Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.
Start free trial →The WAN Show · October 2026
The hosts were discussing a startup's "made in America" laptop and how hard it is to manufacture electronics in North America. Linus had just said getting molds made in Canada takes months and costs close to ten times the overseas price. He argues consumers share the blame for offshoring.
We have so little manufacturing at
…it's just really hard to make things here. We, for many, many years, shipped manufacturing overseas, and it's hard to get it back. And there's like a lot of infrastructure around it. Tool molding, like all these different professions and expertise that just might not be super available anymore.
Dude, we've gone through this. This mold was done in Delta, British Columbia. To get it done, and to be clear, I don't mean this as a criticism of our molding partner. They've actually been really amazing to work with. They do incredible quality work. I mean, that's one of the reasons that you can barely find a part line, even on our transparent drivers. Where's my part line on the handlepiece? Like, they did an absolutely incredible high-quality job, but getting these done is a months-long waiting process and costs, I kid you not, almost an order of magnitude more than getting the molds done somewhere overseas, particularly in China. There are products for which we looked at getting the molds done here and basically went, well, if we were to do that, it pretty much doesn't even make sense to make it anymore because it'll be so late to market and the burden, the cost burden that we will have to bear on this product will be so high that it will be utterly uncompetitive in terms of price and nobody will buy it. And that's. That's the point that I think is really important to bring up too, is that we've all collectively…
People in Fulbright Chat are rattling off cool, interesting points about that video. The chainmail, I forgot this part. The chainmail is made in Canada. It sources American wire to make the chainmail, but like that's kind of cool and shows a structure that is still in place to a certain degree.…
Yeah, I'm just trying to think. Theoretically, screens are going to be tough. Screens are going to be tough. I don't, has there, has there ever been flat panel manufacturing in America? Like it would have been in Japan in the early days and then South Korea and then China, like CRTs, maybe. But…
Some stuff for military and avionics panels, some early like LED video walls, but nothing on like a consumer laptop scale that I can find.