502: Chris Power—The Other Hadrian's Wall

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 https://bit.ly/TWIHIxGoodRanchers—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 https://bit.ly/TWIHIxZipRecruiter—The recruiting site that really is the smartest way to hire. Post a job for FREE and find a qualified candidate in 24 hours.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mike Rowe?

  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 dollars. 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

• 0:45Mike Rowe?

  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'll jump out is borders.

• 1:30Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 2:15Mike Rowe?

  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 US 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 Hadrian.

• 2:57Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 3:38Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 4:22Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 4:58Mike Rowe?

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• 7:01Mike Rowe?

  Power or Powers?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Singular.

• 7:03Mike Rowe?

  Really?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:05Mike Rowe?

  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 Chris Power.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:16Mike Rowe?

  One man, one power.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it.

• 7:19Mike Rowe?

  What part of Australia?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Melbourne.

• 7:22Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. What a great cafe society that is.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yes, best coffee in the world.

• 7:28Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:37Mike Rowe?

  Is it the Mumba, maybe?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mumba, Mumba Festival, that still happens.

• 7:41Mike Rowe?

  So there was an F1, there was this River Festival.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:45Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:57Mike Rowe?

  You are.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yes, they call it the lucky country for the raising because it's the best sport, beer, everything in the world. It's also why nothing ever really happens of significance.

• 8:06Mike Rowe?

  Well then, why'd you leave?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  I mean, simply put, personally, doing business in Australia always feels like being at the kids' table at Christmas.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  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, yeah, working 24/7 on. And I'm a big history guy and I'm a big strategic finance interest rate guy.

• 8:37Mike Rowe?

  What does that even mean?

• 8:38Speaker 01

  So basically, what happened is I was working for this software company and I said, I'm gonna move to America. You've got 12 months to replace me. And I spent that 12 months rereading history, rereading all my interest rate books and like trying to figure out where, where is the world going?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And it was very obvious, at least to me, seven years ago, and I've now been in the country for six years, is that the three big things are really going on. The only thing that mattered 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, is that we'd stretched the manufacturing system of the defense and commercial industrial base to the point where there basically was none. And but it hadn't been tested in a long time.

• 9:25Mike Rowe?

  Uh huh.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  We think we're Mike Tyson in his prime, but we're actually Mike Tyson just before the Buster Douglas fight.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  And then the third thing is that we traded for 40, 40 years or so, we traded financial returns for industrial resiliency and we offshored 95% of all jobs in manufacturing capacity largely to China.

• 9:47Mike Rowe?

  Now, you're saying we.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  The United States.

• 9:49Mike Rowe?

  You're referring to the United States.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:51Mike Rowe?

  And were you still using that pronoun when you were in Australia?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  No, I, I, I think I became an American in my mind, uh, four or five years ago.

• 10:01Mike Rowe?

  Interesting.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:02Mike Rowe?

  So, so when you're diving into the history.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:05Mike Rowe?

  Part of this, is it like big world geopolitical stuff that you're interested in?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:12Mike Rowe?

  You're looking top line stuff.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Top line stuff. Roughly every 120 years, the reserve crunch, 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.

• 10:51Mike Rowe?

  We were able to pivot.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  You were able to pivot because of the commercial manufacturing base.

• 10:56Mike Rowe?

  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 use those same specs in the war effort.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:16Mike Rowe?

  But he's very concerned that we couldn't do that now.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 11:20Mike Rowe?

  Or, or really anything approaching it.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  There's two reasons behind this and I agree is.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  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, the, the second primary reason though, is there was, there was commercial capacity. America has no commercial capacity anymore because we offshore it all and we also cut defense jobs over the last manufacturing jobs by 63% just after the Cold War ended. So there's, the first problem is there's no capacity. And that, and then you've got 40 years of basically, no one wanted, no one wanted to get into manufacturing. So everyone's retiring out, as all you know, I think average age of a skilled 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?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  And the third, and I think the most important thing is culturally, we became a, uh, America became a finance and technology services culture. And we told all the kids in the eighties and nineties that if you didn't have a four year journalism degree, you weren't, you weren't worth much of anything. And that is just as important as the kind of economics of manufacturing of are there 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.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  But they're also such 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, there's just no demand for commercial manufacturing without the president's tariffs and stuff as there was, you know, in, in the 50s or even before the 50s.

• 13:11Mike Rowe?

  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? Like, how does this happen, man? It's just, it's just so interesting that, that an Aussie comes over here armed with all these big ideas and now you're like a regular guest at the Pentagon.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, what happened was I, I moved to the US with $30,000 and I knew that I wanted to do, uh, highly automated manufacturing. The reason why you have to do highly automated manufacturing to solve, 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 with mass skilled immigration or software. And we were never going to do mass skilled immigration into the defense industrial base. So, okay, highly automated factories.

• 14:09Mike Rowe?

  So there's door number one.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Door number one.

• 14:11Mike Rowe?

  Or door number one.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, door number two, which I think is slightly more interesting is 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.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  And then after that, I actually decided to raise a small, very small private equity fund because all advanced manufacturing in the US is highly certified and regulated. So you can't become a SpaceX or Lockheed Martin or Raytheon supplier unless your, 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.

• 14:55Mike Rowe?

  Also known as the primes.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  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, et cetera. So I, I, I raised a small private equity fund and spent 12 months diligencing a bunch of aerospace machine shops. Because you had to buy the certification first and then put the technology into them. And through that, through that process, uh, 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

• 15:41Speaker 01

  and the software at the same time.

• 15:43Mike Rowe?

  How much money did you raise?

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Oh, it was like $500,000.

• 15:48Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  And you, you get a, you get a bunch of group of 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.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  And when we, when we closed it, we gave everyone the money back and the hundred grand we spent or 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 reindustrialize the country. So you have to greenfield everything. Workforce training, the capital equipment itself, the software at the same time.

• 16:24Mike Rowe?

  Explain that greenfield because the first time I heard that expression was in the Pentagon. People talk about it all the time, but I'm, I'm sure a lot of people don't quite understand.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Well, there's, 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 is 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 reindustrialize America to the degree it needed to was that you have to basically do everything yourself from scratch. And then, uh, started raising money for Hadrian, uh, I guess five and a half years ago now.

• 17:06Mike Rowe?

  Why'd you call it Hadrian?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Uh, because in the history of Rome, which rhymes with, uh, American history, at that period in time, there were three big things going on in Rome. The empire was massively overextended.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  The culture and more importantly, the reserve currency were being debased and degraded and hyperinflated.

• 17:27Mike Rowe?

  So less silver going into a.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  A drive, yeah.

• 17:30Mike Rowe?

  Dari or whatever it is.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  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 consolidating the empire into a strong core, rebased the currency and fixed a lot of the crumbling infrastructure and bought the empire another 500 years.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  So the mission is kind of in the name.

• 17:55Mike Rowe?

  You see yourself, Mr. Adrian?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:04Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  So we have two R and D facilities in LA, and one coming up in San Francisco where we do all of our software development, but all of 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 our production facility in LA, 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, a 2.25 million square foot factory in Alabama to help with

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Virginia and Columbia class submarine construction.

• 18:58Mike Rowe?

  Are they still on a two plus one cadence, is it?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  We, the, the American taxpayer has bought two plus one. The actual publicly reported production rate, I think, is, is point six a year.

• 19:11Mike Rowe?

  Just so people understand, we're supposed to be, we, two Virginia, one Columbia, right?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:19Mike Rowe?

  So if you could just take a quick pivot and explain to people, what, building a submarine, I mean. It's crazy.

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• 20:55Mike Rowe?

  It's just, are they still built vertically sometimes? Do they build them like skyscrapers? Are they all horizontal now? Is it?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  I'm not, I know that answer. I'm not sure I can say that.

• 21:04Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  But to give everyone a sense, it's like, if I, if I ranked the most complicated manufactured products that America makes, it would be Columbia class, Virginia class, Starship Falcon nine, 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, I'll tell you a little bit more about the company is with the software, our workforce are anywhere between four and 10 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.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  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, will 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 on that have seen every problem in a foundry that ever existed.

• 22:17Mike Rowe?

  So like you'd hire a 65 year old?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  100%, but we put them on the software engineering team.

• 22:23Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Because, and we pay them like software engineers with equity in the company because the, 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 possibly have. 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 right out of high school, you're 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, our platform, which is manufacturing as a service, which means we're taking someone else's designs, creating a digital twin, building and operating factories that are

• 23:10Speaker 01

  at automotive levels of efficiency, except for high mix, low volume.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:25Mike Rowe?

  So wait a minute, you're, you're actively recruiting people from all these different disciplines.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:33Mike Rowe?

  Into software as a, that was SaaS.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:37Mike Rowe?

  And that, that appears to be on the ropes to a certain degree.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:40Mike Rowe?

  Thanks to AI.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:41Mike Rowe?

  But is mass a new thing, manufacturing as a service?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Yes. And the, the reason, the reason why is, I, this is going to get a little bit fancy, 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.

• 24:00Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  And that is a skills gap and a capacity gap. We can make the skills gap easy with software. We can make the cap, 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 like running six robots at once and it's, it's sick. The second one is just, we're probably half a trillion dollars in capex behind. And the primary reason is when.

• 24:26Mike Rowe?

  Behind what?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Behind the capex capacity gap or what you need to recapitalize.

• 24:32Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  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 this, 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.

• 24:54Mike Rowe?

  They went full greenfield.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  They went full greenfields and America's never had the chance because we won.

• 25:00Mike Rowe?

  So rather than reset the table, we just kept.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Plugging things on.

• 25:05Mike Rowe?

  Moving the plates around and just.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Moving the plates around.

• 25:08Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  And in some sense, it's, it's, uh, the, 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 a workforce of the future that is highly productive and more importantly, we can train them in 30 days

• 25:54Speaker 01

  into our system. Otherwise, you know, a Navy welder, maybe it's 10 years to get good, you know, or aerospace machinist.

• 26:01Mike Rowe?

  So, okay. This is a question I ask a lot.

• 26:06Mike Rowe?

  How, 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?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  I think there are a couple of different big 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.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  So it's like, okay, why can't we hire Eddie Wald as well? The guy's 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 stalled on the year after.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  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

• 27:34Mike Rowe?

  They're going to get poached.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  They're going to get poached by the primes. Um, 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, I would actually refund every small business owner for the first 18 months of a kid straight out of a trade school.

• 27:57Mike Rowe?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Um, and that's the gap I would close. I actually think we've got plenty of competent trade schools. I don't think the certifications are too crazy. I think that's probably right. But it's almost like, um, 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, they literally can't afford to do it and have someone unproductive. So if I was to subsidize everything as 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.

• 28:28Mike Rowe?

  That's what Jamie Dimon 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.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:46Mike Rowe?

  It feels like you have to start there.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:48Mike Rowe?

  What are you guys making exactly?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  So we have, uh, we think about it as capabilities and products. Capabilities are machining, welding, additive, sheet metal, pipe, tube,

• 29:01Speaker 01

  every inspection method under the sun. And we're expanding that capability set as much as possible, as fast as possible. Um, 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 ever lived. And 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, um, either mass manufacturing, such as, yeah, tons of sheet metal and welding for the Navy, or full products, like a subassembly. Right now, if, if you use the, uh, Ford F-150 analogy, you know, there's like components for the car, there's the subassemblies of the car, like a door, and then there's the whole car.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  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, um, and just take, take over the whole thing. Um, but within that is kind of the manufacturing methodologies that we then Lego brick into different configurations.

• 30:01Mike Rowe?

  Mm hmm. So as you look forward, like we, we keep talking about General Dynamics and L3 and, you know, Boeing and so forth. What, what's going to happen to them? Cause it, it, it feels like underneath there's this, well, there's you guys, there's, uh, there's Anduril, there's, there's Palantir. And I, I'm a little confused as to like what kind of layer cake that, that is. And, and like, who's the dog and who's the tail? And what's, what's coming?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  It's hard to tell. I, I think, uh, I think there's a couple of things that are true is, um,

• 30:40Speaker 01

  you know, through, uh, Zachor Hergseth, Depp Zachor Feinberg, and Emil Michael, Honorable Emil Michael, who runs RNA. His job is to make sure there's a couple of new Palantirs and Anduril and a couple of new Andurils to make new products.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  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? Um, we deploy some of our software to the primes as well. Um, but primarily it's, it's factories as a service. And you've got to remember 60 to 80% of what the primes produces is actually in their small business supply chain. So I think that the primes in the federal government and companies like ours, or, you know, 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.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  The small businesses, I don't think anyone's got a really good solve for yet. And the reason why is their payment terms are 300 days long.

• 31:47Mike Rowe?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Uh, and after the 2008 financial crisis, it became illegal effectively for a small business owner to get a machine loan.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  And they kind of gotten squeezed over 40 years with like really crappy margins.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  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 and been gunning for this sort of opportunity, but no one's figured out how to kind of bottoms up enable them.

• 32:19Mike Rowe?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  We certainly won't. It's, it's, it's not, it's not kind of our, our role in this to play, but, uh, there's, 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.

• 32:34Mike Rowe?

  Did you catch the early session with the Wells Fargo and Home Depot over breakfast this morning?

• 32:41Speaker 01

  No, I missed it.

• 32:42Mike Rowe?

  Well, they ended with, I thought they kind of buried the lead. Um, AI came up at the end. And I, I really want to get your thoughts on this because I, I feel, Chris, like,

• 32:55Mike Rowe?

  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 coming and we got to win.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:06Mike Rowe?

  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. Like we don't, we don't really, we don't have a clear line of sight on this, but off we go.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:24Mike Rowe?

  And so with your big brain, can you, like, how do you think about that vis a vis your industry and all the history you've read and, and Iran and everything that's coming? Like what, how do you handicap it?

• 33:45Mike Rowe?

  Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training, like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five week, highly immersive, pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately.

• 34:27Mike Rowe?

  I'm talking about AI proof, six figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you or your spouse or your kid or your grandkid are looking for a straight path

• 35:10Mike Rowe?

  into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  I think that the genie's out of the bottle. I think we're gonna 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 if your job is filing paperwork at a paralegal firm, you're you're going first, unfortunately.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  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,

• 36:10Speaker 01

  I 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.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  At my viewpoint on this is basically, and we do a ton of AI internally, we do, 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're dog fooding your way there.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Manufacturing has been offline for 40 years, and there's never been any training data on the internet because it's no one's gonna crazy enough to upload a Raytheon or Boeing blueprint onto 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 to run automated factories. So we have this huge

• 37:20Speaker 01

  thing going on that no one's really quite worked out yet, which is, I kind of think that outside maybe Optimus, at least we're designed 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.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  If you automated away self-driving trucks, I actually think you put millions and millions of like 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.

• 38:03Mike Rowe?

  I just.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  But it's staggering.

• 38:06Mike Rowe?

  Like, so what are your, 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 the most fundamental tool is liable to upend every single assumption you've you've you've war planned for.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Well, at least on the AI side, I think Secretary Hegseth, 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, 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 the reindustrialization,

• 38:51Speaker 01

  it's it's the toughest job anyone's got. And I won't 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 about placing big asymmetric sets. And I'll I'll give you an example of drone dominance, right? So for people that don't know, DGI, via passing on subsidies to the to the American consumer, has the largest drone manufacturing base on the planet, and therefore China is extremely good at producing military drones.

• 39:20Mike Rowe?

  DGI is.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Is a Chinese drone company. And you know, those like cool quadcopters that you used to get as a Christmas present? They're DGI. And they cut the prices intentionally so the American consumer would fund the capex.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  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, there's a two-part problem there is, who's the best drone companies and which one of them is getting billions of dollars? And what do you do about the supply chain?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  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 you're not tariffs, but you're 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 of just drones. And you you've got to do everything else, but that is, I think, an example of what's been done incredibly well.

• 40:51Mike Rowe?

  So how do you imagine future? Again, I know you've read a bunch of history.

• 40:58Mike Rowe?

  And I wonder too, you know, is it all, is it always relevant?

• 41:04Mike Rowe?

  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 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? Like Moore's Law says it's just gonna keep faster, faster, smaller, smaller, quicker, quicker. I think people are just baffled, like baffled. It's it's it's it's necromancy what you guys are doing.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  I I think there's, there's, there's a couple of other big things, which is, and I'll go back to history for a sec. The other big thing they're doing is trying to treat the primes like a commercial industry. And it's kind of a blessing that you've got like

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Undersecretary Duffy, who runs A and 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.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  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 gonna pay you once a year and they might, they may or may not buy missiles next year.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  So the Pentagon's done an 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.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  We keep investing in it. But the one-child policy means that their demographics are gonna halve overnight, almost overnight, somewhere in the next 20 to 25 years.

• 43:05Mike Rowe?

  That's a true population collapse.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  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 they're done, or they have to invest heavily in robotics. So that is, that I think is never happened in history before of a rising power and a great power. The second thing is,

• 43:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:46Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. I was gonna ask you about that jacket.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  You got, but you gotta, you gotta 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 saw any venture capitalist ever invest in factory companies? And there's now like 40 of them.

• 44:08Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  You know.

• 44:11Mike Rowe?

  Have we been punched?

• 44:12Speaker 01

  I think we've been punched on industrial capacity. And that started off in when Russia invaded 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.

• 44:26Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  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 industrialists and saying, we've got $500 billion, can I have some more? And the answer is no. And now our allies are saying the same thing is just like, where the 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 deterrent. It's not stuffing an inventory. It's the ability to like refill the magazine and outproduce and outcompete. 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 Secor Hegseth.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  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 it's going. Now, I think the scale of this thing is important for people to understand, which is like,

• 45:36Speaker 01

  the capital deployment here needs to be in the 200 to 300 billion range in the next five years. Same with workforce training, like, because we're just starting from a.

• 45:43Mike Rowe?

  Capital deployment toward the manufacturing for the tools necessary to prosecute the next conflict.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Yes. Or even just refill the battery that we just exhausted, you know? And this, 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 attributable systems, you know, drones, et cetera, 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.

• 46:24Mike Rowe?

  Yep.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  And we're gonna, I think we'll be fine as long as we focus on the people.

• 46:28Mike Rowe?

  Well, you've met Cardnazi?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:32Mike Rowe?

  I mean, for what it's worth, I, and I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but they, 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, right? This whole thing started with an open letter to Obama in, what was it, 2009? Just saying, look, we have to make a more persuasive case for the, those 3 million shovel-ready jobs that you're talking about.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:00Mike Rowe?

  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, who are not just like nodding in, 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, and, 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.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:39Mike Rowe?

  And the work.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:41Mike Rowe?

  And, and, and making a case for the work and making it cool.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:45Mike Rowe?

  I mean, that's what ASW Kadenazi said, and that's what his team, they're like, listen, we have to show people how badass it is, what they're doing over at Hadrian, what they're, like, there's an opportunity. One of the things I like best about the way MicroWorks has evolved is the way it lets my foundation partner with other like-minded entities, companies, foundations, whatever. Everybody is now up to speed with the fact that the skills gap has got to get closed, but nobody's doing more about it, in my estimation, than the Pentagon. BuildFreedom.us is a partnership I'm really excited about.

• 48:30Mike Rowe?

  It's been in the works for 15 years when I originally pitched it, back in 2011, I guess, to Congress. Well, the government's on board. 400,000 AI-proof, six-figure jobs are waiting in the industrial base to be filled. And you can find all of them at BuildFreedom.us. You know what you'll also find? $10 million that has been sent to MicroWorks, which we've earmarked to get you the training that you need, or your son, or your daughter, or your niece, or your nephew, or your grandson, or your granddaughter. The money is waiting and the need is extraordinary. And the opportunities are incredible.

• 49:13Mike Rowe?

  These are AI-proof, six-figure jobs, building stuff that really matters in our defense industrial base. The jobs are real, the money is there. It's waiting at BuildFreedom.us. That's BuildFreedom.us, a website that truly lives up to its name. $10 million just waiting. BuildFreedom.us. There's an opportunity for a citizen to get his or her hands on something that's truly consequential.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:46Mike Rowe?

  And maybe even historic. And, and I, I, I feel like that's what you're, that's part of what your company is offering to the country.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yes, and, and I, I think there, 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 ways. Everyone at our company knows that all of the product we build for our customers or our 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.

• 50:23Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  The second thing is, for the manufacturing experts we hire and the 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.

• 50:44Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  But if you're going to reindustrialize the country, a big part of the healing that needs to happen is that we, we literally killed the middle of the country and drove all the wealth to the coasts. 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 read it. The wealth has got to go to the manufacturing experts that are putting their brains into software, and the wealth has to flow to the technicians and the workforce that are actually going to do, 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.

• 51:17Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  You get obsessed with casting or forging or machining. It's math-heavy, it's cool.

• 51:23Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  You know, et cetera. And then you walk into your, like, local 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, and I don't want to sound a little bit defensive, 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 mouthing off to some blonde girl he'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.

• 52:00Mike Rowe?

  You're going to get stuck doing that very thing.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  You're going to get stuck. And that's, that is, that is crazy. It's crazy. So yeah, creating like, the sickest design factories ever is really important, because then you're some kid who's like, yeah, reindustrialize America, and you walk in and it's, okay, it's, it's, it's great, it's clean, there's robots, there's great people, da-da-da-da-da. It has to work like that.

• 52:22Mike Rowe?

  So if I show up at one of your factories, assuming I'm invited, and we bring cameras, what, what, what can we show people? Who can I meet?

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Everybody.

• 52:31Mike Rowe?

  Like, how, how would you make the most persuasive case for the opportunities that exist within your own company?

• 52:40Speaker 01

  The only thing that we've got to blow out is the, 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.

• 52:50Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:05Mike Rowe?

  So why are they there?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Like, because they believe in the mission, they know everything they're producing has some meaning, whether it's human spaceflight, weapon systems, nuclear submarines. And we pay and reward them like they're 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, we, we have workforce training capacity and hiring for about 50 new technicians every month right now, and that's, that's scaling. And 100% of our shift managers have not been hired external to the company, they've been

• 53:53Speaker 01

  promoted from technicians, and they're now on close to, if not, six-figure salaries. 5% to 10% end up changing roles to become software engineers.

• 54:03Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  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 one's become technical manufacturing experts. So I think, you know, 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 this guy called Jacob, and now he's one of our, what we call factory leads, shift manager. I asked Jacob, yeah, he started two years ago and now he's like running half the factory.

• 54:37Mike Rowe?

  How old is he?

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Jacob, I don't know, he's got to be late, late twenties. Great, hilarious guy. But, but that's the same thing. One of my, one of my other favorite guys is this kid named Owen, and he was literally packing shelves at Home Depot, and he only applied because on our job ad it said, we will, we will pay for your forklift certification.

• 54:57Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  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. And it, it, 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.

• 55:23Mike Rowe?

  But you called it meaningful work before.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  It is.

• 55:25Mike Rowe?

  Like, like, like, purpose-driven. How, how important is that in this whole proposition?

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Hugely important. Because I think at the end of the day, how much the company cares about the mission and what the customers' missions are is the most important thing. It's pretty easy to get fired up at the fact that you're contributing to national defense or human spaceflight. 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. You know, like, at the end of the day, I'm putting in 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, I think that, that means a lot. And it's, it's purposeful and meaningful work, not because it's some marketing line, because it actually is.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  And I think ASW Kadenazi 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 Hegseth 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 with this factory we're starting to construct now in Alabama, and it'll 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. They just outproduced the Axis. And then we shut them off and that whole area is just being degraded. And what I'd hoped to find down there was that the, they kind of still had it in them, you know? And they do, they're fired up. They understand why it's important.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  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 then 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 of manufacturing. And it's, it's hard like every job, but it's going really well. And you, you, you, you maybe get to buy a house because you've actually got shares in the company.

• 57:32Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  That's what matters the most and let the American people figure out the rest.

• 57:35Mike Rowe?

  You know, it's, it's a little Pollyanna, but I, I read this thing the other day. It was a, it was a long commentary on work and the interesting part in it came down to dignified work.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:49Mike Rowe?

  It's something people talk to me about all the time, you know, it's well, is it, is it a dignified job? Look, 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, 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, it serves somebody else. If it blesses somebody else, right?

• 58:30Mike Rowe?

  Like you, are, 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?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:40Mike Rowe?

  And so I think what you're saying is fundamentally patriotic, but, but it's also historic. I mean, that's how empires get, get built.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:53Mike Rowe?

  I think it has to be for a cause.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:59Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:17Mike Rowe?

  And again, you've got a front row seat to it.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:21Mike Rowe?

  You're building it.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Yes, and there's, there's two interesting things. Firstly, I think people at their core understand you can't actually be a sovereign nation without sovereign manufacturing.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  People just get that.

• 59:36Mike Rowe?

  That's, yeah, but it needs to be said out loud more.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  And the second thing is, I think the reversing of the betrayal of the bankers and consultants of the last 40 years that betrayed the middle of America is real. People have the right to be frustrated and we got to go reverse it. And the reason why you got to go reverse it is why do you think politic, politics are so heated? Well, sorry, uh, the people in the coast 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, are you building something that is shared and is everyone roughly on the same page?

• 1:00:23Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  And when you've got most of the population that got betrayed and outsourced to China for the last 40 years, you 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 built, they, 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.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  The third thing is, and this is a little bit esoteric and you might end up cutting this.

• 1:01:11Mike Rowe?

  We don't cut anything.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  My opinion of what actually happens to a nation in decline is it's all cultural. Like at the end of the day, why, why was Google a disruptor, right? It's because people have 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 seventies, America became a, a, a much less serious a country than it was in the founding, in the twenties, and certainly at the apex of, of the war. I'm not saying don't have fun. I'm just saying like you're in it to do something. You, you, the garbage man was important, the, the journalist was important. It was a serious country. And in these eras where you kind of become lazy and you, and you detach from reality,

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  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 is a very, finance is now unserious.

• 1:02:04Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  And I think that at the end of the day, what that, what that really means is how close are most of the population to physical reality? Cause you can't, you know, we're, we're trading neo pets 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, it's fine to do CBOs in 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, um,

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  it, the, the, 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, 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, you lose a, you, 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. Cause assumptions don't trade in manufacturing. You're either right or you're wrong. Like it's either a good part or it's a bad part.

• 1:03:20Mike Rowe?

  No gray.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  And in a kind of peace time, I think one of the things you lose in, in, in manufacturing is that, that people staring in front of computer screens, I think it's like a very unserious thing at the end of the day. And we 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 know?

• 1:03:47Mike Rowe?

  Disconnected.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  You're disconnected, yeah.

• 1:03:50Mike Rowe?

  How interesting that an Aussie is helping reconnect.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  The best way to help Australia is to re-industrialize America. This is the only chance we got.

• 1:04:00Mike Rowe?

  If you said that down there to bovers and the shakers and the.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, they know.

• 1:04:06Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  They sometimes get a little bit grumpy with me. But, uh, yeah, the, 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.

• 1:04:20Mike Rowe?

  Last question, fundamentally, are you, are you bullish? Are you optimistic?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  I am scared to death.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  I'm optimistic because the federal government and everybody is moving in a direction now. Everyone knows what's going on.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  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, we were all going to, and we're all in a direction very fast. Two things are going to happen. It's going to look like a complete chaos. There's no plan, bang, bang, and it's going to get done. And now that everyone's fired up around this, like I, I genuinely think it'll be fine. Now there's a lot, there's 10, there's a decade at least of hard work to do here.

• 1:05:05Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  And a lot of traps along the way and a lot of bruised egos and bruised eyes and, but, uh, yeah, we, we're getting after it now, uh, as like 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.

• 1:05:24Mike Rowe?

  Well, you know what? Jamie Dimon said it in a way that just made me laugh when he, 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.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Mike Rowe?

  In the whole world.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Mike Rowe?

  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, I mean, like, how, 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.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Here and there.

• 1:05:59Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. But I mean, heck, if we knew exactly how the story ended, where's the fun in that?

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Correct. And at the end of the day, what are you, you know, what are you going to bet on? The, 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, 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.

• 1:06:23Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  It's the greatest country on the face of the, face of the earth.

• 1:06:35Mike Rowe?

  Chris Powers, Patreon, only saving the world. Appreciate it.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Thank you, sir.

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