April 17, 2025 • 41 mins
Blake Scholl is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake's problem is this: Can you build a commercial airplane that flies faster than the speed of sound – and that makes economic sense?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, the first airline ever, the first airline in the
history of the world, started in nineteen fourteen. It flew
passengers just a short hop across the Bay from Saint
Petersburg to Tampa, and its maximum speed was about sixty
miles an hour. By the nineteen sixties, just fifty years later,
(00:37):
passenger jets were flying ten times as fast as that,
and that increase in speed transformed the meaning of travel.
But then after the sixties, air travel just stopped getting faster.
A flight today takes about as long as a flight
took sixty years ago. We've gone from a ten x
improvement to no improvement at all. What happened? I'm Jacob
(01:07):
Bolgstein and this is What's Your Problem? The show where
I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
My guest today is Blake Shoal, the founder and CEO
of Boom Supersonic. Blake's problem is this, can you build
a commercial airplane that flies faster than the speed of
sound and that can turn a profit. Blake started the
(01:27):
company in twenty fourteen. Since then, he's secured pre orders
from japan Airlines, United and American Airlines, and he and
his team built a test plane that flew faster than
the speed of sound. Now they're working on a full
size commercial jet that Blake hopes will fly at mock
one point seven one point seven times the speed of sound,
(01:49):
or roughly twice as fast as commercial jets fly today.
To start, I asked Blake about the Concord. The Concord,
of course, is the only supersonic commercial passenger jet ever built,
ever flown with passengers on it. But the Concord stopped
flying more than twenty years ago, and today it's widely
viewed as a fail.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I think Concord killed supersonic flight and Apollo killed space exploration.
And yet at nineteen sixty nine, we had that first
moon landing and we had that first flight of Concord,
and at the time it looked like both of these
were harbingers of huge technological progress for humanity. And I
think if you stop somebody in the street nineteen sixty
(02:30):
nine and said, in twenty twenty five, what do you
think space exploration will be like? What do you think
flight will be like? No one would have predicted that
supersonic would be gone and moon landings will be gone.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Right, But that was the peak, it wasn't going to
get any better, and in fact, in terms of commercial
air air travel, it was going to get worse.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, everything got worse. Everything got worse. And I think
that Concord and Apollo are actually brethren. Both were technologically
extremely impressive, like what we did in the nineteen sixties
with rockets and airplanes, with slide rolls, drafting paper wind
tunnels is extremely totonal, logically impressive. Yet that the motivation
(03:12):
as what was killer and both Concored and Apollo were
Cold War era glory projects led by governments who are
competing for prestige.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Basically to show up the Soviet Union right, to show
the superiority of Western capitalism over Soviet communism.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yes, except the deep irony is we did at the
communist way, right.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
They were command and control projects that made no economic sense.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
They were command and control projects with no economic sense.
And it turns out when the West copied effectively the
communist approach for a little while we had technological superiority
because of the momentum that we had, but then we
destroyed ourselves. And so you know, Apollo didn't even pretend
to have anything commercial right, like it was operating on
(03:56):
it like a percentage of GDP, right, which is to say,
an incredibly large amount of money relative to the overall
economy went into getting.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
A very small number of people to the moon a
few times.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
That's that's right, yeah, And you know, and and the
knock on effect of that, you know, for the entire
airspace supply chain, it was basically, you know, land on
the mood at all costs, are at any cost, And
the result was the entire space side of the supply
chain got drunk on these incredibly lucrative contracts were costs
was no object, right, And then after the Cold War
(04:29):
it only got worse and we put all of the
like defense industrial base on corporate welfare and they got
fat and dumb. And then and then on the concord side,
it at least looked better because on paper, this was
a commercial airplane where people could buy tickets and airlines
would buy the airplanes, and you know, the airlines would
(04:50):
make money. But in reality it wasn't that. Here here's
a hundred seat airplane, by the way, one hundred like
actually pretty uncomfortable seats, and what you know, ejected for
inflation was a twenty thousand dollars ticket, and you just
can't find one hundred people that want to pay twenty
grand to go somewhere really fast. I mean this, this
is for royalty and rock stars, and especially with like
(05:13):
eighties and nineties kind of travel demand. The thing flew
half empty on the best route in the world, which
is New York to London. You know, if you want
to find people who want to pay a lot of
money to go fast, New York London, it's the best
city pair you could pick.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
And it doesn't work at all economically beyond that, and
so and then the world drew all the wrong conclusions,
you know, they concluded like supersonic flight had to be expensive,
it had to be cramped and uncomfortable, it had to
be noisy, it had to be uneconomic. And it's like, imagine,
imagine if we built like the Univac, you know, like
(05:47):
one of the first mainframe computers it which is like
the size of the room, and you have to be
like a bank to afford it. And then we stopped.
And then and then fifty years later people would swear
up and down that you could never possibly have a
pocket computer that every day people could have could afford
but yet you know, Concord is like the UNIVAC.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Uh huh, it's a design from the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Basically, that's right, that's right. And I say this with
like deep admiration for the incredible technical work that went
into it. A lot of people worked really hard. They
did amazing things. Now that we are you know now
that at Boom we have like built and flown a
supersonic jet, what we can see is they did really
really well given the tech was available in the nineteen sixties.
(06:34):
It's extremely impressive. You know, in Britain and France, people
are incredibly proud of Concord, and from a technological level,
like they deserve to be.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
So. So, okay, you were you were a software developer, right,
You weren't a plane guy. You weren't an aerospace engineer.
But like whatever, twelve years ago or something, you got
interested in this idea of supersonic air travel. Why aren't
there supersonic jets? So you have this question in your mind.
You go try and figure it out. What do you find?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
The internet was full of all this conventional wisdom about
why flights aren't faster. You can still find some of
these YouTube videos and they say, is like supersonic flight
is inherently more expensive. Passengers always buy the cheapest ticket,
so supersonic flight will never be commercially viable. And hang on, Well,
first off, that's a qualitative claim about a quantitative question,
(07:22):
and it doesn't even really completely make sense, right, Like,
the whole reason we have jet flights is because people
wanted to go faster than not propeller flights. The reason
people pay more for direct flights than connecting is they
want to save time and hassle. Time is the one
resource it's not ever renewable, So the idea that people
wouldn't pay for time savings didn't completely make sense.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Sure, plainly, at some margins, some people will pay some
amount more to go some amount faster. Right, exactly what
are all the margins?
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Yeah, exactly, You're totally right. It's a quantitative question, not
a qualitative one. And I think one of the lessons
of I think the Boom story is never accept a
qualitative answer to a quantitative question. Go run the math. Okay,
what is the actual cost of supersonic flight and what
is people's actual willingness to pay to go faster? So
it turned out it took two weeks to find the
key idea, which is I mean, today there is a
(08:13):
huge market for international business class. It's roughly twenty percent
of passengers and eighty percent of international airline profits on
business class, which is flying beds for people who so
hate that flights are along that they want to try
and sleep through them on the airplane. And so that
(08:33):
the original boom idea was, well, what if we could
make a supersonic seat with the economics of a flying
bed and business class, but on an airplane sufficiently fast
that you wouldn't need to sleep on it. You could
sleep at home instead. And so the first question I
asked is, well, how much would you have to beat
Concord by on just basic airplane efficiency in order to
(08:53):
create a seat with the economics of a flying bed.
And the answer was less than ten percent.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Uh huh, So like Concord was almost there by your reckoning.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, that's right. If you could improve on the gas
dileage basically of Concord by less than ten percent, that
you would tip over to this happy point where you
could have a supersonic seat with the economics of a
flatbed and business class and instead of being this like
stratospheric airplane that like flies mostly empty, a whole bunch
(09:26):
of modern demand would be there, the seats would fill
at a high rate, and the market would be gigantic.
And so that that took two weeks, and I was
like that, well, I don't know anything about airplanes, Like
all I had at that point was my pilot's license.
But ten percent versus nineteen sixties technology didn't seem crazy.
So at that point I was like, Okay, if I'm
(09:47):
going to go do this, I need to know a
heck of a lot more. And it sort of kicked
off what was really a twelve month journey for me
getting educated in aerospace.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
So when you're when you say ten percent, I mean,
is that sort of a marginal cost calculation like that?
That is that basically setting aside the fixed cost of
building the first plane and then build well of building
the first plane like that seems like the big unknown
in the math there is how much is it going
to cost to make plane number one? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (10:16):
I mean, so there are a few things that matter, right.
The first thing is if we could manage to produce
the airplane, would it be affordable for passengers, improfitable for airlines.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, that's kind of the first principles version is like,
let's just look at the physics and like thinks, right,
what we know, is it theoretically possible to build an
airplane that can fly enough people from New York to
London if they pay business class but sit upright at
supersonic speeds? Does the first principles math pencil up? That's
the math you're doing there, that's.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Right, with technology that's available, is it possible to build
an airplane that is affordable for passengers improfitable for airlines?
And it turned out the answer was yes.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Uh huh, And what is business class New York London?
What is that five grand? Something like?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Yeah, yeah about that? I mean, actually people routinely pay
more than five grand. The economics of our airplane. It
turns out thirty five hundred is break even. So at
five grand it's very profitable for airlines. And people pay
five grand by the way round trip routinely.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah. Okay, so you've got the kind of first principles
back of the envelope math that looks promising. So you
started the company, yes, and and that was what about
ten years ago, right?
Speaker 2 (11:30):
That was Yeah, it was about eleven years ago now
that I was making that spreadsheet, and you know, we'll turn.
We'll turn eleven on paper in September, because that was
when I got to the point where, Okay, I'm actually
really committed, it's time to go.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
I love that you called it boom leaning in like
embracing the haters in some in some fashion. Tell me
about the boom. Let's talk about supersonic booms.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, so my belief from day one was that the
boom would not be the blocker, and that that spreadsheet
basically said there is a gigantic market for supersonic flight
even if the boom is entirely unsolved, and you have
to fly subsnic over land and supersonic over water and
(12:20):
focus initially on on routes that were primarily transoceanic.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Just to be clear, in the US right now, commercial
flights are not allowed to fly supersonic, even if there
were a plane that could do it by regulation, right
because of the boom. Is that the starting point?
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah, So that that's where we started, because the premise was, hey,
it's pretty ambitious to start a brand new company from
scratch where your goals to build a supersonic airliners. So
let's not let's not push anything too far. Let's operate
only with existing technology and only with existing regulations, and
that would that would have some hope of making it
tractable for a startup to go do.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
So I want to talk a little bit about the
last ten years and building XB one, your test plane,
And I'm curious in particular sort of unsurprisingly it has
taken longer than you thought, which it would be shocking
if it didn't, rightly given the nature of the project.
But I'm curious, like, what were some of the things
(13:20):
you thought at the jump that turned out to be wrong,
you know, things where you went down the wrong path
and had to do something different.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah, So when we started out with XB one, we
gave it some really really aggressive goals. So we wanted
to go ten percent faster than Concord, We wanted to
do it with a passenger on board. We wanted to
not need an after burner. Like. We gave it all
these you know, fairly aggressive goals that were actually well
beyond what was really necessary. But we thought we didn't
(13:48):
appreciate all of the challenges that would would come with that,
and so we actually made the job a lot harder
than it needed to be. And the biggest thing that
we learned on XB one in this context is is pragmatism, like,
it doesn't need to go mock two point two. At
mock one point seven. Is it totally fine, minimum viable
(14:09):
supersonic chat and it's dramatically easier. So part of what
we learned from XP one is how to make the
overture airliner a lot easier to do, and it was
things like, if you want to go mock two point two,
the wings have to be really skinny, and if the
wings are really skinny, it's very hard to fly takeoff
and landing. And so we ended up spending two years
(14:31):
on low speed aerodynamics for takeoff and landing with a
wing that was really designed to go super super fast,
and then with a long, skinny airplane to go mock
two point two. It's really hard to fit the landing
gear in. And so we ended up I remember in
like twenty nineteen when we're like finishing the design of
(14:51):
this thing and kind of in the process of building it,
and so wait a minute, how did we end up
in a corner of the universe where we have to
design the most efficient shock absorber ever made like that
was a bizarre like and we literally we had to
design the most efficient shock absorber ever made for a
landing gear. Why, well, we given ourselves this like unnecessarily
challenging top speed goal, which it made the airplane log
(15:13):
and skinny, which made the landing gear need to fit
in a very tight space, which meant the shock absorbers
had to be really really good.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Uh huh, Well, why had you? I mean, it's easy
from this point of view to say, like why it
was foolish to try and go so fast? Which is
sort of what you're saying. But presumably when you picked
that speed, you picked it for a reason. Why did
you pick that speed?
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah, well we there was sort of a scientific reason,
and then there was probably an emotional reason. And the
scientific reason was we thought we were on the happy
side of a lot of market opportunity and on the
happy side of the step changes in technological challenge. Based
on what we knew from textbooks.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
The market opportunity means the faster you go, the bigger
the market.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I mean, that's right, Like, you know, if you speed
a flight up. I'll pick an extreme example. Let's let's
say you speed up New York London by like half
an hour. You actually make the flight worse. It's still
going to be scheduled as a red eye, right, but
you don't get as much sleep, that's right, So it's
actually it's actually worse.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And then presumably if you can go fast enough, you
can like fly the same crew to London and back
without having to change the crew, and your economics get
better or something bingo.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
That's one of the ways the economics in this work
when you go faster. Lots of things actually get cheaper.
You need less crews, you don't you don't spend money
putting people up in Marriotts like that. We call that
the speed dividend. There's a lot of cost that comes
down with speed.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Basically, the cost the benefits of going two point two
are the same, but the cost of the marginal cost
of going that much faster was higher than you thought.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
That's that's right. Like and fuel burn. You know, once
we committed to meeting the same most stringent noise rules
that apply to subsonic airplanes that actually puts a big
penalty on high speed, and we found that it mocked
two point two. We'll be burning forty percent more fuel
than at one point seven, and yet and what that
meant in flight times was actually just a fifteen minute difference.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
So it made no sense, and we got more pragmatic.
And the other thing that, you know, it was the
kind of the emotional piece of this was, you know,
I sort of booted up, you know, pounding my fist
on the table and saying, fifty years later, we should
do better than concords, that we should be faster, and
d da DA and all these other things. Yeah, And
the reality was that wasn't actually necessary. What we needed
(17:25):
was a pragmatic starting point that we could then continue
to iterate and innovate, you know. And overture is not
the be all end all of supersonic airplanes. It's the
version one. And we can do a version one point one,
and we can do a version two. And the thing
that matters is ensure ensuring that version one is sufficiently
(17:46):
pragmatic that we can we can birth it. Yeah. So,
how fast did concord go? Two point zero? Actually two
point oh two actually is the precise number.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
And you've you've made your piece with building a first
plane that goes slower than the Concord.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I don't know. I guess officially we've made our piece
with it not in your heart on the spread, not
in my heart like because you know, mock one point
seven just doesn't roll off the tongue like mock two.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
No two, Mock two sounds way cooler.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Mock two sounds way cooler, you know, And for a while,
by license, TAG said mock two point two, and I
learned that I should really never put a technical design
parameter on a vanity plate. That was a That was
a That was a bad decision because it made it hard.
It made it harder for me to admit the difficult
truth when every.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Day when you went out and thought your car, you
were getting mocked by your failure in relatively.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yeah, m A h E D yes, oh very good,
very good.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
That should be your new vanity plate to keep you humble.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
No, now it just says supersonic because so long as
I bust mock one, I'm good.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Still to come on the show. How much more time
and money will it take to build a supersonic plane
that can carry paying passengers? Also, what might go wrong?
So you're building the airliner, you're also sort of building
(19:16):
the jets, right, I know, you were working with Rolls
Royce and then which makes a lot of jets for
airplanes now, and then you stopped working with Rolls Royce.
Tell me, tell me about what you've got to do,
Like what's the next big step in terms of the
airplane the jets, Like what do you got to do next?
And when do you?
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, so step one, scalop those jet engines. Step two,
scalop the airplanes. Step three, put it all together, prove
to ourselves and to our regulator in the public that
it's safe, and then go carry passengers. And so you
mentioned you mentioned the whole jet engine thing. Yeah, we
actually when I started, our plan was to go build
(19:58):
our own jet engines, just the same way SpaceX builds
their own engines. And then we got, uh distracted. I
let us get distracted by this sort of sexy notion
that would be able to take Rolls Race engine and
just modify it working with Rolls Royce, and that turned
out to be just a terrible idea.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Huh. Most companies that build airplanes don't build their own jets. Right,
It's not a crazy idea to say we're going to
build airplanes and we're going to let people who are
really good at building jets, build the jets.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Yeah. So if you look back far enough in time,
it turned out Boeing, United Airlines, and Pratt and Whitney
the jet engine company, were actually all the same company.
H they were all they were vertically integrated from the
airline through to the jet engine or I guess back
that it wasn't jet engines, it was Piston engines. But
I think that was actually the national state of the industry.
(20:50):
And they got broken apart, not because they wanted to.
But there was an airmail scandal in the early nineteen thirties,
the outcome of which was the government split them up. Oh.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Interesting, an airmail scandal. You don't hear about so many
airmail scandals there.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
There was the airmail scandal of nineteen thirty two, where
what was going on was basically the US government was
subsidizing airmail because they wanted to get off the ground.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
So to speak.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, and uh, it's it's so the the retail price
of airmail was less than the airlines were getting paid. Yeah. Uh,
And so the airlines found they could make more money
by going to the post office and mailing bricks. Oh.
I love that that's and so the you know, and
that the Postmaster General was corrupt, like everybody was on
(21:34):
the take. It was nasty. And then and then the
the industry, everybody was kind of at fault here, and
the industry took the blame.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah, in yours telling is why jets companies that make
jets are different than the companies that make the airplanes
they go on. It's a bull claim. Yeah, well, yeah,
and I think there is.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
You know, industries tend to go through cycles where vertical
integration is either a good strategy or a bad strategy.
And there's a there's a great book on this called
The Innovators Solution, But they talk about under what circumstances
vertical integration is smart versus working with suppliers.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
What was it Jim Barksdale line in the nineties, there's
two businesses, bundling and unbundling. It's like that.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
I hadn't heard that, but I think it's kind of true,
and it's it's contextual. Yeah, And the long story short,
when when the current state of the art technology is
good enough for the in purpose, uh you, unbundling and
not vertical integration tends to make sense when the when
the components need to advance and the integration and the
(22:34):
final product is important, then vertical integration really matters. And
so I think they're kind of two threads of the story.
One is, it's probably not a good idea for a
brand new startup to put all of its eggs in
the basket of a like one hundred year old company
that like is a risk averse, doesn't want to make changes,
isn't fast moving, maybe you know, it isn't sure what
it really wants to be, right, so.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
You're putting all of your eggs in your own basket,
which is strong, certainly. So uh so, what like what's
the next mile post you got to hit? Like, what's
the big, big next hurdle.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
We'll find we'll find out around the end of this
year whether our jet engine's working. We're building the first
one right now, and we'll see if it works. And
so this this will be a very very large jet
engine core. You know, like it'll be roughly four feet
in diameter. This is not a small piece of hardware.
You weigh well over ten thousand pounds. This is a
very complex piece of turbomachinery. And we'll we'll we'll fire
(23:33):
it up and we'll we'll see what's we'll see what's working,
and then next next year. So that's the core of
the engine, and a year later our goal is to
have a you know, a full up engine, not just
the core, but the fan and the what's called the
low pressure system as well. Okay, but the core, the
core is actually the really hard part. So we're starting.
We're starting with the hardest part, and.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Then in parallel you're building the plane or designing the plane.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Yeah, we're actually done designing the plane. Okay, So we
we froze, froze the design of the overture I think
a week after XB one's final flight. Okay, And so
that means, you know, I proverbally broke the engineer's pencils.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
So just now, just in the last several weeks, you
froze the design of the plane. You said, this is it,
this is the plane we're going to build. This is
this is it?
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Right? You know, like it's it's very easy for ambitious
engineers to want to optimize forever. Sure, and we said
this is good enough for version one. It's time to
it's time to stop tweaking the design and start doing
the detailed engineering so we can start building this thing,
tell me about what it's going to look like. So, Uh,
supersonic jets fit in some ways sculpted by physics. They're
(24:46):
going to be long and skinny, They're going to have
a triangular kind of delta wing. So in a certain sense,
overture is going to need to look concord like because
physics says it needs to look concord like.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
But the details are the details that come so far forward. Uh.
One of the one of the big aerodynamic advances versus
concord is something called area ruling, which basically said the
fuselage needs to be big in the front and small
in the back. And uh. And so overture looks it
looks a little bit like a concord in a seven
forty seven had a love child. Okay, so it's it's
(25:20):
not literally double deck in the front, but it's bigger
in the front and it's skinnier in the back. And
this leads for a very interesting canvas. And I can't
tell you yet what exactly it's like at the front
of the airplane, because we've got we've got something we
invented that I'm incredibly excited about. That we haven't revealed yet,
but I think it's gonna be. I think it's gonna
be a big wow factor. People look at them, say,
(25:42):
wait a minute, you got that to fit in a
skinny supersonic chat an elephant?
Speaker 1 (25:47):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Uh? It is some It is something that will be
delightful for passengers.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
A waterfall. I'll stop guessing, but I'm curious.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
So it's I'll tell you right now. It's not a
hot tub.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Okay, cold plunge. Cold plunge is the new hot tub.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
That's right. There's a cold plunge in the front of
the air airplane and the hot tub of the back
of the airplane. You can actually have both.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
So what what do you got to do to get
through the very non trivial regulatory hurdles to get from
drawing up a plane into a plane that the FAA
and analogous regulators say yes, this can fly with commercial passengers.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Well, we just have to prove it safe.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
I mean, there's a lot in that.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Just there is a lot of there's a lot of
that just I mean that this will be one of
the most complex safety critical machines ever built. But all
of the rules are published, so we know exactly what
we have to go do, and the certification is just
proving that we did it. And so that that will
involve about five thousand hours of flight testing and many
(27:00):
more hours of ground testing. And so just to give
you a concrete sense of what this is like on
the ground, you know, we will we will build a
a kind of a flightless bird, you know, a copy
of the airplane that will never fly, and will load
up the wings with hydraulic presses and we'll bend them
until they break. It will make sure that they don't
(27:21):
break before they're supposed to. Basically, you have to prove
that they can take one point five times the load
they will ever see under the most extreme case before failing.
You know, that's one example. You do in the ground,
and you and then the air you fly it through
all the most extreme flight conditions. You make sure it
can handle bad weather. You can make sure that it
(27:42):
flies through, you know, a snowstorm, the deicne can keep
up with the icing. You shoot a chicken at the
jet engines and make sure that when you know, if
you get a bird strike, that either the engine doesn't
fail or it fails in a non catastrophic way. That's
actually one of the most difficult tests.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Uh. So okay, so you got to do all these things.
What is your current target date for when I can
buy a ticket?
Speaker 2 (28:11):
About four years, So our goal is to be ready
for passengers by the end of twenty twenty nine, so
about four four and a half to five years from
where we are today.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Like, playing XP one took longer than you thought, but
you're still assuming overture is not going to take longer
than you thought setting them in parallel.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
I mean it's it's mean, it's totally possible overture will
be late. Yeah, I mean, the way these things go,
it seems likely. Again, this is from ignorance, just looking
at the nature of projects in many different companies, in
many different settings. Like, plainly, what you're trying to do
is very hard, and plainly you're only doing it because
you have some amount of optimism which is required to
do the job right. And so just from from that
(28:50):
very small amount of data and for like, yeah, I mean,
you're probably not gonna overestimate that long it will take it. Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah,
it is. It is highly unlikely we will get done
sooner than we're charge. You're not gonna be done early, right, yes,
you know. But the one of one of the lessons
I've learned along the way is is kind of how
to think about schedules. And uh, I think schedules are
(29:11):
actually misnamed because because nothing ever goes according to plan,
and and what what, it's not a schedule, it's actually
a work plan. And the point of the work plan
is to allow the team to respond intelligently the moment
something doesn't go according to plan, which is basically every day.
And so what we do is we build what's called
(29:33):
a success based schedule, meaning we don't pad it to
assume that there's going to be failures. Uh, we kind
of we kind of assume, ever, everything is going to
go well, and we assume that we'll be able to
do things, you know, slightly more efficiently than you know
than like a Boeing Wood And so there's some optimism
built into it, and and and many times we realize
(29:54):
that optimism and and and and when we find oops,
there's something we didn't know about or this was harder
than we expected, then we react to it in the
most efficient way possible. And uh, and that that's what
actually results in the fastest possible deliver uh, because nothing,
nothing ever gets done faster than the amount of time
you give it. Right, But we'll just take all the
(30:15):
time there, that's right, because they want to be the
best job possible, exactly, And the kind of people who
come join a supertonic jet startup are incredibly ambitious and
have very very high standards. So you know, you know,
if if I didn't say, the design is frozen and that's.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
It's a hard trade off, right, It's a hard trade
off because like there's a million hard optimization problems that
people are working on, and there's the kind of meta
optimization problem of how long do you spend on each.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Thing that's that's right? That's right, And there's like you know,
when when do you declare good enough?
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Right? And that was I mean there are so many
stories of you know, really, I think part of my
role is helped the team decide when's good enough and
you know, and what things have to be in one
point zero versus what things we can save for one
point one, and having good judgment about that makes it
(31:04):
much easier to actually ship one point h Right.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
You don't need to build the most perfect supersonic jet ever.
You just need to build on that is safe and reliable.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
That's that's right.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
So let's talk about money. How much have you raised
and how much do you need to get the first
one point zero overture flying with ye.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
So, a thing I've come to believe is that one
of the most important things in pulling this off is
being incredibly efficient with capital. We've raised about six hundred
million dollars, We've spent less than five hundred million dollars,
and with that we built and flew a supersonic jet
with a human on board. We designed an airliner, we
(31:48):
designed an engine, and we did all the other things
that started a pass to do over a decade. So
what does that mean going forward? We need less than
a billion dollars of investor funding from where we are
now to finish.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
When you say investor funding, like, are you assuming more
pre orders or you think for less than a billion
dollars you can actually or less a billion dollars more
you can actually build a build a plane that's gonna
take passengers across the ocean.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah. Part of it is being very smart with capital leverage.
You know, you know, so for example, uh, you know,
we will be able to go use debt to buy
capital equipment, right, So, like a lot of production equipment
will be financed without requiring you know, equity investment from investors, huh.
And we've we've already been able to do some of that.
So there's a lot smart financial engineering as part of
(32:39):
the solution. The other part of the solution is being
incredibly efficient in execution. You know. I still tell that
by the way that this is in some ways the
most difficult thing.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Spending the money intelligently basically.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah, Well, the way I frame it for our team internally,
and we're just very open about this. I say, our
single biggest risk as a company is we don't get
done for an obtainable amount of money.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Yeah, well, because the physics. We've known the physics for
whatever fifty years or more. Right, Like, plainly one can
build a supersonic jet. But building it cheaply enough in
your case to survive, right and then in the long
run to have it be commercially viable is the hard part, right.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Yeah, So one half of this is how do we
execute really efficiently. How do we have a small team
of world class engineers with incredibly good software tools, and
we're using a lot of software, and we're using some
ai uh such that one engineer can do the work
of ten, and that allows us to be really efficient
with our money. And we are just absolutely miserly about
(33:38):
money on one hand. On the other hand, we need
to have a capital structure that's very good for investors
and that leverages non diluted financing sources, be it customer
prepayments or plant and equipment debt, or public support to
kind of lever up those investor dollars to make the
whole thing economically viable.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
What's public support mean?
Speaker 2 (34:00):
So we're we had a fantastic package that we got
from the state of North Carolina that funded the superfactory
and Greensboro, where the state of North Carolina so wanted
Boom to come and build the airplane there that just
as they welcomed the Right Brothers one hundred years ago,
they welcomed us, and and that that basically paid for
(34:22):
the entire site prep and build out of the superfactory.
So that way, and we were incredibly grateful for that,
and I, you know, I want to make sure we
pay it forward in North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
I've heard you say on an interview you did in
the last year or so that you underestimated how hard
it was going to be to build the company to
build a supersonic jet. And I'm curious, if you look
forward now to going from here to you know, having
passengers on a jet, do you think you're underestimating how
hard that's going to be.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
I am sure there are problems that we will have
that I don't know about today.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Yeah, that's a different I mean, it's a weird question
because if you're underestimating it, then you would revise your estimation.
It's like why is the stock market wrong?
Speaker 2 (35:07):
But like, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
I mean maybe you have to underestimate it, Like I
don't know. You know, people always sy if I knew
how hard it was going to be, I wouldn't have
done it.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
And I don't know if they really mean that, but
I think some people mean it and it's really and
I find that really sad, and I don't I don't
mean that in a sarcastic way. I mean like, actually,
like boy, like this startup stuff is so hard. It
just kills me that someone will put in all of
the effort required to birth a new company and a
new product from scratch, and it is really hard. It's
(35:37):
like chewing on glass, and then to do it for
something they're like, wow, I wish I hadn't, Like that
is really sad. And by the way, I have my
chewing on glass days for sure, and I'm sure I'll
have more. And the worst of it, the worst of
it is when I look in the mirror and I'm
not sure whether I'm up for the job. Yeah, I mean,
I think, like boys, someone better than me could have
(35:57):
done this, But I don't know if I can, you know,
Or I look at a problem we have and it's
not you know, and it's it's very much my responsibility
and my error. Like those are the hardest days, and
and yet I care so darn much about this that
that it's worth that personal hell to give it everything
(36:19):
I've got, and I don't. I don't regret it, even
the days where I'm like, boy, I don't know whether
we're going to get through this. And We've had a
bunch of those days, and I think I'd be foolish
to think that we won't have them again.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Why why is supersonic flight your thing? Like, why is
that what you have devoted your professional life to?
Speaker 2 (36:39):
One of the principles I have for myself now is
I only want to work on things that might not
happen if I didn't work on them. And if the
world followed that, we'd have a lot less photo sharing
apps and fewer AI companies. But maybe things like traffic
would be solved, huh. And you know, for me specifically
with supersonic flight, my kids had a grandfather who lived
(37:00):
in Hong Kong, you know, eighteen hours from us in
Denver that they got to meet maybe three or four
times their entire life, and so they never got to
know him. And I grew up with my grandfather ninety
minutes away, and I got to spend every weekend with him,
and I'm a different person because of that. And so
I've had a lot of personal experiences that basically say, hey,
speed's not about saving time or being really cool, although
(37:22):
it is about saving time and being really cool. Yeah,
speed is about what you choose to do or not do,
And there are all kinds of things in the world
that don't happen because flights are too long.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Okay,
let's finish with the lightning ground and then before you
started the company. You made a list of things you
wanted to work on, and you sort of rank ordered
(37:58):
them and how happy it would make you to work
on them. Obviously supersonic jet was one, but what was two?
It fell off really quickly. It's a distant second.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
I had a rental car company idea. Huh, that would
be like a like your rental car picks you up
like an uber, then you get in and drive it
like it's not I would love that product. I don't
think it's a great business idea. What was the scariest
part of getting your pilot's license. Oh, I remember that
very first moment of takeoff and what turned out to
(38:31):
be Larry Elson's old airplane, And there was this moment
of like, holy crap, I'm scared because I got my
life in my own hands.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Yeah, it's like when you learn to drive a car.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
I remember that.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
When I learned to drive a car, is like I
could just swerve into the oncoming lane right now, right.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
It felt really fragile, like I've got my life in
my own hands. But then there was the other side
of that same coin, which is this is really cool,
I've got my life in my own hands.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Uh, Huh. What was the scariest part of working with
Jeff Bezos? Uh.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Jeff was great to work with and I was incredibly
privileged in my early twenties. I got to work on
something he cared about. Uh uh. And Jeff one of
one of the one of the best things about Jeff
is he very fairly calls the balls and the strikes
and he and he rewards honesty and accountability. So I
(39:23):
remember at one point, this is actually my very first
time presenting to him, and it's the presentations overall, going well,
this is before he ban PowerPoint and I get to
some slide and he says, well, why didn't you do X?
And X was actually a pretty good idea, And I said, well,
we didn't think of that and and and he starts
(39:44):
laughing that like famous big Jeff Bezos laugh And he says,
that's a great answer. It's true all the time, but
no one will ever say it. He understands that anybody
sufficiently ambitious is going to make mistakes, and what matters
is to own him and learn from him. And he
always rewarded that. And that's that's something I try to
emulate myself as a as a leader.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Okay, briefly, let's do a few overrated or underrated questions
for jet travel checking luggage overrated or underrated?
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Underrated. The way this should work is you take your
Uber to the airport, someone grabs your bag from the trunk.
You go through the airport only with what you actually
want with you on the airplane. When you arrive on
the other side, you go to your Uber and your
check bag is already in your trunk.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
That's a compelling dream. Rated or underrated.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
The window seat, I think it's highly rated and underrated.
Like I am glued to that window.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
I love highly rated but still underrated things. So I
feel about Bob Dylan neck pillows overrated or underrated.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
It's not for me under overrated.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Same. Blake Schole is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic.
Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Cheng. It was
edited by Lyddy jeen Kott and engineered by Sarah Brugeer.
You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot f M.
(41:10):
I'm Jacob Oldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Popula
Pushkin, the first airline ever, the first airline in the
history of the world, started in nineteen fourteen. It flew
passengers just a short hop across the Bay from Saint
Petersburg to Tampa, and its maximum speed was about sixty
miles an hour. By the nineteen sixties, just fifty years later,
(00:37):
passenger jets were flying ten times as fast as that,
and that increase in speed transformed the meaning of travel.
But then after the sixties, air travel just stopped getting faster.
A flight today takes about as long as a flight
took sixty years ago. We've gone from a ten x
improvement to no improvement at all. What happened? I'm Jacob
(01:07):
Bolgstein and this is What's Your Problem? The show where
I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
My guest today is Blake Shoal, the founder and CEO
of Boom Supersonic. Blake's problem is this, can you build
a commercial airplane that flies faster than the speed of
sound and that can turn a profit. Blake started the
(01:27):
company in twenty fourteen. Since then, he's secured pre orders
from japan Airlines, United and American Airlines, and he and
his team built a test plane that flew faster than
the speed of sound. Now they're working on a full
size commercial jet that Blake hopes will fly at mock
one point seven one point seven times the speed of sound,
(01:49):
or roughly twice as fast as commercial jets fly today.
To start, I asked Blake about the Concord. The Concord,
of course, is the only supersonic commercial passenger jet ever built,
ever flown with passengers on it. But the Concord stopped
flying more than twenty years ago, and today it's widely
viewed as a fail.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I think Concord killed supersonic flight and Apollo killed space exploration.
And yet at nineteen sixty nine, we had that first
moon landing and we had that first flight of Concord,
and at the time it looked like both of these
were harbingers of huge technological progress for humanity. And I
think if you stop somebody in the street nineteen sixty
(02:30):
nine and said, in twenty twenty five, what do you
think space exploration will be like? What do you think
flight will be like? No one would have predicted that
supersonic would be gone and moon landings will be gone.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Right, But that was the peak, it wasn't going to
get any better, and in fact, in terms of commercial
air air travel, it was going to get worse.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, everything got worse. Everything got worse. And I think
that Concord and Apollo are actually brethren. Both were technologically
extremely impressive, like what we did in the nineteen sixties
with rockets and airplanes, with slide rolls, drafting paper wind
tunnels is extremely totonal, logically impressive. Yet that the motivation
(03:12):
as what was killer and both Concored and Apollo were
Cold War era glory projects led by governments who are
competing for prestige.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Basically to show up the Soviet Union right, to show
the superiority of Western capitalism over Soviet communism.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yes, except the deep irony is we did at the
communist way, right.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
They were command and control projects that made no economic sense.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
They were command and control projects with no economic sense.
And it turns out when the West copied effectively the
communist approach for a little while we had technological superiority
because of the momentum that we had, but then we
destroyed ourselves. And so you know, Apollo didn't even pretend
to have anything commercial right, like it was operating on
(03:56):
it like a percentage of GDP, right, which is to say,
an incredibly large amount of money relative to the overall
economy went into getting.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
A very small number of people to the moon a
few times.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
That's that's right, yeah, And you know, and and the
knock on effect of that, you know, for the entire
airspace supply chain, it was basically, you know, land on
the mood at all costs, are at any cost, And
the result was the entire space side of the supply
chain got drunk on these incredibly lucrative contracts were costs
was no object, right, And then after the Cold War
(04:29):
it only got worse and we put all of the
like defense industrial base on corporate welfare and they got
fat and dumb. And then and then on the concord side,
it at least looked better because on paper, this was
a commercial airplane where people could buy tickets and airlines
would buy the airplanes, and you know, the airlines would
(04:50):
make money. But in reality it wasn't that. Here here's
a hundred seat airplane, by the way, one hundred like
actually pretty uncomfortable seats, and what you know, ejected for
inflation was a twenty thousand dollars ticket, and you just
can't find one hundred people that want to pay twenty
grand to go somewhere really fast. I mean this, this
is for royalty and rock stars, and especially with like
(05:13):
eighties and nineties kind of travel demand. The thing flew
half empty on the best route in the world, which
is New York to London. You know, if you want
to find people who want to pay a lot of
money to go fast, New York London, it's the best
city pair you could pick.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
And it doesn't work at all economically beyond that, and
so and then the world drew all the wrong conclusions,
you know, they concluded like supersonic flight had to be expensive,
it had to be cramped and uncomfortable, it had to
be noisy, it had to be uneconomic. And it's like, imagine,
imagine if we built like the Univac, you know, like
(05:47):
one of the first mainframe computers it which is like
the size of the room, and you have to be
like a bank to afford it. And then we stopped.
And then and then fifty years later people would swear
up and down that you could never possibly have a
pocket computer that every day people could have could afford
but yet you know, Concord is like the UNIVAC.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Uh huh, it's a design from the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
Basically, that's right, that's right. And I say this with
like deep admiration for the incredible technical work that went
into it. A lot of people worked really hard. They
did amazing things. Now that we are you know now
that at Boom we have like built and flown a
supersonic jet, what we can see is they did really
really well given the tech was available in the nineteen sixties.
(06:34):
It's extremely impressive. You know, in Britain and France, people
are incredibly proud of Concord, and from a technological level,
like they deserve to be.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
So. So, okay, you were you were a software developer, right,
You weren't a plane guy. You weren't an aerospace engineer.
But like whatever, twelve years ago or something, you got
interested in this idea of supersonic air travel. Why aren't
there supersonic jets? So you have this question in your mind.
You go try and figure it out. What do you find?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
The internet was full of all this conventional wisdom about
why flights aren't faster. You can still find some of
these YouTube videos and they say, is like supersonic flight
is inherently more expensive. Passengers always buy the cheapest ticket,
so supersonic flight will never be commercially viable. And hang on, Well,
first off, that's a qualitative claim about a quantitative question,
(07:22):
and it doesn't even really completely make sense, right, Like,
the whole reason we have jet flights is because people
wanted to go faster than not propeller flights. The reason
people pay more for direct flights than connecting is they
want to save time and hassle. Time is the one
resource it's not ever renewable, So the idea that people
wouldn't pay for time savings didn't completely make sense.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Sure, plainly, at some margins, some people will pay some
amount more to go some amount faster. Right, exactly what
are all the margins?
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Yeah, exactly, You're totally right. It's a quantitative question, not
a qualitative one. And I think one of the lessons
of I think the Boom story is never accept a
qualitative answer to a quantitative question. Go run the math. Okay,
what is the actual cost of supersonic flight and what
is people's actual willingness to pay to go faster? So
it turned out it took two weeks to find the
key idea, which is I mean, today there is a
(08:13):
huge market for international business class. It's roughly twenty percent
of passengers and eighty percent of international airline profits on
business class, which is flying beds for people who so
hate that flights are along that they want to try
and sleep through them on the airplane. And so that
(08:33):
the original boom idea was, well, what if we could
make a supersonic seat with the economics of a flying
bed and business class, but on an airplane sufficiently fast
that you wouldn't need to sleep on it. You could
sleep at home instead. And so the first question I
asked is, well, how much would you have to beat
Concord by on just basic airplane efficiency in order to
(08:53):
create a seat with the economics of a flying bed.
And the answer was less than ten percent.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Uh huh, So like Concord was almost there by your reckoning.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, that's right. If you could improve on the gas
dileage basically of Concord by less than ten percent, that
you would tip over to this happy point where you
could have a supersonic seat with the economics of a
flatbed and business class and instead of being this like
stratospheric airplane that like flies mostly empty, a whole bunch
(09:26):
of modern demand would be there, the seats would fill
at a high rate, and the market would be gigantic.
And so that that took two weeks, and I was
like that, well, I don't know anything about airplanes, Like
all I had at that point was my pilot's license.
But ten percent versus nineteen sixties technology didn't seem crazy.
So at that point I was like, Okay, if I'm
(09:47):
going to go do this, I need to know a
heck of a lot more. And it sort of kicked
off what was really a twelve month journey for me
getting educated in aerospace.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
So when you're when you say ten percent, I mean,
is that sort of a marginal cost calculation like that?
That is that basically setting aside the fixed cost of
building the first plane and then build well of building
the first plane like that seems like the big unknown
in the math there is how much is it going
to cost to make plane number one? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (10:16):
I mean, so there are a few things that matter, right.
The first thing is if we could manage to produce
the airplane, would it be affordable for passengers, improfitable for airlines.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, that's kind of the first principles version is like,
let's just look at the physics and like thinks, right,
what we know, is it theoretically possible to build an
airplane that can fly enough people from New York to
London if they pay business class but sit upright at
supersonic speeds? Does the first principles math pencil up? That's
the math you're doing there, that's.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Right, with technology that's available, is it possible to build
an airplane that is affordable for passengers improfitable for airlines?
And it turned out the answer was yes.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Uh huh, And what is business class New York London?
What is that five grand? Something like?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Yeah, yeah about that? I mean, actually people routinely pay
more than five grand. The economics of our airplane. It
turns out thirty five hundred is break even. So at
five grand it's very profitable for airlines. And people pay
five grand by the way round trip routinely.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah. Okay, so you've got the kind of first principles
back of the envelope math that looks promising. So you
started the company, yes, and and that was what about
ten years ago, right?
Speaker 2 (11:30):
That was Yeah, it was about eleven years ago now
that I was making that spreadsheet, and you know, we'll turn.
We'll turn eleven on paper in September, because that was
when I got to the point where, Okay, I'm actually
really committed, it's time to go.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
I love that you called it boom leaning in like
embracing the haters in some in some fashion. Tell me
about the boom. Let's talk about supersonic booms.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, so my belief from day one was that the
boom would not be the blocker, and that that spreadsheet
basically said there is a gigantic market for supersonic flight
even if the boom is entirely unsolved, and you have
to fly subsnic over land and supersonic over water and
(12:20):
focus initially on on routes that were primarily transoceanic.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Just to be clear, in the US right now, commercial
flights are not allowed to fly supersonic, even if there
were a plane that could do it by regulation, right
because of the boom. Is that the starting point?
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah, So that that's where we started, because the premise was, hey,
it's pretty ambitious to start a brand new company from
scratch where your goals to build a supersonic airliners. So
let's not let's not push anything too far. Let's operate
only with existing technology and only with existing regulations, and
that would that would have some hope of making it
tractable for a startup to go do.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
So I want to talk a little bit about the
last ten years and building XB one, your test plane,
And I'm curious in particular sort of unsurprisingly it has
taken longer than you thought, which it would be shocking
if it didn't, rightly given the nature of the project.
But I'm curious, like, what were some of the things
(13:20):
you thought at the jump that turned out to be wrong,
you know, things where you went down the wrong path
and had to do something different.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah, So when we started out with XB one, we
gave it some really really aggressive goals. So we wanted
to go ten percent faster than Concord, We wanted to
do it with a passenger on board. We wanted to
not need an after burner. Like. We gave it all
these you know, fairly aggressive goals that were actually well
beyond what was really necessary. But we thought we didn't
(13:48):
appreciate all of the challenges that would would come with that,
and so we actually made the job a lot harder
than it needed to be. And the biggest thing that
we learned on XB one in this context is is pragmatism, like,
it doesn't need to go mock two point two. At
mock one point seven. Is it totally fine, minimum viable
(14:09):
supersonic chat and it's dramatically easier. So part of what
we learned from XP one is how to make the
overture airliner a lot easier to do, and it was
things like, if you want to go mock two point two,
the wings have to be really skinny, and if the
wings are really skinny, it's very hard to fly takeoff
and landing. And so we ended up spending two years
(14:31):
on low speed aerodynamics for takeoff and landing with a
wing that was really designed to go super super fast,
and then with a long, skinny airplane to go mock
two point two. It's really hard to fit the landing
gear in. And so we ended up I remember in
like twenty nineteen when we're like finishing the design of
(14:51):
this thing and kind of in the process of building it,
and so wait a minute, how did we end up
in a corner of the universe where we have to
design the most efficient shock absorber ever made like that
was a bizarre like and we literally we had to
design the most efficient shock absorber ever made for a
landing gear. Why, well, we given ourselves this like unnecessarily
challenging top speed goal, which it made the airplane log
(15:13):
and skinny, which made the landing gear need to fit
in a very tight space, which meant the shock absorbers
had to be really really good.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Uh huh, Well, why had you? I mean, it's easy
from this point of view to say, like why it
was foolish to try and go so fast? Which is
sort of what you're saying. But presumably when you picked
that speed, you picked it for a reason. Why did
you pick that speed?
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah, well we there was sort of a scientific reason,
and then there was probably an emotional reason. And the
scientific reason was we thought we were on the happy
side of a lot of market opportunity and on the
happy side of the step changes in technological challenge. Based
on what we knew from textbooks.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
The market opportunity means the faster you go, the bigger
the market.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I mean, that's right, Like, you know, if you speed
a flight up. I'll pick an extreme example. Let's let's
say you speed up New York London by like half
an hour. You actually make the flight worse. It's still
going to be scheduled as a red eye, right, but
you don't get as much sleep, that's right, So it's
actually it's actually worse.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And then presumably if you can go fast enough, you
can like fly the same crew to London and back
without having to change the crew, and your economics get
better or something bingo.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
That's one of the ways the economics in this work
when you go faster. Lots of things actually get cheaper.
You need less crews, you don't you don't spend money
putting people up in Marriotts like that. We call that
the speed dividend. There's a lot of cost that comes
down with speed.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Basically, the cost the benefits of going two point two
are the same, but the cost of the marginal cost
of going that much faster was higher than you thought.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
That's that's right. Like and fuel burn. You know, once
we committed to meeting the same most stringent noise rules
that apply to subsonic airplanes that actually puts a big
penalty on high speed, and we found that it mocked
two point two. We'll be burning forty percent more fuel
than at one point seven, and yet and what that
meant in flight times was actually just a fifteen minute difference.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
So it made no sense, and we got more pragmatic.
And the other thing that, you know, it was the
kind of the emotional piece of this was, you know,
I sort of booted up, you know, pounding my fist
on the table and saying, fifty years later, we should
do better than concords, that we should be faster, and
d da DA and all these other things. Yeah, And
the reality was that wasn't actually necessary. What we needed
(17:25):
was a pragmatic starting point that we could then continue
to iterate and innovate, you know. And overture is not
the be all end all of supersonic airplanes. It's the
version one. And we can do a version one point one,
and we can do a version two. And the thing
that matters is ensure ensuring that version one is sufficiently
(17:46):
pragmatic that we can we can birth it. Yeah. So,
how fast did concord go? Two point zero? Actually two
point oh two actually is the precise number.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
And you've you've made your piece with building a first
plane that goes slower than the Concord.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
I don't know. I guess officially we've made our piece
with it not in your heart on the spread, not
in my heart like because you know, mock one point
seven just doesn't roll off the tongue like mock two.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
No two, Mock two sounds way cooler.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Mock two sounds way cooler, you know, And for a while,
by license, TAG said mock two point two, and I
learned that I should really never put a technical design
parameter on a vanity plate. That was a That was
a That was a bad decision because it made it hard.
It made it harder for me to admit the difficult
truth when every.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Day when you went out and thought your car, you
were getting mocked by your failure in relatively.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yeah, m A h E D yes, oh very good,
very good.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
That should be your new vanity plate to keep you humble.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
No, now it just says supersonic because so long as
I bust mock one, I'm good.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Still to come on the show. How much more time
and money will it take to build a supersonic plane
that can carry paying passengers? Also, what might go wrong?
So you're building the airliner, you're also sort of building
(19:16):
the jets, right, I know, you were working with Rolls
Royce and then which makes a lot of jets for
airplanes now, and then you stopped working with Rolls Royce.
Tell me, tell me about what you've got to do,
Like what's the next big step in terms of the
airplane the jets, Like what do you got to do next?
And when do you?
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, so step one, scalop those jet engines. Step two,
scalop the airplanes. Step three, put it all together, prove
to ourselves and to our regulator in the public that
it's safe, and then go carry passengers. And so you
mentioned you mentioned the whole jet engine thing. Yeah, we
actually when I started, our plan was to go build
(19:58):
our own jet engines, just the same way SpaceX builds
their own engines. And then we got, uh distracted. I
let us get distracted by this sort of sexy notion
that would be able to take Rolls Race engine and
just modify it working with Rolls Royce, and that turned
out to be just a terrible idea.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Huh. Most companies that build airplanes don't build their own jets. Right,
It's not a crazy idea to say we're going to
build airplanes and we're going to let people who are
really good at building jets, build the jets.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Yeah. So if you look back far enough in time,
it turned out Boeing, United Airlines, and Pratt and Whitney
the jet engine company, were actually all the same company.
H they were all they were vertically integrated from the
airline through to the jet engine or I guess back
that it wasn't jet engines, it was Piston engines. But
I think that was actually the national state of the industry.
(20:50):
And they got broken apart, not because they wanted to.
But there was an airmail scandal in the early nineteen thirties,
the outcome of which was the government split them up. Oh.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Interesting, an airmail scandal. You don't hear about so many
airmail scandals there.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
There was the airmail scandal of nineteen thirty two, where
what was going on was basically the US government was
subsidizing airmail because they wanted to get off the ground.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
So to speak.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah, and uh, it's it's so the the retail price
of airmail was less than the airlines were getting paid. Yeah. Uh,
And so the airlines found they could make more money
by going to the post office and mailing bricks. Oh.
I love that that's and so the you know, and
that the Postmaster General was corrupt, like everybody was on
(21:34):
the take. It was nasty. And then and then the
the industry, everybody was kind of at fault here, and
the industry took the blame.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah, in yours telling is why jets companies that make
jets are different than the companies that make the airplanes
they go on. It's a bull claim. Yeah, well, yeah,
and I think there is.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
You know, industries tend to go through cycles where vertical
integration is either a good strategy or a bad strategy.
And there's a there's a great book on this called
The Innovators Solution, But they talk about under what circumstances
vertical integration is smart versus working with suppliers.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
What was it Jim Barksdale line in the nineties, there's
two businesses, bundling and unbundling. It's like that.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
I hadn't heard that, but I think it's kind of true,
and it's it's contextual. Yeah, And the long story short,
when when the current state of the art technology is
good enough for the in purpose, uh you, unbundling and
not vertical integration tends to make sense when the when
the components need to advance and the integration and the
(22:34):
final product is important, then vertical integration really matters. And
so I think they're kind of two threads of the story.
One is, it's probably not a good idea for a
brand new startup to put all of its eggs in
the basket of a like one hundred year old company
that like is a risk averse, doesn't want to make changes,
isn't fast moving, maybe you know, it isn't sure what
it really wants to be, right, so.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
You're putting all of your eggs in your own basket,
which is strong, certainly. So uh so, what like what's
the next mile post you got to hit? Like, what's
the big, big next hurdle.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
We'll find we'll find out around the end of this
year whether our jet engine's working. We're building the first
one right now, and we'll see if it works. And
so this this will be a very very large jet
engine core. You know, like it'll be roughly four feet
in diameter. This is not a small piece of hardware.
You weigh well over ten thousand pounds. This is a
very complex piece of turbomachinery. And we'll we'll we'll fire
(23:33):
it up and we'll we'll see what's we'll see what's working,
and then next next year. So that's the core of
the engine, and a year later our goal is to
have a you know, a full up engine, not just
the core, but the fan and the what's called the
low pressure system as well. Okay, but the core, the
core is actually the really hard part. So we're starting.
We're starting with the hardest part, and.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Then in parallel you're building the plane or designing the plane.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
Yeah, we're actually done designing the plane. Okay, So we
we froze, froze the design of the overture I think
a week after XB one's final flight. Okay, And so
that means, you know, I proverbally broke the engineer's pencils.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
So just now, just in the last several weeks, you
froze the design of the plane. You said, this is it,
this is the plane we're going to build. This is
this is it?
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Right? You know, like it's it's very easy for ambitious
engineers to want to optimize forever. Sure, and we said
this is good enough for version one. It's time to
it's time to stop tweaking the design and start doing
the detailed engineering so we can start building this thing,
tell me about what it's going to look like. So, Uh,
supersonic jets fit in some ways sculpted by physics. They're
(24:46):
going to be long and skinny, They're going to have
a triangular kind of delta wing. So in a certain sense,
overture is going to need to look concord like because
physics says it needs to look concord like.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
But the details are the details that come so far forward. Uh.
One of the one of the big aerodynamic advances versus
concord is something called area ruling, which basically said the
fuselage needs to be big in the front and small
in the back. And uh. And so overture looks it
looks a little bit like a concord in a seven
forty seven had a love child. Okay, so it's it's
(25:20):
not literally double deck in the front, but it's bigger
in the front and it's skinnier in the back. And
this leads for a very interesting canvas. And I can't
tell you yet what exactly it's like at the front
of the airplane, because we've got we've got something we
invented that I'm incredibly excited about. That we haven't revealed yet,
but I think it's gonna be. I think it's gonna
be a big wow factor. People look at them, say,
(25:42):
wait a minute, you got that to fit in a
skinny supersonic chat an elephant?
Speaker 1 (25:47):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Uh? It is some It is something that will be
delightful for passengers.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
A waterfall. I'll stop guessing, but I'm curious.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
So it's I'll tell you right now. It's not a
hot tub.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Okay, cold plunge. Cold plunge is the new hot tub.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
That's right. There's a cold plunge in the front of
the air airplane and the hot tub of the back
of the airplane. You can actually have both.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
So what what do you got to do to get
through the very non trivial regulatory hurdles to get from
drawing up a plane into a plane that the FAA
and analogous regulators say yes, this can fly with commercial passengers.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Well, we just have to prove it safe.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
I mean, there's a lot in that.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Just there is a lot of there's a lot of
that just I mean that this will be one of
the most complex safety critical machines ever built. But all
of the rules are published, so we know exactly what
we have to go do, and the certification is just
proving that we did it. And so that that will
involve about five thousand hours of flight testing and many
(27:00):
more hours of ground testing. And so just to give
you a concrete sense of what this is like on
the ground, you know, we will we will build a
a kind of a flightless bird, you know, a copy
of the airplane that will never fly, and will load
up the wings with hydraulic presses and we'll bend them
until they break. It will make sure that they don't
(27:21):
break before they're supposed to. Basically, you have to prove
that they can take one point five times the load
they will ever see under the most extreme case before failing.
You know, that's one example. You do in the ground,
and you and then the air you fly it through
all the most extreme flight conditions. You make sure it
can handle bad weather. You can make sure that it
(27:42):
flies through, you know, a snowstorm, the deicne can keep
up with the icing. You shoot a chicken at the
jet engines and make sure that when you know, if
you get a bird strike, that either the engine doesn't
fail or it fails in a non catastrophic way. That's
actually one of the most difficult tests.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Uh. So okay, so you got to do all these things.
What is your current target date for when I can
buy a ticket?
Speaker 2 (28:11):
About four years, So our goal is to be ready
for passengers by the end of twenty twenty nine, so
about four four and a half to five years from
where we are today.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Like, playing XP one took longer than you thought, but
you're still assuming overture is not going to take longer
than you thought setting them in parallel.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
I mean it's it's mean, it's totally possible overture will
be late. Yeah, I mean, the way these things go,
it seems likely. Again, this is from ignorance, just looking
at the nature of projects in many different companies, in
many different settings. Like, plainly, what you're trying to do
is very hard, and plainly you're only doing it because
you have some amount of optimism which is required to
do the job right. And so just from from that
(28:50):
very small amount of data and for like, yeah, I mean,
you're probably not gonna overestimate that long it will take it. Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah,
it is. It is highly unlikely we will get done
sooner than we're charge. You're not gonna be done early, right, yes,
you know. But the one of one of the lessons
I've learned along the way is is kind of how
to think about schedules. And uh, I think schedules are
(29:11):
actually misnamed because because nothing ever goes according to plan,
and and what what, it's not a schedule, it's actually
a work plan. And the point of the work plan
is to allow the team to respond intelligently the moment
something doesn't go according to plan, which is basically every day.
And so what we do is we build what's called
(29:33):
a success based schedule, meaning we don't pad it to
assume that there's going to be failures. Uh, we kind
of we kind of assume, ever, everything is going to
go well, and we assume that we'll be able to
do things, you know, slightly more efficiently than you know
than like a Boeing Wood And so there's some optimism
built into it, and and and many times we realize
(29:54):
that optimism and and and and when we find oops,
there's something we didn't know about or this was harder
than we expected, then we react to it in the
most efficient way possible. And uh, and that that's what
actually results in the fastest possible deliver uh, because nothing,
nothing ever gets done faster than the amount of time
you give it. Right, But we'll just take all the
(30:15):
time there, that's right, because they want to be the
best job possible, exactly, And the kind of people who
come join a supertonic jet startup are incredibly ambitious and
have very very high standards. So you know, you know,
if if I didn't say, the design is frozen and that's.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
It's a hard trade off, right, It's a hard trade
off because like there's a million hard optimization problems that
people are working on, and there's the kind of meta
optimization problem of how long do you spend on each.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Thing that's that's right? That's right, And there's like you know,
when when do you declare good enough?
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Right? And that was I mean there are so many
stories of you know, really, I think part of my
role is helped the team decide when's good enough and
you know, and what things have to be in one
point zero versus what things we can save for one
point one, and having good judgment about that makes it
(31:04):
much easier to actually ship one point h Right.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
You don't need to build the most perfect supersonic jet ever.
You just need to build on that is safe and reliable.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
That's that's right.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
So let's talk about money. How much have you raised
and how much do you need to get the first
one point zero overture flying with ye.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
So, a thing I've come to believe is that one
of the most important things in pulling this off is
being incredibly efficient with capital. We've raised about six hundred
million dollars, We've spent less than five hundred million dollars,
and with that we built and flew a supersonic jet
with a human on board. We designed an airliner, we
(31:48):
designed an engine, and we did all the other things
that started a pass to do over a decade. So
what does that mean going forward? We need less than
a billion dollars of investor funding from where we are
now to finish.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
When you say investor funding, like, are you assuming more
pre orders or you think for less than a billion
dollars you can actually or less a billion dollars more
you can actually build a build a plane that's gonna
take passengers across the ocean.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah. Part of it is being very smart with capital leverage.
You know, you know, so for example, uh, you know,
we will be able to go use debt to buy
capital equipment, right, So, like a lot of production equipment
will be financed without requiring you know, equity investment from investors, huh.
And we've we've already been able to do some of that.
So there's a lot smart financial engineering as part of
(32:39):
the solution. The other part of the solution is being
incredibly efficient in execution. You know. I still tell that
by the way that this is in some ways the
most difficult thing.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Spending the money intelligently basically.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah, Well, the way I frame it for our team internally,
and we're just very open about this. I say, our
single biggest risk as a company is we don't get
done for an obtainable amount of money.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Yeah, well, because the physics. We've known the physics for
whatever fifty years or more. Right, Like, plainly one can
build a supersonic jet. But building it cheaply enough in
your case to survive, right and then in the long
run to have it be commercially viable is the hard part, right.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Yeah, So one half of this is how do we
execute really efficiently. How do we have a small team
of world class engineers with incredibly good software tools, and
we're using a lot of software, and we're using some
ai uh such that one engineer can do the work
of ten, and that allows us to be really efficient
with our money. And we are just absolutely miserly about
(33:38):
money on one hand. On the other hand, we need
to have a capital structure that's very good for investors
and that leverages non diluted financing sources, be it customer
prepayments or plant and equipment debt, or public support to
kind of lever up those investor dollars to make the
whole thing economically viable.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
What's public support mean?
Speaker 2 (34:00):
So we're we had a fantastic package that we got
from the state of North Carolina that funded the superfactory
and Greensboro, where the state of North Carolina so wanted
Boom to come and build the airplane there that just
as they welcomed the Right Brothers one hundred years ago,
they welcomed us, and and that that basically paid for
(34:22):
the entire site prep and build out of the superfactory.
So that way, and we were incredibly grateful for that,
and I, you know, I want to make sure we
pay it forward in North Carolina.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
I've heard you say on an interview you did in
the last year or so that you underestimated how hard
it was going to be to build the company to
build a supersonic jet. And I'm curious, if you look
forward now to going from here to you know, having
passengers on a jet, do you think you're underestimating how
hard that's going to be.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
I am sure there are problems that we will have
that I don't know about today.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Yeah, that's a different I mean, it's a weird question
because if you're underestimating it, then you would revise your estimation.
It's like why is the stock market wrong?
Speaker 2 (35:07):
But like, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
I mean maybe you have to underestimate it, Like I
don't know. You know, people always sy if I knew
how hard it was going to be, I wouldn't have
done it.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
And I don't know if they really mean that, but
I think some people mean it and it's really and
I find that really sad, and I don't I don't
mean that in a sarcastic way. I mean like, actually,
like boy, like this startup stuff is so hard. It
just kills me that someone will put in all of
the effort required to birth a new company and a
new product from scratch, and it is really hard. It's
(35:37):
like chewing on glass, and then to do it for
something they're like, wow, I wish I hadn't, Like that
is really sad. And by the way, I have my
chewing on glass days for sure, and I'm sure I'll
have more. And the worst of it, the worst of
it is when I look in the mirror and I'm
not sure whether I'm up for the job. Yeah, I mean,
I think, like boys, someone better than me could have
(35:57):
done this, But I don't know if I can, you know,
Or I look at a problem we have and it's
not you know, and it's it's very much my responsibility
and my error. Like those are the hardest days, and
and yet I care so darn much about this that
that it's worth that personal hell to give it everything
(36:19):
I've got, and I don't. I don't regret it, even
the days where I'm like, boy, I don't know whether
we're going to get through this. And We've had a
bunch of those days, and I think I'd be foolish
to think that we won't have them again.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Why why is supersonic flight your thing? Like, why is
that what you have devoted your professional life to?
Speaker 2 (36:39):
One of the principles I have for myself now is
I only want to work on things that might not
happen if I didn't work on them. And if the
world followed that, we'd have a lot less photo sharing
apps and fewer AI companies. But maybe things like traffic
would be solved, huh. And you know, for me specifically
with supersonic flight, my kids had a grandfather who lived
(37:00):
in Hong Kong, you know, eighteen hours from us in
Denver that they got to meet maybe three or four
times their entire life, and so they never got to
know him. And I grew up with my grandfather ninety
minutes away, and I got to spend every weekend with him,
and I'm a different person because of that. And so
I've had a lot of personal experiences that basically say, hey,
speed's not about saving time or being really cool, although
(37:22):
it is about saving time and being really cool. Yeah,
speed is about what you choose to do or not do,
And there are all kinds of things in the world
that don't happen because flights are too long.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Okay,
let's finish with the lightning ground and then before you
started the company. You made a list of things you
wanted to work on, and you sort of rank ordered
(37:58):
them and how happy it would make you to work
on them. Obviously supersonic jet was one, but what was two?
It fell off really quickly. It's a distant second.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
I had a rental car company idea. Huh, that would
be like a like your rental car picks you up
like an uber, then you get in and drive it
like it's not I would love that product. I don't
think it's a great business idea. What was the scariest
part of getting your pilot's license. Oh, I remember that
very first moment of takeoff and what turned out to
(38:31):
be Larry Elson's old airplane, And there was this moment
of like, holy crap, I'm scared because I got my
life in my own hands.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Yeah, it's like when you learn to drive a car.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
I remember that.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
When I learned to drive a car, is like I
could just swerve into the oncoming lane right now, right.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
It felt really fragile, like I've got my life in
my own hands. But then there was the other side
of that same coin, which is this is really cool,
I've got my life in my own hands.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Uh, Huh. What was the scariest part of working with
Jeff Bezos? Uh.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Jeff was great to work with and I was incredibly
privileged in my early twenties. I got to work on
something he cared about. Uh uh. And Jeff one of
one of the one of the best things about Jeff
is he very fairly calls the balls and the strikes
and he and he rewards honesty and accountability. So I
(39:23):
remember at one point, this is actually my very first
time presenting to him, and it's the presentations overall, going well,
this is before he ban PowerPoint and I get to
some slide and he says, well, why didn't you do X?
And X was actually a pretty good idea, And I said, well,
we didn't think of that and and and he starts
(39:44):
laughing that like famous big Jeff Bezos laugh And he says,
that's a great answer. It's true all the time, but
no one will ever say it. He understands that anybody
sufficiently ambitious is going to make mistakes, and what matters
is to own him and learn from him. And he
always rewarded that. And that's that's something I try to
emulate myself as a as a leader.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Okay, briefly, let's do a few overrated or underrated questions
for jet travel checking luggage overrated or underrated?
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Underrated. The way this should work is you take your
Uber to the airport, someone grabs your bag from the trunk.
You go through the airport only with what you actually
want with you on the airplane. When you arrive on
the other side, you go to your Uber and your
check bag is already in your trunk.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
That's a compelling dream. Rated or underrated.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
The window seat, I think it's highly rated and underrated.
Like I am glued to that window.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
I love highly rated but still underrated things. So I
feel about Bob Dylan neck pillows overrated or underrated.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
It's not for me under overrated.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Same. Blake Schole is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic.
Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Cheng. It was
edited by Lyddy jeen Kott and engineered by Sarah Brugeer.
You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot f M.
(41:10):
I'm Jacob Oldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Popula
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