Aaron Slodov on Reindustrialize Summit 2.0: building the political and cultural coalition to reshore US manufacturing

at the donut? Oh, yeah. Uh, oh, looking good. I I like the background. Uh, we have our intern We have our intern in the studio today uh making the first iPhone in America. It's happening. It looks like he's done. Give me the update. I'm getting pretty close. He's getting pretty close.

Missing most of the kind of, you know, external external things here. I got the volume buttons, home button. I got to put in the battery, the main kind of chip, motherboard. Okay. Um, but feeling pretty good. I'm probably 80% of the way there. 80% of the way there. Less than an hour and a half in.

I think this is uh uh this is going fantastically. I wasn't sure if this is possible, but it looks like it's looks like it's happening. Anyway, Erin, how how you doing? What what are you up to these days? uh doing well and getting ready for uh you know the second annual second re-industrialized conference.

Give me the background on the first one. How'd that go? When and where is the second one? Yeah. Um so this is kind of a labor of love of many people, right? Uh basically, you know, we have we have a nice team of uh co-founders, myself, Austin Bishop, Fallon Donghue, and Greg Bernstein. Cool.

Um and an amazing team of organizers, but yeah, last year the backstory is kind of obviously, you know, hard tech, deep tech, the wave was kind of happening at that point. Um I put out that article, the techno-industrial manifesto. That's right.

Lots of questions, lots of people talking about this across military, government, finance, whatever. um wanted to put all these people in the same room together, right?

So the idea behind this was can we actually build a big tent around this idea and um I saw it as a way to really just like convene and who were some of the top top speakers last time? Um so we had Sham from uh Palunteer, we had Eric Prince, we had the Lieutenant Governor of Michigan, we I mean it was crazy, right?

like this all came together in under 3 months basically. Um and we were we were all like grinding super hard to you know bring this awesome group of people together. Um you know Chris gave the keynote uh from Hrien and it was this really really excellent group of people.

Um it was like you were there with you know a thousand of your friends right and everybody's ready to build and um it was just it was wonderful you know in so many ways and people really thought that it was like yeah what yeah what what is the overall state of the reindustrialization project there's been a lot of thought pieces and conferences um what have we seen on the legislation side on the EO side and what are we waiting for next I mean yeah we could probably spend an entire hour on uh all the things that have rolled out of the admin, you know, since January.

Um, but it it has been it's been surprising uh to say the least. Like, wow, that's awesome. What's up, Aaron? Good to see you. Hello. You as well. Um, so yeah, like following up on last year, right?

Like one of the things that we established at the very end of the summit was we wanted to bring together the new industrial alliance, new American industrial alliance, NIA, right?

So um we Austin has been running that in DC uh for the last year and we've got basically like a mountain of you know uh legislation and policy that has been active and pumped out um through various like EOS we have um reconciliation happening right now. There's there's going to be a ton, right?

And ship building standalone by itself, right? Um it's I think we're going to be at a level where um the sovereign wealth fund potentially, right? Like equipment financing out out the wazoo, like it it will be pretty interesting to kind of like watch and see what happens here. Um very very excited to see.

What can you tell us about what to expect at this year's Reindustrialize? Are tickets on sale yet? Where can people go to sign up? Is it invite only? How is the how is the conference coming together? Any speakers you can tease? Yeah.

Um so we did we did actually uh you know bring out a little list uh the other day of our top um invites and you can check that out on the the Reindustrialize account which is uh ReendSummit um on X. But um yeah, basically the way we're doing this right now is that it's mostly um invite only.

Um we're we're balancing, you know, a very interesting community here uh in terms of like bringing the stakeholders together, decision makers, but also all the people that are very enthusiastic about re-industrialization and bringing manufacturing back. So get in Aaron's DMs. That's what I'm hearing.

Start start yapping. That's great. Uh, and I mean big big development since the last re-industrialized. I've seen the iOS autocorrect keyboard stops correcting re-industrialized to de-industrialize. Total cultural victory. Let's go. Reindustrialize crew. We love it. We love it.

I think that's subtle signaling from Tim that that we're bringing the iPhone back to America. Yeah. Okay. Give me any any advice, Erin, for for Tyler? I was about to ask. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What what's the advice for our intern who's assembling the iPhone in America for the first time? Uh what tools does he need?

Uh you know what are the key what are the key steps to really reshore manufacturing lots of pieces that didn't go in that phone? Yeah. Take it take it apart. Not done yet. I'm not take it apart. Put it back together. So he's not done yet. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Aaron, what does it take to restore the iPhone?

Does he I mean uh are we going to give him a gong ring for this? cuz I mean it's a lot of it's a lot of grit, right? We're watching history. So cultural shift is what I'm hearing. Yes. I mean massive cultural shift which is you know underlied by a lot of other factors too.

So um I think that infusing and transforming the industrial base through technology gives you know a lot of incentive for people to jump back in and join. We're not we're not trying to go back to the 50s here.

So, um I I really do think that that's, you know, part of the cultural movement, uh right, to like bring the stuff kicking and screaming out of, uh World War II era or the '8s or however you really want to think about it into the 21st century. And it's not going to be easy, right?

Like listening to Patrick talk about that stuff is it's mindbending honestly, like how how much one company can actually do, right, at scale. Um so, yeah. Yeah.

uh what are you thinking about kind of the the first steps to uh biggest re-industrial what is the rate limiting like in the supply chain right now we've heard about mining and DRA's working on work constructions and Hrien and you are working on different pieces of uh uh whether it's CNC or injection there's a whole bunch of different pieces of like this the subtle supply chain I talked to one person who was uh working on uh bringing a team internationally to build brushless motors for drones, for small drones.

And they were like, "Oh, yeah. I'm excited to get to America, set up shop here. I'd love to just set up my company in the brushless motor district in America. Wherever the brushless motor district is, I'll just set up my business there.

So then if I need a per certain part, I'll just walk across the street to another company. " And the guy had to explain like, "No, no, no. We don't even have a district. We don't even have a company. We have nothing. " So, uh, so yeah. What what what are you most excited about?

What's perhaps underrated right now in terms of the supply chain?

So it it's a really good question because this is kind of like can we pull the UNO or verso card on you know China or whatever other supply chains and bring some of the stuff back right like what what does that actually require and it's more than just you know the raw the raw materials the machines uh it's the way that I think about this stuff it's like trade skill right like these are very very precious um of skill that when you give them away right it empowers somebody else to scale them somewhere.

And if you've got hundreds of millions of people to to do that, um that's it's pretty challenging, you know. Uh we don't necessarily need to outdo them. We just have to be right like in the arena still. Um because one of the things that they want is to de-industrialize everybody else, right?

So, uh we can't we just can't let that happen. Um and that's okay, right? like we we have to be able to fight back on a fundamental level by preserving, replicating and like scaling this very precious like trade skill.

And if that has to be done through through AI and automation, right, like to compress the stuff that people really shouldn't be doing, right? Um like these dirty, dark, dangerous types of jobs. Um we don't we don't really necessarily need to go back to that.

But yeah, there there's there's a lot, right, like underlying this problem. And I think a lot of people have a challenging time separating the fact that like do we do we actually need to be focused on making t-shirts and toasters in America, but like not necessarily.

But the feeder industries that you need to do all that stuff, you know, grant you the ability to do all these other things, right? Yeah. This line about like maybe we need to make make happy meal toys in America in order to for to earn the right to make iPhones in America, too.

like like the supply chain is so interlin that even these uh kind of like these silly toys that seem so easy to to offshore. Uh maybe we need to bring those back too. Anyway, uh it's been fantastic having you. I'm sure we'll learn a lot more at reindustrialize. Where can people go to learn more? What's the website?

reindustrialize. com. There we go. That's a great domain. Let's give it up for a great domain. Thank you, Aaron. Thanks for hopping on the show. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of We're excited to cover it. Thanks, Aaron. Uh before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.

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