Blake Scholl on Supersonic Flight and Fixing Broken Infrastructure - Live at the Progress Conference

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back civilian supersonic flight. As the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, he's building a new generation of supersonic aircraft and pushing for the policies needed to make commercial supersonic travel viable again. But he's equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it's airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else has learned to accept.

Tyler and Blake discuss why airport terminals should be underground, why every road needs a toll, what's wrong with how we board planes, the contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon, why Concorde and Apollo were impressive tech demos but terrible products, what Ayn Rand understood about supersonic transport in 1957, what's wrong with aerospace manufacturing, his heuristic when confronting evident stupidity, his technique for mastering new domains, how LLMs are revolutionizing regulatory paperwork, and much more.

Recorded live at the Progress Conference, hosted by the Roots of Progress Institute. Special thanks to Big Think for the video production.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded October 18th, 2025.

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Photo Credit: Jeremi Rebecca

Transcript

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0:00.0	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,
0:09.4	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
0:13.5	Learn more at Mercadis.org.
0:15.7	For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,
0:20.4	visit Conversationswithtyler.com.
0:26.5	Hello, everyone.
0:28.7	Welcome to yet another event at the Progress Conference.
0:32.3	I'll be chatting with Blake Scholl.
0:34.5	Blake has done more than any other human to make civilian supersonic transport
0:39.7	a reality.
0:41.0	His company, of course, is Boom in Colorado.
0:44.2	Blake, welcome.
0:45.3	Good morning.
0:46.5	Let's confer some jet fuel into human progress.
0:52.8	There's plenty about Boom online and in your interviews, so I'd like to take some different tax here.
0:58.6	This general notion of having things move more quickly. I'm a big fan of that. Do you have a plan
1:05.0	for how we could make moving through an airport happen more quickly? You're in charge, you're the
1:09.7	dictator, you don't have to
1:11.1	worry about bureaucratic obstacles. You just do it. I think about this in the shower like every day.
1:17.1	There is a much, much better airport design that as best I can tell has never been built.
1:21.7	Here's the idea. You should put the terminals underground and airside is above ground,
1:26.7	terminals are below ground. Imagine like a design with two
	...

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