AI transcript
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0:00:29 The first airline ever, the first airline in the history of the world,
0:00:31 started in 1914.
0:00:36 It flew passengers just a short hop across the bay from St. Petersburg to Tampa,
0:00:39 and its maximum speed was about 60 miles an hour.
0:00:43 By the 1960s, just 50 years later,
0:00:46 passenger jets were flying 10 times as fast as that.
0:00:50 And that increase in speed transformed the meaning of travel.
0:00:55 But then, after the 60s, air travel just stopped getting faster.
0:01:00 A flight today takes about as long as a flight took 60 years ago.
0:01:04 We’ve gone from a 10x improvement to no improvement at all.
0:01:06 What happened?
0:01:14 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem?
0:01:18 The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
0:01:23 My guest today is Blake Scholl, the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic.
0:01:25 Blake’s problem is this.
0:01:29 Can you build a commercial airplane that flies faster than the speed of sound,
0:01:31 and that can turn a profit?
0:01:35 Blake started the company in 2014.
0:01:41 Since then, he’s secured pre-orders from Japan Airlines, United, and American Airlines.
0:01:46 And he and his team built a test plane that flew faster than the speed of sound.
0:01:52 Now, they’re working on a full-size commercial jet that Blake hopes will fly at Mach 1.7,
0:01:58 1.7 times the speed of sound, or roughly twice as fast as commercial jets fly today.
0:02:02 To start, I asked Blake about the Concorde.
0:02:06 The Concorde, of course, is the only supersonic commercial passenger jet
0:02:09 ever built, ever flown, with passengers on it.
0:02:12 But the Concorde stopped flying more than 20 years ago.
0:02:15 And today, it’s widely viewed as a failure.
0:02:20 I think Concorde killed supersonic flight, and Apollo killed space exploration.
0:02:26 And yet, in 1969, we had that first moon landing, and we had that first flight of Concorde.
0:02:32 And at the time, it looked like both of these were harbingers of huge technological progress
0:02:32 for humanity.
0:02:38 And I think if you stopped somebody in the street in 1969 and said, in 2025, what do you
0:02:40 think space exploration will be like?
0:02:41 What do you think flight will be like?
0:02:45 No one would have predicted that supersonic would be gone, and moon landings would be gone.
0:02:45 Right.
0:02:47 But that was the peak.
0:02:48 It wasn’t going to get any better.
0:02:53 And in fact, in terms of commercial air travel, it was going to get worse.
0:02:54 Yeah, everything got worse.
0:02:56 Everything got worse.
0:03:00 And I think Concorde and Apollo are actually brethren.
0:03:05 Both were technologically extremely impressive.
0:03:12 Like, what we did in the 1960s with rockets and airplanes, with slide rolls, drafting paper,
0:03:16 wind tunnels, is extremely technologically impressive.
0:03:19 Yet, the motivation is what was killer.
0:03:27 And both Concorde and Apollo were Cold War-era glory projects led by governments who are competing
0:03:28 for prestige.
0:03:30 Basically, to show up the Soviet Union, right?
0:03:35 To show the superiority of Western capitalism over Soviet communism.
0:03:39 Yes, except the deep irony is we did it the communist way.
0:03:39 Right.
0:03:42 They were command and control projects that made no economic sense.
0:03:45 They were command and control projects with no economic sense.
0:03:51 And it turns out, when the West copied, effectively, the communist approach, for a little while,
0:03:55 we had technological superiority because of, you know, the momentum that we had.
0:03:57 But then we destroyed ourselves.
0:04:01 And so, you know, Apollo didn’t even pretend to have anything commercial, right?
0:04:01 Yeah.
0:04:04 Like, it was operating on, like, a percentage of GDP.
0:04:05 Right.
0:04:10 Which is to say, an incredibly large amount of money relative to the overall economy went
0:04:13 into getting a very small number of people to the moon a few times.
0:04:14 That’s right.
0:04:14 Yeah.
0:04:19 And, you know, and the knock-on effect of that, you know, for the entire aerospace supply
0:04:24 chain, it was basically, you know, land on the moon at all costs or at any cost.
0:04:31 And the result was the entire, you know, space out of the supply chain got drunk on these incredibly
0:04:34 lucrative contracts where cost was no object, right?
0:04:36 And then after the Cold War, it only got worse.
0:04:40 And we put all of the, like, defense industrial base on corporate welfare.
0:04:42 And they got fat and dumb.
0:04:43 Yeah.
0:04:50 And then on the Concorde side, it at least looked better because on paper, this was a commercial
0:04:53 airplane where people could buy tickets and airlines would buy the airplanes.
0:04:56 And, you know, the airlines would make money.
0:04:59 But in reality, it wasn’t that.
0:05:01 Here’s a hundred-seat airplane.
0:05:04 By the way, a hundred, like, actually pretty uncomfortable seats.
0:05:09 And what, you know, ejected for inflation was a $20,000 ticket.
0:05:14 And you just can’t find a hundred people that want to pay 20 grand to go somewhere really
0:05:14 fast.
0:05:16 I mean, this is for royalty and rock stars.
0:05:23 And especially with, like, 80s and 90s kind of travel demand, the thing flew half empty.
0:05:28 On the best route in the world, which is New York to London, you know, if you want to find
0:05:31 people who want to pay a lot of money to go fast, New York to London’s the best city pair
0:05:31 you could pick.
0:05:35 And it doesn’t work at all economically beyond that.
0:05:38 And so, and then the world drew all the wrong conclusions.
0:05:41 You know, they concluded, like, supersonic flight had to be expensive.
0:05:44 It had to be cramped and uncomfortable.
0:05:46 It had to be noisy.
0:05:47 It had to be uneconomic.
0:05:54 And it’s like, imagine if we built, like, the Univac, you know, like one of the first mainframe
0:05:55 computers.
0:05:57 It was just like the size of the room.
0:05:59 And you have to be like a bank to afford it.
0:06:01 And then we stopped.
0:06:05 And then 50 years later, people would swear up and down that you could never possibly have
0:06:09 a pocket computer that everyday people could afford.
0:06:14 But yet, you know, Concord is like the Univac.
0:06:16 Uh-huh.
0:06:19 It’s a design from the 1960s, basically.
0:06:20 That’s right.
0:06:25 And I say this with, like, deep admiration for the incredible technical work that went
0:06:25 into it.
0:06:30 A lot of people worked really hard and did amazing things.
0:06:33 You know, now that we are, you know, now that at Boom we have, like, built and flown a supersonic
0:06:39 jet, what we can see is they did really, really well given the tech that was available in the
0:06:40 1960s.
0:06:41 It’s extremely impressive.
0:06:44 You know, like, in Britain and France, people are incredibly proud of Concord.
0:06:47 And from a technological level, like, they deserve to be.
0:06:51 So, okay, you were a software developer, right?
0:06:52 You weren’t a plane guy.
0:06:54 You weren’t an aerospace engineer.
0:07:00 But, like, whatever, 12 years ago or something, you got interested in this idea of supersonic
0:07:03 air travel, of why aren’t there supersonic jets?
0:07:05 So you have this question in your mind.
0:07:06 You go try and figure it out.
0:07:07 What do you find?
0:07:12 The internet was full of all this conventional wisdom about why flights aren’t faster.
0:07:14 And you can still find some of these YouTube videos.
0:07:18 And they say things like, supersonic flight is inherently more expensive.
0:07:20 Passengers always buy the cheapest ticket.
0:07:23 So supersonic flight will never be commercially viable.
0:07:25 And, like, hang on.
0:07:28 Well, first off, that’s a qualitative claim about a quantitative question.
0:07:31 And it doesn’t even really completely make sense, right?
0:07:35 Like, the whole reason we have jet flights is because people wanted to go faster than propeller
0:07:36 flights.
0:07:41 The reason people pay more for direct flights than connecting is they want to save time and
0:07:41 hassle.
0:07:45 Time is the one resource that’s not ever renewable.
0:07:49 So the idea that people wouldn’t pay for time savings didn’t completely make sense.
0:07:49 Sure.
0:07:54 Plainly, at some margin, some people will pay some amount more to go some amount faster, right?
0:07:54 Exactly.
0:07:56 The question is, what are all the margins?
0:07:56 Yeah.
0:07:57 Exactly.
0:07:58 You’re totally right.
0:08:00 It’s a quantitative question, not a qualitative one.
0:08:01 Yeah.
0:08:05 And I think one of the lessons of, I think, the boom story is never accept a qualitative answer
0:08:06 to a quantitative question.
0:08:07 Go run the math.
0:08:07 Yeah.
0:08:10 So, okay, what is the actual cost of supersonic flight?
0:08:13 And what is people’s actual willingness to pay to go faster?
0:08:19 So it turned out it took two weeks to find the key idea, which is, I mean, today there is
0:08:23 a huge market for international business class.
0:08:32 It’s roughly 20% of passengers and 80% of international airline profits on business class, which is flying
0:08:36 beds for people who so hate that flights are long that they want to try and sleep through
0:08:37 them on the airplane.
0:08:44 Um, and so that the original boom idea was, well, what if we could make a supersonic seat
0:08:49 with the economics of a flying bed in business class, but on an airplane sufficiently fast
0:08:51 that you wouldn’t need to sleep on it, you could sleep at home instead.
0:08:55 And, uh, and so the first question I asked is, well, how much would you have to beat Concord
0:09:02 by on just basic airplane efficiency in order to create a seat with the economics of a flying
0:09:03 bed?
0:09:05 And the answer was less than 10%.
0:09:06 Uh-huh.
0:09:09 So like Concord was almost there by your reckoning.
0:09:11 Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s right.
0:09:20 Um, the, the, if you could improve the gas mileage basically of Concord by less than 10%, um, that
0:09:24 you would tip over to this happy point where you could have a supersonic seat with the economics
0:09:25 of a flatbed in business class.
0:09:32 And instead of being this like stratospheric airplane that like flies mostly empty, uh, a
0:09:33 whole bunch of modern demand would be there.
0:09:36 The seats would fill at a high rate and the market would be gigantic.
0:09:42 Um, and, uh, and so that, that took two weeks and I was like that, well, I don’t know anything
0:09:42 about airplanes.
0:09:45 Like all I had at that point was my pilot’s license.
0:09:49 Uh, but 10% versus 1960s technology didn’t seem crazy.
0:09:54 Uh, so at the, at that point I was like, okay, if I’m going to go do this, I need to know a
0:09:55 heck of a lot more.
0:10:02 And it sort of kicked off what was really a, a 12 month journey for me, uh, getting educated
0:10:02 in aerospace.
0:10:07 So when you’re, when you say 10%, I mean, is that sort of a marginal cost calculation?
0:10:14 Like that, that is that basically setting aside the fixed cost of building the first plane and
0:10:17 then building, well, building the first plane.
0:10:21 Like that seems like the big unknown in the math there is how much is it going to cost to
0:10:22 make plane number one?
0:10:23 Yeah.
0:10:25 I mean, so there, there are a few things that matter, right?
0:10:29 The, uh, the, the, the, the first thing is if we could manage to produce the airplane,
0:10:33 would it, would it be affordable for passengers and profitable for airlines?
0:10:33 Yeah.
0:10:38 That’s kind of the first principles version is like, let’s just look at the physics and like
0:10:40 things with what we know.
0:10:45 Is it theoretically possible to build an airplane that can fly enough people from New York to
0:10:50 London if they pay business class, but sit upright at supersonic speeds?
0:10:52 Does the first principles math pencil out?
0:10:53 That’s the math you’re doing there.
0:10:53 That’s right.
0:10:59 If, you know, with technology that’s available, is it possible to build an airplane that is
0:11:01 affordable for passengers and profitable for airlines?
0:11:03 And it turned out the answer was yes.
0:11:04 Uh-huh.
0:11:06 And what is business class New York London?
0:11:07 What is that?
0:11:08 Five grand?
0:11:08 Something like that?
0:11:09 Yeah.
0:11:09 Yeah.
0:11:09 About that.
0:11:11 I mean, actually people routinely pay more than five grand.
0:11:16 The economics of our airplane, it turns out 3,500 is breakeven.
0:11:16 Okay.
0:11:20 So at five grand, it’s very profitable for airlines and people pay five grand.
0:11:22 By the way, round trip routinely.
0:11:23 Yeah.
0:11:24 Okay.
0:11:29 So you’ve got the kind of first principles back of the envelope math that looks promising.
0:11:31 So you started the company.
0:11:31 Yes.
0:11:34 And that was what?
0:11:36 About 10 years ago, right?
0:11:37 That was…
0:11:37 Yeah.
0:11:41 It was about 11 years ago now that I was making that spreadsheet.
0:11:41 Yeah.
0:11:47 Um, and, uh, you know, we’ll, we’ll turn, we’ll turn 11 on paper in September because that
0:11:50 was when I got to the point where, okay, I’m, I’m actually really committed.
0:11:51 It’s time to go.
0:12:00 Um, I love that you called it boom, uh, leaning in, like embracing the haters in some, in some
0:12:00 fashion.
0:12:03 Um, tell me about the boom.
0:12:04 Let’s talk about supersonic booms.
0:12:06 Yeah.
0:12:11 So my belief from day one was that the boom would not be the blocker.
0:12:18 And that, that spreadsheet basically said there is a gigantic market for supersonic flight,
0:12:25 even if the boom is entirely unsolved and you have to fly subsonic over land, um, and supersonic
0:12:32 over water and focus initially on, on, on routes that were primarily trans oceanic.
0:12:37 Just to be clear in the U S right now, commercial flights are not allowed to fly supersonic, even
0:12:40 if there were a plane that could do it by regulation, right?
0:12:42 Because of the boom, is that the starting point?
0:12:43 Yeah.
0:12:47 So that, that’s where we started because the premise was, Hey, it’s pretty ambitious to start
0:12:51 a brand new company from scratch where your goal is to build a supersonic airliner.
0:12:55 Let’s let, so let’s not, uh, let’s not push anything too far.
0:12:59 Let’s operate only with existing technology and only with existing regulations.
0:13:05 Uh, and that would, that would have some hope of making it tractable for a startup to go
0:13:05 do.
0:13:12 So I want to talk a little bit about the last 10 years and building, uh, XB one, your test
0:13:13 plane.
0:13:20 Um, and I’m curious in particular, I mean, sort of unsurprisingly, it has taken longer than
0:13:23 you thought, which it would be shocking if it didn’t write given the nature of the project.
0:13:28 But I’m curious, like what were some of the things you thought at the, at the jump that
0:13:29 turned out to be wrong?
0:13:32 You know, things where you went down the wrong path and had to do something different.
0:13:33 Yeah.
0:13:39 So, so when we started out with XB one, we gave it some really, really aggressive, uh, goals.
0:13:41 Uh, so we wanted to go 10% faster than Concord.
0:13:43 We wanted to do it with a passenger on board.
0:13:46 Uh, we wanted to not need an afterburner.
0:13:51 Like we gave it all these, you know, fairly aggressive goals that were actually well beyond
0:13:52 what was really necessary.
0:13:58 Uh, but we thought we didn’t appreciate all of the challenges that would, would come with
0:13:58 that.
0:14:01 And so we actually made the job a lot harder than it needed to be.
0:14:08 And, and the, the biggest thing that we learned on XB one in this context is, is pragmatism.
0:14:11 Like it doesn’t need to go Mach 2.2.
0:14:17 Mach 1.7 is a totally fine minimum viable supersonic jet and it’s dramatically easier.
0:14:22 So, so part of what we learned from XB one is how to make the Overture airliner a lot easier
0:14:23 to do.
0:14:29 And it was things like, if you want to go Mach 2.2, the wings have to be really skinny.
0:14:35 And if the wings are really skinny, it’s very hard to fly takeoff and landing.
0:14:41 And so we ended up spending two years on low speed aerodynamics for takeoff and landing,
0:14:46 uh, with a, with a wing that was really designed to go super, super fast.
0:14:51 And, and then with a long skinny airplane to go Mach 2.2, it’s really hard to fit the
0:14:52 landing gear in.
0:14:58 And so we ended up, I remember in like 2019 when we’re like finishing the design of this
0:15:01 thing and kind of in the process of building it is like, wait a minute, how did we end
0:15:06 up in a corner of the universe where we have to design the most efficient shock absorber ever
0:15:06 made?
0:15:11 Like that was a bizarre, like, and we literally, we had to design the most efficient shock absorber
0:15:12 ever made for a landing gear.
0:15:13 Why?
0:15:18 Well, we, we given ourselves this like unnecessarily challenging top speed goal, which made the
0:15:23 airplane log and skinny, which made the landing gear need to fit in a very tight space, which
0:15:25 meant the shock absorbers had to be really, really good.
0:15:30 Well, why had you, I mean, it’s easy from this point of view to say like, why it was foolish
0:15:32 to try and go so fast, which is sort of what you’re saying.
0:15:37 But presumably when you picked that speed, you picked it for a reason.
0:15:38 Why’d you pick that speed?
0:15:38 Yeah.
0:15:43 Well, we, uh, there, there was sort of a scientific reason and then there was probably an emotional
0:15:44 reason.
0:15:49 And the, the, the scientific reason was we thought we were on the happy side of a lot
0:15:53 of market opportunity and on the happy side of the step changes in technological challenge,
0:15:56 uh, based on, based on what we knew from textbooks.
0:16:00 The market opportunity means the faster you go, the bigger the market.
0:16:01 I mean, is that the market opportunity?
0:16:02 That’s right.
0:16:06 Like if, you know, if you, if you speed a flight up, I’ll pick an extreme example.
0:16:08 Let’s, let’s say you speed up New York, London by like half an hour.
0:16:09 Yeah.
0:16:10 You actually make the flight worse.
0:16:12 It’s still going to be scheduled as a red eye.
0:16:13 Right.
0:16:14 But you don’t get as much sleep.
0:16:15 That’s right.
0:16:17 So it’s actually, it’s actually worse.
0:16:23 And then presumably if you can go fast enough, you can like fly the same crew to London and
0:16:26 back without having to change the crew and your economics get better or something.
0:16:26 Bingo.
0:16:28 That’s one of the ways the economics in this work.
0:16:32 When you go faster, lots of things actually get cheaper.
0:16:33 You need less crews.
0:16:36 You don’t, you don’t spend money putting people up in Marriott.
0:16:38 Like the, we call that the speed dividend.
0:16:40 There’s a lot of cost that comes down with speed.
0:16:45 Basically the cost, the benefits of going 2.2 are the same, but the cost of the marginal
0:16:48 cost of going that much faster was higher than you thought.
0:16:49 That’s, that’s right.
0:16:54 Like in fuel burn, you know, once we committed to meeting, um, the same most stringent noise
0:16:58 rules that apply to subsonic airplanes that, that actually puts a big penalty on high speed.
0:17:04 Uh, and we found that at Mach 2.2, we would be burning 40% more fuel than at 1.7.
0:17:09 And yet the, and what that meant in flight times was actually just a 15 minute difference.
0:17:11 So it made no sense.
0:17:12 And we got more pragmatic.
0:17:16 Um, and the, and the other thing that, you know, it was the kind of the emotional piece
0:17:21 of this was, you know, I sort of booted up, you know, pounding my fist on the table and
0:17:24 saying 50 years later, we should do better than Concord.
0:17:27 So we should be faster and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and all these other things.
0:17:30 And the, the reality was that wasn’t actually necessary.
0:17:35 What we needed was a pragmatic starting point that we could then continue to iterate and
0:17:39 innovate, you know, and, and overture is not the be all end all of supersonic airplanes.
0:17:44 It’s the version one and we can do a version 1.1 and we can do a version two.
0:17:53 And the thing that matters is, um, uh, ensure, ensuring that version one is sufficiently pragmatic
0:17:54 that we can, we can birth it.
0:17:55 Yeah.
0:17:58 So how fast did Concord go?
0:18:03 Uh, 2.0, actually 2.2, 2.02 actually is the precise number.
0:18:08 And you’ve, you’ve made your peace with building a, a first plane that goes slower than the
0:18:08 Concord.
0:18:10 Uh, I don’t know.
0:18:12 We’ve, I guess officially we’ve made our peace with it.
0:18:14 Um, not in your heart on the spreadsheet.
0:18:16 Not, not, not, not, not in my heart.
0:18:20 Like, cause you know, Mach 1.7 just doesn’t roll off the tongue like Mach 2.
0:18:22 No, Mach 2 sounds way cooler.
0:18:25 Mach 2 sounds way cooler, you know, and for a while, my license tag.
0:18:27 Mach 2.2.
0:18:32 And I, I, I learned that I should really never put a technical design parameter on a vanity
0:18:32 plate.
0:18:35 That was a, that was a, that was a bad decision because it made it hard.
0:18:37 It made it harder for me to admit the difficult truth.
0:18:42 When every day, when you went out and saw your car, you were getting mocked by your failure
0:18:43 in relative.
0:18:43 Yeah.
0:18:45 M-A-C-H-E-D.
0:18:45 Yes.
0:18:47 Oh, very good.
0:18:48 Very good.
0:18:50 That should be your new vanity plate to keep you humble.
0:18:56 No, now it just says supersonic because so long as I bust Mach 1, I’m good.
0:19:04 Still to come on the show, how much more time and money will it take to build a supersonic
0:19:07 plane that can carry paying passengers?
0:19:09 Also, what might go wrong?
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0:19:51 So you’re building the airliner.
0:19:54 You’re also sort of building the jets, right?
0:19:58 I know you were working with Rolls-Royce, which makes a lot of jets for airplanes now.
0:20:01 And then you stopped working with Rolls-Royce.
0:20:06 Tell me about what you’ve got to do.
0:20:10 Like, what’s the next big step in terms of the airplane, the jets?
0:20:12 Like, what do you got to do next?
0:20:13 And when do you let it go?
0:20:13 Yeah.
0:20:15 So step one, scale up those jet engines.
0:20:17 Step two, scale up the airplanes.
0:20:19 Step three, put it all together.
0:20:24 Prove to ourselves and to our regulator and the public that
0:20:26 it’s safe and then go carry passengers.
0:20:30 And so you mentioned the whole jet engine thing.
0:20:31 Yeah.
0:20:37 We actually, when I started, our plan was to go build our own jet engines, just the same
0:20:39 way SpaceX builds their own engines.
0:20:42 And then we got distracted.
0:20:47 I let us get distracted by this sort of sexy notion that we’d be able to take a Rolls-Royce
0:20:50 engine and just modify it, working with Rolls-Royce.
0:20:53 And that turned out to be just a terrible idea.
0:20:58 Most companies that build airplanes don’t build their own jets, right?
0:21:02 It’s not a crazy idea to say, we’re going to build airplanes and we’re going to let people
0:21:04 who are really good at building jets build the jets.
0:21:05 Yeah.
0:21:11 So if you look back far enough in time, it turned out Boeing, United Airlines, and Pratt & Whitney,
0:21:14 the jet engine company, were actually all the same company.
0:21:21 They were vertically integrated from the airline through to the jet engine, or I guess back then
0:21:23 it wasn’t jet engines, it was piston engines.
0:21:26 But I think that was actually the natural state of the industry.
0:21:30 And they got broken apart, not because they wanted to, but there was an airmail scandal in
0:21:33 the early 1930s, the outcome of which was the government split them up.
0:21:34 Oh, interesting.
0:21:36 An airmail scandal.
0:21:38 You don’t hear about so many airmail scandals anymore.
0:21:43 There was the airmail scandal of 1932, where what was going on was, basically the U.S.
0:21:48 government was subsidizing airmail because they wanted to get off the ground.
0:21:48 Yeah.
0:21:49 So to speak.
0:21:50 Yeah.
0:21:58 And so the retail price of airmail was less than the airlines were getting paid.
0:21:59 Yeah.
0:22:03 And so the airlines found they could make more money by going to the post office and mailing
0:22:03 bricks.
0:22:05 Oh, I love that.
0:22:06 That’s genius.
0:22:09 And so the, you know, and the postmaster general was corrupt.
0:22:11 Like, everybody was on the take.
0:22:12 It was nasty.
0:22:15 And then the industry, you know, everybody was kind of at fault here, and the industry took
0:22:16 the blame.
0:22:16 Yeah.
0:22:22 And you’re telling us why companies that make jets are different than the companies that
0:22:23 make the airplanes they go on?
0:22:24 That’s right.
0:22:25 It’s a bold claim.
0:22:25 Yeah.
0:22:26 Well, yeah.
0:22:31 And I think there is, you know, industries tend to go through cycles where vertical integration
0:22:34 is either a good strategy or a bad strategy.
0:22:39 And there’s a great book on this called The Innovator’s Solution, where they talk about under
0:22:43 what circumstances vertical integration is smart versus working with suppliers.
0:22:44 What was it?
0:22:46 Jim Barksdale’s line in the 90s?
0:22:49 There’s two businesses, bundling and unbundling.
0:22:50 It’s like that.
0:22:53 I hadn’t heard that, but I think it’s kind of true, and it’s contextual.
0:22:53 Yeah.
0:23:02 And long story short, when the current state-of-the-art technology is good enough for the end purpose,
0:23:07 the unbundling and not vertical integration tends to make sense.
0:23:12 When the components need to advance and the integration in the final product is important,
0:23:14 then vertical integration really matters.
0:23:16 And so I think there are kind of two threads to the story.
0:23:21 One is, it’s probably not a good idea for a brand-new startup to put all of its eggs in
0:23:26 the basket of a, like, hundred-year-old company that, like, is risk-averse, doesn’t want to
0:23:32 make changes, isn’t fast-moving, maybe, you know, isn’t sure what it really wants to be.
0:23:32 Right.
0:23:37 So you’re putting all of your eggs in your own basket, which is strong, certainly.
0:23:45 So what, like, what’s the next milepost you’ve got to hit?
0:23:47 Like, what’s the big, big next hurdle?
0:23:51 We’ll find out around the end of this year whether our jet engine’s working.
0:23:54 We’re building the first one right now, and we’ll see if it works.
0:23:59 And so this will be a very, very large jet engine core.
0:24:01 You know, like, it’ll be roughly four feet in diameter.
0:24:06 This is not a small piece of hardware, you know, it’ll weigh well over 10,000 pounds.
0:24:08 This is a very complex piece of turbo machinery.
0:24:12 And we’ll fire it up, and we’ll see what’s working.
0:24:15 And then next year, so that’s the core of the engine.
0:24:20 And a year later, our goal is to have a, you know, a full-up engine, not just the core,
0:24:24 but the fan and what’s called the low-pressure system as well.
0:24:27 But the core is actually the really hard part.
0:24:28 So we’re starting with the hardest part.
0:24:34 And then in parallel, you’re building the plane or designing the plane?
0:24:36 Yeah, we’re actually done designing the plane.
0:24:36 Okay.
0:24:45 So we froze the design of the Overture, I think, a week after XB-1’s final flight.
0:24:45 Okay.
0:24:49 And so that means, you know, I proverbially broke the engineer’s pencils.
0:24:54 So just now, just in the last several weeks, you froze the design of the plane.
0:24:55 You said, this is it.
0:24:56 This is the plane we’re going to build.
0:24:57 This is it.
0:24:57 This is it, right?
0:25:02 You know, like, it’s very easy for ambitious engineers to want to optimize forever.
0:25:03 Sure.
0:25:05 And we said, this is good enough for version one.
0:25:13 It’s time to stop tweaking the design and start doing the detailed engineering so we can start building this thing.
0:25:15 Tell me about what it’s going to look like.
0:25:22 So supersonic jets are in some ways sculpted by physics.
0:25:23 They’re going to be long and skinny.
0:25:26 They’re going to have a triangular kind of delta wing.
0:25:33 So in a certain sense, Overture is going to need to look Concord-like because physics says it needs to look Concord-like.
0:25:37 But the details are, the details that come so far forward.
0:25:48 One of the big aerodynamic advances versus Concord is something called area ruling, which basically says the fuselage needs to be big in the front and small in the back.
0:25:54 And so Overture looks, it looks a little bit like a Concord in a 747 had a love child.
0:25:55 Okay.
0:26:00 So it’s not literally double deck in the front, but it’s bigger in the front and skinnier in the back.
0:26:04 And this leads for a very interesting canvas.
0:26:14 And I can’t tell you yet what exactly it’s like at the front of the airplane because we’ve got something we invented that I’m incredibly excited about that we haven’t revealed yet.
0:26:18 But I think it’s going to be, I think it’s going to be a big wow factor.
0:26:22 People will look at them and say, wait a minute, you got that to fit in a skinny supersonic check?
0:26:23 An elephant.
0:26:24 What is it?
0:26:33 It is something that will be delightful for passengers.
0:26:34 A waterfall.
0:26:37 I’ll stop guessing, but I’m curious.
0:26:43 I’ll tell you right now, it’s not a hot tub.
0:26:43 Okay.
0:26:46 Cold plunge.
0:26:48 Cold plunge is the new hot tub.
0:26:50 That’s right.
0:26:54 There’s a cold plunge in the front of the airplane and the hot tub in the back of the airplane.
0:26:55 You can actually have both.
0:27:10 What do you got to do to get through the very non-trivial regulatory hurdles to get from drawing up a plane to a plane that the FAA and analogous regulators say, yes, this can fly with commercial passengers?
0:27:12 Well, we just have to prove it’s safe.
0:27:15 I mean, there’s a lot in that just, right?
0:27:17 There’s a lot in that just.
0:27:20 I mean, this will be one of the most complex safety critical machines ever built.
0:27:24 But all of the rules are published.
0:27:26 So we know exactly what we have to go do.
0:27:30 And the certification is just proving that we did it.
0:27:39 And so that will involve about 5,000 hours of flight testing and many more hours of ground testing.
0:27:50 And so just to give you a concrete sense of what this is like, on the ground, we will build a kind of a flightless bird, a copy of the airplane that will never fly.
0:27:59 And we’ll load up the wings with hydraulic presses and will bend them until they break and will make sure that they don’t break before they’re supposed to.
0:28:10 Basically, you have to prove that they can take 1.5 times the load they will ever see under the most extreme case before failing.
0:28:12 You know, that’s one example you do on the ground.
0:28:15 And then the air, you fly it through all the most extreme flight conditions.
0:28:18 You make sure it can handle bad weather.
0:28:24 You can make sure that when it flies through, you know, a snowstorm, the de-icing can keep up with the icing.
0:28:37 You shoot a chicken at the jet engines and make sure that if you get a bird strike, that either the engine doesn’t fail or it fails in a non-catastrophic way.
0:28:40 That’s actually one of the most difficult tests.
0:28:43 So, okay, so you got to do all these things.
0:28:47 What is your current target date for when I can buy a ticket?
0:28:48 About four years.
0:28:52 So our goal is to be ready for passengers by the end of 2029.
0:28:57 So about four and a half to five years from where we are today.
0:29:03 Like, flying XB1 took longer than you thought, but you’re still assuming overture is not going to take longer than you thought.
0:29:05 Setting them in parallel.
0:29:08 I mean, it’s totally possible overture will be late.
0:29:09 Yeah.
0:29:11 I mean, the way these things go, it seems likely.
0:29:17 Again, this is from ignorance, just looking at the nature of projects in many different companies in many different settings.
0:29:19 Like, plainly, what you’re trying to do is very hard.
0:29:24 And plainly, you’re only doing it because you have some amount of optimism, which is required to do the job, right?
0:29:31 And so just from that very small amount of data, I infer, like, yeah, I mean, you’re probably not going to overestimate how long it will take.
0:29:33 Yes, yeah.
0:29:36 It is highly unlikely we will get done sooner than we’re targeting.
0:29:37 You’re not going to be done early, right?
0:29:38 Yes.
0:29:45 But one of the lessons I’ve learned along the way is kind of how to think about schedules.
0:29:52 And I think schedules are actually misnamed because nothing ever goes according to plan.
0:29:52 Right.
0:29:54 And it’s not a schedule.
0:29:55 It’s actually a work plan.
0:30:05 And the point of the work plan is to allow the team to respond intelligently the moment something doesn’t go according to plan, which is basically every day.
0:30:06 Yeah, yeah.
0:30:16 And so what we do is we build what’s called a success-based schedule, meaning we don’t pad it to assume that there’s going to be failures.
0:30:27 We kind of assume everything is going to go well, and we assume that we’ll be able to do things, you know, slightly more efficiently than, you know, than like a Boeing would.
0:30:29 And so there’s some optimism built into it.
0:30:29 Yeah.
0:30:32 And many times we realize that optimism.
0:30:32 Yeah.
0:30:40 And when we find, oops, there’s something we didn’t know about, or this was harder than we expected, then we react to it in the most efficient way possible.
0:30:45 And that’s what actually results in the fastest possible delivery.
0:30:50 Because nothing ever gets done faster than the amount of time you give it.
0:30:50 Right.
0:30:53 But we’ll just take all the time they’re allowed.
0:30:53 That’s right.
0:30:55 Because they want to do the best job possible.
0:30:55 Exactly.
0:31:01 And the kind of people who come join a supertonic jet startup are incredibly ambitious and have very, very high standards.
0:31:05 So, you know, if I didn’t say the design is frozen.
0:31:07 It’s a hard trade-off, right?
0:31:11 It’s a hard trade-off because, like, there’s a million hard optimization problems that people are working on.
0:31:15 And there’s the kind of meta-optimization problem of how long do you spend on each thing.
0:31:16 That’s right.
0:31:17 That’s right.
0:31:19 And there’s, like, you know, when do you declare good enough?
0:31:19 Yeah.
0:31:20 Right?
0:31:30 And that was, I mean, there are so many stories of, you know, really, I think part of my role is help the team decide when’s good enough.
0:31:37 And, you know, what things have to be in 1.0 versus what things we can save for 1.1.
0:31:37 Right.
0:31:43 And having good judgment about that makes it much easier to actually ship 1.0.
0:31:44 Right.
0:31:48 You don’t need to build the most perfect supersonic jet ever.
0:31:50 You just need to build one that is safe and reliable.
0:31:52 That’s right.
0:31:55 So, let’s talk about money.
0:32:03 How much have you raised and how much do you need to get the first 1.0 overture flying with passengers?
0:32:10 So, a thing I’ve come to believe is that one of the most important things in pulling this off is being incredibly efficient with capital.
0:32:13 We’ve raised about $600 million.
0:32:17 We’ve spent less than $500 million.
0:32:23 And with that, we built and flew a supersonic jet with a human on board.
0:32:24 We designed an airliner.
0:32:26 We designed an engine.
0:32:28 And we did all the other things that started to pass to do over a decade.
0:32:31 So, what does that mean going forward?
0:32:36 We need less than a billion dollars of investor funding from where we are now to finish.
0:32:42 So, when you say investor funding, like, are you assuming more pre-orders?
0:32:46 Or you think for less than a billion dollars, you can actually, or less than a billion dollars more,
0:32:52 you can actually build a plane that’s going to take passengers across the ocean?
0:32:53 Yeah.
0:32:55 Part of it is being very smart with capital leverage.
0:33:02 You know, so, for example, you know, we will be able to go use debt to buy capital equipment.
0:33:03 Right?
0:33:09 So, like, a lot of production equipment will be financed without requiring, you know, equity investment from investors.
0:33:10 Uh-huh.
0:33:12 And we’ve already been able to do some of that.
0:33:13 So, there’s a lot.
0:33:16 Smart financial engineering is part of the solution.
0:33:20 The other part of the solution is being incredibly efficient in execution.
0:33:23 You know, I still tell, by the way, this is, in some ways, the most difficult thing.
0:33:26 Spending the money intelligently, basically?
0:33:27 Yeah.
0:33:35 Well, the way I frame it for our team internally, and we’re just very open about this, I say our single biggest risk as a company is we don’t get done for an obtainable amount of money.
0:33:36 Yeah.
0:33:41 Well, because the physics, we’ve known the physics for, whatever, 50 years or more, right?
0:33:48 Like, plainly, one can build a supersonic jet, but building it cheaply enough, in your case, to survive, right?
0:33:53 And then, in the long run, to have it be commercially viable is the hard part, right?
0:33:56 Yeah, so, one half of this is, how do we execute really efficiently?
0:34:03 How do we have a small team of world-class engineers with incredibly good software tools?
0:34:09 And we’re using a lot of software, and we’re using some AI, such that one engineer can do the work of 10.
0:34:16 And that allows us to be really efficient with our money, and we are just absolutely miserably about money, on one hand.
0:34:33 On the other hand, we need to have a capital structure that’s very good for investors, and that leverages non-dilutive financing sources, be it customer prepayments, or plant and equipment debt, or public support, to kind of lever up those investor dollars to make the whole thing economically viable.
0:34:35 What’s public support mean?
0:34:55 So, we had a fantastic package that we got from the state of North Carolina that funded the super factory in Greensboro, where the state of North Carolina so wanted them to come and build the airplane there, that just as they welcomed the Wright brothers 100 years ago, they welcomed us.
0:35:02 And that basically paid for the entire site prep and build out of the super factory.
0:35:09 And we were incredibly grateful for that, and I want to make sure we pay it forward in North Carolina.
0:35:21 I’ve heard you say on an interview you did in the last year or so that you underestimated how hard it was going to be to build the company, to build the supersonic jet.
0:35:31 And I’m curious, if you look forward now to going from here to, you know, having passengers on a jet, do you think you’re underestimating how hard that’s going to be?
0:35:35 I am sure there are problems that we will have that I don’t know about today.
0:35:36 Yeah.
0:35:42 That’s a different—I mean, it’s a weird question, because if you’re underestimating it, then you would revise your estimation.
0:35:44 It’s like, why is the stock market wrong?
0:35:46 But, like, I don’t know.
0:35:49 I mean, maybe you have to underestimate it.
0:35:50 Like, I don’t know.
0:35:52 You know, people always say, if I knew how hard it was going to be, I wouldn’t have done it.
0:35:54 And I don’t know if they really mean that, but—
0:35:57 I think some people mean it, and I find that really sad.
0:36:02 And I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way.
0:36:06 I mean, like, actually, like, boy, like, this startup stuff is so hard.
0:36:11 And it just kills me that someone would put in all of the effort required to birth a new company and a new product from scratch.
0:36:13 And it is really hard.
0:36:14 It’s like chewing on glass.
0:36:18 And then to do it for somebody, they’re like, wow, I wish I hadn’t.
0:36:20 Like, that is really sad.
0:36:25 And by the way, I have my chewing on glass days for sure, and I’m sure I’ll have more.
0:36:30 And the worst of it is when I look in the mirror, and I’m not sure whether I’m up for the job.
0:36:35 I mean, I think, like, boy, someone better than me could have done this, but I don’t know if I can.
0:36:41 You know, or I look at a problem we have, and it’s not, you know, and it’s very much my responsibility and my error.
0:36:43 Like, those are the hardest days.
0:36:56 And yet, I care so darn much about this that it’s worth that personal hell to give it everything I’ve got.
0:36:58 And I don’t regret it.
0:37:01 Even the days where I’m like, boy, I don’t know whether we’re going to get through this.
0:37:06 And we’ve had a bunch of those days, and I think I’d be foolish to think that we won’t have them again.
0:37:11 Why is supersonic flight your thing?
0:37:14 Like, why is that what you have devoted your professional life to?
0:37:24 And one of the principles I have for myself now is I only want to work on things that might not happen if I didn’t work on them.
0:37:29 And if the world followed that, we’d have a lot less photo sharing apps and fewer AI companies, but maybe things like traffic would be solved.
0:37:39 And, you know, for me specifically with supersonic flight, my kids had a grandfather who lived in Hong Kong, you know, 18 hours from us in Denver,
0:37:42 that they got to meet maybe three or four times their entire life.
0:37:44 And so they never got to know him.
0:37:51 And I grew up with my grandfather 90 minutes away, and I got to spend every weekend with him, and I’m a different person because of that.
0:37:58 And so I’ve had a lot of personal experiences that basically say, hey, speed’s not about saving time or being really cool.
0:38:01 Although it is about saving time and being really cool.
0:38:03 Speed is about what you choose to do or not do.
0:38:10 And there are all kinds of things in the world that don’t happen because flights are too long.
0:38:16 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:38:26 Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?
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0:38:32 More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.
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0:38:39 So whatever your customers listen to, they’ll hear your message.
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0:38:45 Think podcasting can help your business?
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0:38:54 That’s 844-844-IHEART.
0:38:58 Okay, let’s finish with the lightning round.
0:39:03 And then before you started the company, you made a list of things you wanted to work on
0:39:07 and you sort of rank ordered them and how happy it would make you to work on them.
0:39:09 Obviously, Supersonic Jet was one.
0:39:10 But what was two?
0:39:14 It fell off really quickly.
0:39:16 But what was the distant second?
0:39:19 Like, I had a rental car company idea.
0:39:19 Huh.
0:39:25 That would be like a, like, your rental car picks you up like an Uber, then you get in
0:39:26 and drive it.
0:39:28 Like, it’s not, like, I would love that product.
0:39:30 I don’t think it’s a great business idea.
0:39:33 Uh, what was the scariest part of getting your pilot’s license?
0:39:39 Oh, I remember that very first moment of takeoff in what turned out to be Larry Ellison’s
0:39:40 old airplane.
0:39:46 Um, and there was this moment of like, holy crap, I’m scared because I got my life in my
0:39:47 own hands.
0:39:47 Yeah.
0:39:49 It’s like when you learn to drive a car.
0:39:50 I remember that when I learned to drive a car.
0:39:53 It’s like, I could just swerve into the oncoming lane right now.
0:39:53 Right.
0:39:55 It felt really fragile.
0:39:56 Like, I’ve got my life in my own hands.
0:40:01 But then there was the other side of that same coin, which is, this is really cool.
0:40:03 I’ve got my life in my own hands.
0:40:03 Uh-huh.
0:40:07 What was the scariest part of working with Jeff Bezos?
0:40:11 Uh, Jeff was great to work with.
0:40:15 And I was incredibly privileged in my early twenties that I got to work on something he
0:40:15 cared about.
0:40:16 Uh-huh.
0:40:22 Uh, and Jeff, um, one of, one of the, one of the best things about Jeff is he very fairly
0:40:23 calls the balls from the strikes.
0:40:30 And he, um, and he rewards honesty and accountability.
0:40:35 So I remember at one point, um, this was actually my very first time presenting to him and if
0:40:39 the presentation’s overall going well, um, this is before he banned PowerPoint and I get
0:40:41 to some slide and he says, well, why didn’t you do X?
0:40:46 And, uh, X was actually a pretty good idea.
0:40:46 Yeah.
0:40:49 And, and I said, well, we didn’t think of that.
0:40:54 And, and, and he starts laughing that like famous big Jeff Bezos laugh.
0:40:54 Yeah.
0:40:56 And he says, that’s a great answer.
0:40:58 It’s true all the time, but no one will ever say it.
0:41:02 He understands that anybody sufficiently ambitious is going to make mistakes.
0:41:04 And what matters is to own them and learn from them.
0:41:06 And he always rewarded that.
0:41:10 And that’s, that’s something I try to emulate myself as a, as a leader.
0:41:11 Okay.
0:41:17 Briefly, let’s do a few overrated or underrated questions for jet travel.
0:41:20 Um, checking luggage, overrated or underrated?
0:41:21 Underrated.
0:41:25 The, the way this should work is you take your Uber to the airport.
0:41:27 Someone grabs your bag from the trunk.
0:41:30 You go through the airport only with what you actually want with you on the airplane.
0:41:34 When you arrive on the other side, you go to your Uber and your check bag is already in
0:41:35 your trunk.
0:41:38 That’s a, that’s a compelling dream.
0:41:40 Overrated or underrated the window seat?
0:41:44 It, it, it, I think it’s highly rated and underrated.
0:41:46 Like I, I am glued to that window.
0:41:48 I love highly rated, but still underrated things.
0:41:53 So I feel about Bob Dylan, um, neck pillows, overrated or underrated?
0:41:55 It’s not for me under, uh, overrated.
0:41:56 Same.
0:42:05 Blake Schoel is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic.
0:42:08 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang.
0:42:13 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cott and engineered by Sarah Brugier.
0:42:17 You can email us at problem at pushkin.fm.
0:42:21 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:30 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:31 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:31 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:31 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:32 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:32 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:00:11 Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?
0:00:11 Think again.
0:00:16 More Americans listen to podcasts, then add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.
0:00:20 And as the number one podcaster, iHeart’s twice as large as the next two combined.
0:00:22 Learn how podcasting can help your business.
0:00:24 Call 844-844-iHeart.
0:00:29 The first airline ever, the first airline in the history of the world,
0:00:31 started in 1914.
0:00:36 It flew passengers just a short hop across the bay from St. Petersburg to Tampa,
0:00:39 and its maximum speed was about 60 miles an hour.
0:00:43 By the 1960s, just 50 years later,
0:00:46 passenger jets were flying 10 times as fast as that.
0:00:50 And that increase in speed transformed the meaning of travel.
0:00:55 But then, after the 60s, air travel just stopped getting faster.
0:01:00 A flight today takes about as long as a flight took 60 years ago.
0:01:04 We’ve gone from a 10x improvement to no improvement at all.
0:01:06 What happened?
0:01:14 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem?
0:01:18 The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
0:01:23 My guest today is Blake Scholl, the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic.
0:01:25 Blake’s problem is this.
0:01:29 Can you build a commercial airplane that flies faster than the speed of sound,
0:01:31 and that can turn a profit?
0:01:35 Blake started the company in 2014.
0:01:41 Since then, he’s secured pre-orders from Japan Airlines, United, and American Airlines.
0:01:46 And he and his team built a test plane that flew faster than the speed of sound.
0:01:52 Now, they’re working on a full-size commercial jet that Blake hopes will fly at Mach 1.7,
0:01:58 1.7 times the speed of sound, or roughly twice as fast as commercial jets fly today.
0:02:02 To start, I asked Blake about the Concorde.
0:02:06 The Concorde, of course, is the only supersonic commercial passenger jet
0:02:09 ever built, ever flown, with passengers on it.
0:02:12 But the Concorde stopped flying more than 20 years ago.
0:02:15 And today, it’s widely viewed as a failure.
0:02:20 I think Concorde killed supersonic flight, and Apollo killed space exploration.
0:02:26 And yet, in 1969, we had that first moon landing, and we had that first flight of Concorde.
0:02:32 And at the time, it looked like both of these were harbingers of huge technological progress
0:02:32 for humanity.
0:02:38 And I think if you stopped somebody in the street in 1969 and said, in 2025, what do you
0:02:40 think space exploration will be like?
0:02:41 What do you think flight will be like?
0:02:45 No one would have predicted that supersonic would be gone, and moon landings would be gone.
0:02:45 Right.
0:02:47 But that was the peak.
0:02:48 It wasn’t going to get any better.
0:02:53 And in fact, in terms of commercial air travel, it was going to get worse.
0:02:54 Yeah, everything got worse.
0:02:56 Everything got worse.
0:03:00 And I think Concorde and Apollo are actually brethren.
0:03:05 Both were technologically extremely impressive.
0:03:12 Like, what we did in the 1960s with rockets and airplanes, with slide rolls, drafting paper,
0:03:16 wind tunnels, is extremely technologically impressive.
0:03:19 Yet, the motivation is what was killer.
0:03:27 And both Concorde and Apollo were Cold War-era glory projects led by governments who are competing
0:03:28 for prestige.
0:03:30 Basically, to show up the Soviet Union, right?
0:03:35 To show the superiority of Western capitalism over Soviet communism.
0:03:39 Yes, except the deep irony is we did it the communist way.
0:03:39 Right.
0:03:42 They were command and control projects that made no economic sense.
0:03:45 They were command and control projects with no economic sense.
0:03:51 And it turns out, when the West copied, effectively, the communist approach, for a little while,
0:03:55 we had technological superiority because of, you know, the momentum that we had.
0:03:57 But then we destroyed ourselves.
0:04:01 And so, you know, Apollo didn’t even pretend to have anything commercial, right?
0:04:01 Yeah.
0:04:04 Like, it was operating on, like, a percentage of GDP.
0:04:05 Right.
0:04:10 Which is to say, an incredibly large amount of money relative to the overall economy went
0:04:13 into getting a very small number of people to the moon a few times.
0:04:14 That’s right.
0:04:14 Yeah.
0:04:19 And, you know, and the knock-on effect of that, you know, for the entire aerospace supply
0:04:24 chain, it was basically, you know, land on the moon at all costs or at any cost.
0:04:31 And the result was the entire, you know, space out of the supply chain got drunk on these incredibly
0:04:34 lucrative contracts where cost was no object, right?
0:04:36 And then after the Cold War, it only got worse.
0:04:40 And we put all of the, like, defense industrial base on corporate welfare.
0:04:42 And they got fat and dumb.
0:04:43 Yeah.
0:04:50 And then on the Concorde side, it at least looked better because on paper, this was a commercial
0:04:53 airplane where people could buy tickets and airlines would buy the airplanes.
0:04:56 And, you know, the airlines would make money.
0:04:59 But in reality, it wasn’t that.
0:05:01 Here’s a hundred-seat airplane.
0:05:04 By the way, a hundred, like, actually pretty uncomfortable seats.
0:05:09 And what, you know, ejected for inflation was a $20,000 ticket.
0:05:14 And you just can’t find a hundred people that want to pay 20 grand to go somewhere really
0:05:14 fast.
0:05:16 I mean, this is for royalty and rock stars.
0:05:23 And especially with, like, 80s and 90s kind of travel demand, the thing flew half empty.
0:05:28 On the best route in the world, which is New York to London, you know, if you want to find
0:05:31 people who want to pay a lot of money to go fast, New York to London’s the best city pair
0:05:31 you could pick.
0:05:35 And it doesn’t work at all economically beyond that.
0:05:38 And so, and then the world drew all the wrong conclusions.
0:05:41 You know, they concluded, like, supersonic flight had to be expensive.
0:05:44 It had to be cramped and uncomfortable.
0:05:46 It had to be noisy.
0:05:47 It had to be uneconomic.
0:05:54 And it’s like, imagine if we built, like, the Univac, you know, like one of the first mainframe
0:05:55 computers.
0:05:57 It was just like the size of the room.
0:05:59 And you have to be like a bank to afford it.
0:06:01 And then we stopped.
0:06:05 And then 50 years later, people would swear up and down that you could never possibly have
0:06:09 a pocket computer that everyday people could afford.
0:06:14 But yet, you know, Concord is like the Univac.
0:06:16 Uh-huh.
0:06:19 It’s a design from the 1960s, basically.
0:06:20 That’s right.
0:06:25 And I say this with, like, deep admiration for the incredible technical work that went
0:06:25 into it.
0:06:30 A lot of people worked really hard and did amazing things.
0:06:33 You know, now that we are, you know, now that at Boom we have, like, built and flown a supersonic
0:06:39 jet, what we can see is they did really, really well given the tech that was available in the
0:06:40 1960s.
0:06:41 It’s extremely impressive.
0:06:44 You know, like, in Britain and France, people are incredibly proud of Concord.
0:06:47 And from a technological level, like, they deserve to be.
0:06:51 So, okay, you were a software developer, right?
0:06:52 You weren’t a plane guy.
0:06:54 You weren’t an aerospace engineer.
0:07:00 But, like, whatever, 12 years ago or something, you got interested in this idea of supersonic
0:07:03 air travel, of why aren’t there supersonic jets?
0:07:05 So you have this question in your mind.
0:07:06 You go try and figure it out.
0:07:07 What do you find?
0:07:12 The internet was full of all this conventional wisdom about why flights aren’t faster.
0:07:14 And you can still find some of these YouTube videos.
0:07:18 And they say things like, supersonic flight is inherently more expensive.
0:07:20 Passengers always buy the cheapest ticket.
0:07:23 So supersonic flight will never be commercially viable.
0:07:25 And, like, hang on.
0:07:28 Well, first off, that’s a qualitative claim about a quantitative question.
0:07:31 And it doesn’t even really completely make sense, right?
0:07:35 Like, the whole reason we have jet flights is because people wanted to go faster than propeller
0:07:36 flights.
0:07:41 The reason people pay more for direct flights than connecting is they want to save time and
0:07:41 hassle.
0:07:45 Time is the one resource that’s not ever renewable.
0:07:49 So the idea that people wouldn’t pay for time savings didn’t completely make sense.
0:07:49 Sure.
0:07:54 Plainly, at some margin, some people will pay some amount more to go some amount faster, right?
0:07:54 Exactly.
0:07:56 The question is, what are all the margins?
0:07:56 Yeah.
0:07:57 Exactly.
0:07:58 You’re totally right.
0:08:00 It’s a quantitative question, not a qualitative one.
0:08:01 Yeah.
0:08:05 And I think one of the lessons of, I think, the boom story is never accept a qualitative answer
0:08:06 to a quantitative question.
0:08:07 Go run the math.
0:08:07 Yeah.
0:08:10 So, okay, what is the actual cost of supersonic flight?
0:08:13 And what is people’s actual willingness to pay to go faster?
0:08:19 So it turned out it took two weeks to find the key idea, which is, I mean, today there is
0:08:23 a huge market for international business class.
0:08:32 It’s roughly 20% of passengers and 80% of international airline profits on business class, which is flying
0:08:36 beds for people who so hate that flights are long that they want to try and sleep through
0:08:37 them on the airplane.
0:08:44 Um, and so that the original boom idea was, well, what if we could make a supersonic seat
0:08:49 with the economics of a flying bed in business class, but on an airplane sufficiently fast
0:08:51 that you wouldn’t need to sleep on it, you could sleep at home instead.
0:08:55 And, uh, and so the first question I asked is, well, how much would you have to beat Concord
0:09:02 by on just basic airplane efficiency in order to create a seat with the economics of a flying
0:09:03 bed?
0:09:05 And the answer was less than 10%.
0:09:06 Uh-huh.
0:09:09 So like Concord was almost there by your reckoning.
0:09:11 Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s right.
0:09:20 Um, the, the, if you could improve the gas mileage basically of Concord by less than 10%, um, that
0:09:24 you would tip over to this happy point where you could have a supersonic seat with the economics
0:09:25 of a flatbed in business class.
0:09:32 And instead of being this like stratospheric airplane that like flies mostly empty, uh, a
0:09:33 whole bunch of modern demand would be there.
0:09:36 The seats would fill at a high rate and the market would be gigantic.
0:09:42 Um, and, uh, and so that, that took two weeks and I was like that, well, I don’t know anything
0:09:42 about airplanes.
0:09:45 Like all I had at that point was my pilot’s license.
0:09:49 Uh, but 10% versus 1960s technology didn’t seem crazy.
0:09:54 Uh, so at the, at that point I was like, okay, if I’m going to go do this, I need to know a
0:09:55 heck of a lot more.
0:10:02 And it sort of kicked off what was really a, a 12 month journey for me, uh, getting educated
0:10:02 in aerospace.
0:10:07 So when you’re, when you say 10%, I mean, is that sort of a marginal cost calculation?
0:10:14 Like that, that is that basically setting aside the fixed cost of building the first plane and
0:10:17 then building, well, building the first plane.
0:10:21 Like that seems like the big unknown in the math there is how much is it going to cost to
0:10:22 make plane number one?
0:10:23 Yeah.
0:10:25 I mean, so there, there are a few things that matter, right?
0:10:29 The, uh, the, the, the, the first thing is if we could manage to produce the airplane,
0:10:33 would it, would it be affordable for passengers and profitable for airlines?
0:10:33 Yeah.
0:10:38 That’s kind of the first principles version is like, let’s just look at the physics and like
0:10:40 things with what we know.
0:10:45 Is it theoretically possible to build an airplane that can fly enough people from New York to
0:10:50 London if they pay business class, but sit upright at supersonic speeds?
0:10:52 Does the first principles math pencil out?
0:10:53 That’s the math you’re doing there.
0:10:53 That’s right.
0:10:59 If, you know, with technology that’s available, is it possible to build an airplane that is
0:11:01 affordable for passengers and profitable for airlines?
0:11:03 And it turned out the answer was yes.
0:11:04 Uh-huh.
0:11:06 And what is business class New York London?
0:11:07 What is that?
0:11:08 Five grand?
0:11:08 Something like that?
0:11:09 Yeah.
0:11:09 Yeah.
0:11:09 About that.
0:11:11 I mean, actually people routinely pay more than five grand.
0:11:16 The economics of our airplane, it turns out 3,500 is breakeven.
0:11:16 Okay.
0:11:20 So at five grand, it’s very profitable for airlines and people pay five grand.
0:11:22 By the way, round trip routinely.
0:11:23 Yeah.
0:11:24 Okay.
0:11:29 So you’ve got the kind of first principles back of the envelope math that looks promising.
0:11:31 So you started the company.
0:11:31 Yes.
0:11:34 And that was what?
0:11:36 About 10 years ago, right?
0:11:37 That was…
0:11:37 Yeah.
0:11:41 It was about 11 years ago now that I was making that spreadsheet.
0:11:41 Yeah.
0:11:47 Um, and, uh, you know, we’ll, we’ll turn, we’ll turn 11 on paper in September because that
0:11:50 was when I got to the point where, okay, I’m, I’m actually really committed.
0:11:51 It’s time to go.
0:12:00 Um, I love that you called it boom, uh, leaning in, like embracing the haters in some, in some
0:12:00 fashion.
0:12:03 Um, tell me about the boom.
0:12:04 Let’s talk about supersonic booms.
0:12:06 Yeah.
0:12:11 So my belief from day one was that the boom would not be the blocker.
0:12:18 And that, that spreadsheet basically said there is a gigantic market for supersonic flight,
0:12:25 even if the boom is entirely unsolved and you have to fly subsonic over land, um, and supersonic
0:12:32 over water and focus initially on, on, on routes that were primarily trans oceanic.
0:12:37 Just to be clear in the U S right now, commercial flights are not allowed to fly supersonic, even
0:12:40 if there were a plane that could do it by regulation, right?
0:12:42 Because of the boom, is that the starting point?
0:12:43 Yeah.
0:12:47 So that, that’s where we started because the premise was, Hey, it’s pretty ambitious to start
0:12:51 a brand new company from scratch where your goal is to build a supersonic airliner.
0:12:55 Let’s let, so let’s not, uh, let’s not push anything too far.
0:12:59 Let’s operate only with existing technology and only with existing regulations.
0:13:05 Uh, and that would, that would have some hope of making it tractable for a startup to go
0:13:05 do.
0:13:12 So I want to talk a little bit about the last 10 years and building, uh, XB one, your test
0:13:13 plane.
0:13:20 Um, and I’m curious in particular, I mean, sort of unsurprisingly, it has taken longer than
0:13:23 you thought, which it would be shocking if it didn’t write given the nature of the project.
0:13:28 But I’m curious, like what were some of the things you thought at the, at the jump that
0:13:29 turned out to be wrong?
0:13:32 You know, things where you went down the wrong path and had to do something different.
0:13:33 Yeah.
0:13:39 So, so when we started out with XB one, we gave it some really, really aggressive, uh, goals.
0:13:41 Uh, so we wanted to go 10% faster than Concord.
0:13:43 We wanted to do it with a passenger on board.
0:13:46 Uh, we wanted to not need an afterburner.
0:13:51 Like we gave it all these, you know, fairly aggressive goals that were actually well beyond
0:13:52 what was really necessary.
0:13:58 Uh, but we thought we didn’t appreciate all of the challenges that would, would come with
0:13:58 that.
0:14:01 And so we actually made the job a lot harder than it needed to be.
0:14:08 And, and the, the biggest thing that we learned on XB one in this context is, is pragmatism.
0:14:11 Like it doesn’t need to go Mach 2.2.
0:14:17 Mach 1.7 is a totally fine minimum viable supersonic jet and it’s dramatically easier.
0:14:22 So, so part of what we learned from XB one is how to make the Overture airliner a lot easier
0:14:23 to do.
0:14:29 And it was things like, if you want to go Mach 2.2, the wings have to be really skinny.
0:14:35 And if the wings are really skinny, it’s very hard to fly takeoff and landing.
0:14:41 And so we ended up spending two years on low speed aerodynamics for takeoff and landing,
0:14:46 uh, with a, with a wing that was really designed to go super, super fast.
0:14:51 And, and then with a long skinny airplane to go Mach 2.2, it’s really hard to fit the
0:14:52 landing gear in.
0:14:58 And so we ended up, I remember in like 2019 when we’re like finishing the design of this
0:15:01 thing and kind of in the process of building it is like, wait a minute, how did we end
0:15:06 up in a corner of the universe where we have to design the most efficient shock absorber ever
0:15:06 made?
0:15:11 Like that was a bizarre, like, and we literally, we had to design the most efficient shock absorber
0:15:12 ever made for a landing gear.
0:15:13 Why?
0:15:18 Well, we, we given ourselves this like unnecessarily challenging top speed goal, which made the
0:15:23 airplane log and skinny, which made the landing gear need to fit in a very tight space, which
0:15:25 meant the shock absorbers had to be really, really good.
0:15:30 Well, why had you, I mean, it’s easy from this point of view to say like, why it was foolish
0:15:32 to try and go so fast, which is sort of what you’re saying.
0:15:37 But presumably when you picked that speed, you picked it for a reason.
0:15:38 Why’d you pick that speed?
0:15:38 Yeah.
0:15:43 Well, we, uh, there, there was sort of a scientific reason and then there was probably an emotional
0:15:44 reason.
0:15:49 And the, the, the scientific reason was we thought we were on the happy side of a lot
0:15:53 of market opportunity and on the happy side of the step changes in technological challenge,
0:15:56 uh, based on, based on what we knew from textbooks.
0:16:00 The market opportunity means the faster you go, the bigger the market.
0:16:01 I mean, is that the market opportunity?
0:16:02 That’s right.
0:16:06 Like if, you know, if you, if you speed a flight up, I’ll pick an extreme example.
0:16:08 Let’s, let’s say you speed up New York, London by like half an hour.
0:16:09 Yeah.
0:16:10 You actually make the flight worse.
0:16:12 It’s still going to be scheduled as a red eye.
0:16:13 Right.
0:16:14 But you don’t get as much sleep.
0:16:15 That’s right.
0:16:17 So it’s actually, it’s actually worse.
0:16:23 And then presumably if you can go fast enough, you can like fly the same crew to London and
0:16:26 back without having to change the crew and your economics get better or something.
0:16:26 Bingo.
0:16:28 That’s one of the ways the economics in this work.
0:16:32 When you go faster, lots of things actually get cheaper.
0:16:33 You need less crews.
0:16:36 You don’t, you don’t spend money putting people up in Marriott.
0:16:38 Like the, we call that the speed dividend.
0:16:40 There’s a lot of cost that comes down with speed.
0:16:45 Basically the cost, the benefits of going 2.2 are the same, but the cost of the marginal
0:16:48 cost of going that much faster was higher than you thought.
0:16:49 That’s, that’s right.
0:16:54 Like in fuel burn, you know, once we committed to meeting, um, the same most stringent noise
0:16:58 rules that apply to subsonic airplanes that, that actually puts a big penalty on high speed.
0:17:04 Uh, and we found that at Mach 2.2, we would be burning 40% more fuel than at 1.7.
0:17:09 And yet the, and what that meant in flight times was actually just a 15 minute difference.
0:17:11 So it made no sense.
0:17:12 And we got more pragmatic.
0:17:16 Um, and the, and the other thing that, you know, it was the kind of the emotional piece
0:17:21 of this was, you know, I sort of booted up, you know, pounding my fist on the table and
0:17:24 saying 50 years later, we should do better than Concord.
0:17:27 So we should be faster and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and all these other things.
0:17:30 And the, the reality was that wasn’t actually necessary.
0:17:35 What we needed was a pragmatic starting point that we could then continue to iterate and
0:17:39 innovate, you know, and, and overture is not the be all end all of supersonic airplanes.
0:17:44 It’s the version one and we can do a version 1.1 and we can do a version two.
0:17:53 And the thing that matters is, um, uh, ensure, ensuring that version one is sufficiently pragmatic
0:17:54 that we can, we can birth it.
0:17:55 Yeah.
0:17:58 So how fast did Concord go?
0:18:03 Uh, 2.0, actually 2.2, 2.02 actually is the precise number.
0:18:08 And you’ve, you’ve made your peace with building a, a first plane that goes slower than the
0:18:08 Concord.
0:18:10 Uh, I don’t know.
0:18:12 We’ve, I guess officially we’ve made our peace with it.
0:18:14 Um, not in your heart on the spreadsheet.
0:18:16 Not, not, not, not, not in my heart.
0:18:20 Like, cause you know, Mach 1.7 just doesn’t roll off the tongue like Mach 2.
0:18:22 No, Mach 2 sounds way cooler.
0:18:25 Mach 2 sounds way cooler, you know, and for a while, my license tag.
0:18:27 Mach 2.2.
0:18:32 And I, I, I learned that I should really never put a technical design parameter on a vanity
0:18:32 plate.
0:18:35 That was a, that was a, that was a bad decision because it made it hard.
0:18:37 It made it harder for me to admit the difficult truth.
0:18:42 When every day, when you went out and saw your car, you were getting mocked by your failure
0:18:43 in relative.
0:18:43 Yeah.
0:18:45 M-A-C-H-E-D.
0:18:45 Yes.
0:18:47 Oh, very good.
0:18:48 Very good.
0:18:50 That should be your new vanity plate to keep you humble.
0:18:56 No, now it just says supersonic because so long as I bust Mach 1, I’m good.
0:19:04 Still to come on the show, how much more time and money will it take to build a supersonic
0:19:07 plane that can carry paying passengers?
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0:19:51 So you’re building the airliner.
0:19:54 You’re also sort of building the jets, right?
0:19:58 I know you were working with Rolls-Royce, which makes a lot of jets for airplanes now.
0:20:01 And then you stopped working with Rolls-Royce.
0:20:06 Tell me about what you’ve got to do.
0:20:10 Like, what’s the next big step in terms of the airplane, the jets?
0:20:12 Like, what do you got to do next?
0:20:13 And when do you let it go?
0:20:13 Yeah.
0:20:15 So step one, scale up those jet engines.
0:20:17 Step two, scale up the airplanes.
0:20:19 Step three, put it all together.
0:20:24 Prove to ourselves and to our regulator and the public that
0:20:26 it’s safe and then go carry passengers.
0:20:30 And so you mentioned the whole jet engine thing.
0:20:31 Yeah.
0:20:37 We actually, when I started, our plan was to go build our own jet engines, just the same
0:20:39 way SpaceX builds their own engines.
0:20:42 And then we got distracted.
0:20:47 I let us get distracted by this sort of sexy notion that we’d be able to take a Rolls-Royce
0:20:50 engine and just modify it, working with Rolls-Royce.
0:20:53 And that turned out to be just a terrible idea.
0:20:58 Most companies that build airplanes don’t build their own jets, right?
0:21:02 It’s not a crazy idea to say, we’re going to build airplanes and we’re going to let people
0:21:04 who are really good at building jets build the jets.
0:21:05 Yeah.
0:21:11 So if you look back far enough in time, it turned out Boeing, United Airlines, and Pratt & Whitney,
0:21:14 the jet engine company, were actually all the same company.
0:21:21 They were vertically integrated from the airline through to the jet engine, or I guess back then
0:21:23 it wasn’t jet engines, it was piston engines.
0:21:26 But I think that was actually the natural state of the industry.
0:21:30 And they got broken apart, not because they wanted to, but there was an airmail scandal in
0:21:33 the early 1930s, the outcome of which was the government split them up.
0:21:34 Oh, interesting.
0:21:36 An airmail scandal.
0:21:38 You don’t hear about so many airmail scandals anymore.
0:21:43 There was the airmail scandal of 1932, where what was going on was, basically the U.S.
0:21:48 government was subsidizing airmail because they wanted to get off the ground.
0:21:48 Yeah.
0:21:49 So to speak.
0:21:50 Yeah.
0:21:58 And so the retail price of airmail was less than the airlines were getting paid.
0:21:59 Yeah.
0:22:03 And so the airlines found they could make more money by going to the post office and mailing
0:22:03 bricks.
0:22:05 Oh, I love that.
0:22:06 That’s genius.
0:22:09 And so the, you know, and the postmaster general was corrupt.
0:22:11 Like, everybody was on the take.
0:22:12 It was nasty.
0:22:15 And then the industry, you know, everybody was kind of at fault here, and the industry took
0:22:16 the blame.
0:22:16 Yeah.
0:22:22 And you’re telling us why companies that make jets are different than the companies that
0:22:23 make the airplanes they go on?
0:22:24 That’s right.
0:22:25 It’s a bold claim.
0:22:25 Yeah.
0:22:26 Well, yeah.
0:22:31 And I think there is, you know, industries tend to go through cycles where vertical integration
0:22:34 is either a good strategy or a bad strategy.
0:22:39 And there’s a great book on this called The Innovator’s Solution, where they talk about under
0:22:43 what circumstances vertical integration is smart versus working with suppliers.
0:22:44 What was it?
0:22:46 Jim Barksdale’s line in the 90s?
0:22:49 There’s two businesses, bundling and unbundling.
0:22:50 It’s like that.
0:22:53 I hadn’t heard that, but I think it’s kind of true, and it’s contextual.
0:22:53 Yeah.
0:23:02 And long story short, when the current state-of-the-art technology is good enough for the end purpose,
0:23:07 the unbundling and not vertical integration tends to make sense.
0:23:12 When the components need to advance and the integration in the final product is important,
0:23:14 then vertical integration really matters.
0:23:16 And so I think there are kind of two threads to the story.
0:23:21 One is, it’s probably not a good idea for a brand-new startup to put all of its eggs in
0:23:26 the basket of a, like, hundred-year-old company that, like, is risk-averse, doesn’t want to
0:23:32 make changes, isn’t fast-moving, maybe, you know, isn’t sure what it really wants to be.
0:23:32 Right.
0:23:37 So you’re putting all of your eggs in your own basket, which is strong, certainly.
0:23:45 So what, like, what’s the next milepost you’ve got to hit?
0:23:47 Like, what’s the big, big next hurdle?
0:23:51 We’ll find out around the end of this year whether our jet engine’s working.
0:23:54 We’re building the first one right now, and we’ll see if it works.
0:23:59 And so this will be a very, very large jet engine core.
0:24:01 You know, like, it’ll be roughly four feet in diameter.
0:24:06 This is not a small piece of hardware, you know, it’ll weigh well over 10,000 pounds.
0:24:08 This is a very complex piece of turbo machinery.
0:24:12 And we’ll fire it up, and we’ll see what’s working.
0:24:15 And then next year, so that’s the core of the engine.
0:24:20 And a year later, our goal is to have a, you know, a full-up engine, not just the core,
0:24:24 but the fan and what’s called the low-pressure system as well.
0:24:27 But the core is actually the really hard part.
0:24:28 So we’re starting with the hardest part.
0:24:34 And then in parallel, you’re building the plane or designing the plane?
0:24:36 Yeah, we’re actually done designing the plane.
0:24:36 Okay.
0:24:45 So we froze the design of the Overture, I think, a week after XB-1’s final flight.
0:24:45 Okay.
0:24:49 And so that means, you know, I proverbially broke the engineer’s pencils.
0:24:54 So just now, just in the last several weeks, you froze the design of the plane.
0:24:55 You said, this is it.
0:24:56 This is the plane we’re going to build.
0:24:57 This is it.
0:24:57 This is it, right?
0:25:02 You know, like, it’s very easy for ambitious engineers to want to optimize forever.
0:25:03 Sure.
0:25:05 And we said, this is good enough for version one.
0:25:13 It’s time to stop tweaking the design and start doing the detailed engineering so we can start building this thing.
0:25:15 Tell me about what it’s going to look like.
0:25:22 So supersonic jets are in some ways sculpted by physics.
0:25:23 They’re going to be long and skinny.
0:25:26 They’re going to have a triangular kind of delta wing.
0:25:33 So in a certain sense, Overture is going to need to look Concord-like because physics says it needs to look Concord-like.
0:25:37 But the details are, the details that come so far forward.
0:25:48 One of the big aerodynamic advances versus Concord is something called area ruling, which basically says the fuselage needs to be big in the front and small in the back.
0:25:54 And so Overture looks, it looks a little bit like a Concord in a 747 had a love child.
0:25:55 Okay.
0:26:00 So it’s not literally double deck in the front, but it’s bigger in the front and skinnier in the back.
0:26:04 And this leads for a very interesting canvas.
0:26:14 And I can’t tell you yet what exactly it’s like at the front of the airplane because we’ve got something we invented that I’m incredibly excited about that we haven’t revealed yet.
0:26:18 But I think it’s going to be, I think it’s going to be a big wow factor.
0:26:22 People will look at them and say, wait a minute, you got that to fit in a skinny supersonic check?
0:26:23 An elephant.
0:26:24 What is it?
0:26:33 It is something that will be delightful for passengers.
0:26:34 A waterfall.
0:26:37 I’ll stop guessing, but I’m curious.
0:26:43 I’ll tell you right now, it’s not a hot tub.
0:26:43 Okay.
0:26:46 Cold plunge.
0:26:48 Cold plunge is the new hot tub.
0:26:50 That’s right.
0:26:54 There’s a cold plunge in the front of the airplane and the hot tub in the back of the airplane.
0:26:55 You can actually have both.
0:27:10 What do you got to do to get through the very non-trivial regulatory hurdles to get from drawing up a plane to a plane that the FAA and analogous regulators say, yes, this can fly with commercial passengers?
0:27:12 Well, we just have to prove it’s safe.
0:27:15 I mean, there’s a lot in that just, right?
0:27:17 There’s a lot in that just.
0:27:20 I mean, this will be one of the most complex safety critical machines ever built.
0:27:24 But all of the rules are published.
0:27:26 So we know exactly what we have to go do.
0:27:30 And the certification is just proving that we did it.
0:27:39 And so that will involve about 5,000 hours of flight testing and many more hours of ground testing.
0:27:50 And so just to give you a concrete sense of what this is like, on the ground, we will build a kind of a flightless bird, a copy of the airplane that will never fly.
0:27:59 And we’ll load up the wings with hydraulic presses and will bend them until they break and will make sure that they don’t break before they’re supposed to.
0:28:10 Basically, you have to prove that they can take 1.5 times the load they will ever see under the most extreme case before failing.
0:28:12 You know, that’s one example you do on the ground.
0:28:15 And then the air, you fly it through all the most extreme flight conditions.
0:28:18 You make sure it can handle bad weather.
0:28:24 You can make sure that when it flies through, you know, a snowstorm, the de-icing can keep up with the icing.
0:28:37 You shoot a chicken at the jet engines and make sure that if you get a bird strike, that either the engine doesn’t fail or it fails in a non-catastrophic way.
0:28:40 That’s actually one of the most difficult tests.
0:28:43 So, okay, so you got to do all these things.
0:28:47 What is your current target date for when I can buy a ticket?
0:28:48 About four years.
0:28:52 So our goal is to be ready for passengers by the end of 2029.
0:28:57 So about four and a half to five years from where we are today.
0:29:03 Like, flying XB1 took longer than you thought, but you’re still assuming overture is not going to take longer than you thought.
0:29:05 Setting them in parallel.
0:29:08 I mean, it’s totally possible overture will be late.
0:29:09 Yeah.
0:29:11 I mean, the way these things go, it seems likely.
0:29:17 Again, this is from ignorance, just looking at the nature of projects in many different companies in many different settings.
0:29:19 Like, plainly, what you’re trying to do is very hard.
0:29:24 And plainly, you’re only doing it because you have some amount of optimism, which is required to do the job, right?
0:29:31 And so just from that very small amount of data, I infer, like, yeah, I mean, you’re probably not going to overestimate how long it will take.
0:29:33 Yes, yeah.
0:29:36 It is highly unlikely we will get done sooner than we’re targeting.
0:29:37 You’re not going to be done early, right?
0:29:38 Yes.
0:29:45 But one of the lessons I’ve learned along the way is kind of how to think about schedules.
0:29:52 And I think schedules are actually misnamed because nothing ever goes according to plan.
0:29:52 Right.
0:29:54 And it’s not a schedule.
0:29:55 It’s actually a work plan.
0:30:05 And the point of the work plan is to allow the team to respond intelligently the moment something doesn’t go according to plan, which is basically every day.
0:30:06 Yeah, yeah.
0:30:16 And so what we do is we build what’s called a success-based schedule, meaning we don’t pad it to assume that there’s going to be failures.
0:30:27 We kind of assume everything is going to go well, and we assume that we’ll be able to do things, you know, slightly more efficiently than, you know, than like a Boeing would.
0:30:29 And so there’s some optimism built into it.
0:30:29 Yeah.
0:30:32 And many times we realize that optimism.
0:30:32 Yeah.
0:30:40 And when we find, oops, there’s something we didn’t know about, or this was harder than we expected, then we react to it in the most efficient way possible.
0:30:45 And that’s what actually results in the fastest possible delivery.
0:30:50 Because nothing ever gets done faster than the amount of time you give it.
0:30:50 Right.
0:30:53 But we’ll just take all the time they’re allowed.
0:30:53 That’s right.
0:30:55 Because they want to do the best job possible.
0:30:55 Exactly.
0:31:01 And the kind of people who come join a supertonic jet startup are incredibly ambitious and have very, very high standards.
0:31:05 So, you know, if I didn’t say the design is frozen.
0:31:07 It’s a hard trade-off, right?
0:31:11 It’s a hard trade-off because, like, there’s a million hard optimization problems that people are working on.
0:31:15 And there’s the kind of meta-optimization problem of how long do you spend on each thing.
0:31:16 That’s right.
0:31:17 That’s right.
0:31:19 And there’s, like, you know, when do you declare good enough?
0:31:19 Yeah.
0:31:20 Right?
0:31:30 And that was, I mean, there are so many stories of, you know, really, I think part of my role is help the team decide when’s good enough.
0:31:37 And, you know, what things have to be in 1.0 versus what things we can save for 1.1.
0:31:37 Right.
0:31:43 And having good judgment about that makes it much easier to actually ship 1.0.
0:31:44 Right.
0:31:48 You don’t need to build the most perfect supersonic jet ever.
0:31:50 You just need to build one that is safe and reliable.
0:31:52 That’s right.
0:31:55 So, let’s talk about money.
0:32:03 How much have you raised and how much do you need to get the first 1.0 overture flying with passengers?
0:32:10 So, a thing I’ve come to believe is that one of the most important things in pulling this off is being incredibly efficient with capital.
0:32:13 We’ve raised about $600 million.
0:32:17 We’ve spent less than $500 million.
0:32:23 And with that, we built and flew a supersonic jet with a human on board.
0:32:24 We designed an airliner.
0:32:26 We designed an engine.
0:32:28 And we did all the other things that started to pass to do over a decade.
0:32:31 So, what does that mean going forward?
0:32:36 We need less than a billion dollars of investor funding from where we are now to finish.
0:32:42 So, when you say investor funding, like, are you assuming more pre-orders?
0:32:46 Or you think for less than a billion dollars, you can actually, or less than a billion dollars more,
0:32:52 you can actually build a plane that’s going to take passengers across the ocean?
0:32:53 Yeah.
0:32:55 Part of it is being very smart with capital leverage.
0:33:02 You know, so, for example, you know, we will be able to go use debt to buy capital equipment.
0:33:03 Right?
0:33:09 So, like, a lot of production equipment will be financed without requiring, you know, equity investment from investors.
0:33:10 Uh-huh.
0:33:12 And we’ve already been able to do some of that.
0:33:13 So, there’s a lot.
0:33:16 Smart financial engineering is part of the solution.
0:33:20 The other part of the solution is being incredibly efficient in execution.
0:33:23 You know, I still tell, by the way, this is, in some ways, the most difficult thing.
0:33:26 Spending the money intelligently, basically?
0:33:27 Yeah.
0:33:35 Well, the way I frame it for our team internally, and we’re just very open about this, I say our single biggest risk as a company is we don’t get done for an obtainable amount of money.
0:33:36 Yeah.
0:33:41 Well, because the physics, we’ve known the physics for, whatever, 50 years or more, right?
0:33:48 Like, plainly, one can build a supersonic jet, but building it cheaply enough, in your case, to survive, right?
0:33:53 And then, in the long run, to have it be commercially viable is the hard part, right?
0:33:56 Yeah, so, one half of this is, how do we execute really efficiently?
0:34:03 How do we have a small team of world-class engineers with incredibly good software tools?
0:34:09 And we’re using a lot of software, and we’re using some AI, such that one engineer can do the work of 10.
0:34:16 And that allows us to be really efficient with our money, and we are just absolutely miserably about money, on one hand.
0:34:33 On the other hand, we need to have a capital structure that’s very good for investors, and that leverages non-dilutive financing sources, be it customer prepayments, or plant and equipment debt, or public support, to kind of lever up those investor dollars to make the whole thing economically viable.
0:34:35 What’s public support mean?
0:34:55 So, we had a fantastic package that we got from the state of North Carolina that funded the super factory in Greensboro, where the state of North Carolina so wanted them to come and build the airplane there, that just as they welcomed the Wright brothers 100 years ago, they welcomed us.
0:35:02 And that basically paid for the entire site prep and build out of the super factory.
0:35:09 And we were incredibly grateful for that, and I want to make sure we pay it forward in North Carolina.
0:35:21 I’ve heard you say on an interview you did in the last year or so that you underestimated how hard it was going to be to build the company, to build the supersonic jet.
0:35:31 And I’m curious, if you look forward now to going from here to, you know, having passengers on a jet, do you think you’re underestimating how hard that’s going to be?
0:35:35 I am sure there are problems that we will have that I don’t know about today.
0:35:36 Yeah.
0:35:42 That’s a different—I mean, it’s a weird question, because if you’re underestimating it, then you would revise your estimation.
0:35:44 It’s like, why is the stock market wrong?
0:35:46 But, like, I don’t know.
0:35:49 I mean, maybe you have to underestimate it.
0:35:50 Like, I don’t know.
0:35:52 You know, people always say, if I knew how hard it was going to be, I wouldn’t have done it.
0:35:54 And I don’t know if they really mean that, but—
0:35:57 I think some people mean it, and I find that really sad.
0:36:02 And I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way.
0:36:06 I mean, like, actually, like, boy, like, this startup stuff is so hard.
0:36:11 And it just kills me that someone would put in all of the effort required to birth a new company and a new product from scratch.
0:36:13 And it is really hard.
0:36:14 It’s like chewing on glass.
0:36:18 And then to do it for somebody, they’re like, wow, I wish I hadn’t.
0:36:20 Like, that is really sad.
0:36:25 And by the way, I have my chewing on glass days for sure, and I’m sure I’ll have more.
0:36:30 And the worst of it is when I look in the mirror, and I’m not sure whether I’m up for the job.
0:36:35 I mean, I think, like, boy, someone better than me could have done this, but I don’t know if I can.
0:36:41 You know, or I look at a problem we have, and it’s not, you know, and it’s very much my responsibility and my error.
0:36:43 Like, those are the hardest days.
0:36:56 And yet, I care so darn much about this that it’s worth that personal hell to give it everything I’ve got.
0:36:58 And I don’t regret it.
0:37:01 Even the days where I’m like, boy, I don’t know whether we’re going to get through this.
0:37:06 And we’ve had a bunch of those days, and I think I’d be foolish to think that we won’t have them again.
0:37:11 Why is supersonic flight your thing?
0:37:14 Like, why is that what you have devoted your professional life to?
0:37:24 And one of the principles I have for myself now is I only want to work on things that might not happen if I didn’t work on them.
0:37:29 And if the world followed that, we’d have a lot less photo sharing apps and fewer AI companies, but maybe things like traffic would be solved.
0:37:39 And, you know, for me specifically with supersonic flight, my kids had a grandfather who lived in Hong Kong, you know, 18 hours from us in Denver,
0:37:42 that they got to meet maybe three or four times their entire life.
0:37:44 And so they never got to know him.
0:37:51 And I grew up with my grandfather 90 minutes away, and I got to spend every weekend with him, and I’m a different person because of that.
0:37:58 And so I’ve had a lot of personal experiences that basically say, hey, speed’s not about saving time or being really cool.
0:38:01 Although it is about saving time and being really cool.
0:38:03 Speed is about what you choose to do or not do.
0:38:10 And there are all kinds of things in the world that don’t happen because flights are too long.
0:38:16 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
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0:38:58 Okay, let’s finish with the lightning round.
0:39:03 And then before you started the company, you made a list of things you wanted to work on
0:39:07 and you sort of rank ordered them and how happy it would make you to work on them.
0:39:09 Obviously, Supersonic Jet was one.
0:39:10 But what was two?
0:39:14 It fell off really quickly.
0:39:16 But what was the distant second?
0:39:19 Like, I had a rental car company idea.
0:39:19 Huh.
0:39:25 That would be like a, like, your rental car picks you up like an Uber, then you get in
0:39:26 and drive it.
0:39:28 Like, it’s not, like, I would love that product.
0:39:30 I don’t think it’s a great business idea.
0:39:33 Uh, what was the scariest part of getting your pilot’s license?
0:39:39 Oh, I remember that very first moment of takeoff in what turned out to be Larry Ellison’s
0:39:40 old airplane.
0:39:46 Um, and there was this moment of like, holy crap, I’m scared because I got my life in my
0:39:47 own hands.
0:39:47 Yeah.
0:39:49 It’s like when you learn to drive a car.
0:39:50 I remember that when I learned to drive a car.
0:39:53 It’s like, I could just swerve into the oncoming lane right now.
0:39:53 Right.
0:39:55 It felt really fragile.
0:39:56 Like, I’ve got my life in my own hands.
0:40:01 But then there was the other side of that same coin, which is, this is really cool.
0:40:03 I’ve got my life in my own hands.
0:40:03 Uh-huh.
0:40:07 What was the scariest part of working with Jeff Bezos?
0:40:11 Uh, Jeff was great to work with.
0:40:15 And I was incredibly privileged in my early twenties that I got to work on something he
0:40:15 cared about.
0:40:16 Uh-huh.
0:40:22 Uh, and Jeff, um, one of, one of the, one of the best things about Jeff is he very fairly
0:40:23 calls the balls from the strikes.
0:40:30 And he, um, and he rewards honesty and accountability.
0:40:35 So I remember at one point, um, this was actually my very first time presenting to him and if
0:40:39 the presentation’s overall going well, um, this is before he banned PowerPoint and I get
0:40:41 to some slide and he says, well, why didn’t you do X?
0:40:46 And, uh, X was actually a pretty good idea.
0:40:46 Yeah.
0:40:49 And, and I said, well, we didn’t think of that.
0:40:54 And, and, and he starts laughing that like famous big Jeff Bezos laugh.
0:40:54 Yeah.
0:40:56 And he says, that’s a great answer.
0:40:58 It’s true all the time, but no one will ever say it.
0:41:02 He understands that anybody sufficiently ambitious is going to make mistakes.
0:41:04 And what matters is to own them and learn from them.
0:41:06 And he always rewarded that.
0:41:10 And that’s, that’s something I try to emulate myself as a, as a leader.
0:41:11 Okay.
0:41:17 Briefly, let’s do a few overrated or underrated questions for jet travel.
0:41:20 Um, checking luggage, overrated or underrated?
0:41:21 Underrated.
0:41:25 The, the way this should work is you take your Uber to the airport.
0:41:27 Someone grabs your bag from the trunk.
0:41:30 You go through the airport only with what you actually want with you on the airplane.
0:41:34 When you arrive on the other side, you go to your Uber and your check bag is already in
0:41:35 your trunk.
0:41:38 That’s a, that’s a compelling dream.
0:41:40 Overrated or underrated the window seat?
0:41:44 It, it, it, I think it’s highly rated and underrated.
0:41:46 Like I, I am glued to that window.
0:41:48 I love highly rated, but still underrated things.
0:41:53 So I feel about Bob Dylan, um, neck pillows, overrated or underrated?
0:41:55 It’s not for me under, uh, overrated.
0:41:56 Same.
0:42:05 Blake Schoel is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic.
0:42:08 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang.
0:42:13 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cott and engineered by Sarah Brugier.
0:42:17 You can email us at problem at pushkin.fm.
0:42:21 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:30 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:31 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:31 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:31 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:32 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:32 We’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
Blake Scholl is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake’s problem is this: Can you build a commercial airplane that flies faster than the speed of sound – and that makes economic sense?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.