Latest / The Vance Crowe Podcast / VCP: NNZP on manufacturing, mining and what it will take to produce products in the US

Transcript

VCP: NNZP on manufacturing, mining and what it will take to produce products in the US · The Vance Crowe Podcast

• 0:00
  Unknown: They control that market. Theycan control the prices in that
• 0:03
  market. They have, they have thelion's share of the production.
• 0:09
  And so it's not, you know, weare a marginal producer.
• 0:13
  And so if they want to subsidizemanufacturing in their world, in
• 0:20
  in their economy, they candecide to subsidize the steel
• 0:24
  part, which they do, and throughenergy, through labor laws and
• 0:31
  things like that, and throughthrough pollution laws, and they
• 0:35
  can tell those people to sell itto their domestic manufacturers
• 0:40
  at a certain price and sell itto the world at a different
• 0:42
  price. And they do
• 0:46
  so. It's a, it's a, it's asupply chain. It's a, it's a
• 0:49
  vertically integrated supplychain in Asia, and we don't
• 0:54
  really have that verticallyintegrated supply chain anymore,
• 0:57
  so our costs are much higher forthat reason alone, and then if
• 1:04
  you, if you want to run a steelplan, and in America, in the
• 1:08
  United States or Canada orWestern Europe, you basically
• 1:13
  have to meet a lot of pollutionstandards and a lot of
• 1:18
  other labor standards and OSHAstandards and regulations, and
• 1:24
  those are very different thanwhat you find in Asia.
• 1:28
  And so there's a, there's aninheritive comparative
• 1:33
  advantage. I don't saycompetitive advantage. It's a
• 1:36
  comparative advantage because ofthe way they run their economy,
• 1:41
  in my opinion, you know, steelseems like one of those things
• 1:44
  that's like, yeah, we used tohave to produce steel back, you
• 1:47
  know, in the industrial age.But, you know, do we, do we need
• 1:50
  to be producing steel now, Idon't know, do you need to be
• 1:54
  producing bridges and roads?Because a lot of the steel goes
• 1:57
  into rebar and, you know,bridges. And do you want to
• 2:01
  produce? Be able to produce anaircraft carrier
• 2:06
  or any other type of ship ortruck or car,
• 2:12
  I don't know it's up, up to, upto the public, right? I mean,
• 2:14
  what they want to produce, Iguess. But there is a moment of
• 2:18
  no return, and that moment mayhave come and gone to some
• 2:23
  extent, where you lose enough ofthe know how, that you literally
• 2:28
  can't restart it. And I thinkthere was a great article in the
• 2:32
  Wall Street Journal probablythree or four years ago about
• 2:35
  how we wanted to make a newicebreaker. And it's taking a
• 2:40
  long time, because we'veforgotten how to you work with
• 2:42
  the steel that we makeicebreakers out of. So that
• 2:46
  talent basically was gone, andthey had to relearn how to work
• 2:51
  with the steel that icebreakersare made out of. So they could
• 2:53
  build a new icebreaker. Yeah, Iremember when I was working in
• 2:56
  the shipping industry and youheard like, oh, it takes, you
• 3:00
  know, two decades to build aNavy. And you think, like, how
• 3:03
  is that possible? And then youactually start doing the
• 3:05
  sailing, and you realize there'sso much to know that you
• 3:08
  couldn't possibly put it all ina book. There's this, just like,
• 3:11
  essence of things, that you haveto actually have the physical
• 3:14
  skill and to imagine that we hadsome knowledge and then lost it
• 3:19
  is, it's like, hard to imaginethat it can happen unless you've
• 3:23
  ever been around a deep skilland realize, like, Oh, this is
• 3:26
  so much more than you could putin a textbook. And that's
• 3:29
  exactly right. And the doingteaches you so much of what you
• 3:33
  want to do and what you don'twant to do, and not all that
• 3:37
  goes in the book.
• 3:39
  And there is a there is ageneration that is retiring
• 3:43
  right now. I'm 50 I'll be 56here shortly, and so I'm at the
• 3:48
  tail end of that generation.I've got another 10 or 15 years
• 3:52
  ago before I decide I'm going todo something. Maybe I'll do it
• 3:57
  till I fall over, which becauseI kind of like it, but
• 4:03
  there's a there's a generationthat is retiring that has not
• 4:06
  been replaced in the UnitedStates, as far as technical
• 4:09
  skill and knowledge, justknowledge, and I don't mean
• 4:13
  educational technical skill. Imean technical skill learned on
• 4:16
  the job
• 4:18
  and doing what they're doing.
• 4:21
  And we do. We have not replacedthat with that. We have
• 4:24
  continued to
• 4:28
  innovate to some extent andoptimize so we need fewer and
• 4:32
  fewer of those people for ouroutput. Our output has gone down
• 4:36
  in say, the steel makingindustry or the aluminum making
• 4:39
  industry or the magnesiumindustry, titanium went to zero
• 4:45
  basically last year, because wedon't make any magnesium
• 4:49
  anymore. Long story, but youknow, there's a skill set there
• 4:54
  that we are not
• 4:57
  continuing to build on. And.
• 5:00
  Will atrophy, and we will, wewill have to import people to be
• 5:04
  able to do it, because we won'thave the skills and knowledge to
• 5:10
  do it anymore, which is a littlescary in my book. We exchanged
• 5:15
  the Carl Sagan, you know, quoteand and that, that is the world
• 5:21
  that I see, which is where we'returning into a service and
• 5:25
  information economy, and we'veforgotten how to do hard things,
• 5:29
  right? Well, and it seems likeit's pretty dangerous if you're
• 5:31
  saying, you know, ourbattleships get built, our
• 5:35
  aircraft carriers, our vehicleswith steel, because if you were
• 5:38
  to get into war and somebodywere to cut that off from you,
• 5:41
  then you you'd be done building,or you'd and you'd have to
• 5:44
  rebuild an industry while you'rein the middle of in a war, being
• 5:47
  in a war, correct? And, youknow, the interesting part is,
• 5:50
  everybody brings up World WarTwo and and the Americans can do
• 5:54
  whatever they want when theywhen they have to, right? And
• 5:57
  look at what we did during WorldWar Two.
• 5:59
  Okay, I'm gonna take just amoment to hop in here and
• 6:02
  introduce the show and do acouple of housekeeping items to
• 6:06
  start off. I should probablyintroduce the guest. This is
• 6:09
  nnzp. He is a guy that I havemet through x and then become
• 6:14
  friends with, but he wants toremain anonymous. He builds
• 6:18
  cutting edge factories and hasdesign technologies, and he says
• 6:21
  it really doesn't benefit himmuch for people to know who he
• 6:25
  is. He's not trying to get anykind of fame or anything. So he
• 6:29
  talks about his ideas withouthaving his name attached to
• 6:32
  them. And I am totally okay withthat. He is not a guy that
• 6:36
  throws stones at other people,so his anonymity isn't a way for
• 6:40
  him to hide behind trees androcks and be able to snipe
• 6:44
  people instead, he has reallygreat ideas. He's somebody that
• 6:48
  is fun to interact with. And Ihave been asking and inviting
• 6:51
  him on the podcast for years andyears now, and it was only
• 6:55
  recently that he agreed to dothe podcast and we decided that
• 6:59
  we would talk about hisknowledge of things like
• 7:02
  minerals and mining andmanufacturing and how this
• 7:06
  impacts our own country. Andthis is a great conversation. I
• 7:10
  was so glad to do it. I did itfrom a wintry day here in St
• 7:14
  Louis, Missouri. You know, ifyou are a Vance Crowe podcast
• 7:19
  listener, you've probablynoticed that this is the first
• 7:21
  episode I've done in more than amonth, I decided that I was
• 7:26
  going to make a deliberatechoice to only do interviews
• 7:30
  that I thought would be reallypowerful. There was a stretch
• 7:33
  there where I was doing theweekly podcast, and sometimes I
• 7:36
  would just call up somebody andbe like, Hey, man, I need a
• 7:38
  guest. Let's just talk. And thatwas okay for a long period of
• 7:42
  time, but now, because mybusiness legacy interviews has
• 7:46
  grown so substantially, itdidn't really fit, and so I've
• 7:51
  taken some time, and this hasgiven me the opportunity to
• 7:54
  really wear down people likennzp and some other guests I
• 7:58
  have coming up to sit down andhave a long form conversation.
• 8:03
  So I mentioned legacyinterviews. Yes, we have been
• 8:05
  busier than ever. The Christmasholiday season, we exploded, but
• 8:11
  we have continued that peoplerealizing, Hey, mom and dad or
• 8:15
  grandma and granddad aren'tgoing to be around forever, and
• 8:17
  it is totally worth it for me tocall up legacy interviews and
• 8:22
  find out what kind of interviewcan I do with them so we can
• 8:25
  preserve their stories, theiradventures, their experiences,
• 8:30
  their wisdom, and be able topass it on to future
• 8:33
  generations. So if you have beenthinking about doing this for
• 8:36
  one of your loved ones, Iimplore you, don't wait around.
• 8:40
  There is no benefit once you'vehad the idea to do it, that you
• 8:44
  might put it off, it's not goingto get better with age. In fact,
• 8:47
  the only thing that gets betterwith age is the actual
• 8:49
  recording. But waiting to recordit comes with its own risk. And
• 8:53
  I would really encourage youthat if you've been thinking
• 8:55
  about it, go tolegacyinterviews.com and sign up
• 8:59
  for me to contact you. I callevery single person that wants
• 9:02
  to do these legacy interviews,and once we've come to an
• 9:07
  agreement, then we have somebodycall and schedule, and it all
• 9:09
  works out great. It is turninginto a really robust and
• 9:13
  beautiful business. And I'm ifyou'd like to support the show
• 9:16
  and you'd like to get thisincredible heirloom for your
• 9:19
  family, go tolegacyinterviews.com
• 9:22
  All right, let's head back tothe interview with nnzp.
• 9:28
  Well, World War Two, we were aleader in the world already
• 9:34
  for all of these materials, andwe had giants of industry. Now,
• 9:40
  it helped that, you know, ithelped that our lands were
• 9:44
  pretty much unscathed, exceptfor Hawaii,
• 9:49
  by the war, and we were able tocontinue to build on that. But
• 9:53
  what we did in Europe, while wewere destroying in Japan, while
• 9:57
  we were destroying theirindustry.
• 10:00
  We were continuing to build oursfrom a fairly good base, and so
• 10:04
  we just literally overwhelmedthem with volume.
• 10:09
  Could that happen again? Who'ssitting in that situation today
• 10:13
  is who? What I would ask andwho's sitting in that situation
• 10:17
  today is China. China couldliterally overwhelm you with
• 10:21
  volume,
• 10:23
  and not only people, but steeland aluminum and titanium and
• 10:27
  and just manufacturing capacityin general, they could just
• 10:32
  literally overwhelm you like involume, like we did in World War
• 10:36
  Two.
• 10:37
  So we talked about steel. Whatare these other metals? You
• 10:40
  know, I know these numbers, butaluminum I use for foil and
• 10:45
  what do I Yeah, aluminum. Youknow, aluminum, we've shrunk 33%
• 10:49
  while China's gone frombasically zero to the to the
• 10:53
  world leader, having 60%
• 10:55
  and it's used in everything.Cars, f1, 50s, are made out of
• 10:58
  aluminum. Today, the body panelsand the hoods are made out of
• 11:02
  aluminum. A lot of power trainsare made out of aluminum.
• 11:05
  Electric motors and B vs aremade out of aluminum,
• 11:09
  you know. So your transmissioncase aluminum. Airplanes mostly
• 11:14
  aluminum,
• 11:16
  you know. So lot of uses foraluminum, including as an
• 11:20
  industrial metal for your tincans, which are aluminum cans,
• 11:24
  and your tin foil, which isaluminum foil, right? So, China
• 11:30
  is the world leader in aluminummagnesium, which is used for all
• 11:35
  sorts of alloying purposes. Butit also has one huge use or two
• 11:39
  huge uses. The huge use isdesulfurization of steel. You
• 11:44
  cannot make high strength steelwithout magnesium. It is a
• 11:47
  catalyst that takes outimpurities. So that is the major
• 11:52
  use for magnesium is the makingof steel through the Fisher
• 11:56
  Fisher process. So you mix itin, and you convert it, and it
• 12:02
  desulfurizes, takes the sulfurout of the steel, which is an
• 12:05
  impurity. It also makes ductileiron through the FIS process.
• 12:11
  That's the fissure process.Steel process is a completely
• 12:14
  different process, sorry. And,
• 12:17
  and that creates ductile ironfor from gray iron, so it
• 12:21
  changes the structure of thematerial. And that's what we use
• 12:26
  for, you know, steering knucklesand rear differentials and train
• 12:30
  couplings and train, you know,rate, train wheels and things
• 12:35
  like that. That's all ductileiron. And then you have the
• 12:39
  other use for magnesium, besidescasting into forms, is is making
• 12:44
  titanium and titanium. It takesover one pound of magnesium to
• 12:49
  make a pound of titanium. It isthe catalyst that turns
• 12:53
  titanium, you know, it takes theimpurities out and turns it into
• 12:56
  titanium. So it's magnesium isright next to lithium and sodium
• 13:02
  on the periodic table. And soit's very super reactive. It
• 13:04
  reacts with everything,
• 13:06
  and we use it as purificationand other things. So, and then
• 13:11
  there's with the rare earth. So,so for titanium, we went from
• 13:14
  basically the world leader 84%of titanium in 1995
• 13:20
  to basically zero in 2023
• 13:24
  now I you know, Meanwhile, Chinahas gone from, what is it? 7000
• 13:30
  What is this? Metric tons? Tons,7000 tons to 26 260,000
• 13:37
  tons, while we've basically gonefrom zero. Now, titanium is used
• 13:41
  in a lot of military products,airplanes and and all kinds of,
• 13:45
  all kinds of things, a superlightweight, super strong metal.
• 13:49
  Then you have rare earths, wherewe've started to get involved
• 13:52
  again. And I see 2023, they'resaying that we have, you know,
• 13:56
  43 metric tons of mineproduction, which it was up from
• 14:01
  zero in 2010 Meanwhile, Chinahas gone from zero to 240,000
• 14:06
  and owns about 70% of thatmarket. So, you know, when you
• 14:09
  think about the big industrialmetals, major metals, pig iron,
• 14:14
  you know, this is the from theUSGS website and there. And so
• 14:19
  this is what we mine, what wepull out of the ground? Well,
• 14:21
  no, they have a report, okay?And so they give reports on
• 14:26
  mining. They give reports onprocessing, you know, smelting,
• 14:29
  things that nature. So it's soit's a little different. The
• 14:32
  only one that's mining that Iquoted was rare earth. The rest
• 14:35
  of it is tons produced of rawmaterial. So pig iron. China has
• 14:40
  68% of the world's output. Wehave two raw steel, they have 53
• 14:45
  we have four. Aluminum, theyhave 59% we have five magnesium,
• 14:51
  they have 88%
• 14:52
  we have basically zero. I knowthere's a startup out in
• 14:57
  California that's trying to doit from seawater.
• 15:00
  Titanium we have they have 79%we have basically zero rare
• 15:05
  earths. They have 70% we haveabout 12 up from zero in 2010
• 15:11
  and it's all basically relatedto the one mine out in out in
• 15:14
  California that was shut downbetween 95 and 2000 so they
• 15:19
  basically control the metalsmarkets, the major metals
• 15:22
  markets. And if you wanted toturn these things on you, of
• 15:26
  course, like you said earlier,you have to have the expertise.
• 15:29
  But how long does it take tobring this back online? If you
• 15:32
  were like, all right, allsystems go, flip all the
• 15:34
  switches, it would take probablysomewhere between five years and
• 15:39
  15 years, depending on what itwhat what it is, right? Even if
• 15:44
  you threw all the money at it inthe world, and, you know, I, I
• 15:47
  once told a head of purchasingone time, it's at some point,
• 15:51
  there's no amount of money thatmakes a difference. You know,
• 15:54
  all that, all it takes is time,
• 15:58
  and you have to do the work,right? You can't speed it up
• 16:02
  with money.
• 16:04
  So I mentioned the danger of, ifyou go to war, what else should
• 16:08
  people be thinking about as theyas they hear these numbers
• 16:11
  seemingly to have crashed. Ithink it affects our costs for
• 16:15
  manufacturing in the UnitedStates. I mean, we have to buy
• 16:19
  from,
• 16:21
  we have to buy a lot of thesethings from the world market
• 16:23
  because we, frankly, just don'tmake enough of them,
• 16:27
  and our prices are high becauseof our environmental regulations
• 16:30
  and labor practices and OSHApractice, OSHA regulations and
• 16:34
  other regulations, so we are notcompeting on a level playing
• 16:38
  field, and that that makes ourproducts much higher price than
• 16:44
  than others. I'm not saying thatwe should,
• 16:48
  that we should do away with allour environmental policies and
• 16:52
  our labor policies and blah,blah, blah. I'm not, I'm not
• 16:55
  saying any of that. What I'msaying is, is that
• 16:59
  the people that say that, well,it's a it's a competitive
• 17:03
  market. Yeah, it's a competitivemarket, but it's not, it's not a
• 17:06
  fair market. If you want to buya, you know, like Tupperware,
• 17:11
  say, Tupperware sent all oftheir stuff overseas. I think
• 17:13
  they're bankrupt. I could talkabout them now. They sent all of
• 17:16
  their stuff. They made it all inAmerica, then they sent it all
• 17:19
  overseas, right? And you couldbuy a Tupperware bowl for a buck
• 17:24
  versus it used to cost you, youknow, a couple bucks in the
• 17:27
  States, right? But the realityis, you know, the the the
• 17:32
  working conditions and theenvironmental conditions and
• 17:36
  other things to get to thatdollar reduction that was, that
• 17:40
  was worth something, right? Andbut because we transferred those
• 17:45
  issues offshore to the otherside of the world, we're good,
• 17:49
  they're not good. I mean, it'sokay because it's over there,
• 17:53
  right? And the reality is,there's more, there's probably
• 17:56
  more pollution going into theworld from that side of the
• 18:00
  world than what we had overhere. But we're okay because
• 18:03
  it's on that side of the world.Well, I tell people, it's still
• 18:07
  in the world, right? If they'rereally interested,
• 18:11
  they would, they would beinterested in that so, and if
• 18:14
  they're really interested inhaving, you know, good jobs
• 18:17
  versus, you know, service jobs,where everybody's going to sell
• 18:21
  each other a pizza, you know,I'm going to sell you a pizza
• 18:23
  and I'm going to collect my myprofit, and then you're going to
• 18:28
  sell me a pizza back, and you'regoing to collect the profit
• 18:30
  back. Is that really, you know,both of those add to GDP. But
• 18:34
  did we get did we go anywhere?Yeah, and you have the problem
• 18:37
  that, like as companies, arecontinuing to try and add more
• 18:41
  to their bottom line, orcontinue to drive their stock
• 18:44
  price up if you move your stuffover to China. So then you save
• 18:47
  on labor costs. Eventually youget to a point where, like,
• 18:51
  Yeah, but we got to keepgrowing. And the way we're going
• 18:53
  to grow is to lower our cost togoods sold. And so we're going
• 18:57
  to make the plastic a littlethinner. We're going to make the
• 19:00
  lids, you know, a little bitlike, less sturdy. And then you
• 19:04
  go down this path whereeventually their stuff isn't
• 19:07
  markedly high quality, so youdon't use it. So you either you
• 19:12
  look for another brand, oryou're just stuck in this world
• 19:15
  of crappy products. Well, yeah.And I think, you know some of
• 19:18
  that's the old plannedobsolescence, you know, and you
• 19:21
  know, I know some internationaland General Motors freezers that
• 19:26
  are still running in northernMichigan. I helped moved one
• 19:30
  couple years ago, a GeneralMotors freezer, right? Still
• 19:34
  running,
• 19:35
  yeah. I mean, that's exactlywhat I want. I want a dishwasher
• 19:38
  that has those big funk thunkbuttons, because when we moved
• 19:42
  into our house, it's a 1960shouse, the dishwasher was
• 19:45
  original, and it worked,awesome. It had no pre you know,
• 19:49
  had no water flow issues. Itprobably used a lot of water,
• 19:53
  but that thing got everythingcleaned. And now I've got one
• 19:56
  with digital buttons thatsometimes the digital buttons
• 19:59
  don't work, and some.
• 20:00
  Sometimes it doesn't turn on,right? I just want the big,
• 20:03
  like, clunky analog thing,instead of everybody liking my
• 20:07
  stuff, Wi Fi connected, yeah, Imean, and, yeah, I think there's
• 20:11
  some of that. I think, Ihonestly think B vs are sort of
• 20:15
  that way to battery electricvehicles. You know, they're kind
• 20:18
  of throwaways, you know. I mean,you're going to use them for a
• 20:21
  while. They're not going to beon the road, you know, in in 20
• 20:24
  years. Is that right? I don'tknow. This is not my
• 20:28
  perspective. I don't know,unless they come away with a way
• 20:32
  to swap out batteries, which Iknow China has some companies
• 20:36
  that are doing swap outbatteries, but,
• 20:41
  you know, those batteries aren'tgoing to last there. That's just
• 20:43
  the nature of the battery pack.You know, it's like, you know,
• 20:47
  rechargeable battery state and Iwill get better. They'll get a
• 20:50
  lot better. But there arereasons
• 20:54
  why we have certain things andand why certain things don't
• 20:58
  last long, as long as they usedto lot of is thrifting. The
• 21:02
  thrifting is a thing, and that'swhat you were talking about.
• 21:05
  We're going to thrift the we'regoing to thrift the product down
• 21:09
  by reducing walls or taking outthings or, you know, there was
• 21:14
  an article in the Wall StreetJournal about an appliance
• 21:17
  company just, you know,cheapening up products by not
• 21:20
  painting them, not paintingparts of them, right? It was in
• 21:23
  the Wall Street Journal lastweek, I think, or earlier this
• 21:25
  week, you know. So that's that'sknown as thrifting, and it's
• 21:28
  real.
• 21:30
  And, you know, we can do some ofthat. We can change materials.
• 21:34
  We can do some other things. Wecan, you know, but at some
• 21:38
  point, you know, people wantthings that work and but we've
• 21:42
  we've grown, we've become athrowaway world. My sense is
• 21:46
  that all roads lead back toinflation. You probably already
• 21:49
  know where I'm going to this.But like, of course,
• 21:51
  corporations are trying to dothis because their costs to the
• 21:55
  to, like, the raw materials justkeeps going up and the like,
• 22:00
  there's no way they can put asmuch value into it, because they
• 22:05
  need that planned obsolescence.They need to have the you
• 22:08
  continue to buy things, becausemoney is turning over so much
• 22:12
  faster, whereas when you have aharder money, people will be
• 22:16
  much more careful about whatthey buy, but they want to buy
• 22:18
  something only one time. Yeah, Ithink that inflation is in our
• 22:23
  future. I think it almost has tobe, given our debt levels
• 22:28
  and but we've already seen ahuge amount of inflation since,
• 22:35
  since 2019,
• 22:37
  and I'm not, COVID was a bigpart of that. We threw a lot of
• 22:40
  money at supply when supplychains were breaking down, but
• 22:46
  that caused a second round ofinflation in in wages and
• 22:50
  services and other things thatis still rippling through the
• 22:54
  industry,
• 22:56
  through the country period. Youknow, wages are up
• 23:00
  significantly. And I don't, youknow, including in the company
• 23:03
  that I own and run, and I don'tbegrudge anybody that, but I
• 23:08
  have to pass it on, which meansthat they're going to pay more
• 23:11
  for stuff. And so there is a,you know, there is a circular
• 23:15
  factor, as you you know,inflation feeds on inflation,
• 23:19
  until we have some sort of eventwhere we
• 23:24
  where the markets break down andthere's too much supply, you
• 23:28
  know. So inflation is a supplydriven issue, whether it's
• 23:33
  monetary or goods. You know, ifthere's only, you know, 10 of
• 23:38
  something versus 100 ofsomething, the 10 will be more
• 23:41
  expensive, right? It's, it's,there is a supply piece to that,
• 23:46
  that that is important, andthat's what we saw during COVID.
• 23:49
  I mean, we saw a huge amount ofmoney being dished out to people
• 23:53
  in checks from our government
• 23:57
  while supply chains werebreaking down and everybody was
• 24:02
  staying at home. And this iswhere I always joke about, you
• 24:06
  know, electricity from theoutlet, Wi Fi, from the air,
• 24:09
  water, from the water from thetap, right? I mean, nobody,
• 24:13
  nobody cares until they can'tget those things right. And they
• 24:17
  have most people, I don't knowmost people. Maybe that's way
• 24:20
  too broad, but a lot of peoplehave no idea what it takes to
• 24:26
  get the water to your faucet orthe electricity to your outlet,
• 24:30
  or the Wi Fi that's in the air,or the garbage groceries,
• 24:34
  groceries to the grocery store,garbage away from your house.
• 24:39
  You know there are truckdrivers, and there are linemen,
• 24:42
  and there are gas linemen andelectric linemen. There are all
• 24:46
  sorts of people that have tomake things to keep all of those
• 24:50
  things going and repair things.And those people were called
• 24:54
  Essential workers, you know, andwe all worked through COVID.
• 25:00
  It in our factories. I nevermissed a day in a factory. And
• 25:05
  you know, that's what kept thewheels on the bus right? But
• 25:11
  there's a lot of folks thatdon't understand that the wheels
• 25:14
  are on the bus because wemanufacture things and we fix
• 25:17
  things, and we we get out of ourhouse, we walk outdoors, take
• 25:21
  the risk and do what we need todo. And if we don't do that,
• 25:27
  then you can order all you wanton Amazon. It's not going to
• 25:32
  show up because it wasn't madeor it can't get to you.
• 25:36
  Yeah. I mean, I can feel thisstill as a issue in my world,
• 25:40
  not just the supply chains, butthe high demand on labor. I went
• 25:45
  to get my truck work done, itwas a problem that only the
• 25:48
  dealership could handle. Like Itook it to somebody else, and
• 25:51
  they're like, Yeah, this is toofar into the engine for us to
• 25:53
  work on. And when you go to callthe dealership, it's three weeks
• 25:57
  to get in to get an appointment,and you're like, Yeah, but I
• 26:00
  need this fixed now. And andlike, doesn't matter. Doesn't
• 26:05
  matter how bad you need itfixed. Doesn't matter how. I
• 26:07
  mean, you could maybe use moneyto try and jump ahead in the
• 26:09
  line. But then, to your point,you just further inflation keeps
• 26:13
  going up, because the the supplyof people that can actually fix
• 26:16
  these problems is so low. Yeah,I think that's right. And I
• 26:21
  mean, I will tell you that laboris more available today than it
• 26:25
  was two years ago.
• 26:28
  It is in our area. Itunemployment doubled. I can get
• 26:34
  people to come in
• 26:36
  and work,
• 26:38
  you know, pretty muchimmediately now, whereas two
• 26:41
  years ago, it was virtuallyimpossible,
• 26:46
  and labor, labor went upsubstantially. I think we're up
• 26:49
  about 35%
• 26:52
  all in,
• 26:54
  you know, from from 2020,
• 26:57
  so it's and that ripples throughthe economy, right? I mean, you
• 27:02
  know, I, you know, all mysupplies are up. All my
• 27:06
  everything that I buy is up from2019, everything, some of them
• 27:12
  as much as double,
• 27:14
  right? And it has not come down.And, and we're continuing to
• 27:19
  make some policy mistakes, Ithink that will continue to
• 27:24
  drive that
• 27:25
  such as, I love the planet asmuch as anybody, but affordable,
• 27:30
  abundant, available energy isthe key to everything, and it is
• 27:35
  not windmills and solar panels,which are intermittent energy.
• 27:40
  There has to be base load power,and it has to be abundant.
• 27:45
  So basically, all of thosethings that you are putting up
• 27:50
  in the terms of wind and sun,unless you have a storage device
• 27:53
  somehow, and you can store a lotof energy, you have to build
• 27:56
  redundant energy in the form ofnatural gas, beaker plants, or
• 28:00
  nuclear, or burn coal or nuclearfull time. I mean, they're coal
• 28:07
  or natural gas full time. Therehas to be a base load power,
• 28:10
  because people want power whenthey want power.
• 28:14
  It's not like, you know, theyare very accepting. It's like
• 28:18
  water, it's like the internetnow, right? They want it when
• 28:21
  they want it, which is rightnow, whenever they decide. And
• 28:25
  so you know, if you tell themthe sun will shine tomorrow, you
• 28:28
  know, and you can have somepower, or the wind will blow
• 28:31
  tomorrow, that doesn't work. Sowe have to come up with a plan
• 28:35
  that that satisfies that. And ifwe have that plan, we talk about
• 28:40
  robotics, and we talk about AI,
• 28:43
  all of those things are massivepower hogs,
• 28:47
  right? And so you need abundant,affordable, available energy to
• 28:53
  solve some of these problems atorders of magnitude more than we
• 28:57
  have right where you're talkingabout we need to generate Not,
• 29:00
  not just like, oh, let's bringback on the plants that we had
• 29:03
  before that we've shut down. Butlike many, many, orders of
• 29:07
  magnitude more, because we needa bottomless well, we need as
• 29:10
  much energy as we can produce.Because whoever can produce more
• 29:15
  energy are the ones that canmake the
• 29:18
  the AI give you the the answersto really incredibly difficult
• 29:22
  problems. Can, you know, serveas service? Can smelt, you know,
• 29:27
  steal all these things, butokay, like we're in agreement
• 29:30
  with that. What are youbuilding? Are you building
• 29:32
  nuclear? You're gonna go send ageneration of kids to go become
• 29:35
  nuclear engineers. All the onesthat did it before got their
• 29:39
  asses handed to him. Yeah, theysure did. They, you know, I
• 29:43
  think, you know, China'sbuilding everything. They're
• 29:46
  going to build more coal plantsin the next five years than
• 29:49
  exist on the face of the planettoday.
• 29:52
  They're building nuclear they'regoing to, they're going to put
• 29:55
  online the first thorium nuclearreactor before us. We developed
• 29:59
  it.
• 30:00
  But they're going to put itonline. And what is a thorium
• 30:03
  nuclear thorium salts, asthorium is a radioactive
• 30:06
  substance, and it they it's thenext generation Modular Reactor,
• 30:10
  or new generation ModularReactors, the fuel that they
• 30:13
  use, instead of using uraniumand some other things. And it's
• 30:17
  the way I read it. It'svirtually meltdown proof.
• 30:21
  So and they can use it in small,small batches. I mean, like the
• 30:26
  size of a baseball will power acity for 20 years. I mean, it's,
• 30:30
  it's pretty incredible stuff.But that's nuclear in general.
• 30:34
  Nuclear is when you talk aboutenergy sources. You know, you,
• 30:38
  you not only talk about thesource. But you talk about the
• 30:41
  density of the source. And ifyou talk about, what is the most
• 30:44
  dense energy that we know of, itis, is radioactive materials,
• 30:48
  right? And the next one is, iscoal or oil. And then you move
• 30:55
  up the chain of hydrocarbons,and finally you get to, you
• 30:59
  know, wind and solar and and andwater, right? So you got to talk
• 31:04
  about the density of energy andhow to do that, and that's why
• 31:08
  China is still building coalplants. They're building
• 31:12
  everything, solar, wind, coal,nuclear, natural gas, whatever
• 31:17
  they can get their hands on.They're building power in
• 31:22
  massive amounts. So mysuggestion would currently is,
• 31:26
  is nuclear, and the people thatI that say to me, Well, yeah,
• 31:31
  but we've had all theseproblems. I mean, yeah, we've
• 31:34
  had, we've had some issues, butI think there's new technology
• 31:38
  out there. Our technology hasnever been bad. It's always been
• 31:41
  a failure of cooling,
• 31:43
  that is, that has caused theproblem, except for in the in
• 31:46
  the Russian reactors, which hasa void, a negative void problem,
• 31:50
  as I understand it from readingand and things like that. It was
• 31:55
  a, it was a design flaw,
• 31:58
  and so but we've also hadnuclear powering our Navy for
• 32:03
  how many years, how manydecades,
• 32:07
  and seem to be doing pretty goodthere, right?
• 32:12
  We have a pretty good handle onthat, and we train a lot of
• 32:15
  nuclear engineers through ourNavy,
• 32:18
  and so they're out there. I havea good friend, one my best
• 32:22
  friend, and in high schoolbecame a navy Nuke, and then in
• 32:26
  the 90s, 80s, I guess 88
• 32:31
  you know, he's an environmental,environmental engineer now, but,
• 32:36
  but, you know, I think thatthat's The source of the future,
• 32:41
  and we need to get out of ourown way and figure it out. I
• 32:47
  mean, even even water. If youwant to solve the water problem,
• 32:51
  it takes energy, justdesalination, and it takes
• 32:54
  electricity,
• 32:56
  right? You want to make lithium,it's it's electricity. You know,
• 33:00
  you want to make magnesium, it'selectricity. You want to make
• 33:03
  steel, it's electricity. Itsounds like Trump is looking to
• 33:08
  come in. I mean, he's talkedabout how much more energy we
• 33:10
  need. Do you get the sense thatthis new administration is
• 33:15
  prepared to go the distance thatyou would need to go? I don't
• 33:19
  know. I mean, I have my hopesright, and I think that he's
• 33:24
  trying to change the direction.He certainly changed the
• 33:27
  direction and the conversationthat we were having on China
• 33:33
  in his last administration, andbrought to light that so can he
• 33:37
  do that for energy? I hope hecan,
• 33:42
  and I hope he can for somemanufacturing. And I'm not
• 33:45
  saying we need to bring backeverything, but certainly we
• 33:47
  need to. We need to be some wehave to have some self
• 33:50
  sufficiency.
• 33:52
  America, United States, or NorthAmerica, is an is an amazing
• 33:57
  continent from a resourceperspective. There's virtually
• 34:01
  nothing like it, if you excludeAfrica, which is, you know, is
• 34:05
  an amazing resource continent aswell, but it has all kinds of
• 34:08
  issues that. So the energy, it'sall kind of trapped there. All
• 34:12
  the minerals and energy are kindof trapped right now because of
• 34:15
  corruption and and governmentissues, right So, so the United
• 34:20
  States and Canada stand out
• 34:23
  in the world for what we can do.But we have to want to, yeah,
• 34:28
  that's what it's going to say,is that, you know, right now to
• 34:31
  the average person, they'relike, look, I plug, you know,
• 34:33
  every single TV and computer andcell phone into my wall. I get
• 34:38
  my electric bill and it allworks, and I have all the power
• 34:41
  I need if the these other peopleare telling me that we're going
• 34:44
  to bring back coal, I've beentold for years, this is like,
• 34:47
  you know, the worst thing youcould do for the environment.
• 34:50
  You know, nuclear is so scary.What in the world would it take
• 34:54
  to make it so the regulargeneral public would be
• 34:57
  supportive of making this sortof step?
• 35:00
  Wrap up change that you need todo to get orders of magnitude
• 35:02
  more energy. It's, it's going totake higher, much higher prices,
• 35:05
  and it's going to take outages,brownouts and blackouts. Oh,
• 35:09
  man, I do not want to live in aworld where I'm enduring fucking
• 35:13
  brownouts. I hear you, but Imean people, you know, you go
• 35:18
  back to Machiavelli and hisquote on change, and people are
• 35:22
  are very hesitant to change whenthey believe the system is is
• 35:30
  working right, and they're theyfeel comfortable with the
• 35:36
  system. So usually changehappens when they can no longer
• 35:40
  stand what's going on.
• 35:43
  All right, we're going to take aquick break right here for me to
• 35:47
  talk about a change that I havemade this year, which is that in
• 35:50
  the past, I never used to talkabout exactly how I purchased
• 35:54
  Bitcoin. I am one of thosepeople that does what's called
• 35:56
  dollar cost averaging, whichmeans I just buy a little bit
• 35:59
  every day or every week, maybethe amount that you would spend
• 36:02
  on a cup of coffee, and Iconvert that into Bitcoin. And
• 36:06
  on the old site that I used touse, I didn't really pay much
• 36:09
  attention to the fees, until oneday I happened to log in and was
• 36:13
  looking at stuff, and I waslike, Wait a second, I am giving
• 36:16
  up a lot of Bitcoin to be ableto pay these fees. So I went
• 36:20
  looking around for another site,and I had heard my friends,
• 36:23
  people I trust, people that arein the space, and they were all
• 36:26
  talking about a company calledriver.com so I went to river, I
• 36:30
  checked it out, and I wasastonished to find out that if
• 36:34
  you purchase your Bitcoinreoccurring on their site, they
• 36:38
  actually waive all the fees. SoI was now going to be able to
• 36:42
  stack just a little bit moreBitcoin. I'm not looking to do
• 36:44
  huge purchases. I just want todo a little bit at a time, just
• 36:47
  convert those dollars intoBitcoin. And if you've been a
• 36:50
  person that's heard me talkabout Bitcoin, and I know
• 36:53
  hundreds of you have written toask me about it, to ask where I
• 36:56
  buy, to get suggestions on howto make it all work, don't
• 36:59
  worry, I never Dox anybody, evenif you've been a hater online,
• 37:02
  and then said, Well, maybe Ishould think about doing this.
• 37:06
  But if you're one of thosepeople, in the past, I've just
• 37:08
  kind of said there's a bunch ofdifferent sites out there. Now
• 37:11
  I'm saying I personally buy onriver, and I would recommend, if
• 37:15
  you're looking for a site thatis trustworthy and one that you
• 37:19
  know somebody is using, thenriver.com and if you use the
• 37:23
  affiliate link in the shownotes, you will see that will
• 37:26
  actually help both me the showbecause I'll get a few Bitcoin
• 37:30
  for it, and it will also helpyou out. You will get some
• 37:32
  bitcoin for it. So if you'vebeen thinking about doing it, go
• 37:35
  to river.com using the affiliatelink below. We don't actually
• 37:39
  have a formal relationship. Theyjust said, Hey, if you want to
• 37:41
  do this, you can get support foryour own thing. So go check that
• 37:45
  out. And let's get back to theepisode with nnzp.
• 37:51
  So it takes that sort of thing,and I we might be seeing it
• 37:55
  right now in Germany. I mean,Germany is de industrializing at
• 37:59
  a rate that that isunbelievable, because of their
• 38:02
  lack of power, and they havebeen an industrial power because
• 38:07
  they have had massive amounts ofpower, and they've decided to go
• 38:11
  a different direction. Now, willthey stay on that path? I don't
• 38:14
  know, right? Yeah, Texascertainly got a wake up call
• 38:19
  when they had all those winteroutages, and then all of a
• 38:22
  sudden they went to the thegovernment came around and was
• 38:24
  like, All right, what do we haveto do to have a base load that,
• 38:27
  no matter what, can handle allthis, and that's ended up being
• 38:30
  what brought Bitcoin and thestate of Texas together was the
• 38:34
  energy grid, because they couldbuild way more base load than
• 38:37
  they needed. And the minerswould sit there and say, All
• 38:40
  right, we'll, we'll suck up allthis energy, and then, if you
• 38:42
  guys have, you know, higher thanaverage demand, you pay us to
• 38:46
  turn our miners off, and now youstill have access to all that
• 38:49
  energy. Well, you're seeing thatin AI too. I mean, there's the
• 38:54
  conversations about restartingand nuclear plants that have
• 38:57
  been shut down because they wantto put an AI data center right
• 39:00
  next to them,
• 39:01
  you know,
• 39:03
  because it's constant power asmuch as you want, right?
• 39:07
  So we're seeing that. We'reseeing some of those
• 39:11
  discussions. I just don't knowhow that's going to affect if
• 39:14
  we're going to be a leader inAI, if we're going to be if
• 39:18
  we're going to bring someindustrialization back,
• 39:21
  we require energy. We requireit. It's not like, you know,
• 39:27
  now, if we want to be a serviceeconomy, I mean, if we want to
• 39:32
  not be who we used to be, we canget by with less energy, but,
• 39:38
  but I do believe that, you know,we have to realize that a lot of
• 39:43
  what we're seeing
• 39:45
  in the world, in the Westernworld, is sort of a death cult.
• 39:51
  I mean, they won't be happyuntil we're living in caves.
• 39:57
  You know, did I lose you? No,I'm.
• 40:00
  I'm right here. Yeah, I I thinkthat the things that people were
• 40:05
  talked into to support, theywere genuinely like, I want to
• 40:09
  be a good person. How do you bea good person? You oppose these
• 40:13
  things because industry is bad,and look at how they treat
• 40:17
  workers, and look at how theytreat the the environment when
• 40:20
  they're making this energy. AndI think that people just kind of
• 40:24
  slowly walk towards that,nodding their head Yes. Let's
• 40:27
  get rid always the case, theroad to hell is paved with good
• 40:30
  intentions. And I believe, likeyou, that 99 plus percent of
• 40:34
  people are good. They want good,right? I do not believe that
• 40:39
  there's a lot of evil in theworld, although there is evil in
• 40:42
  the world, right? But I believethat 99 plus percent of people
• 40:46
  are good and want good things,and want progress and and want
• 40:50
  to continue down the path. Thereare limits to that, that that
• 40:54
  keep the lights on, right? Thereare compromises, and there are
• 40:59
  trade offs, and what we want isa world without compromises and
• 41:03
  trade offs.
• 41:05
  Yeah, I've heard that. Iactually heard a Thomas Sowell
• 41:07
  quote not that long ago thatreally is stuck with me. It's,
• 41:11
  there are no right answers.There are only trade offs. Yes.
• 41:14
  So like, you like, that's,that's the actual answer is,
• 41:17
  like, you can have whateverdesire you want. You just have
• 41:20
  to understand what it will costyou. And that's the conversation
• 41:24
  we haven't been having withgeneral society. Of like, Okay,
• 41:28
  well, if you want all theseenvironmental things, then this
• 41:31
  is what it's going to cost you.There's going to be people out
• 41:33
  of work that could be working.Your competitors may actually
• 41:37
  become a menacing threat, notjust like, Oh, they're going to
• 41:40
  have a higher standard of livinglike no, they may actually be
• 41:43
  able to build battleships andthreaten you. They may be able
• 41:45
  to build nuclear submarines andand, you know, haunt your your
• 41:49
  dreams and make the the worldterrible for you. That's right.
• 41:54
  And you know, Thomas Sowell, bythe way, is my wife's favorite
• 41:59
  economist or writer. She's,she's read him since she was a
• 42:03
  kid. Her dad used to read him.Oh, man, you married, right,
• 42:06
  dude.
• 42:09
  And he's, he's a fantastic fontof knowledge, right?
• 42:14
  And he's right. And you see itas being an engineer, you know?
• 42:19
  You see that all the time, beinga business owner and running a
• 42:23
  business, you see it all thetime. There are
• 42:26
  good answers, there are betteranswers, there are perfect
• 42:29
  answers. They all have a costassociated with them. They all
• 42:33
  have trade offs associated withthem. Some of them are
• 42:36
  unachievable just because ofphysics, or, you know, how the
• 42:42
  world works, right, chemistry orphysics, but there are these.
• 42:47
  There are multiple answers, andyou have to choose based on what
• 42:51
  you can afford, and I don't meanin dollars, but in all kinds of
• 42:56
  things. You know, environmental,
• 43:01
  hurting somebody. You know, youmay have the perfect answer, but
• 43:05
  it may run the risk of hurtingsomebody badly. And so, yeah, I
• 43:10
  mean, the trade offs that we cansee are are manifest in the
• 43:15
  California wildfires arehappening down in LA right, like
• 43:19
  it is very clear, you decided todo certain things because you
• 43:23
  wanted to achieve these goals,and that led you down a path.
• 43:28
  Yeah, and again, I think, youknow, it's, it's fascinating to
• 43:30
  watch, and I feel for thosepeople, I, you know, I went
• 43:33
  through a house fire as a kidand lost a lot of our stuff. And
• 43:39
  you know, you could still, whenyou walk into mom's house, you
• 43:41
  can still smell. You know, ifyou know what you're smelling,
• 43:44
  you know what you're smelling,right? And I was in grade
• 43:47
  school, so I remember it, and welived in a trailer,
• 43:52
  fifth wheel trailer, for aboutsix or eight months while they
• 43:56
  rebuilt stuff and cleanedcleaned up, right? So I feel for
• 43:59
  those people, I mean, it's,it's, it's brutal. I've been
• 44:03
  through a flood and had to throwa bunch of stuff away, you know,
• 44:07
  and you lose a lot of memoriesand things like that, and, you
• 44:11
  know. But
• 44:13
  on the other hand, there is areason why some of that is
• 44:17
  happening. It's, it's, yeah,okay, maybe it's climate change.
• 44:21
  Maybe it's not. I got my owntheories on some of that stuff,
• 44:26
  but it is dry in December andJanuary in California, almost
• 44:29
  always. And they have firesthere. Almost always. There are
• 44:34
  things that they can do
• 44:36
  to help themselves, but becauseit's they don't believe it's
• 44:41
  environmentally correct. Theydidn't do some of those things,
• 44:45
  like cleaning out brush orcreating, creating forest lines
• 44:49
  because, you know, or forestbreaks because it would look,
• 44:53
  wouldn't look great, or blah,blah, blah. Now, right now,
• 44:57
  they're driving bulldozers upand down mountains. Right?
• 45:00
  Eight. So all the things theydidn't do, they're doing right
• 45:03
  now, right? It's cleaning outthe brush, and they're, they're
• 45:07
  making fire breaks withbulldozers on mountains.
• 45:11
  And so it's, it's a problem,right?
• 45:15
  So you have a unique experiencein the world of of building
• 45:20
  things and kind of, I don't evenreally kind of know where I'm
• 45:24
  where I'm going with this,because what I really want is,
• 45:27
  what's your take on what's goingon with the drones in the US?
• 45:31
  What's my take on the drones? Doyou want my conspiracy theory?
• 45:36
  Or do you want my
• 45:38
  my my real theory. Oh, I mean, Ithink I want, what do you
• 45:44
  actually think? What is, what isreally going
• 45:48
  it's hard to tell what it is. Itcould be a number of things. My
• 45:53
  guess is, is that it's socialcontagion. To some it's Summit,
• 45:57
  some extent that you know thatit's, it's on social media. So
• 46:02
  now everybody's looking forstuff. And
• 46:05
  when you start looking forstuff, you find stuff. So I
• 46:09
  think a lot of it is socialcontagion. There might be some
• 46:13
  military pieces to this. I thinkit. I think the big thing that
• 46:17
  drives people nuts is nobody cananswer the question succinctly,
• 46:22
  it's like, well, whose is it?You know? What is it? Are you
• 46:25
  seeing it,
• 46:27
  you know? And we get answersfrom the government. Well, it's
• 46:30
  not, it's not our adversaries.It's not us, you know. But it's
• 46:35
  not, you know, it's notdetrimental to you. So don't
• 46:37
  worry about it. Well, that'sthat actually creates the whole
• 46:41
  conspiracy theory, you know,starts them off running well.
• 46:45
  And if you were awake duringCOVID at all, you learn your
• 46:49
  government will lie to you. Theywill lie to you as a noble lie
• 46:53
  that they are convinced willhelp you in the long run. And so
• 46:57
  whatever their answer is,particularly when their answer
• 46:59
  is, we can't really say, but youshould just trust us. It
• 47:03
  definitely doesn't feel good.I'm distraught over what
• 47:07
  happened during COVID And whathas happened over the last
• 47:12
  probably two or three decades,
• 47:16
  as far as you know, socialcohesion and public trust and
• 47:21
  how much we have lost COVID wasa major event for a lot of
• 47:24
  people, including me, you know,
• 47:28
  on the vaccines and on thewhat's going on, PPE and and
• 47:33
  other things. The lab leaktheory versus other theories,
• 47:38
  you know, they did not
• 47:41
  tell us
• 47:44
  the truth, I believe,
• 47:47
  and that has destroyed trust toa large extent in the our
• 47:54
  patriotism was used against us.I remember they were, you know,
• 47:58
  hey, the masks won't help you,but we do need them in a
• 48:01
  hospital setting. So my wife andI, who had prepared and actually
• 48:04
  had masks, she's a forwardthinker, we were like, all
• 48:07
  right, it's our civic duty.Let's help our countrymen.
• 48:10
  Handed off the masks, and thenall of a sudden they're like,
• 48:12
  now everybody has to wear masks,and you need to wear masks, and
• 48:16
  then all of a sudden you'regoing through that, and then
• 48:18
  they're forcing them on you,like, all of these things that
• 48:20
  we were told like you need to dofor other people were actually
• 48:24
  just ways to control us, likeyou'd be a fool to go back and
• 48:28
  trust this, this group, if youknow whatever they say next
• 48:32
  well. And then you, you, you goto the ivermectin, and you go to
• 48:38
  the hydroxychloroquine.
• 48:40
  And, you know, I asked my doctorfor hydroxychloroquine in
• 48:45
  February of
• 48:48
  2020,
• 48:50
  and I had heard in Asia thatthat's what they were using.
• 48:57
  And he told me, I was nuts. Helater came back and told me, Oh,
• 49:01
  that's preventative that they'rehaving doctors take now
• 49:06
  he'll never admit to thatanymore,
• 49:09
  because that is, you know, forboating and then ivermectin and
• 49:14
  that, that whole deal, you know,this is a wonder drug that is
• 49:19
  harmless to humans.
• 49:22
  Okay? I mean, it has been aroundforever,
• 49:26
  and we use it for a lot ofthings. It's not a parasitical
• 49:30
  and we use it for a lot ofthings. And they basically told
• 49:33
  us that we were going to die ifwe took it. You know,
• 49:37
  anybody that's gone to, youknow, a third world country that
• 49:41
  was mosquitoes. They give youivermectin, you know, it's one
• 49:45
  of the things the parasitesthere. It's one of the things to
• 49:48
  ward off parasites. And theygive it to you in large doses.
• 49:51
  It's probably one of the thingsthat's been used more widely
• 49:55
  than a lot of other things, youknow, like aspirin, you know, a.
• 50:00
  Um, and if you do the researchand you dig into it, I was
• 50:05
  really interested in 2020,
• 50:07
  Henry Ford Hospital here inDetroit, had a study. It was
• 50:11
  prophylactic, prophylacticcocktail that they were giving
• 50:16
  their people to use, and theywere doing a full on study, and
• 50:22
  they never published that study,and I think it's still up on
• 50:24
  their site. They have a letterabout why they didn't publish
• 50:28
  the study, and it basically saysthat it's not politically the
• 50:33
  right time to release the study,
• 50:38
  okay?
• 50:40
  And what I heard was it wasworking as a prophylactic, not
• 50:43
  for treatment. I mean, the thingwas, is these things are not,
• 50:48
  you know, to use if you're inthe hospital on a ventilator,
• 50:52
  all right, but as aprophylactic, they were working.
• 50:57
  They were helping your body. Andthen you get into the vitamin D,
• 51:00
  vitamin C,
• 51:02
  you know, and zinc. And the zincis a disruptor, and I use that
• 51:09
  for common colds now. I mean, ifI start feeling bad, I load up
• 51:13
  on my Vitamin C, Vitamin T, andzinc, you know, and, and sure
• 51:16
  enough, it knocks it out. Andguess what? That's exactly what
• 51:19
  zy cam was basically doing, youknow, it's what the zycam spray
• 51:24
  is. It's, it's Zai is zinc,
• 51:27
  you know. And there's so they'reusing as a, as a, as a virus
• 51:31
  disruptor, yeah. Like the thingsthat you're bringing up, like, I
• 51:35
  actually have started hearingabout zinc a lot more lately.
• 51:38
  And like, hey, when you startgetting a cold, take it. There's
• 51:40
  so many things now that arecoming up that were, you know,
• 51:45
  totally eschewed. Like you, oh,don't use that stuff. Like
• 51:50
  theories, yeah, it's making itso like you. There's a bunch of
• 51:54
  stuff where you're like, Idon't, I don't know. I mean,
• 51:56
  like, I heard that you shouldpasteurize your milk. I lived in
• 51:59
  Africa, where we even pasteurizethe milk there because it's
• 52:03
  dirty. You're taking it off adirty teat, off of a off of a
• 52:06
  goat, but all these other peopleare telling me it tastes better,
• 52:09
  and it's actually not beendenatured, and there's these
• 52:13
  benefits to it. Well, I now havea very clear time when the
• 52:18
  government lied to me, and now Ihave these other people who are
• 52:21
  saying, this is a benefit. Howdo you navigate this? Like, what
• 52:24
  you know, you start to look atthe statistics, and they're
• 52:27
  like, well, it's one in 10,000may get slightly ill from it,
• 52:31
  and it's one in I don't knowwhat the other numbers are
• 52:34
  about, like, that'll actuallyget hurt from raw milk. But
• 52:37
  like, why did we go to thispath? I don't think people went
• 52:41
  down this path as a nefarioustrick. So how do you how do you
• 52:45
  get to the bottom of it? I don'tknow whether you ever get to the
• 52:49
  bottom of it, because you haveto have trust to get to the
• 52:52
  bottom of it. And that's whatwe've lost, and that's that's my
• 52:55
  biggest that's why I'mdistraught about what happened
• 52:58
  and what continues to happen,because democracies operate on
• 53:02
  trust.
• 53:04
  And, okay, maybe we're notdemocracy. We're, you know, a
• 53:08
  republic, RepresentativeRepublic, right? Okay, but okay,
• 53:12
  Representative republics, ordemocracies, both work on trust,
• 53:17
  right? And if you can't trustyour government, then you have
• 53:21
  all kinds of other problems thatcrop up. And you you you can't
• 53:27
  function as a society, andthat's a real problem, you know.
• 53:31
  And I spent a lot of timetalking to my mom about during
• 53:35
  COVID, my mom, at first, youknow, stayed home and, you know,
• 53:39
  my mom, she stayed sharp lady.
• 53:42
  But, you know, after a whileshe's like this, you know, I
• 53:46
  want to see I want to see youguys. I want to see my
• 53:48
  grandkids. I want to see youknow, I I'm, what was it? I'm 85
• 53:52
  years old. I haven't got thatmany years left, so I'm not
• 53:56
  going to give up these years. Soyou guys keep coming. You know,
• 53:59
  if you're sick, don't come likenormal. I'm old, right? But,
• 54:02
  but, but I don't want to stopdoing stuff, so let's just keep
• 54:07
  doing it. She'd go to thedoctor, and she'd go into town
• 54:10
  to rehab, you know, which is hersocial hour, and all these other
• 54:15
  things, you know, go down to eatand, you know, it was a,
• 54:20
  she's like, I lived throughpolio. I lived through small
• 54:24
  smallpox. There were multipleother scarlet fever. You know,
• 54:31
  these things were killers,right? And this one doesn't
• 54:34
  appear to be unless you'realready sick, which I'm old, and
• 54:37
  I'm all, I'm kind of sick thosebut so it might get me. But you
• 54:41
  know, what, if I give up three,two or three years of my life,
• 54:44
  what, you know, what did I get?Right? I'd rather keep living.
• 54:51
  And if I die, I die, and thatwas what she said to me, you
• 54:54
  know, I'd say, Mom, you know,maybe you shouldn't go to, you
• 54:57
  know, the big city, right where,you know, just.
• 55:00
  Shop or whatever. So you go andit's gonna get if it's gonna get
• 55:03
  me, it's gonna get
• 55:05
  me. Well, you bring up theseterrible diseases like polio and
• 55:10
  scarlet fever and stuff. Andright now, we have a battery of
• 55:14
  vaccines. They start puttingyour infant on them almost right
• 55:17
  away. I had a good friend,hardcore, like, very ASPE dude
• 55:22
  that will go through the data,and he's had two kids, and now
• 55:25
  he's got a third one, and he'slike, actually, we're looking at
• 55:28
  what they're bringing up aboutvaccines, and I'm not sure it's
• 55:32
  worth the trade off. And that'sexactly where we started this,
• 55:35
  right? Which is, what is thetrade off? You don't trust your
• 55:38
  government. You think, hey, theythey have other people's
• 55:42
  interests, either pharmaceuticalinterests, or, you know,
• 55:46
  whatever it is that now we'renow, we're questioning vaccines,
• 55:51
  which I would have said fouryears ago.
• 55:55
  You know, that is as close togetting something that I would
• 55:58
  mandate on other people as youcould have, I'm pretty hardcore
• 56:01
  libertarian, and I still wasn'tat the point where I'd say, you
• 56:04
  you mandate the polio or measlesvaccine. But like, once this
• 56:08
  breaks out, you know, smallpox,this is terrible, this is going
• 56:12
  to cause all kinds of problems.And now, the further down the
• 56:16
  path I'm all the more you know,anarchist, and there's no chance
• 56:20
  that the government should havethe power to mandate anything,
• 56:23
  but like, now I'm like, I don'tknow. Should you even take
• 56:25
  voluntary should you givevoluntary vaccines to your kids?
• 56:28
  So we are now at the totalbreakdown, and are we doing the
• 56:32
  same thing that California didwhen we're like, Yeah, we don't
• 56:35
  want to take vaccines. And thennow there's a wildfire, and it
• 56:39
  burns everything down, so Idon't want to be a part of that.
• 56:42
  I think we are at that point.And I think we're, you know,
• 56:48
  listen, there are some of thesethat are very old and and
• 56:51
  vaccines, and they work, youknow, and they have a long
• 56:55
  history with very low incidencerates. There are some newer ones
• 56:58
  that I,
• 56:59
  you know, I don't know, right?But I remember going into the
• 57:03
  cafeteria and taking the sugarcube with the, you know, the
• 57:06
  MMR, right?
• 57:09
  And I, my sister has a polio,you know, Scar, polio vaccine,
• 57:14
  Scar. And I don't, I was thefirst one that didn't have first
• 57:18
  generation didn't have it. But Iremember growing up with people
• 57:21
  that that had built up shoes.Saw one the other day, actually,
• 57:27
  you know, he had Polo. That waswhat happened, right? And they,
• 57:31
  they had, you know, one shoe hasa as a five inch sole on it,
• 57:35
  right? Because their legs short,yeah, it's indelibly marked on
• 57:39
  me. I have a buddy in college,he had a white mother that is
• 57:42
  just a staggeringly beautifulwoman, but has a horrible limp.
• 57:47
  And like, you're like, whathappened there? Oh, she got
• 57:51
  polio. And so you see, like, Oh,that is disfiguring. Like, can't
• 57:56
  even walk, right? I don't wantthat running around. But at the
• 58:00
  same time, you hear these peoplesaying, well, the government's
• 58:03
  put in all these or allowed thepharmaceuticals to do it. They
• 58:05
  have adjuvants andpreservatives, and I think this
• 58:08
  is causing autism. And you'relike, Well, I, you know, they
• 58:11
  tell me it's not, but they alsotold me to give up my masks. So
• 58:14
  and so you've got this situationwhere highly, you know, people
• 58:18
  that have the ability to discernthings, for the most part, are
• 58:21
  left in the position where,like, I don't know what to do, I
• 58:23
  got to trust somebody I agree.And I have a sister in law who
• 58:27
  had her first child is awardedthe state today. She's would be
• 58:33
  probably 24
• 58:38
  and it was her first round ofvaccines, and she spiked 107 or
• 58:44
  108 degree fever. It fried herbrain. They were still living
• 58:51
  with her when I was dating mywife and got married, and they
• 58:55
  had to make the hard decision toinstitutionalize her, because
• 58:58
  they literally all she did wasscream and roll around. She
• 59:01
  couldn't walk, she couldn't feedherself, she couldn't take care
• 59:03
  of herself. There was nobodyhome, right? And that was a
• 59:07
  vaccine injury, almost certainhappened the day after she took
• 59:11
  her first round of vaccines. Soshe had a reaction,
• 59:16
  you know, so, but she had herother two kids vaccinated,
• 59:22
  you know, and they're fine. Mykids got vaccinated. They're
• 59:25
  fine, right? We didn't take themall. But you know, we also, you
• 59:30
  know, we've, we've increased thenumber so staggeringly over the
• 59:35
  last 30 years. And some of them,I think, need to be looked at,
• 59:39
  and some of them don't. I also,you know, if you want to talk
• 59:42
  pharmaceuticals, I I have noidea why pharmaceuticals can.
• 59:46
  Can advertise on TV.
• 59:49
  Why are they allowed? I mean,
• 59:52
  why do I need to know about, youknow,
• 59:56
  humera, for example, right? I.
• 1:00:00
  And
• 1:00:03
  makes sense, though, and this isconspiratorial too, but I think
• 1:00:06
  probably makes sense. I don'tthink that those Well, I think
• 1:00:09
  it's money, but I think it'smoney in a very nefarious way. I
• 1:00:11
  think it's like NBC or CNBCcan't afford these hosts that
• 1:00:18
  they have unless they have hugeamounts of money, then they pay.
• 1:00:22
  So the pharmaceutical companies,you can't, you can't advertise
• 1:00:25
  Jack Daniels anymore. Yeah,right, right. I mean, I can't
• 1:00:29
  advertise Newports anymore. Imean, I'm actually against all
• 1:00:33
  of these rules. What we, what Iwould say is the government
• 1:00:36
  shouldn't have control over thebroadcast airwaves to begin
• 1:00:39
  with. And then you have thewhole question of like, All
• 1:00:41
  right, well, how do you, how doyou allocate the, you know, the
• 1:00:44
  bandwidth, and how do youchoose? But at the end of the
• 1:00:47
  day, every time we set up one ofthese rules, we just create a
• 1:00:50
  system that whoever has themoney piled up, can
• 1:00:56
  I guess what I'm what I'm sayingis, is that, you know it is
• 1:01:01
  EpiPen is a great example ofpeople, you know, abusing the
• 1:01:05
  system. The pharmaceuticalabusing the system. You know,
• 1:01:09
  epinephrine is, epinephrine isoff, off label. You know it's,
• 1:01:14
  it's, but they keep getting thepatent for the pin, renewed the
• 1:01:20
  delivery device?
• 1:01:23
  Yeah. I mean, you're you and Ithis actually may be an
• 1:01:26
  interesting discussion. I'mpretty much against patents. I
• 1:01:30
  think that we like, I like, whatare we doing? You that is an
• 1:01:34
  idea, and the fact that you nowhave the force of the government
• 1:01:38
  to come along and say you're notallowed to use that idea because
• 1:01:41
  that guy had it first, andyou're in manufacturing, you've
• 1:01:44
  built things, so you probablyhave a very different
• 1:01:46
  perspective here, but to me, itadds a whole lot of power in the
• 1:01:50
  government to enforce rulesaround ideas. So there's,
• 1:01:56
  there's two sides to this coin,right, and
• 1:02:01
  the one side is, is that I am Ifigured out something
• 1:02:09
  that nobody else has everfigured out.
• 1:02:13
  Should everybody be allowed tocopy that on day one? Should I
• 1:02:17
  have the ability to monetizethat at least somehow,
• 1:02:23
  I would say you would get awhole lot less in it may, you
• 1:02:26
  may get a whole lot lessinnovation. I won't say you will
• 1:02:28
  get, you may get a whole lotless innovation if you don't
• 1:02:31
  allow them to monetize. What'sthe point? Right? Unless so you
• 1:02:36
  get a whole lot less patents forcertain and everybody will go to
• 1:02:39
  know how I hold exactly zeropatents, not because I've come
• 1:02:43
  up with zero patentable ideas,but in order to get a patent,
• 1:02:47
  you have to tell them exactlyhow you did it.
• 1:02:50
  Okay? So as long as you're in anarea that
• 1:02:56
  enforces patents,
• 1:02:58
  that's great, right? I can tellyou exactly how you did it, you
• 1:03:01
  can't do it, but let's take theconversation that we had to
• 1:03:05
  begin this with minerals, andlet's take a place that doesn't
• 1:03:08
  necessarily enforce patents. Sonow I've told you exactly how I
• 1:03:12
  did it,
• 1:03:16
  okay,
• 1:03:18
  and so you're going to go doexactly what I did, and go to
• 1:03:21
  every place else that won'tenforce that patent,
• 1:03:25
  right, and sell my product, whatI came up with. So
• 1:03:32
  in my world, know how might bebetter,
• 1:03:36
  right? And know how is the otherside of that coin, which is the
• 1:03:39
  unpatentable idea that you theunpatent idea that you came up
• 1:03:43
  with that nobody's figured outyet. So I'm I built a better
• 1:03:47
  mouse trap, but
• 1:03:51
  I'm going to not even sell youthe mouse trap. I'm going to
• 1:03:54
  sell you the mouse catchingservice,
• 1:03:58
  right? And you can't look at mymouse trap. It's in a box
• 1:04:02
  because I don't want you to knowhow I did it.
• 1:04:05
  Now you're going to send allkinds of people around try to
• 1:04:08
  steal my mouse traps, right? SoI'm going to have to probably
• 1:04:10
  put some sort of, you know,defeat device on them, right? So
• 1:04:16
  you can't figure out how I didit. But that's the other side of
• 1:04:20
  the patent conversation, andthere's a lot of engineers and
• 1:04:23
  industries that operate on knowhow. And especially, I think,
• 1:04:28
  since
• 1:04:30
  China really came into the WTOand was really ripping off
• 1:04:35
  patents, and that's what theydo. And now it's interesting,
• 1:04:41
  because Japanese rings patents,the Japanese ringed patents. So
• 1:04:44
  you'd come up with an idea, andthey would come up with every
• 1:04:48
  possible variation on that ideathat they could think of, and
• 1:04:52
  patent everything around you. Soyou were stuck with the original
• 1:04:55
  idea, and if you moved one wayor the other, you know, they
• 1:04:58
  basically have a patent, you'dbe.
• 1:05:00
  Fringing on their patent, right?That was the Japanese were
• 1:05:03
  brilliant on that, actually, andreally good, but the Chinese
• 1:05:08
  would just ignore your patent.And I was in, you know, they
• 1:05:12
  talked about all the patentsthat China files and all the
• 1:05:15
  stuff, listen, I was in. I'vebeen, I've been working in China
• 1:05:19
  since 2001
• 1:05:20
  and in order to get our hightech license, you had to come up
• 1:05:25
  with three patents. And you talkto your patent people, and
• 1:05:29
  they're like, Well, why didn'tyou patent that? Well, I didn't
• 1:05:31
  design that. Nobody cares. It
• 1:05:35
  doesn't matter. You just gottafile patents so you get your
• 1:05:38
  high tech status
• 1:05:40
  right. So you could patentsomebody else's design.
• 1:05:44
  Okay? Makes it through theChinese system. You get your
• 1:05:49
  three patents, and you get yourhigh tech status, and you're all
• 1:05:52
  good. You get tax tax rebatesfor another five years.
• 1:05:56
  So it's a it's a game.
• 1:06:00
  And the whole, know how patentthing is kind of a game that you
• 1:06:03
  got to understand, whether youwant people to understand what
• 1:06:06
  you did or not, is China doingthat to get you to participate
• 1:06:12
  in a like a moral quandary? Andthen you've already, you've
• 1:06:15
  already, you know, China as awhole is a moral quandary, but
• 1:06:19
  that's a whole other discussion,but the answer is yes, and no, I
• 1:06:25
  think. But the bigger answer atthat time was, is that
• 1:06:30
  China's government is thecentral government is very
• 1:06:35
  disconnected from potentialgovernment. So the central
• 1:06:37
  government would put out we wantto move to more high tech
• 1:06:41
  industry. Okay, so that getslaid down to the to the
• 1:06:46
  provinces, and the provincialleaders premieres get their
• 1:06:52
  grades on whether they move toan industrial, more high tech
• 1:06:56
  industrial policy. So what dothey do? They go out and they
• 1:07:01
  figure out how to move to a morehigh tech, at least on paper
• 1:07:05
  industrial policy. So okay,let's have everybody file
• 1:07:08
  patents, and then they could getthis high tech credit that the
• 1:07:11
  central government is giving us,and we get credit too, right? So
• 1:07:17
  maybe nothing has changed, buteverybody is now high tech, and
• 1:07:22
  they can spout it out thatwe've, we've, we filed this many
• 1:07:26
  patents, and we're leading inthe patent race. And, you know,
• 1:07:30
  so some of us propaganda, andsome of us the incentives, you
• 1:07:34
  know, be careful what youmeasure, because you get what
• 1:07:36
  you measure, bureaucratichellscape. I mean, this is the
• 1:07:40
  way our corporations work. Yeah,there's some of that, but it's
• 1:07:43
  very prevalent in the provinces,you know, and they compete
• 1:07:48
  against each other for, youknow, the next level up and and
• 1:07:52
  how they are seen by the CentralCommittee and and things of that
• 1:07:56
  nature. So they're going to dothey're going to help you scam
• 1:08:00
  the system. So your part onpatents, I actually am
• 1:08:04
  surprised. I thought you weregoing to be like, no, let me
• 1:08:07
  shove patents down your throatas hard as I can, because that's
• 1:08:10
  the way most engineers are. Man,at Monsanto, when I would talk
• 1:08:13
  about, I don't think we shouldhave intellectual property
• 1:08:15
  rights on on genes. Man, thesepeople would flip out. And I
• 1:08:20
  like your, your take on that,right? Like,
• 1:08:24
  have patents on genes, becausethat's God's patent.
• 1:08:32
  I mean,
• 1:08:34
  I just Okay, so you discoveredsomething that's not creating
• 1:08:38
  something,
• 1:08:40
  yeah, you can't patent math,right? You can't patent a fact,
• 1:08:44
  right? If something is true,then you can't patent that they
• 1:08:46
  definitely got somehow found.Like a weird way to do a flip,
• 1:08:52
  flip over loop to be able tosay, we can patent that, because
• 1:08:55
  you're not allowed to patent amathematical equation, because
• 1:08:58
  that's considered discovered,not not created, isn't a gene
• 1:09:02
  discovered? Yeah. I mean, Ifrankly, like, I really like
• 1:09:06
  your case against them on apurely, like, pragmatic level,
• 1:09:11
  about, like, well, I don'treally want to tell you how to
• 1:09:13
  do this, because then the secretmight get out of the box, and
• 1:09:16
  you've been in a position whereyou've benefited from being able
• 1:09:20
  to keep knowledge secret? Yeah,absolutely. Working on some
• 1:09:24
  stuff right now.
• 1:09:27
  Of course, I'm not asking you totell me what it is, but in what
• 1:09:30
  way, like, Is it like theprocess of, let's say, smelting,
• 1:09:33
  like the order that you put itin? What do you mean? I'm
• 1:09:36
  developed. I'm developing with
• 1:09:40
  a company that I am related,that I have a relationship with
• 1:09:45
  a new process to help pull backparts that have been overseas
• 1:09:50
  for years.
• 1:09:52
  And it's, it's an old processwith a new idea, right? So I'm,
• 1:09:57
  I'm going to do it differently,and I'm going to.
• 1:10:00
  Be able to produce product much,much cheaper than anybody else
• 1:10:04
  in the United States, and shouldbe able to compete with my Asian
• 1:10:10
  competitors. And this is a wayto get around the fact that
• 1:10:13
  we're not producing the rawmaterials. So you're gonna go
• 1:10:16
  recycle them. Yeah, it's, Imean, listen, I mean, we're all
• 1:10:20
  there's only one thing that'ssellable in the world, and it's
• 1:10:24
  time.
• 1:10:26
  Time is the only thing that's ofvalue. And we monetize our time
• 1:10:31
  through a lot of things, right?We can sell corn, or we can sell
• 1:10:36
  auto parts, or we can sellanything, but I'm selling my
• 1:10:40
  time. You're selling your time.You know, we the way we monetize
• 1:10:44
  it. Maybe we're selling itdirectly. Maybe you work for
• 1:10:47
  somebody and they pay you to dostuff, so you're sold it
• 1:10:51
  directly. You sold eight hours aday of your time for X number of
• 1:10:54
  dollars. Right, as a businessowner,
• 1:10:58
  I sell my time by by monetize mytime, by selling parts,
• 1:11:04
  right? So if I can figure out away to make profit or make more
• 1:11:08
  per unit time,
• 1:11:11
  or more good per unit time, thenI can make more. I can still
• 1:11:16
  reduce my price and make moreper hour,
• 1:11:19
  right? So in my world,everything circles back to time.
• 1:11:25
  It's the only thing that's oflimited quantity in your life,
• 1:11:30
  and you sell it every day.
• 1:11:34
  So and what? What is it? I thinkit's Epicurious that it's it's
• 1:11:38
  not that we're given too littletime, it's that we waste so
• 1:11:41
  much,
• 1:11:42
  right? So
• 1:11:44
  everything for me comes back totime.
• 1:11:48
  I like this a great deal. And infact, in my own world of legacy
• 1:11:51
  interviews, it actually mapsdirectly to what I think,
• 1:11:54
  because I'm always saying, like,you could record your family,
• 1:11:58
  like, absolutely you haveequipment to do it. You have the
• 1:12:01
  relationship. They're rightthere with you. But what happens
• 1:12:04
  with us is that we're going totake the time to do it, and it's
• 1:12:08
  actually going to get done. Andthat's ultimately, like, why
• 1:12:12
  people are like, you know, it'sjust, yeah, I could do it
• 1:12:15
  myself, but, like, doing it thisway just just resolves the
• 1:12:17
  problem. And then, you know, ofcourse, quality. But like the
• 1:12:21
  the I had never thought todirectly say that, and that
• 1:12:25
  that's not just the businessthat I'm in, it's the business
• 1:12:27
  you're in. That's, it's thebusiness everybody's in,
• 1:12:30
  stockbroker selling his time,you know, trying to convince
• 1:12:34
  people to do something, right?And a lot, yeah, and that you
• 1:12:38
  don't have to go look up theseideas. You don't have to go look
• 1:12:40
  at the, you know, the p and Eratings. I'll just give it to
• 1:12:43
  you, and that might changeanything you can do to in, you
• 1:12:47
  know, that's why you hire morepeople, right? Because you don't
• 1:12:52
  want to spend 24 hours a daydoing it, and you can afford now
• 1:12:56
  to hire a couple people to helpyou, right? You have other
• 1:12:59
  things you want to do with yourtime, because, you know, it's
• 1:13:01
  valuable, right? And I had, youknow, this is my dad was pretty
• 1:13:06
  influential on some of thisstuff, you know, he was like a
• 1:13:10
  gentleman philosopher. I didn'trealize it until I was much
• 1:13:13
  older, right? But he had allthese sayings about different
• 1:13:16
  stuff and, and then I started,you know, I'm an engineer, and
• 1:13:20
  I've had some discussion withLuke Burgess online about, you
• 1:13:25
  know, people who should peoplestudy the classics, or, you
• 1:13:28
  know, humanities and things likethat. And the answer is yes, but
• 1:13:32
  you got to walk your way upMaslow's hierarchy of needs. You
• 1:13:35
  need to have a job and aprofession that you can support
• 1:13:39
  yourself and have extra time sothat you can study those things,
• 1:13:43
  I think, because they're supervaluable. But I've also had a
• 1:13:47
  couple brushes with death, and,you know, from young times to
• 1:13:52
  recent and, you know, and andwhat's the saying? I think it's
• 1:13:56
  Seneca, or somebody said, Everyman lives two lives, and the
• 1:14:00
  second begins when he realizeshe has but one, right?
• 1:14:05
  So once you realize, and talkingto young kids is hilarious like
• 1:14:09
  that, because you know, time isnot a thing for them, yeah,
• 1:14:15
  yeah. In fact, they're so like,like, my, my four year old, all
• 1:14:18
  she wants is time to movefaster. She has no concept of
• 1:14:21
  like. So when you realize thatyou have only one life, what
• 1:14:25
  happened in your Second Life,then,
• 1:14:28
  well, you know, I was told byone of my mentors that at some
• 1:14:32
  point you knew from an innovatorto being an innovator to being
• 1:14:36
  an educator.
• 1:14:38
  So I decided,
• 1:14:42
  after a couple of the morerecent ones, I had cancer in
• 1:14:45
  2016 and then I wrecked a snowmeal, pretty bad in 2019 hours.
• 1:14:49
  Joke about I met my deductibleand my family deductible all by
• 1:14:54
  midnight on January 1 2019
• 1:14:57
  you know.
• 1:15:00
  Yeah,
• 1:15:01
  because I got a nice lifeflight, and I got a nice private
• 1:15:03
  flight out of it, and the wholenine yards, right? But I decided
• 1:15:08
  that that's what I wanted to be.I wanted to teach what I know to
• 1:15:12
  other people, right down to thefact that we all sell our time.
• 1:15:16
  That's the only thing valuablein life.
• 1:15:19
  And you know how to do thisstuff and pass on what I was
• 1:15:25
  taught by some great mentors. Ihad 234,
• 1:15:30
  really fantastic mentors, mydad, couple bosses, a couple
• 1:15:36
  personal on the personal side,you know, and they taught me so
• 1:15:39
  much. And I've read. I'm avoracious reader, and you know,
• 1:15:45
  it's,
• 1:15:47
  it's time, it's time to passthat on to my kids and to others
• 1:15:53
  that want it, that want it, youknow? And the old saying goes,
• 1:15:57
  you know, when, when the studentknocks the the teacher appears,
• 1:16:00
  you can't teach somebody thatdoesn't want to learn. Want to
• 1:16:03
  learn, so you have to wait forthe student to knock but you but
• 1:16:07
  once they do, you know, you pickup people to mentor, right? And
• 1:16:12
  that's what I try to do. And inmy industry, I try to continue
• 1:16:17
  to teach people, okay? This isthe fundamentals. It is the
• 1:16:20
  basics. I was talking to aservice guy yesterday, and he's
• 1:16:23
  like, there aren't a lot ofpeople around like you anymore,
• 1:16:26
  right, that know the deep down,dark secrets of of how we used
• 1:16:31
  to do it, right? And I said, I'mtrying to teach them sometimes I
• 1:16:35
  teach them bad things, right?You know, things that they work,
• 1:16:40
  but you maybe you shouldn't knowthis. And I tell them
• 1:16:43
  that I want to give you a toolhere, but please use it very
• 1:16:47
  sparingly, right?
• 1:16:50
  But because you can destroystuff if you don't pay
• 1:16:53
  attention. But, well, there's aplace for the dark arts, right?
• 1:16:56
  Once you're really an expert,yeah, there's a place for that,
• 1:17:01
  and it's not, I don't believethat there's alchemy to it. I
• 1:17:04
  believe that it's I believe inscience and I believe in physics
• 1:17:07
  and engineering and everything,you know, I kind of laugh at the
• 1:17:12
  whole Elon first principlesthing, because that was my
• 1:17:16
  mentor in the 90s. He was afirst principles guy, right? I
• 1:17:19
  mean, it's like he looked at meand he said, it's an engineering
• 1:17:23
  problem. You're an engineer. Youcould figure it out,
• 1:17:28
  right? Let physics be thedeterminer of what you could do,
• 1:17:33
  right? You say first principles.I don't know that I could if
• 1:17:36
  somebody said, What does it meanto be a first principles
• 1:17:39
  thinker? It's a concept I hear,but I don't know what it means.
• 1:17:42
  Well, for example, if you wantto, if you want to, if you have
• 1:17:47
  something that's
• 1:17:48
  say too hot, right? I say a partor something, how are you going
• 1:17:54
  to it's, let's say that you'rethrottling a CNC machine because
• 1:17:58
  your coolant is too hot and it'stearing up tools, something like
• 1:18:02
  that, right? Okay,
• 1:18:06
  you shouldn't be throttling theCNC. You should be figuring out
• 1:18:08
  how to cool off the coolant,
• 1:18:11
  right? So let's not work on,let's not work on anything in
• 1:18:16
  that CNC, because people arelike, well, I need to speed it
• 1:18:18
  up and not do this. So I'm goingto change all this programming.
• 1:18:22
  Let's go to the direct source ofthis. This is B to use in,
• 1:18:27
  equals b to use out. Don't useworkarounds. Get to the core
• 1:18:31
  problem. Go to the root cause.Find Your HERBIE, if you're if
• 1:18:36
  you're a gold rat guy, find yourHerbie and work on your Herbie.
• 1:18:40
  Right? You you a gold rat. Eli,gold rat and the goal never even
• 1:18:46
  heard of. The goal is probablythe best manufacturing book on
• 1:18:52
  the planet that if you get goldrat and dimming together, you
• 1:18:55
  have manufacturing whipped
• 1:18:58
  right, does Demings, SPC andquality control. And gold red is
• 1:19:04
  all about throughput. It'sconstraint constraint theory,
• 1:19:07
  right? So those are the two Ialways point people to. And you
• 1:19:12
  know, it's all about findingyour HERBIE, finding your
• 1:19:15
  finding your real constraint,
• 1:19:18
  or finding your real root causeand fixing that. And, you know,
• 1:19:25
  Henry Ford said it, Elon said itthat a lot of engineers spend a
• 1:19:28
  lot of time perfecting processthat shouldn't even exist,
• 1:19:35
  right?
• 1:19:37
  It's a workaround.
• 1:19:39
  Why are you even doing it. Imean, I think this is something
• 1:19:43
  said in science a lot, that it'slike, the hardest part is
• 1:19:47
  actually defining the problem.If you define the problem like,
• 1:19:51
  you find it right, if you know,like, what is actually the thing
• 1:19:54
  that we're trying to solve here,that is most of the challenge.
• 1:19:59
  Because.
• 1:20:00
  Is it's once you discover theright problem to be solving,
• 1:20:03
  then when you solve it, you'reat first principles, but it is
• 1:20:06
  very, very difficult. Like, youknow, you look at a sales
• 1:20:09
  problem, you're like, Well, theproblem is that we're not
• 1:20:11
  selling enough. Well, is it? Isthat the core, yeah, like, or is
• 1:20:14
  there another problem thatyou're actually trying to say,
• 1:20:17
  maybe a symptom, maybe we havean inferior product, or maybe
• 1:20:19
  our prices are too high or costor too high, or maybe our sales
• 1:20:23
  marketing isn't done, yeah? Or,you know, there could be a
• 1:20:26
  number of issues that areleading to that outcome. That is
• 1:20:31
  a that is an outcome, and youhave to have inputs and outputs,
• 1:20:35
  and you have to figure out whichone it is sales, revenue is an
• 1:20:38
  output,
• 1:20:40
  right? It's not an input, andit's do you have what your
• 1:20:44
  customers need? Are you makingit? Can you make it in the
• 1:20:48
  quantities they need? Can youmake it at the quality levels
• 1:20:51
  need, and can you make it at thecost they need?
• 1:20:54
  And if you can do that, thenyou'll have more sales than you
• 1:20:57
  can possibly stand,
• 1:20:59
  right? And if you look throughhistory, that's what happens.
• 1:21:03
  That's the story of the Model T,right? And another book who is
• 1:21:10
  that it's not Womack, it's
• 1:21:13
  it's the machine that changedthe world. And it's about the
• 1:21:17
  it's about the moving assemblyline.
• 1:21:21
  And Henry Ford's invention ofthe moving assembly line. It's
• 1:21:24
  called a machine that changedthe world. And,
• 1:21:27
  you know, you're talking aboutmanufacturing and factories and
• 1:21:31
  things like this. And, you know,growing up, the idea that you
• 1:21:34
  would become a factory workerwas seen as like saying, I'm
• 1:21:38
  gonna go become a slave. I'mgonna go become surf. What
• 1:21:42
  should people know about factorywork that they don't know? Um,
• 1:21:49
  what do I say? I mean,
• 1:21:52
  it's reasonably well paid, butit's not as well paid as it
• 1:21:55
  should be. I think that. Well,that's what we're trying I mean,
• 1:21:58
  because we're not as efficientas we should be.
• 1:22:03
  It's a lot of fun, I mean, to bean engineer in a factory, or to
• 1:22:07
  be part of the process team orthe tooling team, it's a whole
• 1:22:11
  lot of fun because you'resolving problems every day. You
• 1:22:14
  know it's, it's, there's a lotof tedious work for the average
• 1:22:18
  worker. We try to,
• 1:22:21
  we try to eliminate as much asthat as possible. And the
• 1:22:24
  question I have to ask everyone,you know when they're doing
• 1:22:28
  something and you know whenthey're setting up the process
• 1:22:31
  or something, would you wantyour mom to do that for eight
• 1:22:34
  hours a day, five days a week,
• 1:22:37
  right? But if you don't wantyour mom doing it,
• 1:22:41
  then, why are you having thisperson do it? Let's figure out a
• 1:22:45
  different way. So give me anexample of how that would
• 1:22:47
  change. You know something,
• 1:22:51
  I mean, somebody standing on aconcrete floor with a file in
• 1:22:56
  their hand filing something foreight hours a day,
• 1:23:00
  right? Carpal Tunnel comingcoming your way.
• 1:23:04
  Back problems coming your way.So can we give them? Is it
• 1:23:09
  something where they can sitdown? Is it something where they
• 1:23:12
  can we can put a rubber matunder them? Can we automate that
• 1:23:15
  process and eliminate thatentirely so somebody doesn't
• 1:23:18
  have to do that? Can we fix, canwe go to first principles? Why
• 1:23:22
  is it happening? Why are wegoing to file it right? And can
• 1:23:26
  we fix the very root cause ofit, or will it always kind of be
• 1:23:30
  there, and we can't figure outhow to fix that right? So that's
• 1:23:34
  what you got to get them tofocus on. That's what you try to
• 1:23:37
  get people to focus on, is iseliminating those, those spots
• 1:23:41
  where, you know people, weshouldn't have people doing
• 1:23:45
  those things. And by the way,that's what the Chinese do. It
• 1:23:48
  spades. There are boatloads ofpeople standing there filing
• 1:23:52
  stuff.
• 1:23:54
  I mean, that's a brilliant wayto describe the comparative
• 1:23:57
  advantage in this, because it itshows like, well, if you have
• 1:24:03
  people and you can throw them atthat, and you don't care whether
• 1:24:06
  or not and they cost nothing,virtually, right, then you don't
• 1:24:09
  have to solve problems. Like, atthe deeper level, you can just
• 1:24:13
  throw, you can just throw cheaplabor at it. Yeah. I mean,
• 1:24:15
  listen, when I first startedgoing there, one of my JVs, I
• 1:24:18
  was with a big state ownedcompany, and one of their
• 1:24:22
  metrics that we as part of theJV, that we had to report out on
• 1:24:27
  was how many deaths we had.
• 1:24:29
  Okay, it was a KPI, you know,
• 1:24:35
  right
• 1:24:37
  now we didn't have any,
• 1:24:40
  but the fact that it existed
• 1:24:43
  was like, you know, and theywere a big, multi billion dollar
• 1:24:46
  organ, state owned, you know,
• 1:24:50
  you know, but it's there. Howmany people did you kill?
• 1:24:56
  And there's probably tolerancesthere, right? How many people
• 1:24:59
  you employ?
• 1:25:00
  COVID versus how many peopledie? And I don't know, I mean,
• 1:25:04
  I don't remember whether it wasstill there when I, when I left
• 1:25:08
  that company, and I certainlydidn't have any my companies
• 1:25:11
  that I ran as wolfies, you know,of wholly owned, you know. But
• 1:25:15
  I guess, you know, it made me,
• 1:25:19
  you know, my, my skin crawl alittle bit, right? It would,
• 1:25:23
  yeah, but that's the world thatwe were part of over there. Now,
• 1:25:30
  if you that happens over here,you got big problems.
• 1:25:36
  Yeah, that's something OSHAdoesn't ask you, is how many
• 1:25:39
  they will shut down your plantand they will crawl all over you
• 1:25:42
  forever, and they should,
• 1:25:45
  right? I mean our job as asbusiness owners and and
• 1:25:50
  manufacturing leaders orwhatever, maybe it's an elevator
• 1:25:53
  leader or or, you know,whatever, is to send everybody
• 1:25:57
  home at least as good as theycame in.
• 1:26:00
  That's job number one.
• 1:26:04
  So we're about to wrap up. But Iwould be remiss if I didn't ask
• 1:26:08
  you, what does nn ZP meannothing,
• 1:26:13
  really, absolutely nothing. It'sjust static. It's just noise,
• 1:26:17
  just noise. 1730 doesn't meananything, if that's my Twitter,
• 1:26:23
  you know, and that doesn't meananything either. It's just
• 1:26:25
  random. Wow, I'm gonna, I'mgonna stack this away in my
• 1:26:30
  conspiracy theories that you'relying, and then it does mean
• 1:26:33
  something, and that there's likea hidden if it does what it
• 1:26:37
  means, I mean. But
• 1:26:39
  I decided at some point severalyears ago to change Twitter
• 1:26:43
  handles and, and I, you know, I
• 1:26:48
  just typed some numbers andletters and numbers in and and
• 1:26:52
  picked avatar that basically, Ithink it says, If you don't do
• 1:26:56
  maintenance on your equipment,your equipment will decide When
• 1:26:59
  the maintenance is
• 1:27:01
  due. I don't really know what itsays, you know. And you know, I
• 1:27:06
  wanted to be mostly anonymous,because I know a lot of people
• 1:27:11
  in the industry, and I don'twant to, you know, in my
• 1:27:13
  industry and the larger autoindustry, and I really don't
• 1:27:17
  want to be that guy callingpeople out. I there were some
• 1:27:20
  people in my position that didthat when I was a younger guy,
• 1:27:24
  and I just didn't think it wasvery see, you know, they thought
• 1:27:26
  it was a little unseemly. And Iwant to be have good
• 1:27:30
  interactions with people onlinethat, you know, a lot of people
• 1:27:36
  know who I am, and a lot ofpeople don't, and that's fine
• 1:27:40
  with me. I just like being who Iam, I guess. Well, that sounds
• 1:27:47
  like a perfect place to to wrapup. So, man, thank you so much
• 1:27:52
  for sitting down with me anddoing this. Is some long, long
• 1:27:55
  time I've been wanting to dothis. Hopefully it's worthwhile.
• 1:27:59
  I mean, I, you know, I don't
• 1:28:02
  consider myself a philosopher oror anything that's generally
• 1:28:08
  worth listening to. So there yougo. Well, I've known ever since
• 1:28:12
  our first conversation that thiswould be a great podcast, and I
• 1:28:15
  was right.
• 1:28:22
  You