Blake Scholl joins Reid and Aria to explain why the future of aviation won&#x27;t be built by reviving the past, but by reinventing it. They explore how Boom Supersonic rebuilt an entire aerospace supply chain, why small AI-powered engineering teams are outperforming legacy organizations, and how software is transforming the way physical products are designed, tested, and manufactured. Blake explains why building their own engine changed everything, how AI is accelerating hardware innovation far beyond coding, and why America&#x27;s biggest bottleneck isn&#x27;t technology but its ability to build. Together, they unpack what it takes to solve seemingly impossible problems—and why the next generation of industrial innovation may come from startups willing to rethink entire systems.<br><br>For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/

America's aerospace rebirth

Possible

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Possible

## Participants

- **Reid Hoffman** (None)
- **Aria Finger** (None)
- **Blake Scholl** (Boom Supersonic)

## Transcript

[SPEAKER_04] You don't try to bring back what left to China. What you do is invent the generation after it and have that be here. With supersonic, there will be similar stories, we just don't know what they are yet. Imagine if you could get anywhere in the world in four hours for $100. But think how differently you live your life. Fact that we're building our own engine. Change the seats on the airplane. Uh, how?

[SPEAKER_00] In 1947, Chuck Yeager climbed into a Bell X1 over the Mojave Desert and broke the sound barrier for the first time in human history. It was a classified government program, backed by the Air Force, unknown to almost everyone when it happened.

[SPEAKER_06] On January 28th, 2025, in the same airspace, a startup called Boom Supersonic did it again. No government commission, no nation state behind it. The man who made that happen grew up watching Cessnas take off from a suburban Cincinnati airport. He dropped out of high school early. He taught himself aerospace engineering from textbooks and started the whole thing in his basement in Denver with 10 people.

[SPEAKER_00] What supersonic flight reveals about what's possible, what technology can do when ambition is commercially disciplined, what AI unlocks when applied to the hardest physical problems, and what it means when a founder in a basement can do what used to require a superpower. That's what we're here to talk about today.

[SPEAKER_06] Blake also runs the same diagnostic on everything around him. Airports, roads, hotel check-in, regulatory paperwork that he ran on the aviation industry. We want to get into how he actually thinks,

[SPEAKER_00] not just what he's built. Blake Scholl, welcome to Possible. Blake, great to have you here. I'm extremely proud to have backed Boom and to have a front row seat to this journey. Most people ask you about January 28th, the first time that XB1, your supersonic demonstrator, broke the sound barrier. But the

[SPEAKER_00] moment I come back to is February 10th, the final flight of the demonstrator. You got choked up on the live stream saying goodbye. This plane carried a decade of your life. What does it mean to close this chapter of your life and move to the next? It was definitely a bittersweet moment.

[SPEAKER_04] There is nothing more exciting than to pour a huge piece of your life energy into something and then see it actually work. There is just so much drama in flight test. Just the intricate teamwork, the excitement of

[SPEAKER_04] it, the safety criticality of it. And knowing that that thrill had come to an end was very sad. It was still the right decision not to fly the airplane again. But in the end, it gave me all that much more commitment to build Overture. It's like, this is not the end of the story. This is actually getting to base camp. And we're going to...

America's aerospace rebirth

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

America's aerospace rebirth

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.