Blake Scholl

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So I think the worst advice is like work on what you know. Uh what you know can be changed. Particularly in a world where you everyone has personalized AI tutors. Anybody with passion and dedication can learn new knowledge and learn new skills. But what you can't change easily is what you love.

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Why? We engaged early. We made the regulators part of the team and we worked together. We made it boom plus FAA versus the problem, not Boom versus FAA.

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By the way, this is the pattern in a lot of regulation. It doesn't come from like some well-meaning person trying to keep the public safe. It comes from some entrenched, frankly, lazy interest that doesn't want to have to compete and runs to DC or runs to the local regulator and tries to use the power of government to shut their competition down. I think this is deeply unethical, but it happens all the time.

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it it won't work to try to repatriate uh the the manufacturing that left the US. Um that's a uh you you don't you don't beat China at its own game. What you do is invent the future, invent the next wave of manufacturing uh and build that here.

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so I I deeply believe that you should pick a problem that you want to go solve in the world and don't worry too much uh about the answer to why now. Uh the answer to why now can be because I started now.

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There are many many unsolved problems in the world, many great ideas hiding in plain sight that were actually solvable that could have been multi-billion or multi-t trillion dollar businesses a while ago, but nobody's building them and not for any reason other than nobody went and did it.

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This is a supersonic engine adapted for ground power generation that can ship without the rest of the airplane, thereby generating the test data, the learnings, the reliability, and also the capital that we need to go big.

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one of the most important things we discovered along the way is it's extremely difficult to iterate with outside suppliers, particularly outside suppliers in aerospace, which are let's just say I have no kind words for them. So we chose to build our own machine shop. And now we can go from a digitally designed engine part to a prototype part in about 24 hours.

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You can't get to product market fit on a supersonic jet by building it and seeing if anybody likes it. You have to analyze very carefully the art of the possible and also what will maximize the market opportunity.

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We said all of this engineering that historically exists in spreadsheets really should exist in software. The spreadsheet engineering is like it's like baby software.

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But great airplanes are incredibly integrated and everything affects everything else. uh the the best airplane design is interplay of propulsion, of aerodynamics, of structures, of all kinds of optimizations, how you fit the systems into it.

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The key thing is to make hardware development look more like software development to reduce the cost of iteration both in the world of bits and in the world of atoms.

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People talk about isn't it a bad idea to build in a regulated industry? Turns out you can change the regulations. And the way you do it is just by building the thing and communicating why it's okay.

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by making the sonic boom disappear entirely, we are able to put aside a question that had long plagued people talking about supersonic flight, which is how quiet is quiet enough? If there's no boom at all, there's nothing to argue about.

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Well, no. They're not even building new airplanes anymore, let alone innovative new airplanes.

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Those first jetliners truly did double the speed of what had come before them. And was they doubled the speed of air travel, the most important changes were on the ground. Hawaii was simply not a tourist destination before the speed of the jet.

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But if we fast forward half a century, this is the 787, their latest airliner, which by the way was launched more than 20 years ago. You can't spot the difference. It doesn't fly any faster. It doesn't make the world any more accessible.

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It now takes Lockheed more than two years to build a new Patriot missile interceptor. This is crazy. This is no way to build the future and this is no way to win a war.

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In 1969, we landed on the moon for the first time and the same year we flew Concord, the faster than the speed of sound airliner. The future was supposed to be faster and better. where we're supposed to look forward to innovation in air and in space. And yet, half a century later, we can't go to the moon and we can't fly faster than the speed of sound.

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There's a defunct podcast called Futures in Biotech that, if you are not a biologist but you think biotech is cool, look up Futures in Biotech. Listen to all the old episodes, they have amazing guests, and you'll feel like you know enough about biotech to kind of appreciate it.