Lay of The Land

Aaron Slodov — CEO of Atomic Industries, a company he co-founded back in 2019 and has raised over $20 million from leading investors like Toyota Ventures, Impatient Ventures, Narya Capital, 8090 Industries, and others!

Atomic is on a mission to exascale the American manufacturing sector, starting with making tool and die-making orders of magnitude easier and faster through advanced automation.

Through the lens of Aaron’s underlying techno-industrialist philosophy, we’ll unpack what exascaling our industrial base even means, confronting the post-industrial myth and the rich history of manufacturing in Ohio, the opportunity for technology and the implications of automation in building physical things, why more young smart ambitious people should consider careers in manufacturing and heavy industry relative to software-as-a-service companies, the pursuit of Monozukuri, Atomic Industries role to play in all of this, and a whole lot more.

(You can find a link to Aaron’s techno-industrialist manifesto, published in February of 2024 in the show-notes to this episode)

Prior to Atomic, Aaron studied physics in college, pursued a PhD in power systems engineering where he focused on electrical grid infrastructure and energy storage systems, had a stint at Google as an Operations Engineer, and then went on in 2014 to co-found Remesh, an AI-market-research startup, which has gone on to raise over $40mm in funding. 

This was one of my favorite conversations on the podcast so far — Aaron’s passion for applying technology to solve big-picture social and scientific problems and his ambition to build companies to that end is inspiring!

(As a disclaimer to this episode, I am personally a small investor in Atomic Industries)

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LINKS:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abslodov/
https://twitter.com/aphysicist
https://www.atomic.industries/
https://www.piratewires.com/p/techno-industrialist-manifesto
https://twitter.com/newindustrials

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-- AI-Generated Transcript --
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Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:00:00]:
The stars are very aligned, right, in a lot of ways. Not only, like, see all of the hype and, like, the real things that are happening in manufacturing going on right now, but to actually incentivize people to move back into this field. And, you know, one company is great, but we need more. And so I'm hoping as more entrepreneurs and founders jump into the fight, there's so many problems to solve, honestly. I don't wanna say that start up companies are kind of like, you know, the last bastion of hope, but I think they can be the vanguard for it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:39]:
Let's discover what people are building in the Greater Cleveland community. We are telling the stories of Northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs, builders, and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:52]:
podcast where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, today, I had the real privilege of speaking with my friend Aaron Slodov. Aaron studied physics in college, pursued a PhD in power systems engineering where he focused on electrical grid infrastructure and energy storage systems, had a stint at Google as an operations engineer, and then went on in 2014 to cofound Remesh, an AI market research startup, which has gone on to raise over $40,000,000 in funding. Today, Erin is the CEO of Atomic Industries, a company which he founded back in 2019 and has raised over $20,000,000 for. Atomic is on a mission to exascale the American manufacturing sector, starting with the focus to make tool and die making orders of magnitude easier and faster through advanced automation. Through the lens of Aaron's underlying techno industrialist philosophy, we will unpack what exascaling our industrial base even means, confronting the post industrial myth and rich history of manufacturing in Ohio and throughout the Midwest, the opportunity for technology and implications of automation in building physical things, why more young, smart, ambitious people should consider careers in manufacturing and heavy industry relative to software as a service companies, the pursuit of Mona Zikori, Atomic Industries' role to play in all of this, and a whole lot more. You can find a link to Aaron's techno industrialist manifesto, which he published in February of 2024 and which has gone viral in pockets of the Internet in the show notes to this episode.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:32]:
This was truly one of my favorite conversations on the podcast so far. Aaron's passion for applying technology to solve big picture social and scientific problems and his ambition in building companies to that end is genuinely inspiring. So with that, please enjoy my conversation with Aaron Slodov after a brief message from our sponsors. As a disclaimer to this episode, I am personally a small investor in Atomic Industries. Leave the Land is brought to you by John Carroll University's Boulder College of Business, widely recognized alumni of John alumni of John Carroll University, success in this ever changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technologies and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen, all qualities nurtured through the Buhler College of Business. With 4 different MBA programs of study spanning professional, online, hybrid, and 1 year flexible, the Bowler College of Business provides flexible timelines class structures for each MBA track, including online, in person, hybrid, and asynchronous. All to offer the most effective options for you including the ability to participate in an elective international study tour providing unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas and experiencing a new culture. The career impact of a bowler MBA is formative and will help prepare you for this future of business and get more out of your career.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:09]:
To learn more about John Carroll University's Buller MBA programs, please go to business.jcu.edu. The Buller College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International. The highest accreditation a college of business can have. So this may be the longest Slave Land podcast episode in the making. Probably over over 3 years, but I I think,

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:04:36]:
conversation well worth the wait. We've done it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:41]:
So thank you for for joining us here, Aaron. Absolutely.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:04:44]:
I think this is

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:44]:
gonna be a lot of fun. So I I wanna dive right into the heart of what you're working on, thinking on, and talking about most recently, which is techno industrialism, this kind of powerful collision between technology and manufacturing to set, I think, the grand stage for a lot of what we'll unpack today with the work you're doing with Atomic Industries and, again, just thinking about more broadly, you know, waging this war against stagnation in the in the world of atoms. So I'd love if at the highest level, you could just tell us what that is. You know, what what is techno industrialism?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:05:24]:
So my definition of this is basically, how are we transforming 2 classically very distant fields? Right? Technology and manufacturing are very much an oil and water kind of scenario. Yeah. It's this is this is a function of multiple things. I think you have crazy adoption curves because of, you know, shifting demographics with people in heavy industry and manufacturing. The challenge that's also presented plainly is just that manufacturing is very challenging to do. Right? Many of the manufacturing processes that exist are not just something you can transform overnight. And they're also super capital intensive and a lot of the tribal knowledge around, you know, these different areas requires an immense amount of transfer to go from, like, one generation to another. So you there's a lot of barriers, a lot of friction to do something like this.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:06:25]:
So yeah, I mean, building up capacity and tribal knowledge in these areas, right, like merging technology with industry is something that I think we'll see a lot more of, but that's kind of like where my definition rests. I have a lot more I can go into on that. But

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:44]:
And and and we'll get there. We'll we'll unpack, I think, the entirety of of the as you put it down into words and galvanize for all of us to to look at. But I I thought a fun way to explore, you know, your own inspiration for it and and some of the work you're doing with Atomic Industries would be to unpack your call to arms, if you will, kind of applied to yourself because you had this impassioned part of your manifesto that was urging top technical talent, you know, to leave lucrative and prestigious jobs in the technological world, which has afforded them, you know, a lot of real capital, social capital to take up, you know, these entrepreneurial arms to combat the hard industrial challenges that you've begun to introduce here. But I'd love to hear how you heed your own counsel, you know, in that regard as you ultimately made that same shift.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:07:40]:
Yeah. Yeah. I think the genesis for me really has been a very long path. Right? I've always been pretty enamored with moonshot type thinking Yeah. In a lot of ways. And I guess, I've never been super afraid to really get my hands dirty, and I've always loved to build things. But taking that to heart, you know, going from working on kind of, like, physics in my undergrad and then shifting from that to going to Silicon Valley and, like, working, you know, at a FAANG company and then getting exposure to real world projects like working in renewable energy and self driving cars and software and seeing the spectrum of how all these things would play out in my mind and also in real life. And, yeah, the world of atoms is always a longer, more arduous path.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:08:39]:
And maybe I'm just, you know, a total masochist. I don't know. But there's something more interesting, you know, inherently. Right? Because I I genuinely think when I'm on my deathbed, do I wanna imagine having worked on, like, a SaaS product, you know, or do I wanna try to build and engineer something that literally pushes humanity further and forward. Right? And I think you need that type of insanity to really dedicate yourself to something in this in this field because it's really challenging. Right? And it's it's not something that has the easiest and most apparent returns. So for me, I think, yeah, going through that whole process and then ultimately, like, starting Remesh, right, and going through the journey of building a SaaS company, right, was fascinating. And ultimately, I just keep coming back to stuff like this.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:09:41]:
So I don't know. I think I'm probably ultimately just more attracted ultimately to to doing things in the physical world.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:50]:
What what drew you to entrepreneurship in the first place?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:09:54]:
I think in a lot of ways, I believe in, you know, the agency that these types of endeavors grant you. And I know that that's not, you know, a possible thing for a lot of people just trying to survive. That was me though at some point. Right? Like, I I genuinely don't think that the opportunities out there are just, like, calling it people. You really have to just, like, forge it yourself. And I'm pretty hard headed about that in a lot of ways. And so a lot of times, I would just suffer, right? And like, probably needlessly. And I made my way through somehow.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:10:37]:
I think it's just kind of on each individual, you know. There's no there's no I don't think there's like a grand framework for this stuff. Yeah. And I do I do genuinely think though that, like, if you go through the gauntlet, basically, you can come out on top. It might take, you know, 10 or 15 years to do it, and you might be struggling the whole time. But, you know, ultimately, it's cool that we have, you know, willpower and we can do this stuff ourselves. I I don't know. It could sound like a really entitled thing to say stuff like that because I just, like, you know, listen to myself say it and then I actually think about how I didn't have help from, right, like, my parents genuinely.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:11:24]:
And, like, I worked my ass off working, like, 2 jobs during school and like paid for it and it took me like 6 years to get through undergrad, you know, just because I was working so much to Yeah. Support myself And I chose, you know, really strange things to study in undergrad and ultimately, you know, took these jobs that brought me in different directions. I don't know. It's, like, it's really fascinating. But, yeah, for me, I think entrepreneurship is like a form of freedom in some way. You just really have to, like, put your head down Yeah. Ultimately. Well, if

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:03]:
if you'll indulge the the remesh detour for a moment, you know, what what was the catalyst that that drew you to wanting to pursue something at first, in the world of of bits?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:12:14]:
Yeah. So the the kind of, like, moonshot thinking around Remesh was, you know, we genuinely thought that we had come up with a new novel way to communicate and, like, facilitate communication with people Yeah. Which I still think. Right? Like, there's no social platform on the planet that allows you to have a conversation with thousands of people on the other side of it, and it's like a fluid dialogue. Right? I still think that's really novel and interesting, and I wanted to see that and push it to some, like, grand scale. Like, one of our fantasies was always just, you know, like, having the president speak to a 100000 Americans and just have, like, an open dialogue. I mean, AMA. Right.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:13:03]:
But it, you know, it would be this real fluid dialogue where a 100,000 people could respond instantaneously to a question that the president asks. Like, it's kinda crazy. And I still I genuinely still believe in that and that's why I went into working on Remesh because I I thought that we could push that into the world. And yeah. I mean, it's still, you know, using Twitter as much as I do now today. I I I genuinely think there's still, like, a a huge opportunity for something like Remesh. There's a lot of noise in the world for sure.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:39]:
Yeah. So when you reflect on that, knowing the work you're doing now, was there a particular moment that opened your eyes to or catalyzed this desire to shift your focus to working in the world of of atoms over bits? Or was it really this, you know, end of life, you know, regret aversion framework that you know, what what what what inspired that?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:14:06]:
Well, there's a, a really specific story that kinda led me to this. But yeah. After after I stepped away from Remesh, I picked up a couple side projects. Yep. While I was trying to just reset. Mhmm. And one of these was making a, a consumer product, and it was something that had to get manufactured. Yep.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:14:29]:
So I think the interesting part about this was I genuinely didn't have any exposure to manufacturing up to this point. So I had asked some of my friends that still worked on hardware teams, you know, at big tech companies and just out in the world, and a lot of them told me, you know, you need to go find a supplier to make this thing that you're that you wanna do.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:55]:
Yep. And

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:14:56]:
I was like, okay. Like, what the hell is that? And they're like, go on Alibaba and look for, you know, like, a a factory in China and send them the designs for your stuff, and they'll turn it around. Or go to some American suppliers, and they'll charge you, like, 5 times the price, and it'll take longer. So this whole thing was really fascinating because what I was trying to make were toys, basically. Right. These are, like, little figurines for Warhammer and D and D. I didn't think this was a big deal. Right.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:15:26]:
They're stupid little figurines. I mean, it's a hobbyist item, so people expect them to be, like, high quality. They get really into it. But the way I wanted to manufacture them too, right, like, I wanted to turn more product more quickly than most of the legacy companies were doing. And I thought that was something that, you know, like, why are people not doing this? Right. Why not? And I wasn't trying to make a, like, a venture company out of it. I was just trying to have fun and make some stupid consumer thing. And yeah.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:15:58]:
It made me wanna, like, jump off a bridge. I it was just crazy, like, how how much effort really had to go into, you know, designing the product and then taking that design and translating it into something in my hand. So going through all of that, I kinda just step back after a while and, you know, I tried conventional manufacturing and working with some of these suppliers. And then I was like, maybe I'll just do it myself. Tried some 3 d printing, and that sucked. But, ultimately yeah. I just imagined that if I'm having this many problems as, like, a nobody trying to manufacture, like, a stupid toy Yeah. I can't even imagine how this extrapolates to, like, global scale manufacturing.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:16:45]:
It must be orders of magnitude more frustrating, painful, challenging, and it is. And it is. I mean, they obviously have much more process wrapped around it, and it's very dialed in. But it's still something that's, like, extremely challenging and painful for everybody.

Jeffrey Stern [00:17:03]:
Right. And is that line of questioning how you essentially kind of amplify the scope and ambition of what you're doing from, you know, as as you put it, kind of a toy and consumer goods to there's an opportunity to reindustrialize the American manufacturing base? Like, when how does that shift come in?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:17:22]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of this is going back to that oil and water analogy. Yeah. Right? Like, you really have to look at individual manufacturing processes and kind of, like, rip them apart and rebuild them in more efficient ways with more technology, basically. And I genuinely do think that, you know, Tesla is a great example of this. And it's not just like, Tesla's the only people in the world doing this, but they're very forward thinking in in how they do it. Yeah.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:17:53]:
And it's also really challenging for a lot of existing, well established mega companies that do manufacture things to, like, transform their production lines. It's not just this snap of a fingers. So I think looking at that kind of model where we really take the time to scrutinize different manufacturing processes, like especially ones that, you know, 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars of goods go through to Yeah. To come into existence are worth looking at and potentially worth, you know, optimizing Yeah. In a way where you can build a scalable company around that. And I think that you'll see more and more of this stuff as a function of the technology that exists today. And that's kind of where the idea came from in the 1st place. Right? Like, machine learning, robotics, different kinds of autonomy, material science.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:18:50]:
Right? Like, there's, yeah, a primordial soup of good things happening across the board that might actually make this job easier. Right. And so taking that kind of, like, last mover advantage type of mentality and applying it now, there's just so much opportunity because the markets are absolutely enormous and people are changing a lot of their attitudes about how technology can really impact this stuff. Some of that is a function of just witnessing more and more technology in the world, and some of it's also pressure from, like a macro standpoint. Right? Like a lot of companies are being forced to adopt and transform how they manufacture in today's, you know, environment. So there's, yeah, there's a lot of really interesting tailwinds, I think.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:45]:
Yeah. And I I definitely wanna touch on on some of those, but I think now might be as as good as any place to introduce Atomic Industries. You know, what what is it?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:19:57]:
But

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:57]:
yeah. And, what are you working on there?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:20:00]:
So, yeah, going back to the the story of the figurines. Basically, what I learned through that was, you know, I to make these things, I needed to get a mold. Yeah. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:14]:
Like, what what is a mold exactly?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:20:16]:
I mean, you have, like, a part that you wanna manufacture. Right? If you look around on your desk, a lot of this stuff is probably made in molds, but you need a reliable, consistent way to make a single part over and over again. Yep. And there are different manufacturing processes to do that with different types of material. Right? So with metal, you might stamp something, or you might machine it, or cast it. With plastics, there's molding. Right? You shoot liquid hot plastic into a a metal cavity and put a lot of pressure on it, and it forms your part, and you open up the mold and pop out your part. Right? Like this is there are all kinds of fundamental ways of making individual part geometries.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:21:01]:
And so the mastery around each of these different areas varies. And, you know, there's basically, like, a translation layer where you go from a design to making this mold for that part. And it's fascinating. I mean, this is the kind of mysticism, right, around these trades because this is not something that you go to school for. It's not an engineering field. You you sit in a factory for 2 decades, right, and learn how to solve these problems over and over and over again.

Jeffrey Stern [00:21:35]:
And to your point, I think to most of us, it's entirely obfuscated. Like, I don't know who, on average, has exposure to the manufacturing process. You just get the product.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:21:47]:
Yeah. Genuinely, like, if you were somebody like me, you might be a little bit more connected to it because you have to go through all the pain, right, of presenting somebody your design and then they're going to scrutinize your design for manufacturability. They have to tell you. Right? Like, this angle is not good. Right? Like, I can't use that in a mold, or this feature that you have here is actually just not manufacturable. So you have to scrutinize the design first before you even design the mold to make that thing. So there's this whole process of tying, like, end to end knowledge, right, from, like, how you design the tool, how you machine it, and then put it together, and how it works in a factory to pump out your thing. So the best humans that know how to do this stuff have that kind of end to end knowledge, and they can just without any software or simulation tools, they can just look at your design and, you know, they have a vague idea of how challenging it's going to be and how much it's going to cost and how long it's gonna take.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:22:54]:
This is an analog to searching through in their brain, right, like an open solution space for that target.

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:04]:
Yeah.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:23:04]:
Yeah. It's basically, like, I can kinda string it together. I, obviously, my brain is not, you know, like a end to end physics simulator or any I mean, like, it kind of is. We we kind of have them in our brain. It's just loose, but their job is to to do this, like, mystical translation job. So we think that we can actually teach machines how to do that faster. Or at least once we teach a machine how to do it, we will be able to search through that space much faster. Yeah.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:23:32]:
And that's that's kind of the premise of what Atomic is is basically, you know, we respect and appreciate, you know, the art and mysticism around a lot of these different fields. We just wanna make the process more efficient. Right? I don't think many people in this field, which is called tool and die making, would sit there and genuinely tell you with a straight face that they enjoy a lot of the, you know, like arduous repeatable tasks that they have to do in in the design process. There's, you know If we leave the highest creativity pieces and functions, right, to humans, that's okay. Because even taking away 90% of the low hanging fruit would be enormous for what they do. Right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:18]:
And then which is what we've always done with technology. Exactly.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:24:22]:
We're not trying to build a faster

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:25]:
horse. Right. Right. So okay. A lot of a lot of directions we could go from here. Let's let's layer on, I think, some of the headwinds, tailwinds context. I think that, you know, a lot of which you lay out in in the manifesto itself, but I think will add to, you know, the the color of Atomic's story here. One of the things is, I think we could just actually layer in Ohio for a moment because, you know, knowing here we have this incredible history.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:52]:
You know, right after the the civil war, you begin to see Ohio, emerge, particularly around Akron, Cleveland, as arguably one of the greatest, you know, industrial hubs accounting for, I think, about half the world's rubber production. And then over the subsequent, you know, decades through World War 2, layering in oil, iron, steel. And then on top of that, the manufacturing layer and competency over that raw material base. This place became, you know, a formidable production unit with the the end to end knowledge that, you know, you mentioned earlier, but, obviously, things have changed. And so one of the things I wanted to ask you about was, you know, layering in your own historical context, but this idea of the post industrial myth, and then what what that is and and how you've you've thought about it.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:25:43]:
Yeah. I mean, at the very highest level, I mean, you you can kind of you see a lot of evidence for it today in the news. Right? And COVID highlighted a lot of this where the supply chain sensitivities that we experienced and are currently experiencing were almost a direct result of that. Right? Like, if you outsource enough of a skill set like that, it becomes less incentivized over time, and people obviously won't go into it, and that transfer of knowledge fails to continue. Yeah. And that's incredibly detrimental, right, because the trade knowledge is basically all that matters, ultimately. So, yeah, I think you really see some of the stuff appearing in the news today. Right? And I talk about this with building submarines and artillery and semiconductors.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:26:39]:
Yeah. It's crazy. Right? Like, there's a whole litany of things that we just literally don't know how to make anymore. And that's happening with the tacit, like, trade knowledge around manufacturing processes as well. So the more pronounced that becomes over time, there's naturally going to be, you know, like a there's gonna be a reaction to that, which is either gonna come by way of trying to re incentivize some of these trade skills very quickly. Right? Right. And we're seeing that in semiconductors right now. So they build these giant fabs, right, in Columbus and in Arizona, and we don't have enough workers to work in them or even build the fab in the first place.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:27:23]:
They were trying to bring in Taiwanese people. Right? To Yeah. To build the fabs in Arizona, and they got banned. So we're trying to, like, green light them and get them in to help build those things. But even Intel right now has a a 1 year training program, basically, for technicians to work in their fab to just, like, blast people through really quickly. Yeah. So it's really fascinating because when you think about how much time it takes to accumulate and build up trade knowledge and we're kind of at like a, you know, a global minima almost in a lot of ways because we've hollowed out so many of these different, you know, areas of trade skill. So, yeah, losing and forgetting how to make things and, actually, how to build things is it's terrible because we ultimately need physical products.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:28:15]:
Right? Like, we are an industrial society, and we can't escape that. That's the whole idea is, like, you can't just not, you know, pay attention to these types of things. And that also speaks to just where all the incentives ultimately went. Right? Yeah. Getting a software engineering job at Netflix is or used to be great, at least. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:36]:
Right. Like, where are the smartest young people going to work?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:28:39]:
Yeah. It's and it's challenging because you have you have technology drawing people to these very shiny things. Right? And the compensation is obviously amazing. And same thing in, like, finance. Right? Are these things a net positive for society in the face of, right, this diminishing kind of stagnation in the physical world. And so this is something that a lot of people have obviously argued for a long time. Yep. But eventually, it's really gonna be painful.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:29:09]:
So I think I obviously am biased about this. Right? But I I want that to go more full into swing right now because these problems fundamentally are much more challenging than things in, like, computer science and finance. Right? They're not highly incentivized today, but we can make them something like that. Right? And I think, yeah, in a fundamental way, having a common enemy to unite against, right, is this theme that's easy to, like, galvanize people around. And so if that stagnation is something that we can actually rally around, right, and fight against, I think that we can create the kinds of incentives that draw people like that in. I mean, on a very small scale, I have a pretty crazy amount of people that apply to our company. Right? They come from all kinds of amazing areas in technology, and they're fascinated with these problems because they're so hard. Well, and part of

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:11]:
it, I think is that, but I think you've also been able to articulate what this common enemy is in kind of a succinct, clear, thoughtful way at the same time. It's like a beacon for people who are, you know, wanting to perhaps work on something that they think matters like this, but don't maybe know what the options are.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:30:35]:
Yeah. It's it's definitely challenging. And I I think I think a a good amount of people have a an innate, you know, desire almost to to want to build something with their hands. Right? It's Yeah. It's just not it's not every day you get a chance to to really merge both of these fields together. So I think that's why it's kind of a really interesting unique time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:01]:
Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and by 90. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio, Impact Architects has helped 100 of those leaders, many of whom we have heard from as guests on this very podcast, realize their own visions and build these great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love. If you 2 are trying to build great, Impact Architects is offering to sit down with you for a free consultation or provide a free trial through 90, the software platform that helps teams build great companies. If you're interested in learning more about partnering with Impact Architects or by leveraging 90 to power your own business, please go to ia.layoftheland.fm. The link will also be in our show notes. So what is Atonic's role to play in this techno reindustrialization? And I'd love to also just introduce another terminology here that you can layer on which is exascaling.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:32:14]:
Yeah. So the idea of exascaling is something I stole from computing, basically. Right? It's a measure of how many, basically, like, operations per unit of time you can get away with ultimately Yeah. In, like, supercomputing. Right? So I I kind of think about the industrial base as a giant supercomputer or, like, AWS, basically. I just kind of imagine it as this obfuscated layer

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:45]:
Yeah.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:32:46]:
Where we need to make a submarine or, you know, 10,000 drones or something. We should be able to do that in a pretty flexible adaptive way from the raw materials all the way through the manufacturing process and then obviously, like distribution. But I think exascaling the industrial base in my brain is kind of how I laid it out in this, you know, manifesto where you've got these different layers of all the applications, and these are things that you want to make. Yep. And then the middle is this layer of execution, which is, like, the raw trade skill and knowledge of, like, how. And then the bottom layer is, like, the capacity. So these are the, you know, machines and the factories and the raw materials that you need to go through that stack and actually perform, you know, the miracle of production. So in a lot of ways, there's no shortage of applications.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:33:41]:
Right? Like, we can all come up with really cool stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But we still need to improve the other layers. Right? Like execution and capacity. If you can't scale those along with your application layer, you're kinda just where we are right now, like treading water, basically. Yep. And I think that when you look at any any manufacturing process that leads from the kind of ground level up in terms of throughput, Or, like, I wanna produce more submarines.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:34:15]:
What do you like, take apart that entire supply chain, right, and understand what it would take to actually make more than 4 submarines per year, which is basically what we can make. Where, you know, there are probably 100 or 1000 of different suppliers attached, right, to like make all the different componentry, Not to mention, like, the design and simulation that goes into those things too. But it's it's crazy because if you silo them all into different buckets, like, they can all be optimized in some way. Right. And this is this is what happened in World War 2 as well. Right? Like, obviously, things were more simple in terms of, like, their build materials. Right? Like, a Columbia class submarine has 2,500,000 components, and it takes 14 years to design. I don't think that ships during the World War 2 era were at that level of complexity.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:35:11]:
So you've got this kind of function of complexity Mhmm. As things increase over time, is that actually matching, you know, the manufacturing process on the other end of it? And we really only have, like, 2 companies that can make submarines now. But again, going back to your question, I think the way that we see ourselves positioned in this and, like, what exascaling really means is taking a tech enabled approach, right, to improving and optimizing the foundational layer of manufacturing processes that are required to make all this stuff. Yeah. So am I just like a glorified part maker? Or can we actually apply these kinds of techniques to other manufacturing processes as well? That's kind of a question that's, you know, TBD over the next 5 to 20 years, basically. But I think that it's something that we can measure, which is why I like the idea of exascaling. I mean, capacity and throughput of the industrial base is something that's measured by economists in general. I just think that we can probably do a better job at pushing it.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:36:21]:
So yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:23]:
So if today we're, you know, treading water, as you say, and what needs to happen for exascaling to come to fruition? And what what specifically is Atomic Industries working on in pursuit of that?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:36:41]:
So I'm gonna answer the second part first. So for tool and die making, right, like, this is a pretty classic problem in production. You you wanna make a new car model or, you know, a new toothbrush or deodorant, whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. You ultimately like, the product development life cycle goes from market research all the way down through, you know, the physical design of the components to ultimately hitting the manufacturing where you have to go through the same process, right, where you, like, study the feasibility of the design itself for the manufacturing process, and then you sign off on that, start designing, like, the tooling for these different parts, and then they go into production ultimately. And then, you know, if you're a car, you have to obviously assemble all of these parts together into your final vehicle. If it's a deodorant, you still have to kinda assemble that too.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:37:40]:
Yep. You make the, you know, the plastic container and then you shoot the goo into it, and it becomes deodorant, toothpaste, whatever. It's all Yeah. Everything is really fascinating when you kinda look at it at that in that light. So for us, we wanna help people go from, you know, the design through tooling and actually getting into production vastly more rapidly. And the idea behind that is that you need tradespeople, right, to take your design and go through that mystical arcane process to come up with the tool Yep. And then ultimately reach production. So if we can make that, you know, 1 or 2 orders of magnitude faster, you can literally accelerate all manufacturing across many different domains.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:38:28]:
I mean, there are plastic parts. Right? But you can also apply a lot of this stuff to different areas of manufacturing that use tool and die making, which would be, right, like high pressure die casting for aluminum component. You've seen, like, the Giga cast, right, on a in a Tesla factory? Yeah. Yeah. So that's die casting, basically, and then stamping, like sheet metal stamping out parts for cars or airplanes and things like that. Forging is another one. Right? There's a crazy Cleveland has, like, one of the largest stamping presses in the world here that does, you know, wing structures for the f 30 fives made out of, like, titanium. It's crazy.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:39:10]:
Yeah. But you need you need, like, a an engineered die to do that with. And so I think we can we can vastly, you know, accelerate manufacturing processes. And so that's kinda how we see ourselves is improving the speed of going from design to production, basically.

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:30]:
On the talent piece, when you I think we've kind of loosely outlined, you know, there's there's a a generational challenge that we're about to face where this, you know, traditional knowledge embedded within, you know, people's experience and heads is won't translate to the next generation. On top of the fact that, you know, we haven't tapped into this latent desire people maybe have to build things with their hands, although it's there, but the the younger generation is not going into manufacturing. How do you how do you address this?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:40:07]:
Yeah. I mean, so this this is kind of the idea behind or really trying to drive incentives in this direction. Yeah. So you have, you know, Tesla and SpaceX and this big movement happening in, like, aerospace and defense, right, where people can see this stuff happening on a regular basis. I mean, I don't even know how many Falcon launches there have been. I think, like, almost a 100? Yeah. 96 or something like that. It's crazy.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:40:41]:
It's a lot. It just become like the hedonic treadmill. Right? It just becomes regular all all of a sudden, and you're like, we're actually reusing and landing rockets now. It's very cool. All the time. I I think that is just human nature, honestly. But more and more people are getting psyched about that kind of stuff. Right? And I think start up companies, technology companies are very interesting, like, purpose built vehicles that are made to scale around, like, a single problem.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:41:11]:
And so what I'm excited about, at least, is seeing more companies enter into this space. We obviously need to prove that they are scalable and like get them to these states where they can become very large tech companies, right? And attract more people, more resources, more talent into them. And this like, the whole idea, I think, is that, you know, the the Overton window is very squarely, you know, positioned over this right now. Yeah. Where not only like policy can be re reshifted and reoriented to support stuff like this, but a lot of capital in the world is looking at this space right now. So, honestly, the stars are very aligned, right, in a lot of ways to to not only, like, see all of the the hype and, like, the real things that are happening in manufacturing going on right now, but to actually incentivize people to move back into this field. And, you know, one company is great, but we need more. And so I'm hoping as more entrepreneurs and founders jump into the fight, there's so many problems to solve, honestly.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:42:27]:
I don't wanna say that start up companies are kind of like, you know, the last bastion of hope, but I think they can be the vanguard for it. Right? Like, leading the charge in this stuff. And I don't wanna keep going back to Elon's company. I feel like he he's really doing that in a lot of ways. Whether you love him or hate him. Right? Like, he's out there building Gigafactories literally, like, all over the world and being able to demonstrate the reduction in, like, the footprint of these factories while improving their efficiencies, right, as time goes on.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:01]:
The ephemeralization is crazy. Less.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:43:04]:
Yeah. I mean, like and that's honestly some of the the highest level examples of this that we have today, But I think that's possible in so many different areas. So it's yeah. I think, you know, we wanna move in a direction where maybe you can make as much working in a factory, like a future factory, as you could at Netflix. You know? And maybe it wouldn't be some, like, garbage union job. Right. It might actually be like a cool, more tech oriented job where you get equity and you can get rich working, you know, like, this would be new new wave of industrialism, basically.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:41]:
Right. And the and with that, the prestige and, you know, as a respected path. Yep. As you made this transition yourself and, ultimately, I think in an attempt trying to re recruit others to do the same, what did you find in reflection were the most transferable things you learned at Remesh, you know, from this world of bits and software that apply and you can leverage with Atomic? And where does that, you know, transferability stop? And and how do you address that that delta?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:44:13]:
Well, yeah. I think one of the most fascinating things with at least my, you know, my mutt pedigree, if you wanna think about it like that, like my path, is how much of the culture of Silicon Valley and, like, technology I've scooped up. Yeah. And, you know, you obviously just get to like make your own culture ultimately, but rebuilding the culture of manufacturing with that is pretty fascinating. I think in a lot of ways, some of my peers that came before Atomic, right, like, that was a classic interaction that broke down and failed in a lot of ways. Like, getting, you know, some of the best machinists in the world to work at a tech company. They're like, what the hell is this? You know, like, what's Trello? Alright. Or I don't know.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:45:13]:
Like, why do I have to have a laptop and, like, you know, a phone and use Gmail? And, like, why are you trying to text me on Saturday? You know, there like and don't get me wrong. Like, people in manufacture factoring, like, they they grind really hard. It's just they're they're different worlds colliding. So I think it's really fascinating to get them overlapping and aligned, and a big part of that is really building something that in a lot of ways, like, converts them into believers in technology. It's not that they don't care about it or anything. Right? It's like if you try to do what we're doing, like, 10 years ago even, a lot of people in manufacturing probably would have just laughed you out of a room or not taken it really very seriously at all. Right. And that that literal cultural barrier has held back tech and manufacturing for a long time because a lot of people probably just assume that, you know, people from tech are just trying to build, like, a dashboard or a piece of software that's trying to make some other aspects of the manufacturing process, like, more efficient.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:46:22]:
When in reality, they're really just, like, all they care about is when they they start cutting steel. Right? You know?

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:28]:
I mean, to me, it's really fascinating because I to your point about the Overton window, like, I think there's a reason it's within it now because there's this confluence of all the, I think, the macro things we're talking about so far that is like, well, the common criticism of Silicon Valley is like, well, what has it done to actually improve my life? I mean, we're at a point now where we're talking about banning social media overall, and we we face this, you know, wake of what happened throughout the pandemic. And I think there's a recognition that we have to actually, you know, maybe do something about it.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:46:59]:
Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people are kinda waking up to that idea, and it's you know, like, the market and the timing of the downturn, right, are also really fascinating when when you're talking about stuff like this because I think people look at that and they're like, wow, maybe the party's over now. I don't know. I mean, we had a a crazy bull run for a long time, and a lot of people make fun of, you know, this, like, Zurp era of companies that just popped into being, basically Right. With hardly any oversight at all. And some of it's highly questionable. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:37]:
But but inherent in what you're doing, and at least the vision you've painted, is is optimism.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:47:43]:
I would say so. Yeah. And real world value. Yeah. Like, it directly translates to making the real world, you know, more positive in a lot of ways. So it's not that I'm, you know if you make manufacturing more efficient and, like, higher throughput or whatever, does that translate to just making more garbage, I guess, in the world? Or no, Right? Like, there's a real need for physical goods, I like, as we know. And I think that you will have it's all very cyclical. Right? Like if you look at how manufacturing works, there's the supply and demand levels always fluctuate.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:48:27]:
The steady state of demand for any good is, you know, questionable, I think. But one thing is pretty certain though is that manufacturers want to have more flexibility and agility when they make something. So yeah, ultimately, having that real world impact and very tangible value chain, I think is just more meaningful, honestly. Maybe ultimately AI will just literally automate away the business layer. Right? And SaaS companies can just kinda be this automated function, and that would be great. But ultimately, that's I mean, this is where post industrial society really goes. Right? Right. You wanna think about, like, the worlds of Blade Runner and Star Wars.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:49:16]:
Right? Like, yeah. People are using computers and terminals and things, but there's also, like, cities are mega scale, and you've got, you know, starships and things like colonizing other worlds and stuff. Like, how do you get there from where we are? Right? It's industrialism. It's not more software, basically, even though you still need software to guide a lot of these processes. So that's kind of I know that's a giant leap, but, yeah, I think it really takes, you know, the ultimate successful marriage of technology and manufacturing to get to something like that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:49]:
Yeah. Well, I I think you've alluded to what I wanna ask about next from this perspective of, you know, avoiding end of life regrets. But what what what does success mean to you in the context of all of this?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:50:02]:
I mean, ultimately, in a real quantitative way, it's just demonstrating, you know, the optimization of this manufacturing process that we're doing. So Yeah. If we if we can prove, you know, very scalable unit economics and being able to refine and improve them over time, just very analogous to, like, Tesla's model, I think that's a win. Right? And if you can do that across other areas of manufacturing, that's huge. And that all adds up into this, like, idea of exascaling, basically. And we need it in every different area. Right? There's I could list off a 1,000 different things right now that I would love to see that happening. But yeah, for us, that's, at the end of the day, being able to prove out what we started.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:50:49]:
Right? I mean, like, that's it. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:53]:
That makes makes sense to me. Well, I'll I'll I'll ask then, why have you opted to, I think, be more public with the thesis, you know, itself and the the vision more generally for techno industrial optimism? You know, why why why write a manifesto?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:51:16]:
Well yeah. I mean, I think it's important to to at least have a framework, and I'm not, like, deeming my framework as the framework, but I think it's a good start to 1, at least. Yeah. That's my idea of kinda like open sourcing something. Right? Just put it out

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:33]:
there. Right. And get the feedback of the public.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:51:35]:
Yeah. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, it's super challenging too to think about what improving the industrial base even means, you know, because it's it's so vast and, you know, ubiquitous in a lot of ways. So having a framework with potentially even like a roadmap is something that, you know, is super valuable to people trying to work on this stuff. And I discovered the problem by just running into a brick wall, you know, with my with my face.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:07]:
How do I make this figurine?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:52:08]:
Yeah. Pretty much. And I think there's a ton of really driven people looking for stuff right now, you know, in this in this world. And I think as as more incentives open up, especially if more funding comes down the pipeline for, you know, reindustrialization, yeah, there will need to be I don't I really don't wanna say this, but I think there there has to be a little bit of, like, thought leadership. I I really don't wanna say that phrase ever around this stuff. I mean, like, I'm just out there building one of these companies right now, you know, and this is kind of the the internal model that I came up with for it. And so yeah. I mean, I talk to people all the time about, you know, what they could potentially go into and work on.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:52:57]:
Maybe next should be like a a tech tree or like a road map or something of areas that people could attack. Yeah. I like that. What is Manazukuri? Oh, well, so yeah. This is a it's a really interesting Japanese principle, like, to their culture and society, which is it really just boils down to the idea of, like, knowing how to make something is key to, like, their success, basically, and they celebrate it. It's kind of like a, you know, an internalized nationalistic principle, basically, like being able to make a certain thing. Right? And, like, the knowledge wrapped around that is something they hold very, like, highly. Yeah.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:53:48]:
And it's not something that we hold highly.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:51]:
Not at the moment.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:53:52]:
And, you know, like, I genuinely I don't I don't think that, you know, the American industrial base is, like, about to explode. We're still like number 2 in the world. Right? We're overall kind of all over the place in terms of how we rank in terms of, you know, GDP per capita in terms of, like, value add in manufacturing compared to the top, like, 20 countries that do this stuff. Because some really small countries are obviously, like, way more Yeah. Productive and have higher output per capita. But, yeah, that idea is it's fascinating. It is fascinating. And we like, I want us to be able to internalize something very similar.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:54:34]:
Right? And that's kind of like the idea of we're we're losing touch with the physical world and we need to kinda like lean it in. And we have an amazing opportunity to do that using technology. So it could be some kind of like cybernetic monozukuri, right, where it's like we we basically teach machines how to do a lot of this stuff. But at the same time, we regain a lot of that, you know, trade knowledge and preserve it, basically, like, with machines, which is fascinating in its own self. But Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:05]:
Yeah. Well, there I mean, there's still so many things I I could ask you about. I I wanna I wanna ask though, is there something particularly important that we haven't talked about, you know, in your analysis of what you're working on at Atomic, the kind of more macro level thing that you would wanna introduce here or call attention to?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:55:25]:
Yeah. I think, like, something I think about a lot too is just the the policy side of this. Yeah. And it is generally something that is quite unique in its ability to be bipartisan in nature. Like, pretty sure everybody agrees that we should have more capability stateside and domestically, and that the security of the industrial base is obviously like very important. Yeah. Especially in the face of, you know, potential global conflict or destabilization. I mean, the trend of deglobalization right now is fascinating.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:56:07]:
Right? And I think you'd find people that would argue different sides of that itself. But overall, I think it's accepted that we're kind of moving that direction. And that's one of those, like, macro forcing functions. And ultimately, the policy around it, which I think there's 2 very distinct angles. 1 one is basically, we need to make more stuff in America. Right? I have a great company or idea kind of like at that application layer. Right? I wanna make a new drug or a drone or whatever it is. Like, are the incentives there for me to spin up a factory and start producing more stuff? Yeah.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:56:49]:
A lot of times from the capital risk perspective, the ROI is very questionable, right, like on paying for somebody's factory. So having the ability to spin up more, like, physical capacity is a big component of that when you are kind of sitting and waiting at the application layer, like, to scale. Yep. That also calls into question whether or not there are enough people once I build the factory, right, to work in it and help me make more of these things that I wanna make. Right. I'll I'll I'll, like, semiconductors. Right? Right. To your

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:23]:
point about in Yelp.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:57:24]:
So that that's, that's a fascinating conundrum, but you still need, you know you need to either train people really quickly or accelerate how they're trained. So if you can somehow condense trade knowledge and go from, like, a 10 year time span to a 1 year time span, right, like, that's massive. How do you do that? Is that something that, you know do we use, like, these LLMs or some type of AI to regurgitate or kind of like to be an aid for you to, like, learn faster. I mean, we have a natural learning rate as humans. Right? So you can only make that go so fast. Yep. And you wanna make sure that to get off the ground, right, like that escape velocity for trade, whatever trade it is, you can short circuit it somehow through, like, any kind of technology. So those are there's a ton of really fascinating ideas there.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:58:22]:
And the other side of this is that, yeah, we know that machines are expensive, right? And factories are not generally the greatest investments. And it's hard, right, to make good margins on CapEx heavy businesses. So what about, like, the other side of this, which is how do we actually improve the factory? Right? Like, maybe it doesn't have to be that bad. There's a natural physical limit, right, to how much machines actually cost and what their throughputs are and energy and all these other real world, you know, problems when you put it together. But we don't really focus on that either. Right? Like this is this is why the optimization of different things in manufacturing is fascinating because you you can, you know, you can make them better, and you can make them more scalable. And this is why I like I like the analogy of AWS. Right? When Amazon first came out with that, there was basically an explosion of software companies because now they could just build on top of, you know, Amazon.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:59:31]:
They took away all the complexity of, like, setting up your own servers and all, like, all that stuff. And I I really think that we can do that for the physical world in a lot of ways. We just it's I don't I don't know. You've probably seen what an Amazon what, like, AWS dashboard looks like and how many services they offer. It's really crazy.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:50]:
It's a lot. Yeah.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [00:59:51]:
There's there's a lot of things. Hundreds of things that AWS does for a company, and, like, it's very similar in manufacturing. So it's this real hairy problem. But over time, that's kinda what we need to do. We need to AWS if I the industrial base.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:08]:
Right. I mean, it it's to such a degree that I mean, one of the best framings of AWS that I've heard is it's basically a tax on software and the Internet at this point. Basically.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:00:20]:
Yeah. But, arguably, a productive one. Yeah. Well right. I mean, that's that's why, you know, Sam Ullman and other people think, like, pretty soon you'll see companies that only need, like, 2 2 or 3 people and they're just $1,000,000,000 companies. They're pure software. Right? Can we get to that kind of level with physical hardware companies or manufacturing companies? Right? Yeah. There's a there's a tremendous amount of bad capital allocation that could be that could be redirected into stuff like this.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:00:53]:
Right? That just has so much more value Yeah. Ultimately. And these types of companies are I think the other problem too is there's not enough sophistication around how these things play out because this is this is really a frontier, a very new frontier. And we don't have many good, you know, comps on companies doing stuff like this. So it's hard it's hard to compare, like, what a multiple would be on, you know, a true, like, cybernetic manufacturing company if you wanna wanna think about it like that.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:28]:
Yeah. But, man, it's exciting.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:01:31]:
It is. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:31]:
I mean, it's it's It's so compelling as well.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:01:34]:
Yeah. We really have to prove it out. So who knows? I think I think there's yeah. There's a really a really, really interesting frontier out there to be, explored.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:46]:
Yeah. Well, what an opportunity. I mean, it it really is fascinating to to think about. Well, I think we can work to to bookend the the conversation here. I'll leave a little space if you have any, you know, parting thoughts, and then I can ask our traditional closing question.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:01:58]:
Yeah. I think just a little bit more on the policy side because my brain kinda locked onto that a little bit. But these two distinct sides of, you know, like, how do we use technology to improve manufacturing and also we need more manufacturing. Right? Yes. I just think it's important that if moving forward we do think that these things are existential threats or, you know, areas for policy improvement that that we really take a look at areas in the country, at least geographically, that are gonna be more, I guess, supportive or I guess it is kind of like a form of support for this. But, like, you really wanna find areas to rebuild the industrial base. Right? Like, obviously, the Midwest has great DNA for that. From a policy perspective, is it really the best place? Right? So if you get one of these companies off the ground and it hits unicorn, decacorn kind of, you know, status Yep.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:02:57]:
Are the unions gonna come, like, crushing down on it like a big 3 automaker? Right? Like, there's a reason Tesla doesn't have a factory up here. This is the kind of stuff where it's very, very, you know, culturally combative, I think, and potentially harmful. Yeah. For something like this to really flourish here. I don't know, but I genuinely hope that we can, like, explore that and move beyond it if it is.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:25]:
But I I I share that hope and desire. You know?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:03:31]:
I don't want I just don't want ourselves to shoot shoot ourselves in the foot. That's all. Because there's, like, a massive, massive opportunity for it. Right.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:37]:
But it does require overcoming short termism. Like, you right? You have to

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:03:44]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:45]:
We would have to collectively invest for the long term.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:03:48]:
A big, big investment. Yeah. And also just get over those kinds of, like, cultural, Yeah. And also just get over those kinds of, like, cultural, so that I think keep Silicon Valley culture and thinking from merging with, you know, this old world, salt of the earth kind of Midwestern mentality, which is also great. But if they can't work together, it's gonna be, you know, probably just have to go to Texas or something.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:14]:
Right. Right. But, you know, it's it's worth saying out loud because practically, right, that's that's what's happening.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:04:20]:
Yes. And it's really, like to me, it would just be a total shame. Right? Because this really is, like, the most fertile ground to do this. Right. And I mean, harkening back to that history piece.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:32]:
I mean, there was a point in time where it was, like, literally half of the world's stuff came from this area.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:04:36]:
Yeah. And this was the Midwest I'm not saying we can make that happen again overnight, but, potentially, you know, in the I'm not saying we can make that happen again overnight, but potentially, you know, in the future that could be a reality. Yeah. It's fascinating. It is. It is.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:56]:
Well, with that, you know, I'll ask you about about Cleveland. And while a traditional closing question is for a hidden gem, you know, for something that folks may not know about that perhaps they should.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:05:09]:
I think this is something that, like, popped into my head the other day, and I tweeted about it a little bit. But in storytelling, I think that there's a fascinating endless refinement kind of property to storytelling that I mean, genuinely, I don't care like who you are. Like everybody's pitch or story can be improved, and you will find ways to to do that. I always find myself thinking about, you know, how I said something and being like, wow, that's actually I should just do that. And I know this is probably, like, not a really interesting realization for a lot of people or maybe it is. I don't know. But I think telling these stories can be very tiring. Right? Like re pitching the same thing over and over and over again, but

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:03]:
Which is almost the nature of the job.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:06:05]:
It is. It is. A lot of the job is doing this, and maybe that's why it's this little nugget of wisdom, I guess. But I think, yeah, like discovering that in, you know, the stories that you tell or even that you that you pick up over time over and over again is a really fascinating property and something that I don't necessarily pride myself on that, but I just find myself doing it almost just through osmosis, I guess, of doing this over and over and over and over. Yeah. I I would say that that's kind of my weird little my weird little nugget is that having this repeatable, endlessly refined findable, like, process of storytelling is incredibly valuable for some reason. And I think it's not everybody needs to tell stories all the time, but it's cool.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:56]:
And But it's certainly requisite for founders. Sure.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:06:59]:
Yeah. I I would highly recommend, anybody, you know, trying to get out there and do this stuff to to seek that out, basically, you know, like, in their own storytelling.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:10]:
And what and what and what about Cleveland?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:07:13]:
I have so many high hopes. The reason I I wanted to throw in, like, the storytelling thing is that after going over this so many times now, right, I really always and this might just come back to, like, me being a masochist, I guess. I don't know. I really don't know. I I look at this place, and I genuinely see, you know, like, empire building kind of potential. And I I want that for for here. I think ultimately, yeah, some kind of grand opportunity or vision has to collectively be bought in. Right? And again, this is just why I think this story is so fascinating because it is our DNA.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:07:59]:
And if there were ever a time to do this, it it would be It would be now. In the near term future. Right? If not just right now. And so, yeah, my my hopes and dreams for this place really kind of squarely rest on the reindustrialization efforts of the United States. And I think I think it's just honestly, like, the most perfect place to do it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:24]:
I share I share that sentiment wholeheartedly. I mean, if the hidden gem of Cleveland is the latent potential that we can tap into right now, I mean, that's that's pretty good.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:08:33]:
I think that's what I'm saying. Yeah. Yes. Well, I

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:40]:
I appreciate that that sentiment very much. Well, I mean yeah. Fascinating stuff. This was awesome, Aaron. Thank you.

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:08:47]:
Well, thank you. Good to finally ultimately do this, and hopefully, it's not the the last one either.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:53]:
I I hope not. Yeah. Well, yeah. Wow. If folks had anything they wanted to follow-up with you about, what would be you know, where where can they find you on x? Twitter? Where's the best place?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:09:03]:
Yeah. Yeah. X slash Twitter is good. That's probably the best place, actually. Yep.

Jeffrey Stern [01:09:08]:
What's what's your handle?

Aaron Slodov (Atomic Industries) [01:09:09]:
A physicist, all one word. Sweet.

Jeffrey Stern [01:09:13]:
Well, thank you again. Thank you, sir. That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffrey@layoftheland.fm, or find us on Twitter at podlayofthelandor@sternjefe, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guess for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show.