go do a bake off with a bunch of governors and, like, I mean, you're gonna watch me, you know, be a hypocrite on this whenever I I open a US factory at some point. But it's like, okay, I gotta go, I gotta go... I'm trying to make a stereotypical Republican governor name, but basically, like, I gotta base... I gotta basically, like, go to some red state, tell them how much I love Donald Trump, you know, all this other stuff. And then I get my tax breaks, and I get my free campus, and I get all this stuff. Meanwhile, my engineers are over in Hipsterville in California, and they don't wanna move over there. They don't wanna move to, you know, real Midwestern small town that I am re... Trademark re industrializing. And so this is actually a... I think this is actually a problem. So it's like, think there's like two solutions. One of which is like, we should convince some smart engineers to go move to move to move to these actually kind of awesome Midwestern towns in Ohio. And like, if we can basically rebuild those, it's like, they're gonna be great places to live for smart people because those smart people lived there before. Like, these were walkable communities with, like, you know, with great amenities and, like... And and again, the engineers were next to the factory. The flip side is, like, where would I do it today? Well, where are the smartest engineers on the planet right now? The Bay Area. So you should put it in the Bay Area. How do you do that? Well, there's a guy who successfully expanded a factory in the Bay Area by putting a tent in the parking lot because that was the only way you can get around all the permit constraints and all this other stuff of like needing... I need to... You need to expand the facility in Fremont. So I think that basically the way I'm approaching it from my perspective is the the YIMBY movement was a good start for like, let's unlock housing production to like make it so it's actually affordable to live in places like the... In the most popular places to live on the planet.