Podcast Summary: Blake Scholl on Supersonic Flight and Fixing Broken Infrastructure

Podcast: Conversations with Tyler
Host: Tyler Cowen
Guest: Blake Scholl, Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic
Recording: Live at the Progress Conference
Date: November 19, 2025

Episode Overview

In this live episode, Tyler Cowen interviews Blake Scholl, the visionary founder of Boom Supersonic, about transforming the future of air travel with supersonic flight. The conversation delves into why progress in infrastructure—especially in aviation—has stagnated, how to fix broken systems (from airports to highways), and why incremental improvements aren't enough. Scholl shares his perspective on regulatory barriers, the need for innovative business models, lessons learned from Amazon, the pitfalls of legacy institutions, and the cultural changes needed to drive genuine progress.

Key Themes and Highlights

Rethinking Airport and Airline Infrastructure

• Underground Terminal Design & Efficiency

  • Scholl proposes a radical redesign for airports: terminals should be built underground, with sky-lit designs and improved logistics, including direct connections to runways and innovative jetways using escalators.
    “You should put the terminals underground and airside is above ground... Imagine you pull into a gate. The jetway is actually an escalator that comes up from underneath the ground.” (Blake Scholl, 01:13)
  • He argues that current designs are held back less by engineering than by misaligned business models and entrenched regulations restricting how much airports can charge.
    “We’ve socialized airports, right?... We’ve limited their revenue to $5.60 per in-plane passenger. This is why airports trap people in shopping malls, because it’s the only way for them to make any money.” (Blake Scholl, 02:09)

• Baggage Handling and Boarding

  • Scholl envisions a future where baggage teleports seamlessly from your car to your destination car, eliminating the need for carry-ons and speeding up boarding and deboarding.
    “By the time you get to your Uber, your bag is back in the trunk. So the customer experience is, your bag teleports from the trunk of your Uber at your origin to the trunk of your Uber at your destination.” (Blake Scholl, 11:16)

• Cultural and Spiritual Issues with Acceptance of Inefficiency

  • “We live in a world full of things that are radically improvable, and yet we’ve learned to live with most of the problems.” (Blake Scholl, 07:08)
  • Scholl finds traffic especially emblematic, advocating for all toll roads to combat induced demand and congestion.

Regulatory Obstacles and the Failure of Top-Down Innovation

• Security Theater and Risk Aversion

  • Scholl calls current airport security largely “a farce,” highlighting both personal anecdotes and systemic incentives for bureaucrats to avoid risk at the expense of genuine improvement.
    “We are not actually stopping terrorists, what we need is solve the regulatory problem where nobody wants to... do anything that's risk on” (Blake Scholl, 03:35)
  • He suggests the only really effective changes post-9/11 were reinforced cockpit doors and passenger awareness, stating, “not filtering box cutters and preventing us from bringing like bottles of water... none of that makes anything safer.” (Blake Scholl, 04:52)

• Global Regulatory Cartelization

  • The propagation of the most restrictive rules across the world is a direct result of explicit international harmonization, to facilitate passenger transfers without rescreening.
    “There is international harmonization of security that basically results in like the worst rules in any country metastasizing.” (Blake Scholl, 06:03)

• Congressional-Optimized Supply Chains

  • Aerospace supply chains are inefficient not due to logistics, but because political pork spreads manufacturing across as many congressional districts as possible.
    “This is a congressionally optimized supply chain because the way you get a defense program to become a program of record is you maximize the number of votes.” (Blake Scholl, 31:23)

Lessons from Industry: What Works, What’s Broken

• Amazon vs. Groupon & Long-term Thinking
  • Scholl contrasts Amazon’s customer-centric, long-term orientation (“what’s actually best for customers” as a trump card) with Groupon’s short-term tactics, showing how only the former delivers enduring success.
    “The thing Amazon did very, very well is make long term decisions while being... incredibly short term vigilant. There was operational excellence moment to moment, day to day, while all major decisions were made with a view of the long term.” (Blake Scholl, 15:52)

Commercial vs. State-Driven Innovation

• The Concorde and Apollo as Cautionary Tales

  • Scholl argues that Concorde and Apollo were inspiring but wasteful examples of government-led “tech demos,” rather than true, iterative progress.
    “We built really impressive tech demos, not products. And that’s what happens when you have government specked innovation.” (Blake Scholl, 18:53)
  • Effective innovation, he insists, needs the market’s disciplining forces:
    “Supersonic should have started with a supersonic private jet... and that would have kicked off a whole S curve of innovation.” (Blake Scholl, 19:39)

• Legacy Airline Market Limitations

  • The regulatory ban on supersonic flight over land (1973–2025) stifled private innovation and made minimum viable products essentially illegal until it was repealed just recently.

Accelerating Progress: Cultural and Technological Shifts

• Breaking Iteration Paralysis

  • Scholl and Boom Supersonic aim to reduce the cost and time of change and iteration, using vertical integration, new manufacturing models, and LLMs (large language models) to draft regulatory documents and free up creative engineering.
    “Many, many things about what we’re doing at Boom and how we’re doing it are about reducing the cost of change, about reducing the cost and time required for iteration. And LLMs are a really potent weapon for this.” (Blake Scholl, 35:17)

• The Importance of Domain Hopping

  • The ability to rapidly learn new technical domains by focusing on first principles and maintaining a “confusion list” is key for genuine innovation.
    “I think there is a massive advantage in switching domains and doing so quickly because it forces a focus on first principles.” (Blake Scholl, 32:58)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On Airport Design:
  “Imagine you pull into a gate. The jetway is actually an escalator that comes up from underneath the ground… and the terminal underground should have, like, skylights, so it can still be incredibly beautiful.” (Blake Scholl, 01:13)

• On Living with Inefficiency:
  “We live in a world full of things that are radically improvable, and yet we've learned to live with most of the problems.” (Blake Scholl, 07:08)

• On Security Theater:
  “It’s all a farce. I think we know that.” (Blake Scholl, 03:35)

• On the Supply Chain Problem:
  “The part spends more time on a truck than on a machine. And I was like, this is insane.” (Blake Scholl, 30:13)

• On the Need for Iteration and Speed:
  “Don’t plan to certify once, plan to certify repeatedly. Plan to do it iteratively. Let’s get with the regulators and figure out how we prove out airplanes much more efficiently than we do today so we can keep changing and innovating and moving much faster.” (Blake Scholl, 22:29)

• On the Repeal of the Supersonic Ban:
  “It was 115 days to repealing the ban on supersonic flight over land via executive order on June 6. The barriers are all removed. The technology is there, the regulatory environment is there. It just throttles all the way forward—like let’s go.” (Blake Scholl, 36:18)

• On Future Thinking and Problem Solving:
  “I think a lot about why problems that seem really obvious, that have in some ways solutions that seem really obvious don’t get solved. I think if we could figure that out, we could maybe unlock a lot of innovation.” (Blake Scholl, 36:51)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:13] Radical airport design and obstacles
• [03:35] TSA, security theater, and needed regulatory change
• [06:03] Global regulatory "cartelization"
• [07:08] Cultural acceptance of inefficiency and induced demand in traffic
• [11:16] Boarding, baggage, and envisioning seamless passenger flow
• [15:52] Amazon vs. Groupon: Long-termism vs. short-termism
• [18:53] The Concorde and Apollo—why government-led innovation failed
• [22:29] The stagnation in commercial aircraft innovation and regulatory paralysis
• [30:13] The reality of American manufacturing supply chains
• [31:23] How Congress suboptimizes defense and aerospace production
• [32:58] Rapid mastery of technical disciplines; the value of first principles and a "confusion list"
• [35:17] How Boom leverages AI/LLMs to accelerate regulatory processes and reduce change costs
• [36:18] Repeal of the supersonic flight ban—what’s next for Boom and supersonic travel
• [36:51] The meta problem of unsolved, obvious opportunities

Conclusion

This lively and forward-thinking conversation highlights Blake Scholl's quest to bring back the "speed premium" to commercial flight and to overhaul legacy systems in aviation and beyond. Regulatory misalignments, broken infrastructure, cultural complacency, and lack of genuine iterative progress are laid bare—but so too are the solutions, from creative business models to AI-powered paperwork and vertically integrated factories. The message throughout: With the right incentives, focus on first principles, a bias for action, and a willingness to challenge the status quo, seemingly intractable problems can once again become opportunities for radical progress.