Reindustrialize Opening Keynote — Chris Power, CEO at Hadrian

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into 1,000 years of darkness. There's something going on in time and space and beyond time and space which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Chris Power!

CEO Hadrian.

Well, firstly, welcome everybody, and it's an honor to be here. We're all here because what we did to ourselves is we gave the farm away in the '80s and '90s, where we traded hard industrial power for financial returns, the same mistake every great empire makes. And for too long, we've ridden on those coattails of success And now the chickens are coming home to roost, and the piper must be paid. The good news is that I still believe that all of us in this room and Americans have what it takes to become an industrial superpower once again. Over the last few decades, we've ceded hard industrial power to the CCP, and we're potentially heading towards the greatest industrial grudge match we've ever seen in the last century. And frankly, right now the industrial base is just simply not what it needs to be and not what the country needs. And the stakes couldn't be higher because it's this decade that the world is going to decide whether the West remains or declines. In this decade, the world will decide whether the West has the driver's seat on AI, settling the solar system, and navigating the largest economic reset in the last century. And it's up to us to decide whether we cede moral and economic leadership to a communist regime or maintain Pax Americana forever. And make no mistake, that chessboard is set and we have 3 short years to figure this out, not 10. And the key to all of this is reindustrializing this nation fast and regaining that hard economic power that made this country a world leader in the first place. In the '70s, we began reshoring— we began offshoring industrial power. We removed the gold standard. We bet on the hippies over Nixon and decided that history was over. We fell into the same trap that all large technology companies do, that success lasts forever and will never be disrupted. We moved up the layers of abstraction and we forgot that the physical world matters. We allowed ourselves to forget the values and the capability that made this country successful in the first place. We decimated the middle class, we destroyed the Midwest, and we told all our kids that manufacturing was dumb and getting a 4-year college degree was the only thing that mattered. And when you do things like removing the gold standard, where money no longer matters, you give up manufacturing and you forget that the physical world matters. you remove the draft and you let your core values degrade, you start becoming a fundamentally less serious country than you used to be. And like a once great startup riding on its coattails, things got too easy and the generations after the Greatest Generation became fundamentally less serious than those that made our country successful in the first place. The US was built by serious people. Drunks, poets, and barbarians, yes, but serious people. And fundamentally, that's what we've done to ourselves in the last 40 years. We're no longer as serious as we used to be. And as we gear towards a potential conflict, what we've lost is significant. We lost industrial power, we lost speed, and we lost a hell of a lot of seriousness along the way. But there is hope. And what this room of you all represent to me is a community of folks who understand the stakes and are willing to be men and women out of time and are willing to step up, lead, and get us back on track. And the main problem that we've got is that we forgot how to make things and we forgot how much that matters. We don't have the production scale we need, nowhere close to it, and hell, we couldn't make an iPhone onshore if we tried. And people forget that we won World War II not because we had the fanciest fighter jet. We won because we simply outproduced and we had the industrial base to do it. And it's now time for all of us in this room to give the US what she needs. We need a new industrial base and we need it fast to compete on the global stage. And the only way that this is possible is to give the American workforce a 100x advantage with software and robotics and reclaim our birthright of global industrial leadership. We need to rapidly deploy technology into every factory in the country, build enormous industrial companies, and rebuild the base with a new standard of what we can achieve together in America. And this will be one hell of a fight, but it's one worth fighting for and one worth winning. And to pull this off, this is not just the job of technologists or the primes or startups. It's the job of everybody. And we need to team up and fight like hell to pull this off. We need you to fight the capital markets. We need you to fight your colleagues who are moving too slow. And I need you to fight physics. But the thing that we all believe in being here is that there's a chance. There is a huge chance to reclaim the golden path, and there is a huge chance to let America reign for another 100 years. And we have a chance to win a once-in-a-lifetime, no-fail mission that will set the next century of history in motion. So what I'm asking you all to do is bend history. I'm asking you to distort reality. And I'm asking you to convince venture capital funds to give you money for manufacturing companies, which is the largest reality distortion we've ever done. I'm asking you to take on technology partners before they're really ready. I'm asking you to think in orders of magnitude, and I'm asking you to break decades of stagnation in the most important industry, our manufacturing base. And I'm asking you to do what Americans do best: admit and tell everyone the emperor has no clothes while staying as irrationally optimistic as the best Americans are. And I'm asking you to sprint a marathon. And if you're here and you hear me, I'm also asking you to go back after this conference and rally the troops. Tell your LPs, tell your team, tell your friends, tell your loved ones, and tell your representatives in government. Tell them that your country needs you to help rebuild the industrial might of our nation and that we need you now, not next year, not after the election, now. And we need everyone running in the same direction. We need to break down these bonds of customer-supplier. We need to break these bonds of government-industry. We need to get everything out of the way. And push forward on this faster than you ever have in your life, because we need a next-generation industrial base yesterday. And this is make or break. There isn't a backup option or a secret plan or a room full of smart people. It is literally just us. And we lost our way by giving up our industrial might, but the core of America is still here. There are enough people who believe, enough people who see the golden path, and enough of you all to light the flame.

Thank you.

So my message is that it's time to do it. It's time to return to our position as a global industrial superpower, not with low-cost labor and suicide nets, but with the combined power of the American worker and our best technologists. We need 100x leverage to compete globally, and I believe we can deliver. Each of us holds a small part of this puzzle. None of us alone can bend history and physics to our will. But together we can. Together we will reindustrialize America and lead the world into the next century of prosperity. And there really isn't any outcome other than that that's worth imagining. So I hope you come away from Detroit with more of that enabling, great spirit that made this country great in the first place. It's going to take all of us. The timelines are incredibly short, and it's the ultimate test. We don't have an option to fail, but I do believe in everyone here and our ability to win and the American spirit. And things might seem gloomy and things might seem bad, but you must remember that the thing Americans are best at is going against the odds and winning when it really matters. We were behind in the space race, but we caught up and won. We were late to COVID, but we caught up and won. And we're late to the new industrial race, but we will catch up and we will win. Because the one thing we do, and we have to remember, is that we're Americans and this is what we do. We leave it to the last minute, we throw the winning Hail Mary pass, and we kiss the cheerleader. We are late, but we win. And I believe in our ability to reindustrialize this country, and since you're all here, I know you do as well. But it's time to shake off the change and get aggressive. We don't have the time to waste. All of you here see the path we're on and you want to fix it. And now you've got hundreds and thousands of new friends to help you do it. It's time to prepare for the big game. It'll be a game of inches. Leave nothing on the table. Write the code. Close the deal. Disrupt your operation. Do things in days, not weeks. Break the laws of physics and history. The United States is the greatest country that has ever existed, and we need to give her the industrial base she deserves. So my message is, this is a huge mission that we've got to do. It's never been done before, so we all need to team up and bring this thing home. We absolutely cannot fail to reindustrialize this country, and I know we won't. So let's win this fucking thing.

Thank you.

It's time to reindustrialize our nation and return to our rightful place as the industrial superpower of the world. So thank you all for being here, and God bless the United States of America. You heard it here first.