A super smart scientist asked me last week: what's so hard about reshoring general advanced manufacturing (short of TSMC frontier precision chemistry)? Isn't the issue just labor cost? Nope. A toy example to illustrate: We're trying to build a lot of drone motors in America right now, and falling short. It's not a labor cost issue. The work instruction says: this magnet, this adhesive, cure at this temperature, wipe the rotor first. Any competent team can build the station and follow it. But in week 3, motors start failing vibration testing. Some of them, mostly night shift. Also, weirdly, whenever the careful new hire is on station. The adhesive cures differently with humidity, and the dehumidifier cycles differently at night. The new hire wipes the rotor generously, and that leaves a solvent film the adhesive doesn't like very much. Someone who has run a motor line before can figure this out in 10m. Everyone else -- struggle city. The "fix" is two lines in the work instructions: run the dehumidifier continuously, one solvent wipe per rotor. But those lines aren't in the work instruction, and they're not in anyone's! At best the fix becomes a corrective-action report in one line's files, linked to nothing and never read. A motor line rapidly may go from 5 to 40 stations, each with a dozen of these painful stories on the weekly as it grows. "What Shenzhen knows" is not written down in a book whose covers can be sliced off and ingested into a model, it's a few million humidity stories stored in people, and a pace of knowledge-rich adjustment that keeps cost down and yield high. The only way to get it back is work with people who have brought up lines, to reshore and grow the ecosystem of people who have this knowledge, and to capture that knowledge as we build. Lots of people have clever ideas about the data capture/API piece, but we think the business of manufacturing may need equal portions pain tolerance, customer commitment, and cleverness on talent. America needs to solve the other half of reshoring.