Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway, so we're doing our live show here at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood. And one of the things that I know very little about, but that I'm very excited to learn more about, is the attempts to turn this part of the country into a booming part of our industrial tech ecosystem.
Yeah. So we hear about industrialization efforts in America all the time. But what does it actually take to try to do that? And what are the companies actually doing in this space right now? We have two very interesting ones for you.
Yes, I'm very excited. You're going to be hearing our chat with Chris Power. He is the founder of Hadrian, which is trying to build a new generation of factories, as well as Tom Mueller, founder of Impulse Space, also the first employee of SpaceX. We're going to learn about these attempts to reindustrialize Southern California. Take a listen.
All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on, all of you. Truly the perfect guests. I'm going to start with, I guess, the question I alluded to at the beginning, which is what is your narrative for the hollowing out, to use a cliche, of U.S. manufacturing? Why does it seem that we lost some sort of edge? Chris, do you want to start?
I do, and I think the first question is, do you want the accurate answer that's going to take three minutes or the political one?
How long does the political one take?
I can't give you both. So here's what happened. But it happens in context. So every great power of all time does four very simple things. They have some generative population function. They have the best industrial capacity, and then they win or prevent a war, and then they get incredibly lazy and they end up with the financial industry and they offshore what made them successful in the first place. And by the way, this function is represented in the trade of the reserve currency of the world. So the last three times this happened, the Netherlands ceded power to the British Empire. And the British Empire ceded power to the American Empire. And in each moment of industrial power being retrained for financial power, you switched the reserve currency of the world. And the mistake that everyone makes, because you have four or five generations of softness, is that just because you have the reserve currency means you rule the world, and you forget the fact that the only reason you have the reserve currency is because you had the best shipbuilding capacity or manufacturing capacity.
So this is also the founding story of Hadrian, which is if you track these things roughly every 150 years, the reserve currency of all changes. And the reason is because you think you're Mike Tyson in your prime and the other guy or gal thinks you're Mike Tyson before the Buster Douglas fight, and the pattern remains the same. So, well, the founding story of Hadrian. And the answer to your question is the reason why it's important is because you've ultimately traded spreadsheet returns from a high affect and luxury of leave society. And if you've gotten that, the world is real and eventually that comes back to bite you.
We just did an episode with Francis Fukuyama. And so we're very well acquainted with this fantasy that the world comes with the... Oh, you're in the fourth turning. Yeah. Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Just out of curiosity, before we go to tell him on that question, how often do you think about the Roman Empire?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha! I'm assuming a lot. A lot in the sense that I think that America was so everyone knows, like, what a weird boo is. Yeah. A lot. There's a lot of laughs. So America was founded by a lot of Roman boos, which is, like, obsessive Roman. A lot of the fundamental infrastructure of the state. And the Congress was Roman. The flow that happened with Rome is eventually the elites lost the capacity to connect with reality. So in a sense, what you outsource when you have the reserve currency is reality and then you get bit in the ass.
Tom, what's your version of the decline of U.S. manufacturing story? And do you also think about the Roman Empire?
Well, first of all, I'm going to put on my glasses to try and be as smart as this. Oh, yeah. My take on that was, you know, how being a founding employee at SpaceX. We, you know, I still say we can. I still feel like I'm still at SpaceX. Actually, when I left there five years ago. We launched 165 rockets last year, more than any other country. And we put 10,000 satellites in orbit, three times everybody else's number of satellites. So tell me again why we can't build in the U.S. Okay.
Great answer. Optimistic. All right. I'm going to ask you this is I promise this will be the most cynical question that I asked tonight. I promise, but I'll ask it to both of you. We all love the sound of quote reindustrialization. It makes us feel really good. There's a lot of imagery associated with reindustrialization that we like. We like the image of factories, all these things. There's this very cynical part of me that when I hear, say, like VCs and founders talk about all of this stuff, that really what they want to do is they want to go on podcasts and give their theory about the decline of empires and that they're actually no offense. That was and I believe you. But there and then I'm like, yeah, but where's the thing that you've built? So why don't we start with you and both of you and maybe give me. Why don't you tell me what you're doing and tell me why I should believe it's real, rather than creating good footage for a 92nd tweet.
So my company is Impulse Space. I started it within, you know, six or eight months after I left SpaceX in 2020 or 2021. Sorry. And we do in-space transportation. So we still use SpaceX and other rockets to get to space. Okay. Everything I build operates in space. So we take over where launch vehicles leave off. So think of a launch vehicle, especially like Starship and, you know, a gigantic launch vehicle that can take 100 tons to orbit. Think of it as like the container ship coming into a port, the port being a certain orbit and all that cargo, it needs to go to different places. So we provide the sprinter vans and the, you know, the trucks to move that cargo to other places. So we have two products. We have one that's a very precision maneuvering satellite that has a lot of propulsion that can move very, very closely. We just had we had we have three of these on our boat right now. Two of them just came within 200m of each other. 200. There are two football fields, which is really close in space, actually. Yeah. And then we have another product called Helios, which is basically a rocket on a rocket. It's a giant tank of propellant with a very high energy engine. Okay. You can take your way out. It can escape Earth's gravity. It can improve the payload of a Falcon 9 to the moon or to Mars by about a factor of five. So those are the two main products. And then there's other ones I can't talk about.
And what are you actually building?
So we build design-agnostic autonomous factories, which means manufacturing is hard. We will take any design and build factories as a service with our software platform and our technician base that we train from scratch where we are an automated contract manufacturer. What we actually produce is everything from spaceflight components for the products that Tom said to entire missile to 30% of a Virginia-class submarine. So our job is to use technology to do process designs into a digital twin. Run that into factories as a service where we build software-powered factories combined with the workforce where we can operate lights out 24 over seven. So we are incredibly more efficient and competent. But we are like, yeah, Foxconn to Apple. Yeah, we are Foxconn to every defense problem.
But when you say autonomous manufacturing, how autonomous are we talking about here? Could I, for instance, run one of your machines? And then also one of the things I always wonder is when we talk about autonomous machinery, what are the humans who are actually running them doing? Just like pressing the button that says go and stop.
So the first thing that people get wrong is if you look at a factory and you see a bunch of humans moving things, you think it's a like a humanoid robot problem. Actually, what's happening in advanced manufacturing is there's an incredible amount of smart humans either at a desktop doing digital engineering, or they are at the factory floor driving an incredibly dumb computer. And that's 90% of advanced manufacturing. This is why we're a software company. Because it looks like to any robotics person, the like if you could optimize a technician not loading the part on the machine or the assembly into the robot, that's going to save you money. It's not. It's actually all massive amounts of software engineering to tie everything together and make it autonomous. The reason why a welder or machinist has to stand in front of machine, yeah, is because it's not closed loop. They're genuinely doing trigonometry in their head, being like, oh, I think the tools are about to break and therefore I have to like stand in front of it. That's all actually a software problem. So we build software-powered factories to make sure that you can do a physical task, which is very hard for any robot to do, which is high judgment. Set up something very fiddly and then loaded into a robotics and CNC or welding system and say go, it's done. Walk away. And the power of the software is that you're able to walk away without being really scared that you're going to accidentally make a code change and crash that $3 million machine.
I think the trigonometry point was a polite way of saying that no, I could not, in fact, run on one of these machines, which is fair. It's fair.
I think fundamentally what humans who want out of factories is they have high judgment. They have control over there. What they are going to do, and they do very high dexterity tasks. Most of the load is on the software.
So I was in a I spent I was in Shenzhen earlier this year. And one of the things that people always talk about the Chinese manufacturing success is the ecosystem, right. You need some part or something like that that's custom fit, and there's someone a mile away and they can make it for you that afternoon and then you like have it there. And what's interesting or intriguing or why we wanted to have this part of the conversation is. I know that there's actually quite a number of companies in the Southern California area building stuff. And I'm curious, like, is it becoming rich in the sense that you're complimenting each other and sort of like building on each other's successes? And each one of you is increasing the odds of you that the other succeed in some way.
I think it's both. And we're stealing talent from each other, certainly. And we're competing for talent, for sure. There are so many companies that a lot of founders that were ex-SpaceX like me and a lot of my employees are ex-SpaceX. Yeah. And other and then like, right across the street from me at Northrop Grumman, which was TRW, I worked there for 15 years. It's literally across the street from me. I look out of my office window and I was in that building. We steal a lot of people from them. We steal from Boeing. It's just there's only so much talent in the area, and there's so many companies growing so fast. We're bringing it back. I was talking in the greenroom about this chart that I used to love that showed aerospace jobs in the South Bay like this. And SpaceX started in 2002. It took it took maybe three or four years and it started going up. And it's just going, well, that's that because there's this. And then and you think about that, like all the other startups are not necessarily all SpaceX startups. There's there's nuclear companies, there's there's drone companies. There's, you know, defense companies, there's 3D printing companies, all kinds of new tech happening in the area. And if you go even further, like, not just it's not just South Bay, but, you know, like, and ah, you know, down in Orange County and and the general area is just I always say that like, software is done in in Silicon Valley, hardware is done in LA.
Can both of you say a little bit more about how you think about producing stuff in-house versus sourcing it externally, because you think about SpaceX? And one of the famous things about SpaceX is vertical integration, right? The idea that there were enough space manufacturers making vital components, so they brought everything in-house in order to do it, you know, to the speed at which Elon desires to put it, politely or mildly. How do you think about that tradeoff?
