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- [00:00]
Blake Shull
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- [01:05]
Sean
Blake Shull, welcome to the show.
- [01:07]
Blake Shull
It's good to be here, Sean. Thank you for having me.
- [01:09]
Sean
It's good to have you. Another innovator. I love being around you guys. I mean it just been interviewing a lot of interview a lot of innovators here in recent history and man you guys are just incredible and fascinating and motivating to be around. So. So thank you for coming. I love what you're doing.
- [01:31]
Blake Shull
Well, thank you and it's honored to be here.
- [01:34]
Sean
I got a question. How long did it take you to get here from Denver?
- [01:38]
Blake Shull
It was about 2 hours and 10 minutes.
- [01:40]
Sean
2 hours and 10 minutes.
- [01:41]
Blake Shull
If all the flights were about that long, we'd be doing okay.
- [01:45]
Sean
You're not flying on the new jet, huh?
- [01:49]
Blake Shull
Not yet. You know, 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 1/3 scale demonstrator airplane and I'd love to go hot wire that thing and make it my own personal airplane.
- [02:08]
Sean
I'll bet you and just about everybody else would 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 Shull, the founder of Boom Supersonic, a company he 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 in audible sonic boom. The architect of Overture, the fastest airliner in development, set to fly at Mach 1.7 with 130 orders from major airlines. Earned her private Pilot's license in 2008 and an instrument rating in 2011. A former Amazon software engineer who at just 24 managed 300 million P&L. Like I said, I love what you're doing. You are reinventing commercial air travel. It sounds like the XB one can make is it from New York to Paris in under four hours?
- [03:25]
Blake Shull
Under four hours?
- [03:28]
Sean
That's incredible. Before we get too far, would this be used for CONUS travel or is it only overseas flights?
- [03:37]
Blake Shull
Well, now that we've cracked sonic boom and the President has now signed an executive order to legalize supersonic flight in the US can be used for CONUS too. So you can leave, you can leave New York at 9:00am and land in San Francisco at 9:30am San Francisco time.
- [03:55]
Sean
That's crazy.
- [03:57]
Blake Shull
It's going to be so great.
- [03:59]
Sean
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?
- [04:30]
Blake Shull
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 RD facility we're building in Denver. And we've got the, we 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 photos from way back and there was one of them from nine years earlier in the plywood and cardboard mock up of that airplane. Oh man. And I was just looking back at it like 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.
- [05:15]
Sean
Man, it's amazing what you're doing, but everybody gets a gift.
- [05:21]
Blake Shull
Oh, thank you.
- [05:24]
Sean
Vigilance Elite 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.
- [05:34]
Blake Shull
Colorado. I told my friends I was doing it to start a company and everyone thought it was gonna 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, if I could pray that out here.
- [05:49]
Sean
Thank you.
- [05:50]
Blake Shull
Yeah. So this is a pretty special artifact. This is. That has flew on the first supersonic flight of XB1. So that has gone supersonic.
- [06:03]
Sean
Oh, man. Thank you.
- [06:04]
Blake Shull
And so that's numbered. I think that's number 60. There are not that many of those.
- [06:08]
Sean
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 it 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?
- [06:47]
Blake Shull
Oh, boy, so much. 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 at 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 kind of frustrated with what I thought the problems were. And then after that, as part of a different couple, different startups, you know, one that I founded and we sold to Groupon. And after having spent time at Groupon, I learned how lucky I was to be at Amazon. The companies all like to say all these great things about themselves, their principal, they make long term decisions, they care about their customers, et cetera, et cetera. The hard part is actually doing the real work when I can look at what Amazon would do versus what Groupon would do. 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. And I think it's the reason that proximately Groupon doesn't exist anymore.
- [08:09]
Sean
We haven't heard of it in years.
- [08:10]
Blake Shull
Right?
- [08:12]
Sean
Have not heard of that.
- [08:13]
Blake Shull
Well.
- [08:16]
Sean
Let'S move into. I mean, how did you get started? I mean, you went from Amazon to your company that you sold a Groupon. How did you get in? I mean, what is it with aerospace?
- [08:31]
Blake Shull
For some of us, there's just this magical flight thing, and it's a bug that bites us and it 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 was just 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's both scary and empowering. And I've loved, you know, loved flight ever since. When I was in my 20s working at this startup in Seattle, there was one of the. One of the final Concordes had been put out to the museum there. And I went and saw it. And I remember looking at the Concorde, I remember looking at the SR71 Blackbird and thinking, like, 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 Concorde 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 if she'd been able to show up at Mach 2. And for basically a decade, it was just crickets. There was some talk of a supersonic private jet for the ultra, ultra wealthy. I looked at Concorde and I was in. I was at Amazon when Concorde got shut down. I never got to fly on it. Why? It's a $20,000 ticket. That was for royalty and rock stars. 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 Concorde was it wasn't affordable. Meanwhile, I'd had this experience of starting my first company and selling it to Groupon. So I'd been at Amazon, so I thought I knew E commerce. And then I'D been at this other startup that was building mobile apps. So I thought I knew mobile. 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. 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 yet there's no such thing as an easy startup. I was worried I'd lose all the investors money. I was at times super depressed and I'd wake up and think, why did I get into this? How do I get out of it? When I had a chance to sell the company to Groupon and the investors got their money back in a little bit, 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. I never want to work on something where I have to ask myself, is it worth it? So after a couple years at Groupon, having gone one level from barcode scanning game to Internet coupon, I couldn't take any more of those phone calls saying, send more email, Blake. And fired myself. And, and I thought, you know, let me put all my startup ideas in order of how happy I would be if it worked.
- [12:06]
Sean
How many startup ideas did you have?
- [12:09]
Blake Shull
I was looking at my notes from this a couple weeks ago cause I actually kept a journal back then and there were probably a couple dozen.
- [12:17]
Sean
I'm just curious, what were some of the other ideas?
- [12:18]
Blake Shull
Oh, they were terrible.
- [12:20]
Sean
Were they all in aerospace?
- [12:21]
Blake Shull
Some of them were, you know, and like 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 it turned out somebody else did that. That became basically jsx.
- [12:40]
Sean
Okay.
- [12:41]
Blake Shull
And I'm a big fan of, big fan of that. But 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 that'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 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. 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 gonna look at this supersonic thing. And I thought I would get two weeks into it and be done with it.
- [13:58]
Sean
That had to be. That had to be. The intimidation factor had to be pretty high.
- [14:04]
Blake Shull
Oh, absolutely. I mean, the weirdest thing was, I mean, so I got slightly down path with 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 and 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 since high school. I remember in the middle of 2014, I had a spreadsheet model of the airplane and a spreadsheet model of the market. I took them both to a professor at Stanford, and I said, would 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, 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. But that was the weirdest part, is I'm like, who am I to go build a supersonic jet company? And I would tell my friends I was looking at it, and I could just see their eyes roll back. And 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, I'm almost definitionally part of history. And so I'm, like, declaring to myself and my friends that I'm gonna try to be a historic figure. That was really weird. And I think, like, man, does this make me somebody really arrogant to even go try this? And I struggled with it. And 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, I don't know, something 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 hand. On the other hand, they're probably. 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?
- [17:12]
Sean
Yeah, I can relate to that and other aspects. Who was the first person that believed in you?
- [17:21]
Blake Shull
Avitul 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. He'd 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, he didn't have the heart to tell me not to.
- [18:00]
Sean
No kidding.
- [18:01]
Blake Shull
And so I think the reality was, on day one, nobody believed it, not even me.
- [18:08]
Sean
Wow. How old were you when you decided to make the shift?
- [18:13]
Blake Shull
33.
- [18:14]
Sean
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?
- [18:26]
Blake Shull
Yeah, let's see. So I left Groupon in Something like March of 2014. And then I set the company up on paper in September of that year, but decided quick. Well, to me that feels slow, but really, yeah. I had in my head that I would take a few months off. I think I only took a few weeks off before I really got focused on it. And it was around that time I was still living in California. I hadn't moved to Denver yet. And I think I had some folding chairs and some plastic tubes that I was using in my basement just by myself to try and 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. Then I moved to Denver in early 2015, hired our first few people. One of the first things we did is start building mock ups.
- [19:24]
Sean
And you're doing your own engines, you're doing everything.
- [19:28]
Blake Shull
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.
- [19:42]
Sean
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- [22:37]
Blake Shull
Yeah, so it was actually not part of the original plan.
- [22:40]
Sean
Really?
- [22:41]
Blake Shull
Yeah. So everyone thinks that the point of the whole company was to solve sonic boom. And so, of course, we were going to go demonstrate 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 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. I wanted to enjoy that. And the team came back and said, no, no, no. We've been talking for years about this thing called mach cutoff where the boom doesn't reach the ground, 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 mach 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 transoceanic airplane. It's not a conus 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 cruise and this physics called mach cutoff 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 touch 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's like, well, the transonic excel altitude just went up 1,000ft, went up another thousand feet, another thousand feet. And I started thinking, what if the Internet is right and I'm wrong? 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 Cruise? It took 90 minutes, and they said, thumbs up. It just works.
- [25:16]
Sean
No kidding.
- [25:17]
Blake Shull
The next thing I did is I called the marketing team and I said, we're going to relaunch the company around boomless cruise. Everyone's gonna think it was the plan all along, but we just figured it out, man. So why did. Let's just go back.
- [25:31]
Sean
I got a lot of questions, actually. Let's talk about a sonic boom and what it is.
- [25:36]
Blake Shull
Yeah. So a sonic boom is the sound an airplane makes while it's flying supersonic. You can think of it as kind of like the wake of a boat. Boat's going sufficiently fast, it's gonna make a wake. The wake's gonna propagate outwards, and. And you notice it when it hits you. And so a big boat. Big boats make a big wake, right? Small boat's gonna make a smaller wake. The boat's right next to you. You're gonna feel the wake more strongly than if it's further away. A lot of that is the way sonic boom works. Big airplanes are gonna make bigger sonic booms, but the further away they are, the less you hear. And then there's a distinction with booms. It 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. 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, the lower, the cooler it is. And so refraction happens. Whenever a wave moves through something where its 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 gonna 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 have this gigantic U in the sky. And at the bottom of the U never touches the ground. Nobody hears any boom.
- [27:24]
Sean
Gotcha. Gotcha.
- [27:25]
Blake Shull
And so this is the easy solution for sonic boom. For 50 years, people have talked about it like it's this boogeyman that's going to require decades of R and 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.
- [27:47]
Sean
No kidding.
- [27:48]
Blake Shull
It's actually really simple.
- [27:50]
Sean
Wow.
- [27:51]
Blake Shull
We can talk about why people have made it out to be a harder problem than it is.
- [27:54]
Sean
Let's do it.
- [27:56]
Blake Shull
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 and D airplane called the X59. They've been working on it for longer than boom has existed as a company, and it hasn't flown yet. 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.
- [28:29]
Sean
Okay.
- [28:30]
Blake Shull
And that thing can go up to Mach 1.4. Boomless tops out at about Mach 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 and D type efforts where the incentive for the people working on them is to make the challenge sufficiently hard that it justifies the program.
- [29:02]
Sean
Interesting. I mean, you've had, I mean, just to start that company, I mean, you're going up against Boeing. You have the, you have the, the regulations, the speed regulations. What was the speed regulation?
- [29:17]
Blake Shull
It says thou shalt not exceed Mach 1, the speed of sound. I mean, it's a dumb regulation.
- [29:23]
Sean
You've got some hurdles and you have no background in aviation or aerospace. And I mean, how did you, when you as the founder of the company, I mean, how did you. Those are some big things. Those are some major hurdles to get over, right?
- [29:41]
Blake Shull
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 Mai Tais and I'm reading 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. History never goes that way. The big guys never suddenly get enlightened. Okay, well, do I think we're still going subsonic? Geesh, 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 without me being part of it. Okay, it had to be an effort from outside the industry. Nobody who had spent their careers at Boeing or Airbus would ever do it because 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 sane, 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, 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 buying Boeing and Airbus airplanes. They go buy airplanes from a startup instead. It would require this incredible power of Persuasion of perseverance. 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 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.
- [32:26]
Sean
Gotcha. Gotcha. Let's talk about. So it sounds like Concord was the main inspiration, correct?
- [32:36]
Blake Shull
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 Concorde 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.
- [32:55]
Sean
So this was. I didn't. This was. This goes all the way back to the 60s.
- [32:59]
Blake Shull
Concorde was established as a joint venture between the French and British governments by treaty in 1962.
- [33:08]
Sean
Wow.
- [33:08]
Blake Shull
It first flew in 1969, within months of the moon landing.
- [33:12]
Sean
Wow. Who was using it?
- [33:17]
Blake Shull
So British Airways and Air France were the only two airlines that really operated it for any length of time. And the tickets were adjusted for inflation, north of $20,000. So this was really for the royalty and rock stars who could drop a whole lot of coin to go somewhere really fast. It was not practical the way it was done then.
- [33:42]
Sean
How long did it run for?
- [33:43]
Blake Shull
27 years.
- [33:45]
Sean
27 years.
- [33:45]
Blake Shull
27 years, yeah. Shut down in 2003, really? With no plan to replace it.
- [33:50]
Sean
Why was it shut down?
- [33:52]
Blake Shull
So the proximal cause was it was just too expensive 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 Concorde, and 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 it too, and it'll force the whole fleet down. So that happened. I don't know if the conspiracy theory is exactly true, but I think the reality was it died. It was stillborn. This was an airplane with 100 seats on it, mind you. 100 uncomfortable seats. You could think they were out of back of Ryanair or something. Not a comfortable airplane. $20,000 ticket, 100 seats to fill. That just doesn't work. You can't find 100 people want to drop 20 grand to go somewhere all at the same time. That's why they only ever had 14.
- [34:58]
Sean
Interesting. So 100 seats, $20,000 a ticket. And then. So it was actually the company that deep sixed it.
- [35:06]
Blake Shull
It wasn't the regulations, I think 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. So one of my controversial opinions is that Concorde 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 a lot of people, and I loved Concorde and I loved Apollo, but I don't think they helped us. And if that seems like a crazy thing, just notice it's 20, 25 and we can't fly supersonic and we can't land on the moon. So these things that we were told in where the harbingers of great progress didn't pan out the way it was predicted. So why. And I think the answer is that for the first 50 years, from the Wright brothers forward, innovation in aerospace was commercially driven. You're building a commercial airplane that passengers got to be able to afford to fly on, that airlines won't operate profitably. Nobody would build a machine unless they at least believed it was going to make economic sense. And then if you're building military machines, they had to make sense for that mission. So there was a commercial hand saying, it's gotta make sense, or there's a military hand saying, it's gotta 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, they were government spec'd, and the result was everybody was building products that show technological superiority, not products that made any commercial sense. So Concorde 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 Concorde did. And then what happened is the American. So Congress pulled the plug appropriately on the American supersonic airplane. Concorde and Concordsky were still coming. And now all of a sudden, it was not obvious back then just how economically dead on arrival Concorde was gonna be. And so then America responded, trying to protect Boeing by banning supersonic flood over land.
- [37:46]
Sean
That's what it was.
- [37:47]
Blake Shull
That's what it was.
- [37:48]
Sean
It was to protect Boeing.
- [37:49]
Blake Shull
This was protectionism. As long as Boeing's building a supersonic airplane, it was all fine. That project gets canceled all of a sudden. 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.
- [38:16]
Sean
Why would the government be protecting Boeing?
- [38:20]
Blake Shull
Regulatory capture. I mean, that happens all the time, right? I think an enormous amount of the regulations that we have in any industry today are there to protect the incumbents.
- [38:34]
Sean
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 supersonic.
- [38:47]
Blake Shull
I mean, I don't know exactly how it went, so I'm speculating a bit, but we had European and Russian government funded projects to build a supersonic airliner. The US taxpayer funding and Boeing to do the same thing had just been pulled. I could imagine saying, hey, 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 are subsidized, then at least block them so they can't do anything here. Then the public story was all about how bad these airplanes were going to be noise wise and environmentally. A thing I've come to believe is every bad regulation tends to have a moral cover story that's believable, like, oh, we can't disturb sleeping babies and break windows. And then there's a real motivation, which is Boeing doesn't want to compete with Concord, which 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.
- [39:51]
Sean
And you've been in business for 10.
- [39:52]
Blake Shull
Years, a little more than 10.
- [39:55]
Sean
11. 11. Years is the.
- [39:57]
Blake Shull
It'll be 11 in September.
- [39:58]
Sean
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?
- [40:14]
Blake Shull
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 transoceanic, not just New York, London, Miami to Madrid and Seattle to Tokyo and LA to Sydney, where most of the flying's over water, where there is no speed limit.
- [40:32]
Sean
Okay.
- [40:33]
Blake Shull
Right. And so our basic idea was, well, Concorde missed on cost, and it missed on comfort. So we got to solve those problems, but I gotta make the seats nicer, and we gotta get the cost down to the point that more people can afford to fly it. And today, there's really nice flatbed seats at the front of the airplane. And business or first class for international flights. Right. And people pay top $5, 10, 15, sometimes 20 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 Concorde 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 Concorde. The math closes at 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 2000, 10s, 2000s, 2000s kind of travel demand in business class on these international routes, if you could make the fare similar to what people were already paying, not stratospheric like Concorde. 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. 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 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 boomless cruise. 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, I spent time with Congress, I spent time with the faa, and I basically said, look, if we're 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.
- [43:29]
Sean
How was that received universally?
- [43:32]
Blake Shull
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 that basically said, hey, faa, go rewrite your rules so you can fly supersonic without a boom. You're allowed. And so that got introduced very quickly. Senator Budd introduced it in the Senate, and Representative Troy Nels introduced it in the House. We had bipartisan support on the House. And then meanwhile, I think the President looked at it, and he loved Concorde. There's this beautiful video clip of him talking about how it was the most beautiful airplane ever and never really should have gone away. And. And he said, well, I can do it faster than Congress. I'm going to do an executive order. And so he did.
- [44:22]
Sean
Nice. Nice. Look, how do you. I mean, how do you see your company fitting into the world? I mean, is this going to be. We. 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 conus. Is it going to be just overseas flights?
- [44:44]
Blake Shull
Yeah, well, I think the.
- [44:45]
Sean
Who's going to be able to afford it? All this stuff.
- [44:48]
Blake Shull
Well, let's start with the vision, and we can work backwards to how we get there. Okay. I want to replace subsonic with supersonic for every passenger on every route, at least every long route, you know, for the President, all the way down to families, is the.
- [45:03]
Sean
What's a long route?
- [45:05]
Blake Shull
Anything that's, you know, more than three or four hours today.
- [45:08]
Sean
Okay.
- [45:09]
Blake Shull
You can kind of argue where the threshold is, where the 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. I think everything's better faster. But for flights over three or four hours, you can argue cutting in half is meaningful. So ultimately, if we want to enable more people to go more places more often, we need the flights to be faster. We delete 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 the ultimate goal. To confine subsonic jets to the airplane boneyards, put them in museums where they belong. But it'll take a few iterations to get there. So Overture, which is this airplane, the first commercial airplane starts all business class. So you can kind of think of, for people who know the Tesla story, our XB1 supersonic demonstrator. It's kind of like the Tesla Roadster. Proved you can do it.
- [46:12]
Sean
Okay.
- [46:14]
Blake Shull
The airplane was really just for a test pilot. Proved we could do it, prove the technology was there. Okay. The first product is kind of like the Model S. A lot of people can afford to drive a 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 it'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.
- [46:42]
Sean
No kidding. And how many passengers do you think it'll hold?
- [46:45]
Blake Shull
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 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 of 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. Nobody wants to go to a hub and change airplanes. 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 gonna be a whole family of airplanes here.
- [47:33]
Sean
Gotcha. Gotcha. And when do you think these will be implemented?
- [47:38]
Blake Shull
Our goal is to have the first Overture roll out in a little over two years in 2027.
- [47:43]
Sean
Wow.
- [47:44]
Blake Shull
Fly in 28. Our goal is to be certified in 29 and hand over to airlines in 30. So five years is the goal.
- [47:54]
Sean
Will you be your own airline or will you sell to the airlines?
- [47:57]
Blake Shull
No, we have sold to airlines. United was first to announce that they'd 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.
- [48:22]
Sean
What about infrastructure as far as airports? Are they going to need longer runways? Certain airports that can handle a jet like that? I mean, what are some of those kind of hurdles? If there are any?
- [48:36]
Blake Shull
Yeah, we've worked real hard to make sure there aren't any. So any airport that can handle a Boeing 777 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 Concorde didn't. Concorde needed an extra long Runway and you had to. It came in really fast and so it was disruptive for air traffic control. We've been able to solve all those problems.
- [49:06]
Sean
Really. What about the pilots? Do you need specific pilots?
- [49:10]
Blake Shull
Like any airplane, you gotta 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.
- [49:25]
Sean
Wow.
- [49:25]
Blake Shull
And so if you come up here, 40 years. 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 gotta get you to fly it. Cause we've got a flight simulator and it's so much easier to fly than a Boeing Airbus. It's like going from a BlackBerry to an iPhone.
- [49:47]
Sean
No kidding.
- [49:48]
Blake Shull
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 touchscreen and it's really nice. And so you don't need to be some hot shit military pilot to fly this thing. It's a little scary to say it, but we're designing it for the worst pilot. Just like there's a worst doctor, there's a worst lawyer, there's also a worst airline pilot. And we want to design this such that the average pilot can succeed.
- [50:24]
Sean
What will the experience be like for the passengers? You mentioned it's all you'd mentioned. I don't know if you were talking about pricing or is it going to look like business class?
- [50:36]
Blake Shull
So pricing wise, it'll be like what people pay in business class today. Nominal fare thing, $5,000 round trip would be very profitable on this airplane. I know that's not for everybody, but that's a pretty good business class price.
- [50:49]
Sean
Is that from. Is that Conus? Is that Oconus?
- [50:53]
Blake Shull
Round trip across the Atlantic would be about five CONUs. Round trip could be less than that.
- [50:59]
Sean
Okay.
- [51:02]
Blake Shull
But on board the airplane. So years before I started, boom, I would get on commercial airplanes. I'd look around and I think, man, what if this thing was designed by Steve Jobs and Jony, I've just noticed 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 underside of the overhead bin in the window seat on every commercial airplane, you'll notice there's this little brown splotch in every row. Why? Because when people stand up, they bump their head and their hair schmutz gets on the underside of the bin. Look all through these things. They're so thoughtlessly designed. And the airplane's 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. 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.
- [52:32]
Sean
When's that getting revealed?
- [52:33]
Blake Shull
Maybe next year. I don't know. We haven't decided yet.
- [52:36]
Sean
Nice.
- [52:37]
Blake Shull
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.
- [52:47]
Sean
And so how fast are planes flying today? Let's do miles per hour.
- [52:52]
Blake Shull
Yeah, let's see. So I think of these things in terms of percentages of speed of sound, which is 75 to 85% of the speed of sound today on a Boeing or Airbus. If you got a high end private jet, you can go a little bit faster and then overTure will do 1.7 Mach, so twice as fast.
- [53:07]
Sean
What is that ground speed?
- [53:11]
Blake Shull
Around 1200ish. It varies with temperature a little bit, so it's substantially faster.
- [53:18]
Sean
Do you feel that when you're in the jet?
- [53:20]
Blake Shull
No. The one thing you'll notice when you go supersonic is it's slightly smoother and you'll be at a higher altitude, so you're above more of the weather.
- [53:33]
Sean
So no, nothing.
- [53:35]
Blake Shull
It's completely uneventful. On Concorde, 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.
- [53:47]
Sean
No kidding.
- [53:49]
Blake Shull
The day I'm looking forward to, 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. I want to make supersonic flight boring. But at first we'll make it exciting.
- [54:08]
Sean
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, taking off from.
- [54:19]
Blake Shull
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, 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 answer is sit back, relax, you don't have to do anything. It just works. Now, of course, I'd love to redesign airports, but we don't need to. Not for supersonic, we don't need that.
- [54:49]
Sean
But. Well, how is. I mean, how are your competitors handling this? Like Boeing and Airbus.
- [54:57]
Blake Shull
I mean they're.
- [54:58]
Sean
Fly all over the place all the time for work. And I mean the planes are legitimately falling apart. I mean, one of my recent flights, the damn. The overhead luggage bin like fell off in the middle of all the luggage fall on the. It's just, you know, if you fly. You know what I'm talking about?
- [55:17]
Blake Shull
Oh yeah.
- [55:18]
Sean
I mean, 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.
- [55:46]
Blake Shull
I think there's some truth to that.
- [55:47]
Sean
Then you come around with this.
- [55:50]
Blake Shull
Well, let me first paint a sympathetic picture here. Wright Brothers forward to the first jets. Every generation of airplanes was faster than the one that came before it. That was the primary vector of innovation. Then 1973, we outlaw increases in speed. 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. Just iteratively tweak it, right? 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 tube and 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 closed to innovation. And heck, I was one of them.
- [56:52]
Sean
That did not even cross. That's a damn good point.
- [56:55]
Blake Shull
Why is Boeing 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.
- [57:12]
Sean
That's a damn good point. I didn't think about that. So are you getting any pushback from Boeing or Airbus?
- [57:21]
Blake Shull
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 has 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 US maker of airliners. There are only two in the world. There's Boeing and Airbus.
- [58:05]
Sean
That's it.
- [58:07]
Blake Shull
And Boeing is trying to get out of a self destructive tailspin. They're not doing new products, they're trying to competently produce the products they already have. And it's not a good situation.
- [58:22]
Sean
Is this like the days of McDonnell Douglas when Boeing acquired them?
- [58:26]
Blake Shull
Yeah, I think that's part of the story too. There's sort of a, there was a sort of GE mindset that made its way to Bowen through McDonnell 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 you're gonna do next quarter and beat it by a nickel. And if you do that successfully, through whatever machinations, you can make the stock price go up into the right. And it works great until the day it doesn't. The way you do that is by cutting a lot of long term stuff. 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. If you look at the results of their lack of focus on safety, it was the biggest financial disaster they'd ever had that didn't pay off financially. The problem was their financial focus was short range, not long range. 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. 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 dad's.
- [59:59]
Sean
Are you serious?
- [60:00]
Blake Shull
I can't make this up. It 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 who 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 it's a huge problem.
- [60:55]
Sean
Yeah. Where's Airbus?
- [60:57]
Blake Shull
Out of Toulouse, France. They're spread out all over Europe. Airbus is like approximately the European government.
- [61:06]
Sean
Gotcha, Gotcha. Well, Blake, let's take a quick break and then when we come back, we get into some more stuff. What if you could delay your next two mortgage payments. That's right. Imagine putting those two payments in your pocket and finally getting a little breathing room. It's possible if you call American Financing today. If you're feeling stretched by everyday expenses, groceries, gas, bills piling up, you are not alone. Most Americans are putting these expenses on credit cards and there doesn't seem to be a way out. American Financing can show you how to use your home's equity to pay off that debt. You need to call American Financing today to get ahead of the curve. Their salary based mortgage consultants are helping homeowners just like you restructure their loans and and consolidate debt, all without upfront fees. And their customers are saving an average of $800 a month. That's like a $10,000 a year raise. It's fast, it's simple and it could save your budget this summer. Call now at 866-781-8900 that's 866-781-8900 or you can go to americanfinancing.net/srs nmls182334 nmlsconsumeraccess.org it's no secret precious metals like gold and silver are gaining traction. From the billionaires to the central banks who are stockpiling gold to the growing use of silver for artificial intelligence, the demand is rising. But how should you buy precious metals? Where do you start and who should you buy from? Well I was relieved to find a great company I can trust and that company is goldco. They are top rated and keep it simple and transparent. They are an award winning organization with over 7,000 5 star reviews and they've got the best free silver offer out there. So if you're ready to learn how Gold Co can help you, call 855-936-GOLD or visit Sean likes gold.com you'll get a free 2025 gold and silver kit. Plus you'll also learn about how you could qualify for the number one silver offer out there. So give Gold Co a call at 855-936-GOLD or visit Shawn likes gold.com performance may vary. You should always consult your financial and tax professional. Why are elite athletes and high performers using Armor Colostrum? Because Armor Colostrum is nature's first whole food with over 400 bioactive nutrients working at the cellular level to help build lean muscle, accelerate recovery and to fuel performance. All without artificial stimulants or synthetic junk. Armor can help strengthen immunity, help ignite metabolism and so much more. I've been using armor ever since they sent me some to try, I have more energy and faster recovery after long days and workouts. Whether you're running a business, training hard, or just want an edge, armor can help optimize your body for peak output. I've worked out a special offer for my audience. Receive 30% off your first subscription order. Go to armor.com SRS or enter SRS to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's a R M R A.com SRS these statements and products have not been evaluated by the fda. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or condition. These statements and information are not a substitute for or alternative to seeking care from your healthcare providers. All right, Blake, we're back from the break here. And something that. That I wanted to cover earlier, but I missed it, is lack of. 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.
- [65:26]
Blake Shull
Yeah, I didn't walk in with any credentials in aerospace at all. I mean, I had my pilot's 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, or flight out of Mojave, California, to recruit out of Scaled Composites. And I'd fly my little airplane. I could fly myself. And that was 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 Internet guys that want to go start airplane companies. And all the airplane guys were used to hearing pitches from Internet guys that didn't make any sense. In fact, they had a term for it. 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. He looked at it and he said, I didn't think you'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 one actually makes sense. So there's no. My experience has been. There's no substitute for actually knowing what I'm talking about, actually doing the work 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, 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 I bought every aerospace textbook that was 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 through it over the course of about a year. And so I think 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 of 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 want to spend that kind of time. I didn't have that kind of time. So I had to go really focus myself on first principles, and I wanted to understand the fundamentals. It turns out that focus is incredibly powerful. For example, you want to 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 and cargo and payload? And then last is its speed. Mach number. 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 Concorde's numbers were all published. How much better than Concorde 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. Truth be told, I didn't actually have the courage to go double click on supersonic. First I thought, there's no way, there's no way, but 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. When you go model out airline economics, 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. 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.
- [70:46]
Sean
You had mentioned something a little earlier, too, that resonated with me. I think we were talking about the interior of the airplane, and you didn't want to hire the traditional designers of the basically that designed the traditional commercial air transportation. And that just. It registered with me because I'm in entertainment, you know, I found myself in entertainment. Hate entertainment, the industry. 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 roadmap, you know, and everybody follows the exact same roadmap. You got to come out with this type of a product. You got to do this, all these different things. And when I started this, I looked at podcasts 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, like I said, I got involved with entertainment. Very unimpressive industry by my standards. And so when I started scale out the company, which actually was just about six months ago, to find somebody to run it, I looked, I. If entertainment was on your resume, I went right in the trash.
- [72:09]
Blake Shull
Yeah.
- [72:09]
Sean
And. And so I hired my CEO, Eric. He was at the energy sector. And in one of 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 that I think is cool, that I like, that I want to do start new businesses. I don't want this mold.
- [72:33]
Blake Shull
Very wise.
- [72:34]
Sean
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 the typical roadmap in the box entertainment, podcast type thinking. And so when you mentioned that about the interior of the plains, it was like, good job, Sean. You're doing it right.
- [73:07]
Blake Shull
I think. I mean, you could do it the other way and you end up like everybody else.
- [73:10]
Sean
That's.
- [73:11]
Blake Shull
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. So I don't throw out the roadmap. Be focused on facts and be focused on what. 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 you could look at that and say, what an arrogant asshat. But I think there's actually real wisdom in that. 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 be a cog.
- [73:57]
Sean
Did you adopt that from inception?
- [74:01]
Blake Shull
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 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.
- [74:23]
Sean
Wow. Still nobody else is doing this?
- [74:25]
Blake Shull
No. There are a couple people working on hyper. Well, yeah, we'll get into later. China announced it right after we broke the Saudi Arabia.
- [74:31]
Sean
Go figure.
- [74:32]
Blake Shull
Right?
- [74:32]
Sean
Go figure.
- [74:33]
Blake Shull
So we inspired even the Chinese. But 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 are the only private company ever to have built and flown a supersonic jet. And were the. It's only been governments before. You know, this was like rockets before SpaceX. Nobody done it outside of government. Never had there been a civilian supersonic jet made in America. So there's a lot of first in here.
- [75:24]
Sean
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 I was in the SEAL teams contractor for the CIA. 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. You didn't hear about Palantir and just interviewed this guy the other day who's making mini nuclear reactors. We got a guy, Rainmaker cloud seeding. 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?
- [76:42]
Blake Shull
I can tell my story of it and I think there's a really interesting perspective that also looks back from World War II to today and what the arc of that has been. But for me, so I'm 44, 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 so it was like we were in 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 where 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 gotta do something about that. And had I, had I been, I don't know, five years later and starting boom, maybe boom would have been a different company. But fortunately, there are really great people working on defense tech now. And it's become, I think there are at least a couple threads recently that played 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 resurgence 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 gonna go build weapons to defend the country.
- [78:58]
Sean
Yeah, yeah. I mean even, I mean, you have all the new, I mean, Palmer Luckey, Dino Mavrukas with Sironic. I mean. And you know, the other thing that I'm noticing is everybody, all of these next generation innovators are bringing all the manufacturing, including yourself, back to the United States. I mean, pretty sure Andurrell's doing that, Sironics doing that. Every single innovator that I've talked to is manufacturing in the US That I know of. That I know of, as far as I know.
- [79:31]
Blake Shull
Yeah, I think it's really important too.
- [79:33]
Sean
And so how was that happening? Because, shit, it seemed like four years ago nobody would talk about that. It was all going to China.
- [79:42]
Blake Shull
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 the 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'd that happen? And then the guys across the table smile and say, 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, 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 10,000, multiple tens of thousands of dollars per engineer in 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 US 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 tool work to China. And if your competitor ships their tool work to China and you don't ship your tool work 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 die 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 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 in the US all the manufacturing moved to California and in Tennessee we do software? That'll be just fine. Law of comparative 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 is that 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 that that stuff left. And then we've done. So there was 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've made it really difficult to build here. So 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. That shouldn't surprise anybody.
- [83:28]
Sean
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, one way or another.
- [83:39]
Blake Shull
That's right. I mean, there is a way to. So we have found great ways to work with FAA. Like we never had a regulatory delay on XB1 and we made it teamwork. We found a way to work on 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 airliner factory in America. It took longer to get the building permit than it took to build the factory. 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.
- [84:28]
Sean
In order to say that again, it.
- [84:30]
Blake Shull
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.
- [84:42]
Sean
Where does this shit even come from? Is that like a written law?
- [84:48]
Blake Shull
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 pre approval of anything that has federal jurisdiction. Our factory was on an airport, so there was 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 on the day you build the facility is to 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.
- [85:36]
Sean
Wow.
- [85:39]
Blake Shull
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. Mine was years or decades. I think the whole way we do permitting and the whole way we do regulation is broken.
- [86:01]
Sean
Do you see that changing? I mean, this is just. It just makes me wonder how many more innovators are out there and how much farther ahead we would be or it could be if these regulations weren't there. I mean, it's throwing our country behind. It is just about every.
- [86:22]
Blake Shull
I hope that more people talk about it. Because there's also a dynamic where 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 policy people always say, 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 fundamentally mistaken. 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 this 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, Obviously. But we have to take some risk. So who gets to decide, well, if it's related to environment, there's a monopoly called EPA that has that decision. Airplanes, there's a monopoly called FAA that has that decision. If we're talking food or drugs, there's a 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, FAA approved the 737 max. FDA famously approved thalidomide. And so 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 asymmetric bias towards conservatism. And this is not anything about anybody at any of these agencies. There are many great people at these agencies trying to do good work. But fundamentally, the incentives are all tilted. And we've monopolized risk decisions and 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. Imagine we drive to work, the way we build factories or airplanes. Well, we have to get permission every day and show our plan. And okay, on this stretch of road, 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.
- [89:02]
Sean
It's a good point. It's a damn good point.
- [89:06]
Blake Shull
You know, when you.
- [89:08]
Sean
So do you see this. How fast do you see this changing throughout this administration? Because it seems like everybody that I talk to, they seem really positive.
- [89:18]
Blake Shull
Yeah, it's gone much better than I thought it would. Right after the election, I forced myself to sit down. Everyone was spouting opinions, right? And some people are just going to be glorious. Some people say 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. And 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 then 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 band.
- [90:15]
Sean
And if you look at 115 days.
- [90:16]
Blake Shull
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.
- [90:48]
Sean
Nice.
- [90:49]
Blake Shull
That's huge.
- [90:50]
Sean
Nice.
- [90:51]
Blake Shull
Right. And we haven't even started to see that play out. 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.
- [91:19]
Sean
What do you think that looks like by the end of this term?
- [91:25]
Blake Shull
I don't know if I'm smart enough to predict timescales. It's much easier to predict the distant future than 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, 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. He got to plan. And then they hit the ground running. Because four years is going to go by like that.
- [92:25]
Sean
Yeah.
- [92:26]
Blake Shull
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.
- [92:42]
Sean
I would have never thought of that. Do you think we'll start seeing more of that?
- [92:46]
Blake Shull
I don't know. I mean, I think it takes a very special leader to say, I'm gonna run for President, I'm gonna win, and then I'm gonna walk out of the White House voluntarily after four years, but I'll be back.
- [93:03]
Sean
That's a interesting concept.
- [93:05]
Blake Shull
Right. I'd like to see somebody else do it. I would do on purpose.
- [93:10]
Sean
That's something I would have never thought of.
- [93:14]
Blake Shull
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 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'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. By definition, was mission failure. I have to figure out 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.
- [94:20]
Sean
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 got laughed out everywhere. Now he can successfully launch every single day of the week if he wanted to. I mean, how is this working for you? I mean, like I had 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 allotted. And so what do you have to say about that?
- [95:05]
Blake Shull
I mean it's David and Goliath, but Goliath is like asleep. So I think it's a little bit different for SpaceX in that they went into space launch which is commodity market with a big entrenched player and sort of head to head competition with an entrenched player that was very powerful. We made a different decision. We went to go do something that nobody was doing. And at some point will we see a competitive response? Probably. But I think a thing I tell the team every day is 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 I try to get the team to self start actually without a lot of external competitive pressure. And your passion for mission ends up being super important. There's still no guarantee of success. Statistically we're probably something like 90% likely to fail just because it's what happens with most businesses. But there's 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.
- [96:30]
Sean
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?
- [96:38]
Blake Shull
Yeah, I mean from where we are today, our goal is to be in airline service in under five years. Regular in airline service. But if you mean how long does it physically take to make an airplane, that's one area we're putting a lot of energy into making it better. The aerospace supply chain we have in the US it's actually one of the few manufacturing bases that still exists in this country. A lot of consumer goods have left for Asia, textiles, electronics, et cetera. But aerospace has stayed here in part because there's a defense element to it. And we have not let the defense pieces go to China. But what we have done is let them get really, for lack of a better word, stupid. For example, we go 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 a part? 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 in 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.
- [98:52]
Sean
Wow.
- [98:54]
Blake Shull
But the whole supply chain is messed up like that. You find that 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 step and then it goes to California, Then it goes back to South Carolina and then to California. You a second time.
- [99:11]
Sean
Holy shit.
- [99:12]
Blake Shull
And this is. At first I was like, what is going on? Is this just 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, it's easy to just 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 ponging around the country, I could have said, you know, I could have laughed and shrugged it off and said, how stupid. But instead I got curious about it. And what I realized was this is an artifact of how defence procurement works. So post Cold War, in a certain sense, post World War II, we have not had a big urgent need for military stuff. We've wanted to keep alive a defence industrial base. So all the defense primes 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 ponging their way around the country and it's incredibly inefficient. So we should blow all that up, metaphorically and fix it.
- [101:09]
Sean
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- [103:43]
Blake Shull
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. We just, let's just go build efficient stuff. And so we are ultimately. So we're building a new R and D center in Denver. And when we're, when we're completely done with that, every kind of part on the airplane will be able to be made in one roof.
- [104:05]
Sean
Wow.
- [104:06]
Blake Shull
And for our engines, it will ultimately be a facility that's like raw materials on one side of the building and jet engines out the other side. And you can massively improve time and massively improve 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.
- [104:33]
Sean
Where are your manufacturing facilities?
- [104:35]
Blake Shull
So we've got, our headquarters are in Denver, so engineering is there and our sort of R and D scale manufacturing is in Denver. We've got a engine test site near Denver International. We're going to be able to run all these engines. We like controlling our own manufacturing, our own engine 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 108,000 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.
- [105:14]
Sean
One of the 130 jets do.
- [105:18]
Blake Shull
As soon as we can deliver them. If we had them in a warehouse today, the airlines would be asking for more after that. It's as soon as we can get them done. My goal is to get production ramping starting five years from now when we prove the airplane is ready and then we'll scale it as quickly as we can to be at full rate, hopefully cranking 100 jets well within a decade from now. 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.
- [105:51]
Sean
Do you see this taking over all commercial travel in the future?
- [105:56]
Blake Shull
Anything that's a sufficiently long distance? I think so. I think I'm very bullish about the next ten years of flight. I think over the. For shorter range flights, there's a lot of work happening for vertical takeoff and landing companies like Joby and Archer. I think there was going to be also some good work in hybrid electric mid range aircraft. Think things like LA, San Francisco, LA, San Francisco. You're not going to fly that supersonic. But what you might do is have a neighborhood vertiport where you can get on an airplane that can take off and fly you right to the right neighborhood. You go into in LA and you save all the ground time and 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 ultimately for everybody.
- [106:54]
Sean
How long does it take to get up to supersonic speed?
- [106:58]
Blake Shull
15, 20 minutes on a typical flight.
- [107:01]
Sean
How much to slow it down?
- [107:03]
Blake Shull
Oh, similar challenges or not really. We did look at 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.
- [107:24]
Sean
Man, I can't wait to be on one of these.
- [107:26]
Blake Shull
Oh, it's going to be so much fun.
- [107:28]
Sean
Have you been on one yet?
- [107:30]
Blake Shull
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 T38 with our chief test pilot. We took off out of Mojave and he gets it off 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 was like, Blake, you gotta increase your climb rate. So you're gonna go supersonic before you're in the test space if you don't kind of pull back a little bit. So we did and then turned around and went I think Mach 1.18 down the corridor.
- [108:10]
Sean
Nice.
- [108:11]
Blake Shull
That was fun. I got a picture of the Mach meter to prove it. And that was probably one of the most exciting flights of my life. By the way. You can't tell when you're going supersonic. Wouldn't have noticed it. Very smooth. But then we did. Then we did two barrel rolls, three aileron rolls, a couple loops. Damn, those were noticeable.
- [108:35]
Sean
You think you'll fly your jet?
- [108:37]
Blake Shull
Oh, definitely. Yeah. One of my personal goals is to be qualified to fly it by the time it's ready to fly.
- [108:43]
Sean
Wow.
- [108:45]
Blake Shull
It's gonna require some work, but I'm up for it.
- [108:47]
Sean
How about your ethos in your company and who you're looking to hire and how you've built your team out?
- [108:54]
Blake Shull
Yeah. We've been through a few iterations on how we do the team, and I've come to the conclusion that 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? Initially, we oscillated between those two. The. The early team was the people that I could convince to join a supersonic jet company headquartered in my basement. So definitionally, 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 first timer mistakes. 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 then we started looking. 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 is, 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, the people, 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 XB1 with a team of great engineers that had never done a landing gear before. They were bold enough and passionate enough that they were willing to take that on. It turned out that we made a bunch of mistakes. 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 F16. And so we said, okay, well, we gotta go find some F16 landing gear engineers. I don't care if we have to pull them out of retirement, we gotta 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 on the phone with F16 landing gear engineers.
- [111:32]
Sean
Wow.
- [111:32]
Blake Shull
And they said, well, did you put double pistons in your shock absorber or did you just put one? And we slapped our foreheads and said, double pistons. I don't know how long it taken 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 who are driven, running at something, but they should call somebody experience 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.
- [112:17]
Sean
Nice. How many employees do you have now?
- [112:21]
Blake Shull
115.
- [112:22]
Sean
115 employees.
- [112:24]
Blake Shull
We did XB1 with 50 people.
- [112:27]
Sean
50 people?
- [112:29]
Blake Shull
Yeah. Yeah. SpaceX, when they went into orbit, were 500, and we broke the sound barrier with 50. I am a big believer in small teams.
- [112:42]
Sean
How do you keep it so small?
- [112:45]
Blake Shull
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 was very painful. But we get more done now with half the people than we got with a team twice as big. And so 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 do 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.
- [113:22]
Sean
How's AI helped your business?
- [113:25]
Blake Shull
Oh, software and AI are going to be a huge part of the success story. 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. 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. So. 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. 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 compounded 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. We actually put an engineer in charge of recruiting.
- [115:54]
Sean
Really.
- [115:57]
Blake Shull
It was this guy that we hired. He'd been a SpaceX manufacturing engineer, had been something like a six year boom vet, had done a whole bunch of work on XB1. 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 gonna ask you to do something different. And you're gonna think I'm crazy. I'm gonna ask you to run hr. And he's like, you're right. I didn't think that was the conversation we were gonna have. And we talked about it and I was like, look, I want an engineering mindset applied to thinking analytically about 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 other job you want. But he's like three months into it now and he's loving it and it's going so well.
- [117:00]
Sean
Good, good. Let's talk about China.
- [117:03]
Blake Shull
China.
- [117:04]
Sean
So you had 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?
- [117:17]
Blake Shull
The good news is we're ahead. And if we stay out of our own way, we're going to stay ahead.
- [117:21]
Sean
Yeah. This is the first time I've heard we're ahead. This is great news.
- [117:26]
Blake Shull
Airplanes are one of the few areas where we're still ahead in the U.S. but we gotta 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 787 clone. And earlier this year they announced that 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 gotta 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'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're dead serious about it. But we're ahead.
- [118:38]
Sean
How do you know you're ahead?
- [118:40]
Blake Shull
We've actually built and flown an airplane and they've got a cartoon rendering.
- [118:44]
Sean
You don't think they're just. That's a disguise.
- [118:47]
Blake Shull
Um, we haven't seen an airplane fly yet.
- [118:53]
Sean
Okay.
- [118:53]
Blake Shull
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 on our laurels. I think absent, I think absent the action to repeal the supersonic ban in the US aviation was going to go to China just like everything else has. This is like watching a slow motion plane crash. Boeing hasn't built a new airplane in 20 years. They can't, you know, some days 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.
- [119:38]
Sean
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?
- [119:51]
Blake Shull
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, the twin aisles, let's say they got 2, 300 seats on them. About 20% of the seats at the front of the airplane are business and 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 fares. 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. So in order to build the supersonic future, you have to be willing to disrupt the subsonic widebody. And that's not something that big companies are generally willing to do. It's a very.
- [121:13]
Sean
Did you say 20%? 80% of the profit is in the first 20 seats.
- [121:20]
Blake Shull
It's roughly 80% in the front 20% of seats. Rough numbers. This is why if you fly business class, you've got this outstanding wine list 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. It'll vary route to route, 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 while you get all the status and if you're global services, you get on first. 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 a founder led company in most cases. Like Steve Jobs was willing to destroy the ipod business in order to create the iPhone business.
- [122:28]
Sean
I mean, it just seems like they would have 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 whatever, then that's where I'm going.
- [122:41]
Blake Shull
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. Why did Boeing do the 737 Max? Because Airbus did the A320neo, 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 wanting 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 motivation? Well, Boeing's down and out, I should steal market share. So Airbus is trying to ramp production of their airplanes faster than Boeing can get people to trust them again. That's that game. And nobody's incentivized to go build a supersonic jet. If you're a public market investor in Boeing or Airbus, and 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 board 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 how to put the screws in the ones you make now. So neither of them is really in a position to do has to come From a new entrant.
- [124:16]
Sean
Do you think they'll carbon copy or.
- [124:19]
Blake Shull
They'll probably try to buy us first and then they'll try to compete. I mean, I welcome that. I'm shocked a decade into this that we don't have competition. At some point that will change.
- [124:34]
Sean
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.
- [124:40]
Blake Shull
It's hard for me to wrap my head around it, too. But I think it comes down to what people call the innovator's dilemma in business, that the big guys don't want to disrupt themselves. And there are 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. Ten years ago, 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. Theoretically, it's hard. And for whatever reason, we were just crazy enough to go do it anyway, 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. 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, we did just get supersonic flight legalized, so 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 be disappointed if nobody else does that.
- [126:10]
Sean
You'll get into private jets.
- [126:11]
Blake Shull
If nobody else does it. We will, because it should exist. But my hope is somebody else gets there before we do.
- [126:17]
Sean
But you got a lot of guys waiting for that to happen.
- [126:22]
Blake Shull
Yeah, well, the president opened the doors to that by legalizing superatonic flight over land. That market is wide open. I don't know anybody with a Gulf stream that wouldn't want to upgrade. Somebody should do that if they wanted to. We'd sell them engines.
- [126:42]
Sean
And then, I mean, but even it just. I still can't 100% wrap my head around it. Because if whatever you said, 80% of the revenue is in the first 20% of the seats. I mean, those seats are going there. Those customers are going to go to you and so what do those companies look like when this is online and this is becoming mass produced?
- [127:11]
Blake Shull
I think it ends up being a gradual transition.
- [127:17]
Sean
Even with 130 jets, you're going to book out. Whoever buys those is going to book out like that.
- [127:23]
Blake Shull
Absolutely. I think 130 is not nearly enough. If people who fly first year 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.
- [127:57]
Sean
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.
- [128:09]
Blake Shull
Yeah. I think there can be. I think there will 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 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'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.
- [129:08]
Sean
I don't think of that either.
- [129:09]
Blake Shull
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 Overture, when we have another Overture, if we look at Overture relative to Concorde 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 invention. It's going to require a second generation powertrain. And boy, I get my juices flowing about that because 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.
- [130:01]
Sean
Okay.
- [130:01]
Blake Shull
This is made out of the same stuff as a 787. It's like we took a 787, we shrank it down, 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 powertrain that will allow us to go much faster, will also be much quieter.
- [130:36]
Sean
Well, let me ask you this. I'm just curious. Why would you want to go to economy if 80% of the profits in the first 20% of the seating? Why would you want to open yourself up to economy as a business?
- [130:51]
Blake Shull
I think it just should exist. And 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 we didn't have the money to go drop on business class. We went to Hong Kong maybe two or three times in the back of the bus. So Supersonic would not have in the cards for us. I want every family, every kid in that situation to be able to benefit from this. I want to get there.
- [131:30]
Sean
Wow, that's admirable.
- [131:32]
Blake Shull
Well, thank you. I think also you can build a great business. 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 many times more expensive than economy. There's a little bit of premium economy emerging in the middle, but mostly the middle is empty. I think their market dynamics. People in the airline industry keep talking about, oh, people won't pay for a better experience. 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. Remember when the first iPhone came out, People laughed. They're like a $400 phone, unsubsidized. No one's going to buy that. Well, no, fast Forward now. It's $1,500 for an iPhone, and everybody does it and it's worth it. And 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.
- [132:40]
Sean
It's horrific.
- [132:41]
Blake Shull
It's terrible.
- [132:43]
Sean
It's horrific. And I'm with you. I mean, if you line up a United, American, Southwest, emirates, Qatar Airways, 110% of going with Emirates or Qatar Airways, right?
- [132:59]
Blake Shull
So it's a night and day experience.
- [133:00]
Sean
Because it's a better experience.
- [133:02]
Blake Shull
It's a better experience. But 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 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. There wasn't a lot of money in 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. It's not been done in air travel, and some reason people think it's impossible. But if you go look at the comparison to, say, other parts of travel like hotels, there's a zillion different strata of Hotels. Motel 6 is not the mass market leader. 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.
- [134:39]
Sean
What are some of the lessons you've learned from fighting some of the setbacks that you face?
- [134:46]
Blake Shull
Most importantly, don't give up. And I remember the day, you know, the day that we flew XB1 Supersonic. I stood with the team on the tarmac outside the airplane and I said, guys, we're here today because a hell of a lot of not giving 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, 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 when we lost our way for a little while and we were trying to outsource an engine and it ultimately we were working with Rolls Royce and it became clear 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 paper, we were still working with Rolls Royce. 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. United is ordering, Americans are 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 trashing the press. I was personally called a fraud. We were unfundable. And I remember thinking, if we don't find our way out of this, we're toast. And I remember listening to a talk that Brian Chesky, the 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 needed 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. That'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 and the team at Boom believed that this should exist and it was worth not giving up on. So for a while, XB1, we called it the Mojave Honey Badger. It was just like, we're not going to. Stuff happens, we keep going. Can't stop us.
- [138:18]
Sean
I love that. I love that. 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.
- [138:34]
Blake Shull
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. 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 custom. Sorry. 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 the one that we design and build ourselves. The worst part is one where we design and we outsource engineering and manufacturing. On XB1, 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 up and we had a supplier build something custom instead. That was a disaster. We had to go rescue them. 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 the one case where it worked well with the drag chute. The drag chute is like the parachute that goes in the back of the airplane. It's like the E brake. 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 spec it and your spec doesn't change, you can give a package to a supplier, they can give you a firm fixed price bid, they can commit to it and get it done. But anything that's in the, anything that needs to evolve, anything that 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 vertical integration is good, outsourcing is bad. It's more complicated than that. It is anything where innovation is going to 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. Think even of how the contracting works. There's really only two contract models that have been invented so far. There's firm fixed price, meaning I want to go buy this, you tell me what it's going to cost and that's the firm bid. And then by the way, or there's time and materials, meaning 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. Now you're in this kind of time and materials world, but if you're in a time and 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 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.
- [141:58]
Sean
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 doing this. So what does that look like in the future? I mean the supply chain is everything. Is every company going to start going in house?
- [142:23]
Blake Shull
Well, I think we have to re industrialize America. If America was already a thriving manufacturing country the way we were before World War II, a lot of the answers would be different. But instead what we are is we are very calcified, very inefficient on most of that in the US 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 die design by and large went to Asia, you go to China, you throw a baseball, you're going to hit a tool guy. In the US they're few and far between. Okay, so we could try to rebuild tooling engineering in the US and we probably need to do a little bit of that. But most of what we need to do is figure out 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 9 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, 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 we wouldn't try that might not work. The pace of iteration speeds way up. The behavior of the engineers completely changes. So if we can go away from a very tool heavy manufacturing approach to a tool light manufacturing approach, it ricochets back into how we design and 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 and 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.
- [145:38]
Sean
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?
- [145:51]
Blake Shull
Work on something that you'd be proud to fail at. I think of when I took my. 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, 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? And 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. Can't fake it at that age. And so it's my wish for every entrepreneur and really everybody. For me, if you went back to me when I was like five or seven years old and you 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. 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. For me, that's supersonic jets. But I think we've all got our version of that. Go do the thing your 5 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.
- [147:38]
Sean
Man, I love that advice. Thank you. And man, what a moment with your 10 year old.
- [147:44]
Blake Shull
She's pretty cool. Wow.
- [147:46]
Sean
Well, Blake, thank you for coming. I wish you the best of luck. And selfishly, I cannot wait to get on one of those jets. So you and me both, please hurry up.
- [148:00]
Blake Shull
All right, I'm on it.
- [148:00]
Sean
Thank you so much.
- [148:01]
Blake Shull
All right. Thank you, Sean. Foreign. I am Michael Rosenbaum. I am Tom Welling. Welcome to Talk Bill. Where it's fun to talk about Smallville. We're going to be talking to sometimes guest stars.
- [148:25]
Sean
Are you liking the direction Lois is going in?
- [148:27]
Blake Shull
Yeah, because I'm getting more screen time. It's good. But mostly it's just me and Tom remembering. I think we all feel like there was a scene missing here. You got me, Tom.
- [148:33]
Sean
Let's revisit it.
- [148:34]
Blake Shull
Let's look at it, See what we remember.
- [148:36]
Sean
See what we remember.
- [148:37]
Blake Shull
I had never been around anything like that before.
- [148:40]
Sean
I mean, it was so fun. Talk ville.
- [148:42]
Blake Shull
Talk ville. I just had a flashback.
- [148:44]
Sean
Follow and listen on your favorite platform.
- [148:45]
Blake Shull
Let'S get into it.