Ben, Marc, and Erik Torenberg are joined by Brian Schimpf, Co-Founder & CEO of Anduril, and Chris Power, Founder & CEO of Hadrian. Together, they dig into America’s defense production gap: why the U.S. can out-innovate but not out-produce—and what it will take to turn that around.
They discuss why U.S. war games show we run out of munitions in a week, the myth of “exquisite-only” systems, how to rebuild industrial capacity with software-led automation, financing factories like data centers, and what it takes to create real deterrence in a Taiwan scenario.
Timecodes:
0:00 Introduction
0:27 Technical Superiority vs. Industrial Scale
3:59 The Decline of US Manufacturing
7:23 Challenges in Onshoring & Skilled Labor
13:27 Supply Chains & Rare Earths
15:34 Automation, Software, and Catching Up
17:15 Complexity of Modern Production
23:34 Strategic Policy & Industrial Planning
26:37 Regulatory Barriers & State vs. Federal Roles
35:27 Talent, Data Centers, and Financial Engineering
38:33 China’s Industrial Policy & US Response
46:07 US Manufacturing, National Security, and the China Challenge
52:00 Demographics, Long-Term Outlook, and Closing Thoughts
Resources:
Find Chris on X: https://x.com/chris_power
Find Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bschimpf/
Marc on X: https://x.com/pmarca
Marc’s Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com/
Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz
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