#52 - San Francisco: The Frontier City | Sam D'Amico, Jason Carman, Will O'Brien, Michael LaFramboise, Laurence Allen

0:00Silicon Valley used to be the innovation capital of the world. past 10 years, the city that I grew up next to has kind of changed, and I don't think all for the better. This has always been kind of this like industrial parkland of the United States. It just happened that we got really rich off of enterprise SaaS for the past 20 years. San Francisco very much exemplified the idea of like a frontier city, right? That spirit is still here. There's a lot of really, really great talent, a lot of people that are interested in building really new things. I think there's a lot of undiscovered hardware talent specifically that has kind of been underserved for the last 15 years.

0:26The fact that they're difficult companies to build is exactly why they're good companies to build. It's easier to recruit the best talent to solve a hard problem. It feels like a return to form for Silicon Valley is happening right now. I am in San Francisco with Lawrence, Sam, Jason, Michael, and Will. Do you want to just go around and basically explain what your companies do? Will? Oh, yeah, sure. Hello, everyone. My name is Will O 'Brien, one of the founders of Ulysses. We build autonomous underwater vehicles for use in nature, use cases for use in commercial offshore survey and defense. Cool.

1:08Hi, I'm Michael Law from Boise. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Aurelia Systems. We make laser weapon systems. Howdy. I'm Jason Carman. Grew up an hour north of here, sitting here in beautiful San Francisco, California, the sailing capital of the world. That's dope. And I'm the founder of Story Company, which is the company I've wanted to build since I was nine. and we're making movies. We're working to make the next big sci-fi trilogy series as well as have it be inspired by real nonfiction science and engineering stories. Some of the folks here I've filmed with before, which is awesome. And today's a cool day because we just released our first sci-fi film, Planet, online.

1:39And it's online now and we're using that to go and make a bigger movie soon. Let's go. I'm Sam D 'Amico, founder and CEO at Impulse Labs. We build the highest performance stove on the market today, which has been shipping for the past several months. You can order it on our website. But additionally, what we're doing is we're basically reinventing the grid by putting battery storage into like every device with a power cord. Like every medium sized machine is now going to get reinvented around this new electrified technology stack. And I think I'm older than everyone else here, which is kind of funny.

2:09So hello, my Gen Z brethren. Boomer. Hey, boomer. This is crazy that I can say that because I used to be the young guy. And yeah, it's been in San Francisco since 2014 officially. and really great to see a lot of awesome folks kind of like building stuff here. Yeah. I'm Lawrence Allen. I'm CEO of Terra Nova. We're making terraforming robots and lifting land out of flood zones. Yeah, let's just start off with like, why did you guys start your companies? I went down to El Segundo and there's very clearly like missions behind each of those companies. And I wanted to kind of show that like people in San Francisco are also going after really tough problems and meaningful missions.

2:49So Silicon Valley used to be the innovation capital of the world. I mean, it's where the semiconductor was really done in the early days. It's where the internet was really pioneered. And then I think that went so well that now there's skyscrapers built behind us solely for software as a service and similar things. And I think the past 10 years, the city that I grew up, it's like the biggest city I grew up next to, has kind of changed. And I don't think all for the better. and I grew up north of that initial innovation and that inspiration being so excited about it and moving here working at a satellite company an aerospace company found this burgeoning underground deep tech scene myself talking about Sam and time at all these wonderful gentlemen who are building incredible things and so for me I'm just making movies I'm not doing anything nearly as ambitious as what they are but to me there's a story here of getting back to that initial vision of innovation and changing the world for the better.

3:42Whether you're building the most advanced robots or things to terraform the land or work in the ocean or anything in between, there's a huge opportunity to get back to building real physical things here. And it feels like this is the current capital of the world, obviously, of AI, but also robotics, smaller, more kind of niche and bespoke technologies as well. And it feels like a return to form for for silicon valley is happening right now here yeah so i i think one of the rationales for starting impulse was basically i kind of wanted to cook pizza really fast um to be frank um and realize that basically every medium size home appliance and frankly every medium size like machine on the grid kind of has a very big mismatch between its peak power and its average power and you can make the peak power and thus cooking your pizza much more fast much faster if you put a battery inside.

4:35And so realized that that was kind of a big idea that came from a very small, like almost like personal, you know, anecdote. But the separate part was I was working in AR and VR, like Google Glass, Oculus, these other programs. And it was like, these are increasingly the realm of like mega, mega cap companies, like they had to innovate on like the silicon, the core display technologies, all these other things. But like the appliance industry has been neglected for decades without seeing a ton of innovation. And if you can just fundamentally make a better product well we don't have to worry about gas stove debates we don't have to worry about any of this other stuff we just like build better stuff with now we've got this new set of tools which is kind of like the electric technology stack let's do that and then we'll transform the grid as well and so that was kind of the the impetus for getting stuff started but realized that it turned out to be a bigger idea than i expected it's like many of these appliance companies that already exist are like wait can we have that too and then they give you distribution um and we don't have to stop at just stoves we're doing other things as well so that's what's been really exciting but yeah the other point with san francisco is like obviously like i'm literally looking across the bay and like there's all these former industrial facilities that built like a huge chunk of our military might in world war ii um obviously down there like pier 70 where like astronis was like this has always been kind of this like industrial heartland of the united states it just happened that we got really rich off of enterprise sass for the past 20 years and uh it's frankly pretty exciting to see that maybe the big ideas are going to come back soon so yeah yeah we started here because i i grew up in center fell just like an hour north of here and it's you know in a flood zone downtown's like the most densely populated part in the entire bay area and it's like six feet under sea level they're talking about spending a billion dollars on a seawall i thought that was crazy like first principles you know it needs to just be lifted up so you know set on fixing that that's our mission trying to start in the bay area, kind of bounced around Berkeley, Stanford, and realized this is the core hub of not just lame SaaS companies, but also cool atoms over bits and trying to bring that back, that spirit of innovation.

6:37I think all these founders here are really modeling that for this next generation, showing that you really can build big physical companies and get that same venture capital interest going for things that are cool and big and physical and real. you see this wall in front of enterprise s tower yeah yeah i mean it's interesting you like this whole area is terraformed technically right like this whole area of san francisco just did not exist at a certain point in time um so it's good to see uh you guys do this flooding too yeah the ships that brought some of my early family members i have some family that's from california like the ships that brought them here from like new england some of them are buried and basically built a lot of this waterfront yeah i mean during during the gold rush like this whole area just had ships coming in and out in and out and they would just like if if the the company would go bust they would just like leave the ship here and then they like infilled like you're gonna find around it and it's like ship after ship and then like you literally added like 40 foot but like that's the degree of dog in them that these like gold rush people had and i know i like on the let's go dude i mean yeah so i think the reason why we we do what we do i i or me well why why we started I grew up by the seaside in a small town in the southwest of Ireland.

7:50Grew up on the coast, was in the water, on the water, fishing, surfing, swimming, whatever it was, every summer growing up as a kid. So always just had a very strong affinity to the ocean. And then a few years ago, me and my co-founders two years ago got nerd sniped by building underwater robots. We initially got like very, we were becoming very worried about the loss of subsea ecosystems, seagrasses, calls, these sorts of things that are dying at like an insane rate around the world. And basically the tools for replanting them or bringing them back are basically humans going down and manually hand planting or hand intervening with the subsea domain.

8:30Because the subsea technology space is just so ancient, it really has not changed much since the 80s. The tools there are ancient. you see all these like developments in self-driving cars or these jumps in like uh fpv drones or others that just hadn't been brought to the subsea domain and uh yeah in like thinking about how do we solve this like subsea kind of ecosystem restoration problem we realized holy crap you could build a very big business that builds tools for this uh great blue frontier um like you know we know more about the surface of mars uh than we know about our own oceans uh we you know there's there's like we believe atlantis is out there somewhere in the subsea domain we don't know There's all these archaeological sites in the subsea domain we don't know.

9:09There's like trillions of dollars of minerals like stuck at the bottom of the ocean. There is all this like subsea life that we don't know about. And also like the ocean is just becoming a very geopolitically important domain, particularly the subsea domain. The amount of subsea cables that are being built out every year, subsea energy infrastructure being built out each year, and the tools for maintaining them and intervening them again have not been reinvented for a long time. So that kind of like nerds like us and that. But it's more generally this idea of like the frontier, right? We believe the ocean is like one of the next great frontiers and one of the greatly underrated frontiers of our time.

9:45But San Francisco very much exemplifies the idea of like a frontier city, right? America itself is a frontier nation, right? It's born of people. It's selected for, especially as the United States moved westward, it's selected for a certain type of crazy person, maybe a crazy Irish person who came over during the famine or a crazy German person or what have you, or an Italian. They came out and they decided to set up base on the frontier because they saw opportunity there. And they moved westward. And then we had this frontier that moved westward across the country and then ended here when you get to the ocean.

10:15And that frontier spirit is what San Francisco was born of. It was born of that. I mean, San Francisco was born of a Catholic mission. It's a missionary. It's the mission. That was the first place with the Presidio and the mission. These people are pursuing westward for a transcendent reason. In that instance, it was like missionaries. But, you know, after that, you have then things like the gold rush again, another frontier of exploration pursuit for something greater than themselves. And that spirit that that spirit is still here. Right. And that spirit remained here. You had the gold rush and you had all that brought.

10:45And then you have like the industrialization of America and you had some of the great industrial families setting up bases here. And then you have that like, you know, we have this kind of like a revolution. You know, the hippies came here. Right. But that was another frontier idea. Right. It was like new ideas. but you know it turned inward then you know it was like but still there was like frontier ideologies here the summer of love started here again it's like a very much a frontier very contrarian to the kind of like post-war people and then you have like from actually the kind of the embers and the ashes of the kind of hippie uh revolution you have like the earliest days of the uh software and the kind of broader like silicon valley uh you know rises out of the ashes of this like hippie revolution you have people like stuart brand who was like he was like organizing he was organizing like the Grateful Dead's first confincer, right?

11:30But he was also like the first person to give Steve Jobs money, right? Like you have that continuity then. It's like this direct lineage, right? And he hands over to them and then you have like Homebrew Computer Club. That starts here. You have that whole revolution, Fairchild, like in kind of maybe a decade or two before that. So then you have that and then we kind of get in this, as you put it, like this enterprise SaaS slump. Although, you know, I think there is some like great frontiersmen in the world of enterprise SaaS, like Benioff. We caught Bin Laden. We did. Yeah, Oracle, right? Like, these guys, they're true frontiersmen, right?

12:02And I think we've recognized that, you know, it came to mobile, that was, again, a little bit cringe. But, like, now the frontier spirit is still here. And you have, like, a group of people here who are very much, like, embodying it then and other people on the West Coast, our friends now, so going to do, like, similar things and reviving it again and going to the frontier. We went internal, we went to the internet, and now it's, like, moving off the internet and bringing technology into the real world. So, yeah, that frontier spirit very much resides here. I mean, we made a very deliberate choice.

12:29We moved our company from Ireland to San Francisco. We chose it for kind of some of these reasons. But, yeah, it's sick to see us. Yeah, there's a very strong lineage of, like, people who, like, pursued the frontier in San Francisco. And, yeah, I think this is just, like, a natural extension of it. Love it, man. That's dope. Well, I don't think I need to glaze San Francisco anymore than everyone else has. I mean, it's a great place for all the reasons that you're describing. I mean, we operate out of both San Francisco and Detroit. Right now, so we come here, there's a lot of really, really great talent, a lot of people that are interested in building really new things.

13:02I think there's a lot of undiscovered hardware talent specifically that has kind of been underserved for the last 15 years. Dude, all the SaaS glazing that's been going on, everyone's been getting drunk on SaaS money, as Sam was describing. Me specifically, my co-founder and I are from just outside Detroit, like 10, 15 minutes outside. And I think for a lot of similar reasons, you were describing, like growing up, I grew up in like the ruins of a once great American city. like totally annihilated just horrible especially in like the recession in 2009 like just like everyone's parents are getting laid off everything like that no one has any money it's just like satanic it's just horrible um but i think not only in san francisco but across the country and especially in a lot of these industrial heartland areas that used to used to exist there's a great great resurgence and so we're trying to build building both of those um we specifically chose what what we do in directed energy weaponry is is really you know we we sat down and saw that like look at all the YouTube videos on of the war in Ukraine and you see you get a little glimpse into like what the future of warfare looks like for us specifically and it's really really terrifying I mean like we're looking out on the bay like if 10 million drones show up tomorrow morning we're totally screwed I mean it's just over and right now what what we're doing is we're spending million dollars hundred thousand dollars even like if you make micro missile technology it goes down to maybe maybe twenty thousand dollars twenty five thousand dollars marginal cost to shoot down like asymptotically.

14:20But what we're really trying to extract is the promise of using electrons instead of kinetics, where we can go and distribute like a 10 million X marginal cost differentiation. We're shooting on drones for like 10 cents. I came out of the directed energy area where I worked in laser weapon systems development and R &D. We would sell to Lockheed and Northrop and do all these cool projects. But I think when I look at and sit down, like, where do I want to build a company that's doing integrated hardware, software, firmware, AI integration, on edge device, where I have all these developments to do.

14:49I need to produce systems in the great American heartland outside Detroit, and I need to do the R &D and the initial development in the great development city in the country. So that's why we're in both. Yeah, I think it's probably worth spending a moment. Like, you know, Meta, I think a day or two ago, released some new, like, AI. Boo! Boo! Some new, basically, short-form feed to, you know. That was the worst. Yeah, very disheartening. Yeah, short form feed that's basically just AI generated content on repeat. And I want to, I think a lot of people on Twitter especially kind of rejected that.

15:27But I want to just talk about for a second, like what is the future that you guys are excited about building and living in? I don't think enough people genuinely think about that before they're starting like the things that they're working on. I think for me, I got, I was not a science technology kid growing up. I was in love with movies and technical in the sense that I could do Python as far as I needed to do CGI and visual effects and blunder and, you know, all the visual effects and CG shots in our movies. But I think growing up for me, I was so inspired by Star Wars and all these movies that captured, created a cultural story for America and the world.

16:02Stories used to be so important to culture and society. When you look back to the Greek and Roman days or even earlier than that, every single culture had stories, whether it's religion or the stories that are getting told around the campfire or stories that are being passed down from parents to children and so on. That story is our only sense of identity that we have. Otherwise, how are we different? And I think in the post-Internet age, we almost lack a shared story. There's a very felt lack of community, which I think is such a vapid word oftentimes, but like what relates us? and I think to people sitting here and a lot of other folks that aren't sitting here but that are working in the city building amazing things there's a shared inspiration and ethos of building the future and I think what I get worried about is I think about everybody not in San Francisco I think about everybody in the flyover states in the places where you can't come here and get high and drunk off of the excitement and the energy of building the future and what what is there what what are the options are the options bankruptcy nuclear war uh America failing like what stories are we telling the young people that are growing up in our country right now?

17:07And they're the stories that we grew up with. And I think our mission at Story is to make just awesome movies that you want to go see in theaters. You want to see when Luke Skywalker confronts his father in the third movie. You want to see what happens when Thanos snaps his fingers. But I think we want to make stories in movies that collectively, just on the childhood level of cognition are exciting and inspiring and show people that are enabling building things for good rather than just technology always being default evil when you go to the movies because it's not it's a tool and it's most importantly a tool that are used by people then what are the morals and the ethics in this sort of almost post-religious post-shared sense of story society that we're building so so for us that's what's really important in its story we want to be the merge between the awesome fiction and sci-fi you can see and the people who are building the real thing and get direct inspiration from that for our movies.

17:56And so I think for me, that's what gets me up every morning. In San Francisco, as Will was pointing out so eloquently, San Francisco is the city where new ideas start. It is the frontier city. It has been for hundreds of years. It's probably the most diverse cities in the world as well. People from all over the world will choose to come here because of what it is and what it represents and the opportunity that it represents and what America is supposed to represent. And so to me, that's what inspires me. And I think I mostly spend all of my waking hours thinking about what are the stories we're telling the 300 million Americans and the rest of the world that are going to take us to a better, brighter, more abundant future rather than one that looks broken and hopeless and desolate.

18:40I'm also hoping to live in an abundant future where we have control over all of our domains. I think, you know, Will's tackling the oceans, you know, making it so we can see and manipulate the oceans. Michael is over here making it so we don't have China take over our skies. Get BTFO'd, dude. Yeah. Jason's protecting, you know, the story and the narrative and in the cyber world. You're protecting the very important food world. And we're trying to make it so you can... More than that, though. I think you're bringing the electronic backbone that is going to power this, like, future, like, electronic age.

19:11Power the pizzas of the future. But yeah, we really want to, you know, not settle for what currently is sci-fi. I think there's this interesting push in the AI realm where, you know, all of a sudden anything is possible and they're so excited they can build whatever little AI SaaS tool they want. I think it's very similar in the hardware world. You know, things that seemed impossible are not anymore. You know, you can terraform land, you can deploy 10 ,000 robots to the sea. that there really there is no upper limit to your creativity and i think sf is really the the place to make that happen yeah i think uh like uh you know my model of the future is extremely rooted in human flourishing uh like at ulysses we describe ourselves as like a pro-human company uh i think uh you know human flourishing is like what we should like uh aspire for for uh for for humanity and uh and uh you know pursuing abundance is exactly that and i think uh you know in the context to piggyback what you're saying about like you know control over a realm uh i think you know human flourishing uh is like produced through like uh you know your interaction with the self your interaction with your family and your community and your interaction with the broader world i think all companies like exist at this realm of like how do humans interact with the broader world all hardware companies do that they seek to uh they seek to steward a realm in a in a in a good way like we're very much built like our mission statement is like stewarding the oceans for an abundant future and and that means you know uh i mean i'm gonna i'm gonna be the christian on the podcast one of the christians on the podcast here but like it literally opens in genesis where like you know cry you know god gives us this planet like he bestows us he gives us dominion over the this the the seas the air and the skies right like we've got like you know you working on on the air domain we're working on the sea domain and you're working on on the land domain and i think uh but he gives dominion over it but he also asks us and commands us to steward it we don't own it right we don't own this world like we're going to die right each of every one of us are going to die right and our children are going to take over the mantle for us so it's like our duty to put us in a in a better position beyond that and stewarding like for us like again what motivates is like the ocean is this like critically important realm like three billion people rely on it as their daily source of protein a billion is their primary source of of uh of income every day and yet still we have so little command over it right so little like control over it and uh i think you know giving giving people tools to kind of like will the the material world into the future that we want is like at the very core of that we want to be able to get exactly what we want out of the ocean while preserving it for for for for people beyond so yeah i think that's that like that's the kind of through line i would imagine true like a lot of our companies it's like it's like just like manipulating the the physical realm and into the future we want it's like it's alchemy in a sense right like it's like you're just like you're just like uh you know you're moving atoms in in in in a new way and i think that is like that that is something in a way that you can't do you can't you can't really do in software software is very inherently like intro it's like it's a very like involved with the self it's very like it's for it's for one person or maybe it coordinates different groups of people but it doesn't touch the world and it doesn't actually interface with the world of atoms and i think you know if you really want to realize this like abundant future that i think we're all aligned on you just have to interact with the real world i'm like yeah we're actually at a very interesting time right now where that is like actually kind of the best company to build right like if you look at like the uh largest companies in the world by market cap right it's like all companies that like interact with like the physical world right like so it's like i think uh our good friends in the venture ecosystem are finally wising up to this after a few decades long addiction to uh to sas business models and uh and and it's actually now it is and in ways it's actually these companies that were not like respected for a long time because they were hard.

22:53But the fact that they're difficult companies to build is exactly why they're good companies to build. It's easier to recruit the best talent to solve a hard problem. It's easier to raise money for like a massive problem. And the rewards are so great. So yeah, let's hope interest rates keep going down. That would be great. Because then we can buy way more things on debt, which would be great. I don't want to sell anymore my company away. Very American. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Irish, the true Americans. Yeah. You said we're all going to die. Are you fading Brian Johnson right now? Oh, hell yeah.

23:24Sorry, Brian Johnson. Don't die. I want to die. I'm going to have it. You refuse the Chinese peptides. You refuse the gospel of GLP-1s. GLP-1s again. A lot of people in San Francisco. He did send me a nice email. He sent me a really nice email. A lot of people in San Francisco building AI and wanting to build AGI are really obsessed, I think, with the idea of transhumanism and living forever and escaping their form. And on the one hand, I like the pursuit of things that are new in regulation. On the other hand, there's a very real world with 8 billion people living in it that deal with the real world every day and I don't think are interested today in uploading their consciousness to Salesforce cloud.

24:03As cool as that would be. I don't think you have a choice. I don't think you're asking, Jason. You're going to have to use Hawaiian aphorisms when you do that. Aloha. Yeah, the thing too that I think Ty probably also is a big motivation for him as well as us is that what you guys are doing is so innovative and important. And I think our view as storytellers is that we want to provide the narrative air cover for what you're doing. Because what you're doing, if you're educated and smart and you're read up on the topic and you get to talk to the people that are inventing it, it's smart, it's safe.

24:32You're good people that care about human interests. but when you're you know an average person just scrolling twitter and you come across like wait there's a company that's putting something chemical in the sky to make it rain oh and then his friend is trying to like raise the ground levels by putting stuff in the ground and then this other guy is trying to put tens of thousands of robots in the ocean it just gets freaky really quick if you're not a sci-fi nerd and so i think a big thing that we want to do and i know ty does too is put those people on camera have them tell the story what they're trying to do the reasons they're trying to do it they're not just evil uh megalomaniacs entirely maybe a little bit but not not like the the goal is like you said will for human flourishing and human abundance and i think that's really how i see my role in the ecosystem is just trying to provide that narrative air cover help share and tell your stories so that you guys can focus on building the future and making it better for for mankind yeah i think it's totally like an underrated part of the equation is like the storytellers right like i mean uh shock you build like an industry on top of nerds and uh all of a sudden the public perception is like not that good like there's a degree to which like you know you kind of live in like two worlds that we live in the material world like the stuff you can touch and there's like the symbolic world the world of ideas and people always think that like you know it's a one way if you want to like uh you know change the future that like oh yeah you just work in the material world and build that but like what is like equally important is like what you two guys are doing is like uh it's like yeah creating this like beautiful narrative about the future that pull people to work at our great companies or to like support them or something like that understand and be and not be not be afraid of it i think another thing that's like interesting about the kind of like this like generation of companies as well as like how many of them are building for like the kind of like uh 80 of americans or people around the world that have kind of been forgotten right like there's like we haven't been building technology uh you know brilliant technology for members of the military we haven't been uh building uh you know technology for people who like live on coastlines or getting their houses floated or like uh we haven't been building technology that like helps fishermen do like a better catch every year or people who work on like uh offshore infrastructure i think that's like another thing as well that's like you mentioned detroit right like i'm sure like that's like that's i think one of the things that like excites me the most as well is like oh yeah there's like the appliance market is just as big as the smartphone market right yeah and like and like there's no There's no Apple in that market, which makes no sense.

26:51I have more appliances than I do smartphones. But you might break your phone more often than you break your stove. But that's a different story. That's fair. But I have more of them. Also, it's hilarious. I have, for the first time in my life, an electric stove in my apartment. God, it's horrible. Do you want to fix that? I want to, but I think we've got to convince the landlord to do the whole building with impulse. Sam, how many phones do I have to trade you for one stove? If you can get me, like, two iPhones, I'll get you a stove. I got one iPhone for me. You give me the new one. It's going to be a new one.

27:20You can try the stove. We're moving together. Sam, what's on your wish list of appliances to do after stoves? So I think a lot of it's just ambient. A lot of it. So stove. You can also do oven where you can cook a piece really fast. Obviously, I've not forgotten that one. I'm obsessed. Yeah, can I get the European high-voltage kettle that instantly? We can beat the Europeans at kettles. Really? um hot water is not a bad one like you're gonna disrupt a lot of people to be hot like that sucks um laundry i want better making laundry not suck i need better laundry it's but there's a bunch of stuff where it's like basically there's like you can throw more power at things and then you redesign the device around them and one of the really funny things is you just make things quieter because like if you're running a um like a fan even if it's like a refrigerator fan or whatever you're running a fan it's gonna have the like ac line hum and you're gonna hear that in the blades as they spin as torque ripple and like you just can avoid that now and so there's a bunch of stuff like this where we can make things just like less noisy yeah because you're basically hearing the grid no matter where you are and if you can decouple energy input from device power output well you won't anymore can you make dishwashers clean again because they've been lower powered and so they're just not as good as they kind of used to be is that sort of right i think some i think dishwashers got better over the last couple years the other thing that's crazy is people refrigerators have gotten way better than people think like used to be refrigerators were like they use like 200 watts 300 watts like that they're like 50 to 100 watts now and it's because we got really good at like these like vacuum insulated panels and like special composites with like microspheres in them and all sort of fun stuff but i can talk about this for a while but basically the other piece i wanted to say is we're at this weird inflection point in technology where like it's probably the highest leverage point in decades of like there's now all these tools you could be a kid in rural kansas and you have access to like as long as you're down to pay 200 bucks a month for like the latest ai the the top end ai models you've got access to the best information sources the most useful information sources you possibly can do you can use them to code you can use them to build stuff mcmaster card the book yes you can use them to you can use them to design hardware now i would actually push back on like me master master having one day shipping no no mcmaster car hate here dude yeah no no no i'll tell you guys this which is like straight up we have like we were now at the point of the digital domain is getting mastered to the point of like if you can build software to find hardware you can now progress really fast yeah on making next generation products that are awesome the issue is actually now how do we get the physical stuff moving again and how do you do that efficiently and like and and do it with leverage because the big issue is fundamentally if i need to go buy one of every machine i would need to use to build my product i would not like company wouldn't make any financial sense because It's like, if I could fractionally rent those machines, then it makes sense.

30:14To do that, you typically need to go to China right now. And it's something where I think people are, this is an underrated part of San Francisco, is like, you can fly to China really easily from here. But you can also just share equipment. You know, we have a laser that can do like quarter-inch steel. You know, I let these boys use it. I got a lot of lasers that can do quarter-inch steel. Will's got a pick-and-place, right? PCB. Well, so much of the problem is doing it at scale. I'm also having the expertise. and like the sort of prototyping is different than production as well he makes he makes the story around china used to be that it's cheap labor and it's unskilled but now they're the best in the world at building they are the best at the electric technology stack they made me an awful drill rig so you know you gotta you gotta take these anecdotes and uh i will let's just say that these are not anecdotes our iphones are not made in america like most most of the appliances we have designed though they're designed that's his point is that we have to figure out to get the physical stuff moving here we're sure i'm sovereign within the border we got to make that ourselves it doesn't have to be sovereign to the border like you know it's just we just need to nah this is where we differ it'd be cool but it would be great i'd buy stuff out of toronto that's okay you just need to basically have optionality but like the big point though is like elon can do this because he's big enough to basically give enough demand to basically mean that he can like one of each like he gets above the integer number of machines where they pay for themselves basically but like if you're a startup you don't you can't afford an integer number of all the equipment you need to build your thing a scale where's Jim Belosage?

31:40He's in Reno and by the way that's the coolest story ever and also a good lesson you should never raise VC money what's the story? Jim Belosage

31:50Jim is goaded Jim is probably the best American manufacturing founder CEO alive right now he was traveling over 8 years starting with a single laser laser cutting machine in his garage that he convinced his wife to get for i think half a million dollars and now they they deliver farts parts they deliver parts as fast cheap and reliably and in quality as china does yeah within days it's it's incredible and now they're getting into cnc as well let's go and there's it is so unrated i think he like basically has no venture i think he took like a small tiny little check at some point from someone and it's not even like he doesn't need it for his growth it's yeah as soon as he started going viral on twitter i should have figured out to send him send his money yeah i'm not sure what valuation no no no no you just no you just send the check yeah yeah i send the cut and send the check send him a share certificate in the mail is there is there anything that you guys think that like we've um like we should have today that that we don't have due to some like defocusing of the country over the last 40 50 years i think we need more or like like it should be here like i don't live in i don't live in the world that should exist because of some weird like offshoring political reason it's not actually offshoring political reason it's basically like um the big meta-narrative and i'm not sure if you guys are young enough to remember when ralph nader tilted the 22 000 presidential election in jerusalem bush but like if you're if i don't think lawrence was born that yeah if you're if you're if you're on the left ralph nader's number one villainry exercise in villainy was that meanwhile the actual truth is his number one exercise in villainy was basically beating the new deal coalition um like inside the democratic party basically there was an abundance coalition within the democratic party in the 60s in the 50s 60s whatever but then the kind of like trial lawyer lawsuit like environmental law like public interest law syndicate effectively led by ralph nader because he wanted to sue manufacturers for not having seatbelts in their cars some of these things were justified some of these things were not but that built the infrastructure institutions that allowed us to basically block us doing anything in the physical world yeah and and and that's the that and and that is basically enshrined us into this sort of like do nothing nimby universe totally now this is also like ronald reagan signed the california environmental quality act this is bolt like basically we decided that thing's gone dude as a response to the oil crisis in the 70s to the soviets probably psyoping the anti-nuclear movement through the 50s and 60s through the bay area even still area communist even still yeah they're still doing it in germany in germany the the whole like anti-nuclear thing is just like oh it's all just astrotrip yeah like soviet conduit like uh non-profits in france and other places they're like funneling money like uh back to germany to get them to shut the down so yeah that hasn't ended yeah yeah but basically you know it's it's great if you know you know he had Nord Stream 4 or whatever built, you know, off of that.

34:43But basically, all of these, the forces of degrowth won in the, probably, like, I would argue locking up in the 80s. And then the end of the Cold War meant that we deindustrialized the defense sector. Because we had all of, like, the U.S. still needed to beat the Soviets. And so we had all this stuff. Now in the 90s, you basically have, like, GE with Jack Welch, you know, and all this other stuff. We started financializing our physical industries. Yeah, yeah. And now suddenly everything turns into a spreadsheet versus turns into like a starship and it's over. And so we're now at the point of like, OK, so that'll happen.

35:19And meanwhile, like our GDP is still doing great. But then, OK, if like stuff pause for a minute and like I wanted to build something and I could choose between doing it in Shenzhen or here, you kind of, you know, it's kind of a bad comparison for the United States. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, can you like it's like it's like the U.S. is a wealthier country than China. But like, could you build a sick shit as fast? yeah no no way and that's the and that's the thing that i think people need to understand yeah and during you know war times what's going to happen well no because you get an imbe if you wanted to build a ship over there yeah or you wanted to rebuild the you wanted to rebuild the golden gate bridge like we built it in five years for like 300 million yeah so this never happened today so like telegraph hill is being like it's like the the quote-unquote mayor of telegraph hill aaron paskin who did run for mayor in this past election like we've built institutions of blocking shit and it's like i mean this city is this sort of amazing frontier city where we get bailed out by like degenerate gambling once every 20 to 30 years it's just like gold rush we love that like like that's a feature not a bug what's wrong with no no but it's great it's like ai ai ai ai ai ai brought san francisco out of like a major slump from the pandemic.

36:32Miami's ass is grass, but Miami's 20 bucks an hour for skilled electromechanical technicians. I think it's not bad. Kurt from Hextronics is paying literally 20 an hour. I'm pissed. After the filming, I can give you a tip for how to do this in Bay Area. I need like five of them. There's many things from Miami I would like to report. I'll tell you exactly how to do it. Miami's not bad. Not just electrical I love going to Miami just like I like going to Vegas. That's it. An interesting thing too is that, you know, like you mentioned the financialization and you being from Detroit and watching like the frontier city of building things in America and just sort of crumble over the past 50 years is the talent here is so overpaid to the worth that they add to the company in my take.

37:22And I think the VC kind of thought was like, oh, well, they're doing things that once they build it, it's done and it keeps working and it scales really well. And in a sense, it's true. And yeah, it adds some GDP numbers to the economy. But like the actual people building the stuff have been disenfranchised, kicked out, laid off. As a result of that happening, we've lost the ability to build stuff. We've lost the ability to actually make these things. and we've totally, I think, outbalanced our software engineers who, like, candidly, most are not great software engineers, I think, getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.