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

In a live Odd Lots episode recorded at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood, hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway sit down with two founders who are trying to rebuild America’s industrial base from the ground up: Chris Power, founder of Hadrian, and Tom Mueller, founder of Impulse Space and the first employee of SpaceX. The conversation moves from the historical pattern of industrial decline to the nuts and bolts of what it actually takes to manufacture things in the United States today, and why the stakes are far higher than most people realize.

The Real Reason Manufacturing Left

Chris Power offers a sweeping historical frame for why the U.S. lost its manufacturing edge. He argues that every great power follows the same cycle: it builds the best industrial capacity, wins or prevents a war, then gets lazy, pivots to finance, and offshores the production that made it powerful in the first place. This pattern, he says, tracks with the reserve currency — the Netherlands ceded to the British Empire, which ceded to the American Empire. The mistake, Power warns, is thinking the reserve currency is the source of power, when in fact it is the consequence of having the best ships and factories. “You’ve ultimately traded spreadsheet returns from a high effect and luxury of leaf society,” he says, “and forgotten that the world is real.”