What America Is Missing Between Sanctions and Nuclear War (Bryon Hargis, Co-Founder & CEO of Castelion)

27:21And again, one of the ways to lose a war is just to have someone bleed you dry of money. And so it is not a perfect solution to only focus on defense. You need to focus on how do I get them to stop shooting at me and quick. And so you have to have a mix of these systems. And that's not to say that the defense is not important because you do want to go try to stop those things from getting through and you're willing to pay a large chunk of money to do that. But I think that overall, we need to be more cost effective in both the defensive and offensive systems. And that's something that we have to work on.

28:03And it's something that Castellan is working on. We're obviously working on the offensive side. We have plans in the hopper for what we're going to do on the defensive side to get the cost down. And I think that you get back to the end of the day, it all comes back to cost and scale. You have to have these systems proliferate and they have to be effective.

28:22Bryon Hargis:I'd love to come back to that cost and scale piece as we sort of maybe head towards learning more about exactly what you're building and why. You mentioned your experience in this space. You had 15 years at John Hopkins APL and five at SpaceX. What were the things that you noticed in your first week at SpaceX were different from the 15 years that came before it? Besides everything? Besides everything. Besides everything? There was even free fro-yo. I mean, we didn't have that. Wow, there you go. When you graduate from an engineering program in school and you go into traditional aerospace, the first thing you learn is that you don't know anything.

29:12You don't know the aerospace engineering process of the systems engineering process. It was very foreign concept to me. I was not taught that. and so you have this like gut reaction of like this doesn't feel like the most efficient way to get to the answer but I'm 22 what do I know and I have someone with 20 years experience telling me that that's not how it's done and so you find yourself in that environment for 10 years and then you notice that I'm now beating on the fresh out of school graduate that that's not how it's done and you just become a part of that machine yes and it propagates forward and then anybody that comes in that has any inkling of kind of like being you know more forward leaning on how they do systems engineering you're beating it out of them because that's not how it's done i think the biggest thing that i saw joining spacex everything that you ever felt when you first started that that job in aerospace fresh out of school that you're like this just doesn't seem efficient.

30:17Turns out it's not efficient. And if you don't do it, you can make tremendous progress in aerospace. And I would say that my first 12 years at APL, they were highly informative.

30:27Bryon Hargis:I loved my time there. I got to work across all of government doing really cool problems. It kind of felt like the golden age of aerospace was dead and gone. And I was just born into the wrong generation and I was never going to get to experience it. And you know, you read the books about the Apollo era, you read the books about skunk works and you're just like, my God, what a time to be alive. How cool it had been to be part of one of those programs. Going to SpaceX was 100 % getting to be a part of history that I think that in 30 years, someone's going to think the same thing it was just a truly cool experience and i think that one of elon's superpowers that's not always a superpower sometimes he's wrong but he doesn't care if everybody thinks what he's doing is wrong he thinks it's right and he's willing to give it a go and he's very open to being data driven and proven that hey i was wrong and then without ego dropping that path and then doing something different.

31:32And I think that that is like very different than I'd say a normal company behavior who when you make that large bet if I'm going to go do something this way, you then get into the sunk cost fallacy where I'll look like a giant idiot or we've spent too much. We have to just keep going and make it successful. And then it ends up in a disaster. And I think that SpaceX showed that there are a lot of ways to get back to that Apollo era progress in aerospace and they they've proven it and it kind of the funniest thing that I would see happening before I joined SpaceX of course you know I'm in the aerospace field I know people at all kinds of companies like they're working on reusable rockets something that everybody's like that'll never work that can't be done that's not possible everybody's literally just making fun of them they're like it'll never happen what a bunch of idiots and I'm thinking I'm like but at least they're trying yeah uh and then they get it to work even after it works you would still hear people kind of talk about it as though they're a pyramid scheme they'll fall apart shortly no way that that works and it's like it's literally working you just saw it land like what are you talking about and and there's literally people because i think what it honestly like when you get back to like the kind of the root cause human nature of it they would have to accept that they have been doing something in a horribly stupid way for decades they'd have to admit that or you can just continue to think that spacex is just around the corner from from failing and so in the u.s aerospace industry you watch spacex become completely dominant i mean they took over all like all launch for the most part especially from like a mass to orbit perspective.

33:24They killed all Russian launch vehicles. They decimated European launch market. And all the while, like the primary competitor of the United States was like, it'll never work. And they just watched it happen. And unfortunately, I see that same attitude in almost every other area of kind of traditional aerospace and defense manufacturing. Because again, I think to admit that, hey, what we're doing is not working, you have to first admit that there's a problem and that's hard. But I'd say we take a lot of heat for being different, irrespective of whatever results that we put out. We still get looked at like, you can't do it like that.

34:05It'll never work like that. I fundamentally, like what SpaceX taught me was that's not true.

34:10Bryon Hargis:What was it in you that allowed you after 12 years in this old paradigm to say, actually, maybe the way I've spent my time here has been totally wrong. And I'm open to this very different style of building things. I would say I never drank the traditional aerospace Kool-Aid. I always was like, this doesn't seem right. But I didn't have the confidence like at 22 to be like, this is wrong. I'm not going to do this. Yeah. You know, I was like, I'm probably the idiot here. This is how it's done. And this is not to say that everything in which traditional aerospace is wrong. A lot of it is right. in caring about the complex like the way you approach complex issues a lot of thing that's that's right um so i got tremendous experience but i was always just a little bit skeptical of like this can't be the best way to do this because frankly like i started my career as an as an engineer i was a mechanical engineer i went back and i got a master's in physics specialized in photonics and optics i worked on space program after space program that never got to space.

35:20For an engineer, there's nothing more demoralizing than I've just worked like two, three years on something and it gets canceled because it's too expensive. It's too slow. It didn't solve the actual need. And that became very frustrating. And that actually prompted my move away from engineering because I wanted to have my hand in guiding the type of work we were doing because I wanted to try to get something over the line. And so my time at APL, I'd say I already felt like I was missing the boat to a degree. And then when this explosion of commercial space happened, I remember watching from the sidelines, like Planet Labs, Skybox.

36:00And sure, were they the most capable systems? No. Did they get something in space? Were they taking imagery and doing something? Absolutely. And frankly, I just felt like I was missing out. And so I quit voluntarily because I wanted to go be part of a company that was focused on moving faster. And that's not to say I'm not trying to say anything negative about APL. It was a great place to work. But their behaviors mimicked the behaviors of traditional aerospace.

36:34Bryon Hargis:And I wanted to go work with a company that wasn't doing that. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the B2B identity platform helping businesses verify users, fight fraud, and build trust. fraudsters are already using AI to spoof faces, voices, and documents, so your defenses need to adapt just as fast. Persona helps secure some of the Internet's largest and most trusted platforms with identity verification. If you're building a product where trust matters, identity should be a priority. You've probably already experienced Persona without realizing it, verifying your LinkedIn profile, signing up for Etsy, or renting a scooter with Lime.

37:12Bryon Hargis:Trusted by leading companies like Square, Brex, and Twilio, Persona gives you the building blocks to create identity flows that adapt to your customers, risk tolerance, and locales you operate in, whether you're verifying age, onboarding businesses, or automating KYC. It's fully configurable, so you can launch in days, not quarters. Want to see for yourself? Generalist listeners get a free year of the starter plan. Head to withpersona.com slash generalist and check it out. Given your experience, why after your sort of five years at SpaceX and obviously the era before that, wasn't it the logical move to create sort of a space defense company of some kind or something more explicitly in that realm?

37:58Bryon Hargis:Obviously, there are places where that intersects with what you're doing. But yeah, was that sort of an area that you explored or yeah, what drew you to this in particular? I'm very focused on the outcome and the outcome for me personally. I want to leave, I want to leave a safe world to my kids point blank. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. Cause I think this is the way, this isn't the only way to leave a safe world to be very clear. Unfortunately, this is what I'm good at and what I know. And so this is how I can help. This is what I got. Um, and you know, could I be a Beethoven? No. Would I like to do that?

38:36Sure. That'd be awesome. but like that's I don't have that skill in me but um uh there's a lot of ways to contribute but this is what I can contribute and so yes I could have we could have built a space company and there were a lot of things there's a lot of things to still be done there I had given almost my I think my greatest ideas and best work to SpaceX and they executed them flawlessly in a way that you know But frankly, you know, I had been working in like the kind of like the space and defense side of, you know, of the sector for my entire time. And these ideas were talked about for decades and had never been pulled off.

39:20and I go to SpaceX and over like whatever I was there for like almost six years executed and built like this tremendous capability that had been talked about by the rest of the space industry for forever and had not happened and so when I left did I have more ideas sure do I want to go and try to directly compete with SpaceX no I am I'm not suicidal from a business perspective that

39:46Bryon Hargis:is very difficult yeah especially because uh they control almost all of global space launch yes it's just it's just there's so many things stacked against you and you have to give them credit for what they've done and what they've been good at and and like how well that they have executed on on that vision but for me like that was in and frankly like i wouldn't have left spacex if i felt that wasn't in a good place and those those capabilities weren't going to continue because like I was achieving kind of my personal goal at SpaceX, leaving a safer future. What I saw was a need for, we need to go work on other parts of this kill chain because it's called a chain because it's only as good as its weakest link.

40:29It was very apparent, like the, like, you know, the concept for what Castellan was working on, you know, if you were in the industry, this is not like some genius idea that we came up with that no one else had it was very apparent and i wanted to go focus on that and i i actually brought i brought the idea to spacex as like i would i would really love for us to go solve this and there was a under no illusions of what spacex was they were you know they're they're making humanity multi-planet multi-planetary under no illusions they're going to mars i was told that from the beginning and then it was too big of an opportunity cost to kind of divert into what I felt would be necessary to truly deliver on that outcome of leaving a safer future.

41:16And so that was totally fine. Love the time there. We went off and started this business to go focus on that other, you know, the offensive pointy end side of the kill chain, because I think that it needed a lot of work. And so that's how we got to here. And I don't feel like it took if you were in the industry this was a very apparent problem to anybody i always think that it was kind of funny like when you go to try to raise money very you know early on and people always want you to have like a technical gimmick or some kind of like what's your what's your like uh you know breakthrough that no one else is going to be able to copy and we really didn't have a technical like you know something like patentable or something that was just us it's like you're bringing the same kind of culture of how do we get back to the apollo era roots but apply that just to a different area aerospace that's what we're doing i have faith that that process works and that really doesn't sell well quite frankly spacex proved that like Apollo era is not dead.

42:22And one of the coolest things that I think they did is the, the podcasting that they have always done with almost all the launches and all the important things I think is empowered, like a totally new generation of Americans that are going to want to go into STEM science technology fields and that wouldn't have otherwise existed because it wasn't cool.

42:43Bryon Hargis:As you said about sort of building this business, I'm curious to understand how important the moment of time was that you entered into because it was clearly I think you've called it anti-hot when you set out to you know raise money for this but it was anti-hot for not as long as you know it might have been right like you know if you'd started this business five years earlier maybe it still would have worked and you know there was enough sort of uh of the right tailwinds beginning to very very slowly pick up steam but uh that seems like it would have been massively harder how do you think about like what the key factors were for you that arrived in in just the right moments i completely agree with your assessment that five years earlier like i don't know that our company would have made it there's there's a reason that a lot of these types of like hardware focused startups require a billionaire to start them yes um it was very apparent as we were trying to like raise our first funding and they're like where's your prototype i'm like i don't think you understand i cannot lock the engineers in a room with a pizza over the weekend and we'll have a working hypersonic missile prototype like i i can't do that i didn't think about that probably as much as i should have before before leaving because there was definitely a point, I think, when we started the business and I was like, I've just self-elected out of a great job and I'm going to be unemployed.

44:17That was a, I feel like a real reasonable outcome of likelihood for the first four months. Androll, I think, changed the game to a large degree with making investors see that you can make money in defense if you don't do it the same way that all of the traditional you know defense primes run their business on these cost plus models where the margins are quite appropriately capped pretty hard and so andrew's success in my opinion and and to a degree spacex's success because at this point in time in late 22 like if you just like we're doing something in space like you're going to get funded and the idea could be absolutely ridiculous but you would get initial funding to go find out yes and so i think you know spacex obviously is like the first one moving through showing tremendous success for a very capital intensive hardware focused business but then you have andrew doing it in defense and truly i think they paved the way in making this an investable category now even so in 2022 it was absolutely brutal i don't remember for what firm it was.

45:32But I remember pitching them and like five minutes in, they just like, they're like pause. They tell me to stop. And then like, they're literally like drawing on their whiteboard behind them. And they, they draw like a quad, you know, like a quad, like an X and Y axes. And they're like, you've got like pure commercial and you've got defense and then you've got software and hardware. And they're like, you're over in this quadrant. In fact, you're probably like off the chart over here. This whole quadrant's uninvestable. And I was like, uh i was like okay i guess let's just call this meeting meeting over but you know i think with um with anything business requires luck and and i whenever i like hear somebody talk about you know like their business success is like they made it they made it happen through their perfect skill i'm like i'm immediately tuned out that is complete crap now you can make your own luck and by that I mean if there's a certain chance that something happens let's say it's 25 percent if you just persevere and just try and try and try again you will get one of them to go through and so you can create your own luck but to think that it you don't have some degree of luck to have success in breaking through is completely disingenuous and especially disingenuous to like anybody new that's going to try to start a business who could become extremely discouraged because things don't go perfectly like nothing goes perfectly and i think one of the you know the strongest traits is like a successful founder that you have to have is you just have to be persistent i am doggedly persistent when i set my mind to something i think i had lots of people think that i was absolutely crazy for leaving but it mattered to me and even after that meeting of being shown that you know we're in the top white front quadrant of failure you know you just go have 98 more meetings uh and luckily luckily we had success uh with like one of the hundred and um got going from there and i'd actually state like you know we raised less and we took more dilution in those early rounds because it was just not hot um and they were taking a gamble which is completely fair but we've been very lucky that the market since then like since like going into 24 obviously AI is on top but defense is probably second that's a tremendous tailwind for us so from a luck perspective of when we started the business to your question we're lucky I knew it's a good idea it's been a good idea the whole time but we're lucky on timing and I think that is something that we can't forget and I'm very thankful that we're lucky

48:23Bryon Hargis:Yes, lucky and good. Lucky and good. It's a good combo. Yeah, that's the perfect combo. I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into the sort of specific product bets that you're making and what you're building. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. So our first product, kind of funny, it was named Blackbeard internally. The Blackbeard name was, I don't want to say leaked, but it was put into a government budget document as Blackbeard. And I was like, oh, I guess we're releasing that now. And now that is a name of our product publicly. That wasn't necessarily my original intention, but like you could see.

48:59Bryon Hargis:I think it's a great name. We've leaned in. Yeah. First thought was like, oh, God, I hope there's nobody has like a Blackbeard trademark that is going to come after us for a missile. But you know, it's directionally correct. You've got to solve these three factors. You need a weapon that's survivable, that goes very far and gets there quickly. Great. That's a huge wide open trade space. So like, where are you going to start after that? I actually went and because I had been working in the, you know, in defense and aerospace for 20 plus years, the government actually maintains like these extremely large physics based simulations of United States assets, allies assets, foreign adversary assets.

49:41and they play them against each other in these like giant monte carlo um simulations that are all physics driven and so i went and uh talked to an individual who owned one of these said models and just asked like hey you obviously play all these war games like within this model like what what would really be a standout like what would like beyond like the obvious of going far going fast and being survivable what would be you know what would be the type of weapon that would really make a difference and that helped give us the initial steer for like what are like the second set of requirements for for blackbeard and we took that then started iterating that against customers because i think one of the things that people seem to forget when they're doing like business with the government is that they think that the government sales process is like i'm going to wait for like an RFI or RFP and I'm going to start responding and then hopefully I'll win.

50:44And it's absolutely wrong. The government is a extremely sophisticated and complex buyer, but you need to treat them like you would any other enterprise sales deal, meaning that you need to know who the decision makers are. You need to know who the stakeholders are. They need to like you. You need to make friends. You need to talk to them. You need to be meeting them well in advance of them releasing anything. And so we started taking like those initial concepts of a Blackbeard design that we had created and we started talking to people that buy weapons and asking them, what do you think? And so even though we have funded the majority of Blackbeard's development ourself off of venture capital private funding, the customer has been involved from the very beginning, even if unofficially.

51:30And so we started working through what the specs would look like. And the second part of that work that we were doing is vetting who should be our customer. If you have a group that just doesn't want to work with you, it's going to be very hard to sell them on your product. They're just like, please go away. And so our earliest customer was the Air Force, but not the part of the Air Force that buys munitions, unfortunately. But our second customer was the Navy. And so let me tell you that building a carrier-based air launch weapon is not your ideal weapon to build as your first missile. It is a layer of complexity that you would prefer you would hit in missile two or three.

52:21Why is that? There are so many requirements that go along with being on a carrier in terms of just storage on the carrier, safety requirements, being cats and traps, as they call it. So like catapult launches and being, you know, they I mean, if you watch any naval aircraft land on the carrier, it's like a control crash. They just slam it into the deck. And then being air launched is like and now you have all the requirements for being air launched with like on a manned platform. It's just there's tremendous amounts of extra work that you have to do both for the environment that you're in, but also to prove that the weapon is safe to be around people.

52:58And so you would much rather say, hey, let me just put a munition in a container and we can launch it without anybody being nearby. Yes, I see. But that wasn't where we found our customer.

53:10Bryon Hargis:So you were launched into the deep end. So we launched right into the deep end. And I mean, we're not ones to shy away from the hard work. And it was the right thing to do because it's been announced at this point, you know, we're integrating onto F-18. The Navy has the most F-18s. I mean, they have F-35s, but they have more F-18s than F-35s. And so if you want to get back to, again, that goal of deterring, you need to be on the platform that is most proliferated, that can launch the most missiles. And then everybody knows that. And so it's not the easy thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.

53:46and some of the the the ways that we achieved range especially were at the time that we started very novel um and so most of our folks have like a space or space launch background like an orbital launch background so it's it's kind of like a missile but larger scale but the first thing you know about you know an orbital launch vehicle is like single staged orbit is thus far been a pipe dream. And so if you want to go really far, you want to stage your system. A staged tactical air launch weapon is, I don't know that that's ever been done. So we started with like, okay, you're telling us range is really important.

54:28How do you feel about having a staged weapon? And that was, I'd say a kind of a difficult question for folks early on because they had never encountered that or thought through it. Because obviously when you have a staged weapon, meaning that you have two rocket motors and the first one's going to burn and then separate and drop off early into the flight and then the rest of it's going to continue on which reduces your drag and reduces your mass so you get you get a tremendous increase in range but now you have this in you know the spent booster that's going to fall somewhere early that was not a easy conversation But at the same time, it's like, hey, if you're telling us range is important, like we really think you should consider this.

55:15And so one of the ways that we have achieved range is Blackbird is a stage weapon. And that's going to be very new. And now you're putting that onto a carrier launched aircraft where you have tremendous forces involved with the with the catapult and with the landing. and then you have like a separation mechanism that cannot fail and like you can't have your you know the front of your missile fall off from a safety perspective much less like obviously it would break the weapon it's it's been quite the journey uh with folks but i mean we've proven that it's doable and the navy is fully on board um as as i'm sure that you've seen um so we are a year away from being integrated into F-18.

56:05And then we're also working with the Army where that concept of a staged weapon was also new to them from a tactical land-launched missile perspective. Those are normally unitary missiles where they're not staged, but it was the right thing to do to get range.

56:21Bryon Hargis:And I think we're pretty upfront on that thinking. We focused on a boost glide weapon for simplicity's sake. And so for everybody, what that really means is that after our motors burn out that's all the energy that the system has it has no it has no like turbo fan it has no other form of propulsion it is literally just coasting and so you are losing speed losing altitude for the entire rest of the flight as it travels to you know the end destination but there's a level of technical simplicity especially on the manufacturing side that comes along with that because when you talk about like a hard manufacturing problem making turbo machinery is not easy a boost glide weapon is literally like a rocket motor and then a a glide body with some arrow control surfaces to simplify it now it's going very fast so there's a lot of heat and thermal problems that you have to solve but there's no complex like machinery and internal to it and so we were very hyper focused on making our first product something that we could build as a startup something that would be affordable and something that could be built in large quantities and so that's why we centered on what we did and then we accomplished some of the other objectives like very long range by looking at non-traditional things like the staging versus making the weapon an air breather and so the other type of hypersonic system is they're known as air breeders where basically they have either a ramjet or scramjet combustor there's a lot of technical challenges in those and that's not to say that we would never build an air breathing system but there's a lot of technical challenges that still have to be worked through and so we were focused on simplicity and so blackbeard is all about simplicity while still being tremendously capable and unfortunately most of the actual details of the capabilities i can't talk about but you kind of get the overall gist that if you take that mindset to every single part of the system and you think through we know how it's currently done on traditional systems does that make sense should we think about a different way what would be manufacturable you know how do we keep the cost down what should it look like if you hold those metrics as the most important and capability as the third and you come to some pretty different distinct solutions when you think through the whole system in that in that regard and i think like the common misconception misconception is that as you if you think that you're placing capability third and cost and schedule you know or cost and manufacturability first and second it's like well your system you're going to be building is completely incapable that's not true uh sure can it do absolutely everything in every edge case no but what if i could afford to shoot five because it's cheaper than one yes the alternative and you get into this like system level thinking of like the effect you're trying to achieve and when we go all the way full circle to to the start of this long monologue for me of these physics-based models it turns out that a affordable scalable good enough weapon is incredibly effective in these scenarios and so you see a lot of this discussion of like a high-low mix where there's a like a low-cost scalable munition that's going to be employed with some like very specific niche use case high-end weapon to go do something very specific but it's incredibly important to have that low-end mix and the u.s has just not done a very good job to date of doing that and now you know with this administration and the department there's been new thinking like we have to bring in new entrance we have to bring in these low-cost munitions in a big way because we need this type of industrial base in our supply chain.

1:00:18And we're part of that. And so we're very grateful to be part of that. And Blackbeard is meant to address the first mass produced, low cost hypersonic munition in the U.S. inventory ever. Maybe, I don't know how cheap the Chinese ones are. I'm sure they're actually quite cost effective as well, but at least outside of China, it will be the first.

1:00:40Bryon Hargis:You know, that that concept of the high, low mix is so interesting. And, you know, it's obviously such a big part of what you're doing. I've I saw somewhere that Blackbeard sort of described as having maybe 80 percent of the capability of sort of the very top of the line army missile, but obviously at this fraction of the cost. So you can produce five or 10 or however many, you know, to sort of match against that, you know, to come back to the topic where we started with and explored a little bit on in matching the capabilities of peer powers, you know, China is obviously so effective at low cost manufacturing at scale.

1:01:23Bryon Hargis:To what extent is trying to compete on that basis sensible? You know, maybe it's just necessary that you at least have some capability there. But it seems like historically, America has sort of tried to find these, you know, offset strategies where you're competing on some very disparate dimension than than someone else, whether that's just going much more upmarket. But I suppose the question I'm asking is, will there ever be a stage where America can truly match the volume of output of a peer power like China? This is a great question. And it ties to your 80 % comment earlier. So I want to make sure to tie that in.

1:02:05America in the past has been an absolute powerhouse of manufacturing. There were financial decisions made as to why that is no longer the case. I think America is uniquely situated to be very good at manufacturing. Now, are our labor costs going to be as low as you know a developing country's labor cost absolutely not so is it is it if you have the same exact approach can you get the cost parity probably not but that isn't to say that we can't afford american manufacturing and in fact i think that the biggest issue that has to be solved and this gets to the cost and the manufacturability because i think like the thing that people forget is like the old adage like time is money in aerospace the thing that costs money is everybody's time and if you can get the time down the cost is coming out by default because it's almost all labor um and so like when you see these giant budgets for what have you it's all labor and so if you focus on creating a design that takes less labor not that you're better at like doing that labor or cheaper doing that labor but you are making a design that fundamentally is simpler to build takes less to put together is put together with higher yield because it's designed to go together only one way correctly you can have a very very cost effective mass produced product and so like if you look at automotive american auto manufacturers are are competitive within the world economy with everybody.

1:03:51They're going to be under tremendous pressure if the slate of Chinese automakers are allowed in. Now, there's some unfair advantages that they're getting. A lot of the manufacturing in China is state-subsidized on top of already having lower labor. There are geopolitical factors at play there, but America can be very competitive in manufacturing. It's the process that aerospace and defense has traditionally moved to, I'd say, since the 1960s, that is not competitive with any type of commercial practice whatsoever because it had different goals. The goal was, we want the lowest risk possible for this thing to not work or to hurt somebody.

1:04:31And that's very reasonable, like in a national space program, et cetera. But we're now at the point that that process is so slow and therefore so labor intensive and therefore so expensive because you're paying for that labor that we're almost at the limit of complexity of the types of aerospace systems we can build and you see that across like kind of the like numerous flagship programs whether you're like talking like sls and space launch or f-35 it's like what's the next generation fighter going to cost if this one costs one trillion dollars and can america even afford that yes i'm going to posit no not doing it this way yes like we have to we actually have to change to approach that allows us to have greater product and system complexity at a lower cost, or we're just going to stagnate at our current technological level.

1:05:22And so the biggest issue that needs to be addressed is China's approach and other countries' approach who don't have the money that the United States has has been this approach of how we used to do aerospace. It's this, I'm going to iteratively design something. I'm going to build it. I'm going to test it. I'm going to see how it works. And I'm going to rapidly go back and do that again in a tight circle. You get to the end answer in a shorter amount of total time and therefore a lower cost. And you also get experience of like, hey, I thought when I built this thing, it was going to behave this way.

1:05:55It turns out I was completely wrong about this one thing. And it's a nightmare to build. It would cost a fortune if we went to production that way. We need to change it. You can do that in this AERDIV model. In the traditional aerospace model, you're usually so deep into the program that if you take that delay to fix something like your program is likely to be canceled. And so, you know, you have a huge flaw and you are choosing to move forward because that is the only option you have left. And so when you get back to like, can a cost-effective mass-produced system be more capable than a very exquisite, you know, kind of traditionally designed system?

1:06:32The answer is absolutely yes. And so like the proof points for this you know you'd look at like what SpaceX has done with Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is by far the cheapest most mass-produced launch vehicle it is also the most performant and the reason it's the most performant is because they have iterated so many times they've redesigned system after system then they built it and they've seen where that the assumptions or the model wasn't correct and they've went back and they fixed it and they fixed the manufacturing system, which is something that Elon always will talk about. Like the system, the production system that builds the system is like the harder part.

1:07:14You get practice when you're building hardware, building the production capability. So what really scares me about the way China is behaving is they're using this iterative model as are other countries, you know, like North Korea. Like everybody used to just make North Korea, like they'd launch a missile and it would like blow up or fall in the ocean. But they couldn't afford to do it the way the US did aerospace. They just do this rapid iteration. And it turns out like they're getting very good because they're having so many shots on goal and so many opportunities for like engineers to learn.

1:07:47And they have so many opportunities to inject improvements, whether the improvement is a capability improvement, it's a cost improvement, it's a manufacturability improvement. They're getting all those opportunities to incorporate that. that's the thing that has to be fixed because what happens is in a system where you are learning faster than the other side you're ultimately going to have a more performant lower cost more producible system in the end and so like this concept of you know being an 80 solution sure today absolutely like this is this is our company's first time building a missile i think it's going to be quite a good missile but it's our first time give me like 20 years and we've designed more weapons than the traditional industry has in like the 100-year history, I have a feeling our missile is going to be better.

1:08:34And I have complete faith in that process. And so the thing that we really have to solve as a country is that we can't let our adversaries and our peers walk away with that iterative approach and be faster than us because warfare is always just adapting to whatever the other side is doing. And the person that actually wins is whoever adapts faster and puts the cost back on the other side quicker to counter it. And that's just how warfare is. You have to be good at that. We have to fix that. And I'd say at this point in time, American aerospace, traditional aerospace, is uniquely poorly suited to do that.

1:09:10And all of the new entrants, we all have a common theme of, we're going to do this differently. We're going to get back to these narrative approaches so that we can produce complex systems affordably and on a reasonable schedule, even if I don't know the exact technical solution for how to do this today. I'm going to build the company and all of our internal processes about how do I go out and learn quickly to do it. I think sometimes my attitude can come off as arrogant. I absolutely do not know how to do all future things. I just have faith in the process of how you can get to an understanding of a highly complex system in a reasonable amount of time and a reasonable amount of money.

1:09:50And I think that's what we are trying to solve.

1:09:54Bryon Hargis:Yeah, magical things happen when you can optimize for a learning rate. That's what's so magical about what you're trying to do and so important, I think, about what you're trying to do. As a final sort of wrap-up question, I always like to ask people if there's a book that you had the chance to assign to everyone on earth to read and know that they'd understand it, what would you like to give to them? If you're thinking of running a business, I really like The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Great book. By Mr. Horowitz, yes. I have a lot of recommendations for books from like Kip Thorne on astrophysics, just because I'm like a huge physics geek.

1:10:32Bryon Hargis:Oh, there'll be some people who want to hear those if you have a few. I'm struggling to remember the title of the book. I just have all of his books. I was actually admiring we have another one of his books on the shelf over here as a prop but it's a book on gravity and I was like maybe I'll just come steal that book. Oh no one will notice. The other series of books that I think are really interesting biographies on like Richard Feynman famous physicist from like the you know Manhattan Project era. His lectures on physics, you know, if I ever had a role like model that I'd want to emulate, it's like he has unique skill was such a genius, such so smart with physics, yet presented it in such a funny and relatable way.

1:11:16Even if physics is not your first passion in life and just like his other interests of humanity, like he like he like bongo drums, like music. While also like having like, you know, reading some of the biographies, they had like very clear personal flaws like all of us do. If you're like physics adjacent and not just a complete nerd, reading some of the books about Richard Feynman, I think you'd find it really interesting because they intertwine physics in a way that is also like a very good personal story. I'll come back to you with exact names. I'm so terrible with remembering names. I just have all of the books.

1:11:51Maybe you're thinking of something different, but surely you're joking, Mr.

1:11:55Bryon Hargis:Feynman. surely you're joking mr feinman so fantastic i love that yes and and then i i earlier this year i actually read um his collection of letters uh which someone put together and i thought that was also just amazing what a colorful character and brilliant person oh yeah and i mean his like his lectures somebody has put them on there's probably multiple channels that have put them on youtube i'm actually a huge fan of youtube of all things there are so many good creators on youtube um that talk about whatever you're you could be you could have any interest on earth just go search it like there's somebody who just loves it it has a great content about it and there's so many for me i have like this interesting mix of like watching veritasium um was it what is it three brown one blue yeah three brown one blue or three blue one brown i can't remember but all of these science related shows and then also like i watch shows on like how to weld i want to be a better welder um and and there's there's channels like make i think it's making mistakes with greg i'm also a car guy there's a channel super fast matt incredible content i watched the veritasium um game theory video after i think i saw you had mentioned it somewhere i'd watch some of his other stuff but that's an amazing video i highly recommend it isn't that an amazing video yeah i mean it's incredible i think when you watch some of these things um or read about them i'm not opposed to reading about them, but it's obviously easy to consume YouTube as you're falling asleep.

1:13:23But that episode in particular sticks in my head as like, wow, everything makes sense as to how countries respond to each other. And it's truly interesting. So I highly encourage anybody that's watching this, go check that episode out on Game Theory by Veritasium.

1:13:41Bryon Hargis:Yes, it's sort of a, you know, a nice encapsulation of in some ways the worldview one wants from your country, which is, you know, I think you sort of alluded to it. The optimal game theoretic strategy is, what was it? Nice, clear, retaliatory, and forgiving. You know, you want to be nice enough to the other person. You want to be clear about what you're doing. You want to hit back when they hit you. And you want to be more forgiving than you might think. Yeah. You're like, are those the traits that I should embody as a person and interacting with other people? Yes. Apparently, yes. Apparently, yes.

1:14:17But like, you're like, oh, that doesn't feel good. But yeah, it's quite interesting. And then the way that the science and the math comes into it as well. My mother was or is was a sociologist. And so, you know, I always viewed it as like it's a soft science. Like what how do you how do you work with that? And it turns out there's like a lot of math and statistics and models that goes into like how you model social behavior and all of these unique kind of aspects of like human society. that if you're like me and you're very like very math and like physics heavy and even chemistry is like getting a little too far out there because like you have to remember just like processes not from first principles and like you get to social science and kind of like my mind was blown like oh there's some really interesting concepts you just have to have the interest to dig into

1:15:08Bryon Hargis:them how fascinating because you basically picked the the absolute combination of math physics and sociology in many respects. That's certainly subconscious if that happened, but I guess that is true. Yeah, it was an interesting upbringing being sandwiched between a sociologist and a former fighter pilot who transitioned to running a nuclear power plant like Homer Simpson. Wow, gosh. I can't believe I'm kicking myself. I can't believe I landed on this at the very end, but maybe that's the perfect place. Well, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure, Brian. No, thank you, Mario. Very straight having me on.

1:15:43This has been great.

1:16:10Bryon Hargis:continue to explore the future.