The Exchanges

Q where do you go? I mean, you had to build a prototype of a supersonic aircraft. It's not like, you know, we've had a lot of cosmetics companies on the show. It's not like going to a white label cosmetics plant and going, hey, build me this. Here's the 20 ingredients that I want in there and just come back to me in a month. Like, where do you start?

A Well, we started off with what the design was, and so it started off very digitally focused, and we actually put a lot of attention on how we develop the airplane, not just actually going off and building something. So great software is loosely coupled, like one piece of our code, if we change it, shouldn't affect what another piece of our code does. But great airplanes are very tightly coupled, highly integrated machines. The best wing structurally is thick. The best wing aerodynamically is thin. If we add more passengers, then all of a sudden the whole airplane has to get bigger. The wing has to get stronger. The engines need more thrust, needs to carry more fuel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so for that reason, airplane design tends to be highly iterative. And historically, when design is very manual, the pace of iteration is slow. And so one of the early insights was that we wanted to really invest in digital design and optimization tools. And so we had this digital design Path going. And then in parallel, we, we started building hardware and that was really about getting calibration data for all the digital stuff. So we, you know, along the way we tested probably thousands of samples of carbon fiber composites and different ways to put it together, different ways to make a joint ranges of temperatures. We started doing wind tunnel testing and all of that sort of da…

AI assessment note: “we started off with what the design was, and so it started off very digitally focused”

Q I mean, not necessarily around aircraft technology, but, but around how to make air travel cheaper and more accessible and more efficient. I mean, the main thing that has changed in the last 50 years is that more people can fly because it's cheaper, right? You can pack more people in and it's, it's more efficient, but it's certainly not a pleasant experience to fly on a commercial airplane today.

A No. I mean, we've turned something that, that in my view, people should be incredibly inspired by and look forward to, into an experience that, that most of us dread. And, you know, it doesn't have to be that way. It's solvable. But you were talking about how, you know, Herb and Dave Nielman, and there've been others who have, who have been great innovators in making travel more accessible, more affordable. Um, you know, they've both innovated with experience, but if you look at the history of entrepreneurship in And aviation broadly, there was kind of a first era starting from the Wright brothers and going until the 19 sixties where there were entrepreneurs focused on the airplanes themselves. And then in the 19 sixties, basically all the entrepreneurs in the aircraft companies retired. And if we look at that entire, now more than a hundred year history of aviation, I think it shows a really interesting pattern that I bet we could find in other industries as well, which is Founder led companies tend to push what the product can do. Yeah. And, and then when the founders retire, what happens in those companies? Well, they, they promote the most successful executive.

AI assessment note: “we've turned something that... people should be incredibly inspired by... into an experience that... most of us dread.”

Q one. It's a smaller version of what you will Eventually produce, but I mean, how is, is there, like, how does it, how do you build that? I mean, do you guys have a warehouse that you, you know, you get component parts and you start to assemble it, or is it built for you in another place, and are you directing them? Like, who builds a supersonic aircraft prototype?

A So we put it all together ourselves. Uh, one of the things that makes this business possible is that the, the aerospace supply chain is pretty mature. And yeah, just to put this in context, this is the first independently developed supersonic jet ever. Like previously it's been governance and military. So we were, we were first to say, Hey, we're going to go do this. And we designed the whole airplane and then to get it built, we teamed with suppliers, uh, to build components. And then we've Brought it all to our facility in Denver, where we put it together. And so we have this, you know, roughly 50,000 square foot building that's in a part office as part hangar. It was a supersonic jet factory. That's where we built the XB-I, where we put it together ourselves.

AI assessment note: “we teamed with suppliers, uh, to build components. And then we've Brought it all”

Q in, in a metal tube flying across the country or the world, and it is incredible. But that technology, I mean, jet travel hasn't changed, right? It hasn't changed in 50 years. It's basically been updated, made more efficient, and modernized, but it's the same basic principle. You know, there's a jet engine, you get in the plane, and then it takes off and you land, and it's, that's it.

A That's right. I mean, I find it very paradoxical, because on one hand, it is this amazing thing that it exists. I mean, we take off on the runway, accelerating to hundreds of miles per hour, climbing into the sky in near-perfect safety. We get to look down at that view that, you know, humans were not born to have, that, frankly, no bird can have, where we get to take in all the natural beauty of our world, as well as what, you know, we as humanity have created. And that singular vantage point provided by the airplane is this amazing A very visceral manifestation of what humanity has accomplished. And yet, on the other hand, like you said, it hasn't gotten any better in half a century. And in fact, it's gotten worse in a lot of ways. And so it, in my mind, it represents both the pinnacle of human achievement, but also this very weird thing where we've stopped and gone backwards.

AI assessment note: “That's right. I mean, I find it very paradoxical”

Q you do now. You decided to start an aviation company, and not just any company, but one that is going to revive supersonic flight, which, I mean, unless you're in the military, I think the last opportunity to fly faster than the speed of sound would have been on the Concorde, which was, like, put out of service in, in, in To start such an ambitious project like, like this?

A In a sort of roundabout way, I started out thinking I would convince myself to not start it. Um, I wanted to work on a new startup. Um, I realized that no matter what startup I've founded, uh, I would work really hard at it, and I would be sort of at my personal red line, regardless of what I'm doing, and so I wanted to pick something that would be very much the opposite of my first company, where I I would never get up in the morning and think, why in the world did I get into this? And so I kind of took a deep breath and said, okay, I got to look at the supersonic thing. And I thought I would get two weeks into the research and understand why nobody was doing it and then move on to something that was, you know, less pie in the sky. Uh, but instead what I found was a bunch of stale conventional wisdom. You know, there were zillions of, you know, articles and YouTube videos out there that purported to explain why airplanes didn't fly faster. And one of the themes was, you It was always a qualitative answer to a quantitative question. And so people would say things like, speed inherently has to cost more.

AI assessment note: “I started out thinking I would convince myself to not start it.”

Q All right, and now let's talk about the environmental side to it, because you're talking about using sustainable aviation fuels and Tell me how this is going to, because you have a plan to be carbon neutral. So how, how do you make this flight substantially better than, than existing commercial flights?

A Let's start with why. And it goes back to kind of what makes me get out of bed every morning. And I deeply believe that life happens in person, that more time spent in the same room with other people around the planet is not just good for business. It's not just good for, you know, being able to fall in love with somebody from any continent. It's going to be deeply transformative for cross-cultural understanding. You know, what happens when our kids grow up having spent Time with people from every continent, not just kind of read about them or watch, you know, YouTube videos or whatever. So like enabling more in-person interaction matters. And so I actually believe in a future where there's a lot more travel than there is today. Um, and that your speed and affordability and convenience are the big drivers of making it possible to travel more than we do today. So that brings us to sustainability. Cause there are, you know, there are real concerns that today aviation is about two, two and a half percent of global carbon emissions. But if we, you know, if we like 10 times the travel, like, wow, we took, we took a thing that we already needed to make smaller. We made it a lot bigger. And so it's not good enough, in my view, to just sort of optimize, focus on efficiency, kind of chip away a few percent at a time. We need to find a way to go all the way to carbon neutral so that, tha…

AI assessment note: “Okay, so how do you do that? Um, you know, it's not batteries”