502: Chris Power—The Other Hadrian's Wall

Chris Power left Australia with $30,000 and a conviction that America’s hollowed-out industrial base was a national security emergency hiding in plain sight. Seven years later, his company Hadrian—named for the Roman emperor who consolidated rather than expanded—is on track for nearly a billion dollars in revenue and employs 700 people, almost none of whom had ever set foot in a factory before joining. The conversation with Mike Rowe is less a company profile than a diagnosis of how the U.S. lost its manufacturing capacity, what it will take to rebuild it, and why the workforce problem is cultural before it is technical.

The strategic diagnosis: three things that broke

Power’s move to America was preceded by a year of rereading history and interest-rate theory. He concluded that three forces were converging: the West versus China, a manufacturing system stretched to the point of nonexistence but untested, and forty years of trading industrial resiliency for financial returns. “We think we’re Mike Tyson in his prime,” he says, “but we’re actually Mike Tyson just before the Buster Douglas fight.” The reserve currency cycle—industrial capacity, military readiness, reserve currency, then laziness and loss—had played out before with the British and the Dutch. America was repeating it, but without the commercial manufacturing base that had allowed it to “McDonald’s the hell out