A massive lithium deposit was just discovered in the US, potentially enough to supply domestic demand for hundreds of years. The bottleneck was never the raw material, it's refining capacity. That's the next problem to solve.

Most people have never heard of OEE. It might be the most important number in American manufacturing. Overall equipment effectiveness is the single best measure of how productive your assets actually are. A facility with aging equipment and material piling up between steps is inefficient. With better production planning that number can move up and even a small OEE gain is beneficial. 🎙️ @MatthewChang, PE on the ReForge Podcast 👉 Full episode link in the comments

Working with the future generation of agentic AI, it's top of the line and it's also intuitive so you don't need formal training. You just go into it and now you're working with top of the line AI products. What the intelligent people in the factory do is they coordinate those AI systems and they coordinate those robotics. They're going into a high quality, clean, safe work environment that's best in class efficiency. — @MatthewChang, EP 011

Every town of 10,000 people should have at least one factory. Not a factory with 5,000 jobs like the old days, but one with a hundred highly skilled, well paid technicians who never have to leave their hometown to build a good life. That's the model we are working towards.

We offshored factories in part because of the pollution and the danger. What we're talking about is we want to bring the factories back, but we're not gonna bring back the pollution or the danger. We're gonna have it be safe and clean jobs. — @briankeithai, EP 011

The AI slop problem is only going to get worse. The people who will have an advantage in an AI saturated world aren't the ones who learned the most tools. They're the ones who spent years documenting their own thinking, their perspectives, and their real experiences before AI showed up to manufacture a version of it.

The factory of the future isn't rows of workers doing repetitive tasks. It's a small team of highly skilled technicians coordinating AI systems and robotics in a clean, safe environment. The workers who get in are getting world class on the job training with cutting edge technology from day one. 🎙️ @MatthewChang, on the ReForge Podcast 👉 Full episode link in the comments

The Church of Eleven22 started in Jacksonville and now has 16 campuses. People are relocating their families to be part of it. That kind of gravity is exactly what a city needs to grow.