Shore was riffing on Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works rules: the team, the acquisition decision-maker and the operator should be able to iterate on a text chain. Instead, he says, "you got to talk to the staffer who's going to talk to the staffer," and three weeks later the window is gone.
It's not to open us up to like a nine-hour podcast, but I mean, it's a good from like the Kelly Johnson era. You know, it's like we used to do a rocket every couple days. Yeah, so
…in the actual necessary and sufficient set of stakeholders across the communities that Zach talked about and run a very minimalist office that can move very quickly. And those two things together, industry operating this way and the government teams operating this way, that's how it works. I mean,
…need. He's like, you need your team operating that way. And then in the room, he's like, you need to have direct, direct access to the decision maker. So who is the acquisition decision maker and who's the operation? And the three of you need to be able to, in today's parlance, be on a text chain so you can iterate rapidly. The test case for this is Elon and Elon's discussions around interfaces. Interfaces are where risk resides. And what we've done is built a bureaucracy predicated on more and more interfaces. And that obfuscates the clarity of just the three principles being in the room. And so, you know, just to reiterate what AJ said is you can create a Skunk Works type business, but if there's not two or two other people at the table to interact with very quickly, you know, hey, we have an issue. Can we solve that issue? Oh, no, you got to talk to the staffer who's going to talk to the staffer.…
And how do you imagine this plays out for the U.S.? Like, if I compare SpaceX, you know, China was very far behind in space. And then SpaceX has lapped the entire world in many ways, both in satellites and rockets. Now, China's spending tons of money catching up in a lot of ways, even exceeding the…
look, it's a hell of a prognostication to make to say what will or won't. I will say, you know, I'm obviously a homer for America. And I think it's not necessarily a volume question. It's a culture question too, right? So, you know, Elon's talked about you can put the drawings out, but that doesn't…
Yeah, which I get, and I for sure buy into on sublevel. And I don't know, it was like two weeks ago, I think we saw the China catching a rocket different than SpaceX and getting rid of the Finns and a lot of the weight that would have been, you know, I mean, it feels like, yeah, I don't know. I…
