Why the Future of Video Games is Moving Back to the Dinner Table

21:27I know Go. I know Jazz. I know Backgammon. And we had an amazing, hilarious time doing it with her rules. But eventually you want to play by the rules. Strategy games have rules for that reason. And this just, for the tutorial portion of, you know, Settlers of Catan or whatever that's called that everybody gets into. Like I tried to play that two or three times with people. It's just way too much. It's like learning to snowboard or golf or something. Like the first five games are going to be brutal. And then I'm sure you have some opening up moment. But maybe you could talk a little bit about the skill level and onboarding people to these games?

22:06Because that seemed to be the hardest part of getting into a new board game is getting five people around to learn the rules.

22:13Brynn Putnam:I mean, that's the genesis of board is I left Mirror and my life looked very different when I started Mirror. I was pregnant with my first child. Now I have a three-year-old, a nine-year-old and three stepchildren, 18, 20 and 22. And so, you know, trying to get that range of ages and interests together for family time is virtually impossible. You know, we would try to play video games and I don't know if you've played with a modern controller, but there's about 20 more buttons than the last time I played Mario, which was, you know, incredibly challenging. And then, you know, we'd play board games and it was the exact experience that you said.

22:50Brynn Putnam:We would sit there and we'd either play the same game over and over again or we'd read 20 pages of rules to try and fight about them to try to get to a game. And then invariably it would be too hard for the youngest or too easy for the oldest. And so we really think about that when we're making games. We want – for example, we've got a kitchen game similar to Overcooked where you're all collaborating to manage a busy kitchen. And my littlest one, she's the cleaner. She manages the sponge and she has a great time. And the oldest girls are there trying to memorize the recipes and think about the strategy of sequencing the tickets to get the optimal payday.

23:23Brynn Putnam:And so that's really kind of where Bored shines is experiences where everyone can come together without too much setup and no one feeling left behind. All right. Do me a favor. This is like the third time I've heard about Overcooked. Explain to Unk. I'm like – people are starting to call me Unk now. I think it's like a compliment slash joke. It's like 6 '7 or something like that. But what is overcooked? Because Jalen Brunson was playing overcooked after a Knicks win, I think. And I'm just like, well, if the captain's playing overcooked and my daughters are telling me I'm cooked all the time, I need to know what's going on here.

23:59What is overcooked and the phenomenon here?

24:02Brynn Putnam:It's a cooperative cooking game. So you're working together to manage a kitchen. And there we go. So you get guests who come in and they have specific requests and you have to figure out, you know, who does what in the kitchen to deliver these dishes before the guests get angry and leave. And so you're rewarded for the speed with which you're able to deliver on the guest satisfaction. Oh my God. This is like the bear. Yes, Jeff. Yes, Jeff. Oh my God. It's funny. I was at the French Laundry last week and we had a party for all in this liquidity conference we do. And they were putting, like, they let us walk into the kitchen and they created stations.

24:42So I just went in and I just started, it's a service, hands, and I just started, like, expediting. They thought it was either hilarious or totally cringe. But my understanding is now, I don't know if you're, I think you're a millennial, but you should embrace cringe is what I'm understanding now. Like, embrace your personal cringe.

25:01Brynn Putnam:This is what my teenage stepdaughters say, that you should lean into what makes you a little bit odd. That wasn't what I grew up with, though. No, you were supposed to hide the odd stuff. Exactly. Hide your crazy. Hide the crazy. Try to be normal. Here, you could just be like, I love board games. I'm going to do this. So when will this be available? How do people get one? And how do you think about distribution this early on? I like that you have premium pricing for the first year or two. You know, make sure the company's profitable. You don't run out of money. Everybody, every hardware startup I've ever been involved in is like, we want everybody to afford it.

25:36And I'm like, so you want to be the Sony Walkman in year 40, month four, like always a bad idea. And you probably learned that lesson, I think, maybe with Mira, which was a huge success, right? You sold it for a half billion dollars to somebody, I can't remember.

25:51Brynn Putnam:Lululemon. Lululemon. So you felt good about that? I mean, it was a good sale? Yeah. I mean, I think people don't realize we actually sold about a week before COVID. So I think it certainly would have been an interesting outcome if that conversation happened a year later. Timing is everything, yes. That would have been a different timeline, but no regrets. No, but an incredible experience. And to be able to watch a public company that's that beloved sort of operate from the inside was really fascinating. So tell us a little bit about availability and how you think about distribution. Did you do a Kickstarter for this?

26:26That seemed to be like a requirement for hardware companies back in the day is to run some sort of a Kickstarter.

26:30Brynn Putnam:No, I mean, I think we felt like we didn't want to use a Kickstarter to fund development. You know, we really, we wanted people to have confidence that the product was going to ship and that the product was going to be really high quality. And so we didn't do a Kickstarter. We launched D2C for holiday of last year. And, you know, we sold out of our 10 ,000 launch units within a few weeks of our launch, which was really exciting. and then from there you can get bored still at bored.fun on our website which is the core channel Is there a wait for these or could I just buy one of these to take on my summer trip it's just available now Available now Amazing, I am so stoked for this I was like oh man I'm going to have to like I'm going to have to use my my celebrity my micro celebrity to get one of these early because I was talking about it with my daughter one of my two twins and they were losing their mind over it.

27:27But I don't need to try to leverage a tweet or something to get one. That's good to know. I'm going to order one now for our trip. The games that are on it, Omokase, that's your cooking one, I take it.

27:42Brynn Putnam:Chop Chop is our cooking one. Omokase is a strategy game where you're sort of building different sets of sushi. Bloogs is sort of our interpretation of Lemmings, this great physics puzzle game where you're trying to save these little blue characters in this reverse platformer. I remember that, yeah. Yeah, and we have a retro arcade game, so things where you're shooting asteroids with spaceships or trying to use robots to steer snakes to eat fruit. Spycraft is like our escape room in a box, so it's a puzzle game. You're working as spies to unlock this kind of global mystery. Mushka's our virtual pet.

28:22Brynn Putnam:So sort of learn a Tamagotchi who you have to care for and play with. In a couple of weeks, our next game that's launching is called Heist, where you're using mirrors to route lasers to sort of get burglars in and out of various heist puzzles. Founders scale faster on deal. That's the deal. You can grow your company without borders and you can set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone anywhere like a modern startup or large company does. And Dio is going to get all the visas handled fast so you can get back to building. There's a great talent war that's going on right now. And you need people with superpowers for your startup to be competitive, to beat your competitors, to get your products to market.

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29:35So visit deal.com slash twist. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash twist. You know what's interesting about what you're doing? I remember getting pitched early on about casual games and it didn't fit in a box, right? Like there was gaming and like, okay, you have this Nvidia card and you get your keyboard and then, you know, consoles and it just didn't fit anywhere. And then it became bigger than everything. Candy Crush, Plants vs. Zombies, all that stuff. I kind of feel like you have that potential here, which is it's hard for people to understand where it lands, but once they do, it'll probably feel to them like an obvious use of 30 bucks.

30:16Oh, Tharos. Thrasos? Yeah.

30:19Brynn Putnam:Thrasos is that. Thrasos. Is that like - Similar to Risk. Oh, to Risk. Perfect. So yeah, this is one of the interesting things about gaming. Any of these formats, like a recipe, not copyrightable. The name obviously is, but not the game functionality. So you can make these, but what about, and you have an API, anybody can put a game in the store. Great. So that's an app store. You take half the money, 30 % of the money. Do you have a model yet? So our first community game launches next month. It's a pinball game using the robots and spaceships from our arcade game. And the model differs based on game by game.

30:57Brynn Putnam:In some cases, it's a rev share. In some cases, we're buying the game outright. But it's a marketplace where people submit their games for review, and then they get posted in the community section. Got it. So TBD, like what the sustainable business model there is in terms of like, you'd have to be careful that it's, since you don't want it to be an open platform, you want some level of quality. I think for us, we feel really excited about the fact that building a game on board to some degree is one of the most fun games on board. So I think for lots of people, they'll use the creator studio to build experiences for themselves and share them with their friends.

31:30Brynn Putnam:And then for people who want to share with the broader community, it'll go through our review just to ensure it meets sort of our quality and safety standards. And then that will be, in most cases, a rev share model. Fascinating. Yeah, that is going to be great potential. Now talk to me about like premium IP. There's huge businesses out there licensing IP constantly. uh lucas art was probably one of the most famous uh marvel before they were inside of disney was completely licensing and tragically so they licensed their characters across five movie studios and had to go recollect them all but how do you think about ip here because lucas art loves people to make games for them and my lord i mean if we could have an ashoka mandalorian grogu game, I mean, we probably wouldn't leave.

32:19And there's 10 different games you can do because you could give me a chess game for that. There's Lord of the Rings. There's so many different amazing collections of IP. Is that like down the road or you're talking to folks already?

32:31Brynn Putnam:Yeah, we've been in conversation with sort of all the large players that you mentioned. I think for us, we are really excited about sort of like Monopoly Go strategy where you take IP and characters and worlds that are really beloved and you reimagine them for board in a way that feels native and true to the technology, you know, where the pieces and the digital worlds really make sense. So early days, I think, you know, investors and customers even were encouraging us to do sort of more ports, just bringing Monopoly over, bringing checkers over. And I think we've steered away from that really in service of trying to figure out places where IP partnership can really deliver something that is new and native and authentic to board.

33:12Brynn Putnam:And those will release in the next few years. Oh man, this is going to be such an amazing startup. I think like don't sell this one. Never, never sell it. I think you're going to cry. I think you're going to, like you said earlier, like you're going to create a new category that on a platform basis, you know, as you could just, I mean, look at what services has done to Apple. Apple was kind of stagnant and then services just layering, layering, layering on all these different opportunities. So yeah, this has got to be the patient, go for the IPO, never sell this company. One of the benefits of selling a company is I think you're probably less likely to do it again.

33:55Brynn Putnam:You're more excited about other outcomes. It's funny you say that. I now own 100 % of my firm and the projects I do, have complete control, don't take on investors and go for a 10, 20-year vision. Like, why not? And you have patient investors in USV. I mean, they were in meetup.com, Scott Heiferman's company for a long time. You know, patient capital is super important. I don't think you'll ever need to raise money again, you know, the way you're doing this, if people are willing to buy the next version ahead of time. And you'll release a new version every year or two, I would assume. You'll have some sort of a cycle and the size could get bigger or different.

34:33You could build a table. I mean, so many different hardware profiles you can do.

34:37Brynn Putnam:And we launched a D &D product, a tabletop product comes out in July, which obviously really lends itself to a larger, you know, larger surface, a larger map. So I think we're excited to see how that community receives it. And if that's positive, there's definitely an opportunity for a much larger. Did you ever play Dungeons and Dragons when you were young or were you? You know, I did it young, but my son really got into it. And so we had a GM who would come to our house with a bunch of kids and they would do sessions in our dining room. And it's been really fun to watch him just use his imaginations to create stories.

35:11Brynn Putnam:It's incredible. I can remember when I was like 11, 12 or 13 growing up in Brooklyn and we would play Sunday nights. And I would just be counting the hours. I would wake up thinking about playing Dungeons and Dragons on a Sunday morning. And then we got together at like 3 or 4 o 'clock for this Dungeons and Dragons game. I would just be on pins and needles. I can't wait to play. Kind of like poker now. Like if I'm going to go to like Tremont to play poker, I'm going to play poker in a game. I'll just, I was talking to my friend Sky and we would be at work 20 years ago and thinking about going to the casino in LA, Hollywood Park down in Inglewood.

35:45And he'd be like texting me and we'd be like, oh, two more hours to go and we can go to the casino and play poker and learn strategies. There's something just great about playfulness and my Lord, what a brilliant idea. And man, if I had a nickel for every founder that came through Stanford, MIT, or Juilliard in the dance program, it seems to be the three major paths to being a successful founder. It's either you're a scientist from MIT, GSB, or a ballet dancer. Those seem to be the three big funnels. You're one of one. From ballet to -

36:22Brynn Putnam:I've been loving my - Any dancer I've ever hired has been an incredible success. So it's been number one on my hiring criteria. Anybody out there? Love hiring dancers. They seem to be a bit obsessive, yeah? And resilient, and they're able to deal with pain. It seems like an incredibly painful thing to do. You'll run through walls, so it's a good fit for startups. All right. Now, I have to ask, is this background, are you in Paris right now? is it a fake background or do you have an extremely cool bistro office that looks like it's friends no i'm i'm in new york so just a wall it looks like uh you might be in a parisian cafe uh listen i i'm ordering one like literally when i get off the actually i don't even have to do that i have people hey can somebody buy me one of these and ship it to the ranch i i'm going on this great vacation with my kids and i'm like thinking of things to do between going to the Louvre and getting a croque madame.

37:23You know, I want to sit in the park or do something at night in Hawaii or in Paris or, you know, tour of our destinations this summer. And this is like the perfect thing to travel with. And man, a larger version for like Dungeons and Dragons. That would really be cool. you should look at the poker table space there's like anybody who's into poker buys a specific poker table like there's the octagon one there's the nine seat one and like you can get them all customized and stuff like that and there are some dungeons and dragons and board game ones I think people are going to want like there'll be an aftermarket you were talking about like

38:03Brynn Putnam:accessories luxe tables yeah embedded there's going to be some you know some idiot whale like me is going to be like, is there a thousand dollar version or a$2 ,000 version that make all the kids in the neighborhood want to come over and play with my daughters? That's what I'm always trying to do is have our house be the hub. Like I want the version that's like absurdly large and all the kids can't wait to come over. I love it. I love it. Yeah. All right. Listen, continued success. Everybody go to board.fun. Is that it? Board.fun? Board.fun. And a fun, domain name. I didn't know.fun existed. It's the first startup I've ever heard.

38:40Listen, continued success with this and everybody go buy one.

38:43Brynn Putnam:Thank you. I appreciate it. My Lord. It is so great to see all these great entrepreneurs making new products and a lot of lessons there from today's interviews for founders. Number one, really understanding your customer and finding spaces where maybe it's not clearly defined, which means idiot VCs or entitled VCs. The issue with venture capitalists in a lot of cases, not all, and people like to dig on VCs, which is kind of lame in and of itself because they dedicate their lives to supporting founders and getting a bunch of capital from around the world and providing it. So it should be a little more symbiotic and there should be a love of VCs and the part they provide in the ecosystem.

39:32But there is a valid criticism that if it doesn't fit into an existing TAM, very hard for, I think, some young, inexperienced VCs to understand this. When you look at these two companies, like Online Tutor doesn't exist, Digital Board Game doesn't exist, and the people who like the existing board games hate this, and the serious gamers, it's not serious enough, and the Dungeons and Dragons people think it's sacrilege. You have to ignore all that, and you have to ignore people who are trying to create a TAM for something that doesn't exist in the world. The TAM for Airbnb was basically zero. They induced a market to exist, the TAM for ride-sharing, the TAM for eBay.

40:14eBay was like flea markets, but you couldn't really assess it to flea markets because it was global. All of this is to say, listen to your customers and build a product that delights them and everything will be fine. High order lessons here. Hey everybody, welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex. Now, if you're watching this show, listening to it, I presume you are interested in technology and that means you know about great human projects like the Concorde, the world's first supersonic passenger jet. Now that's pretty far in the past, but some companies are trying to bring it back. One of which is called Boom, had them on the show a couple of times.

40:49They want to build the modern supersonic passenger jet. But what if you wanted to go faster and with fewer people? That's what Hermes is working on. They're trying to build a hypersonic autonomous jet. And hypersonic means five times the speed of sound. So we're not just going over the limit by a little bit. We're blowing past it. I wanted to figure out how they're building this, what technology still needs to be put together, when it's coming to market, what the use cases are, and also how much more money do they need? So please join me in welcoming to the show. It's co-founder and chairman, AJ Pippica.

41:17AJ, how are you doing? Great, Alex. Happy to be here. And just because we can't start anywhere else, you are currently on camera and you're in front of what appear to be a lot of truss cranes. So where are we and what's being built behind you? Yeah, I'm in our factory here in Atlanta, Georgia. And behind me right now is our Quarter Horse Mark 2.2 airplane. So it is our second supersonic jet that the company's built. Should be out of here hopefully in the next few weeks. I can't wait. I'm actually literally counting down to the news about that. But look, AJ, I want to get to the entire Quarter Horse program and the recent iterative and impressive progress the company has made.

41:51But I think what we should do is set kind of the North Star, what you're building towards, and then we'll go back to the technology and how fast you're progressing. So maybe the thing to understand is what is Dark Horse, which is what you're building towards, and why is it an exciting and worthy technology project? Sure. So Dark Horse is a hypersonic, reusable aircraft, faster than the SR-71, smaller than the SR-71 with no person on board. So as you can imagine, you know, put that in the hands of our military leaders, the ability to operate basically with impunity in almost any airspace in the world.

42:26That is the type of asymmetric advantage that our Air Force and our allied partners are used to having. You know, we've had that type of advantage for many years through stealth technology and precision guided weapons and those kinds of things. But as we look forward into the future of modern warfare and especially things over very long distances, dealing with adversaries like China, being able to fly very far, very fast and efficiently is an important piece of that because it allows you to stay alive. And oh, by the way, don't put your airmen at risk by putting them in harm's way. So, yeah. Not to be rude about it, but we've seen a number of, let's call them high profile military aircraft crashes lately.

43:05and it would be great if instead of seeing people pass away, no one got hurt. That would be a dramatic upgrade. The unmanned element of this is very interesting to me because when I think about going faster, I think about the need to make even quicker decisions. And on one hand, it seems like it'd be a great time to have a human there so they can drive the plane. But on the other hand, at that kind of speed, I wonder if humans are even fast enough in reactions. So why is it useful to have this be an uncrewed aerial system and keep the humans out of it? Yeah, so I'll give you a couple relatively recent pieces of news.

43:40We had two F-15s shot down over Iran, created a really difficult search and rescue operation that thankfully was wildly successful. But imagine where we would be today in the negotiations if that wasn't successful and if those pilots were captured and became POWs. I mean, a POW being captured from an airplane getting shot down is almost the whole reason the SR-71 existed in the first place, because Gary Powers got shot down on the U-2. And then, you know, same kind of thing with the helicopter pilots that were rescued by an uncrewed system from Saronic. Shout out Saronic. I love that company. Yeah, yeah.

44:17Love what Dino's doing there. But, you know, as you look at the modern battlefield, be it Ukraine or the conflict in Iran, unmanned systems are by all means the future of warfare. So for sure. But when I think about Ukraine, I'm thinking about FPV drones and trailing fiber optic cables. so that way they have low latency, 100 % available steering ability. When you're going Mach 5, it's a little bit trickier. So these systems, are they going to be entirely autonomously driven, or will there be a human somewhere in a bunker or a crate with a stick? No, they'll be uncrewed. I mean, they'll fly the way that rockets fly today.

44:55Rockets fly very fast in the atmosphere on their way up and on the way down, and they do that with no human pilot in the loop whatsoever. Now, how they fly is a little bit different. They adjust to their environments within some constraints. Modern aerial warfare is a bit more challenging. And that's why I think you see the type of investment that you see in the U.S. Air Force making in its collaborative combat aircraft program on the software side, especially to create autonomy capabilities that can actually apply to real airplanes at a real combat. So, yeah, I do not expect there to be pilots in the loop, maybe decision makers on the loop, but they're not there flying the airplanes.

45:35They're making high level command and control decisions. The rocket analogy is very interesting because earlier you called it a reusable aircraft. And I'm like, of course it's reusable. It's not a rocket. And you're like, it's just like a rocket, actually. So we're kind of we're between the two, it feels in a way, because we've taken out the humans and we've taken away the human control, which smells like a rocket. but it definitely looks like a plane and it flies like a plane. So it kind of walks, talks and quacks like a duck. Maybe when you kind of have a middle category, that's not just like drone or jet, maybe you're inventing something like a third way, if you will.

46:09Maybe, you know, I always have fights with people on the internet about what's an airplane and what is not. You know, I think we're, we're all, we're all very eager here to break some records around airplanes. You know, the SR 71 speed record is, is the one that we all see in the, in the headlights but um yeah i mean there are there are a lot of fundamental differences there you know like we flew rockets before we flew supersonic jets like the v2 flew before we flew a supersonic we flew a supersonic rocket plane in the you know the um the x1 is the first aircraft or vehicle to break the sound barrier that was powered by a rocket because it's it's easier to do that in a rocket so um i think it just underscores the challenge and difficulty in building a supersonic, you know, jet powered aircraft.

46:51Um, yeah, it's, it's tough. There are not that many, uh, you know, companies out there that have been able to do it. We're going to talk about how you're making it go so fast in just a second, but I'm thinking about applications in this because clearly as someone who grew up playing, you know, Jane's flight simulator and taking a couple hours in private planes and such. I think I only flew the A-10. Well, that's because it has the world's best gun in it. Yes. If you don't, if you don't know what we're talking about, look at the A-10 Warthog and, And two things about it you need to know. One, look at how the pilot is protected in their little cocoon of metal.

47:20And then look at the gun in the front. And look at the stats about how fast it can fire and the amount of lead it can put downrange. It's tremendous. Yeah, notice this is like literally an airplane designed around a gun. Like the nose landing gear is off center because of the gun. So, yeah. The gun's huge. I mean, okay, people joke that Russia is an oil company with an economy attached. I think really the A-10 is essentially a rotary cannon with some wings bolted on. but those things look tough uh still are now a-10s a-10s slow close to the ground you know i mean these are anti-tank aircraft essentially you're building kind of the opposite but i'm curious outside the military context what we could do with this now i started off by bringing up boom because everyone kind of gets that uh i want to go to paris fast i'm going to get in a boom off i go viva but when i think about what you can do with an unmanned hypersonic plane like i mean you could bring like a like a donor kidney anywhere in the world in like some small amounts of time.

48:16I'm not going to do the math in my head because I'll get it wrong. But to me, it seems like there's a lot of applications for what you're building that are that are possible if we can get the per flight cost down. So AJ, I'm really curious. Do you see Dark Horse and other similar flight platforms that you're built down the road becoming cost possible for non-defense, non-military application? Yeah, I certainly think there are commercial applications down the road. Cargo is the natural entry point, number one, because you don't need to put people on the platform. So you're still flying over people, you're still flying over long distances, so there's certainly an element of safety there.

48:51But because you built this military business along the way, it's not your first rodeo. It's not the first iteration of the aircraft that's going and getting certified. So there's a handful of things that like to fly around the world very quickly. I looked this up a long time ago. It's pretty funny, like the things that people overnight around the world, it's like somehow still like legal documents. I don't know how that's still a thing. And we haven't gotten rid of that, but apparently it is. People say DocuSign is just a vibe-coded app with a big sales force. Well, no friends, because people are still overnighting documents.

49:23So there's, there's that, uh, flowers and lobsters. These are like the things that people ship around the world and, uh, and, and they want to move around more quickly. So great. And like the thing that you, the really, I think the real way to think about, you know, Mach four, Mach five traveling, it really takes the world and makes it regional, you know, across the Atlantic ocean in 90 minutes at the same time from like Miami to New York today. So you're really taking these economies and you're bringing them closer together at any time in history that you've done that by whatever technological means, be it steam power and shipping or railroads or the interstate system in the U.S.

50:00It's always driven economic growth. Trans-Siberian Railway, I mean, just the advent of containerization as a way to move goods more quickly with easier transfer. I mean, faster equals better and cheaper for everybody. And that's why, even though we're going to talk probably mostly in a defense context today, I wanted to put that seed in people's heads because I think that what you're building, and I know it's hard, you're not done yet, but once you get it up there and you're ready for the second version, I'm optimistic that you'll find some cool use cases there. Now, you hinted at rockets are good for going fast, but you guys aren't actually doing that.

50:31Instead, you've built Chimera, which is a great name for this because it's kind of a two-in-one system. On one hand, you have the turbojet, which I think people probably understand, And then here's the thing that blows my mind. It converts into a ramjet mid-flight and allows you to go even faster. I'm going to pull up a picture of this that you guys put out, but explain to me, one, how hard this was to do. And then, two, what it unlocks for your program that off-the-shelf engines wouldn't have been able to bring to the company. Yeah. So in terms of the challenges associated with a turbine-based combined cycle engine, the fancy term that they use out in the Air Force for these things, number one, you have to get an off-the-shelf existing gas turbine engine up to about Mach 3.

51:14So you have to get it to go maybe 30 % to 50 % faster than it was originally designed to go. And we've done that through developing a pre-cooler, which cools down the air that's coming in so that the thing doesn't melt. And you get a pretty good performance of those high speeds out of the gas turbine. And the other piece you got to... Can I ask a question about that? So you're cooling down the air intake because at those speeds, the air gets kind of compressed and therefore heats up. So you have to effectively air condition the air before you light it on fire. Yes. A little bit counterintuitive.

51:48So at Mach 3, if you take air that's flying at Mach 3 and you slow it down to a stop, which happens at the front face of a gas driven engine, that air will heat up to about 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which will melt aluminum and lots of other things. uh so like yeah it doesn't doesn't work super well when your engine's just like fragging out uh along the way up there uh not to mention the the performance that you get because the way turbojets create thrust is they raise the temperature of this high pressure flow and then exhaust it through a nozzle the temperature coming in is already pretty hot uh you're not getting as much you know bang for your buck in terms of generating thrust so um yeah those two two big pieces of uh of that and then and then once you're over Mach 3 then the real magic can again yes that's right so uh actually i actually i think it's much more simple so like a ramjet is literally the simplest air propulsion device you can think of it is the first thing in the textbook literally you open the air breathing propulsion textbook it's ramjets before anything else um because they're literally a tube with fuel injectors and a nozzle that's it um now there's potato cannon that goes very frequently yeah so uh you're using um instead of mechanical compressor blades to compress the air you're using shock waves which naturally occur when you're flying faster than the speed of sound those do the compression for you um and because you have no mechanical compressor you don't need a turbine a mechanical turbine to generate the power to drive that compressor so you remove those two components from the system and there you go kind of you kind of you don't actually remove them from the system you just route the air around the original turbine yeah which to me sounds uh difficult because you're talking about a lot of volume and a lot of inertia movie very quickly so uh one has anyone done this sort of hybrid turbojet ramjet before uh not just in a lab but i mean like actually out in the sky and uh how long did it take to figure out how to swap between modes yep so uh it's never been done in the sky uh it's been done in the lab lockheed and aerogen rocket night had a program that did it took them like six years and i don't know like 250 million dollars to do it um but the closest thing that that has existed and actually flown would be the J58 engine, which powered the SR-71.

53:58They bypassed some of the turbine, but not all of it. Well, we all know the SR-71 famously worked, so I'm glad you're barking up the right tree. Now, Chimera, as far as I understand it, has reached the point in which you have these in the air, yes? No, we haven't flown them yet. So we've tested them on the ground at two scales. The airplane that you see behind me is the first one where we will fly the pre-cooler. So we'll do that later this year. Um, and then pretty soon we'll be flying the, the Ramjet piece too. All right. So then let's, uh, because this is a little technical and I've already gotten a point of it wrong.

54:29Let's go back to the beginning and talk about your quarter horse program, which is, I think a fair way to say it is the iterative process by which you're adding complexity to your kind of smaller sized jets to work your way up to dark horse down the road. Yeah, that's right. Quarter horse is the program by which we're de-risking the technology for long duration, high speed flight. So, you know, we do that in an iterative way, building roughly one new airplane per year that de-risks the next step. You know, famous adage from Kelly Johnson, you know, famous founder of Skunk Works and greatest aircraft designer ever to live, one miracle per program.

55:02And, but like that's kind of one miracle per year though, AJ. I mean, that seems like a little bit more. Yeah. But like, you know, Kelly Johnson put 41 aircraft into production in his 40 year career. So like, we're not, we're not like, we still have a ways to go to to meet what uh you know the ideal that they set back then but um yeah you know like the way we set up the program was like step one teach rocket people how to build airplanes um that was the first piece because like there was nowhere we could hire from like where in the world could we hire people who had built a brand new airplane a year in their career today like nowhere they're all dead like we used to do this back in the 50s and 60s but they're all they're all dead So we have to rebuild it.

55:40The inverse of Boeing today, essentially. Yes, exactly. Now, in the rocket world, they do this all the time. This is exactly how SpaceX was built. Rockets, spacecraft, satellites, even over Tesla with cars. But we have to build that workforce and that discipline from scratch. So the first airplane that we built wasn't even an airplane. It was a jet-powered go-kart. It was the size of our first airplane. But the goal was really to just drive around an Air Force runway at 50 miles an hour and do it in a very short period of time. So that was the quarter horse Mark Zero. And then next step was, okay, now go fly.

56:16So that was quarter horse Mark One, which flew in May of last year. Fly is, we like, I think skirted the definition of flight as best as we could. It was about a 30 second flight, 50 feet off the ground, but it achieved the outcome of fly the airplane and get all the approvals and everything required. Okay, so that was the earliest stages. Now, I know that the Quarter Horse program in its 2.1 edition is actually breaking the sound barrier. So what's the latest flight you've done? And then what's the next flight you have coming up? Yeah, so the last flight we did with Quarter Horse 2.1 was its first supersonic flight.

56:53So that was achieved 364 days after Mark I flew. So less than a year. So kind of exactly hitting that G-Risk 1 new thing on an annual basis. The next thing that we'll want to do is we'll want to push the speed up higher. We hit about Mach 1.21. So I want to get that up a little bit higher, maybe 1.5, a little bit north of that. And then we've already integrated what we call a weapons rack. So these are the racks that you start integrating stores and missiles and things on. So that's been integrated. We want to start flying with those in the relatively near term and start dropping things in the airplane.

57:31A question. so everything that i know about ordinance for for jets is so much slower than the speeds we're talking about here so can you rack mount let's just pick a missile beyond though sidewinders on the wings or do they go in a bay because we're going so fast that you can't afford the drag on the actual wings yeah so one of the nice things about having an f-100 engine in there is that we have an immense amount of thrust. So that allows us to carry a lot of things externally still at these high speeds. So the aircraft will be capable of releasing stores like an AMRAAM. So AMRAAM is a bit bigger than a Sidewinder, but the longest range air-to-air weapon that we have from high speed and high altitude.

58:16And what do you get when you release these weapons from those conditions? They tend to go a lot further. And that's a pretty big value proposition of these types of aircraft. the ability to extend the range of existing and new weapons. Because the name of the game, whether it's the Ukrainian conflict or around the Pacific, is range. It's just like boxing. If you've got a longer arm, you're probably going to win. Same thing goes with basketball and defense. So let's talk about range, because I'm really curious about what you think you're going to get. So let's go to the future. We've handled all the yearly miracles.

58:50We have Dark Horse, the Air Force, or the Navy, or whomever is going to put it into use. how far can it go on one tank of whatever magic juice it's going to run on so the the mark ii will have a range it's actually pretty similar to existing fighter jets maybe a little bit more but nothing wild um the the big thing is the range that you get out of the weapons that it can launch um so you know existing weapons double-ish the range maybe more um and then we've got some other things up our sleeve that go beyond that that i can't really talk about just yet so we'll have to talk about that next time we come on if this thing is a platform to bring munitions especially missiles closer to potential targets does that mean that it's really just a reusable first stage there you go this is i'm actually i told you we're building rockets i'm not sure if you're building well you're not but you are but you aren't but you definitely are but definitely you might be you might be this is weird i thought i had your company kind of figured out before the show but now i'm actually more confused than i was before okay well anyways i'll learn more as you guys keep building um now quarter horse 2.3 i think you're gonna bump up the speed to like mach 3 exactly yep so that one will not only have the pre-cooler in it uh it'll also be it'll also have a high temperature airframe so these airplanes this one behind me and the first one that we flew uh they're all aluminum uh so the next ones will be high temperature metallic uh that can take the temperatures up at up at those conditions um and you know also have all the fuel that's needed to get up there so yeah big thing there is get up into the mach 3 range where you can start a ramjet engine.

1:00:17And then I'm going to stick with your numerical nomenclature here. Does Corner Horse 2.4 bring Chimera up to the clouds? So actually Mark III will be Chimera. So the Mark II series is just the F-100 plus the pre-cooler from a propulsion perspective. And then we move on to the next kind of family, still similar scale, but now we bring in the full Chimera engine with the Ramjet and the pre-cooler and the gas turbine together. But the airframe itself is actually pretty much the same as 2.3. So that step is actually quite small from, you know, the aircraft that will fly next year without the Ramjet to the one that will fly with Chimera maybe a year or so later.

1:00:53It's not that big of a difference. And then after that, once we get the new airframe that can take higher temperatures, once we get the Ramjet in place, they can go even faster. What's left to sort out before you can start to build, let's just call it 1.0, the final production version yeah so um for the kind of dark horse uh style concept like you know high speed airplane uh the the next big thing and kind of the last big thing is long duration high speed flight um and that's the single most challenging bit of the the whole thing can you fly for long time at you know mach three to five handle the thermal environment in a closed loop yeah um and then reuse it like quickly and you know for for many many cycles that's the the last chunk So when I think about thermal issues, I think mostly about kind of like orbital reentry.

1:01:40How good of an analogy is that to the heat that we're talking about when we're going Mach 3 to Mach 5 for one of your aircraft? It's a great question. So I would say it is an equally challenging problem, but the nature of the problem is flipped. So for orbital reentry, you spend a very short period of time. Like you're only in these high temperature conditions for maybe a few minutes. you're screaming down through the atmosphere um which means like the total heat load the total amount of heat that comes into the system it's not that bad but the peak heating the peak temperature that you have to take is ridiculous now but if you're gonna fly you're gonna keep building up heat constantly at that level so you have to have simply an amazing way to dump heat out of the aircraft exactly or avoid picking it up that's right which way are you guys going dump or just don't pick it up there are lots of ways to do it and like it'll be a combination of the too um so yeah you gotta you gotta manage it um once it's on but once once it's in the system and you want to keep it out of the system as best you can too so um could the pre-cooler pre-cool the plane uh that would be maybe i don't know you have a big little cooler in there already like can't you just plug that in you know it would be i think it would be like pretty inefficient to do that for long periods of time it just takes a ton of energy uh to do that so um like you could i I don't know that it would make the right system level trade, though.

1:02:58All right. I want to talk about a couple of other things. First of all, you guys recently raised a$350 million series seed led by Coastal. Congrats, by the way. Thank you. Quite a lot of capital. Glad to see that venture funds can kind of put up that kind of funding. I'm curious about if you look a couple of years down the road, if venture capital is going to have enough muscle to provide what you guys need. My guess is that this is going to be an expensive project to get over the finish line, which is kind of a compliment. because I think it's worth it. But are you guys going to look at other capital sources as you grow or will venture capital kind of take you all the way to church?

1:03:31Yeah, I think the way we're building this company, you can build it privately with sufficient access to capital so long as that stays good to do what we need to do. And I think a perfect example of that is like compare SpaceX and Andrel. Andrel has raised, I think, like$11 billion of equity financing in the private markets. So like quite a bit. So like there's plenty of capital out there for these types of businesses. But look at SpaceX. Prior to the IPO, they raised$10 billion. Everything that they did. I know. And how much of that was liquidity, not actually working capital? It's insane the level of capital efficiency that that company has been able to create.

1:04:10And the way that they did is because they effectively got their customer to pay for their R &D by paying them to fly rockets all the time. How do you get the data to learn how to land a rocket? We fly rockets a lot. And you get your customers to pay for it. It's the greatest hack of the book. So for us, like we get paid to fly our airplanes by our customers all the time, which gives us the data that we need to move on to the next step and the next step, the next step. And that'll be the same for production down the road. But like capital efficiency is the name of the game when you're doing something this hard.

1:04:36So I don't expect the numbers to be small. Like there will be billions of dollars that we'll want to raise. But the revenue numbers that are coming alongside that will be equal, if not more. And I think that allows us to persist in the private markets much longer than you might otherwise be able to. I'm really glad to hear all of that. You also have some deals with the defense, oh, the DIU. Defense Innovation Unit. Defense Innovation Unit. Thank you. Sorry, my brain just... Okay, so the DIU recently bumped up its contact with y 'all. Essentially, as far as I can tell, just to learn and de-risk hypersonic flight, does that provide an equity capital-like infusion to the company?

1:05:14Or should I think about that deal as something entirely distinct from this part of the conversation? Yeah, I think you look at that deal as we are monetizing the tech de-risking that we're doing with the equity capital that we're raising. So we're developing these products with private capital. And then all of the testing that we're doing to expand the envelope and push beyond what's been done before, that data is very valuable. And we're delivering that data to the Department of War under this contract, which is exactly the type of contract that SpaceX set up with NASA in the original commercial orbital transportation services contract.

1:05:47And like, you know, I've literally like been walking around the Pentagon like a Jehovah's Witness with like the report from that that says this is how you do this. I've been doing this for almost eight years now. And now, like, you know, DIU and the Air Force specifically are starting to understand this. They're starting to see the technical progress that's being made and like the tiny, relatively tiny amount of capital that they're having to put forward to do it. And they're seeing what happens. And like SpaceX wouldn't exist without that. Yeah, it's amazing. Think about what, okay, look, I don't want to cast, you know, stones or throw aspersions, but let's make fun of Raytheon.

1:06:23Why not? Well, they're an investor, so I won't make fun of them too much. Name a prime who hasn't invested in you. Choose others. That one. That one. That unnamed prime. Imagine how Raytheon would have gotten this done in three days for$5. We all know it. But any other prime would have taken so much longer and so much more capital. I wonder if we just have a structural advantage for startups like you guys, because you're not, I don't know exactly what their ills are other than, you know, inertia, organizational drift, lack of efficiency, poor incentives, et cetera. But like, it's just so refreshing to hear that we're going what it feels like three times faster than we used to or five times faster for less money, AJ.

1:07:02I mean, like there, there is a reason there has not been a new fighter jet manufacturer or like large military aircraft manufacturer founded in this country since the 1950s. General Dynamics was the last one. And like Peter Thiel talked to Elon about this, you know, when he was thinking about investing in SpaceX. And, you know, he was asking like, hey, like you got this Tesla thing over here. Nobody started a successful U.S. car company since when was like, well, Jeep in 1941. and people everybody saw that as like well this is a reason not to do it and yet the inverse is actually paradoxically the correct thing this is the opportunity if you are willing to take the risk to try and that's what we've done here over the past you know seven and a half years and proved it out and now I think we've got pretty good moat for ourselves that we hope to continue building but like there's no other help coming when it comes to aircraft production in this country like the f-22 and f-35 they each took 20 to 25 years to develop and like 30 and 60 billion dollars just for development um so being able to a jillion dollars a piece and they can't make more than two per year and look the f-22 raptor is gorgeous we can all agree it's a beautiful plane that took too long to build and cost too much money that's why i'm excited about you guys so aj i guess uh we'll have to have you back on every three to six months as you have new announcements but I'm incredibly hype and you're building this here in the United States and I think your last couple of paragraphs are pretty much the distilled pitch for American Dynamism.

1:08:29So thank you for coming on and spreading the good word. Go fly, go faster and then as soon as you have one with a seat, I volunteer as tribute. Perfect. We'll put a saddle on for you. How's that? I'll hang on to the freaking wing, dude. Let's go. I like things that go fast in the sky. So I'm a natural fan. All right. This has been Twist. He's AJ. The company is Hermius. Check it out. See you all next time.