#934 Chris Power On Building 21st Century Manufacturing Facilities

Chris Power is the Co-Founder & CEO of Hadrian, a brand new 21st Century software enabled, manufacturing facility focused on the aerospace industry. In this conversation. we discuss building this new manufacturing model, space travel, going to Mars, Elon Musk, advancements in the aerospace industry, and the current macro economic climate. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Go to https://www.eightsleep.com/Pomp to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the UK. ======================= The world's 2nd largest crypto exchange, OKEx, has dropped the "E" to become OKX, reflecting its evolution from a traditional crypto exchange to a comprehensive, cross-platform crypto services provider. With OKX's decentralized platform and Web3 wallet, MetaX, you have full custody over your crypto. Explore DeFi, NFTs and play-to-earning gaming with the world's most powerful crypto exchange. Visit OKX.com to learn more. =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Chris Powers, the co-founder and CEO of Hadrian, a brand-new 21st century software-enabled manufacturing facility focused on the aerospace industry. In this conversation, we talked about space, Mars, Elon Musk, economics, software, hiring, building out factories, and much, much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Chris, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I first want to talk about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital, the number-one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, underscored

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:55Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:16Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:39Anthony Pompliano?

  We have Chris Power who's joining us from Hadrian. I think is how you say it correctly. Is that right?

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So Chris is here. We're gonna have to go real slow. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, so to understand is like big brain stuff. But maybe what we could just start with is like, what the hell is your background? You guys are building this incredible company around like space manufacturing and contract manufacturing, etc. What is your background even understand that this problem exists, let alone have enough kind of confidence and courage to go work on it?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a weird journey. So I've got a mix of like blue collar kind of logistics experience from helping run e-commerce businesses in Australia. And at the time, this was like pre eBay, pre Amazon. And Australia's a big country, so it's very like logistics heavy to run an e-commerce thing. You got to actually run like a warehouse and figure out a bunch of international shipping as well. So I was always building software for like blue collar environments. And then I was head of sales in a very technical environment, building like automated scheduling software for large, large factories, large shift-based workforces. So if you have like 5,000 people in a logistics facility, like, how do you know how many drivers you need? How many, you know, how many forklift drivers you need, all that other stuff. So building very complex software that connects with like a real world environment, like people

• 4:56Speaker 02

  and machines. So I've always been in that weird blend of like blue collar finance and like building complex software. And I wanted to build something in the American industrial base because I realized that at a very like Peter Thiel style macro view, you've got software really hasn't touched industrials at all. You know, there's there's SaaS companies that sell to industrial, you know, and you've got like SAP or whatever, but you know, it's all built to sell to the CFO and get a million dollar contract. It's not actually built to drive any real operating efficiencies. So I realized that at a macro view, the only way to bring bring technology to the industrial spaces in general is basically vertically integrate a software company with an industrials company. And that the value creation was in being the

• 5:38Speaker 02

  most efficient factory on the planet, not in selling SaaS software to other factories because, you know, they only use 10% of it. There's a lot of misaligned incentives, all this other stuff. And then I think mission is really important. So, you know, I was working 80 or 90 hour weeks, like we were killing it as a business was awesome. But, you know, I was getting pretty burnt out and I realized it was primarily because I think 90% of the venture funded companies in the world, you know, you could delete basically and outside the investor base and the employees, the world wouldn't really blink. I think it's really, yeah.

• 6:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe more.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Maybe more. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of contrived missions out there, right? And that's fine, but I hate the cognitive dissonance of like, we've got this really amazing mission, but everyone knows you're just trying to make money. Like, that's actually fine. Just say you want to make money and then, you know, go do that. Don't like hide the ball behind some contrived mission. But for me, it was like, what I want to do for the next 20 years and how can I align, you know, what I've kind of landed on is like an Archimedes lever of a company, which is you build the company and the economic incentive of building that company as big as possible is completely aligned with the mission. So there's never any like, oh, we're like an ESG company and we're trying to make money and there's a clash between the balance sheet and like what what the mission is of the company. Um. So I literally went bottoms up on the every, basically every manufacturing industry in America.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  So when I landed here, I didn't know what specific industry in manufacturing I wanted to build this type of company in. So I literally bottoms up analyzed, you know, food, paper, plastics, you know, logistics, aerospace, like every type of manufacturing you can think of.

• 7:10Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you do that? What like, what's the process? You say, hey, I want to go learn about the paper manufacturing, like, supply chain. What do you do?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  You call like a hundred people a day.

• 7:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Um. So the, the, there's a lot of alpha in manufacturing because it's not like you can, you know, download a report or it's on Zoom info or something where like you can understand the margins of a food manufacturing business, for example, right? The knowledge is out there. There's a ton of plant managers and people, experts in the industry or whatever, but it's, um. Yes, I, I literally just reached out to, you know, fifty to a hundred people a day from all these different industries and started to learn. You know, where's the technology at? You know, how automated is each industry? What are the margins? How fragmented is supply base? Like, what are the macro challenges? What are the micro challenges? And started hearing the same beat in aerospace where it was this like Keith Raboy, highly fragmented, low NPS. You know, you have to vertically integrate this whole problem for the, you know, type of, type of market.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Um. And because of the boom in commercial space, there was huge changing demand signals from the customer side. You know, they're moving ten times faster than the legacy primes. There's net new spend all over the place and the supply chain is really breaking. And basically what I realized was, um, there's this enormous, you know, forty, fifteen billion dollar high margin market that's being served by three to four thousand literal mom and pop small businesses. The average revenue of a single business is about eight to nine million dollars. It's unbelievably fragmented. And all these businesses basically got started either around the time of the Cold War or the first space race. And basically what you've got is all these amazing, incredible, you know, family operated manufacturing businesses

• 8:42Speaker 02

  serving our most important companies in space, defense, semiconductor manufacturing, you know, eVTOL.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  And it's just a period of time where the customers are basically just moving too fast and the supply chain domestically that's making pots for these companies is just not keeping up. And when I realize that, and then when you realize the geopolitical importance of the US having strong space and defense capability, especially in this decade when we're butting heads with China, you know, the reserve currency of the world might be shifting, you know, either to like a, you know, a kind of a polar, multipolar system, or you've got like the rise of Bitcoin as well as like a potential pseudo reserve currency of the world. So there's all these interesting dynamics. And once you realize that there's huge customer pain right now, but also for the country and for, you know, having, having a US-led system where it's largely free, and you understand that, you know, none of these important companies that are making rockets, satellites, jets and drones can

• 9:34Speaker 02

  operate over the next decade and really increase their production to the level that we need them to without the supply base being really fixed, then it's perfect mission alignment. But yeah, it was all bottoms up, brute force discovery. Yeah.

• 9:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So when we look at the aerospace, uh, space or industry, um, what's fascinating to me is there's, uh, I listened to a couple of podcasts that you did. And one of the things that you brought up was like, look, pretty much all the players were built for like the original space race, right? And they've been around for a long time. They're usually owner operated. They're relatively small in the grand scheme of things, you know, millions of dollars to maybe low tens of millions of dollars in revenue, a small employee base, super, super fragmented to your point, uh, almost, you know, no technology in the way that you or I would think of, of kind of technology and where it is today. Uh, and it kind of just feels like it's like a good gig. Like, like when I was listening

• 10:27Anthony Pompliano?

  to you talk about it, I kind of thought of it as like, oh, it's the type of thing where like, you know, you get done early and like, you can like go golfing with your buddies and like, it provides a good life for you and your family and like, you're off to the races. But it's not the 90, 100, 120 hour, you know, work week. How do we go and solve real problems? It's more like, oh, I got this contract, it lasts for a long time. It's providing this great kind of financial benefit. Is that like a fair characterization or am I being too kind of tough on analyzing like the existing? Part of the system.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  So I think there's some businesses where the owner is kind of absent and you know, it is like that. You know, they've got a bunch of Northrop Grumman contracts and it's been rolling for 20 years and they're never gonna have to reshore that business like it's always gonna stay there. It's a very sticky revenue base. I think a lot of owner operator machinists do have a really tough time like like manufacturing is hard. These people are like incredible at what they do as owner operators.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  But yeah, there are there are some of these legacy companies where there's probably not a lot of work involved. You know, the employees have been there for 20 years, the contracts have been there for 30 years. Don't worry about it. And there is a definitely, especially in defense, there's a huge subset of businesses like that where yeah, they've they've been around for 20 years, they're gonna be around for 20 years and it's a pretty easy gig. Yeah.

• 11:41Anthony Pompliano?

  So when we start to think about what you're actually building, right? So there's a fragmented kind of I'll call it an analog system, even though there's a little software, mostly analog. What what are you building? Like, how does this work from like a software and you're laughing because I know people are asking you this, right? Yeah, but it's from what I understand, it's a software manufacturing and supply chain.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  We're building highly automated factories, basically.

• 12:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Do you have physical factories?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have two in the moment in LA.

• 12:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain more.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  So basically, from a customer's perspective, what they want is what they're getting is hey, they say, hey, I want a bunch of rocket engine parts and they get they're getting them in 10 to 12 weeks. Thirty to 40% of those orders end up several weeks later have quality issues. And then the customer service is incredibly poor. Like I call Pumps Machine Shop and say like, hey, you promised me this in six weeks. I haven't heard anything and it's week five, like what's going on? And then you like hang up the phone or you don't even know because you don't have the capacity of your own factory, right?

• 12:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So these big rocket manufacturers, they're literally calling like mom and pop shops to get some of these parts right now?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, completely. So the entire advanced manufacturing like supply chain in the US is basically resting on this this house of cards of small machine shops, which did an incredible job for the country in the first space race in the Cold War, but are now just no longer keeping up with the demands of all these advanced companies.

• 12:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And how much of this is there's challenges with like quality? So like I order five parts from five different people and they make all come in different you know, measurements or quality or stuff like that versus it's just like I need the five parts and like I don't know if I get them today or in a week.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Both.

• 13:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Both, okay.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  So like what can happen is you might be like an aerospace engineer that's trying to get a satellite design done by the first of June, right? And you've got an assembly team, so you need the parts a couple of weeks beforehand. So you've sent out all these contracts for different parts and they've all said, yeah, we'll definitely get them to you by like, you know, the first of May. So firstly, like half of those will end up in the third week of May. So now your assembly team is panicking, which is like terrible, right? Be like trying to run a McDonald's and you're like, your patty supplier just can't really tell you whether the patties are coming on Thursday or like next Monday. How can you possibly serve customers? It's completely insane. On the quality side, the tolerances of parts that the supply base and that we are making are down to like micron, you know, surface profile tolerances, right? So you might look at like a satellite housing that looks, you know, the size of a laptop.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  And across that entire surface, the position of a hole has to correlate to a position of another hole within a couple of microns. So you're, you're dealing with tolerances where like, um, we climate control our factory down to like one degree Fahrenheit variance. In machining, if the sun shines on a machine at the start of the day, the parts will come off completely different to the end of the day when the sun is not shining through the window. Cause you down, you down to so incredibly close like tolerance for the quality side that even like the heat thermal expansion properties of like the aluminum part can like literally change based on, you know, a couple of degrees in weather. So it's really hard to do properly. But yeah,

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, it sounds really hard.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you're in this, you're in this pressure cooker situation where like, you know, you're screaming at me saying, I'm trying to make this satellite. I'm trying to get you parts. And maybe on the day that we're meant to ship them, I call you and like, hey, two of them are out of tolerance. Like can, can you, can you just accept them anyway and use them? Like it's completely, it's completely insane.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  One of the things that I read too, when you guys announced your fundraising was that you said that you guys were hiring people from all over basically. I think the, the companies you had mentioned were like Chick-fil-A and Walmart.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  And you have them basically down to make the, they're able to make the parts within 30 days.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  How are you able to do that?

• 15:04Speaker 02

  So this is where the software comes in. So basically from every part of the process, from, you know, quoting a job to scheduling the factory and managing capacity, and then doing all the workflow of like, you know, how do you spit out all the tasks to either machines or humans as, as part of this manufacturing process? A lot of it is digital because you actually got to program the machine to like cut these parts, you know, it's custom geometry every single time. And then operating the machines can be incredibly difficult where you're using firstly, these things are like $2 million each. They're incredibly like, you know, they're two tons. You know, they're moving around 2,000 pounds of steel at like, you know, 1.2 Gs, but still hitting like sub-micron tolerances. They're incredible things, right?

• 15:43Speaker 02

  And usually what happens is you've got a custom piece of software that the manufacturer has written, where you have to learn this obscure code base or learn this obscure user interface to just run one of the machines.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  So what we've done with all of our software is basically at each step of this process, including running the machines, automated 80 or 90% of it. And then wrapped our own user interfaces around the 10% that's still very hard for a computer to do. There are some computation stuff that, you know, a human can select the right outcome in five minutes, but it might take three PhDs for five years to automate that bit. But we wrap it around a way, simply user interface, so that an operator from, say, Chick-fil-A can be running one of these five axis machines in 30 days because they're not starting from scratch and learning how to set a tool or figure out what this crazy UI is or get into the depth of this machine to figure out how to even turn it on. Most of that's automated and the tasks they have to do are in our software that we've basically connected everything together so that, you know, you can set someone in front of a machine.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  It's not, you know, it's not super intimidating, you know, our software looks more like, you know, Instagram or something like that. And then that's how we're doing the whole thing.

• 16:46Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about this, are you starting with a specific type of part?

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so like I assume folk focus is really important here, get it right. And then you kind of expand. What are the parts that you're starting with?

• 16:56Speaker 02

  So anything in aluminum within a bounding box of about, you know, 28 inches cubed. And the reason for that is in aerospace, you've basically got like aluminum, steel, titanium and in canals and, you know, in canals might go on a rocket engine because it, you know, it can get really hot and doesn't warp. Aluminum's like great for satellites or like rocket housings and stuff. So basically we built a factory that as long as it's aluminum, you know, within a certain bounding box, you can throw a CAD file at us and we'll spit out a part, you know, 10x faster than anybody else, basically.

• 17:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And is this like the equivalent of 3D printing, but with different materials? Or like, how are you doing it?

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is CNC machining, which is subtractive. So additive is, you know, you build up deposition of material, subtractive is you cut it away. And for aerospace and defense and semiconductor, the quality and the tolerances is so tight that 3D printing technology is five to six years away from having tight enough tolerances to be able to make aerospace parts. So if you wanted to print something 3D printed for automotive, where like it might be within a couple of foul quality because a car needs to be accurate, but not like super accurate.

• 17:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  But if you're making something for, you know, a human spaceflight program, like it has to be super accurate, otherwise like people can die and the 3D printing technology just isn't there.

• 18:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so the subtractive model is much better. Okay. Now, another question I have is, uh, there's Varda, there's a bunch of these companies that now, I think. The invention of the reusable rocket, right? And the ability to kind of drop the cost of rocketry is going to lead to the explosion of space, let's call it.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 18:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you guys targeting the Vardas of the world? Or are you targeting the like Lockheed, you know, what I would think of like the legacy people who have been participating in kind of this space-enabled world? Like, who is the better customer? Like somebody who's technology-enabled or somebody who has no technology at all, really?

• 18:46Speaker 02

  So the short answer is both.

• 18:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  But for this year, we're just doing what I would call like new commercial space and defense.

• 18:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Which is companies like Varda and Delian, who co-founded Varda, led, co-led our seed round with Lux Capital. This is almost a year ago now. So.

• 19:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't tell us that. We're going to get mad at Delian for not calling us.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Go ahead. I was just saying, I was checking my phone. I didn't see a call.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like, where's the alpha?

• 19:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, all right, Delian. And then he's like, yo, by the way, should bring Chris on the podcast. Like, hey, Stripe 2, Delian.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  It could have been 12 months ago.

• 19:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's do this in reverse next time.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 19:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So, but those types of companies are the ones that actually.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  New space first, because it's your classic startup dynamic of like, hey, if you're Stripe, you want to sell to Y Combinator startups because they'll adopt you quickly, right?

• 19:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And they understand the value. You probably do less like convincing them.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And then what I would call the larger primes or the larger space companies, no, we're engaging with them as well. The response since we announced the fundraise has been absolutely incredible. It's just their internal processes might take six months to onboard us, whereas, you know, a new space company might take three weeks. So we're working with both of them in parallel, but we don't expect any revenue to kick in from the like larger legacy companies or, no, they're not even legacy companies. They're just massive, massive, massive companies.

• 20:04Anthony Pompliano?

  More bureaucratic.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or they're working on government programs, so, you know, their processes have to be way, way, way tighter than someone who's just putting a commercial satellite up.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  How, how long does it take to build a factory?

• 20:15Speaker 02

  So we, we retrofitted an existing factory within, I think, like 47 days.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Oh, shit, that's crazy.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Which is like nine to 12 months faster than anybody else. The new factory that is coming online, which is about 100,000 square foot, just, you know, in Torrance in LA, will come online, I think roughly July 1st. And that took us from signing the lease, I think it'll be like five months. Um, because

• 20:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Fast too.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  It's yeah, super fast because it's it's like rolling out a Starbucks franchise or rolling out an Amazon logistics center. Like for Amazon to scale, one of the things they have to get really good at, and they did get really good at, is rolling out logistics centers super, super fast. So, you know, you acquire a site and within 60 days, there's a hundred people that, you know, pick packing books or whatever. We basically have to do the same thing. This is why this is such a painful business to execute is because if we want to hit like a exponential growth curve, like your average SaaS company, we have to have a great product, we have to be great at selling it, we have to be great at onboarding customers. We also have to learn how to scale factories as fast as fucking like you can roll out Starbucks franchises or you can roll out Amazon logistics centers. So part of what, part of our like competitive advantage is like, you know, give us another six months and we'll launch like two factories and start building the third one and then skip ahead a year and like

• 21:23Speaker 02

  good luck finding another team who can like build factories in a couple of months, you know?

• 21:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you think about building the factory, how much of it's like, uh, the, I'll call it the organization of the machinery versus there's other things you have to do? Like what's the slowest part of it right now?

• 21:37Speaker 02

  I mean, I'll give you an example. We nearly lost schedule because you can barely find any concrete or cement in the country right now, just because of supply chain issues. That's part of the Ukraine, Russia conflict, but also

• 21:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Bro, you're going to space and you can't find fucking concrete?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, literally. Yeah. So these machines are so accurate that we actually have to retrofit the factories with 18 inch concrete foundations and vibration isolation pads. If a truck drives past, they don't, they don't move, right?

• 22:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  And your usual out of the box factory that you, you know, acquire from commercial real estate maybe has like four to six inches, right? So we have to like literally rip up the floors and like do it again. We're putting HVAC in the entire factory so that at any point in the factory, it's climate controlled within a couple of degrees Fahrenheit. So

• 22:16Anthony Pompliano?

  For a hundred thousand square foot factory, that's a lot.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a lot of, it's like a lot of energy and it's a lot of, uh, it's a lot of HVAC. It's really expensive. But like, you know, a lot of the HVAC material is made out of like, you know, aluminum tubing or steel tubing and you just like can't get the raw materials at the moment. So we're, we're just fighting this inflationary effect of both the conflict and the Fed all the time because it's causing these massive supply chain shocks. So part of what we do is yeah, we have to retrofit the buildings to be, um, to land the machines. And then, you know, it's effectively just plugging everything in and setting everything up and commissioning the machines. So, yeah.

• 22:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Infla- inflation's only eight and a half percent. Don't worry about it.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Chris, are you guys?

• 22:52Speaker 04

  Going after these contracts yourselves, or you're just kind of licensing stuff out to mom, pop shops, building better facilities for?

• 22:58Speaker 02

  No, we do. We do with the direct, direct with our, direct with the customers.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  How, um, how do those contracts work?

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Some of them are long term, like you're building a bunch of satellites for someone and it's a five year deal. It's like ARR, right? Um, some of it is more like, uh, the, the closest analogy I would give is like Dropbox or Box, where like some of the users might be, oh, they've just, you know, one buyer has just found it online. And then, you know, they're using it, you know, for incremental stuff. And then the CTO will come along and be like, wow, you guys are amazing. We're rolling, we're rolling this out as a service across the.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  Will you guys bid for the contract or?

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. But, but most of the contracts that we do are like long-term kind of capacity deals, where someone's coming along and saying, hey, you know, we're going to make a hundred million in parts next year. We want to, we want to put a deal down for 10 million in Hadrian capacity. And now underneath that, what are the parts? We don't know because it'll depend on what they need to make over the year. But that's, that's the way we're structuring it. So it looks more, much more like a data center than it does a factory.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  How do you, how do you run the business? Cause I'm assuming you have technologists, you have like the manufacturing component. You've got the executive team, et cetera. Like what, what is like a, a week look like at the business right now in terms of, are there specific standing meetings or what does that look like?

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think the most unique thing about how we've constructed the business is, is two main points, which is, um, everyone who's tried to automate manufacturing before has taken this very like coastal elite approach. Either it's, you know, people in suits who have MBAs going, I've got a finance degree, I'm going to acquire a manufacturing business and tell you guys what to do, which is super arrogant, like people in manufacturing have the hardest job on the planet and they're geniuses. The software angle to that is, hey, you know, I've got, I've got a PhD and I'm going to automate everything and I'm not even going to listen to you. I'm just going to assume I can figure it out. So the unique thing about Hadrian is we have the best machinists in the country. Have been making aerospace parts for, you know, 10 to 20 years, who also know enough about software where we can put software engineers with them and they work together to build the company.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  So we basically have project teams, you know, with software engineers and machinists working in hand to hand across all parts of the business and we decentralize it. So it's kind of just like, hey, you sit next to your customer who is, you know, your, your, your teammate or whatever. But the people who are running the factory are the software engineers' customers and we run projects like that. And then every week, there's literally a customer service meeting about like, hey, here's what we here's what we fixed for you, you know, whatever. And culturally, that's really important because we need to continually teach people like, hey, you're coming out of Google and you know, you're super smart or whatever, but your customer is this guy on the floor who might be, you know, might be working hourly, you know, packing boxes or running a machine or whatever. And that's the most important cultural touch point is making sure we always serve the people in the factory who are doing the actual work

• 25:35Speaker 02

  versus taking this like really arrogant approach.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. When you think about talent, what's like the process look like to get a job at Hadrian?

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Depends on the role. I mean, software engineering, we have a super great pipeline, like tap us up with jobs at hadrian.co.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  That was a softball, by the way.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thanks, Tom. The funny thing about the factory jobs, though, is none of these people are on LinkedIn. And the market does not know that you can take someone who's, I don't know, working in hospitality, right? Getting grinded down by 12 hour, 12 hour weeks, maybe you're on 14, $15 in California, you know, you're, you're, you're burning daylight because, you know, Sweet Greens or whatever can't hire employees at the moment because, you know, the great resignation or whatever. And the market in general doesn't understand that you can onboard to Hadrian, get a job at a way higher hourly rate, and within 30 to 60 days be doing something really meaningful, like, you know, making rocket parts for the coolest rocket program in the country, right? And that's part of the thing why we have

• 26:32Speaker 02

  to make the brand so cool is to make sure of that, like boosting that awareness, because none of these folks are on LinkedIn, so you can't really go outbound and reach them. And yeah, that's a, it's a real challenge.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  So in the software hiring process, like, what does that look like in terms of, are you giving them like tests to take home? I'm fascinated by a business like this, which is you need to have an immense knowledge in both software engineering,

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  but also need to understand just, hey, I can write code, but also like, there's a manufacturing component to this. There's various different files, etc.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  So we basically like, we've got good, good pattern matching, but the two things we test for and look for is basically, You know, can you be a product engineer? Like, are you going to sit there waiting for someone to tell you what to do? Or can we put you next to one of the internal customers and just going to start solving problems for them? And we actually, in the interviewing cycle, have them interact with one of their potential coworkers who they're going to be writing software for. And if that goes well, it's a really good signal. And we interview some amazing software engineers that just kind of stumble around and say like, I don't know what to build or whatever. Other ones, they get off the call and they're like, you know, this was awesome. Like, you know, I can solve all these problems, like, super hyped. And they're kind of doing their own mini product management. And the second thing is, we have a mechatronics and robotics team. We have a computational geometry team. We have a data science team. We have a backend and frontend team.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Like, we have a very broad, you know, software engineering practice within Hadrian. So as part of the technical assessment, we're actually not only going, are you a great engineer? But like, where's your personality? Like, do you want to integrate with the machines? Like, do you want to write, you know, things in the cloud for computing, you know, geometry calculations? Like, are you a mathy person? Are you more of a data scientist? So we're kind of doing this matching process as well.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  So when you think about this, is it fair to say that SpaceX basically dropped the cost of rocket launches? And that was an enabling factor to this kind of explosion of interest in doing things in space?

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  And really, you all are building the ability to enable even more of an explosion? Because now, all those people who want to build these aerospace or space-type companies, there's a manufacturing solution that will allow them to get the parts and kind of enable them to actually do it?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. You know, so it's kind of like, you know, 10 years ago, to start a software company might have cost a million dollars because you had to write everything from scratch. Figure out how to spin up your own servers, figure out how to write payments, you know, whatever. And then you've got like Stripe, Twilio, AWS. And now, starting a software company is maybe a couple hundred bucks if you've got the skills, right? And that enables this huge Cambrian explosion of many, many more software companies. What SpaceX has done and other companies like SpaceX have massively lowered the cost of launch. So you're getting a ton, tons and tons and tons of new things being launched to space. What we want to do with Hadrian is, by lowering the barrier of entry of advanced manufacturing and abstracting all these supply chain problems away to a user interface for a new aerospace engineer or someone working in defense,

• 29:18Speaker 02

  is lowering the costs massively for existing companies making rockets, satellites, jets, drones, you know, semiconductor factories. But then, once this infrastructure layer exists, what I think is going to happen is when you lower the barrier of entry of starting something, you're just going to see tons and tons and tons of more aerospace engineers, mechanical engineers, starting new space companies because they've got this infrastructure layer there and they can just spin it up instantly versus having to spend a year just figuring out how to get parts. Yeah.

• 29:45Anthony Pompliano?

  SpaceX, $100 billion company, how big can this be?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Adrian, so I mean, right now, the industry, just in high-precision manufacturing alone, is 40 billion in high-margin revenue today, not accounting for the secular growth.

• 29:57Anthony Pompliano?

  40 billion in, you said, high-margin revenue?

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Yep, like, right now.

• 30:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Not accounting for any future growth in defense. You know, you can assume if a company like Andor grows, this, you know, the secular thing grows. So I think we can be Amazon big, basically. If we get the next two years right, we're so far ahead of anybody else that I don't see any reason why we can't, you know, it's like an AWS-style thing, where the infrastructure layer for everybody, there is no other option. Yeah.

• 30:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And basically, all of the quote-unquote incumbents, they're so far behind from a technology software standpoint. They don't actually understand a lot of this stuff of how to do it. So even if they recognize the problem, there's an advantage against the incumbents. And then also, there's this element of, I don't know, there's 10 investors in the world that I think if you get them behind you, you got a much better shot in something like this. You've got most of them.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And then, really, it ends up being, in a business like this, like every 30 days that you're working and somebody else hasn't started their company, it's just compounding and like, they'll never catch you.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it's the capital side, it's the talent side, it's the understanding side, it's progress with customers, it's all that other stuff. But yeah, we're learning all these hard incremental lessons. So I think in about six months' time, another company could raise $200 million and start and they would never catch up because they'd be starting with the B-team or the C-tier team. And, you know, they're trying to catch up not having learned all these hard incremental lessons, which actually let us move fast today.

• 31:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Have you seen demand just rise more and more by the month or by the year in this industry?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Literally, literally, the biggest problem in space and defense at the moment that no one's talking about is it's just massively supply constrained. No one can get parts.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Gotcha.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Anyone with any sort of, like, ignore the technology. Ignore how efficient we are. If you, if we just spun up a half-decent machine shop right now, there's just a massive supply and demand imbalance. It's completely insane. Yeah. So you're seeing lead times just grow and grow and grow and grow and grow.

• 31:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe let me check out your software for a little bit and see kind of how you're doing everything. If I license that.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  No, no, we'll franchise it out. Pomp machine shop.

• 31:59Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, we don't need any more shit going on.

• 32:02Anthony Pompliano?

  We got enough cash flow. Do you have any, any guesses on when we're gonna be on Mars?

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Oh, definitely within 10 years.

• 32:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Within 10 years?

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there are two like.

• 32:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Like you're gonna be there or just like a human will be there?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Oh, definitely a human. Yeah, so there are two launch windows to Mars. It's 2024 and 2028. Cause you gotta wait for a four year cycle, cause the orbits.

• 32:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's when we're the closest, it's the least distance.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, and, and.

• 32:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not a genius, but like I figured that one out.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, cause the biggest, the biggest cost to a Mars mission is basically getting enough rocket fuel in orbit. And that's super expensive because it's heavy. So.

• 32:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and that's enough to get there and back or just get there?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know what Elon's got planned. Like, you know.

• 32:38Anthony Pompliano?

  That sounded like just to get there, fellas.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Also not, not the smartest cookie in the shed or whatever the fuck phrase is, but yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's, that's a plan. And I, I really don't think that SpaceX or anyone else shooting it will let us slip past 2028. Cause then you're in like the mid 30s is your next opportunity and that's a long time to wait.

• 32:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So let me ask a couple of questions actually about Mars. And I'm assuming you just, cause of what you guys do, have thought a little bit more about this than I have. One of the, the, what maybe started out as a conspiracy theory in my mind, but now it's started to become more of a, a real theory. Given that the boring company just raised $675 million at a 5.6 billion valuation. I've always thought that, is he practicing on Earth for what he's gonna have to do on Mars?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know this firsthand, but that would be the guess.

• 33:21Anthony Pompliano?

  That, that, to me, that would be the thing, right?

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Probably need, you know, solar cars, battery powered things, cause you're not gonna have a combustion engine. Okay. You probably need to dig because there's not a lot of atmosphere. So you don't want to build over ground bases. You want to build underground ones. Like, okay. You need vertical takeoff and landing for getting things to and from the surface. Like, you know, it's not just landing a rocket or launching one. You need to like land it vertically, you know? It's like, ah, yeah.

• 33:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, is this guy a fucking genius?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, right. Like, like, like when you start to put it together and you're looking at this, you're like, this dude is out here. He, he's playing a, a practice game and he's built, you know, whatever, 1.5, $2 trillion worth of value and he's practicing.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  What do you think the Twitter use case is for Mars then?

• 34:09Anthony Pompliano?

  To honest to God, this is what I really, I really do think that he's telling the truth when he says that he doesn't care about the economics and it would not surprise, I'm not gonna say he's gonna do this, but like, I think this is what he should do and it would not surprise me if he did it. If he took it private, he fired like 80% of the staff and he open sourced the whole thing.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, you do the Calicon thing.

• 34:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but, but Calicon wouldn't fire 80% of the staff and then try to like sell it later. I literally mean buy Twitter, fire 80, 90% of the staff, just keep the engineering team, open source it, and then literally say, this is now for the internet. And like, some kid in India who's, you know, 18 years old, who just learned to code and they come up with some great feature, why can't I add that to my Twitter product?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  I think that would be wonderful. I think, I think the backend of Twitter might be a dumpster fire, so.

• 34:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Possible.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Probable.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:02Anthony Pompliano?

  There's enough spam on here for a lifetime.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  I feel like when you think about all the businesses he has going though, and specifically Tesla, right? His whole thing is that they don't spend any money on marketing and it's zero dollar cost item. Twitter is that marketing engine, obviously.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's vertically integrated, yeah, yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  If you're Tesla and you're Elon Musk and you can spend $15 billion of your own money, go take out money, whatever, financing wise, and go acquire that and basically buy yourself insurance, right? I mean, hey, I'm just saying, if the president can get deplatformed, anyone can get deplatformed.

• 35:31Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that Elon Musk is buying Twitter as insurance?

• 35:33Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 35:34Anthony Pompliano?

  As his marketing engine for Tesla?

• 35:35Speaker 03

  I don't know, I'm just saying it makes sense.

• 35:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Damn, bro, you, you got more of a ticket to go after me.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  You got deep down the rabbit hole.

• 35:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm just saying. That's a big boy conspiracy theory.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Is that coughing in that cup?

• 35:44Speaker 03

  I'm just saying, it would make sense.

• 35:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you, you really think that he cares about the econo, let's start with the economics? You guys think he cares about the economics of Twitter?

• 35:53Speaker 02

  You have to, because otherwise, you know, I don't know if you saw the, the readout of the Morgan Stanley deal? There's like a $500 million revolver, there's a bunch of debt tranches, like you have to.

• 36:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So he wouldn't buy it with cash? He basically would go and do an LBO essentially?

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Well, you gotta do an LBO and even if, even if he didn't personally care about the economics.

• 36:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Somebody does.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  The partners have to, so there has to be a justification for it.

• 36:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Money in the deals, like how much we buy it for.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Totally. You still got like, you know, even if, even if Morgan Stanley are the biggest Elon fans, they still got to underwrite it, you know, it's some IRR, right? It's just, you know.

• 36:27Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but at some point, it seemed like he was going to take a run at this by himself. And he was gonna say, I'm gonna just bet 20% of my net worth. I mean, we're 250 billion, right?

• 36:35Speaker 02

  This is classic, like, you know, mid eighties barbarians at the gate stuff, right? Where, you know, first you get up to like 9.9%, you send a nice board letter saying like, hey, I'm on the board now, you know, you do like the billions thing. And then obviously whatever happened in that, that board spill didn't go well. And then the next move on the thing is, yeah, you, you, you put a syndicate together with a couple of banks funding it, you do, you do the barbarians at the gate thing and you, you know, LBR, LBO, you know, RJ Novisco or whatever.

• 37:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you want to hear our theory as to why he didn't join the board?

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, go for it.

• 37:04Anthony Pompliano?

  They probably sent him like the code of conduct and like the, the, uh,

• 37:07Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 37:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Public policy speech and like all that stuff. And he was like, no, I'm not agreeing to none of this shit.

• 37:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm on Twitter so I can tweet whatever I want.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  So this is the most interesting thing.

• 37:16Anthony Pompliano?

  He's like, the SEC can't even tell me to stop tweeting.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. And then you look at the board of directors and like, none of them have any significant Twitter shareholdings. So they're not aligned. They all seem to come from funny places. Like, none of it makes a lot of sense. And you got Jack putting out like two kind of snipey comments. And obviously he can't say anything publicly, but you know, he's hinting at stuff that might've been going on for like several years. So like.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Do you think Jack and Elon are in cahoots and Elon Bison brings Jack back? Yes, that was my second tinfoil.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  Was that Jack? With a vengeance? Was that Jack got forced out essentially?

• 37:48Speaker 02

  I think this is a new project. We're gonna do pump conspiracy theories.

• 37:51Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  I think he was against a lot of the stuff that was happening towards the end and he basically wanted nothing to do with that. And then if Elon was to buy it, he would be much more inclined or interested to run.

• 38:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I do think a lot of the people shooting at Jack when he was the CEO of Twitter didn't realize that internally, he was like, I think of it like he was like holding everyone back. He was like.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  No, no, no. You seen the Spiderman on the train thing?

• 38:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, yes. Hundred percent.

• 38:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, if he would have just been like, all right, fine, I'll do whatever you want. Like, every single one of us would be off Twitter too. Like, forget just the president. Like, it would have been over.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. Like, Jack, Jack is ultimately like a free speech proponent, you know, as, as are we all in this room. But, yeah, I, I do think that the company was like pseudo taken over and Jack was firewalling a lot of it. And now that he's gone, like, we don't have that anymore.

• 38:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's, um, it's, it's pretty wild. Are there any other companies that you find really fascinating right now, like tech wise or, or space related?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  So I still think, so obviously all of our customers are making amazing shit like rocket engine companies, drone companies. I mean, that is actually the coolest thing is just like, holy shit, like this part is going on this amazing piece of equipment. And we're like, you know, um, in terms of other companies broadly, I think like companies like Varda, which are doing really interesting plays and like shout out to Delian, here's some free alpha, like returning capsules with goods, you know, from space for manufacturing, whether it's pharma or defense applications, especially when, I don't know if you guys know this, the ISS is getting retired in 2028. So like anyone building anything that is stable in orbit for capsules or return or whatever, has just a huge run ahead of them. Um, cause a lot of the ISS revenue is actually from like pharma companies, you

• 39:24Speaker 02

  know, paying them 10, 20 million dollars a year. So I think something like that is huge. I think that, uh, you guys know Flexport, Ryan Peterson's companies. I think that like Flexport will just slowly grow to a like 200 billion dollar company.

• 39:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm shocked. I think the latest valuations, we can Google real quick. I think it's only like eight billion, 10 billion, something like that. Right? And, uh, for how important and how dominant it is, I was shocked at how low the valuation.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. I don't, I don't know anything about that deal specifically, but like Ryan and his team and their COO Sane are like incredible operators. And it wouldn't shock me if, you know, everyone was asleep at the wheel and we woke up in five years' time and it was like one of the biggest companies on the planet.

• 40:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I, I, that I completely agree with. And I actually was shocked when I, uh, cause I forget what happened. Maybe he, I think he went on the all in podcast and I was listening to him and, uh, I'd heard him talk a bunch of times before and thought, you know, pretty highly of him. Uh, but he said a couple of things, how big is this company? And I went and I Googled it and it was only eight billion. And I remember being like, dude, this company should be worth a gazillion dollars, right?

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. And I, and I think it will be.

• 40:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Okay. All right. So, uh, so that's your two for two Varda, Flexport. I agree with both those.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  And then like I would, if I could, if I had any money, uh, that's liquid, which I don't.

• 40:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I have a great deal for you. I'll give you money. You give me shares and then you'll have money and you can go do whatever you want.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Isn't there a name? Is there a word for that?

• 40:50Speaker 02

  And then I then I would say any any animal or human longevity company.

• 40:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, interesting.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 40:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Why, why animal?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  So this is going to get a little bit weird, but a lot of the problems with longevity companies is the FDA.

• 41:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Cause it's a huge regulatory environment, right? And the way biotech works is you either invent a new molecule and that molecule become kind of becomes like a regulatory bridge. So a lot of what happens is I don't Merck or whatever invest a billion dollars into this particular compound. And then everyone follows on because the FDA is like approve that compound. So any modification to a compound that looks like that, basically it's it's like an opportunity cost. You don't have to spend a billion dollars to get it through the FDA and do all these trials. So you can kind of like go in stream with it. There are a bunch of really interesting longevity companies that are doing longevity for animals. And the bet is effectively that it's a firstly, it's an amazing market because if you could sell technology or a booster shot to a dog, you know, you know, do you guys have any pets?

• 41:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I was laughing because they're in the comments here. I have a dog named Ranger and they said Ranger is going to live to be 100.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  All right. So let's say Ranger, like, you know, like family dog, like cool name for a dog. Sounds like a German shepherd or something cool like that, right?

• 42:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Golden retriever.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  If Rangers like, okay, golden retrievers, Rangers like eight years old and you could pay a thousand dollars to make him live till 12, you'd probably do it. So it's an amazing commercial market, right? And but it's also a regular pathway to human longevity because it's the same, it's the same technology. So if you can race to get there with animals and you have this kind of regulatory barrier to entry, then you can be the first person to do human longevity. And that is just like a huge, huge, huge market that no one's thinking about. There are a couple of really cool startups.

• 42:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait, I got a crazy stat. This is the same stat that you're about to say.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  I was gonna read it because I sent it so I get to read it.

• 42:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, this is, this is a, this might be the wildest stat we've shared on the show in a long time.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  That's a big call.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  It's wild and it goes along with what you were saying. So Bill De Alessandro tweeted this yesterday and he said, mind blowing stat. There are more dogs in the United States, 76 million than there are children under 18, 73 million.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  There you go. Secular decline of the American empire.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, 38% of households have at least one dog and only 30% of households have at least one child. The dog market is bigger than the kids market.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 43:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Like that, that is mind blowing.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:04Anthony Pompliano?

  There are more dogs in the United States than there are children under the age of 18.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we are fucked.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, dog companies. Oh, yeah, the birth rate's fucked. Yeah, this is this is this is a secular decline of the American empire. Yeah, yeah.

• 43:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  You guys gotta have more kids.

• 43:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Market's not bigger. Well, hold on a second. Do you have kids?

• 43:22Speaker 02

  No, I won't.

• 43:22Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, wow. I have one. So why don't y'all pick it up around here, all right?

• 43:27Speaker 02

  My personal promise to the board was that I would not try and get a dog or start a family until at least a series B. I just like done at time.

• 43:34Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a board's a certain ass a lot of really important things now. We had somebody come in here recently.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And they said that they had bought so much Bitcoin that the board made them promise they wouldn't buy any more Bitcoin on the balance sheet or they couldn't raise the round.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Who was that?

• 43:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Who was it? Oh, Joe from Mudwater. They basically had bought.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Mudwater's treasury is in Bitcoin?

• 43:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 43:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Like they were.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Like they're a mushroom company. What are you gonna do?

• 43:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So, but yeah, the birth rate is obviously huge, huge problem. But I think when you put it in contrast with the dog, like population, right? Say everyone's like, oh, yeah, dogs are popular, but like, no way there's more dogs than kids. But yes, there is.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, huge problem.

• 44:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that space in any way solves that stuff?

• 44:21Anthony Pompliano?

  It actually probably hurts it, right?

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, you've got this weird like, you know, ultimately, I think every fight in every arena, whether it's political or whatever, can be boiled down to like, are you are you a degrother or are you a grother? Like, are you are you for growth or are you for decline, right?

• 44:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, there's two like perspectives I'd say growth versus non-growth. And then I also always talk about like, problem solver versus like, critiquer of problem solvers.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  But I think that's degrowth. I think I think it's like, hey, we want this like, world government totalitarian thing where there's like, you know, population control or like, you know, as a central central bank currency where like, we can make sure we're not using as many resources and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's all it's all degrowth. Yeah. The problem with space is that the narrative that you see, oh, it's a billionaire space race, like you got Bernie Sanders out there, you're like, whatever.

• 45:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Bernie would go to space if he could.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 45:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Like he was like this dead serious.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  He's gonna have to start lifting.

• 45:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Cause like you have to be jacked. Like actually, that was the funniest thing is like, you remember that photo from Bezos when he went from skinny to jacked like three years ago? Everyone in the space industry was like, he's doing astronaut training.

• 45:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cause it's obvious he started a space company. That's, that's why you have to be like super fit to be an astronaut.

• 45:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, rewind, rewind.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  That or? Yeah.

• 45:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Jeff Bezos is training to be an astronaut?

• 45:33Speaker 02

  No, this was like three years ago.

• 45:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  You remember at, uh, what's that, what's that conference?

• 45:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Sun Valley.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Sun Valley and previous, you know, photos from Jeff six months before Sun Valley, three years ago.

• 45:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And then he looked at the Terminator.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And everyone in the space industry knew that he was going up on a Blue Origin flight because he got jacked. Cause you have to be super fit to be an astronaut.

• 45:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And so literally Jeff Bezos, who was at the time, the most richest man in the world. He literally said, I want to go to space, but like he's not going.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Started training for it. Yeah.

• 45:58Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but he's not going to real space. He's going to like face space.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  But no, but if you think about the psychology three years ago, it's like, I gotta start.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  But what about the kid that was like 16 that went with him? He wasn't jacked.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. You don't, you don't have to, you don't have to be jacked to go into like that.

• 46:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. We call it face space around here.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  It's not face space. It's like, there's.

• 46:14Anthony Pompliano?

  If you use a hot air balloon, you don't have to be jacked.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  That's fair enough.

• 46:19Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So hot air balloon and our version of face space.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  I'm just saying.

• 46:22Anthony Pompliano?

  But if he does want to go, no, but this is serious. If he wants to go to ISS or anything like that. Okay. And as part of that, what is the training that astronauts, like, why did he become so physically fit from doing that? Is it just lifting weights and like cardiovascular stuff? Like if I just go to the gym?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Like it's just that?

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. You just have to be in much better shape than your average human.

• 46:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you think that he's going to go to ISS? Do you think he's going to try to go to Mars?

• 46:46Speaker 02

  I, I have no idea. That's an interesting thing. I wonder, I wonder if Elon's going to go to Mars or he's going to stay down here, but yeah, who knows?

• 46:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Musk, I think he said that he would go, but when he knew that it was, uh, not safe enough, he, I forget exactly what he said, but he basically was like, I'd go, it'd be a one-way trip and I would only go once I knew that like, I could still have impact when I got there.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 47:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So like, okay, that's kind of crazy.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. What about you, Paul?

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Mars?

• 47:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's my whole thing.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  You can do like time delayed podcasts.

• 47:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it would take a long time to send back. No, but I, but I think that there's a, a really interesting question around like, if you get sent to Mars, right? Let's just say that like, we were, uh, we were the central planners, right? And we could be like, all right, you go, you don't go, you go, you don't go. Who would you send? Like from society's perspective, who are the best people to send? Like, we obviously have to send some technologists, some like problem solving people, et cetera. Right? Also, what people get real weird about is like.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Gene pool.

• 47:45Anthony Pompliano?

  You, yep, you want gene pool? You also want, uh, the, uh, a group of people who want to create families and continue to reproduce, et cetera, on Mars. You also.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  You're missionaries.

• 47:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. You also want, uh, people who might not necessarily be there to solve scientific or technology related problems, but will make it, uh, viable and attractive for more people to want to come.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 48:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So like, you start thinking about this, like, you're planning a society.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Oh, of course you are. Yeah, yeah.

• 48:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And there's people that are in that bucket that should go. I think of like the Titanic with like women and children only. And it's like, sure, like, we morally think that that's the right thing.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  In a survival case, yeah, yeah.

• 48:27Anthony Pompliano?

  But.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  To build something.

• 48:29Anthony Pompliano?

  But if you were like, hey, in the whole Titanic, there's only 12 people that get to go and these 12 people, like humanity is going to count on to like survive.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:39Anthony Pompliano?

  People get mad, but you're probably not sending the kids.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  So the psychological thing here is really interesting. So there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of like studies that the space agencies do where they put 12 people in a fake capsule or whatever. And then they have a simulated mission control and they're giving people orders and yada, yada, yada. And basically, and they put them under pressure situations because they're trying to figure out like, how do we live on ISS for long term? How do we live in orbit? How do we live on Mars? And inevitably, most of the studies go bad. Because like within a week, it's like, they all team up against mission control and it becomes this weird effect of like.

• 49:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a huge psychological problem that no one's, no one's solved. Cause when you, when you split two people like that and it's isolating all this other stuff, like the ISS is super connected, so it doesn't cap. And a lot of the simulated studies of like living on another planet or whatever, like you just, you just turn and then, you know, you turn against mission control like that and it becomes this like split thing. Yeah.

• 49:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So what are they gonna do?

• 49:26Speaker 02

  No idea. It's unsolved.

• 49:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Or you just have to keep sending enough people where they feel like connected.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  This is what I'm saying. It's not, it's, it's, it's just to your point. It's not, it's not just a technology problem.

• 49:35Anthony Pompliano?

  How long is the communication right now? So like, i- if you were on Mars and you wanted to like, send photos back, like the rover or whatever, do we know how long the delay is?

• 49:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not, it's not far. So I don't know the time. It's not fast enough to control the rover. That's why the rover has to be autonomous, because you can give it directional shit, but you can't, it's not fast enough to like, pick up a rock. You know, it all has to be trained. I don't know. It's at least several hours, but I think.

• 49:57Anthony Pompliano?

  But hours is much better. It's not weeks.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  I don't know. We should look this up.

• 50:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  It takes five to 20 minutes for a radio signal to travel the distance from Mars and Earth.

• 50:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Five to 20 minutes, but that's just the radio signal.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So if you have any sort of data, et cetera, like, could be even harder. I mean, that, that's interesting. And then the other piece that I think becomes really interesting is.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  The laws?

• 50:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Huh? That, that's what I was gonna say.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  Elon gets there first. He makes the rules.

• 50:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Well, this is the interesting thing.

• 50:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So, well, do you remember when everyone was freaking out and they're like, Elon Musk said he's gonna create the laws on Mars? And everyone was like, we can't let the evil billionaires in. He was like, okay, you go then. Like, if you get there, you get to create the rules.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. The other thing is like, laws are only enforceable with threat of force, right? So if you're up in space by yourself, like, yeah, what are you gonna do?

• 50:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Yeah. But like Mars, like when you get there, if you have a society, like who, like, can, do you drive on the left or right side of the road?

• 50:47Speaker 02

  No, it all has to be really, really litigated. This is one of the most interesting things. Yeah.

• 50:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, you think that like, they're gonna set up a whole nother judicial system?

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. It's inevitable.

• 50:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  It's a completely different operating mode. There's survival instincts all over the place.

• 50:59Speaker 04

  How do countries think about it? Should it be like, should countries be racing to get there first and try to establish something there or?

• 51:05Speaker 02

  So there are treaties that govern this. There's the out of space treaty and the lunar treaty, which governs things like, it's like Antarctica. It's like, you can't just take shit off the lunar surface. You can't actually claim territory. You can put a base there, but you can't own land. There isn't one that governs the rest of the solar system.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  So that's completely up for grabs. Uh, but no, there are, yeah, there are.

• 51:25Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like Mars is up for grabs.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  It's not up for grabs in the like cowboy sense. It's just, there is no, there is no agreed upon legislation. That sounds like it's up for grabs.

• 51:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So if we somehow pulled a rabbit out of a hat, we got to Mars before Musk, like, we could be like, we own Mars. And then like, if he starts to try to get there, then he's invading us.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  I think it's a very similar thing to like, you know, a group of countries that are UN-aligned, will decide on something, the Mars Treaty, like the Luna Treaty. Now, is that enforceable?

• 51:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Who cares about the paper on Earth?

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Well, this is what I'm saying is like, if you're there first and you're there five years early.

• 52:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Then like, what are you gonna do?

• 52:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Whoever gets there with the most presence, right?

• 52:08Speaker 02

  No, correct. Yeah, this is what I'm saying.

• 52:10Anthony Pompliano?

  If you have authority, you have like power.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  What is the general estimate or thinking around what period of time we'll have like a sustainable living on Mars?

• 52:20Speaker 02

  I don't know about Mars. I think that'll be more like 15 to 20 years because it'll take a while for it to be sustainable, right? Sustainable being like, you don't have to continually ship food and supplies.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  I think if we pushed five or six billion into the moon, we could have it done in five years. Easy. If you just drop the ISS onto the moon and accelerated some of the technology around like water extraction and shit, easy.

• 52:40Speaker 03

  And what is the thought process on investing much more heavily in Mars versus the moon?

• 52:46Speaker 02

  It's just two schools of thought around like, how do you settle the solar system, right? So, one view is, one view is the moon is a perfect like fuel station.

• 52:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  It's a good test case and it has hydrogen and water and solar power, which is what you need to make rocket fuel, right? And the other case is it's not hard enough and it'll never be a long enough forcing function because you can resupply the moon much easier than Mars. So that one of the other schools of thought, which is for Mars, is you have to do the harder thing, otherwise we'll never set up something that's self-sustaining. And the other side of that is, you know, protecting human life, the moon is close enough to Earth that there was any sort of huge asteroid catastrophe, the moon would probably be taken out as well. Whereas Mars is far enough away that it's actually, you know, a hedge against a terminal event for humanity.

• 53:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So if I went, I'm being dead serious now. If I went and I raised $6 billion and I said to investors, I said, hey, I want to go build a moon base. You think that could get it done? Six billion could get a moon base built?

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'm assuming SpaceX rockets could get the materials there, right?

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is what Elon's building for. Like, you know, you basically do your own private Artemis mission and.

• 53:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Is he, is he going to try to build the moon base? I've seen photos of what looks like a moon.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  I don't think, I don't think NASA has bid out the base yet, but they've bid out the contracts for landing supplies for the base.

• 54:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So NASA is in charge of this?

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Cause the government's funding it and then they, they do this really smart thing where they basically, it's a really smart thing that NASA is one area of the government where they're nailing this. They just give the economic incentive and they'll let the market compete. So they just basically say, hey, to get a kilo of mass to the lunar surface, like what do you intercharge us? And obviously they vet the quality and the safety and you know, it's very rigorous.

• 54:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Trying to do, trying to do it themselves.

• 54:30Speaker 04

  SpaceX is, they're the winner. I talked to an aerospace company the other day and there's, from what I took away from the conversation, it's everyone's just building to fit those SpaceX payloads if they want to send anything up there. Is that relatively true or?

• 54:41Speaker 02

  No, no, no. There's, there's a bunch of rocket classes where like SpaceX would be like a train or a bus. There's a bunch of small launches like Astra where you're launching stuff that's like, you know, one satellite, but they're trying to go much faster. Um, there's a bunch of mid to heavy sized launches for ABL Space, Relativity, Rocket Lab, where depending on the payload class and the speed, whereas like Starship or whatever, you could put a bunch that, you know, they actually sell rideshare.

• 55:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  Like, so people are designing, yeah.

• 55:10Speaker 04

  That's what they were building.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  The availability of the capacity does affect like the designs of what you can put up there, but there are a very wide range of rocket companies that are serving different parts of the market.

• 55:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think in your lifetime, you personally, you'll spend a considerable amount of time on Mars?

• 55:23Speaker 02

  On Mars? No.

• 55:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Like one night, maybe?

• 55:27Speaker 03

  I'm trying to figure out if you think that you're gonna sleep there, if you're gonna go.

• 55:29Anthony Pompliano?

  No, but I don't think that they're going to have the ability to come back. That's the part that I think.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Correct. No, no, you could come back from the moon. There's no way you could come back from Mars.

• 55:37Speaker 04

  Would you go to the moon if offered?

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but the moon, the moon.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:42Anthony Pompliano?

  For some reason, the moon, and maybe it's just literally it's closer and like, you know, they allegedly went in the sixties.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Fucking Shill Moon Coin or whatever.

• 55:53Speaker 04

  Don't give people.

• 55:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Idea, next thing you know, they're gonna be like, pomp endorsed moon coin.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  Is that a real coin, by the way?

• 56:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I have no clue, but no, no, I think that there is this element of like, everyone thinks of the moon as like, not that crazy. And I do think part of it is like, uh, uh, you know, Neil Armstrong, Buzz, all like the whole situation. For some reason, like, um, it's like when Roger Shipmanister brought, uh, broke the four minute mile. And everyone's like, oh, of course we can do that.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 56:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And so with Mars right now, like, I think a lot of people are like, oh, I saw Martian, like, that didn't look so cool. Right? Like the, the movie.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  It's tough.

• 56:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're like, dude, he was like, you know, he's like, I'm a botanist bitch, right? Like in the movie, he's literally like growing stuff out of the Mars soil.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  The thing that's unrealistic about that is like, you could, you could like conceivably send a rescue mission to the moon relatively quickly. Your Mars, you're fucked.

• 56:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. How, how long would it take to get to the moon?

• 56:46Speaker 02

  I have no idea, man. It's, it's, it's, it's less than a month, I think. Yeah. I don't know. I really.

• 56:50Anthony Pompliano?

  That's not quick.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's quick enough.

• 56:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  It's not like six months.

• 56:55Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So this is the last part of my question though.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  All right, go ahead.

• 56:57Anthony Pompliano?

  How long?

• 56:58Speaker 02

  I could talk to him.

• 56:59Anthony Pompliano?

  How long would, yeah, me too. How long would it take to basically be able to get people back from Mars? Or once they go, are we basically just like?

• 57:05Speaker 02

  You can't get back because you can't get enough.

• 57:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You can't get back at all.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  You can't get enough fuel and stuff there to then get back, right?

• 57:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So the. Well, technology can evolve and maybe.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Well, so, okay, so here's the problem is you can make rocket, you basically like need water, electricity and hydrogen. Right? Sorry. Uh, you need, yeah, you need water and power conceivably. That technology doesn't really exist, but like you could do it. Like, has Mars got enough water except for the poles? Like, maybe not. Whereas the moon, the, the, the bet with the moon, which is unproven is that there's actually ice all around the place. So getting, getting water for both rocket fuel and humans living is much, much easier. But yes, the problem with Mars is like, the biggest cost is basically getting fuel in orbit. So you can push a bunch of rockets to Mars. And if you burn all that down, like it's much, much harder. You would have to just go there, go there and make a bet that you would figure out how to make rocket fuel that fit your rocket engines off the Martian surface. And that might take a decade.

• 57:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And the other thing is like, it would almost be like taking a long-term trip and being like, hey, I'm gonna drive 500 miles in my car. And I'm going to carry gas cans in the back to then like refill it, which doesn't make economic, like it doesn't make sense to try to do that. All right. I have one last question and then we'll let you get out of this shit show that we've created. Or this circus, maybe is a better way to describe it. If I remember the dates correctly, there's between 1958, 1962 is moon landings. And I think there was multiple moon landing. I think I have those dates right, but like over like three or four years, whatever the the exact dates were, multiple moon landings. Why didn't we go back? Like, what's your read on this whole thing?

• 58:37Speaker 04

  Six moon landings, four years.

• 58:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So, yes, yeah, in four years, right?

• 58:39Speaker 02

  Late 60s.

• 58:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Late 60s. Okay, so 68 to 72, then I think it was. Yeah. Is, why didn't we go back? Or like, what's up with now all of a sudden, there's this resurgence in interest in the?

• 58:51Speaker 02

  I think that as a country, we forgot, we got lazy and we focused on, you know, the roaring 80s of private equity and the financial success or whatever. And we forgot how to do hard things. We had no real global competitors after the Russians until now, because now the Russians are back in full force and so are the Chinese. And but as a country, we we fell into this classic cultural trap of everything's really easy. So let's not focus on doing hard things and maintaining the culture that got us here in the first place and just, you know, focused on the financialization of everything and, you know, expanding the empire financially, right? And something happened in the early 70s with, you know, Bretton Woods or the removal of the draft. There's all these other things that happened in the same three period in the 70s. And somehow, America lost its seriousness, you know?

• 59:36Speaker 02

  We used to focus on, you know, not trading cat pictures on the internet. We used to go do hard shit just because it was hard, like send human beings to the moon or figure out how to, you know, do all this incredible stuff and build quickly. And I think you have this wave of patriotic people or immigrants like, you know, Elon being an immigrant. And actually, like, you know, half of the startups that make it to the Fortune 500 are immigrant founded. So I think, you know, Americans in general, you know, there's been this overall decline in doing hard things and building in the real world. Then you have this huge software is eating the world wave, you know, where everyone's focusing on software. Your Harvard Business School grad doesn't want to go into private equity. He wants to go start a SaaS company, right? And I think we're now at the wave of, you know, trailblazers, people, you know,

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  they're making rockets and satellites for their own private companies are showing people that it is possible, you know? And now we will go back, but I think it's a huge, huge loss to the country that we stopped building in the real world for 30 or 40 years and that resurgence is really important. And that's why in some ways, what's important to me about Hadrian is not just the work we're doing for customers of the country, it's the fact that we are showing people that you can build fast in the real world again, and we are the anti decline company and that's not that hard. And whether we successful or fail, I think hopefully one of the biggest impacts we have is that like many, many, many other people realize that yes, it's painfully hard, but it's possible. Like we can go back to the moon and encourage more people to do that rather than doing things that are like very incremental or maybe don't matter so much, you know?

• 1:01:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's um, I want to completely agree with the thesis that like we forgot how to do hard things. I'm going to add something to it. It's not only did we forget how to do it, the inspirations started to get pushed into the background and there was the celebrities became the hedge fund managers, even the venture capitalists, right? Like a bunch of this stuff.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Or in the 90s, it's all supermodels. Yeah, where are the astronauts?

• 1:01:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. And I think that Elon, actually, this is probably, if I had to pick one thing that he's done that I would assign the most value to, which most people aren't talking about, is he empowered an entire generation of really kids, right? 35, 40 and under to dream again.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, early twenties, yeah.

• 1:01:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And I remember, what was it, a year ago, two years ago, when they had the big launch

• 1:01:55Anthony Pompliano?

  at SpaceX? And I remember watching it.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  The Bob and Doug mission?

• 1:01:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember watching it and I was, you know, classic millennial, I'm watching it, plus I got Twitter up. And I'm watching all these parents at the time tweet and be like, I'm watching this with my seven year old, I'm watching this with my nine year old, I'm watching this with whatever. And they're, and they're basically sharing anecdotes of how these kids are like, holy shit, like this is possible. And that feels like woo woo and kind of like, oh, whatever. But I think it's really important.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause it ultimately drives like, there's, there's some kid who watched that, who now will spend the next 20 years thinking about what to build and will go on to build a massive.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. And we don't need more kids doing slide decks at McKinsey. And we don't need more kids optimizing ad clicks at one of the big fan companies.

• 1:02:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  Like, it's a fucking waste of the best brain power the country has to offer. And the fact that if you look at like, you know, you do this survey of like Chinese kids and who they look up to, it's like scientists, astronauts, they fucking released a propaganda movie in China that was about a semiconductor engineer, like, and we're releasing movies about like dumb shit. I don't even know what.

• 1:03:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Dumb and dumber.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Six is coming out now.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  No, no, totally. And the, the, the resurgence of builders at the forefront of the American psyche is one of the most important things we can push because we don't need the smartest people optimizing ad clicks or fucking how, how, how do you tweak an algorithm and make this one ad path on Google 1% more profitable? Like, no, come build at a company like Vada or Hadrian or Anduril or SpaceX or something that's doing something that matters instead of just spooling around solving a hard problem. But, you know, like the empire is like collapsing around you. You know what I mean? Like, people are going to find out.

• 1:03:34Anthony Pompliano?

  100% is happening.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  Very quickly that like, oh, I can't click button and food appears in my pot and I eat the bugs anymore, you know, like it's, it's going to come very hot and fast. Yeah.

• 1:03:43Anthony Pompliano?

  We're, we're already seeing it now all of a sudden, if you, uh, uh, uh,

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I could talk to you forever about this.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  What's your, what's your, what's your bet on inflation, by the way? Cause I think it's more like 23%.

• 1:03:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I don't think it's anywhere near eight and a half.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  I love how you just lit a fire at the end of the.

• 1:03:58Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I, so it depends on how you evaluate it. I actually think that you can't put one single number on inflation because the, the inflation for Hadrian is different than like the average person.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Normal, like CPI basket that's not being fiddled with a bunch of, uh, you know, Chicago economists.

• 1:04:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it's over 15% for sure.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  Easy.

• 1:04:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So like, like. Just put that at like, probably at least double what they're stating it is. And the best way that I usually describe it to people is like 33% of the basket sheltered. They're still saying shelters up 5% year over year. Like, fuck off. Right? There's just, like, no matter how you do the math, you can't possibly-

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  And they've changed the construct of the basket every couple of years. It's like function numbers, anyway.

• 1:04:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. But like, even if you use their construct, it's still like, if 33% of the basket is shelter, you can't tell us housing's up about 20%, rent's up 20%, but oh yeah, shelter's only up 5%. Like, the numbers just don't make sense.

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I think that's there. But what I actually think is the story that doesn't get talked about a lot is the business owners, right? If you look at Adrian or others, their inflation is way worse.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Because they're not dealing with what I would consider consumable goods that are actively being worked on to keep the cost low.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So, there's all sorts of stuff that the government tries to do to try to drop prices around food and this type of stuff, right? But if you need concrete, like, I don't know what the price of concrete's done over the last two years, but my guess is that it's gone parabolic.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  I'll give you an example. My dentist, small business owner, amazing woman, you know, runs one of the top clinics in LA, and she was telling me about six months ago that the cost of a dental tech, firstly, she can't hire any, it used to get flooded with jobs and now can't hire anybody, even though she's taken the hourly rate from $22 to $28. So, that's like real world inflation. That's like 30, 40%.

• 1:05:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Yeah. And you can always look at real estate, you know, 20, 30%. Stock market was up 30%, Bitcoin's up 65. Like, you just look, it's like, how are all the investment assets that also benefit from inflation, how are they all up more than 8.5%? But somehow only the consumable goods went up 8.5%.

• 1:05:54Speaker 02

  This is the problem with money printing, which you know, but I keep telling people this, especially on the left, because regardless of your political affiliation, one of the things people, we've got to get really straight, is that you print money for stimulus packages that are meant to help poor people. You know, you can argue whether that's moral or not, but if you assume that it's like a morally good thing to help people, what people don't understand is in an inflationary environment where there's been tons of money printing, the economy becomes K-shaped. And basically, you know- There's a bunch of poor and rich people. The economy is already K shaped. So you're trying to put stimulus money in to help the poor people and like, you know, bring the curve back together. What you end up doing is basically printing a bunch of money. Inflation hits and what happens in an inflationary environment is that assets inflate three to

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  four times faster than, you know, wage rates or, you know, consumables or whatever. So what you end up with is you're making the problem worse for the people that you were trying to help. And this is what fucking baffles me about the strategy is this is huge cognitive dissonance of like, okay, you're trying to help the bottom 50% of Americans in terms of income or socioeconomic status. You're printing a bunch of money to do it and it's inevitably leading to the situation where if you're an asset holder, when inflation goes through the roof, you win. And if you're not an asset holder, you're basically fucked and you can never catch up. It's crazy.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  It, um, it's a situation where, uh, once you understand it, you can't unsee it. And then once you can't unsee it, you begin to realize why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  It's because it is, it is not, has nothing to do with wealth. It has everything to do with the education.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Yep. And we only have two very scary options in this current inflationary environment. Cause last time it happened, we, you know, interest rate was like four or five percent. So we could lower it, curb it, uh, sorry, raise it. Okay. Whatever. Now I think if we raise, if we raise interest rates at a Fed level, like it's something crazy, like 2%, don't quote me on this exact number, but it's like low enough that it's possible. The, at, at the Fed and American level, the, uh, debt to GDP ratio on the payments on America's debt will go to like 30% of GDP. And at that point, we can't, we can't power our own debts, right?

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  Uh, yes.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  So you either have to print the trillion dollar coin and debase the American currency or we're a Weimar Germany inflation in a period of time where Russia and trying to create, you know, create a multipolar currency system off the Petro dollar. And you've got, you know, cryptocurrency creating this new third road or whatever. There are only two inevitable options and both of them lead to a serious crack in the global financial system. And it's, it's, it's inevitable. There are only two roads and I don't know why everyone's like not panicking in the streets. You know, like it's crazy.

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  The chat, by the way, people are like, he's one of us.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  I own no cryptocurrency. However, yeah, global financial.

• 1:08:38Anthony Pompliano?

  You don't own any, no Bitcoin, nothing?

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 1:08:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Why not?

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Oh, because I like.

• 1:08:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Just focused on Hadrian?

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  Took on my liquid cash to like move to America and then I have no cash because I pay myself like nothing and that's all.

• 1:08:46Anthony Pompliano?

  When did you come to the US?

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  About three years ago.

• 1:08:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, okay. So recent.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, uh, welcome. Uh, sorry, sorry for the pandemic lockdown inflation.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, masks. Yeah, I was coming in for more freedom, not less.

• 1:09:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know. I see some videos from Australia. I don't know if that was a good trade or bad trade, but the stuff that was going on there was pretty crazy.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I would have gone nuts.

• 1:09:09Anthony Pompliano?

  You got coffee in your cup? Yeah, that's the video I always remember is there's a video of a guy, he's walking through the park and the cops come up and they make him open the cup to see if he's got coffee in it because you're only allowed to be out for a coffee.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:09:22Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Hadrian?

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  Uh, they can look for Chris Power on Twitter, 202112power. And then, uh, they can just Google, yeah, hadrian.co, come apply for jobs, come visit the factory, come build some cool shit in the real world instead of, you know, doing dumb things on the internet. Uh, and yeah, that's it.

• 1:09:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What a pitch. Yeah, that's an all time.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  What a pitch. Yeah, I mean, yeah, everyone like everyone, everyone in your audience knows what's going on. You're either fucking do something about it or you don't do something about it. And now is the time. So fucking get off your seat and like stop eating the bugs, you know?

• 1:09:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Or you can complain.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:09:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Hadrian's hiring.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's it for today. I, that's it. I'm not saying anything else at the end of this show. I love you all. We'll see you guys tomorrow.

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  Thanks, fellas.

• 1:10:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.