SPEAKER_00: If you look at aviation, you know, the early days weren't so safe, but every accident got a

SPEAKER_01: root cause review, and the industry at least used to be really good at learning from these things. Every time I read something that's like, well, we shouldn't have self-driving cars until we can prove they're perfectly safe. I'm like, no, no, no, you're actually killing the on-ramp. You're killing the on-ramp to safety. And, you know, we have to allow things to come to market so long as they're better, and then we can make them perfect over time.

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SPEAKER_08: All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. Very excited to have our guest on again today for the second time. His name is Blake Scholl. He is the CEO and founder of Boom Supersonic,

SPEAKER_09: and they are making supersonic planes. He was last on This Week in Startups back on episode 638. It's been a minute. And as you know, we in this amazing technological miracle of an existence have seen so much change in the past 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. One thing that's gone in the wrong direction is the speed of flight. Things have gotten slower. And the dream of supersonic flight, which I as a kid was

SPEAKER_11: enamored with because we had something called the Concorde that left out of JFK, not too far from my

SPEAKER_09: home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. And you could get to London in a very short period of time. Welcome back to the program. Blake, when was the last Concorde flight? Was that in the 90s or late 80s?

SPEAKER_14: Uh, it was the early 2000s, actually 2003. Uh, it shut down. I was, I was 22 years old, never got to fly on it.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah, I never got to fly on it as well. Um, but I knew people who did and I would regularly in New York

SPEAKER_09: meet people. So they were flying them as late as 2003 and there were one or two accidents, I think,

SPEAKER_18: tragically. And it also maybe was too expensive. Why did the Concorde program fail? Why did nobody ever

SPEAKER_21: replicate it? Well, there are many layers to that onion. Uh, there was one accident, which actually for 1960s airplane design, one accident in 30 years of flying is actually a good safety record. Uh, so that,

SPEAKER_00: I don't think that was the real story. Uh, go one level deeper. It was economics. Uh, this was an airplane with 100, not very comfortable seats. They cost $20,000 a ticket and you just can't fill a 100 seats, $20,000 a pop, uh, especially not with eighties nineties kind of travel demand. And if you go a layer deeper than that, it's actually a story about product market fit because that doesn't make any sense as a product. Uh, that, that price point, that experience doesn't go to a scalable market.

SPEAKER_21: If you go a layer deeper than that, it's really about the birth and death of entrepreneurship in an

SPEAKER_00: industry. Um, where for the first 50 years of aviation, uh, from the Wright brothers forward, uh, founders were in charge of their companies. We had a very entrepreneurially driven model of innovation in aerospace. And what happened in the sixties is that all the founders retired from the industry and we shifted from commercially driven product development to national prestige driven. So Concorde was not a, it's not a startup. It wasn't even an established company. It was two

SPEAKER_21: governments, the French government, the British government got together. They basically handcuffed themselves together and said, we're going to build a supersonic jet to beat the Russians.

SPEAKER_28: And, uh, we're not going to think too hard about the economics. Uh, and of course the phrase

SPEAKER_29: product fit had not been invented yet. Um, and so they, they went off and did something that was technically marvelous, but commercially made no sense. And that's really crazy to think of that.

SPEAKER_09: It was a government sponsored program. Well, beating the Russians was one dynamic in it,

SPEAKER_00: but was there some economic or pride to doing this? Well, so it was established via treaty in 1962. And so this is the height of the cold war. And the thing that I think it helps to kind of hold in,

SPEAKER_01: in context is we had, we had the first world. It was the last, and we had the second world that was the communist world and the, the first and second worlds were fighting over the third world. And the, the mindset that we were in geopolitically was that what we had to do was impress the third

SPEAKER_00: world. And that would like impact which countries would align with Soviet Russia and which would

SPEAKER_01: align with the West. Um, and, and so this is very much the same motivation for why we did Apollo.

SPEAKER_00: You know, we, we, we went to the moon, not because it made any sense to go to the moon, uh, at least not in the way we did it. Uh, but we wanted to, we wanted to show that American rocket

SPEAKER_35: technology was better than Russian rocket technology. Yeah. And so, yeah. And for people

SPEAKER_09: who don't know when you fly a supersonic plane, it creates a boom in the name of your startup boom. Um, I guess as a, uh, uh, as a, uh, hat tip to that. And this is why it only flew from the east coast of New York to those European cities. So there was also this, um, geography that played a bit of a role.

SPEAKER_38: Yes. He's sort of, I mean, I, I think it's half true. It's half anthology. Um, so any, yeah,

SPEAKER_00: anytime a supersonic plane fly supersonic, it, it creates a sound called a sonic boom, uh, which, uh, and if you do it really close to the ground, it can, it can be pretty obnoxious. Uh, but if you do it up at altitude, um, you know, it's, it's more like the sound of a thunder. Um, and, and you can fly a supersonic airplane without making a sonic boom just by flying it a little bit slower. Uh, so, so the way we're doing our overture airliner is we're about 20% faster over land, right under the sound barrier. So there's no, there's no question of like, is the sonic boom too loud or not? Uh, and there's still a speed up relative to building your airbus coming out of our open ocean

SPEAKER_01: where no one's there to hear the boom, push the throttles forward and we go fully two times faster. So, um, so it makes sense to focus on the routes that are more trans-oceanic, because that's where you get the bigger speed ups. But then, you know, people remember Concord, New York to London, because it was the only one that had anywhere close to the economic legs to make it work.

SPEAKER_21: You know, we're gonna be able to do Miami, Madrid and Seattle to Tokyo and, uh, LA to Sydney. And, you know, there are over 600 routes around the planet where this is going to have a big speed

SPEAKER_44: up and make, make economic sense as well. You know, it's very weird. Um, as everybody knows

SPEAKER_09: the typical routes, like, I think it was Washington DC and New York to Paris and London, obviously, it makes total sense. They also went to Barbados, which was bizarre, like Paris to Barbados, four hours,

SPEAKER_16: which is incredible because that would normally be eight or nine hours to the Caribbean. Any indication

SPEAKER_00: of why they did that? Or did you even know that? Yeah, no, I do that. They, they, they did that. They did, uh, Bahrain. Um, British Airways had one that would take to Singapore, I think with a stop, with a stop in Bahrain. And it was, it was, uh, kind of a neat concept. The airplane, if you look

SPEAKER_01: at it from one side was British Airways livery. If you look at it from the other side, it was Singapore Airlines. So it was literally one, one logo on one side, the other logo on the other side. Um, but yeah, they, they tried it in a, in a bunch of places, but just you've fundamentally, you know, everybody wants faster flight, so long as it's affordable and it's safe. The problem was that, um, it wasn't affordable and it wasn't comfortable. And then, and then that

SPEAKER_00: one accident didn't happen until it was about time to shut it down anyway. Um, uh, but you know,

SPEAKER_21: it left for this kind of hangover, like, is there a safety question? Listen, a strong sales team can

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SPEAKER_13: for close to a decade now, correct? Yeah, I think we'll turn we'll turn 10 on paper, uh, in a few weeks.

SPEAKER_44: In a few weeks, I had that idea. So it was a good idea to have you on here to talk about this 10 year journey. Obviously, a lot of this was just getting people to believe that it was even possible. You were

SPEAKER_09: able to raise some money for this. And recently you had a test flight, I understand of one of the

SPEAKER_61: prototypes. So take us through where you're at today. The question everybody wants to know is when can I get him one of these? Are they going to be for billionaires? Are they going to be, you know, as part of the United fleet or jet blue? And how much is it going to cost? So, so take us

SPEAKER_62: through where you're at today and how many more years it will be before we're in one of these?

SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll just start with the bottom line up front. The ultimate goal is to enable virtually anybody to be able to fly supersonic. And, uh, the first airplane called Overture is basically all premium class. And so if you can fly business class today, you're going to be able to fly twice as fast on Overture. And so that's about, um, that's about a quarter of what it costs on Concord. I think Concord about a $20,000 ticket in order for it to make any money and just, it didn't, didn't work really. No legs there. Is that 20 per, per leg or?

SPEAKER_67: For 40 round trip. For round trip. Okay. So you think you can do it for five?

SPEAKER_00: I do five. It would be very profitable at five, you know? So, so, so just take one example, New York, London, uh, uh, with 80% of the seats full, which is a little bit less than what airlines usually get today. Uh, and, uh, the, the breakeven fare will actually be $3,500 round trip. And so any, any dollar above 3,500, the airlines are making money. And, uh, I, I think what we'll find is, especially in the early years where there aren't yet enough of these flying, the, the, the market clearing fares are going to be pretty high. Uh, stratospheric, I guess would be the phrase to use. And, um, uh, and it's going to be a flying meant for the airlines, but you know, with Overture one, as supply catches up with demand, the cost is going to come down. You know, I think $5,000 is probably a good number to kind of hold in mind for what a typical ticket could be, which of course is not that different from what people pay in business class today. And that's, that's actually

SPEAKER_16: business class in the summer to Europe is more like 10 to 15,000. Um, pretty, pretty standard.

SPEAKER_78: So when, when, when, when, when five years, five years, five years, okay.

SPEAKER_00: Five years, five, five years for first passenger flight. And to give you a sense of where we're at, um, yeah, so we had our, our first test flight in March with our second test flight, uh, two weeks ago. And, uh, and that's on the, what we call the XB one, which is near one third the size of, of Overture. So I think you have a picture of that if we want to show it. Yeah, let's show the test

SPEAKER_09: flight. So this, this is really the manifestation of how many years in the laboratory, how many years

SPEAKER_00: in the laboratory? Yeah. I mean, you know, we spent a lot of time kind of just figuring the company out, like on day one, it was really just me. Yeah. And, uh, you know, and we didn't start building the airplane for quite a while. Uh, uh, after that, and to get the resources together, we actually turned out it was, was critical to get orders before we started building in order to be able to obtain financing. That makes sense. Uh, so, so the last two, three years have just been enormous acceleration. Uh, so we, uh, so, so XB one, so that's what you're looking at there. It's the, it's the scale of a fighter jet, but this has got all the airliner technology on it. It's got a carbon fiber composite fuselage. It's got an augmented reality vision system for landing. Um, it's got software optimized aerodynamics and, and the most shocking thing, uh, is that we didn't actually invent anything to build that airplane. All we did is bring technologies together that were technologies have been invented

SPEAKER_01: over the last 50 years since Concord was designed, uh, that allow us to get past the tipping point on efficiency so that we can get to product market fit. And so, so that, yeah, that airplane's, uh, about 66 feet long. It's got about a 20 foot wingspan and overture is about three times

SPEAKER_00: bigger, uh, three times bigger. So about 200 feet long, uh, actually even proportionally bigger

SPEAKER_21: wingspan, about a hundred foot wingspan and, uh, on, on board, it's all premium class. So I think business class, maybe some first class, uh, 64 seats. And, uh, we, we actually just opened the factory

SPEAKER_14: where we're going to build this in North Carolina. And so we are, we're, we're getting going and yeah,

SPEAKER_89: the goal's been ready for you and I to fly on it in five years. Now that has a United logo on it is, is that customer zero United? Uh, yeah. So we actually, yeah, Japan airlines was first to pre-order.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. Um, uh, then United was the first to make an order with a non-refundable deposit,

SPEAKER_21: which that was a real big deal. And then American, American airlines also made an order with a deposit. So we've, we've got, um, about 130, uh, announced orders and pre-orders between United

SPEAKER_00: America and Japan airlines. And, and to put that in context, basically what that means is the first five years of production of booked. Uh, like there was a, uh, there, there's a line out the door for airlines, uh, you're wanting supersonic jets. It's just our job to go deliver them.

SPEAKER_99: Hmm. And these are going to cost 200 million, something in that range.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's 200 million dollars a copy. Um, and, uh, and that's one of the interesting things with the

SPEAKER_00: business is just like surprising things. One, we don't need to deal with a sonic boom, uh, in order to have a business model here. Number two, we don't actually have to invent anything fundamentally new. It's just, it's just engineering with technology that already exists. Uh, the, um, yeah. And then, and then, you know, number three, um, you know, all we have to do is take this, the small scale

SPEAKER_44: design and, and scale it, scale it up. So if we were to compare this in terms of price, I mean, the

SPEAKER_16: highest end of the private jet market tops out with the like global 700 or something, 70, 75 million dollars. It's kind of like as good as it gets in private in terms of speed and height and that stuff. And then you start looking at like the Boeing lineup, the seven three sevens, those go for a

SPEAKER_105: buck 50 ish, buck 25. Am I correct? That market has very obscure pricing. Um, the, the, the real price

SPEAKER_00: is usually about half of the advertised price. And so, yeah, yeah. So that, so a 737 goes for approximately half of this price, same thing true with all these aircraft. And, and the reason is

SPEAKER_01: that it's, it's a commodity market for every, every, every product in Boeing's catalog. There's an Airbus product, which is a near identical clone. So the 737 and the A320, you know, as an airplane nerd, I know which one I'm on. I can tell even what engine it is, but, but for 99% of passengers, they have no idea. And unless they're worried about the airplane coming apart, they don't even care.

SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then from an airline perspective, you know, so the A320 kind of equals a 737, a 787 kind of equals an A350, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like the, the, the, the, the,

SPEAKER_08: you're saying those $120 million planes actually get sold for 60 or 70. Yep. It's a stupid question. Why don't private buyers buy some of those? Is it the maintenance or it's just

SPEAKER_110: obscenely large and you can't land them at most airports and the maintenance. It's the size in the,

SPEAKER_01: in the airport compatibility. You know, like part of the, part of the idea of flying private

SPEAKER_00: is that you're, you're able to get in closer to your final destination. And so there, there are all these, you know, a lot of people who fly commercial don't realize this, but the country is covered in

SPEAKER_14: small airports and a small airplane can get in and out of a small airport. And then that saves the, the hassle, the big commercial terminal, and it probably gets you close to your destination. And so you can, you can get a whole 737 for your own use that Boeing sells. That's called a BBJ or a business

SPEAKER_115: jet. Yes. I've been on a couple of those. Yeah. I have a couple of friends who have those. They're ridiculous. But I would, they don't suck. Let's just call it that. Uh, but, but yeah, it's crazy.

SPEAKER_09: The one I was on was set up with, I would say six or seven, like individual cabins, maybe 80, even it was crazy. And like each one had multiple seating areas. So it was, uh, so quite an airplane, a lot of airplane in those range. You said yours is how many feet long? Uh, about 200 feet long tip

SPEAKER_119: to tail. Got it. So, so it's even longer, it's longer than the 320 or something like that. Right?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Just by, by a little bit, it's, it's probably about 20, 30 feet longer than the longest, um, a three, a three 20 series airplane. So it's, it's almost exactly the same length as a triple

SPEAKER_01: Saturn. Uh, to put that in context, but it, but it's much skinnier. Uh, and to actually, actually you can kind of see it behind me. So I'm standing in our passenger experience lab.

SPEAKER_00: And we, you know, one of the things we can talk about is that whole aspect of it, but the, uh, what you're looking at is kind of a full scale of mockup, uh, tip to tail of the passenger cap. And of course there's, you know, there's cockpit in front of it and there's baggage and, you know, mechanical equipment behind it. And that all adds up to the 200 feet so that the passenger cabin is, is less than, less than 200 feet. Uh, and it's also, it's also a bit skinnier.

SPEAKER_09: And this will be closer to, you know, what, what's the configuration? One seat on each side, like without the Concorde was one on each side or was it two on each side?

SPEAKER_00: Concorde was, was two and two, uh, the whole way through. Um, and, uh, you know, we, we've talked about having one and one. So actually one of the things that makes Overture more efficient than

SPEAKER_01: Concorde is we we've shaped the fuselage different. So it's actually, if we could pull that United render back up, you could see in the, in the front of the airplane, it's actually a bit fatter. And, uh, as you go back, it gets skinnier and you'll, you'll notice that the windows actually stop the last, the last passenger row is actually ahead of the engines. That's, that's an important

SPEAKER_00: safety feature, but the, the airplane's bigger in the front and it's skinnier in the back. And, uh, in, in the, in the back it's, uh, it's a one plus one and the, in the front we've talked about, it could be a two plus two. And, uh, so the back could have seating, but as you go back,

SPEAKER_61: it narrows. So nobody is, nobody doesn't have a window and nobody's above the engine or that's,

SPEAKER_21: that's right. So then the back is it's, the back is really nice actually. So it's one seat on each side of the aisle. So you don't have to choose window seat or aisle seat. And, um, you know,

SPEAKER_39: everybody gets both and when you say the back, you kind of mean the middle of the plane, right?

SPEAKER_21: Like the middle of the airplane, but the back of the passenger cabin. So, you know, if you look at the last like seven windows there, those are the last, the last seven rows of seats.

SPEAKER_09: Got it. So these are all business class seats. And, uh, so it will feel like a large private jet or a small commercial jet. I'm not sure what the, we have a commercial jet is. I'm trying to

SPEAKER_00: think of the ones that have two and two. Right. So, so the, by the way, we haven't revealed

SPEAKER_01: the final design and, and I think when people, so, so we've said it's two plus two. It may or may not actually be a two plus two. Sure. There's some, there's something there. Well, there's something I can't talk about yet. Oh, okay. I hope you, I hope you can hear it in my voice. I'm really excited about it. Are you going to stack people on top of each other? I saw like some crazy Japanese

SPEAKER_16: airline had done that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Um, but you know, there, I mean, if, if you have cabins or you do it, jet blue mint does where they do the two one, two, there are some really interesting things you can do in terms of maximizing space. So I'm sure.

SPEAKER_21: There are. Yeah. Yeah. So one of our philosophies is that, that you really want designers that think like engineers and engineers that think like designers. And, uh, and so we, we, we've put a

SPEAKER_01: lot of energy into building that into the product development culture. And, and we've got something

SPEAKER_00: really magical that, that we'll show it probably next year. And, and when people, when people see it, they'll be like, there's no way you got that in a small skinny airplane. It just couldn't be.

SPEAKER_70: Uh, cause that the, the first time I saw it, that was my reaction that there's, there's just no way.

SPEAKER_07: Uh, but it turns out that customer experience behind you is what you're working on. Got it. Okay.

SPEAKER_16: That's right. Yep. We'll have you back next year to debut that here on this week in startups.

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SPEAKER_09: Tell me a little bit about what you've learned during this journey about how the markets have changed for startups. You know, we're here on this week in startups and the idea of a startup company doing something other than an app or SaaS software or a marketplace or, you know, anything in that software realm has changed radically since, you know, I think since Uber, Airbnb and SpaceX and Tesla, I think when you saw those four cohort, that cohort, those four, they really operated in the real world in a way that I remember watching them. They were received very poorly by venture capitalists at first, and then very significantly, you know, that's changed dramatically. Now you got Parker doing Android, you've got all kinds of space products, you know,

SPEAKER_61: people are not afraid to do large scale, big tech products, whether it's bombs or drones, or in your case, planes. So tell me about, you know, you straddle that market, you've been around for 10 years. So

SPEAKER_146: SpaceX existed, Uber existed, but they were kind of upstarts. And then you struggled a bit to get people to

SPEAKER_149: believe in this. So take us with that journey. Yeah, well, I think if we pull the camera back even

SPEAKER_00: like one click further from that, it's the period where we weren't doing hardware startups, it's really the anomaly. So if you look backwards to the early 1900s, from the Wright brothers forward,

SPEAKER_01: so the Wright's first flew in 1903, of course, they were bicycle entrepreneurs, that was a startup. And by the way, one with no credibility, they should have been able to go invent the airplane, but yet they did it. And then the Wright brothers through about 1921 was sort of a golden age of aviation. And there's a lot of companies that got created then the ones that we all know the names

SPEAKER_00: of now. So not just Wright, but also Douglas, and Lockheed and Boeing, all got created, but the last one was 1921. And by the way, you can you feel like an automotive industry, you see the same pattern,

SPEAKER_01: there was a golden age of automotive, and then there was this long period of no entrepreneurship.

SPEAKER_14: And in aviation, the founders all retired in the 1960s. And in fact, the introduction of the last

SPEAKER_01: mainstream speed up in flight, when we went from props to jets, coincides with the retirement of founders. So that the first jetliner was the de Havilland Comet. The first successful one came from Boeing, but the actual first one that really kicked off the jet age with the de Havilland Comet created by de Havilland while he was still running the company. And, and then what kind of happened is that the people who had worked with the founders took over. And, and so, and then we ended up in

SPEAKER_00: this kind of, there was innovation happening, but much more from an optimization kind of perspective, you know, so the 707, which is Boeing's first jetliner, if you put it right next to the 787, which is their latest, unless you're an airplane nerd, it's hard to tell the difference.

SPEAKER_01: Um, it's a long skinny tube with some wings and the engine's hanging under the wings,

SPEAKER_00: looks kind of the same. And by the way, it flies basically the same speed. Uh, and then, and then the even worse thing happened, which was that the people who would respect it and learn from the founders left, and then, and then the bean counters took over.

SPEAKER_103: And then that really wrecked, that just wrecked commercial aviation. Uh, I, and I wish that were just purely metaphorical, but at Boeing it's literal.

SPEAKER_16: Um, so let's pause there for a second. I think it's like a good thing to double click on since we went down this, uh, sort of history lesson, which is super fascinating because these companies, people forget how old Boeing is as a company. Um, you know, these were an airbus. These were created in

SPEAKER_00: the twenties and thirties, correct? Uh, more like no, no, before then the, the last one was Doug, was Douglass in 1921 and Boeing was Boeing was 19 tents. Oh, wow. Incredible. So these things are

SPEAKER_16: incredibly old and it's really interesting to see who winds up running them. They are being run now.

SPEAKER_09: You said being counters, but they're being run to lower the cost of aviation. And that reminds me in some ways of the Uber story, because the goal was, how do you get this in the hands of more people? It reminds me of the Android story or the PC story, you know, Dell computers, et cetera. How do we

SPEAKER_61: have these, uh, devices become incredibly affordable or services, you know, Uber, black SUV, X, then even pool. And then eventually self-driving might be cheaper. We'll see. It might be more expensive. And then you have this counter trend, which is luxury comes back or performance or elite

SPEAKER_09: services. And, uh, I guess the comment about luxury is like luxury begins. I think Trump said the famous quote is luxury begins where necessity ends. So that's different luxury. Um, because that would be more like iPhones versus Android phones, but really they, they just tried to make each mile and the maintenance of these planes cheaper and cheaper to the point at which Boeing was so the bean counters and accountants there tried to put through that goddamn MCAT system in order to not have to train people. So take me through the state of like, how deranged these people are behaving.

SPEAKER_149: I think there are two things that we're conflating here that are really important to tease apart

SPEAKER_01: because there, there is a totally valid journey of bringing the cost to travel down, whether we're talking a car, you can send it from your phone or an airplane. They'll take the other side of the planet. It makes sense to bring the cost of that down because what that means is more people can go more places more often. And that will absolutely be part of our journey at Booms. We're starting with, you know, 79% less expensive than Concord, still business class, still not for everybody,

SPEAKER_166: but you know, I want to get to the point where, um, you get, you know, it's never as a never a cattle car experience, but, but it's, it's the, where the cost has come down enough that people, people will travel around the planet just the same way they would call an Uber today. Um, and you know,

SPEAKER_01: like imagine that future where flights are faster and the, the cost is, the cost is a point where you don't think about it too hard. And, and therefore you can, you know, the way you'd imprompt to get around your city, you'd imprompt to go around the planet. Like that's a very, very exciting future. And, and so that's one trend. Um, and you know, and Boeing for a while was part of that trend of

SPEAKER_14: bringing the cost down. And, uh, and I think that's all valid and appropriate as part of making, you know, part of reaching a larger, larger market, which is entrepreneurs we should do. And then there's the other piece of it, which I think is pathological, which is a very short term focus on financial results. And, uh, the, the, the best metaphor I have for this is, so let me give you a little Boeing company history, though, contextualize it. Uh, so through about the 1990s, uh, Boeing was really good at developing new airplanes. They did it pretty quickly, did it pretty efficiently, and you could trust the airplane would come out and be safe. And, but they would, they would invest a lot of money. They'd invest a few billion to develop an

SPEAKER_171: airplane and then they'd ship it and then, and then they'd sell a lot and make their money back.

SPEAKER_01: And that continued through about 2004 when, when I think the last good CEO at Boeing left. And, uh, and then they had a new guy come in who said the most insane thing. He said, we're not going to do any more moonshots. And of course it's ironic because like, this is the company used to be literally in the moonshot business.

SPEAKER_174: Like literally, it wasn't a metaphor, literally.

SPEAKER_00: I can't believe people say these things. Um, but the, uh, so then they said, all we're

SPEAKER_01: going to do is tweak the products we already got. And, and we're going to, and the motivation for this was optimization of basically like next quarter financial results. And, and so a lot of Jack Welch acolytes kind of took over at Boeing. If you trace the histories of the individuals involved, they trace back to the Jack Welch acolytes and Jack, Jack's thing was, you know, he was the one to beat the street by a nickel every quarter. And, and you can do that for a little

SPEAKER_00: while. Um, but it's like, it's like flying in an airplane while only looking straight down. And, uh, it, and so it'll be good for a little while, but pretty soon you're not going to be

SPEAKER_01: happy with where you're at. And that's, you know, so, so Boeing, Boeing tried to tweak the 737 and they, they, you know, did a bunch of unnatural things, the MCAS, uh, which is that,

SPEAKER_00: that's the system that was responsible for those, those crashes. Uh, that's one example, but you, you're doing it now with the triple seven, the big disaster. Um, you know, they, they, they have not,

SPEAKER_01: you should pause on this. Cause I think, you know, the, the people who are listening today are like, we're all builders, entrepreneurs. And like, it's so normal that we make new things. Boeing

SPEAKER_182: has not launched an all new product for 20 years, right? They're just trying to make the existing

SPEAKER_16: ones more price competitive in a really rabid market where, as you said, the list price and the actual price varies by double or 50% because that's right. You have a situation where it's too

SPEAKER_110: competitive and it's just a race to the bottom and all margin has been taken out.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Well, it's a duopoly. And so, uh, between Boeing and Airbus, and so nobody moves unless the other one moves. And, uh, and, and so the margins get compressed and in the, in the, in the world of margin compression, cause there's like a product differentiation that, then it really creates this

SPEAKER_00: incentive. Well, like, well, when we build a product, we want to keep it production for like decades and we want to not reinvest because without, without the margin, uh, you know, it's harder to justify the payback, but it's this, it's just kind of this death spiral where really all the innovation drops up. If you drop the innovation out, it kind of kicks off the rest of this death spiral. It's okay. Now

SPEAKER_105: there's no differentiation. The lack of differentiation drives lack of margin, lack of margin drives lack of desire to invest in innovation. And it just, it just goes around in a bad way.

SPEAKER_187: This is something you and I know natively, um, but might not, uh, be obvious from the outside,

SPEAKER_09: which is it's not, um, compelling to work in a company like that for top performers. Like if you go to Facebook, you know, the people working on trying to make the incremental click on a Google ad or a Facebook ad, you know, if, if they were that good, um, they would be working at boom or Andrew or space X or X AI or chat GPT, which is what happens really supremely talented people are drawn to the project, all things being equal, uh, which is why some companies will give fantastical amounts

SPEAKER_61: of RSUs and stock-based comp because they know, gosh, this person could work at boom or X AI or wherever, or, or they could work on the ad network. I mean, that sounds like death to us, right? Like,

SPEAKER_38: yeah. I mean, I very ironically earlier in my career, I worked in building automated advertising to the

SPEAKER_64: Amazon. Uh, but the, uh, but back when that was new and exciting and, and, you know, and it's not, it's not now.

SPEAKER_00: And so that, that center of gravity of innovation swings around it within an industry, it swings between companies, but I think, I think it also swings between industries. And, you know, the, the, if you look at people who were the big innovators, I think it's interesting to look back at what was going on when they were kids and of what inspired them. And, uh, you know, so, you know, in the late 1960s, you know, we, we lost our way as far as how to develop new products. We did Concord and Apollo, actually both from 1969 and it, both are regarding these big technical breakthroughs. I think both were actually disasters. Um, I, I think, you know, can't go back to the moon, can't fly supersonic, like, it like literally killed progress, but what it did still do was inspire people to go into aerospace.

SPEAKER_01: And then we got to this moment where like nothing in aerospace was even exciting. And so, you know,

SPEAKER_00: people of my generation, uh, I, you know, I've loved airplanes since I was a kid. It never occurred to me to go have a career in, and I spent my first 15 years in tech because that's where new stuff was

SPEAKER_09: getting built. Yeah. I mean, it, the internet, you know, was so inspiring and dial up even before that in the eighties into the nineties, the idea that you connect with anybody on the planet was like kind of mind blowing. Like it was kind of trippy and it did capture everybody's imagination

SPEAKER_16: for a very long period of time. And then you get to a certain point where we are today and you're like, yeah, everybody's online and it's a mess and there's great things and there's, you know, misinformation and hate and rage and doom scrolling. So, you know, you kind of see the, the full cycle. Um, and then it's nice that people are kind of coming back to looking at projects and

SPEAKER_09: saying, well, what does this do for humanity and how exciting and thrilling is it? It's not very exciting or thrilling in, in many cases. And if you're doing things for just the money, which is what in a way Boeing was doing, when you're doing something for just money, um, at some point you get

SPEAKER_61: the money and then all of a sudden you lose motivation, you know, you have to then say, well, am I actually into this? I see this in venture all the time. You have somebody like Paul Graham or myself, or, you know, some other folks who are really into startups because we're passionate about entrepreneurship, whatever. And you make some money. And then I watched all my contemporaries

SPEAKER_203: who made money were tired. They were like, yeah, I hit Uber. I hit Airbnb. I hit AngelList. I hit this,

SPEAKER_61: I hit that. And they're like, I'm going to go meditate. I'm going to go do things that are more important to me. So then you realize like, okay, they were into it to an extent, but they were

SPEAKER_09: mercenary in another way, which is when the money came in, they stopped being investors. And then you have people like Vinod or like Michael Moritz and, and Doug Leonie who are supposed to be retired,

SPEAKER_206: but I go to Sequoia and I see them running around doing stuff. So yeah, or Bill Gurley supposed to be retired. And all he's doing is talking to me about startups and, you know, he's doing all kinds of, uh, I still on boards and stuff like that. So I do find that super interesting.

SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, yeah. Well, it's, it is interesting because by the way, Paul Graham and Mike Moritz are both, both significant investors in bone and, and, and both, and both actually pretty involved.

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SPEAKER_16: and get a free trial and get 20% off. What's it like to work with Michael Moritz? Because you know, we, we, we have right now a lot of the investment class, whether it's Vinod or Michael Moritz or Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz fighting over Trump versus not Trump and never Trump. Put all that politics aside. What is the nature of Michael Moritz as a partner? I'm really grateful to have him

SPEAKER_00: involved and he's, he's incredibly wise and, and he's, he's, I've always experienced him as, and, and, and Paul Graham is the same way. Like, like the, they, they show up more when things are hard than when

SPEAKER_166: things are easy. And, uh, and you know, both of them, you know, there are other folks that are on

SPEAKER_01: this list for me as well. Uh, where, um, yeah, when, when, when it's going well, we don't hear from them when, and when there's some hard problem to solve, I get on the phone with them and we, we work on it. And, you know, and one of the things I will love, I love about both of them, uh, is, is they tell me

SPEAKER_09: what I need to hear even when it's not pleasant to hear candidness, right? It's a, it's a hallmark. I think actually what you're experiencing, is this your first startup by the way? I never asked you.

SPEAKER_39: No, it's, it's like, I don't know. It's, it's my first significant one. My, my first venture back,

SPEAKER_14: first venture back. No, so you had a venture for that kind of anyway, like, like a big baby startup. Like I, in high school, I started an ISP, uh, in my parents' basement, but that never was, I, I tried to

SPEAKER_00: raise an angel around for my parents. I never succeeded in that, but we got, we got to be, ramen profitable. Um, and then I sold it when I went to college. Uh, and then my first, what you really think of as a startup was at, uh, was in 2010, which was a, it was an, uh, iPhone e-commerce company. Um, uh, which we sold to group on. So that was the first thing that

SPEAKER_226: was what you would really think of as a startup. So it's good. You got a singular double out of it.

SPEAKER_01: Uh, it is, but it also was incredibly motivating for me because what we made, and I, I feel a little embarrassed to say this, uh, we made a barcode scanning game. Like, oh wow. If you make a list of like the most important thing in the world down to like the least important, like barcode scanning

SPEAKER_09: games, that's like a new low. Um, and, uh, it's the output of barcode scanning, understanding all the prices and skews and where they existed in the world. Yeah. Like that's, that's where we wanted to

SPEAKER_00: go with it. Uh, but it, it had like an idea actually had like a force that the idea was it have a four square light game dynamic that would cause people to put in content and then you could

SPEAKER_14: go scan a barcode and like nice compare. And you know, that, that, that was sort of the notion of it

SPEAKER_01: until you got kicked out of Walmart for doing it. Yeah. And well, mostly like I would get up in the morning and, uh, and it was really hard because there's, there's no such thing as an easy startup. They're all hard and I, I would get up in the morning and I think, why am I doing this?

SPEAKER_00: Yes. And, and so, and so when we had a chance to sell it to Groupon, like, uh, like I was so high,

SPEAKER_14: I was so excited to tap out because it just, it just wasn't worth the like pain.

SPEAKER_240: The juice wasn't worth the squeeze as we said. The juice was not worth the squeeze.

SPEAKER_44: What you're experiencing, by the way, with Michael Moritz in that instance, or Paul Graham

SPEAKER_09: is not that they show up when this is my, I suspect they, it's not that they show up when

SPEAKER_16: there's hard problems. It's not when there's hard problems, you go to them and they find out about the hard problems. And when things are going well, they know enough to let you cook. And this was a big lesson for me. And I got to work with Michael Moritz and rule off and I, and I got to meet Paul Graham in the very, very first couple of classes. And I think in the earlier part of investors careers, they want to be involved in everything. And it's exciting to be a part of the winning stuff.

SPEAKER_09: And then what you realize is, Hey, when you get product market fit, you have market pull. And, you know, you hit that magical moment where United is putting in orders and then, oh, they'll put a deposit down. Oh, they'll, they'll check the box and initial the box that says non-refundable. You know, when you start getting those things done, you don't want to mess

SPEAKER_61: with the magic. Now it's like the band is in the studio and the tracks are laying down. Now, if the band is fighting and somebody is not showing up and, you know, there's a fist fight over the console and people can't get the lyrics. Yeah. That's when the producer and the manager got to get in there and say, Hey, I noticed we haven't laid a track. Should we maybe do a cover song here and get back into the groove? And I think that was one of the major lessons for me as an investor is knowing when you can be of service and you can truly be helpful and knowing when you're just noise. And I remember with Uber in those early days, there was a couple of investors who, when it was taking off, were super, like, I don't wanna say taking credit for it, but like doing a lot of press hits about it, et cetera. And then when you go back to that time period and you see me doing press hits,

SPEAKER_16: um, which sometimes you get either asked to do or you volunteer to do them. I jumped in

SPEAKER_09: when Travis was getting destroyed. When, you know, there was some controversy, uh, over, uh, variable pricing and surge pricing. I thought, you know what? Use me when nobody else will say yes to go on CNBC. And you can find these hits where I'm saying like, listen, all companies have

SPEAKER_16: crucible moments. Things are hard. And, you know, that's kind of what makes the entrepreneur. So let's let these entrepreneurs keep growing. It's an amazing service and going, but, but, but. And I'm like,

SPEAKER_09: yeah, you know, I've seen this before. Trust me, huh? But it is a, uh, it is important to stay the heck out of the way when things are cooking. And then when things are hard, yeah, that's when you're

SPEAKER_16: like show up on a Saturday or Sunday with the founder and say, let's go for a hike and let's have a real deep discussion about this. How are we gonna solve this? What's the most challenging moment you had? Did you have any moments of like running out of money, complete death?

SPEAKER_64: Oh, I mean, we, we, we've had all of those. My expectation at this point is we have one major crisis every year. Um, and you know, maybe the, uh, maybe the one that's

SPEAKER_01: kind of most fun to tell a story about is, um, this was, this was just two years ago, almost exactly

SPEAKER_260: now. Um, uh, where we, uh, we sort of famously been dating with Rolls-Royce, uh, for them to build

SPEAKER_00: an engine for our airplane. And, uh, we had, uh, long story short, we had decided that ultimately that was not the smart decision, um, that, that it didn't make sense for us to put all of our eggs in the basket of, you know, a hundred year old British company that was sometimes on some days

SPEAKER_01: not even sure you even want to stay in the jet engine business. Um, and, and so we said just like SpaceX, we're gonna build our own engines. And, you know, that was, that was a project that we now started on and it were, you know, spinning it up and incubating it. And we, we'd had a conversation with, with Rolls privately, you know, where we, you know, we thank them for the partnership and we said, look, look, we're gonna do this a little bit differently. Cause we're not, we're not getting there together. And, uh, and let's find a face saving way to hug each other and say goodbye

SPEAKER_00: when, when we're ready to go say exactly what we're doing. And, and, and we just smiled and shook

SPEAKER_01: hands. And, um, and, you know, in the meantime, we were in the process of incubating what became our symphony engine and then American Airlines placed an order, uh, it was our largest order yet. And then there was this freak out because I think we had been this, um, you know, sort of, you know, this cute thing that maybe wasn't super credible, uh, you know, then United orders, maybe that's an anomaly. Maybe they did it for PR, but United ordered and American ordered.

SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, once you're lucky twice, there's something interesting. Yeah. And it's always where

SPEAKER_01: people, but you're making the own engine now. We, we, we are. And the crazy thing was the idea that we would ever not do that by the way, but what happened is so, so roles ran to the press

SPEAKER_153: and broke up with us. And, uh, and, and so we went from being, you know, this darling thing that

SPEAKER_01: everyone was so excited about. So like, they've got no engine there, you know, no, none of the engine companies are going to work with them. And this whole thing is just a glider. And, and like, so, you know, overnight, my ability to fundraise dropped to zero overnight, my ability to get new

SPEAKER_00: customers dropped to zero, um, overnight, you know, it just like, it completely blew up on us. And, um, you know, and we were, we, we were well into the process, but we didn't want to talk about it half baked with doing our own engine. And so there was this, uh, I think it was from August or September through to December, where we said, okay, we're, you know, we're ready to talk

SPEAKER_01: about what we're doing and how we're doing it, that there was this like big stink over the company.

SPEAKER_00: And, um, you know, and then we had to go rebuild all the industry confidence because the, the way we

SPEAKER_01: went through that, you know, it created such a negative stink that, you know, the, the suppliers wanted to work with us for like, you know, but you have no engine. And, uh, and, and so it took us

SPEAKER_171: probably another 18 months to just kind of get all that momentum back.

SPEAKER_60: And that's like, basically a second startup inside your existing startup, like making the engine

SPEAKER_09: yourself sounds to me like it's technically more complex than making the plane. Am I correct?

SPEAKER_00: I don't think so. Like it's, it's, um, yeah, probably, it's probably 50, 50. Uh, but, but, but here's the thing that's surprising. There is no way this would work if we weren't doing it that way. Got it. Not just, not just because the legacy supply chain would flake, which they probably

SPEAKER_64: would, uh, but because, I mean, so can you imagine spacex if, if Elon went to aerojet rocket dine for

David Friedberg: engines? Yeah. Like Merlin's is like, how many do you want all of them? Right. It would take them five

SPEAKER_01: years to decide whether they wanted to do it, let alone to go invent and move with their speed. And so, and, and, and with a supersonic airplane, there's even stronger coupling because the, um,

SPEAKER_00: the, the way the engine and the airplane work together has to be really, really tightly matched. And so if you've got a company boundary between, you know, between the airplane company, the engine

SPEAKER_01: company, like the rate of iteration is, is very low. And, and if what ends up happening is the product

SPEAKER_00: isn't nearly as good, you know? So, so, uh, you know, we were talking earlier about the, the breakthrough

SPEAKER_01: passenger experience that I can't share the detail yet. That is actually enabled by us doing our own engine. What? That makes no sense, but okay. It makes no sense. Let me explain why. To get the passenger experience where we really wanted, we had to change the tube of the airplane a little bit. Got it. Okay. So that makes sense. And it set us, and it set us backwards on range. And, and we said, wow, okay, well, we want, we want the airplane to be able to fly as far as we, we need it to fly. But we also want to have this thing that passengers are going to love.

SPEAKER_00: Right. Like, how do we do both? And that we, we found that missing efficiency by more closely matching the airplane and the engine. And, uh, and there, there was a

SPEAKER_01: moment, this is actually pretty recent. It just crossed the like, yes, we can do all this technically.

SPEAKER_00: And, uh, I was in the, you know, I, I review the, the, uh, airplane and engine together a couple

SPEAKER_01: times a week. And we were in one of our Friday reviews and the, the head of arrow and the head of propulsion were like making out with each other in the meeting. Uh, and they're, and they're just like, look, we, we have both been at engine companies before. We've both been at airplane companies before. We've never been able to work together like this. And we just found 500 miles of range that we needed for the airplane to be able to do its mission. And we would never have found it any other way.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Well, this is, you know, one of the great skills of great entrepreneurs, but also of just contributors inside of entrepreneurial organizations is cross discipline. And, you know, if you are

SPEAKER_16: somebody like Joe Jebbia, you know, uh, and, uh, the co-founders, you know, Brian, uh, at airbnb,

SPEAKER_09: they have, like, they went to RISD. They got a lot of design skill. You start thinking about airbnb. Every time you go to an airbnb, you're like, this place is designed really beautifully. Well, that's because they looked at it and they would see the pictures of an, you know, an airbnb. I'm like, this is not beautiful. And then they take better pictures and like, okay, these pictures are better, but this is still not beautiful. And it's like, you know, it'd be nice if there was like a coffee set up in the airbnb that was stunningly beautiful. Now, when I rent an airbnb and I love airbnbs in my family, I prefer them to hotels and I can afford to do either. You know, I noticed they all use very beautiful coffee stations. So something happened where, and then beautiful outdoor seating areas, and then like a foosball table or a ping pong table. Like there's something happening in that design panache and that patina, you know, uh, that you see on the website that then translates to the experience. And he really has thought about that in a, in a way that's, you know, not possible. If you were just a business person trying to optimize a marketplace for the take rate or the supply side, you know, these are kind of intangibles and there's a ton of stories about this as well with Tesla, where, you know, they were using Mercedes drivetrain. So on my model s, which I just took, which was the first one, it has a Mercedes shifter and drivetrain. Um, whatever the drivetrain, I think it's the, you know, the steering wheel, all that kind of stuff. And so when I first like had to teach a nanny how to drive it to take the kids to school or whatever, pick them up, I was like, it's just like the Mercedes. We had a Mercedes next to us, the same exact thing, except you don't hear noise. But over time he started, I remember when he started, when I started touring the gigafactory with him and he would be like, this is where we're going to make this. And this is where we're making that. And by the way, here's what we're making with the HVAC

SPEAKER_61: system. Now you'd be like, why would you possibly waste time on the HVAC system? Elon. It's like, what do you think the number two after moving the car use of the battery is? It's not the display. Those LEDs don't use a lot of energy. It's the HVAC system. And so the fact, and that's when you see,

SPEAKER_09: um, have you ever seen this guy who takes cars apart? Sandy Monroe, when he took apart the Y, it's an incredible video. He loses his mind when he sees the HVAC system of how innovative it is. And

SPEAKER_16: those are things that you would never think like, okay, the HVAC is going to unlock 30 miles or whatever. It might've unlocked more than 30 miles. I don't know, 10%, 20%. So you could either increase the price of the car and the weight by putting more batteries in or wait for physics and

SPEAKER_297: innovation to change batteries or you fix the HVAC system. Pretty dope. Right? Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_00: It's so dope. And, um, actually I'm glad you brought that up because it also, the, the technological

SPEAKER_01: arc of development at Tesla and at SpaceX and, and at boom actually have some really interesting commonalities that somebody should write a book about this one day, because I think it actually will become the playbook for how you do a hardware startup. And if you, you know, if you look at

SPEAKER_00: SpaceX or Tesla today, they've earned the reputation of somebody who reinvents every piece. And because, because they have, but, but if you look back, that's actually not where it started. The, the, the original Tesla Roadster was a Lotus Elise body with a cell phone battery. And the, the original

SPEAKER_01: Falcon one, it didn't land. It didn't even try to land and it was small and it never carried a payload.

SPEAKER_00: And, and so they, they, they didn't actually invent anything new on the roadster. They didn't actually invent anything new on the Falcon one, but they did. Well, the battery and the engine was

SPEAKER_39: probably a bit, well, no, they used cell phone batteries. I take it back. Cell phone batteries.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. They, they had a motor, but it wasn't, it wasn't built out of like unobtainium. You know, it was, it was, uh, the, the, the thing that was, you know, if you, if you want to say there's one miracle, the one miracle is a startup could do it. You know, the, the, the Falcon one.

SPEAKER_09: Well, think about it too. The roadster. I remember, I remember taking a plane ride with Elon where he, you know, he was essentially, I don't want to say losing his mind, but he was perplexed because they had just told him that the $150,000 roadster I bought number 16 was going to cost $190,000 to deliver. And he said, well, why didn't we charge $225,000 for, he's trying to figure

SPEAKER_61: out like how these idiots were like, who had been running the company very shortly before he, you know, took over with founder authority and was like, wait, that doesn't make any sense. And man,

SPEAKER_199: they just were not doing that grinding of every single component. If you are making every component, well, think about the gains. If you wanted to make something a hundred percent more effective

SPEAKER_146: or efficient, well, there's probably nothing that you can change that will make it a hundred percent efficient, but there are certainly 25 things you could make 4% efficient in the next year or two.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's, that's exactly right. You know, but I think this goes back a little bit to what's surprising to people about boom. I don't want to throw up the picture of the XP one flying again. Oh yeah. Um, the, uh, but there is nothing that we invented on that airplane. Like, okay, it's got a carbon fiber composite fuse wash. Guess what? Boeing did that in the 70s. You know, we just made it the right shape. Um, oh, there's, there's engine intakes, you know, ours are pretty efficient, but that's the same basic architecture for the engine intake. It was done on Concord in the 1960s. The, um, the, there's an augmented reality vision system for landing. So we don't need that group knows that Concord needed. Well, and this was, but guess what?

SPEAKER_01: Gulfstream put something not all that different on the G650 for people to land on the clouds. And so, you know, so the, the, you know, you know, there is going to be an over at XP two, and there's going to be an overture two, and these things are going to have a lot of new

SPEAKER_315: technology. And with that augmented reality angle, you're looking up, uh, you're actually

SPEAKER_14: looking down. So if you look at the pilot there, so the, the, the reason Concord had that root nose

SPEAKER_01: was, was there's two things. Well, uh, one is for a supersonic airplane. Once we long and skinny, big pointy nose. And the other thing is with that triangular kind of delta wing or takeoff and landing for that to generate lift, the nose needs to be pretty high. So you come into land like this.

SPEAKER_29: And if it's the 1960s, the old, the pilot can't see the runway. So they had to move.

SPEAKER_322: Yeah, that's what I'm sort of getting at is like, you're, you just don't have the ability to see the runway. So game over.

SPEAKER_29: Because the nose is in the way. Well, so today we've got this amazing thing called a camera,

Chamath Palihapitiya: right? You put a couple of those up front.

SPEAKER_01: We put a couple of those up front and they're, they're about the wingspan of a bird apart from each other. So no, no, no, no single bird can take out both cameras.

SPEAKER_325: Um, and then there's a, uh, the pilot's little toggle when they turn on the, the pilot screen

SPEAKER_14: basically flipped over from a normal instrument to an algorithmic reality rule. And you just look at the screen, you land the runway on the airplane on the screen.

SPEAKER_325: The greatest, my point.

SPEAKER_326: Oh, keep going. Yeah. Tell your money.

SPEAKER_325: But my, my, my point was like, we're cobbling these things together, but none of them are actually new. And I think that's, I think that pragmatism, it is a, in the, in the initial part of hardware is a really important lesson to learn if you're doing a hardware startup. Like these, these complex integrated hardware straps, like Tesla, like SpaceX, like boom. Um, the first places they're starting, they're actually integration of things that are proven where all they're doing is bringing the integration together. And, uh, and then because, because they want to have a sexy brand and they actually do want to go and get new stuff pretty quickly, they get to the state they're in today where, you know, you've got starship and you've got the, the octo valve on the model three and you've got the steer by wire on the cyber truck and all, there's all this stuff, but then people forget where it started and that it has to start with

SPEAKER_09: that pragmatism. Yeah. And you then earn the ability with your investors, with capital,

SPEAKER_16: with timelines to say, you know what, we're going to do this project. It's the unibody project. You know, we're going to just stamp. Like that's like a, that's like a moonshot kind of ish project, or we're going to land this thing, or we're going to make it much bigger. You know, you start

SPEAKER_09: earning the right to, to, to do all that. Um, yeah, I have a stupid question, you know, at the front of all of these, um, supersonic planes is like a, a, a stick and antenna,

SPEAKER_89: like a little tip on top of the tip. What is that for?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So that's on a, um, let's bring the picture back up. Let's see what we're talking about. So

SPEAKER_24: that's an artifact of it being a test airplane. Um, so that, yeah, so that it's, that it's an air probe and it's, it's something called a pitot tube. And we've got a pitot tube on there. Of course,

SPEAKER_39: pitot tubes do airspeed, right? And stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. They, they measure what's called

SPEAKER_00: ram air pressure, which is the force of the air coming at the airplane. And basically if you compare

SPEAKER_01: the ram air pressure to the, to the ambient pressure, the difference tells you what the speed is. And so if you, if you look at the nose of XP1, we've got a pitot tube at the end of it. And then we've also got, um, uh, what are called alpha and beta veins, which basically measure the nose angle relative to oncoming air flow. So is the nose up or down? Is it left or right? And the reason on a test airplane, it's way out in front of the airplane is we don't yet have calibration data to put it near into the airplane. We put it right next to the airplane before we're a hundred percent certain what that airflow pattern really is. We could be wrong. And so you, you, you put the sensors way out in front of the airplane where there's,

SPEAKER_00: where they're going to be in clean air and, uh, and therefore we'll be more accurate. But once you've got calibration data and you're in production, you get rid of the nose, boom,

SPEAKER_336: and it looks like everyone, but, but all planes have those, I think, right? Cause there was that light. There was an air France flight from South America where they, like these young pilots

SPEAKER_09: didn't understand the airspeed of the plane because I think the pitot tubes or one of them had frozen

SPEAKER_338: or something. It was, or it was getting a wrong. Yeah. Do you remember that one?

SPEAKER_342: Oh yeah. That was air France for air France 447 was from Rio to, to de Gaulle. And, and yeah,

SPEAKER_00: what, what happened was actually this, this is a lesson in cockpit design. Yes. Um, because they, they had, uh, they're up at altitude and the, the pitot tube, which

SPEAKER_01: did the airspeed sensor ice stove. And so all of a sudden the, the air bus, uh, there were certain kind of automated protection features in the cockpit that, that, that would work only if it knew airspeed.

SPEAKER_00: And so the, the moment that airspeed data went away, um, uh, it, it, it stopped having that protection and then the two pilots. So, so they both had joysticks and they're going to think of them as like your joystick on your, you know, on a home flight sim or on your Xbox or whatever.

SPEAKER_166: And, and so if you and I are flying an airplane together and you're on your stick and I'm on my stick, they can both move independently. So, so one of the pilots freaked out and hold all the way back on

SPEAKER_346: the stick. And the other one, elevation, he wants to get altitude. Yeah, but we all know what happens

SPEAKER_166: when you do that. That's right. So then the other pilot was doing the rational thing, which is a little bit of forward pressure. So, okay. Uh, they're not physically coupled. And what is,

SPEAKER_01: what does the air bus cockpit do when you're, when I'm pulling all the way back on my stick and you're

SPEAKER_348: pushing, I don't know, split the difference, split the difference. It's the most insane.

SPEAKER_349: That's the worst decision. It's the worst decision. It flies the average. So the average of catastrophically back and a little bit forward is still catastrophically back. And then so they,

SPEAKER_61: they just stole the airplane all the way. The nose is going up. The lift goes away and it just drops and the pilot wakes up. The captain comes out who has, who knows how to fly an airplane. Cause these guys don't obviously know what they're, or one of them didn't know what he was doing,

Chamath Palihapitiya: you know, and he kills all the passengers and he's like, no, get the nose. They had, and by the time they hit the ocean, uh, the ice had all melted off and they had a

SPEAKER_00: perfectly fine airplane. Um, and the, uh, it, but you know, the lesson, there's a lesson in pilot training there, which the industry is, has really taken to heart, but there's also a lesson in cockpit design. And, and so when we revealed our cockpit about six weeks ago, uh, like Airbus, we've got these side sticks, but they're forced feedback side sticks. So that if you and I are, you know, the Airbus thing had this alarm that would go off and it'd say dual input. But by the way, when you're in a crisis, there are a thousand alarms going off and you miss.

SPEAKER_356: Yeah, the whole thing's blinking like a Christmas tree. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Right. So, so we did a more, it's the connection with the pilot until we can do autonomy,

SPEAKER_01: which I think is gonna be a ways off for airplanes. Um, it, until we do economy, the, the tangible connection, the visceral connection with airplane and pilot really matters. And, uh, and so it, uh, if you and I are flying the airplane together, then we can feel each other on the stick. And when, and then over 20, turn the autopilot on, it acts like a third pilot and it moves the stick. And so you can feel the, the autopilot forces. If you did take over from the autopilot, you, you're, you're literally, you're reaching your hand where the autopilot's flying and you're taking over from that exact position. So there's this great, like tangible, uh, visceral sensory awareness of what's going on with the airplane.

SPEAKER_358: So if they had that on the air bus, they never would have had that accident.

SPEAKER_360: Oh, do we have a picture of your new cockpit design? Let's pull that up. If we have,

SPEAKER_00: I think, I think we have a video of it. I really love this. It's like going from a

SPEAKER_262: blackberry to an iPhone. Like we got everything on this airplane. You can control through software.

SPEAKER_361: So instead of having glass avionics, with the exception of that section in the middle where

SPEAKER_39: you have the thrust, right? That needs to be more visceral tactile. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01: That's that's, that's right. Well, there's, um, we basically said, put everything needs to be software control. Some things also you want to have a physical control.

SPEAKER_166: And then we only added that minimum of physical control where it was important for that visceral feel. And, you know, for normal flying is also, we also think about emergency situations. Like

SPEAKER_46: if there's a smoke in the cockpit and you can't see, there's certain things you need to be able to

SPEAKER_336: do just by feel. Oh, wow. I never thought about that. Yeah. If you have smoke, you got to feel around to, you know, change the flaps maybe, or change the air speed, right? Those are important.

SPEAKER_166: So if, so if you look at the details of the cockpit design, the really critical controls all have a

SPEAKER_01: physically different shape. So when you put your hand on it, you know what it is. Like the landing

SPEAKER_38: gear controller there, um, is, it looks like a wheel and you touch it. You don't have your hand on

SPEAKER_367: anything other than landing gear controller. Yeah. Um, and the flap controller looks like the landing

SPEAKER_01: gear. It looks like the landing gear. And when you put your hand on it, it feels like the landing gear. So if you, and this is, this is really, you know, this is really important in emergencies because what happens in an emergency is that the pilots get saturated. They're like, they get overwhelmed but easily. Yeah. And, and then, so if you're using only the communication channel of the screen or an audio alert, you have a very narrow bandwidth ability to get put more information to the pilot. Yeah. So you have to make use of the, of the, uh, touch and, and that, that, you know,

SPEAKER_262: oh, I just can't be what I should have my hand on. It feels wrong. Right. Let me ask you some

SPEAKER_360: stupid questions here since we're, we're diving into the, the, the pilot experience. Um, we'll have

SPEAKER_16: automation. Um, obviously that's super important, but why are planes, you know, we had MH370 disappear. I'm like really into this kind of stuff. Like once you go down the YouTube rabbit hole, I watched this guy called Blanco Lirio. Do you ever watch the Blanco Lirio channel?

SPEAKER_09: I don't know that one. Okay. Uh, Blanco Lirio, um, YouTube channel. Uh, and I, I give this guy five bucks a month on, on Patreon only because I think he ultimately will make people safer. So this is a channel here. Um, and, uh, you can see he just takes every crash and he breaks it down. He takes all the data. He'll do like the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash the day it happens three months later, three weeks later, three months later, six months later, a year later, it's incredible for education. And you have three 70 disappears, right? And we have this, the greatest aviation mystery. I'm curious what you think happened. I have my own thoughts. Um, I think it was intentional. Um, but that's me. Um, the thing that comes up is why aren't these given Starlink, given that we're all on the internet, why aren't these remote controllable from the ground, obviously hacking is a piece of that, or why aren't people in the control towers

SPEAKER_372: or at boom or at United, not able to pull up the cockpit or virtual cockpit and watch the pilots

SPEAKER_09: in this air France situation and say, Hey, we're watching air France. Do you guys have

SPEAKER_206: pitot tubes that are frozen? What are you doing? You're both pulling the stick the wrong way. And when is that coming? It's coming on the overture. Okay. So I think, I think I just made

SPEAKER_00: an announcement. We haven't talked about that before, but the, but yeah, so over to overture will

SPEAKER_01: have basically a remote tech support, uh, feature where, um, the pilots on the ground can get into a flight sim and it will mirror exactly what somebody in the sky is seeing in real time. Now they can't, they can't control it. You know, and that's kind of a hardware lockout because you go down that

SPEAKER_380: rabbit hole. Now there's a security question, but Al Qaeda trying to hack into it and take a plane

SPEAKER_95: down. That's right. But it's, it's the airplane equivalent of, uh, we call tech support and you

SPEAKER_00: can screen share with tech support. Perfect. The airplane equivalent of that is, uh, you press a button and there are two, you know, factory train test pilots that can see and feel exactly what you're seeing and feeling and help you through it. And so that's, um, I, I think it, and if you

SPEAKER_01: kill that in your back and say, why has no one done that before? Uh, it's the lack of innovation. Right. Back to our original discussion. Yeah. Back to the original discussion.

SPEAKER_221: The last time Boeing did an all new airplane was 2004. Now satellite wifi hadn't really been invented

SPEAKER_384: yet. Right. Right. And so there's your answer. Yeah. Right. Cause it's an overture. This blows my

SPEAKER_01: mind to say that in the year 2024, overture is the first airline designed in a world where internet

SPEAKER_325: connectivity is, is the standard assumption. Like, like if you look at every other airplane out there that they, they've got the, the satellite humpback on that. They're pinging to a satellite

SPEAKER_372: every minute. And like, we're, we're, we, we are worried. We are literally going to the bottom of the

SPEAKER_389: ocean, trying to find a flight recorder to figure out what happened. Yeah. Okay. Yes. It's great to have

SPEAKER_01: flight recorders. It's great to be a flight recorder, but all that should be real time and it should be built in. Like literally the satcom on today's airplanes is a bolt on and you can tell it's a bolt on

SPEAKER_332: because it's got a hump. What about pilots and having cameras in there to monitor the pilots in

SPEAKER_09: the cockpit? This is a controversial union issue. I understand, but you do have situations with pilots. Sadly, you know, it's one in, I don't know, a million or something. Some pilot shows up drunk. We had one who showed up on mushrooms and tried to hit some, you know, shut the engines down. I mean, there's some crazy stuff that's occurred. You have the Egyptian pilot who ran the plane into a mountain and committed suicide by commercial airline. These are very rare things that occur, but it would seem to me that on a human factors basis and studying pilots, having the video of the pilots in the, uh, box or being streamed when that plane went down, you know, from MH 70 or the four, four, seven, whatever it is,

SPEAKER_00: would be invaluable. It sure would be. And, and also, by the way, I think, I think you're right that it was intentional. And the, the, the, the strongest evidence from that, from my perspective,

SPEAKER_38: is that there was a bunch of equipment that was turned off. And so they would have turned the cameras off, you know, the first thing. So, um, they were allowed to, there could be a camera

SPEAKER_08: that's not allowed to be turned. So you think MH 370 was intentional too? I, I mean, certain, no,

SPEAKER_01: uh, probability basis, the product on a probability basis, it, it, it seems to be the only thing that's

SPEAKER_233: consistent with the facts, uh, from, you know, from, from my YouTube study of that. Um, but, uh,

SPEAKER_403: and if you think about it on an, if you, if you think about it on who would want to do a cover up

SPEAKER_09: here, if you had a pilot who, uh, you know, was suffering from depression or whatever mental illness and who did this intentionally and you knew about it and you would cover it up. Right. And it would be very confusing to the rest of the world. And I think that's kind of what happened here. The reason this is such a mystery and feels so weird to me, I think it's to the rest of the world is

SPEAKER_145: there's some amount of data. It feels like the Malaysian government just didn't give to people. That's me saying it. I know you have to work with people, but yeah, I mean, I think there's some

SPEAKER_389: conspiracy going on here where they're like, let's not investigate it too much.

SPEAKER_00: That, um, I see a little bit differently. So I, I, I'm not aware of what data they could have shared

SPEAKER_01: that they didn't share. Uh, you know, this, this is, this is not like, if you go back and look at the, you know, we're not conspiracy theory chat here. Now, if you look at the origin of COVID,

SPEAKER_00: there's a lot of data that, that, that, that the Wuhan or Chinese government had that wasn't public.

SPEAKER_01: And I'm not aware of any analog of that on image 370. Uh, okay. Yeah. I, I'm just thinking like,

SPEAKER_09: they seem, you know, to not have done the most thorough job. That's my kind of, I feel like they

SPEAKER_01: slow walked it in a way. So they might, they might have, so there's a, so you have a few favorite YouTube teared out of this. My, my favorite YouTube teared out of this is from a

SPEAKER_00: channel called mentor pilot. M E N T O U R pilot. And, and he, he does these awesome accident tear downs that go all the way down to the cockpit design, but he's got a really good one on image 370, including there's new data that did not exist. Uh, when it first happened, that that's,

SPEAKER_166: this is a whole new way of tracking what happened that airplane that they've been able to do in the

SPEAKER_00: 10 years that elapsed, um, that, that suggests a place where we could, where it might be that no

SPEAKER_61: one has looked. Oh, wow. Is that the deepest location? Like, cause they said in his simulator, he had flown a sim to like one of the deepest cliffs and locations. And so if he was intentionally trying to ditch in that area to make it unrecoverable, he kind of, it wasn't the Mariana trench, but it was like similar to like the depth. And then when they found the wings and stuff like that, they said this, these wings are indicative of a controlled landing in water because they didn't

SPEAKER_145: shatter. So you're like, wait a second, how it it's yeah. So crazy. I would love to see us go look

SPEAKER_13: at a place we haven't looked forward. So if you can find that airplane, find the black box. And then

SPEAKER_297: we're going to know what happens. It's an extraordinary how safe it all is.

SPEAKER_416: It is actually that's that there's this weird paradox of safety and in, in aviation work,

SPEAKER_14: but literally the most dangerous part of flying is driving to the airport and not, not by a little

SPEAKER_01: bit, by a lot. And it's great. We've been able to accomplish that. It creates this sort of paradoxical situation where if, if something even like a little bit bad happens on an airplane, it's news versus in automotive and automotive, we have the equivalent of a 737 crashing every 48 hours and everybody

SPEAKER_21: dies. That's just the U S auto fatalities, U S. And if you reported on it, you couldn't report anything

SPEAKER_00: else. It was just take over all the news. And this, this is, and this is what kills me on the pushback

SPEAKER_262: people have about wanting, um, you know, uh, uh, driver automation to be perfect before we can roll it out. It's like, no, I would take a half automation because it would still be better than the carnage

SPEAKER_16: that we have on roadways today that nobody talks about 30,000 deaths, about a hundred a day. And it hasn't gotten better meaningfully, which is super interesting because you have Uber and Lyft and options

SPEAKER_09: for drinking and driving, yet you still have it. And it seems from the statistics that you still have

SPEAKER_16: a ton of drinking and driving, but we have this addition of distracted driving. And if you told me,

SPEAKER_09: I'm with you, you know, every single car has to have level two, uh, adaptive cruise control and stay in the lane. Oh, and all automatic braking, which I guess would be three. I don't know if automatic braking, emergency braking and adaptive cruise control are considered the same thing, but I kind of are right. Stop. If you're gonna hit something or, you know, adapt to the speed. It'd be very interesting if everybody was forced to have those on.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. I think there's something interesting there and it's also how you manage safety over time. So if you

SPEAKER_00: look at aviation, you know, the, the early days weren't so safe, but you know, every, every accident got a, um, root cause, uh, review and the, and the industry, um, aside, at least used to be really

SPEAKER_85: good at learning from these things. And, uh, and the, the safety bars come up and come up and come

SPEAKER_01: up and come up and the expectations come up. And, you know, and I think that like on ramp is actually really valuable. And we, you know, every time I read something that's like, well, we shouldn't have self-driving cars until we can prove they're perfectly safe. I'm like, no, no, no, you're actually killing the on-ramp. You're killing the on-ramp to safety. And, you know, we, we have to allow things to come to market so long as they're better. And then we can make them perfect

SPEAKER_297: over time. Yeah. Availability. The, I just looked it up while we were talking availability.

SPEAKER_09: Heuristic is the cognitive bias where people over estimate the likelihood of a bad thing happening based on some recent event in psychology. You might call it catastrophizing where you'd think about the worst thing, but our minds remember these things. And there are famous cases where in New York city, a child was abducted in Manhattan and that everybody stopped letting their kids walk to school in Manhattan and Brooklyn. When I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, because rightfully every parent was like, I don't want my kid kidnapped. And I was like, this doesn't happen that often. And the ritual of being able to walk yourself to school at nine,

SPEAKER_61: 10, 11, 12 years old is what turns you into an adult. And then the damage that caused to independence in kids in different generations would probably be greater than the occasional kidnapping and murder of a child as horrible as that is, which speaks to like what you have to deal with, with, I don't know, suicidal pilots or Al Qaeda taking over an airplane. These are edge cases.

SPEAKER_89: I think it's exactly the same situation where we can, we can trade a visible,

SPEAKER_01: but small risk or an invisible, but actually much larger risk. And, uh, and so that that's exactly

SPEAKER_00: what happened after nine 11, when your airport security went way up and, um, and, you know, and the, it's hard to measure what the real impact of that would be, but, but I, I suspect the airport

SPEAKER_01: security has killed more people than the terrorists did. And, and, and the way it did that is to at the margins, nudge people from flying to driving. There's, there's some tipping point on how long does it take and how convenient is it? And, you know, and it's some, it's some point putting a bit more friction at the airport, which is passengers, the margin out of the airplanes and into the, uh, into cars. You can see it on routes like New York, Boston used to have a lot more shuttle service

SPEAKER_149: than they do now that the air, the air shuttles, a bunch of air shuttles, the friction killed a bunch

SPEAKER_09: of air shuttles. Yeah. I used to take the Boston one all the time and it would go from, uh, this marine terminal, um, I forgot the name of it, but it was at LaGuardia. It was the marine terminal, LaGuardia.

SPEAKER_437: The marine terminal LaGuardia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you would go there. It was the greatest

SPEAKER_09: experience ever. You could walk up. It was every hour. You didn't book a flight. It was like taking the subway. You walked up, you would go in my day, you went up to a counter, you gave the woman your credit card, you bought it. And then shortly thereafter, you had a kiosk. And there was like very little security. It was just, you go through and you get on and you could show up five, 10, 15 minutes before the flight and still get on. Because what you would do is you would queue up at the gate. Imagine how revolutionary it would be if you could go from LA to San Francisco, you know, LA to San Francisco on Southwest and it left on the hour and you got there. If you got there an hour before, you definitely got a seat. If you got there 15 minutes before, maybe you got a seat, but if no big, you get a cup of coffee and you go on the next flight. You're first on the next flight.

SPEAKER_440: Right. Right. We, we need to, we need to bring that back. And it's, I think that's actually a

SPEAKER_01: harder problem with supersonic flight. Uh, because the safety protocols can often be one way doors.

SPEAKER_00: Uh, even, even when they're not really effective. Um, like, uh, like I'll, I'll tell you, I'll tell you a fun story. When I first got married, flew from San Francisco to Seattle, got married on Whidbey Island. Um, uh, then flew to through, through Heathrow and onward to Italy for my honeymoon and we're like in, uh, somewhere in Venice in my, uh, my now ex-wife is like, honey, can you get the, like, blah, blah, blah out of my purse? I'm fishing through her purse.

SPEAKER_01: And I, and I find a, uh, a box cutter, uh, which is the literal weapon used on 9-11 and it's gone

SPEAKER_00: through airport security and SFO and sea tack and in Heathrow. Um, and, and not found. And so the, uh, but by the way, there's a bottle of water. We're really good at finding that. Um, and so

SPEAKER_01: the, like, it's not what, what, whatever has made airplanes safer since 9-11. And I think they actually

SPEAKER_16: are safer since 9-11. It's not the airport security. No, I mean, you know, yeah. And then they, we probably, you think about those doors, right? We reinforce every door so you can't kick in the door.

SPEAKER_14: Like that's a great innovation, right? It is. I think, I think, I think two things have actually mattered. You're in the doors one and there's a second one and it's, it's, it's. Hold on.

SPEAKER_335: Let me see if I guess it. Uh, oh, see something, say something. People are super aware. It's obvious.

SPEAKER_296: That's right. That's right. And in fact, in fact, that learning happened so quickly,

SPEAKER_01: it happened on the day of 9-11. The passengers learned that they, that they should fight back. Right. And that's why, that's why the fourth flight didn't make it into the White House.

SPEAKER_64: Yeah. That's right. Yeah. That learning happened in a few hours. And so those two,

SPEAKER_14: those two things have actually made it safer, but now we've got this airport security theater and

SPEAKER_119: like, nobody knows how to get rid of it or simplify it. Yeah. Amazing. Uh, what, what is the, uh, what's the, since we're wrapping up here, what's the path to autonomy in airplanes? Cause we do have

SPEAKER_61: many things. Like I, I bought one of these latest DJI drones. I was, I was shocked. You're allowed to fly these in Manhattan and like my friend's flying his drone. He's teaching me how to do it. And you just hit a button return and this thing's, you know, 10 blocks away, whatever it's out of visual side.

SPEAKER_421: He just presses return and it returns and lands in this little tiny park we were sitting in Manhattan.

SPEAKER_103: Well, I think it's going to, it's going to start encounter into places. It's definitely not going

SPEAKER_00: to start with, with overture. Like this is not what we're doing here. Um, but the, uh, I think the place where it will start is, um, with, with the small kind of vertical takeoff and landing airplanes that are getting developed now, where they've only got four. Yeah. Like the jobies and archers, they've only got four or five seats on them. And when, and when one of those seats is taken by somebody you have to pay. Yeah. Versus somebody who's paying to be there economically, it's a huge difference. And so like, if you want air taxes to work economically, like one, we're just like doing fine enough pilots. Yeah. Uh, so it's not a jobs problem. It's like,

SPEAKER_16: we can't find a point of flying a quadcopter like that. These things know exactly where they're

SPEAKER_09: going. They have very short missions. It's a very constrained environment. You're only going up to, I don't know what they fly five, 10,000 feet. They're just zipping from Manhattan to JFK or, you know, across the bay and from Oakland to San Francisco. I mean, this is going to be very short missions. And those things are already doing massive calculations in terms of the rotors. And if they do get knocked off balances, load balancing them, it's kind of baked into what they do, right?

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think, so I think it'll start there. And like, I think, you know, for commercial airplanes, it's going to be really, really, really a long time. And, you know, and the reason is, because we've made that one, when there are a couple hundred people on the airplane, there are two pilots, economically, it's not that significant. Um, so there's just nobody with a strong financial incentive to go change this up.

SPEAKER_00: Um, on one hand, on the other hand, like the platform has gotten to a near perfect level of safety and, and the question becomes, you know, uh, is there a way to actually move forward on

SPEAKER_01: safety with autonomy? It's really hard to do that given how nearly perfect the safety bar is today. And you look at things like, you know, Sully landed in the Hudson, you know, um, maybe, maybe I'm

SPEAKER_262: going to date myself quickly here, but I think, I think it could be a long time before we have an AI that's going to say, I'm going to land in the Hudson.

SPEAKER_441: Um, I'm going to, I'm, I'm with you on that. Yeah. Like I, the edge cases is always the hardest

SPEAKER_61: part, which is why today when an airplane, um, is at whatever 34 or 40,000 feet, it's on autopilot. When it lands in a storm, it's on autopilot, right? If I'm, if it's in fog, it's on autopilot. Um, in almost all cases. And like, when do pilots actually fly a commercial airline? I wonder, but to your point, why wouldn't you have the two? If it's perfect, why would you take on that complexity?

SPEAKER_39: And it's already, what, what percentage of commercial flights are on autopilot? You think

SPEAKER_00: every flight uses it at least once and you know, uh, what percentage of the time is the autopilot act? I mean, it's, it's on the entire cruise and the longer the flight, the greater the percentage that is. So it's, you know, I don't know the numbers, it's gotta be in the nineties, gotta be in the nineties, right? Yeah. That's amazing. But then it turns out that there, there are those edge cases where you're gonna be really glad there's a pilot there. Yeah. Like when the, uh, those tubes

SPEAKER_01: freeze over pretty good to have a pilot. Yeah. Pretty good. Now there's a, there's a different way to solve that problem. I watched like every accident tear down video I can find. And, and then

SPEAKER_00: we try to learn what's the root cause and how, and how do we fix it three different ways, which they can never happen in overture. And so we were talking earlier about the active force feedback side sticks that solves air France 40, 47, one way. Another way to solve it is something called synthetic airspeed, which is, uh, even if the airspeed tube freezes over and you can use GPS and recent wind data to come up with pretty good estimate. Um, uh, you can also use inertial navigation. There's a lot of ways you can kind of synthesize airspeed. So if the tube freezes over, it's not a, you know, all the automation still works. And the last thing is you make the automation

SPEAKER_01: not need a lot of sensors. And so, uh, on overture, another thing, if you look at the airbus cockpits, the flight controls have many different modes that can be in there's normal mode, there's alternate mode one, there's alternate mode two, and it keeps going. There's a long list and you spend almost all your time in normal mode. And if something goes happens and all of a sudden you're alternate mode, the pilots, you know, may not even remember what that really does and how it's different.

SPEAKER_00: Um, and so a thing that we put a big focus into is not having a bunch of modes. Like

SPEAKER_485: the overture has two modes, normal mode and reversionary mode and reversionary mode depends

SPEAKER_421: on very, very little for it to work. You know, it's really interesting. I was talking to my friend,

SPEAKER_16: Sky Dayton, who was the original investor in Joby, and he was giving me the statistic. Like, we haven't had a commercial death in the United States, not gone wood, got some wood over here.

SPEAKER_78: Um, since 2009, and I was just looking as we were talking at the last couple of fatalities, tragically. And when you look at them, like, it's unbelievable. Like college and air.

SPEAKER_336: I'm not getting on any airline called Colgan air, Colgan air, started college and Colgan air. That

SPEAKER_488: was in Buffalo. It's one of these regional airlines really good for your skin college.

SPEAKER_09: times breakfast again, Homair flight, uh, 51 91 in 2006. Uh, again, one of those regional, uh, things.

SPEAKER_398: I don't fly regional airlines as a rule. No American evil for me. Yeah. I won't fly that. You know why?

SPEAKER_09: I looked it up. Cause I'm like you, I watch these things. If you eliminated the regional airline and recreational pilots, I mean, you're you've just accounted for the overwhelming majority of accidents

SPEAKER_16: are small planes with recreational pilots. I will not get in one of those. I have friends who have a little serious. They got this thing, that thing. Yep. No, thanks. You got two gray hair pilots in the

SPEAKER_61: front or preferably one salt hair, salt and pepper, one younger, kind of like that combo. I never go in with one pilot, always two, never a regional airline and never a small plane. You, you take those out. You've just eliminated. It's like eliminating, getting in a car with a drunk driver or an old car with mechanical problems or a speeder or a distracted driver. I wouldn't give some, I've been in a car where an Uber driver will start using their phone. I'll say, excuse me, I'm sorry. I have anxiety when you're using your phone. Can you please not use your phone? I'm still going to give you five stars. It's it's me. I'm just getting very anxious. Oh, no problem, sir. No problem. Um, that's the way I handle it. I put it on, always put it on me. That's the best way to handle with service. You, you have a problem. Maybe you can help me. You know, it's like a Jedi thing. Uh, listen, you're fascinating. Uh, congratulations. We put you in the twist 500. It's our top 500 private market companies. Um, that doesn't mean anything right now. Cause I just started it.

SPEAKER_09: But I'm indexing the top 500 private companies based on Alex Wilhelm. And I was the co-host now,

SPEAKER_16: formerly of tech crunch and we're building this twist 500.com. So everybody can go check that

SPEAKER_09: out. Welcome to the 500, uh, continued success. We're rooting for you. We cannot wait, cannot wait to get to, you know, for me, it's to get in LA and go to Japan. I don't know if you can

SPEAKER_78: make that one, but Hawaii and Japan is my dream. It is. Well, I got to tell you the story about that

SPEAKER_00: and then we'll, then we'll let you out. But the, but today, as you know, if you're leaving west coast and you're going to Japan, let's say you got a Monday morning meeting in Tokyo, you gotta leave midday Saturday. You get there on a Sunday, you go to a hotel room, try to sleep in the

SPEAKER_01: hotel room. Next morning, your alarm goes off. You're going to try not to sleep in the meeting.

SPEAKER_00: And then, and then you come home and the whole thing takes at least three calendar days and, and you're messed up from the jet lag the rest of the week. And Supersonic doesn't just save you time. It saves you two whole calendar days. Instead of leaving Saturday, Saturday night, you sleep at home. Sunday morning, uh, the flights, the flight from west coast to Tokyo is about six and a half hours supersonic. What that means is an 8 AM departure, say from San Francisco gets to Tokyo, um, six and a half

SPEAKER_01: hours later. It's now 8 30 AM Monday morning in Tokyo. And so, but to you, it's just Sunday afternoon. So, so we're awake. They're awake, right. Right to the meeting. Go to bed, go to bed early, come home if you want, uh, you can do the whole thing at 24 hours. And so, so that's, that's the magic of this.

SPEAKER_16: It's not just about hours. It's about days. Amazing. Listen, uh, we love what you're doing. Continued success. And we will see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye. Bye.