Notes — Blake Scholl on Supersonic Flight and Fixing Broken Infrastructure

Notes on Blake Scholl in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler #261, recorded live at the Roots of Progress Institute’s Progress Conference, 18 October 2025; published 19 November 2025.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? A live interview with the founder of Boom Supersonic, ranging across two connected registers: a rapid tour of everyday physical-world friction (airports, traffic, boarding, hotel check-in, online reviews) that Scholl treats as needlessly unsolved, and a sustained argument about why civilian supersonic flight died after Concorde and how Boom is reviving it. The throughline, named in the title, is that broken infrastructure — physical and regulatory — is not a fact of nature but the product of specific, identifiable, and often reversible institutional choices.

Q2 — How is it argued? Almost entirely by worked example and anecdote rather than abstract claim. Scholl answers Cowen’s rapid-fire prompts (‘you’re the dictator, what do you do?’) with concrete redesigns (underground terminals, toll roads, baggage that ‘teleports’ between Ubers) and grounds his supersonic argument in specific numbers — Concorde’s load factor (52 per cent), its inflation-adjusted fare ($20,000), the ban’s exact duration (1973 to 6 July 2025) — and a single manufacturing anecdote (a turbine blade quoted at six months and $1 million, when the machine time is 24 hours) that he uses as a proof case for a general diagnosis of Congressionally-optimised defence supply chains.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? The historical and technical claims — Concorde’s economics, the 1973 ban’s dates, the 2004 Boeing/Airbus all-new-programme gap, Boom’s own test-flight timeline — are checkable and consistent with public reporting [?] on the exact 52 per cent figure, which is stated without a cited source. The interpretive claims are more contestable: Scholl’s view that Concorde and Apollo were ‘tech demos, not products’ is a strong, source-invested judgement (he runs the company betting the opposite approach works) rather than a settled historical consensus, and Cowen pushes back once, noting the Apollo programme’s satellite-infrastructure spillovers, without Scholl fully answering the counterfactual. His claim that airport security does ‘nothing’ rests on a single personal anecdote (an unnoticed box-cutter) rather than systematic evidence.

Q4 — What of it? The most transferable material for the wiki is not the supersonic history but the general mechanism Scholl offers for why obviously fixable problems stay broken: regulation tied to safety is politically a one-way door, because the career risk of removing a rule is asymmetric to the (invisible) cost of keeping it — a direct extension, into public policy, of the reversibility logic Jeff Bezos uses for corporate decisions in Two-Way Door Decisions. The Congressional-supply-chain anecdote is a concrete case study for that same asymmetry applied to defence procurement. Scholl’s own heuristic — ‘when something seems stupid, ask what would have to be true for it to be smart’ — is a workable one-line Chesterton’s-fence test that recurs across the transcript.

Glossary

Induced demand — the traffic-engineering claim that adding road capacity does not relieve congestion because the new capacity draws more drivers onto it. Scholl treats this as an argument used to justify not building or pricing roads, and rejects it as a symptom of the underlying problem — free (unpriced) road access — rather than a law of nature. [§ On fixing traffic]

One-way door (regulatory) — Scholl’s term, echoing Two-Way Door Decisions, for a rule that is trivial to add but politically near-impossible to remove once in force, because reversing it exposes whoever does so to blame if anything later goes wrong, while leaving it in place carries no comparable personal risk. [§ On airport security]

Congressionally-optimised supply chain — Scholl’s diagnosis of US defence manufacturing: a single weapons programme’s production steps are deliberately scattered across many states and congressional districts, because that maximises the number of legislators with a local stake in voting to keep the programme funded, at the cost of speed and efficiency. [§ On American manufacturing and defense procurement]

Boomless Cruise — Boom’s technology for supersonic flight that does not produce an audible sonic boom at ground level (by keeping the shockwave from reaching the surface under the right atmospheric conditions), announced February 2025; central to the case for repealing the US ban on supersonic flight over land. [§ On future innovation]

Confusion list — Scholl’s own practice, from Boom’s first year, of writing down every point of genuine incomprehension and working to resolve one a week; he credits it with building the skill of knowing, in his own mind, when he is actually clear versus merely confused. [§ On learning across domains and reducing the cost of change]

Key claims by section

On fixing traffic and everyday friction [§ On fixing traffic]

Scholl’s preferred underground-terminal airport design was never built because airports are revenue-capped by regulation (a fixed per-passenger charge), which forces them to earn money instead through captive retail — a business-model problem, not a design problem.
His traffic fix is universal road tolling, priced like any other scarce good; he treats ‘induced demand’ as evidence for pricing, not against building, and expects enforcement problems (unregistered or untraceable vehicles) to be a solvable detail, not a reason not to try.
The same logic, he argues, would sound absurd applied to groceries (free-for-all with no cash register) — the point being that we already accept metered pricing everywhere except roads.

On airport security [§ On airport security]

Scholl argues post-9/11 airport security screening (‘the farce’) does not stop weapons — illustrated with a personal anecdote of an unnoticed box-cutter carried through three international airports [?] (single anecdote, not systematic evidence).
He credits only two post-9/11 changes with making flying safer: reinforced cockpit doors, and passengers now knowing to fight back against hijackers.
His explanation for why security theatre persists: safety-tied regulation is a political one-way door — reversing it is career risk for the official who does so, so nobody does.
International security rules harmonise toward whichever country’s rules are strictest, to preserve connecting passengers without re-screening — an explicit mechanism, not merely ‘implicit cartelisation’.

On the contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon [§ On the contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon]

Scholl worked at both; his central contrast is long-term versus short-term decision-making. Amazon ran discounted cash-flow analysis on channel-stuffing offers and took short-term hits (a bad Q4) for a better long-term outcome; Groupon’s leadership pushed short-term email volume (‘send more email, fix it next quarter’) that degraded the long-term customer relationship it depended on.
He attributes Amazon’s discipline at scale to a durable cultural ‘trump card’ — resolving any internal debate by asking what is actually best for the customer.
Asked whether online reviews can be fixed, he proposes percentile ranks (replacing the compressed ‘everything is 4.5 stars’ scale) but has no answer to the harder problem of review-ballot-stuffing incentives.

On the rise, fall, and return of supersonic flight [§ On the rise, fall, and return of supersonic flight]

Scholl’s central claim: Concorde and the Apollo programme were both government-specified ‘tech demos’, not products — built without serious attention to unit economics or a path to iterate, so both proved a capability existed and then went nowhere for decades. [?] (a strong interpretive judgement, not uncontested — Cowen pushes back once on Apollo’s satellite-infrastructure spillovers without full resolution.)
Concorde’s numbers, as Scholl states them: ~$20,000 inflation-adjusted fare, 52 per cent average load factor across 27 years even on its most popular route, only 14 aircraft ever in service. [?] on the exact load-factor figure, stated without citation.
His counterfactual: supersonic should have started as a private jet for a small, wealthy market, kicking off an ordinary innovation S-curve; instead the 1973 US ban on supersonic flight over land also killed that minimum-viable-product path (85 per cent of business-jet miles are flown over land), so Boom instead leapt straight to an international-route airliner.
The land-speed ban ran from 1973 to 6 July 2025 (repealed by executive order 6 June 2025, per Scholl, with 115 days from the Boomless Cruise announcement to the repeal); Boom broke the sound barrier twice in the six to nine months before the interview (January and February 2025).
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) mentions supersonic transport once, in Galt’s speech, in Scholl’s reading arguing that only a profit-motivated capitalist, not a state actor, could actually build one — see Objectivism.

On American manufacturing and defense procurement [§ On American manufacturing and defense procurement]

Central anecdote: a 3D-printed jet-engine turbine blade quoted at roughly $1 million and six months’ lead time, when the underlying machine work is 24 hours and the printer itself costs $2 million and sits idle two weeks out of the supply chain — the six months is consumed by shipping the part between separate single-process-step factories in different states.
Scholl’s diagnostic heuristic: ‘when something seems stupid, ask yourself what would have to be the case for this action to be smart’ — applied here, the answer is that the supply chain is optimised to place one production step in each of many congressional districts, maximising the votes for a defence programme’s continued funding, at the direct cost of speed and (he argues) wartime resilience.
Boom’s countermeasure is vertical integration: a single Denver factory taking in raw materials and shipping out finished jet engines, removing inter-factory shipping entirely — which he argues has a second-order effect of making engineers willing to take design risks, since a wrong turbine-blade design can be re-made in 24 hours rather than six months.

On learning across domains and reducing the cost of change [§ On learning across domains and reducing the cost of change]

Scholl argues domain-switching is undervalued: deep expertise risks calcifying into defence of the status quo, whereas a fast learner who can distinguish genuine clarity from confusion in their own mind can get productively useful in a new field quickly. His practice: a running ‘confusion list’, resolving roughly one item a week during Boom’s first year.
His hiring test at early Boom: candidates had to ‘teach me something’ in the interview.
LLMs, in his account, mainly compress the cost of regulatory paperwork — a single prompt plus a RAG system over federal aviation regulations can draft a 100-page lightning-strike-protection certification document that previously took an engineer two months, which a ‘creative engineer’ then edits to fix hallucinations. The claimed second-order effect: certification changes stop being expensive to make, so engineering teams stop being change-averse. [?source] — no external verification offered for the claimed time savings; this is Boom’s own internal practice, described by its founder.

On future innovation [§ On future innovation]

As of October 2025, Scholl frames the prior six to nine months as the inflection point for Boom and for supersonic flight generally: two successful sound-barrier tests, the Boomless Cruise announcement, an Oval Office model plane, and the land-speed ban’s repeal, in rapid sequence.
His closing reflection returns to a general question rather than a supersonic-specific one: why do problems with seemingly obvious fixes go unsolved for so long, and could that pattern itself be diagnosed and broken.