Lockheed Martin, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Lockheed Martin comes up
Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:30 Ben Gilbert General Motors, Nike, Starbucks, Lockheed Martin, Visa, Apple,
Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 11:31 Ben Gilbert And much like the development of Silicon Valley, which we talked about in our Lockheed Martin episode, there's sort of this positive feedback loop that keeps that area the main area for this.
- ▶ 2:15:09 Ben Gilbert The way people talk about Adrian Newey is basically the same way that they talk about Kelly Johnson from Skunk Works from our Lockheed Martin episode.
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:52:59 Ben Gilbert It's almost like the Lockheed Martin episode that we did.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:32 David Rosenthal Lockheed, GE, Siemens.
- ▶ 6:35 Ben Gilbert Lockheed was a vendor to hospitals.
- ▶ 2:42:58 David Rosenthal I mean, we talked about this on the Lockheed episode.
TSMC founder Morris Chang · Acquired
- ▶ 2:28:08 David Rosenthal It's like if Silicon Valley were all in one, you know, kind of government sponsored, you know, industrial park, uh, which it sort of was, it was Silicon Valley, you know, as we talked about in our Lockheed Martin episode.
Holiday Special 2023 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:45 Ben Gilbert Yes, listeners, if you count Lockheed Martin, it's five.
- ▶ 16:14 David Rosenthal Nintendo, Lockheed, Porsche, Nike, Costco, Nvidia part three, and then Visa.
Visa (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:01:57 Ben Gilbert This is a lot like the Lockheed Martin episode where I'm actually not sure we can apply the formal definition where we say, like, what enables them to be more profitable than MasterCard, because together they're like this…
Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 12:37 Ben Gilbert David, you and I were just down in San Diego doing our episode with Doug DeMuro, and I went and stopped by the Midway Museum, because we had just done our Lockheed Martin episode.
Porsche (with Doug DeMuro) · Acquired
- ▶ 47:52 Ben Gilbert Like, she is the SR-seventy-one pilot, and this, you know, playing on a local bar stage is flying a Cessna, and the machinery to do so is entirely different, in the same way that you're talking about car racing splitting at this moment in…
- ▶ 2:35:21 David Rosenthal This is a little bit echoes of our, our Lockheed Martin episode that we just did.
- ▶ 2:54:52 Ben Gilbert So for any listeners who are new, um, and based on the Lockheed episode, a lot, a lot of listeners are new.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi · Acquired
- ▶ 1:37:03 Ben Gilbert Y'all picked Lockheed Martin, which is shaping up to be one of our biggest episodes ever.
Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 0:32 Ben Gilbert Did you catch the Lockheed thing in Maverick?
- ▶ 1:17 Ben Gilbert Today's episode is on a critical piece of American infrastructure, Lockheed Martin.
- ▶ 1:23 Ben Gilbert They are the nation's largest defense contractor.
- ▶ 1:26 Ben Gilbert They're actually the federal government's largest contractor, period.
- ▶ 1:30 Ben Gilbert The American taxpayers pay Lockheed Martin around
- ▶ 1:36 Ben Gilbert And just to state this early and clearly, Lockheed Martin makes, among other things, killing machines.
- ▶ 1:43 Ben Gilbert The company is, of course, critical to defending the American way of life, and most of these things they make, fortunately, are used as deterrents to keep peace, but we should not mince words.
- ▶ 1:53 Ben Gilbert They make weapons synonymous with phrases like overwhelming force and air superiority.
- ▶ 1:59 Ben Gilbert You may feel, and probably should feel, conflicted as you learn about this company.
- ▶ 2:03 Ben Gilbert There are really no easy answers to the question, is what they make right or good?
- ▶ 2:09 Ben Gilbert And that's why we entrust the decision to use their products to the office of the President of the United States.
- ▶ 2:16 Ben Gilbert But this company's history is absolutely fascinating.
- ▶ 2:38 David Rosenthal To tell the full story of Lockheed and Lockheed Martin and all the predecessor companies that came before it, because I think it's like, 17 companies all merged together at this point, would probably require a full season of Acquired, so…
- ▶ 3:13 David Rosenthal So if you're in the tech world and you think Lockheed Martin and defense and fighter planes doesn't apply to me, think again, because pretty much everything you do came out of this.
- ▶ 4:26 David Rosenthal So, for many of you listening, one thing you may not know that I didn't really know till we started the research is that the company that eventually became Lockheed Martin today was two companies.
- ▶ 9:41 David Rosenthal Who started the famous Lockheed Skunk Works division.
- ▶ 9:44 Ben Gilbert And this is great, because before I started the research, I was loosely aware that Lockheed had the first Skunk Works.
- ▶ 10:04 David Rosenthal There are a bunch of wonderful books around Lockheed, but a book titled Skunk Works.
- ▶ 10:34 David Rosenthal And that is an amazing history of Lockheed during all these eras that we're going to talk about.
- ▶ 12:21 David Rosenthal The quote from his first boss, Lockheed's chief engineer at the time,
- ▶ 12:52 David Rosenthal So he ends up joining Lockheed right out of the University of Michigan Engineering School.
- ▶ 13:09 David Rosenthal So he becomes the star of Lockheed's then only six-person aviation design and engineering department.
- ▶ 13:39 David Rosenthal Okay, so the start of World War II rolls around, and the first thing that Kelly and Lockheed do is they adapt the Electra
- ▶ 13:46 David Rosenthal Into a bombing vehicle called the Hudson, and even before the US enters the war, the British Royal Air Force ends up buying about 3000 of these Hudsons from Lockheed.
- ▶ 14:02 Ben Gilbert Lockheed's big customer in World War II before the U.S. enters was Britain's Royal Air Force.
- ▶ 47:36 David Rosenthal And then the Blackbird and everything else we're going to get into later in the story, all happening out of Area-Fifty-One.
- ▶ 52:50 Ben Gilbert Arguably the last great deal they got from Lockheed Martin, but...
- ▶ 59:57 Ben Gilbert I knew a little bit of it from watching Steve Blank's great talk maybe five, eight years ago, The Secret History of Silicon Valley, but you sort of found the last 20 minutes and then just dug in like a splinter on this particular moment in…
- ▶ 1:00:23 David Rosenthal The Lockheed story.
- ▶ 1:08:12 David Rosenthal What does this have to do with Lockheed?
- ▶ 1:08:35 David Rosenthal Was a new secret division of Lockheed.
- ▶ 1:08:52 David Rosenthal And what LMSC, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, did, I honestly think, like, it is bigger impact to the country, to the world, and certainly on business to Lockheed and to Silicon Valley than Skunk Works.
- ▶ 1:16:08 David Rosenthal The reason that Steve Wozniak grew up in Silicon Valley is directly because of Lockheed Martin.
- ▶ 1:28:57 Ben Gilbert And you might know that eventually after the U-II, Skunk Works would create the next great spy plane, the SR-seventy-one, which we will get to, but that wasn't for a little while, so this intelligence gap was filled by this secret, not…
- ▶ 1:29:18 David Rosenthal This is heretical to say, because it's so beloved, but I think the Blackbird was a decoy.
- ▶ 1:29:30 David Rosenthal And so everybody now is like, oh, the Blackbird, it's such a shame.
- ▶ 1:46:00 Ben Gilbert And Martin Marietta, future Martin and Lockheed Martin, built the large orange fuel tank for the space shuttle, which took the Hubble telescope to space.
- ▶ 1:49:08 David Rosenthal Okay, two other things that I want to talk about with LMSC before we come back to the coda on Skunk Works and the Blackbird and all that.
- ▶ 1:56:24 David Rosenthal So, this program, if you know anything about the SR-seventy-one Blackbird, you're like, well that's a Air Force airplane.
- ▶ 1:56:34 David Rosenthal The Blackbird was not a CIA airplane.
- ▶ 1:56:36 David Rosenthal The program that the Blackbird ultimately came out of was the A-II Oxcart.
- ▶ 1:57:33 Ben Gilbert If you're standing on the ground, and you pick up a rifle, and you shoot it, and an SR-seventy-one flies over your head, the SR-seventy-one will beat the bullet.
- ▶ 1:57:50 Ben Gilbert So, there's a fun stat about the SR-seventy-one.
- ▶ 2:01:42 David Rosenthal There wasn't enough titanium in the United States to build all these blackbirds, or raw titanium, that they could easily source.
- ▶ 2:02:00 David Rosenthal And they source a large amount of the titanium that goes into the Blackbirds, the A-Twelfs and then the Blackbirds, out of the Soviet Union.
- ▶ 2:02:17 Ben Gilbert Titanium is so hard that it will damage your tools, so they had to machine new tools for the Blackbird itself out of titanium in order to manufacture the titanium plane.
- ▶ 2:03:22 David Rosenthal Ben, are you telling me that the Blackbird had panel gaps?
- ▶ 2:03:25 Ben Gilbert The Blackbird had panel gaps, and to add insult to injury, there are a variety of reasons they decided not to have custom fuel tanks.
- ▶ 2:04:46 David Rosenthal And I believe, actually, they weren't even able to get the J-fifty-eight in the first A-twelves, and then only later in the Blackbirds did they put it in?
- ▶ 2:04:54 Ben Gilbert And we should tell people the Blackbird, the SR 71, was the two-seater Air Force version of the single-seater.
- ▶ 2:05:27 David Rosenthal So if you're looking at a Blackbird and you look at the engines, they've got these like
- ▶ 2:05:35 David Rosenthal I mean, I'm sure everybody listening has seen a photo of Blackbird.
- ▶ 2:06:46 Ben Gilbert But they did consider, I think, Kelly and the Skunk Works team were really advocating to build a tactical aircraft that was based on this, or a bomber, and that never happened, so every version of the SR-V-I or the early prototypes of the…
- ▶ 2:07:38 David Rosenthal The Blackbird comes about.
- ▶ 2:07:41 David Rosenthal Within the Air Force and the Pentagon, the project originally was called the RS-seventy-one.
- ▶ 2:07:49 Ben Gilbert And the SR-seventy-one is strategic reconnaissance, but it ended up being backwards.
- ▶ 2:07:55 David Rosenthal It happened because President Lyndon Johnson actually announced the existence of this thing in a national speech, and, uh, during the speech he calls it the SR-seventy-one instead of the RS.
- ▶ 2:08:06 David Rosenthal There's some speculation that it wasn't that he messed up and made a mistake, but that his speechwriter wanted it to be called the SR-seventy-one and intentionally modified the speech.
- ▶ 2:08:38 David Rosenthal So, the first official flight of the Blackbird happens on December, 22nd, 1964.
- ▶ 2:09:22 David Rosenthal Obviously nobody really knows, but supposedly, according to internet lore, over 4000 missiles have been shot at Blackbirds and none of them have ever hit.
- ▶ 2:10:34 David Rosenthal If you need full flexibility, you need a Blackbird.
- ▶ 2:10:48 Ben Gilbert So the Blackbird doesn't fly today.
- ▶ 2:10:53 Ben Gilbert There's a crazy stat, a little piece of trivia, about the SR-I-I, and this really puts into context how early this was and how strange it is that we've had nothing faster since.
- ▶ 2:11:07 Ben Gilbert The SR-seventy-one first flight was closer to the Wright brothers than today.
- ▶ 2:11:55 David Rosenthal Now, I don't know the details of stealth with the Blackbird.
- ▶ 2:12:22 Ben Gilbert It's more, I think, that the SR-SV-I's bottom was one of the first airplanes with a flat bottom, rather than a rounded fuselage.
- ▶ 2:15:19 David Rosenthal The later Lockheed, right before the merger with Lockheed Martin, would acquire General Dynamics' fighter plane business, so it does come back into Lockheed.
- ▶ 2:21:36 Ben Gilbert But somebody at the Skunk Works reads the paper and says, huh, I think all the ways that we've been thinking about trying to make an airplane stealth, like the SR-seventy-one, with flattening the bottom a little bit and trying to use…
- ▶ 2:26:04 David Rosenthal We don't like the Blackbird.
- ▶ 2:27:12 Ben Gilbert Lockheed Martin doesn't build stuff.
- ▶ 2:34:41 David Rosenthal Lockheed today, which is not Lockheed, but Lockheed Martin.
- ▶ 2:34:53 David Rosenthal And Northrop, which is not Northrop, but Northrop Grumman, and which very closely, almost, was part of Lockheed Martin, but got blocked by the DOJ.
- ▶ 2:36:13 David Rosenthal And the CEO of then Martin Marietta, soon to be Lockheed Martin,
- ▶ 2:39:09 Ben Gilbert There's two spin-outs of the Lockheed Martin combination.
- ▶ 2:39:30 Ben Gilbert I was disappointed to see that there were no mine safety disclosures in Lockheed Martin's financials.
- ▶ 2:39:34 Ben Gilbert There's another thing that spins out called L-III communications, which is the set of things that won't be combining into Lockheed Martin.
- ▶ 2:39:47 Ben Gilbert There's the five big primes, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics.
- ▶ 2:40:36 Ben Gilbert Right, this is like Lockheed Martin sort of, like, looks at the DoD and they're like, are we supposed to keep going?
- ▶ 2:40:53 Ben Gilbert Yeah, I mean, the thing with the five big primes is they're all, like, very good at a certain bucket of things, and so if you start combining Lockheed and Northrop, which are the two that really kind of, like, bid against each other at…
- ▶ 2:41:55 Ben Gilbert There's Lockheed Martin, right after their combination, there's Boeing, and there's still independent McDonnell Douglas.
- ▶ 2:42:03 Ben Gilbert And McDonnell Douglas is eliminated from competition, so it just comes down to Boeing and Lockheed as the two finalists.
- ▶ 2:42:20 Ben Gilbert This contract is so big, and they were betting so heavily on it, that basically Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, after McDonnell Douglas loses, kind of need to just combine and size up in order to be a formidable competitor to Lockheed Martin…
- ▶ 2:43:09 David Rosenthal Norm Augustine, who was CEO of Martin Marietta, where the merger happens, and Dan Tellup, the CEO of Lockheed, is the first CEO of the combined company.
- ▶ 2:43:24 David Rosenthal He's the first CEO of the combined company, and then Norm takes over for a few years after that.
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