America's aerospace rebirth

Blake Scholl joins Reid and Aria to explain why the future of aviation won't be built by reviving the past, but by reinventing it. They explore how Boom Supersonic rebuilt an entire aerospace supply chain, why small AI-powered engineering teams are outperforming legacy organizations, and how software is transforming the way physical products are designed, tested, and manufactured. Blake explains why building their own engine changed everything, how AI is accelerating hardware innovation far beyond coding, and why America's biggest bottleneck isn't technology but its ability to build. Together, they unpack what it takes to solve seemingly impossible problems—and why the next generation of industrial innovation may come from startups willing to rethink entire systems. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You don't try to bring back what left to China. What you do is invent the generation after it and have that be here. With supersonic, there will be similar stories. We just don't know what they are yet. Imagine if you could get anywhere in the world in four hours for $100. But think how differently you'd live your life. Fact that we're building our own engine changed the seats on the airplane. How?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  In 1947, Chuck Yeager climbed into a Bell X1 over the Mojave Desert and broke the sound barrier for the first time in human history. It was a classified government program backed by the Air Force, unknown to almost everyone when it happened.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  On January 28th, 2025, in the same airspace, a startup called Boom Supersonic did it again. No government commission, no nation state behind it. The man who made that happen grew up watching Cessnas take off from a suburban Cincinnati airport. He dropped out of high school early. He taught himself aerospace engineering from textbooks and started the whole thing in his basement in Denver with 10 people.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  What supersonic flight reveals about what's possible, what technology can do when ambition is commercially disciplined, what AI unlocks when applied to the hardest physical problems, and what it means when a founder in a basement can do what used to require a superpower. That's what we're here to talk about today.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Blake also runs the same diagnostic on everything around him. Airports, roads, hotel check-in, regulatory paperwork that he ran on the aviation industry. We want to get into how he actually thinks, not just what he's built.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Blake Scholl, welcome to Possible. Blake, great to have you here. I'm extremely proud to have backed Boom and to have, you know, a front row seat to this journey. Most people ask you about January 28th, the first time that

• 1:59Speaker 01

  You know, XB1, your supersonic demonstrator, broke the sound barrier. But the moment I come back to is February 10th. The final flight of the demonstrator. You got choked up on the livestream saying goodbye. This plane carried a decade of your life. What does it mean to close this chapter of your life and move to the next?

• 2:21Speaker 00

  It was definitely a bittersweet moment. Is that there is, man, I might tear up again. There is nothing more exciting than to pour a huge piece of your life energy into something and then see it actually work. And there is just so much drama in flight test. The intricate teamwork, the excitement of it, the safety criticality of it. And knowing that that thrill had come to an end was very sad. It was still the right decision not to fly the airplane again. But at the end, it gave me all that much more commitment to build Overture. It's like, this is not the end of the story. This is actually getting to base camp.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  And we're gonna take a very brief rest and then we're gonna climb again.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  But it's a low base camp, actually. The hardest work is still ahead.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Can you, for those of our listeners who might not know, can you just say a bit more on like, why was it the right decision for this plane not to fly again?

• 3:21Speaker 00

  So, let's put the, why in the heck do we even build this airplane? Sometimes people say XB1 looks very little like our Overture production airplane. So why did we even build it? Wasn't that a waste? Should we have gone straight to production? And I think the actual reverse is true. If our prototype looked exactly like our production airplane, it would imply that we learned nothing. And the whole point of doing XB1 was to learn 100% of what it takes to build a supersonic jet safe enough to put a human on board. And we knew that there were mistakes. And the only way to find them was to go design, build, fly, learn. And so we, across 13 flights of the airplane, we did, you know, 100% of, actually 200% of what

• 4:05Speaker 00

  we intended to do, was a story we can come back to. We solved sonic boom actually without trying. It was, that was an accidental discovery. But you, every, every flight of an experimental airplane carries risk. And this was, you know, this was an airplane that was not designed to be as safe as an airline, or is designed to be safe enough for a flight test program. So you never know kind of how close you are to a mishap. And, and so just a safety perspective, you don't do more than you actually have to do. The other piece is, this, it took a team to keep the airplane alive. It was, you know, roughly 50 people kind of full-time on the program. Every flight requires a control room, like think NASA mission control. And it was costing something like kind of 1.4 million dollars a month, just to keep the

• 4:49Speaker 00

  program alive. And, and, and those were also all of our best people. So, so we wanted to, one, they wanted to get out of the Mojave Desert as well. But we wanted to go put them on the next thing. And, and, you know, we could have, you know, paraded XB1 around the country very expensively, with some risk of a mishap, and, and then also just delayed the actual supersonic future. So it was just not, for a bunch of different reasons, it wasn't the right call to, to keep flying.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  So we're going to dig into all of those details, but let's zoom out for a second.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  This is all about flight. For you, it seems like you've been like watching Cessnas at the airport with your parents since you were a kid. Like, why has flight captured your imagination?

• 5:28Speaker 00

  I think, we, we don't really get to control our passions. I think they, they kind of choose us. And I remember being fascinated with airplanes, like as long as I can remember. I remember, you know, as a kid, just like sketching things I'd love to build. And, but it never, it never occurred to me that I'd actually touch it professionally. I think, I think because... I was very drawn to things that were innovative. And you know, like a Cessna is like, you know, a hundred year old design almost at this point. And you know, what was Boeing doing as I was growing up? Well, they were redesigning yet another subsonic airliner that looks pretty much like the last subsonic airliner, which also looks pretty much like the one that came before that. And so there's, there's nothing going on.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  And, and so, you know, I went to school for computer science. I sort of built my first company in my parents' basement in high school. It feels too much to call it that. Like, like we like managed to host people's websites out of my basement. That was, that was, and I got, it broke even. But I loved flying, started flying for fun when I was in college. And there was a key moment in my mid twenties. So I was in Seattle out of my time at Amazon and they have a Concorde there in the Flight Museum. And I remember looking at that and thinking, how is it that the most amazing airliner ever made is in a museum when there's nothing better in our skies? And that day I set a lifetime goal of breaking the sound barrier, put a Google News alert on supersonic jet.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  So I'm like, I just want to be first to know when I can go buy a ticket. You know, so I, I, I thought I would accomplish the goal by means of buying a ticket, not, not by, not by building the jet. Another 15 years kind of went by. And I just sort of had my first career in tech. I sort of built a baby startup that got Aqua hired to Groupon. And, and I'm like going to work every day, like basically running the world's largest scale spam system and thinking, is this why I'm on earth? And so I sort of, I kind of fired myself from Groupon. And I knew I wanted to do another startup, but I wanted to do one where no matter how hard it got, I would never ask, was it worth it?

• 7:39Speaker 00

  And so my most ambitious ideas went to the top of the list. And I thought, okay, I will, I will need to understand why supersonic is a bad idea. I'm sure it is because if it was a good idea, everyone says in the valley, if it's a good idea, there's already a team on it, right? And that's, it was one of the worst pieces of advice because it causes some of the most important problems to be left untouched. It's a by, creates a bystander effect. But the, but I thought I would get too big into the research and move past it. And instead I just, I just couldn't find the reason it was impossible. So felt like I had to go do it.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Well, and you know, obviously, the title of the podcast is possible, and it's been amazing for you to demonstrate the possibility. One of the things I think it's important to start at is, you know, people tend to think, oh, it's about building a plane. But actually, in fact, you're not just building a plane, you're reconstructing an entire industrial base.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  And that is basically atrophying. So what does it mean to think at the industry level and not just the product level? And also, you know, it might be a good time to demonstrate.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Yes, so let me tell a little bit of the backdrop to this. When we started, it didn't occur to me how much of the industry would have to be reinvented to do this. America's aerospace industry is incredibly broken. Not only has it all kind of calcified down to kind of the Boeing Airbus duopoly that basically stopped shipping new products, I don't think people appreciate that. The last time Boeing introduced a new airliner was the 787 in 2004, right? And like in tech, we're like, this year's iPhone is too much like last year's iPhone, right? It's like, this year's airplane is more than 20 years old.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  The latest and greatest. It's absolutely nuts. And worse than that, so much of the industrial base behind aviation is really driven by defense. And the, you know, so a thing I was starting to notice as we started to build the engine, we just kind of went to the first, we went to like the default aerospace supply chain. We were sort of getting these quotes like nine months for a turbine blade that was 3D printed. Like, why? Does it print for nine months? Like, why does it take nine months? Well, actually, there are a few different operations. You have to wait your turn on the printer, and then it has to go to like another factory where they inspect it, and then it has, which is in a different state. And then it has to go to another factory where they like braze it in another state

• 10:03Speaker 00

  where they like clean, polish it. And it's just like, each production process is in its own different location, and the thing spends more time on a truck than it does on a machine. And I'm like, why in the world would there be one factor in every like congressional? Oh.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Right, it's like what we have is a congressionally optimized supply chain. Right. So, so programs like the F-35 actually drive the industrial architecture. And, and what it, what it means is we have one supplier for every little bit of thing in every congressional district and parts bop around. That way you get jobs everywhere. That's where you get votes everywhere. And all of these contracts tend to be cost-plus contracts. And, and what, what that means is so if you, if you, if your margin is basically fixed, then what you want to do is just jack up the price, like, because that's the only way to maximize profit. It's just like, increase the cost. And, and we have this thing we call Slacker Index, which is how long it takes to get a thing divided by how long it actually takes to make it.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  As an example, the thing that's currently driving the schedule for our engine, the low-pressure turbine shaft, which must be inertially welded, and the quote we got out of the traditional aerospace supply chain is 88 weeks for inertial welding. Do you know how long it takes to do inertial welding?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  I would guess three hours.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Seconds. Like, like you spin this thing up, you put the parts next to each other and they like bond.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  It like, literally, this is like one of the fastest things you can do, but it takes 88 weeks to get a supplier to actually do it. And so what we, what we realized pretty quickly is we needed to just take all that manufacturing in-house. Yeah. And, uh, in, in particular, it was important to put every production process, starting from raw materials, under one roof in the same building where the engineers work. And in the industry, this is, uh, like I tell people this, to me, it seems like the most obvious thing you would do. You wouldn't like spread this out and like have all these trucks. But like I tell people, we're going to go from raw materials to completed engines in one building and people are like, whoa, like what an insane idea. But it's, it, uh, it, it allows us to move faster and do things that otherwise would just not be possible.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's actually functioning as a tech startup versus a defunct industry.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  So, um, you brought a couple of, of parts that you have been manufacturing. You want to care to?

• 12:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Explain their, what they are and their relevance?

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So we, we, uh, we- A year ago, we had no factory. We had no manufacturing team. Like, we had nothing. And we had to go kind of build the team, build the factory, and build the know-how. And we've basically been just climbing up the learning curve, doing on our own progressively more difficult parts. And so, these are engine blades, and these are amongst the most difficult to manufacture things in the world. And we just started with the easiest one. So, this is a compressor stator vein. And it looks like a very funny shape, but actually, those contours are very, very important. And this must be accurate to within about a thousandth of an inch on that leading profile.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  So, the smallest ones are the easiest ones to make. And then, we went kind of up the difficulty curve. This is a stage-two variable guide vein. So, this sits between the first-stage compressor and the second-stage compressor. There are something like 60 of these kind of circumferentially around the engine. And they actually rotate to redirect the airflow. So, depending on the state of the engine, these blades actually pivot. So, there's a thing outside the engine that grabs onto this and it twists. This also has to be accurate within a thou. And then, the hardest thing is these two nubs have to have what's called high concentricity. They need to be aligned with each other. Otherwise, when you put the part in the engine, it'll jam.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  And these are manufactured on a computer-controlled milling machine, starting with a gigantic, like, block of stainless steel. And the thing that's tricky is, you're basically manufacturing these in a cantilevered fashion. Like, one of these is, when this machine is held, and there's like a little drill head over here, and like, it's just, it's, it will very easily deform. So, you have to get really good at reducing the internal stress in the material along the way, and then controlling the manufacturing process such that you don't end up slightly out of tolerance from here to here. This is the next hardest thing. And then, this is a high-pressure turbine blade. So, this is the kind of our first-generation high-pressure turbine blade. So, this goes to the back of the engine.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Again, there's something like 60 of these circumferentially around the engine. And this is, it sits right after the combustor. So, the hottest air comes in and basically hits this blade, causes the whole thing to spin, and that's how you get energy out of the engine. And what's kind of neat is these blades operate in an environment, actually hotter than Starship on re-entry. And it's actually above, it's above the melting point of the metal. And so the only way to have the turbine not melt is these blades are hollow in the inside. So there's these cooling holes at the bottom. And there are 248 individually cut holes in the blade. So that, so air comes in this, in, in the blade and out all these holes.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  And that blade actually gets enveloped in a layer of cooling air. And the, the cooling air is nice and cool. It's only a thousand degrees. And this, so this, this is our first generation, uh, high pressure turbine blade. This was built out of a nickel super alloy on a 3D print process. And, and we brought that in-house because we didn't want to wait nine months. And we can print one engine's worth of these blades in about three days.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Right, isn't it, it, it, and by the way, when you do that, it completely changes the way engineering works. So that, that the thing that we've really learned is what you gotta do is iterate and enable iteration, both in, in the design world digitally and in the manufacturing world. So, so, uh, we've done a lot of work with digital, uh, design tools to allow engineers to, to, allow small numbers of engineers to go through design cycles much faster. And then, and then if you 3D print a blade in a, you know, in a few days, also you can iterate physically much faster. What otherwise happens, if you get these out of the supply chain, it's called nine, 12 months. The, the engineers can't try anything, right? They have to get it right the first time or else you've got like a nine month setback.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Uh, so you get a lot of conservatism, you get a lot of analysis paralysis, et cetera. Now, now people who, um, have been following turbine Twitter will, will point out that the 3D printed blades are not going to give you the strength and life you need, uh, for a production engine. And that's true, that there's a technology called single crystal that only, uh, three companies in the world, again, according to turbine Twitter can do. And so I, I can't talk more about single crystal yet, but we'll have something to share later on.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  That's awesome. Amazing. Just back to the earlier thing, although this was like, we're, you know, we're geeks and nerds. So we love this stuff. The, um, is there, when did you kind of realize that the challenge wouldn't be capital, wouldn't be regulatory, both serious?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  But a knowledge and capability.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, um, well, reality keeps teaching the lesson until the student learns it.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Uh, but the, the, uh, of the, the least difficult thing in all of this is the incredibly difficult engineering. Um, the next even more difficult thing is, is financing. Uh, this, this is, you know, th- this is a pre-revenue company that requires a lot of capital for a long time. Uh, but the actual most difficult thing is building the team and building the culture. And the, the reason is that this, this industry has had no entrepreneurship.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  For an extremely long time. Prior, prior to boom, the last new commercial aircraft startup, uh, founded by an entrepreneur, founded by an entrepreneur, it was Douglas Aircraft, nineteen twenty-one. So it was, right? So we went from nineteen, nineteen twenty-one.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Otherwise known as McDonald Douglas.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Right? Yeah. It, it didn't, didn't go so great in the end. Um, uh, but it's, in its heyday, Douglas was great.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Uh, but yeah, it, it, you know, so from nineteen twenty-one to twenty-fourteen, there were no entrepreneur-funded commercial aircraft startups. And so, and, and, and worse, what's happened in the industry, um, it goes back to like my own story. Like, as a kid, I loved airplanes, but I wasn't gonna go work at Boeing where I could like redesign the same thing over and over again, right? I was gonna go to Amazon where I could do something new. Um, and there's an entire generation of kids that did not go into this industry. And so there is, uh, so not only is there nobody familiar with what the heck a startup would look like, um, a, a, a bunch of the best and brightest didn't go into the field. And, and so there, it's, it's extremely difficult to find senior talent. And, and basically, everybody we hired out of the industry at a senior level failed.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Every, like, ev- ev- every single executive was a failure. Uh, some of them just abysmal failures. Like, you know, I, I caught people literally cooking the books on engineering data.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Pfft.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Right? Like, it's, it, this industry is not just calcified in many places, it's corrupt. That's how you end up with stuff like the seven thirty-seven Max.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Um, and, and so we had to learn how to kind of mint the team. And we ultimately came up with a concept we now call the talent distillery. And the idea of the talent distillery is you get some young spirits and you get just a little bit of oak and then the oak will infuse into the spirits and if it's the right oak, actually the spirits will also infuse back into the oak and then the oak is kind of there to keep the spirits from just kind of going everywhere. You have to contain them somehow. And so we've just tried to accelerate development of our own talent in-house that way. And the non-obvious thing is you don't put the oak in the organizationally senior position. The oak can also just be advisory. So our rule is, I'll tell the story

• 19:35Speaker 00

  of how we kind of discovered this. So in the early days, we were all spirit, no oak. And so we had a very young, bright team that built the landing gear on XB1 and they had never done a landing gear before. They were sufficiently self-confident, they also didn't call anybody who had ever built a landing gear before. And so they made a whole bunch of first-timer mistakes and we ended up having to completely rip and replace the landing gear. And of course iterative engineering is good, but we probably could have started in a much better place than where we actually were. And so the lesson we learned is it's totally fine to do something you haven't done before. But if somebody in the world has done it before, the requirement is at least to call them. You don't even have to

• 20:20Speaker 00

  take their advice. You just have to hear their advice. And so we've made that a rule in the culture and it's gone super well.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the proof is in the results.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Well, I'm about to ask you about one of those results because like you said, you need the right team, you need the right culture. It's not just the young spirits. It's like, how does that interact with the world? So your innovation was Boomless Cruise and it's a striking example because it was flying supersonic without an audible ground level boom and that turned out not to be a hardware problem. That was a software problem. It was the right weather data and an algorithm that tells you what speed and altitude to fly. And NASA had spent decades trying to engineer the boom away, and you figured out you could just root around it. And so, first of all, like, tell us more about that. And is that a pattern, like dissolving these hard physical limits with AI?

• 21:15Speaker 00

  It's absolutely a pattern. There's all kinds of interesting things we can extract out of this, but I should tell the story.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Please, please do.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  It is a non-obvious story. So this was not the plan. So Reid will remember, the original boom pitch was, you don't have to solve sonic boom. You can just fly supersonic over water, subsonic over land. The longest, most painful flights are over water, anyway. A sonic boom solution is not part of minimum viable product. And so, we kind of ignored it. We knew along the way that there were these, you know, physics called Mach cutoff. And what Mach cutoff means really is if you break the sound barrier at a sufficiently high altitude, and you're controlling speed, which basically lets you control the angle at which the boom comes off the airplane, the boom will refract as it goes to the atmosphere

• 22:05Speaker 00

  and make a big U-turn in the sky and never touch the ground. And this was, you know, we didn't invent this physics. Like, we didn't invent the idea of applying it to a supersonic jet. It was all out there. But at the time, we had made the terrible decision to outsource our engine to Rolls Royce. This was one of the most awful things I ever tried to do. And that the Rolls Royce, all Rolls Royce was like maybe willing to do is offer us like a warmed over modified subsonic engine. And it did not, it didn't have the performance to break the sound barrier at a sufficiently high altitude. You need what's called, you know, good transonic thrust drag margin. So right around the speed of sound is the hardest place to fly. And so, if you don't have a good airframe and a good engine, you have

• 22:50Speaker 00

  to break the, you have to punch through lower. And the key threshold is that you have to be somewhere above 30,000 feet in order to have enough refractive power in the atmosphere that the boom goes away. And so, we looked at it and we're like, can we get Rolls to change the engine? We're like, that's not gonna happen. We'll be lucky if they even make us an engine, let alone customize it. So we kind of put the idea on the back shelf and forgot about it. And now, it's late December, early January. Uh, 2024 and we're gearing up for the first supersonic flight aboard XB1. And the, the world believes, no matter how many times I say that you don't have to solve sonic boom. The world believes that solving sonic boom is incredibly critical for minimum viable product. And they believe that we caused the, called the company boom. So therefore we must have solved it.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  And, uh, and so I was like, okay, guys, I need a, I need a sonic boom forecast for this flight. Because if it's going to be a real wallop, I need to set everyone's expectations. Also, I kind of want to know where to stand. Yes. Having spent 10 years on this thing, I want to hear the sonic boom. Yeah. Uh, and the team comes back and like, no, man, like XB1 has great transonic performance. It's going to be up 30,000 feet. There's, there will be no boom. And at first I was disappointed. I was like, darn, I really, really wanted to hear the sonic boom. I wanted to call the flight, the boom heard around the world. That was like the marketing idea. And I was like, okay, shoot, it's going to be boomless. All right, fine. Uh, and the, the team had the insight to have our friends at NASA turn on the microphone away. So that we could actually confirm this really happened. So we go and we do the flight and sure enough, three times through the sound barrier, look ma, no boom.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  You know, and the internet is rejoicing, you know, Twitter blew up. Uh, and everyone's like, boom, solve the sonic boom. And I'm like on Twitter, trying to convince people that we haven't.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  And, and it occurs to me like, wait a minute, uh, we, we, we had our famous breakup with Rolls Royce. Uh, we're doing our own engine now, but when we're doing our own engine, we can customize it. And a thing I keep hearing as we go through these engineering status meetings is, oh, the transonic performance just keeps getting better. And that means the acceleration altitude can increase. And like, every, you know, every time we're one of these reviews, it's like, oh, there's another thousand feet. There's another thousand feet. And I was like, what if, what if we actually cross the threshold of viability without realizing it? And so I, I called the team together on a Saturday. I was like, all right, guys, we got to rerun, we got to rerun the math. Can our own engine in production do boomless cruise? Or if it can't, is there like a small gap and we could actually choose to go after it?

• 25:13Speaker 00

  And it took about 90 minutes for the team to run the simulations. Uh, we've gotten very, very good at running simulations quickly. And the answer came back, no, man, it just works. Like. We got it already. Somebody will write a book and we'll call it how to solve sonic boom without really trying. And so I called the marketing team, I was like, guys, we're going to relaunch the entire company around Boomless Cruise. And at first, like, my team pushed back, they're like, Boomless is off-brand for Boom. Like, what are you talking about? Like, everyone's going to love this. And so we did it. In the second supersonic flight, we announced it was going to be Boomless. Once again, we did three times through the sound barrier. Once again, nobody heard anything. And so, and so there we are.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  That's awesome. And I mean, it's certainly key, like, who are the people building this? And you've talked about sort of the types of people you're bringing in. But you've also talked about the size of teams, and how that with like, small creative teams, you do not have to be an aerospace company with thousands who are doing this. Like, talk about what that looks like.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so communication overhead increases exponentially with team size, right? I think this is, you know, this is why when you zoom in like into really historic efforts, you often find it's like three people that did the key thing. And then you look at, you know, these multi, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of size companies, and they don't get nearly as much done as you would think. Sometimes they get very, very little done. So there's a real magic in small teams. Yet, if you do things the classical way, these hardware companies require enormous teams. And what we've found is, if we really embrace software-enabled design, we can enable small teams to do big things. So, I'll give an example. So if you're designing one of these blades, so when they operate, they're very

• 26:50Speaker 00

  hot, right? So there's thermal expansion in the blade, it gets bigger. The thing has to be structurally sound and aerodynamically sound. But when it's operating, it's actually a different shape than it is when it's made. So to do the design, you're basically going from cold shape to hot shape, looking at the aerodynamics and the structural integrity of the hot shape, and then you're converting that back to a cold shape, which is what you have to manufacture, right? And so you're going in a loop on this. And classically, there's one team of people who knows aero, there's another team of people who knows structures, and doing one, you know, one set of analysis on one blade takes one guy one day. So if you ever want to do very many iterations, you just need these astronomically

• 27:29Speaker 00

  sized teams. And so the Boom team, two people on the Boom team, built this thing that they called Blade Runner. And and they built it in something like three weeks with Claude Code. One of these people is a um uh uh uh uh engine engineer. The the other one is a is a person who was an engine engineer, but hated the the classic big companies so much that she quit and became a software engineer because that was the only way to do anything interesting. And now she gets to go back and actually do the software stuff that she wished she could do at the engine company. So these two people build Blade Runner. And Blade Runner basically has three panels in the user interface. One panel is the blade geometry. And you can literally drag sliders. And and it uh we we have our own custom CAD kernel and it will generate all this geometry in real time.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  So you can say, oh, what if you change the blade twist? Uh, or you change the chord length? You can like move or you change the fill it radius. You can change all these things and the the blade just refreshes on your screen in real time. Uh, and then it runs a real time structural simulation. It shows you that in pain number two. And then uh and then pain number three, it has a real time aerodynamic simulation, which otherwise wasn't possible to do if you weren't running on GPUs. And and so it allows one engineer to basically like do iterations on the blade design like in moments.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Um, and what it means is only a couple of people will be required to actually design and optimize all of the blades in the engine. And there are, you know, there are like a thousand blades in the engine. So there's incredible leverage. And and and so it means the team size can shrink, which means the hiring bar can be elite. And it is um it's enabled by software. But now the fact that software is easier to create thanks to AI just incredibly supercharges all of this. Because what what we find is we what we used to do, actually, we still do this, as we we take software engineers and we embed them in hardware teams. And you don't have to have a hardware background. You just have to think hardware is cool. But you'll sit with the software engineer, uh, sit with the hardware engineers, realize what they're doing that's repetitive and automate it. And this allows iteration cycles to improve um uh significantly,

• 29:27Speaker 00

  allows the the hardware teams to become much less change averse than they are historically. But now, because anybody can code. What what happens is the software people play the role of the architect. And they, you know, how should these systems be organized? How do you have clean data structures? How do you actually make sure the system will scale and not hit a wall? So those are the things the software people do. And then and then basically they create the framework that create the sandbox within which all the hardware people can contribute their code. There's a whole lot of like class, classically, all this is done in spreadsheets. And and spreadsheets are like, they're actually like software, but they're not treated like software. They have no automated testing. They have no continuous integration.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  They have no way of integrating one person's spreadsheet with another person's spreadsheet without a bunch of manual translate, etc. So so this, this, all, what this does is enable really powerful, small teams to move to move quickly. And I think where this goes writ large is, to the first order effect, you might say, oh, my gosh, this is the doom narrative around jobs and AI. Like, here it is, right there in front of you. AI took a thousand person engine team and reduced it to two.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  I think actually what will really happen is you have a larger number of small teams. We did this, we did this experiment as I wanted to get, I wanted to get the whole company AI pilled. And I was like, how do I get, you know, I would like go up to all hands and I would like tell everybody use AI, but like nothing was happening. Or very little was happening, like, how do I actually get everybody to do it? So we paused all project work for a week. And and we said, everybody work in small teams, work only on what you think is the most important thing that you see to the company. You get to pick that. You have to use AI and you have to demo it at the end of the week in front of the whole company.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  So I forced everyone to use AI for a week. And my expectation was we get two or three really creative things that would pay for the entire company being shut down for a week. And I thought mostly we would get like dozens of like not very good stupid projects. Instead, what happened is we had two or three stupid projects and dozens of really good ones. And also two or three that changed the trajectory. Blade Runner came out of this.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  So what I learned was that surprised me is like even the lowest level employee in the company, like literally the shipping and receiving person, use Claude to build a shipping and receiving tool. I was like, wait a minute. Everybody actually has an idea.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Very few people have the skills or the resources to go realize that idea. But now, now they're enabled.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  So I think we're gonna have an explosion of entrepreneurship. Because like, poor be the person who has no idea for a product or service that could exist. And now those people are empowered. So I think we're gonna have an explosion of small teams doing creative things.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  I completely agree. What, in addition to Blade Runner, are there any other key projects? Because one of the things I think is amazing about this is showing how the AI software revolution plays from the world of bits to the world of atoms.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's another one called MakeBoom. That's our airplane design software. We actually, we created this pre-AI coding, but I think it's emblematic of the kind of thing that will be very powerful. So, so if, let's make a software-hardware contrast here for a second. In, in the software world, your modules of code should be independent of each other, right? If I, if you change this bit of code over here, it should not affect what this code over here does. If it does, things are very wrong. But airplanes are very integrated, right? Like, like the, and there are these intricate trade-offs. So, you know, for example, if we say, oh, we want to add another row of seats to the airplane, well, now the whole structure of the airplane has to get longer. It got heavier. The wings have to get stronger to hold up that extra weight. There will be more drag

• 32:59Speaker 00

  from the bigger wing, and so the engines have to be more powerful. The, you need to carry more fuel. You have to find a place to put that fuel. And it all goes back in this loop. So, like, you can't change anything without changing everything. And so, classically, the way this engineering is done is there are these discipline owners. You know, there's a structures team, there's an aerodynamics team, there's a propulsion team, there's a systems team, and they all have, you know, in their own laptop, some Excel spreadsheet with all their calculations in it. And, and they have to all hand off to each other every time you want to do a design iteration. And so, you can't do very many design iterations because of just the complexity of the handoffs and the fact that they, you know, it's like the last thing you want to do is tell the guy sizing the, the cabin air conditioner, they added more passengers. And so, then now they have to rethink all their assumptions

• 33:44Speaker 00

  about how much heat dissipation there has to be and resize the entire system. And so, it makes you, it makes you very, very changeaverse. And, and what we said is, you know, actually, we want, we want to turn all of those spreadsheets into software, treat them like software, and have all the components talk to each other so we can iterate very, very quickly. And so, that was the origin of what MakeBoom was. And so, literally, you can define a supersonic jet in a configuration file. And you can run this thing and it will evaluate that entire airplane in a low fidelity way, like in moments. And it can run, you know, it can go spin up a whole bunch of CPUs in the cloud, do high fidelity simulations overnight, and give you a higher fidelity

• 34:27Speaker 00

  answer. And plus, it can do what you call trade studies. Like, do we want a little bit more passengers? Do we want a little bit more range? Or if we end up with a higher fidelity model of the engine, we can like drop that engine model into make boom and see how it affects the rest of the airplane. So one of the, I'll tell a story about this, how this actually, the fact that we built this tool and the fact that we're building our own engine changed the seats on the airplane. How? One of the things we deeply believe is you can't just like, design the airplane technically and then shove the passengers in there and kind of hope it'll all be okay. You have to design the passenger experience together with the airplane itself. So we want engineers to think like designers, designers to think like engineers. And so we've been trying to figure out, you know, how to make

• 35:11Speaker 00

  the cabin really great. And so somebody came up with an idea, I can't say what it is yet, but it is, it is a breakthrough cabin, but it required the geometry of the airplane change. And so we took, we took that initial geometry, we fed it through the simulation, and we lost a thousand miles of range. So this airplane is supposed to fly 4,000 miles nonstop. If we put this new cabin in, it could only fly 3,000 miles nonstop, which means there are a whole lot of routes you can't fly. It's like, ugh, I don't think we can give up 1,000 miles of range. And I remember sitting with the team and saying, guys, just think as passengers, do you want to fly on this airplane or this airplane? Everyone's like, that airplane. Like, we all want to be on that one. Like, okay, should we try to find the range? And everyone's like, we should try to find the range. So

• 35:56Speaker 00

  we had no idea whether it was even possible to go find 1,000 miles out of 3,000. It's a lot of range recovery. And and what what somebody had the great instinct to do was to to generate about a dozen different theoretical engines. And and by theoretical engines, I mean, like, do you want a little bit more fan on the front of the engine or a little bit less fan? Do you want a little bit more core or a little bit less core? And each each of these design parameters kind of optimizes for one phase of flight at the expense of others. And it's not immediately obvious like which combination will be best. So we generated a dozen combinations of engines, dropped them all into MakeBoom. And and like what MakeBoom would do is take that theoretical airplane on top of a theoretical

• 36:40Speaker 00

  engine and fly it through an entire mission, meaning it would take off, climb, accelerate through the sound barrier, cruise, descend, land, and then tell you how much fuel was in the tank at the end.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  And and so out of those 12 engines, we found a counterintuitive better one that gave back most of the 1,000 miles of range.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  And so we we were able to change what engine we were building, change what airplane we were building, and and the result is a meaningfully different passenger cabin that would not have been possible had we not had the software tool. And and by the boom is full of stories like this. I we can fill three podcasts with stories like that.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Well, so I feel like a lot of critics of sort of using AI, using LLMs is like, yeah, you can do documentation, compliance, whatever, but you're doing hard engineering and to do hard engineering, like, AI is not going to help. Like, what do you say to those critics?

• 37:32Speaker 00

  Hold my jet A. The I mean, it's it's just false. AI turns every hardware engineer into a software-enabled hardware engineer. And by the way, don't don't I would also not be dismissive of the compliance implication to this. Like, one of the first things we did with AI was automate regulatory paperwork. And to to give you a again, a theme that runs through all of this is reducing change aversion, increasing the ability to iterate. So so so you're going to certify an airplane with the FAA. One of the very many things you have to go prove are right is the the ability to withstand lightning strikes. And and so a lightning strike test certification plan might stretch for 200 pages. And and and so the kind of person who will write this, frankly, not every engineer wants

• 38:16Speaker 00

  to write a 200-page test certification plan. The best and the brightest to not to want to.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  And so so you have to this army of the kind of less creative engineers to go crank these things out. And it takes like maybe two months to build one. Now someone wants to change. Some crazy person comes along and wants to change the cabin of the airplane. Right. And like, well, that that means is all the lightning strikes backs are now wrong. And need to be redone. And so, great. Do you now want to have the army of certification engineers like rewrite? The all this technical documentation for the regulators, it it's it's it will create this organizational resistance to change.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Because because the actual cost of change is high. Well, it turns out, we built a rag with all the regulatory documentation in it. And and you can prompt AI and get a like 90% correct lightning strike test plan. And so what that means is, and basically, the airplane design is like embedded in the prompt. Uh, and so if you update the airplane design, in fact, you could probably auto update the prompt. And then boom, out comes the test plan. And so what it what it does is, so it is, it reduces the aversion to change.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  And and what this means is we'll be able to go certify and way more iteratively than we can today. If you play all this out. You know, today, um, one of the, one of the many reasons we don't get new airplanes is, uh, is Boeing and Airbus think like patients going to bad doctors. Right. Like you go to a doctor, you say, doctor, it hurts when I do this. And the bad doctor says, well, don't do it. Right. And the great doctor says, let's figure out how to make it not hurt. But but, um, basically, you know, Boeing was the patient that went to the bad doctor. Uh, it hurts when I certify an airplane. Okay, well, let's not certify any new airplanes was their response. And and, you know, so this is why. They're still making seven thirty seven sixty years later. But if you can, um, I think the right mindset is to make certification not painful.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  And, uh, and part of that you can do company side, part of it requires working with regulators. But by the way, they will totally do it if you. You know, keep their trust.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  And so, and so this will allow us to iteratively certify many, you know, many iterations of the airplane. And and so the whole improvement curve is going to be way faster than it ever has been before. And AI is part of that story.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Can you tell us for a second, I feel like you, everyone, when we're trying to innovate, we talk about regulations slowing it down.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  And I feel like a lot of Americans agree. But with air travel, I feel like a lot of people would say, ah, but don't mess with that because safety is so important. Can you tell us why your way is actually safer than the alternative? Because I think that's where some people would have a question.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, um, we're not trying to drop the safety bar. If anything, we're actually increasing it.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  The, uh, the question is really, how do you prove? To yourself, to the public and to the regulator that you've met the safety bar. And this is about reducing the cost of proof of safety, not about moving the safety bar.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  And I'm very proud of the safety culture we built at Boom. We did this airplane program with zero incidents, zero mishaps, no major injuries, no OSHA reportables. So it's about reducing the cost of demonstrating safety, not the other way around. And I do think some of the most important regulatory stuff is actually not in the air, it's on the ground. So a thing I'm spending a lot of energy right now on is trying to figure out how to build physical infrastructure faster. We are a year behind on our engine test facility because a local fire bureaucrat who knows nothing about how to build anything safely is forcing us to apply the code in such a way that is far more difficult, far more expensive, and less safe. And this makes me want to set my hair on fire.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  And this is, the entire way we build in this country, I think, is backwards. Like, you know, this country is founded on the idea of innocent until proven guilty. But not if you build. If you build, you have to prove your innocence before you're allowed to move, you know, to do anything. And, you know, like, if we drove to work the way we build in this country, it'd be like, oh, can't get on the roads. You have to have a plan. What route are you gonna take? What speed are you gonna drive? What are you gonna use your blinkers? And then some bureaucrat waits a few months and then gives you feedback and tells you you should really take, you know, 101, not the 280. And you're like, fine. And then eventually you can drive, you know, but that's the way we do buildings today. And what instead we should do is make building work like roads, where you have to have a license.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  So you prove that you're competent to do this. And then there are rules, but the rules are enforced rather than pre-approved. And so what you can then do is just build at your own speed. And if you break the rules trivially, you're fine, and you have to fix it. If you break the rules seriously, you lose your license. If you break the rules in such a way that somebody gets hurt, that's criminal and you go to jail, just like driving. And if we had that model, we'd be able to build so much faster, so much faster. And it would have zero compromise on safety. In fact, I would argue very strongly that you actually have a safety lift. A lot of times, the people enforcing the rules, particularly for complex facilities, are not domain experts.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  And we're domain experts on how to do complex hardware safely. The local fire department is actually not.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Well, let's go to one of the really interesting kind of product extension, which is superpower.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  So it's one of the most elegant moves I've seen in a long time. You're using the engine you built for a plane to fund the plane, and in the process, potentially solving the power crisis for AI data centers. That's not just a financing strategy, it's a systems insight. What did you see that made that connection obvious? And when did you see it?

• 43:56Speaker 00

  The origin story on this, so we famously had our breakup a few years ago with Rolls-Royce, did the thing that everyone said we couldn't do, which is just to take on building an engine ourselves from scratch. And I remember sitting in one of the first technical presentations, the lead engineer said, "By the way, your engine looks a heck of a lot more like a power turbine than subsonic engines do." Because subsonic engines are about a burst of power to get off the ground. And then you hear it as a passenger, the engine kind of gets quieter after takeoff. And a supersonic engine is actually partial power for takeoff, but full power, the entire flight, supersonic. And that's much more like a power turbine. And so the engineers said, "By the way, if you ever..."

• 44:38Speaker 00

  So everybody who builds jet engines kind of has a side business selling them on the ground for power. GE, Pratt, like, everybody does this. And the engineers are like, "By the way, if you ever wanted a power turbine business, you'd have the most amazing thing." Because there are no new power turbines. Your engine will be new instead of the art, and it's naturally aligned with what makes a great power turbine. And I was like, "Uh huh, uh huh, we're an airplane company, people, but next slide." That was four years ago. And so fast forward to March of last year. So we've broken the sound barrier on XB1. My primary focus is lobbying to have the speed limit in the US repealed, which did happen successfully. And I see the things that we all know now. Like, AI is massively power-intensive.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  The grid is not growing, takes five to 10 years to get a grid hookup. Everybody's starting to say they have to vertically integrate their own power generation. To do that, you need turbines. Now the turbines are sold out. And the turbine companies are not AI-pilled. They got burned the last time there was a data center bubble. They don't want to invest in production capacity. And so everyone's stuck. And I was like, "Huh." I've been looking for 10 years to find, you know, what could be a way to pull revenue to the left. You know, how do we, building a supersonic airliner, certifying it for passengers, and that's, you know, and then only when all of that is done, you get your first revenue dollar, is like a financial hail mary. And so I've been trying to find, like, what can we do that will get more cash sooner? And we said no to a thousand things that were shiny objects.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  But so I remember seeing those tweets, and I sent two texts. Uh, one was to Sam Altman, who, who backed us, uh, about the same time you did, Reid, backed way in the early days. Uh, another one was to my head of propulsion, and, and to Sam, I said, hey, if we had a 40-megawatt nat gas turbine, uh, would that be of interest? And the other one was my team was like, what would it actually take to do this, guys? Is this feasible? And Sam wrote me back right away, was like, yes, yes, please, here's who you should call. My team was like, oh, yeah, we actually had a plan on a shelf, we just didn't know there was a market. And I was like, ah! This, this, so this is opportunity. And I think it was about 90 days from those texts exchanged to we actually, we actually had a billion-dollar LOI from a, for a launch customer. And, uh, and then we just, we went all in on this.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  Uh, so we took, we realized this is the most important opportunity in front of us. It will allow us to generate the cash to do the airplane. It will also allow us to test the engine on the ground. So we'll go to the FAA with the most tested new engine ever. Right now, everyone else builds these aero engines, and then they convert them for the ground. I think it's backwards. Run on the ground first. Beat that thing up, where if it blows up, nobody gets hurt. Right? Find all the bugs, iterate on the ground, and then put it on the airplane. So that's what we're doing. And so, you know, as we speak, 90% of the team is on the part of the airplane called engine. And 10% of the team is on the part of the airplane that is not engine. And we're just very focused on speedrunning this development, getting as much power production online as we can, as quickly as we can.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  So everyone talks about bringing industry back to America, and instead of bringing the old industry back, I mean, you guys, so... Superpowers, your engine powering data centers. This is a picture of American industry that is working and sort of for the future. Like, do you see this as a way to like really be optimistic about American industry?

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely. If we just get out of our own way, great things are going to happen. Getting out of our own way regulatorily is a big deal.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  It's huge.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  But I think, I think there's also another thread underneath this, which is about the how. We were talking earlier about how it takes like a year to get a turbine blade. And, and so a single crystal investment cast turbine blade is, is actually 12 months plus out of the traditional supply chain. And the longest thing in that is actually the tooling production, meaning like the complex, high precision mold that you need to go cast things in. And, and part of that is because the American tool and die industry basically died.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  No pun intended. And it all went to Asia. And there's a whole other story we could tell about how China sucked that out. But, but it did. There's very little tool and die left in this country. And so, so you might say, great, if we want to reindustrialize America, we got to go rebuild tool and die. And, and sometimes that is actually the right pattern and we will need some tool and die. But our first thought was like, can we just do this without any tool? Can we just delete that part of the manufacturing process? And can we go to more, more additively based approaches for this? And I'll, I'll be stealing my own thunder if I go too much further in this story. But what I will say is this is a great pattern. You don't try to bring back what left to China. What you do is invent the generation after it and have that be here.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  And it's, it's, it tends to be digitally enabled.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  It tends to delete hard tooling. It tends to be robotics heavy.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  So we should just, you don't, don't try to bring back like old school textiles as an example, build next generation textiles.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  You know, a natural thing for Boom is comparing with Concord and Apollo, which were impressive tech demos, but bad products.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  You said it very well. They were tech demos.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. So kind of go into the details of what the thinking, how the thinking was a mistake and what thinking we need.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I have a very, you know, I get looked at a sconce at aerospace events because I actually think Apollo was a terrible idea and we shouldn't have done it. And before you slaughter me. So imagine going back to 1969 and finding the most pessimistic person you could find on the street and saying, in the year 2026, what do you think space travel will be like? And what do you think air travel will be like? And of course, 1969 was the moon landing. And also the first Concorde flight. I don't think you could have found anybody so pessimistic to have predicted what actually happened. Because we can't go back to the moon and we can't fly supersonic. And so if Apollo and Concorde were supposed to be these massive leaps forward, something went wrong. It didn't deliver, right?

• 50:30Speaker 00

  And I think the, I think what happened was we got confused about motivation. The first half century of flight was entrepreneurially driven innovation. Where the, you know, Adam Smith's invisible hand forced product market fit. Nobody built products for tech demos. You had to build products that had markets. And instead, you know, JFK said, great, let's go to the moon so we can show up the Russians. And also let's build supersonic airplanes so we can also show up the Russians. And very ironically, in our attempt to defeat communism, we took a communist approach. Like we said, great, let's beat the Russians with our own centrally planned projects.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  Turns out it's not, communism doesn't work any better for Americans than it does for Russians. Like, central planning is a terrible idea. And so the centrally planned projects built useless things. And I think we all sort of recognized that Apollo was not, it had no commercial intent. What is not broadly recognized behind Apollo is it created, it contributed to this entire supply chain that was cost insensitive. Right? And then after Apollo's done, there's no vision beyond it. So the Apollo program gets shut down. But now you've got all these suppliers used to these fat, happy government contracts that like basically find other ways to keep themselves alive while doing nothing hard. And then, you know, and then an analogous thing happened on the supersonic side.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  Concorde at least looked like it was supposed to be commercial, right? Because this is for, this is an airliner and people should buy tickets, right? But nobody thought too hard about this. Here's a hundred seat airplane adjusted with tiny seats. Adjusted for inflation, fares are about $20,000.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  A 747 at the time would have maybe 40 seats in first class at a lower fare. So hang on, we're going to have two and a half times as many seats at a much larger fare, a much less comfortable experience. This doesn't add up at all, right? Like, obviously, the seats will be empty a lot of the time. And even the most popular route, which is Newark to London, it was half empty.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  And so economically, it couldn't do anything else. And it's a classic example of no product market fit. And why? It's because the mechanism that drove product market fit, that, you know, Adam's invisible hand makes every entrepreneur focus on this, right? And, you know, we cut off Adam's hand here. He was not involved in the creation of Concorde. But then people didn't realize this, and they draw all the wrong conclusions about supersonic. Like, oh, people won't pay more for speed. It's inherently more expensive, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Supersonic airplanes are tiny and uncomfortable. None of these things are inherently true.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  You know, it's as if we had built the Univac, had stopped iterating in computers, and then, and then, and then everyone says you couldn't possibly have an iPhone because all computers are the size of a room.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  But that's what we did in flight.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  So, thinking about supersonic flight, I'm sure you've never heard this critique before, that this is just for wealthy people, you're building something that's a luxury good. Like, why should we care about your company if it's just, you know, 100 rich people who are gonna fly to London faster?

• 53:32Speaker 00

  So first off, just to factually say where we're starting here, it's, we've been able to take about three quarters of the cost out. So flying supersonic on overture will have the cost profile of business class today, which I mean, tens of millions of people already do.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Now, that said, that's where we start, not where we stop. And I want to We're not done until you can't convince kids that we didn't just always normally fly supersonic.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  I have a kid's story we can come back to on this if we want. But this will be like electric cars, computers, cell phones. Where initially, the market is high end, but with iteration and scale, the cost comes down. And what a lot of folks don't realize is, so when you go faster, there is an energy intensity. So it matters to reduce, energy efficiency matters. And choosing a low-cost energy source matters. But when you go faster, you actually get more done with the same airplane and crew.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  So if you design the whole thing for high utilization, you get what we call the speed dividend. And so there is a tipping point, actually, where the fastest flight can actually become the cheapest one. Not because it had the lowest fuel usage, it probably won't. But the total operating cost, thanks to utilization, was better. So we're going to keep iterating towards that. And I think we end up somewhere in the vicinity of today's economy fares. But with a much better experience. It might be that the lowest supersonic is actually economy plus, I don't know, 20%. But the experience will be something where you're treated far better than you're treated in economy today.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  So to be clear, my kids will be upset about this because they're allowed to watch unlimited shows on planes. So they just want the flight to be the longest possible.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  We found the one passenger that doesn't want it.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. But tell us your kid's story.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is how innovation impacts the next generation. So my youngest, when she was about 18 months old, I would just watch SpaceX launch videos with her. And she got fairly obsessed with them. She would ask me for like Red Car Rocket. And it took me a while to figure out what that was. That was the Falcon Heavy test flight that had Elon's bright red Roadster on it. So Red Car Rocket meant Falcon Heavy. But eventually, we get some, now she, at this point in the story, she's maybe two and a half. I take her to go launch one of these STS model rockets. And so we go out and like put it on the pad. And of course, I am who I am, so I got the smallest rocket, I put the biggest rocket motor in it. And so we launched this thing off, boy, it goes, and it ends up in a tree like three fields over. And she's so upset.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  And at first, I thought she was upset just because we lost the rocket. But it turned out, the reason she was upset was she completely expected the rocket to come back to the pad. And I realize I'm just this dummy of a parent. I've only shown her videos of rockets landing because I think they're so cool. And of course, she would have no idea that this is a recent innovation.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  So that's where we want to get with supersonic, where you have to explain to kids that flights used to be longer.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Exactly. Well, speaking of which, you personally led the campaign to legalize supersonic flight over the US. We talked about that briefly earlier. Test the line before Congress, pushing the White House, and the House just passed SMA unanimously. What did you learn about how American policy actually gets made?

• 56:53Speaker 00

  So much. It was 115 days from announcing Bumless Cruise to an executive order to legalize supersonic flight. Yes, and as you said, then the House passed a bill to codify that unanimously. And we're working to make the same thing happen in the Senate now. The American politics, in my view, is very tribal. And the moment you pick, the moment you take a position that's aligned with any human, now you're branded as a team, and the other team is evil. And I think it's, I think it's pretty bad for the country. And it leads to a lot of unnecessarily polarized position-taking. I call it values-oriented communication. It sounds hokey, but like,

• 57:34Speaker 00

  I don't talk tribally. I just talk about what really matters. And so I can walk into a Republican's office and talk about why supersonic flight matters, why it should be legal. And I can say only things I passionately believe to be true. And I can walk into a Democrat's office, and I can also talk about supersonic flight and say only things I passionately believe to be true. They are different but compatible sets of things. Like, you know, if I'm speaking to a more left audience, I talk about human connection. I talk about what happens when our kids grow up with friends from other continents. What happens when we're far more culturally connected. If I'm in a Republican's office, I talk about the need for American leadership in technology, how a lot of defense technology is commercially derived, and if we don't have the next generation...

• 58:17Speaker 00

  Of commercial airplanes in the country, we're not getting the next generation of defense airplanes either. And that's really bad. And so we make different arguments in different places, but they're all compatible and they're all true. And what I find is, I think on many of these issues, there's just a rational middle 80% that is normally not spoken to.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  One of the kind of neat full circle things here is the opposition to supersonic flight was originally a leftist issue. It was, the ban on supersonic was one of the first victories of the environmental movement. Entire books were written about the evil of supersonic flight. All of this is basically forgotten. By the way, one of the guys that wrote one of the books, wrote me an email and it was one of the best emails I ever got. He's like, I helped lead the campaign to ban supersonic flight. I have listened to you and how you're doing it. I decided I was wrong and I'm now behind it. I was like, what just happened? But they just speak the truth passionately and explaining the human value of this stuff. And I think if you do that, and I, my hypothesis is this actually would work on a number of political issues.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  That is, the conversations aren't happening today, but you could unify people.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  What's the most important thing that still has to go right, even if it's not fully under your control?

• 59:27Speaker 00

  We just have to not screw it up too badly. The, the, let's start, let's start with what, you know, what fundamentals are good here. People want passenger supersonic flight. I don't know, apparently we just heard about the first humans that want longer flights. Your kids, but everybody, everybody else wants a shorter flight.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  They might learn.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, they'll, they'll learn.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Everybody else wants shorter flights and airlines want these so long as they can make money. Airlines are so frustrated with the duopoly. They're desperate for another differentiated product that would actually grow the market. The technology is all there. We demonstrated the regulations are there and also they're way more malleable than people thought. A year ago, the, the answer would have been capital is an enormous challenge, but we actually figure out how to make our own capital. So we now have, we now have in the bank account, you know, enough money to get from here to actually delivering the engine. And the engine prints all the rest of the money to deliver the airplane. So what's, what's left is really, do we make a mistake? And, um, you know, do we take too long? Uh, do we screw up something critical? Do we have a setback we can't recover from?

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  And so, you know, what I, what I worry about every night is just what mistake are we making? Uh, that we don't know about that will be painful to fix later. And just how do we, how do we discover those quickly? And so I put a lot of my energy into building a culture where people, um, talk openly about problems. That's one of the most important things. Uh, the, the natural human tendency is when some, your thing isn't going right. Well, I don't want to tell anybody. It's embarrassing. Uh, I, I will hold on to it and fix it. And so what tends to happen is the problem metastasizes and, and the problem is shared only when it's like really quite big.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  And, uh, and then it's very hard to recover from. So we really try to train our people to share their problems early.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  So one of the things about these, you know, difficult projects, the ones that are long, um, is that they take an enormous amount of grit and conviction. So, you know, um, you know, as we've talked about, you spent a decade on something most people think was either impossible or relevant. Um, so what's your theory on why ambitious things take as long as they do? We've been talking about speed a little bit. And what's, um, and whether that's a bug or a feature?

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Well, I have a couple of thoughts on even the first part of what you said too. Um, I, I think, I think it does take a lot of grit, but I think you can engineer the grit. Um, like in this, the way I picked Boom as the thing I wanted to work on was by optimizing for how happy I would be if it succeeded. And, uh, and that, you know, the, the, we nearly failed so many times. We got down to seven days of cash once. Uh, we had, we had to do a down round. It was very painful. I don't recommend it, but I got through those, I got through those moments because I, I never lost conviction that this should exist. And so I think founders should be more selfish. They should engineer, they should pick something where they will never question, is it worth it? Um, no matter how hard it gets. And I, I think that's, I think that's very important, but okay. So why do these things take so long?

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  Boy, if we'd been wiser in day one, we could have done this much faster. Uh, part of what's going on here is we had to rediscover. How to do a startup in an industry that didn't have startups. Right? Like, I had no background in this. We had to go figure out a team that would figure it out. And a lot of what we know today, we just didn't know on day one. Like, the single biggest mistake we made on XB1 superficially was I made it way too hard. We said the goal was to fly 10% faster than Concorde. It had to have a second seat in it so we could call it a passenger airplane. It had to not have afterburners. Like, I imposed all these requirements that made it actually far more difficult to engineer. Some of those requirements were actually dropped along the way because they weren't actually necessary. But we went far enough with them that it made the airplane harder. Okay, so I made it harder.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  Well, why did I make it harder? I didn't know how hard it was going to be. I was pretty naive. Okay, why did it take me so long to figure that out? Well, we only, this is the real worst mistake on XB1. We only planned to build one. What we should have done is planned to build a series and made each one, the early ones in the series, far simpler. We should have been iterative, right? Had we been iterative, we would have learned the lesson about all the requirements being too hard. I would have changed it much faster. So, the single biggest lesson learned was just to be iterative in hardware. And that was, in hindsight, it feels really obvious, but it was, it certainly wasn't obvious to me in 2014. And I got the company on this very long path that was unnecessary. But now, we've got a whole bunch of hardware startups, right?

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  And we're like exchanging lessons learned. And like now, the next entrepreneur founding, the next boom, won't make that mistake.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  Okay, so that's my question. In hindsight, it's 2020, so now you know all the mistakes that you shouldn't have made. But you think the next generation of founders can have, know all the things on day one that you didn't know.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  I want way more hardware startups in America. So, I'm not secretive about any of these things, right? So, I try to, I write a Substack about this.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  I speak to every YC batch and I meet with the hardware founders and I just try to share like, here are all the things that I got wrong that nearly killed boom. Don't do those things, do different things. And like, one of the most essential things is you got, you have to get to integrated hardware quickly. You have to plan to have several units along the way that you throw away that you iterate on, and that forces you to keep it simple enough that you can actually go do the iteration. And then that, that, that creates this learning loop where the mistakes, the mistakes get found and fixed inexpensively.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  So I think most Amer- well, who knows what most Americans think, but when you think about the difference between software and hardware, hardware just seems so hard. Like, things are in the real world, it's hard to do. Like, how do we get more hardware startups? Like, what is that path?

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  We have to overcome that mythology.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  Right? Like, it's, uh, the notion that startups exist only in software is a relatively recent notion, right? Like Silicon Valley, let's remember, silicon is hardware. Right? Like, we used to have semiconductor startups.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  And then, you know, and then I think we got like, you know, a little drunk on SaaS and, and, and forgot that anything else could exist. And there's this mythology that hardware startups can, uh, consume more capital than software startups. But if you look at the, if you look at like, how much VC Uber consumed, how much VC Airbnb consumed, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can compare it to like Androl, SpaceX. Uh, like, actually, the hardware startups consumed less venture capital than, than, than these asset-light companies. So, so what do you make of that? I think the one thing that really is different, it is more expensive to, to build a prototype. And it is more expensive to ship. So in, in the SaaS world, how do you prove you have a good idea? How do you prove you have product market fit? You just ship and

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  you prove it by actually being in the market, right? I cannot build a supersonic jet in order to demonstrate that people want to fly supersonic, right? You have to have other mechanisms. And, and frankly, Kickstarter shows the way. You know, we got pre-orders for our airplane with deposits. We did, we did Kickstarter for supersonic flight. And, and so, so you have to, you have to be different, there are different playbooks, um, for product market fit for long duration, expensive hardware projects. But they're not, this isn't rocket science. It really is just Kickstarter.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  It's just jet science, but yes. So, you know, the jet age produced second order effects that nobody forecast.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  In 1960. Global tourism, Justin Tynes supply chains, the modern business trip, fresh produce the year round. You said the thing you're most excited about isn't the travel itself. It's the effects you're not smart enough to predict yet.

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  All the most amazing stories about the jet age are the things that nobody would have predicted, like shoes.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Like Phil Knight, I only discovered this like reading Phil Knight's memoirs, he's the founder of Nike. And he fell in love with Japanese style running shoes after business school and a transfer to Japan. And then Nike actually got their start importing Japanese running shoes to America. This couldn't have happened without a jet. Baseball, there was no Major League Baseball west of the Mississippi before the speed of the jet. And so I think, I think with supersonic, there will be similar stories. We just don't know what they are yet. And I think the most important innovations in the world tend to be platform innovations, innovations in which other innovators can build, like the smartphone. I don't think, you know, when Steve Jobs stood on stage in 2007 introducing the iPhone.

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  I remember that one of my favorite moments in the keynote is he's got this like, it's a, it's a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod and a breakthrough internet communicator, all in one, right? And he's going through this and like, and there's like, there's like heavy applause at the phone line. There's this heavy applause at the iPod line and he says breakthrough internet communicator and it's kind of muted applause. So everyone's like, what is that? Well, it turns out it's actually the only thing that mattered, right? But he had no idea that Uber would come out of the breakthrough internet communicator, the innovator, it was a platform innovation. And I think, I think airplanes, i- i- in a non-obvious way are also platform innovations. They, they enable kind of more liquidity of movement on the planet.

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  And, and that liquidity creates non-obvious benefits, you know, like, like we, I think we can predict we'll have Major League sports worldwide. But there'll be other things that are less predictable.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  Well, I also think, you know, I just read that the median American took zero flights last year. And that's America and that's compared to, you know, countries in Africa or Southeast Asia, like no one is flying.

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  And so there could be so many changes from a global perspective.

• 1:08:47Speaker 00

  Totally. Like a, a thought experiment is imagine if you could get anywhere in the world. In four hours for a hundred dollars.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  Now, I'm not sure we'll actually literally get there, or anybody would really want to be on the hundred dollar flight. But, um, but think how differently you'd live your life. Um, and think about what if it was all available last minute? You know, so you could just decide this weekend to, to go to Mumbai and come back. And time for work on Monday.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  Like, that is, that, that is a not impossible future.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  Uh, and it will be one that has incredible second order effects.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  So, a lot of people have thought your ideas about the future were crazy throughout this career. Is there something about the future of flight right now that you believe that almost no one agrees with?

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  Probably a lot of people still disagree with everything I just said.

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  Right, that might be the answer.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think this is, I think this is actually going to happen. And, uh, and there's still a lot of people in the industry that just don't believe it.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  So, we're about to move to rapid fire. So, you can answer these at any length you want, they're just the same questions we ask any of our guests.

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  I love The Martian. Um, and I think, you know, so many, we, we were missing, uh, utopian sci-fi. And we have way too much dystopian sci-fi. I think this is, uh, but The Martian is great. And, you know, one of my favorite things is kind of the final scene where Matt Damon's in front of a college class. He's talking about almost dying. And he has this thing about, you know, uh, some things, sometime, something's gonna go wrong. And if you just solve one problem after another, if you just keep doing that in a row long enough, you get to live. And, and that resonates with me and it makes me think of, you know, the life of an entrepreneur. Like, if you just keep solving problems and don't stop, then, you know, eventually you get to IPO.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  Uh, what is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  Uh, there's some technical ones that are, that I think are underappreciated. Like, what does the speed of sound have to do with an airplane? Nobody ever asks that. It's non-obvious, never talked about.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Should I ask you that question?

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  Uh, yes.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  So, so what does the speed of sound have to do with an airplane?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  The, uh, the speed of sound is the speed at which pressure waves propagate in air.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  Right? And a lot of what an airplane does is about manipulation of pressure.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  Uh, so that's, that's kind of the fundamental connection. So what's, what's supersonic? Um, supersonic is when you, uh, when the airplane outruns the pressure wave. Imagine there's like a group of people, a crowd, and we're running at them and they can see us coming. Uh, they're gonna kind of look at us weirdly and then they'll start to move out of the way, right? So we don't just crash into them. That is subsonic. Like, there is a pressure wave in front of the airplane, uh, running ahead of the airplane. It's basically saying, "Hey, I'm coming. Start getting out of the way."

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  And, um, and when you go supersonic, uh, it's like running at a crowd of people that can't see you coming. So what happens is you crash right into them and they start bumping into each other and falling over like dominoes. That is exactly what happens with air.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  That, when the airplane is going faster than the air's ability to get out of the way, uh, it compresses the air.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  And, and it, uh, so any part of the airplane that is moving supersonic relative to the local airflow gets compressed. And, and so you get all these little bands of compressed air coming off an airplane. That's what a shockwave actually is. And then there's shockwaves as they come off the airplane, they kind of, they coalesce, they constructively interfere as they get to the ground, and that's what causes a sonic boom. It's just these compress, these bands of compressed air that stack up on top of each other. That's it.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Yep. Unless, of course, they reflect before they get there.

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Uh, so where do you see progress or momentum outside of your field that inspires you?

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  Oh, there is so much to be excited about. I mean, uh, you know, we're, we're in a golden age of space, thanks to SpaceX. Um, the second order effects of that, we're just starting to see, um, with, you know, global communication. The other examples, I think, are kind of, you know, widely known, right? Like, like I think AI is gonna be even bigger than people think it is. The, the second order, I don't think we're gonna have a jobpocalypse. Uh, I think we're gonna have a, an explosion in entrepreneurship. We're gonna, you know, that maybe the biggest beneficiaries are gonna be, you know, YC and VCs because we're gonna have way more startups, uh, than we've ever had before. Um, and that's, I think that is incredibly, incredibly exciting.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  Well, as always, our last question. Can you leave us with a final thought on what is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity's way over the next 15 years and what's the first step to get there?

• 1:13:11Speaker 00

  A question I like to ask people sometimes is people get very doomerism about lots of things and they, and they, they think there is a past that is somehow better. But I like to ask people, um, if you could pick, uh, any time and place in history to live, where would you pick? And what this tends to do is force people to be rational because they realize if they go back in time, they have to give like air conditioners and cars and like, you know, indoor plumbing if they go back far enough. And, you know, but then they, still, most people fail to realize that that trend probably progresses into the future, right? And that, that probably the future is much better than the present. So, but, but that doesn't happen automatically. Uh, people have to go make it happen. And I think if we can overcome, I think one of the most important things to overcome is the bystander

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  effect in innovation. This, you know, this, this notion that if it's a good idea, there's already a team on it, which causes people to ignore some of the most important unsolved problems. Like one, one I love to point out is traffic. There are, as best I can tell, zero teams actually working on the root cause of traffic, but it's very solvable and it actually could be a gigantic business. I think, I think if we can overcome that culturally, uh, we have this explosion of entrepreneurship, like we will have solved problems that people don't even realize are problems today.

• 1:14:21Speaker 02

  Awesome. Blake, thank you so much.

• 1:14:23Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  Thank you, Reid.

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  Possible is produced by Palette Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tenasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imo Zoo, Amon Suri, Lexi Kevin, Danny Garrison, Trent Barboza, and Tifadzwa Nima Rundwe.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  Special thanks to Surya, Yala Manchili, Sayida Sabieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relles.

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  And a big thanks to Laura Arnold, Laura Hain, and the team at Greylock.