China Has Scale. Can America Catch Up?

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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