Blake Scholl

started with Chinese pirating of Western CAD software.

And this is the high-end software that you use to design stuff on a computer.

And of course, there's no respect for intellectual property in China.

And so they'd rip off the software.

And this software is, don't think this is like $100 copy of Windows.

This is tens of thousands of dollars per engineer for this high-end custom software.

You need to do these things.

And so if you take out multiple tens of thousands of dollars per engineer and cost, forget that there's a labor cost discrepancy.

Just that alone means it's going to be cheaper to do the work in China than it is in the US.

Because we pay for the software here.

They don't pay for it there.

Okay.

Now anybody who wants to save some money is going to ship their tool work to China.

And if your competitors shipped their tool work to China and you don't ship your tool work to China, now you start losing contracts.

You're not commercially competitive.

And so it sort of starts this giant, like sucking of, of talent out of, you know, tool and dye design into China.

Um,

And that only accelerates with labor cost differences, et cetera, et cetera.

And at the same time, I don't know why, but we told ourselves in America that manufacturing isn't important or isn't sexy.

And it was like somehow okay to be we don't make things.