487: Blake Scholl—Making Supersonic Travel Real

Mike Rowe sits down with Blake Scholl, the former Amazon software engineer turned aerospace entrepreneur who walked away from Silicon Valley to revive supersonic passenger travel. As the founder of Boom Supersonic https://boomsupersonic.com/, Blake explains the century-long pursuit of faster flight. From the Cold War race to break the sound barrier to the rise—and fall—of the Concorde, Blake explains why supersonic travel disappeared just as it seemed destined to change aviation forever. He also shares how Boom Supersonic is working to make high-speed passenger flight practical again, and what it will take to shrink a 12-hour flight into just a few hours. Along the way, Mike and Blake discuss innovation, risk, engineering breakthroughs, and why some people refuse to accept that getting somewhere faster is a problem already solved.

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

• 0:03Mike Rowe?

  Hey guys, Mike Rowe here. This is The Way I Heard It. And today, we are making supersonic travel real. Or at least, talking to the guy who has dedicated a big chunk of his life to making that possible. I like the way it sounds, Chuck. I like the idea of flying from New York to San Francisco. I like the idea of leaving at 9:00 in the morning and getting there at 9:30 local time. I like that a lot.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would be great. Three and a half hours? Whew, that would be awesome.

• 0:34Mike Rowe?

  Uh, Blake, what did we decide? It's Scholl.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:38Mike Rowe?

  Even though he spells it like school.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  No, no, it's 1-O-2-Ls. S-C-H-O-L-L. Scholl.

• 0:44Mike Rowe?

  Well, you know what? If we got it wrong, it serves him right. It's got a funny name. But man, what a big brain and what a nice guy.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Super.

• 0:51Mike Rowe?

  He's on such a mission. It's such a big swing and he's got so many reasons to feel optimistic. Because he really just, he asked himself a really simple question, this guy did, um, back in, whatever it was, 14 years ago. It just occurs to him that, you know, planes haven't really gone any faster.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:12Mike Rowe?

  Than they got in, what, I guess 2003 or so? We just, it's like we just said, okay, that's fast enough.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20Mike Rowe?

  And, uh, you know, never mind the Concorde. Those sonic booms were annoying. They were outlawed. We just came to accept the fact that this was as good as it gets.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Right. And what he has done that's so amazing, I think, or at least he's figured it out, is that he's able to go supersonic without the supersonic boom.

• 1:39Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. And so because of that, he's worked around, and maybe it's a loophole. I think the president signed an executive order back in June that's basically allowed the pursuit of supersonic international and domestic travel to happen again. He's formed a company. The company is called Boom. It is well-funded by a number of very enthusiastic billionaires.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04Mike Rowe?

  And this guy knows what he's doing. He's already built one prototype, I think the XB1. And now he's working on something called the Overture.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, already got 130 orders with United, American, and Japan, I believe, Japan Airlines.

• 2:18Mike Rowe?

  It's just beautiful. He brought me a model, which I'll show you over on YouTube. If you watch the episode there, we have the kind of conversation you hope you're gonna have with a capitalist who's an entrepreneur, who is really paying close attention, not just to technology, but to the unintended consequences of doing and not doing a thing. And the way that relates to everything from data centers to AI, to the way we're thinking about our species in the future, you know, he's just got his head screwed on right.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  And the best thing about him to me, besides his big brain and all, is that he's super optimistic.

• 2:53Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Really optimistic, sees the future as very bright.

• 2:57Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  And he wants to make it better.

• 2:58Mike Rowe?

  And final point, as you'll learn, he, like, he didn't go to MIT, he didn't study engineering, he didn't study aerospace. This guy comes out of the software world.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:09Mike Rowe?

  Worked for Amazon and Groupon and just decided that he wanted to go another way. He got real smart, real fast, and now everybody's chasing him in the race to go supersonic. Me, I'm betting on boom, and I bet you will too. Blake Shoal, right after this.

• 3:32Mike Rowe?

  So some of you may have heard, I went to Congress 16 years ago to testify before a House Subcommittee. And then again, a year later, to testify before a Senate Subcommittee about the need to reinvigorate the skilled trades with some kind of national effort that would make a more persuasive case for a lot of good jobs out there that didn't require a four-year degree. Well, 15 years later.

• 4:00Mike Rowe?

  I finally heard back from the government and I am delighted to tell you about a program called BuildFreedom.us. This is the national PR campaign that MicroWorks has been talking about for a decade and a half now, and it's focused on 300,000 or 400,000 excellent jobs in the defense industrial base. These are the electricians and the plumbers and the steam finners and the pipe fitters and the CNC operators and the shipbuilders and so forth. But in this case, all of those trades are focused on building out our national infrastructure through the defense industrial base. So people who are building our autonomous weapons, our planes, our ships, it's only

• 4:45Mike Rowe?

  a matter of national security and it's a very big deal. And on a personal level, it's really been very gratifying. Build Freedom donated $10 million to MicroWorks. The money's available right now for you if you want to pursue a skill that's in demand and work in the defense industrial base. I think it's an opportunity of a lifetime. Go to BuildFreedom.us, see what's available and then apply for a scholarship from MicroWorks. The money's there, burning a hole in my pocket. Go get some. BuildFreedom.us.

• 5:20Mike Rowe?

  Sure appreciate you flying in.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Happy to be here.

• 5:23Mike Rowe?

  From Denver.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:25Mike Rowe?

  How long did it take you?

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Only a couple hours, which is not bad. If every flight was a couple hours, I think we'd be winning.

• 5:31Mike Rowe?

  No kidding. I was telling you just before we were rolling, I was in Denver a couple of weeks ago, early in May. It snowed. And I was struck too, because I flew to Denver, which felt civilized, and then I flew to DC and did my thing there, and then I flew back to Dallas and did a thing which felt civilized. And then I made it home to San Francisco, where two runways are under construction and the FAA, for whatever reason, just forbade parallel landings. So the delays here are constant. That didn't feel civilized, but in the end, as trips go, I didn't have much to bitch about on that one, really, you know? But that's the exception.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  It is, yeah. No, I mean, I think we're living in a dark age as a flight and nobody knows. Like...

• 6:15Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. So, like...

• 6:20Mike Rowe?

  I don't want to just jump in quite this fast. I want to thank you again for coming and remind the listeners that my introduction to you was was really random. I was on a plane, ironically, a private one, trying to get to Alex Epstein's conference and you were speaking and I was, I mean, what a miracle of technology, right? We're, we're going pretty fast, high in the air, and I'm watching you. And then we land and I get there just in time to hear the crowd go wild after you, after you finished up. What did you tell those assembled in a nutshell?

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Long story short, it's a really exciting time in flight. We've had half a century of the same or actually just getting worse. Like, you know, today's flights actually are scheduled for longer than they were in the 1950s because we've got more congestion. And we haven't done anything to make the actual flying faster, but that's about to change.

• 7:13Mike Rowe?

  It seems like for the longest time, everything was rooted in speed. How much fat progress, progress, like, that's how we measured progress.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  It's literally the purpose of an airplane, is to do something faster than you could otherwise do it.

• 7:27Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Right? And then we lost our way in the late 1960s. And there are a lot of layers to this onion. We can peel them all back. But at one level, we literally banned faster in this country. 14 CFR 91817, my least favorite number, says thou shalt not exceed the speed of sound. And, you know, if you look at the Wright brothers, all the way forward to the jetliners, the one thing that was true of every new airplane, it was faster than one that came before it. And, and then we banned going any faster. And theoretically, this was about sonic boom. But we didn't ban sonic boom, so we banned speed. And that left, I think, just kind of, you know, a 50, 60 year disaster. Because if you can't actually build

• 8:10Speaker 02

  a faster airplane, all you can do is polish the one you've got. So if you look at Boeing's latest airliner, and you squint, it looks just like their one from the 1950s. And, you know, of course, Boeing has kind of fallen apart as a company. And I think part of the story is if you're an innovator, but innovation is banned, you don't even want to work there.

• 8:31Mike Rowe?

  So we just what? We like, we ran out of runway. We lost, I mean, was it bureaucracy? Was it compliance? Was it overregulation? Or was it something more, I don't know, human? Was it ambition?

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I have a provocative view on this, which I actually think is JFK's fault. Approximately at least. So in the same speech that he committed America to the space race, he also committed America to the supersonic race. And that's less remembered, but it was very much a part of the 60s. And just as there was Apollo in the US and the Soviet space program, there was also a supersonic program in the Soviet Union. There's one in Europe, a joint venture between France and Britain governments that gave rise to Concorde.

• 9:17Mike Rowe?

  Was it a race?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was absolutely a race.

• 9:19Mike Rowe?

  People were in a supersonic race in the 60s?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  People were in a supersonic race, yeah. So there were three government-led projects, two in the West, one in Europe, one in the US, and one in the Soviet Union. And the Soviets flew an airplane, the Europeans flew an airplane, the Americans canceled theirs. And but if you look forward, you know, imagine it's 1969. So 1969, we land on the moon. And we also, Europe flew Concorde, a supersonic airliner, for the first time. And I think if you had stopped on the street and found the most pessimistic person in 1969 and said, what is space travel going to be like in 2026? What is air travel going to be like in 2026? I don't think you could have found a single soul that would have told you, we can't fly faster than the speed of the sound, and we can't go back to the moon.

• 10:02Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  And yet, that's what actually happened. So why? Why? And I think it's because we raced forward technologically in the wrong way. So Concorde and Apollo, I think, are brethren. Both of them were government-led projects to show that Western technology beat Soviet technology. And what were they? They were centrally planned. Meaning the specs set by the government, the money handout, top down, right? Ironically, we wanted to beat the communists and we adopted communism's central planning. It doesn't work any better for Americans than it does for the Russians. And so we did some very impressive, like, I think you can think of it as tech demos. Apollo, certainly impressive. We did some very difficult things, did some inspiring things.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Concorde, incredible airplane, but didn't make any economic sense.

• 10:50Mike Rowe?

  No market.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  No market. So then what happens is, so Concorde's not actually come to passenger service yet. We pull the plug on the American competitor. Boeing was building it under contract with the FAA. It was called the 2707. It was supposed to go Mach 3, 3 times the speed of sound.

• 11:07Mike Rowe?

  How fast is that?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Oh, you could fly across the country and, you know, hour and a half, two hours, something like that. Like, it's super, it's super fast.

• 11:14Mike Rowe?

  2,000 miles an hour.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's super, super fast. We didn't have the technology back then to make that economically viable. So Congress pulls the plug on it. Concorde's still coming. It's not obvious that Concorde is economically dead on arrival because of how it's been, in my view, done wrong. And so now, now American airspace is threatened by Europeans and the Soviets. So what do we do? We ban supersonic. And that happened in 1973. We didn't say, "Let's ban sonic booms." We said, "Let's ban speed."

• 11:43Mike Rowe?

  Are sonic booms always the result of sonic speed? Do they always follow?

• 11:51Speaker 02

  No. I mean, in fact, we showed last year you can fly supersonic with no audible boom, none. But I think the best analogy is to the wake of a boat. Like, if you've got a big boat nearby, you're going to get hit by a big wake. If you've got a smaller boat or a more distant boat, when the wake hits you, it's smaller, it's less bothersome. And so airplanes are the same way. Like, you know, SR71 flew supersonic over the US all the time. And there are basically zero stories about that being a problem because it flew really high.

• 12:20Mike Rowe?

  How high?

• 12:20Speaker 02

  80,000 feet.

• 12:22Mike Rowe?

  That's, what is that? That's the, what sphere?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  It's upwards of the stratosphere.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  And so, you know, I've heard a bunch of sonic booms, and if you get a low level one from an airplane that's right there, it can, you know, it can be startling. But if you're flying at the supersonic at the altitude an airliner would fly at, this is not some cataclysmic terrible event.

• 12:44Mike Rowe?

  I mean, the parallels to automotive are interesting. You know, like a horn, a car alarm, the sound of a busy freeway. These are all, you know, we sign off on that because, you know, it's part of the bargain.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  That's right. I mean, every single thing in our world has a pro and a con, right? And if we say we can't have any cons, we don't get any pros. And this is true of every new technology. There's something that's great about it, and it's always got some kind of a downside. But if we don't allow any downside, then we can't have any progress.

• 13:16Mike Rowe?

  Well, that's called risk, right?

• 13:18Speaker 02

  It's called risk. And also with, I mean, with supersonic in particular, it's absurd because we actually can fly supersonic with absolutely no booms. So actually, the con's not even there. And, and the good news is that we actually, we had a huge breakthrough last year. It was 115 days from us breaking the sound barrier, showing we could do it without a sonic boom, to the president signing an executive order that repeals Part 14 CFR 91817.

• 13:44Mike Rowe?

  This is signed, done?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  It was signed June 6th of last year, and the FAA is working on finalizing it. And I'm told that's going to be done pretty darn soon. And then the speed limit is no more. The other thing that I think, Mike, is really interesting, is if you look back to the history of how that speed limit got put in place, you know, ostensibly, it was about sonic boom was bad. I think the real motivation was protect Boeing from European competition. And so what ends up happening is the ban on supersonic flight was one of the first victories of the environmental movement in this country. And if you fast forward to today, not only did the president sign that executive order, but there's a bill that does the same thing that passed the House unanimously.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Right? Because I think it's super interesting that we went from like sonic boom for those boogeyman's, you can't have supersonic flight. And now all of a sudden, it's actually a bipartisan thing that we should allow supersonic flight again, so long as there's no boom.

• 14:43Mike Rowe?

  As we say in Baltimore, boom.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Boom, hon.

• 14:46Mike Rowe?

  Boom, hon.

• 14:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, why isn't your logo the word boom, like with the circle around it and a line through it?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  The joke was that we should have renamed the company Shhh Supersonic. Or maybe just delete boom and just call it Supersonic. The, a story we could go into if it's interesting, but we actually solved boom without intending to do it. It was kind of an accident.

• 15:07Mike Rowe?

  How in the world?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the physics of how this work is pretty neat. Basically, the boom makes a U-turn in the sky and never touches the ground. And that's due to, you know, think about dropping a straw in your glass of water. And it looks broken, right? Because the light bends when it goes through the water.

• 15:24Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, refraction.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Refraction, that's right. So sound waves refract the same way when they go through the atmosphere. And so you got, if you got a sonic boom coming off an airplane, it actually curls upward as it comes off the airplane. And so if you fly high enough.

• 15:38Mike Rowe?

  Sorry, when you say it comes off the airplane.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:41Mike Rowe?

  Like, it walked me right to the point of origin of the sound.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, so let's have fun with this. The best question nobody ever asked me is, what in the world does the speed of sound have to do with an airplane?

• 15:53Mike Rowe?

  What in the world does the speed of sound have to do with an airplane?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  There you go. Brilliant question.

• 15:57Mike Rowe?

  Thank you.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  So the speed of sound is the speed at which, you know, pressure waves move in air. And as the airplane moves about, it's all about, you know, how pressure waves move around the airplane. So let me break this down a little bit. So, so if you're moving, imagine you're running along and there's a group of people, a crowd in front of you. You're running at that crowd like a crazy person. And they look over, they see you, Mike, Mike's running at me. What am I, I'm starting to get out of the way, right? And like mostly like the crowd parts and you kind of run through, they look at you weird, right? That's subsonic. Because when you're flying less than the speed of sound, there is a pressure wave in front of the airplane that is basically saying, hey, air, I'm coming, start getting out of the way. And now the moment you're supersonic, what that means is the airplane is outrunning that pressure wave.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  So what that means is imagine you're running at that crowd of people. They can't see you coming and you just crash into them headlong. And they just start falling over like dominos, right? And so that's what happens in air. When the airplane is going faster than the pressure wave, it squishes the air as it hits it, compresses it. That compressed air is what we hear on the ground as a sonic boom. That little band of compressed air, which is sort of this compressed air pressure wave, comes off the airplane and it turns, it refracts in the air and it turns upwards. And that's because there is a, the speed of sound varies with temperature. It's cold up high, it's warm down low. And that's what causes this refraction. But so if you fly high enough and you control your speed, the boom basically makes a big U-turn in the sky and never hits the ground.

• 17:32Mike Rowe?

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• 18:54Mike Rowe?

  But in terms of like, maybe I'm thinking of this wrong, but as I imagine the surface of a plane, the nose, the wings, so forth, is it like a match hitting a flint where like there you have the spark and then you have the light and then you have the heat, like what part of the plane does the sound?

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, so think about-

• 19:19Mike Rowe?

  Like, it's not the engine.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  No, it's the whole airplane.

• 19:22Mike Rowe?

  The whole-

• 19:22Speaker 02

  The whole airplane.

• 19:23Mike Rowe?

  It's like a tuning fork.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Kinda. If you actually hear a sonic boom, it tends to sound like a bang-bang, like a double bang. Why? Because the front half of the airplane is basically smashing into air that didn't see it coming, it compresses. And the entire front half of the airplane is compressing. So the more, the more like, you know, blunt bodies you have run into air, the kind of the more compression effect you get. And then the back half of the airplane has to undo it. And the air kind of expands to fill what would be the gap behind the airplane. So that leads to, there's kind of a, if you look at this on a graph, you'll see a spike in pressure, and then you see a drop in pressure, and then you're seeing it return to normal. And so that gets heard as like a double bang. People call it an in-wave, it's kind of in-shaped.

• 20:02Mike Rowe?

  Why doesn't it persist?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Uh, it's like the wake of a boat. Like, you know, a boat goes by, you feel the wake hit you once.

• 20:10Mike Rowe?

  And then it goes past you?

• 20:12Speaker 02

  And then it goes past you and it moves on elsewhere.

• 20:14Mike Rowe?

  But there's another one coming though, right? Or if, I guess, maybe if you're keeping up with it at a distance?

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Uh-

• 20:20Mike Rowe?

  Like, why don't, why isn't it boom, boom, boom, like, constant?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  You know, if you got a whole bunch of airplanes, you get that. Like, one boat only makes one wake.

• 20:29Mike Rowe?

  Okay. Oh, oh, good, now I get it.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:33Mike Rowe?

  You're smart.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  People talk about these things in complicated ways, but in my, in my view, there's only two things in the world. Things that are simple and things I don't actually understand.

• 20:42Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, tempted to pivot right now and ask you how in the world a guy goes from Amazon and Groupon and software and product thinking and all that stuff into aerospace, but let me, I'll get to that. I want to circle back to-

• 21:03Mike Rowe?

  Uh, when you were talking about the aerospace industry and Apollo as being both the epitome of aspirational success and the beginning of what sounds like a giant disappointment, right? It reminds me of, um, of most PR campaigns, or like most PR events, they ramp up because somebody like Kennedy says, okay, here's the plan, not because it's the easy thing, it's the hard thing, right? He gets everybody fired up and you have a, an objective, maybe a date certain, and you have a plan. And you march toward it and you execute it and then you got it. And now what?

• 21:48Mike Rowe?

  Like, there's no plan after it. And in the, my theory is like in the, what is it? Power hates a vacuum. We're uncertain of what to do. We made it to the moon, now what?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:01Mike Rowe?

  And there's no clear idea for it. And so what fills that vacuum is a bunch of people going, hey, slow it down there, Sparky, or, you know, why are we doing this?

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's part of it, but if you go back and read what was written at the time, there actually was a vision beyond it. There was a, hey, we're gonna go build a colony on the moon and then we're gonna go to Mars. In 1969, everyone thought for sure there'd be a man on Mars by, by 1980.

• 22:25Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Uh, right? And it didn't happen. So it wasn't exactly a lack of vision. We went to the moon in a way that cost 4% of the federal budget. Right? You just can't afford to keep doing that.

• 22:37Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Right? In behind that is a, a supply chain that's now cost insensitive, right? Think about, you know, fundamentals of building anything, you got cost, quality and schedule, pick two, right?

• 22:47Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Right? Kennedy gave us the goal and he gave us the deadline.

• 22:52Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  And then we just fed all the money into the machine. And so now it's created this industrial base that's cost insensitive, right? And it's created this bureaucracy called NASA that, uh, wants to preserve its own existence. And this is the origin of the term self-licking ice cream cone. The organization, this purpose is to continue the existence of the organization, right? We keep doing these things, but we can't, we can't keep going back to the moon because we never did it economically.

• 23:14Mike Rowe?

  Are you pissing people off right now?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Oh, I hope so.

• 23:18Mike Rowe?

  Okay, I mean, wow, let's go there then. What is it precisely you're trying to disrupt? Is it NASA? Is it aeronautics as we understand it?

• 23:27Speaker 02

  No, I think what we need to do, if we want to make progress, was we've got to get back to some capitalism. Which means, let's build things that make some economic sense. If you go build, as a private company, if you go design something like Concorde, meaning here's a 100-seat airplane with a $20,000 ticket for a seat that looks like it came out of the back of a Southwest jet, and it's the 1970s and not that many people travel internationally, you go out of business. In fact, you never even get to that point. Well, nobody will give you the money for such a dumb idea.

• 23:57Mike Rowe?

  Who, that was France?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  France and Britain.

• 23:59Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Right? And so, the way this works in a free market is your plan's got to at least make some sense in order to get any funding. And Adam Smith's invisible hand keeps you from doing things that are too stupid. And if you do something that proves to be stupid, well, you know, the capital, the investors, give the next set of money to somebody else. Right? So, we're able to do this because we figured a way to do supersonic flight in a way that actually makes some sense economically. And the fundamentalist, let's get the cost down to the point a lot more people can afford to go on it. Let's make the seats nice so that people want to fly on it. And let's size the airplane in such a way that the airlines can fill the seats and make some money. You know, and let's solve sonic boom so you can fly in more places. Right? This is not complicated.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  And if you go do this because you're trying to make the Russians look bad, you lose track of all that.

• 24:51Mike Rowe?

  So then, what is the prime directive at boom? Like, as you really think about the impact of your success, how should, how should people be processing this?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Let's imagine what this is like a few iterations out. And this is, I'm going to give an extreme example because I just think it helps, helps see it clearly. What if you could get anywhere in the world in four hours for $100? Like, where would you vacation?

• 25:19Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Who would you do business with? Uh, who will your kids' friends be? Who would you fall in love with?

• 25:24Mike Rowe?

  Where would you have breakfast?

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Right? Yeah, no, it's exactly. Um, and I don't know that we'll ever do exactly that, because I think you can make a hundred-dollar flight's not gonna be very nice. But the, um, but if you think about the way you live your life, when time and cost are a barrier to bopping around the planet, that's the future that I think it's our job to create. Just keep, let's keep driving speed up and driving costs down, and such that ordinary people can travel around the planet without having to plan it, without having it to be a big cost in time or money.

• 25:59Mike Rowe?

  Star Trek fan?

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 26:02Mike Rowe?

  Don't you think, like, at the guts of what Roddenberry really did was, was shrink the world and the universe? Like, the idea of light speed? The idea of the transporter? Like, all the stuff that was so insanely, for me, cool about that, all had that, uh, property. It shrunk space and time.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. The other thing I love about Star Trek, and which I don't think we have enough of this today, is it's fundamentally optimistic science fiction, right? It paints a positive vision of the future.

• 26:40Mike Rowe?

  It ain't Blade Runner.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  It ain't Blade Runner, right? And, uh, I think, you know, somewhere, I think woven in this narrative of how did we get so lost in this country? You know, there's a story we talked about with Supersonic and JFK and the glory prologues, but there's also, like, what vision do we really tell of the future? And, and there's the Gene Roddenberry, the future is amazing and we should have these great things. And then there's the dystopian version. If you get too much dystopian, nobody actually builds the great things. By the way, the other thing that's interesting about Star Trek is if you go back and you look and you say, what, technologically, what was in Star Trek? Uh, say TNG, which I grew up watching.

• 27:15Mike Rowe?

  Uh-huh.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Um...

• 27:16Mike Rowe?

  That's the next generation.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Next generation, yes.

• 27:18Mike Rowe?

  Young kids.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Ironically, it's now the previous generation.

• 27:21Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  But back then it was called the next generation. And so they had iPads and Kindles. They had touchscreen computers.

• 27:29Mike Rowe?

  Sliding doors.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  They had sliding doors. They had voice control, so they had Alexa, right? And we got all that. But what we didn't get was the transporter. We didn't get the replicator. We didn't get the warp engine. And one way to look at it, I think this is, I think there's at least some truth to this.

• 27:47Mike Rowe?

  The holodeck.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  The hol- yeah.

• 27:48Mike Rowe?

  Wait, still waiting on that one.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  We am.

• 27:50Mike Rowe?

  We're getting close.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Palmer's trying to deliver that, right? And he's getting close. We got all the low-energy sci-fi, but we didn't get the high-energy sci-fi. We lost our way on energy.

• 28:02Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Which is why you were at Alex's event, probably.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah, and there's a connection between energy and supersonic, it turns out. Which is the engine that we're building for our supersonic passenger airliner. That I think we're all going to fly on here before too long.

• 28:16Mike Rowe?

  The overture?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  The overture's the airliner, that's right. But the engine for it, we call Symphony. Turns out if you hook an electric generator to it, you can make 42 megawatts. And so there's the-

• 28:29Mike Rowe?

  Explain to people the significance of that.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Well, so I think we all know today, we've got an electricity crisis in this country, right? We've got a grid that actually is basically flatlined. We make less electricity per capita today than we did in 1999. And yet, energy fuels our modern lifestyle. And if we look at AI, and I'm very much an AI bull, it's power-hungry. And we just don't have electricity for it. And I was looking at your shirt before we got on the air.

• 28:57Mike Rowe?

  I swear, Scouts Honor, I didn't wear this because you were coming. I wore it because some company called Maddox, who makes these generators transformers, just sent it to me in the mail. But, look, I get it. We award scholarships to all the trade pursuits. And right now, what we hear more than anything is electricians. Please, please, give us electricians.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, we need electricians, we need electrical engineers, we need people who build things with their hands. And we need, you know, and we need to produce a lot more electricity. You know, some reading, electricity will kill you. Also, the lack of electricity will kill you. And we've got a lack of electricity problem.

• 29:39Mike Rowe?

  What, if you could have just briefly explained to people the consequences of not solving that problem, is it, is it losing to China? Is it just, and sorry, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but is that another example of the aerospace, space race, like, like we got the grid to where somebody said, okay, that's good enough?

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I worry that we are today with electricity and AI where we were with nuclear power in the late 1960s, meaning there is a glimpse of an amazing, amazing future that we could have, you know, with, with nuclear power, the story used to be power too cheap to meter. And then we got afraid of it, we opposed it, we shut it down, and now we find ourselves, you know, 50 years later, we're energy poor, our power bills are going up and no one's happy about that. And, and we've got this energy intensive new technology that can do amazing things, but we don't have the energy for it. And if we sit around and we don't build data centers, we don't build power plants, you know, forget what China does or doesn't do, we don't have the amazing future we could have.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  And then, yeah, and it's worse if you imagine, you know, the Chinese having it and us not, because now that gets militarily really scary.

• 30:51Mike Rowe?

  You know, the thing that I worry about, aside from all of that, it's why I use the PR as an example. I think all challenges at some level really are communication challenges. And I just saw a survey that said, the general feeling around data centers in this country among the hoi polloi, the great unwashed, just Joe, Joe Blow from Idaho doesn't have a great feeling. It's like 75% negative in general. And so, what is the industry? What are all the consequential industries going to do? Because I think they blew it two years ago.

• 31:35Mike Rowe?

  I think they should have sat down and explained to the American people what's coming, what it means, and why the data centers are going to be a critical part of it. We didn't do that. So now it just seems like among, along with everything else, we've got ourselves a rhetorical challenge.

• 31:57Mike Rowe?

  Couple of weeks ago, on this very podcast, I talked with Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, about the incredibly complicated business of delivering affordable beef to our citizens without disadvantaging American ranchers. We also discussed the very controversial decision to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from various foreign countries and the maddening policy that allows meatpackers to label imported meat as a product of the USA. Well, shortly after that conversation, one of my sponsors, Good Ranchers, reported an unusually high level of interest in their product. And this is not surprising.

• 32:37Mike Rowe?

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• 33:20Mike Rowe?

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• 33:31Speaker 03

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• 33:42Speaker 02

  I think you're right. I think the industry did not do itself a service by just not getting ahead of this and communicating well. And in fact, I think they did a lot of own goals. So let's just talk about data centers for a second here. I imagine that most people who are scared of them haven't been close to one. And I've been to a bunch, including the ones that have their own vertically-integrated power plant. And if you stand right next to those turbines and you're not wearing earplugs, I don't recommend that.

• 34:05Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  But by the way, if you're a block away, you have no idea.

• 34:09Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  No idea, right?

• 34:11Mike Rowe?

  It's not like a sonic boom.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  It's like a total nothing.

• 34:17Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  And what we're finding is because the grid isn't scaling and the grid interconnects are backed up, all these data centers, in fact, everyone's pledged now, they're going to make their own electricity. So they can't drive electricity prices up because they're making their own electricity. They are taking natural gas, but if you look at the price of natural gas, it's largely not going up. It's not constrained, right? What's constrained is generation and the data centers are bringing their own generation. If you're not right next to them, there's no noise problem. So put them out kind of middle of nowhere and there's definitely no problem. They make their own electricity, there's kind of no problem. The water thing, I mean, almonds take orders of magnitude more water than data centers.

• 34:58Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  It's kind of a non-issue. By the way, if you use our turbines, they don't need any water. So you can run closed loop cooling, you can run our turbines, it's waterless.

• 35:07Mike Rowe?

  I mean, I'm sorry, but technically, how is that? What is closed loop?

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Closed loop cooling means you might use water in a loop to cool the data center. So imagine you run water through the servers, they get hot, take that water back outside. You run it through a radiator, you blow fan over it, cool the water off, you put it back inside. It's just like a refrigerator, the coolant goes in a loop, right? You can do the same thing with water in a data center. You know, you've got to fill the pipes up once, but after that, unless you got a leak, you don't need any more water. And some of these older turbines do take a lot of water because they, the turbines themselves can't run hot. And so the only way you solve that problem is basically put a swamp cooler in the intake and you're blowing a bunch of water into the air that goes into these turbines.

• 35:51Mike Rowe?

  That's like an evaporative cooler.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  An evaporative cooler, yeah, swamp cooler, evaporative cooler, that can take a lot of water. But I mean, our units are designed to run hot without any water. So you don't, you know, so you can get rid of all the water. I think the water problem is not a real problem, but you can, even if you believe it is a problem, you can get rid of that problem.

• 36:08Mike Rowe?

  So the sonic boom, the perception of data centers, you know, at that same conference, I mentioned briefly these polymetallic nodules on the seafloor. And a month before the EO, you mentioned this administration signed another one and we're going to go get these things.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 36:28Mike Rowe?

  I'm so glad to hear you say it because there's the NGOs are gonna scream. And I get it, the idea of mining the ocean sounds scary. It's more like going down to vacuum up the rocks that are full of cobalt and copper and nickel and manganese, the same stuff we've been tearing the Amazon apart to get. But I just, I'm just making the point that whether it's a boom, or whether it's a data center, or whether it's, what has happened to make us so reflexively frightened of progress?

• 37:02Speaker 02

  I don't know exactly, but something did happen around 1970 where like we turned culturally more pessimistic about the future. Right? And like the optimistic sci-fi dwindled, the Blade Runners kinda came online.

• 37:17Mike Rowe?

  Paul Ehrlich.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Paul Ehrlich, right?

• 37:19Mike Rowe?

  Frickin' population bomb.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Right? And now, and now we have the opposite problem, right? We have a population bomb, we blew up the population.

• 37:26Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  And, and you know, you know what? Humans are good.

• 37:29Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  And if we had more humans, we'd have more Mozart's, we'd have more electricians, you know, we'd have more innovators. And then, you know, and if you, all you have to do is fly coast to coast in this country and look down and notice we've got plenty of space. And, you know, we know how to scale food production, we've done that. Technology solves these problems. I think we got scared and we lost our inspiration. And, you know, you're talking about the fear of mining the seabed. Well, you know what's scary is mining the ground. A lot of people get killed, that's a dangerous job. But even scarier than that is not having this stuff. If you go back all the way to the, you know, the, when we invented fire. It's like, imagine if we'd invented fire and someone came through and said, well, that smoke is not good to breathe in, so we can't have fire.

• 38:09Mike Rowe?

  And it could spread and, you know, that would be bad.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Now, now, now we're, now we're all the way back to like, I don't know how many humans there are on the planet with a miserable existence.

• 38:17Mike Rowe?

  Six.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Right? Six.

• 38:21Mike Rowe?

  Prove me wrong. What's in the box?

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Ah, so this is a, this is a scale model of our Overture airliner. So this is, this is the airplane that in not too, too many years, that all of us will be able to buy a ticket and fly on twice as fast as we fly today.

• 38:41Mike Rowe?

  Oh my God, that would be just beyond incredible. I could just pull this right out of here.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Just pull it right out.

• 38:47Mike Rowe?

  I don't want to break it. Hold on a second. Here you get it.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  All right. Watch, watch, watch me break it. There we go.

• 38:54Mike Rowe?

  Don't break the prototype.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  There she is. Let me get you the stand.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Here. It's an action stand, so it looks like it's taking off.

• 39:12Mike Rowe?

  I like it.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. What are the things you learn early when you're building airplane models? They're always pointed up, never down.

• 39:18Mike Rowe?

  Yes. Well, our friend Bill Whittle would be so excited to be here. He's a, I don't know if you know Bill. He's a sort of an amateur historian and a pilot. And just would love, love, love everything you're doing. All right. How's this different than the Concorde?

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Uh, it's a lot cheaper to fly on. So if I just think about what, what actually matters in the end, a Concorde ticket would set you back 20 grand today's money. And Overture 1 is, uh, you'd be like flying business class internationally today. So I think more like five grand.

• 39:53Mike Rowe?

  How many seats?

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Seats about 60 in really nice, much, much more comfortable seats. And a lot of people think in five grand, that's, that's, that's a lot of money. It is. That is about 20% of the international travel market today, but about 80% by, by profit. So this starts out with the, the passengers that make the most money for airlines. So think about this as like, it's like the Tesla Model S of, you know, an electric car. It comes at a high price point. You kind of figure it out and the cost comes down. So there's going to be, we call this Overture 1. There will be an Overture 2, an Overture 3. And, uh, you know, we, we're not going to stop until anybody who values speed doesn't find that it's worthwhile to go buy the ticket.

• 40:32Mike Rowe?

  And you put a symphony in the overture, is that what I heard?

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Put a symphony in the overture, so it's got four symphony engines, and that's another Concorde difference. Concorde had these converted military engines that are rip roaring loud.

• 40:41Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  And this has, has no afterburners, it's what's called a turbo fan, it's a lot quieter, it's a lot more fuel efficient. All of that adds up to kind of efficiencies in the airplane itself and the engine that allow us to get the cost down. So if you look at the airplane itself, you notice the front's a bit bigger and the back's a little bit skinnier. It's a very svelte shape, you know, and today really only fighter jets have that shape. It's a lot more efficient, going faster than the speed of sound to have a very contoured fuselage. So that, the wings, the engine, lighter materials, all of that adds up to making the airplane more efficient so the cost can come down, so more people can afford to fly on it.

• 41:21Mike Rowe?

  Well, speaking of money, so you, Boom is, is building these?

• 41:24Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 41:26Mike Rowe?

  How you financed? Where'd you get the dough?

• 41:28Speaker 02

  With, with great difficulty. The first 10 years of this were extremely difficult to finance. We're only here today, actually thanks to a handful of billionaires that, that personally invested. And we have, we have a dozen very wealthy people that put forward some of their own personal wealth to say, I don't know how this thing gets finished, but I want to find a way. And then what happened about a year ago, as we're talking about earlier, is we found we could take those engines that are destined for the airplane and use them for power generation on the ground. And of course, that's a white heart market. So it's actually, it's actually the power generation.

• 42:02Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  That funds the development of the airplane now.

• 42:05Mike Rowe?

  Wow, that's ingenious.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  So when you, when you use ChatGPT, you're helping fund the supersonic future.

• 42:13Mike Rowe?

  Okay. You want to mention any of these billionaires by name, or are they keeping a low profile?

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, some of, some of them are higher profile, some of them are lower profile. I, if I mention some, I'll forget others.

• 42:26Mike Rowe?

  Well, it just, it warms my cockles, as it were, to know that, you know, people are betting on this.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, they are.

• 42:34Mike Rowe?

  It's not a dot gov solution, although you. You need the feds on your side.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and actually, the feds have been remarkably good to work with on this. I've been pleasantly surprised. We have a great relationship with the FAA in this administration, in previous administrations. We've been able to get stuff through Congress that we needed to. The regulatory at the federal level has not been the roadblocks that we, on day one, I was afraid it was.

• 42:58Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. What was day one like? No, never mind. Prior to day one.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:03Mike Rowe?

  Just this, if we could just get a little into your, into your personal curriculum vitae. I need to understand.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:11Mike Rowe?

  The pivot.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Well, I don't have the resume for this at all, right? Like, you know, my last job before this was I was running email marketing at Groupon. So, so, yeah, I know. It's a little, Groupon had bought my first startup that was basically sold in the fire sale. It was not a success, but I ended up at Groupon and.

• 43:30Mike Rowe?

  Silicon Valley?

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Silicon Valley, yep. And so I'm like, literally, they put me in charge of email. And whenever revenue was soft, the CEO would call me and say, Blake, send more email. And I was like, dude, that's why people unsubscribe and why the revenue is soft. He's like, I don't care, send more email. And this was kind of a miserable existence. But I'd been, I'd been flying for fun since I was in college and.

• 43:50Mike Rowe?

  You're a pilot?

• 43:51Speaker 02

  I'm a pilot, yeah, just little airplanes.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  And in my mid twenties, I toured a Concorde at the Seattle Museum of Flight. And, and that, I didn't understand why the most amazing airliner ever made was in a museum when there was nothing better at our airports. So I put a Google News Alert on supersonic jet. And I told myself, Blake, you got a lifetime goal of breaking the sound barrier. And back then, I thought I would do it by buying a ticket. But I watched it for about 10 years and nobody was doing anything. So eventually I just couldn't handle being like, I don't know, the spam king. And, and so I fired myself from Groupon and I got, I wandered around for a little bit. And I was like, okay, I want to work on the most exciting thing that's not impossible. And I was thinking back to having done my first company.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  When I had my first company, I mean, I think any entrepreneur will tell you, like, no matter what your startup is, there are always tough days.

• 44:41Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  And there are days where you don't know if you're going to get through it. And I remember thinking a lot like, man, I kind of wish I hadn't started because this isn't worth it. And, and I didn't, I wanted to do another company and I, and I knew I would have the hard day, but I never wanted to say, is it worth it? So I thought, well, let me just organize all my ideas by how happy I would be if it worked. Leave everything else aside. And so the supersonic airplane kind of went to the top of the list. And I thought, okay, Blake, you're crazy. But like, dig in, dig in and understand why you're crazy. And then I won't have to be 80 years thinking, what if I'd actually looked at the jet. But what I what I found as I dug into it, and you know, all I knew about airplanes back then is how to fly a Cessna. But as I dug into it, what

• 45:23Speaker 02

  I found is if you if you could beat Concorde by just 10%, you could do a supersonic seat with the economics of a flatbed in business class. I was like, can we really not do 10% better than 1960s technology? Surely you could find 10% efficiency gain. And so I started digging into it more and more and ended up just, I went back and I had to do remedial calculus and physics, because I hadn't had any since high school. And I don't know if I really understood it back in high school.

• 45:51Mike Rowe?

  Khan Academy?

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Khan Academy.

• 45:53Mike Rowe?

  It's unbelievable, man.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Right?

• 45:55Mike Rowe?

  I mean, if we can do for education, what he's done, if you can do that in relative terms, well.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. And I think it also goes back to a little bit, the power of AI, which is, you know, Khan Academy will teach you anything Khan Academy is set to teach you. AI will teach you anything you want to know about. And I think it's just, it's the greatest thing for people who want to learn things. Like, you know, sometimes I'm driving around, I'll just pull up chat and I'll be like, hey, this topic I don't understand. Let's just talk about it until I get where I'm going. And, and like, I would never get to do the research any other way.

• 46:31Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  But it's like, I'll kind of show up, but it feels like that scene from The Matrix, where like, you've been injected with jujitsu.

• 46:36Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  It's like, okay, now I know.

• 46:37Mike Rowe?

  Can you fly that thing? Not yet. Now I can.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:41Mike Rowe?

  Let's go.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:47Mike Rowe?

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• 47:31Mike Rowe?

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• 48:10Mike Rowe?

  You want to, you want to hear some, we basically, what was the prompt? Some, ask, ask Blake Scholl.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Ask Blake Scholl, is it Scholl?

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Scholl.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Scholl.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Scholl.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Ask Blake Scholl, 10 questions he's never been asked before.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Uh oh.

• 48:27Mike Rowe?

  If, okay. If boom succeeds, what human behavior changes first? Business, tourism, relationships, or geopolitics?

• 48:39Speaker 02

  They all change. And I think that's the brilliance of that question. I think business probably is the first to change. There's the people who are flying around in business class today and obviously would, you know, you can do more meetings in a week. Obviously, it's worth it. I think geopolitics is maybe the, one of the later things that changes, but the most important. Right? It's, it's hard to hate somebody you've spent time with.

• 48:59Mike Rowe?

  Life happens in real time.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  It does.

• 49:02Mike Rowe?

  This virtual shit, pardon me, but it just, it's better than nothing, but that's a low bar.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  That's right. And I think there's been this mythology for decades that various forms of telecom are going to kill air travel. I mean, you and I are probably old enough to remember when email was going to kill the airlines.

• 49:20Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Strange now, right? But the the exact opposite is true. Because if there's some way, I mean, the fact that you and I were able to schedule this kind of over email.

• 49:29Mike Rowe?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  And arrange to be here made it possible for me to physically show up. And so we can have a little bit at a distance. I mean, you think about it romantically, it makes it more obvious. You know, if you can meet somebody over the Internet, you know, romantically, now you're all the more excited to go see him in person. But it's just true of any kind of relationship.

• 49:45Mike Rowe?

  But you don't stay in the Internet, right? You don't meet there and go, you know what? Let's not push this. Okay. Let's not turn this into the next Apollo project. I think we can be pretty happy 3,000 miles apart and never actually meet it. But I mean, we laugh, but that's like Henry Ford or the government could have said, okay, we got the Model T. You know, that's fine. It's so much better than a horse. Let's not go crazy with the highways and the V8. I mean, what are we doing?

• 50:12Speaker 02

  I think it's such a great, you know, example. Imagine if we'd done the Apollo version of the Model T. It would have been millions and millions of dollars. It had been very impressive. Maybe it would have like run, uh, won the Indy 500 or something, but nobody could have had one.

• 50:27Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  And and because Ford did it, he made sure he did it in a way that people, ordinary people could benefit.

• 50:33Mike Rowe?

  Right. And you know, I was talking to a, to Jim Farley the other day, uh, who's been a, a good friend over the years and I don't know it, but I wouldn't be shocked if they built their own repair schools now. Like Henry did.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:50Mike Rowe?

  They can't wait. They, I mean, I'm a big fan of trade schools, but they can't wait four years for a technician to get up to speed on, right? They'll, they can train them in for, for a fraction of the money and five times faster, speaking of speed.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:06Mike Rowe?

  Do you think that's going to, kind of happen in all industries? Like, do you think the Palantirs and the, and the Lowe's and the Home Depots and are they going to start? Building a better pipeline to train the next generation?

• 51:24Speaker 02

  I mean, I think the answer is yes, because it needs to be. It's certainly what we're going to do. Like, you know, over the next few years, we need to hire hundreds of machinists and technicians. I don't think we're going to find enough of them, certainly not in our, you know, in Denver where we're headquartered. We're going to bring them in from everywhere else. And the plan we have is we are going to, we're going to pay top dollar and help people move to where we are if they're not already there. If they're experienced, because there are just not enough of these experienced people.

• 51:51Mike Rowe?

  How many are you going to hire? How many are you talking about?

• 51:53Speaker 02

  I mean, this year, we're going to hire 100. Probably next year, we're going to hire 200 or 300, and it keeps going from there.

• 51:58Mike Rowe?

  And you're looking for skilled workers?

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Skilled workers, machinists, technicians, you know, people who can assemble things, people, you know, electricians who can wire things up. This thing makes 42 megawatts. We need people who can wire all that up. And the plan is to hire one junior person for every senior person we hire.

• 52:17Mike Rowe?

  So the mentorship?

• 52:18Speaker 02

  So the mentorship happens, right? And the, we actually, we have a term for this. We call it the talent distillery. And the idea of the talent distillery, this is true whether it's a blue collar job or a white collar job. You get a little bit of oak, you know, people have been there, done that before, and you get as much spirits as you can. And, and the oak will kind of infuse into the spirits. And if it's the right oak, by the way, the spirits make the oak better, too. And, and so the idea is that's how we, if we just go try to find enough people, we're not going to find enough. We need to go help grow the people.

• 52:50Mike Rowe?

  Not to be confused with Spirit Airlines, which tragically. What did you think about that?

• 52:57Speaker 02

  I actually thought it was, you know, it's never exciting when, you know, any business fails. But the, I think it's, it goes back to a little bit of the Java capitalism to, you know, shut down the losers and get behind the winners. And Spirit had a model that just didn't work. I think part of it is, if you look at air travel in general, people are so fed up with being treated like cattle. Right?

• 53:22Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  And, you know, and I think the good thing is we're productive enough in this country. We're wealthy enough in this country that we don't necessarily need to have a lot of bargain basement air travel. And people want, people want to be treated better.

• 53:34Mike Rowe?

  I was going to say that. Are you talking about just the experience on the plane? Or like, how could an airport be better?

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh, don't get me started.

• 53:43Mike Rowe?

  Get started, man. Because, look, I live in the, I live in the things. I'm literally, I'm in two airports a week, every week.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  My condolences. I mean, I think we have, uh, we have some decent, small airports. I don't think we have any good, large ones. You know, just think about how long it, you know, you have to get to the airport super early because you're worried about the security line and the delays. And you know, you don't want to miss your flight because then that's a cataclysmic thing. Uh, and then you show up and they turn it into a shopping mall. Because that's the only way they know how to pay for the airport now.

• 54:11Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  And, uh, and it's, you know, it tends to be visually cluttered, it tends to be loud, it can be uncomfortable. Some of them are better, but the, uh, I, I think if we, in a, in a, in a future version of the world where the airplanes get faster, I think everyone's going to want the airports to get faster too. And so, uh, one of the things we're doing with our overture airliner, initially it's only got 60 people on it. So you can do things for 60 people at a time you can't do for a million people at a time. And, uh, and one of the things we're working with the airlines on is how do we make it such that if you get to the airport 20 minutes before your flight leaves, you're guaranteed to make your flight. Right? Like, JSX actually does this today.

• 54:48Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  With a little 30-seat airplane.

• 54:50Mike Rowe?

  Yep.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  Right? With what works at 30 seats, 60 seats. Uh, you can make these incredible experiences. And then the challenge becomes, how do you actually scale that up? But I think if you, if you can make the, uh, you get the airport 15, 20 minutes before your flight leaves and you make your flight, it, it saves you exponentially more time. And then the question over time becomes, how do you make that handle more passengers at a time? And I think you can, it just requires some innovation.

• 55:14Mike Rowe?

  Was it you I heard? Some underground airports, maybe?

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, underground airports. I think, I think the, I think you can, uh, this is an idea in my head. I'd love to find somebody actually go build the thing. Is if you move the terminal underground, you can actually make the rest of the airport a whole lot more efficient. So imagine you've got a twin, um, twin runway airport, two, two parallel runways. Not put them too close together like they did at SFO. So you can actually use both.

• 55:40Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  One's departures, one's arrivals. And in the terminals in the middle, it's underground. So today, I think how it goes, you got airplanes crisscrossing each other over the ground. You've got all this congestion. You pull into a gate, but then the terminal's in the way. You can't put the airplane in reverse. So you gotta get the tug to push you back. You get people running around this. You're pushing back. Oh, there'll be another airplane.

• 56:03Mike Rowe?

  It's a cloud show.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  It's a cloud show, right? But so, okay, you got two runways. The terminal goes underneath. The jetways become escalators that come out of the ground. So you land a one runway, you taxi into the center, you stop. The jetway comes up, people get off, people get on, right? It's time to go. The escalator goes back down to the ground and you pull through. You don't need tugs, right? You don't need all this clutter that you have today. And the traffic flow is from one runway across the airport to the other runway. So this whole thing takes up less geographic space. You can get way more density of airport in the same physical region, which by the way, now means you can like scale airports closer to city centers and you spend less time getting to and from the airport.

• 56:45Mike Rowe?

  Like putting, like all the great stadiums in major league sports today are in city centers. Didn't used to be that way, you know, but they found a way to do it. And I think revitalized virtually every town that has a major stadium downtown. It's just, it's just good for, for, for living.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  Right. It's good for living. It's good for community. It's good for culture.

• 57:10Mike Rowe?

  All right. Let's see what the AI has for number two, shall we? What's the aerospace equivalent of technical debt? And is the airline industry buried in it?

• 57:21Speaker 02

  I mean, there is absolutely, the same technical debt concept exists in aerospace engineering as much as anything else. You do a poor job, uh, putting something together, you pay for it in triplicate on the backend. And we've made that mistake. There's things on the, you know, you look at the XP1 airplane and you can see, you know, what looks like a beautiful jet.

• 57:41Mike Rowe?

  That's your first one.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  That's the first airplane. Yeah. I look at it. I see things we never do again.

• 57:45Mike Rowe?

  How many of those did you make?

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Well, only one.

• 57:47Mike Rowe?

  Got the one.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Got the one, right? So just to give you an example. Uh, we put three engines on that airplane, one under each wing. Well, where's the third one? I'll put it in the middle in the tail cone. And every time there was maintenance to be done on that center engine, I think a technician cried because it's so darn hard to get at that thing, right? So if you look at the overture, what's got four engines, two under each wing, each of them is the exact same install, they're underwings, so they're really easy to reach and get to, and you got to do work on them. And so, yeah, there's a lot of technical debt on, on XB1, but that turned into better ideas on the, on the overture.

• 58:20Mike Rowe?

  And just to circle back, to be clear, you're going to hire hundreds of skilled technicians to work on this.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, just, just on the engines alone, it's going to be hundreds of technicians.

• 58:31Mike Rowe?

  That's, I mean, if you want consequential, where like you want to, to be involved in making that, that has to be part of the, the value proposition.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  It is. I mean, if I think about what makes a boom person, a boom person, it's because they believe that the work that they're doing is meaningful and impactful, right? And like, you know, you go work on the engine. Well, the first thing it does is you're helping power the future of power generation in this country and making sure we don't lose the energy in the AI race to China. The next thing that happens is you're enabling this airplane. And, you know, so I talk to people, you know, it's like, you know, do you want to be able to look at that airplane and say, I put that part on and it's safe and it's efficient and my family gets to fly on it because I did a damn good job.

• 59:14Mike Rowe?

  And think about your kids, when they're, when their friends say, what's your dad do? What's your mom do? And they point to this on the bookshelf.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:21Mike Rowe?

  They built that.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  My kids went off to a, I have a 13 year old, twin 12 year olds and a four year old that I know about. Um, and

• 59:29Mike Rowe?

  Boom.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Boom.

• 59:31Mike Rowe?

  Or sorry, bang.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  The boy, the boys were off at this summer camp last summer and I'm on a Zoom call with the summer camp instructors at a camp. And they're like, well, you should know your boys are proud of you. And I'm like, yeah. And they said, yeah, they kept telling everybody else in the class that their dad built supersonic jets and we thought they were full of it, but then we Googled you.

• 59:49Mike Rowe?

  And you do.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  And you do. But the, that exists for all the kids of all the employees at our company.

• 59:57Mike Rowe?

  But before that, daddy was involved in some spamming with a company called Groupon. We're pretty excited about that.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  But the, let's, let's, uh, let's, let's make sure we pull the positive lesson out of that. I think anybody can learn anything if they put their mind to it.

• 1:00:11Mike Rowe?

  Do you think modern society has lost the emotional appetite for giant engineering projects?

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  I think we have forgotten that they are good to do and that having impact on the world around us is a good thing. We have this like no impact mindset or this impact minimization mindset.

• 1:00:33Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  But you know, and like think about the water and like, you know, people were in, we have enough water and enough in the right places. You know, we forget water falls from the sky. And when we use it, it evaporates and it goes back into the sky. So it's an infrastructure problem, not a like limited resource problem. But what do we need to do? Well, we gotta build dams and aquifers, but we don't do gigantic projects that improve the planet for our own purpose anymore. And I think that's a huge mistake. We should be really proud of things like the Hoover Dam. We should make more of them.

• 1:01:03Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. I mean, that's kind of where we started with this. That was the, the thing that was so implicit in Kennedy's challenge.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:14Mike Rowe?

  You know, it's, we're, day to day, you know, you can win a game with singles and doubles. But every now and then, you've got to swing for the fence.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:23Mike Rowe?

  Like, those aforementioned stadiums would never fill if there was no such thing as a home run.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  That's right. That's a really right point. Yeah. So I think it's about, we've got to be one to make the big swings. And we have to accept that building things on the planet that change the planet is good.

• 1:01:38Mike Rowe?

  We want to leave a footprint.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  We want to leave a footprint, right? Like, you know, make the actual human environment better and one where we have energy, one where we have water, one where we have good food. Those are good things. And so we should build farms and dams and reservoirs and airports and stadiums.

• 1:01:57Mike Rowe?

  And data centers?

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  And data centers.

• 1:02:00Mike Rowe?

  Oh, you dirty boy.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Oh, I know, right?

• 1:02:02Mike Rowe?

  Did you know Alex Epstein before this conference?

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  Alex and I met when we were both about 19.

• 1:02:08Mike Rowe?

  No kidding?

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Mike Rowe?

  Good God, I can't imagine. What a geek out that must have been.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, we were both, you know, we had no idea what we were doing. But, uh, yeah.

• 1:02:18Mike Rowe?

  Amazing. Yeah, he sat right here not long ago and like right adjacent to all this is this Malthusian idea. It's a, I guess it's the opposite of abundance. And there is a religion that swirls around that notion and it does touch on a lot of the stuff we've talked about. And I, I do think that's part of the answer.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  I think that's right. But I mean, there's a lot of fear mongering out there. And at some level, I get the people who are afraid because it's like, hey, if this thing automates away my job, what do I do? I think one of the things that gives me a lot of comfort is I think about, you know, how many of the jobs that existed 100 years ago exist today? And how many of the jobs that exist today existed 100 years ago? So think about the people who were put out of work by the tractor.

• 1:03:04Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Right? Or the steam shovel.

• 1:03:06Mike Rowe?

  The plow.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  The plow.

• 1:03:07Mike Rowe?

  Self-sowing plow.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Right? Exactly. And, you know, or, or think of, you know, the, the people who are bank tellers.

• 1:03:14Mike Rowe?

  The loomers, the Luddites.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  That's right. Where are, do you go to telephone operators? You don't, you don't go down the street and see a bunch of unemployed telephone operators. Where'd they all go? Right? Well, a lot of the jobs we have today, Uber driver, didn't exist not that long ago. And, and so these things, I mean, change is scary, but if we look back across, you know, what's happened since the dawn of the industrial revolution, we've had a lot of change along the way. But boy, would you rather live now or would you rather live in 1850?

• 1:03:49Mike Rowe?

  Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training, like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive, pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need. Start a career in the skilled trades immediately.

• 1:04:31Mike Rowe?

  I'm talking about AI proof, six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago, and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you, or your spouse, or your kid, or your grandkid are looking for a straight path into a career with no cost at all,

• 1:05:16Mike Rowe?

  check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. How do you think about, sorry if I'm veering way outside our lane here, but like, universal basic income and, you know, just some of the things that seem to make sense on paper that are promoted by people with enormous brains, I wrestle with.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of respect for Elon.

• 1:05:48Mike Rowe?

  Me too.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  I don't see eye to eye with him on this. I think the, I think the biggest victims of universal basic income would be the people receiving it.

• 1:05:56Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  I think there is a dignity and a humanity you get from knowing you supported yourself and you made your own way and you did something productive. And if everything's a handout, I think we've deleted that meaning. If you believe all the jobs are going to go away, then I can understand how logically you get there. I just don't think that's true. And let me just give some idea about that. Who, I mean, so just, if you're listening now, do you have an idea for a product or service that you wish to exist to that doesn't exist? And I think most people have a thing that they wish for. But most people don't have the resources or the skills or the time or whatever to go create it. And but what I think what you're seeing in that, you know, you're seeing it now in the world of software. And I got a story I can tell about this in a minute.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  You don't have to be a software engineer to create software that solves a problem for you. And pretty soon with digital manufacturing, you actually don't have to be super skilled to turn your idea for a product into a product. And so I think what we're going to have is an explosion of entrepreneurship, an explosion of creativity. And you know, AI is not going to be dehumanizing. It's going to be the most humanizing thing we've ever had because it lets anybody be a creator. Right? And poor be the person who has no idea for anything they want to exist in the world. I think that's very few people.

• 1:07:11Mike Rowe?

  That is so fundamentally optimistic. Who opposes you? You don't have to name names, but like where like who's? What is the attitude that worries you most?

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  I think there, you know, the, I think there is a small contingent that that are actually fundamentally anti-progress, anti-human, you know, the Paul Aerlich's.

• 1:07:35Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  And the problem is they fool people through various forms of scary mockery. AI is going to take our jobs, it's going to take our waters, it's going to drive our electricity bills up. We're not going to have any jobs, you know, the the robot armies are going to kill us. It's going to be Blade Runner, there won't be food, you know, and it's all bullshit.

• 1:07:54Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Am I allowed to say bullshit here?

• 1:07:56Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, you better, you better believe it.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  It's all bullshit, but it takes in well-meaning people who, you know, want good things. And so I think it's that 10% that are fundamentally anti-human who sneak in their anti-humanism under a pro-human guise, right? Like Aerlich would be very happy, and he said this, if everybody just died.

• 1:08:18Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Right? But what does he tell you? He says, well, we can't have more people because there won't be food to eat. Right? Now it sounds pro-human. And he snuck his poison in, dressed up as as as food.

• 1:08:29Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, and back to my point earlier about the communicative relevance of these ideas. You take like Paul's books. Way before there were clicks and likes and shares and social media. But there was Johnny Carson.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Mike Rowe?

  And Johnny Carson loved him. Had him on the show like 17 times.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:50Mike Rowe?

  And I love Johnny Carson. I did not a dig on him. It's just that when you're right in the moment, it's really hard to know.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  It's hard to know.

• 1:08:57Mike Rowe?

  What you're spreading, you know? And he was persuasive and compelling and he was good for viewership.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  Right? And like, you know, if you, if you take it as honest and well meaning, who's not concerned?

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  Right? So I think you're absolutely right, you know, being able to communicate the reality of things compellingly and to inoculate people against the fear mongering is super important.

• 1:09:19Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  And, and I'll go back to, I think one of the, one of the biggest things that gives me comfort is just to look back at history. And none of the doomerism since time immemorial has ever been correct. Not once. Like a question I like to ask people who are concerned about new technology. Can you give me one example of a technology that was net negative for humanity?

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  Can you give me one example? Sometimes people say nuclear bombs. Like, well, okay, you could, you could argue, uh, nuclear bombs are why we haven't had a world war. Um, but even if you, but you gotta roll nuclear bombs in with, uh, with nuclear power and nuclear medicine, because all of that's kind of one set of technology. And, uh,

• 1:10:00Mike Rowe?

  It's also part of the hierarchy of, of energy too.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:10:04Mike Rowe?

  You wouldn't have that without, you know, fossil fuels, right? You wouldn't have it without all these other things.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  That's exactly. I can't think of a single technology writ large that's been a net negative. You can argue individual products might be net negatives, but technologies, I don't see it. And so why are we suddenly thinking something new is going to be the first net negative thing that we've had?

• 1:10:27Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27Speaker 02

  Doesn't make any sense.

• 1:10:28Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  And, you know, and like think about AI, like, okay, if we forget the artificial bit of it for a second. Imagine we said, we're going to create a new generation of children. We found a way to make them all smarter and more capable.

• 1:10:38Mike Rowe?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  Like, that sounds pretty good, right?

• 1:10:41Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  We're going to increase the amount of intelligence in the world. How could that be a bad thing?

• 1:10:44Mike Rowe?

  And obedience.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. There we go.

• 1:10:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the conversation, right? It just seems like so many smart people are really wrestling with the idea that the tech and the products surrounding it are not one in the same, but they are all tools. Have you read like Jonathan Haidt and his, his take on social media? And like very, very specific harms that are unique between, you know, Instagram does the very bad for girls, TikTok bad for boys. This, and so forth.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  His, his book is sitting on my desk. I, I admit I haven't read it yet, but I'm, I'm very cautious with social media with my kids. And I think there's, that's another example of a technology of pros and cons. Like it connects the world and enables communication that we wouldn't otherwise have. And yet some of this stuff is just, it's addictive personality feeding. Like, and so I'm very careful, you know, the same way I'm not, I don't feed my kids just any food. I don't feed them just any social media.

• 1:11:43Mike Rowe?

  But is social media itself a legit technology? Or is it a product that evolved from it? I mean, back to your Groupon days, right?

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Mike Rowe?

  What's junk mail?

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Mike Rowe?

  What's the?

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, yeah, I, I think if you draw a small enough circle, you can find things that aren't good, right? Like if you say unsolicited spam, well, that's bad. But email, email is the broader technology. And I think we're, I think we're better off with email, even though sometimes we get annoying things.

• 1:12:09Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:12:09Speaker 02

  And in a social, you know, social media, like I'm, you know, I'm a huge fan of X. And I've met people I wouldn't have met without it. I've been able to hire people I wouldn't be able to hire without it. And, you know, at the same time, you know, do I want my 13 year old daughter, uh, you know, hooked on Snapchat? Not really.

• 1:12:26Mike Rowe?

  Right. How then are we to think about like, okay, I'm in this plane now, or any other plane, as I often am, and I'm strapped in. And we've been delayed two hours. It's hot. The service isn't good. The food is piss poor.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:41Mike Rowe?

  Right? We're late. We're going to be later. And now we've been diverted. And you sit there and you try not to descend into a place of anger. Because let's face it, it's still pretty miraculous. You know, you're, you're still in a piece of pressurized tin. Flying pretty fast, right? And so it feels like, like, should we settle for that? Like, should I be, as a consumer, constantly reminding myself that I'm living at a terrific age? Or should I be frustrated that there are not more people like you out there pushing the rock up the hill?

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  I think the hard part about this is it's a duality. And two seemingly contradictory things are true at the same time. It is an amazing, amazing thing that we have airplanes, right? The fact that we can like rush forward into the sky at hundreds of miles per hour in a thing that's nearly perfectly safe, that we can be at 35,000 feet where the air is not breathable, but we can breathe just fine, right? And that we can go anywhere on the planet in about 24 hours today, right? That is an amazing, amazing thing. It is a triumph of humanity. And yet, it is not what it could or should be. I think holding those two things at the same time is the tricky thing to remember, that it's okay to be proud that we have this and okay to be dissatisfied that we haven't made it better. And the other thing that goes in there, I think this is, you know, is to remember

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  that the people working for the airlines aren't necessarily the cause of the problem. I try to remember that the entire decisions of the industry are not the responsibility of the person in front of me.

• 1:14:07Mike Rowe?

  Sure. Well, look, because we need to stay sane in the end.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:14:11Mike Rowe?

  And there's this other thing, you know, that's certainly the fault in our stars, where we come to resent a long list of things we rely upon, you know, whether it's affordable electricity or whether it's, you know, reliable transportation. And we take it out on the workers all of the time.

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  So unjust, like, so unjust, like, you know, the, uh, so I, you know, I try to put myself in the shoes of the person who's, who's there. And unless I, you know, overtly think they're just being a jerk, to try to have some empathy for them.

• 1:14:44Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  So, like, the person, you know, serving you on an airplane is not the reason that there was a weather delay. Right?

• 1:14:51Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  I get the weather delay is annoying. It'd be great if we had airplanes that could fly through any weather, but we don't. It's definitely not the flight attendant's fault.

• 1:14:58Mike Rowe?

  No. There is something, though. I mean, gosh, there's just, just, just the notion of...

• 1:15:05Mike Rowe?

  Compliance, you know.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:08Mike Rowe?

  It's difficult to close the laptop. You know, it's difficult to, it's just.

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  In aviation, there is a rule following mindset in some places that is just misplaced. Like, I don't close my laptop. They tell me to close the laptop, I close a little bit, then I get it back out.

• 1:15:25Mike Rowe?

  I do too, man.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:15:27Mike Rowe?

  I do too.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  And guess what? It's not actually dangerous. You know what? The one thing that does matter is buckle your seatbelt, because if you hurt turbulence.

• 1:15:33Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  And you're gonna bop it around that cabin, that's not good.

• 1:15:36Mike Rowe?

  That'll hurt.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  That's the, you know, that's the thing that matters. If you have a pound and a half iPad, you're allowed to have it out. If you have a pound and a half laptop, you're not allowed to have it out.

• 1:15:43Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  Right? Doesn't make any sense.

• 1:15:44Mike Rowe?

  Right. Oh, it's 4:30 now? All right. We're gonna wrap this up at about 5:00. I know you've got a plane to catch.

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  If only it were a supersonic flight, we could go, we could go much longer.

• 1:15:53Mike Rowe?

  What, where you leave two hours later? Yeah, well, that's where you're saying the same thing. Okay, what I'm gonna take from this, and my own worldview, is that lots of jobs are gonna be available. Many at boom, for people who wanna learn a skill that's in demand.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:07Mike Rowe?

  We've got scholarships, and we help train people for all that. So, tell your billionaire buddies if they wanna close the loop, you know, we're standing by. But beyond that, man, I just really wanna applaud you for, uh, for hitting the reset button in your own life. And taking a big swing on a truly consequential quest. That's a Roddenberry thing to do, and it makes me happy to share the species with you.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  Well, I appreciate your saying that, Mike. And, you know, people used to ask me, like, how in the world could you do something so risky? And I always thought people had their risk idea upside down. But to me, the thing that seemed risky was spending the rest of my life doing things that weren't meaningful. And I'd rather have tried supersonic and failed miserably publicly. I'd rather be called the next Theron host, which I've been called, than spend the rest of my life wondering what if I'd given it my all.

• 1:16:59Mike Rowe?

  You know what would've been a really shitty show open? To timidly go where everyone's gone before.

• 1:17:08Mike Rowe?

  I'm not watching that. Who's the Laura person before we say goodbye?

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  Laura runs my life, keeps me together, tells me where to go, gets me there on time. I'm very, very, very grateful that she's my, uh, my work wife.

• 1:17:20Mike Rowe?

  Awesome.

• 1:17:24Mike Rowe?

  Thank you for getting him here on time and under budget. Thank you. I assume this is a gift for me?

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  It is, it is.

• 1:17:30Mike Rowe?

  I'm gonna put that right over there on the, uh, on the keg of whiskey.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Well, the president has one of these in his office, and now you get to have one in yours.

• 1:17:39Mike Rowe?

  Wow. Well, that'll give me something to triangulate when I see him next. I really, really appreciate you coming by, Blake. I wish you every success. I think it's, um, I think it's important in every way.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you for having me, and thank you for doing what you do.

• 1:17:53Mike Rowe?

  You got it.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long, but if it made you smile, Then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go online And leave us a review. I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge, But in this world, the advertisers really like to judge.

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  You don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Not four. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. And not three. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Definitely not two. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. We need five. All you've got to do is leave a quick- Even if you hate it. Five-star review. Thank you.

• 1:19:06Speaker 04

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• 1:19:36Speaker 05

  What's that?

• 1:19:37Speaker 06

  My fresh detector.

• 1:19:39Speaker 05

  Uh, your what?

• 1:19:40Speaker 06

  There it is.

• 1:19:41Speaker 05

  What is it detecting?

• 1:19:43Speaker 06

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 1:19:45Speaker 05

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:19:50Speaker 06

  Apparently we celebrate.

• 1:19:53Speaker 05

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.