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

Warfare is always just adapting to whatever the other side is doing. And the person that actually wins is whoever adapts faster. We can't let our adversaries be faster than us. This is our company's first time building a missile. Give me like 20 years and we've designed more weapons than the traditional industry has in like the hundred year history. As technology has increased, the ability to project force at a distance has continually grown further and further and further out. And you're now at the point where more traditional solutions like a cruise missile take a very long time because they fly at subsonic. They fly roughly the same speed as like a passenger airliner. And so to close like the distances we're talking about now, which could be 1,000, 1,500 miles, you're talking hours. You don't just want like economic sanctions. And if that doesn't work, then we're going to like create a global catastrophe. You need something in the middle. What really matters if you want to deter is that you have to be able to do a counter response, that kind of middle of the road option between economic sanctions and the threat of global nuclear war, which nobody wants. And so it kind of like the specific capabilities that we're building within Kasselian are meant to provide a very credible middle option. What sits between an economic sanction and a nuclear weapon? For a growing number of conflicts, the honest answer is not enough. America's credible middle options, the non-nuclear ways to deter an adversary, have been quietly eroding. Castellian CEO Brian Hargis believes hypersonic missiles are a key part of the solution. Hargis spent 12 years at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and five at SpaceX before co-founding Castellian. Blackbeard is built to be cheap, survivable, and produced at scale. And it's roughly a year from flying on the Navy's F-18. In this episode, Brian and I discuss the game theory behind warfare, what SpaceX taught him about building hard things fast, and why manufacturing missiles is paradoxically essential to maintaining peace. I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist. This episode is brought to you by .tech Domains.

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Other folks don't want to lose a war. And so you just want to have overmatched strength. And the real reason that hypersonics are important is just as technology has increased, the ability to project force at a distance has continually grown. That range has grown further and further and further out. And you're now at the point where more traditional solutions like a cruise missile take. a very long time because they fly subsonic. They fly roughly the same speed as a passenger airliner. And so to close the distances we're talking about now, which could be 500,000, 1,500 miles, you're talking hours. And so if you've noticed what most of the United States' adversaries have invested in, it's been putting things on mobile platforms. And they've done that specifically. to avoid the problem that a tomahawk is a very good weapon, but it takes a very long time to get there. And so they just can do things and then they can move. And so hypersonics is really solving three fundamental problems all at the same time. It's solving range. They go very far because they fly extremely high in the atmosphere. And so there's very low drag. And so you get very good range for the size of the weapon. You get speed because it's in the name. It's hypersonic. It's faster than Mach 5. And so you're closing that vast distance very quickly before whatever you're shooting at has had time to move on. And they're highly survivable. And in this context, survivability really means that the weapon is very hard to shoot down. So it makes it to the target. And they know that. And so it gives people pause of like, hey, I can't act with impunity. And that hopefully causes them to rethink their decision of like, do I act today? Do I do this today? Do I just wait a year and see if I can improve my technology? And so we're at this point in this inflection point where our traditional solutions are going to have a reduced deterrent effect and you need a higher capability weapon to gain back that non-nuclear deterrence. And that brings us kind of to the other main point. It's not just having this concept of a hypersonic weapon because the U.S. has had that for decades. You have to build enough of them.

that they care, that it matters to them. The cost of those systems has to be affordable enough that you can buy a reasonable quantity that they care. And so all of these have been issues in hypersonics for a very long time with cost, the quantity, more so than the capability. And that is what Castellian is setting out to solve. And we're doing that to deter future conflict. There's so many interesting threats there. And, you know, I've been... going sort of obscenely deep, at least as much as is possible over the past sort of week and last few days in particular, and trying to understand these different trade-offs that are being made across different weapons and deterrence and the sort of game theory behind a lot of this. In reviewing some of the history of hypersonics, it seems like 2021 was, you know, kind of a critical moment described as, you know, something of a Sputnik moment where There was the sort of detection of China's hypersonic capabilities and just sort of how far advanced they were relative to the expectations. I wondered how that moment struck you and how it perhaps either galvanized your plans to start this business or has changed how you've thought about what it is that needs to be built. I would say very sadly, I was not surprised. I've been in aerospace and defense for 20 years. 25 years? I don't even know. A long time at this point. We can usually get the thing done, but it is incredibly expensive. It's incredibly slow. It usually works the first time, which is the whole point of the traditional aerospace systems engineering process. But you get the known byproducts of that process, which are it's going to cost a fortune and it's going to take forever. If you're up against someone else who is doing a different process that's much more agile and much faster. and more iterative, you're going to be passed. They're learning faster than you are. And so I think that that moment that you're referencing, when that came out, I forgot if it was in the Wall Street Journal or who reported on it. Yeah, I think Financial Times maybe? Financial Times? Yeah. I wasn't surprised at all. Because the problem is not just a hypersonics problem. It's almost like the game ad-libs. You could replace the noun that you're talking about and just insert something else, shipbuilding.

satellites, what have you, the problems are all the same because they're following the same systems engineering and development process. And the results of that are the same. You get a probably works outcome at very slow, very high cost. And in a world where the U.S. is so far ahead, then sure. And when you can afford it, then it's fine. But we're now moving into a world where we have peers that are, you know, even if they're not ahead of us currently in a technology area, they are moving faster. And all you have to do. logically is you you give that enough time to play out they're going to move in front and i'd say in hypersonics in some regards they have moved out in front but what's more frightening is like in that first question we talked about where the thing that truly matters to have deterrence is cost and scale that's where they're severely kicking our butt and and and i think that that is even It's less talked about, but it is a bigger problem even than the specific capabilities that they demonstrated to the world. Yes. And just to sort of put a finer point on that and make sure I'm following you, when you say sort of cost and scale, a peer power like China, their sort of industrial manufacturing base is just so much more cost effective, so much more efficient that it's not just that they're able to demo this hypersonic missile in 2021. you know, is sort of concerning. It's that they can produce so, so many more at such a cost advantage. And as you said, that's sort of something that's being seen from shipbuilding to satellites to whatever it might be. Is that right? That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. You know, it's not a paper tiger. They literally like they had their victory day parade and then they just roll missile after missile after missile after other whatever, you know, name your other system like right through Beijing and let everybody see their manufacturing prowess. that is like the true problem that i think that the united states the west in general needs to get much better at addressing and then hypersonics is just like the specific product where you're going into like we're going to work on this and that's what castellian is doing but i think overall like that is the problem that has to be addressed right now before we find ourselves not just behind in a couple areas but behind in many areas or most areas and it really just comes down to

you have to have that manufacturing capacity. You have to be able to build things that is actually important in warfare. And then when you look at how wars are most normally won, sure, there's like, if you have a greatly, you know, you have a greater capability than the other side, it looks easy. But then at the end of the day, if you're like evenly mashed, it almost always comes down to economics. And so the cost of war really matters. And you have to do that better than the other side. And that has to be solved as well. And that is something that certainly I'd say traditional aerospace in the United States is not doing a good job with. I'd love to follow up on the manufacturing base piece in a moment. But on this concept of deterrence, I've heard you say before that, you know, right now, America sort of has very little middle ground, few middle rungs between sanctions and nuclear warheads. Maybe to sort of. give folks a better sense of that. Why are those middle rungs so important? And I guess something that I've been trying to think through is like, why are traditional missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, why are those not sort of suitable middle rung deterrences? When you get into the game theory of this, it's honestly quite fascinating. And I think there's lots of ways we could take this. it's specifically to what you asked when you're looking at kind of like the the what is the optimal response to conflict and if you look at like the game theory of like prisoner's dilemma yes the optimal game theory for that has been proven and simulated is is tit for tat yes and so if someone does something you need to basically do it back effectively it can't be you know it can't be ineffective And then you need to forgive because otherwise, if they just take that same approach and just keep going back and forth, it'll go forever. And that's not ideal either. But when you play that out, you actually realize like, hey, that that applied that you can literally just witness what happens in the world, you know, between countries and their conflicts. They're literally just playing out prisoner's dilemma in a horrible fashion. Yes. So what really matters if you want to deter is that you have to be able to do a counter response. And so.

The United States has built up tremendous capabilities to have that kind of middle-of-the-road option between economic sanctions and the threat of global nuclear war, which nobody wants. We still have that for certain, I'd say, threats in certain countries. Unfortunately, with a peer country, we are starting to lose that middle ground. They have done such a good job of building up their capabilities that that middle rung... is no longer extremely effective as a response. And at the point that it's ineffective, they can kind of act with impunity and they're not dumb. They know that. And so then you lead to the situation where you've got like on the two hands, as I said, you've got economic sanctions, which can work. It's like the softest approach. And you can see those being employed constantly. But then with no middle ground, you have no you have no room to kind of slowly escalate, which is always as like a policymaker. That was that's you want options. You want options. You don't just want like economic sanctions. And if that doesn't work, then we're going to like create a global global catastrophe. You need something in the middle. And so it's critically important that they have those options, not so that they're used. But so that the other side knows that you have them and that they're effective and hopefully they think about what they're doing before they go and act. And so it doesn't happen in the first place. And so hypersonics and kind of like the specific capabilities that we're building within Kesselian are meant to provide a very credible middle option in terms of like technical capability, but also when you get back to that cost and scale so that it impacts their decision making. The reason that you can't just put like a traditional warhead on a ballistic missile and then start lobbing those. And to be clear, from like a technical perspective, a ballistic missile solves all of the things like it goes far, it's survivable, and it gets there quick. But it also looks like the same delivery vehicle you would commonly use to employ nuclear weapons. And that's extremely, extremely risky to utilize against a nuclear armed.

uh peer because they don't know you can't you can't really tell what's on board you could you can say publicly hey i'm going to use this system against you and it's not nuclear arm but they're just trusting you that that that's what you said because they don't know until the first one hits that's a lot of risk yeah and i don't you know thankfully for most countries not all but most countries that's not risk that they take likely and And I think that's good for everybody. And so I know it kind of sounds like a very weird for like a munitions manufacturer. I truly believe like what we're trying to do and what we're building is going to keep not just like the United States safe. It's going to keep most of the world safe. And I truly believe that. And I know not everybody would agree with that. But that's why I feel so passionate about what we're working on. And that's why most of our workforce works here. Like we don't come into work thinking like. I can't wait to launch a missile against a ship or what have you. I come into work thinking like, it would be great if we could help avoid a conflict and that never happens. And it's really hard to prove a negative, right? Like, will I know that it didn't happen at some point? I probably won't. But I do believe that if you are left with only those two options of economic sanctions and then something just completely unreasonable, you're more likely to get into a conflict. I fully agree. I think you need to have these deterrents for peace. And there is something sort of paradoxical about that, but essential. I mean, I want to live in the world where everybody just gets along. Trust me. I truly do. I just unfortunately don't believe that that's actually the world we live in. And I think we have to be mindful of that because, frankly, the strength of the U.S.'s military, especially since World War II, is halal. a lot of prosperity for a lot of people. And I think that that has been a net good. You mentioned this concept of, you know, with a ballistic missile, I think I've heard it phrased as warhead ambiguity, where you can't tell if it's a nuclear warhead or not. And so that sort of can create a possibility where your adversary overreacts and, you know, sort of escalates far beyond.

the intensity of the attack. As I understand it, that's also possible with hypersonics. Is that not true that you can have hypersonics that are sort of nuclear capable and there's still sort of this level of confusion that can happen where you don't necessarily know what's coming at you, so to speak? I mean, for sure, there's no way to verify. But what the U.S. has been very clear about is messaging. We're not putting nuclear warheads on these maneuvering hypersonic vehicles. And you will see those kinds of policy statements stated time and time again. Not every country has the same types of policy statements. You can absolutely do it. If you want to have a weapon that you can use without any kind of overreaction, you're going to be very clear. about throughout development what's on it what's in it and and i think like it's it may be even surprising to folks it to your point about not overreacting in a lot of cases right before you attack someone you actually can give them a call and tell them what's happening so that they don't overreact even though you're literally going to have a conflict yes um But it's like in nobody's best interest to have that overreaction. One of the other sort of like criticisms or skepticisms I've seen around hypersonics that I'd be curious to understand how you think this through from the deterrence perspective is that, you know, I hope I do a passable job of explaining this, but hypersonics can be harder to detect because they fly so much lower, as I understand it, at parts of the process compared to... ballistic missile, and they're much less predictable and more maneuverable, such that it often gives the adversary much less time to respond, which is obviously beneficial from the aggressor's perspective. But as a result, also maybe results in sort of, I don't know, faster twitch responses, overreactions. How do you think about sort of weighing those things? Well, let's go. I mean, maybe we should go through like the differences real quick and then let's talk through.

i guess how people can perceive that but so the funny thing is like when when when we say hypersonics and when like the you know the u.s department of war says hypersonics they're typically meaning like a hypersonic maneuvering vehicle whether it's an air breather or it's a boost glide system which we can get into those distinctions but what it means is that we are for the most part staying within the atmosphere for most of the flight even though we are moving at five times or faster than the speed of sound and the reason that that's helpful like from a you know range perspective is that you're you're very low drag but you do get some lift so you can have like a a vehicle that looks like a very stubby winged plane and it gets some lift from the air but it also the air provides something to react against meaning you can you could steer because you are in the atmosphere. And so you can literally steer so you can maneuver as you're going. Yes. The reason that it's harder to see is that because you're still in the atmosphere, so you're in like the 100,000 to 200,000 foot range, you're typically going to be under the horizon from the point of view of something far away, just because the Earth is spherical for the most part. And so the main defense systems that almost every country has is a radar. Radars do not do well looking through the surface of the earth. And so you're effectively just out of line of sight. Whereas a ballistic missile, you're literally lobbing an object in a parabolic arc. So it's going extremely high. And so the radar can see that very early on because it's so high up that it has a vantage point to look at it. When that ballistic... a weapon comes back down they are actually usually hypersonic depending on like the range and the size and they're actually coming in hypersonic but they're in the atmosphere for such little time that's not typically what people are talking about when they're talking about a hypersonic weapon and so that can be confused like i've seen it confused in like major media like you know with iranians launching ballistic missiles like their ballistic missiles come in hypersonic but that's not

uh the same type of technology we're talking about where most of the flight is spent within the atmosphere and it can maneuver and so you do get this element of surprise because by the time the radar does is able to see it because it has line of sight the the weapon is actually much closer and so you have very little time to respond and certainly that could lead to like as as you mentioned like overreaction which you wouldn't want But it does prevent a long projected time to respond. And everybody knows that. And so the advantage of this is that if they know that you have these types of systems and they have very little they can do to defend against it, it makes them think harder before they go do something that would have you respond that way. And again, you're getting back to that deterrence effect. In ballistic missiles at this point, But especially with the United States and Israel, I mean, there's several countries that can now shoot down ballistic missiles and make it look relatively easy. It is definitely not easy by any means, but can make it look easy. It does remove kind of that, you know, you're doing to the other side what we're trying not to have done to us. You're taking away that option like, hey, you can law ballistic missiles at us. It doesn't matter. We'll shoot them all down. I would posit, though, that that doesn't really achieve deterrence because they're just like, well, I'll just lob these at you and it's your fault if you don't shoot them down. And so you lead, you know, you kind of like if you put all of your efforts into because somebody may ask, it's a reasonable question to ask. Like, why don't you just put all your money in defensive systems and we'll just shoot down everything that comes through? I would posit that that doesn't deter people from. taking the first shot at you. And unfortunately, these systems are not 100% effective. It's an impossibly hard problem to get absolutely everything. What you really want is folks not to be taking those shots at you in the first place because they know that you have the capability to respond. And so you need a balance of all of these things. So there's no one magical system that solves all these problems. You need a balance. And that's obviously been everybody's strategy, whether it's the United States, Europe.

China, what have you, they have a number of these systems because they're all kind of solving like some specific use case of when you would use it. And that's why. I also imagine that if you take the stance, oh, you should just put all of this money into defensive systems, that's just economically inadvisable and infeasible because it's so much more expensive to defend the amount of territory or possible targets that a single missile might attack, right? Like your sort of territory that you have to be able to protect against is much broader than, you know, this single weapon might possibly hit. Is that a fair characterization? Most people don't think through kind of all of like the aspects of it, but just think of it as, you know, if you have a family member going to like some vacation and you're both going to meet up together and they live. 400 miles closer but you get on the road at the same time and you're driving at the same speed you are never going to catch them you'll see them at the end you have to have a higher velocity you have to have higher capabilities in an interceptor to give you some type of envelope of time where you you could actually reach the thing you're trying to intercept and it is certainly harder you need more quantity to be able to provide that as you mentioned like that coverage area because you can't get that geometry favorable you can't you can't say i can intercept this from like all possible locations it's only certain places that you're going to be able to kinematically reach the target and so you'll need a lot and and you're kind of seeing that right now with like the congressional uh budget office uh assessment of how many you know how many weapons can golden dome shoot down and what the cost would be because of how many you need i have a feeling that they weren't fully informed of what the actual inputs and what the plan was, because they're probably just trying to use publicly available information to estimate that and not the correct information. But it's definitely non-zero. And then certainly the difficulty of just building a defensive system that has to go maneuver and get close to this thing that is very hard to catch up with, it's just a harder problem. And it is unreasonable to think that it could be as cheap as that offensive system because it has to have a lot more capability.

And so you're losing, when we get back to it, you're losing on the economic front. And 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 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. And 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. 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. You don't know the aerospace engineering process or 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 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 job in aerospace, fresh out of school, that you're like, this just doesn't seem efficient. Turns 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. I loved my time there. 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 and 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've proven it. And 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. 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 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 failing. And so in the US aerospace industry, you watch SpaceX become completely dominant. I mean, they took over all launch for the most part, especially from a mass-to-orbit perspective. They killed all Russian launch vehicles. They decimated European launch market. And all the while, their primary competitor in 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 traditional aerospace and defense manufacturing. 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, you know, irrespective of whatever results that we put out. We still get looked at like, you can't do it like that. It'll never work like that. I fundamentally like what SpaceX taught me was that's not true. 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 at 22 to be like, this is wrong. I'm not going to do this. 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. And caring about the complex, like the way you approach complex issues, a lot of things that's right. 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 engineer. I was a mechanical engineer. I went back and I got a... Masters in physics specialized in photonics and optics. I worked on space program after space program that never got to space. For 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 like i already felt like i was missing the boat to a degree and then when like this explosion of commercial space happened like i remember watching from the sidelines like planet labs skybox and sure were they the most capable systems no did they get something in space were they you know 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. And I wanted to go work with a company that wasn't doing that.

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I think my greatest ideas and best work to SpaceX and they executed them flawlessly in a way that, you know, 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. And 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 is very difficult. especially because uh they control almost all of global space launch yes it's just yeah 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 won't 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 it was very apparent like the like you know the concept for what castellan was working on it 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 actually brought the idea to SpaceX. I was like, 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 making humanity 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 cause to kind of divert into what I felt would be necessary to

truly deliver on that outcome of leaving a safer future and so that was totally fine um love love the time there we went off and started this business to go focus on that other you know the offensive pointy inside 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. One of the coolest things that I think they did is 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. 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 uh you know raise money for this uh 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 what the key factors were for you that arrived in just the right moments? I completely agree with your assessment that five years earlier, I don't know that our company would have made it. There's a reason that a lot of these types of hardware-focused startups require a billionaire to start them. Yes. It was very apparent as we were trying to 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. I can't do that. I didn't think about that probably as much as I should have 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. That was a, I feel like a real reasonable outcome of likelihood for the first four months. Enroll, 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 gonna 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. And then you have Andro 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 what firm it was, but I remember pitching them and like five minutes in, they just like, they're like, pause.

tell me to stop and then like they're literally like drawing on the 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 it's like uh i was like okay i guess let's just call this meeting meeting over but You know, I think with anything, business requires luck. And whenever I hear somebody talk about their business success, they made it happen through their perfect skill. 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%. 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 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 strongest traits as 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 we're in the top white quadrant of failure, you just go have 98 more meetings. And luckily. Luckily, we had success with like one of the hundred and 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 and they were taking a gamble, which is completely fair. But we've been very lucky that the market since then, like since like, you know, going into 24 has, you know, obviously AI is on top, but like defense is probably second. That's a tremendous tailwind.

uh for us so from like a luck perspective of when we started the business to your to your question i mean we're lucky i i mean i knew it was it's a good idea it's been a good idea the whole time but we're lucky on timing and i i think that that you know something that we can't forget um and i i'm i'm very thankful that that we're lucky yes lucky and good um 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. 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. I think it's a great name, I have to say. 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 these extremely large physics-based simulations of United States assets, allies assets, foreign adversary assets, and they play them against each other in these giant Monte Carlo simulations that are all physics-driven. And so I went and 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 business with the government is that they think that the government sales process is like, I'm going to wait for an RFI or RFP and I'm going to start responding and then hopefully I'll win. Absolutely wrong. The government is an 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. And 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. 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 like missile two or three. Why 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 and 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 uh i see but that wasn't where we found our customer so you were launched into the deep end because 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. proliferate it that they, that can launch the most missiles. And then, and then everybody knows that. And so it's not the easy thing to do, but it was the right thing to do. And some of the, the, the ways that we achieved range, especially were at the time that we started very novel. And so most of our folks have like a space or a 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. How do you feel about having a staged weapon? And that was, I'd say, 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 stage 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 spent booster that's going to fall somewhere early. That was not an easy conversation, but at the same time, it's like, hey, if you're telling us range is important, we really think you should consider this. And 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 space, 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, uh, obviously it would break the weapon. It's, it's been quite the journey, uh, with, with folks, but I mean, we've proven that it's doable and. The Navy is fully on board, as I'm sure that you've seen. So we are a year away from being integrated into F-18. And 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. 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 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 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 machinery 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 breeder. The other type of hypersonic system is they're known as air breathers, 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 regard. And I think the common misconception is that if you think that you're placing capability third and cost and schedule, 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. 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 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 entrants. 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. And 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. You know, that concept of the high-low mix is so interesting and, you know, is obviously such a big part of what you're doing. I saw somewhere that Blackbeard sort of described as having maybe 80% 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 to sort of match against that. To come back to the topic where we started with and explored a little bit on, in matching the capabilities of peer powers, China is obviously so effective at low cost manufacturing at scale. To what extent is trying to compete on that basis sensible. 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 offset strategies where you're competing on some very disparate dimension 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 um earlier so i want to make sure to tie that in america in the past has been an absolute powerhouse of manufacturing there were financial decisions made as to why that is no longer the case it is not 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 costs 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 if you look at automotive, American auto manufacturers are competitive within the world economy with everybody. They'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, like 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. And that's very reasonable, like in a national space program, etc. 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 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. We actually have to change to an 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. And 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. 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. It 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 narrative 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's 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? The 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 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. You 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, like North Korea. Everybody used to just make North Korea like they'd launch a missile and it would blow up or fall in the ocean. But they couldn't afford to do it the way the U.S. did aerospace. They just do this rapid iteration. And it turns out they're getting very good because they're having so many shots on goal and so many opportunities for engineers to learn. And 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 this concept of being an 80% solution, sure, today, absolutely. 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. And 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 like at this point in time, American aerospace, traditional aerospace is uniquely... poorly suited to do that. And 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. And I think that's what we are trying to solve. Yeah, magical things happen when you can optimize for 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... You know, books from like Kip Thorne on astrophysics, just because I'm like a huge physics geek. 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 Richard Feynman, famous physicist from the Manhattan Project era. His lectures on physics. If I ever had a role model that I'd want to emulate, it's like his unique skill was such a genius, so smart with physics, yet presented it in such a funny and relatable way, even if physics is not your first passion in life. 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 it like very clear personal flaws like all of us do um if you're 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. Maybe you're thinking of something different, but surely you're joking, Mr. Fineman. Surely you're joking, Mr. Fineman. So fantastic. I love that. Yes. And then earlier this year, I actually read his collection of letters, 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 that talk about whatever you're, you could be, you could have any interest on earth and just go search it. Like there's somebody who just loves it and has a great content about it. And there's so many for me, I have like this interesting mix of like watching Veritasium. 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 Game Theory video after I think I saw you had mentioned it somewhere. I'd watched 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 or read about them, I'm not opposed to reading about them, but it's obviously easy to consume YouTube as you're like falling asleep. But like that episode in particular, like sticks in my head is like, wow. everything makes sense is like how countries respond to each other yes and it's truly interesting um so i highly encourage anybody that's watching this like go check that episode out on game theory by veritasium yes it's sort of a you know a nice encapsulation of in some ways the the worldview one wants from your country which is you know i think you sort of alluded to it you the the optimal game theoretic strategy is what was it nice clear retaliatory and forgiving you know you you 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. But 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 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 them

How fascinating, because you basically picked 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. Thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure, Brian. No, thank you, Mario. Very great having me on. This has been great. That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions. So if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.