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Start free trial →The Social Radars · Startups & Venture · November 2026
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.
Right?
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.
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…
Yeah. Interesting.
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…
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