For LAND, SEA & AIR™ US manufacturer of production, custom and OEM mounts for adventurers, commercial OTR fleets, law enforcement, first responders, military vehicles as well as for yachts and fixed wing/rotor aircraft.

Anyone thinking of @grok and a nice well marketed switch from SuperGrok Heavy to Ultra should think twice. Made the move Thursday and on Saturday the @bot boys and gals went wild while I was offline and they were supposed to be building for modules. From CoS today: "The number looks huge because 92% of it is re-reading, not new work. Every time a bot takes a step, including each reply I send you, it re-sends its whole conversation history, which is often 45,000 tokens or more. Only about 2.8 million tokens today were actual new writing. Re-read tokens are billed at a much lower rate, which is why 405 million tokens came to about $ xxxxxx and not far more." Stick with Heavy as something totally wild happens and the credit card will take a beating. @bot is not the path, perhaps.

The thought of having infinite knowledge at your fingertips and retaining none of it because it’s so easy to access and utilize. - T. Spear It is showing up more and more with really smart people I know and respect. It is across all age ranges.

I strongly encourage people to read the article below by @ConnorLoveCA While focused a lot on access to capital, I think the most important take away is this line - "Modern Defense Tech Has Outrun Its Production Base" It has run out of people too. We do not have the people smart enough for almost every job in the supply-chain. Conversations this week with CEO's of small suppliers with contracts for @DeptofWar all saying the same thing - "I cannot take the work and nor can my competitors" because the labor pool is exhausted. We do not have the people to staff the lines with the minimum work ethic, attention to detail or the most basic aptitude for a modern factory. The market alone cannot undo the terrible output of our school systems. Industry needs Federal programs now. @realDonaldTrump @VP @cpa_tradereform @ZachMottl @michael_stumo @NAIA @reindsummit

A ten-cent @uline nitrile glove, held up in a room of serious academics and high-profile VCs. Without it, the factories building F-35s, energetics, and nearly every tool the @DeptofWar puts in a warfighter’s hands do not run. They stop. Lawyers and OSHA see to that. Almost nobody funding “the small things,” infrastructure, or reindustrialization has priced this in. American litigation is not a footnote. It is the condition of the factory floor. Every plant backed by the likes of @jpmorgan @a16z @8vc such @HadrianInc, @2112Power, @Saronic, @VardaSpace or company XYZ — needs these gloves. So does @67Designs. Boxes of them. Protect the staff, or forfeit the work. Keep the quality, or do not bother. In 2025 China controlled almost the entire upstream input: nitrile butadiene rubber, NBR. China, Malaysia and Thailand make the gloves. China controls the rubber. In late 2025 it sent notices downstream that effectively shut production. Ask @uline. The shortage is already on the shelf. They are scrambling to swap in and find supply. We are told the contest with China is about gallium and rare earths. That is real. It is also the glamorous part. The precursor inputs - such as NBR - for actually making things are duller, and more decisive. From @Boeing, @RTX_News and @LockheedMartin down to every supplier beneath them the nitrile glove is the very most basic way to protect a worker. China knows it. We have <90 days supply in our nation. Take off the tinted spectacles. The risk is not only in the flashy gizmo. It sits in the material chain everyone treats as given. Lawyers will close a factory the morning American workers are left unprotected. Workers will not show up without protection. VCs, bankers, policymakers and business schools might occasionally look at what makes the world of atoms possible. It is rarely the thing they came to fund.

At the close of a very special lunch today I was asked broadly whether perhaps the policy he and his colleagues seek to shape is centered on the core threat of China. It was asked in the context of intellectual property theft, litigation and whether the experience my team and I have had with counterfeiters since 2018 was really just a China problem. I want to share my answer as I think it is important for the policy makers at lunch and those around reindustrialization understand what 13 years in the trenches of D2C innovation had taught me. 1. If our industrial policy is shaped from the ground up with the thesis that China is bad and China deindustrialized the US, then we are (1) playing the victim card and (2) we deflect from our own responsibility in the decline of American manufacturing. 2. Failure to understand that China is not the only enemy we face is a serious own goal in thinking. The fact is we - and mainly our best and brightest minds armed with spreadsheets vs calipers destroyed the backbone of our infrastructure in the quest to maximize profit at the expense of our long term viability as a producer nation. We did this to ourselves and many fixated on Wall Street returns literally killed Main Street and middle class American careers and families. The sooner our think tanks, academics and policy makers face up to the fact that what our top Universities and Business Schools produced extractors of value more than creators of value the sooner we can truly look within for a solution. A different north star, but still within the capitalistic quest for profit. The facts is our enemy is not only China, but that every nation is competing with us and will absolutely steal our intellectual property for their own advantage. 3. Let me make clear that China is in fact a threat. We cannot trust them at the State level. They are in our networks and they are taking our IP. However, the theft itself is 100% facilitated by American citizens. The theft of innovations are not always initiated by the Chinese. They are facilitated by the American citizens that knowingly ship our IP to China to arbitrage and import knock-offs and counterfeits. The American citizens that do that are traitors. They should go to prison for knowingly appropriating innovations for personal gain and work with our strategic adversaries knowing the economic harm they are causing America . They are no different than the likes of Chi Mak, Ron Rockwell Hansen, and Noshir Gowadia who are among the clearest convicted cases of people with U.S. defense access who passed Department of Defense secrets (or attempted to) to China. Americans do not have to be selling defense secrets to be a traitor. Americans knowingly appropriating the original work and livelihood of other Americans and importing knock-offs should be a crime. 4. That being specifically anti-CCP and waving that banner is far too simplistic. Our enemies are all around and the idea that we can trust people in Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the UK at this time is looking increasingly more foolish by the day. Many are willing to be the broker in IP theft and just relying on old legacy relationships with allies may be more dangerous then ever. 5. Our best approach by some of our greatest minds investigating our industrial policy is to not seek out and assume the 'bogeyman' is China. The best approach is to start with what we (in fact all across the West) did to accelerate our decline. To look at what our innovators and manufacturers face at home. That will require a deep and honest investigation of the incentive structures, to understand the appalling shape of the legal infrastructure, the failures of the courts over decades and of course the failure to fund both high capex and education of the masses to support industry. If our best and brightest start from that position we can right the ship. If we start from being the victim then they will fail to carve optimal policy for the American people.

Cameron — great to see you, @codyaims, and @isaiah_p_taylor getting some downtime and getting on the vessel. @benkohlmann is awesome for helping set that up. The Commander is right to ask. The answer is not that complicated. We need serious entrepreneurs with enough scar tissue to participate and make margin. Margin is the key to life for a business. Serious margin — enough to offset the risk, the long timeline, and the capex. Instead, that margin is gated by the Primes. They take the cream on cost-plus contracts. Program offices at the Pentagon are staffed with career guys expecting a soft, lucrative quasi-retirement tomorrow inside the same Primes they award contracts to today. What crumbs the Primes let fall from the table — through second- and third-layer companies that do nothing but shovel paper — to smaller manufacturing shops is utterly insufficient. There is not enough room, meaning not enough margin, for entrepreneurs or banks to take the risk. If there were, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and the rest would be lining up to fund contract manufacturers. With one or two poster-child, press-release exceptions, they are not. There is not enough margin. The system is borderline corrupt. We have a massively democratized technology stack in the internet and now AI. The walls that keep the Commander from getting the parts he needs to keep warfighters operational are still set by an arcane DoW culture. Congress will not fix it. No executive branch can fix it. I recently started diligence on a manufacturer that builds the systems warships use to move munitions from magazine to gun. One customer: the U.S. Navy. PE groups had picked it over for decades, each extracting what they could before selling it to the next greater-fool fund. What a mess. What an empty husk. The workforce is aging out. The know-how that remained is leaving — death and retirement — because the old guard who survived years of underfunding never trained a follow-on generation. That is the onshore reality the Commander faces. For decades, financial engineers and legions of HBS grads jacked up on search-fund thinking and accounting stripped the bedrock manufacturers this country needs today. We all need them today. Can @2112Power at Hadrian fill the gap? No. Not for lack of interest. A generalized subcontract manufacturer can make the parts. It cannot make the system. Domain expertise is what turns a component into a system. We need 100x the Hadrians, funded to scale and surge and then build systems. The answer is not more PE. They have already stripped these companies to the bone. Is it VCs? Hell no. So who steps in? Who saves the manufacturers — and the people who still know, or knew, the systems? That is the question that has to be answered. Then the Commander gets what he needs.

A not atypical small anodizer in the U.S. Legacy? Yes. Going away when the owner’s lease is up or maybe before if he dies on the job? You bet. Currently anodizing parts in a supply-chain to a Prime (through several in the chain) awarded DoW contract worth billions.

So what is an American? So who amongst our political leadership can articulate what it means to be American like @Jacob_Rees_Mogg did for being English? This is the fundamental question of our time across all Western nations and in the debate of who should stay and who needs to be expelled at greatest speed. Who indeed is deemed worthy through thorough examination of being given an American passport? Not because they dropped from their mother’s womb on US soil in tourist birthing charade, but those who contribute, defend and commit to the nation freely and affirmatively under oath. Further, to be an American and to retain your passport you must put America and not an ideology at the top of your life priorities. Those that objectively place the needs of another country or ideology above America while holding an American passport should be expelled after their right to hold an American passport is revoked. To be an American citizen is a true privilege. If anyone at any moment in time places their ideology or heritage nation flag over the American flag or promotes their ideology over the needs and security America and American way of life should not hold a passport and not be a Citizen of the United States of America. Nobody should be allowed to vote in any election unless they have a passport and everyone should be required under law to bring their passport for CBP scanning at polling stations to ensure the passport is valid to vote. If it expired, you cannot vote. If you want to get a passport renewed that you are made to swear highest order allegiance to America not any ideology.

I would point out @Prusa3D vs Bambu and the CCP. Opensource anything reaches economic edges pretty fast. It is also cultural. As we know, all cultures are not the same. It is extreme Western gullibility and naivety to think that the CCP will continue to leverage opensource forever. They will believe in opensource only until the ‘opponent’ is drained and reaches the economic edges, pretty fast. After that, the CCP will erect the largest toll bridge in history on all of humanity. The worst thing is that Bambu proves Americans are damn fools for letting their Trojan Horses through the gates and onto the networks of every manufacturer ‘for protypes’. When our most advanced VC fueled startups, including @chamath, open the gates and let CCP Trojan Horses in, who indeed cares? @josefprusa was not wrong. He just failed to understand the enemy. @randallmbriggs @barbinbrad @JoshuaSteinman @DavidSacks