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

The episode features a live OddLots recording at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood with Chris Power, founder of Hadrian (an autonomous manufacturing company), and Tom Mueller, founder of Impulse Space and former first employee at SpaceX.

Chris Power frames the decline of U.S. manufacturing through a historical lens: great powers historically cycle through phases of industrial dominance followed by financial dominance and eventual decline. He references the pattern seen with the Netherlands, British Empire, and American Empire—each eventually trades industrial capacity for financial returns, represented by shifts in the world's reserve currency. He argues America has made this mistake, becoming complacent with reserve currency status while outsourcing manufacturing and forgetting that industrial power is the foundation of geopolitical dominance. The founding principle of Hadrian is to rebuild this capacity through design-agnostic autonomous factories that use software-powered manufacturing combined with trained technician workforces.

Hadrian operates as a contract manufacturer for aerospace, defense, and submarine components—producing everything from spaceflight components to entire missiles to 30% of Virginia-class submarines. The company's competitive advantage is software-driven process optimization combined with 24/7 lights-out manufacturing capabilities.

Tom Mueller describes Impulse Space's business: in-space transportation services that operate where launch vehicles leave off. The company has two main products—precision maneuvering satellites and Helios, a high-energy engine system that can improve payload capacity to the moon or Mars by a factor of five. Mueller notes SpaceX launched 165 rockets in the previous year and deployed 10,000 satellites, more than any other country or company, proving large-scale manufacturing is achievable in America.

Both discuss the talent ecosystem in Southern California, particularly around the aerospace industry. Mueller notes that the region has become a hub for hardware manufacturing, with companies recruiting talent from SpaceX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and other defense contractors. There's competitive talent poaching but also complementary growth—SpaceX's founding sparked broader aerospace industry expansion in the South Bay.

On vertical integration, Mueller explains that SpaceX initially builds prototypes in-house to understand assembly and machining challenges, then scales production externally. Power argues companies should maintain 10-15% in-house capability while outsourcing scale, but must vertically integrate where trust and schedule reliability are uncertain. Power emphasizes this is about trust and schedule certainty rather than pure economics—he'll invest millions in internal CapEx to avoid relying on legacy manufacturers with poor track records.

Power provides detailed analysis of manufacturing cost competitiveness. He notes that even with zero labor and energy costs, Chinese imports can be three times cheaper for commercial components due to Chinese government subsidization of energy, labor, capital, and export tariffs. He argues American policy has treated industrial capacity as a financial spreadsheet issue rather than national security (as China does). The Biden and Trump administrations' subsidies aimed to level the playing field, but tariff implementation is complex—ring-fencing must include intermediate countries like Singapore to prevent transshipment fraud, and component definitions affect American businesses trying to import from Mexico.

On AI and robotics, Mueller expresses concern about the pace of AI development, citing Ben Bostrom's Superintelligence and noting that LLMs achieved capabilities faster than anticipated. He emphasizes robotics are essential for space exploration, as humans cannot sustainably work on the moon or Mars. He argues robots need three components: dexterity (human hand-like), vision (largely solved), and AI brains—once combined, they become superhuman workers suitable for hostile environments.

Power provides broader geopolitical context, arguing the U.S. is in the "fourth turning" and facing a real civilizational competition with China. He contends that AI training velocity now depends on physical deployment and mass manufacturing capability—making manufacturing capacity central to AI dominance. He also argues SpaceX's achievements under Elon Musk prove that defying conventional wisdom about what's manufactureable domestically is possible, though difficult.