Blythe Milligan:
0:00
Blythe, welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. My name is Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly presented by SPI logistics. And in this episode, I want to talk about a company named Hadrian and how they're trying to reinvent American manufacturing. Now for a lot of us, especially after the election, there's a lot of economic news that are going on that that's going on you what's going to happen is American manufacturing coming back? Tariffs going to go into place. For most of us, we don't really know a lot of those answers yet, but one answer we do know is how a company called Hadrian is rethinking that American manufacturing process. And so for folks who may not know, American manufacturing was dominating in this country since the Industrial Revolution, up until about the 90s, when a lot of our manufacturing was sent overseas. And so for a lot of that manufacturing, we're trying to bring that back now to the States, but we're bringing it back in ways that are new and inventive, especially this company called Hadrian. Now Hadrian from their website, they talk about accelerating advanced manufacturing. Their bio says America's or their intro says America's space and defense industry is bottlenecked by the capacity of a network of owner operated machine shops that produce precision metal components. Hadrian is building a series of highly automated precision component factories across the US to enable space and defense manufacturers to get parts 10 times faster and half the cost of making rockets, satellites, jets and drones. Now, on this, on the show, we have talked a lot about space logistics and how we're really like reinventing a new way of moving cargo into different and new and beyond spaces. And yeah, spaces that that's the right word that I'm trying to say here, but a company like Hadrian is creating this model and going after these high margin industries and high precision industries, so then, that way, they can take this model and replicate it to other industries. It's a really, really cool story that I am resurfacing from this conversation of freight friends, but I just kind of wanted to set up the show of how we're thinking about manufacturing and when we're going to bring manufacturing back, what does that look like? And there are companies like Hadrian that are trying to redefine what that looks like by using a little bit of the past and a little bit of the future. So I'm really fascinated by them, and I hope you all enjoy this breakdown of who Hadrian is what they're doing, how they got here, what the plans that they have for the future. It's really cool to learn about. So I hope you all enjoy I have been on a little bit of a kick on, I guess, to sort of set this up properly. I have been, I guess, you know, sort of echoing a little bit of what I just said about, you know, working in this particular three PL asset based silo, this podcast has really afforded me the luxury of talking to experts from throughout a variety of the silos within logistics. And that's sort of the goal of the show, is to break down those information silos and to really spread further awareness. And one of those aspects that I haven't done, a really, I haven't really touched on, is the manufacturing side of logistics. But there was a video that I watched recently. It's about the future of American manufacturing. Because obviously, we all know that in this country, it was really within the 90s and the early 2000s that we had a really before that we had a really strong manufacturing hub within this country, but then a lot of it started to be offloaded and offshored to China, to a lot of East Asian countries, and that's where a lot of our manufacturing still lives. Well, COVID was a big eye opener, and that we shouldn't probably consolidate all of our manufacturing within one country, within one government. It should be a little bit diversified. There was, you know, an example that we had here, just it's sort of like closer to home a few years ago when Hurricane Maria, I think, I think that was the name of the hurricane. But that hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico manufacturers anywhere from 85 to 90% of the world's supply of IV bags. And so when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, it wiped out all of that manufacturing. And so you have a situation where one country is affected, and it impacts the entire globe in a very serious way. And so I've just been sort of fascinated as to how that could possibly happen from just a business standpoint, why? I mean, I guess from a business standpoint, is the reason we got into this mess is, you know, they're thinking of, well, let's just consolidate and put it all in one place, and then you find out why that's such a terrible idea. So now. All of this talk of manufacturing coming back to the United States. What does that look like? Is it going to be the steel mills that you know, that we saw in sort of, you know, Pennsylvania, West Virginia type places are is that coming back? Or is it sort of a new way of thinking about manufacturing? And I tend to lean more towards especially after watching a few internet, educated YouTube videos, I tend to think that it needs to be the newer version of what manufacturing looks like. And so this company called Hadrian, is really, really fascinating, because what they're doing is they're trying to implement the software side of things with manufacturing. And I know you're probably people who are in manufacturing, they're gonna hear they're gonna roll their eyes about trying to add, you know, technology into manufacturing, because it's probably what we hear about when it comes to any of these industries. But with the chips act coming here, we have the infrastructure bill, there's a lot of different ways that we should be sort of investing in our manufacturing, how we're just thinking about what that process looks like. So this company, I'm going to play a short clip of what they're trying to do, and I think I'm going to play it from right here, so hopefully we can hear it
Unknown:
6:14
realizes something, and then it zooms out to the earth, so then it comes back in. I have one of those moments, and I was like, Oh God, this is how the whole thing was. This is Chris Powell. He's the founder of Hadrian automation, a young company based in Los Angeles that's aiming to change how manufacturing works in America. He's already built one automated facility, but that's just the start. In other words, building the factory. Adrian is trying to build the factories of the future. The real problem is that America's greatest companies are resting on this house of cards of 40,000 small business owners propping up the aerospace and defense industry, and now they're just old and retiring, taking all their knowledge with them, and there's no one to replace them. American manufacturing is a huge problem, primarily because in the 80s and 90s we outsource manufacturing. We decimated the Midwest. Now it's called the rust belt for a reason, but Chris has a unique strategy for how to solve it. Our task has been to rebuild the future on a stronger foundation than we had before. So Hadrian's vision is to basically re industrialize America, and the way we are doing that is building automated factories for space and defense. I don't think you get the Jetsons flying car future in a western LED system without something like a Hadrian, and we're trying to build it as fast as
Blythe Brumleve:
7:26
possible. Are you in freight sales with a book of business, looking for a new home? Or perhaps you're a freight agent in need of a better partnership? These are the kinds of conversations we're exploring in our podcast interview series called The freight agent trenches, sponsored by SPI logistics. Now I can tell you all day that SPI is one of the most successful logistics firms in North America who helps their agents with back office operations such as admin, finance it and sales, but I would much rather you hear it directly from SPI freight agents themselves. And what better way to do that than by listening to the experienced freight agents tell their stories behind the how and the why they joined SPI hit the freight agent link in our show notes to listen to these conversations, or if you're ready to make the jump, visit SPI three. Pl.com, so that's just a little bit of a snippet of what. By the way, he's and we talked about this beforehand. It's very much a I'm currently obsessed with CEO by the name of Homer lucky. And when I have been watching a ton of his videos, he's like an aerospace manufacturer Department of Defense trying to be a department of defense contractor, co founder of Oculus, also co founder of a new company called Andrew, not really new, but they've been around for, you know, a few years now, but he very much reminds me of that. And so with knowing all that, I wanted to pull out a couple more quotes, because that video is really, really long. It comes from John Coogan, who really has, he has a ton of really, really great sort of documentary style YouTube videos. He's a former, like VC kind of guy. Now he's making content and covering a lot of these different types of stories. And this one is just really fascinating to me, because he says, You cannot put SAS software into industrial companies. You need to vertically integrate a software company within the industrial company. And so when he started up this company, hey, in 2020 it's to with the goal of building automated factories. And you can kind of tell by the accent that he's he's not from the US. He's actually Australian based. But when he was working for an E commerce company, he moved to the United States, and basically this is where he sort of got his feet wet when it comes to manufacturing and sort of the inefficiencies that are involved in that process. So he started cold DMing on LinkedIn, cold calling a lot of different manufacturers all over the country. He said that he would call 100 and a day. He would visit three per week. And he just did this over and over, sort of going back to what. Carrie, did you know, doing that due diligence and having the conversations stuff like that is not scalable, but he's doing he's having those conversations in order to build something that is scalable. So what he heard, whenever he's having all of this, you know, actually, let me take that back, he'd call 10 per day, not 100 he'd call 10 per day and visit with three per week, which is still, you know, impressive numbers, especially visiting in person three per week. And he was doing this in the height of COVID, and he says during that, you know, sort of that that video is that he was flying in airplanes when there was, like one other person on a Delta flight at a time. So he was willing to, and
Grace Sharkey:
10:39
I wish, well, his
Blythe Brumleve:
10:41
thought process was is that, you know, either COVID will kill me during this process, but I need he was so determined that he was willing to take that risk in order to have these conversations and really focus on what he was going to build next. And what he heard is that from all of these different folks is that the supply chain is fragmented, the customer experience is terrible. Everyone is 55 to 65 years old, and it's a highly technical industry, and there's no real reason why software robotics hasn't been put into place. These were the concepts that these companies were telling him, and so that's the reason why he started his manufacturing company, but he wanted to pick a lane that was a high margin and high precision. And so he picked aerospace manufacturing, as far as like his his entry into the manufacturing world. And so he said, starting here can lead to revenue to fund the next manufacturing facility. So he starts realizing the need to partner with existing suppliers, and he uses them as the way to vertically integrate software and automation. And what I think is the coolest part of the way that he's doing this is that they have different teams that are set up throughout his automation facility. And if you missed it in that clip, Elon Musk is talking about, you know, it's a very brief clip, but he says, you know, the problem isn't necessarily building the product, it's building the machine that builds the product. And so that's what Adrian is focused on, is building the machine that builds the product. And so what they do is they take an industry veteran that has been, you know, they have all of this subject matter expertise all up in their head. And so what they're doing is they're pairing one of those guys, and they're pairing them with a software engineer. And so the software engineer and them work in tandem on different aspects of the manufacturing process, and so that if something is able to be automated, they can do that through software. And so what I mean by that is building the machine that builds the machine, but also building the process in which you find out what contracts to even go after. So they started building that kind of software asking, you know, it basically, it would, it would sort through, and it would scan all of these different government contracts that were put out for for suppliers to to try to bid on. And so what they would do is they would filter through all of those different things, then they would build it into a system of, can we build this ourselves? What does that look like? What does the revenue look like? And it spits this kind of information out in minutes. And so you're then combining those tandem software plus industry expert. You're pairing them together in order to bring that product to life, bring it to fruition, so that it's not only the product that you're building, but you're developing a supply chain ecosystem where these factories are located in the United States. You can, you know, have a lot of safeguards from a security perspective, it was just really, really exciting in order to see the approach that they're taking with it, and little things that I would have not even thought of. So the machine that builds the machine, they have different tools that are on the machine that builds the machine. And after every time that that little part is used, think of like a giant, like Phillips head screwdriver that's on that's designed to, you know, do something I don't, I don't know the extent of like that part of it. But that Phillips head screwdriver is normal wear and tear will happen after you make a, you know, a long period of products, or a certain amount of products, I should say. And so the wear and tear on that device will affect future products that you make. And with aerospace engineering, you have to be like a fraction of a hair within a hair of making sure that these parts are good enough to go into these different types of machinery, different type of weapons, planes, systems, stuff like that, you know, to keep the country safe. And so what they do is they scan the tool before it starts the manufacturing process, and then they scan it afterwards. And so then, that way, they can have a realistic timeline of how long that tool that's going to help the machine build the product, so that that tool doesn't go down, because currently in our manufacturing system, that does not exist, and so being able to scan it before. What would happen is that the tool would just go down. Then you would have to, you know, find a supplier that builds the tool that for the machine that builds the product. So, as you can see, like it's if there is a problem with the original tool, then it's going to create this downstream effect where you get the product, you get the products later. Takes months in order to fulfill, you know, some of these tools within the machine that builds the product. And so it's just a recipe for disaster. And so what his machinery does is it actually scans the tools in advance, before and after they've been put to work, in order to figure out what that lifeline looks like and get that product in before that tool goes down. So then that way, you have a more efficient supply chain, and that, you know, you can kind of keep all of those a little bit more contained. Then there's also a standpoint of, like American security. There's, you know, so going off in a little bit of another tangent, there's all of this sort of colonialism that's going on on the moon. So on the moon?
Grace Sharkey:
16:10
No, it's funny though. No, keep going. I do have something to add to this point. No, I love this. I love this switcheroo, though.
Blythe Brumleve:
16:21
Okay, so moon logistics, basically, what is going on on the moon is that the global order of everybody who essentially goes to the moon has set up different rules and parameters, where, if you set up a base on the Moon, nobody else can set up a base within 500 miles of your base. So once you sort of claim it, and you put your flag in the, you know, the dust of the moon, then nobody else can build that within 500 miles of that. And so right now, there's just a race to get to the moon as quick as possible, to lay your sort of, you know, stake in the ground, and that's your area. And no other country can come in and take it, because what happens is that you know, when you land, when you take off, when you're doing you know, sort of experiments on the moon, it kicks up a lot of moon dust. And the justification behind it is that, you know, we don't want your dust interfering with our experiments over here. But the other problem with it is that on the moon in particular, there's there's very limited sunlight at any given time just because of the nature of the rotation of the moon relative to the Earth relative to the sun. So there's really a very small window of time that we that you have light on the moon. And so what happens, from a national security perspective is that a large The Dark Side of the Moon is is, you know, they made a song of it for a reason. And so you have the Dark Side of the Moon, where a lot of these different rovers, apparently, a Chinese nuclear powered rover in particular, can operate on the Dark Side of the Moon. And no one knows where it's going. No one knows what it's doing. It can essentially just operate in silence. And so his, you know, going back to Chris power of Hadrian, you know, he's building this sort of, you know, aerospace, you know, manufacturing automation, in order to not only help American manufacturing, but also from a national security perspective, where we should probably know if there's, you know, a nuke rover running around on Mar or running around on the moon. And, you know, maybe we should have a little bit more intelligence to that, or maybe we should have our own in order, you know, to sort of combat this. You know, the the best deterrent to war is essentially making sure that that doesn't happen, and that's by showing off your weapons and showing off your capabilities in order to deter other opponents from thinking that you are a week party. So it's really like this grandiose thinking, not grandiose, but these big problems that I'm fascinated by when entrepreneurs are trying to solve them. So the big problems like that. So I think that that is really just sort of cool that, you know, we have these entrepreneurs like a Palmer, lucky, like a Chris power, that are seeing these big problems. And instead of going through the normal sort of government bureaucracy and the normal way of doing things, they're coming in with a fresh pair of eyes. They're having the conversations, and they're coming up with the solutions in order to combat some of this, in order to sort of, you know, because obviously, you know, with America, we have, you know, we've, we've talked earlier, we have, obviously our issues from a historical perspective, that we haven't been the best leaders that we should but the American Exceptionalism is, is something that should still be revered and still be something that we strive to, is to get better as a country. And so i That's why I wanted to highlight this company and to talk about, sort of the greater ethos of just, just trying to solve the big problems and doing it in a really fascinating way. So, so that's, that's my spiel. So, so kudos to them. Brokering success demands a battle ready strategy. Yeah. Ty TMS equips freight brokers with the ultimate battle station for conquering a tough market. With Tai, brokers gain access to a comprehensive platform where rate intelligence and quote history converge on a single screen. It's not just a page, it's a strategic command center designed to help brokers win. Thai equips your team with all of the data they need to negotiate with confidence and allows them to communicate directly with carriers and customers from a simple control base, revolutionize the way your brokers perform by giving them a competitive advantage with Thai TMS. For more info, go to Tai software.com backslash battle stations, and we also have a link for you in the show notes to sign up for a demo.
Grace Sharkey:
20:42
Yeah, you know, I don't have my own, but I'm going to piggyback off this. And when you're talking, I was trying to figure out the companies, because there's, I completely agree with this problem. I think it's and this is, you know, you know, by the time this comes out, it's people already kind of know about anyways, just to let people know, kind of out there, I'm going to be lowering my radio time here shortly to only a few days a week. And part of the reason I'm very excited about that is because it's going to give me an opportunity to dive a little bit deeper into some of these technology providers. I mean, like this one in particular. This is really cool. I'm going to, I want to reach out to this guy, but a lot of these technologies that aren't as flashy, or maybe like behind the scenes, more than people, that people understand the what's really interesting about this is that he's 100% right, and especially you bring up, right? It's like, how are, how are we building these, these robotics, is automation, these automation tools that are going to even be there to help build a lot of these things. And a big part of all of this discussion is something that, I mean, I don't want to get to the political side of this, but a lot of this has to do with employment, and a ton of jobs that I need to be filled in order, like that's why we're looking to automate, in particular, a lot of these manufacturing sites, because they're jobs that people just don't want, or I don't want to see our courses older
Blythe Brumleve:
22:12
too, and you don't want to lose that knowledge that of these skilled tradesmen who have been doing this for a long time. So how do we hire technology in order to solve that. Because his his argument is, is that we need to speed up the lead time in American automation and manufacturing, and we need to do it like yesterday, or it's going to remain a problem for both supply chains and, more importantly, national security.
Grace Sharkey:
22:35
Yeah, so there's, there's a few companies I've read about in the past, like, I want to bring up in this discussion, one of them to go to, like, more of the automation side, right? So, like, the work that he's doing, let's say that he gets these robots going, or even, let's bring up a few of the robotic companies are out there that we we, we write about freight waste, right? Like locust robotics, six river systems, things of that nature. So, like, there's a huge demand for that kind of stuff in warehouses in particular. Now, a lot of the problems is, and this goes into, I'm sure, the work that he's doing in these calls he's making, too, is that, like, they're they're not easily in they don't easily integrate into the same systems together, right? So it's kind of like, if you're more of a broker person in here, it's like you make all these investments to still have 20 100 tabs open on your computer, right? Well, that's not really helping the problem. There's a company I covered a while ago, again, now I'm gonna have some more free time to, like, follow up with these people called SVT robotics, and they were looking at themselves, and their platform was called, I think, soft, soft bot, and their main goal was to make the integration of these automation systems easier, right? Like that alone is a big problem part of all of this, and they were basically trying to become like what they call like the USB of of automation integrations, right? So long history. We talk about a different time, but the USB was created to make it so that computers were easy to have and easy to invest in as a normal computer at home person like back when the computers first came out, there was a different cord. Funny how Apple's making this happen again. But there was a different cord for every single application, every different one. For the mouse, a different one. So you had to spend a lot of money to get a computer. So as soon as they figured out how to make the USB now you can plug every all of your tools, even at this microphone, right into your computer. And now it made sense to invest in one because it was easier to use. And so that's kind of what they're doing with automation. Is like, a big part of it is like, Who are these integrators going to be? We don't have enough people to fill those jobs with how much people want to invest in it, and I'm sure hire someone like him to to help with their manufacturing. But we don't. We don't have enough people to kind of like, what, who? Going to guard the guards, like, who's going to run the robots, right? And so making that easier, so that investment becomes better as well. Another company in particular, because you're bringing up even, like, being able to take photos and like, understand when this equipment is going to be down. A company called Go expity, G, O, x, P, E, D, sorry. X, P, E, D, I, they're, they're doing the same exact thing for heavy industry equipment. So it was started by a guy who, like, worked for a huge Chinese like, some type of, like, energy company, and, like, for instance, right now, and thank God we got enough inventory. But like right now, most US oil factories are down because this is the time for the time of the year where they're replacing their equipment. Oh, perfect. Got it. And so what they do is they can, they work with companies to create a very fast supply chain so that when that manufacturing equipment goes down, they can easily bring in some new ones and get things fixed faster. And because they realize, like, the downtime, or, like you said, like knowing prior to when that screw is going to, like, actually stop working and your line would be shut down, like, they want to be proactive about that and get that done faster. So it's like, we talk about, like, everything is logistics, right? Like, there's so many, I love stuff like this, because it's like, okay, that you're solving a problem that's definitely out there, that downtime and it had any heavy industry, is like, we're talking GDP dollars, disrupt, disruptive like, so to see how quickly you can get, like, a big part to you, not only before something happens like that, proactiveness of a lot of like, what he's doing that you just went through, is pretty huge. So, yeah, let me know if you want to talk to these guys. Yeah,
Blythe Brumleve:
27:00
that sounds super cool. And this is, I mean, these kinds of conversations, like, I just don't think that are happening enough. I especially,
Grace Sharkey:
27:10
like, we just did a bunch of trade shows, right? It's like our industry shows, and it's like, how much did this come up? Like, not at
Blythe Brumleve:
27:17
all. Not, not one conversation this come up, but, you know, and to go back to Hadrian for a minute now, he's focused on, you know, sort of the high margin and high precision right now. And so his goal is to take this model and apply it to other types of manufacturing within the United States. I believe he has two facilities right now, but he's also planning for, he's also planning for demand as well. And so he's, he's planning on opening up more facilities in the future. But I just think it's, it's, it's one of those things that you don't even think about, like nobody even talks about that side of the coin. And so, you know, sort of going back to, you know, the the ISO scores that that we were referring to earlier, where, you know, a lot of carriers were getting the blame on, you know, loads being delivered late when come to find out it might be on the retailer or the shipper side of things. Yeah. And so, if you have, you know, sort of greater eyes on these problems that have downstream effects. You know, maybe we can start to set some baselines on, on what to expect in the new era of American manufacturing. So I thought, obviously, shout out to Hadrian for that part of the process and trying to fix sort of the broken supply chain, or the fragmented supply chain, and then also just sort of the big thinkers out there. I did have a couple, I
Grace Sharkey:
28:42
want to say quickly, too. Big lesson from this story is, if you are a young woman or you have a young daughter right now, put that girl in engineering or manufacturing, get her to like science. Okay, I couldn't get physics to work in my brain, because I hated it. But, like, we just listed off four different areas where you're going to make a lot of money one day, if you just focus on that engineering aspect. So women in STEM,
Blythe Brumleve:
29:14
and that's yes, I absolutely co sign that. And I, and I think, you know, anytime we talk about automation, I, you know, I there's always the caveat of, like, oh, you know, everybody's gonna lose their jobs and things like that. It's like, no jobs evolve. They're
Grace Sharkey:
29:26
gonna lose their jobs if this job isn't filled, you know, it's exactly,
Blythe Brumleve:
29:31
you know, we're, we're losing our jobs already, you know, to overseas manufacturers and things like that. But you know, for for the, for the betterment of American exceptionalism, for the betterment of, you know, sort of your neighbors and, you know, just the overall future of your children and things like that. No, I definitely agree. Start investing in some of these careers that, especially from a trade perspective, because that's going to be the most safe from any kind of knowledge work, AI work that's going to really consume a. Lot of us in the next you know, sort of probably two to five years going to come a lot quicker than than you think. But as jobs are replaced or evolve, then you can stay ahead of it, and you can learn these things and see these market shifts and be able to evolve with it. A social media coordinator Job did not exist 15 years ago, but it is very prominent role today. There are a lot of other different roles, autonomous truck driver, I know it's gonna piss off some people that I said that, but autonomous truck driver did not exist 10 years ago, but that role exists today, and it's paid very well. So if you're looking at where the trends and sort of these different I guess, industrial type industries are concerned. Like, tech is here. It's not going anywhere. The cat is out of the bag. And so either you want to learn with it and grow with it and evolve with it, or, you know, probably not going to have a good time. I hope you enjoyed this episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight, telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B. Subscribe to the show. Sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials over at everything is logistics.com and in addition to the podcast, I also wanted to let y'all know about another company I operate, and that's digital dispatch, where we help you build a better website. Now, a lot of the times, we hand this task of building a new website or refreshing a current one off to a co worker's child, a neighbor down the street, or a stranger around the world, where you probably spend more time explaining the freight industry than it takes to actually build the dang website. Well, that doesn't happen at Digital dispatch. We've been building online since 2009 but we're also early adopters of AI automation and other website tactics that help your company to be a central place, to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit new employees and give potential customers a glimpse into how you operate your business. Our new website builds start as low as$1,500 along with ongoing website management, maintenance and updates starting at $90 a month, plus some bonus freight, marketing and sales content similar to what you hear on the podcast. You can watch a quick explainer video over on digital dispatch.io, just check out the pricing page once you arrive, and you can see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you all real soon and go jags. You.
