Shawn Ryan Show - #225 Blake Scholl - Founder & CEO of Boom Supersonic

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

Blake Scholl is the Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, a company he started in 2014 to revive commercial supersonic flight with the Overture airliner, designed to fly at Mach 1.7 and carry 64–80 passengers.  A Carnegie Mellon University computer science graduate (BS, 2001), Scholl began his career as a software engineer at Amazon, later owning a $300 million P&L at age 24, and co-founded Kima Labs, acquired by Groupon in 2012.  Inspired by seeing Concorde in a museum, he self-taught aerospace engineering to launch Boom, which achieved the first privately developed supersonic flight with the XB-1 demonstrator in January 2025. With orders from United, American, and Japan Airlines, Scholl aims to make sustainable supersonic travel mainstream using 100% sustainable aviation fuel, targeting passenger flights by 2030. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://americanfinancing.net/srs NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org https://tryarmra.com/srs https://betterhelp.com/srs This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://shawnlikesgold.com https://hexclad.com/srs https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://ketone.com/srs Visit https://ketone.com/srs for 30% OFF your subscription order https://ROKA.com – USE CODE SRS https://trueclassic.com/srs https://USCCA.com/srs https://blackbuffalo.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Blake Scholl, welcome to the show. It's good to be here, Sean. Thank you for having me. It's good to have you. Another innovator. I love being around you guys. I mean, it's just been interviewing a lot of innovators here in recent history. And man, you guys are just incredible and fascinating and motivating to be around.

So thank you for coming. I love what you're doing, so. Well, thank you, and it's honored to be here. I got a question. How long did it take you to get here from Denver? It's about two hours and ten minutes. Two hours and ten minutes? If all the flights are about that long, we'd be doing okay.

You're not flying on the new jet, huh? Not yet. You know, we, I have committed I will be in the first test flight myself. So that I'm very much looking forward to. And I joke. So we just finished with our XB1, sort of our one-third scale demonstrator airplane. And I'd love to go, you know, hotwire that thing. I make it my own personal airplane.

I'll bet you and just about everybody else will love that. But, well, hey, I want to get in to how you got into this and all about what you're doing right now. But first, every guest starts off with an introduction here. So Blake Scholl, the founder of Boom Supersonic, a company you started in 2014. to bring supersonic air travel back to the mainstream. Challenged a 52-year-old ban on supersonic flight over land, helping to reverse it in just 115 days. A self-taught leader behind the world's first independently developed supersonic jet,

the XB1, which broke the sound barrier six times this year without an audible sonic boom. The architect of Ofercher, the fastest airliner in development, sent to fly, set to fly at Mach 1.7 with 130 orders from major airlines. Earned your private pilots license in 2008 and an instrument rating in 2011, a former Amazon software engineer who had just 24 managed 300 million PNL. Like I said, I love what you're doing. You are reinventing commercial air travel. It sounds like the XB1 can make, is it from New York to Paris in under four hours?

Under four hours. That's incredible. Before we get too far, how, would this be used for Conis travel or is it only overseas flights? Well, now that we've cracked sonic boom and the president has now signed an executive order to legalize supersonic flight in the U.S. can be used for Conis too. So you can leave New York at 9 a.m. in land in San Francisco at 9.30 a.m. go time. That's crazy. It's going to be so great. And you know what I love when I was going over the outline downstairs? I mean, I love that you, you started this in your basement with

cardboard cutouts of what you thought it would look like. And now here we are today with the model and the test flights and 130 orders. And it's just, I love these stories that somebody that just started something from scratch. You had no, I mean, you didn't have any education or, you weren't in aerospace. No, I had no formal training in this. And yeah, it seems a little surreal. So on Father's Day, I took my dad and my twin boys to the new R&D facility were building in Denver, and we've got our test airplane there.

And so we opened up the cockpit, and I let them all get in it. And I was flipping through my phone, and you know how it shows you, you know, photos from way back. And there was one of them from nine years earlier in the plywood and cardboard mockup of that airplane. Oh, man. And I was just looking back at the, I don't know why any of us believed. You know, I don't know, we somehow believed it ourselves. I don't know how in the world we got anybody else to believe in it. Because it looks, you know, quite a bit different from an actual real supersonic jet.

Man, it's amazing what you're doing. But everybody gets a gift. Oh, thank you. Vigilance League gummy bears, legal in all 50 states, although you don't have to worry about that living in Colorado, so. But, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. I told my friends I was doing it to start a company,

and everyone thought it was going to be a weed company. And I thought, you know, it's actually different kind of getting high people. Different kind of getting high. But I've got something for you also. I can pry it out here. Yeah. So this is a pretty special artifact. This is a, that has flew on the first supersonic flight of XB1.

So that has gone supersonic. Oh, man, thank you. And so that's numbered. I think that's number 60. They're not that many of those. It is number 60. Thank you. Very cool.

Very cool. And then one more thing before we get going, I have a Patreon. account and it's a community of all the people that have been with me here since the beginning and it just continues to grow and we've grown into quite the community. And so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. And so this is from Richard Beamer. Blake, what did you learn from working for others like Amazon and Groupon that helped you in your field of supersonic travel? Oh boy, so much. I, was, so Amazon was my first job out of school, and I'll date myself in this. It was 2001.

So I was something like engineer number 200 in Amazon. So it was early compared to today, but not ultra, ultra early. And it was my first real job. So I didn't, you know, I didn't know what a great company looked like versus crappy company. So I spent about five years there. And ultimately, I left feeling, you know, frustrated what I thought the problems were. And then After that, it was part of a couple of different startups, one that I founded, and we sold to Groupon. And after I mean spent time at Groupon, I learned how lucky I was to be at Amazon. The company is all like to say all these great things about themselves, you know, their

principal, they make long-term decisions, they care about their customers, et cetera, et et cetera. The hard part is actually doing the real work. And so when I can look at what Amazon would do versus what Groupon would do, I guess, again, back then, just a huge study in contrast of who were actually the long-term thinkers, who were actually principled, who was willing to take short-term pain

for the long-term right outcome. And Amazon, this is really very much Jeff's leadership, built that. And Groupon didn't have it, but I think it's the reason that approximately Groupon doesn't exist anymore. You haven't heard of it in years. Right.

I have not heard of that. Well, let's move into, to, let's move into, I mean, how did you get started? What, I mean, you went from Amazon to your company that you sold a group on. How did you get in? I mean, what is it with aerospace? For some of us, there's just this magical flight thing, and it's a bug that bites us, and it never, never gets out. I remember taking my first flying lesson when I was an intern in college, working in the Bay Area.

I'll never forget that first takeoff. It was just magical. It's sort of this experience of, holy crap, I have my life in my own hands, and also I have my life in my own hands. So it was both scary and empowering. And I've loved flight ever since. When I was in my 20s working at this startup in Seattle, there was one of the final concords had been put out to the museum there. And I went and saw it. I remember looking at the Concord.

I remember looking at the SR 71 Blackbird and thinking, like, how? How is it that the most amazing military airplane and the most amazing commercial airplane are both found in a museum, not in the skies? And I put a Google alert on Supersonic Jet that day, and I figured someone's going to obviously fix this. This was like 2007, so Concord had been gone for about four years. And I thought, okay, somebody else is going to fix this. I want to be first to know I could buy a ticket. I still have this email I wrote to my girlfriend about how much better our life would have been, you know, if she'd been able to show up at Mach 2. And for basically a decade, it was just, they were just crickets.

You know, there was some talk of a supersonic private jet for the, you know, the ultra, ultra wealthy. But, you know, I looked at Concord, and I was in, sheesh, I was at Amazon when Concord got shut down. I never got to fly on it. Why? It's a $20,000 ticket. Yeah, that was for royalty and rock stars. And, you know, I don't have anything against private jets. I think they should exist.

I think we should have supersonic private jets. But the big problem with Concord was it wasn't affordable. And so meanwhile, you know, I'd had this experience of starting my first company and selling it to Groupon. And it was, so I'd been, so I'd been in Amazon, so I thought I knew e-commerce. And then I'd been at this other startup that was building mobile app, so I thought I knew mobile. and what everyone tells you is you should work on what you're good at and so I thought I should work on mobile e-commerce

and so I end up I can't say this with straight face I built a mobile barcode scanning game and it's like the least important thing I could possibly work on and I would and yet like there's no such thing as an easy startup you know I was worried I lose all the investors money

I was at times super depressed and I'd wake up and think, like, why did I get into this? You know, how do I get out of it? And so when I had a chance to kind of sell the company to Groupon and the investors got their money back in a little bit, you know, it was my escape fantasy had come true. Nonetheless, I had loved that experience of being my own boss, of creating something from scratch.

And I just figured, man, I just want to invert every decision I made at that company. And I never want to work on something where I have to ask myself, is it worth it? So, after a couple years at Groupon, you know, having gone one level from barcode scanning game to internet coupon, I just couldn't, you know, I couldn't take any more of those phone calls, say, and send more email, Blake. And, you know, fired myself. And I thought, you know, let me put all my startup ideas in order of how happy I would

be if it worked. How many startup ideas did you have? I was looking at my notes from this a couple weeks ago because I actually kept a journal back then and there were probably a couple dozen. What were some, I'm just curious, what were some of the other ideas? They were terrible. Were they all in aerospace?

Some of them were, you know, and I, some of them, like I had an idea for a better rental car company. I had an idea, probably the most promising thing I had on the list was a convenience-oriented airline that would fly out of private terminals rather than commercial terminals. And that turned, it turned out somebody else, did that. That became basically JSX.

Okay. And I'm a big fan of that, but I ended up I ended up saying, I want to just focus on what would be most awesome if it worked, and I'll leave everything else aside, including whether I think I personally have any business working on it. I remember telling

when I decided I wanted to do Supersonic, I remember calling my mom and telling her, and she said, Blake, shouldn't you work on something you know something about? And it's what every mom would say, Right? It's the conventional standard advice to work on what you know about. And I think the actual much better thing is to work on what you love.

So if you stop any successful entrepreneur, so on the day they make it, let's say day of IPO, and you say, hey, of what you know today, how much of it did you know on the day you started? And I think the answer would be almost none. Like you have to learn the vast majority of how you scale a company and how you lead an organization and how you sell and blah, blah, blah. Everybody has to get reinvented along this journey. You're going to learn 99% new stuff.

So why not learn 99.5% new stuff and work on something that you really, really love? So I sort of said, okay, I'm going to look at this supersonic thing and I thought I would get two weeks into it and be done with it. That had to be, that had to be, the intimidation factor had to be pretty high. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the weirdest thing was, I mean, so I got slightly down path of it over a few months of expecting that I was going to talk myself out of it.

But every time I would go and study something, I would just find that the conventional wisdom was wrong and that anybody with a spreadsheet in a web browser could build a basic model that said you should be able to fly supersonic with today's technology. So I took an airplane design class. I put myself through remedial calculus and physics because I hadn't had any sense high school. I remember in the middle of 2014, I had a spreadsheet model of the airplane and a spreadsheet model of the market. And I took them both to a professor at Stanford. And I said, do you look at this? Because I don't know what I'm doing. But if my math is right, this is all

practical. And he looks at it and he clicks around. He says, Blake, you know, if you're going to actually consider this, you need to be more aggressive. All your assumptions are conservative. I remember leaving his office and thinking either I have no courage or I'm going to try to find some great people and go do this and it was, but that was the weirdest part is I'm like, who am I to go build

a supersonic jet company? And, you know, I would tell my friends I was looking at it and I could just see their eyes roll back and I struggled with I struggled with my own ego a lot in that because it's such a bold declaration to say I'm going to go build a supersonic

airliner. Like if it works, you know, I'm almost definitionally part of history. And so I'm like declaring to myself and my friends that I'm going to try to be a historic figure. Like that was really weird. And I think like, man, does this make me somebody really arrogant? Do you even go try this? And I struggled with it. And that I remember thinking back about Bill Gates' story, who'd been one of my heroes in high school. And he had famously, I think in the late 70s said that his goal for Microsoft was to put a personal computer in every home and on every desk running Microsoft software. And he said that in, how does it? I mean like 78. And then he did that and then some. And so I tried to ask myself, what was it like to be Bill Gates and say that?

He wouldn't have succeeded if he hadn't gone for it. And it wouldn't have happened on one You know, on the other hand, they're probably, like, I think of it as the dark matter of entrepreneurs. The people who try for big missions and go for it and don't make it. And we don't know who they are. Their names are lost to history. But they knew who they are, and they know they gave it their all. And for me, the choice was, I'd rather be embarrassed in front of my friends. I'd rather be in the dark matter of entrepreneurs

than be 80 or 90 years old looking back and thinking I would have loved to work on supersonic flight what would have happened if I tried yeah I can I can relate to that in other aspects who was the first person that believed in you

Avichel Garg was at least the first person to say he believed in me this was somebody I'd gone to high school with in Cincinnati who had gone on and sold a company to Facebook quite successful

in his own right and I remember I was having lunch with him at the Facebook cafeteria when I was thinking about all this stuff and I kind of gave him the pitch

and he says Blake you should do it and I was like really no one else says that and years later years later he told me that he actually thought I was crazy

but he could tell I was just so darn passionate about it, you didn't have the heart to tell me not to. No kidding. And so I think the reality was on day one, nobody believed it, not even me. Wow. How old were you when you decided to make the shift? 33.

33 years old. Wow. And how long after you decided to do it did you start the company? And I mean, when did the cardboard cutouts and all that kind of stuff start happening. Yeah, let's see. So I left Groupon in something like March of 2014 and then I set the company of my paper in September of that year

but it decided... Well, to me that feels slow. Really? Yeah, I had my head that I would take a few months off and I think I only took a few weeks off before I really got focused on it. And around, it was around

that time, I was still living in California, I hadn't moved to Denver yet. And I think I had some, you know, folding chairs and some, you know, plastic tubes that I was using in my basement just by myself trying to figure out how small could you make an airliner and still have it be comfortable. The diameter of these things matters for the fuel efficiency. And then I moved to Denver in early 2015, hired our first few people. And one of the first things we did is, you know, start building mock-ups.

And you're doing your own engine. You're doing everything. It's all... We're doing our own engines. We're not doing our own everything, but I've become a big believer that if there is a custom part needed on the airplane, it's much better to vertically integrate it than to outsource it. Let's talk about, you know, you'd had that, you'd overturned in 115 days,

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Black Buffalo Tobacco Alternatives, the future of dip honoring the past. Yeah, so it was actually not part of the original plan. Really? Yeah. So everyone thinks that, you know, the point of the whole company was to solve Sonic Boom. And so of course, of course, we were going to go demonstrate the Sonic Boom solution. Of course, we're going to push for the repeal of the supersonic ban. And that was actually not the plan on day one. The plan on day one was, let's assume we can't change any regulations. And let's keep the plan as simple as it possibly can be and still find a big enough market. So that was, so what happened was in January, so January of this year, we did our first supersonic test. flight, January 28th. And in the run-up to that, I asked the team, I was like, hey, we're going to go fly supersonic. We should probably know what kind of sonic boom we're going to make. So we can expect it, set people's expectations, be able to talk about it. And I kind of wanted to be told, oh, it's going to be a real wallop. You know, wanted to enjoy that. And the team

came back and said, no, no, no, we've been talking for years about this thing called mock cutoff where the boom doesn't reach the ground and you don't hear anything. And we're going to be in mock cutoff. So there's not going to be a sonic boom. And I was actually a little disappointed. So we went and we did that test flight. We broke the sound barrier three times, three times in mock cutoff, boomless condition.

Microphones in the ground confirmed it. And then I'm on X and I'm just talking with people. And the plan had been, you know, this is a trans-oceanic airplane. It's not a conis airplane. And the internet is convinced that we're all about solving sonic boom. And I can't convince people that wasn't the point.

And I remember thinking about, wait a minute, we did this thing in boomless crews and this physics called Mock cut off that we can get into how that works. And we looked at it for the Overture airliner and decided it wasn't practical because when we were building on these outsourced engines, it wasn't.

In order to do this boomless thing, you have to break the sound barrier at a sufficiently high altitude that the boom can make a U-turn in the sky and never touched the ground. And the Rolls-Royce engines couldn't do it. So we sort of put it aside as impractical. But meanwhile, we started designing our own engines and optimizing them.

And every time I go to these engineering meetings, it was like, well, the transonic Excel altitude, we just went up 1,000 feet, went up another 1,000 feet, number 1,000 feet. And I started to think, well, what if the Internet is right? And I'm wrong. And so we called an emergency Saturday engineering meeting. And I said, team, we've got different engines than last time we did this analysis. We need to rerun the analysis on overture. Can we do boomless crews?

And it took 90 minutes, and they said, thumbs up, it just works. No kidding. And so the next thing I did is I called the marketing team, and I said, we're going to relaunch the company around boomless crews. Everyone's going to think it was the plan all along, but we just figured it out. Man. So why did, let's just go back. I got a lot of questions.

Actually, let's talk about Asonic Boom and what it is. Yeah. So Sonic Boom is the sound. an airplane makes while it's flying supersonic, you can think of it is kind of like the wake of a boat. The boat's going sufficiently fast. It's going to make a wake. The wake's going to propagate outwards. And you notice it when it hits you. And so a big boat, big boats make a big wake, right? Small boat's going to make a smaller wake. The boat's right next to you. You're going to feel the weight more strongly than if it's further away. A lot of that is the way sonic boom works.

big airplanes are going to make bigger sonic booms but the further away they are the less you hear and then there's there's a distinction with booms that doesn't occur with wakes which is they curve as they move and they do that because there's a temperature gradient in the atmosphere it's you know of course it's cold up high and it's warmer down low that temperature gradient

creates a speed of sound gradient the speed of sound is higher the warmer it is Okay. Lower the cooler it is. And so the refraction happens. Whenever a wave moves through something where it speed changes, it turns in the direction of lower speed. So imagine like you're driving your car and your inside wheels are moving slower than

your outside wheels. You're going to turn towards the inside. So when light refracts, that's why. When sound refracts, that's why. And so the sonic boom, which is this sort of compressed airband that comes off the airplane when it's flying supersonic makes, you know, it turns as it goes through the sky. And so if it comes off the airplane at a sufficiently shallow angle and the airplane is sufficiently high, you've got this gigantic U in the sky.

And at the bottom of the U never touches the ground, nobody hears any boom. Gotcha. And so this is the easy solution for Sonic Boom. For 50 years, people have talked about it like it's this buggy man that's going to require you know, decades of R&D, turns out this is a software solution. You just need today's weather data and an algorithm and it tells you what speed and altitude to fly. And then there's no boom. No kidding. It's actually really simple. Wow. I mean, talk about why people have made it out to be a harder problem than it is. Let's do it. I think there is a, so like NASA, for example,

has been working on sonic boom suppression for decades. And they've got this R&D airplane called the x-59 that they've been working on it for longer than boom has existed as a company and it hasn't hasn't flown yet um it's in it's they're they're going about this with completely different physics it's this very long skinny airplane which i think is part of why it hasn't flown yet it's really hard to make that work and the idea is if you stretch the airplane out it kind of spreads the boom out across more time and so when you hear it it's quieter oh good and that that thing can go up to mock 1.4 uh boomless tops out at about mock 1.3 so they can go very slightly faster.

But that's hard mode. Okay, well, why do it on hard mode? Well, if it's not really hard, I don't think you can justify the research program. So I think there's this dynamic around some of these R&D type efforts where the incentive for the people working on them is to make the challenge sufficiently hard

that it justifies the program. Interesting. I mean, you've had I mean, just to start that company, I mean, you're going up against Boeing, you have the regulations, the speed regulations. What was the speed regulation? It says, thou shalt not exceed Mach 1, the speed of sound. I mean, it's a DOM regulation. You've got some hurdles, and you have no background in aviation for aerospace.

And, I mean, how did you, when you, is the founder of the company, I mean, how did you, those are some big, those are some major hurdles to get over. Right. Well, I remember sitting in my basement thinking, okay, take my own ego out of this. Just imagine it's the year 2050. And I'm retired and I'm sitting on the beach, sipping mitis, and I'm reading, you know, aviation history. How do I think it goes? do I think after

150 years of not doing supersonic Boeing or Airbus finally do it? No, of course not. Like, history never goes that way. The big guys never suddenly get enlightened. Okay. Well, do I think we're still

going subsonic? Jeezh, I hope not. Okay. So if we're not going subsonic and Boeing and Airbus didn't do it, how would it happen? And I just started imagining how that history would go, you know, without me being part of it, okay, it'd have to be an effort from outside the industry. Nobody who had spent their careers at Boeing or Airbus would ever do it

because, you know, they'd have learned all the reasons why it's impossible. It had to be somebody from outside the industry. And what would the attributes of that effort have to look like? And what would the leaders of that effort have to look like? Well, you'd have to be incredibly passionate about the mission because it would be long and hard. And if you didn't care about it and you were saying, you'd give up. So mission passion, mission orientation would matter. Being able to tell the story of why supersonic would matter would be really important

because that would be the only way you could get a dream team together, and this would need a dream team. And so the ability to storytell, the ability to be persuasive, the ability to be a minnow that gets sharks to come swim with you, the startup would have to go get

these airlines that are used to buy in a Boeing and Airbus airplanes to go buy airplanes from a startup instead. It would require this incredible power of persuasion, of perseverance. And so I put that aside, and I looked in the mirror and I said, do I look like the CEO for this? And the answer was not at all. I didn't know anything about the industry.

I don't think I could have sold you a dollar bill for 50 cents. And so I said, okay, well, And a lot of these things I was really insecure about. I was insecure about networking. I was insecure about sales. And I asked myself, well, what mattered more? My insecurity or my passion for this idea? And I said, okay, Blake, if you want to actually do this,

you have to become that person. And I have to have to be willing to reinvent myself. And I have to do that continuously along the way. And so I sort of set out to become what my idea was of the right kind of leader for it. Gotcha. Gotcha. Let's talk about, so it sounds like Concord was the main inspiration, correct? Well, it was an existence proof, right? Like, in some ways, I think it requires way more courage to go off and create something of a category that's never existed before. And Concord existed. In fact, it was done in the 1960s. It just wasn't done in a way

that made it make any sense. Nobody could afford to fly on it. So it was sort of dead on arrival. So this was, I didn't, this was, this was, this goes all the way back to the 60s. Concord was established as a joint venture between the French and British governments by treaty in 1962. Wow. It first flew in 1969 within months of the moon landing. Wow. Who was using it? Uh, so British Airways and Air France were the only two airlines that, that really operated it for any length of time. And the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the tickets were adjusted for inflation north of $20,000. So this was, this was really for the, you know, royalty and rock stars who, you know, who could

drop a whole lot of coin to go somewhere really fast. It was just, it was not practical the way it was done then. How long did it run for? 27 years. 27 years. Yeah, shut down in 2003, really with no plan to replace it. Why was it shut down? So the proximal cause was it was just too expensive.

The, you know, at this point, the successor entity of the companies that had made it was Airbus, and the market was tiny. It had always been tiny for Concord. And they were, you know, they were having to make spare parts and whatnot. And Air France wasn't making any money flying it. And so the story I've heard is that Air France and Airbus kind of got together and said, let's just stop doing spare parts for this. And then the British will have to stop flying at two and it'll force the whole fleet down. So that, that happened. You know, it was. I don't know if the conspiracy theory is exactly true, but I think the reality was it died, it was still born. This was an airplane with a hundred seats on it. Mind you, 100 uncomfortable seats. Like, you could think they were out of back of Ryanair or something. Not a comfortable airplane, $20,000 ticket, 100 seats to fill. That's just, this doesn't work. You can't find 100 people who want to drop 20 grand to go somewhere all at the same time.

that's why they only ever had 14. Interesting. So 100 seats, $20,000 a ticket. And then, so it was actually the company that deep-sixed it, wasn't the regulations. I think it was, it was not the company. The French and British governments specced it. So let's, I think this is a big piece of kind of what went wrong in aerospace in the 1960s. You know, so one of my controversial opinions is that Concord killed supersonic flight.

It never should have existed. And Apollo killed space exploration. And also should not have gone to the moon in 1969. And, you know, a lot of people, you know, and I loved Concord and I loved Apollo. But I don't think they helped us. And if that seems like a crazy thing, just notice it's 2025 and we can't fly supersonic and we can't land on the moon. So these things that we were told in the 1960s, where the harbingers of great progress

didn't pan out the way was predicted. So why? And I think the answer is that for the first 50 years, you know, from the Wright brothers forward, innovation in aerospace was commercially driven. It was

you're building a commercial airplane that passengers got to be able to afford to fly on, that airlines won't operate profitably. You know, nobody built a machine unless they at least believed it was going to make economic sense. You know, and then if you're building military machines, they had to make sense for that mission. And so there was a commercial hand saying it's got to make sense, or there's a military hand saying it's got to make

sense. But either way, something's keeping us grounded. And in the 60s, we pivoted to Cold War era, national prestige as the motivation. And so there was a Soviet project to create a supersonic airliner. There was a European project to create a supersonic airliner. And there was an American project to create a supersonic airliner called the SST. And in all three cases, they were government-funded and they were government-spect. And the result was everybody was building products to show technological superiority, not products that made any commercial sense. So Concord and the Soviet airplane were very similar.

The American airplane was going to be 300 seats in Mach 3. So it made even less economic sense than Concord did. And then what happened is the American, so Congress pulled the plug appropriately on the American supersonic airplane. Concord and Concordski were still coming. And now all of a sudden, and it was not obvious back then just how economically dead on arrival Concord was going to be. And so then America responded trying to protect Boeing by banning supersonic flood over land. That's what it was. That's what it was.

It was to protect Boeing? This was protectionism. It was as long as Boeing's building a supersonic airplane, it was all fine. That project gets canceled. And we can't have that sonic stuff. It's terrible. And I think the real tell was if it had been about Sonic Boom being bad, it would have been a noise limit. Not a speed limit.

Literally it banned supersonic flight in the U.S. the government be protecting Boeing? Regulatory capture? It just... I mean, that happens all the time, right? That I think an enormous amount of the regulations that we have in any industry today are there to protect the incumbents.

So what? They set up a lobbying, they lobbied to put a speed limit in place so that they could have no competitors, even knowing that they had no ambition to become a competitor in that, and supersonic I mean I don't know exactly how it went

some speculating a bit but you know we had European and Russian government funded projects to build a superthonic airliner the U.S. taxpayer

funding and Boeing did do the same thing had just been pulled and so I could imagine saying hey that's Boeing saying hey that's unfair you got to protect me from that

if you're not going to subsidize me the way the other guys were subsidized then you know then at least block them so they can't do anything here and and then there was The public story was all about, you know, how bad these airplanes were going to be noise-wise and environmentally.

A thing I've come to believe is, you know, every bad regulation tends to have a moral cover story that's believable. You know, like, oh, you know, we can't, you know, disturb sleeping babies and break windows. And then there's a real motivation, which is Boeing doesn't want to compete with Concord, which you would never, you know, they would never say out loud. They can only say the other stuff. And so it's plausible sounding, but there's a, you know, more sinister actual motivation. And you've been in business for 10 years. A little more than 10.

11? 11 years is 11 years? It'll be 11 in September. Yeah. So 11 years. And just in the past 115 days, you were able to get that ban. So, I mean, how were you, how did you get around that for the first 10 years? Well, we had a business plan that didn't need. it. As it turns out, there are about 600 routes around the planet that are primarily trans-oceanic, you know, not just New York, London, Miami to Madrid, and Seattle to Tokyo, and L.A. to Sydney, where most of the flying is over water where there is no speed limit.

Okay. Right? And so our basic idea was, well, Concord missed on cost and it missed on comfort. So we've got to solve those problems. But I've got to make the seats nicer, and we've got to get the cost down to the point that more people can afford to fly it. And today, I mean, there's really nice flatbed seats at the front of the airplane in business or first class for international flights, right? And people pay top dollar, five, ten, ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty grand to be up there. And the whole premise is, I hate the flight as long, give me a flying bed so I can sleep

through it. But of course, if you make the flight twice as fast, you don't need the bed anymore. The experience could be more like flying first class domestically. And so the basic idea was, can we improve upon the efficiency of Concord enough that people would be able to trade a flying bed for a supersonic seat instead and sleep at home, not on the airplane? And to do that, you need a remarkably small improvement versus Concord. like the math closes it less than 10% improvement versus 1960s technology. Now, we found a lot more than 10%. We put all the extra into making the seats nicer and the airplane more comfortable.

But that was the basic idea. If you just run the math, which for some reason I think I was just the first person who actually ran the math, there was plenty of business in 2010s, 2020s, 2030s kind of travel demand. in business class on these international routes if you can make the fair similar to what people were already paying not stratospheric like Concord

so that was the original plan we didn't need to solve Sonic Boom we thought we'd do that in version 2 but it turned out it was easier than anybody said and so my experience getting that changed was so in February 10th

we did our second supersonic flight on XB1 and we announced boomless cruise and that That night I flew to D.C. on this horrific flight that should have been supersonic. And by the time I landed in D.C., I had an invitation to the West Wing. And so we started our lobby campaign that day. And I tweeted about Boonless Cruz, and Elon had responded and said, yeah, we should get rid of dumb regulations like this.

So we had a bunch of people who were supporting it. And so I spent time in the White House and I spent time with Congress, I spent time with the FAA. And I basically said, look, if we were proposing to make sonic booms, we'd have to have an argument about, are they too loud or not? And reasonable people might differ on how loud is too loud and how quiet is quiet enough. But we can do this in a way that there is no audible sonic boom. So there's nothing to disagree about. How was that received? Universally, people were excited.

So there was a bipartisan bill that got introduced in the House and in the Senate called the Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act. They basically said, hey, FAA, go rewrite your rules so that you can fly supersonic without a boom, you're allowed. And so that got introduced very quickly. Senator Bud introduced it in the Senate, and Representative Troy Nells introduced it in the House. We had bipartisan support on the House. And then meanwhile, I think the president looked at it, and he's, he loved Concord. There's this beautiful video clip of him talking about. It was the most beautiful airplane ever and never really should have gone away.

And he said, well, I can do it faster than Congress. I'm going to do an executive order. And so he did. Nice. Nice. How do you, I mean, how do you see? your company fitting into the world. I mean, is this going to be,

we kind of talked about it, I think downstairs. I don't think it was on here yet, but, you know, is this going to be Conis? Is it going to be just overseas flights? Yeah, well, I think the... Who's going to be able to afford it?

All this stuff. Well, let's start with a vision and we can work backwards to how we get there. Okay. I want to replace subsonic for every passenger on every route,

at least every long route, you know, at fort you're the president all the way down to families is the what's a long route anything that's you know more than three or four hours today okay uh you can kind of argue where the threshold is where that the speed uh speed really makes a big difference i mean i haven't found anything in the world i don't think i would be better off faster think everything's better faster uh but for fly it's you know over three or four hours uh you can you can argue cut in a half is meaningful um so you know ultimately if we want to enable more people to go more people to go more

places more often. We need the flights to be faster. We need to delete, you know, the terrible hassle and inconvenience that is air travel today. And we need to get the cost down as much as we can so that cost isn't a barrier to actually going. That's, so that's the ultimate goal, you know, to, you know, confine subsonic jets to the, you know, airplane boneyards. Put them in museums where they belong. But it'll take a few iterations to get there. So, you know, Overture, which is this, this airplane, the first one, first one, commercial airplane starts all business class. So you can kind of think of, you know, for people who know the Tesla story, RXB1, Supersonic Demonstrator, it's kind of like the

Tesla Roadster. Proved you can do it. Okay. Not, you know, the airplane was really just for a test pilot. Prove we could do it. Prove the technology was there. Okay, the first product is kind of like the Model S. It's a lot of people can afford to drive Model S, but not everybody. And then we take everything we learn from that airplane and we'll build a second generation larger airplane that's even more affordable. And we'll probably take two or three kind of iteration cycles to the point where anybody who wants to fly supersonic will be able to afford to fly supersonic. No kidding. And how many passengers do you think it'll hold? Ultimately, there's going to be a whole family of airplanes. The way you make commercial airliner economics work is you need to size the airplane for the market it flies on.

So, you know, you want bigger airplanes to support city pairs that have more traffic. You want smaller airplanes to be able to fly between city pairs that have less traffic. So there'll probably be a whole family of airplanes at different sizes. There's no upper limit to scaling. There is a slight advantage in smaller airplanes because they can work economically on more direct flights. You know, nobody wants to go to a hub and change airplanes, right? But if you can make an efficient long-range airplane with a smaller number of seats on it, then you can connect more cities directly. And that's an added speed benefit.

So there's going to be a whole family of airplanes here. Gotcha. Gotcha. And when do you think these will be implemented? Our goal is to have the first overture rollout in a little over two years in 2027. Wow. Fly in 28. Our goal is to be certified in 29 and, you know, hand them over to airlines in 30.

So five years is the goal. Will you be your own airline or will you sell to the airlines? No, we'll sell. We have sold to airlines. So United was first to announce that they put an order in with a non-refundable deposit. American Airlines did the same thing. Japan Airlines was the first to do a pre-order. And I think ultimately every international airline is going to need to have this because it's what their passengers want.

So if you don't have it, you're going to be left behind. what about what about infrastructure as far as airports are they going to need are they going to need longer runways is there only

certain airports that can handle a jet like that I mean what are some of the what are some of those kind of hurdles if there are any yeah we've worked

real hard to make make sure there aren't any so any airport that can handle a Boeing triple seven can handle an overture jet so it works with existing runways

existing jetways existing terminals it can run on sustainable fuel but can also run on today's fuels. So this drops right into the air travel ecosystem that exists today. In a way that Concord didn't. Concord needed an extra long runway,

and it came in really fast, and so it was disruptive for air traffic control. We've been able to solve all those problems. Really? What about the pilots? Do you need specific pilots? Like any airplane, you've got to learn to fly it. But it'll be like going from a Boeing to an airbus as far as pilot training.

In fact, probably a little bit easier. this is the first brand new airliner cockpit in about 40 years Wow And so If you come out to It's been 40 years

Since anyone did a brand new airliner cockpit versus They take the last one And they tweak it And so we get to do a fundamental rethink And if you come out to Denver We've got to get you to fly it Because we've got a flight simulator

And it's so much easier to fly Than a Boeing Air Airbus It's like going from a Blackberry to an iPhone No kidding Like, we got rid of all the knobs and switches and buttons, except a handful that are really important for safety. And everything else is a big touch crane. And it's really nice. And so you don't need to be some, you know, hot shit military pilot to fly this thing.

It's a little scary to say it, but, you know, we're designing it for the worst pilot. You know, just like there's a worst doctor, there's a worst lawyer, there's also a worst airline pilot. and, you know, we want to design this such that the average, you know, average pilot can succeed. What will the experience be like for the passengers? You mentioned it's all business. You mentioned, I don't know if you were talking about pricing or is it going to be, is it going to look like business class?

So pricing-wise, it'll be like what people pay in business class today. Okay. You know, within, you know, nominal fare, I think $5,000 round trip will be very profitable on this airplane. No, that's not for everybody, but that's a pretty good business class price. Is that from, is that Conis? Is that O Conis? Round trip across the Atlantic would be about five. Conis roundtrip could be less than that.

Okay. But on board the airplane, we wanted, so years before I started boom, I would get on a commercial airplane, I'd look around, and I'd think, man, like, what if this thing was designed by Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive? and just notice the number of seams and gaps from the outside of the airplane to the inside of a window notice I mean I'll say something you can't unsee it once you've heard this

if you look at the window the underside of the overhead bin in the window seat on every commercial airplane that you'll notice there's this little brown splotch in every row why is when people stand up they bump their head and there are hair schmutz gets on the underside of the bin

and you just look all through these things they're so thoughtlessly designed and the airplanes made by one company and the interior is made by another company and they're kind of just smushed together and so we said we're going to design the airplane and the interior together and we hired some great designers

we were very careful to pick ones that had never done an airplane before but we wanted some fresh thinking and we've got something we haven't revealed yet, but I'm pretty excited about it. And it's something that would not be possible if we hadn't designed the airplane and the engine together, and if we hadn't designed the airplane and the interior together.

Both of those were big unlocks for the kind of cabin we were able to create. When's that getting revealed? Maybe next year? I don't know. We haven't decided yet. Nice. I can show you off the record if you come to Denver, we can let you walk through a passenger experience lab,

put on some VR goggles and see it. I think people are pretty excited for it. And so how fast are planes flying today? Let's do miles per hour. Yeah, well, let's see. So I think of these things in terms of percentages of speed of sound, which is it's 75 to 85% of the speed of sound today on a Boeing or Airbus. If you've got a high-in private jet, you can go a little bit faster.

And then Overture will do 1.7 mock, so twice as fast. What is that ground speed? Around 1,200-ish. It varies with temperature a little bit. So it's substantially faster. Do you feel that when you're in the jet? No. The one thing you'll notice when you go supersonic is it's slightly smoother.

And you'll be at a higher altitude to you're above more of the weather. So no, nothing. It's completely uneventful. On Concord, they had a big screen that would show you the speed. And whenever it went through one, they'd celebrate and bring around champagne, make a big deal out of it. Because otherwise, you wouldn't notice. No kidding. The day I'm looking forward to is in the past, I'm sure we'll do that too.

The day I'm looking forward to is when the passengers say, would you stop with that? I just want to get back to my movie or my book or my email. You know, I want to make Supertonic flight boring. But at first we'll make it exciting. Are any airports, I mean, is there any airports that are giving you guys, or maybe we're not there yet, but are they going to give you pushback about landing, taken off from? I don't think so. I mean, we've committed that it's not going to be louder than today's airplanes, and we've committed it doesn't require infrastructure upgrades. And so for the most part, you know, we get calls from airports saying, hey, would you tell us what we need to do because we want to welcome your airplane?

And our, you know, our answer is sit back, relax. You don't have to do anything. It just works. Now, of course, I mean, I'd love to redesign airports, but we don't need to. Not for Supersonic anyway. So don't need that. But, well, how is, I mean, how are your competitors handle on this, like Boeing and Airbus? I mean, they, I fly all over the place, all the time for work.

And, I mean, the planes are legitimate. legitimately falling apart. One of my recent plates, the damn the overhead luggage bin, like, fell off in the middle of the luggage. It's just, you know, if you fly, you know what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah.

They're all outdated. Planes are falling out of the sky. And, you know, in recent history, I mean, it's just crash after crash after crash and things catching on fire, things falling apart. I mean, they're not, innovating at it almost

seems like they are purposely not innovating it's just let's just reuse this old shit over and over until it falls out of the sky. I think there's some truth to that. And then you come around with this. Well let me first paint a sympathetic

picture here. Wright brothers forward to the first jets every generation of airplanes was fashioned than the one that came before it. That was the primary vector of innovation. And then you know, In 1973, we outlaw increases in speed. So where does that leave Boeing?

I mean, yes, in some ways it was an own goal, but let's be sympathetic for a moment. All they can do is improve the design they've already got, is iteratively tweak it. So if you look at Boeing's latest jetliner and you squint and you're not an aerospace engineer, it looks just like their first one. Cuban-wing transonic airplane. Now think about what that does to kids and what industry they want to work in. I think there's a whole generation or two

that did not go into aviation because the door was close to innovation. And heck, I was one of them. I'm not, that did not even cross, that's a damn good point. I mean, why is Boeing, you know, literally falling apart? There are multiple threads to that story.

But one of them is, when the door is shut to the most exciting innovation, you can't attract the most talented people. They literally go to other industries. That's a damn good point. I didn't think about that. So are you getting any pushback? From Boeing or Airbus? Yeah. Well, they've got their own problems to solve.

I mean, Boeing, so neither Boeing nor Airbus has built an all-new airliner since 2004. 2004 Boeing and Airbus launched the 787 and the A350 and since then they have not done any all new products all they've done is take their existing things and tweak them

Airbus has been largely successful at that Boeing has been 737 Max it's been a famous disaster and so they've really just Boeing especially just gotten hollowed out and I hope

I hope they can fix the company Boeing's the only U.S. maker of airliners. There are only two in the world There's a Boeing and Airbus. That's it. And Boeing is like trying to get out of a self-destructive tailspin.

You know, they're not doing new products. They're trying to confidently produce the products they already have. And it's not a good situation. Is this like the days of McDonnell Douglas when Boeing acquired them? Yeah, I think that's part of the story too. I mean, there's sort of a, there was a sort of GE mindset that made its way to Boeing through McDonald-Douglas that was kind of the Jack Welch playbook that was, okay, you know, the way

you succeed in business is to know what Wall Street thinks we're going to do next quarter and beat it by a nickel. And if you do that, you know, successfully through whatever machinations, you can make the stock price go up and to the right. And it, you know, it works great until the day it doesn't. And the, you know, the way you do that is by cutting a lot of long-term stuff. And so the way Boeing ended up getting run was quarter to quarter. A lot of people say they got too focused on money and so they didn't care about safety. And I don't think that's quite true. And if you look at the results of their lack of focus on safety, it was the biggest financial disaster that ever had.

They didn't pay off financially. The problem was, their financial focus was short range, not long range. So Phil Condit left in 2004. I think he was the last good CEO over there. I'm fortunate to have him on our board now. And after that, we had people like Jim McNerney who explicitly said, hey, no more moonshots. And they meant no more new products. And I remember hearing that at the time, and I was in my 20s living in Seattle. actually I was living in a building called Concord Maybe this is my death today Are you serious? I can't make this up

I was a little condo in downtown Seattle A building called Concord, no E But I remember reading that from Jim McNerney And thinking, what the heck, dude You used to be in the literal moonshot business And now you've just decided to give up And by the way, if you can't attract young people before Now you definitely can't attract young people

and if you go 15, 20 years without developing a new product you don't have anybody left and knows how to do it and so the whole thing just devolves so at this point

by the way we didn't mention how this is important to the country Boeing's the number one US exporter and as you know we've got a huge problem we don't make things here anymore airplanes are one of the last things we still do

and we're fumbling that that's a huge problem yeah where's Airbus out of Toulouse, France and they're spread out all over Europe Airbus is like approximately the European government

Gotcha Gotcha Well Blake Let's take a quick break And then when we come back We get in some more stuff What if you could delay your next two mortgage payments

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These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or condition. All right, Blake, we're back from the break here. And something that I wanted to cover earlier, but I missed it, is lack of traditional, excuse me, lack of traditional credentials was both a hurdle and an advantage. And so I wanted to kind of get your thoughts on how that, I mean, I can see how it would be a hurdle. But I'd like to hear you talk about how it has been a hurdle. Yeah, I didn't walk in with any credential. in aerospace at all. I mean, I had my pilots license, and that was about as close as I got.

I remember the early days when I was recruiting, I'd fly down to Hawthorne where SpaceX was, to try and recruit out of SpaceX, we'd fly down to Mojave, California to recruit out of scaled composites, and I'd fly my, you know, a little airplane I could fly myself, and that was like the only cred I had showing up to these meetings. And I remember talking to people, and they were all there was sort of this pattern of like internet guys that want to go start airplane companies and that all the airplane guys were used to hearing pitches from internet guys

that didn't make any sense and in fact they had a term for it and people would say oh that's fruitcake and I remember when I first met with the guy who ultimately became our first chief engineer and I sat down I think we ended up meeting

at the subway at SFO Airport because he happened to be flying through SFO and I was like, great, I'll come over. And I sat down with him and he's eating a sandwich and I showed him the spreadsheet model of the airplane and the sizing calculations

I'd learned how to do out of a textbook. And he looked at it and he said, I didn't think he'd be this far along. And then our next conversation, he's like, man, I've been pitched a lot of ideas by internet guys, but this would actually make sense. So, you know, there's no, my experience has been, there's no substitute for actually

knowing what I'm talking about, actually doing the work. You know, like, I'd pick up, it was one of the things that I realized would have to be true about myself, is I would have to be technically deep in order to know what I was doing, make the right decisions, to be able to pick the right people and have them want to follow me. If I didn't know what I was talking about, if I was just some business guy, like, great people don't want to work for bosses that don't know what they're doing. So I had to learn it.

And by the way, it's fun. So, you know, so I bought every aerospace textbook that was, you know, used for teaching at the top universities. And I've quickly found I couldn't understand them. And so I went back. I did remedial calculus and remedial physics on Khan Academy. I didn't remember anything. I hadn't had any since high school. And I just made my way, you know, made my way through it over the course of about,

a year and so I think you know in some ways walking in not knowing anything is a disadvantage but I think it's actually mostly an advantage because I didn't want to spend a decade in my life going and getting a new degree and then going to work at Boeing or something and trying to learn it that way I didn't I don't want to spend that kind of time I didn't have that kind of time so I had to go really focus myself and first principles. And I wanted to understand the fundamentals. And it turns out that focus is incredibly powerful. For example, when I predict the performance of an airplane, there are really only four numbers that matter. There's aerodynamic efficiency, which is the lift-to-drag ratio.

For every pound of airplane I hold up with my wings, how many pounds of drag do I incur? That's aerodynamic efficiency, one number. There's engine efficiency, something called thrust-specific fuel consumption. Pounds of thrust, or sorry, pounds of fuel per pounds of thrust per hour. How much fuel does it take to create a pound of thrust and sustain it for an hour? Structural efficiency. What percentage of my overall airplane weight is the empty weight of the airplane versus fuel versus people in cargo and payload? And then last is at speed.

mock number. And so if you have those four numbers and you've got the correct assumptions, you can set up a mission profile for an airplane and predict the entire performance of it. And so you don't have to know. So, okay, and Concord's numbers were all published. How much better than Concord could we do? So all of that thinking it through from first principles mattered. Or I think I mentioned earlier that one of the other ideas I looked at and didn't do was an airline. be told I didn't actually have the courage to go double-click on Supersonic first. I thought, like, there's no way. There's no way. But, you know, maybe an airline. And so I built all the financial models for how an airline worked.

And that turned out to be really useful because I understood airline economics. And when you go model out airline economics, like the first thing you learn is the fill rate on the seats really matters. A seat that flies empty just adds cost. But filling that seat versus it being empty is like free revenue. So the fill rate, they call it load factor, that really mattered. And my point in all of this was because I had to go learn it in approximately a year, I had to focus on basic truths, but it turns out focusing on basic truths, focusing on first principles is what helped me see what other people had missed.

You mentioned something a little earlier, too, that resonated me. I think we were talking about the interior of the airplane, and you didn't want to hire the traditional designers, the basically that design the traditional commercial air transportation and it just it registered with me because I'm in entertainment you know but found myself in entertainment hate entertainment the industry and and I had gotten involved with managers and agents and all this other shit and it wasn't really working for me and what I've realized is everybody there seems to be a road map you know and everybody follows the exact same road back you got to come out with this type of a product you got to do this

all these different things and when i when i started this i looked at i looked at podcasts and and i was like okay this is what everybody's doing how can i make what i'm doing as different as i possibly can and create a better experience i think i've done that and then and then like i said i got involved with entertainment, very unimpressive industry by my standards. And so when I started to scale out the company, which actually was just about six months ago, to find somebody to run it, I looked, if entertainment was on your resume, it went right in the trash. And so I hired my COO, Eric.

He was in the energy sector. And my main point to him was, do not look at the, do not look at the road entertainment podcast roadmap. I don't want to do that. I want to do shit that I think is cool, that I like, that I want to do, start new businesses. I don't want this mold. Very wise. That's the direction that we're heading in now. We have a lot of different products that are going to be rolling out later this year that have nothing to do with podcasting. Some of it has to do with tech. I'm really excited about it. But I guess what I'm getting at is none of that would have happened had I done, you know, the typical road map.

map in the box, entertainment, podcast type thinking. Right. And so when you mentioned that about the interior of the planes, it was like, good job, Sean. You're doing it right. I think, I mean, you could do it the other way and you end up like everybody else. That's, yeah. But the world doesn't need more of what the world's already got. The world needs more of what you, and I mean, you, Sean, or you, me, or you anybody, can uniquely bring.

Mm-hmm. So I don't throw out the roadmap, be focused on facts and be focused on what, you know, like Elon said something years ago that one of his principles was he wouldn't work on anything unless he thought it wouldn't happen without him. And there's, you could look at that and say, what an arrogant ass hat. But I think there's actually real wisdom in that. Like what is your unique opportunity to contribute that otherwise wouldn't happen in the world? And focus on that. That's your differentiation. And don't follow the well-worn path unless you want to, you know, be a cog.

Did you adopt that from the, from inception? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I remember feeling very inspired by that. And it seems a little weird to say it, but I think it's actually true. Nobody else was doing supersonic flight before boom. I've been working on it for almost 11 years. Still nobody else is doing it. And it, I would like to believe that at some point it would have happened without

me and without boom, but it's not obvious that it would have. Wow. Still nobody else is doing this. No, there are a couple people working on hyper well, yeah. We'll get into later. China announced it right after we broke the South area. Oh, go figure. Go figure.

So, so even, you know, we inspired you for the Chinese. But, no, there's some companies working on hypersonic weapons where their story is they want to build a hypersonic airliner. But I think they're just defense companies who were started in an era when defense was not socially acceptable. And so they had to say that it was a commercial product when really it wasn't. Maybe they'll make it commercial someday. But no, nobody else is actually building a

supersonic airliner. We're the only private company ever to have built and flown a supersonic jet. And we're the, like never, it's only been governments before. You know, this was like rockets before SpaceX. Nobody'd done it outside of, outside of government. It never, never had there been a civilian supertonic jet made in America. So there's a lot of first in here. What do you think it is within the last decade? I mean, it's just, what am I trying to say here? I guess what I'm trying to say is, you know,

I've been doing a lot of, like I mentioned, I've been doing a lot of tech interviews, a lot of especially defense tech. And, you know, I told you, you know, through here, you know, I was in the SEAL teams contractor for the CIA, did not see a tremendous amount of innovation, you know, in defense tech. And then let's talk about the last 10 years, though. You have all these other companies, innovators just seem to be showing up nowadays.

When you didn't hear about all, you didn't hear about Palantir and you just interviewed this guy the other day who's making mini nuclear reactors. We've got a guy, you know, Rainmaker, Cloud Seating. I mean, there's just so many impressive young innovators that are coming to the table now. What do you think yourself? I mean, you're another one of them. And what is it about the past decade or so that has motivated tech innovators to start innovating? I can tell my story of it. And I think there's a really interesting.

perspective that also looks back from World, you know, from World War II to today and what the arc of that has been. But, you know, for me, you know, so I'm 44. You know, I, I was, you know, I watched the Berlin Wall fall. I kind of grew up as an adolescent being told that the world was safe. They were kind of the post-war era. And, and so it was like, we were like, like, the post-defense era was my assumption growing up. And then 9-11 happened. And then Russia invaded Ukraine. And then we've watched China, which was trending free and capitalist, kind of get recaptured by the CCP. And for me, the turning point was really Russia and Ukraine. Or I was like, wait a minute, the world is not nearly as safe as I thought it was.

And we've let the bad countries. And I think it's important that we say there is such a thing as a bad country. Get powerful. And so we've got to do something about that. And had I been, I don't know, five years later and starting boom, maybe boom would have been a different company. But, you know, fortunately, they're really great people working on defense tech now.

And it's become, I think, I think there are at least a couple threads recently that played it together here. One is it's become socially acceptable to do a defense company. It's become more clear that we need defense tech. And then, frankly, I think we've got a research instead of a belief in America,

which we lost for a good long while. It was not fashionable to like this country. And so I think that interplays with like, well, maybe we shouldn't be so proud. There's a whole period of time and there's still pockets of our culture that are not proud to be American. And if you're not proud to be American, you're not going to go build weapons to defend the country. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even, I mean, you have all the new, I mean, Paul Merlucky, Dino Mavrucus was Serronic. I mean, you know the other thing that I'm noticing is everybody, all of these next general,

innovation innovators are bringing all the manufacturing, including yourself back to the United States. I mean, I'm pretty sure Andrews's doing that. Seronics doing that. Every single innovator that I've talked to is manufacturing in the U.S. that I know of, that I know of, as far as I know. Yeah, I think it's really important, too. And so how is that happening? Because, shit, it seemed like four years ago, nobody would talk about that. It was all going to. to China. Right. Well, maybe it makes sense to start with how we lost it. And I heard a story recently that was eye-opening for me. We were out shopping for jet engine parts. We're making our own jet engine. It turns out it's really important to do it that way. And so we're shopping for turbine blades. And we're meeting with some of the high-tech manufacturers of

turbine blades. And I said, well, how long does it take to get one if I gave you the design today. They said 18 months. Why does it take 18 months? Well, nine of that is just to do the tools, the high precision industrial molds. Does it take nine months to make a mold? Like, what is somebody doing for nine months? Well, actually, no, most of that time is you're waiting for your turn with a tool guy. Okay, why is that? Well, we only have a couple of tool guys left in the country that know how to do that. Okay. How do that? How do that? How do that? How do that? that happened. And then the guys across the table smiled, they said, we got a story for you. Started with Chinese pirating of Western CAD software. And this is the high-end software that

you use to design stuff on a computer. And of course, there's no respect for intellectual property in China. And so they'd rip off the software. And this software is, you know, don't think this is like a $100 copy of Windows. This is tens of thousands of dollars per engineer for this high-end custom software. You need to do these things. And so if you take out multiple tens of thousands of dollars per engineer and cost, forget that there's a labor cost discrepancy. Just that alone means it's going to be cheaper to do the work in China than it is in the U.S. Because we pay for the software here. They don't pay for it there. Okay, now anybody who wants to save some money is going to ship their toolwork to China.

And if your competitors ship their toolwork to China and you don't ship your toolwork to China, now you start losing contracts so you're not commercially competitive. And so it sort of starts this giant like sucking of talent out of tool and dye design into China. And that only accelerates with labor cost differences, et cetera, et cetera. And at the same time, I don't know why, but we told ourselves in America that manufacturing. isn't important or isn't sexy. And it was like somehow okay to be, we don't make things. And the most plausible way I can think of this is imagine China wasn't communist. Imagine China was just like another state.

Okay, would it matter if, you know, would it matter if in the U.S. all the manufacturing moved to California and in Tennessee we do software? That would be just fine. Yeah. You know, law compared advantage. Some of that stuff should happen. The problem is, and I think there was a period of time where this was less obvious. Of course, it's way more obvious now.

China's not a free country. And fundamentally, I think that not free countries are a threat to free countries. And so it became very dangerous with that stuff left. And then we've done, you know, so there's that whole side of it. And then America, we've done as much, I think we've probably done more damage to ourselves than China did to us. So we made it really difficult to build here.

So, you know, the speed limit we talked about before is probably one of the biggest examples of that. That's the biggest regulatory own goal in history. We banned innovation in airplanes. And then 50 years later, we're surprised we can't competently make them anymore. Like, that shouldn't surprise anybody. Well, that's the other thing

that every single innovator I've brought in here says is the biggest hurdle they have to deal with is the bureaucracy with the government. It is. In one way or another. That's right. I mean, there's a way to so we have found great ways to work with FAA. Like, we never

had a regulatory delay in XB1. And we made it teamwork. We found a way to work in the system. We made friends with the people there. There are a lot of good people at FAA. But fundamentally, a whole lot of the system we have is really broken. So I'll give you another story. So we built a factory in North Carolina.

180,000 square foot factory, first supersonic Carolina factory in America. It took longer to get the building permit than it took to build the factory. It took 18 months to get the building permit. Okay, well, why? Well, we had to get a environmental approval on the noise that would be made by the airplane

after we manufactured it. Wait, you say that again? It doesn't make any sense. we had to get approval for how much noise our airplanes were going to make after they were built in order to build the factory. This makes no sense. Where does this shit even come from?

Oh. Is that like a written law? It is a... So there's something called NEPA, which is the National Environmental Policy Act, that was, I think, probably one of the worst laws ever. And it requires environmental studies,

is pre-approval of anything that has federal jurisdiction. Our factory was on an airport, so there is federal jurisdiction. So the FAA administered it, and the FAA had a rule that basically said, well, we don't want you to be able to build anything and later on be able to increase your footprint. So anything you might ultimately do in a facility has to be approved in the day you build the facility. Is it just pull on that thread, and all of a sudden we're doing noise studies on an airplane we haven't designed yet, let alone built yet, where our pledge has been it's not going to be

any louder. Wow. So it, and I tell my business friends about this, and I'm complaining about this 18-month process, and some of them are saying, are you kidding, dude? That's good. You had only 18 months? Like, mine was years or decades. And I think the whole way we do permitting and the whole way we do regulations,

broken. Do you see that changing? I mean, this is just, it's, it just makes me wonder how many more innovators are out there and how much farther ahead we would be or could be, you know, if these regulations weren't there. I mean, it's throwing our country behind. It is. It is. I hope that more people talk about it. There's also a dynamic where, you know, if you're regulated by some entity, you need to cooperate with that entity in order to actually get stuff done. And then all the pressure is, well, definitely don't say anything bad because maybe that would sour a relationship. Maybe that, you know, like my policy people will always say, don't, you know, can't say anything bad about the entities that have jurisdiction

over us. But I think we just need to talk about it. I think the system is, I think the system is fundamentally mistaken. I mean, so to move forward with anything as humans, we have to take some risk. So we have to decide what are good risks and what are bad risks. And the way we have set the system up today is we have monopolized centrally risk decisions. So everybody wants clean air and clean water and food that's safe and drugs that work and airplanes that don't crash, right? like obviously and okay but we have to take some risks so who gets to decide well if it's related

to environment there's a there's a monopoly called EPA that has that decision there's related to airplanes there's not only called FAA that has that decision um if it's if we're talking food or drugs there's monopoly called the FDA that has that jurisdiction and if they ever approve anything that doesn't work they're in big trouble and by the way it happens you know FAA approved the 737 max FDA famously approved thalidomide and so if when they let one thing through that maybe wasn't so good now they're in real trouble

if they hold up something that is good kind of nobody notices and so it creates this like asymmetric bias towards contervatism and this is not anything about anybody at any of these agencies there are many great people of these agencies trying to do good work but fundamentally

the incentives are all tilted and we've monopolized risk decisions. And so put that aside at one point. The other point is that in many cases, we have to ask for permission before we can go do things. Like, imagine we drive to work the way we build factories or airplanes. Well, we'd have to get permission every day and show our plan and, okay, you know, on this stretch of road,

you know, what speed are you going to drive? Okay, it's under the speed limit, all right, you can go. versus what we actually do is go drive and if you break the rules we enforce the rules and so the whole notion of permitting I think needs to be rethought It's a good point

it's a damn good point you know when you so do you see this how fast do you see this changing throughout this administration because it seems like everybody that I talk to is they seem really positive

yeah I'm I am it's gone much better than I thought it would. On, right after the election, I forced myself to sit down, you know, everyone was about in opinions, right? And some people are going to be glorious. Some people say, you know, we're headed into dictatorship. And I thought, okay, I'm going to force myself to write down what I really think. I'm going to make four predictions. And then I'm going to put them down, put a date on them, and I'll come back and I'll see what I was right about, what I was wrong about, and I'll try to learn from where I was wrong. I got going. I ended up

writing about 40 predictions. I was like, well, I'll write enough. I'm guaranteed some of these are wrong. And I'll get to learn about it. And one thing I wrote down was there will be deregulation, but it won't be that significant. Boy, I was wrong. Now, are we doing everything that I wish we would do? Probably not. But, heck, we repealed the supersonic flight ban.

And if you look at what's... 115 days, right? And that's not even the most significant thing. I mean, it's most significant for supersonic flight and for me. But if you look at what's happening out of energy, it's even more exciting. Chris Wright, who I think is just one of the most amazing leaders we have in D.C. now, our energy secretary, worked with the president to get an executive order that basically zero baselines regulation. And so if you don't renew a regulation, it automatically goes away.

Nice. That's huge. Nice. Right? And we haven't even started to see that play out. You know, it takes, these things take a little while to be implemented, and then once they get implemented, industry has to respond, and then the building has to actually happen. So it takes a little while, but I think there is a, I don't know, if it's a year or three years, there is a big boom of a good kind about to happen from a lot of that unleashing that has just barely started. What do you, I mean, what do you think that looks like in, by the end of this term?

I don't know if I'm smart enough to predict timescale. It's much easier to predict the distant future that it is to predict the near future. I'll tell you what my hope is. My hope is there's enough actual positive results that people can understand it, get behind it, and not reverse it. But times of the essence. And I think that's one of my other hopes is that this pattern of I do one term, then I go away and I come back and I do another term.

I know that wasn't the plan. It might actually be a really good idea because in the time away, Trump got to rebuild his team, he got to reflect on everything he learned. in his first term, what worked, what hadn't worked, got to plan, and then they hit the ground running, because four years is going to go by like that. Yeah. And there's a bunch of entrenched resistance to change in Washington. And so the more you can just have good muzzle velocity right out of the gate, the more they

can get done in four years. That's another, I would have never thought of that. Do you think we'll start seeing more of that? I don't know. I mean, I think it takes a very special leader to say, I'm going to run for president, I'm going to win,

and then I'm going to walk out of the White House voluntarily after four years. But I'll be back. That's an interesting concept. Right? I'd like to see somebody else do it. I would do. That's something I would have never thought of.

It's very hard to I mean, my experience before founding boom was I would go take on some job or some mission and I would be 150% consumed by it. And then when I would, you know, finally after years change, I would go through this intense period of learning as I reflected back on the experience I had had. And then I would be a step level beyond in the next thing I did. And when I started boom, one of the things I told myself was, I don't get to do that that way anymore. I have got, I'm here on day one.

I have to be up here. And if I have to step away from the job to learn, I'm never going to get there. Like, by definition, it was mission failure. I have to figure how to learn on the job. And I'm still learning how to learn on the job. But I think that if you look at an administration that goes for eight years, Boy, that's on the job learning and what's got to be

one of the most difficult environments to do it. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about, I mean, boom seems, it almost seems like a David versus Goliath story. I mean, you're going up against Boeing and Airbus.

I mean, the beginning when Elon started SpaceX that we got laughed out everywhere, now he can successfully launch every single day of the week if he wanted to. I mean, how was this working for you? I mean, like I said, you're an outsider from the industry. You have 130 orders. I think there's a lot of speculation if a company of your size is going to be able to do those deliverables in the amount of time, lot of it. And so what do you have to say about that? I mean, it's David and Goliath, but Goliath is like asleep. So I think it's a little bit different for, for space.

in that, you know, they went into space launch, which is commodity market with a big entrenched player. And, you know, sort of head-to-head competition with an entrenched player that was very powerful. And we, you know, we made a different decision. We went, we went to go do something that nobody was doing. And at some point, you know, will we see a competitive response? Probably. But, you know, I think I tell the team every day is, you know, boom will, not die of murder. We're much more likely to die of suicide, meaning we just fail to execute. We don't get out of our own way. And so we try to, we try to self, I try to get the team to self-start actually without a lot of external competitive pressure. And just passion for mission

ends up being, ends up being super important. And there's still, you know, there's still no guarantee of success. Statistically, we're probably something like 90% likely to fail. That's what happens with most businesses. But there is no reason we can't succeed. And if we get the right people and we give it our all, either we succeed or it's because we fumbled the ball ourselves. Let's talk about your... Actually, how long is it going to take to make these planes

from start to finish? How fast can you make them? Yeah, from where we are today, our goal is to be in airline service in under five years, regular an airline service. But if you mean how long does it physically take to make an airplane, that's one area

where we're putting a lot of energy into making it better. The airspace supply chain we have in the U.S., it's actually one of the few manufacturing bases that still exist in this country. A lot of consumer goods have left for Asia,

textiles, electronics, etc. and but aerospace has stayed here in part because there's a defense element to it and we you know we have not let the defense pieces you know go to China but but what we have done is let them get really for lack of a better word stupid so um for example we go you know source some part out of the traditional aerospace supply chain and they say, okay, great, you can get your part in six months. What? Six months?

Why does it take six months? Elon has this thing he calls the idiot index, which is like how much does something cost as a finished part divided by the raw materials cost? And we have this thing I think is actually far more important called the slacker index. And the slacker index is how long it takes to get something divided by how much time it actually takes to make it.

And I'll give you a, story. We were ordering some of these turbine blades for our first prototype engine, and it cost a million dollars for one engine's worth of blades, and it was going to take 180 days to get them. These are 3D printed parts. I was like, okay, how long does it take to actually print apart? Well, about 24 hours. Okay, what are we doing the other 179 days? and so we ended up saying we're just going to buy all the production equipment ourselves turns out it was an inventory we could get it in a couple weeks and we could just print the parts and for the price of two engines worth of parts

we could buy the machine and make them ourselves wow and there's a but the whole supply chain is messed up like that like you find that and you order some part and it's got one process step in south Carolina then it goes on a truck to Wisconsin and they do some other process that, but then it goes to California, then it goes back to South Carolina, and then to California a second time. Holy shit. And like this is, you know, at first I was like, what is going on? Is this just like stupid?

And by the way, I think one of the principles I've learned along the way about how to learn is whenever I see something that looks stupid, you know, it's easy to just like, you know, be smug and say, what an idiot did that. And sometimes it actually is stupidity, but sometimes I find if I ask the question, well, what would have to be going on for this to be smart or necessary? What might somebody who's close to this know that I don't know? And I find that when I ask that question, I can often end up with some interesting discoveries. So in the case of the supply chain thing and these parts ping pong around the country, I mean, I could have said, you know, I could have laughed and shrugged it off and said, how stupid. But I said I got curious about it.

And what I realized was this is an artifact of how defense procurement works. So post-Cold War, and a certain since post-World War II, we have not had a big urgent need for military stuff. We've wanted to keep alive a defense industrial base. So all the defense prims say we need to. You talk about whether we really need to. And who controls the spending? Well, Congress does. How do you get the votes in Congress for your stuff?

Well, do it in the right congressional districts. And so the lack of urgency for defense procurement, combined with how Congress fundamentally operates, has resulted in there being one factor in every congressional district in order to get these big programs authorized. And so you end up with a supply chain where you've got all these little mom-and-pop mini factories and you've got these parts ping pong on their way around the country

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upgrade in your kitchen with Hexclad's superior performance. How did you do that? I mean, so for being a commercial first company, you know, we don't need, you know, we don't need to go past some big thing that requires unanimous out of Congress. So we just, let's just go build efficient stuff. And so we are ultimately, so we're building a new R&D center in Denver. And when we're completely done with that, every kind of part on the airplane will be able to be made in one roof. Wow. And for our engines, you know, it will ultimately be a facility that's like raw materials in one side

the building and jet engines out the other side. And the, uh, you can massively improve time and massively improved cost just by putting all the production processes in one physical place. It doesn't require some like, we invented a new kind of metal. It just put it all in one building. And already that makes a huge difference. Where are your manufacturing facilities? So we've got, um, our headquarters are in Denver. So engineering is there and our sort of R&D scale manufacturing is in Denver. We've got an engine test site near Denver International. We're going to be able to run all these engines. We like control on our own manufacturing, our own engineering, our own test. So we don't have to get anybody's permission to go do anything. And then in North Carolina

is where we're doing this at scale. So we have a hundred and a thousand foot facility where we're going to assemble the first engines and where we're going to assemble the overture airliner. And we've got a 62-acre campus there that when we build that out, we'll be able to do 100 airplanes a year. Wow. What is, when is the, one of the 130 jets do? As soon as we can deliver them. Okay. Yeah. If we had them in a warehouse today, you know, the airlines would be asking for more after that. And, uh, and so it's, uh, it's as soon as we can get them done. And, you know, my goal is to get production ramping, starting and starting five years from now when we've proved the airplane is ready. And then we'll scale it as quickly as we can, uh, you know,

to be at full rate, you know, hopefully, you know, cranking on a hundred jets, you know, well within a decade from now. Wow. When I say that, it kills me to say it's going to take a decade. We'll do this as fast as we possibly can. Do you see this taking over all commercial travel in the future? Anything that's a sufficiently long distance, I think so. I think, I'm very bullish about the next 10 years of flight.

I think over the, you know, for shorter range flights, There's a lot of work happening for vertical takeoff and landing. You know, companies like Jobi and Archer, I think there was going to be also some good work on sort of hybrid electric, you know, mid-range aircraft. You know, think things like, you know, L.A. San Francisco, you're not going to fly that supersonic. But what you might do is have a, you know, neighborhood vertiport where you can get on an airplane that can take off and fly you right to the right neighborhood. you go into an LA and save all the ground time and you're, you know,

you're subsonic in the air, but you get this big speed up. So I think there's things like that that will cover short range. And then long range, it should be supersonic, you know, ultimately for everybody. How long does it take to get up to supersonic speed? You have 15, 20 minutes on a typical flight. How much to slow it down? Oh, similar. Those are the challenges or?

Not really We did look at In the first iteration of the design It actually couldn't slow down fast enough It was too slippery And so we did end up putting speed brakes on the design So you don't just kind of glide in forever Man

I can't wait to be on one of these things Have you been on one yet? So I have gone supersonic But in a fighter trainer So I got to fly along with our test pilots when they were training to fly our XB1 airplane. So I was in backseat of a T-38 with our chief test pilot. We took off out of Mojave, and he gets it off of the runway.

And he says, okay, Blake, your airplane. I'm like, oh, okay, my controls. And we're climbing out towards the supersonic corridor. And he's like, Blake, you've got to increase your climb rate. So you're going to go supersonic before you're in the test base if you don't kind of pull back a little bit. So we did. and uh yeah and then uh turned around and you know went i think mock 1.18 down the corridor that was that was fun i got a picture of the mock meter to prove it and that was uh it's probably

one of the most exciting flights in my life by the way you can't tell when you're going super sonic wouldn't wouldn't have noticed it very smooth but then we did uh uh then we did uh two barrel rolls, three aileron rolls, a couple loops. Damn. Those were noticeable. You think you'll fly your jet? Oh, definitely. Yeah, one of my personal goals is to be qualified to fly at by the time it's ready to

fly. Wow. That's awesome. It's going to require some work, but I'm up for it. How about your ethos in your company and who you're looking to hire and how you've built your team out? Yeah, what I've, um, we've been through a few iterations on how we do. the team. And I've come to the conclusion that the right, the debate was, do you hire young

people who are bold and smart and work hard, but are inexperienced, or do you hire been there done that before professionals? And we, you know, initially we sort of oscillated between those two. The early team was, you know, the people that I could convince to join a supersonic jet company headquartered in my basement. So definitely they had to be kind of bold. And nobody big and good was going to

work in my basement. And then we made a bunch of kind of first timer mistakes. And then we made this other mistake of saying, well, let's go hire a bunch of experienced people. And we started bringing people in from big companies that thought they knew how to do this.

and and then we went through a period of time where we looked way too much like a big company not enough like a startup and where I landed on this I think we finally cracked it it's something I call the talent distillery

so what's that well we get a bunch of young spirits people just a few years into their career or right out of school smart driven hardworking innovative passionate and we get just a little bit of

I call it the oak and the people have a bit of gray hair to kind of help contain them a little bit and the magic happens when you got way more spirits than you've got oak and there's a little bit of an interplay between the spirits and the oak.

The spirits make the oak better and the oak infuses a little bit in the spirits. And that turns out to work very well. So I can tell a story about this. We did the landing gear on our XP1 with a team of great engineers that had never done a landing gear before.

And they were, you know, they were bold enough and passionate enough that they were willing to take that on. And it turned out that, you know, we made a bunch of, made a bunch of mistakes. We kind of, we got into this thing and we're having trouble making it work. And it's a very unique landing gear because it's a very unique airplane. The most similar thing out there is an F-16. And so we said, okay, well, we got to go find some F-16 landing gear engineers. I don't care if we have to pull them out of retirement. we got to just get them on the phone and ask them how they did it.

And so we called up a friend at the Air Force and they said, all right, we're on it. 24 hours later, we were actually in the phone with F-16 landing gear engineers. Wow. And they said, well, did you put double pistons in your shock absorber? Or did you just put one? And we slapped our forehead. It said, double pistons. I don't know how long it would take us to figure that out.

And the lesson I learned from that was it's totally okay to have a team of great young people or driven running at something but they should call somebody experienced along the way and just ask for feedback and they don't even have to take it

just have to ask for it and so that's been our new rule is totally unafraid to deploy inexperienced high aptitude talent but the rule is phone somebody with some gray hair don't have to listen

just make the phone call nice how many employees do you have now um 115 employees yeah we did xb1 with 50 people 50 people yeah yeah space x when they went to orbit were 500 and we broke the sound barrier with 50 um i am a big believer in small teams and uh and so how do you keep it so small um well i for a little while i didn't we ended up having to go through a cycle where I actually cut the company in half, which is very painful. But we get more done now with half the people than we got with a team twice as big. And so that my rule now is, anything that does not complain about being understaffed is

overstaffed. And we hire very reluctantly and very deliberately, and only when we've exhausted all other options to we grow the team. So we can't do this with software, we can't do this with AI, we can't just find a more clever way to do it. We can't find a way not to have to do it. Okay, then we'll hire. We do it very, very deliberately. How's AI helped your business? Oh, software and AI are going to be a huge part of the success story. So one of the things that makes hardware companies traditionally harder to do is the development cycles are longer, the iteration cycles are longer, it's harder

to make changes, it's harder to iterate. And so we do everything we can to make hardware development look more like software development. And so we've got a huge investment in digital engineering. And the way we do that is we hire great software engineers that are incredibly curious about airplanes. They don't have to know anything about them. They just have to think it's cool. And then we have them sit with the hardware people and they look over the shoulders of the hardware people, learn from them, and learn how to automate the work that they're doing. And so we have, I think, the best airplane design tools ever made in software, and they keep getting better. And what we find is, oh, now we can, like, put, you know, if we put new assumptions in about engine performance or aerodynamics or something, we can press a button, and the rest of the airplane gets automatically redesigned.

And that's all the power of software. And now AI just takes that a whole step further. There's an old joke in the industry that, for every pound of airplane, there's a pound of paperwork. You know what AI is really good at? Going through paperwork. Filling out paperwork. And not only does that allow the team to be much smaller than it otherwise would have to be, it makes the jobs a lot more fun.

The kind of engineer that is happy spending two months filling out paperwork is not the same kind of engineer that really wants to invent the future. So by having AI do the really boring work, we can thereby increase the caliber of the kind of people that want to come join the company. And so all of this gets compounding returns. The smaller a team, the easier it is to keep the talent bar high. The number one thing great people want is to work with other great people. So therefore, it's easier to attract and retain great people.

We have AI do the bullshit, and then the people are doing the most exciting work, which means we can attract and retain better people. This flywheel starts to spin. It's a really important talent engine. And this is one of my biggest focuses is really building the talent engine. And we're doing a bunch of unconventional stuff. Like we actually put an engineer in charge of recruiting. Really?

It was this guy that we hired, he'd been a SpaceX manufacturing engineer. He'd been something like a six-year boom vet had done a whole bunch of work on XB1. He was building, he built the flight sim for overture. He was building the engine test facility and I took a walk with him about two, three months ago. And I said, Nate, I'm going to ask you to do something different and you're going to think I'm crazy. I'm going to ask you to run HR.

And he's like, you're right. I didn't think that was the conversation we were going to have. And we talked about it and I was like, look, I want an engineering mindset applied to thinking analytically about how we, the kinds of people we select, how we select them, how we train them, how we onboard them, and think about this. And if you're willing to try it, just try it for a year. And then if you don't like it, I'll let you go back to any kind of, you know, any other job you want. But he's like three months into it now, and he's loving it. And it's going so well. Good, good. Let's talk about China. China. So you mentioned China,

announced that they were doing supersonic flight right after you came out. So is that are they, where are they in the process? The good news is we're ahead. And if we stay out of our own way, we're going to stay ahead. Damn, this is the first time I've heard we're ahead. This is great news. Yeah. Airplanes are one of the few areas where we're still ahead in the U.S., but we've got to be careful. So China right now is shipping a 737 clone. We don't know that in America because we won't import it here. But elsewhere, that's going to happen. They are working on a Boeing 77 clone. And earlier this year, they announced the one after that's going to be a supersonic airplane. And when they did the announcement, so I think what happened

was they saw what we'd done at boom. And they said, we got to play. And they found some research paper and then labeled it with a product number and put that out as a press release. They put it in the South China Morning Post, which is that that's where the CCP puts things that they want to be noticed in the West. And so the airplane's a cartoon. Like if you know anything about supersonic airplanes, you know this is not credible. But I think the tell was they gave it a product number that was the next product number in the Comac roadmap.

Comac is the Chinese Boeing. So I think they are, I think they're dead serious about it. it. But we're ahead. How do you know you're ahead? We've actually built and flown an airplane. And they've got a cartoon rendering. You don't think they're just, that's a disguise? We haven't seen an airplane fly yet.

Okay. Now, they've got fighter jets. And fighter jets and supersonic airliners are not the same, but they're things you can cross-learn. I think we have to take this incredibly seriously. I don't think we can rest in our laurels. I think absent I think absent the action

to repeal the supersonic ban in the U.S., aviation was going to go to China just like everything else has. You know, this is like watching a slow-motion plane crash. Boeing hasn't built a new airplane in 20 years. They can't, you know, sometimes they can't competently produce the ones they've already designed.

China's moving forward as fast as they can. That's not going to end well. We have to invent and build the next generation of airplanes here or else we know how this ends. It ends just like it does. for every other kind of manufacturing. I'm still trying to wrap my head.

Why do you think Airbus and Boeing have not jumped into this race to compete with you? Oh. I mean, with the amount of funding that they have and the legacy companies like that, I mean, why wouldn't they? So it has to do with most businesses are unwilling to disrupt themselves.

They have to change their business model to compete. Let me explain why that is. So a typical international airliner today, a wide body, you know, the twin aisles, let's say they got two, 300 seats on them. About 20% of the seats at the front of the airplane are business in first class. But those seats represent roughly 80% of the profits. All the money's in the front part of the airplane. Now, Supersonic, with the technology that we have right now, we can't build a Supersonic Jumbo jet, 300-seat supersonic jet, that can support economy fairs. We only have the technology

right now, this will change, but right now today, we only have the technology to do it for about a business class fare. Okay, if you take the business class seats out of a Boeing or Airbus airplane and put it in another airplane, the big airplane just lost 80% of its value. Right? So in order to build the supersonic future, you have to be willing to disrupt the subsonic wide body. And that's not something that big companies are generally willing to do. It's a very... Did you say 20%, 80% of the profit is in the first 20 seats?

It's roughly 80% in the front 20% of seats, rough numbers. This is why if you fly business class, you know, you've got this outstanding wine lists and you've got these fancy lounges and all these other perks. Why? Because that's where all the money is. On a per flight basis, depending on very root to root, market to market, but roughly 80% on a per flight basis. And if you look at it on a per customer basis, it's even more significant because the people who fly long haul international and premium class are almost all the profit for international airlines. Again, that's why you see all those perks and why we get all the status, and you know, if your global services, you get on first.

And so if you move that into a separate airplane, you have to rethink a bit of the economics. And very few companies are willing to disrupt their own business. I mean, really, I think it takes, I think it takes a founder-led company in most cases. Like, you know, Steve Jobs was willing to destroy the iPod business in order to create the iPhone business. I mean, it just seems like they would have to. to do it. Otherwise, they're going to go extinct. I mean, if you come out with this in a year or 10 years or one, then that's where I'm going. Remember, there's a duopoly here. You'd be

right in a normally competitive market with lots of players. But with Boeing and Airbus, there are only two. And so you get duopoly type behavior. One only moves when the other one moves. Like, why did Boeing do the 737 max? It's because Airbus did the A320 Neo. Why did Airbus do the A350? Well, it was a carbon copy, literally, of the 787. And so if one moves, the other one kind of copies that move. And for the most part, they're in a staring competition.

Nobody wanted to blink. And so the right now dynamic is Boeing's got to get healthy. They're in trouble. They can't do a new airplane. They've pledged they're not going to do a new airplane. What is Airbus's motivation? Well, Boeing's down and out. I should steal market share.

So Airbus is trying to, you know, rant production of their airplanes faster than Boeing can get people to trust them again. So that's that game. And like nobody's incentivized to go build a supersonic jet. Like if you're in a public market investor in Boeing or Airbus and, like, imagine Airbus says we're going to go do Supersonic instead of trying to eat Boeing's lunch while Boeing's down and out, your investors say you're stupid. pretty soon you get

an activist gets on your bore and you're fired as CEO reciprocally if Boeing right now says I'm going to go build a supersonic jet I think everyone's going to say what are you talking about dude maybe you should figure out

to put the screws in the ones you make now so neither of them is really in a position to do it it has to come from a new entrant do you think they'll carbon copy or they'll probably try to buy us first and then they'll try to compete I mean I welcome that

I'm shocked you know, a decade into this that we don't have competition. At some point, that will change. Wow. I don't know why. It's just so hard for me to wrap my head around. You're the only one doing this. It's hard for me to wrap my head around it, too. But I think it comes down to, you know, what people call the innovator's dilemma in business, that the big guys don't want to disrupt themselves. And they're only two of them, so they don't think they're going to be competitively forced to, on one hand. On the other hand, all the conventional wisdom 10 years ago was it was impossible to start an airplane company. The last new commercial airplane company

before boom, 1921, Douglas Aircraft, it had been a century. And there are all these reasons why it's capital intensive, takes a while, highly regulated, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There are all these reasons you could, you know, theoretically it's hard. And, you know, for whatever reason, you know, we were just crazy and I have to go do it anyway. And, and then we got far enough along that I don't think it makes any sense for someone to start another company right now to compete with us. Like, okay, boom's 10 years ahead and counting. So unless you've got a very different idea about how to go about this, it doesn't make sense to compete with us. on the other hand you know we did just get supersonic flight legalized so that that opens up

when you can't fly supersonic over conus there is basically no market for a supersonic private jet but now that you can there is so i will um how will we disappointed if nobody else does that if nobody else does it we will because it should exist uh but my hope is somebody else gets there before we do. But you've got a lot of guys waiting for that to happen. Yeah. Well, we, the president opened the, open the doors to that by legalizing supersonic flight over land. That market is wide open. I don't know anybody with a Gulfstream, they wouldn't want to upgrade. Somebody should do that. And, you know, if they wanted to, we'd sell them engines. And then, I mean, but even

And it just, it's, I still can't 100% wrap my head around it because of, whatever you said, 80% of the revenues and the first 20% of the seats, I mean, those seats are going there. Those customers are going to go to you. And so what, what do those companies look like when this is online and this is, this is becoming mass produced? I think it ends up being a gradual transition. Even with 130 jets, I mean, you're going to book out, like, whoever buys those is going to book out like that. Absolutely. I mean, I think 130 is, you know, not nearly enough. If people who fly first your business today on a route where Supersonic is going to be meaningfully faster and where the airlines can operate profitably,

airlines are going to need 1,400 of these jets. and that's not assuming people fly more and flights are faster but for me I'm going to go to London more when it's half the time I'm going to go to Tokyo more when it's half the time so probably 1400 is a low number

probably it's going to be way more than that yeah does that make Boeing I mean there are companies that do do this I mean I think Spirit Airlines they have no business correct Southwest they have no business yeah I think there can be

I think there'll be a middle period where premium goes supersonic and subsonic is about low cost and that'll be sort of a middle period and then and then the cost of supersonic is going to come down and more and more people are going to say it's worth it and then there is a there's an economic effect that I think is widely underappreciated we call it the speed dividend when you go faster your main cost challenge is just the energy consumption. And so you work really hard to make the airplane as energy efficient, as fuel efficient as it can be. But most of the other costs of flying are proportional to time, not distance.

So how many pilots do I need? Well, if the flight's twice as fast, I need half as many pilots. If the flight's twice as fast, I need half as many airplanes. Or to look at it more positively, I can get twice the flights out of the same airplanes and crew. So there's all this... You don't think of that either. Right? So if you could fly to Hawaii today on a propeller plane that is more efficient than today's jets, but nobody does it because economically it would be more expensive because it takes all that extra time.

So, you know, overture, when we have another over, if we look at overture relative to Concord, and we imagine another step beyond overture of a similar size, we can do economy. supersonic and it requires that's going to require a lot of a lot of invention it's going to require second generation power train and boy I get

I get my juices flowing about that because one of the most surprising thing about this airplane and I think why it's just barely possible for a startup to pull this off is it doesn't actually have any fundamentally new technology okay this is made out of the same stuff

as a 787 it's like we took a 787 we shrank it down we made it long and skinny We put twice as many engines. That's it. It's a lot of new engineering, but it's not any new science, and it's not any new technology. It's proven stuff.

And we did it that way because we wanted to keep the hurdle for version one as low as it possibly could be. For version two, we're willing to say, hey, let's try five new things. And one of those is going to be a radically new power train

that will allow us to go much faster will also be much quieter. Well, let me ask you this. I'm just curious why would you want to go to economy if 80% of the profits on the first 20% of the seating?

Why would you want to open yourself up to economy as a business? I think it just should exist. Part of it goes back to that mission and it goes back to why I started the company. I think about where I was a decade ago

when my kids had a grandfather in Hong Kong that they couldn't see. And, you know, we didn't have the money to go drop on business class. You know, we went to Hong Kong maybe two or three times, you know, in the back of the bus. So Supersonic would not have been the cards for us. And I want, you know, I want every family, every kid in that situation to be able to benefit from us. I want to get there.

Wow, that's admirable. Well, thank you. I think also you can build a great business. is I think there is a bizarre dynamic in economy today. If you look at the strata of air travel, there's economy, and then there's business. And business is like many times more expensive than economy. And there's sort of a little bit of premium economy emerging in the middle, but mostly the middle is empty. And I think their market dynamics, like people in the airline industry keep talking about, like, oh, people won't pay for a better experience.

and I think for the most part that's not true I don't think people have found a way to deliver and market the experience that they will pay more for like remember when the first iPhone came out people laughed they're like a $400 phone

you know unsubsidized no one's going to buy that well no fast forward now now it's $1,500 for an iPhone and everybody does it and it's worth it and you know people aren't willing to pay more for better unless you find a way to actually show them a better thing they're willing to pay

for. And I think the whole travel experience today is terrible. It's horrific. It's terrible. It's terrible. It's horrific. And I'm with you. I mean, if you line up a United American Southwest Emirates, Cutter Airways, 110% I'm going with Emirates or Cutter Airways. Right. So, night and day experience. Because it's a better experience. It's a better experience, but even, even, you know, even in those airlines, there's still so much that could be better about the end-to-end travel experience. So I think there's a lot of room to reinvent the whole thing end-to-end and to create a, you know, maybe it bottoms out at 20% more expensive than economy is today, but it's 10 times better. It's faster, it's more comfortable.

You're actually cared for. The way baggage works needs to be completely rethought. The way you get through an airport needs to be completely rethought. And I think there's something in there that will be affordable, that people will be willing to pay for, that is a supersonic experience that is also way more profitable than economy is today. So, one, I want to make this available to everybody. But two, I also think you can build a great business doing that. You know, there wasn't a lot of money and phones before the iPhone. And Apple found a way to build a product people willing to pay a lot more for and built a great business doing that.

And it's not been done in air travel. And some reason people think it's impossible. But, like, you know, if you go look at the comparison to say other parts of travel, like hotels, there's a zillion different strata of hotels. And, you know, Motel 6 is not the mass market leader. You know, people pay more for a better meal. They pay more for a better hotel room. But it doesn't happen in air travel. Why?

I think those are solvable problems. What are some of the lessons you've learned from fighting some of the setbacks that you faced? Most importantly, don't give up. And I remember the day, you know, the day that we flew, XB1 Supersonic, I stood with a team on the tarmac outside the airplane. And I said, guys, we're here today because a hell of a lot of not given up

when reasonable people would have given up. And in fact, a whole bunch of reasonable people did give up along the way. And we're here because we kept fighting through the setbacks because we didn't let ourselves lose faith. and for overture to exist it's going to take a heck of a lot more not giving up and so that's

I mean for me personally there have been this company has a near-death experience it seems like almost every year something happens and it's like the startup equivalent of a cancer diagnosis and it's like

you know like when you know we lost our way for a little while, and we were trying to outsource an engine. And it ultimately, you know, we were working with Rolls-Royce, and it became clear that it just wasn't going to get there. And we started working on our own engine, and we were sort of baking that plan. It wasn't fully baked yet. We weren't ready to talk about it publicly. And then American Airlines followed United, and they signed up for up to 60 of these airplanes. And on, on paper we were still working with Rolls Rice. We kind of, Rolls and Boom knew that we were going

to part ways. And then Rolls freaked out and ran to the press and told them they didn't think there was a supersonic market and they weren't going to be involved. And then to the world, suddenly Boom went from high-flying, you know, United is ordered, Americans ordering, Japan Airlines is ordering, to like, ha ha, they don't have an engine. And instantly, no supplier wanted to work with us. Instantly, we were trashed the press. You know, I was personally called a fraud. Um, we were unfundable. And, uh, I remember thinking, you know, if we don't find our way out of this, you know, we're toast. And I remember listening to a, uh, um, a talk that Brian Chesky, that founding CEO of Airbnb gave about how

he led Airbnb through the crisis that was COVID. And what he said is when you're in a crisis, you need to become more of who you deeply are and always need it to be. Go back to who you really are. I remember hearing that and thinking, we're going to go all in on our own engines. It's what we always should have done. We'd already sort of started down that path, and then we doubled down on it, and we clawed our way back. And if I think about why we were able to claw our way back. It's because I, you know, and the team at Boom believed

that this should exist and it was worth not giving up on. So, you know, for a while, XB1, we called it the Mojave Honey Badger. It's just like, we're not going to... Stuff happens. We keep going. Can't stop us.

I love that. I love that. It seems, it seems like you have just brought everything in-house along the journey. And, man, it just seems to be the way to do it. It's, we've learned some principles about this. And we're actually in the process of writing them down and trying to get really clear on the principles. Elon talks about, you know, the best part is no part. It's true. But there's a whole hierarchy. The best part is no part. The next best part is a completely off the shelf commercially available part. It's already designed and built.

Easily available. The next best part after that, if it's custom, is one that we design and build ourselves. The worst part is one where we design and outsource engineering and manufacturing. On XP1, we had a whole spectrum.

You could find every supply chain strategy somewhere on that airplane. The wheels and brakes were off the shelf. we had the option of an off the shelf what's called a flutter test system and we screwed it up and we had a supplier built something custom instead that was a disaster

we had to go rescue them and so and we had parts also that we designed and built ourselves or that we designed and then we worked hand in hand with a great supplier to build it and the outsourced engineering

only worked once and again it goes back to this idea of get curious about the why so I was like okay well what was What was the one case where it worked? Well, it was the drag shoot. And the drag shoot is, it's like the parachute that goes in the back of the airplane.

It's like the e-break. You never planned to use it, but it's there for backups. We outsourced that, and that went just fine. Well, why? Well, we knew on day one exactly what it needed to be. We could spec it, and the specs never needed to change. Oh, that's why the outsourcing was okay. Because if you can speck it, and your spec doesn't change, you can give a package to

supplier, they can give you a firm fixed price bid, they can commit to it and then get it done. But anything that's in the, anything that needs to evolve, anything needs to be innovative on, anything where the specs are going to change as you go through development is very hard to do across company boundaries. So it's not just that like, oh, vertical integration is good, outsourcing is bad, it's more complicated than that. It is anything where innovation is going need to happen, where things are going to evolve, those things need to be under a single umbrella that has high bandwidth communication and high ability to change. So, like, think even of, like, how the contracting works. There's really only kind of two contract models that have

been invented so far. There's a firm fixed price, meaning, like, you know, I want to go buy this. You tell me what it's going to cost, and, you know, and that's the firm bid. And then, And then, by the way, or there's time of materials, meaning, like, you know, how much time did you spend on it? What did you spend? And you mark it up X percent and I buy it. Okay, well, you can't do firm fixed price on something where the spec is going to change. So now you're in this kind of time and materials world.

But if you're in a time of materials contract, the supplier's incentive is to maximize time and maximize materials. They make more money by sucking. And so you're kind of counting on their, like, their good reputation and they're being good humans to work well. So if the specs are going to evolve, it's much better not to outsource. If the specs are not going to evolve, and you're really sure of that, then it can be okay to outsource. Man, you know, I mean, it seems like a lot of these newer companies are doing their own manufacturing. What do you think that, I mean, I don't know any of the other companies that are,

you know, that are doing this. So what does that? that look like in the future? I mean, the supply chain? Is everything, is every company going to start going in-house? Well, I think we have to re-industrialize America. And if we, if America was already a thriving manufacturing country, you know, like the way we were before World War II, a lot of the answers would be different. But instead, what we are is, you know, we are very, calcified, very inefficient on most of that in the U.S., and we've got a much more efficient competitor in China. Okay, so what do we need to do as a country?

We could try to bring back exactly what left. I think that's really hard to do. Instead, I think we need to invent and build the next generation. We need to leapfrog. So what does that look like for manufacturing? I think it is, well, let's take the example of tooling. Like we were saying before, tool and dye design, by and large, went to Asia. Like, you know, you go to China, you throw a baseball, you're going to hit a tool guy.

In the U.S., they're few and far between. Okay, so we could try to rebuild tooling, engineering in the U.S., and we probably need to do a little bit of that. But most of what we need to do is for how to manufacture in a very tool-light way. We need to invent software-driven manufacturing. And so a big part of what we're doing at, boom, is we say, how do we do digital manufacturing such that we don't need the tools?

So those jet engine blades that take 18 months to get where nine months is tool design, we're working on how do we 3D print a tool in 24 hours? Just delete that part of the process. And we can turn nine months into 24 hours. Man. And by the way, and the second-order effects of that are amazing because if it takes nine months to go build a tool

or even in a good scenario, three months, And then you can get a part out. Well, if you tell an engineer, okay, go design a part, but by the way, if you need to change it, it's going to set us back by months. Now they spend a lot of time wringing their hands, got to make sure it's right, I don't want to cause a setback.

So they tend to be very conservative. They tend to spend a lot of time analyzing and double checking. But if I can digitally manufacture, if I can change the design in software overnight, then I don't spend, all the engineering conservatism can stop. we can be more aggressive. We can go try things that might not work.

The pace of iteration speeds way up. The behavior of the engineers completely changes. So if we can go to, if we can go away from like a very tool-heavy manufacturing approach to a tool-light manufacturing approach, it ricochets back into how we design an engineer. And those cycles become much faster, and we can iterate much faster. And so I think this is how the US wins in manufacturing. We need to invent the next wave of manufacturing here in a way that plays to our strengths. It's going to play to having the best minds in the world.

Maybe we don't have the lowest labor cost, so we're going to invest in automation. We're going to have robots building these things, and they'll be following software instructions. And that means we can iterate way faster. And I get excited about this because now we can run circles around China. And we don't need a billion people to do it. Love the way you think. Love it. Well, Blake, we're wrapping up the interview, so I just want to ask, what advice do you have for future innovators like yourself?

Work on something that you'd be proud to fail at. I think of when I took my daughter turned 10, my oldest daughter, she's 12 now. She turned 10, I took her out to ice cream. and it was one of those sort of like low moments in boom history where I didn't know how we were going to get through some challenges I was worried we'd run out of money before we ever flew an airplane and I'm driving her back from the ice cream shop and I said Ada you know what would you think

and by the way to her this is all her dad has been doing her entire life has been saying he's going to build supersonic jets I said Ada what would you think if it didn't work in our even our test airplane never flew And she said, I'd be proud of you for trying. And boy, it hit me right here. And she's a 10-year-old. She's not making that up. She means that.

You can't fake it at that age. And so it's my wish for every entrepreneur. And really, everybody. Like, you know, for me, if you went back to me when I was, like, five or seven years old, and he said, Blake, you're going to get to build supersonic jets. my reaction would have been like no way you're kidding i get to do that uh i'd have just been tickled pink and so my put is go work on the thing that your five-year-old self would have been dazzled by and for me that's supersonic jets but i think we've all got our version of that go do the thing

your five-year-old self would have been tickled pink by do something that you love so much that you'd be okay having failed at it. And if you do both of those things, there is actually no losing. Man, I love that advice. Thank you. And man, what a moment with your 10-year-old. She's pretty cool.

Wow. Well, Blake, thank you for coming. I wish you the best of luck. Selfishly, I cannot wait to get on one of those jets. You and me both. Please hurry up. All right, I'm on it. Thank you so much.

All right, thank you, Sean. It's part sports. We have football on the brain. Part pop culture. Dennis Lerick. True or false. You refuse to wear a glove with Mickey Mantle's signature on it

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