March 9, 2025 • 45 mins
Newt talks with Kevin Czinger, lead inventor, Founder, and Executive Chairman of Czinger Vehicles and its parent company, Divergent Technologies about his recent visit to the Divergent 3D factory in Torrance, California. They discuss Czinger's impressive background, from his working-class roots in Ohio to his achievements in football, military service, and law. Czinger shares his journey from Yale Law School to becoming a Deputy US Attorney and later joining Goldman Sachs. He explains his transition to founding Coda Automotive and eventually Divergent Technologies, focusing on sustainable production systems. Their conversation highlights Divergent's innovative manufacturing process, which integrates AI, 3D printing, and robotics to create advanced, lightweight structures for various industries, including automotive and aerospace. Czinger also discusses the development of the Czinger 21C, the world's fastest street-legal hypercar, and the potential of Divergent's technology to revolutionize the aerospace and defense industries.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
On this episode of Newsworld. On February twentieth, my grandson, Robert,
and I were in Los Angeles and we had the
pleasure of visiting the Divergent Technologies factory in Torrance, California.
I was so impressed by the manufacturing innovation we saw
on that tour, I wanted to share the story of
Divergent with you, So I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
(00:27):
Kevin Zinger, founder and executive chairman of Divergent Technologies and
Singer Vehicles, the original equipment manufacturer of the world's fastest
street legal hypercar, the twenty one CE. Kevin, Welcome and
(00:52):
thank you for joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Well, it's my honor to be on your podcast, mister speaker,
and we as a team, I really enjoyed hosting you
and Robert, so thank you for the opportunity.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
And I should say for the full exposure to our audience.
That upon leaving you, we promptly went to in and
Out Burger and my grandson was able to have animal fries.
So I felt that the entire trip was both culturally
and intellectually very exciting.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
The only thing better would have been going to the
drive in part of an and out Burger with twenty
one C.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
That's true. I don't think I'm quite ready yet, although
it's an amazing car, which we'll get to. But I
want to start out with you because you know, what
you've achieved is amazing. But frankly, you're kind of really remarkable.
I mean, you grew up in working class Ohio. You've
built hot rides along with your brothers, you got a
football scholarship to Yale, ended up being an All American,
(01:47):
and then you chose to join the United States Marine
Corps reserves. Mean, you've really had a remarkable life before
you got into manufacturing. What motivated you through all that experience?
Speaker 2 (01:59):
I think that each of these things had its own
unique motivation, but in general, I was the youngest of
five in a working class family and the first to
go to college, and I ended up because Ohio is
a football crazy place and the Catholic schools are really
the football powerhouses in Ohio. I ended up going to
(02:22):
a very good Jesuit high school. And in that Jesuit
high school, they taught the classical virtues, one of which
is the life well lived is finding an area of
competition that allows you to express your talents and stretch
(02:45):
your talents in the greatest possible way. And that idea
of the classical Greek well lived taught by Jesuit priests
of all things, has always stayed in my head. As
you know, apart from your spiritual life, the driver of
(03:06):
how you use the gifts that you've been God given,
in my view, to their fullest extent.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
When you went to you, I was reading up on
this and your coach, who himself is in the Football
Hall of Fame, said that you were the outstanding player
he ever coached, and that part of it was your intensity,
your commitment. What do you think made you so effective
on the football field.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Well, you're given this gift of life. You have a
short period to use it to the full extent. And
I always trained to the max, and part of that
training was to kind of figure out what you thought
your limit was and push behind that. And I think
(03:56):
when you approach life that way, you're not mentally prepared
to lose. And so that would happen again and again.
I'd give you one instance. You know, we were playing
in a game where it was actually nationally televised. It
was the ABC Game of the week Keith Jackson was
commentating and I had in this game. The score was
(04:21):
twelve to seven, we were losing. There were only a
few minutes left in the game. I had already blocked
two punts. The one blocked punt I had and I
played defense resulted in a touchdown, and the time was
running out in the game. It was fourth down. The
(04:41):
other side was about to punt, and my coach pulled
me over and said, stop pooling around. You have to
block this punt. And obviously I blocked two punts already
in this game, so people were keying in on me,
and I think, you just at that moment, you're like
(05:01):
this person, you know, who is a great person, Hall
of Fame coach believes in me. I will find a way.
And so basically what I did is I lined up
on one side of the ball and as they got down,
they of course, you know, wanted to make sure I
didn't block the punt, so they moved their blocking coverage
over to the one side. Then I moved over to
(05:23):
the other side and basically ran straight to the punter,
blacked the punt, recovered it on the one yard line,
and we ended up winning thirteen to twelve. So I
think those things are really just a matter of believing
in yourself and feeding off of the belief of others
in you, and respecting that belief.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Then you went on a Yale to the Yale Law.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
School, Yes, so you know. Originally I was thinking of
getting after I graduated from school an md PhD, and
then having worked in a lab, I decided not to
do that. And I met a person who was later
the dean of Yale Law School, Guido Calibrazy, and we
actually went to the same church in New Haven, Saint
(06:07):
Thomas more To is a Catholic church, and he said,
what are you doing. I explained to him, and he
was a football fan, that I had been working in
the Yale Med School lab and I had decided I
didn't want to get an mdphd. And he said, why
don't you come to Yale Law School And I'm like,
I don't know anything about law, and he said, Kevin,
(06:29):
and this is the first time I'd heard of this school.
He said, no, Yale Law School is the Lake Cole
Normal Superior of America. And I said, well, what do
you mean. He's like in France, that's where they send
people who are thinkers who find their own way to
lead in some way. In France and here at Yale
(06:51):
Law School, which at the time only had about one
hundred and twenty five students in each entering class, said
there were only four required courses at the time, and
they were all past fail and they said, you want
to study science, you want to study philosophy, you can
study anything after those four courses. And so I thought, well, terrific,
and then I went to Ye Law School.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Our mutual friend, John Thornton tells the story that you
went on to become a lawyer, and that they got
this call one day that one of the great defense
attorneys in New York called and said, this young guy
just beat me in court, and I can't believe how
really really smart he is. He said, you guys at
Golden Sacks ought to grab him. And so you leave
(07:36):
Yale Law School and you become a deputy US Attorney.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Well what happened was I left law school. I had
been an editor of the Yale Law Journal. It's like
being on the Law Review, and at that time kind
of the usual sequence, and I didn't want to become
an academic. But my mentor, Guido calibrase you, who at
that point was the dean of Yale's law school, said
(08:00):
there's a judge who's been assigned the Iran Contra cases
and he's looking for a clerk. He only takes one
clerk a year. His name was Gerhard Gazelli. He's a
District of Columbia US District court judge. And so I
went to work for him for a year. I got
a top secret clearance, all the sensitive compartmented information clearances.
(08:23):
As somebody from a working class family, this was incredibly interesting.
And I got to work with this judge for a
year on this case. And basically what happened was that
at that point I was actually thinking of going into
business or doing something other than law. And the judge
(08:44):
said to me, even if you go and do business
as you said you want to do, being a trial
lawyer will teach you a lot. And I said, Judge,
I'm one year out of law school. How do you
become a trial lawyer? And I remember he picked up
the phone and called up Rudy Giuliani, who was at
the time the US Attorney for the Southern District of
(09:06):
New York, and said, Rudy, I've got this guy, You've
got to hire him. And I remember it was around noon.
I'm sending him up on the train from DC to
New York and Rudy hired me. And over the course
of three years, in all of the cases that I had,
I won top count convictions, including against some of the
(09:27):
top lawyers. And then that's when that call took place
to John Thornton.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
So you then end up going over to Goldman Sachs,
which is a totally different career.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
It is, And I ended up working directly for John Thornton,
and i'd say at the time and he was really
progressed to running the international operations of Goldman Sachs, and
I was really his point execution person and person that
anything that he needed really to get done from a
(10:01):
deal standpoint, everything from the merger between B sky B
and Sky Television into Sky in the UK, to representing
Leekha Singh in the sale of Star Television, all a
wide variety of different transactions and setting up offices and things,
and so over the course of five years working with John,
(10:24):
I learned a tremendous amount and was able to interact
with people directly like a Rupert Murdoch on transactions.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
John says that he told you when he offered you
the job that you'd last about five years because it
just wouldn't be dynamic enough for you that you'd altimately
want to go do something more than it was under
your control. So at the end of five years, this is,
after all, one of the two or three greatest investment
firms in the world. What led you to then leave
(10:54):
Goldman Sachs.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
I remember I was in how it was late at night.
Rupert Murdock had summoned me to talk about a transaction
that he was on the other side of, and he
was there with the lawyer that he had, and I
remember we had this long conversation. It was late at
night and we were just talking in general, and I
(11:17):
remember him saying, these businesses aren't life and death to me.
It's much more important than that. And then I started
talking to him about being an entrepreneur and he's like,
why are you doing this? And I think, what do
you mean. I'm at Goldman Sachs. It's no like someone
like you really should be creating something. And I thought, okay.
(11:41):
I thought more and more and more, and that led me.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
So you then decide to co found Coda Automotive, which
is an electric vehicle manufacturer. This is about two thousand
and eight. But that becomes for you a real evolutionary
process from when you first thought about it. As you
got into it, you really be in looking at the
whole notion of what is a sustainable production system, not
(12:05):
just what is a sustainable fuel? Talk about that problem.
I think it's a very interesting evolution and very important.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I learned a couple of very big lessons which resulted
in me founding Divergent Technologies. One of the lessons was
I would say that around kind of two thousand and
seven two thousand and eight, we were focused on building
an affordable ev but the first thing we looked at
(12:32):
was battery cells. And I'd say we were the first
to work with and generate with a battery company a
large format prismatic lithium iron phosphate cell. That is the
cell that China has scaled up with that company. Originally
I tried to build the battery factory in Ohio and
(12:57):
because the US at that time, I would say, during
the Obama administration Secretary of Commerce Gary Lock, they were all, hey,
if you can't build in the US, you know, China
is our partner, you should build this factory in China.
That factory was set up, and if you look on
YouTube and you put in Coda and Gary Lock and
(13:19):
Kevin Zinger, you'll see it's about a two minute video
of me giving a tour of that factory. That gave
China what I think was the decisive edge in scaling
up battery production. That is what CAATL licensed and scaled
up that battery cell technology. When I was doing that,
(13:41):
as it relates to China, I looked at the CO
two emissions that related to manufacturing in China, and as
you know, China uses dedicated coal power for manufacturing. When
you manufacture a battery cell using coal fired power, which
(14:02):
is what is used in China, the emissions from that
are greater. I'd say, for the average, say a ninety
kilowatt hour battery pack in a car, you're generating over
two hundred kilograms of CO two omitted per kilowatt hour.
That manufacturing is greater than say, driving a Toyota Camry
(14:26):
with all of its manufacturing emissions plus eighty thousand miles
of driving. And when I realized that, I realized that
how you manufacture something and how you look at extraction, processing, manufacturing,
then the actual use of fuel or electricity, and then disposal.
(14:48):
That life cycle assessment which this analysis has also been
done by Goldman Sachs in a very good report called
electric Vehicles Enter the life Cycle Assessment Era. That kind
of uncovers whether these vehicles are environmentally friendly or not.
And a lot of it has to do with where
(15:09):
you manufacture that battery cell and what the power source is.
I'll stop there. I can then tell how that informed
the next company that I started.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
This is the evolution. Although I want to take a
brief detour because in the middle of all this you're
also in the Marine Corps. I mean, how did that
fit in?
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Well, I don't want to test the patience of your listeners.
But what happened is in between my deciding to go
to Yale Law School and entering Yale Law School, I
had some time and my older brother, during the Vietnam War,
served in the Army. Both my parents served in World
War Two as enlisted service people in the Army Air Corps,
(15:49):
which was the predecessor to the Air Force, and educated
as I was by Jesuit High School and men for
others and one of the books that I read in
high school was a book by William Manchester called Goodbye
Darkness about his service in the Marine Corps as an
enlisted Marine during World War Two. And my parents never
(16:14):
really talked about the war. My brother didn't either, But
I thought, as a citizen, this is something where I've
gotten these benefits, where I should do some service. And
so I enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves and went
through Paris Island boot Camp Camp La June for advanced
(16:34):
infantry training, and then because I was being assigned to
a special operations unit out of Quancet Point Naval Air
Station in Rhode Island, I had to go through jump
school at what at the time was called Fort Benning, Georgia.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
You're cling a guy who fills up every day with something.
So now we're back to the real breakthrough, which is
(17:12):
the focus on processes. And I have to say, having
visited Divergent, someday you're going to have to set up
an entire tour service to be able. You're going to
have so many people want to come see this because
when you see it and you realize how you have
integrated artificial intelligence with three D printing with robotics, with
(17:32):
very sophisticated use of materials. This is the factory of
the future today. I mean, you have leapfrogged over virtually
every potential competitive system. Did that just come to you
or how did you put all of that together?
Speaker 2 (17:48):
I mean what happened was with the Automotive and Battery company.
I had been living in the Bay Area, so in
the Silicon Valley area, and I had interaction, had a
couple of discussions with Andy Grove after he had retired
from being chairman CEO of Intel, and I'd say we
(18:09):
both shared I told him about my frustration with the
inability of finding capital to build a factory in the
United States. And we also looked and said, hey, and
this feeds into obviously a focus and passion of President
(18:29):
Trump and both his administrations. From a trade policy standpoint
and from a funding standpoint, we were looking at Silicon
Valley and if you had some hardware aspect to your
tech startup, unless it said and by the way, we're
going to outsource manufacturing to China, you didn't get funded.
And we saw things because of these trade policies, because
(18:53):
of the nature of that type of capital. We were,
for example, having an Apple transfer Process manufacturing IP like
Critical Advanced Manufacturing IP over to China and companies like
fox Con start to build a next generation of manufacturing
(19:17):
ahead of the United States, as well as move manufacturing
capacity over to China in the eighties. I think must
have come out in the late eighties that book by
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Decline of Great Powers. It
was clear to me that no leading power maintains that
(19:39):
position if its industrial capacity is less than its pure competitors. Today,
we're in a a lot of must talk about fork
in the road. I mean we're in a manufacturing fork
in the road. More than anything else, We're in an
existential fork in the road. China in two thousand had
(20:03):
seven percent of global manufacturing market share. It's now trending
toward forty five percent. The US had twenty five percent.
It's now trending toward eleven percent. The US plus all
of its allies have not only less overall industrial manufacturing
(20:25):
capacity than China, they have less advanced manufacturing. That is unsustainable.
I looked at that at a slightly earlier point and said,
all of the things that I know about machine learning automation, manufacturing,
(20:47):
if you were going to start with a clean sheet
of paper and reindustrialize the US. Because at that time,
I said, we will lose our position as a leading
nation state if we do not reindustry realize. But we
can't go back to what we were doing before. We
can't go back to the way things are or were
(21:08):
before we offshored our manufacturer. We need to make a leapfrog,
the kind of leapfrog say JFK made when he brought
in Werner vun Braun, the rocket scientist, and said, how
do we catch up to the Soviets? And Verner front
Bron said, you will never catch up to the Soviets
by going to Earth orbit. You need to go to
(21:29):
lunar orbit and develop the technology to do that right.
And that in turn obviously created semiconductor industry many different things.
I simply said, you can't do industry four point zero.
You can't do what Fox, kN and Apple have done
with CNC machining and automation. You need to completely leapfrog
that with a total digital system. And if you're starting
(21:50):
a company, the first thing you ask is what's the
biggest problem you can solve? And I looked at things
like car companies, which obviously go through these peaks and
valleys which we saw in two thousand and eight nine,
because their factories are designed specific huge amount of capital
goes into designing a single model type both for the
(22:12):
vehicle and then the factory. Right, so design specificity, And
so I said, okay, what happens if you solve that
problem at a given price point by creating a fully
digital system. Machine learning generates a structure. That structure then
gets printed with fidelity the way that it's printed. It
(22:36):
gets printed in assemblable blocks, and then an automated system
assembles those. And that's a super simplified version of what
we're doing. But that in turn allows you, in a
non design specific way, to design any kind of structure
for AirLand s, in space vehicles. Generate that structure, have
(22:59):
it be a far better, lighter, better performing structure, be
able to print it off the same equipment, and then
be able to assemble it off the same equipment. Whether
it's an Aston Martin Vantage frame or a Lackheed Martin
Cruise missile system. You can design, print, assemble both of
those back to back.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
As you developed this, the divergent factory I saw, if
I understand the story correctly, is the result of eleven
years of evolution in which now Divergent has five hundred
and twenty patents, and your son Lucas, who's a great
story in his own right, has fifty of them. So
you guys have been methodically solving problems one step at
(23:43):
a time and just gradually building the system, if you will,
until now it is I think unmatched by anything else
in the world.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
What I'd say is not meaning to correct you, but
we have about seven hundred and fifty patents today. I'm
the lead and venner with about two hundre and I
think two hundred and twenty two at last count. Lucas
has around eighty. Now he's my son and partner in
the business. What I'd say is about three years ago
or four years ago, we had the first version of
(24:16):
the factory that could be commercialized, and since that time
this has gone into production. So automotive, which obviously you're
doing the safety performance structures for passenger cars, right, This
is enormous risk if you're not manufacturing properly those structures
for those vehicles we brought in as customers. For example,
(24:40):
we're shipping frames to Aston Martin for a variant of
the Aston Martin Vantage today. But Aston Martin, Bugatti, an
Italian company I can't name, McLaren, Mercedes AMG, and a
German company I can't name. Those are all production customers.
So we actually proved three years ago this system was
(25:00):
fully commercial and are now shipping structures and on production
programs with six major automotive brands. Obviously, the system is
an adaptive system, so we take all of that data
generated by the system, and the system is version the
software and hardware. But what you saw is now a
(25:23):
factory that is ready to scale and which we want
to take from that initial factory to tens and then
hundreds of factories. So literally every single state in the
United States could have multiple digital factories across the country.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Now, if I could just take a minute to stay
with the Zinger cars, because as I understand it, when
you approach the big auto companies, they were too slow
and too timid, and see you just decided you'd build
a car to show them that could be done. I
have to say I was out in your car factory
and it's pretty breathtaking. I mean, these are amazing cars
(26:06):
can you talk just from here about the whole notion
of the Zinger vehicle models and the way you've approached this,
because it's quite an amazing story.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah. So, going back, probably if somebody looked at a
Google search, they would see when I was a company
of one, I bought one of these archaic commercial three
D printers and worked and built a first prototype car
that was called the Blade. From there, we then used
that as I hired people and started to scale as
(26:37):
a laboratory as a development platform. And about three and
a half years ago Lucas, my son and my partner said, Dad,
this is how we really became. The two of us
are kind of founders of the car company, which is
owned by the tech company. He said, why don't we
turn that platform into a car company. We can do
(27:00):
it with almost no capital, because you're almost like an Apple,
you know how Apple is a fabulous product design company.
It uses others for that fabrication. We could use the
tools of Divergent and the factory of Divergent to rapidly
design the most advanced vehicle in the world. Take it
(27:22):
through crash safety, take it through emissions, which we did
in all fifty states, including California, and then take it
to the track and show that it is faster than
any production Ferrari, faster than any production Maclair, and faster
than any production Mercedes or Portia meaning street legal car,
which we did. We chattered the circuit of the America's
(27:45):
record in Austin, the Goodwood Hill Climb record, the Laguna
Seca record. Now that car in a factory which was
set up by Andy Lambert. Alan had hired him over
a decade ago to set up manufacturing and production at SpaceX,
and he ran that for about a decade and he
came over to us and he's now set up our
(28:06):
production factory for the Zinger twenty one C. And as
you saw, cars are now rolling off and being shipped
to customers. And that is within a period of time
that no auto company in the world could match. We designed, built,
and are shipping the most advanced, highest performing production car ever.
(28:27):
And it's American made, it's off American patented technology. And
this is we call it the twenty one CE after
twenty one century because this is like twenty first century
American muscle car.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
And as I understand it, it produces something like sixteen
hundred and fifty horse power and can go about two
hundred and ten miles an hour. And it's street legal.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
It's completely street legal. You know, it's been through full crash,
full emissions. The car is about a three thousand pound car.
It's got thirteen hundred and fifty horse power, all wheel drive.
I've two EV motors upfront, our own design V eight.
We designed and built our own V eight, much of
which is printed. The top speed of the arrow body
(29:09):
car is two hundred and fifty three miles an hour.
The car does zero to sixty and one point eight
eight seconds. What I'd say the most impressive thing though,
is when you take the car to the track and
like reference tracks tracks that are the famous tracks, it
way out performs any production car ever built by any
of the great European companies, whether it's a McLaren or
(29:32):
a Ferrari or a Bugatti. It is in one very
short period of time. You see that Ford versus Ferrari,
this was Zinger versus the world, and the world was defeated.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
I really want our listeners to understand what you have
built is a process system using the most advanced technology
in the world and integrating it synergistically so that each
of the breakthroughs reinforces the next breakthrough. But can you
just walk us through a little bit of what happens
and how is it done at the what you would
(30:19):
call the divergent adaptive production system.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Sure. So the system has three subsystems. One is a
machine learning based generative engineering engine. One is a printer
that takes what that engineering engine generates and with fidelity
in three dimensions, prints that structure. And then an assembly
(30:43):
cell that takes those component structures and puts them together,
say into a full vehicle structure, whether it's a large drone,
a collaborative combat aircraft, or the chassis of the twenty
one s. So how that works is, say you have
an Aston Martin or a Lockheed Martin. Let's take Lockheed
(31:06):
because a big focus of ours right now is aerospace
and defense. They may come to us and say we've
got a modular cruise missile system. Here are the requirements.
Here are the engineering load cases, the stresses that'll have
when say it's something that is launched from under the
wing of an airplane. Here are the loads when the
(31:28):
plane is carrying that off a bomb release unit. Here
are the stresses when it gets released. Here are the
thermal requirements vibration. They give us those requirements. At that point,
Divergent takes over design authority, and really the machine takes
over design authority in that we then take those requirements,
(31:48):
we put those into the machine. The machine runs a
simulation of the performance of a structure. It also runs
concurrently the generation of manufacturing instructions and assembly instructions. It's
called bidirectional evolutionary structures optimization. The machine is adding and
(32:10):
subtracting material in a simulation until it creates a perfectly
optimized structure perfectly pareto optimized structure. At that point, the
machine has fully optimized the structure, both for its performance
but also for its manufacturing and assembly. So say you're
(32:32):
I'll take an example. McLaren would ordinarily take six to
nine months to do the design for a suspension component
for their new hypercarp. This is all out in public
domain that we're working with them. We replace that six
to nine months and an engineering team with about fifteen
hours of compute time, and at the end of that
(32:53):
fifteen hours of compute time, they have a structure that's
twenty to forty percent lighter, stiffer outperforms. The structure is
lower cost, and that structure has its manufacturing and assembly instructions,
and we can immediately manufacture and assemble it. This is
a machine for taking a design, minimizing material and energy
(33:16):
in its building, maximizing its performance, lowering its cost, printing
it off a machine that doesn't care whether it's printing
for Aston Martin or Lockheed Martin. And then an assembly
system that assembles the assemblable blocks that doesn't care whether
it's manufacturing or assembling for Aston Martin or Lockheed Martin.
We in turn charge for that engineering, and then we
(33:38):
charge per piece for what we delivered to the customer.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
You had actually done work for General Atomic, which produces
the Predator among other things, and which is a very
very sophisticated company, And they came back with results of
your intervention that was so amazing and there's such a
serious firm that it really sort of stopped me in
my tracks, made me think about, you know, how big
(34:04):
a breakthrough that this potentially is.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, So two plus years ago General Atomics reached out
to us. They asked us to re engineer one of
their smaller unmanned aerial systems, and we were able to
in a very short period of time, reduce the part
count by ninety eight percent, so things like fuel tanks
(34:28):
instead of being separate with brackets and attachments, they actually
get printed into the structure. As an example, that's how
we reduce one hundred and eighty four parts in that
drone to four parts, so one hundred and eighty four
to four ninety eight percent part reduction. We reduce the
production cycle time from twelve days to less than a day,
(34:50):
like over ninety percent reduction in production cycle time. We
reduce the per unit cost by over forty percent, and
we reduce the development cost by over or fifty percent
and the development time by about ninety five percent. I'd say.
More recently, we have contracts with almost every single major
(35:10):
US defense prime and aerospace company. We were able to
on a modular cruise missile system. From the start of
engineering to successful flight testing. It took ten weeks. That
ten weeks would be compared to years in a normal process.
As an example, General Atomics after we did that, actually
(35:33):
published the results in a press release. Immediately, we had
almost every single major US defense prime reach out to us,
and that really kicked off our involvement in aerospace and defense.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Basically, if you think about the fact that you're universally applicable,
I mean, what you do doesn't actually matter which particular product,
because you're taking the basic the same approach. I saw
a note that said that potentially on a worldwide basis,
this is like a five trillion dollar market.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yes, this company, I'd say, we don't want to get
ahead of our skis. We've got one factory. We do
have six major auto brands doing this. I don't think
any of them thought this would happen for another decade
or more. We have almost every single major US prime
I'd say for the US on the defense side, our
(36:26):
achilles heel right now is inability to rapidly develop and
then manufacture at volume. This system solves both of those
problems today. Is scalable today, and the same factory that
is printing missiles and torpedoes and collaborative combat aircraft can
(36:51):
also print for Aston Martin and Bugatti and McLaren and
Mercedes off of the same equipment at the same time.
Or we can do replacements spare parts for defense aircraft,
for jets, jet fighters, other things that need it. We
can develop new weapons, we can re engineer old weapons.
(37:12):
But this gives us, in my view, the only plausible,
real deterrent to China, and that is very rapid development
of the new kind of weapons that people like Elon
Musk and the Defense Department talk about, unmanned AirLand, sea,
in space vehicles, the ability to rapidly develop those and
(37:35):
then immediately scale manufacturing in a distributed way, and also
the ability if you look at our defense budget, which
is over eight hundred billion, three hundred billion of that
is for sustainment replacement parts. These new machines can digitize
those parts and as needed, manufacture those parts. We're already
doing things for the C one thirty right now, spare parts.
(37:59):
That means that you could massively reduce those sustainment costs
while massively increasing the readiness of aircraft. So I think
there's a very very very good fit there. And as
you said, that kind of designed agnostic equipment allows you
to save money, create higher performance products, and have the
(38:24):
kind of volumes of missiles and other armaments and munitions
that actually will deter ch China.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
I think back to the book by the Chief Logistician
in the first Iraq War who talked about moving mountains,
because the sheer volume of stuff we send forward and
as you saw in Afghanistan, the amount of stuff we
leave behind. In this model, you could imagine a specific
divergent factory that moved into the field with the expeditionary
(38:53):
force and provided real time manufacturing on site, that could
actually take virtually every spare part of what they needed
and simply do it digitally right there, cutting out all
sorts of the logistics tale, and also only producing what you.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Need exactly, not keeping excess inventory. I think distributing out
factories to different theaters certainly would functionally allow this system
to do exactly what you're describing, mister speaker.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
One last question, which is, you're really one of the
most interesting and smartest people I've met in a long
career of meeting a lot of interesting people. What keeps
you up at night? What do you worry about the most?
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Well? I have a concern and I also have optimism.
My concern is, I'll say, two years ago, when I
first did this with General Atomics, my view of the
military industrial complex or whatever you want to call it,
the defense industrial base, How's that was one that comes
(40:01):
from probably the first Golf War, which is we just
have overwhelming technology and capacity. I've now seen that that
defense industrial base has suffered the way the rest of
our commercial base has, and even worse from moving our
supply chain offshore. We don't have and it's not a
(40:24):
secret because almost every single congressional hearing, and we just
testified recently in front of Senator Wicker and the rest
of the Senate Armed Services Committee about this problem. We
don't have the industrial base that is here to not
only develop new weapons rapidly and then volume produce them,
but even for our existing weapons, we don't have the
(40:47):
casting suppliers on shore. We don't have this supply chain.
And the reason I've focused so much now on defense
is I think we're at an existential moment. This is
the last best chance we have to leap frog Chinese
manufacturing technology and catch up with that manufacturing and I
(41:08):
think what you saw, respectfully is that solution. So my
fear is that will not be identified rapidly enough. People
won't fully understand what you've seen. They can only really
do it by spending enough time to do it. People
will look and somebody says, oh, that's three D printing.
(41:28):
We are far more advanced than any three D printing
system commercially available. This is really a fully digital engineering
and manufacturing system where all the software and hardware has
been developed as a full system. It's moving from the
typewriter to mac desktop publishing in one step, and people
(41:50):
have to really understand that to see that. So my
concern is about the adoption of that and the bureaucracy
within the military that would look and say, oh, we
don't understand this. Therefore we have to put it through
whatever long process we need to make sure that we
(42:14):
smash it from a square peg into something round that
we can stick into our round hoole, and it takes
up time and loses the jump on the Chinese that
we have right now. I'd say my optimism comes from
the reason why President Trump's administration has tariffs is they
want to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Right,
(42:36):
we were a great country. I grew up obviously parents
of the greatest generation. I grew up in Cleveland, I'm
sixty five now, where manufacturing you took pride in America,
made things right. That's a lot of our dignity in
middle class came from that. We've lost that the tariffs,
(42:56):
for example, and trade policy that was to really we
build that manufacturing. This is the solution to do it.
So my optimism is that we have an administration that
I think in a productively disruptive way. I hope through
people like yourself, mister Speaker, who do come and see it,
(43:18):
who do take the time to understand this is one
of one in the world and is something that the
United States needs to take from one to one hundred
to one thousand. My optimism is that that can happen.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Well, my hope is that and I think President Trump
and Secretary Headsets maybe up to this. You know, in
World War Two we went from a jumpstart and it
was astonishing how fast we ramped up. And I think
that you are the first system I've seen which gives
us the opportunity to ramp up in that kind a
(43:53):
similar kind of way, and who once again the leapfrog
passed all of our competitors in a way that just
leaves them behind. So, Kevin, I want to thank you
for joining me. I think of you not only as
extraordinarily bright and hard working, but a genuine patriot, somebody
who has spent most of your life developing a system
which could in fact be the difference between survival and
(44:18):
failure for the United States. And I want to let
our listeners know that they can learn more about the
groundbreaking work you're doing at Divergent Technologies by visiting your
website at Divergent three d dot com. And if they
like cars, they are to check out the Zinger vehicles
at Zinger dot com. And I just want to thank
(44:39):
you for taking this time out of your extraordinarily busy
schedule to help educate us well.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Thank you and God bless you, mister speaker, for all
you do and for supporting us.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
Thank you to my guest, Kevin Zinger. You can learn
more about his company, Divergent Technologies on our show page
at newsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by Gingrich three
sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our
researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show Who's
created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at
(45:15):
Gingrich three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope
you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with
five stars and give us a review so others can
learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of newts
World can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at
gingrichstree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This
(45:37):
is Newtsworld
On this episode of Newsworld. On February twentieth, my grandson, Robert,
and I were in Los Angeles and we had the
pleasure of visiting the Divergent Technologies factory in Torrance, California.
I was so impressed by the manufacturing innovation we saw
on that tour, I wanted to share the story of
Divergent with you, So I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
(00:27):
Kevin Zinger, founder and executive chairman of Divergent Technologies and
Singer Vehicles, the original equipment manufacturer of the world's fastest
street legal hypercar, the twenty one CE. Kevin, Welcome and
(00:52):
thank you for joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Well, it's my honor to be on your podcast, mister speaker,
and we as a team, I really enjoyed hosting you
and Robert, so thank you for the opportunity.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
And I should say for the full exposure to our audience.
That upon leaving you, we promptly went to in and
Out Burger and my grandson was able to have animal fries.
So I felt that the entire trip was both culturally
and intellectually very exciting.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
The only thing better would have been going to the
drive in part of an and out Burger with twenty
one C.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
That's true. I don't think I'm quite ready yet, although
it's an amazing car, which we'll get to. But I
want to start out with you because you know, what
you've achieved is amazing. But frankly, you're kind of really remarkable.
I mean, you grew up in working class Ohio. You've
built hot rides along with your brothers, you got a
football scholarship to Yale, ended up being an All American,
(01:47):
and then you chose to join the United States Marine
Corps reserves. Mean, you've really had a remarkable life before
you got into manufacturing. What motivated you through all that experience?
Speaker 2 (01:59):
I think that each of these things had its own
unique motivation, but in general, I was the youngest of
five in a working class family and the first to
go to college, and I ended up because Ohio is
a football crazy place and the Catholic schools are really
the football powerhouses in Ohio. I ended up going to
(02:22):
a very good Jesuit high school. And in that Jesuit
high school, they taught the classical virtues, one of which
is the life well lived is finding an area of
competition that allows you to express your talents and stretch
(02:45):
your talents in the greatest possible way. And that idea
of the classical Greek well lived taught by Jesuit priests
of all things, has always stayed in my head. As
you know, apart from your spiritual life, the driver of
(03:06):
how you use the gifts that you've been God given,
in my view, to their fullest extent.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
When you went to you, I was reading up on
this and your coach, who himself is in the Football
Hall of Fame, said that you were the outstanding player
he ever coached, and that part of it was your intensity,
your commitment. What do you think made you so effective
on the football field.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Well, you're given this gift of life. You have a
short period to use it to the full extent. And
I always trained to the max, and part of that
training was to kind of figure out what you thought
your limit was and push behind that. And I think
(03:56):
when you approach life that way, you're not mentally prepared
to lose. And so that would happen again and again.
I'd give you one instance. You know, we were playing
in a game where it was actually nationally televised. It
was the ABC Game of the week Keith Jackson was
commentating and I had in this game. The score was
(04:21):
twelve to seven, we were losing. There were only a
few minutes left in the game. I had already blocked
two punts. The one blocked punt I had and I
played defense resulted in a touchdown, and the time was
running out in the game. It was fourth down. The
(04:41):
other side was about to punt, and my coach pulled
me over and said, stop pooling around. You have to
block this punt. And obviously I blocked two punts already
in this game, so people were keying in on me,
and I think, you just at that moment, you're like
(05:01):
this person, you know, who is a great person, Hall
of Fame coach believes in me. I will find a way.
And so basically what I did is I lined up
on one side of the ball and as they got down,
they of course, you know, wanted to make sure I
didn't block the punt, so they moved their blocking coverage
over to the one side. Then I moved over to
(05:23):
the other side and basically ran straight to the punter,
blacked the punt, recovered it on the one yard line,
and we ended up winning thirteen to twelve. So I
think those things are really just a matter of believing
in yourself and feeding off of the belief of others
in you, and respecting that belief.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Then you went on a Yale to the Yale Law.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
School, Yes, so you know. Originally I was thinking of
getting after I graduated from school an md PhD, and
then having worked in a lab, I decided not to
do that. And I met a person who was later
the dean of Yale Law School, Guido Calibrazy, and we
actually went to the same church in New Haven, Saint
(06:07):
Thomas more To is a Catholic church, and he said,
what are you doing. I explained to him, and he
was a football fan, that I had been working in
the Yale Med School lab and I had decided I
didn't want to get an mdphd. And he said, why
don't you come to Yale Law School And I'm like,
I don't know anything about law, and he said, Kevin,
(06:29):
and this is the first time I'd heard of this school.
He said, no, Yale Law School is the Lake Cole
Normal Superior of America. And I said, well, what do
you mean. He's like in France, that's where they send
people who are thinkers who find their own way to
lead in some way. In France and here at Yale
(06:51):
Law School, which at the time only had about one
hundred and twenty five students in each entering class, said
there were only four required courses at the time, and
they were all past fail and they said, you want
to study science, you want to study philosophy, you can
study anything after those four courses. And so I thought, well, terrific,
and then I went to Ye Law School.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Our mutual friend, John Thornton tells the story that you
went on to become a lawyer, and that they got
this call one day that one of the great defense
attorneys in New York called and said, this young guy
just beat me in court, and I can't believe how
really really smart he is. He said, you guys at
Golden Sacks ought to grab him. And so you leave
(07:36):
Yale Law School and you become a deputy US Attorney.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Well what happened was I left law school. I had
been an editor of the Yale Law Journal. It's like
being on the Law Review, and at that time kind
of the usual sequence, and I didn't want to become
an academic. But my mentor, Guido calibrase you, who at
that point was the dean of Yale's law school, said
(08:00):
there's a judge who's been assigned the Iran Contra cases
and he's looking for a clerk. He only takes one
clerk a year. His name was Gerhard Gazelli. He's a
District of Columbia US District court judge. And so I
went to work for him for a year. I got
a top secret clearance, all the sensitive compartmented information clearances.
(08:23):
As somebody from a working class family, this was incredibly interesting.
And I got to work with this judge for a
year on this case. And basically what happened was that
at that point I was actually thinking of going into
business or doing something other than law. And the judge
(08:44):
said to me, even if you go and do business
as you said you want to do, being a trial
lawyer will teach you a lot. And I said, Judge,
I'm one year out of law school. How do you
become a trial lawyer? And I remember he picked up
the phone and called up Rudy Giuliani, who was at
the time the US Attorney for the Southern District of
(09:06):
New York, and said, Rudy, I've got this guy, You've
got to hire him. And I remember it was around noon.
I'm sending him up on the train from DC to
New York and Rudy hired me. And over the course
of three years, in all of the cases that I had,
I won top count convictions, including against some of the
(09:27):
top lawyers. And then that's when that call took place
to John Thornton.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
So you then end up going over to Goldman Sachs,
which is a totally different career.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
It is, And I ended up working directly for John Thornton,
and i'd say at the time and he was really
progressed to running the international operations of Goldman Sachs, and
I was really his point execution person and person that
anything that he needed really to get done from a
(10:01):
deal standpoint, everything from the merger between B sky B
and Sky Television into Sky in the UK, to representing
Leekha Singh in the sale of Star Television, all a
wide variety of different transactions and setting up offices and things,
and so over the course of five years working with John,
(10:24):
I learned a tremendous amount and was able to interact
with people directly like a Rupert Murdoch on transactions.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
John says that he told you when he offered you
the job that you'd last about five years because it
just wouldn't be dynamic enough for you that you'd altimately
want to go do something more than it was under
your control. So at the end of five years, this is,
after all, one of the two or three greatest investment
firms in the world. What led you to then leave
(10:54):
Goldman Sachs.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
I remember I was in how it was late at night.
Rupert Murdock had summoned me to talk about a transaction
that he was on the other side of, and he
was there with the lawyer that he had, and I
remember we had this long conversation. It was late at
night and we were just talking in general, and I
(11:17):
remember him saying, these businesses aren't life and death to me.
It's much more important than that. And then I started
talking to him about being an entrepreneur and he's like,
why are you doing this? And I think, what do
you mean. I'm at Goldman Sachs. It's no like someone
like you really should be creating something. And I thought, okay.
(11:41):
I thought more and more and more, and that led me.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
So you then decide to co found Coda Automotive, which
is an electric vehicle manufacturer. This is about two thousand
and eight. But that becomes for you a real evolutionary
process from when you first thought about it. As you
got into it, you really be in looking at the
whole notion of what is a sustainable production system, not
(12:05):
just what is a sustainable fuel? Talk about that problem.
I think it's a very interesting evolution and very important.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I learned a couple of very big lessons which resulted
in me founding Divergent Technologies. One of the lessons was
I would say that around kind of two thousand and
seven two thousand and eight, we were focused on building
an affordable ev but the first thing we looked at
(12:32):
was battery cells. And I'd say we were the first
to work with and generate with a battery company a
large format prismatic lithium iron phosphate cell. That is the
cell that China has scaled up with that company. Originally
I tried to build the battery factory in Ohio and
(12:57):
because the US at that time, I would say, during
the Obama administration Secretary of Commerce Gary Lock, they were all, hey,
if you can't build in the US, you know, China
is our partner, you should build this factory in China.
That factory was set up, and if you look on
YouTube and you put in Coda and Gary Lock and
(13:19):
Kevin Zinger, you'll see it's about a two minute video
of me giving a tour of that factory. That gave
China what I think was the decisive edge in scaling
up battery production. That is what CAATL licensed and scaled
up that battery cell technology. When I was doing that,
(13:41):
as it relates to China, I looked at the CO
two emissions that related to manufacturing in China, and as
you know, China uses dedicated coal power for manufacturing. When
you manufacture a battery cell using coal fired power, which
(14:02):
is what is used in China, the emissions from that
are greater. I'd say, for the average, say a ninety
kilowatt hour battery pack in a car, you're generating over
two hundred kilograms of CO two omitted per kilowatt hour.
That manufacturing is greater than say, driving a Toyota Camry
(14:26):
with all of its manufacturing emissions plus eighty thousand miles
of driving. And when I realized that, I realized that
how you manufacture something and how you look at extraction, processing, manufacturing,
then the actual use of fuel or electricity, and then disposal.
(14:48):
That life cycle assessment which this analysis has also been
done by Goldman Sachs in a very good report called
electric Vehicles Enter the life Cycle Assessment Era. That kind
of uncovers whether these vehicles are environmentally friendly or not.
And a lot of it has to do with where
(15:09):
you manufacture that battery cell and what the power source is.
I'll stop there. I can then tell how that informed
the next company that I started.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
This is the evolution. Although I want to take a
brief detour because in the middle of all this you're
also in the Marine Corps. I mean, how did that
fit in?
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Well, I don't want to test the patience of your listeners.
But what happened is in between my deciding to go
to Yale Law School and entering Yale Law School, I
had some time and my older brother, during the Vietnam War,
served in the Army. Both my parents served in World
War Two as enlisted service people in the Army Air Corps,
(15:49):
which was the predecessor to the Air Force, and educated
as I was by Jesuit High School and men for
others and one of the books that I read in
high school was a book by William Manchester called Goodbye
Darkness about his service in the Marine Corps as an
enlisted Marine during World War Two. And my parents never
(16:14):
really talked about the war. My brother didn't either, But
I thought, as a citizen, this is something where I've
gotten these benefits, where I should do some service. And
so I enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves and went
through Paris Island boot Camp Camp La June for advanced
(16:34):
infantry training, and then because I was being assigned to
a special operations unit out of Quancet Point Naval Air
Station in Rhode Island, I had to go through jump
school at what at the time was called Fort Benning, Georgia.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
You're cling a guy who fills up every day with something.
So now we're back to the real breakthrough, which is
(17:12):
the focus on processes. And I have to say, having
visited Divergent, someday you're going to have to set up
an entire tour service to be able. You're going to
have so many people want to come see this because
when you see it and you realize how you have
integrated artificial intelligence with three D printing with robotics, with
(17:32):
very sophisticated use of materials. This is the factory of
the future today. I mean, you have leapfrogged over virtually
every potential competitive system. Did that just come to you
or how did you put all of that together?
Speaker 2 (17:48):
I mean what happened was with the Automotive and Battery company.
I had been living in the Bay Area, so in
the Silicon Valley area, and I had interaction, had a
couple of discussions with Andy Grove after he had retired
from being chairman CEO of Intel, and I'd say we
(18:09):
both shared I told him about my frustration with the
inability of finding capital to build a factory in the
United States. And we also looked and said, hey, and
this feeds into obviously a focus and passion of President
(18:29):
Trump and both his administrations. From a trade policy standpoint
and from a funding standpoint, we were looking at Silicon
Valley and if you had some hardware aspect to your
tech startup, unless it said and by the way, we're
going to outsource manufacturing to China, you didn't get funded.
And we saw things because of these trade policies, because
(18:53):
of the nature of that type of capital. We were,
for example, having an Apple transfer Process manufacturing IP like
Critical Advanced Manufacturing IP over to China and companies like
fox Con start to build a next generation of manufacturing
(19:17):
ahead of the United States, as well as move manufacturing
capacity over to China in the eighties. I think must
have come out in the late eighties that book by
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Decline of Great Powers. It
was clear to me that no leading power maintains that
(19:39):
position if its industrial capacity is less than its pure competitors. Today,
we're in a a lot of must talk about fork
in the road. I mean we're in a manufacturing fork
in the road. More than anything else, We're in an
existential fork in the road. China in two thousand had
(20:03):
seven percent of global manufacturing market share. It's now trending
toward forty five percent. The US had twenty five percent.
It's now trending toward eleven percent. The US plus all
of its allies have not only less overall industrial manufacturing
(20:25):
capacity than China, they have less advanced manufacturing. That is unsustainable.
I looked at that at a slightly earlier point and said,
all of the things that I know about machine learning automation, manufacturing,
(20:47):
if you were going to start with a clean sheet
of paper and reindustrialize the US. Because at that time,
I said, we will lose our position as a leading
nation state if we do not reindustry realize. But we
can't go back to what we were doing before. We
can't go back to the way things are or were
(21:08):
before we offshored our manufacturer. We need to make a leapfrog,
the kind of leapfrog say JFK made when he brought
in Werner vun Braun, the rocket scientist, and said, how
do we catch up to the Soviets? And Verner front
Bron said, you will never catch up to the Soviets
by going to Earth orbit. You need to go to
(21:29):
lunar orbit and develop the technology to do that right.
And that in turn obviously created semiconductor industry many different things.
I simply said, you can't do industry four point zero.
You can't do what Fox, kN and Apple have done
with CNC machining and automation. You need to completely leapfrog
that with a total digital system. And if you're starting
(21:50):
a company, the first thing you ask is what's the
biggest problem you can solve? And I looked at things
like car companies, which obviously go through these peaks and
valleys which we saw in two thousand and eight nine,
because their factories are designed specific huge amount of capital
goes into designing a single model type both for the
(22:12):
vehicle and then the factory. Right, so design specificity, And
so I said, okay, what happens if you solve that
problem at a given price point by creating a fully
digital system. Machine learning generates a structure. That structure then
gets printed with fidelity the way that it's printed. It
(22:36):
gets printed in assemblable blocks, and then an automated system
assembles those. And that's a super simplified version of what
we're doing. But that in turn allows you, in a
non design specific way, to design any kind of structure
for AirLand s, in space vehicles. Generate that structure, have
(22:59):
it be a far better, lighter, better performing structure, be
able to print it off the same equipment, and then
be able to assemble it off the same equipment. Whether
it's an Aston Martin Vantage frame or a Lackheed Martin
Cruise missile system. You can design, print, assemble both of
those back to back.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
As you developed this, the divergent factory I saw, if
I understand the story correctly, is the result of eleven
years of evolution in which now Divergent has five hundred
and twenty patents, and your son Lucas, who's a great
story in his own right, has fifty of them. So
you guys have been methodically solving problems one step at
(23:43):
a time and just gradually building the system, if you will,
until now it is I think unmatched by anything else
in the world.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
What I'd say is not meaning to correct you, but
we have about seven hundred and fifty patents today. I'm
the lead and venner with about two hundre and I
think two hundred and twenty two at last count. Lucas
has around eighty. Now he's my son and partner in
the business. What I'd say is about three years ago
or four years ago, we had the first version of
(24:16):
the factory that could be commercialized, and since that time
this has gone into production. So automotive, which obviously you're
doing the safety performance structures for passenger cars, right, This
is enormous risk if you're not manufacturing properly those structures
for those vehicles we brought in as customers. For example,
(24:40):
we're shipping frames to Aston Martin for a variant of
the Aston Martin Vantage today. But Aston Martin, Bugatti, an
Italian company I can't name, McLaren, Mercedes AMG, and a
German company I can't name. Those are all production customers.
So we actually proved three years ago this system was
(25:00):
fully commercial and are now shipping structures and on production
programs with six major automotive brands. Obviously, the system is
an adaptive system, so we take all of that data
generated by the system, and the system is version the
software and hardware. But what you saw is now a
(25:23):
factory that is ready to scale and which we want
to take from that initial factory to tens and then
hundreds of factories. So literally every single state in the
United States could have multiple digital factories across the country.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Now, if I could just take a minute to stay
with the Zinger cars, because as I understand it, when
you approach the big auto companies, they were too slow
and too timid, and see you just decided you'd build
a car to show them that could be done. I
have to say I was out in your car factory
and it's pretty breathtaking. I mean, these are amazing cars
(26:06):
can you talk just from here about the whole notion
of the Zinger vehicle models and the way you've approached this,
because it's quite an amazing story.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah. So, going back, probably if somebody looked at a
Google search, they would see when I was a company
of one, I bought one of these archaic commercial three
D printers and worked and built a first prototype car
that was called the Blade. From there, we then used
that as I hired people and started to scale as
(26:37):
a laboratory as a development platform. And about three and
a half years ago Lucas, my son and my partner said, Dad,
this is how we really became. The two of us
are kind of founders of the car company, which is
owned by the tech company. He said, why don't we
turn that platform into a car company. We can do
(27:00):
it with almost no capital, because you're almost like an Apple,
you know how Apple is a fabulous product design company.
It uses others for that fabrication. We could use the
tools of Divergent and the factory of Divergent to rapidly
design the most advanced vehicle in the world. Take it
(27:22):
through crash safety, take it through emissions, which we did
in all fifty states, including California, and then take it
to the track and show that it is faster than
any production Ferrari, faster than any production Maclair, and faster
than any production Mercedes or Portia meaning street legal car,
which we did. We chattered the circuit of the America's
(27:45):
record in Austin, the Goodwood Hill Climb record, the Laguna
Seca record. Now that car in a factory which was
set up by Andy Lambert. Alan had hired him over
a decade ago to set up manufacturing and production at SpaceX,
and he ran that for about a decade and he
came over to us and he's now set up our
(28:06):
production factory for the Zinger twenty one C. And as
you saw, cars are now rolling off and being shipped
to customers. And that is within a period of time
that no auto company in the world could match. We designed, built,
and are shipping the most advanced, highest performing production car ever.
(28:27):
And it's American made, it's off American patented technology. And
this is we call it the twenty one CE after
twenty one century because this is like twenty first century
American muscle car.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
And as I understand it, it produces something like sixteen
hundred and fifty horse power and can go about two
hundred and ten miles an hour. And it's street legal.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
It's completely street legal. You know, it's been through full crash,
full emissions. The car is about a three thousand pound car.
It's got thirteen hundred and fifty horse power, all wheel drive.
I've two EV motors upfront, our own design V eight.
We designed and built our own V eight, much of
which is printed. The top speed of the arrow body
(29:09):
car is two hundred and fifty three miles an hour.
The car does zero to sixty and one point eight
eight seconds. What I'd say the most impressive thing though,
is when you take the car to the track and
like reference tracks tracks that are the famous tracks, it
way out performs any production car ever built by any
of the great European companies, whether it's a McLaren or
(29:32):
a Ferrari or a Bugatti. It is in one very
short period of time. You see that Ford versus Ferrari,
this was Zinger versus the world, and the world was defeated.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
I really want our listeners to understand what you have
built is a process system using the most advanced technology
in the world and integrating it synergistically so that each
of the breakthroughs reinforces the next breakthrough. But can you
just walk us through a little bit of what happens
and how is it done at the what you would
(30:19):
call the divergent adaptive production system.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Sure. So the system has three subsystems. One is a
machine learning based generative engineering engine. One is a printer
that takes what that engineering engine generates and with fidelity
in three dimensions, prints that structure. And then an assembly
(30:43):
cell that takes those component structures and puts them together,
say into a full vehicle structure, whether it's a large drone,
a collaborative combat aircraft, or the chassis of the twenty
one s. So how that works is, say you have
an Aston Martin or a Lockheed Martin. Let's take Lockheed
(31:06):
because a big focus of ours right now is aerospace
and defense. They may come to us and say we've
got a modular cruise missile system. Here are the requirements.
Here are the engineering load cases, the stresses that'll have
when say it's something that is launched from under the
wing of an airplane. Here are the loads when the
(31:28):
plane is carrying that off a bomb release unit. Here
are the stresses when it gets released. Here are the
thermal requirements vibration. They give us those requirements. At that point,
Divergent takes over design authority, and really the machine takes
over design authority in that we then take those requirements,
(31:48):
we put those into the machine. The machine runs a
simulation of the performance of a structure. It also runs
concurrently the generation of manufacturing instructions and assembly instructions. It's
called bidirectional evolutionary structures optimization. The machine is adding and
(32:10):
subtracting material in a simulation until it creates a perfectly
optimized structure perfectly pareto optimized structure. At that point, the
machine has fully optimized the structure, both for its performance
but also for its manufacturing and assembly. So say you're
(32:32):
I'll take an example. McLaren would ordinarily take six to
nine months to do the design for a suspension component
for their new hypercarp. This is all out in public
domain that we're working with them. We replace that six
to nine months and an engineering team with about fifteen
hours of compute time, and at the end of that
(32:53):
fifteen hours of compute time, they have a structure that's
twenty to forty percent lighter, stiffer outperforms. The structure is
lower cost, and that structure has its manufacturing and assembly instructions,
and we can immediately manufacture and assemble it. This is
a machine for taking a design, minimizing material and energy
(33:16):
in its building, maximizing its performance, lowering its cost, printing
it off a machine that doesn't care whether it's printing
for Aston Martin or Lockheed Martin. And then an assembly
system that assembles the assemblable blocks that doesn't care whether
it's manufacturing or assembling for Aston Martin or Lockheed Martin.
We in turn charge for that engineering, and then we
(33:38):
charge per piece for what we delivered to the customer.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
You had actually done work for General Atomic, which produces
the Predator among other things, and which is a very
very sophisticated company, And they came back with results of
your intervention that was so amazing and there's such a
serious firm that it really sort of stopped me in
my tracks, made me think about, you know, how big
(34:04):
a breakthrough that this potentially is.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, So two plus years ago General Atomics reached out
to us. They asked us to re engineer one of
their smaller unmanned aerial systems, and we were able to
in a very short period of time, reduce the part
count by ninety eight percent, so things like fuel tanks
(34:28):
instead of being separate with brackets and attachments, they actually
get printed into the structure. As an example, that's how
we reduce one hundred and eighty four parts in that
drone to four parts, so one hundred and eighty four
to four ninety eight percent part reduction. We reduce the
production cycle time from twelve days to less than a day,
(34:50):
like over ninety percent reduction in production cycle time. We
reduce the per unit cost by over forty percent, and
we reduce the development cost by over or fifty percent
and the development time by about ninety five percent. I'd say.
More recently, we have contracts with almost every single major
(35:10):
US defense prime and aerospace company. We were able to
on a modular cruise missile system. From the start of
engineering to successful flight testing. It took ten weeks. That
ten weeks would be compared to years in a normal process.
As an example, General Atomics after we did that, actually
(35:33):
published the results in a press release. Immediately, we had
almost every single major US defense prime reach out to us,
and that really kicked off our involvement in aerospace and defense.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Basically, if you think about the fact that you're universally applicable,
I mean, what you do doesn't actually matter which particular product,
because you're taking the basic the same approach. I saw
a note that said that potentially on a worldwide basis,
this is like a five trillion dollar market.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yes, this company, I'd say, we don't want to get
ahead of our skis. We've got one factory. We do
have six major auto brands doing this. I don't think
any of them thought this would happen for another decade
or more. We have almost every single major US prime
I'd say for the US on the defense side, our
(36:26):
achilles heel right now is inability to rapidly develop and
then manufacture at volume. This system solves both of those
problems today. Is scalable today, and the same factory that
is printing missiles and torpedoes and collaborative combat aircraft can
(36:51):
also print for Aston Martin and Bugatti and McLaren and
Mercedes off of the same equipment at the same time.
Or we can do replacements spare parts for defense aircraft,
for jets, jet fighters, other things that need it. We
can develop new weapons, we can re engineer old weapons.
(37:12):
But this gives us, in my view, the only plausible,
real deterrent to China, and that is very rapid development
of the new kind of weapons that people like Elon
Musk and the Defense Department talk about, unmanned AirLand, sea,
in space vehicles, the ability to rapidly develop those and
(37:35):
then immediately scale manufacturing in a distributed way, and also
the ability if you look at our defense budget, which
is over eight hundred billion, three hundred billion of that
is for sustainment replacement parts. These new machines can digitize
those parts and as needed, manufacture those parts. We're already
doing things for the C one thirty right now, spare parts.
(37:59):
That means that you could massively reduce those sustainment costs
while massively increasing the readiness of aircraft. So I think
there's a very very very good fit there. And as
you said, that kind of designed agnostic equipment allows you
to save money, create higher performance products, and have the
(38:24):
kind of volumes of missiles and other armaments and munitions
that actually will deter ch China.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
I think back to the book by the Chief Logistician
in the first Iraq War who talked about moving mountains,
because the sheer volume of stuff we send forward and
as you saw in Afghanistan, the amount of stuff we
leave behind. In this model, you could imagine a specific
divergent factory that moved into the field with the expeditionary
(38:53):
force and provided real time manufacturing on site, that could
actually take virtually every spare part of what they needed
and simply do it digitally right there, cutting out all
sorts of the logistics tale, and also only producing what you.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Need exactly, not keeping excess inventory. I think distributing out
factories to different theaters certainly would functionally allow this system
to do exactly what you're describing, mister speaker.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
One last question, which is, you're really one of the
most interesting and smartest people I've met in a long
career of meeting a lot of interesting people. What keeps
you up at night? What do you worry about the most?
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Well? I have a concern and I also have optimism.
My concern is, I'll say, two years ago, when I
first did this with General Atomics, my view of the
military industrial complex or whatever you want to call it,
the defense industrial base, How's that was one that comes
(40:01):
from probably the first Golf War, which is we just
have overwhelming technology and capacity. I've now seen that that
defense industrial base has suffered the way the rest of
our commercial base has, and even worse from moving our
supply chain offshore. We don't have and it's not a
(40:24):
secret because almost every single congressional hearing, and we just
testified recently in front of Senator Wicker and the rest
of the Senate Armed Services Committee about this problem. We
don't have the industrial base that is here to not
only develop new weapons rapidly and then volume produce them,
but even for our existing weapons, we don't have the
(40:47):
casting suppliers on shore. We don't have this supply chain.
And the reason I've focused so much now on defense
is I think we're at an existential moment. This is
the last best chance we have to leap frog Chinese
manufacturing technology and catch up with that manufacturing and I
(41:08):
think what you saw, respectfully is that solution. So my
fear is that will not be identified rapidly enough. People
won't fully understand what you've seen. They can only really
do it by spending enough time to do it. People
will look and somebody says, oh, that's three D printing.
(41:28):
We are far more advanced than any three D printing
system commercially available. This is really a fully digital engineering
and manufacturing system where all the software and hardware has
been developed as a full system. It's moving from the
typewriter to mac desktop publishing in one step, and people
(41:50):
have to really understand that to see that. So my
concern is about the adoption of that and the bureaucracy
within the military that would look and say, oh, we
don't understand this. Therefore we have to put it through
whatever long process we need to make sure that we
(42:14):
smash it from a square peg into something round that
we can stick into our round hoole, and it takes
up time and loses the jump on the Chinese that
we have right now. I'd say my optimism comes from
the reason why President Trump's administration has tariffs is they
want to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Right,
(42:36):
we were a great country. I grew up obviously parents
of the greatest generation. I grew up in Cleveland, I'm
sixty five now, where manufacturing you took pride in America,
made things right. That's a lot of our dignity in
middle class came from that. We've lost that the tariffs,
(42:56):
for example, and trade policy that was to really we
build that manufacturing. This is the solution to do it.
So my optimism is that we have an administration that
I think in a productively disruptive way. I hope through
people like yourself, mister Speaker, who do come and see it,
(43:18):
who do take the time to understand this is one
of one in the world and is something that the
United States needs to take from one to one hundred
to one thousand. My optimism is that that can happen.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Well, my hope is that and I think President Trump
and Secretary Headsets maybe up to this. You know, in
World War Two we went from a jumpstart and it
was astonishing how fast we ramped up. And I think
that you are the first system I've seen which gives
us the opportunity to ramp up in that kind a
(43:53):
similar kind of way, and who once again the leapfrog
passed all of our competitors in a way that just
leaves them behind. So, Kevin, I want to thank you
for joining me. I think of you not only as
extraordinarily bright and hard working, but a genuine patriot, somebody
who has spent most of your life developing a system
which could in fact be the difference between survival and
(44:18):
failure for the United States. And I want to let
our listeners know that they can learn more about the
groundbreaking work you're doing at Divergent Technologies by visiting your
website at Divergent three d dot com. And if they
like cars, they are to check out the Zinger vehicles
at Zinger dot com. And I just want to thank
(44:39):
you for taking this time out of your extraordinarily busy
schedule to help educate us well.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Thank you and God bless you, mister speaker, for all
you do and for supporting us.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
Thank you to my guest, Kevin Zinger. You can learn
more about his company, Divergent Technologies on our show page
at newsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by Gingrich three
sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our
researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show Who's
created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at
(45:15):
Gingrich three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope
you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with
five stars and give us a review so others can
learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of newts
World can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at
gingrichstree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This
(45:37):
is Newtsworld
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