← The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
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- [00:04]
A
Hey, guys. Mike Rowe here. This is the way I heard it. And today we are making supersonic travel real. Or at least talking to the guy who has dedicated a big chunk of his life to making that possible. I like the way it sounds, Chuck. I like the idea of flying from New York to San Francisco. I like the idea of leaving at 9 in the morning and getting there at 9:30 local time. I like that a lot.
- [00:31]
B
Yeah, that would be great. Three and a half hours. That would be awesome.
- [00:35]
A
Blake, what do we just said? It's shol. Even though he spells it like school.
- [00:40]
B
No, no, it's 102 Ls, S, C, H, O, L, L, Shoal.
- [00:45]
A
Well, you know what? If we got it wrong? It serves him right. It's got a funny name, but, man, what a big brain and what a nice guy.
- [00:51]
B
Super.
- [00:51]
A
He's on such a mission. It's such a big swing. And he's got so many reasons to feel optimistic because he really just. He asked himself a really simple question. This guy did back in. Whatever it was 14 years ago. It just occurs to him that, you know, planes haven't really gone any faster.
- [01:11]
B
No.
- [01:12]
A
Than they got in, what, I guess, 2003 or so. We just. It's like we just said, okay, that's fast enough.
- [01:19]
B
Yeah.
- [01:20]
A
And, you know, never mind the Concorde, those sonic booms were annoying. The. They were outlawed. We just came to accept the fact that this was as good as it gets.
- [01:29]
B
Right. And what he has done that's so amazing, I think, or at least he's figured it out, is that he's able to go supersonic without the supersonic boom.
- [01:39]
C
Yeah.
- [01:40]
A
And so because of that, he's worked around. Maybe it's a loophole. I think the President signed an executive order back in June that's basically allowed the pursuit of supersonic international and domestic travel to happen again. He's formed a company. The company is called Boom. It is well funded by a number of very enthusiastic billionaires. And this guy knows what he's doing. He's already built one prototype, I think the XB one, and now he's working on something called the Overture.
- [02:12]
B
Yeah. Already got 130 orders with United, American, and Japan, I believe, Japan Airlines.
- [02:19]
A
It's just beautiful. He brought me a model, which I'll show you over on YouTube. If you watch the episode there, we have the kind of conversation you hope you're gonna have with a capitalist who's an entrepreneur, who is really paying close attention not just to technology, but to the unintended consequences of doing and not doing a thing. And the way that relates to everything from data centers to AI to the way we're thinking about our species in the future. You know, he's just got his head screwed on right.
- [02:48]
B
And the best thing about him to me, besides his big brain and all, is that he's super optimistic. Yeah, really optimistic. Sees the future as very bright and he wants to make it better.
- [02:59]
A
And final point, as you'll learn, he didn't go to mit. He didn't study engineering. He didn't study aerospace. This guy comes out of the software world, worked for Amazon and Groupon, and just decided that he wanted to go another way. He got real smart, real fast, and now everybody's chasing him in the race to go supersonic. Me, I'm betting on boom. And I bet you will, too. Blake Shoal right after this.
- [03:31]
D
Dumb.
- [03:32]
A
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- [04:59]
D
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- [05:13]
A
Sure appreciate you flying in. Happy to be here from Denver.
- [05:17]
C
Yes.
- [05:18]
A
How long did it take you?
- [05:19]
C
Only a couple hours, which is not bad if every flight was a couple hours. I think we'd be winning.
- [05:24]
A
No kidding. I was telling you just before we were rolling, I was in Denver a couple weeks ago. Early in May, it snowed. And I was struck, too, because I flew to Denver, which felt civilized, and then I flew to D.C. and did my thing there, and then I flew back to Dallas and did a thing, which felt civilized, and then I made it home to San Francisco, where two runways are under construction and the faa, for whatever reason, just forbade parallel landings. So the delays here are constant. That didn't feel civilized, but in the end, as trips go, I didn't have much to bitch about on that one, really. You know, but that's the exception.
- [06:02]
C
It is, yeah. No, I mean, I think we're living in a dark age as a flight, and nobody knows, like.
- [06:08]
A
Yeah. So, like, I don't want to just jump in quite this fast. I want to thank you again for coming and remind the listeners that my introduction to you was. Was really random. I was on a plane, ironically a private one, trying to get to Alex Epstein's conference, and you were speaking, and I was. I mean, what a miracle of technology, right? We're. We're going pretty fast, high in the air, and I'm watching you. And then we land, and I get there just in time to hear the crowd go wild. After you, after you finished up. What did you tell those assembled?
- [06:47]
C
In a nutshell, long story short, it's a really exciting time in flight. We've had half a century of the same. Are actually just getting worse. Today's flights actually are scheduled for longer than they were in the 1950s because we've got more congestion and we haven't done anything to make the actual flying faster. But that's about to change.
- [07:06]
A
It seems like for the longest time, everything was rooted in speed. How much fat Progress, Progress. Like, that's how we measured progress.
- [07:15]
C
It's literally the purpose of an airplane is to do something faster than you could otherwise do it. Yeah, right. And then we lost our way in the late 1960s. And there are a lot of layers to this onion. We can peel them all back, but at one level, we literally banned faster in this country. 14 CFR 91.817. My least favorite number says, thou shalt not exceed the speed of sound. And if you look at the Wright brothers, all the way forward to the jetliners, the one thing that was true of every new airplane, it was faster than the one that came before it. And then we banned going any faster. Theoretically, this was about sonic boom, but we didn't ban sonic Boom. We banned speed. And that left, I think, just kind of a 50, 60 year disaster. Because if you can't actually build a faster airplane, all you can do is polish the one you've got. So if you look at Boeing's latest airliner and you squint, it looks just like their one from the 1950s. And of course, Boeing is kind of falling apart as a company. And I think part of the story is if you're an innovator, but innovation is banned, you don't even want to work there.
- [08:24]
A
So we just, what, we ran out of Runway, we lost. I mean, was it bureaucracy, was it compliance? Was it over regulation? Or was it something more, I don't know, human? Was it ambition?
- [08:39]
C
Yeah. So I have a provocative view on this, which I actually think is JFK's fault, proximally least. So in the same speech that he committed America to the space race, he also committed America to the supersonic race. And that's less remembered, but it was very much a part of the 60s. And just as there was Apollo in the US and the Soviet space program, there was also a supersonic program in the Soviet Union. There was one in Europe, a joint venture between France and Britain, governments that gave rise to Concord.
- [09:10]
A
Was it a race?
- [09:11]
C
Yes. Yeah, it was absolutely a race.
- [09:12]
A
People were in a supersonic race.
- [09:13]
C
People were in a supersonic race, yeah. So there were three government led projects, two in the west, one in Europe, one in the US and one in the Soviet Union. And the Soviets flew an airplane, the Europeans flew an airplane, the Americans canceled theirs. But if you look forward, imagine it's 1969. So 1969 we landed on the moon and we also Europe flew Concorde, a supersonic airliner for the first time. And I think if you had stopped on the street and found the most pessimistic person in 1969 and said, what is space travel going to be like in 2026? What is air travel going to be like in 2026? I don't think you could have found a single soul that would have told you we can't fly faster than the speed of the sound and we can't go back to the moon.
- [09:55]
A
Right.
- [09:56]
C
And yet that's what actually happened. So why? Why? And I think it's because we raced forward technologically in the wrong way. So Concord and Apollo, I think, are brethren. Both of them were government led projects to show that Western technology beats Soviet technology. And what were they? They were centrally planned, meaning the specs set by the government, the money handout top down, right. Ironically, we wanted to beat the communists and we adopted communism. Central planning, it doesn't work any better for Americans than it does for the Russians. So we did some very impressive, I think you can think of it as tech demos. Apollo, certainly impressive. We did some very difficult things. We did some inspiring things. Concorde, incredible airplane, but didn't make any economic sense.
- [10:43]
A
No market.
- [10:44]
C
No market. So then what happens is Concorde's not actually come to passenger service yet. We pull the plug on the American competitor. Boeing was building it under contract with the FAA. It was called the 2707. It was supposed to go Mach 3. Three times the speed of sound.
- [10:59]
A
How fast is that?
- [11:01]
C
You could fly across the country in hour and a half, two hours, something like that.
- [11:06]
A
It's a thousand miles an hour.
- [11:08]
C
Yeah, it's super, super fast. We didn't have the technology back then to make that economically viable. So Congress pulls the plug on it. Concorde's still coming. It's not obvious that Concorde is economically dead on arrival because of how it's been, in my view, done wrong. And so now American aerospace is threatened by Europeans and the Soviets. So what do we do? We banned supersonic. That happened in 1973. We didn't say let's ban sonic booms, we said let's ban speed.
- [11:36]
A
Are sonic booms always the result of sonic's speed? Do they always follow?
- [11:44]
C
No, I mean, in fact, we showed last year you can fly supersonic with no audible boom. None. But I think the best analogy is to the wake of a boat. Like if you've got a big boat nearby, you're going to get hit by a big wake. If you've got a smaller boat or a more distant boat, when the wake hits you, it's smaller, it's less bothersome. And so airplanes are the same way. Like, you know, SR71 flew supersonic over the US all the time. And there are basically zero stories about that being a problem because it flew really high.
- [12:12]
A
How high?
- [12:13]
C
80,000ft.
- [12:15]
A
What is that? That's the what sphere.
- [12:19]
C
It's upwards of the stratosphere. And so I've heard a bunch of sonic booms. And if you get a low level one from an airplane that's right there, it can be startling. But if you're flying at the supersonic, at the altitude an airliner would fly at, this is not some cataclysmic terrible event.
- [12:36]
A
I mean, the parallels to automotive are interesting. You know, like a horn, a car alarm, the sound of a busy freeway. These are all you know, we sign off on that because, you know, it's part of the bargain.
- [12:51]
C
That's right. I mean, every single thing in our world has a pro and a con. Right? And if we say we can't have any cons, we don't get any pros. This is true of every new technology. There's something that's great about it, and it's got. Always got some kind of a downside, but if we don't allow any downside, then we can't have any progress.
- [13:09]
A
Well, that's called risk.
- [13:11]
C
Right, it's called risk. And also with supersonic in particular, it's absurd because we actually can fly supersonic with absolutely no boom. So actually, the con's not even there. And the good news is that we actually. We had a huge breakthrough last year. It was 115 days from us breaking the sound barrier, showing we could do it without a sonic boom, to the President signing an executive order that repeals Part 14, CFR 91.817.
- [13:37]
A
This is signed, done.
- [13:38]
C
It was signed June 6th of last year, and the FAA is working on finalizing it. And I'm told that's going to be done pretty darn soon. And then the speed limit is no more. The other thing that I think, Mike, is really interesting is if you look back to the history of how that speed limit got put in place, ostensibly it was about sonic boom was bad. I think the real motivation was protect Boeing from European competition. And so what ends up happening is the ban on supersonic flight was one of the first victories of the environmental movement in this country. And if you fast forward to today, not only did the President sign that executive order, but there's a bill that does the same thing that passed the House unanimously. Right. I think it's super interesting that we went from, like, sonic boom to this boogeyman. You can't have supersonic flight. Now all of a sudden, it's actually a bipartisan thing that we should allow supersonic flight again, so long as there's
- [14:34]
A
no boom, as we say in Baltimore, Boom Boom hun. Boom hun. Yeah. Why isn't your logo the word boom, like, with the circle around it and a line through it?
- [14:47]
C
The joke was that we should have renamed the company Shh. Supersonic. Or maybe just delete boom and just call it supersonic. A story we could go into if it's interesting, but we actually solved boom without intending to do it. It was kind of an accident.
- [15:00]
A
How in the world.
- [15:01]
C
Yeah. So the physics of how this work is pretty neat. Basically, the boom makes a U turn in the sky and never touches the ground. And that's due to, you know, think about dropping a straw in your glass of water and it looks broken.
- [15:15]
A
Right.
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C
Because the light bends when it goes through the water.
- [15:17]
A
Yeah, refraction.
- [15:18]
C
Refraction, that's right. So sound waves refract the same way when they go through the atmosphere. And so you got. If you got a sonic boom coming off an airplane, it actually curls upward as it comes off the airplane. And so if you fly high enough.
- [15:31]
A
Sorry, when you say it comes off the airplane. Yeah, like, walk me Right to the point of origin of the sound.
- [15:40]
C
Yeah. Okay, so let's have fun with this. So the best question nobody ever asked me is, what in the world does the speed of sound have to do with an airplane?
- [15:46]
A
What in the world does the speed of sound have to do with an airplane?
- [15:49]
C
There you go. Brilliant question.
- [15:50]
A
Thank you.
- [15:50]
C
So the speed of sound is the speed at which, you know, pressure waves move in air. And as an airplane moves about, it's all about, you know, how pressure waves move around the airplane. So let me break this down a little bit. So if you're moving, imagine you're running along and there's a group of people crowd in front of you. You're running at that crowd like a crazy person. And they look over, they see Mike's running at me. What am I? I try to get out of the way, right? And like, mostly, like, the crowd parts, and you kind of run through and they look at you weird, right? That's subsonic. Because when you're flying less than the speed of sound, there is a pressure wave in front of the airplane that is basically saying, hey, air, I'm coming. Start getting out of the way. And now, the moment you're supersonic, what that means is the airplane is outrunning that pressure wave. So what that means is imagine you're running at that crowd of people. They can't see you coming, and you just crash into them headlong, and they just start falling over like dominoes, right? And so that's what happens in air. When the airplane is going faster than the pressure wave. It squishes the air as it hits it compresses it. That compressed air is what we hear on the ground as a sonic boom. That little band of compressed air, which is sort of this compressed air pressure wave comes off the airplane, and it turns. It refracts in the air and it turns upwards. And that's because there is a. The speed of sound varies with temperature. It's Cold up high, it's warm down low. And that's what causes this refraction. But so if you fly high enough and you control your speed, the boom basically makes a big U turn in the sky. It never hits the ground.
- [17:24]
A
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- [18:43]
D
american Giant, American made. American Giant, American made.
- [18:52]
A
But in terms of like, maybe I'm thinking of this wrong, but as I imagine the surface of a plane, the nose, the wings, so forth, is it like a match hitting a flint where like, there you have the spark and then you have the light and then you have the heat. Like, what part of the plane does the sound?
- [19:14]
C
Yeah, so the.
- [19:16]
A
So think about like, it's not the engine.
- [19:18]
C
No, it's the whole airplane. The whole, the whole airplane.
- [19:21]
A
It's like a tuning fork kinda.
- [19:23]
C
If you actually hear a sonic boom, it tends to sound like a bang bang, like a double bang. Why? Because the front half of the airplane is basically smashing into air that didn't see it coming. It compresses. And the entire front half of the airplane is compressing. So the more like, you know, blunt bodies you have run into air, the kind of, the more compression effect you get. And then the back half of the airplane has to undo it and the air kind of expands to fill what would be the gap behind the airplane. So that leads to. There's kind of a. If you look at this on a graph, you'll see a spike in pressure and then you see a drop in pressure and then you're seeing a return to normal. And so that gets heard as like a double bang. People call it an in wave. It's kind of in shaped.
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A
Why doesn't it persist?
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C
It's like the wake of a boat. Like, you know, a boat goes by, you feel the wake at you once
- [20:09]
A
and then it goes past you, and
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C
then it goes past you and it moves on elsewhere.
- [20:12]
A
But there's another one coming though, right? Or if. I guess maybe if you're keeping up with it at a distance, like, why don't you. Why is it boom, boom, boom, like constant?
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C
You know, if you got a whole bunch of airplanes, you get that, like, one boat only makes one wake.
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A
Okay. Oh. Oh, good. Now I get it.
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C
Yeah.
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A
You're smart.
- [20:34]
C
People talk about these things in complicated ways. But in my view, there's only two things in the world. Things that are simple and things I don't actually understand.
- [20:41]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, tempted to pivot right now and ask you how in the world a guy goes from Amazon and Groupon and software and product thinking and all that stuff into aerospace. But let me. I'll get to that. I want to circle back to when you were talking about the aerospace industry and Apollo as being both the epitome of. Of aspirational success and the beginning of what sounds like a giant disappointment. Right. It reminds me of most PR campaigns or like most PR events, they ramp up because somebody like Kennedy says, okay, here's the plan. Not because it's easy thing. It's the hard right. He gets everybody fired up and you have an objective, maybe a date certain, and you have a plan and you march toward it and you execute it and then you got it. And now what? Like, there's no plan after it. And in the. My theory is like in the Power hates a vacuum. We're uncertain of what to do. We made it to the moon. Now what?
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C
Yeah.
- [21:59]
A
And there's no clear idea for it. And so what fills that vacuum is a bunch of people going, hey, slow it down there, sparky. Or you know, why are we doing this?
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C
Yeah, I think that's part of it. But if you go back and read what was written at the time, there actually was a vision beyond it. There was a, hey, we're going to go build a colony on the moon, and then we're going to go to Mars in 1969. Everyone thought for sure there'd be a man on Mars by 1980. Yeah, right. And it didn't happen. So it wasn't exactly a lack of vision. We went to the moon in a way that cost 4% of the federal budget. Right. You just can't afford to keep doing that. In behind that is a supply chain that's now cost insensitive. Think about fundamentals of building anything you got cost, quality and schedule. Pick two. Right, right, right. Kennedy gave us the goal and he gave us the deadline and then we just fed all the money into the machine. And so now it's created this industrial base that's cost insensitive. Right. And it's created this bureaucracy called NASA that wants to preserve its own existence. And this is the origin of the term self licking ice cream cone. The organization whose purpose is to continue the existence of the organization. Right. We keep doing these things, but we can't keep going back to the moon because we never did it economically.
- [23:12]
A
Are you pissing people off right now?
- [23:14]
C
Oh, I hope so.
- [23:16]
A
Okay. I mean, wow, let's go there then. What is it precisely you're trying to disrupt? Is it NASA? Is it aeronautics as we understand it?
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C
I think what we need to do if we want to make progress is we got to get back to some capitalism, which means let's build things that make some economic sense. If you go build as a private company, if you go design something like Concorde, meaning here's a 100 seat airplane with a $20,000 ticket for a seat that looks like it came out of the back of a Southwest jet. And it's the 1970s and not that many people travel internationally. You go out of business, in fact, you never even get to that point when nobody will give you the money for such a dumb idea.
- [23:55]
A
That was France.
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C
France and Britain. Right. And so the way this works in a free market is your plan's got to at least make some sense in order to get any funding. And Adam Smith's invisible hand keeps you from doing things that are too stupid. If you do something that proves to be stupid, well, the investors give the next set of money to somebody else. So we're able to do this because we figured a way to do supersonic flight in a way that actually makes some sense economically. And the fundamentalists. Let's get the cost down to the point where a lot more people can afford to go on it. Let's make the seats nice so that people want to fly on it. And let's size the airplane in such a way that the airlines can fill the seats and make some money. And let's solve sonic boom so you can fly in more places. This is not complicated. And if you go do this because you're trying to make the Russians look bad, you lose track of all that. Mm.
- [24:49]
A
So then what is the Prime Directive at boom like, as you really think about the impact of your success,
- [25:00]
C
how
- [25:01]
A
should people be processing this?
- [25:03]
C
Let's imagine what this is like, a few iterations out. And this is. I'm gonna give an extreme example. Cause I just think it helps see it clearly. What if you could get anywhere in the world in four hours for $100? Like, where would you vacation? Who would you do business with? Who will your kids friends be? Who would you fall in love with?
- [25:22]
A
Where would you have breakfast?
- [25:24]
C
Right. Yeah. No, it's. Exactly. And I don't know that we'll ever do exactly that because I think you can make $100. Flight's not gonna be very nice. But if you think about the way you live your life when time and cost are not a barrier to bopping around the planet, that's the future that I think it's our job to create. Just keep driving speed up and driving costs down such that ordinary people can travel around the planet without having to plan it, without having it to be a big cost in time or money.
- [25:57]
A
Star Trek fan.
- [25:59]
C
Absolutely.
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A
Don't you think, like, at the guts of. What Roddenberry really did was shrink the world and the universe? Like, the idea of lightspeed, the idea of the transporter, like, all the stuff that was so insanely for me, cool about that all had that property. It shrunk space and time.
- [26:27]
C
Yeah. The other thing I love about Star Trek, which I don't think we have enough of this today, is it's fundamentally optimistic science fiction. Right. It paints a positive vision of the future.
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A
It ain't Blade Runner.
- [26:39]
C
It ain't Blade Runner. Right. And I think, you know, somewhere, I think, woven in this narrative of how do we get so lost in this country? You know, there's a story we talked about with Supersonic and JFK and the glory projects, but there's also, like, what vision do we really tell of the future? And there's the Gene Roddenberry. The future is amazing and we should have these great things. And then there's the dystopian version. If you get too much dystopian, nobody actually builds the great things. By the way, the other thing that's interesting about Star Trek is If you go back and you look and you say, technologically, what was in Star Trek? Say tng, which I grew up watching,
- [27:14]
A
that's the Next Generation, young kids.
- [27:18]
C
Ironically, it's now the previous generation, but back then it was called the Next Generation. And so they had iPads and Kindles, they had touchscreen computers, sliding doors. They had sliding doors, they had voice control, so they had Alexa. Right. And we got all that, but what we didn't get was the transporter. We didn't get the replicator, we didn't get the warp engine. And one way to look at it, I think this is. I think there's at least some truth to this.
- [27:45]
A
The holodeck. Yeah, still waiting on that one.
- [27:47]
C
Yeah, Palmer's trying to deliver that.
- [27:50]
A
Right.
- [27:50]
C
He's getting close. We got all the low energy sci fi, but we didn't get the high energy sci fi. We lost our way on energy.
- [27:59]
A
Yeah, which is why you were at Alex's event, probably.
- [28:03]
C
That's right, yeah. And there's a connection between energy and supersonic, it turns out, which is the engine that we're building for our supersonic passenger airliner that I think we're all gonna fly on here before too long.
- [28:14]
A
The overture.
- [28:15]
C
The overture is the airliner. That's right. But the engine for it that we call symphony, turns out if you hook an electric generator to it, you can make 42 megawatts. And so there's the.
- [28:27]
A
Explain to people the significance of that.
- [28:29]
C
Well, so I think we all know today we've got an electricity crisis in this country, right? We've got a grid that actually is basically flatlined. We make less electricity per capita today than we did in 1999. And yet energy fuels our modern lifestyle. And if we look at AI, and I'm very much an AI Bull, it's power hungry, and we just don't have electricity for it. And I was looking at your shirt before we got on the air, I swear.
- [28:57]
A
Scout's honor. I didn't wear this because you were coming. I wore it because some company called Maddox, who makes these generators, transformers, just sent it to me in the mail. But look, I get it. We award scholarships to all the trade pursuits, and right now what we hear more than anything is electricians. Please, please give us electricians.
- [29:21]
C
Yeah, we need electricians, we need electrical engineers. We need people who build things with their hands. And we need, you know, and we need to produce a lot more electricity. You know, some reading. Electricity will kill you. Also, the lack of electricity will kill you. And we've Got, we've got a lack of electricity problem.
- [29:37]
A
What if you could just briefly explain to people the consequences of not solving that problem. Is it, is it losing to China? Is it just. And sorry, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but is that another example of the aerospace space race? Like we got the grid to where somebody said, okay, that's good enough.
- [30:00]
C
Yeah, I think, I worry that we are today with electricity and AI, where we were with nuclear power in the late 1960s, meaning there is a glimpse of an amazing, amazing future that we could have with nuclear power. The story used to be power too cheap to meter. And then we got afraid of it, we opposed it, we shut it down, and now we find ourselves 50 years later, we're energy poor, our power bills are going up and no one's happy about that. We've got this energy intensive new technology that can do amazing things, but we don't have the energy for it. If we sit around and we don't build data centers and we don't build power plants and forget what China does or doesn't do, we don't have the amazing future we could have. And then. Yeah, and it's worse if you imagine the Chinese having it and us not. Because now that gets militarily really scary.
- [30:49]
A
You know, the thing that I worry about aside from all of that, it's why I use the PR as an example. I think all challenges at some level really are communication challenges. And I just saw a survey that said the general feeling around data centers in this country among the hoi polloi, the great unwashed, Joe Blow from Idaho doesn't have a great feeling. It's like 75% negative in general. And so what is the industry? What are all the consequential industries good going to do? Because I think they blew it two years ago. I think they should have sat down and explained to the American people what's coming, what it means and why the data centers are going to be a critical part of it. We didn't do that. So now it just seems like along with everything else, we've got ourselves a rhetorical challenge. I don't build houses for a living, but I know a lot of people who do. And, and they all have the same primary complaint. They are drowning in information. Their days are spent not building, but chasing down PDFs and scrolling through text threads and trying to figure out which version of a plan is the most current. That's why builders across America are turning to Diggs. Diggs is ingenious. It's an AI powered platform that connects everything into one. Visual workflow, plans, documents, selections, product info, conversations, approvals. Everything stays tied together so builders can instantly find answers to all kinds of questions like what flooring option did the homeowner approve? Or what paint color did we use in the primary bathroom? Or where's the spec sheet for this particular appliance or that one? Without spending 30 minutes digging through endless folders or calling half a dozen different people, builders using digs report saving 40 to 50 hours per project and catching costly mistakes before construction even starts. Less rework, less confusion, and a much smoother build experience for the homeowner. So if you're a builder, see how much simpler your life could be@diggs.com and if you're having a home built, for crying out loud, make sure your builder knows about Diggs. It makes everybody's life a whole lot easier. That's diggs.com digs.com can you
- [33:33]
D
dig it?
- [33:35]
C
I think you're right. I think the industry did not do itself a service by just not getting ahead of this and communicating well. And in fact, I think they did a lot of own goals we've got. So let's just talk about data centers for a second here. I imagine that most people who are scared of them haven't been close to one. And I've been to a bunch, including the one that have their own vertically integrated power plant. And if you stand right next to those turbines and you're not wearing earplugs, I don't recommend that. But by the way, if you're a block away, you have no idea. No idea, right?
- [34:03]
A
It's not like a sonic boom.
- [34:05]
C
Yeah. It's like a total nothing. And what we're finding is because the grid isn't scaling and the grid interconnects are backed up, all these data centers, in fact, everyone's pledged now they're going to make their own electricity. So they can't drive electricity prices up because they're making their own electricity. They are taking natural gas. But if you look at the price of natural gas, it's largely not going up. It's not constrained. What's constrained is generation. And the data centers are bringing their own generation. If you're not right next to them, there's no noise problem. So put them out kind of middle of nowhere and there's definitely no problem. They may throw in electricity. That's kind of no problem. The water thing, I mean, almonds take orders of magnitude more water than data centers. It's kind Of a non issue. By the way, if you use our turbines, they don't need any water. So you can run closed loop cooling. You can run our turbines. It's waterless.
- [35:00]
A
I mean, I'm sorry, but technically, how is that? What is closed loop?
- [35:04]
C
Closed loop cooling means you might use water in a loop to cool the data center. So imagine you run water through the servers. They get hot, take that water back outside, you run it through a radiator, you blow a fan over it, cool the water off, you put it back inside. It's just like a refrigerator. The coolant goes in a loop. Right. You can do the same thing with water in a data center. You've got to fill the pipes up once, but after that, unless you got a leak, you don't need any more water. And some of these older turbines do take a lot of water because the turbines themselves can't run hot. And so the only way you solve that problem is basically put a swamp cooler in the intake and you're blowing a bunch of water into the air that goes into these turbines.
- [35:44]
A
That's like an evaporative cooler.
- [35:45]
C
An evaporative cooler? Yeah, swamp cooler. Evaporative cooler. That can take a lot of water. But our units are designed to run hot without any water. So you can get rid of all the water. I think the water problem is not a real problem. But even if you believe it is a problem, you can get rid of that problem.
- [36:01]
A
So the sonic boom, the perception of data centers. You know, at that same conference, I mentioned briefly these polymetallic nodules at the. On the sea floor. And a month before the EO you mentioned this administration signed another one. And we're going to go get these things.
- [36:19]
C
That's great.
- [36:21]
A
I'm so glad to hear you say it, because there is. The NGOs are going to scream. And I get it. The idea of mining the ocean sounds scary. It's more like going down to vacuum up the rocks that are full of cobalt and copper and nickel and manganese. The same stuff we've been tearing the Amazon apart to get. But I'm just making the point that whether it's a boom or whether it's a data center, or whether it's what has happened to make us so reflexively frightened of progress.
- [36:55]
C
I don't know exactly. But something did happen around 1970, where we turned culturally more pessimistic about the future and the optimistic sci fi dwindled. The Blade Runners kind of came online.
- [37:09]
A
Paul Ehrlich.
- [37:10]
C
Paul Ehrlich. Right.
- [37:11]
A
Frickin Population bomb.
- [37:13]
C
Right. And now we have the opposite problem.
- [37:15]
A
Wrong.
- [37:16]
C
Right. We have a population bomb. We blew up the population. And you know what? Humans are good. And if we had more humans, we'd have more Mozarts. We'd have more electricians. You know, we'd have more innovators. And, you know, and if you just. All you have to do is fly coast to coast in this country and look down and notice we got plenty of space, and, you know, we know how to scale food production. We've done that. Technology solves these problems. I think we got scared and we lost our inspiration. And, you know, you're talking about the fear of mining the seabed. Well, you know, what's scary is mining the ground. A lot of people get killed. That's a dangerous job. But even scarier than that is not having this stuff. If you go back all the way to when we invented fire, it's like, imagine if we'd invented fire and someone came through and said, well, that smoke is not good to breathe in. So we can't have fire.
- [38:02]
A
No. And it could spread, and that would be bad.
- [38:06]
C
Now we're all the way back to. I don't know how many humans there are on the planet with a miserable existence.
- [38:10]
A
Six.
- [38:11]
C
Right? Six.
- [38:14]
A
Prove me wrong. What's in the box?
- [38:17]
C
Ah. So this is a scale model of our Overture airliner. So this is the airplane that in not too, too many years, that all of us will be able to buy a ticket and fly on twice as fast as we fly today.
- [38:33]
A
Oh, my God. That would be just beyond incredible. I could just pull this right out of here.
- [38:39]
C
Just pull it right out.
- [38:41]
A
I don't want to break it. Hold on a second here. You get it? It's all right.
- [38:45]
C
Watch me break it. There we go.
- [38:47]
A
Don't break the prototype.
- [38:55]
C
There she is. Let me get you the stand.
- [39:02]
B
It's an action stand, so it looks like it's taking off.
- [39:05]
A
I like it.
- [39:06]
C
What are the things you learn early when you're building airplane models is they're always pointed up, never down.
- [39:11]
A
Yes. Wow. Our friend Bill Whittle would be so excited to be here. He's a. I don't know if you know Bill. He's a sort of an amateur historian and a pilot and just would love, love, love everything you're doing. All right, how's this different than the Concorde?
- [39:31]
C
It's a lot cheaper to fly on. So if I just think about what actually matters in the end, a Concorde ticket would set you back 20 grand. Today's money overture one is going to be like flying business class internationally today. So I think more like five grand.
- [39:46]
A
How many seats?
- [39:47]
C
About 60 in really nice, much, much more comfortable seats. A lot of people think in five grand. That's a lot of money. It is. That is about 20% of the international travel market today, but about 80% by profit. So this starts out with the passengers that make the most money for airlines. So think about this as like. It's like the Tesla Model S of an electric car. It comes at high price point. You kind of figure it out, and the cost comes down. So there's going to be. We call this Overture one. There will be an overture two, an overture three, and we're not going to stop until anybody who values speed doesn't find that it's worthwhile to go buy the ticket.
- [40:24]
A
And you put a symphony in the overture. Is that what I heard?
- [40:26]
C
Put a symphony in the overture. So it's got four symphony engines, and that's another Concorde difference. Concorde had these converted military engines that are rip roaring loud. And this has no afterburners. It's what's called a turbofan. It's a lot quieter. It's a lot more fuel efficient. All of that adds up to kind of efficiencies in the airplane itself and the engine that allow us to get the cost down. So if you look at the airplane itself, you notice the front's a bit bigger and the back's a little bit skinnier. So it's a very svelte shape. And today, really, only fighter jets have that shape. It's a lot more efficient. Go in faster than the speed of sound, to have a very contoured fuselage so that the wings, the engine, lighter materials, all of that adds up to making the airplane more efficient so the cost can come down so more people can afford to fly on it.
- [41:14]
A
Well, speaking of money, so Boom is building these.
- [41:17]
C
That's right.
- [41:18]
A
How are you financed? Where'd you get the dough?
- [41:21]
C
With great difficulty. The first 10 years of this were extremely difficult to finance. We're only here today, actually, thanks to a handful of billionaires that personally invested. We have a dozen very wealthy people that put forward some of their own personal wealth to say, I don't know how this thing gets finished, but I want to find a way. Then what happened about a year ago, as we were talking about earlier, is we found we could take those engines that are destined for the airplane and use them for power generation on the ground. Of course, that's a white hart market. It's Actually, the power generation that funds the development of the airplane now.
- [41:57]
A
Wow. That's a genius, dude.
- [41:59]
C
So when you use ChatGPT, you're helping fund the supersonic future.
- [42:05]
A
Okay, you want to mention any of these billionaires by name or are they keeping a low profile?
- [42:12]
C
Some of them are higher profile. Some of them are lower profile. If I mention some, I'll forget others.
- [42:18]
A
Well, it just. It warms my cockles, as it were, to know that, you know, people are betting on this.
- [42:26]
C
Yeah, they are.
- [42:27]
A
It's not a dot gov solution. Although you need the feds on your side.
- [42:32]
C
Yeah. And actually, the feds have been remarkably good to work with on this. I've been pleasantly surprised. We have a great relationship with the FAA in this administration. In previous administrations, we've been able to get stuff through Congress that we needed to. The regulatory at the federal level has not been the roadblocks that we. Yeah, on day one, I was afraid it was.
- [42:51]
A
Yeah. What was day one like? No, never mind. Prior to day one.
- [42:55]
C
Yeah.
- [42:56]
A
Just. If we can just get a little into your. Into your personal curriculum via T. I need to understand.
- [43:03]
C
Yeah, well, I don't have the resume for this at all. Right. Like, you know, my last job before this was I was running email marketing at Groupon. So, Yeah, I know it's a little. Groupon had bought my first startup that was basically sold in a fire sale. It was not a success, but I ended up at Groupon
- [43:23]
A
Silicon Valley.
- [43:24]
C
Silicon Valley, Yep. And so I'm like, literally, they put me in charge of email, and whenever revenue was soft, the CEO would call me and say, blake, send more email. And I was like, dude, that's why people unsubscribe and why the revenue's soft. He's like, I don't care. Send more email. And this was kind of a miserable existence. But I've been flying for fun since I was in college. I'm a pilot. Yeah. Just little airplanes. And in my mid-20s, I toured a Concorde at the Seattle Museum of Flight. And I didn't understand why the most amazing airliner ever made was in a museum when there was nothing better at our airport. So I put a Google News alert on supersonic jet. And I told myself, blake, you got a lifetime goal breaking the sound barrier. And back then, I thought I would do it by buying a ticket. But I watched it for about 10 years, and nobody was doing anything. So eventually I just couldn't handle being like, I don't know, the spam king. And so I fired myself from Groupon. And I wandered around for a little bit, and I was like, okay, I want to work on the most exciting thing that's not impossible. And I was thinking back to having done my first company when I did my first company. I mean, I think any entrepreneur will tell you, no matter what your startup is, there are always tough days, and there are days where you don't know if you're going to get through it. And I remember thinking a lot like, man, I kind of wish I hadn't started, because this isn't worth it. And I wanted to do another company, and I knew I would have the hard day, but I never wanted to say, is it worth it? So I thought, well, let me just organize all my ideas by how happy I would be if it worked and leave everything else aside. And so the supersonic airplane kind of went to the top of the list. And I thought, okay, Blake, you're crazy, but, like, dig in and understand why you're crazy. And then I won't have to be 80 years thinking, what if I'd actually looked at the jet? But what I found as I dug into it, and all I knew about airplanes back then is how to fly a Cessna. As I dug into it, what I found is if you could beat Concorde by just 10%, you could do a supersonic seat with the economics of a flatbed. In business class, I was like, can we really not do 10% better than 1960s technology? Surely you could find 10% efficiency gain. And so I started digging into it more and more and ended up just. I went back and I had to do remedial calculus and physics because I hadn't had any since high school. And I don't know if I really understood it back in high school.
- [45:44]
A
Khan Academy.
- [45:45]
C
Khan Academy.
- [45:46]
A
It's unbelievable, man, right? I mean, if we can do for trans, for education what he's done, if you can do that in relative terms.
- [45:57]
C
Well, yeah, I think so. And I think it also goes back to a little bit of the power of AI, which is, you know, Khan Academy will teach you anything. Khan Academy is set to teach you. AI will teach you anything you want to know about. And I think it's just. It's the greatest thing for people who want to learn things. Like, you know, sometimes I'm driving around, I'll just pull up, chat, and I'll be like, hey, this topic, I don't understand. Let's just talk about it until I get where I'm going. And. And, like, I would never get to do the research any other way. Yeah, but it's like, you know, I kind of show up, but it feels like that scene from the Matrix where, like, you've been injected with Jiu jitsu.
- [46:29]
A
Yeah.
- [46:29]
C
Like, okay, now that thing.
- [46:30]
A
Not yet. Now I can.
- [46:33]
C
Right, let's go. Yeah.
- [46:36]
A
That's amazing. You want to. You want to hear some. We basically. What was the prompt? Some. Ask. Ask Blake.
- [46:46]
B
Ask Blake. Shull. Is it Shull?
- [46:48]
A
Shull.
- [46:49]
B
Ask Blake Shull 10 questions he's never been asked before.
- [46:52]
A
Uh. Oh, okay. If boom succeeds, what human behavior changes first? Business, tourism, relationships, or geopolitics?
- [47:05]
C
They all change. And I think that's the brilliance of that question. I think business probably is the first to change. There's the people who are flying around in business class today, and obviously you can do more meetings in a week. Obviously, it's worth it. I think geopolitics is maybe one of the later things that changes, but the most important, it's hard to hate somebody you've spent time with.
- [47:25]
A
Life happens in real time.
- [47:27]
C
It does, and it happens.
- [47:29]
A
It's virtual shit. Pardon me, but it just. It's better than nothing. But that's a low bar.
- [47:34]
C
That's right. And I think there's been this mythology for decades and that various forms of telecom are going to kill air travel. I mean, you and I are probably old enough to remember when email was going to kill the airlines. Yeah, it seems strange now, right? But the exact opposite is true. Because if there's some way. I mean, the fact that you and I were able to schedule this kind of over email and arrange to be here made it possible for me to physically show up, and so we can have a little bit at a distance. I mean, you think about it romantically, it makes it more obvious, you know, if you can meet somebody over the Internet, you know, romantically now, you're all the more excited to go see him in person. But that's just true of any kind of relationship.
- [48:11]
A
But you don't stay in the Internet, right? You don't meet there and go, you know what? Let's not push this, okay? Let's not turn this into the next Apollo project. I think we can be pretty happy 3,000 miles apart, never actually meeting. But, I mean, we laugh, but that's like Henry Ford or the government could have said, okay, we got the Model T, you know, that's fine. It's so much better than a horse. Let's not go crazy with the highways and the V8. I mean, what are we doing?
- [48:38]
C
I think it's such a great Example, imagine if we'd done the Apollo version of the Model T. It would have been millions and millions of dollars. It had been very impressive. Maybe it would have like run, won the Indy 500 or something, but nobody could have had one.
- [48:53]
A
Yeah.
- [48:54]
C
And because Ford did it, he made sure he did it in a way that people, ordinary people, could benefit.
- [48:59]
A
Right. And you know, I was talking to Jim Farley the other day, who's been a good friend over the years, and I don't know it, but I wouldn't be shocked if they built their own repair schools now, like, and we did. They can't wait. I mean, I'm a big fan of trade schools, but they can't wait four years for a technician to get up to speed on. Right. They'll, they can train them for a fraction of the money and five times faster. Speaking of speed, do you think that's going to kind of happen in all industries? Like, do you think the Palantirs and the Lowe's and the Home Depots, are they going to start building a better pipeline to train the next generation?
- [49:50]
C
I mean, I think the answer is yes, because it needs to be. Certainly what we're going to do over the next few years, we need to hire hundreds of machinists and technicians. I don't think we're going to find enough of them, certainly not in Denver, where we're headquartered. We're going to bring them in from everywhere else. And the plan we have is we're going to pay top dollar and help people move to where we are if they're not already there, if they're experienced, because they're just not enough. Of these experienced people, how many are
- [50:18]
A
you going to hire? How many are you talking about?
- [50:19]
C
I mean, this year we're going to hire 100. Probably next year we're going to hire two or 300. And it keeps going from there.
- [50:24]
A
And you're looking for skilled workers.
- [50:27]
C
Skilled workers, machinists, technicians, people who can assemble things, electricians who can wire things up. This thing makes 42 megawatts. We need people who can wire all that up. And the plan is to hire one junior person for every senior person we hire.
- [50:43]
A
So the mentorship program.
- [50:44]
C
So the mentorship happens. Right. And we actually, we have a term for this. We call it the talent distillery. And the idea of the talent distillery, and this is true, whether it's a blue collar job or a white collar job, you get a little bit of oak. People have been there, done that before, and you get as much spirits as you can and the oak will kind of infuse into the spirits. And if it's the right oak, by the way, the spirits make the oak better too. And so the idea is that's how we. If we just go try to find enough people, we're not going to find enough. We need to go help grow the people.
- [51:17]
A
Not to be confused with Spirit airlines, which tragically. What did you think about that?
- [51:22]
C
I actually thought it was. It's never exciting when any business fails, but I think it goes back to a little bit. The job of capitalism to shut down the losers and get behind the winners. Spirit had a model that just didn't work. I think part of it is if you look at air travel in general, people are so fed up with being treated like cattle, right?
- [51:48]
A
Yeah.
- [51:50]
C
And I think the good thing is we're productive enough in this country, we're wealthy enough in this country that we don't necessarily need to have a lot of bargain basement air travel and people want to be treated better.
- [52:00]
A
I was gonna say that. Are you talking about just the experience on the plane or like, how could an airport be better?
- [52:07]
C
Oh my gosh, don't get me started.
- [52:09]
A
Get started, man. Because look, I live in the things. I'm literally, I'm in two airports a week, every week.
- [52:15]
C
I mean, I think we have some decent small airports. I don't think we have any good large ones. Just think about how long you have to get to the airport super early because you're worried about the security line and the delays and you don't want to miss your flight because then that's a cataclysmic thing. And then you show up and they turn it into a shopping mall because that's the only way they know how to pay for the airport. Now it tends to be visually cluttered, it tends to be loud, it can be uncomfortable, and some of them are better. But I think if we in a future version of the world where the airplanes get faster, I think everyone's going to want the airports to get faster too. One of the things we're doing with our Overture airliner initially, it's only got 60 people on it. You can do things for 60 people at a time, you can't do for a million people at a time. One of the things we're working with the airlines on is how do we make it such that if you get to the airport 20 minutes before your flight leaves, you're guaranteed to make your flight. JSX actually does this today with a little 30 seat airplane. What works at 30 seats, 60 seats. You can make these incredible experiences, and then the challenge becomes, how do you actually scale that up? But I think if you can make the. You get the airport 15, 20 minutes before your flight leaves, and you make your flight, it saves you exponentially more time. And then the question over time becomes, how do you make that handle more passengers at a time? And I think you can. It just requires some innovation.
- [53:40]
A
Was it you? I heard underground airports, maybe?
- [53:46]
C
Yeah, underground airports. I think you can. This is an idea in my head. I'd love to find somebody actually go build. The thing is, if you move the terminal underground, you can actually make the rest of the airport a whole lot more efficient. So imagine you've got a twin Runway airport, two parallel runways. Let's not put them too close together like they did at sfo. So you can actually use both, right? One's departures, one's arrivals, and the terminal's in the middle, except it's underground. So today, think of how it goes. You got airplanes crisscrossing each other over the ground. You got this congestion. You pull into a gate, but then the terminal's in the way. You can't put the airplane in reverse, so you got to get the tug to push you back. You get people running around this, you're pushing back, oh, there'll be another airplane.
- [54:29]
A
It's a clown show.
- [54:30]
C
It's a clown show, right? Okay. You got two runways. The terminal goes underneath. The jetways become escalators that come out of the ground. So you land on one Runway, you taxi into the center stop. The jetway comes up. People get off, people get on. Right? It's time to go. The escalator goes back down to the ground, and you pull through. You don't need any tugs. You don't need all this clutter that you have today. And the traffic flow is from one Runway across the airport to the other Runway. So this whole thing takes up less geographic space. You can get way more density of airport in the same physical region, which, by the way, now means you can, like, scale airports closer to city centers, and you spend less time getting to and from the airport.
- [55:12]
A
Like putting, like, all the great stadiums in major league sports today are in city centers. Didn't used to be that way, you know, but they found a way to do it and I think revitalized virtually every town that has a major stadium downtown.
- [55:28]
C
It's just.
- [55:28]
A
It's just good for living, right?
- [55:32]
C
It's good for living, it's good for community, it's good for culture.
- [55:36]
A
All right? Let's see what the AI has for number two, shall we? What's the aerospace equivalent of technical debt? And is the airline industry buried in it?
- [55:48]
C
I mean, there is absolutely the same technical debt concept exists in aerospace engineering as much as anything else. If you do a port job putting something together, you pay for it in triplicate on the back end, and we've made that mistake. There's things on the. You know, you look at the XB1 airplane, and you can see a. You know, what looks like a beautiful jet.
- [56:07]
A
That's your first one.
- [56:08]
C
That's the first airplane. Yeah. I look at it, I see things we'd never do again.
- [56:11]
A
How many of those did you make?
- [56:12]
C
Only one got the one got the one. Right. So just to give you an example, we put three engines on that airplane, one under each wing. Well, where's the third one? I'll put it in the middle, in the tail cone. And every time there was maintenance to be done on that center engine, I think a technician cried because it's so darn hard to get at that thing. So if you look at the overture, what's got four engines, two under each wing, each of them is the exact same install. They're underwing, so they're really easy to reach and get to when you got to do work on them. And so, yeah, there was a lot of technical debt on XB1, but that turned into better ideas on the overture.
- [56:46]
A
And just to circle back, to be clear, you're gonna hire hundreds of skilled technicians to work on this?
- [56:54]
C
Yeah, just. Just on the engines alone, it's gonna be hundreds of technicians.
- [56:59]
A
That's. I mean, if you want consequential work, like you want to be involved in making that, that has to be part of the. The value proposition.
- [57:10]
C
It is. I mean, if I think about what makes a boom person a boom person is because they believe that the work that they're doing is meaningful and impactful. Right. And you go work on the engine. Well, the first thing that does is you're helping power the future of power generation in this country and making sure we don't lose the energy. And the AI race to China, the next thing that happens is you're enabling this airplane. And so I talk to people. It's like, do you want to be able to look at that airplane and say, I put that part on and it's safe and it's efficient, and my family gets to fly on it because I did a damn good job.
- [57:41]
A
And think about your kids when their friends say, what's Your dad do? What's your mom do? And they point to this on the bookshelf. They build that.
- [57:48]
C
My kids went off to a. I have a 13 year old, twin 12 year olds and a 4 year old that I know about. And boom, boom.
- [57:58]
A
I'm sorry, bang.
- [57:59]
C
The boys were off at the summer camp last summer and I'm on a zoom call with the summer camp instructors at a camp. And they're like, well, you should know your boys are proud of you. And I'm like, yeah. And they said yeah. They kept telling everybody else in the class that their dad built supersonic jets. And we thought they were full of it, but then we googled you and you do, you do. But that exists for all the kids of all the employees at our company.
- [58:23]
A
But before that, daddy was involved in some spamming with a company called Groupon. We're pretty excited about that.
- [58:31]
C
But let's make sure we pull the positive lesson out of that. I think anybody can learn anything if they put the their mind to it.
- [58:37]
A
Do you think modern society has lost the emotional appetite for giant engineering projects?
- [58:45]
C
I think we have forgotten that they are good to do and that having impact on the world around us is a good thing. We have this like no impact mindset or this impact minimization mindset. But you know, like think about the water. Like, you know, people, we have enough water enough in the right places. We, you know, we forget water falls from the sky and when we use it, it evaporates and it goes back into the sky. So it's an infrastructure problem, not a like limited resource problem. But what do we need to do? Well, we got to build dams and aquifers, but we don't do gigantic projects that improve the planet for our own purpose anymore. And I think that's a huge mistake. We should be really proud of things like the Hoover Dam. We should make more of them.
- [59:31]
A
Yeah. I mean that's kind of where we started with this. That was the thing that was so implicit in Kennedy's challenge.
- [59:39]
C
Right.
- [59:39]
A
You know, it's we're day to day, you know, you can win a game with singles and doubles, but every now and then you've got to swing for the fence. Like those aforementioned stadiums would never fill if there was no such thing as a home run.
- [59:54]
C
That's right. That's a really right point. Yeah. So I think it's about we gotta be willing to make the big swings and, and we have to accept that building things on the planet that change the planet is good.
- [60:05]
A
We want to leave a Footprint. We want to leave a footprint.
- [60:07]
C
We want to leave a footprint. Right. Like, you know, make the actual human environment better and one where we have energy, one where we have water, one where we have good food. Those are good things. And so we should build farms and dams and reservoirs and airports and stadiums and data centers. And data centers.
- [60:27]
A
Dirty boy.
- [60:27]
C
Oh, I know, right?
- [60:29]
A
Did you know Alex Epstein before this conference?
- [60:31]
C
Had you met him? Alex and I met when we were both about 19.
- [60:34]
A
No kidding?
- [60:35]
C
Yeah.
- [60:36]
A
Good God, I can't. What a geek out that must have been.
- [60:39]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we were both, you know, we had no idea what we were doing, but yeah, amazing.
- [60:45]
A
Yeah. He sat right here not long ago and like right adjacent to all this is this Malthusian idea. I guess it's the opposite of abundance. And there is a religion that swirls around that notion and it does touch on a lot of the stuff we've talked about. And I do think that's part of the answer.
- [61:07]
C
I think that's right. But there's a lot of fear mongering out there. And at some level I get the people who are afraid because it's like, hey, if this thing automates away my job, what do I do? I think one of the things that gives me a lot of comfort is I think about how many of the jobs that existed 100 years ago exist today. And how many of the jobs that exist today existed 100 years ago. So think about the people who were put out of work by the tractor. Sure, right. Or the steam shovel.
- [61:32]
A
The plow.
- [61:32]
C
The plow.
- [61:33]
A
Self scouring plow.
- [61:34]
C
Right, exactly. Or think of the people who are bank tellers, the loomers, the Luddites. That's right. Where are telephone operators? You don't go down the street and see a bunch of unemployed telephone operators. Where'd they all go? Well, a lot of the jobs we have today, Uber driver, didn't exist not that long ago. These things, I mean, change is scary. But if we look back across what's happened since the dawn of the Industrial revolution, we've had a lot of change along the way. But boy, would you rather live now or would you rather live in 1850?
- [62:10]
A
How do you think about. Sorry if I'm veering way outside our lane here, but universal basic income and you know, just some of the things that seem to make sense on paper that are promoted by people with enormous brains. I. Yeah, I wrestle with. And that's.
- [62:28]
C
I have a. I mean, I have a lot of respect for Elon.
- [62:30]
A
Me too.
- [62:31]
C
I don't I don't see eye to eye with him on this. I think the, I think the biggest victims of universal basic income would be the people receiving it.
- [62:39]
A
Right.
- [62:40]
C
I think there is a dignity and in humanity you get from knowing you supported yourself and you made your own way and you did something productive. And if everything's a handout, I think we've deleted that meaning if you believe all the jobs are going to go away, then I can understand how logically you get there. I just don't think that's true. And let me see if I can give some idea about that, who I mean. So just if you're listening now, do you have an idea for a product or service that you wished existed that doesn't exist? And I think most people have a thing that they wish for, but most people don't have the resources or the skills or the time or whatever to go create it. But I think what you're seeing, you're seeing it now in the world of software. I got a story I can tell about this in a minute. You don't have to be a software engineer to create software. That solves a problem for you. And pretty soon with digital manufacturing, you actually don't have to be super skilled to turn your idea for a product into a product. I think what we're going to have is an explosion of entrepreneurship, an explosion of creativity. AI is not going to be dehumanizing. It's going to be the most humanizing thing we've ever had because it lets anybody be a creator and poor be the person who has no idea for anything they want to exist in the world. I think that's very few people that
- [63:55]
A
is so fundamentally optimistic. Who opposes you? You don't have to name names.
- [64:03]
C
I don't know
- [64:06]
A
what is the attitude that worries you most?
- [64:10]
C
I think there is a small contingent that are actually fundamentally anti progress, anti human. They're Paul Ehrliches. And the problem is they fool people through various forms of scaremongering. AI is going to take our jobs, it's going to take our water, it's going to drive our electricity bills up, up. We're not gonna have any jobs. The robot armies are going to kill us. It's gonna be Blade Runner, there won't be food. It's all bullshit. Am I allowed to say bullshit here?
- [64:39]
A
You better believe it, man.
- [64:41]
C
It's all bullshit. But it takes in well meaning people who want good things. And so I think it's that 10% that are fundamentally anti human, who sneak in their anti Humanism under a pro human guidance, guys. Right. Like Ehrlich would be very happy. And he said this if everybody just died. Right. But what does he tell you? He says, well, we can't have more people because there won't be food to eat. Right now it sounds pro human. And he snuck his poison in dressed up as food.
- [65:11]
A
Yeah. And back to my point earlier about the communicative relevance of these ideas, you take like Paul's books way before there were clicks and likes and shares and social media, but there was Johnny Carson.
- [65:28]
C
Yeah.
- [65:28]
A
And Johnny Carson loved him. Had him on the show like 17 times. And I love Johnny Carson. There's not a dig on him. It's just that when you're right in the moment, it's really hard to know. It's hard to know what you're spreading, you know. And he was persuasive and compelling and he was good for viewership.
- [65:46]
C
Right. And like, you know, if you take it as honest and well meaning, who's not concerned? So I think you're absolutely right. Being able to communicate the reality of things compellingly and to inoculate people against the fear mongering is super important.
- [66:01]
A
Right.
- [66:02]
C
And I'll go back to. I think one of the biggest things that gives me comfort is just to look back at history and none of the doomerism since time immemorial has ever been correct. Not once. Like a question I like to ask people who are concerned about new technology. Can you give me one example of a technology that was net negative for humanity? Can you give me one example? Sometimes people say nuclear bombs. Like, well, okay, you could argue nuclear bombs are why we haven't had a world war. But even if you. But you got to roll nuclear bombs in with nuclear power and nuclear medicine, because all of that's kind of one set of technology.
- [66:44]
A
It's also part of the hierarchy of energy too.
- [66:46]
C
It is.
- [66:47]
A
You wouldn't have that without fossil fuels. Right. You wouldn't have it without all these other things.
- [66:54]
C
Exactly. I can't think of a single technology writ large that's been a net negative. You can argue individual products might be net negatives, but technologies, I don't see it. And so why are we suddenly thinking something new is gonna be the first net negative thing that we've had? Doesn't make any sense.
- [67:11]
A
Yeah.
- [67:12]
C
And think about AI, okay. If we forget the artificial bit of it for a second. Imagine we said we're gonna create a new generation of children. We thought a way to make them all smarter and more capable, like that sounds pretty good, right?
- [67:24]
A
Yeah.
- [67:24]
C
We're going to increase the amount of intelligence in the world. How could that be a bad thing?
- [67:27]
A
And obedience.
- [67:31]
C
Oh boy, there we go.
- [67:32]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the conversation, right? It just seems like so many smart people are really wrestling with the idea that the tech and the products surrounding it are not one and the same, but they are all tools. Have you read like Jonathan Haidt and his, his take on social media and like very, very specific harms that are unique between. You know, Instagram does very bad for girls, TikTok bad for boys, this and so forth.
- [68:02]
C
His, his book is sitting on my desk. I, I admit I haven't read it yet, but I'm, I'm very cautious with social media with my kids. And I think there's another, that's another example of a technology with pros and cons, like, like, it connects the world, enables communication that we wouldn't otherwise have. And yet some of this stuff is just, it's addictive personality feeding, like, you know, and so I'm very careful. You know, the same way I don't feed my kids just any food, I don't feed them just any social media.
- [68:25]
A
But is social media itself a legit technology or is it a product that evolved from it? I mean, back to your Groupon days. Right. What's junk mail? Yeah, like, what's the.
- [68:38]
C
Yeah, I mean, I mean, yeah, I think if you draw a small enough circle, you can find things that aren't good. Right. Like if you say unsolicited spam, well, that's bad. Email is the broader technology and I think we're better off with email, even though sometimes we get annoying things.
- [68:52]
A
Sure.
- [68:52]
C
And social media. I'm a huge fan of X and I've met people I wouldn't have met without it. I've been able to hire people I wouldn't be able to hire without it. And at the same time, do I want my 13 year old daughter hooked on Snapchat? Not really.
- [69:09]
A
Right. How then are we to think about, like, okay, I'm in this plane now or any other plane, as I often am, and I'm strapped in and we've been delayed two hours, it's hot, the service isn't good, the food is piss poor. Yeah, right. We're late, we're going to be later. And now we've been diverted. And you sit there and you try not to descend into a place of anger because it's still pretty miraculous. You're still in a piece of pressurized tin Flying pretty fast. Right. And so it feels like, should we settle for that? Should I be, as a consumer constantly reminding myself that I'm living at a terrific age, or should I be frustrated there are not more people like you out there pushing the rock up the hill?
- [69:56]
C
I think the hard part about this is it's a duality and two seemingly contradictory things are true at the same time. It is an amazing, amazing thing that we have airplanes. Right. The fact that we can rush forward into the sky at hundreds of miles per hour in a thing that's nearly perfectly safe, that we can be at 35,000ft where the air is not breathable, but we can breathe just fine, and that we can go anywhere in the planet in about 24 hours today, that is an amazing, amazing thing. It is a triumph of humanity, and yet it is not what it could or should be. I think holding those two things at the same time is the tricky thing to remember that it's okay to be proud that we have this and okay to be dissatisfied that we haven't made it better. And the other thing that goes in there, I think this is to remember that the people working for the airlines aren't necessarily the cause of the problem. I try to remember that the entire decisions of the industry are not the responsibility of the person in front of me.
- [70:50]
A
Sure. Well, look, because we need to stay sane in the end. And, and there's this other thing that's certainly the fault in our stars where we come to resent a long list of things we rely upon, whether it's affordable electricity or whether it's reliable transportation. And we take it out on the workers all of the time.
- [71:15]
C
So unjust. So unjust. So I try to put myself in the shoes of the person who's there. And unless I overtly think they're just being a jerk to try to have some empathy for him.
- [71:27]
A
Yeah.
- [71:28]
C
So like the person, you know, serving you on an airplane is not the reason that there was a weather delay. Right, right. I get the weather delay is annoying. It'd be great if we had airplanes that could fly through any weather, but we don't. It's definitely not the flight attendants fault.
- [71:41]
A
No, there is something though. I mean, God, there's just, just, just the notion of compliance. You know, it's difficult to close the laptop. You know, it's difficult.
- [71:54]
C
It's just in aviation there is a rule following mindset in some places that is just misplaced. Like I don't close my laptop, they tell me to close the laptop. I close a Little bit. Then I get it back out. I do too, man. Right. And guess what? It's not actually dangerous. You know what? The one thing that does matter is buckle your seatbelt. Because if you hurt turbulence and you're going to bop it around that cabin, that's not good. That'll hurt. That's the thing that matters. If you have a pound and a half iPad, you're allowed to have it out. If you have a pound and a half laptop, you're not allowed to have it out. Right, Right. Doesn't make any sense.
- [72:27]
A
Right. Oh, it's 4:30 now. All right, we're going to wrap this up at about 5. I know you've got a plane to catch.
- [72:32]
C
If only it were a supersonic flight. We could go. We could go much longer.
- [72:36]
A
What, were you going to leave two hours later? Yeah, well, that's what you're saying, the same thing. Okay, what I'm going to take from this in my own worldview is that lots of jobs are going to be available, many at Boom, for people who want to learn a skill that's in demand. Yeah, We've got scholarships and we help train people for all that. So tell your billionaire buddies if they want to close the loop, you know, we're standing by. But beyond that, man, I just really want to applaud you for? For hitting the reset button in your own life and taking a big swing on a truly consequential quest. That's a Roddenberry thing to do. And it makes me happy to share the species with you.
- [73:14]
C
Well, I appreciate your saying that, Mike. People used to ask me, how in the world could you do something so risky. I always thought people had the risk idea upside down, but to me, the thing that seemed risky was spending the rest of my life doing things that weren't meaningful. I'd rather have tried supersonic and failed miserably. Publicly. I'd rather be called the next Theranos, which I've been called, than spend the rest of my life wondering what if I'd giving it my all.
- [73:41]
A
You know what? Would have been a really shitty show open to timidly go where everyone's gone before. I'm not watching that. Who's the Laura person?
- [73:53]
C
Before we say goodbye, Laura runs my life, keeps me together, tells me where to go, gets me there on time. I'm very, very, very grateful that she is my. My work wife.
- [74:03]
A
Awesome.
- [74:03]
C
My only husband.
- [74:07]
A
Thank you for getting him here on time and under budget. Thank you. I assume this is a gift for me.
- [74:12]
C
It is. It is.
- [74:13]
A
I'm going to put that right over there on the. On the keg of whiskey.
- [74:17]
C
Well, the president has one of these in his office and now you get to have one in yours.
- [74:22]
A
Wow. Well, that'll give me something to triangulate when I see him next. I really, really appreciate you coming by, Blake. I wish you every success. I think it's. I think it's important in every way.
- [74:33]
C
Thank you. Thank you for having me and thank you for doing what you do.
- [74:35]
A
You. You got it. This episode is over now.
- [74:39]
D
I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long but if it made you smile, then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go on life and leave us a review. I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge. But in this world the advertisers really like to judge. You don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two. All you've got to do is leave a quick five star review.
- [75:26]
A
Number four.
- [75:26]
D
All you got to do is is leave a quick five star review.
- [75:29]
C
And not three.
- [75:30]
D
All you got to do is leave a quick five star review.
- [75:32]
A
Definitely not two.
- [75:33]
D
All you got to do is leave a quick five star review. You need five. All you got to do is leave a quick.
- [75:38]
A
Even if you hate it, five star. Especially if you hate video.
- [75:44]
C
Thank you.
- [75:52]
B
The Way I heard it is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.
- [76:15]
E
Hey there, it's Wayfair here where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock so scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it. A brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too. Alright, Wayfair's got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast expert setup on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier. Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app.
- [76:41]
C
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