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BS Blake Scholl On 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.”

The Social Radars · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“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

Context

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.

Transcript

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.

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