How LA Is Quietly Becoming America's New Industrial Tech Hub

Odd Lots

Recorded live in Los Angeles, this episode explores the resurgence of advanced manufacturing in Southern California through a conversation with

Key takeaways

Chris Power (Hadrian) describes 'factories as a service' using software-powered automation for defense and space components.
Tom Mueller (Impulse Space) highlights SpaceX's success in launching 165 rockets and 10,000 satellites as evidence that U.S. manufacturing is still viable.
The discussion posits that the shift from industrial power to financial power often precedes a change in the global reserve currency.
Hadrian focuses on solving software engineering challenges rather than just humanoid robotics to achieve autonomous manufacturing.
Mueller notes that Impulse Space provides 'sprinter vans' for space, moving cargo between orbits using products like Helios.

Main topics

Re-industrialization of America
Autonomous Manufacturing
In-space Transportation

Notable quotes

Software is done in Silicon Valley, hardware is done in L.A.

Conclusion

The episode provides a compelling argument for the strategic importanc

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) AI is entering its most consequential phase where scale, safety and sovereignty will determine who leads and who lags. Join Bloomberg Tech in London on November 2nd and 3rd as global leaders across business, finance and policy examine the defining trade-offs shaping the future of AI. Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Salesforce, and supporting sponsors, IDA Ireland and Schneider Electric. Learn more at BloombergLive.com slash Tech London. Speaker 3 (0:30) Hey, Odd Lots listeners, the Odd Lots tour continues and our next stop is in Chicago. Speaker 6 (0:34) That's right. Joe and I will be at the City Winery Chicago on October 15th for a live Odd Lots recording. Tickets are on sale now at Bloomberg.com forward slash Odd Lots. And Speaker 3 (0:45) of course, a special thank you to Barclays for supporting Odd Lots Live. Speaker 6 (0:49) So that's October 15th at City Winery in Chicago. Get your tickets now. Speaker 5 (0:54) Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Speaker 3 (1:00) Radio. News. Speaker 3 (1:12) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wiesenthal. And Speaker 6 (1:18) I'm Tracy Alloway. So Speaker 3 (1:19) 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. Speaker 6 (1:36) Yeah, so we hear about re-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. Speaker 3 (1:49) 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 re-industrialize Southern California. Take a listen. Speaker 6 (2:09) All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts. Truly the perfect guest. 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 Speaker 2 (2:31) do. And I think the first question is, do you want the... Speaker 2 (2:37) accurate answer that's going to take three minutes or the political one? Speaker 6 (2:41) How long does the political one take? Can't you do both? Speaker 2 (2:45) So here's what happened. But it happens in context. So every great power of all time does four very simple things. Speaker 2 (3:01) 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 a 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 at each moment of industrial power being retraded by financial power, you switch 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. Speaker 2 (4:03) So this is also the founding story of Hadrian, which is if you track these things, roughly every 150 years the reserve currency of the world 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. Speaker 2 (4:27) 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 life society. And you've forgotten that the world is real. And eventually that comes back to bite you. We Speaker 3 (4:48) just did an episode with Francis Fukuyama. And so we're very well acquainted with this fantasy that the world comes. You're in the fourth Speaker 2 (4:57) turning. Speaker 3 (4:57) Okay. Speaker 6 (4:58) Wait, wait, wait, wait. Just out of curiosity before we go to Tom on that question, how often do you think about the Roman Empire? I'm assuming a lot. Speaker 2 (5:07) A lot in the sense that I think that America was, so everyone knows like what a weeaboo is. Yeah. A what? There's a lot of laughs. So America was founded by a lot of Roma booze, which is like obsessive Roman. Speaker 4 (5:25) So a lot of the Speaker 2 (5:26) fundamental infrastructure of the fourth estate and Congress was Roman. The flaw 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 a... The reserve currency is reality, and then you get bitten in the ass, and yeah. Speaker 6 (5:52) Tom, what's your version of the decline of U.S. manufacturing story, and do you also think about the Roman Empire? Well, Speaker 4 (5:59) first of all, I'm going to put on my glasses to try and be as smart as this guy. Speaker 4 (6:06) My take on that was, you know, being a founding employee at SpaceX, we, you know, I still say we because I still feel like I'm still at SpaceX even though 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. Tell me again why we can't build in the U.S.? Speaker 3 (6:35) Okay, great answer, optimistic. I'm going to ask you, I promise this will be the most cynical question that I ask tonight, I promise. And 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, and I believe you, 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 90-second tweet. Speaker 4 (7:38) So my company is Impulse Space. I started it within 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. Speaker 3 (7:54) Everything Speaker 4 (7:55) I build operates in space. So we take over where launch vehicles leave off. So think of a launch vehicle, especially like Starship, 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 Speaker 3 (8:14) being Speaker 4 (8:15) a certain orbit. Speaker 3 (8:17) And Speaker 4 (8:17) all that cargo needs to go to different places. So we provide the sprinter vans and 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. It can move very closely. We have three of these on orbit right now. Two of them just came within 200 meters of each other. There are two football fields, which is really close in space, actually. Speaker 3 (8:46) And Speaker 4 (8:47) 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 that can take you 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. Speaker 2 (9:08) 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