The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Virtual Real Estate Boom, plus Supersonic Travel — with Kathy Savitt

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Scott shares his Pivot Miami interview with Kathy Savitt, the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Boom Technology.  He also opens with his thoughts on why virtual real estate is going to be the Gamestop of 2022.  Algebra of happiness: identifying problems and solutions.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 139. The Wizard oz premiered in 1939 true story when i'm having sex and i'm about to climax i scream out surrender dorothy welcome to the 139th episode of the Pop G Show. We're coming to you from the Pivot Miami Conference. What is real? We're here in Miami. Daddy's bringing sexy back.

That's right. I make this town more sexy by leaving it. Anyways, we're here. And in today's episode, we're going to share our interview with Kathy Savitt, the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Boom Technology, which took place during the Pivot Miami event on Tuesday, which is why I am down in South Beach. Hello, South Beach. Sexton up the place, bringing up the heat in Southern Florida. That's right. So I'm a big fan of Boom. I've been thinking about investing

in this company. I've actually tracked down Kathy and their CEO, Blake Scholl, because I think supersonic travel is going to be much more enduring than any of this ridiculous bullshit called space travel, where Bob from accounting blows up on a launch pad. I know that's somewhat cynical, but I think this space tourism could be over in a flash because there's no utility there. I think going one four thousandth of the distance that three brave souls went 50 years ago and paying $400,000, that doesn't sound like a good business. Whereas getting to London in three hours versus seven hours sounds like something there's a big market for. So I'm excited about Boom

and excited about this interview with Kathy Savage as we explore what hopefully is a new era of innovation that is somewhere in between a photo app and putting people on Mars. All right. Anyways, let's bust into something we've been thinking a lot about lately, and that is unreal estate. Well, the real estate investors are paying millions of dollars for plots of land that don't even exist. It's come to this. And what do we mean by that? The American dream of homeownership has become, in my view, somewhat of a hallucination as defined by the apparent perception of something that's not present. Housing already on a 12-year tear has now gained the chaser of a pandemic that's made everyone's home feel unbearably small and shabby. Think about it. Spending all the time at home makes that carpet just untenable. And all of a sudden you're thinking, well, low interest rates, maybe I sell this place, lever up. People have gotten really hurt here, first-time homebuyers.

God, can you imagine being a first-time homebuyer? Anyways, eight out of 10 urban areas in America registered average home price increases of more than 10% in 2021. 50 years ago, the average home cost two years of the average American household's income. Today, today, it costs four, all of which raises an important question. Where should people put their money? If it's an asset that has become something that people can't engage in, if owning a home is being slowly but surely kind of the playground of the rich, where do you put your money? How do you develop that sort of long-term equity value? Typically, crises offer great buying opportunities for the next generation as they come into their prime earning years in the wake of a reset. Just as earthquakes relieve geological pressure, a decrease in asset values

are a societal release, birthing a key component of any healthy economy. What is that? Churn. And by the way, this bullshit PPP program, there's basically nothing but a giveaway to the rich. We weren't building piers, we were building bridges. What we were also doing is subsidizing people who are already rich. And that is when you keep a boomer in business or just give them money, you're taking away opportunity from future generations. You're taking away the opportunity from a recent graduate of the Brooklyn Culinary Academy, an institution I don't even know exists, and stealing from her the opportunity to come in and buy, quite frankly 60 bucks a share and Apple at 17 bucks a share or something, one up 40-fold, one up 10-fold. When you have capitalism on the way up and then you have socialism on the way down, bailing out everyone, that's not capitalism.

It's not even socialism. It's cronyism. Suppressing volatility protects the incumbents. For the first time in US history, a 30-year-old is not doing as well as his or her parents at 30. I think that is the underlying incendiary to almost every problem we have. I don't care if it's opiates. I don't care if it's very justified social justice movements. The underlying incendiary that gets everyone moving from a productive conversation to just outright rage is income inequality and specifically generational income inequality, where again, see above a 30-year-old isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. That's the basic compact of any society, that as we make progress, as we

work hard, we would come up with prosperity that leaks to the next generation. That just kind of makes sense. That's sort of why we're here, isn't it? And for the first time, that compact, that guarantee has been broken in America. And it's, in my view, it is literally the kind of basis for a lot of our problems. And not only that, when you have more than 50% of young adults living with their parents and living on their own, you're constantly reminded of your failure because your roommate is your mother. So what happens? Young people are creating their own volatility. They're creating their own asset classes. In 2021, these forces manifested in crypto,

in meme stocks, which offered a mix of volatility, a halo of technology, and a lively cast of carnival barkers who use their credentials and their aggression and their Twitter followings to say you don't get it if you didn't sign up for the narrative that, you know, crypto's going to the moon. And also one of the big pitches of crypto was that it wasn't correlated or wasn't linked to the broader market. So everyone could find a safe haven. Something very interesting happened in the 80s. And that was a lot of finance,

academics put out a lot of good work saying that you get, you sort of get free return, risk adjusted return through diversification. And so everyone listened and diversified. The problem is, is that everybody is now invested in everything and such that when there's margin calls or one asset price goes down, it's correlated or linked to other assets. So if you own iron ore mines in Australia, you're going to feel the impact of tech stocks declining in Europe. So everyone's looking for non-correlated assets. And crypto was pitched as this, but the reality is it looks as if the R is not zero here, that there is a correlation. And as stock markets go, so do the crypto markets. It's just more volatile. It feels as if,

to a certain extent, the era of outsized returns is drawing to a close. Across the street from crypto is the meme stock trade. And it looks to me unwinding as investors realize they're not investing in a movement, but a shitty theater chain. So let's think about that. Where could there be outsized returns, asymmetric upside that is sort of irrational, if you will? As Yoda said, there may be another or there is another. I believe 2022 will bring increased attention and potentially asymmetric upside to virtual real estate. So stay with me for a moment here. Virtual real estate is simple.

Plots of land in a digital world, such as the metaverse, whose value is determined by factors similar to those that drive the value of physical real estate, namely how big and cool and developed and proximate to other cool people and events these plots of lands are. In a virtual platform such as Sandbox, you can buy beachfront property or something next to the mall or something next to, say, Warner Music Group headquarters. Once you own it, it's yours and leverages the only utility I can discern from the blockchain, and that is a ledger that keeps just awesome records. You can also develop the real estate, rent it out, have friends over, host parties, open a store or virtual theme park, whatever you want. You just can't, unfortunately, live there. And maybe some of us could. Who knows? Isn't this all a simulation? Why do we think metaverse real estate could be the GameStop of 2022? Simple. Brand. The mythology of real estate

is that its value never goes down, at least over the long term. And that's probably brought to you by the good folks of the National Realtors Association who want you to believe that no matter what the prices of real estate will go up. In fact, there's a decent amount of research showing that if in fact you account for maintenance and taxes, it's an okay investment, but not the investment that realtors would have you believe. I think what it does though is it forces savings and it ends up being a great vehicle for wealth creation because you have to pay that mortgage because you don't want to be kicked out and also this notion that ownership of land makes you more responsible and quite frankly a more attractive potential mate 70 of single women in china say that if you don't have a deed you're not a viable mate if you don't own real estate there's even a term for it that you're not attractive. Just as Robinhood fomented this myth that staring at a day trading app is investing or learning versus just gambling or the pursuit of dopa,

Metaverse Real Estate combines the heavy, comfortable blanket of a boring asset class with the meme-tastic growth narrative of crypto. Nitro, meat, glycerin. Money is pouring in and a flood could follow. Virtual real estate sales exceeded 500 million in 2021. Analysts project that number is going to double in 2022. A plot of land on Sandbox was recently purchased for $450,000 as it meant being meta neighbors with Snoop Dogg. That's something. There's also commercial real estate.

Luxury designer Philip Pline purchased a property on Decentraland for $1.4 million. It will soon become Pline Plaza. There's also going to be dedicated real estate development. Metaverse real estate firm Republic Realm recently made the largest virtual land purchase in history, $4.3 million. Okay, but what's the fundamental value? That's a tough one. It's a speculative asset. Could it be a store of value? Maybe. Could you turn it into cash flow, running it out or putting an e-commerce company on top of it or running content? Sure, you could do all of those things.

I think the key here will be that these different platforms, if you will, or organizations that create plots and figure out a way to develop some sort of attraction around them, even if they're just speculative assets, they're going to have to do what Bitcoin has pulled off. And what Bitcoin has pulled off is scarcity credibility. And that is people believe because of this incredibly complex and energy hungry process of mining coins, that crypto will in fact stop mining at 21 million coins. That is scarcity credibility that quite frankly is probably more credible than the Fed or fiat currencies have who give into to political pressure and start printing money. One in three dollars in circulation now was printed after or since COVID-19 hit our shores. to instill a sense of trust that once they have 50 beachfront plots in their virtual metaverse, that they aren't going to just decide overnight, oh, here's another million of them. So scarcity credibility will be key. But also, a younger generation doesn't have the same inability as

my generation to assign value to virtual goods. My sons buy skins on video games. They buy better laser cannons. We're going to see an NFT boom, I think, online as people want to signal to other people in the metaverse that they're cool and wardrobe their avatar with Birkin bags or park their Ferrari outside of their home. I actually think this is going to be a huge growth period for luxury brands and media companies as they figure out a way to put IP fences or ring fence their properties with intellectual property lawyers and agreements such that you have to license. And if you want to wear an Hublot watch in the metaverse, you have to give them or you have to license it from them.

This will open up an entirely different category of people that don't have $20,000 for an Hublot watch, but want to signal that online. It'll be entirely different revenue stream with incredible margins. And I think the same thing could happen in real estate. And that is take the speculative nature, the meme-tastic kind of growth opportunities, and also take this traditional boring feel of real estate as a great asset to own. Also the signaling value. If these organizations can establish scarcity value, I think you could see virtual real estate absolutely skyrocket. Metaverse or not, we live more of our lives virtually every year. We have more conversations on Twitter, more meetings on Zoom, sex and rock and roll are increasingly online. So why wouldn't we want a place online for further signaling that we could

call home, that we could run out, that we could engage in events, invite people over. Don't we want a place to call home in the most aspirational places online? Don't we want an opportunity to participate in the upside of real estate, which most people have been locked out of, or a lot of people have been locked out of because of low interest rates and see above 10% year-on-year increases? Few people can afford a start at home in the real world right now. So maybe, maybe they buy a place in Decentraland. Virtual real estate. I think this could be big. What am I saying?

Is this an investment recommendation? No, I don't make those anymore. I just tell people what I'm doing. I am openly considering taking a small portion of my net worth, 1% or less, and buying some plots of land and kind of crossing my fingers, doing it a few different places for some diversity. I think this is something that could offer incredible upside or asymmetric upside, if you will. I think this is also the type of investment you really have to watch because if it's like crypto or meme stocks, it might offer the same incredible pop and then would likely come down again. So what am I going to do? I'm going to put a small amount of money in this. Young people

could put a little bit more because they have more time to get it back. I wouldn't suggest anyone goes above 5% or if they're in the real estate business and feel as if they really understand this, maybe 10% of your net worth. And if you're my age, no more than 1%. But when I look at different asset classes that might follow the arc of meme stocks, of crypto that might have outsized returns, I go virtual and I think about real estate. We'll be right back for our conversation with Kathy Savitt, the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Boom Technology. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals,

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a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Kathy Savitt, the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Boom Technology. So we're going to welcome Kathy Savitt, who's the president of Boom Supersonic, this is a company that when Kara is a big fan of Kathy and I said, I'd love to just know more about this company. I'm fascinated with aviation. And I don't know if there's other people here, but hands down, and this is a charmed life, but the least wonderful part of my life is how much time I spend in airports and on planes. And so when I heard about Boom and that the progress they met, I said it would be great to have someone come talk to us about supersonic. Anyways, with that, Kathy, please come on out. I have to stink. So, boom, your turn.

It almost sounds cliche, but we are a very mission-driven company, which is to make the world dramatically more accessible. And one of the final frontiers in making the world dramatically more accessible is time. And so we are developing the world's fastest, most sustainable supersonic commercial airliner called Overture. And that's our quest and our mission and what we've been focusing on. Okay, so supersonic, everybody immediately thinks of the Concorde. And I have a story about the Concorde. My first year out of college, I was working for Morgan Stanley and had a chance to go to London. And because I was going with my boss's boss's boss, he was approved for the Concorde to go to London. And so I got on the Concorde.

I grew up with aviation. My father used to take me to John Wayne Airport, cover my ears, and we would play this game where we would try and guess the plane landing. And so just was so excited, such a nice moment. Hour delay, two hours delay on the ground, and finally they said, we've got a D plane, and they put us on a 747. And what ended up happening, the research shows that the Concorde actually, if you factored in maintenance delays and canceled flights, it actually took longer than a traditional aircraft to get from New York to London. The bottom line is the technology just wasn't there. It's a great idea, but the vision was way ahead of the technology. What has changed that makes supersonic a viable commercial technology now? Well, lots changed.

I don't know what year that particular incident was. 1938. 1930, yeah. Well, then I was right there with you. But remember that... 88, actually. 80, okay. So near the latter years of Concorde's commercial operation. It's important to note that Concorde was developed in the 60s, you know, roughly the same time as the 707. And it really was an answer from the French and the UK government to the space programs of the United States and the Soviet era. So while she was a very fast plane, she was fast at all costs. At the time, it was very cutting edge design, but she was not sustainable either environmentally or economically. And over time, as it became, you know, it certainly didn't fulfill the commercial objectives. It was

never really meant to be a commercial aircraft. It just kind of became the momentum fell out, et cetera. And when you have such an iconic symbol as one product, it's very bizarre that aerospace is almost like the one industry is like, oh, well, tried that 60 some odd years ago. Doesn't mean it didn't work. Imagine if we had that same approach for biotech or for AI or anything computing, the entire world of innovation would stop. And Overture is really leveraging in many ways the 50 to 60 years of advancements in propulsion, aerodynamics, materials. And we're taking all of that advancement, adding our own innovation on top of it to create a commercial product that is not only super fast, it'll be twice as fast as anything that's flying today, but also sustainable economically and environmental and, of course, safe. And when we talk about safety, we're not just talking about the certifications, which, of course, are table stakes, whether it's with the FAA or ESA, et cetera.

We are talking about well-being. But what's changed? Is it the fuselage the materials the engines a lot has changed so you know first let's talk about aerodynamics in order to go really really fast you're going to want to be you're going to want to as an aerospace engineer make those wings small and your control surface is small But if you want to land and take off, you're going to manage to make them large. And so the way that you used to have, the way you used to have to test and sort of thread that needle was through physical wind tunnel models. So you would actually

take the physical iteration of that and spend months and millions and millions of dollars iterating to thread that needle. Today, we're doing all of that using high speed computer engineering. So we will actually use a hundred million core hours of computing to thread that needle. And that's what Overture is about. Second is materials. So Concorde's fuselage was made out of aluminum. And because at high speeds and at high altitudes, it gets really hot, like 150 degrees. The story goes that as you flew the Concorde, it would actually grow or contract by a foot by the time you landed. We're using carbon composite materials, which are not only easier to mold into shape to make the engines and the overall aircraft

more efficient, but they also allow us to handle the different variations in temperature. And last but not least is propulsion. Concorde infamously was built on sort of a turbojet. So you would have those really loud afterburners. We don't have any of that. We are leveraging and working to innovate on top of turbo engines that allow for far more efficient, fast, and just overall more sustainable practices. And so when you put all that together, plus a seven times increase in the amount of global travel, you have a really interesting situation for supersonic to come back to the world. Yeah, it's strange. We were talking about this backstage. So you have a plethora of innovation around a photo sharing app or dog walking. And then you have people get rich and say,

I want to send people to a certain death on Mars. But there's no, there's nothing in between. There's nothing at the atmosphere. There hasn't been a commercial or an aviation manufacturer started, I think, since you said Douglas. 1921, the Douglas Company. Why has there been such a lack? And it just seems so nakedly obvious. It takes longer, if we go to Miami International and go to Dallas, it takes longer to get there than it did in 1975 right now. That's correct.

Why has there been such a dearth of innovation at kind of the atmosphere level, if you will? Well, as it relates to aerospace, you've had like these blips. The 707, when we went to the 747, that was a big innovation because, you know, I grew up on the East Coast in New York and my family, you know, had enough money to go on vacations, but we went to Florida. We didn't go to Hawaii because it just took too long. You know, 747s were just kind of finding their footing. And then, you know, roughly concurrently, we had Concorde. But then in the age of deregulation, in order to save miles to improve something called chasm, which you know is cost per average seat mile, our planes got slower and slower and slower. And it requires both capital and long-term vision. You have to be patient.

It's not like a software program where you can say, okay, we have this idea. We're going to release a minimum viable product and then performance test it or A-B test it. You can't do that with an aircraft. So you're asking whether it's VCs or others to invest in things that take longer than their average fund return share. So a good aviation program takes 10 to 15 years to develop, but the average fund needs to return from 7 to 10. So you have some of the greatest minds thinking about biotech has this problem a little bit as well, especially aerospace, where you have people saying, I could do the ad platform for dog walking leashes or whatever you want to say. Or I could do this 12 to 15 year air program that is really trying to do something truly audacious. Some investors have really gotten it.

Some, you know, that's scary. They'd rather come in right at the end. We'll be right back. Hello, I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast, Where Should We Begin, which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic. But in this special series, I focus on our relationships with our colleagues, business partners and managers. Listen in as I talk to co-workers facing their own challenges with one another and get the real work done. Tune into Housework, a special series from Where Should We Begin? sponsored by Klaviyo. Support for the show comes from Indeed. If you need to hire,

you may need Indeed. Indeed is a matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to Indeed data, and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Listeners of this show can get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. All right. So I don't think there's ever been a successful commercial aviation or aviation manufacturer that hasn't had direct or indirect subsidies of billions. Airbus, European Airspace, Boeing, Lockheed, they were all sort of subsidized by the military industrial complex. How do you build a viable product without billions in subsidies?

Well, it's a great question, and it's a question we get quite a bit. It's not cheap, as you would imagine, to build a next-generation supersonic aircraft program. But the way we do it is equity is really only about 15% to 20% of what we're going to do. We do get investments from state and local as well as federal government in terms of grants, in terms of when we come to a state. We just announced a few weeks ago. Say more about that. Yeah, we just announced our final assembly line, which is really our production.

We call it the super factory, where we'll make supersonic aircraft. We did an extensive process and selected Greensboro, North Carolina. We're really fired up to be there. And the state of North Carolina is being an awesome partner. They'll build our facility for us. They're extending the runway for aviation in general to come there, as well as really welcomed us with a series of incentives. We also do a lot of risk-sharing programs, which... Did they put a number on that? You know, it's in excess of $200 million, just's real money. We're working with the U.S. Air

Force and with the innovation arm of the Air Force to actually explore what can be done with Overture is the name of our flagship and our first aircraft. How do you modify Overture so it works for executive transport? And so when I talk about executive transport, I'm talking about taking whether it's what you would think about Air Force One or Air Force Two or just the Secretary of State or Secretary of Commerce, supersonic. And let's talk about the Ukraine and Russia right now. Imagine if you could get over there in literally

half the time, what would that do for the way we look at and solving crises? And so those are some examples. Yeah, it seems obvious to me that they'll test it with the vice president for a year. And as long as the thing works, this is going to be Air Force One. It just strikes me like, I don't think there's any way they're not going to want to say, hello strikes me like, I don't think there's any way they're not going to want to say, hello, the Americans. I don't know why you'd fly subsonic if you could fly supersonic. Absolutely. I also would imagine, I mean, I saw all those logos of the airlines. I would think that because of the incredibly perverse income inequality that infects the entire globe now, there's a fairly large segment

that didn't exist in the 60s and 70s of people who individually, I mean, if I'm Bezos and Musk, and there's nothing I can do to stave off death, it's coming for all of us guys, I'd be on this list. Is the market bigger for commercial airliners or individuals, mega, you know, Forbes 400 individuals? Well, when we think about Overture One, it goes back to that mission to make the world dramatically more accessible. We believe that ultimately the fastest plane should also be, you know, decades from now, the most accessible across every dimension, including cost, and also sustainable. When we look at Overture right now, it's a business class product. Fares, and we've done some, I think we had a slide on this. We've done a lot of research

in terms of what people are willing to pay. And sort of, as you would imagine, a flight that's about $3,500, people are willing to pay 100% more on average to go in half the time. And as you get into, let's say, that 5,000 number on average. It's about 55%. So it's really accessible to someone who's flying corporate business and certainly that bleacher first class. But going back to private, yes, there are, at the end of the day, time is the ultimate luxury that we have. And so when you quantify that for people,

also post COVID, do you really want to be spending 16 hours on a plane? I can go LA to Sydney in about eight hours. I can go from Seattle to Tokyo in four and a half hours, that's a long distance relationship right there. And so it is actually the ultimate luxury is time. Let's talk a little bit about the environmental footprint. So CJ3, about 150 gallons an hour. The Challenger 300, about 320 gallons an hour. Gulfstream 450, about 450 gallons per hour. And then I think, what does a 737 spew into the air? I'm not even sure. I don't know off the top of my head, but I do know that with supersonic, we are going to take more fuel. We run our engines harder. That's how you get that Mach 1.7, which is why, as we deconstruct what collapsed Concorde, that notion of sustainability, both on the economic side and on the environmental side,

we took extra time to make sure that we were going to design our aircraft on the dimensions of speed, safety, and sustainability. And we are really, I think, proud of the fact that Overture will be optimized to run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel. So from a clean sheet aircraft program to be able to do that, and that's how we're working on our propulsion system. That's how we're doing our business development in terms of working with SAF providers and really trying to lead in not only creating abundant supply, but also about driving SAF price parity with jet A fuel, because you can burn more fuel as long as you're burning clean. And our programs have been net zero carbon from the day we put it on a clean sheet. And as a company, including our offsets, including me coming here today, we have a budget for our carbon spend. We're doing high quality carbon offsets until we

burn on SAF and we're actually flying our planes. And then also environmentally, traditionally, supersonic was always relegated to overwater because of the sonic boom. By the way, I love that you've leaned into a negative. You've named your company Boom. I think that is so innovative. I heard Facebook's renaming is Depression. You know, the name of the company, which... Tell us about the Sonic Boom. Is it actually getting less boomy or is it... Well, there are a lot of folks, including Boom,

that are working on noise. We decided that for Overture 1, we were going to try and build on top of not only existing innovations, innovate on top of innovations, but also not try and change regulation to actually work with it. So we will fly subsonic,

which means over land, faster than you can fly today, about Mach 0.94. And so... 720 miles an hour. Correct. And I heard there's going to be, like Kansas has announced it's going to be a supersonic corridor saying put the metal down. Yes, you're just going to circle Kansas because, you know...

Go really fast. Yeah, you just go real fast around Kansas. No, I think, so, you know, we don't talk about the fact that you'll be able to get from LA, from New York to LA, which is like the baton death march, in four and a half hours versus six and a half. That's really meaningful as someone who does that. But where you see the supersonic dividend is over water. So our route, our proprietary routing tools are a little non-intuitive. Instead of using great circle, which is the way you're used to seeing a route tool being done, we're about optimizing to get out to the coast as fast as possible over water, and then we'll immediately go Mach 1.7. And so that's where we'll fly supersonic. But what bothers people, so you won't hear that boom on land, what bothers

people also is that Concorde, they have this perception, Concorde had these really nasty, noisy afterburners that sounded like, you know, they were the place. Yeah, they were horrendous. Whereas we're using and leveraging and modifying the most modern and the most quiet turbo engine, turbo engines, which ultimately what we're going to do, and we've removed those nasty afterburners and we've created proprietary inlet and nozzle technology. So we're going to be quieter than a 777 for our airport communities,

which we think is really, really important. So I'm just thinking that some of the roots immediately my mind went to, well, how does my life get better? So how many miles off the coast before you can go supersonic right now? Well, it depends. I mean, Concorde flew 27 miles off the coast before you can go supersonic right now? Well, it depends. I mean, Concorde flew 27 miles off. We've modeled it as 150. You can go. It just depends on the weather, et cetera.

But you go. We can get supersonic pretty darn quick. So once you're over water, you can put the pedal down. You just go. Right. It's not like suddenly your hair blows back in that old, it's a very mellow. Bugs Bunny cartoon. Yeah. So 500 routes. For those of us who commute back and forth to New York, you take off from PBI, you head to the coast. Can you commute to New York theoretically in an hour? From Palm Beach are you talking? Palm Beach, PBI. That's about 980 nautical miles, two hours and 26 minutes. It depends on the routing,

but yes. I mean, one of the things, and I'll get to the exact routes we're going to have pretty soon on our website, Boom Supersonic, you'll be able to do, we'll launch publicly our route tool where you can actually plug in different coordinates and play. But we'll do 500 routes supersonic, whereas Concorde, you know, you kind of knew like New York to Paris, New York to London. We'll do anywhere sort of on the East Coast, including slightly not East Coast, like Atlanta, which is a big, obviously the largest airport to the United States, it's Hartsfield. And you'll be able to really make all of Europe your oyster. There is a tremendous opportunity also trans-Pacific. We're getting calls and a lot of cooperation from places like the government of Auckland and New Zealand and Australia. When we did our Net Good Summit, which was an environmental

future of travel summit, we had the head of tourism for South Africa. So this is about really changing human connection through speech, which is pretty darn exciting. Connecting the world, wherever I heard that. We're going to ask questions in about 30 seconds. So last question, you've raised about 300 million bucks. You're seven years away. In equity. So if you actually look at risk sharing, the investment made by our suppliers, as well as government investments.

It's hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. And we still have more equity to raise. But with every sale we get, with every milestone we hit, we've become more and more in inevitability. Have any airlines made hard commitments to purchase? Yes. Right now in our order book, we have 70 aircraft. Fifteen we announced in June of last year. United Airlines made our first what we call full order, which means non-refundable deposits. And they have been incredible partners, incredibly supportive. So in addition to their 15 full orders, they have another 35 options for a total of 50. And then Japan Airlines, who really wants to unlock those Asia-Pacific routes, have options for 20 right now.

So 70, but a lot more to come, as well as the work we're doing with the U.S. government. There's a lot of private corporations where they feel this would tremendously change their trajectory, as well as you, Scott. So algebra of happiness, this is usually my hallmark moment where i talk about something wonderful in my life i did have that's some nice stuff happened recently my youngest son has gotten really into the rams and football and brought back a lot of wonderful memories for me and we watched super bowl yesterday and i but i've already kind of talked about that something else has been happening that's not nearly as pleasant and there's no lesson i'm not even sure what to do about it but three or four times in the last three months, I've woken up in the

middle of the night with sort of like a severe amount of anxiety. And it's over weird things. It happened to me last night. Maybe I'm nervous about this conference, but I woke up and I spoke at a conference. And sometimes I have a difficult time reading the room. One of the reasons that people hire me to come to conferences is that I'm provocative and I'm profane, but on a regular basis, I cross the line and I just offend people in the room. And this wasn't about anything profane or anything like that. I just said something about the institution that was hosting me and just the place just went literally just still. And I could tell they were really embarrassed by what I said. And I don't know if it was that big a deal or not. I just don't know.

But I woke up last night, literally at three in the morning, just like, oh, fuck, I offended them. I need to reach out to them. I need to make amends. A few weeks ago, no joke, Michael Smirconish, who is a friend, had me on his show. He was hosting the Nine O'Clock Hour, where Chris Cuomo used to host. And at the end of my segment, I said, and Michael, you've done a great job. Well done for the last week. And then later on, I thought, was that kind of belittling for someone like me to commend him for that? And I thought, did I offend him? Was that belittling for me to say that to him? And that night I woke up in a panic that I was disrespectful or condescending to someone who I respect and I like

and it literally woke me up in a cold sweat. And of course, the next day they called me and said, can you be on again tonight? Life isn't about what happens to you. It's about how you respond to what happens to you. And a lot of how you respond to what happens to you, I think is a function of where your head's at or your body chemistry.

One thing I've noticed is the nights this happens to me, I wake up with these, what I'll call, not night terrors, but night anxiety, is I've been drinking. So I got to figure out a way to get around this because daddy's not giving up the sauce. No, he's not doing that. And anyways, no real lesson here

other than I think part of addressing any problem is acknowledging the problem and recognizing that it's probably not as good or as bad as it seems. And also anxiety, which I never had as a kid. Zero to 30, not enough anxiety. I almost got kicked out of UCLA five times. I could give a shit. It didn't bother me.

Da-da-da-da-da. And then 30 to 45, 50, I had exactly the right amount of anxiety. And now I just have too much. I think I worry over things that other people have moved on from. How to handle it? I don't know. Exercise? Maybe dial back on alcohol or edibles? I don't know, but I need to do something. Part of any process on attacking the issue is identifying it, acknowledging that it's a problem, and getting on it. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller

is our assistant producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to The Prophecy Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week on Monday and Thursday. Daddy want one. Daddy want one. Daddy want one. Oh my God. Mommy can give you one. I need, I am, these things cost 200 million? Yeah, it's a bargain.

If I end up with 201 million dollars, I'm going to have one million and one of these fucking bad boys. Let's be honest, this is interesting. With this thing, I'm fucking fascinating. Who's with me? Oh, my God. Oh, we're pretty fired up. My heart's running. Gosh. Hey, you want to go to want to go to Seoul in six hours? That's a good wrap. It's a really good wrap. That's a good wrap. It's a really good wrap. Support for the show comes from Alex Partners. Did you know that almost 90% of executives see potential for growth from digital disruption? With 37% seeing significant or extremely high positive impact on revenue growth. In Alex Partners' 2024 Digital Disruption Report,

you can learn the best path to turning that disruption into growth for your business. With a focus on clarity, direction, and effective implementation, Alex Partners provides essential support when decisive leadership is crucial. You can discover insights like these by reading Alex Partners' latest technology industry insights, available at www.alexpartners.com slash vox. That's www.alexpartners.com slash vox. In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the point and deliver results when it really matters. Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time. Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform

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