Building Long-Range Supersonic Planes | Ian Brooke, Astro Mechanica

0:00Do you want to talk about the economics of Concord and why it just didn't make sense at all. You need to drive down operating costs. That's really difficult when you're not flying that much and there's not that many of the airplanes. My strategy on this is like you just can't go straight for the airliner. I don't think people get just how insanely expensive private jet travel is. The cheapest whole aircraft that you can get for one of those trips is on the order of at least$200 ,000. Almost a quarter million. One way. The aircraft I'm making is less than$10 ,000 for the whole jet. Today I have the pleasure of sitting down with Ian Brooke, the founder and CEO of Astromechanica.

0:30Ian, do you want to just start off by explaining what you guys are actually doing and what the difference is between this and Concord? Yes, thank you. Far too often for people to know us, they think we're an engine company. That is a part of what we're doing. But the main thing is my background. I build and fly planes. The point of the company is travel, ultimately. To do that, we have to do everything up to that. So that's the engines, that's the airframes, that's operations. so the one liner on this i'd say is uh we're enabling low cost long-range supersonic flight this is a very simple one i know that for the engines themselves that might be one very difficult challenge but then there's the entire like building a new aircraft company and basically creating the next net jets sort of situation what is that going to be like the whole problem is is extremely um like obviously it's all very complicated it's very difficult but it actually gets even more so if you can only adjust one piece of it so i would actually argue um it is easier to solve the problem of making flight cheaper if you have control over every part of that equation uh now it's you know certainly more expensive to be more integrated in that way and i think that's why you see a lot of the behavior we do um and you know maybe another one with this it's also it's more useful to have control over everything when you need to change everything but we like kind of as many people are familiar with aviation and air travel has actually been the same for a while now and so i i guess i have a i guess higher level philosophy on this of like earth theory um i think there's maybe an initial in the early days of something genuinely new you need complete control uh but over time if things aren't changing then then maybe the efficient market part starts to play in um once that those pieces aren't changing and you're needing more of that that optimization at lower levels so i guess going to this um you know if we're going with the question of how do you make supersonic flight affordable unfortunately it is not as simple as just make a better airplane you have to do a lot more than that um and in my case i i conveniently my interest was not supersonic aircraft per se but it was making better you know i like to build planes and like i just wanted a better like well actually for me selfishly i wanted things that i was going to fly but i like where you're saying basically that you were going to just you wanted to make planes and then if you were going to make planes then why not make them supersonic as well yeah well so it was for this company in particular um i was working on on making affordable i i knew it was technically possible private jets that were at like per passenger mile cost paired with airliners that's how this all started um the way that you do that so private jets are very different from airliners in that they have very low utilization and maintenance costs are much more dominant on them as well so it was i was working on that problem the way that i was solving that ended up going to this hybrid electric architecture the main benefit mainly being they are just cheaper and easier to fix which again is really what dominates on private jets i mean among many things again it's always very complicated i unfortunately people want it to be a single thing it's not but that was a lever to pull on it was it was actually a place like a new technology to apply and that in turn um plus a few other things i found along the way enabled supersonic that actually solved the economics of supersonic flight i think i think i often like to say is growing up as a aviator and pilot like i didn't like things that i couldn't afford to do um so if it was Yeah, if it was expensive it wasn't particularly interesting And so yeah supersonic flight for instance couldn't be made cheap Just because at the time you know there's there's you run into these things of drag increases with speed and You're going to consume you know increasing amounts of fuel and the price of fuel is not getting cheaper So and this problem was made even worse.

4:44It wasn't just the drag increase of speed It was also like high-speed engines were even worse than they could be less efficient yeah yeah so they were also less efficient which really compounds the problem do you want to talk about like the economics of concord and why it just didn't make sense at all yeah um again you want to be as high utilization as possible um so so you're going for like an air travel they call like load factor so you want the planes to be in a perfect world you want these planes completely full all the time because planes are very expensive you want them full all the time you want them in the air all the time so you can amortize the cost as much as possible aircraft in a way have more similarities like infrastructure or like a bridge i guess in that sense than like owning a car um it's actually probably what elon points to correctly of like this is where autonomous cars for instance as a tangent are interesting because like you'll probably start to build them in a very different way when they're more like background infrastructure that's just around and not a thing that an individual owns so it's anyways as we go back to concord yeah you want high utilization um you need to drive down operating costs that's really difficult uh when you're not flying that much and there's not that many of the airplanes so you want as big a fleet as possible as well um so there's just a lot of things like that that work against it and you you just need to solve all of them over time um and so yeah i would say um like in our case this is at least my strategy on this is like you just can't go straight for the airliner is one thing um you know you need to have it's just cost prohibitive yeah yeah i i would go like certainly if you're a clean sheet company like mine um we you need to be building on some prior success first um so it's like it's much easier to first be an airplane company that is doing this as yet another new model um i mean this is as like a car example i can go with it's like it's easier to start lamborghini as a company than like honda or Toyota um you need economies of scale for for like a Honda or something to make sense um where for doing a high performance thing that works at a much smaller scale so you know everybody knows this there's the the Tesla uh Tesla example here of Roadster Model S Model 3 and so on um and yeah I think that just generally holds true so for us you go for niche expensive um you know this can be like fighter jet type things or space launch you know that's why a lot of people you know I was interested in doing that one um still would like to do it but uh thankfully i've actually found um interest a little bit sooner on just the plane half which was really what you know in the near term what i wanted to get to so go for niche things that are okay with the high costs that don't require the economies of scale then you go for um you know more like private flights type you know you can think of actually almost a version of this is imagine the airplane sort of like you're on a United flight or something, there's the different classes sort of broken up.

7:41There's first class, business class, and economy. In your perfect world, you can make a plane that was like most of the money, certainly per passenger. It's first class. It's first class and then business class and so on. So if you could make an aircraft that was like just getting that customer base, you're obviously going to make the most money. Then you sort of scale it down. Okay, now we can get the unit economics so that we can do business class as well. and then eventually you can get to the point where you do economy but you can't you can't do economy on day one um and you do this in my strategy of literally different airplanes so um now that's a the interesting thing is that we can actually serve that that first class customer base or rather we can give everybody that experience a private jet experience um so even our most expensive product that we're going to have ultimately on the on the consumer side um is still not actually particularly expensive so like i'll give a number on this just um i don't think people get just how insanely expensive private jet travel is because you mentioned like net jets like that's actually not my interest um a gulf stream from san francisco to you know like around so gulf stream going about 4 500 to 5 000 nautical miles so that it's like either paris or tokyo from us here in san francisco the cheapest whole aircraft that you can get for one of those trips um regardless of number of seats because of that distance is on the order of you know again at least two hundred thousand dollars typically almost a quarter million yeah yeah one way so the aircraft i'm making is solving that problem of how do you get a whole aircraft again we're not we don't like uh we're not going to talk per seat yet but whole aircraft the we would target that around um charge about two dollars per nautical mile so it's more of like a flat rate it's like a you're just paying per distance so those flights are you know around it's like 20x cheaper just on the base case yeah and again there's like lots of different ways so i'm just pointing out this is like how bad a gulf stream is now um what's fascinating is like a you look at a a 737 or something like 7 3 doesn't quite have the same range but um you know even the a321 xlr not quite there so you kind of have to do this thing where you go up to boeing 787s and bigger planes like it's very hard to do small planes that do long range uh and we're making supersonic aircraft the whole point is long range so in our case we can get a five passenger it's a big plane but it's five passengers and like big ones linebackers people don't want to hear the thing if they're too heavy to get on an airplane um you know you could fit like 10 of me in one of these at least so five linebackers um going max range and the cost will be less less than ten thousand dollars for the whole jet is the price that we would charge so now so it's it's around call it's like two thousand dollars per person is the price that we're targeting on that aircraft and would that be for like new york to or there'd be sf to to paris okay yeah so you know now i've yeah i grew up with normal friends and like i you know i remember like that's still not cheap right uh so i don't want to suggest like oh wow it's this this just goes to show relative to a gulf stream this is like free but you know relative to i remember like just looking for the cheapest possible flights and leaving at like 6 30 in the morning so that it was you know a 450 dollar one way instead of like 550 or something like that so like and we'll eventually get to that level but in the near term you know as i've also become an adult it's like it's just not worth it to suffer in that way uh but i guess this is the thing this is like keenly top of mind I remember what that was like and I remember like things that weren't attainable in that way like they're just kept being a rich people thing like I don't know that just wasn't interesting to me what was the first moment when you were a kid that you ran into this problem of there's an interesting idea or something to work on but it was just cost prohibitive for you everything I have expensive taste yeah um maybe it almost be I just mentioned it's like it's like a reaction to my dad's existence in a way the man fucking loves costco and he would just buy so much cheap shit and i remember just being like it was like revolting to me and just you know like it's just i would just rather nothing i you know i think you're mentioning something like this too you just don't like having stuff around yeah um i just liked having my handful of things and i just whatever those things were i just wanted them to be good um so yeah it was like i i guess i grew up as a very i had like you know my obsessive possessions and so like for me in my in my early days like i was building model aircraft um and then you know went into uh model helicopters things like that like the german helicopters are just like obviously better made is this an example of that and so like i would just really want to get that nice thing but you know they are it's more expensive to do things well so um yeah it was just like always very top of mind to me like you could see what it was to get something abundant and cheap but also not good uh and so yeah there's there's like hurt your soul a little bit to get everything from costco yeah and you know it's funny i mean i love like the acquired podcast um and i listened to the episode on costco like i love what those guys like i do really appreciate what they are it's just like that because i just have a very different like life philosophy in a way of just like so i mean maybe we'd go with um there are the different ends of how the world should work like for certain things you do just want scale and raw unit economics there are certain things are like absolutely there's almost a certain beauty in that totally yeah totally um so there are you know like yeah there's an absolutely a time for that um you know we can just go like most things that need to be commodities like i absolutely want the most abundant cheap metal and like titanium you know what everything like that or solar panel like there's a lot of things where like commodify it a lot of it like high quality and cheap um or you can even go with other things i don't know we can go to like i don't know medical supplies right like you don't you're not going to be like i need the best reusable syringe like obviously bad idea uh no what we want is like okay we actually have a really good system for making you know medical things like that very cheap um and so that's one end then you have the other end where they're really good things that you just have forever um which is definitely the space that I found myself drawn to of like it's like well if I have the one really good one I just don't even want another one and I think what's tricky certainly when you're like young and not of means yet is like but you can't afford that thing and so what you know what do you know your options are like save up for me that was certainly uh this is why at a really young age it's like okay well I like money so that I can go get the get the good thing which then this is what like this is why I like business ultimately for me it's gets you the resources to get you the good things um and it caused me to like have really odd interests I guess of like it's like I really liked yeah this thing of like high amortization um like things that could be like long lasting and reusable like I grew up in California like we have to have droughts and stuff like that a lot and it's like a weird one i was like well we could just spend money on on technology to like make water limitless this was always a really appealing thing is like let's do the big projects up front it's expensive it's like complicated but like and then it's enduring and it's just around and nice for a long time it's like i was already drawn to those kinds of problems at a young age which again it's just like very different from the consumable lifestyle and approach and like again they each have their place um like roads and infrastructure i really think it's like you know we'll touch on this more as a theme through this of um there's a cost of getting something and there's a number of times you get to use it and at the end of the day what really matters with both of these things whether it's consumable or not is um it's cost per use and so So you really want to think about what timescale you want these things to operate on.

15:55So yeah, like highways, bridges, things like that, like they're going to last a long time, build them well. But other things are going to be like thrown away all the time. Like, yeah, optimizing that end. I know that you like tinkered a bunch as a kid on like tractors and like you said, model aircraft and helicopters and stuff like that. How are you kind of incorporating this philosophy of making the thing that doesn't need to be replaced um into the early stuff that you were doing yeah so just for any problem that i mean i can go to one of this it's like so okay we're building airplanes and engines and uh i'm gonna be operating them um those are the main notes it's almost thinking through it's like if you go to that end state assume that there's like a bunch of these out there in the world you know for any it's like when i'm you know looking at the engine design or the aircraft or something like that i guess from my background of flying and building and fixing these things i also think about me having to fix it and then when you think about the cost of you know as i mentioned early on it's like what makes private jets expensive and you know there's many things but uh or airliners any of this and i mentioned maintenance what that's actually saying is like how much there's the cost of the the good or the part and there's the time spent to like you know fix this thing so and in their their equivalent so one thing is like people really undervalue their time is a really common failure mode where like the part can be cheap but it takes so much time to get this thing like installed on it so so it just makes more sense to just make the part really good in the first place and then not yeah all the way through and i think this goes to another part of my philosophy like I you know I don't know where where I sit between like designer and engineer because in a way like an industrial designer or just any designer you are thinking through the human layer of this that's what it is to be a designer is like the human experience the human interaction and that goes all the way through fixing these things and so I think that's where my lens is like when I'm looking at it like to be an elegant part you could look at one where like okay we made so many of these widgets and they were so cheap um and so we got these off the line and this was like the cogs and look at how optimized this was and if the thing you know lasts a decent amount of time you're maybe even looks pretty economical for a while but eventually the thing breaks down and you start fixing it and that's where the difference of the well-designed product where you thought through okay we need to actually fix this and keep it going that's where now suddenly that thing where that part was more expensive but you just like unbolted it bolted on a new one and you're done um that ended up being a lot cheaper then like yeah there was more cost in the part but you're not seeing you know you're not seeing the full life cycle and you're not taking that into account yeah and you're not seeing i mean there's like the variance of um you're not seeing the variance of of like skilled labor in this so yeah this is another one comes up of like a lot of things can be like an expert expert craftsperson can just you can just give them a hunk of metal and they can make this like you know perfectly patchless thing and fix it um but what you're not seeing is the cost of that person like for them to get those skills that amount of time um and then you know and you know there's like a great story of you know is it some some sort of assembly line you know back in i don't know 1920s or 30s or something was broken and there was uh the expert for fixing this comes by and uh you know again the whole assembly lines down and uh you know he has some crazy rate and he comes by and it's like this is price and he comes by and you know he like i don't know taps the thing here's a sound and knows exactly what thing to turn and fix and off it's working and you know and the owner's like how was this as much as like you didn't pay me to turn the bolt you paid me to know you know which bolt to turn yeah so the same thing with plumbing yeah and so this as a this is like a general um this is a general like Thing that I think a lot of people have very bad intuition for in part because they don't actually have to they don't interact They don't fix things.

20:03They don't exist physical layer of any of this and You realize very quickly if you're the one I mean either you're so rich that you're just paying someone to solve this problem You almost don't even think about it. Yeah, you don't give a shit that it's like, you know This is like Ferraris and stuff like that You know, they're just money's being thrown at them and like again They'll it's like it back in the day you hear the story is like oh you had to take the engine out of the car to do an oil change or something like that like well that's obviously dumb uh that's just bad engineering um but it's fine because you're like solving this with with you're just paying people's time to solve that uh so there's i i maybe there's a theme with this with the wanting things to be well done up front i prefer to front load the work on this where design it well and you get the dividends later again this is what's so frustrating is like that necessarily takes time to be obvious like thoughtfulness yeah like because again if you're you know pick your it's like you talk on on warm like value investing right it can seem there's lots of other things that can like make a lot of money in the near term but did they actually like address the fundamentals and a lot of people are bad about that so can i feel like i've taken forever to get to this point but it's it's definitely this um this idea of being very forward-looking when you're making the part it's like imagining the future state again they're out there you're fixing it at every imagine like the full life cycle of everything that you're doing and and picture what that is going to be like and sometimes it you know it can be fun like i don't know it's going to be again a consumable type thing but there's other things we can imagine like how often is this really going to have to be done um who is going to be the one that i like to think of like you know nightmare of nightmares for me is having someone who doesn't care doing the work and and I think this is also true of like while you're designing anything for like consumers and stuff like that um you can get away with a lot if you have expert users and expert people that are like thoughtful and using all this like we can do things so differently but that is not unfortunately the world we live in uh again you know for me I'm like horrified seeing things like it's like seeing machines needlessly abused I guess in a particular way people are just hard on and stuff for no reasons like I don't know like you're grabbing a bolt with like pliers instead of a wrench or something like that it's just and you know you're rounding it out and again you're just like making that worse for yourself in the future and so anyways you have to like design around that um either so I guess you can also go to now if you're going to control everything well then you do you can also solve it that layer you can hold a bar the bar high enough uh and maybe maybe one that i could even mention on this is like we talk on um you know customer experience because i love you know i i had direct to customer businesses before in manufacturing and like and i love my customers um but there's something of also picking your customers so i don't want to make things for people that don't give a shit um you know like ultimately you do need to make things for people that don't give a shit, but like, that's just not going to be, you know, I like it when like, I can be excited.

23:09They see the value in what I'm doing. Uh, I appreciate them. The Microsoft versus Apple, where you want to design a computer where the person genuinely cares about the machine and wants it to be beautiful and wants the software to be beautiful more than just like throwing a bunch of random shit together and saying, this is our product. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you can imagine the really complaining one, like, you know, I think I mentioned already, like how much cheaper what we're doing is going to be than a Gulfstream and like what what like a herculean effort is going to be to do that it's like quite staggering um and you know that we're going to do all of that and then people are going to complain again um you know it's just like you know we're here in san francisco we have literal like robot chauffeurs it is true sci-fi stuff um it's better than a human driver and like and you know people are going to complain about it and it's going to be the thing i make it's like okay i'm gonna take 12 hour flights down to four hours it's gonna be a literal private jet it's it's so much this experience is gonna be incredible and there's going to be some customer that is gonna be bitching about it because you know i don't know it took four and a half hours or something because the weather was what it was and like i back to the thing of like i'm sort of future mapping to it's like how can i architect all this i'm actually another one i mention is like um you know planes obey the laws of physics they can only carry so much and like people don't get that like if there's a seat there they're they're associating the seat with a available like a available amount of weight it's like again you're small like me i'm literally half the weight of like a football player or something um you can quite literally fit double of me for the same mass but if i made an airplane with a bunch of seats for like small people like myself like um it you would have some you know some some big big fella who's coming in and like they're complaining that like this isn't you know in like meeting their needs or whatever the whole you basically have someone that weighs 350 pounds book a one seat coach seat and they're unhappy that basically they're in multiple seats yeah and you know it's like and we can separate this from like judgments on the person it's just like but the physics you know we unfortunately designing it for yeah your 90th percent mass is not ascribed to a human life it is just to mass that like physics there you know like what you're what you're carrying on with you um again i've gone i've gone too far down this rabbit hole on all this but but yeah so we can just go to saying there's going to be elements of the experience um that the people will will feel differently on um and it's really balancing that so i want people that really appreciate so actually maybe we can go to the way that i am seen is through my work um you know maybe it's not that they love it so much as like i feel that i accurately represented myself in what i made and so yeah you can't get everybody like some people are gonna you know we all have different tastes like you feel like you're leaving a little bit of your soul with with the work and you want someone when they interact with it to kind of say you know this person that i don't even know had some thoughtfulness on well yeah they just they they liked that thing you know they they're like this isn't this is an incredible experience it's like just something about it was right yeah and it would be like and you know for me it's like i i did that that's that's what i'm really really going for with that and that that's what it is to like make the best product you can so anyways yeah this gets to how i guess how i think about it's like all the way to that and you know at the end of the day like it's we're all people we're all alive like it's a human experience for all of this together and you're like making things for that you know we can't i think in san francisco we have so many engineers they'll like try and and reduce us down to being you know it's like number it's a number on a spreadsheet type thing like that misses something would have been the products that you've personally experienced where you've felt this natural affinity that someone did put in the thought and care and effort required to make something great you see pieces of it in lots of different things i mean apple products are very easy one right um i like to to say it's like if you look at how they're doing things it's more about um they were making the best thing they could and then sort of the price falls out of that in a way it's like now you do need a there needs to be some some you know limits on that you can't make it out of unobtainium um but you can eventually make it out of titanium for instance um but yeah apple products for me i love leica cameras um uh you know they used to not be as expensive of things that were more functional unfortunately they're pivoting more into like a luxury brand as well like i mean things once you sort of build a name for yourself like that you can lean on that a lot um so yeah there's sort of the cost to make something good and there's like the cost but the brand value past that um so yeah like uh i don't know certain plant like pilatus aircraft are very well made um just i don't know thoughtful little things in it and there's a reason that they're so popular for for certain customer base which is like because they're so well made they don't break much relative to other jets um and in turn you can just count on them to just work and like it's a nice experience in them um they're very good at what they do so i yeah i look them a lot now they're still far too expensive you know I think you can do a much better job but like I'm not gonna I think that's more also just a function of their ambitions relative to someone like me who's ultimately trying to like take over and change all of air travel their goal is to you know make the kind of plane that they make very well they do that it's still way too much money and so on but if you're trying to design something today that doesn't fail and there's the thought put in on the front end what kind of experience did you have working on planes where you were just like rebuilding things as they broke i i would just go to like piston engines as a whole i really dislike piston engines why um what always say why uh they are they they very much if you look at the difference between a turbine engine and a piston engine they actually really embody maybe this like difference that i'm talking about it's cheaper to make the piston engine they actually get pretty good performance for like for how cheap like the thermal efficiency it's much easier to get high thermal efficiency out of a piston engine than a turbine engine um so say like small affordable turbine engines jet engines um they're really they're really bad uh but they do have some perks to them namely turbine engines in an aircraft uh last uh you know meantime between like your in-flight shutdown rate for like i think a typical turbine is um you know at least an order magnitude higher than a piston engine um that's really you can feel much safer flying in one of those uh that's why they they undergird uh modern air travel so yeah it would be that of like you're stuck i don't know i had to deal with like a shitty car like for if the experimental they had it was like a carbureted engine and like you know some people get sentimental towards this kind of stuff and like fuel injection is just obviously better um seeming like i know modern electronic ignition better than like magnetos um a bunch of things like that where you're just seeing like but you know it just was that way and people liked it being done that way or something like that i don't know maybe it's familiar but like i never had any respect for it i guess just like let's just maybe it was good for the 1950s but we're not in the 1950s now so when you first started this company the first basically thing to work on or the thing that you worked on was basically rebuilding or creating a new engine from from the ground up and now you're going to be leaning towards you said like working on multiple different aircraft i think it's going to be like three different aircraft until you actually get to the passenger jet that's flying 100 plus people okay so we can talk on on yeah the company roadmap which is uh niche near term ultra high value type um you know i'll just broadly say like government type work i was also again interested in space launch.

31:15The things where you don't need to fly that much, they don't need to last that long, but they just need to do something that is fundamentally new. So maybe just to say, there has never been a supersonic aircraft that could cross Pacific nonstop. And, you know, there are some companies working on some things right now, but in the useful sense that I would define that, like, I don't think that there are any that are probably also none under development that'll be able to do that either. How did you kind of think through the process when you were just first starting the company of what the right road map you know if you know what the wrong road map looks like how do you think through the right one yeah like running running home idmas on this um well and so i was getting that first i guess maybe i'll continue describing what you know these these different aircraft and so on and what we're going to be doing to explain how i'm solving this um there is the initial solving the technical problem very rarely does an aerospace like an aircraft project fail because it technically didn't work like that's that's pretty uncommon um it's because they ran out of money that's that's it every every time every time something happens in aerospace it's like they ran out of money the first rule of businesses don't run out of money yeah uh truly there's like even in civil aviation you see the same thing it's like company goes and develops cool new airplane they go bankrupt doing it after bankruptcy you know they knew either new company buys or do they you know they reform and it operates well in the market but like bankruptcy was almost always involved in the process is this similar to uh cars where there hasn't been i think like previous to tesla there hasn't been yeah well i mean but even ford i think what when was that founded like 1917 or something the only two american car companies that haven't gone gone bankrupt at some point yeah um just all aircraft manufacturers have gone bankrupt at some point pretty much yeah uh certainly if you go into more general aviation all constantly or you know they get acquired at some some low price or something so okay problem it's expensive right and so how do we separate out the work of we need to do something technically new and difficult and you know certainly some you know almost certainly expensive to some degree um and then separate that out from like the mark what the market needs on scaling this and so on so you really want to go for these things of again you could charge a lot because it was just offering new capability that like you simply couldn't buy so go for those things like it's like I mentioned at the start of hey there's airline there's Gulf Streams and there's like airline travel it's obviously a lot easier when you're undercutting a$300 ,000 flight than like a thousand dollar ticket so pick things where you get to do that so it's like you've got that and then you also need to be that at a scale So when you sort of multiply it out to what you can serve that okay, we can make enough You know there are enough people paying, you know 300 ,000 for a charter flight again I'm not actually and it I won't actually target that customer base probably at any point I'll probably go straight to undercutting them, but You're going for you can make enough per and there's like a an attainable You know what you can get with like for each grasp that you can do So you really want us like you've got to have a good sense of where that could be um so again i've mentioned this like there's the very bleeding edge stuff of um if you can have genuinely new capability of long range um really we just go with let's first do the technical part we can fly really far what customer is interested in that we don't even need to talk about the cost part yet start with them space launch again is a good example like cost you know there's like cost matters to some degree but it's also can you even get a thing into orbit there are many people I mean the wait list on you know Falcon launches is years so it's like it's so interesting how you sort of have these other dynamics come into play it's like well there's actually probably a space for you know well we know that there's space for like more expensive launches but more readily available but you literally can't make them no one is willing to serve the cost is so high to get going so okay back to this first make find a way to make money on the base technical breakthrough can be niche then that gives you sort of it's like you always want to be getting to some sort of default alive state you want to have some fallback in some way the financial engine this is for me what you know i call the financial engine get your financial engine up and running um it allows you to take risks it's like when you have when you've got that fallback you're more readily able to like take these bigger risks um now you know elon certainly makes everything existential each time but like I'm sure at any stage for like any like of it they could fall back and Probably have some more middling existence But like that's the other thing is like that's on you to just you know I think it becomes really easy as like well, you know, even that for that very first thing I'm doing that never flies any people I'm sure I'll be me.

36:09I mean, I'll be making a small fortune at that point I could choose to stop there So this is the other one of like you need to be wanting to go past that you want to basically design something where you have the chips and it works but then you can push the chips back in yeah so you want to exactly so you want to get to that point of like can you you've got your sort of you can just keep going back in each time it's like another and another and another so uh but you need to get to something at any given level like this is the other thing is also like it can be really fatiguing if you don't if you don't get that uh it's like you're lost in the wilderness for too long um and you start to like lose touch with what matters like if you were just forever in r &d land i think this is where like a lot of like like aerospace uh legacy aerospace companies have existed where they've they've kind of they've just gotten out of touch i do think they were all probably like you know they can still do a particular kind of problem uh you know i don't know about well but they can certainly solve certain kinds of problems um but doing it on like the the urge the the aspects of like cost and speed are like long gone um speed of execution that is that just you know they haven't had to like pay attention to that and that's atrophied so this is the other reason why you really want to make sure that you ship products like even if you don't have to you know even if somebody gave me 10 billion dollars to like do the thing honestly it's probably still wrong to go straight to like go straight to that uh i mean we're gonna also maybe point to another interesting one of like this this is maybe this is part of open ai's philosophy actually is a point to one again here in san francisco somewhere around ai people like the decision to make chat gpt as a thing for people to interact with it was actually to like kind of get an extra rep in of like how are people going to interact with this thing and look at how instantly changed how we all you know it's like we had contact with this imagine if that was just forever under development like even now you know we wouldn't have had that um contact with reality yeah yeah like that thing was going to happen so so you want to have these like that was good for open ai that's good for the world more broadly we want to have similar contacts right so um first solve the technical problem you know that's very cool and just make sure that we keep marching down the the path of execution and scale and driving down costs but like again you have to go with the right measure on each one you can't and it's really hard for me it's like you know i want to get to making the really big things like that's why i started this but ultimately you really need to have a good sense of it's not just solving any problem for you it's getting to a useful thing looking at where you are and then getting to the next thing it's like the next grasp over and over and over again so in my case this is niche uh initial aircraft um fundamentally new paradigm of maybe i'll go with another another thing i'll mention you want things to be generally shaped the you know sort of shaped the right way it's like i know this end point i'm getting at is solving all of air you know like solving air travel um so it's there's steps early on that could maybe not make sense like maybe an example like if i'm building airplanes right now you know jet engines and airplanes but it actually is maybe not a bad idea for my company to start doing charter operations with planes that we don't make um because it's good for us to have you know like every day we're sort of seeing like right this is this is what it is to operate aircraft build a muscle memory and then you basically sub in the better product that ships faster you know get someone from point a to point b a little faster but yeah like like you know it's yes since that's a part of what we want to do we've really like for us to build the plane well we need to have contact with that so right now you know i get to assert like you know it is certainly like fade a bit in a way as i'm like spending too much time running the company um but like you know this is a really salient part of my life as i was you know tight braided and flew jets and so on um and i remembered what that was like you know and it's like why I start doing this but I have been heads down for so long I'm like it's like starting to atrophy a bit so having this around and not just for me but for the whole team seeing like remember this is this is actually what we're solving and like yeah and you need that to be fresh it can't and you know you also don't solve this I think a lot of other companies maybe say like okay we'll hire in I don't know executives that work in airlines and things like that but even that is different from just like the day-to-day contact with these things so I think that's this is the other reason right why you really want to do this you need to like build and experience those things um and yeah so we can just keep doing it again at the next step and the next step the next step i mean you know with the company that i have right now it's like it feels like a different company every you know six to twelve probably like every six months or so um there's roughly tracking to like you know it's like every doubling of the company I started this year at 12 people we're in the mid 40s now um and it's you know that's just gonna keep like and it feels like a wildly different company and so it's going through like the thought process of like you know how are we running this company all the time that's happening a lot um but the more contact we can have with all the relevant things as we're doing that i.e operations uh I think the better you said you started the year off with you said 12 people um that's four years into the company that you're still at 12 or you know three three and a half four years in the company that you're still 12 people how have what decisions have you made on basically keeping the team really really small before you have something you genuinely want to scale up um as opposed to you basically have this massive pot of cash in your bank account and it's just go build that you know 10 billion dollar program uh from the get yeah um well again And I think much like I was mentioning, there's like the different footholds that you can get along the way, like technical development.

41:55It's also true for, you know, I've been honestly talking the same story for the better part of certainly at least 10 years. But at each scale, it is perceived differently. So, I mean, honestly, you know, even still, everybody thinks we're an engine company and I keep repeating we're not. Why is that the perception? Because we're just building engines. Right. right um you know i mean we'll go back to the ai things or autonomous cars or something like that like i mean obviously all the people that were starting the autonomous car companies like at waymo um you know tesla others when they were working on that you would hear them all say this you know back in like 2014 2015 whatever you know more than a decade ago this was obvious to them that otherwise they wouldn't have like started these companies that we could have the future that we're currently living in now but it really needs to be right in front of someone's face for them to get it um i think if you're maybe for an exceptionally good storyteller and this is honestly this is where the steve jobs type stuff comes in really good storytellers the reason that's such a superpower is they can effectively bar they can port for that future that is maybe going to take 10 plus years and make it salient now um that's not one of my skills i can the only you know i at least can do the part where i can make it real which obviously is a you know necessary component of this in the long run that is what matters yeah um but it's going to be a little bit more like one day you wake up and you just get the four-hour flight from you know sf to paris yeah it's going to feel like that for for everyone um for what we're doing even though again i will have been talking about it for ages at that point when we were just talking this morning you were talking about how you basically kind of go in a bunch of different directions uh and i i do the same thing where I'll go down one path and then try it and then walk back a few steps and go down another path and try that and keep on doing that until I find something that feels right.

43:49How have you kind of been guided and how does your brain work? Intuition? Fun bit of trivia. If I wasn't doing aerospace, I would probably be doing something in neuroscience. Interesting. What about that sparks your interest? Well, I definitely knew my brain was not, I did not feel particularly normal. I mean, the only reference that I had it's not that I felt weird it's just I was wondering why I seemingly had you know I don't know my I was coming to different conclusions and I had different interests and was just dissimilar to those around me you know one of this is like I'm definitely I'm very I'm an extremely patient person I don't know like I can really just hang on for a while for a lot of things and that doesn't get to me um at the same time I also find you know well yeah i just get to like some conclusion quickly i'm like i would also just disregard a thing like no this is like a dead end or whatever and i would get there quickly um and yeah i i guess i just i found thinking interesting maybe this is part of it right there's some people where maybe you know maybe they're much more they're better at just living in you know it's the reality is really only the present moment so in a sense they're doing quite well on this front and i'm not uh but i was really in my head all the time and then thinking about thinking uh and what this all meant so yeah that was just like which then also informed so i have a very like built up model of what it is to then kind of be alive be a person and be alive and this goes to like why do i like making the things that i like to make um so like it really actually goes back like it's i've really i've really thought deeply on all of this all the way it was like not just so that that is a component of like when i'm finding a part pleasing i even have a sense of like why my brain in particular finds that pleasing and why another person may not because i'm kind of got a pretty good map of like how it is not like uh you know like my customers or others so it was uh but you you started this by asking um how how we go about like i don't know the intuition in solving these things and i definitely have a very non-linear thinker um like yeah i I guess very massively parallel processing, as it were, where there are concepts that are maybe tangentially related to my brain, and they kind of all run at the same time.

46:09The one I think of on this is like, it's like a quantum computer versus a classical computer. And I actually do, so the reason I was smirking at the start of this is, this person I quite like, Susanna Gilbert, she works in quantum consciousness. I am keen on this as what makes us what we are um again this feels like too too off topic for aerospace to you know founder and so on but like i don't know you can get a sense around certain people or even even animals i love this it's a thing again this is going to just seem like way out of pocket but you know that's the good stuff yeah you can you meet certain animals and you're like wow the lights are really on with this like cat or dog like there's really something happening there's really something going on and you know like and i had my you know my one cat like he was an absolute sweetheart but he was just dumb dumb as a bag of rocks like not particularly not the most enlightened being but so sweet um so anyways there's a thing and i think that this is also true there's a thing that like has varying levels of it sounds odd to say like you can change your level of conscious consciousness um you can sort of tune out or you can be more there and and i think that that is a very different kind of problem solving um and it just yeah it requires like i don't know being in it just a sort of different state of mind um so yeah there is the very like i am following this thread and you know it has started here and it ends here and i need to maintain continuity through that um but that is not how how my mind has ever particularly functioned um yeah they're just like lumped many different things are like lumped together uh we can go with the version maybe this in part i've like got the semantic tree built up very very effectively at this point that's the main thing that's probably changed my life over time um it's a lot more full and and so it's very you know i will say if there's concepts that i can't map onto it um i've really bad retention so so i really have to be able to connect it back to my tree but once it's on that map I can like hop all over and I can look at it from many different angles and and that that becomes really easy to do Charlie Munger has the same idea where it's like you have to create a latticework of mental models and basically have a bunch of analogies and metaphors and stories built on top of that to basically create context and understanding in your own reality yeah yeah maybe we go to like it definitely makes sense if you're more verbally inclined I definitely um I mean words are not my my dominant uh I mean you're saying how much I'm struggling with a bunch this other stuff to express it uh not my dominant medium or like that's not how how i think in my head i don't know how do you think in your head if it's not in words it's like shapes uh very spatial um yeah and there's like just conceptual weighting and shapes for for lack of a better like it's like when i'm imagining the engine running or something like that there is some spatial sense of like what it is to be the air being compressed through it and and what it is to be it's like a very good physics engine right and like i can then it's like flipping through different filters it's like what is the what is like the the molecular filter on this what's going on at that level uh like a kinetic one so you know what are what are like how are the atoms like jiggling around um but it's all sort of over like that same you know again it's kind of nice way of the engine like while all of that is also happening like spatially for that whole thing so that is it's even that as like people interacting um because i think you know we talk about this like most most um conversation or just uh communication is non-verbal right so so it's like little facial expressions it's a little thing so it's like knowing more of what feeling you're you're giving out of this uh like a phenomenal book on this um uh lisa felman baron how feeling um how feelings are made such a good book and it gives you a sense of like back to sing about how brains work and like it's like what is the utility of feelings for instance it's actually um it just does actually tie into language um but feelings in a way are like a pre-loaded uh or words are also part of this they're like pre-loaded um sets of actions or so on that you could take on that uh you know a great example she has on this is like as we make up words it's like if you if you go with it's funny you could say one version this could be like um this person's uh i don't know downfall or suffering brought me joy sounds really terrible but then if you said i felt schadenfreude because we know this word it's like schadenfreude it's like it's referring to a very specific kind of thing and that's actually what's going on like on the first thing like what an asshole and the second i'm like oh yeah i i get that um this also goes to like other fascinating things of how we work on um you know it's like was i was i like nervous or excited like those can actually so and what what feelings are actually doing like the and if we go back to really not talking about airplanes at this point but what this is doing in your brain um is it's it's because like it's pre-loading maybe the correct response like if you're you know excited versus scared on something like well if you're if you're scared like this is you know if your body's like i'm like primed and ready to go uh you might need to run or something like that like that's why you're feeling that right but there could be something that is maybe um it needs a similar state of like heightened arousal but it's not negative right this is like how those things can be kind of close um you know i don't know before we're going to talk on this right we're anxious like there's not it's like triggering you know you are your body knows to be in a heightened state of arousal but like it's not like i need to like go run from this thing it's like there are subtle subtle differences in that way but there's also so the reason these things are coming up is it's like actually to get your body ready for that in a way the better you understand the world you could this could be having more words or analogies things like that or in my case it's just like sort of um i don't know like a like a little video in my head of like how i think that's going to go um the better i can react to it when it does happen the whole point is like you're trying to predict what's going to happen right that's the actual point of these things maybe we're gonna say the point of feelings in a way is like prediction uh you want to have the correct prediction for what's going to happen is like does this person like me or something like that is like you know if you're pretty good this is in a way what it is to be good at reading someone like if if you get that right um then this can go really well and similarly like you know also in san francisco the land of socially obtuse um if you get that wrong like they don't understand why this isn't going well and it's a way it's like they actually don't have a this is what people talk about of like emotional intelligence it's actually just they have such a bad understanding of of others that they do a really bad job like just getting what you know what they want yeah it's like you know there's nothing more annoying it's like oh you don't even get that you're being really annoying or boring or something like that which again i've been droning on about feelings for a long time here so uh but it all ends up getting applied for me right so this is like i think i gave that example like imagining the you know error through the engine and i can flip through the different filters this is one of the ones of like how i imagine it's like one of the ways that i can perceive how the company is operating um and yeah it's you know which then goes to again it can be that same lens all the way through the customer experience the team how the team is feeling about building this stuff you know what excites them um on doing it when you were a kid did you have you know when you're talking about like kind of just thinking in shapes and thinking in design um did you have a situation where you could express yourself and express yourself the best way through the things that you were working on and then you kind of had to backfill figuring out how to express through words and like maybe this is is this why you went into psychology in the first place is just through wanting to be able to express it through yeah yeah and it's definitely anything i mentioned like my medium like i loved photography i definitely because i very strongly resonate with certain visual scenes or just again objects things like that um it felt really good when i could make a thing that that was like reflecting that and then somebody saw and simile it was like yes this is very you know this is very nice um yeah so i i picked up that pretty early i mean first off it was just with the love of building things it was definitely just for me um but it definitely became a thing also later on you know it felt uh another person brings this up is like uh toby lukey um yeah shopify uh you know he mentions something um of like there's this feeling you get when you're starting a business when you have a person that like gives you money to to do this thing and I remember when I um certainly when I I did like services early on like when I do commercial real estate photography from from drones and that was already I did that when I was like 14 15 I was like a you know 14 year old giving a presentation a local real estate office um because it was I built this machine like I could take photos for them and that was definitely i thought at that time i was probably still a little bit more anxious like i was doing it but i didn't understand it didn't it made me feel a little uncomfortable that like people were trusting me at that time um but later once i was making physical products like i machined things that i designed and i think in particular when it really hit me is like when i would see motorcycles around san francisco with a person that i did not know that had they you know bought a thing for my company online you know and because like the forums feel like this thing is you know they loved the thing that got them to buy it you know they had and like okay i had a pretty pretty happy customer base on that and like that feeling was so validating good of like i was like that is what i am built to do is like i'm making this thing that you like um you know and so this goes back to think of like well i you know i like bmw i like particular kinds of bikes um so i was making for my my customer base on that but like that really felt great so um that really gets you hooked in uh in a particular way so like that's yeah that was the way that i really enjoyed it so is astromechanica just basically your expression of trying to um rectify almost the mistake of having badly designed planes and you just want to make the thing that you want to fly we can go with like maybe just like it's the way the world is right like i yeah astral mechanic is absolutely my way of making the world that like i believe there is a vision of the world that i have in my mind that i you know that i quite like and i and i can make it and i believe that everybody else will like this too um and yeah that's why that's why i'm doing all of this like and if it isn't that thing um like i'm i'm certainly not going to feel you know i'll forever feel like well i haven't quite gotten there yet like i also go with the um like the one that i so over time as i as i got to having and flying bigger planes um the feeling when i take people flying and they get to go and like a private jet for the first time and you know now this isn't a plane that i made but i certainly you know i am at least the pilot in it and they're like i had no idea like they're like it's like going in the way more for the first time type experience you like i mean granted it's like solved through sheer money but still i can solve that's the engineering part i can but still you take a friend up and you do that and like everybody is just in awe like that was the coolest thing they experience it in a very different way like yeah than you do from coach yes yeah yeah and you're like and it's just and for me like as the person building is like i know that i can build the things that brings that to everyone So that's where I get just so so excited on this of and again like it's gonna take Decade, you know, I'm already at this point from when I started working on things early.

58:18It's like I'm already like two decades in 35 now and I'd say like more concretely probably about like a solid 10 years of like the idea was getting pretty crystallized It's like 20 of knowing I wanted to have an aircraft company and you know work in airplanes more broadly and 10 of like, okay, this is like more specifically how I want to do it. And it is just getting more and more like, I sort of, it's almost like the way this is going is like when you're rendering something, you know, it's like initially just like a couple pixels and it's sort of vaguely in the shape and it's just like higher and higher clarity over time.

58:53Yeah. The, the image is getting pretty well rendered at this point. Walk me through the different stages of, of that rendering in your own mind. You know, you say that you started basically 20 years ago, I guess you're at 17 at that point kind of thinking in this general direction of you've already decided that you're going to start an aircraft company or you know if you wanted to right yeah well that's that's the preconditions for actually doing it right yeah yeah um yeah but what was that initial like vague idea and then how how has the clarity been sharpened over time yeah uh the very first idea i still i still get like so um so bitter about this in a way uh so from like oh and i'll throw like very specific reasons uh i'll explain why so for model like when i was getting like rc stuff um we were right at the at the bleeding edge of like um high power energy density lithium batteries and brushless motors which was the thing that you know that was uh that undergird like the ev revolution and we had like a lot of first contact that were making actual like electric powered vehicles at the time it became really obvious when we went from these like crappy little nitro motors that you had to tune and you know you know like they would make the thing fly but they sucked so like getting the electric motors you're like oh my i charge it and it's just perfect every time and this is more fun to fly and like all of this is just better so from that since i had like first contact that right at the right age too um and i think of like it's like you know stories like mark andreason when he made the internet it's like it's because they actually had that at university of illinois i think it was university of illinois um so my this is like a similar version right like I had the early contact with this and so in fact the thing I always had just like this weird thing of I wanted it to be attainable so there was a particular aircraft chassis that I really wanted it was the the pipstrel sinus in the virus it's but like Cyrus sinus and virus I there was like the largest these RC electric motors they were getting pretty big they were like 20 kilowatts and like small airplanes don't actually need that much power so it's like I was imagining like oh I could put a couple these on a common gear I could drive the propeller I could actually put enough lithium batteries in the thing and I could actually just make an electric airplane like I could do the thing of like what was the change that I saw happen a model aircraft going from these like shitty combustion engines electric motors like I saw that that I saw that in about 2005 they had that airframe was so efficient I was like I could do this um unfortunately like my whole life was like rather my whole youth was just I hated being a kid because I wanted to work on these things and like I didn't like being 15 it was like getting in the way of like doing the adult things um so the reason I'm bitter about it is literally at my home airport and within a couple years that I think I want to say it was like in 2007 it was like the cafe foundation did this they they used that airframe granted it wasn't the motors that I was talking about I didn't know the people working on this but it was like they actually did it I was like I wanted to be the first to do that so like this this kept happening in a way i felt like i was always too young and behind the curve we also had this of like i was old enough where the elon type things like with tests and stuff like that it was like he wasn't really a role model to me at the at the time it was just like because he was doing the thing that i wanted to do yet yeah like well he was in the middle of doing it and the whole time i was like but i wanted i like he's doing it but not the way that i want to do it so i actually had this like frustration the whole time um and it's like in a way the more similar you are the more you highlight the differences kind of a thing i'm not sorry i'm not suggesting i'm similar to him but like uh you know he's obviously done a lot more than i have but in the sense of like these interests um so so yeah there was like that was happening with like that was like the really early one of like you know like i that could have been a thing on that plane and if i was the first to have done it like that would have been huge and it just felt like my whole life was a sequence genuinely for like certainly the next 10 years and honestly still feels like this now i feel like i am constantly missing like the leading edge of some technical wave um yeah i just like every time it's like drives me nuts uh just like a few years behind almost yeah all the time like you know even even the thing i'm doing like for building building these planes the hyperelectric architectures and like you're saying all this stuff like and it's cool but like again this was like pretty well formulated about 10 years ago like and it's like the longer this is taking i'm like is somebody else going to do this am i going to miss the boat on this uh so you're constantly like in the back of your mind there's this anxiety that's driving you towards working faster and trying to to make it happen bring the future forward yeah and it's like where where it's where the anxiety the frustration on this is like and again it's when i mentioned the storytelling thing um it's that i am struggling to get people to like buy this is this is actually changing now i mean i have a team so this was you can imagine was just a kid right um it was just me doing this and then even in the early stages like you know when i met my first folks here in startup world and i described all this they're like i didn't make sense then i was like how do you even know like this this can't this can't be um and it was just kind of the take like one guy saying that i mean there's there's more deep tech folks and people get get more stoked on it now but um certainly in i think i interviewed at like yc and got rejected like four or five times um and i think the first time was like 2017 um so it was like four or five years yeah yeah again i've been like repeating this thing i i and i was like to say i'm the broken clock and it is now my time of day uh so i've been just parroting this over and over and over again and but over time over enough cycles like you know i mean i have a phenomenal team so one of the first things that changed um eventually there was like some amount of just i actually had enough money and resources to throw at this to kind of to build an initial demonstrator um that was the one that i finally concluded is like because in theory what works the best is you can just you can tell the right story you get people on board you've got your team and you're doing your thing And this is why I was so frustrated and like why I was going so poorly for me is like that wasn't what i was good at so and it's funny i mean this is where i just felt like such a fucking idiot where i was like trying this strategy over and over and over again uh that was wrong what ended up working like instantly was i'm pretty good at building things i was like all right i will just build you know some version of this like jet engine architecture but in particular once it was the one i really had to like resize this at first it was like i wanted to build a hybrid electric airplane i was like guys i just need 20 million dollars to get a thing flying like just you know and like at the time like i i had some some decent fraction of that money of my own to burn is like and i was like i was burning it to like set up the infrastructure again i had the prior businesses um so yeah anyways from that i got to this initial demonstrator it was like the first first like you know it's cool when when the engine oh yeah i was like that nozzle behind me um people like oh there's a thing and like in my brain i was like of course the thing always could have worked and people are like how did you know it's like i always fucking knew this is going to work.

1:05:55So that part never landed. Again, this is just me being bad at this. I think of this as, you know, one thing that I I think I kind of felt the same way for a very long time where I think people vastly underestimate how powerful proof of work is and like just proof of results. So if you if you say like, I want to do the craziest podcast ever, I want to build this new jet. That's very and you like email a cold email someone and they try to understand what have you done in the past? Yeah, they just can't come up with anything. Yeah. It's basically an impossible like no yeah obviously i do that i get yeah i do the same thing like people email and like and i you know this is where it's like i get why people did that to me as well i'm just like it's funny when you're on the other end you're like uh yeah like i get i get why they came to that conclusion oh but then eventually like what i wish i wish someone had just told me uh probably three or four years ago was whatever you want to be doing just show that you're doing it and it doesn't even matter if it's it it needs to be like the best that you can do at the time yeah but you just keep on putting in you know pounding the pavement and over time you basically build the track record of yeah someone can believe it's a believable story you need explainability uh with the stuff like you need to give them you know this comes up often like startup world like this is full of a lot of optimistic people that want to believe so you have to give them reason too um and so yeah like in in hindsight i guess another thing is like i often wonder it's like maybe if instead of starting the manufacturing business that i did um and doing those things like if i should have just gone to spacex then again um because like for me when i'm hiring i have a pretty strong bias to it like i know there's weird people like me out there that didn't work at spacex but like i honestly probably should have just done that granted i don't know if i could have been hired i probably couldn't have been you're basically the person that you would never hire oh i would never hire me um so you know so we have to just suffer in the wilderness it's fine uh so yeah anyways this thing of what that process was um it took me like again clearly i'm not the sharpest on this because i just kept beating my head against that particularly eventually i'm like i'll just make a thing uh the thing that i was good at all along i'll do it under duress yeah yeah um and it was actually i you know it really took something i care what it was i mean the markets were tanking in 21 and it was like well i can't afford oh actually they're great in 21 22 yeah i was like well i can't keep this going much longer uh because i i'd stopped the prior work um uh to actually like pursue it was like finally like okay i gotta i gotta say i got the machine shop i gotta take the leap on on building this stuff um it's so funny how with like within months of just doing that like things that i was fucking up on for years under the right right duress you know necessity being the mother invention there like instantly uh build the thing people like oh yeah that cool and then from there it's been the same um same effect of like getting as the team has gotten on board like once i had the thing i could then explain it to other engineers and this became the next proof point um there's been just like a snowballing of quality of the company so i'll just say like then it made more sense it was no longer oh it's just ian and then it was like ian in a machine chop slightly more believable then it was ian with a machine chop and a prototype and like oh This is actually and then once there's a team.

1:09:06Okay, and like this is well, how did he convince these like these are sharp people? How did he convince them and then is that just and then it's like the quality? Yeah, and then I was able to get a little more money then I was able to get even better people Suddenly you're doing this spider-man meme where it's you know Three spider-man's they're all pointing to each other and you've got the customers on one side and then they you know Not the customers but basically like the employees and the capital and also the work and they're all pointing at each other and then that convinces someone yeah and yeah and this is the thing of like you know i wish i just known this earlier but then again maybe i just had to go through this whole process to get there i don't know uh i certainly love like i i do also actually often think about this like i wonder if it would have actually been good if i had gotten earlier support because i don't know i wouldn't have the specific team i do like my coo is incredible uh vp of engineering uh met perc so actually pelzel co like she was co of bridgewater of technology group there was exact i knew that I needed a person like this to this whole thing of like I've got a pretty good mental map of how this all needs to work and I knew it was so quick like I knew I needed my like Gwen uh Gwen Shotwell and I didn't know who it was specifically but I had a very good sense of like and I remember it was like suspicious when I'm like this is exactly the person that I needed in every real yeah and like this was it was like you know so um so yeah she joined um then there was another one of this was like Matt Perkins another one of just all embodied all of the best of SpaceX when he came in since I'm like I actually don't know how to program but I can like design and but like do more CAD and things like that a lot of Excel math since I can do those other things but I don't know software it's also ironic and I like electrical things but I didn't know electrical engineering Matt Perkins is electrical engineer and software and I was like I never viewed that as I go you know we're building physical things and like it's going to be a mechanical engineer that'll be like you know but no matt perkins was incredible he embodies all the best of spacex he was there for for 11 13 years um no you joined in 2011 and i think he left we're the first company that he's joined after spacex um anyways you start to get him and like and then greg crowland uh chief engineer of xp on a boom greg i love greg uh he's hilarious and just like and like this team is more like you know anyways i'm getting more and more of this i i you know i'm feeling bad like i'm playing favorites of this like you know the company's more than 40 people but like these are the proof points of like and you know if you're a vc again i also spend a lot of time with vcs now i'm like right of course this is why this is what you look for um yeah this makes perfect like again i look at all these things like it would be in hindsight in hindsight uh and it's funny because again i was doing pretty well in the prior business stuff but it was these were never these were never venture-backed companies so you know it's kind of interesting like i think yc has they they did this uh this test on what traits in founders ended up actually creating valuable companies and they were thinking like maybe it was just technical ability or sales ability or something else and uh what they came to was that the number one trait was just determination and if someone just stuck it out for long enough and just kept on trying kept on smashing their face into the wall yep um eventually that was the best indicator for for future success and so it's it's a it's a weird you know I've had things in my own life where I'm like well what if that had worked and the truth is is honestly we can't rerun the world and and but honestly I'm pretty happy with how things are going and you know if I'm 23 like we've got many years ahead of us there's we're not you know we never we never did something so bad that uh that we we we basically locked ourselves into one timeline where you can unfuck it yeah yeah yeah it's definitely um and yeah you know i think i mentioned like patience thing earlier on for me it's like yeah you just out of you it's just something you have and you're like you're just okay um in my case it was like maybe this came out of ignorance um i didn't know what easy i don't know everything seemed hard i guess maybe a combination of i picked hard problems um i didn't know when to stop with stuff okay it was just like you didn't know what was too hard so you just started yeah uh that's the thing that i've kept on coming back to while i've been talking with you um is this idea of we did it not because we we because it was easy but because we thought it would be easy yeah it wasn't even because we thought it was easy but we just didn't know how hard it would be yeah i think there's definitely the version i also always had in my brain is like man in another life should i have just gotten into finance to have gotten a bunch of money because that really money is the easy easy mode button on this, but you don't necessarily get the other important skills that you need when you do that.

1:13:42But yeah, I've, I've kind of thought about this too. You know, I've, I've thought at points in my own journey, if I just had like a hundred million dollars or something similar to that effect, then things would kind of just work themselves out. And I've kind of come to more of the conclusion that you, if you, Brian Treske has talked about this, where he said at the beginning of a startup, most people want to immediately just take off and have the thing grow and be, become successful but there's almost like a blessing in disguise of just like suffering for a long time trying to do things and then you just kind of like learn all of the failure modes and the things that you shouldn't be doing and then eventually like figure out the thing that you know if you were super fluent and able to raise huge amounts of capital maybe you raise that money but you never actually build a successful business because you don't you know you're able to raise the money too easily I think so yeah I think so and this is what this is why I I hate I hate this I hate that this is the reality is like I probably had to suffer and I probably have to keep suffering uh i wish it weren't so do you do you kind of like the suffering though i no i i genuinely i don't uh i think this is like i think you know an elon type person i think they do enjoy it um in my case it's just that i really want the thing on the other end it's it's just like i mean what else am i gonna do like i i would it would be one of those things like i could the the reality is like I could not stop and just like hey you know let's say like say I had you know I actually think about this often of like I don't have enough money to have the big jets that can fly far and like I've got my budget and I've got you know I don't know if I would I don't like two pilot airplanes but I guess a Gulfstream and I've got a guy to sit there with me because I want to fly it not him um I've got that I've got the budget to run it I'm sure I would just get back to being annoyed about that plane and be like I want to make a different one so I don't think i think i'm like sort of cursed to to go through this um but i i do enjoy life i enjoy the process so yeah yeah it's it's also it's funny on the suffering side because i've noticed that my you know in my own life as well is hypothetically i do i want to suffer probably not like if i were to say that i probably don't really want to suffer but then if i look at my history it seems like i almost put him put myself in situations where i am suffering continuously and then when like things start to work i figure out a way to suffer again yeah yeah yeah it just keeps you know it's interesting how that works because like yeah i think that whatever that trait is that's probably actually more the one that why i see you know all right find the determination one but some some other you know thing you just somehow keep you can't not suffer so the way i think about it almost is you basically as soon as i figure out something you know we can do something i raise the bar in my own mind to such an extent that we are failing and then we must you know try to achieve it and the failure to achieve it you know in the short run is my suffering yep and yeah it's funny like this similarly um it's like i'm kind of so bad about this for like the team of like if we get wins or something like that uh it never felt like a win at any point uh so i'm in the celebration you're just like god damn it why didn't we do it yeah it's like this is this is okay i guess it's gonna be that did i this this was never really success in the first place like we gotta move the bar yeah like i don't you know i do i mean i can at least i will say i'm a pretty uh i guess my one the one thing that was like nice for me at least i'm like fairly sensory hedonic type type person i guess like i like to go fast i like the loud you know loud music loud engines like i that one i that part i do like um so that one is like that's as close as I get to like a happy in between is like I like when the engine makes a loud noise so you know and do the thing of like the sensory thing like it looks pretty like okay those are like the little wins that I get along the way uh they fuel you yeah they fuel me uh there's definitely like the the bigger one uh I guess through that of just it's definitely not land like I don't know at the higher level it's like always sort of just disappointment all the time of like and so I'm I'm bad on that but if you were like forced to psychoanalyze yourself mm-hmm How do you imagine who Ian Brooke is and your own mind?

1:17:52Um, yeah, well, I love the Another friend of mine. I actually heard that heard this from it like amateur twitch He I think I heard him. He's like it was like the seed and so there's like a couple different ways to imagine You know how we come to be it was like that the seat seed and soil notion of there is certain seeds and plants will do better in different kinds of soil and then kind of like conditions from there determine like you know and also it's like what kind of a seed was it what's it going to turn into um i definitely felt like there was some there's like some shape to what i meant to be and it's just like very clear when i'm doing things that are consistent with that that feels good um and and so yeah there's um i i guess since that is the place where where i'm feeling feeling fulfillment again i think that's what we're all all pursuing it definitely wasn't um i know i think other people can maybe feel that more directly of of how they can feel like connection with other people this is the other one that i was like pretty bad about when i was young um because i'm i'm pretty extra well i'm very extroverted uh but i'm also picky so can seem like an introvert um i it like i didn't fully appreciate how much it meant to be with people and so early on at least since it was like pretty lived out in the woods and i was not like the other people around me um like my my friends when i i mean i had my normal high school friends and stuff like that but like they they just got whatever minimal level interaction like that high schoolers get up to or whatever um you know which is fine but like i also so i was really lucky with my mentor um if i met when i was 13 american aliens captain and i had like the other part which is like the old pilots uh and it was like practically it was like a you know not literally coming but like it was like i was raised by like a whole bunch of pilots and that was an element where it felt it certainly felt good to have like that community in a way and like you know have them to like this thing that i like to do with them that was an early sort of clue on it granted they were like you know again i was a kid they're adults um so there wasn't as much could be camaraderie in the same way um but so we'd go to like but it was definitely the machine very machine focus so that was really formative for me in the early years it's probably part of why that's like the way that I feel feel seen I'm sure um well I also I wonder if the reason why you kind of didn't why you wanted to build the thing alone for a very long time is because during you know your early years as a teenager the way that you operated was you were surrounded by no one that was similarly focused in and had the same intensity and drive as you did and so going later on you probably just took that mental model and took it to the to the company yeah and eventually once you find people like a gwen shotwell you suddenly are like oh there are people like me and and they can just like unfuck all these areas yeah yep yeah and so it was definitely and i had also just changed enough as a person just grown enough rather um i think i've felt like more or less the same person since the beginning of time it's just just grown um have more answers to things so yeah as i uh as i found those people like it was just yeah it felt just more clear how we were going to do it um so yeah i you know i i've got a i guess just a decent model of this again i know what um it's very easy you know you need to go for things that are energizing for yourself and i i know what that is and you know the thing of when i mentioned um you know forgetting you know ashley is the next gwen uh is strongly my opinion on that and you you want to be doing things like the you should be focusing on i guess back to the seed and soil thing it's like there's something that is unique about you know you or me or any any of us there's like some like there's some ultimate shape that you could be there's like your maximum potential um you should really be doing things like you know you hear vc says say this of like be be spiky um and that's like that's where your value really is like where are you just exceptional and you know i don't know maybe this can also be you're just exceptionally you're like a perfect universal tool you're like so well-rounded you can actually be thrown at a bunch of things there's value in that too but they're still going to like there's some like shape of thing that you're going to be and again that could be well-roundedness um moving in that direction is where you want to go and part of that is i think exporting the things like you know again i ran prior businesses i can do uh the accounting and like these other kinds of like i other job functions yeah i can i can absolutely do those things but like that is not a good use of my time it's not those things are actually very important this is the other thing of like just because i don't like doing them doesn't mean they don't matter so it really was important to so i wanted to find people that for them those were the things they liked there's like nothing better i learned early on there's like nothing i loved more when you would see because I know what it is for me to hate doing something uh and so I it's like I like when I'm doing the thing like I don't know so other people don't like I'm obviously going to just be better suited for that for me it's it's to the extent where I remember when I was in high school and if I didn't want to do things like most of high school I just didn't want to do anything that I was doing and so I just didn't do it yeah and people would be like why are you lazy or why are you not but why are you procrastinating it's like I genuinely just don't I don't care yeah When I when I ask people why I should care like I asked for the why again and again and no one gave me good reasons to care And so I just kind of like it wasn't you know the things that I was passionate about I was just You know voraciously consuming and trying to understand But then that was not what they were optimizing for yeah I imagine you can maybe relate to this because it was the same way for me I mean like I did horribly even in middle school because I just didn't do homework I mean, I was already building these things likewise like yeah I remember like the one of like it's like yeah I didn't really like school because it got in the way of learning for instance it's not that I mean I love I love knowledge I love solving problems I love doing these things and it turns out in many of the institutions we have are they're not bad ways of doing that for particular kinds of people but this goes back to think of like are you like you know other people like do you do you drive I've, um, you know, like I didn't particularly like being told, like being told what to do, Carrie.

1:24:23So this is another weird thing maybe for me to get used to in the company. Um, actually great example of this. Uh, it seemed weird to me that it was useful to like, I guess, provide like clarity and guidance of like, this is what we're doing everybody. Like, um, so which sounds silly, but like, um, I don't know, like, I feel like it should just be sort of evident on this or similarly like these are your roles and responsibilities this is the other one of of like yeah I don't know just like having leadership I was just used to like I wanted to pursue my thing and I assumed that this was true for everyone it's not yeah it's not it's not and like I shouldn't say I assumed I got this rationally but for me it's very hard I don't like making people do things that I wouldn't want to do and so that feels really weird when you're like telling someone to do a thing that you don't like like that to me felt wrong i guess that was the really big one of like i felt like i was getting away with murder on this where i'm like yeah it's like you know this what i consider just like absolutely eating shit on this thing which is like the miserable part of the job um could bring them great joy yeah yeah when you meet someone that's really happy with accounting yeah exactly there's like i i am you know actually and this is where as we're coming up on on the b for us it's like we want to get you know a very good you know finance like whether a cfo or a high level finance person like they just they they it would be really weird if there was a cfo or you know a finance person that was like me that like these things like no they need to get off on a very particular thing that is completely different from what i like and and yeah that's like you know so i can at least go a different like it gets easier for me to solve this problem in a way of more it's like i get to spend more time in a way of the place i like of thinking about people and it's like okay what what is that kind of person like um and you know how are they going to assimilate with the rest of the group and like curating at the end of the day you know it's it's like in the same way that you're not actually making um the the plane is not actually ultimately going to be like the the product watch or even the the aircraft service it's like there's like the factory that makes the thing is more the that's more of what you're making than the thing itself it's the same thing with a company it's like well what i'm actually doing is i'm assembling the group of people uh uh and giving them like you know the right ones they're going to want to solve this problem and that's far more what you know that that's what i'm actually doing as ceo of the company like yeah that's that's what my job should be uh and so this is actually where it's pretty convenient that i do you know it's like when i was talking earlier on like i don't know uh how brains work and feelings and things like that like it's actually very relevant for for this job um it's not it's not just the suffering part it turns out so that's a key part of it yeah yeah it definitely definitely is uh you know humbles you in all the right ways so i remember when i first started and there was a number of of aspects of this and other like other businesses that i tried to start before even on like my first business was an empanada business and i made you know blueberry empanadas and i i you know made hundreds of these things and sold you know um and that's how i paid to get to poland uh for my foreign exchange was i just sold$7 gluten-free blueberry empanadas with Alaska wild blueberries at soccer games.

1:27:30And there was aspects to that business that I really enjoyed. And there was things that I didn't. And then over same with the podcast, there's aspects to the business that I'm really, really happy about. I love interviewing founders and kind of like understanding people. But then the like editing side just kills my soul. And like, it would be something where I would delay for over a month editing something. And it just made me want to kill myself. And then I would finally under duress, like do it over the course of three or four days. You know, this thing could be done in an hour, but took forever um how is the kind of version of ian that gets to do you know the things that you love how has that evolved over time um are you trying to what areas are you trying to focus on to just bring make it so your life is more full of things that bring you joy and energy versus you know kind of suck your the living yeah i mean it's it's clear like um i love again running with prior talks of like i obviously like the being in my head solving prop like that that sort of future state so i'm very like i'm very ahead in the clouds again i can do can machine the thing like i can fully make everything applied um and that is where the rubber meets the road and i like to have very high opinions on how this needs to be done but i really love the the process of it's like i it's kind of funny when something comes up in um I don't know, there's like kind of one on this of, oh no, the TSFC is going to be like too high or something like, there's some issue.

1:28:56That's when I get to bring out my favorite part of like, there's finally a problem to solve. You know, it's not the high level, like it's all been architected. It's like, there's actually a thing to solve that like gets to use my talents on this, where I get to make the big, you know, I get to move the big levers on things where like, where I guess on engineering, I don't derive too much joy from. um certain kinds of like analysis you know i get i like performance modeling is like it's kind of fun um but you're kind of doing in your head anyway yeah yeah i do i do like a high fidelity one to sort of set initial parameters uh or low fidelity one rather uh to set initial parameters and get us like pretty close like ballpark of like you know it's like not quite just uh fear me estimate type type stuff but you know in that in that ballpark um and then but there's like another kind of person where like it's like it's interesting when you're hiring folks certainly get a flavor of engineer where it's like you know they've been at ge or something and they've done analysis on like a flange for you know it's like and how long was that program it was like a year and a half great um yeah but the thing is like they like that work and like hey for my thing to work you know the whole point of it for an airplane to be safe every level of it needs to be done to that degree ultimately i would blow my brains out doing that like i could i could never um and so yeah i think that's the kind of so on the technical front there is there's that of all right sort it like um again i i get to focus more on my like architectural level i don't have to spend as much time you know down on the specifics now i do even have specific opinions on like how cad drawing everybody how you should like make a 3d model just be a little specific um i have high weight on optionality and art like so when i'm designing a part optionality and art well in the part uh so like i don't know there's like some some component and i don't know i mean again it just reflects how i solve problems like i've got a general sense of like okay this whole thing i i'm really big on setting up relations in in like the 2d 2d cad drawing uh where i can change certain variables and it kind of like it'll all adjust in the right way i suppose there's like sort of the really bad way where you can like set it's like i don't know maybe finance people have this equivalent like hard coding too many things i have this for like doing something even in cad where you're like that is a lazy bad way to do it maybe it's it requires more forethought designing this way because you already have to know kind of what you're getting at to know which which relations matter and which don't um so anyways i even have it to that level of like i'm going even even for those those kinds of specific things um so yeah like i obviously again can do it um but it's more that i like setting up even that as like the final driving towards okay what exact parameter does it need to be i derive less joy from that it was more of like well i've made it in a way where kind of no matter what it is what an analysis says like i can very quickly adjust this thing accordingly so again i like architectural type problems um so doing that but then getting to the uh You know so I get to set up my time to be more that so yeah when the right sort of problem shows up where I get to get Like bring out those skills of like actually well We can just change these few things about it which are like major major architectural changes So if you were just you know that very linear process Started here, you know like everything was sort of starting at this point and ending up there like a very yeah Just linear linear thinking that seems like off the map because I've just talked about this completely tangential thing but again if you had like the broader architect like you knew why that thing maybe did or did not matter uh so yeah i love when i get to do that kind of a problem you want to keep the entire product in your head yeah yeah this is like i need to be doing that all the time so like it's nice when yeah when i need to update that anyway it's like and it's definitely even when things seem like really bad uh architecture's like fuck this is a big problem like i it's it's been it's like having enough it's like i always find the solution to it and like i kind of imagine this too for for my own product is I it would it would suck for me if the like lighting was perfect but then the like scenery was bad and stuff is is the way that you kind of think about it you are designing this engine and you want it to be beautiful and amazing and performant and all these things but then you have like the full context of if you imagine taking the engine and just putting on like a shitty aircraft it like maybe kills your soul but then having the full embodied vision in your head of here's the aircraft and here's the design of the interior and even a little like customer experience and then you kind of like work your way backwards from there and you like when you're waking up in the morning and working on this engine to start um you're thinking about that long-term vision of how everything is going to fit together even maybe how the customer experience will be yeah for deciding whether or not to buy a flight yeah exactly yeah that's definitely all um and so i can i can delay gratification in a way when i'm like unhappy with how the engine is currently being done by you know uh you know for whatever reasons like well we needed to get an iteration done now that's typically what it is right like again i have some like platonic ideal i'm driving towards but it's like okay but we can't do some of those things now or that doesn't matter now again this is a lot a lot of the um this is where like talent and skill also comes in of knowing where where you need to focus right now so yeah and i think that's just like really the um i've certainly always got the full thing going on there and one way this always makes it easier in maybe this gets to how the company is also structured it's a lot easier to tolerate things being bad right now if we get one more iteration if we're if we can get to it on the next one you get if you get to basically wake up in the morning again yeah yeah so it's like now if this was going to be the the one final one you're like fuck like it's not good enough you know because this is the problem like where i'm at like nothing is ever good enough but it becomes a lot easier to stomach it when you're like it's fine we're going to do another and then the way that you set up the company this goes to why i'm vertically integrated on manufacturing why i could never have someone else make it it's like i want to drive down the cost as much as possible for me to say i want to do it like i want to do another take on this this even goes to how i architect the teams um i need it to not be if we weren't changing everything it would be a little bit different on who we would hire and what we would do but i need to be able to say it's like okay but i want to like reconsider this and we're actually starting over again um we're doing another another iteration again that's a different personality type to the to the person that was optimizing a flange for a year and a half that's you know it sounds like the worst thing ever um but for me this goes everywhere like everywhere from the equipment that that we have in house uh through the people that you know like designing these things um yeah that's that's like i've i've solved this problem for myself in a way i'm very and so there's things where you could absolutely do it differently again if you were just doing like your your first first take um yeah you would just pick different people build in a different way but that's i know that's not gonna like i'm giving myself room to tinker in a way even though again i have like high clarity on what i'm trying to get to um it's interesting um for me to think about this kind of wrapping it to what you were talking about initially was you mentioned you hate like expensive things and not like you want quality but you also want the ability to access it if you're not you know extremely wealthy and so i think kind of i'd imagine that probably in your mind if you created a world where you do have this amazing point-to-point experience but it costs an obscene amount of money and you basically can't have you yourself as a 17 year old literally can't even afford to experience what you've created yeah like that would probably like hurt you yeah yeah yeah again i wouldn't have solved the problem yeah that that would be like failure yeah that would totally be failure so and then you know and there's the we can also just say the other obvious one of like if this was not a product that ever um you know similarly it'll be failure if like it isn't uh scaled like the business has to succeed um for this to actually actually matter like it can't just be this is why i don't actually derive that much joy from the you know we've kind of got it working because again like that that was just just a start that's a prerequisite like of course it has to work uh it also has to work so consistently and so you know there's like there's always that much harder problem to solve um it has to be nine nines of reliability yeah and also work at scale and we're doing that with again just like a wildly new category of problem so yeah yeah let's uh do final question what's the hardest thing you've overcome uh i just remember i mean i do remember like school was the most miserable time in my life I hated it so much um yeah it's such a bit like if I just think of like the things that I suffered through the most that definitely was the most continual like there was no upside that was just fucking suffering so again I know other people like they you know they can find something that they like in it um I was also not in an ambitious place so I it literally did not seem obvious why it was like eventually I met people from like MIT and stuff like me like oh my god if I knew that I could have hung out with you guys I would have probably worked a lot harder just so that I could have been around them um yeah you know that's like one that comes top of mind uh but you know I don't know this whole project but no I do think it's that that's kind of that yeah hopefully that was with other people yeah and again I was just like um I didn't you know it just seemed normal I guess but yeah that was a pretty uh pretty bad one so I kind of was like as soon as I was eight the second i was 18 i moved to milan italy uh i yeah i went to a design school there and then just out of like guilt because i felt like i would be a loser if i didn't have a college degree um you know i did go back to uh uh studying physics at boulder but then dropped out when i started another company i was just like you know when i you know i still feel like a little lame for not and i'm again i'm sure i could have suffered through it suffered through it but like I just couldn't handle it anymore.