The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 502: Chris Power—The Other Hadrian's Wall

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Roman Emperor Hadrian built a wall to protect the empire's northern frontier. Today, another Hadrian is building something very different—but with a similar purpose: helping protect America by rebuilding its industrial strength. Chris Power is the founder and CEO of Hadrian, an advanced manufacturing company using AI and automation to produce critical components for America's aerospace and defense industries. Born in Australia, Chris believes America is the greatest country in the world—and he's determined to help keep it that way. His mission is to reinvigorate America's industrial base, starting with the Defense Industrial Base. Chris joins Mike to discuss manufacturing, national security, and why America's ability to defend itself ultimately depends on its ability to make things. Because sometimes the best defense isn't another wall. It's the ability to make what you need, when you need it. Many thanks to our excellent sponsors GoodRanchers.com/ROWE—100% of their meat from American farms and ranches and delivered straight to your door. Start your plan and get a free Ground Beef Bundle with your firs order. Good Ranchers—American meat delivered. ZipRecruiter.com/Rowe—The recruiting site that really is the smartest way to hire. Post a job for FREE and find a qualified candidate in 24 hours.

Hello, friends, me again with another episode of the way I heard it. My guest today is Chris Power, a remarkable American who sounds an awful lot like he came from Australia because he did. He immigrated over here a few years ago with $6,000, I think he told me. And in that period of time, built a company called Hadrian, which now employs lots of people and is worth about $7,8 billion. It's a defense company, and if you're a student of history, you'll recognize the name, as belonging to a famous Roman emperor.

By the way, this episode was recorded at the Ronald Reagan Library. The gift that just keeps on giving, I was there a couple of months ago for an economic conference and just ran into so many cool people who I thought had stories that you guys might appreciate. And this guy in particular has done something near and dear to microworks. I really wanted to talk to him, and I was so glad he had an hour to spare

because what he's built, I think it's important. not just for our national defense, but, well, for our national identity, if you know your history, and believe me, Mr. Power does, he studies how empires rise and fall, particularly the Roman Empire. And you can draw a couple of really cool parallels between Hadrian, the emperor, his philosophy, and Chris's modern defense mission. First thing that will jump out is borders. It's all about securing borders over expansion.

So in the old days, the Roman emperors, they focused very heavily on invading new territories. That's how they grew. Hadrian was the guy, the first one really, to pivot toward domestic consolidation. He built a massive wall, Hadrian's wall, to reinforce and protect what Rome already had. Power chose the name for his company because Hadrian is doing something almost identical. They're focusing on reinforcing. America's domestic supply chains and shoring up defense walls rather than outsourcing dependencies overseas. So it really comes down to infrastructure as well. Chris was very inspired by Emperor

Hadrian's sweeping historical efforts to restructure and stabilize and rebuild Rome's infrastructure from the inside out. His startup was created to tackle a modern version of that same crisis. rebuilding the hollowed-out U.S. industrial base and rescuing the aging aerospace manufacturing sector from terminal decline. There's a lot of crossover in this episode, the stuff I've been doing with the Pentagon over the last year. They've dropped a lot of names and, you know, we've rebooted a show and we're going back and we're highlighting companies like Adrian. In fact, I'm going to reach out to Chris and see if he'd like our cameras to come, maybe to Alabama or Arizona, where he's building his factories. I'm telling you, it's so impressive what he's done, and it's so important,

and it's kind of validating, frankly, to talk to somebody who confirms a lot of the stuff I've been mouthing off about for the last couple of years. He has a front row seat to what it takes to reinvigorate the skilled trades in this country, and he talks at length about some of the things that they're doing internally, the way they're shifting from manual labor to technical oversight. He talks about the autopilot model, right? So workers on a floor at a Hadrian factory, they operate a lot less like manual crank and cut machinists and more like flight controllers. There's massive output leverage to talk about a ton of career growth. Mostly, though, it's the onboarding speed. They've got proprietary software. I hope I get this right.

I think he called it opus, but they absorb the super complicated tasks of machine programming, right? And they're bringing people up to speed. Like they're training factory technicians in 30 days or less in an effort to address the skilled labor shortage. So it's a super intuitive onboarding system that he's perfected. They're actively recruiting and elevating individuals with zero manufacturing background. So this is just an amazing story and a huge bit of good news for veterans and former nurses and hospitality workers and people who want to jump into the manufacturing game from the ground up. This is definitely a place for you to consider. It's a great conversation with a great American who talks kind of funny on account of he's from Melbourne.

It's the other Hadrian's Wall with Chris Power right after this. Big news this week in the wide world of agriculture. In an effort to lower beef prices, the government's okayed the importation of 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef into the U.S. market without the normal tariff. This is a decision that's got a lot of people up in arms, and I'm going to talk about it at length in an upcoming podcast. But for now, I'm just going to remind you that when that beef finds its way onto the shelves of your local grocery store, you'll have no way of knowing where it came from. The administration's working on correcting that as well. But for now, if you want beef grown and delivered by American ranchers, you need to shop at Good Ranchers. This is the number one company delivering 100% American meat to your door.

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Hey-haul! Or Powers. Singular. Really? Yeah. I guess that's good. I mean, from an individualistic standpoint, you think Austin Powers, and of course that's seared into the zeitgeist, but you're simply crisp power. Yep.

One man, one power. Yeah, that's it. What part of Australia? Melbourne. Yeah. What a great cafe society that is. Yes. Best coffee in the world.

I mean, I haven't been in years, but I was there. I guess maybe 20 years ago, do they still, there's a river festival. Yes. Is it the Mumba maybe? Yeah, Mamba. Mamba festival. That still happens. So there was an F1.

There was this river festival. Yep. There was a lot of jet lag. And there was just, there's nothing I can tell you about Australians. You don't know. But what a spontaneous, fun-loving, dangerous group of bipeds? Yes. You are.

Yes. They call it the lucky country for the reason because it's the best sport, beer, everything in the world. It's also why nothing ever really happens of significance. Well, then why'd you leave? I mean, simply put, personally doing business in Australia always feels like being at the kids table at Christmas. And then secondly, I wanted to work on something that was very difficult I could work on for 100 years, and then I'd be perfectly happy working 24-7 on.

and I'm a big history guy and I'm a big strategic finance interest rate guy What does that even mean? So basically what happened is I was working for this software company and I said I'm going to move to America and got 12 months to replace me

and I spent that 12 months rereading history rewriting all my interest rate books and trying to figure out where is the world going and it was very obvious at least to me seven years ago when I've now been in the country for six years. is that three big things are really going on. The only thing that matter was, you know,

the West versus the CCP, and that's largely just America because everyone else is pretty degraded in capability. The second thing is that we'd stretch the manufacturing system of the defense and commercial industrial base to the point where there basically was none, but it hadn't been tested in a long time. We think we're Mike Tyson in his prime,

but were actually Mike Tyson just before the Busted Douglas fight. And then the third thing is that we traded for 40 years or so, we traded financial returns for industrial resiliency, and we offshoreed 95% of all jobs in manufacturing capacity largely to China. Now, you're saying we, you're referring to the United States. And were you still using that pronoun when you were in Australia? No, I think I became an American in my mind. four or five years ago.

Interesting. Yeah. So when you're diving into the history part of this, is it like big world geopolitical stuff that you're interested in? You're looking top-line stuff. Top-line stuff. Roughly every 120 years, the reserve coach, the world changes. Because the global order gets reset because of a great conflict.

The last one was World War II. But underpinning all of that is this cycle of industrial. capacity, military readiness and strength, reserve currency, and then you get really lazy, and you lose that. And that's what happened to the British and the Dutch. And people forget that the reason why America saved the world in World War II is because we had the largest manufacturing logistics base. And we didn't even have like the best tanks. We just McDonald's the hell out of everybody else. We were able to pivot. You're able to pivot because of the commercial manufacturing base. And it is, but what about the specs? I asked,

Palmer lucky about this and he had a whole kind of riff on it where, you know, we, we basically used the specs that we had committed to commercially and just used those same specs in the war effort. But he's very concerned that we couldn't do that now. No. Or were really anything approaching it. There's two reasons behind this. And I agree. is

one is the systems are way more complicated whereas like I don't know a World War II bomber is like not that hard and we can give it to Ford

and they'll figure it out the second primary reason though is there was there was commercial capacity America has no commercial capacity anymore because we offshored at all and we also cut defense jobs

over the last manufacturing jobs by 63% just after the Cold War ended so the first problem is there's no capacity and that and then you can got 40 years of basically no one wanted to get into manufacturing so everyone's retiring out

as well you know i think average age of a skills worker is early 60s there's no one coming behind them because we killed all the jobs for 40 years so why would anyone get into it and the third and i think the most important thing is culturally we became a uh america became a um finance and technology services culture and we told all the kids in the 80s and 90s that it'd be didn't have a four-year journalism degree, you weren't worth much of anything. And that is just as important as the kind of economics of manufacturing of are they actually good paying jobs or jobs to be done. And then the advancements in technology, especially for, I don't know, whether it's munitions or ships or whatever, they've kind of been built off actually the specs from the post-Cold

war industrial base. But they're also such as exquisite systems that you probably couldn't hand them today to a commercial manufacturing company in the United States, even if one did exist. So you kind of have to start with the defense industrial base and build that back up and then rebuild the commercial base because there's just no demand for commercial manufacturing without the president's tariffs and stuff as there was in the 50s or even before the 50s. So to your company, when do you form it? Why do you form it? Is it a direct result of reading these history books combined with whatever your inner

Wonk is regarding finance. How does this happen, man? It's just so interesting that an Aussie comes over here, armed with all these big ideas, and now you're like a regular guest at the Pentagon. Yeah. Well, what happened was I moved to the U.S. with $30,000 and I knew that I wanted to do highly automated manufacturing. The reason why you have to do highly automated manufacturing to solve the skills and labor capacity gap is because it takes 20 to 30 years to catch up. So you have to make everyone 10 times more productive to even have a hope. And the only way you can do that is mass skilled immigration or software. And we were never going to do mass skilled immigration into the defense industrial base.

So highly automated factories. So there's door number one. Door number one. Or door number one. Yeah. Now door number two, which I think is slightly more interesting, is I think, I then spent six months cold calling factories in Dallas and Oregon and ever just basically be like, can I come in and talk to you and talk to the supply chain guys and talk to the factory guys like, you know, what's actually going on? And I started to get a good feel for what was actually going on.

And then after that, I actually decided to raise a small, very small private equity fund because all advanced manufacturing in the U.S. is highly certified and regulated. So you can't become a SpaceX or Lockheed Martin or Raytheon. supplier unless your quality management system of manufacturing has to be, it's extremely complicated. It usually takes people seven years to get their foot in the door. Also known as the Primes. The Primes. So what I decided was the only way to actually, so if you start in uncertified manufacturing, you're competing with China, fail.

But it takes seven, eight years to get AS9100 and qualify as a Lockheed supplier or whatever. It's just complicated. And it's very, it's as complicated as like a hospital billing system. Like, you really need to get it right to ensure that what you're producing is up to spec, up to code, etc. So I raised a small private equity fund and spent 12 months diligent a bunch of aerospace machine shops because you had to buy the certification first and then put technology into them. And through that process, and then 12 months later, I changed my mind. And the basic reason was I realized that you had to rebase the CAPEX and the training and the software at the same time.

How much value you raised? Oh, it was like $500,000. Okay. And you get a bunch of group investors together, and they basically give you two years worth of runway to try and find a deal, and then they'll fund it if it's a good deal. And they thought I was nuts because they'd never done a manufacturing deal before. And when we closed it, we gave everyone the money back,

and the 100 grand we spent something. We rolled into Hadrian at a severe discount, so everyone's very happy. But at the end of that, I basically decided that you could make legacy manufacturing businesses maybe 30% more efficient, but you could never go the whole way to re-industrialize the country, so you have to greenfield everything. Workforce training, the capital equipment itself, the software at the same time. Explain that Greenfield. It's the first time I heard that expression was in the Pentagon, actually. People talk about it all the time, but I'm sure a lot of people don't quite understand. Well, there's existing factories that you can go and attempt to upgrade or improve

with Lean Six Sigma operations processes or buy software and try and plug it into it. Greenfield to simply start with empty building and build a factory inside of it. Clean sheet, brand new factory, brand new systems processes. So I decided that the only way to reindustriize America to the degree it needed to was that you have to basically do everything yourself from scratch. And then I started raising money for Hadrian, I guess, five and a half years ago now. Why'd you call it Hadrian? Because in the history of Rome, which rhymes with... American history, at that period in time, there were three big things going on in Rome. The empire was massively overextended.

The culture and more importantly, the reserve currency were being debased and degraded and hyperinflated. So less silver going into a... Yeah. And then the third one was a lot of the core infrastructure, like the aqueducts and stuff like that were crumbling. And my read of Roman history is that Hadrian basically reversed that by consultations. The Empire into a strong core, re-based the currency, and fixed a lot of the crumbling infrastructure, and bought the Empire another 500 years.

So the mission is kind of in the name. You see yourself, is Hadrian? No, no, no, no. I'm just trying to help everybody, but I do think it's important to name the company against what the mission's for, because there's no confusion about what we're here to do, which is. So, flashing forward to today, what's the company look like? What exactly are you making that you're able to discuss? and how large are you at this point? So we have two R&D facilities in L.A.

and one coming up in San Francisco, where we do all of our software development, but what that actually looks like is a bunch of software engineers standing around every possible machine you could possibly think of, figuring it out. We have a factory two, which is a production facility in L.A.,

which is high-precision aerospace machining. We have factory three in Arizona, which is almost 300,000 square foot, which is a mixed model, which I'll talk about in a sec. And we announced a couple of months ago at 2.25 million square foot factory in Alabama to help with Virginia and Columbia class submarine construction.

Are they still on a 2 plus one cadence, is it? The American taxpayer has bought 2 plus 1. The actual publicly reported production rate, I think, is 0.2.2. six a year. Just so people understand, we're supposed to be we. To Virginia, one Columbia. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. So if you could just take a quick pivot and explain to people, building a submarine, I mean, it's crazy. Do do do do do do do do. At the MicroWorks Foundation, we've been awarding work ethic scholarships for the last two decades to people who demonstrate the most valuable quality that an employee can offer initiative. I'm talking about the lift driver who carries your bags to the door or the grocery

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Are they all horizontal now? I'm not, I know that answer. I'm not sure I can say that answer. Okay, okay. But to give everyone a sense, it's like, if I rank, the most complicated manufactured products that America makes, it would be Columbia class, Virginia class, Starship, Falcon 9, everything else. And the core problem basically is that, and this is publicly reported,

that they are 50 million labor hours in deficit. So it's primarily a workforce issue. And what we are able to do, I'll tell you a little bit more about the company, is with the software, our workforce are anywhere between four and ten times more productive depending on the task that they're doing. And because the software also makes the task more accessible, 100% of our manufacturing workforce have never set foot inside a factory before and we can train them in 30 days.

And that's the kind of productivity gap. It's primarily a workforce issue. At the company scale, we are on track to do close to a billion in revenue next year. We have about 700 people now. We'll be about 2,000 people next year. And we have three groups of people. that we hire. We hire all of the old manufacturing experts

we can possibly get their hands out that have seen every fucked up problem in a foundry that ever existed. So you'd hire a 65-year-old? 100%. But we put them on the software engineering team. Yeah. Because, and we pay them like software engineers

with equity in the company, because the value they're creating is teaching us what went wrong over the last 40 years and plugging their brains into software. Then we have a massive software robotics controls engineers to automate every process we can bother again. And then the third and most interesting group is our technician workforce, which are almost 100% have never set foot inside a factory before.

So you're kids straight out of high school, you're a packing shelves at Home Depot, you're a bus driver, you're a nurse, you actually were a paralegal and you hate your desk job. And those three things combined are effectively our platform, which is manufacturing as a service, which means we're taking someone else's designs, creating a digital twin, building an operating, factories that are at automotive levels of efficiency except for high, mix, low volume,

with this new workforce of the future that is software and robotics first. And we are able to also give them equity in the company. They have the same healthcare that software engineers get. So, wait a minute, you're actively recruiting people from all these different disciplines. Yes. into software as a certain. That was SaaS. And that appears to be on the ropes to a certain degree.

Yeah. Thanks to AI. But is mass a new thing? Manufacturing as a service? Yes. And the reason why is this is going to get a little bit financing, but it's actually important. You've got two big problems to solve

in the reindustrialization of America. The people, and I hate calling people labor, it's silly. It's like a dumb McKinsey thing. Right. And that is a skills gap. and a capacity gap. We can make the skills gap easy with software.

We can make the capacity gap easier with more automation, and we can pay people more and train them. And also the working environment's awesome because they're not getting a wrench thrown at their head. They're running six robots at once and it's sick. The second one is just we're probably half a trillion dollars in CAPEX behind. And the primary reason is when... Behind what?

Behind the CAPX capacity gap. Or what you need to recapitalize. Okay. And to give, well, you know this, but to give people a sense, the reason why Germany and Japan have such good, like, car manufacturing and stuff, is because all of their factories got bombed in World War II, so they had to reset them. America's factories are literally the same factories from the 30s,

maybe just the Cold War. So a lot of those have to be rebased on capital equipment as well. They went full greenfield. They went full greenfield. And America's never had the chance because we won. So rather than reset the take. we just kept plugging things on. Moving the plates around.

Yeah, moving the plates around. Okay. And in some sense, it's, it's, the government and the primes in concert have kind of created this issue, but right now it's kind of not their fault because I'm not sure with a legacy workforce where you cannot possibly hire a welder

for the Navy anymore at any cost, and factories that have been cobbled together over time from World War II to the Cold War, you're kind of fighting with two hands behind your back. So we will take your designs micro and we will build and operate an automated factory as a service and the output you get is whatever you want within some tight bounds of what we're capable of doing now what we'll be able to do in the future. We run a highly automated model with the workforce of the future that is highly productive and more importantly

we can train them in 30 days into our system. Otherwise, you know, a Navy welder, maybe it's 10 years to get good, you know, or aerospace machinist. So, okay. This is a question I ask a lot. How broken is the vocational educational system in the country? Like if you look at it in terms of certifications and just the whole time rubric, like are we looking at it wrong when we look at it through how much time should it take to become a welder as opposed to some more meritocratic approach? I think there are a couple of different big friends.

flaws in what we're doing. The first thing is most of the primes have legal mandates from the government to pay people's wages lower than what they could get at McDonald's. So it's like, okay, why can't we hire any well as well? The guys on 25 bucks an hour at McDonald's. Okay. On the training and certification pipeline, I actually think that it's not a trade school gap. It's a first year on the job gap, both for big companies and small businesses. And my viewpoint on this is let's say you're a small machine shop that's a supplier to Boeing and you need people. And you can't hire any of the old guys because they don't exist. And the local college is doing a machining shop class.

And let's say they run that really well. In reality, unless you're highly automated, you need a year on the job to actually be productive and helpful to that small business owner. The problem is as soon as you get any sort of apprenticeship, you're just going to get stolen the year after. So what I see on the ground floor for a lot of small businesses, I don't really want to take the kids and train them because they're going to get poached by the primes, which is no one's fault. That's just the market. If there was one policy change I would make,

apart from, you know, let's stop subsidizing university degrees, because that's just a market correction that needs to happen. I would actually refund every small business owner for the first 18 months of a kid straight out of a trade school. And that's the gap I would close. I actually think we've got plenty of competent trade schools. I don't think the certification. are too crazy. I think that's probably right. But it's almost like you get your law degree and then you're a junior lawyer for four years. Okay. There's no version of that for manufacturing. And because a lot of the skills bases in the small businesses, they literally can't afford to do it and have someone unproductive. So if I was to subsidize everything as a federal government,

it's kind of like first 12 to 18 months of on the job. That's where the real training happens, in my opinion. That's what Jamie Diamond was talking about, at least broadly when he said to Congress, you know, stop wasting your time fighting this, this, this, and this. We need policy, like real policy changes right now. I mean, if we want to change it from the bottom up anyway, it feels like you have to start there. Yeah. What do you guys making exactly?

So we have, we think about it as capabilities and products. Capabilities are machining, welding, additive, sheet metal, pipe, tube, every inspection method under the sun and we're expanding that capability set as much as possible, as fast as possible. And then we have two separate business models. One is we're, I think, one of the best aerospace and defense, high precision machining companies that's never lived. You buy parts from us, and some of our customers are public, some of them are not. And then we have factories as a service, which is we're actually going to deliver you either mass manufacturing, such as, you tons of sheet metal and welding for the Navy, or full products, like a sub-assembly.

Right now, if you use the Ford F-150 analogy, you know, there's like components for the car, there's the sub-assemblies of the car like a door, and then there's the whole car. We're doing one, two, and I would say half of three right now, and by the end of next year we'll be at three. And just take over the whole thing. But within that is kind of the manufacturing methodologies that we then Lego brick into different configurations. So as you look forward, like we keep talking about general dynamics and L3 and, you know, Boeing and so forth. What's going to happen to them? Because it feels like underneath there's this, well, there's you guys, there's, there's Anderil, there's Palantir.

And I'm a little confused as to like what kind of layer cake that is. And like who's the dog and who's the tail? and what's coming? It's hard to tell. I think there's a couple of things that are true. Through Sec War Hegsteth, Depsec War Feinberg, and Emil Michael, Honorable Emil Michael, who runs R&E, his job is to make sure there's a couple of new Palantiers and Andrel and a couple of new Andrels to make new products.

And everyone else's job is to figure out how to produce the ever-loving hell of what is already there. And our job is to effectively help the primes upgrade themselves very rapidly for things that they, the companies are too big or they can't do it by themselves or they just need to start fresh, you know. We deploy some of our software to the primes as well. But primarily it's factories as a service. And you've got to remember 60 to 80% of what the primes produces actually in their small business supply chain. So I think the primes in the federal government and companies like ours or maybe Ford or something like that figures out this production issue where we've got to very quickly. We've got to start with the people first. The small businesses, I don't think anyone's got a really good soul for yet.

And the reason why is their payment terms are 300 days long. And after the 2008 financial crisis, it became illegal effectively for a small business to get a machine loan. and they kind of gotten squeezed over 40 years with like really crappy margins. If someone comes up with a policy solution for that and it actually works, there are, I don't know, 40 to 50,000 certified suppliers in the defense supply chain that have been massive patriots have been gunning for this sort of sort of opportunity, but no one's figured out how to kind of bottoms up enable them. We certainly won't.

It's not kind of our role in this to play. I think there's a huge unlock in letting the small businesses do a lot more and a lot faster. We've got to solve some of these financial issues for them, though, because they kind of slowed down by it. Did you catch the early session with the Wells Fargo and Home Depot over breakfast this morning? No, I missed it. Well, they ended with, I thought they kind of buried the lead. AI came up at the end. And I really want to get your thoughts on this because I feel, Chris, like,

I know two things can be true at the same time, but the smartest people here at this conference all seem to agree that it's inevitable, it's common, and we got to win. Yep. They also seem to sort of admit or maybe even confess that the genie's out of the bottle and we don't quite know what the actual doing.

We don't really, we don't have a clear line of sight on this. but off we go. Yep. And so with your big brain, how do you think about that vis-à-vis your industry and all the history you've read and Iran and everything that's coming?

Like, how do you handicap? I think that the genie's out of the bottle. I think we're going to need more software engineers than ever because intelligence is a scarce resource. In terms of the blue-collar. stuff though. Okay, first thing is true is like if your job is file and paperwork at a paralegal firm, you're going first, unfortunately. You'll still have law firms, but you want three partners and a bunch of AI bots, not 10,000 associates who are largely shuffling paperwork. So judgment,

judgment and talent becomes actually more expensive, but just doing white collar task, I think, is massively degraded very quickly. The blue collar side, I mean, I just think that the jobs that we're creating for people at Hadrian and the legacy manufacturing jobs are the most protected jobs from AI in the country and will be for a long time, which I think is a huge opportunity. My viewpoint on this is basically, and we do a ton of AI internally, we do everything under the sun. And we've learned over time is basically because it's okay, why is software engineering AI very good? Well, all the code is on the internet and has been since the founding of the internet. And if you're a software engineer working on your own product, you can recursively self-improve it because you're using it. You dug-fooding your way there.

Manufacturing has been offline for 40 years. And there's never been any training data on the internet because it's, no one's going to crazy enough to upload a Raytheon or Boeing blueprint on to stack overflow. And then the other thing that's unique to us is having a blueprint to train an AI model is completely insufficient, you actually need the manufacturing data, and more importantly, you need the quality data of how you inspected what you're producing. And the only way to do that and produce that data set is actually around automated factories. So we have this huge thing going on that no one's really quite worked out yet, which is, I kind of think that outside may be optimist, at least for design to manufacturing, we're probably the only ones with, you know, any sort of

AI training set. But we use that to enable the workforce to be more productive, which is exactly how you should do it because we need so many more of the workforce. If you automated away self-driving trucks, I actually think you put millions and millions of hardworking 40-year-old Americans out of work. In manufacturing, you actually need the productivity boost to even have a chance of catching up of what we've lost and then combating China on that raw manufacturing capacity. How this all plays out is like it changes every quarter. It's going so fast that I would probably change my mind every month.

I just, but it's staggering. So what are your friends in the Pentagon say about this? How are they thinking about it? How do you even invest when you don't know quarter to quarter? Like the most fundamental tool is liable to upend every single assumption you've war planned for? Well, at least on the AI side, I think Secretary Heggsat, Secretary Feinberg, and Undersecretary Emil Michael, have done a very good job because they actually understand this because you've got technologists in the Pentagon

and they've actually decided to bring up a system where the models are going to change all the time. They're not pot committed to one thing and they're enabling agility for the warfighter and the people in the Pentagon to use AI. In terms of reindustrialization, it's the toughest job anyone's got, and I won't speak for any of our good friends in the Pentagon,

but what is observably true is that they are, they've gotten incredibly good about placing big asymmetric tests. And I'll give you an example of drone dominance, right? So for people that don't know, DGI, via passing on subsidies to the American consumer, has the largest drone manufacturing base on the planet, and therefore China is extremely good at producing military drones. DGI is the Chinese drone company. And you know, those like cool quadcopters that used to get as a Christmas present,

the DGI. And they cut the prices intentionally so the American consumer would fund the CAPEX. So there's no commercial drone base in the United States at any sort of scale. And now the Pentagon wants literally millions of drones. So there's a two-part problem there is. Who's the best drone companies? And which one of them is getting billions of dollars? Then what do you do about the supply check?

The first very smart thing they did was they went to 20 companies and they said, you've all got a shot. Here's some range testing. You're all getting 50 million bucks. Top three, you're getting a billion dollars. And on the supply chain side, all the components that go into drones, batteries, printed circuit boards, cameras, they're all Chinese.

So the government is now, and this is public, every quarter they're going to ban one of those component sets and then fund the commercial market, figure it out, of how to recreate that drone industrial base. So you get, okay, you pick some winners and you put them at scale so they can fund their suppliers, and you're not tariffs, but you were banning the Chinese components and forcing the country to reindustrialize under drones that now have a 56.3 billion

budget of the president wills it to be in the next six months. That is a great example of how they're attacking the three-sided problem of just drones. And you've got to do everything else. But that is, I think, an example of what's been done incredibly well. So how do you imagine future, again, I know you've read a bunch of history. And I wonder, too, you know, is it always relevant? Like when I think about Rome and I think about, you know,

like there's this, the whole Santa Ana thing, you know, we're doomed to repeat the past if we don't learn from it. But on the other hand, I'm just having a hard time visualizing. Like, even what's happening in real time as we speak right now, I don't think people understand how that, how do we do what we did in Iran as quickly as we did it? And what does that mean? Wars law says it's just going to keep faster, faster, smaller, smaller, quicker, quicker.

I think people are just baffled, like baffled. It's it's necromancy, what you guys are doing. Yeah. I think there's there's a couple of other big things, which is, and I'll go back to history for a second. The other big thing they're doing is trying to treat the crimes like a commercial industry. And it's kind of a blessing that you've got like. like Undersecretary Duffy who runs A&S and Depsec Feinberg

and a couple of these other guys in there that really understand the commercial market. And people forget like the Lockheed Martin CEO used to run American Telecom. Right. And it's really hard to build a lot of factories that have a lot of CAPEX and ask maybe JP Morgan, maybe Morgan Stanley, to help you fund those factories if the government's only going to pay you once a year and they may or may not buy missiles next year.

Yeah. So the Pentagon's done in. incredibly good job of doing what they can under the rules to create a durable demand signal to allow private capital to invest behind factories. On the history point, I think the two big unproven things that are different this time around is firstly the one-child policy. So everyone knows China's economy is fake. No one prints 6% GDP growth for 40 years. We keep investing in it. But the one child policy means that their demographics are going to halve overnight, almost overnight, somewhere in the next 20 to 25 years. That's a true population collapse.

Yes. What that means, in my opinion, is that they have to go to Taiwan or take over Africa or something in this 15-year window because outside of that, they're done. Or they have to invest heavily in robotics. So that is, that I think has never happened in history before of a rising power and a great power. The second thing is, you know,

I think people really forget at the end of the day that America is America because everyone's like a nutcase cowboy. And kind of one of my framings of America is just like, it's still the Wild West and we just all wear suits now. Yeah. I was going to ask about that jacket. But you got,

you got to, you got to remember like, Americans are incredibly good at moving at light speed against problems only after they get punched in the face. The momentum in the Pentagon, the momentum in the industrial base, the momentum in venture capital. When was the last time you're sure any venture capitalist ever invest in factory companies? And there's now like 40 of them.

Right. You know. Have we been punched? I think we've been punched on industrial capacity. And that started off in when Russia-invated Ukraine and we shipped three years worth of missile inventory to them, to the Ukrainians to support them. and they blew through it in six weeks.

And then everyone went, oh, shit. Yeah. And then that kept happening with, you know, our support of Israel, certainly with Iran, where we're shooting so much mass, and then we're going back to the industrial posting saying, we've got $500 billion, can I have some more? And the answer is no. And now all allies are saying the same thing is just like,

where the fuck my weapons? So I think we've been scared enough that everyone's moving really fast, which is honestly a good thing, because the system is now being tested. because factory capacity is the deterrence. It's not stuff sitting in inventory. It's the ability to refill the magazine and outproduce and out compete. And the third thing I think is this administration specifically has a really good read on culture.

And we were lucky enough to have a visit at one of our factories from Seco or Hegsseth. And they've done this at many other companies. But their entire message of both the startups and the primes is basically that the workforce is the most important thing and the warfighter can't do their job unless reindustrialization happens. I thought I'd never see that. in my entire life. So I think there's a lot of hard work to do, but it's hard to argue that it's going. Now, I think the scale of this thing

is important for people to understand, which is like, the capital deployment here needs to be in the two to 300 billion range in the next five years. Same with workforce training, like, because we're just starting from a... Capital deployment toward the manufacturing for the tools necessary to prosecute the next conflict.

Yes. Or even just re-refering. fill the battery that we just exhausted it, you know. And this is public. And, you know, I think we've been purchasing 100 Tomahawks a year for Raytheon, something like that. People can Google it. And we shot 850 in one day in Iran. So you can do the math on like refilling that magazine alone, not to mention submarines, not to mention attritable systems, you know, drones, et cetera, et cetera, because all of it comes down to just like manufacturing capacity at the end of the day. And at the end of the day, that is a skilled labor issue.

Yep. And we're going to, I think we'll be fine as long as we focus on the people. Well, you've met Kadanazi? Yes. I mean, for what it's worth, and I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but they're so paying attention to this issue now. And for me, we were joking about it earlier, but I stopped hearing the sound of the drum I've been beating for 18 years. And I, this whole thing started with an open letter to a. Obama in, what was in 2009, just saying, look, we have to make a more persuasive case for those three million shovel-ready jobs that you're talking about.

Because they're not going to fill themselves and people aren't standing in line waiting to do it. This is the first administration and the first conversations I've had with people who are not just like nodding in agreement. Because nobody ever really disagreed with me, Chris. But now it's like a memo went out. And that's why I'm so interested to talk to you and guys that are in this space, because I haven't met anybody. You've got a big brain for a lot of different topics, but it's just so fundamentally primal to come back to two hands and the work.

Yes. And making a case for the work and making it cool. Yeah. I mean, that's what ASW Kodanasi said, and that's what his team. They're like, listen, we have. And we have to show people how bad ass it is, what they're doing over at Hadrian. What they're, like, there's an opportunity. There's an opportunity for a citizen to get his or her hands on something that's truly consequential.

Yes. And maybe even historic. And I feel like that's what you're, that's part of what your company is offering to the country. Yes. And I think there are three important things that we. we got right and we continue to try and get right and we make some mistakes along the way is everyone at our company knows

that all of the product we build for our customers or software is ultimately down to how easy how easy and graceful it is for the technician who's actually doing the work not the operations manager how do you get really good customer quality well a lot of systems and software in a culture that is really important and there's no hierarchy

the second thing is for the manufacturing experts we hire and technicians private equity and venture capital have treated manufacturing experts or the workforce like second-class citizens for 40 years. And we give everyone equity in the company to a degree that we don't have to. But if you're going to reindustrialize the country, a big part of the healing that needs to happen is that we literally killed the middle of the country and drove all the wealth to the coast. So Silicon Valley and the Pentagon and private equity,

and private credit are going to spend a bunch of money making $100 billion mega cap companies that are going to be to... The wealth has got to go to the manufacturing experts that are putting their brains in the software and the wealth has to flow to the technicians in the workforce that are actually going to do the thing on the floor.

And then the third thing is, if you're a kid, and this is what I think happens in the trade schools, you get obsessed with casting or forging or machining. It's math heavy, it's cool, you know, etc. And then you walk into your local business, business and it sucks. Someone's yelling at you. It's a dirt floor. It clearly hasn't been, nothing's been changed in 30 years. You don't feel proud. So one of my one of my acid tests for

Hadrian, I don't want to sound a little bit offensive is like, I think we've won when you walk into a random bar in the middle of wherever. And you've got some like 18 year old kid, Mouthton off to some blonde girl who's trying to hit on being like, no, I work in manufacturing. You know? And we've been telling kids since. the 80s, that if you didn't have a four-year college degree in anything, you're going to get stuck doing that very thing. And that's, that is, that is crazy. That's crazy. So yeah, creating, like, the sickest design factories ever is really important because then you're some kid who's like, yeah, reindustrial as America and you're walking and, okay, it's, it's great. It's clean. There's robots.

There's great people. That has to work like that. So if I show up in one of your factories, assuming I'm invited and we bring cameras. What can we show people? Who can I meet? Everybody. How would you make the most persuasive case for the opportunities that exist within your own company? The only thing that we've got to blow her out

is the actual stuff we make for customers because it's all super sensitive. Apart from the factory tours, I think you just interview the workforce. Yeah? Honestly. They're the best storytellers. Because people think this is like a, even our investors, they're like, you know, because we're doing the board meeting and it's hunting.

No, no, no, just go anyone, just diving instructor, ex-marine. So, why are they there? Because they believe in the mission. They know everything they're producing has some meaning, whether it's human space flight, weapon systems, nuclear submarines. And we pay and reward them like their own. owners of the company, which I don't think for a blue-collar workforce anyone's ever done before. And I think the fifth thing, frankly, is we just ran the stats on this the other day, is 30% of a cohort. So we have workforce training capacity and hiring for about 50 new technicians every

month right now, and that's scaling. And 100% of our shift managers have not been hired external to the company that have been promoted from technicians. And they're now on close to, if not six-figure salaries. Five to 10% end up changing roles to become software engineers. Because they're smart. They just didn't go to Stanford. And they're sitting next to a software engineer trying to figure out how to make themselves more productive. And they start writing code themselves.

And the third ones become technical manufacturing experts. So I think companies like to say things like, oh, Mike, you know, you start here and you'll eventually get here. And everyone knows it's bullshit. But, you know, they come in an interview with their team and it's like, well, who's my manager? Well, one of my favorite guys is a guy called Jacob. And now he's one of our what we call factory leads, shift manager. I asked Jacob. He started two years ago and now he's like running half the factory.

How old is he? Jacob, I don't know. He's got to be late 20s. Great. hilarious guy. But that's the same thing. One of my other favorite guys is this kid named Owen and he was literally packing shells at Home Depot. and he only applied because on our job out, it said,

we will pay for your forklift certification. And now he's on our software engineering team. But we also have people who are, you know, 40 to 55 years old. They're a nurse. They're a bus driver. And they're back to work. It's cool.

It's high school kids through 25-year-olds, through ex-military folks, through like, you know, 50-year-olds on the factory floor, having a blast. I mean, what we do is very difficult. no doubt. But you called it meaningful work before. It is. Like purpose driven. How important is that in this whole proposition? Hugely important. Because I think at the end of the day, how much the company cares about the mission and what the customer's missions are is the most important thing.

It's pretty easy to get fired up with the fact that you're contributing to national defense or human space flight. And there aren't that many jobs where you can actually go home and be like, Man, my day was tough. The CEO, Chris, is kind of an asshole. Yeah. At the end of the day, I'm putting an effort because it's furthering the country and it's also furthering something really cool that's like really good for America. And I think that that means a lot.

And it's purposeful and meaningful work, not because it's some marketing line because it actually is. And I think ASW Kedanazi and you guys are absolutely right about this. It's like, that's the message. And you see all these like submarine builders where Secretary Hegsef, visits or whatever, and they're fired up. And they need to be fired up because it matters. And one of the most powerful things that I realized in this factory, we're starting to construct now in Alabama and be online in about a year is that population in Alabama in World War II, there was 60,000 people that were just crushing shipbuilding. And they just outproduced the axis.

And then we shut them off. And that whole error is just being degraded. And what I'd hoped to find down there was that they kind of still had it in them, you know? And they just, do. They're fired up. They understand why it's important. They know it's going to be, make, you know, generational changes to that area in terms of economic impact. But the most important thing is they're fired up to have a job that's not, you know, doing whatever. Pretty good job, but they're fired up to work on something meaningful, like making submarines or making munitions, or, you know, making spaceflight hardware for some of our space customers. Like, and the culture of that is just so insanely important because at the end of the day, if you're not, like,

proud to tell your friends at a bar that you got this really cool job in manufacturing. And it's hard like every job, but it's going really well. And you maybe get to buy a house because you've actually got shares in the company. Yeah. That's what matters the most. And let the American people figure out the rest. You know, it's a little Pollyanna. But I read this thing the other day.

It was a long commentary on work. And the interesting part in it came down to dignified work. Yes. This is something people talked to me about all this. time, you know, as well, is it, is it a dignified job? Like, well, you know, the pat answer is all jobs are dignified, I think, you know, certainly on dirty jobs. A lot of people would look sort of askance at that and go, okay, well, it's not easy, but, blah, but like what makes a job dignified? And the point of this piece was to say, it has nothing to do with the circumstances of the work

itself. It has nothing to do with with with the inherent labor. What makes it dignified is whether or not it serves somebody else. If it blesses somebody else, right? Like you are you doing something that improves somebody else's life or is it all inward? Is it, are you doing it because it makes right? Yep. And so I think what you're saying is fundamentally patriotic. But, but it's also historic. That's how empires get built. Yes. I think it has to be for a cause

bigger than the hourly wage. In other words, it all matters. But I think what's coming out of this is we're going to reshape the way we train people, but we also have to kind of rethink the way we consider what a good job. really is. Yes.

And again, you've got a front row seat to it. Yes. You're building it. Yes. And there's two interesting things. Firstly, I think people at their core understand you can't actually be a sovereign nation without sovereign manufacturing. People just get them.

Yeah, but it needs to be said out loud more. And the second thing is, I think the reversing of the betrayal of the bankers and consultants over the last 40 years that betrayed the middle of America is real. People have the right to be frustrated and we've got to go reverse it. And the reason why you got to go reverse it is, why do you think politics are so heated? Well, sorry, the people in the coasts do have different opinions to the people in the middle of America

because they have two very different economic and social outcomes. That's not a country. That's an economic zone. And America is a country and it's a people and it is a history. And it's not about skin color. It's not even about immigration. I'm Australian. It's about are you building something that is shared?

Is everyone roughly on the same page? And when you've got most of the population that got portrayed and outsourced to China for the last 40 years, you've got to go fix that. And America is the greatest financial in the human world. We do not have a mechanism to provide generational wealth to people in quote-unquote blue-collar jobs, right? If you've got a four-year college degree

or you're in venture capital, software, banking, finance, media, whatever, you can climb your way up. You have to reattach the people to the economy, which means giving them shared wealth creation in the companies that are rebuilding the economy instead of just paying them the hourly wage. They're building something, and it's not just a story that we like to tell people,

they're actually building something, and the faster we grow, the faster they grow. The third thing is, and this is a little bit esoteric and you might end up cutting this. We don't cut anything. my opinion of what actually happens to a nation in decline that it's all cultural like at the end of the day why why was google a disruptor right it's because people are got they just they just got it you can

feel it you know and and i think i think at the end of the day in the 70s America became a much less serious country than it was in the founding in the 20s and certainly at the apex of the war I'm not saying don't have fun I'm just saying like you're in it to do something the garbage man was important the journalist was important it was a serious country and in these errors

where you kind of become lazy and you and you detach from reality you start looking a lot more at spreadsheets than how the people around you are feeling you become a lot less serious like removing the gold standard as a very finance is now unsurious yeah and I think that at the end of the day what that really means is how close

are most of the population to physical reality. Because we're trading neopets and monkeys on the internet and you think that's the economy. It's not. It's just kind of layers and layers and layers of abstraction that at the end of the day is a bond that someone wrote that said it's fine to do CBOs and all the houses. But at the end of the day, it's nuts

because it's not resilient and it's not making contact with reality. And the Romans and some religions are very good at this. So the old rule in the Roman Senate was, if your son is going to become a senator, they go and fight the barbarians at the front, the very military culture. The reason why they did that is so that they have contact with the ground floor reality of the people

in the hopes that they make better decisions while they're the elite, right? And I think one of the things you lose as a country when you offshore your heavy industry is that you lose a thing that creates a serious population because you are removing more and more people from hard contact with reality every single day. Because assumptions don't trade in manufacturing.

You're either right or you're wrong. It's either a good part or it's a bad part. No great. And in a kind of piece time, I think one of the things you lose in manufacturing is that people staring in front of computer screens I think it's like a very unsurious thing at the end of the day and people forget that we're here because there's chips

and there's machine tools and there's 3D printers and there's planes and missiles. And the outsourcing of that, I think, is a big reason why the culture is kind of fragmented because you're not you're not just you kind of your hands aren't dirty anymore you're disconnected you're disconnected yeah how interesting that an Aussie is helping reconnect the best way to help Australia is to reindustrialize America this is the only chance we got if you set that down there to bovers and the shakers and the yeah they know yeah they sometimes get a little bit grumpy with me

but yeah the best way to help the entirety of the West is to re-industrialize the country so we have a resilient deterrence and an economy that actually works for all Americans instead of just the people who happen to live on the coasts or got lucky. Last question. Fundamentally, are you bullish? Are you optimistic? I am scared to death. I'm optimistic because the federal government and everybody is moving in a direction now. Everyone knows what's going on. And I'm also optimistic. because at the end of the day, like, it's, it's, you know,

it's America, like, it'll be fine. You know, we're all going to, and we're all in a direction very fast. Two things are going to happen. It's going to look like complete chaos. There's no plan. Like, bang. And it's going to get done.

And now that everyone's fired up around this, like, I genuinely think it'll be fine. Now, there's a lot, there's 10, as a decade at least of hard work to do here. Yeah. And a lot of traps along the way and a lot of bruised egos and bruised eyes. But we're getting after it now

as a whole of nation vibe and effort. And at the end of the day, like, would you ever, ever bet against the average American? Probably not. Well, you know what, Jamie Diamond said it in a way that just made me laugh. When he said, okay, you've got all the money. You got all the money you're going to get

and you can only put it in one place, in the whole world. Yeah. One country. Where are you going to put it? And he's like, oh, I have an idea. Put it in the place where there's an ocean here. There's an ocean here.

I mean, like, how could you even ponder putting it anyplace else? Why would you even ponder it? So that made me feel good. Now, there's some, you know, here be dragons between here and there. Yeah. But, I mean, heck, if we knew exactly how the story ended, where's fun in that? Correct. And at the end of the day, what are you going to bet on?

the decline or the rebirth of the American Empire, which is ultimately up to the people, and the people are fired up. It'll be fine. It's going to be complete chaos and really hard, but like, everyone should be so excited that there's finally a whole of nation effort of actually doing something big again.

Dude, I love it, man. I love to hear that. It's only going to be chaos and really hard. On the other hand, there's that, you know? It's the greatest country on the face of the earth. Chris Howard. Hadrian. Only saving the world.

Appreciate it. Thank you, sir. If you like what you heard And even if you don't Won't you please Pretty puffs grow Well I hate to beg and I hate to plead But please

Pretty freeze Please So