Reviving Forgotten Technologies: How Airships, Supersonic Flight, and Geothermal Energy Could Transform Our World (Eli Dourado, Head of Strategic Investments at Astera Institute)

How did someone who foresaw their career in academia originally find their way through to a supersonic flight company and tech investing? Initially, it was like sort of fear, right? It was fear that I was going to be stuck doing the same thing over and over again. And then when I changed focuses and nobody stopped me, it was really empowering. I think it was maybe in 2016 that you write this paper, Make America Boom Again, about supersonic flight. How did you become interested in that? I was very interested in the great stagnation. And supersonics is like the poster child for that. We had Concord. It existed. And then now here we are. Concord is gone. We're all flying at subsonic speeds. It's not just stagnation. It's the great regress. You also are one of the first people in tech and tech adjacent crowds that I think I've seen write about Joseph Tainter and civilizational collapse, which I think now is becoming something that people are thinking about more and talking about more. How are you feeling about the complexity of our society today and how it may jeopardize us in the future? If we can actually get to a point where people really... Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. As the saying goes, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. Each week, I sit down with the founders, investors, and visionaries who are living in the future to help you see what's coming next and understand it more clearly. Today, I'm speaking with Eli Dorado, the head of strategic investments at Estera Institute. Eli has a remarkable track record of writing ideas into reality. His research has directly influenced policy changes that resurrected supersonic flight and sparked the creation of new airship startups. Before joining Estera, Eli worked as a regulatory hacker at Boom Supersonic and has spent his career reviving forgotten technologies that could transform our world. In our conversation, we explore why airships could revolutionize global logistics, the untapped power hidden deep in the earth, how reading regulatory fine print might be the secret to unlocking an industry, and why AI might not deliver the productivity revolution that everyone expects it to.

I walked away from this conversation with a fresh perspective on forgotten technologies that have the potential to reshape transportation and energy, plus a clearer view of why breakthrough innovations often require someone willing to dig into the details. This is a new podcast, so if you enjoy today's episode, I hope you'll consider subscribing and joining us for some of the incredible conversations we have coming up. Now, here's my conversation with Eli. This episode is brought to you by Brex. Fred Adler, the influential venture capitalist of the 1970s, was known for displaying decorative pillows in his office that featured a signature business philosophy. Corporate happiness is positive cash flow. In today's post-SERP environment, Adler's wisdom feels particularly relevant as founders need to make every dollar work harder. That's exactly what Brex delivers. Their modern finance platform was built specifically for startups like yours, and designed to help extend your runway when capital efficiency matters most. With Brex, you get global corporate cards with up to 20x higher credit limits and no personal guarantee required. Their banking solution has no minimums and no transaction fees, while letting you earn high yield from day one with same-day liquidity. Best of all, Brex knows you were born to build, not juggle spreadsheets and finance tools. Their AI-powered platform brings cards, banking, expense management, and travel all in one place. It's simple, scalable, and designed to get you back to what you do best, building. More than 30,000 companies, including one in three U.S. venture-backed startups, trust Brex to help make every dollar count toward their mission. Join them at brex.com slash Mario. Eli, it's amazing to have you here. I have been a long admirer of your writing and public thinking and some of the wild but plausible views of the future that you have advanced over the years. So excited to chat about all things airships and more. And thanks so much for being here. Well, my pleasure. Those are some of my favorite topics. So always happy to chat. Amazing.

You've had such an interesting career sort of traversing policy and tech. And maybe just to sort of set the stage a little bit, I'd love to talk a little bit about what led you to your current spot. But to even start, let's talk about what your current spot is and what you do for Astra. Yeah, so I'm head of strategic investments at Astera Institute. Astera is a large... private foundation founded by Jim McCaleb that's focused on sort of advancing really transformative technology and science. And so in this role, you know, most foundations have somebody whose job it is to give grants. You know, that's like the slot I fill. The difference at Astera is that we will do grants and investments and we're open to like lots of things in between. So the philosophy here is that, you know, if you do a grant, you lose 100% of the money 100% of the time and if you do an investment even if it's like maybe like on paper it's a bad investment like you you know expected term value terms like you get some of your money back some of the time and so you can put your thumb on the scale and maybe make technologies advance faster while still recycling capital and being more efficient so that's kind of the philosophy here and And that's my job is to sort of lead that and think through the technologies and investments, both like grant making investments and equity investments and other capital deployments that we might want to do. Amazing. Well, I'm always reminded of how little I know about many of the topics I discuss with people on this podcast, even if I think I might. And I'm glad to start with an immediate shibboleth, which is that it's. like Astera rather than Astra. So there you go. Yeah. In terms of the way that you think about these investments, like, you know, are you very flexible in terms of the size and the stage and the type or how have you sort of thought about the right way to do this? You know, I don't know if impact investing is really the right frame, but it's maybe sort of has a little bit of that flavor to it. Yeah, I think we are unusually flexible, unusually risk averse or risk tolerant rather.

And you might say that there's actually like two spots in particular in the capital stack where it's hard for new technologies to or maybe three spots. So like so there's like the basic science stuff before it can become a company. It's hard for for people to get capital. There's like that was like maybe like first check early startup times that it's it's it's really hard. And then it was like. later stage there's like a valley of death round at some point for a lot of like capital intense things and so so those are all like three different stages and you know i think we're we're open it doesn't have to be those those particular three stages but i think of those as like particular times where we could be catalytic and and you know make an investment or a you know a grant or a equity investment that really changes the game for the project right and and that hopefully crowds in other capital as well from other sources and, you know, let's let, you know, let's the, the project lead or the founder, like, you know, let, let them shoot their shot. Right. And, and, and let's, let's, let's give this technology a shot and see if it works. That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, obviously as venture has become bigger and bigger and more and more crowded capital availability is not usually the problem, but I think you're right that there are always these moments when. you know, venture is maybe quite scarce in these valley of death rounds or super duper early or science risk, you know, these pieces. So that's like a super valuable place to be sitting. In terms of the technology, are there certain areas that you've been sort of like especially excited to invest in or spend more time learning about for potential future investments? The biggest sort of areas for us right now at Astera is, you know, energy, which I kind of have a background in, space. AI, of course, because that's the biggest thing going on right now. And then the other thing that we're kind of focused on is neurotech. So with sort of the lens that this is going to be important in the era of AI, right? Like being able to have humans keep up and really flourish in an age of powerful AI.

Amazing. Well, I'm sure we'll talk about some of those different pieces as we go along. But yeah, to set the stage a little bit, how did you end up in this seat? And particularly, how did someone who maybe foresaw their career in academia originally find their way through to a supersonic flight company and to tech investing? Yeah, I've always kind of followed my interests throughout my career and have always really run away from being pigeonholed in any one thing. So I recall being in grad school teaching undergrad. So I taught undergraduate economics for three semesters. And I remember the second time I taught intermediate microeconomics, I was like, well, I did a lot better this time than I did the first time I taught. But I can't imagine doing this over and over again for 30 years. Right. Like, like, I mean, it just sounds terrible. So that sort of mindset of like, I actually maybe don't want to just rest on my laurels. Like same, same thing. Like, so I ended up at the Rakeda Center and had some initial success right off the bat doing some international telecom stuff. And, you know, I'd go to the same to these different, you know, ITU and internet governance meetings. And, you know, you kind of see the same. people at you know different city different place on the planet uh you know different hotel bar but same crowd and you know i kind of would see these people who had been doing the same thing for 30 years and it sounded not fun so i i really sort of adopted um you know initially it was like sort of fear right it was fear that i was going to be stuck doing the same thing over and over again and then when i kind of like changed focuses and nobody stopped me It was really empowering to be able to do that. And so I've just sort of adopted that mindset. And so, you know, I have had sort of what I would call like a meandering career. But it's been really rewarding to be able to...

you know, follow, follow my interests, like sort of pay attention to like my own emotions about like how I feel about what I'm working on and try to really, uh, align, you know, I always, I think a lot about like aligning my, uh, system two brain with my system one brain, right? So the rational brain with the monkey brain, and if the monkey brain like really wants to be working on something else, like maybe I should find a way to get the rational brain to also get to work on that thing. And you know, the, with the, with the sort of the thesis that your best work is going to be. when they're both when both of those brains are trying to do the same thing at the same time. So I've really just tried to adopt, you know, sort of an attitude of freedom to freedom to choose what I'm working on for, you know, I think you do have to go deep at times, obviously. But but, you know, something like on the order of like a five year period, it's fine to like work on this thing for five years and then and then be like, well, what's. the most interesting thing for me in the world right now and should I go do that and change in that way and so yeah when so earlier this year I got an email from Kate Hall the CEO at Estera and she was just like you know hey Eli we're hiring for these roles do you know anyone who'd be good and and the job I ended up accepting I just kind of emailed her back and was like you know this role feels like it could be really interesting so you know let's talk and so Kind of went from there, but it was just sort of following that interest level and emotional component. That's amazing. Yeah, I find that most of the interesting people that I end up meeting have had some version of a slightly peripatetic path. Maybe it isn't all for their entire career, but at least some portion where they really sort of stretch the boundaries of what maybe they anticipated they were going to do. And I love that framing of sort of giving yourself a bit of a boundary for it, like the five-year period sort of stops you from being a dilettante, but also allows you the freedom to jump between things. I think it was maybe in 2016 that you write this paper, Make America Boom Again, about sort of supersonic flight. How did you sort of become interested in that as a canvas for some of your thinking? And it did sort of then take, I don't know if it was a full five years, but a good chunk of your life that followed.

Yeah, so kind of the backstory there was that I had been doing this more internet policy, internet governance, IP kind of policy at the Mercado Center. In 2014, my boss left and I got promoted. So I became the director of the program. And as part of sort of my new reign there, I said, well, I'm going to like do less of this. telecom stuff and i'm gonna do uh i was gonna i decided i wanted to do some drone research so drones were kind of early then yeah there wasn't like a really like mature uh drone industry there that then that could could lobby for itself or anything like that so i thought i could do some interesting drone policy work And so I did. I did did some couple of interesting papers and, you know, got to present my research at NASA and all that stuff. And then I kind of was talking to my research assistant and I was like, you know, I think I've done everything I want to do on drones. Like, let's brainstorm. You know, we have this like hard one FAA knowledge now that we we kind of worked up the learning curve. Let's think about what else we could do that's like FAA related. And so. we had a few ideas but like the clear winner was supersonics and i think supersonics were particularly interesting because um as you know i was very interested in the great stagnation of you know why why we had not been growing very fast since uh 1973 and the you know supersonics is like the poster child for that because it's not only that we've stagnated we've regressed yes uh you know we had concord it existed we people flew mock-2 across the atlantic every single day And then, you know, now here we are, you know, several years later, Concorde is gone and, you know, we're all flying at subsonic speeds. And so it's not just the great stagnation, it's the great regress, right? And so I thought, like, it seems like the best place to get started if you're really serious about ending the great stagnation is look at the areas where we're regressing, actually like negative productivity growth. And if you can fix those.

then you're on your way maybe to solving the broader stagnation question. And so for folks that maybe didn't follow that pocket of the great regression, let's say, what were the things that you discovered that were driving this step backwards when it came to flight speeds? And how did it sort of inform the way that you were thinking about what needed to happen? Yeah, so I think that the biggest problem with supersonics is that... There was a ban on supersonic flight over land in the US that was instituted in 1973. And, you know, this allowed modes of supersonic flight like Concorde, where you are, you know, flying transatlantic, you're only going supersonic when you're over the ocean. So there's no sonic boom problem that people get exposed to. But the problem with this is that an airliner is actually like a really hard place to enter. a new market like you know the in aviation market you're talking uh you know a hundred passengers on concord you know huge you know hundreds of thousands of pounds a maximum takeoff mass and that is just that's just really hard uh one way to think i learned about this later but like one way to think about it is that you know uh the complexity of an aircraft program is exponential with with takeoff mass so so it's actually like you know a small airplane is much, you know, is like significantly less complex to develop and bring to market than an airliner. What the overland band did was it cut off the natural entry point for supersonic aircraft, which was smaller planes, right? Like, you know, business jets or, you know, maybe something even smaller than what you'd normally think of as a business jet. And business jets, they can't, they don't have the option. You don't have the option in that market of being like, well, we're going to build a business jet that's only for transatlantic or something like that, right? Like, people you know they're not going to buy a business jet they're not going to pay a premium for a business jet that uh speeds them up like 25 of the time which is kind of the percentage of miles that go over the ocean so it needs it needs to work all the time right and so our take uh in writing that paper was look the the overland ban is like the original sin here it prevented that cut off truncated the market and so you have to go for the really hard airliner move

instead of uh instead of you know the natural like okay we're gonna we're gonna what we're gonna do is we're gonna enter the market as a small business jet you know and then and then perfect the technologies that will scale up and then we're gonna build something a little bigger you know maybe a large business jet and then and then maybe a small airliner and then and then uh you know you can get up to something concord size and maybe concordo is even too big for the market in general um but if you if you allow people to iterate and and perfect the technologies and in sort of a sort of a bite sized way, then they can they can work their way up the curve. And that's how you get technology to progress. And what was the theory behind that sort of initial 1973 ban? Was it a pure noise pollution issue? How did you sort of like think about that that aspect of things? Yeah, it was it was mostly noise pollution. There was this element also of it where the Europeans were leading in supersonic technology, right? So they had they developed concord through you know concord was developed um by a consortium of um countries right it was british and french government it's like you know essentially a treaty between the two countries to develop this aircraft together and then that company is became airbus right like so that is that's how airbus i never knew started and so the the us had this uh program uh since the Kennedy administration of, well, the Europeans are developing Concorde, it's going to go Mach 2. And we had this other program where Kennedy was like, it's got to go faster and it's got to be bigger. And so it was going to be like 300 seats in Mach 2.7. And that brought in titanium and Congress allocated money for it. And then Boeing got the contract. And so they got pretty far along in in development is the those the boeing 2707 you know just got to the point where the costs were exploding and eventually congress pulled funding and and that was around that time that uh faa also did the uh overland ban because just like well we're losing in this so we don't want to we don't want to help it along but then you know like almost every country in the world copied the ban so you know including the europeans so it wasn't it you know i i think mostly it is just like a legitimate noise issue like concord had a

sonic boom of 105 pldb it's pretty loud we definitely know how to make it softer today through shaping the aircraft differently and and having a smaller aircraft also helps but it yeah that is sort of a confluence of those two factors fascinating and uh it's it's sort of writing that paper that then sort of brings you into the private sector with Boom Supersonic, where I think you've described your work as being a regulatory hacker. What did that mean functionally? And what was it about Boom that you felt like, hey, actually, this is a really interesting take on it, or, you know, maybe the sort of right first principles approach to this problem? Yeah, I mean, I think I just got a call from the Boom CEO one day, and he was just like, hey, we really like what you're, you know, I had talked to him for writing my paper and stuff like that. And he was just like, we really like what you're doing at Mercatus. Like, would you like to do that more? Like, would you like to do more of that and come do it? And of course, I said yes. The situation when I got into the company was that on landing and takeoff noise, there was no supersonic specific standard. And the FAA's position was, you know, OK, we might consider a supersonic. specific standard at some point but until we do you're stuck with the subsonic landing and takeoff noise standard and that just you know our position was that just didn't work for a supersonic airliner you have to have narrower engines right because at cruise speed you know the big giant high bypass ratio turbo fans you know they they create a lot of drag right at at mock you know mock two speeds uh or or even less and then and then the other problem is the uh the wing aspect ratio right you have you have these sort of like like uh you don't have long wings you have like like delta wing kind of configuration so that means you need more thrust to take off too um so those those two like physics based you know challenges uh limits means meant that um you you cannot be quieter uh you know with with sort of today's

uh fixed cycle engines you cannot be quieter on takeoff than a you're going to be louder than a airplane my job coming in was like okay figure this out like like how like how do we get you know faa to you know move move off of this position and and and change it so uh we tried like a lot of different things uh you know kind of Tried to leverage relationships in the White House. We got Congress, you know, in Congress and talked to a bunch of people. We eventually found a couple senators that were willing to be sort of champions for us on this issue. Sort of passed some stuff in committee that never became full law, I think. But it was enough to show like FAA that we had some political support. So basically the story here is we're just like throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks, right? It was just trying a bunch of different things. And then the thing that finally ended up working surprisingly was something that we were doing on the international front. So there was a deadline of December 31st, 2017 for under international rules that if you certified, if you applied for tight certification before that date, then you were grandfathered into a laxer subsonic standard than if you applied after it. And there was no time limit for how long certification had to take. So my thing was like, look, this is crazy, but we should probably just apply for type certification this year. So that we, you know, there's at least an interpretation that, you know, force comes to force, we fall under this standard internationally. And so, you know, kind of previewed that with our FAA colleagues and they were like, well, that's crazy because part 36, you know, the noise standard like only gives you five years from when you apply that it holds. And I said, well, OK. And so then I went back and I read it carefully. And as I was reading the rules, I figured out.

like actually nothing here technically applies to supersonics. And so, so I kind of made, followed up with them and made a bit of a legal argument that like this actually doesn't apply to us right now. And so, and so you, you know, your current policy stance isn't like supported by, by the regulatory code. And, and so they're like, well, okay, we'll talk it back and take it back and talk to our lawyers. And then. a few months later they yeah they issued a legal opinion saying like okay lots of people are looking at supersonic flight now are you know we've we've taken the opportunity to review the law and you know given that we've we've given this review like we find that like the current noise standards don't apply and like it will be our job to like make a new uh new standard for each applicant if we don't already have a standard uh that's generally applicable so uh so that was kind of the the breakthrough was just sort of following this path like pulling the thread kind of as far as it went and and and um uh creating a little you know political pressure on the faa but then there was also just like a circumstantial time pressure thing because like they actually had a an applicant at that point even though it was you know way way premature uh we were technically an applicant for a type certification and um that kind of forced them to really look at the issues square in the face and they realized like oh actually like legally we can't You know, we can't really do this. And also because of all the pressure, it's kind of like, well, we don't want to. We actually do would like to loosen up a little bit. I love getting into the nitty gritty on it because, you know, I do think it's so difficult to resurrect a technology like this where you are opposing also sort of the incumbent stance in some respect. And it's always fascinating to me to hear that, like, so much of these unblocking moments is literally someone just sitting down. reading the thing from scratch and being like, hang on, actually, is this really what it says? And so obviously there are lots of other pieces that you're talking about, too. And, you know, the political angle. But, you know, I think of the story that is in Isaac's book on Elon, certainly about him sitting and plugging in the, you know, raw costs into a spreadsheet for a rocket and just like having someone actually sit down and do those things that seem.

Like someone must have done this, but actually, you know, you need someone to do that. And, you know, so much comes from it often. Yeah, no, I think going back to like primary sources is like it's such a power move. Like you kind of understand the issue at like. much greater detail if you can if you can start at that sort of the the prime you know in in in policy and regulatory work like going back to like the authorizing statute and then like reading like the regs and and making understanding really like how they apply like a lot of people uh surprisingly don't do that and it's just like you know it's like a lot a lot of alpha and doing that yeah 100 um I'm sure folks have seen some of the headlines over the past year plus around boom supersonic. But for those folks who maybe haven't, like, you know, it's really exciting to see how the technology has progressed. What's the sort of state of the art in where, you know, returning the boom to America is these days? And, you know, how do you think it plays out over the next few years? Yeah, on the on the policy side is really exciting. The administration did an executive order basically saying. you know, we're going to repeal the Overland ban and we're going to, you know, replace it with the noise standard, which is kind of what I've always said we should do, you know, back to that 2016 paper. Like that was that was our position. So it's really exciting. And, you know, so Boom is going to market with an airliner and still like sort of targeting that Concord market. So they're not really designing what I would call like a low boom aircraft. Yeah, they are targeting now an operating regime where they, you know, they fly, you know, Mach 1.1, 1.2, depending on atmospheric conditions. You can fly that fast and not have a boom that reaches the ground, which would be that would that's like something that's enabled by this recent policy change. Wow. And then and then, you know, there are other entrants in the market that are pursuing. you know, initially more of a DoD route, you know, I'm thinking of Hermeus and Astra Mechanica, and they are doing a DoD route. But then with the idea of like, you know, once they, they perfect the technology, they'll do airliners as well. And then, you know, we'll see it was, you know, we'll see if anybody does a low boom aircraft. That's, you know, the thing that I want to see that, you know, that would enable you to fly, you know, between New York and LA or whatever.

uh two hours or or something like that it would be uh a game changer i think yeah that would be a dream um why do you think no one has taken that approach so one of the one of the lessons of boom is that it's like really um it is really capital intensive to do an air an airliner first right so everybody has seen that you know i would say that sort of the the next gen companies uh you know hermeos and astromechanica in particular they've kind of looked at that and they've seen like the defense market as a better bridge uh for for their purposes so so they're they're looking at like well if we're trying you know instead of doing an airliner let's focus on defense first and there's money there and you know we can get stuff flying the defense department doesn't care about the the low boom design and and to be clear like there is an aerodynamic trade-off with the low boom design right it's so so you end up paying higher fuel costs if you do a low boom design so it doesn't make sense to do a low boom design on spec You need to do you need to like have a real plan. Yeah. For for, you know, what's what's the aircraft. So I think, you know, at some point, you know, you know, I would be surprised, you know, if if there's, you know, an overture V2 from boom that it would probably be I would assume it would be a low boom aircraft. And, you know, depending on what what these other guys build, you know, could could also potentially be a low boom. Well, one of the through lines, I think, of your career, you know, despite it spanning a lot of sectors, is that you managed to write things that make it into reality with sort of an amazing impact. Your words per flight craft is extremely high. And so, you know, you write another piece which sort of deals with the aviation space, which is something that I remember reading it at the time that it came out and thinking, you know, that is a, you know, a kind of a wild idea and not doing much with it. in my own head, but other people did. And so I'm talking about the cargo airships could be big piece, which I think is maybe 2023. How did your mind sort of jump from sonic supersonics to to airships and and the sort of potential in in the resurrection of this modality? I guess it was in 2019. At that point, I was already thinking about leaving boom. And I was sort of like, well, what would be next? Right. Like, or what's the what's what else? You know, again, like,

Having having like a lot of hard one experience in the aviation sector, I was I was I was thinking about things like, oh, what would what would be the next thing to do? And I came across this idea of of airships. And like, you know, once you start thinking about the physics of airship scaling, it becomes very seductive, right? Like that there's a square tube rule. So the volume increase increases with like length to the third power and and the drag increases with length to the. second power so it's you know if you double the um the size of the airship the length of the airship let's say one dimension um then you get a an increase in lift to drag ratio so your your economic performance and your your your uh technical and and economic performance of the of the airship gets better as it gets bigger and so the the logical conclusion here is like it should be really really big just massive yeah yeah and so you know having having had the experience of boom of you know we we did this capital intensive uh you know company you know had just finished our series b you know it's like okay that seems like a thing worth exploring so after i left i um just started um making phone calls to people um basically so i talked to people working on other airship programs and and tried to understand the market at first i was like i thought well maybe what i should do is start an airship a cargo airship airline just like buy somebody else's airship and then and then quickly realize like no one's building the right thing there's only 25 airships in the world Wow. So you see if you see like the Goodyear blimp, you're seeing like four, you know, four percent of the world's ships right right there. I love that. So so it's not there wasn't a lot going on. And so I quickly realized like, oh, we would have to build our own and and and then started to think about like, what would that look like? You know, in the meantime, had taken and taken a job at another think tank Center for Growth and Opportunity.

um but still like sort of like was was tinkering with this in my mind and i was at a uh i was at a conference and uh you know gave a talk on something i think i gave a talk on geothermal energy or something like that but there was a there was a prompt at the at the end of the conference it was like what's what's an institution or thing that should exist in the world that doesn't and i kind of wrote down you know giant transatlantic or trans pacific cargo airships some people like came over and were talking to me with it and and one of the one of them was this guy ian mckay and uh he works for gates ventures and and runs his own lab there and we just started talking and really hit it off like i you know had never met him before that weekend um and uh you know we became friends but but uh and along with my other friend matt zettler we just started to like explore you know what this space would look like and Could it be done? And we ended up hiring some engineers to do a parametric study of what this could look like. Sort of loose performance capabilities and how big, let's say you wanted to do 500 tons at this speed. And so I'm like, what kind of airship would you need? And so we got answers on that. And ultimately, we kind of decided, look. we probably you know this probably can't be done you know in the the margins are small we were we were we still had it we're laboring under a a wrong idea of like what the market would look like yes yeah so we kind of think there was no real market right so you have to sort of imagine it right right but but we we kind of we kind of uh you know we thought our reasoning at the time was you know most cargo in in the u.s it doesn't go by you know slow you know, boats or anything like even intercoastal or, you know, like, you know, up rivers and stuff like we have waterways in the US, especially in the eastern half. A lot of cargo could go that way. It doesn't, right? The market, it's too slow. You know, it's super cheap, but it's too slow. And we could do a lot more domestic air cargo, right? Like we have airports and it's too expensive. It's nice and fast, but people don't do that. What do they do? They do trucks.

Right. Trucks. Trucks have like most of the most of the domestic cargo. And so if you could do something across an ocean where roads don't exist and that has truck like economics, right? Like truck truck delivery times and costs like you would take the lion's share of the trans oceanic market. And and that's what we were thinking about. And so we were sort of baselining. you know, you really have to hit like trucking unit economics. And we just thought like, yeah, you could maybe do it, but it's like not huge, not a huge margin to that. And you, you know, it's, it is, it is like super capital intensive. So it's like, it's like super capital intensive project to get like maybe a small win. Right. And so we were just like, uh, like maybe if you squint, like there's something here, but, um, but it's probably not something like that we're going to do. So let's just, write it up and put it online and and kind of let people see it and so uh so we did that and that was that's the blog post that ended up getting a lot of eyeballs so um amazing and then and then i'm sure you know the the rest of the story which is that somebody else figured out that uh the the economic story was wrong so yes i definitely want to get to that i want to um before we do do you remember like what it was that sort of nerd sniped you about airships even to begin with? Like, was it, I don't know, were you reading a steampunk book or, you know, learning about, you know, the Hindenburg or, you know, one of these old aviation, maybe pioneers? How did you sort of like even, how did that even cross your mind? Because it's not something that I think most people were even vaguely thinking about. yeah no so i think um probably initially heard about the idea from this guy uh nathan smith who i went to grad school with um and he he was really obsessed with it he had no like startup experience no aviation industry experience but he was just sort of obsessed with it like people had been talking about like airships for you know in canada for like the mining operations like supporting mining operations or something like that and somehow he was he was

got associated with somebody who is working on that and but then just like sort of here and the thing that really yeah i think i've already mentioned it but the thing that really struck me was this square cube scaling law it's just like oh it's a thing that makes sense but it's you got to go big it doesn't make sense to do it subscale and sort of my experience at boom was um the subscale prototype is really uh really valuable right like the as as you know boom has you know yet to build an airliner but they've built a subscale demonstrator uh xv1 that has already flown and has already uh flown supersonic and as i mentioned like like the smaller uh aircraft are much simpler uh much simpler engineering programs and so the normal move that you want to do in aviation which is build a subscale demo and and then and then scale it um you can't really do that right with airships because like if you're if you're subscale you're losing most of the performance and and just sort of observing the industry seeing like oh everybody's doing these things that are just like you know too small if you're building like a 20 ton payload vehicle you cannot you're not going to hit any sort of unit economics that are that are attractive to anybody. And so you really have to go significantly bigger. Why do you think this was an idea that, you know, went so viral for lack of a better framing? Like why did it capture people's imaginations quite so much? The reason it kind of works or worked is that you can kind of understand it, right? Like you can kind of understand, you can kind of see the logic, right? I think this sort of square cube factor. yeah is is something that like you can explain to somebody and they can really get it in a very short amount of time And and they feel like they've learned something. And then it's kind of then the rest of it is just like, well, yeah, why doesn't this exist? This would be this would be this would be really great. So it's kind of like one of these like interesting, like technical tricks that is like highly accessible. And so they can understand it like on a relatively deep level, like fairly quickly. Why did we lose that technology or forget that technology? I think, you know, most people do sort of associate it with the Hindenburg, but that's not really the story.

no i think it's just airplanes got too good for transporting people airships are i think way too slow um airplanes are faster um you know particularly you know after world war ii we had you know pressurized cabins you know higher flying altitudes like much much faster speed so you know basically um you know had the jet you know jet engine jet aircraft by the 1950s and and it's just yeah but by then it was um it was over right it was just you know nobody no you know the the the graph zeppelin um did do an around the world trip you know like a luxury luxury trip uh uh around around the globe with you know multiple stops and you could go and multiple yeah it's like a cool trip but like that's not transportation that's like that's like a a pleasure cruise uh really and um for most things like people that's not what people uh value so is is is too slow for transporting people there was not really enough margin i think at that time to transport cargo it doesn't make sense to transport cargo you know that way in you know and i say the yeah 1940s 1950s because i think i think a real key enabler for cargo will be autonomy so being able to not you know being able to like sort of delete everything on board that is intended to like support human life um yeah so getting rid of You need multiple crews on board if you have a five-day or seven-day journey on one of these. So you have all these beds where people need to sleep, kitchens, you have to have catering, all these things. You can just delete them if you can either remotely pilot it or have it be autonomous or semi-autonomous. And that, I think, is the key enabler to bring this back. And just to give folks a sense of... of the speed, you know, what is the, what is it? I think three or so, so days to go from East coast to, to London, let's say New York to London or. Yeah. Yeah. You could do that. Yeah. Okay. Got it. So yeah, you're, you're certainly, uh, much, much faster than it would take to drive, but you're much, much slower than it would take to, uh, to jump on a traditional plane.

Yeah. Yeah. You can, you know, if you had Concord back, it'd be three hours. Yes. Right. Right. OK, great. And yeah, let's talk about how it came to life, because that is sort of maybe the most exciting part of all this, that someone found what you had written and sort of ran with it in a really exciting way. Yeah. So so Jim Kutcher found the post, just was kind of curious about it, like started a spreadsheet, you know, kind of to hear him tell it. He just sort of started thinking about what are all the systems? So he had, you know, experience at SpaceX. He was then at Hyperloop and sort of, you know, chief engineer at Hyperloop. And so he had a lot of experience like building like complex transportation systems. And so he was just thinking about what are all the systems you need on board? You know, and then can I put like cost bounds on it and performance bounds on it? Right. And so he was kind of like looking at it from that perspective and starting a spreadsheet. And he kind of came to the. conclusion that yeah you could definitely build this and then he also because he had sort of like logistics experience being at hyperloop he had the the insight and the realization that actually you you um don't need to match trucking unit economics if you are delivering cargo from asia to the u.s like if you're doing it today on a container in a container on a airplane it's still like roughly like a week uh service why is that so it's it's all the handling that has to happen um because you're not literally point to point right so so if you think about um you're booking you're booking this service it's like well you have your goods in a warehouse and then somebody some trucker has to come and like take them and and put it take it over to the airport and then it goes into another warehouse and then You know, maybe somebody has to inspect it and then it goes on to gets loaded onto the airplane and then the airplane does it. And then you have to repeat the whole process on the other side. And so his idea was, let's let's do true point to point service with airships. And so, you know, basically it's like customer site airship flies over, lowers down a crane, picks up the boxes.

puts them on board and then um maybe you have a milk run so you're you're picking up cargo from multiple customers like in the same city and then and then you you make the the transit uh in you know say four five days across the pacific and then uh and then you do the milk run on the other side right so uh so you drop off at a bunch of Pacific or, you know, like sort of end to end. But it's also like many fewer people like touching your stuff, your goods. And so many fewer opportunities for like theft or other other problems that are just like, you know, ubiquitous in this kind of trade. And if something does go wrong, you know who to blame. Right. And so so the, you know, having having like accountability. uh you know because it's just one party that's taking it across like you know you know exactly who to blame and and and who not to do business with in the future right and so so being accountable is actually good for for the industry realizing this um you know he kind of came to conclusion actually you could do this with pretty fat margins and uh if you can do it with fat margins then it's that makes sense to do it uh as a startup yeah so he so he got an intro to me and and connected with me and we started talking and uh met up in person and validated the idea with a customer a potential customer um and kind of heard the feedback that we heard was like this this solves every pain point i deal with uh on a day-to-day basis like importing uh goods from uh asia to the u.s and um and so it's just it was like okay we definitely want to take a swing at this so Um, yeah, so, so he started the company. Uh, I was, uh, one of the first investors and yeah, they have just been, uh, going from there. Amazing. Um, is it the case that sort of certain paths, I don't know what the right terminology would be, um, work better? Like you mentioned sort of Asia to the U S like, is it sort of something about the, the amount of checkpoints and handling that make that, you know, especially attractive? I imagine there's some, you know, obviously you're not going to do it from.

next door to each other but is that like particular set of uh yeah obstacles make it particularly attractive the reason the way the reason that's like a pretty lucrative market is that there's just a lot of volume of of trade done and and you're kind of stuck you know you there are no roads so you can't do trucks yeah i mean i think the things to sort of think about uh the interesting interesting like dimensions to think about are like wind so if you can if you can um if you can plot a course where you're the wind is at your back right you can you can actually improve the unit economics further um and including things like um you know if you're doing a round trip you know it might be that you take like one path across and then you're picking you know you're picking up goods from the u.s to go to asia which which does contrary to popular opinion like that does uh that does actually happen uh to some degree you know it is it is less But assuming you can get, you know, maybe charge less for that route. But then you'd take a different path, you know, maybe it's more southerly path for that so that you could get the wind at your back again. And so it brings back like a form of sailing, which is interesting, right? Like you're riding the winds and it becomes, you know, a little faster and a little bit more economical if you adjust for that. But there's, yeah, I mean, there's tons of... routes for this uh all over the world um you do have to watch out for uh sort of the higher mountain ranges so i know when we were looking at it it's like you want you want to like probably avoid rockies himalayas uh andes um but uh other than that like uh i guess antarctica too is like quite high um but uh but you know not a lot of reason to do that um so So so avoiding avoiding like high mountain ranges could be important because these things don't cruise at like really high altitude. And you could you could do it. You just have less payload available. I imagine one of the tradeoffs you make is that they are a bit less robust when you talk about sort of like going over these mountain ranges. Is that a fair assumption or is it actually sort of like that's not the case necessarily? They definitely have different limitations than airplanes. And one of them is cruise altitude. Like you're not going to be.

If you're a fully loaded airship, it doesn't make sense. This is all in part design trade-offs. The thing that's economical to do means that you would have some of these limitations. People have designed airships to fly much higher. It probably doesn't make economic sense to do that for this application. You mentioned a little bit earlier, you know, one of your interests is also energy. And you've also been quite, I think, active in sort of like investigating geothermal energy. How did you sort of come to that as something worth spending time on? And where are the opportunities there today? I was at a conference and met Bob Metcalfe, who created Metcalfe's Law, right? Like, you know, early invented Ethernet. and was one of the early Internet pioneers and was just chatting with him. And he was like, well, what are you working on now? And he said, well, I'm working on geothermal, which that was surprising. But just, you know, he kind of talked to me about it. And then I mentioned it to somebody else. And somehow there was an introduction to his his colleague at the time was this woman, Jamie Beard, who's just a force of nature. And she was working on. just sort of supporting the the sort of broader broader industry you know really really coming from a climate angle and so i got to know jamie a bit and and then uh decided to do some uh work on the policy side right for for uh cgo and you know along the way sort of did my like sort of survey of the industry and kind of you know who who are the different companies and you know um and so on and and you know got excited by it um uh ended up you know giving a few talks and and and and i did a blog post on it um and then also ended up making an investment in a geothermal company uh quays but yeah just sort of all this stuff like really felt organic wow at the time just sort of just followed like one interesting uh tidbit trail uh you know trail and just follow the thread again what did bob metcalf tell you about geothermal energy that you were like huh this is worth spending

more time on my side or like, I understand why this person is, is dedicating their brainpower to it right now. I, you know, I forget, I forget the details, but I mean, the thing that struck me was, okay, like Iceland gets a lot of their power from geothermal. And if you just go a little bit deeper, everywhere is Iceland, right? So like, like, you know, everywhere has the geothermal resources of Iceland. It's just, it's just covered by, you know, an extra few miles of rock. um and it's fairly easy to imagine like we'd get like drilling cheap enough and and good enough to to basically exploit that um you know the the temperature at the center of the earth is as hot as the surface of the sun so it's it's there's there's plenty of heat there's plenty of plenty of heat plenty of energy in the earth um and and um yeah and then and then i started looking into it just the um you know sort of the the resource size yeah it's just is just so um massive it's 15 000 yada joules or something like that where like yada is like the si prefix for like 10 to the i don't know 27 or something like that it's it's just like it's it's um it's just a massive amount of energy that is stored thermally like in in the earth uh in in relatively you know shallow parts of the earth so if you could if you can drill um for cheap you know into the uh into the crust and you know yeah you don't even have to go go that deep right you know something like 20 kilometers uh if you could do that anywhere you would have basically unlimited uh unlimited thermal resources to drop on wow fascinating and and is it the case that really the economics of the drilling are the major bottleneck I mean, there's, there's other things, a few other things too. Right. But, but yeah, that's, that, that to me is, is the, is the big unlock, right. The better you get a drilling. Cause we, cause we know that it works in Iceland, right. Like we know that, you know, so the, so the other piece of it would be, you know, they're sort of expensive CapEx pieces, like the conversion equipment, right. The, the steam turbines and so on. Right. And that's also the efficiency of that is going to be dependent on the temperature.

of the steam that you get out right so higher steam higher steam temperature is like higher efficiency as well so those are kind of levers that you could pull on but the big one that i think could could improve um is um and that has been improving is is drilling economics so if you can if you can drill deeper faster you know uh companies like furvo have really been mastering sort of these like uh drilling like laterals uh with in geothermal conditions so drilling uh uh you know to the side uh while uh while in hot rock and using drill bits that are you know substantially similar to those that are used in the you know oil and gas industry but just really optimize you know increasingly like manufacturers have started to optimize for geothermal conditions so harder rock hotter rock you know higher shocks like you need like more motors that are slightly more uh powerful etc and if you kind of make those optimizations like it can get pretty good and and really it is building off of the success of oil and gas in the sort of shale gas revolution right and so so building off of that success and and and getting better at drilling is is sort of the key thing You know, it strikes me that one of the sort of through lines of your of your work is, you know, discovering these sort of overlooked or forgotten technologies that, you know, deserve our attention again and, you know, deserve another look. Are there things at the moment that are maybe earlier in that sort of progression from forgotten to remembered that you think are worth taking a look at again? Well, I'm always I'm always thinking about something. So, yeah. So one thing I'm thinking about right now is titanium. metal so if you you know it's really hard to think of uh material that is like higher performance uh than than uh titanium for a lot of things so you know higher you know strength to weight ratio than steel or aluminum or magnesium and uh really nice thermal properties so it doesn't you know doesn't um expand in heat so um very much so so you could

You know, if you're building a Mach 3 airliner, you might want it to be made out of titanium. And if you look at the cost, it's just right now, it's just crazy. So I like to use the idiot index idea. So this is an Elon Musk thing, which is just like a thing within SpaceX. It was like, let's look at a component or something and let's see what the price is on the market. And then. what would it cost you know what does it cost from a raw material standpoint to make it you know in terms of energy and materials um and then what is the multiple what you know between that and if it's if it's if it's high we're gonna make it we're gonna insource it yes and if it's if it's low we're gonna outsource it right well with um you know you can use that concept for other things too but like just as a comparison point like the idiot index on steel is like less than two so so like the price of steel is is you know, between, between the energy and the, or like, like less than double the energy and the, or right with titanium, I think it's 42. Wow. No way. Um, so it's, it's, it's just like much, much higher. And, you know, in part that's because of like how it's made right now, it's made in still in batch processes. So there's no like continuous process or how you make it. Um, there is no, um, there have just haven't been as many optimizations you know steel is just so ubiquitous like there's thousands of grades of steel right and and and and it's all been optimized for different things and and the the process has just been so perfected with titanium there's like way way fewer um the market is is so much smaller and that has limited the amount of attention that's gone into like really scaling and optimizing that process and If we could figure out like a really great process for it and, you know, if you could get the idiot index on titanium data to you, you know, we would make a lot more things out of titanium. Wow, that is fascinating. Well, I hope you write about it if you haven't already. I don't think I've seen it. But, you know, before we sort of wrap up, I do want to talk about, you know, one of these other subjects, particularly sort of through the lens of some of the technologies that are happening today. You've written.

a lot about the great stagnation. We've talked about it earlier. But you've also sort of talked about it a little bit in the sense of some of the heretical thoughts you have on AI and the fact that we may not really see some of these amazing technologies translate into productivity in the way that we expect. What is sort of the principles behind that? And how do you feel about that idea today, maybe a couple of years after you initially sort of posed that question? As AI has gotten really hot, I'm obviously excited about it and I'm a user of AI and I see that it's getting very powerful. But I think my bottom line is I don't want people to be complacent. And I think that there's a lot of people who think like, okay, AI is here or it's coming or it's inevitable and therefore the economy is going to go gangbusters. And problem is solved and we can... like sit back and just like watch this happen and and my view is much more different is which is that like no it takes it's going to take like a lot of work and insight and stuff to like fully leverage that and to you know especially in some of these spaces where it is uh physical the physical world, not the world of atoms, not the world of bits. This is like very much like not an automatic process, right? It's a process that requires entrepreneurship and hard work. And it requires overcoming a lot of other obstacles like regulatory barriers and so on. So that's sort of like where I... That was like my initial reaction. And I think it's still like something that I believe. I think that. Yeah, I don't know what I think right now. I guess I think more or less. I think more or less what I thought then. But maybe in some ways the progress has been maybe slightly faster than I expected it to be. But then also I think I am approaching it now.

And I'm wondering if like transformers are not going to be enough, right? Like it's, you know, we are starting to hit some limits on how good AI could be. You know, at Astero, we have an internal AI lab, interestingly. So we are sort of like exploring ideas that are a bit orthogonal to what's happening in the big labs. You know, neuroscience inspired structures and ideas. um and and maybe you maybe we need some sort of like trick there uh that that is still missing to really get to uh really competent uh agi and then you also just need a lot of engagement with actual um the industry that you're you're trying to apply the ai to i'm not currently anticipating you know this sort of you know, 30 percent economic growth that some people have been saying we're going to get just because AI is going to substitute for all labor or something like that. Yeah, we have more more work before we're anywhere close to that is sort of what you're saying. You also are one of the first people sort of in tech and tech adjacent crowds that I think I've seen write about Joseph Tainter and sort of civilizational collapse, which I think now is becoming. Something that people are thinking about more and talking about more. Maybe before we sort of go into the wrap up questions, maybe you can give us a sort of pricey on that on that idea first. And how are you feeling about the complexity of our society today and how it may jeopardize us in the future? You know, you can think about it as like we're trying to do a lot of things, you know, in particular sort of. Politically, we're trying to do a lot of things. We have this very complex governing structure. We have a very large administrator class, whether that's government administrator or things that are just downstream of government policy, compliance officers and so on. And I think the real risk that I took away from the Tainter book is that

People become very jaded and they become very disloyal or, you know, like they don't they don't perceive like a need to be loyal to the current state of affairs. Right. So the example, you know, an example that we know from Roman history is that the Roman countryside, right, they were they were just like laboring under these high taxes. They're kind of like they didn't see like a benefit to them. And so the barbarians come in and they they like welcome the barbarians you know they they they took the perspective that you're coming in like i'm not gonna fight you like come on in like like and they just then they just let the the barbarians come through and and that that is ultimately what um led to the collapse of rome right it's the sort of defecting from uh from from like sort of caring about the well-being of the polity right and i think That is the thing that I worry about as we've had 50 years of stagnation, as that stagnation has been really lopsided. We've had rapid growth in the tech industry, software industry, computers, AI, but not really anywhere else. you get this sort of like, I think people feel really negative about it, right? Like, and they feel really, really disaffected. And, you know, there's going to come a problem someday that is in some way analogous to the barbarians. And people are just going to be like, yeah, I don't care. Like, I don't want to stand up for the current system. I don't want to fight for it. And that's... you know, then the problem comes, right? So it's, it's, it's, um, it doesn't have to be literal invaders. It could be, it could be something else. Right. But just like, you know, society exists to solve problems. And if we just eventually decide, no, I'm fed up with solving these problems, you know, sacrificing anything at all for the sort of continued existence of society. And, you know, I'm just going to not contribute to this, to solving this problem. And that, that's what leads to collapse. And so I do think like,

The goal of ending the great stagnation, like sort of getting really rapid productivity growth and progress in. The sort of a broad based swath of the economy, every, you know, everything like like all the things that have been stagnating, right? Like health care, transportation, etc. Like all those stagnating industries, if we can if we can actually get to where, you know, a point where people really feel like their lives are just. rapidly improving year to year and that the middle class and lower middle class isn't really just suffering while other people are getting rich. That is the thing that's going to make our society flourish. Having broad-based growth is the answer to the problem. Agreed. Agreed. Well, with that, let's move into our few little wrap-up questions. We always like to end with a few. abstract, more philosophical questions. And so to start off, if you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would like to run? One thing I've been thinking a lot about is antimatter. So antimatter, I think, is the most expensive substance we have. So we've made less than a gram of it on Earth, and it costs about a trillion dollars a gram. uh to make and and it's like wildly inefficient so like the wall plug efficiency of antimatter is like one part in 10 billion or something like that um so it's just it's just huge amounts of energy and very for very low amounts of like embodied energy in the antimatter the thing that i want to try i think someone should try is collecting antimatter uh instead of making it so if you if you go into uh into space there is an antimatter flux. So you do get sort of gamma rays and stuff interacting with particles and magnetic fields and stuff. And it does make antimatter that exists for some period of time. And what you could do is you could launch a power source and create a collector. So if you had, say,

100 kilowatt nuclear reactor in orbit at a, at a, you know, say a thousand kilometer altitude orbit, you could maybe capture something like three kilowatts worth of, of antimatter. So, you know, you kind of, if you kind of do, do that, you know, so instead of making antimatter, spending a lot of money to make antimatter, just collect it where it already exists. Scavenge it. Scavenge it. Exactly. And, and if you did that, um you know maybe you could create enough to create some some interesting uh propulsion system for uh for spaceships it would still take a long time it's sort of those power levels that i was talking about but and then and then uh sort of the near nearest term propulsion system you could make is not just a pure antimatter drive although that would be awesome uh but you could do something like antimatter catalyzed fusion so um using antimatter to sort of kick off a fusion process that would be like a reasonably near-term way of getting a really awesome propulsion system that would let us zip around the solar system. I think this is possible over the period of a couple decades. Wow. If I could just do that, I would want someone to do that, and I would want to support that. People always have good answers to this question in general, but I think that's my favorite. so interesting and is going to send me down a number of Google search and Wikipedia. So you can actually harvest it even more efficiently if you're willing to go to Jupiter. So Jupiter, you could probably get over 100% efficiency in terms of your, you can get like 500% efficiency or something like that for collect five times as much as your power source. Fascinating. Okay. Well, we'll circle back in 20 years to do a podcast about that one. Final question. If you had the power to assign a book to everyone on Earth to read and understand, what book would you like to assign to folks? One that I love that was really influential on me was Finite and Infinite Games, James Garst. Great choice. Love that book. Yeah. A lot of people have already read it, but it's great.

you know, crystallized for me, like what we're all doing here. Right. And, and, and sort of being able to see, see the world through that lens and, and, and, you know, my own life through that lens of, of, you know, what we're really trying to do is just like keep the game going. And it's, it's very beautiful. And, and we're not trying to play like a game where you're trying to get final victory over somebody else. Right. And, you know, he doesn't even make the argument directly in normative terms. He's just sort of outlining like these are the two kinds of games you can play. And by the end of the book, it's like obvious which one you want to play. Yes, it is a perfect place to end. Thank you so much, Eli. This was so lovely and so interesting. My pleasure. Thanks so much for the great conversation. Thank you. or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions, so if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.