00:00When you talked about scaling up, you know, you famously are building this huge place in Ohio, Arsenal.
00:06You built that first one, and what have you learned?
00:09This is, because some people look at you and say you're a brilliant technology company, that's one thing,
00:13but the real skill you have is in producing stuff.
00:17The, yeah, everyone tells you manufacturing ramps are incredibly painful,
00:24and you can believe that, and then you go through it, you know,
00:27it's like there's a big difference in the emotional experience of thinking you're going to get punched in the face
00:32and getting punched in the face, and so the, it is hard.
00:37It is legitimately hard.
00:38It is just one of the most complex operational things you can pull off.
00:42It's a five million square foot.
00:44This is like a large campus, five million square foot.
00:47We've got the first building already filled, starting to produce,
00:49but just the process of going through and, like, the thousands of parts that all have to land on time
00:54with quality and be delivered, it's like you're missing one part, you don't ship the thing.
00:59And so just the apparatus you have to build up.
01:01And the fascinating thing to me is, it's like when we look for a head of manufacturing,
01:05I could not find someone who had built a new manufacturing system that was American.
01:10It is not a skill set that was valued.
01:14The best and brightest were not going into manufacturing.
01:18For a lot of other countries, that was a highly aspirational job,
01:20and you got really good people going into it.
01:23But in the U.S., we essentially said for a whole generation,
01:26this does not matter, you should not go into it, and we outsourced the whole thing.
01:29So this process of rebuilding manufacturing competence in the U.S.
01:34and, you know, getting that back, that is a generational problem.
01:38But what I've been seeing is beyond what we're doing on this,
01:42the Y Combinator classes have a ton of manufacturing startups.
01:47Some of the best minds in AI coming out of, you know,
01:50senior people from OpenAI and other places are starting manufacturing AI startups.
01:55Like, there's a massive push into this that we're going to benefit from tremendously.
01:59When you come to Arsenal 2, could that be in an allied country?
02:04Could that be outside the United States?
02:06Absolutely.
02:06So I think the view on this is, it seems like a, you know,
02:13if you're an allied country, you would want to have, like, as a goal,
02:17I would like to be able to spend money and get weapons in a predictable way.
02:21That seems like a good feature of your defense procurement system.
02:24I do not think that is the current system most people are living in,
02:27which is you spend money, and in some time in the future,
02:30in an unpredictable way, you may or may not get those weapons.
02:32And have you zeroed in on any country that could be the place for that?
02:35We haven't locked into any one country, but, you know, when you look across Europe,
02:40there's a lot of manufacturing talent that exists.
02:42And the way we designed our systems, we can tap into a supply chain
02:47that isn't traditionally aerospace and defense.
02:49And that's a huge feature of how we designed our systems.
02:52And we've kind of designed it for this ability to kind of localize production
02:55wherever we are.
02:56And it's relatively inexpensive.
02:58We try to drive skilled labor out of the assembly we do,
03:02not need overly precise parts.
03:04There's all these things you can change about how you build your stuff
03:07that we've really focused on and I think is going to pay out
03:10in terms of rapidly being able to build up manufacturing capacity
03:14in a lot of different regions around the world.
Comments