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Blake Scholl

Things Blake Says on Podcasts

“If you go by the state-of-the-art GE mid-sized turbine, it's called the LM6000. It is based on a 747 engine from 1971. … Boeing last built a new design airplane in 2004. … The entire time all of you have been alive, Boeing has built zero new airplanes. All they do is take the old ones and tweak them, and they don't even do that competently anymore.” — Blake Scholl, The Social Radars “One of my regulatory theories is that most regulations have two pieces. They have a moral cover story, like we must ban supersonic flight because sonic boom is really bad, or nuclear power is scary. But if you follow the money, you find there's some lazy incumbent that doesn't want to work hard.” — Blake Scholl, The Social Radars “If you take that fan off and put a little bit extra turbine connected to an electric generator, the engine that would make 40,000 pounds of thrust on a supersonic jet makes 42 megawatts, which turns out, by luck, is the perfect size for a modular turbine that you can put in at a data center like bricks. … This is like blade servers of energy.” — Blake Scholl, The Social Radars “One of the most disastrous decisions I ever made was to try and outsource development of a semi-custom supersonic engine to a big established company. And looking at it now with clear eyes, it's just so colossally stupid. Can you imagine SpaceX succeeding had Elon given the engine to some legacy rocket company and decided to build only the rocket?” — Blake Scholl, The Social Radars

Where to Find Them

Blake Scholl has been a guest on TBPN (3 times) , The Social Radars (2 times) , This Week in Startups (2 times) , Y Combinator Startup Podcast (2 times) , FreightCasts (2 times) , All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg , Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth , How I Invest with David Weisburd , TruthWorks , Odd Lots , Grit , Limitless: An AI Podcast , Conversations with Tyler , The Logan Bartlett Show , How I Built This (Guy Raz) , Naval , Signal & Noise , The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch , Possible , What's Your Problem? , FT Tech Tonic , Betting on America: Winning the Global Tech Race , My First Million , The Skift Travel Podcast , StrictlyVC Download and Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) .

Recently: “Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO, Boom Supersonic: Part 2” on The Social Radars (November 2026); “Blake Scholl: Why Plane Speed Stalled, Supersonic Commercial Flight, & Revolutionizing the Engine” on All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg (September 2026); “The Groupon PM Who Built A Supersonic Jet: "I Couldn't Find The Reason It Was A Bad Idea" | Blake Scholl” on TruthWorks (August 2026); “Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban” on Y Combinator Startup Podcast (July 2026); “America's aerospace rebirth” on Possible (July 2026); “Life After AdTech: What Happens When You Stop Optimizing Clicks and Start Building Aircraft?” on Signal & Noise (June 2026).

What They Said

“If you go by the state-of-the-art GE mid-sized turbine, it's called the LM6000. It is based on a 747 engine from 1971. … Boeing last built a new design airplane in 2004. … The entire time all of you have been alive, Boeing has built zero new airplanes. All they do is take the old ones and tweak them, and they don't even do that competently anymore.” — Blake Scholl, The Social Radars

Asked how established turbine makers reacted to Boom, Scholl says they laughed. He argues both turbine and airliner makers have stagnated; the Boeing line is from a talk he gave to undergraduates.

The Social Radars · 2026-11-06 Permalink → Listen →
“One of my regulatory theories is that most regulations have two pieces. They have a moral cover story, like we must ban supersonic flight because sonic boom is really bad, or nuclear power is scary. But if you follow the money, you find there's some lazy incumbent that doesn't want to work hard.” — Blake Scholl, The Social Radars

The hosts were discussing why US energy production per person has been flat for decades. Scholl offers his theory of how regulation gets captured by incumbents.

The Social Radars · 2026-11-06 Permalink → Listen →
The Social Radars Around 23:37 into the episode
Blake Scholl

Right?

Carolynn Levy

Well, when you contextualize it right now, where we are and how much power we need for compute, like it makes it's probably more sexy now than it would have been two decades ago.

Blake Scholl

Leave the sexiness aside for a second. I think it's important. So if you look at, so there's a trend line that you can look at basically from the Industrial Revolution forward, which is amount of energy production per capita. And this was an exponentially increasing curve until 1971. And then it turned into a slow linear curve, which eventually flatlined and it stopped in the U.S. We are not increasing energy production per human. We haven't for decades. Is it because of nuclear? Well, it certainly coincides with nuclear getting frozen, right? But we stopped building new power plants kind of in general, or at least it kept up with population growth, but like no more than that. And it's why exactly that happened, I think, is a little bit, I don't know if I know all the answers. It coincides with the success of the environmental movement, early environmental movement. It coincides with a lot of regulation going into place. I think you can make a good so one of my regulatory theories is that most regulations have two pieces. They have a moral cover story, like we must ban…

Carolynn Levy

Yeah. Interesting.

Blake Scholl

And I think you see that in a lot of places. And it echoes into conversations around AI today in some corners. Regardless of what happened to you, so there's some big laws that were passed. There was something called NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, that made it very, very difficult to…

Jessica Livingston

Did

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“If you take that fan off and put a little bit extra turbine connected to an electric generator, the engine that would make 40,000 pounds of thrust on a supersonic jet makes 42 megawatts, which turns out, by luck, is the perfect size for a modular turbine that you can put in at a data center like bricks. … This is like blade servers of energy.” — Blake Scholl, The Social Radars

Scholl explains how Boom's supersonic jet engine became a power turbine for AI data centers, the new business funding the airliner. The 42-megawatt unit happens to suit modular data center power.

The Social Radars · 2026-11-06 Permalink → Listen →
The Social Radars Around 15:30 into the episode
Carolynn Levy

Nice. And

Jessica Livingston

now you have this huge revenue stream.

Blake Scholl

Yeah, or at least we will next year. So essentially the same engine, if you take the fan off the front that's there to like blow air back to push the airplane forward, like the fan's there for thrust. If you take that fan off and instead you put a little bit extra turbine connected into an electric generator, the engine that would make 40,000 pounds of thrust on a supersonic jet makes 42 megawatts, which turns out, again, by luck is like the perfect size for kind of a modular turbine that you can like put in at a data center like bricks. It's like, oh, you want like a gigawatt? That's 24 units. And you just gang them together.

Jessica Livingston

Because you don't want it too big or too small. That's

Blake Scholl

right. Yeah. If it's too small, it's like you can't manage that many engines. It's too complicated and that you lose efficiency in the small end. If it's too big, it's very expensive to get enough redundancy. But if a medium-sized turbine, you can basically deploy them in N plus 1 arrays.…

Carolynn Levy

you basically have to, you already probably knew what your whole production line was going to be because you were actually going to turn these engines into your flying airplanes. But did you have to call and be like, yeah, we're going to massively move up this timeline?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“One of the most disastrous decisions I ever made was to try and outsource development of a semi-custom supersonic engine to a big established company. And looking at it now with clear eyes, it's just so colossally stupid. Can you imagine SpaceX succeeding had Elon given the engine to some legacy rocket company and decided to build only the rocket?” — Blake Scholl, The Social Radars

Asked about the moment a major engine maker backed out as Boom's supplier, Scholl says the real mistake was ever outsourcing the engine. Boom went on to build its own.

The Social Radars · 2026-11-06 Permalink → Listen →
The Social Radars Around 00:46 into the episode
Carolynn Levy

Shift you.

Jessica Livingston

You remember that analogy? Oh, that was in Blake's first podcast episode. So I want to, I want to hear more about what happened

Blake Scholl

there. Yeah. So one of the most disastrous decisions I ever made was to try and outsource development of a at least semi-custom supersonic engine to a big established company. And looking at it now with clear eyes, it's just so colossally stupid. Can you imagine SpaceX succeeding had Elon given the engine to some legacy rocket company and decided to build only the rocket? But so this, I think this was never going to work, really.

Jessica Livingston

Why did you do

Blake Scholl

it? So my original thought, when the company was founded, I was planning not to do it. And we actually, our first employee was an engine designer. And like week two into his jointing. So the company is tiny at this point. We're like four or five people. And he's like, oh, the Rolls engines are more…

Jessica Livingston

Oh my.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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