502: Chris Power—The Other Hadrian's Wall

Mike Rowe (0:04)

Hello, friends, me again with another episode of The Way I Heard It. My guest today is Chris Power, a remarkable American who sounds an awful lot like he came from Australia. Because he did. He immigrated over here a few years ago with $6,000, I think he told me. And in that period of time, built a company called Hadrian, which now employs lots of people and is worth about $7-8 billion.

It's a defense company, and if you're a student of history, you'll recognize the name as belonging to a famous Roman emperor. By the way, this episode was recorded at the Ronald Reagan Library. The gift that just keeps on giving. I was there a couple of months ago for an economic conference and just ran into so many cool people who I thought had stories that you guys might appreciate. And this guy in particular has done something near and dear to MicroWorks. I really wanted to talk to him and I was so glad he had an hour to spare because what he's built, I think it's important, not just for our national defense, but well, for our national identity. If you know your history, and believe me, Mr. Power does, he studies how empires rise and fall, particularly the Roman Empire. And you can draw a couple of really cool parallels between Hadrian, the emperor, his philosophy, and Chris' modern defense mission. First thing that will jump out is borders. It's all about securing borders over expansion. So in the old days, the Roman emperors, they focused very heavily on invading new territories. That's how they grew. Hadrian was the guy, the first one really, to pivot toward domestic consolidation. He built a massive wall, Hadrian's wall, to reinforce and protect what Rome already had. Power chose the name for his company because Hadrian is doing something almost identical. They're focusing on reinforcing America's domestic supply chains and shoring up defense walls, rather than outsourcing dependencies overseas.

So it really comes down to infrastructure as well. Chris was very inspired by Emperor Hadrian's sweeping historical efforts to restructure and stabilize and rebuild Rome's infrastructure from the inside out. His startup was created to tackle a modern version of that same crisis. Rebuilding the hollowed out US Industrial Base and rescuing the aging aerospace manufacturing sector from terminal decline. There's a lot of crossover in this episode. The stuff I've been doing with the Pentagon over the last year, they've dropped a lot of names, and we've rebooted a show, and we're going back, and we're highlighting companies like Hadrian. In fact, I'm going to reach out to Chris and see if he'd like our cameras to come, maybe to Alabama or Arizona, where he's building his factories. I'm telling you, it's so impressive what he's done, and it's so important. And it's kind of validating, frankly, to talk to somebody who confirms a lot of stuff I've been mouthing off about for the last couple of years. He has a front row seat to what it takes to reinvigorate the skilled trades in this country. And he talks at length about some of the things that they're doing internally, the way they're shifting from manual labor to technical oversight. He talks about the autopilot model, right? So workers on a floor at a Hadrian factory, they operate a lot less like manual crank and cut machinists and more like flight controllers. There's massive output leverage to talk about a ton of career growth. Mostly, though, it's the onboarding speed.

They've got proprietary software. I hope I get this right. I think he called it OPUS. But they absorb the super complicated tasks of machine programming, right? And they're bringing people up to speed. Like, they're training factory technicians in 30 days or less in an effort to address the skilled labor shortage. So it's a super intuitive onboarding system that he's perfected. They're actively recruiting and elevating individuals with zero manufacturing background. So this is just an amazing story and a huge bit of good news for veterans and former nurses and hospitality workers and people who want to jump into the manufacturing game from the ground up. This is definitely a place for you to consider. It's a great conversation with a great American who talks kind of funny on a county. He's from Melbourne.

It's the other Hadrian's Wall with Chris Power right after this.

Big news this week in the wide world of agriculture. In an effort to lower beef prices, governments okayed the importation of 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef into the US market without the normal tariff.

This is a decision that's got a lot of people up in arms, and I'm going to talk about it at length in an upcoming podcast. But for now, I'm just going to remind you that when that beef finds its way onto the shelves of your local grocery store, you'll have no way of knowing where it came from.