What an American Stove Maker Wants You to Know About US Manufacturing

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:25)

Tracy, I think one of the most interesting dynamics going on right now is that you have a White House, and a lot of people in both parties, but specifically the White House right now, that are very set on re-industrializing manufacturing in the US. At the same time, actually existing US manufacturers are talking about, wait, everything you're talking about is throwing our business into extreme chaos.

Tracy Alloway (0:47)

Yeah, and we've had a lot of anecdotal evidence so far of this happening. So we've already mentioned at this point, the Dallas Fed Energy Survey and a bunch of businesses in the oil patch saying that things are slowing down, they're having difficulty planning for long-term capital investments. There was one anonymous company that basically said they were asked by a Canadian client if they could move production to Canada, which again seems to be the opposite of what you would assume the Trump administration is trying to achieve here. We've talked to Ryan Peterson about factories slowing down production and things like that. And I think the big question here is, okay, tariffs are on pause, but are we going to see lingering issues, lingering uncertainty? Because the assumption of business people is Trump could always turn them back on. He could always start threatening them. And then the other thing I would ask is, there's actually so many questions that you could ask about all of this. But Trump keeps talking about how he wants to do both basic industrial manufacturing in the US, but also every once in a while he talks about doing really advanced stuff. And he wants to do everything, I guess. And it seems really difficult to me to thread the needle between very expensive, high-tech stuff where you have to pay people a lot and then very, I don't want to say it's cheap because factories still cost quite a lot, but less expensive basic stuff. I don't know.

Joe Weisenthal (2:21)

Here's the thing. I want to set up a factory in the United States that's at the cutting edge of production. But some of the tools I might need for my factory might be made in Germany, or maybe they're made in China or Vietnam. And this seems like an issue. A couple of days ago, we had headlines, a company called Haas, which I have to admit I had not heard of. They make CNC lathes talking about how they were canceling overtime, pausing all hiring, et cetera. Anyway, remember we were out in San Francisco, and we visited Impulse Labs. They make that amazing stove. We had this great steak, it boils water in two seconds.

Tracy Alloway (2:54)

Oh, it was so good.

Joe Weisenthal (2:55)

That stove seemed like one of those products that I would expect to see on TikTok from a Chinese propaganda video about how good they have it over here. But it's actually an American company. Like, that's the thing, it actually exists here. And I kind of want to know what building that stove is like in a world of tariffs.

Tracy Alloway (3:12)

Yeah, and looking back on it, now that we have Trump as president, there are a bunch of broader themes that it definitely touches on. So it's an electric stove, as you mentioned. Electric versus...

Joe Weisenthal (3:23)

It has a battery in it.

Tracy Alloway (3:24)

Yeah, electric versus gas has been in the midst of the culture war at various times recently. But then also it feeds into green technology. We're not really certain how Trump feels about green tech. He wants America to do cool stuff, presumably, make cool products, but does that include electric things, batteries, green stuff? Again, I don't know.

Joe Weisenthal (3:47)

Well, let's find out some more. He cooked us an amazing steak several months ago, but now we're not talking steak, we're talking about the reality of US manufacturing. Back on the show, Sam D'Amico, founder and CEO of Impulse Labs. Sam, thanks for joining us.

Sam D'Amico (4:03)

Yeah, good morning, everyone. It's been a fun week or so.

Joe Weisenthal (4:06)

I'm enjoying it in the news business. If you're having fun, I'm at least relieved that someone in industry is also enjoying it. Let's start with this question. Listeners can go back and check out our episode where we ate this amazing steak. And like I said, you make this amazing stove and it has a battery in it and boils water in two seconds and it will never burn an egg, all this stuff. But just describe, like, what do you build here? And what are the inputs of the stove? Where do they come from and then what do you assemble?