What America Is Missing Between Sanctions and Nuclear War (Bryon Hargis, Co-Founder & CEO of Castelion)

Bryon Hargis is the co-founder and CEO of Castelion, a defense startup building low-cost hypersonic missiles designed to be manufactured at scale. Before founding Castelion, Bryon spent more than a decade at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and nearly six years at SpaceX, where he worked on national security space programs and saw firsthand how iterative engineering and manufacturing speed could reshape aerospace. Castelion’s first missile, Blackbeard, is slated for integration on the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet in roughly a year. — In our conversation, we explore: Why Bryon believes building missiles is paradoxically essential to maintaining peaceThe game theory behind warfare and why tit-for-tat strategies require credible middle-ground responsesHow China’s 2021 hypersonic test revealed not just a capability gap but a manufacturing and cost advantageWhy traditional aerospace processes—optimized for low risk and high cost—can’t compete with rapid iterationWhat Bryon learned in his first week at SpaceX (after 12 years in traditional aerospace)Why building a carrier-based, air-launched hypersonic missile as a first product was the hard but right choiceHow focusing on manufacturability and cost over maximum capability can produce more effective deterrenceWhy the person who adapts faster in warfare always wins, and how that shapes Castelion’s philosophy— Thank you to the partners who make this possible .tech domains https://go.tech/thegeneralistnl: An identity for builders at their core. Ahrefs Brand Radar https://ahrefs.com/generalist: Find your brand in AI results. Persona https://withpersona.com/generalist: Trusted identity verification for any use case. — Timestamps (00:00) Intro (04:01) Why America needs hypersonic missiles (07:13) China’s edge in hypersonics (12:05) The missing middle ground in deterrence (18:05) Preventing warhead ambiguity (19:40) How hypersonics differ from ballistic missiles (25:05) The economics of defensive vs. offensive systems (28:21) How SpaceX differs from traditional aerospace (37:40) Why Bryon chose to build in defense over space (42:42) Key factors that drove Castelion’s success (48:28) Designing Blackbeard, Castelion’s first hypersonic missile (1:01:06) The importance of lower costs and quicker manufacturing (1:10:04) Book recommendations — Follow Bryon Hargis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hargsb X: https://x.com/hargsb — Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/what-america-is-missing-between-sanctions — Production and marketing by penname.co https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Warfare is always just adapting to whatever the other side is doing. And the person that actually wins is whoever adapts faster. You can't let our adversaries be faster than us. This is our company's first time building a missile. In, give me like 20 years, and we've designed more weapons than the traditional industry has in like the 100-year history. As technology has increased, the ability to project force at a distance has continually grown further and further and further out. And you're now at the point where more traditional solutions like a cruise missile take a very long time because they fly at subsonic. They fly roughly the same speed as like a passenger airliner. And so to close like the distances we're talking about now, which could be 1,000, 1,500 miles, we're talking hours.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  You don't just want like economic sanctions, and if that doesn't work, then we're going to like create a global catastrophe. You need something in the middle. What really matters if you want to deter is that you have to be able to do a counter-response, that kind of middle-of-the-road option between economic sanctions and the threat of global nuclear war, which nobody wants. And so, and kind of like the specific capabilities that we're building within Castelion are meant to provide a very credible middle option.

• 1:16Mario Gabriele?

  What sits between an economic sanction and a nuclear weapon? For a growing number of conflicts, the honest answer is not enough. America's credible middle options, the non-nuclear ways to deter an adversary, have been quietly eroding. Castellian CEO Brian Hargis believes hypersonic missiles are a key part of the solution. Hargis spent 12 years at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and five at SpaceX before co-founding Castellian. Its first missile, Blackbeard, is built to be cheap, survivable, and produced at scale. And it's roughly a year from flying on the Navy's F-18. In this episode, Brian and I discuss the game theory behind warfare, what SpaceX taught

• 1:58Mario Gabriele?

  him about building hard things fast, and why manufacturing missiles is paradoxically essential to maintaining peace. I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist. This episode is brought to you by .tech domains. I spend a lot of time speaking with founders and builders who are building the next generation of technology companies. For all of them, finding a compelling and distinctive company identity is essential to breaking through the noise. That starts with a great name and a great domain. That's exactly the thinking behind .tech domains. For companies building in tech, a .tech domain gives your project a clean, confident identity from day one, instantly communicating what you're building.

• 2:39Mario Gabriele?

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• 3:20Mario Gabriele?

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• 4:02Mario Gabriele?

  I'd love to start just by understanding why it's so important for America to create its own hypersonic missile program. Why has this been your mission for the last few years and something that feels, from your vantage, like it's so sorely needed?

• 4:21Speaker 00

  I feel like this is going to be 90 minutes on the question all in itself, but it's uh, I mean, it all comes down to deterrence. So the ultimate goal, right, is you don't fight any wars because other folks don't want to lose a war. And so you just want to have overmatched strength. And like the real, the real reason that hypersonics are important is just as technology has increased, the ability to kind of, you know, project force at a distance has continually grown. That range has grown further and further and further out. And you're now at the point where more traditional solutions like a cruise missile take a very long time because they fly, they fly subsonic, they fly this, you know, roughly the same speed as like a passenger airliner.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  And so the, to close, like the distances we're talking about now, which could be 500,000, 1500 miles, you're talking hours. And so if you've noticed like what most of the United States' adversaries have, have, you know, invested in, it's been putting things on mobile platforms. And they've done that specifically to avoid the problem that a tomahawk is a very good weapon, but it takes a very long time to get there. And so they just can do things and then they can move. And so hypersonics is really solving three fundamental problems all at the same time. It's solving range. They go very far because they fly extremely high in the atmosphere. And so there's very low drag. And so you get, you get very good range for the size of the weapon.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  You get uh, speed because it's in the name, it's hypersonic, it's faster than Mach 5. And so you're closing that vast distance very quickly before whatever you're shooting at has had time to move on. And they're highly survivable. And in this context, survivability really means that the weapon is very hard to shoot down. So it makes it to the target and they know that. And so it gives people pause of like, hey, I can't act with impunity. And that hopefully causes them to rethink their decision of like, do I act today? Do I do this today? Or do I just wait a year and see if my, can improve my technology? And so we're at this point in this inflection point where Our traditional solutions are going to have a reduced deterrent effect,

• 6:35Speaker 00

  and you need a higher capability weapon to gain back that non-nuclear deterrent. And that brings us kind of to the other main point. It's not just having this this concept of a hypersonic weapon, because the US has had that for decades. You have to build enough of them that they care, that it matters to them. The cost of those systems has to be affordable enough that you can buy a reasonable quantity that they care. And so all of these have been issues in hypersonics for a very long time, with cost, the quantity, more so than the capability. And that is what Castelion is setting out to solve. And we're doing that to deter future conflict.

• 7:13Mario Gabriele?

  There are so many interesting threads there. And, you know, I've been going sort of obscenely deep, at least as much as is possible over the past sort of week and last few days in particular, and trying to understand these different trade offs that are being made across different weapons and deterrents and the sort of game theory behind a lot of this. In reviewing some of the history of hypersonics, it seems like 2021 was, you know, kind of a critical moment, described as, you know, something of a Sputnik moment, where there was the sort of detection of China's hypersonic capabilities and just sort of how far advanced they were relative to the expectations. I wondered how that moment struck you

• 7:58Mario Gabriele?

  and how it perhaps either galvanized your plans to start this business or has changed how you've thought about what it is that needs to be built?

• 8:07Speaker 00

  I would say, very sadly, I was not surprised. I've been in aerospace and defense for 2025 years. I don't even know, a long time at this point. We can usually get the thing done, but it is incredibly expensive. It's incredibly slow.

• 8:23Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  It usually works the first time, which is the whole point of like kind of the traditional aerospace systems engineering process, but you get the known byproducts of that process, which are it's going to cost a fortune and it's going to take forever. If you're up against someone else who is doing a different process, that's much more agile and much faster and more iterative, you're going to be passed. Like they're, they're learning faster than you are. And so I think that that moment that you're referencing, when that came out, I forgot if it was in the Wall Street Journal or who reported on it.

• 8:54Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, I think Financial Times, maybe.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Financial Times?

• 8:57Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  I wasn't surprised at all. Cause it, the problem is not just a hypersonics problem. It's almost like the game ad libs. You could, you could replace, you could replace the noun that you're talking about and just insert something else, shipbuilding, satellites, what have you. The problems are all the same because they're following the same systems engineering and development process and the results of that are the same. You get a probably works outcome at very slow, very high cost. And in a world where the US is so far ahead, then sure. And when you can afford it, then it's fine. But we're now moving into a world where we have peers that are, you know, even if they're not ahead of us currently in a technology area, they are moving faster. And all you have to do logically is you, you give that enough time to play out.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  They're going to move in front. And I'd say in hypersonics, in some regards, they have moved out in front. But what's more frightening is like in that first question we talked about where the thing that truly matters to have deterrence is cost and scale. That's where they're severely kicking our butt. And, and, and I think that that is even, it's less talked about, but it is, it is a bigger problem even than the specific capabilities that they demonstrated to the world.

• 10:10Mario Gabriele?

  Yes. And just to, to sort of put a finer point on that and make sure I'm, I'm following you. When you say sort of, uh, cost and scale, you know, a peer power like China, their sort of industrial manufacturing base is just so much, uh, more cost effective, so much more efficient that, you know, it's not just that they're able to, to demo this, uh, hypersonic missile in 2021 that, you know, is, is sort of concerning. It's that they can produce so, so many more at, at such a cost advantage. And as you said, that's sort of something that's being seen from, from shipbuilding to satellites to whatever it might be. Is that, is that right?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. You know, it's not a paper tiger. They, they, they literally like they have their victory day parade and then they just roll missile after missile after missile after other whatever, you know, name your other system like right, right through Beijing and let everybody see their manufacturing prowess. That is like the true problem that I think that the United States, the West in general, needs to get much better at addressing. And then hypersonics is just like the specific product where you're going into like, we're going to work on this. And that's what Castelion is doing. But I think overall, like that is the problem that has to be addressed right now before we find ourselves not just behind in a, in a couple of areas, but behind in many areas or most areas.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  And it really just comes down to you, you have to have that manufacturing capacity. You have to be able to build things. That is actually important in, in warfare. And then when you look at how wars are most normally won, sure, there's like, if you have a greatly, you know, you have a greater capability than the other side, it, it, it looks easy. But then at the end of the day, if you're like evenly matched, it almost always comes down to economics. And so the cost of work really matters and you have to do that better than the other side and that has to be solved as well. And that is something that certainly I'd say traditional aerospace in the United States is not doing a good job with.

• 12:05Mario Gabriele?

  I'd love to, to follow up on the manufacturing base piece in a moment, but on this concept of deterrence, I've heard you say before that, you know, right now, America sort of has very little middle ground, few middle rungs between sanctions and nuclear warheads. Maybe to, to sort of give folks a, a better sense of that, why are those middle rungs so important? And I guess, uh, something that I've been trying to, to think through is like, why are traditional missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles? Why are those not sort of suitable middle rung, uh, deterrances?

• 12:45Speaker 00

  When you get into the game theory of, of this, it's, it's, it's honestly quite fascinating. Um, and I think there's lots of ways we could take this, but. It's specifically to what you asked. When you're looking at kind of like the, the, what is the optimal response to conflict? And if you look at like the game theory of like prisoner's dilemma.

• 13:07Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  The optimal game theory for that has been proven and simulated is, is tit for tat.

• 13:15Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  And so if someone does something, you need to basically do it back effectively. It can't be, you know, it can't be ineffective. And then you need to forgive because otherwise if they just take that same approach and just keep going back and forth, it'll go forever and that's not ideal either. But when you play that out, you actually realize like, hey, that, that applied that you can literally just witness what happens in the world, you know, between countries and their conflicts. They're literally just playing out prisoner's dilemma in a horrible fashion.

• 13:46Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  So what really matters, if you want to deter, is that you have to be able to do a counter response. And so the United States has built up tremendous capabilities to have that kind of middle of the road option between economic sanctions and the threat of, you know, global nuclear war, which nobody wants. We still have that for certain, for certain, I'd say threats in certain countries. Unfortunately, with like a peer country, we are starting to lose that middle ground. They, they have done such a good job of building up their capabilities that that middle rung is no longer extremely effective as a response. And at the point that it's ineffective, they can kind of act with impunity and they're not dumb. They know that.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  And so then you lead to the situation where you're, you've got like on the two hands, as I've said, you've got economic sanctions, which can work. It's like the softest approach and you can see those being employed, you know, constantly. But then with no middle ground, you have no, you have no room to kind of slowly escalate, which is always as like a policymaker. That was, that's, you want options, you want options. You don't just want like economic sanctions. And if that doesn't work, then we're going to like create a global, global catastrophe. You need something in the middle. And so it's critically important that they have those options, not so that they're used, but so that the other side knows that you have them and that they're effective. And hopefully they think about what they're doing before they go and act.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  And so it doesn't happen in the first place. And so hypersonics and kind of like the specific capabilities that we're building within Castelion are meant to provide a very credible middle option in terms of like technical capability, but also when you get back to that cost and scale so that it impacts their decision-making. And the reason that you can't just put like a traditional warhead on a ballistic missile and then start lobbing those, and to be clear from like a technical perspective, a ballistic missile solves all of the things like it goes, it goes forward, it's survivable, and it gets there quick. But it also looks like the same delivery vehicle

• 15:56Speaker 00

  you would commonly use to employ nuclear weapons. And that's extremely, extremely risky to utilize against a nuclear armed peer, because they don't know. You can't, you can't really tell what's on board. You could, you can say publicly, hey, I'm going to use the system against you, and it's not nuclear armed, but they're just trusting you that that's what you said, because they don't know until the first one hits. That's a lot of risk. Yeah. And I don't, you know, thankfully, for most countries, not all, but most countries, that's not risk that they take lightly. And, and I think that's good for everybody.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  And so in, I know it kind of sounds like a very weird for like a munitions manufacturer. I truly believe like what we're trying to do and what we're building is going to keep not just like the United States safe, it's going to keep most of the world safe. And I, I truly believe that. And I know not everybody would agree with that. But that's why I feel so passionate about what we're working on. And that's why most of our workforce works here. Like, we don't come into work thinking like, I can't wait to launch a missile against, you know, a ship or what have you. I come into work thinking like it would be great if we could help avoid a conflict and that never happens. And it's it's really hard to prove a negative, right? Like, will I know that it didn't happen at some point? I probably won't. But I do believe that if you are left

• 17:22Speaker 00

  with only those two options of economic sanctions and then something just completely unreasonable, you're more likely to get into a conflict.

• 17:30Mario Gabriele?

  I fully agree. I think you need to have these deterrents for peace. And there is something sort of paradoxical about that, but essential.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  I mean, I want to live in the world where everybody just gets along. Trust me, I really, I truly do. I just unfortunately don't believe that that's actually the world we live in. And I think we have to be to be mindful of that because like frankly, the strength of the US's military, especially since World War II, is allowed a lot of prosperity for a lot of people. And I think that that has been a net good.

• 18:05Mario Gabriele?

  You mentioned this this concept of, you know, with a ballistic missile, I think I've heard it phrased as warhead ambiguity, where you can't tell if it's a nuclear warhead or not. And so that sort of can can create a possibility where your adversary overreacts and and, you know, sort of escalates far beyond the intensity of the attack. As I understand it, that's also possible with hypersonics. Is that not true? That you can have hypersonics that are sort of nuclear capable and there's still sort of this level of confusion that can can happen where you you don't necessarily know what's coming at you, so to speak?

• 18:46Speaker 00

  I mean, for sure, there is there's there's no way to verify. But what the US has been very clear about is messaging like, we're not putting nuclear warheads on these maneuvering hypersonic vehicles. And you will see those kinds of policy statements stated like time and time again. Not every country has those same types of policy statements. Like, you can absolutely do it. If you want to have a weapon that you can use without any kind of overreaction, you're going to be very clear about throughout development, what's on it, what's in it. And and I think like, it's it may be even surprising to folks, to your point about not overreacting. In a lot of cases, right before you attack someone, you actually can give them a call and tell them.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  What's happening so that they don't overreact even though you're literally going to have a conflict?

• 19:35Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  But it's like in nobody's best interest to have that overreaction.

• 19:40Mario Gabriele?

  One of the other criticisms or skepticisms I've seen around hypersonics that I'd be curious to understand how you think this through from the deterrence perspective is that, you know, I hope I do a passable job of explaining this, but hypersonics can be harder to detect because they fly so much lower, as I understand it, at parts of the process compared to a ballistic missile. And they're much less predictable and more maneuverable, such that it often gives the adversary much less time to respond, which is obviously beneficial from the aggressor's perspective, but as a result also maybe results in sort of, I don't know, faster twitch responses, overreactions.

• 20:23Mario Gabriele?

  How do you think about sort of weighing those things?

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Well, let's go. I mean, maybe we should go through like the differences real quick. And then let's talk through, I guess, how people can perceive that. But so the funny thing is like when we say hypersonics and when like the, you know, the US Department of War says hypersonics, they're typically meaning like a hypersonic maneuvering vehicle, whether it's an air breather or it's a boost glide system, which we can get into those distinctions. But what it means is that we are, for the most part, staying within the atmosphere for most of the flight, even though we are moving at five times or faster than the speed of sound. And the reason that that's helpful, like from a, you know, range perspective, is that you're very low drag, but you do get some lift.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  So you can have like a vehicle that looks like a very stubby winged plane and it gets some lift from the air. But it also, the air provides something to react against, meaning you can steer, because you are in the atmosphere and so you can literally steer, so you can maneuver as you're going.

• 21:27Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  The reason that it's harder to see is that because you're still in the atmosphere, so you're in like the 100,000 to 200,000 foot range.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  You're typically going to be under the horizon from the point of view of something far away, just because the earth is, you know, the earth is spherical for the most part. And so the the main defense systems that almost every country has is is a radar. Radars do not do well looking through the surface of the earth. And so you're you're effectively just out of line of sight. Whereas a ballistic missile, you're literally lobbing an object in a parabolic arc. So it's going extremely high. And so the radar can see that very early on because it's so high up that it has a vantage point to look at it. When that ballistic weapon comes back down, they are actually usually hypersonic, depending on like the range and the size, and they're actually coming in hypersonic,

• 22:21Speaker 00

  but they're in the atmosphere for such little time. That's not typically what people are talking about when they're talking about a hypersonic weapon. And so that can be confused, like I've seen it confused in like major media, like, you know, with Iranians launching ballistic missiles, like their ballistic missiles come in hypersonic, but that's not the same type of technology we're talking about where most of the flight is spent within the atmosphere and it can maneuver. And so you do get this element of surprise because by the time the radar does is able to see it because it has line of sight, the the weapon is actually much closer. And so you have very little time to respond. And

• 23:02Speaker 00

  certainly that could lead to like, as as you mentioned, like overreaction, which you wouldn't want. But it does prevent a long projected time to like respond. And everybody knows that. And so the the advantage of this is that if they know that you have these types of systems, and they have very little they can do to defend against it, it makes them think harder before they go do something that would have you respond that way. And and again, you're getting back to that deterrence effect. Ballistic missiles at this point, especially with the United States and Israel, I mean, there's several countries that can now shoot down ballistic missiles and make it

• 23:45Speaker 00

  look relatively easy. It is definitely not easy by any means, but can make it look easy.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  It does remove kind of that, you know, you're doing to the other side what we're trying not to have done to us. You're taking away that option like, hey, you can lob ballistic missiles at us. It doesn't matter. We'll shoot them all down. I would posit, though, that that doesn't really achieve deterrence because they're just like, well, I'll just lob these at you and it's your fault if you don't shoot them down. And so you lead, you know, you kind of like if you put all of your efforts into, because somebody may ask, it's a reasonable question to ask, like, why don't you just put all your money into defensive systems and we'll just shoot down everything that comes through? I would posit that that doesn't deter people from taking the first shot at you. And unfortunately, these systems are not 100% effective. Like, it is just, it's an impossibly hard problem to get absolutely everything. What you really want is

• 24:36Speaker 00

  folks not to be taking those shots at you in the first place because they know that you have the capability to respond. And so you need like a balance of all of these things. So there's like, there's no one magical system that solves all these problems. You need a balance. And that's obviously been everybody's strategy, whether it's the United States, Europe, China, what have you. They have a number of these systems because they're all kind of solving like some specific use case of when you would use it. And that's why.

• 25:05Mario Gabriele?

  I also imagine that if you, if you take the stance, oh, you should just put all of this money into defensive systems, that's just economically inadvisable and infeasible because it's so much more expensive to defend the amount of territory or possible targets that a single missile might attack, right? Like, your, your sort of territory that you have to be able to protect against is much broader than, you know, this, this single weapon might, might possibly hit. Is that a fair characterization?

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Most people don't think through kind of all of like the, the aspects of it, but Just think of it as, you know, if you have a family member going to like some vacation and you're both going to meet up together and they live 400 miles closer, but you get on the road at the same time and you're driving at the same speed, you are never going to catch them. You'll see them at the end. You have to have a higher velocity, you have to have higher capabilities in an interceptor to give you some type of envelope of time where you could actually reach the thing you're trying to intercept. And it is certainly harder. You need more quantity to be able to provide, as you mentioned, like that coverage area because you can't get that geometry favorable.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  You can't, you can't say, I can intercept this from like all possible locations. It's only certain places that you're going to be able to kinetically reach the target. And so you'll need a lot and you're kind of seeing that right now with like the Congressional Budget Office assessment of how many, you know, how many weapons can Golden Dome shoot down and what the cost would be because of how many you need. I have a feeling that they weren't fully informed of what the actual inputs and what the plan was because they're probably just trying to use publicly available information to estimate that and not the correct information.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  But it's definitely non-zero and then certainly the difficulty of just building a defensive system that has to go maneuver and get close to this thing that is very hard to catch up with. It's just a harder problem and it is, it is unreasonable to think that it could be as cheap as that offensive system because it has to have like a lot more capability. And so you're losing, when we get back to it, you're losing on the economic front. And again, one of the, one of the ways to lose a war is just to have someone bleed you dry of money. And so it is not a perfect solution to only focus on defense. You need to focus on how do I get them to stop shooting at me?

• 27:38Speaker 00

  And quick. And, and so you have to have a mix of these systems. And that's not to say that the defense is not important because you do want to go try to stop those things from getting through. And you're willing to pay a large chunk of money to do that. Um, but I think that overall, we need to be more cost effective in both the defensive and office offensive systems. Um, and that's something that we have to, we have to work on. And it's something that Castelion is working on. We're obviously working on the offensive side. We have plans, um, in the hopper for what we're going to do on the defensive side to get the cost down. And, and I think that you get back to the end of the day, it all comes back to cost and scale. It's you have to have these systems proliferate it and they have to be effective.

• 28:22Mario Gabriele?

  I'd love to, to come back to that cost and scale piece as we sort of maybe, uh, head towards learning more about exactly what you're building and, and why. Uh, you, you mentioned your experience in this, this space. You had, you know, 15 years at John Hopkins APL and, and five at SpaceX. What were the things that you noticed in your first week at SpaceX were different from the 15 years that came before it?

• 28:49Speaker 00

  Aside everything.

• 28:51Mario Gabriele?

  Besides everything.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Besides everything.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  There was even free fro yo. I mean, we didn't have that.

• 28:58Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, there you go.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  When you graduate from an engineering program in school, and you go into traditional aerospace, the first thing you learn is that you don't know anything. You don't know the aerospace engineering process of the systems engineering process. It was very foreign concept to me. I was not taught that.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  And so you have this like gut reaction of like, this doesn't feel like the most efficient way to get to the answer. But I'm 22, what do I know? And I have someone with 20 years experience telling me that that's not how it's done. And so you find yourself in that environment for 10 years. And then you notice that I'm now beating on the fresh out of school graduate, that that's not how it's done. And you just become a part of that machine.

• 29:50Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  And it propagates forward. And then anybody that comes in that has any inkling of kind of like being, you know, more forward leaning on how they do systems engineering, you're beating it out of them because that's not how it's done. I think the biggest thing that I saw joining SpaceX, everything that you ever felt when you first started that, that job in aerospace, fresh out of school, that you're like, this just doesn't seem efficient.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Turns out it's not efficient. And if you don't do it, you can make tremendous progress in aerospace. And I would say that my first 12 years at APL, they were highly informative. I loved my time there. Got to work across all of government, doing really cool problems. It kind of felt like the golden age of aerospace was dead and gone. And I was just born into the wrong generation and I was never going to get to experience it. And, you know, you read the, the, the books about the Apollo era, you read the books about skunk works and you're just like, my God, what a time to be alive. How, how cool it had been to be part of one of those programs.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Going to SpaceX was a hundred percent getting to be a part of history that I think that in 30 years, someone's going to think the same thing. It was just a truly cool experience. And I think that one of Elon's superpowers, that's not always a superpower, sometimes he's wrong, but he doesn't care if everybody thinks what, what he's doing is wrong. He thinks it's right and he's willing to give it a go. And he's very open to being data driven and proven that, hey, I was wrong. And then without ego dropping that path and then doing something different. And I think that that is like, very different than I'd say a normal company behavior who,

• 31:39Speaker 00

  when you make that large bet of I'm going to go do something this way, you then get into the sunk cost fallacy where I will, I'll look like a giant idiot or we've spent too much, we have to just keep going and make it successful. And then it ends up in a disaster. And I think that SpaceX showed that there are a lot of ways to get back to that Apollo era progress in aerospace and they've proven it. And it kind of the funniest thing that I would see happening before I joined SpaceX. Of course, you know, I'm in the aerospace field. I know people at all kinds of companies. Like they're working on reusable rockets, something that everybody's like, that'll never work. That can't be done. That's not possible. Everybody's literally just making fun of them. They're like, it'll never happen. What a bunch of idiots.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  And I'm thinking, I'm like, but at least they're trying.

• 32:28Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  And then they get it to work. Even after it works, you would still hear people kind of talk about it as though they're a pyramid scheme, they'll fall apart shortly. No way that that works. And it's like, it's literally working. You just saw it land like, what are you talking about? And, and there's literally people, because I think what it honestly, like when you get back to like the kind of the root cause, human nature of it. They would have to accept that they have been doing something in a horribly stupid way for decades. They'd have to admit that. Or you can just continue to think that SpaceX is just around the corner from, from failing. And so in the US aerospace industry,

• 33:16Speaker 00

  you watch SpaceX become completely dominant. I mean, they, they took over all, like all launch for the most part, especially from like a mass to orbit perspective. They killed all Russian launch vehicles. They decimated European launch market.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  And all the while, like the primary competitor of the United States was like, it'll never work. And they just watched it happen. And unfortunately, I see that same attitude in almost every other area of kind of traditional aerospace and defense manufacturing. Because again, I think to admit that, hey, what we're doing is not working, you have to first admit that there's a problem. And that's hard. But I'd say we take a lot of heat for. For being different, irrespective of whatever results that we put out, we still get looked at like, you can't do it like that. It'll never work like that. I fundamentally like what SpaceX taught me was that's not true.

• 34:10Mario Gabriele?

  What was it in you that allowed you after 12 years in this old paradigm to say, actually, maybe the way I've spent my time here has been totally wrong. And I'm, I'm open to this very different style of, of building things.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  I would say I never drank the traditional aerospace Kool-Aid. I always was like, this doesn't seem right. But I didn't have the confidence like at 22 to be like, this is wrong. I'm not going to do this.

• 34:39Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  You know, I was like, I'm, I'm probably the idiot here. This is how it's done. And this is not to say that everything in which traditional aerospace is wrong. A lot of it is right. And caring about the complex, like the way you approach complex issues, a lot of things that's, that's right. So I got tremendous experience, but I was always just a little bit skeptical of like, this can't be the best way to do this because frankly, like I started my career as an, as an engineer. I was a mechanical engineer. I went back and I got a master's in physics specialized in photonics and optics. I worked on space program after space program that never got to space. For an engineer, there's nothing more demoralizing than I've just worked like two, three years on something.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  And it gets canceled because it's too expensive. It's too slow. It didn't solve the actual need. And that became very frustrating and that actually prompted my move away from engineering because I wanted to have my hand in guiding the type of work we were doing. Because I wanted to try to get something over the line. And so my time at APL, I'd say like, I already felt like I was missing the boat to a degree. And then when like this explosion of commercial space happened, like I, I remember watching from the sidelines, like Planet Labs, Skybox.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  And sure, were they the most capable systems? No. Did they get something in space? Were they, you know, taking imagery and doing something? Absolutely. And frankly, I just felt like I was, I was missing out. And so, you know, I quit voluntarily because I, I wanted to go be part of a company that was focused on, on moving faster. And that's not to say I'm not trying to, you know, say anything negative about APL. It was a great place to work. But their behaviors mimicked the behaviors of traditional aerospace. And I wanted to go work, you know, with a company that wasn't doing that.

• 36:38Mario Gabriele?

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• 37:23Mario Gabriele?

  Whether you're verifying age, onboarding businesses, or automating KYC. It's fully configurable, so you can launch in days, not quarters. Want to see for yourself? Generalist listeners get a free year of the starter plan. Head to withpersona.com/generalist and check it out. Given your, your experience, why after your sort of five years at SpaceX and obviously the, the era before that, wasn't it the, the logical move to create sort of a, a space defense company of some kind? Like, or something more explicitly in that, in that realm? Obviously, there are places where that intersects with, with what you're doing. But yeah, was that sort of an area that you explored? Or yeah, what, what drew you to this in particular?

• 38:07Speaker 00

  I'm very focused on the outcome. And the outcome for me personally, I want to live, I want to leave a safe world to my kids, point blank. I'm doing it. I'm doing it because I think this is the way, this isn't the only way to leave a safe world, to be very clear.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, this is what I'm good at and what I know. And so this is how I can help. This is what I got. And, you know, could I be a Beethoven? No, would I like to do that? Sure, that'd be awesome, but like that's, I don't have that skill in me. But, um, uh, there's a lot of ways to contribute, but this is what I can contribute. And so, yes, I could have, we could have built a space company. And there were a lot of things, there's a lot of things to still be done there. I had given almost my, I think my greatest ideas and best work to SpaceX and they executed them flawlessly in a way that, you know, frankly, you know, I had been working in like the, the kind of like the space and defense side of, of, you know, of the sector for my entire

• 39:11Speaker 00

  time. And these ideas were talked about for, for decades and had never been pulled off. And I go to SpaceX and over like, whatever I was there for, like almost six years, executed and built like this tremendous capability that had been talked about by the rest of the space industry for forever and had not happened. And so when I left, did I have more ideas? Sure. Do I want to go and try to directly compete with SpaceX? No, I am, I'm not suicidal from a business perspective. That is very difficult.

• 39:47Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Especially because, uh, they control almost all of global space launch.

• 39:52Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  It's just, it's just, there's so many things stacked against you and you have to give them credit for what they've done and what they've been good at and, and like how well that they have executed on, on that vision. But for me, like that was in, and frankly, like I wouldn't have left SpaceX if I felt that wasn't in a good place and those, those capabilities weren't going to continue because like I was achieving kind of my personal goal at SpaceX, leaving a safer future. What I saw was a need for We need to go work on other parts of this kill chain because it's called a chain because it's only as good as its weakest link. It was very apparent, like the, like, you know, the concept for what Castelion was working on.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  It, you know, if you were in the industry, this is not like some genius idea that we came up with, that no one else had. It was very apparent and I wanted to go focus on that. And I, I actually brought, I brought the idea to SpaceX. I was like, I would, I would really love for us to go solve this. And there was a, under no illusions of what SpaceX was, they were, you know, they're, they're making humanity multi-planet, multi-planetary. Under no illusions, they're going to Mars. I was told that from the beginning. And then it was too big of an opportunity cost to kind of divert into what I felt would be necessary to truly deliver on that outcome of leaving a safer future. And so that was totally fine. Love, love the time there.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  We went off and started this business to go focus on that other, you know, the offensive, pointy end side of the kill chain, because I think that it needed a lot of work. And so that's how we got to here. And I don't feel like it took, if you were in the industry, this was a very apparent problem to anybody. I always think that it was kind of funny, like when you go to try to raise money very, you know, early on and people always want you to have like a technical gimmick or some kind of like, what's your, what's your like, uh, you know, breakthrough that no one else is going to be able to copy. And we really didn't have a technical, like, you know, something like patentable or something that was just us.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  It's like, you're bringing the same kind of culture of how do we get back to the Apollo era roots, but apply that just to a different area aerospace. That's what we're doing. I have faith that that process works and that really doesn't sell well. Quite frankly, SpaceX proved that like Apollo era is not dead. Yes. One of the coolest things that I think they did is the, the podcasting that they have always done with almost all the launches and all of the important things, I think is empowered like a totally new generation of Americans that are going to want to go into STEM, uh, science, technology fields and.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  That wouldn't have otherwise existed because it wasn't cool.

• 42:44Mario Gabriele?

  As you said about sort of building this business, I'm curious to understand how important the moment of time was that you entered into because it was clearly, I think you've called it anti-hot when you set out to, you know, raise money for this. But it was anti-hot for not as long as, you know, it might have been, right? Like, you know, if you'd started this business five years earlier, maybe it still would have worked and, you know, there was enough sort of, of the right tailwinds beginning to very, very slowly pick up steam. But that seems like it would have been massively harder. How do you think about like what the key factors were for you that arrived in just the right moments?

• 43:26Speaker 00

  I completely agree with your assessment that five years earlier, like, I don't know that our company would have made it. There's, there's a reason that a lot of these types of like hardware focused startups require a billionaire to start them.

• 43:42Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  It was very apparent as we were trying to like raise our first funding and they're like, where's your prototype? I'm like, I don't think you understand. I cannot lock the engineers in a room with a pizza over the weekend and we'll have a working hypersonic missile prototype. I, I can't do that. I didn't think about that probably as much as I should have before, before leaving. Cause there was definitely a point, I think, when we, we started the business and I was like,

• 44:13Speaker 00

  I've just self-elected out of a great job and I'm, I'm, I'm going to be unemployed. That was a, I feel like a real reasonable outcome of likelihood for the first four months. Enroll, I think, changed the game to a large degree with making.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  Investors see that you can make money in defense. If you don't do it the same way that all of the traditional, you know, defense primes run their business on these cost plus models where the margins are quite appropriately capped pretty hard. And so Andro's success, in my opinion, and to a degree SpaceX's success, because at this point in time, in late 22, like if you're just like, we're doing something in space, like you're gonna get funded and the idea could be absolutely ridiculous. But you would get initial funding to go find out. Yes. And so I think, you know, SpaceX obviously is like the first one moving through, showing tremendous success for a

• 45:13Speaker 00

  very capital intensive hardware focused business. And then you have Andro doing it in defense and truly, I think they paved the way in making this an investable category. Now, even so, in 2022, it was absolutely brutal. I don't remember what firm it was, but I remember pitching them and like five minutes in, they just like, they like pause. They tell me to stop and then like they're literally like drawing on their whiteboard behind them and they, they draw like a quad, you know, like a quad, like an X and Y axes and they're like, you've got like pure commercial and you've got defense and then you've got software and hardware. And they're like, you're over in this quadrant. In fact, you're probably like off the chart over here.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  This whole quadrant's uninvestable. And I, it's like, uh, I was like, okay, I guess. Let's just call this meeting, meeting over. But, you know, I think with, with anything, business requires luck. And I, whenever I like, hear somebody talk about, you know, like their business success is like, they made it, they made it happen through their perfect skill. I'm like, I'm immediately tuned out. That is complete crap. Now you can make your own luck. And by that, I mean, If there's a certain chance that something happens, let's say it's 25%. If you just persevere and just try and try and try again,

• 46:40Speaker 00

  you will get one of them to go through. And so you can create your own luck. But to think that you don't have some degree of luck to have success and breaking through is completely disingenuous and especially disingenuous to like anybody new that's going to try to start a business who could become extremely discouraged because things don't go perfectly, like nothing goes perfectly. And I think one of the, you know, the strongest traits as like a successful founder that you have to have is you just have to be persistent. I am doggedly persistent. When I set my mind to something, I think I had lots of people think that I was absolutely crazy for leaving, but it mattered to me. And

• 47:24Speaker 00

  even after that meeting of being shown that, you know, we're in the top white quadrant of failure, you know, you just go have 98 more meetings. And luckily, luckily we had success with like one of the hundred and got going from there. And I'd actually state like, you know, we raised less and we took more dilution in those earlier rounds because it was just not hot. And they were taking a gamble. It was just completely fair, but we've been very lucky that the market since then, like since like, you know, going into 24 has, you know, obviously AI is on top, but like defense is probably second. That's a tremendous tailwind for us. So from like a luck perspective of when we started the business to your, to your question, I mean, we're lucky.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  I mean, I knew it was, it's a good idea. It's been a good idea the whole time. But we're lucky on timing and I think that that, you know, is something that we can't forget. And I'm very thankful that we're lucky.

• 48:23Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, lucky and good.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Lucky and good. It's a good combo.

• 48:27Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, that's the perfect combo. I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into the sort of specific product bets that you're making and what you're building. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  So our first product, kind of funny, was named Blackbeard internally. The Blackbeard name was, I don't want to say leaked, but it was put into a government budget document as Blackbeard. I was like, oh, I guess we're releasing that now. Now that is a name of our product publicly. That wasn't necessarily my original intention, but like you could see.

• 48:59Mario Gabriele?

  I think it's a great name, I have to say.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  We've leaned in.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, first thought was like, oh God, I hope there's nobody has like a Blackbeard trademark that is going to come after us for a missile. But you know, it's directionally correct. You've got to solve these three factors. You need a weapon that's survivable, that goes very far and gets there quickly. Great. That's a huge wide open trade space. So like, where are you going to start after that? I actually went and because I had been working in the, you know, in defense and aerospace for 20 plus years. The government actually maintains like these extremely large physics based simulations of United States assets, allies assets, foreign adversary assets. And they play them against each other in these like giant Monte Carlo simulations that are all physics driven.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  And so I went and talked to an individual who owned one of these said models. And just asked like, hey, you obviously play all these war games like within this model. Like what, what would really be a standout? Like what would like, beyond like the obvious of going far, going fast and being survivable? What would be, you know, what would be the type of weapon that would really make a difference? And that helped give us the initial steer for like, what are like the second set of requirements for Blackbeard? And we took that, then started iterating that against customers.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Cause I think one of the things that people seem to forget when they're doing like business with the government is that they think that the government sales process is like, I'm going to wait for like an RFI or RFP and I'm going to start responding and then hopefully I'll win. And it's absolutely wrong.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  The government is a extremely sophisticated and complex buyer, but you need to treat them like you would any other enterprise sales deal, meaning that you need to know who the decision makers are. You need to know who the stakeholders are. They need to like you. You need to make friends. You need to talk to them. You need to be meeting them well in advance of them releasing anything. And so we started taking like those initial concepts of a Blackbeard design that we had created and we started talking to people that buy weapons and asking them, what do you think? And so even though we have funded the majority of Blackbeard's development ourself off of venture capital, private funding, the customer has been involved from the very beginning, even if unofficially.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  And so we started working through what the specs would look like. And the second part of that we were doing is vetting who should be our customer? If you have a group that just doesn't want to work with you, it's going to be very hard to sell them on their product. They're just like, please go away. And so our earliest customer was the Air Force, but not the part of the Air Force that buys munitions, unfortunately. But our second customer was the Navy. And so let me tell you that building a carrier-based air-launched weapon is not your ideal weapon to build as your first missile.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  It is a layer of complexity that you would prefer you would hit in like missile two or three.

• 52:21Mario Gabriele?

  Why is that?

• 52:22Speaker 00

  There are so many requirements that go along with being on a carrier in terms of just storage on the carrier, safety requirements, being cats in traps, as they call it, so like catapult launchets. And being, you know, they, I mean, if you watch any naval aircraft land on the carrier, it's like a controlled crash. They just slam it into the deck. And then being air-launched is like, and now you have all the requirements for being air-launched with like on a manned platform. It's just, there's tremendous amounts of extra work that you have to do, both for the environment that you're in, but also to prove that the weapon is safe to be around people. And so you would much rather say, hey, let me just put a munition in a container and we can launch it without anybody being nearby.

• 53:06Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, I see.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  But that wasn't where we found our customer.

• 53:10Mario Gabriele?

  So you were launched into the deep end.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  So we launched right into the deep end and I mean, we're not ones to shy away from the hard work and it was the right thing to do because it's been announced at this point, you know, we're integrating onto F-18. The Navy has the most F-18s. I mean, they have F-35s, but they have more F-18s than F-35s. And so if you want to get back to again, that goal of deterring, you need to be on the platform that is most proliferated that they that can launch the most missiles and then and then everybody knows that. And so it's not the easy thing to do, but it was the right thing to do. And some of the the ways that we achieved range especially were at the time that we started, very novel.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  And so most of our folks have like a space or space launch background, like an orbital launch background. So it's it's kind of like a missile, but larger scale. But the first thing you know about, you know, an orbital launch vehicle is like single stage to orbit is thus far been a pipe dream. And so if you want to go really far, you want to stage your system. A staged tactical air launched weapon is, I don't know that that's ever been done. So we started with like, okay, you're telling us range is really important. How do you feel about having a staged weapon? And that was, I'd say, a kind of a difficult question for folks early on because they had never encountered that or thought through

• 54:41Speaker 00

  it. Because obviously, when you have a staged weapon, meaning that you have two rocket motors and the first one's going to burn and then separate and drop off early into the flight. And then the rest of it's going to continue on, which reduces your drag and reduces your mass. So you get you get a tremendous increase in range. But now you have this, you know, this spent booster that's going to fall somewhere early. That was not an easy conversation, but at the same time, it's like, hey, if you're telling us range is important, like, we really think you should consider this. And so one of the ways that we have achieved range is Blackbird is a staged weapon, and that's going to be very new. And now you're putting that on to

• 55:26Speaker 00

  A carrier-launched aircraft where you have tremendous forces involved with the catapult and with the landing. And then you have like a separation mechanism that cannot fail and like you can't have your, you know, the front of your missile fall off from a safety perspective, much less like, obviously, it would break the weapon. It's been quite the journey with folks, but I mean, we've proven that it's doable. And the Navy is fully on board, as I'm sure that you've seen. So we are, you know, a year away from being integrated into F-18. And then we're also working with the Army where that concept of a staged weapon was

• 56:10Speaker 00

  also new to them from a tactical, you know, land-launched missile perspective. Those are normally unitary missiles where they're not staged, but it was the right thing to do to get range. And I think we're pretty upfront on that thinking. We focused on a boost glide weapon for simplicity's sake. And so for everybody, you know, what that really means is that after our motors burn out, that's all the energy that the system has. It has no, it has no like turbo fan, it has no other form of propulsion. It is literally just coasting. And so you are losing speed, losing altitude for the entire rest of the flight as it travels to, you know, the end destination. But there's a level of technical simplicity, especially on the manufacturing side that

• 56:55Speaker 00

  comes along with that. Because when you talk about like a hard manufacturing problem, making turbo machinery is not easy. A boost glide weapon is literally like a rocket motor and then a glide body with some aero control surfaces to simplify it. Now, it's going very fast, so there's a lot of heat and thermal problems that you have to solve, but there's no complex like machinery internal to it. And so we were very hyper-focused on making our first product something that we could build as a startup, something that would be affordable and something that could be built in large quantities. And so that's why we centered on what we did. And then we accomplished some of the other objectives, like very long range, by looking at non-traditional things like the staging.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Versus making the weapon an air breeder. And so the other type of hypersonic system is they're known as air breathers, where basically they have either a ramjet or scramjet combustor. There's a lot of technical challenges in those. And that's not to say that we would never build an air breathing system. But there's a lot of technical challenges that still have to be worked through. And so we were focused on simplicity. And so Blackbeard is all about simplicity while still being tremendously capable. And unfortunately, most of the actual details of the capabilities I can't talk about. But you kind of get the overall gist that if you take that mindset to every single part of the system and you think through, we know how it's currently done on traditional systems.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Does that make sense? Should we think about a different way? What would be manufacturable? You know, how do we keep the costs down? What should it look like if you hold those metrics as the most important and capability as the third? And you come to some pretty different distinct solutions when you think through the whole system in that in that regard. And I think like the common misconception is that as you, if you think that you're placing capability third and cost and schedule, you know, or cost and manufacturability first and second. It's like, well, your system you're going to be building is completely incapable. That's not true.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  Sure. Can it do absolutely everything in every edge case? No. But what if I could afford to shoot five because it's cheaper than one? Yes. The alternative. And you get into this like system level thinking of like the effect you're trying to achieve. And when we go all the way full circle to the start of this long monologue for me, of these physics based models, it turns out that a affordable, scalable, good enough weapon is incredibly effective in these scenarios. And so you see a lot of this discussion of like a high-low mix where

• 59:46Speaker 00

  there's a like a low cost scalable ammunition that's going to be employed with some like very specific niche use case, high end weapon to go do something very specific. But it's incredibly important to have that low end mix and the US has just not done a very good job to date of doing that. And now, you know, with this administration and the department, there's been new thinking like we have to bring in new entrants, we have to bring in these low cost munitions in a big way because we need this type of industrial base in our supply chain. And we're part of that and so we're very grateful to be part of that. And Blackbeard is meant to address the first mass produced, low cost hypersonic munition

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  in the US inventory ever. Maybe, I don't know how cheap the Chinese ones are, I'm sure they're actually quite cost effective as well, but at least outside of China, it will be the first.

• 1:00:41Mario Gabriele?

  You know, that, that concept of the high-low mix is so interesting and, you know, is obviously such a big part of what you're doing. I've, I saw somewhere that Blackbeard sort of described as having maybe 80% of the capability of sort of the, the very top of the line army missile, but obviously at this fraction of a cost. So you can produce five or 10 or however many, you know, to, to sort of match against that. You know, to, to, to come back to the, the topic where we started with and explored a little bit on, in matching the capabilities of peer powers, you know, China is obviously so effective at low cost manufacturing at scale.

• 1:01:24Mario Gabriele?

  To what extent is trying to compete on that basis sensible? You know, maybe it's just necessary that you at least have some capability there, but it seems like historically, America has sort of tried to find these, you know, offset strategies where you're competing on some very disparate dimension than, than someone else, whether that's just going much more up market. But I suppose the question I'm asking is, will there ever be a stage where America can truly match the volume of output of a peer power like China?

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  This is a great question and it ties to your 80% comment earlier. So I want to make sure to tie that in. America in the past has been an absolute powerhouse of manufacturing.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  There were financial decisions made as to why that is no longer the case. It is not. I think America is uniquely situated to be very good at manufacturing. Now, are our labor costs going to be as low as, you know, a developing country's labor cost? Absolutely not. So is it, is it, if you have the same exact approach, can you get the cost parity? Probably not. But that isn't to say that we can't afford American manufacturing. And in fact, I think the biggest issue that has to be solved. And this gets to the costs and the manufacturability. Cause I think like the thing that people forget is like the old adage like time is money.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  In aerospace, the thing that costs money is everybody's time. And if you can get the time down, the cost is coming out by default because it's almost all labor. And so like when you see these giant budgets for what have you, it's all labor. And so if you focus on creating a design that takes less labor, not that you're better at like doing that labor or cheaper doing that labor, but you are making a design that fundamentally is simpler to build, takes less to put together, is put together with higher yield because it's designed to go together only one way correctly.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  You can have a very, very cost effective mass produced product. And so like, if you look at automotive, American auto manufacturers are competitive within the world economy with everybody. They're, they're going to be under tremendous pressure if like, you know, like, like, like the slate of Chinese automakers are allowed in. Now there's some unfair advantages that they're getting. Like a lot of the manufacturing in China is like state subsidized. On top of already having lower labor, there are geopolitical factors at play there, but. America can be very competitive in manufacturing. It's the process that aerospace and defense has traditionally moved to, I'd say like since the 1960s,

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  that is not competitive with with any type of commercial practice whatsoever because it had different goals. The goal was we want the lowest risk possible for this thing to not work or to hurt somebody. And that's very reasonable, like in a national space program, et cetera. But we're now at the point that that process is so slow and therefore so labor intensive and therefore so expensive because you're paying for that labor that we're almost at the limit of complexity of the types of aerospace systems we can build. And you see that across like kind of like numerous flagship programs, whether you're like talking like SLS and space launch or F-35. It's like, what's the next generation fighter going to cost if this one costs $1 trillion? And can America even afford that?

• 1:05:05Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  I'm going to posit, no, not doing it this way.

• 1:05:09Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  Like we have to, we actually have to change to approach that allows us to have greater product and system complexity at a lower cost, or we're just going to stagnate at our current like technological level. And so the biggest issue that needs to be addressed is China's approach and other countries' approach who don't have the money that the United States has, has been this approach of how we used to do aerospace. It's this, I'm going to iteratively design something. I'm going to build it. I'm going to test it. I'm going to see how it works and I'm going to rapidly go back and do that again in a tight circle. You get to the end answer in a shorter amount of total time and therefore a lower cost. And you also get experience of like, hey, I'm, I thought when I built this thing, it was going to behave this way.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  It turns out I was completely wrong about this one thing and it's a nightmare to build. It would cost a fortune if we went to production that way. We need to change it. You can do that in this iterative model. In the traditional aerospace model, you're usually so deep into the program that if you take that, that delay to fix something, like your program's likely to be canceled. And so you know you have a huge flaw and you are choosing to move forward because that is the, the only option you have left. And so when you get back to like, Can a cost-effective, mass-produced system be more capable than a very exquisite, you know, kind of traditionally-designed system? The answer is absolutely yes.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  And so like the proof points for this, you know, you look at like what SpaceX has done with Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is by far the cheapest, most mass-produced launch vehicle. It is also the most performant. And the reason it's the most performant is because they have iterated so many times. They've redesigned system after system. Then they built it and they've seen where that the assumptions or the model wasn't correct. And they went back and they fixed it and they fixed the manufacturing system, which is something that Elon always will talk about, like the, the, the system, the production system that builds the system is like the harder part. You get practice when you're building hardware, building the production capability.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  So what really scares me about the way China is behaving is they're using this iterative model as are other countries, you know, like North Korea, like you, everybody used to just make from North Korea, like they'd launch a missile and it would like blow up or fall in the ocean. But they, they couldn't afford to do it the way the US did aerospace. They just do this rapid iteration. And it turns out like they're getting very good because they're having so many shots on goal and so many opportunities for like engineers to learn and have so many opportunities to inject improvements, whether the improvement is a capability improvement, it's a cost improvement, it's a manufacturability improvement. They're getting all those opportunities to incorporate that. That's the thing that has to be fixed because what happens is in a system

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  where you are learning faster than the other side, you're ultimately going to have a more performant, lower cost, more producible system in the end. And so like this concept of, you know, being an 80% solution, sure, today, absolutely. Like this is, this is our company's first time building a missile. I think it's going to be quite a good missile, but it's our first time. Give me like 20 years and we've, you know, designed more, more weapons than the traditional industry has in like the 100-year history. I have a feeling our missile is going to be better and I have complete faith in that process. And so the thing that we really have to solve as a country is that we can't let our adversaries and our peers walk away with that iterative approach and be faster

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  than us because warfare is always just adapting to whatever the other side is doing. And the person that actually wins is whoever adapts faster and puts the cost back on the other side quicker to counter it. And that's just how warfare is. You have to be good at that. We have to fix that. And I'd say like, at this point in time, American aerospace, traditional aerospace is uniquely poorly suited to do that. And all of the new entrants, we all have a common theme of we're going to do this differently. We're going to get back to these iterative approaches so that we can produce complex systems affordably and on a reasonable schedule, even if I don't know the exact technical solution for how

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  to do this today. I'm going to build the company and all of our internal processes about how do I go out and learn quickly to do it. I think sometimes my attitude can come off as arrogant. I absolutely do not know how to do all future things. I just have faith in the process of how you can get to an understanding of a highly complex system in a reasonable amount of time and a reasonable amount of money. And I think that's what we are trying to solve.

• 1:09:54Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, magical things happen when you can optimize for a learning rate. That's what's so magical about what you're trying to do and so important, I think, about what you're trying to do. As a final sort of wrap up question, I always like to ask people, if there's a book that you had the chance to assign to everyone on earth to read and know that they'd understand it, what would you like to give to them?

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  If you're thinking of running a business, I really like The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

• 1:10:22Mario Gabriele?

  Great book.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  By Mr. Horowitz, yes. I have a lot of recommendations for. You know, books from like Kip Thorne on astrophysics, just because I'm like a huge physics geek.

• 1:10:32Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, there'll be some people who want to hear those if you if you have a few.

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  I'm struggling to remember the title of the book. I just have all of his books. Um, I was actually admiring, we have another one of his books on the shelf over here. As a prop, but it's a book on gravity. And I was like, maybe I'll just come steal that book. Oh, no one will notice. Um, the, the other series of books that I think are really, um, interesting biographies on like Richard Feynman. Famous physicist from like the, um, you know, Manhattan Project era. His lectures on physics, you know, if I ever had a role like model that I'd want to emulate, it's like he has unique skill was such a genius, such so smart with physics, yet. Presented it in such a funny and relatable way, even if physics is not your first passion in life.

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  And just like his other interests of humanity, like he like, he liked bongo drums, he liked music. Well, also like having like, you know, reading some of the biographies, they had like very clear personal flaws, like all of us do. If you're, if you're like physics adjacent and not just a complete nerd. Reading some of the books about Richard Feynman, I think you'd find it really interesting because they intertwine physics in a way that is also like a very good personal story. I'll come back to you with exact names. I'm so terrible with remembering names. I just have all of the books.

• 1:11:51Mario Gabriele?

  Maybe you're thinking of something different, but, um, surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman.

• 1:11:56Mario Gabriele?

  So fantastic. I love that.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:11:58Mario Gabriele?

  And, and then I, I, earlier this year, I actually read, um, his collection of letters, uh, which someone put together. And I thought that was also just amazing. What a colorful character and brilliant person.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. And I mean, his like, his lectures, somebody has put them, uh, there's probably multiple channels that have put them on YouTube. I'm actually a huge fan of YouTube of all things. There are so many good creators on YouTube, um, that. Talk about whatever you're, you could be, who could have any interest on Earth, just go search it. Like there's somebody. Who just loves it. It has a great content about it. And there's so many for me. I have like this interesting mix of like watching. Veritasium.

• 1:12:39Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  Was it, what is it? Three brown, one blue?

• 1:12:42Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  It's either three brown, one blue, or three blue, one brown. I can't remember, but all of these science-related shows. And then also, like, I watch shows on like, how to weld. I want to be a better welder. And, and there's, there's channels like make, I think it's Making Mistakes with Greg. I'm also a car guy. There's a channel, Superfast Matt. Incredible content.

• 1:13:00Mario Gabriele?

  I watched the Veritasium game theory video after I think I saw you had mentioned it somewhere. I'd watched some of his other stuff, but that's an amazing video. I highly recommend it.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Isn't that an amazing video?

• 1:13:11Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  I, I mean, it's incredible. I think when you watch some of these things, um, or read about them, I'm not opposed, I'm not opposed to reading about them, but it's, it's obviously easy to consume YouTube as you're like falling asleep. But like that episode in particular, like sticks in my head is like, wow, everything makes sense is like how countries respond to each other.

• 1:13:32Mario Gabriele?

  Yes.

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  And it's truly interesting. Um, so I highly encourage anybody that's watching this, like, go check that episode out on game theory by Veritasium.

• 1:13:42Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, it's sort of a, you know, a nice encapsulation of in some ways, the, the worldview one wants from your country, which is, you know, I think you sort of alluded to it. You, the, the optimal game theoretic strategy is, what was it? Nice, clear, retaliatory and forgiving. You know, you, you, you want to be nice enough to the other person. You want to be clear about what you're doing. You want to hit back when they hit you and you want to be more forgiving than you, you might think.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. You're like, are those the traits that I should embody as a person and in interacting with other people?

• 1:14:14Mario Gabriele?

  Yes, apparently yes.

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  Apparently yes, but like, you're like, oh, that doesn't feel good. But yeah, it's, it's quite interesting. And then the way that the science and the math comes into it as well. My mother was a, or is, was a sociologist. And so, you know, I always viewed it as like, it's a soft science. Like what, how do you, how do you work with that? And it turns out there's like a lot of math and statistics and models that goes into like, how you model social behavior and, and. All of these unique kind of aspects of like human society that if you're like me and you're very like very math and like physics heavy and even chemistry is like getting a little too far out there because like you have to remember just like processes not from

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  first principles and like you get to social science and it kind of like my mind was blown like, oh, there's some really interesting concepts. You just have to have the interest to dig into them.

• 1:15:08Mario Gabriele?

  How fascinating because you basically picked the absolute combination of math, physics, and sociology in many respects.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  That's certainly subconscious if that happened, but I guess that is true. Yeah, it was an interesting upbringing being sandwiched between a sociologist and a former fighter pilot who transitioned to running a nuclear power plant like Homer Simpson. So.

• 1:15:29Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, gosh. I can't believe I I'm I'm kicking myself. I can't believe I landed on this at the very end, but maybe that's the perfect place. Well, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure, Brian.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  No, thank you, Mario. Very straight having me on. This has been great.

• 1:15:46Mario Gabriele?

  That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions. So if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.