This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 17th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The order in which we do policy matters.

Eli Durato of the Center for Growth and Opportunity explains how state and

federal agencies and lawmakers can take a page from Elon Musk in thinking about how

to get that order right.

Yeah, Elon Musk, you know, is a is a manufacturing genius, right, in a way, right?

Like, like what he has done is both of his major companies, Tesla and SpaceX,

where they have excelled is in ramping up this you

know manufacturability of their products and so so with both the

Model 3 and with the

Starship program at SpaceX they are trying to put out you know put out you know put out a lot of hardware and so he has sort of landed upon a specific you know five step

process that he says you know over and over again has to be completed in order and so the idea is you know start with the

requirements can you make the requirements of engineering requirements less dumb then work very

very hard to delete a bunch of parts and processes and, and, you know, even

go so far as to make mistakes sometimes because if you're not, he says if you're not,

occasionally putting parts back in and you're not deleting enough.

And then you simplify and optimize the design and then you accelerate the cycle time, try to get

everything to happen faster, And then finally you automate.

And what's interesting is that Elon says his tendency,

you know, a mistake that he's made multiple times

is to go in reverse, to start with the automation, then try to accelerate it, then try to

...