The Ledger, every show

“It's a lethality mirage and a lethality mirage is basically, you know, everyone else's impression of you is that you are a 10 out of 10 lethal. So they absolutely not going to fuck with you. And then maybe you lose one small conflict and someone goes, well, ho…”

“But if we have one conflict with China where we expand most of our ballistics inventory, We might not be able to remake it for like five years. Then we're basically standing around, you know, with our hands tied behind our backs.”

“90% of the solar panels in the country are being made in China by basically slave labor where millions of minority and immigrant women are being chemically castrated every year and forced into servitude.”

“We just have to last till about 2037, 20 42, and then kind of overnight China's working population will cut in half, and then they can try again in another thousand years. So that will put a lot of pressure in our opinion on Xi to actually do something, becaus…”

“I think the answer is yes. I think the answer is yes. I would take that bet. I think they're selling, you know, dollars for 18 cents.”

“I think in general, it's a terrible idea, and the main reason is, is like, you want to run a factory, you gotta be leading the people, and you gotta have that credibility, and no master machinist or welder is gonna respect a kid who's got a suit and a Harvard …”

“And we no longer make CNC machines in the US.”

“We shipped the Ukrainians what we thought was three years of inventory of stinger and javelin missiles, which are shoulder mounted, really cheap missiles that can take out a tank or something. So for providing that to a human force in Taiwan or the Ukraine, it…”

“In reality, I think we're about a three out of 10 and the real danger comes when, you know, a great power competitor finds out before you find out that you're actually a three out of 10.”

“And the only way to replace that skill in my mind is basically high levels of automation to kind of make those jobs simpler so that a new workforce can ramp up in a month.”

“I just think people forget manufacturing is this like real brute force equation where I think you just have to pick like Four to five companies and let them have at it at a scale that's never been seen before and let them figure it out.”

“As of right now, if you look at, like, the PlayStation five as a product, like, that is effectively, I would say, 90% of fully automated production line, and, like, writ large across the board, people really miss this, and I think it's, like, strategic CCP com…”

“We don't even make the CapEx that goes into the factories in the US anymore. Like it's all German, South Korean, Japanese or whatever, and they're controlled products.”

“Even the basics, like some of the exquisite stuff can only be made in a certain state to feed the defense ecosystem because all the other states banned it or like they're literally in facilities that got certified 50 years ago and you could like, you literally…”

“I think alongside that certain areas of the government where there's a lot of immature companies, they're going to spend the next year making eight bets and seeing how it plays out. And in certain other areas, I think in the next two years, what you're going t…”

“Otherwise it's just the playing field is so uneven that no amount of technology can catch up to like the China cost.”

“My thesis on this is because of the one child policy is going to really drop off China's population very quickly at a certain period of time. It creates this forcing function where in my opinion that the Taiwan scenario is more likely to happen because if they…”

“I think that unless it goes hot in 28 is going to be 10 to 15 years. And as long as we can Hold them off there. Then their population drops off and we're good for another 300 years. Like that's kind of how I view the equation.”

“We produced a grand total of five ships last year.”

“And that's where we think automation has the highest leverage, not to replace people, but to really give the new workforce 10 times productivity, because we just don't have the people in America anymore to build these, you know, critical hardware for our custo…”

“As well as in the munitions categories where there's not much innovation to be done, but you just need to be able to produce a lot very fast, and we just don't have that capability in the U.S. Anymore.”

“I don't think there's going to be more SpaceX's. I don't think there's going to be more Andrews, you know, of like new defense primes or neo primes, and I don't think there's going to be more than a handful of large industrials companies.”

“When you disconnect production from design, you get very bad at design.”

“I mean, we're talking about like a quantum shipbuilding of like, I think it's 1700 last year of commercial and military vessels versus five.”

“The second thing is, I think it'll generate a bunch of great acquisitions for us. If any of them grow too fast in the category that we're going to enter, we have this phrase internally, which is we're either going to scoop them up, or we're going to bonk them.”

“So we're the only company that's actually generating labeled data that you can then train models around for advanced manufacturing in the US.”

“Designed and launched the actual building and all the construction in three months, and then sat around waiting for permits and energy for six to nine months and probably had to put more documentation together to convince Southern California Edison to give me …”

“And I think the most important thing is policies where just force more demand onshore, which is either tariffs, or if you're getting paid by the DOD or the federal government for a product, your entire supply chain should be onshore, and then let capitalism fi…”

“Because American manufacturing is largely regulated in ITAR, there is no training data on the internet. So the, one of the reasons why our internal models actually work for manufacturing, you know, machine learning models is because we're the only ones with th…”

“I think really what you're seeing in Europe is two warring tribes. One is the people that You know, set their energy policy based off the poor advice of a 14 year old Swedish girl and gave all the leverage to Russian oil and gas. And then you've got your kind …”

“The only way for Americans to be globally competitive with China is Literally just a labor equation, right? If we want to keep high wages in America, but compete globally, then we have to have high wage people that are using software and robotics to get a 10 X…”

“Large vertically integrated companies have two options. One is basically you do the whole thing and you win and you're like TSMC or like Tesla big, or you like die getting there. And there's no kind of halfway mark.”

“The way I would underwrite deep tech is basically like series B is the biggest risk point because you're starting to tip real money at the company. C and D is like what's already working. It's a fucking near monopoly. C to A is like, well, it's insane. And you…”

“And we are never going to be like fully, fully automated. Cause like Tesla tried to do this. SpaceX tried to do this. It's just like a bad idea. Cause you build this inflexible system. It's just super brittle.”

“From a workforce and training piece, we can train and onboard them in 20 to 30 days from their Home Depot, their bus driver, literally any background.”

“We are 20 or 30 years away from the reserve currency flipping, which happens roughly every a 120 years.”

“I think we're probably going to see some like bruised brews return profiles in the next two years of, you know, people flooding capital into companies that aren't a platform on a model product company, but the opportunity is still there.”

“Cause the other thing about deep tech is there is no iteration, honestly. Software companies, you can raise a couple million bucks, have an idea, test an idea, ship something new in four weeks. Whoops. Customer base sucks. Pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot. Th…”

“One of the reasons why the best companies have founded directly after recession has nothing to do with like pricing. It's just that you get people like Airbnb or Travis from Uber where they're just like, I have no other option. So my pain threshold is stupidly…”

“And to do the amount of hiring, scaling, and execution that we need to do is like, 40% chance it works, 60% we're having this conversation in like 18 months, and like, company, company no longer works.”

“Unless we solve this problem, I think the country and, you know, our way of life is, is a six existential risk.”

“About a year ago, the government had to issue an RFQ for some of the parts on the B to not just to replace the parts, but because no one, you know, the guy that designed it or engineered it retired and they didn't have it documented anywhere. Like there's lite…”

“If you look at the DOD stats, more than 50% of the F-sixteans are grounded, and it's mostly because they can't maintain them, and it's mostly because they can't get parts, and what ends up happening is they end up cannibalizing other planes for parts, and that…”

“Culturally, basically the entire industry is tooled up around 50% of our promises we break all the time.”

“In reality, we're probably so far away from doing that, that if we have one conflict with China, where we expand most of our ballistics inventory, we might not be able to remake it for like five years.”

“There are like less than 50 GPS satellites, and all of those can be shot out of the air pretty easily, and all that's preventing, you know, some adversary doing that and basically collapsing Western civilization in one fell swoop, taking out, you know, less th…”

“It's not a capital problem. It's a, where are the people that are going to go engineer that system and then run that system? And the re the reality is they don't exist.”

“You know, you can't go and hire 20,000 people or even a thousand people that know how to go and execute that construction, how to go engineer that factory, how to go run that factory. They just simply don't exist.”