Episode #61: Reindustrialization Beyond Announcements: Turning Investment Into Real Output with Patrick J. Wolf
The episode of U.S. Manufacturing Today focuses on whether massive reindustrialization investments translate into real productive output, jobs, and supply chain resilience or become stranded, announcement-driven projects. Host Matt Horine interviews Patrick J. Wolf, executive director and chair of the Institute for American Manufacturing and Technology (IAMT), which conducts research through Aegis (AI/compute governance), Atlas (energy/power infrastructure), and Forge (manufacturing capacity, supply chains, and the defense industrial base), arguing these areas form a dependency chain. Wolf describes his path from industrial engineering and manufacturing to tech and AI, then back to manufacturing policy, emphasizing that small and medium-sized manufacturers lack a policy voice despite being the backbone of industry. Discussion covers community decline from globalization, skepticism of unsupported statistics, why short-term investment mindsets can block long-horizon industrial projects, permitting and bureaucratic barriers, workforce development and labor undercutting, and the grid challenge of meeting simultaneous energy-intensive buildouts, with IAMT positioned as an accessible outlet for practical, publishable solutions.
Links
- Patrick J. Wolf Website
- Patrick J. Wolf on LinkedIn
- Patrick J. Wolf on X
- Institute for American Manufacturing and Technology (IAMT)
- Veryable Is Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing
- Sign Up on the Veryable Platform
Timestamps
- 00:00 Reindustrialization Reality Check
- 00:56 Meet Patrick Wolf
- 02:12 From Factory to Tech
- 05:49 Connecting Compute Power Industry
- 07:49 SMBs Need a Voice
- 10:29 Community Hollowing Out
- 14:15 Rigor Over Talking Points
- 16:54 Why Investment Misses Output
- 21:20 Permitting Reform Roadblocks
- 26:14 California Fire Bureaucracy
- 27:29 Nonpartisan Truth Seeking
- 28:16 Permitting Leverage Points
- 29:37 Workforce And Labor Rules
- 32:08 Power Grid Bottlenecks
- 35:55 Monopolies Incentives Nuclear
- 38:56 Integrated Industrial Energy Policy
- 42:42 Mindset Culture And Networking
- 43:46 Ten Year Manufacturing Future
- 46:55 How To Engage The Institute
- 50:25 Closing Thanks And Takeaways
Episode Transcript
Matt Horine: [00:00:00] Welcome to US Manufacturing Today, the podcast powered by Veryable, where we talk with the leaders, innovators, and change makers, shaping the future of American industry, along with providing regular updates on the state of manufacturing, the changing landscape policies and more.
Today, we are getting into something that has been building in the background of every conversation we've had on this show, which is the reindustrialization story. You've heard it, you heard it from us, and you probably told s- that story yourself. Hundreds of billions of dollars committed to bringing manufacturing back to America.
Defense production ramping, data centers going in faster than anyone thought possible just a few years ago. The announcement machine has been running at full speed. But here's the question we don't ask enough: does all that investment actually become productive output? Does it become real capacity, real jobs, real communities, and real supply chain resilience?
Or does it become something we're good at in this country, which is a great announcement, a ribbon cutting, and then a quiet conversation a few years later about why the numbers weren't there. Today, we're going to explore this topic, and our guest has built an [00:01:00] entire research institution around that question.
Patrick J. Wolf is the executive director and chair of the Institute for American Manufacturing and Technology, or IAMT, or the Institute, operates across three distinct research capacities, which is Aegis focused on AI and compute governance, Atlas focused on energy and power infrastructure, and Forge focused on manufacturing capacity, supply chain, and the defense industrial base.
What Patrick has figured out, and what we're going to dig into today, is that those three domains aren't separate conversations. They are a dependency chain, and when any link in that chain breaks, capital commitments don't become productive output. They become stranded investments. So we're excited to have Patrick join us.
Patrick, welcome to the show.
Patrick J. Wolf: Yeah. Thank you, Matt, for having me.
Matt Horine: Oh, very excited to have you. We've also just, by the way, for a show note here, we've been Twitter mutuals for a long time, so this is a very ex- ... very exciting, very exciting development for those out there on X interacting with the reindustrialization conversation.
So really [00:02:00] looking forward to this one. Let's just jump straight in. Your background, because I think there's a lot of context there. You built IAMT from the ground up, but would love to hear more about your background and how you came to, to establish the institute.
Patrick J. Wolf: It's interesting. I was-- went to school, I have an industrial engineering degree, and went into the whole track of just the traditional manufacturing, right?
It was that age-old thing where your parents are like, "Hey, become a lawyer, become an engineer, become a doctor," whatever the other components are. And I figured, yeah, engineering sounds pretty good. My dad's an engineer, and went into that capacity, Lean Six Sigma, the whole thing, process improvement, and actually went into that realm, right?
Dived into it. So across aerospace to some Lean Six Sigma Black Belt projects on the service side industry, all the way to working for big industrial manufacturers like 3M, and intimately working with every single customer that uses 3M products, which is just about everyone across almost the entire state of Florida.
So everywhere from defense to boat manufacturing, to people building Stuff for the military, which is all hush-hush, and then all the way to people just building some little widget, and they sell a [00:03:00] million, million a month. And it's just interesting to see that industrial variety. And then I kinda went to the dark side, got an MBA, and they became very attractive within that tech boom, right?
So tech was really harvesting a lot of talent from out of these areas, and I had no concept of tech. I always thought the kids that I knew that went into it, they're all the, the stereotypical programmers, right? Things like that. And I had no concept that these skills that you'd learn from this industrial realm and manufacturing and other stuff like that is heavily needed in tech because they're all trying to sell into these, right?
They're all trying to sell into those industries. So I went to the dark side also because the pay was a lot more lucrative and went into tech, right? Ma- primarily with data, right? Data analytics, AI. So it was very interesting to see this cusp of this, I'd say pre-AI tech boom, and seeing how it went from everyone's talking about these different curves, right?
It's all about how are we making actionable insights from our data, right? To now we need better data. We have... trying to just do better pipeline cleansing from the source to target, all the way down to the final state, which is now where everyone's at, is AI, right? And it all just full circles back to you need good [00:04:00] data.
'Cause a lot of data is being collected, right? I think 90% is collected in the last two years, and you could say that probably over the last five to 10 years. It's just an exponential growth. So being in tech, it, it was interesting to see this perception of people that we're trying to sell into these traditional industries without any context of what they're actually doing, right?
Or people that work for these industries but have no concept of what, what they actually do as a company. I've had plenty of conversations with people in their tech departments, and they had no idea of what they were doing or what their company did. They had a Wikipedia article type understanding, but nothing really in depth.
So you had people trying to build the systems for that. So I got this little interesting aspect to it. And I never thought I would go back to the manufacturing realm in a solid core because it was a... seemed like it was just that was not where the money was flowing. Lo and behold, I think in the last probably five years, it's really kinda kicked off.
And I'd say defense has been the big one for it, right? COVID, supply chain shock. I was always a big advocate against just-in-time manufacturing, uh, for a lot of reasons. I know that it made sense accounting-wise for books, and people thought it would [00:05:00] be perfect and a wonderful, clean system. But then we got the supply chain shock, which everyone was shocked to see unironically what happened, right?
And they had this big push, right? And that's where I think the money started determining to be flowing back domestically, primarily a lot with defense too, right? With the AI boom, everything's coming to this realization that we really need to have a lot of these core components invested, right? And then eventually, talking with my friends that were in tech, right, the startup founders, the people that are working at VC funds, all the way to people that are actually manufacturing, right?
Friends that are working at their parents' machine shop, all the way to people that are working on the factory floor, and all the way in the hierarchies of these primes and major c- component suppliers, and realize that there's this big gap, right? That there's a lot of push for the reindustrialization, which is wonderful.
There's a lot of brilliant and wonderful people doing a one-- a lot of great work, right? Matt and I know we're probably mutuals with a lot of Monex, right? And I've talked to many of them over the years. And but there's this kind of this little bit of a gap of this sounding board of treating all these different components together, right?
So as you mentioned, GS doing AI compute, the, the data governance, [00:06:00] Atlas working on energy, the grid, nuclear permitting, forage, manufacturing, the supply chain workforce. It's just one big circle, right? They all feed into each other. And the easiest example that comes to mind as I go into this reasoning is you have The entire system, let's use like a, a big one is what, semiconductors and needing data centers.
So let's say I'm a company and I need to build a data center, and I say, "I need to build a data center." Do you have the power, right? That's the first question. Do we have the components to build it? Do I have the domestic resources and the, the ability to actually source these things here in case something happens?
And the answer comes down to, no, we don't, right? So you need to have more power. You go to the power plant and they say, "We need to build out. We need a five-year commit for purchasing, and you need to actually pay for us to have upfront cash so we can actually build out our system, and that you're gonna be consuming it."
And then they say, "We need a manufacturer," so then we have a manufacturer. They say, "That's great, but we need more capacity in our supply chain." And they're trying to integrate more AI and data and collect the data points to be more efficient in today's world, to be more competitive. And then it goes back to now they're collecting all this data and they need a data center, right?
And they need more AI and whatever else they're doing for compute. [00:07:00] So that's an easy just, like full circle argument just in one area. And no one was really treating them as a, as just, like separate. They were just like, eh, manufacturing's this bucket. Don't ever talk about tech. Tech is separate. Don't ever talk about manufacturing unless we wanna sell you something.
And then the energy grid was always like, "Hey, we don't have enough power. Nuclear's great," and that was, like, where it stopped. Okay, that's great, and then they moved on. And you have something that can set that ground of truth to connect all three of those, and that's where the institute formatted, was initially that.
And then finding out the niche was really getting these small and medium sized manufacturers a voice, and giving them the ability to voice and talk about what they see and what issues are occurring and how we can get these things changed. Because ultimately, that's where we need to be. As a country, we need to be more agile in determining how we're actually gonna be reindustrializing, and that was a big impetus for that.
So long-winded story, my background and where we can go with the institute, but hopefully it gives a good context to it.
Matt Horine: No, absolutely. That'll, that's a lot of great context. And one of the things that has been somewhat of a recurring theme on this show is the industrial policy part of the equation and what's going on there other than just ribbon cuttings and [00:08:00] investment announcements.
Those are great. In that policy conversation, you highlighted something really important there, the SMB side. And I think the stat is somewhere around 95% of American manufacturing employers are 50 employee or less. And is it your perspective, and if I'm wrong on this, shoot me down, that they don't really have a voice on the policy side?
Patrick J. Wolf: Yeah. Oh, big time. When you think of reindustrialization, you think of some big player, right? You think of insert massive tech defense name or a big manufacturer, and they have teams of lawyers, they have giant lobbyist groups and everything like that, and they can do their own studies and research and determinations of where they wanna go.
But the individual, the 50-man machine shop, they experience everything at a hyper scale, right? If they come across something that's a, a hiccup in their process, it's gonna cost them a million dollars. That's detrimental to their business, right? It's make or break. And oftentimes these type of changes are something that's just minor, right?
It could be some regulatory policy, it could be some type of outdated way back into some government agency decided to make some arbitrary [00:09:00] law that no one voted for, and they have now completely power over something that changes, right? So it's things like that to give this voice to it, right? And almost like in a very populist type clause, but it's the backbone, right?
When we talk about reindustrialization, there needs to be an investment, right? And that's coming from these majors, right? The people with this, these major cores and these investment banks and these VC funds and these p- private equity. But it's all funneling, right? The majority of it's gonna come from these small to medium sized shops, the people that are nimble enough and agile enough to be having the development team to building out unique products, right?
Breaking the ground for these different areas as we've seen, I think, in this reindustrialization movement, especially across like nuclear And across places of different manufacturing. So yeah, they need a voice, right? They need to know what's going on, and there needs to be some type of outlet they can, to put it out there.
In academics, if you're not a PhD, good luck getting a paper published, and good luck going to these traditional journal publications, and it gets filed into a desk, right? And I'll be honest with you, it's like you get a little boost up on your Google Scholar page, but how are we doing something that actually gets to the right people to know, "Hey, this is a problem.
Can we fix it?" And that's the main thing we're trying to do, is just identify that.
Matt Horine: Yeah. [00:10:00] No, that's really correlates to what we're hearing from folks that we've had on the show who are, like, machine shop owners and people like that. They see this, they see the wave, and they're waiting for that to materialize in some way, and that movement is there, and I think the leadership structure around it makes a lot of sense from a policy perspective because most of those profiles, those guys are worried about their output for that day, surviving as a business, and being on the shop floor.
Pretty compelling stuff that it's actually coming together in a way that has a voice, and maybe tapping into the broader reindustrialization conversation here. But that voice was missing, and I think it's a big part of what people recognize over the past 30 to 40 years, and kinda wanna tap into this a little bit because we don't talk enough on this show about the era of globalization and what happened from, let's just call it the '70s.
Like, just somewhere in the middle. I think somewhere in the '70s, maybe in the '80s, what that hollowing out really looks like. And you and I have had discussions on this. We see s- we see stuff out there on X, but for that small, medium-sized business, even breaking it down a little bit further into the community level, [00:11:00] what does it mean for manufacturing community?
'Cause I think that's a big theme for the institute, and based on our previous discussions, something we both care about pretty deeply.
Patrick J. Wolf: Yeah. I think born into a flyover state, and then I was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, and I now live in northern Idaho. It's, it's interesting to see areas that are these former mining, shipping communities, right?
And it's just like these graveyards, right? This aspect, what happened is, we talked about this with, we can look back to our grandparents. There's this generation where you didn't have to go to college. You could have left at eighth grade and got a job at the local factory, and then worked there for 33 years and retired with a pension, and progressed throughout the ability to have a house, a home, things like that.
And I know it's a, it's an interesting concept. If you're someone that's currently from some large city on the east or west coast, they... It's easy to forget, and that's why it's called a flyover state, right? What is this? But there's all these little towns, right? There's these towns across every little part of America that had a, had some type of company or business or something there that was the backbone to a community.
And from that, it provides a better cohesion within the society as a whole because you [00:12:00] had something that was providing for people to have a livelihood, to have a job. It's always funny when you see these places and they're like, "Oh, buy this house in the middle of nowhere. It's affordable in Kansas." And it's, yeah, it's a nice house in the middle of nowhere, like two hours away from the city, but there's no jobs.
And there used to be, there used to be the ability to have a job there. There used to be a reason to be there, right? Or even like in upstate New York, people post these houses. It's, "Oh, here's a $30,000 house." That's great. It used to have, it doesn't now. And that's where it comes down to as we look at this reindustrialization is building up the core of, I think, the American identity, right?
And a revitalization of these smaller towns and communities, and getting away from having where it's just gonna become this urban density occurrence, right? Where everything wants to be stacked into one big city. And we saw a little bit of that with people moving out of California into Texas, right?
Dumping into Austin, to other areas their business. But in reality, it's like you wanna have these areas, which I always think it's ironic at times when people are trying to find like a machinist to live in like El Segundo, California, and I almost have to chuckle a little bit because I'm like, if you went to any other state in the Midwest, I guarantee you could find a machinist like [00:13:00] very easily or find someone that's willing to be trained onto it.
Some of these places in California where the average rent is like, I don't know, three grand a month, it's gonna be hard to find, right? It's gonna be hard to find someone that's willing to take that unless they've lived there. It's interesting to see where there's this like development hub that kind of popped out of the tech, but eventually, I think it has to migrate and build out within this, the average community, right?
And it's just good. It's good for the, uh, the whole world. I see that primarily the world being America, right? So if you wanna take that as a little soundbite, when I say the world, I only perceive it in America, right? 'Cause that's my whole world.
Matt Horine: It's funny because on this show and maybe broader context, people have to get more comfortable with saying, "I see the world as America," and you could put a lot of political jargon around it this way or that way.
But at the end of the day, reindustrialization is about the survival of your civilization at, in state, and it's about advancing into the rest of the 21st century. Bizarre to think that we're a quarter of the way through it, but that framework is, I know what your institute is stood up around and what the broader conversation around reindustrialization is.
But people don't know that's what we're [00:14:00] fighting for. It's not this near term five-year career path that you're like entry level into, and you might move to the suburbs, and you might do this, or it's rebuilding that from the ground up and understanding where the past is prologue for future and how manufacturing is gonna take shape.
Patrick J. Wolf: Yeah. Even to that point, when the institute was formed out, we said, "Okay, we wanna build something that can last longer than us," right? I don't wanna be doing this when I'm like 88, like the typical, some of the political leaders that we have. I wanna have it where there's a, the ability for it to adapt and change and actually make, make an actual viable impact.
And I come from this as an honest perspective. You'll see a lot of places where they'll cite something. They'll say this percentage, that, and it's... Are, is that all you're doing is just churning out talking point percentages that can be thrown out in like a talk on major broadcast news and, or at a political hearing to kind of sell some point or make some tweets?
It, it really needs to come down to a little more depth, right? Of saying how are we actually... What is the what, right? It's easy to say something, what is the how, right? How are we gonna do that? What's the step, right? What's the perspective that you can get from the ground for that? And I see it a lot.
There's a lot of places where I honestly think, and this is maybe the more controversial [00:15:00] take, and a lot of academics and maybe the large consulting firms, I truly believe that they just make up a lot of these percentages, right? Coming from an academic background And even like work functionality, people will quote something and I'm like, "Okay, let's find the source," right?
And you start doing that maybe with the Socratic method, the let's explain back, and I'm like, "Okay, here's some guy in this blog that he pulled it from, and he said this percentage, and he got it from this consulting firm," and they won't show you the data, right? And that's always my biggest red flag is if I can't take the data and run it myself to repeat your results, uh, just there's no validity to it.
And we've got to this academic loosening over the years. I think like the watering down of a lot of this stuff is just getting to the point where there's no rigor, right? There's no requirement for it to be hard. So they take the path of least resistance where they're like, "We'll just do this, and then we'll just say that we have 1,500 respondents, but we're not gonna give you any other data."
And they just claim it to be proprietary, right? Claim it to be sensitive and which I kinda think is a little bit not good, right? I don't think it's a good and an honesty sit-situation 'cause it's just gotchas then. It's just you're just doing research, but I don't know if you actually did. That's just claiming things that I don't know if it's actually true.
And it's just to do a political point. It's the [00:16:00] same point. Pick any topic and you'll find people on opposing sides, and you can pay anyone to get a result that can say something. And whether this is truth is the hard thing because that's what people want. We wanna make decisions off of well-informed data and then actually making the decision that's the best going forward, right?
Not something that we just wanna make up for some political cause because it helps us with a particular portfolio or a short option or whatever else we have going on, so.
Matt Horine: Really spot on. I think that there's a lot of question about what is truth these days. There's a lot of numbers that get thrown around.
I think my, my return to all-time joke is I think there was a speech at maybe the Democratic National Convention or a convention of some sort a few years back where they were citing jobs numbers, and it was just jobs numbers, right? And we don't... We get to a place where it's like, what jobs? And now looking forward, they'll say that about reindustrializing or reshoring.
It's opening XYZ plant with X amount of jobs. And it's like, what does that mean by jobs, right? Is that some type of permanency? Which leads to the some of the work of the institute and some other operating thesis about [00:17:00] the problem that investment is not equal to output, right? And overall, your work points at real measurable gaps between the reindustrialization investment and the productive output.
What is really behind that gap? Is it some of the data points you were mentioning earlier, or is there a broader one?
Patrick J. Wolf: A lot of the investment capital when you evaluate a company was you have a lot of these guys are like the former, no dig against Mitt Romney, but like the investment bank type where they bought a company, they stripped it, and they sold it out offshore, right?
They figured out, "How can I buy all these companies, merge them together, strip the assets, and then get rid of them?" They're always looking at these internal metrics of, "Okay, what's our IRR," right? "How do we get this where in five years we sell it?" They don't wanna hold onto these investments past a certain time period.
There's these things that kind of developed in investment banking, requested whole portfolio, right? As, as a general thing of we don't wanna hold these things for long term, right? Like, the idea of the intelligent investor of holding something for 30 years is not a, an idea anymore And when you look at the industrial in- investment, it's a long, it's a long haul, right?
SpaceX, right? I think, what, it started in 2002. I think I have to go look, but it's been a [00:18:00] while, right? And their valuation is in the trillions, but that's just one outlier, but it's something where it's a long-term investment. And if people along the way just kept on buying and selling and flipping the company and change over and try to optimization for this next turnover and flip, it's not gonna be good.
It's not a tech company, right? The intellectual property is physical, right? It's actual plants, material output, things like that. And it takes a long time. If I wanna go invest in a mine, it's not gonna be like a one year I buy it and I sell it. It's a, you have to buy it, you have to get the permitting, you have to go through the process and develop it.
You need to have funds off to the side for recovery and environmental impact, right? You have to get all the insurances lined up, and then you have to find the mining materials and the core sampling and where are you gonna be doing which... What's the phases to it? It's a long process. It's not like a one and done.
You could point to any mine in Idaho and look at it and legitimately say, "How long has it been?" And pre-indu... Re... You know, pre-reindustrialization, it's like a, "Hey, it might happen." And then it now in the industrialization realm, they're pushing for a lot of this stuff, and a lot of the stuff is coming from a regulatory change in efficiency.
And they're getting opened because we need it, right? We need these things. [00:19:00] And it's that investment capital where it needs to flow, right? The same thing in the mining vein. If I pull out minerals or rare earth minerals, it's very toxic, right? To make these, to break them down and to refine them. And now it's pushing for inve- investment into recapture technology that otherwise made no investment sense because we didn't have a reason to do it here.
Now we do. And now it becomes where if we're gonna do it here, we have this much output that's expected, we need to refine this much, right? Now, this recapture method of actually doing like a closed loop system for the heavy earth and minerals and elements and things like that becomes more viable, and then it becomes a thing to that.
So I think we see this and people need to change the perspective of how they invest, right? And this is the core thesis of the system of money flow is just saying, "What are you doing to it?" You could get a better investment somewhere else, but maybe an eight percent annual return on a mine is better because it maintains part of community and it helps with this, your ethos or whatever you're saying that you wanna do with the reindustrialization, it's there, right?
So I mean, there's always these investment vehicles to it. It's just changing people's perception of where they invest, right? The same thing. You could point to a lot of these small towns, these [00:20:00] manufacturing hubs or other areas that used to be owned by a family, right? A family that was in the community, and the community was reliant on that particular company, and there's a stewardship that's involved.
I think there's just a conversation with a lot of people talking about how are we being good stewards in our community, right? How do we have this area where we can actually take care of these, these people that are working in a part of this ecosystem and not looking at it as like just numbers on a piece of paper or a spreadsheet and something that you can just sell off and move assets and then close down It's a change of the investment ethos needs to change, right?
People need to have their thesis of the way they invest needs to be different, right? And the payout could be huge, right? It could be where you have this trillion-dollar valuation, that's great. But coming to the realization that it might not be, and it might just be like a steady return on capital, right?
And maybe even the way that people look at oil, right? Oil has that level of where people invest in it, and it strikes out, and they either do good or they don't, and it can provide a continual dividend, and they ride it for their life, right? I know people that are generational, their great-grandfather had something with oil.
They still are in some trust, and they get this money from wells, right? And it's interesting. We just need to change that mindset to it.
Matt Horine: I think it's a [00:21:00] modern age thing where people think that something like SpaceX happens overnight. Probably a lot of buzz around the IPO and what is even... I don't even know what a $2 trillion valuation means.
I don't know.
Patrick J. Wolf: Yeah. Yeah, it could be one, two, 10, 100 trillion at this point, doesn't, it doesn't matter what the valuation is.
Matt Horine: Yeah. Total future value of money, whatever we wanna equate that to. But no, I think you tapped into a couple of other things there. I wanna talk two kind of separate segments because these are both super important, the interconnected work that the institute does.
We'll talk about powering the build-out here in a second, but I think I caught something about permitting problem, and kind of some of this languishing structure that we have that seems to be ever more bureaucratic or, I don't know how, even if the word has entered the lexicon, but de-bureaucratize. I don't know if that's a word or not, a little out there, but you call the permitting the single greatest structural barrier.
Can you kind of walk us through what permitting reform would look like and how it could be become more real, and it's not just something that's incrementally done through EOs or those types of things?
Patrick J. Wolf: We've gotten to this age, and this is the reality of [00:22:00] situation, regardless of your political belief, I think everyone can agree that we have given these individual departments almost like unilateral power over domains, right?
Look at the impetus of the EPA, right? EPA, they had this whole issue of acid rain, which by the way, besides all the, the scariness that people pushed out about acid rain, there was a time period where acid rain was actually like viably bad in particular areas, especially in the East Coast, right? And They, the EPA was formed and said, "Let's fix this problem."
And they got all the brightest people, and they did, they fixed the problem. And it didn't come through like heavy regulatory changes and pushes. It came through, what are we doing today in our process that's causing all this, these chemicals in the atmosphere that's r- raining down to people and, like, burning the skin, right?
Oh, okay, let's put scrubbers on, let's do this. Yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They figured out a process. It didn't really majorly impact, you could probably argue on that, but it changed the impact of the manufacturing capacity. And instead of being like, "Hey, we did our job, let's close down," right, the EPA decided, "What's the next problem we can go after?"
And that was the problem. It was always one problem after the other. And we saw over this year of this very emotionally charged, politically motivated crusade against particular [00:23:00] things within the US that was actually just damaging to us, right? And there was some good out of it, because it pushed standards to change, right?
And as I said, as one barrier comes up, so there's a... needs to be some technology developed to get around it. And as such, our manufacturing capabilities today are a lot cleaner than they've ever been. But the problem is that a lot of the stuff that was not able to survive that, and didn't have the ability to be defensible, right?
Our government put up a regulational barrier, and did not do anything to help protect those industries from overseas dumping, or did not subsidize them. There's countless examples of companies where they said, "Hey, can we have a float loan? Can the government back us for a few, otherwise we gotta close down," right?
Diamond Tools in, in Minnesota, that's an example, just because it's close to home, and wonderful tool manufacturer. They said, "Hey, can you provide us a little bit of money?" And they said, "No, screw you." And long story short, they're closed, right? And then whatever, it's 88 jobs gone. And, and you look at these things, and that happened, right?
So then the money flow changed, right? So foreign companies could dump in, regulations kept on getting kicked up. The ones that could compete, which eventually came down to consolidation of companies, and people that are big [00:24:00] players started creating these big, huge companies that could develop and get around these things.
And that's where we have these, this uni- unisystem of, like, one company owns, like, 15 different subsections, and it's just because they had to. And because of it, our processes are a lot cleaner, more efficient, but the problem is all this stuff that was sent overseas was not, right? They kept on doing it the way they did in the '70s.
They're just like, "They dump chemicals in the river, who cares? Groundwater, never heard of it, doesn't matter," and just kept on doing that. So we had this environmental push no one else did, and then it drove that. So when we look at these things, there's some stuff that over time could change, right? And understand and say, "Okay, we put this barrier up.
Why? Why did we do this?" And it's this reevaluation. The government never goes back and asks, "Why did we do this? Why did... Was this done 30 years ago?" Or was this done 20 years ago? Was it done 15 years ago? And you never stop and ask what was the first section to that. And that's what we wanna have, right? We wanna have this idea where we can kinda capture what's actually happened, ground this truth, and then say, "Let's kinda synthesize it," right?
Let's figure out what's actually happening, use that academic process, and then, and getting people on the ground that are experiencing it to say, "This is actually what's happening." That's right, you have this regulation that was [00:25:00] 30 years ago. This is the why it happened. Is that a problem anymore? Did this actually solve it?
It's like there's no repeat of why things are happening, and then placing it, and getting the information, the data to the right rooms. Because regardless of political party, this is something that really crosses party lines of just saying, "Okay, here's a problem. Can we fix it?" And fixing it comes down to just whoever's in charge of that agency.
That's legit- that's legitimately it, right? And that's where I think if anyone that talks about divisions of power, we've consigned that power to these agencies where they can go do whatever they want, right? Fish and Game can just walk in my house if they think I have fish in my freezer that's out of game season, right?
They don't need a warrant, right? And people don't get that. So the same thing, EPA, they can just walk onto your job site and give you a letter and say, "We're closing you down because of this, because you're impacting some little fish that you never heard of." And you never asked the why, right? Are they actually being impacted by that, right?
So that's the first aspect of it, is using this as a ground source, because people always are gonna go towards... You give them a task like, "Hey, figure out how to make the environment better," people are just gonna constantly find things over time, right? And they're not gonna ask, "What's this long tail effect?"
So it's really trying to get these things where we can [00:26:00] actually go through and give this, the right information to people that wanna make a change. Ultimately, because people, when they do that, it looks good for them as well, right? There's always that, that human instinct to self-promote a little bit and get that direction going.
And sometimes it's these regulation things we never hear about. Pick any example. Like why are the water reserves in California empty for the fire? Because of some little fish, right? And it's, oh, that, that's a perfect example of the everyone knew about it. But who knew about it? Just the people on the ground, just the people that were dealing with it day to day, like the small, medium sized shops, the fire department, stuff like that.
Who do they go to? They don't know, right? They just, they say something. Who do they go tell, right? It's where do you go? How do you actually bring awareness to it, right? Shine light on it. So yeah, that's, I think, the biggest impetus to that, is just asking these questions. 'Cause it always seems, oh, it's, once it's made set in stone.
And we've seen in the past four years, these things can change very easily by just literally just the top person just saying, "Yeah, maybe not. Let's change it." Okay, X-nay it, right? And that's it. That's all it takes.
Matt Horine: It's pretty incredible, the unwinding of that. I think it's, a lot of times it's a question of political capital and then even more so question of political [00:27:00] will.
Why do something if the bureaucracy is entrenched and it provides some type of purpose to either an agency or a person to enforce said rule? Which can be pretty catastrophic. The example of the fires in California is a great one because I remember a lot of officials there being asked on camera, why did this happen?
And someone would say from the state level would say, "Oh, you've gotta talk to the local fire department. They're the ones that had an answer for that." And the local fire department saying, "We couldn't do this because the state-"
Patrick J. Wolf: Completely, yeah. A nonpartisan issue. People always wanna make it political, but that's where I'm like, this is kinda the luxury of being like the 501[c][3] is it's out- outside the bounds of politics.
It's just, is this right or wrong? Is this the... Where does the data point to? And then who's saying it? And then can we verify it? And that's it. It's what is the source of truth? Something needs to be kinda developed to point to it and not be like a clickbait article, not be like a... It's simple. Who, how do you give the voice?
How do you give the voice back to the people where they can actually say, and then verifying it and be like, okay, this isn't just hearsay. This is actually real.
Matt Horine: Yeah, I think the Twitter phrase or the X phrase for it would be something along the lines of [00:28:00] you can just do things. Yeah. Just like- Yeah ... just there's nothing really stopping you, and I think that's what a lot of the reindustrialization movement is about.
It was like, oh, labor arbitrage, or I can't find skilled labor, or I can't do this. And it's, you can, if you commit capital and that kinda sense of purpose to it. One final question on this point. If you had to name two or three specific interventions with the highest leverage on actually moving permitting timelines, where do they stand right now, or what's the biggest hindrance?
Patrick J. Wolf: Oh, that's a tough one 'cause this goes back to the point of when you cover three different major domain areas, it, it becomes a, it's quite hefty A lot of it comes down to the permitting issues that come down to things like, you know, and this is gonna boil down to the systems of government is there's a lot of local things that, that happen, right?
And that's where I think people always wanna think of federal. They don't wanna think about what's happening in their town or county, right? And there's a lot of regulatory changes that kind of happen there that are the hiccup for things, right? If I wanted to go build a big manufacturing plant in a particular area, you have to go through that process, right?[00:29:00]
And that process hasn't been done in such a long time in most areas that they just don't know, right? Look at, for instance, like they wanna build that data center in Utah as like what a three, three-person county determined it, and you're like, what data was given to them in that situation, right? So I think those are the big areas to first look at when you wanna look at these things, is focusing on these hyper-local city and county level issues that kind of lead into a state issue.
And 'cause whether or not we like it, there's actual, there's federal and then there's state environmental agencies and things like that do almost the exact same thing and have the same or more regulations. So getting into the one-page book of truth, a big one I'd say is looking at what does it take to, and this is a big conversation, is the onshoring capability.
And this is I think the big one to look at, and maybe it's not even a regulational change, it's just a what are we doing to incentivize companies to train American talent to bring it here, right? And I think that goes back to the wor-workforce development. That seems to be the biggest prelude issue, is this idea that there's not enough Americans to do the work.
Which I always think is interesting when I know there's a lot of guys that are, and gals that are unemployed, don't have jobs. They need something, right? And they need to be trained. So I think [00:30:00] that workforce development's a big one. Where's the investment coming for that? And it could be regulatory, because at the end of the day, I think that's a big one that kind of hinders us at the waistband, is when you have people that are talented, right?
They're an engineer from insert some type of middle ground flyover state college, and they can't compete against the globalized workforce. And that I think is something that is, is been talked about a lot. Something I've seen personally within tech, within manufacturing is it's the, the undercutting of American labor.
And it's always interesting to see this full circle is I grew up a lot around a lot of union guys. Maybe personally I w- at the time I wasn't a union guy 'cause it was just more of a political thing, not a, the viability of what they're doing. But I look at it and say, "We need to have more worker rights for the American white collar, blue collar worker that's getting displaced."
And that's an easy regulatory change, right? We can label off a ton of different visas that kind of occur ways around the system to undercut labor with regulations, things like that. But I think that's a big one, right? And that's an easy regulation change, right? I think ending a lot of that stuff and at some point Am-Americans had to train their replacements, right?[00:31:00]
I saw that firsthand with a company that was in the news quite controversially and getting banned because they're working with, by the Chinese government and they were... I watched people that worked at this company for 25 years have to train their replacement and, and then get fired three weeks later.
So I think that the same thing could happen here, right? They say we don't have talent, train and find some, find someone and train them and invest in that, and then it comes from a regulatory standpoint. So That one's a more hot topic, right? I think that one's become very politically polarizing, but I think in terms of one that's actually the easiest impact to help Americans initially is that.
It's a non-starter regardless. If you can't have it be bu- if you're gonna have it be built in America, and you're not gonna have Americans building it, that's just, it's counterproductive. It's against the re- I think it, I personally think it's against reindustrialization as a whole.
Matt Horine: No, that's spot on. It's, it goes back to your point about we see the world through the lens of the coast to coast, right?
And what you mentioned a couple times was the flyover territory. We've often taken the standard or viewpoint that there's not a labor shortage, it's a labor access issue, and whether that access is training availability down to schedule [00:32:00] availability. Can we be more flexible on how we think about approaching our own production and our own operations tempo?
It's requiring people to think differently. You did hit on something very interesting earlier, and I wanna talk about the power side of this for a minute. I spoke with, this has been probably about a year ago, a small business here in Houston, that they had moved shops, and it's a oil field tools company.
They make a lot of really large pieces that go into oil drilling and storage and pipeline movement. And they invested, they'd moved shops, they bought tools, and they've gotten to this new facility, and they cannot get the power requirements right. And I think, if I remember correctly, and I won't mention a name, the gentleman was cursing everybody from the governor on down to the city level about permitting and actual power output, but it's a much bigger conversation than that I think one of the things that you wrote about in powering the build-out is that the US is pursuing three of the most energy-intensive industrial build-outs in modern history [00:33:00] simultaneously, and the current energy planning doesn't account for that cumulative demand of all three.
Can we break that down a little bit here for our listeners?
Patrick J. Wolf: Yeah. To that point of you'll always hear these things like when people talk about the energy grid, they'll be like, "The issue is that we can generate the power. We just need a way to store it." And it's like, that's true, but you have to realize that there's a capacity to moving the power and where it has to be, right?
To the same point is you always hear this, they'll bring up like, "Oh, there's a particular part that it's like a 10-year lead time from China." And I'm like, oh, that's crazy. What this is... That something like that is critical to say outside of the profit incentive as a strategic initiative, why we don't have or the government peels off, what everyone always, government money, but it has to happen, right?
That's what goes on in China is you need to have government money. Why don't they say, "Okay, here's a billion dollars. Build, have a f- factory in wherever, build this," right? We need this. This component takes 10 years. There's a three-year lead time, what a five-year lead time, 10-year. It's always something different.
Why aren't we building it, right? Why aren't we building it here? A lot of the systems built from the power grid is like from the 1950s. We've basically given power companies a, the, their monopoly, and they, they [00:34:00] act as such, right? Is that they do that, and there's also these environmental pushes for renewable energy that we saw in Texas, right?
I remember the big freeze, and you didn't have any power, and it's, that's what happens when you kinda mess with the grid to a capacity where you don't have the ability to kinda turn it on, right? Natural gas, coal, it's always going. It's actually very clean and efficient for power. Relying on solar, I get it.
People, there's big solar fans to it, but the environmental impact afterwards is just not beneficial. It's one of those places where the investment was there because government subsidies existed, and we saw when Trump got away from those, the subsidies, the whole industry lost like ninety percent of its valuation.
So it's something like that where, yeah, solar might be a potential in the future, but it's something that should've been still in the development box, not a let's do a mass rollout across entire fields and just burn birds with the radiational reflection. But to the point of the power grid build-out, it, that's critical because they've gotten to this point where if you're a company that's operating, that's essentially private closed off monopoly, and if I wanted to get on the board of directors for one of them, they wouldn't let me be on one, not that I have tried, but in the sense that I'm not from the, that utility company [00:35:00] aspect.
So you get this kinda echo chamber feel that kind of occurs. Some of them they have where they're publicly traded, right, which is good, and there's that competitive advantage they can build out and be more efficient, more effective. But they were reliant on not having to do much, right? So if you almost went from being the status quo and just slightly increasing, doing the maintenance, people don't want taxes raised, then they're taking whatever cash and using that for basic maintenance, and then suddenly you plop down a factory or a data center or five of them or 10 of them or whatever else is going on, then all of a sudden you say, "Oh, wow, we actually need to build out more," what does that look like?
All these parts that go in the system We have to go order it. We have to get on the order system, and there's lead times in all these parts, right? And then we have to have the build-out plan to do it, the capital investment to, to kinda do it. And when you're operating as a monopoly, where's the market competition, right?
So you're not, you maybe not run as efficiently as you should be. You don't have the cash for it. You have to go raise taxes, and then that's why people's power bills are, like, going up 10 times, whatever it is, right? There's some places you hear about where it's just astronomical, right? And we're getting to that point where we're hitting that uncomfortable truth where we've let power companies have [00:36:00] a monopoly because we wanted reliability on the grid.
But was it good for a competitive standpoint? I don't know, right? So to that aspect of, yeah, do you have the power? That's always, like, the number one thing to check is do you have power for it. And that's where you see, like, the data centers where they're flowing and building into is do they have power, right?
And do they have the ability to access power? And a lot of times they're just bypassing power companies and just looking and saying, are, is there a natural gas line that we can just hook into and then build a bunch of generators and run it ourselves, right? And yeah, it's become a big issue. So the power build-outs is a very complex one, because you'll, everyone will have an opinion, and some opinions are well-informed, some are not, but it comes down to getting the actual brass tacks, and everyone's a little different, right?
I think that's the diff- the differentiating nature of the US, right? Like, the power system here where I'm at in northern Idaho is gonna be radically different than places in California. It's gonna be different in a state like Minnesota versus Illinois And it's just having that concept of what does it look like?
And when you have a monopoly, the difficulty with that is what's the financial incentive to improve? There needs to be some type of financial incentive, and oftentimes that's [00:37:00] coming from the place that people don't want, taxes or government money, which is coming from taxes, right? What's the incentive for a bank, right?
So that's where you see, I think, the big push with the nuclear is occurring with the small microreactors because the enticement of being able to just plop down a nuclear power plant anywhere in the middle of nowhere, you could build out a lot, right? So I think that's the accessibility. 'Cause if you look at towns, and this is a little bit of a further digression to it, and the way America's built out, we're built along water, and we're built along natural coastlines, and we're built along river inlets and things like that, right, because there's the ability to do it.
Where we could build hydroelectric plants, they've been built. You'd have a paper mill next door, other things that needed the water and the electricity. And now we're taking where we're saying, what if we can, like, actually manipulate aspects where we don't need to have that, right? We don't need to be near fresh water because we don't need it.
We can pipe it in or we can do something else. What if we can have it where we can be anywhere and have power, right? That's kinda the change of the game to it, so that power discussion is... It's flowing. It's just too long tail of effect, and things kinda need to change because there are different regulatory standards that might exist that are, like, [00:38:00] 1950s classifications, and people say this is what it is, and they never looked at it.
It was only because that's what it was at the time, right? They didn't have an idea that there'd be technology that changes that. That always also comes down to investment capital like I talked about. As a monopoly, what's your point? What-- why would you invest in, in yourself when you own the entire market and there's no one taking it or beating at your door to, to take it away from you?
Matt Horine: For sure. No, it's something that a lot of people don't think about the long arc of... Arc, didn't mean the pun there, but power distribution, energy independence. That's why a lot of the talk around the manufacturing side drifts directionally towards talking about energy independence, whether that's oil, and then building out the power grid and doing those types of things that maybe some people saw in the '70s.
I think there was a Project Independence talking about building that much nuclear capacity, which is being revisited now because the science and the technical aspect around it is much more manageable, and we know a little more, and it may actually be required. So those types of things and thought processes make their way into manufacturing talk.
It's pretty interesting From the policy perspective, [00:39:00] what does an integrated energy industrial policy framework actually have to look like to fix the institutional gap between energy planning and industrial planning? And what I mean by that is, is this just something that's done in the abstract, or is this like a, it's gonna need somebody from the government to basically say, "We break up monopolies," or we go about this type of build-out differently?
Patrick J. Wolf: Yeah, I don't know if the breaking up monopolies is... Yeah, that's a whole different conversation with the power utility systems. I think that what kinda happens to this is we always need to look at these aspects of it doesn't happen in a void, and I know that people don't like talking about the money situation for it, but the only reason anything's gonna be occurring in today's age that we have is there needs to be some type of incentive, right?
Whether that incentive... You often see, like in a movie, right? What was that? Project Hail Mary, right? They all got together and the world all had peace because, "Hey, we're all gonna die soon, so we gotta figure out these things together." Th- those impetus, right? There's no financial reasoning. It was a survival reasoning.
And some people view it as a survival reasoning, right? You get people that kind of look at this and say, "This is a survival reasoning," right? Because we do have a lot of enemies at [00:40:00] our doorstep that are growing at a scary pace, and there's a lot of dependencies in our system that eventually easily could turn off, and that promotes that, that level of survival.
There's also just the more apparent one is the actual capital flow, right? Where is money coming from? How's it gonna be invested? What's the return on it? It doesn't happen in a void, and that's where it goes back to the initial point of it, it needs to happen outside of the traditional investment mindset.
It needs to happen in a way that people look at it and say, "Is this good for the nation and the community? Am I sacrificing a 3% increase of return year over year by doing this versus that?" That type of stuff needs to kind of change in the harking of the mindset of not constantly chasing to have the biggest return you possibly can, and then dumping it, and selling it, and moving away.
Build that community aspect to it. But in terms of the unified approach to it, it needs to be... We can't look at these things in a vacuum, right? I think previously it was easy to look at something like manufacturing as a vacuum. You didn't have to worry about the power grid build that didn't matter to you.
You just, you were just worried about your little domain and niche. Nowadays, with everything, you kinda have to have this understanding of the whole system in order to, to progress, right? And to go forward on it. [00:41:00] Same thing, if you're gonna build a manufacturing plant and you're not utilizing AI or data, it just, it's just not as efficient, right?
And there's a million reasons you could say what's the efficiency of AI. And I always go back to, it's nothing, like, brand new, it's just the ability to actually build your own things and have a vertically integrated ecosystem, right? That you can actually develop. The same thing, energy, right, doesn't happen in a void.
There's a million different little pockets that pick up here and there, and it comes back to why didn't it happen? There's no financial incentive. Okay, that explains it, right? The same thing for the last one, supply chains, right? Supply chains, whether or not we like to admit it, was revolutionized through Amazon, right?
What Jeff Bezos did was absolutely phenomenal. But they had a huge amount of government support, right? They were able to ship packages essentially for free or half the time paid by the United States Postal Service. They had the huge competitive advantage of that, and they built up massive warehouses and built out an ecosystem and developed technology to get a package.
I could order it right now and have it delivered at my front door. That's almost unheard of from a logistical point. Why'd that happen? It was a competitive advantage that was developed, given oftentimes through US government subsidies, and developed into a profitable manner, right? So it's that long tail mindset.
And the [00:42:00] same thing for nuclear, right? It-- The only reason nuclear's happening is 'cause permitting's become a lot easier. It's, you have people that actually have an invested interest of getting this stuff going. And it was determined that all this fear-mongering of nuclear was actually not true in the long term, right?
And it's actually a lot better than what we think, right? So that long tail effect of it, I think it just comes down to what's the incentive, right? And this is not like our sun is drying out, but I can think of when we talk about the world as being America, if we wanna remain the dominant player in the country and we wanna have air conditioning and avoid rolling blackouts And avoid being subjugated by other world powers or having no food on a particular shelf.
Things, these luxuries that we've gotten used to that then we need to start looking at this as a different system, right? And it's all just one thing that stays into itself, right? But yeah, it's a change mindset, and I think there's a cultural mindset that's changed over time, right? Generational-wise as well.
I think it's interesting to talk about environmental conservatism, right? Every single person you talk to that's, I think, below a certain age in environmental, in, in the reindustrialization movement, starting factories, very much outdoors, outdoorsman in a certain c- capacity and l- [00:43:00] and does not wanna see our lakes filled with battery acid.
But so it's an interesting mindset where you have the idea of being a, conserving the environment, but also being an industrialist, right? And those two have always been looked at as something that are polar opposites, and in reality they're not, right? And so it's interesting to see how that's gonna built out.
So it's just a, it's a mindset change, and it's like anything, it's slow. It takes years, and it's not gonna be like the institutes, we're not gonna flip a switch, and it's, it's just small victories, right? It's getting these conversations happening, getting the right people to meet the right people, and have that conversation and get connected.
It's that baseline networking effect, which is I think the most critical, right? That's the biggest impact, is just who do you know and how do you know 'em? How do you get them to have that conversation? And then is the conversation they're having based on fact, or is it just based on an opinion that they heard on a podcast, right?
So it's things like that really become critical.
Matt Horine: Last big question, and this is another part of the show where we look for either advice or some type of forward-looking impact statement. Ten years out from now, and back to the community piece of this, if we get this right, what does American manufacturing look like?
And what happens if we don't get it [00:44:00] right?
Patrick J. Wolf: Yeah. What, what's that Huey Long, every man a king? I would say every, every man a job, right? Every man a job that can provide for them and, and give the ecosystem that allows them a human dignity, right? And I think that's the aspect that we look at with AI and job replacement, things like that, is are we maintaining human dignity, right?
And is that something that we can actually maintain going forward, and are we doing it in such a way? And hopefully that's where it is in 10 years, right? Hopefully, we have it right. Hopefully, we have power is very inexpensive, innovation's being able to occur, people are able to create things that make life better.
We're doing... It's not like this scape of a technological futurism that you see in movies, but it's actually something that's a little more, more beneficial, human-orientated, and, and beneficial. So that's kinda like the look-forward statement. In 10 years, hopefully it is like that. Hopefully, there are no major wars, right?
Hopefully, just due to the sheer economic power that can be developed through America and the dominance of innovation, we're able to carpenalize our, the enemies that are foreign and domestic, and, and they don't become an issue of destroying the cohesion of society. If we do get it wrong, I think we'll have a [00:45:00] very difficult time.
I think we'll see America fall out of the graces of being a world power, and we'll just be an economic siphon. That's it. We'll be looked at as a, uh, just a place to, to drain the resources and the blood from, and somewhere else is gonna become the place that becomes the new dominating factor, or it just all gets pushed down.
There's not gonna be any- anywhere else, right? I think there's always needs to be some place to run to, and I think at some point we have to realize that we don't have anywhere to run to and that America is it, and that if we fall, then the entire world is gonna be in a place that's just slums, right?
That's just where it's gonna be. It's the baseline human dignity where, you know, the mindset of having huge class divides, right? Now, this is an aspect that someone... They hear it, they might go, "Oh, that's..." This is political talk, but I think the reality of a class divide is major, right? We need to have a healthy middle class, right?
And the reindustrialization movement is to build a healthy middle class, right? And when people think of the white collar, blue collar, white collar and blue collar jobs are in that middle class, right? It's the giving people the ability to produce and generate things here, to not have reliance on overseas dependencies, to have the ability where they have the mouthpiece to change things, [00:46:00] and they can adapt and understand and say, "Hey, this is working.
This isn't. How do we change it?" Because what's today is not gonna be the same 10 years from now. We need to constantly have those conversations. So that's kinda my, my, my statement. Never, don't doom, don't be a no doomerism. Hopeless optimism, right? 'Cause I do think that we have everything that we need, and it's all lined up, and there's gonna be growing pains.
But I think that due to human innovation- We can do it. And even if it's just small stuff like getting a simple regulatory policy change because there's something that's holding stuff up for six months, and that increases the timeline by six months, then that's phenomenal, and that's where we kinda hope to go.
Matt Horine: Spot on. I think the hopeless optimism is a distinctly American trait, and especially for somebody who is working on the shop floor or in a manufacturing setting because there's a lot of optimism that has to make things work and to make things, to build things. So that's great. Patrick, this is the exact conversation I wanted to have, and it's grounded in your research, very direct about the stakes.
If someone was listening to this and they wanted to engage with the institute's work, whether they're a [00:47:00] policymaker, industry leader, or someone who just cares about it, some of our mutuals maybe, where do they go, and how can they find out more about you?
Patrick J. Wolf: Yeah, go to the website, right? Go to X. Anyone that you see there, so sh- just reach out.
I think I've really harkened home on anyone that, that's a part of the institute, right, from our board to our various directors and things like that, people that are actually working at, in the institute, is be accessible, right? Is because that's our whole motif is if you have something that you're really passionate about and you say, "This is something that I believe, and it's my hobby, my passion I'm dealing with on a daily basis," write it, go through our editorial process.
We wanna help be able to promote those ideas, and hopefully some of these ideas... And it's actually amazing to see, right, is it leads into more conversation, right? So we have this tiered system, right, it's based off of, like, academic white papers, very intensive, right? They require a lot of research. It's something that the institute puts its stamp on and says, "This is some, like, a foundational thing that we believe in," right?
And then there's other aspects too of, like, publishing research studies and saying, "This is the facts that come out of a situation." So if you're in academics, you're going through a master's or PhD and you have a dissertation that you [00:48:00] think is interesting and you can adapt it to be, like, in a journalist type s- article type thing or you wanna actually publish it, w- have a conversation, right?
Just reach out. We wanna have those conversations. If you need help with something, right, and you're saying, "I need this," whether it's within the domain of the institute or just a capacity that we have, and we're building out, like, this, this private networking app where people can communicate, and that's the biggest thing is having a conversation.
Because you might say, "Hey, I have this issue. I can't find someone to do XYZ," right? You'll be surprised that there's people out there doing XYZ, and you can get in contact with them. Because if you're not, if you're not dominating the SEO, the, the online place where you're competing against AI of adapting your website every five minutes to optimize against people, you know you're not gonna win, and th- the manufacturers aren't caring about that.
A lot of it's word of mouth. So reach out, right? Reach out. We're very accessible. If you have questions, if you have comments, if you have ideas, we wanna hear them. We wanna facilitate it And yeah, if you're, as long as your idea that your article that you're writing is not complete, just off the base, it's not just some political rant, it's something more tangible, reach out.
We wanna give you the ability to have some type of voice or mouthpiece and get in front of the right people. And I'll be honest, every [00:49:00] time we've had someone write something, they have five or six people that DM them or reach out, and the connections that are made from it is actually very interesting, right?
All the way from journalists that wanna write more articles about a particular issue, like the one that we recently had by Dr. Kopel wrote about the nitrate glove issue, right? And he's like, "I got, like, all these people DM-ing me about it, wanna interview and other stuff." I'm like, "See, this is the important thing, because what does it take to start a, start a, a factory for nitrate gloves, right?"
There, there might be actual, and if you're an investment banker, things like that, there, that might be a viable investment, right? And then why don't we do them here? Is there... We're asking these questions, right? Why don't we have them here? It costs 2 million to build it. Okay, it costs 2 million. Now, let's say money is not an issue.
Where does it go from there? Is there envi- regulational issues? Is there a supply chain issue to it? All the machines are made in China. Okay, if we buy a machine from China, we put it here, right? Where do we go from there, right? Can we build our own parts and maintain it here? So it's this type of questions that we wanna increase the conversation to that, that promote these things, because who thinks about that?
I use, I u- I use gloves. I probably used it two, three times this week, and I'm like, "Oh, where do they all come from? China. Okay, that might [00:50:00] be a strategic issue," right? So have a conversation, reach out. That's the biggest one, is it's not gonna be closed off. We're not gonna... Unless you're some schizo, which I get all the time.
I do get some schizos that legitimately send me just the most, I think are just like, "Oh, that's crazy," but they're probably brilliant in, in, in their own right. But we wanna have a conversation. We wanna have a conversation and promote what you're thinking about and get you connected to the right people, because if we can't change the policy, let's find it where you, you can do it, right, and find the people that wanna do it with you.
Matt Horine: Excellent work. Great stuff. We'll make sure to link some of your research and socials and everything to the episode, but appreciate you joining us from Idaho today. You are our second guest from Idaho. Andrew Crapuchettes from Red Balloon joined us a few months ago. We're 2 and 0 on folks from Idaho.
Patrick J. Wolf: I keep telling people we gotta have a, maybe we'll have a big reindustrialization event here just because it's a, such a beautiful area to come to.
Mountains, trees, lakes. The northern half. The southern half's potatoes. You can do what you want with that, but yeah.
Matt Horine: That farm feeling, the northern half. Great stuff. Patrick, we really appreciate you joining us today.
Patrick J. Wolf: Likewise. Thank you so much.
Matt Horine: The investment to [00:51:00] output gap is real, not a forecast, and it's already showing up in some types of reindustrialization plays, power availability timelines, and communities waiting for promised capacity to actually arrive. The answer to combat this is to run your operation with the flexibility to absorb whatever timeline actually materializes and keep doing what you're doing.
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