the big corporations want to keep their tax loopholes. it's what they do. well, i do what i do. if you'ld like to help, join me and vote yes on prop 15. this week on "press here" a startup that's the first privately built super connisoni airplane and we check in with contributors at home during the pandemic and common sense media jim steyer on the press that fronts to our election. that's this week on "press here." ♪ ♪ good morning, everyone. the guests i bring on the show, i screen ahead of time. i won't bring some crack pot inhai

invent inventor, somebody that made a blood testing machine or something without checking it out first. when i first invited blake schull in 2016, i had doubts about his ability to build a super sonic airliner. after all, his previous job was at groupon and he thought he could build a 21st century concord. i talked to those in the know and he said he could do it because he assembled a dream team. so at the end of a 2016 segment i'm about to show you, i said to blake, come back when you have an actual airplane. >> blake schull come back when you have an airplane. i believe in you. goodness knows, elon musk did it and so many others. blake is black. i'm guessing the fact you're here almost exactly four years later, you built an airplane. >> we did. the xb 1.

in 2016 we unveiled it in mockup form and today it's a real airplane. >> it hasn't flown yet, though, right? you will fly it later? >> we'll fly it next year. the rollout we had marks the hand off from building the aircraft to testing the aircraft. we have 36 ground tests planned, taxi tests and then next year we'll put the trhrottle forward >> this is not a full sized airliner. this is a smaller model? >> if you think back to concord's development, they built the ferry delta two. a one-third scale prototype for the technology and we're doing the same thing at boom. so xb 1 is about one-third the size. it's a test airplane but it's got all the same technology as over tour, carbon fiber, digitally augmented flight

controls. so when we fly xb 1, we know everything is there to be a success. >> when you do fly this, will you be a passenger on this? i know there is the -- you go from a model that you built on paper, i'll get more to that in a second to a real thing. now you're talking about life and death. >> i'll be on one of the first flights no doubt. for xb 1 it's piloted by military test pilots. it is -- that will be an aircraft that needs a test pilot to fly and i'm looking forward to being on over tour myself. >> to aviation geeks, can you tell who is the first test pilot? is it mike? >> no, we've got -- i know mike. he's great. we have two test pilots on staff. dusk who is a former f-22 test pilot and dock schumaker who is a former test pilot. the navy and air force will wrestle it out.

>> because this will be the first privately built super sonic aircraft, right? >> that's right. historically, this is government and militaries only. concord was a joint venture between the french and british governments and every other super sonic aircraft has been military. this is the first independently developed super connick jet eso >> when built on paper, of usually using computers these days but the aviation geek, at one point you were using x plane, is that doesn't know anything that doesn't know about planes but that's laugh out loud because that's a computer blaga >> it's a flight simulator built by pilots that know what they are doing. it's a lot of fun but you can also plug in your own air dynamic models into the system and we have a full scale flight

simulator for xb 1 with the same hardware in it as the actual costs, the same displays. it got the beautiful wrap around screens. you have the pan roramic view fm the airplane and it does the visuals and we have our aerodynamic model behind it so that flight flies exactly the way xb 1 will fly. >> this is a reason you're able to do this for less than concord because you do so much on the computer and using off the shelf parts. >> that's exactly right. we're standing here with 50 years of technology. we have gone from aluminum to carbon fiber and doing reiteration and commuter simulation and completely new ways of building jet engines and we're standing on the shoulders of what concord did 50 years ago but applying those modern technologies to let you build an

airplane that is safer and more efficient and also sustainable. >> compared you in the past to elon musk and this is a reason why. elon musk didn't know anything about rockets before he got into rockets. he didn't go to school for it and you did not go to school to be an aircraft designer. you are largely self-taught on this. >> i think people really under estimate what they can learn when they're really motivated. when i started boon, this is my second company and i wanted to work on something i would never give up on, so personal and motivating to me, it would do whatever it takes to make it a success. when you have that kind of motivation, you can learn a lot and so i read aerospace textbooks and took an airplane design class. i met all the smart people i could find and asked them to tell them what was wrong with what we were doing and in the early das f of buiys of buildin. my favorite saying was teach me

something. if you couldn't teach me something about airplanes, you didn't get hired at boon. we built a team of great engineers but communicators that got down and shared that logic with other people they work with. >> what do you know now that you didn't know then? we talked in 2016. what do you know now about building airplanes you didn't know in 2016? >> we have a saying, you have to be naive enough to start and wise enough to finish. i think it's safe to say that there have been more challenges along the way than we anticipated. in particular, how do you balance low speed performance and high speed performance as a technical challenge? you have to apply low speed for take off and landing and have to fly at high speed very efficiently. it turns out there is one of two different airplanes but you build a super sonic jet, one airplane will do both jobs. getting that right, took a lot of iteration and trial error and then we cracked the nut and the nice thing is that's solved on

xb 1 and we know how to do it for overture. >> when you first designed this idea, you could not have known there would be a giant glut of airliners. there are hundreds of thousands of airliners sitting in storage now and obviously, that will change. you're doing a long-term project and at least, hopefully that will change, but does these current situation economic and pandemic affect your business in any way. >> it surprising. it's mostly positive. there is a broad downturn in aerospace, we are able to go attract great talent from around the industry to come join the team. the overture team is led by brian who led at good enough gu which is the fastest airplane money can buy. as they pulled back, a lot of capability became available in the supply chain. we've been able to accelerate

the development with rolls royce and at the same time, we look forward to bringing overture to market, the airlines have cleared the cobwebs out of their fleet. we don't know when air travel will recover. it will be sometime between two and four years host likely and airlines will look for growth opportunity and super sonic will look to be baked into the next set of opportunities. >> final question for you, when realistically, do you think i would be buying a ticket on american airlines or united airlines, boom super sonic airport. >> well before the end of the decade. >> ah. okay. last time i invited you on when you had an airplane, now you have an airplane. next i'm i invite you on, i'll have the ticket in my hand. thank you so much. "press here" will be back in a moment.

welcome back to "press here." 100 years from now the world may have forgotten the word facebook but historians will no doubt look back on the era and note the difference of cell phones and technologies that change the way we communicate and spread messages. true and untrue, helpful and hurtful. i suspect historians will concentrate on the untrue and the hurtful.

it wasn't always this way in the early days of internet, we thought it would bring people together. it has. it's certainly been a force in bringing life and democratic ideas to countries. let face it, it's not working for us. if you don't think facebook doesn't have a negative effect on elections or the snapchat is causing your teenager angst, you're not paying enough attention. let ask that fundamental question asked by so many politicia politicians, are you better off now than you were? jim steyer is the founder of common sense media and he joins us this morning. you've edited a book of essays about the pros and cons of technology called which side of history, how technology is reshaping democracy and our lives. in my intro, i was hard on technology and suspect some of your contributors are, as well. >> we have contributors that range, some of the gurus of the

tech world. i asked them the fundamental question you posted at the onset of the program. which side of the history is the tech industry on? if you're correct, many think tech is on the wrong side of history when we look at the impact on the election, including the 2020 election we're in the middle of now and also, we've shown over the past 15 years on the social, emotional and cognitive development of children. this is indeed a profound question that historians will be asking as we mentioned but i think everybody is asking it today and that's the point of this book. this is an issue for all of us. >> you mentioned cohen, i don't think of him being a media thinker but then again, he's pretty good at media. explain the reason you -- >> he's a big thinker on media. as the audience knows, common sense are founded in stop hate for profit, which basically is aimed at facebook and instagram for the fact they have both

amplified hate and racist messages for the past few years on their platform and also, helped undermine some of our democratic norms and institutions. and the actor who has a new "ba"bar ar "bara t 2" movie has anti-semitism and hate on the internet. we've built a campaign called stop hate for profit. it been incredibly successful. he got many major celebrities involved and we helped facebook and you may have noticed this week they said they won't put on holocaust deniers anymore. >> finally. >> after ten years. when a big surprise. we've been the biggest critic. common sense as the audience knows, i wrote a book called "talking after facebook." we've been taking them on whether privacy or cyber bullying or impact on kids' lives but now on democracy, and so facebook and instagram should

be in the cross hairs and they are. >> i think most americans understand that facebook has a significant effect on democracy and everything else. >> right. >> you will recall that mark zuckerberg when presented in 2016 called it crazy somehow facebook influenced the american elections. i think most americans now realize that is happening. i think most americans don't realize to what degrae. >> i agree. i think it's the scale. we singled them out because they have denied, deflected and distracted. it was very clear they knew what was going on in the 2016 election, 2018 election and allowed probably a major foreign adversary russia to hack elections in 2016 and we're putting pressure on them today to stop that in the 2020 election. and it's quite amazing how the big ones like facebook and twitter and others impacted democracy with zero regulation. these are profound questions.

i would say right now, facebook is on the wrong side of history and is going to be held to account for that. >> jim, i want to end with this idea that parents may be aware that facebook and snapchat are coming into, you know, families lives and not always a positive way. but on your site, you also have information about things like roblox and mine craft and fortnight and youtube. these are media children are consuming these days. >> totally. scott, kids today kids are living on youtube, tiktok, roblox. they are on the platform. it instagram, not facebook, where young people are. in this book, i'll show it for the audience because it is my book, in which side of history, scott, there are a number of cool articles. one by chelsea clinton about the impact on children. and about the fact that in fact,

they are spending hours and hours a day on roblox and fortnight in addition to instagram and youtube and tiktok. that's what common sense does. when you rate everything, we have guidance but at the end of the day, we're asking this very profound question to the tech industry, which is head quartered here in the bay area, you're the most powerful industry in the history of this country. you're unregulated. you're shaping your life, my life, my kids' lives in an unprecedented level. how do you want to be remembered? when you look in the mirror, when you look in the mirror, how do you think you should be viewed and have you contributed to the betterment of society or not? which side of history are you going to be on? that's the message we're saying to the tech industry and the result will be profound for all of our lives. >> jim steyer, i wish you luck in your future efforts and with your book, as well. thank you for being with us. "press here" will be right back.

welcome back to "press here." one of my favorite parts about the show is being competitive with other reporters. once a week we come together and work as a team and i've been able to build some of the team back together. john schwartz is here as is mccall, lev, rams. thank you for being here. it amazing this technology is

even possible to do but it's pretty cool. how are you guys -- let's start with you mcculloch. how are you oldiholding up? you have small children so your house is a school. >> it is. it's a schoolhouse. luckily, we have good broad band but we have probably three different zoom calls going on right now simultaneouslysimultag luckily is sleeping. you never know. every day is different. >> every day is different. my dog is not sleeping and he is interrupted more than one television newscast. john, you also have a school in your house, but no young children? >> right. so my wife is a teacher. so she's teaching virtually right now in the bedroom. meanwhile, my adult daughter who lives in brooklyn and works in new york is now home working through her publishing company and at the same time, we have a younger son who is studying at u.c. santa barbara in his room. it all going on at the same

time. normally, we know when internet is not up to snuff when we hear somebody scream slow speeds. >> so how has this changed the way you do your jobs? print reporters do have it slightly easier in my television opinion because you're calling people on a telephone to begin with and writing down what they said. you didn't have to go to specific places. but has it -- how has it changed the way you're doing your jobs? >> it's funny. i actually see people more, people that i'm interviewing more than i did before because now by default, everything is by video conference. i used to do a lot of interviews over the normal and now i have to look presentable a lot more of the time. >>en -- john, you're much the same on zoom. >> i'm talking to more people than before. i'm able to cover more events than before because it virtual. it goes back to january if i

couldn't make it to one event, i would go to my hotel room and bri write a story watching another panel of my screen. i can multi task now. so there is an upside. >> i've been doing the pod cast and what we do is we -- i think i have one. we send people a digital recorder in the mail and they record their side of the conversation. i record my side of the conversation here and then we talk on the phone, you know, to communicate but don't record the phone call. i have found that i actually prefer -- they'll want to use zoom and i'll prefer they don't because in somew ways you can gt a more intimate answer out of somebody when you're not looking to them. you're strangers to the person you're talking to and the sab stability to see them is not an advantage. >> i started a pod cast at fortune from home, of course, and i've gotten really good at building pillow forts. >> this is one of the bedrooms

and one of the kids' is away in the navy, actually, would come home and realize his bed is not here and filled with those foam protectors, as well. tell me about your pod cast. what's it called? >> "fortune brainstorm" and how tech is reshaping everything in our lives, which we know very well but happening at a faster speed now in light of covid. it's kind of in depth behind the scenes of some of the stories that we're already doing, not necessarily breaking news but just interesting angles and interesting personalities and god knows there are a lot of those in tech. >> it's an interesting way of also -- because i come from television and you come from proin print, especially radio is a much different way to get that skill. i really under estimated how well radio reporters, how hard they work. >> yeah, i by the way worked with some years ago that used to say he had a face for radio and

a voice for print. >> right. >> so hopefully that's not either of us here. yeah, it very different but it also been really fun to just take on a new medium. >> you economyize your words on a pod cast. "usa today" did it and there would be five of us sitting around and i noticed there were two types of people. those who went on and on and on who lost the train of thought and those who are very short and punching and i learned a lot about self-editing. >> yeah, well, editing while you're talking and then ideally editing afterwards, as well makes a huge difference. absolutely. john, let's talk about what you're working on. anti trust is a topic. it seems as if washington and silicon valley's relationship changed a bit. >> it has. we went -- the obama administration, which is very silicon valley friendly to trump and biden, by the way, so regardless of who wins the election, i think we see a

scenario where we see a democratic senate, democratic house and regardless of the administration, the executive office, we see continuation of the anti trust investigation actually an escalation of it. google will probably be sued by the department of justice by the time this area and facebook. this report from sicily is how some committee on anti trust essentially leads to this conclusion that we need to either break these companies up or limit the way they make acquisitions. and i think it's a first step to a wave of legislation we'll see with the new congress. >> i think it's necessary, i haven't studied all of the evidence and what not and we're going to -- you remember covering microsoft and how difficult that was. >> right, right. >> it does strike me that when we started in silicon valley, you had big companies but not with the powerful over powerful

sort of power that we're seeing now. >> right. right. i mean, a $5 trillion market cap among the big five. i think the interesting thing about the sicily hearings and at least six or seven of them over the last year is how deep and sophisticated the questioning was and how compelling the evidence was and when they had the four ceos in late july, they -- any cases were tongue tied to the case of looking absolutely terrified and bold over by the line of questioning in the sophistication and the order and the magnitude of what they were doing and could have got off a little easy. they are all over this. we'll see. the other thing i want to point is anti trust, i think about the next administration, think of all the issues they have to deal with. i'm not sure how high a priority anti trust will be on necessarily. >> mcculloch, your thoughts?

>> yeah, we have so much to cover right now. obviously, anti trust is huge but the issue of election integrity, misinformation, what's going to happen with the upcoming election is so top of mind and there is a lot still tbd on the anti trust side. it interesting you brought up microsoft. it hilarious microsoft is known for empathetic leadership and not even giving any thoughts in the anti trust -- >> by name -- >> not at all. >> microsoft weighs in on some of the cases. some of the issues. it just amazing how it's changed and stayed the same. >> this is perfect. this was our first experiment in bringing the reporters back into the fold as we continue to learn how to do television from home and i think this is going to work just great. so i look forward to seeing both of you again on the show very soon. thanks so much. "press here" will be right back.

welcome back. at the top of the broadcast, i mentioned that blake schull and i did a interview previously about super sonic airplanes. that interview is available at press here tv.com. we have more detail how blake got started and how he got the funding he did. you can find it at press here tv.com. my thanks to my guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.