Podcast Transcript: Eli Dourado on the Key Tech Breakthroughs For the 2020s

This is an edited transcript of our podcast episode with economist and regulatory hacker, Eli Dourado. He provides his views on some of the key tech breakthroughs for this decade, including sustainable energy, space travel, and crypto currencies. While we have tried to make the transcript as accurate as possible, if you do notice any errors, let me know by email.

Bilal Hafeez (1:47):

So welcome, Eli, to the podcast, it’s great to have you on. I have to say, I wasn’t that familiar with your work until you wrote this excellent blog that came out a week or so ago, called Notes on Technology in the 2020s. And I have to say, it’s probably one of the best notes I’ve read on the different technological breakthroughs that we’ve seen, and how likely they are to be implemented in society in the near term. So, kudos to you for that.

Eli Dourado (2:06):

Well, thank you. Great to be with you, and appreciate the kind words about the post.

Eli’s Background & Career Path

Bilal Hafeez (2:10):

Great. Before we jump into the topics that you discussed in that post, I always like to get a sense of the person’s background, who I’m speaking to. So, you’ve had quite an interesting background, as it turns out, when I kind of delved into your biography. So, perhaps you could tell me in your own words how you ended up where you are now, and your path along the way?

Eli Dourado (2:30):

Yeah, sure. So, maybe start 15 years ago. I thought I wanted to be an economics professor. So, of course, I started on a PhD, and really enjoyed a lot of the course work, and the environment and so on. But along the way I decided, “No, this really isn’t for me, I really would like to get off that track.” And so, I was fortunate to find a role at the Mercatus Center, working on technology policy in 2012, on the tech policy team.

And then when my boss left in 2014, I took over the team as the director of that program, and I sort of made a shift in priorities to focus really on technology other than just information technology, which I think, if you talk about technology policy in DC, most people think, “Oh, you’re talking about Facebook, and Twitter, and Section 230, and stuff like that.”

And somehow, there’s this really perverse idea that consumer technology is the pinnacle of invention, which is… it’s apps. And so, I started to focus our team more on real world stuff. And my own research was a lot on drones, and supersonics. And so, that work on supersonics ended up leading to… I ended up taking a role as the first policy hire at Boom, which is a startup working on supersonics, and spent two and a half years at Boom, building the policy team, and working with FAA, and managed to change their interpretation of policy towards supersonics. Worked with Congress, managed to pass a very progressive supersonic agenda in the 2018 FAA reauthorization, a lot of work with GAO, and the UN.

I left Boom in 2019, and joined The Center for Growth and Opportunity about a year ago, it’s a research center at Utah State University. And working at CGO has been amazing, they’ve basically let me delve into a lot of these topics that I’m interested in. And basically, my goal is to figure out how to accelerate broad-based economic growth, and figure out, how do we get these mainly non-IT technologies to come online faster, through policy engagement, and maybe to some extent cultural shift that values are moving faster on these subjects.

Why We Haven’t a Replacement for Concorde (yet)

Bilal Hafeez (4:20):

Yeah, you mentioned boom and supersonic flight, just as an aside, why haven’t we seen a replacement to the Concorde? It just seems really odd to see something go backwards, technologically. We had Concorde, the supersonic flight, and then it stopped, and there’s nothing to replace it. Why is that? Is it the noise issue, or was it just some kind of weird public fear around the way it got discontinued?

Eli Dourado (4:43):

A bunch of things people don’t realize. So first of all, Concorde was a little a bit ahead of it’s time in terms of the market. Concorde retired in 2003. If you think about transoceanic, premium business travel, it has more than doubled. So, business class and first class has more than doubled in that period, and if Concorde were operating today… You’d think the business case would’ve closed for Concorde, but given that it was so early, the business case didn’t really close. There were only 14 Concordes that ever saw service.

The problem when you’re running a fleet of 14 airplanes is maintenance. You never get the scale, and spare parts and so on. Of course we’ve had efficiency improvements, big efficiency improvements since Concorde. Concorde was designed on slide rules, on paper. No computational fluid dynamics whatsoever. They would do wind tunnel tests that would take six months to get all the data back, and analyze it. And today, with computational fluid dynamics, you do that in an afternoon.

So, we could do a lot better. The barriers have been things like, in 1973, the US banned supersonic flight over land. So, you could fly Concorde, supersonic over the ocean, then you had to slow down, and then come to an airport, on the coast, and so on. And that really cut off the natural entry point for a lot of the supersonic market, which initially, it probably would have been business jets, right? And for business jets, more so than airliners, they fly more of their miles over land, rather than over the ocean. So, it basically killed the supersonic business jet market, and it created a lot of lack of investment in supersonics, on the other sort of technologies that you need to make supersonics really thrive.

How Vaccine/mRNA Breakthrough can Help with HIV and Cancers

Bilal Hafeez (6:18):

Okay, yeah, yeah, I can see that there could be a lot more to talk about that subject, so I don’t want to completely get dominated by that, but I can see your point. But let’s jump into the recent post that you put out, and the themes around that. So, if we kind of just go through the main areas of new technology, let’s start with biotech and health.

Obviously, 2020, and coming into this year, we’ve had these major breakthroughs in vaccines, mRNA technology. So that seems to me as an outsider, as a huge breakthrough. So maybe let’s start with that, and get your sense on how big this is, and what it means for the next five, 10 years.

Eli Dourado (7:01):

Yeah. mRNA, I think is potentially huge, right? Basically, it’s technology that enables us to send a payload into your cells, basically, you send the mRNA instructions to the ribosomes in the cell, and your ribosomes produce proteins from that messenger RNA. But we can tell your ribosomes what proteins to produce, and that can be whatever you want, right?

In the case of the coronavirus vaccines, what you’re doing, is you are saying to the cells, “Produce this spike protein.” Which is universal to all the COVID viruses, because your body has produced these spike proteins that it starts to figure out, “Here’s how I’m going to respond to the spike protein every time I see it. Here’s the immune response.”

So, you’re training your immune system to be reactive against a protein that exists on the coronavirus, that you made yourself, right? So, we’re teaching cells to make the proteins that we want them to make. And then, that has so many applications. Of course, it could be used against other viruses. I think it’s really interesting that there are HIV vaccines that are in development using this exact same technology. And HIV may be a little bit harder of an opponent than coronavirus, but it is very promising.

And then of course, it’s not just viruses, I think if you can make proteins in general, you can use it against things like cancer. And so, the mRNA vaccine companies are in fact working on cancer treatments where they sort of take healthy cell DNA, they take the cancer cell DNA, they figure out what’s the difference between them. They use that to figure out, “Well, what can we target on the cancer cells?” And it doesn’t always work, but when it works, it’s beautiful. The people they’ve tested on are like, “I’m seeing my melanoma recede.”

Bilal Hafeez (8:28):

And this technology, for example, targeting HIV, targeting cancer, that is something that we could see implemented broadly in the next five years, say, or something like that.

Eli Dourado (8:28):

On HIV, right? The issue is running trials, and how long are we going to take to run these trials? So, to be clear, this seems like a very safe platform, right? And if you look at the COVID vaccines, like I quoted a reporter, who said, “None of the scientists I talked to had any doubt that the mRNA vaccines for COVID would be safe, and effective.” Right? And so, we’re spending a lot of time on trials to make sure that these are safe and effective.

So, it’s really just, I think, a question of, how quickly can we get through those? And of course, the reason we got through them relatively quickly, in sort of the trials that we did the US is there was this huge epidemic, and it was very easy to tell if the vaccine was safe and effective, or if it was effective, anyway. And so, that that may be harder if we’re sort of doing business as usual with the HIV vaccine. But, if you could speed it along, yeah, I think it very much could enter the market in the first half of this decade.

Bilal Hafeez (9:32):

And another sort of technology that I guess has been around for a bit longer, has being all the CRISPR gene editing technology and science. And when it got sort of discovered or created, however you want to term it, it came with a lot of fanfare, and there was all these kind of expectations of cloning, and mutant creatures, and so on, and it seems to have kind of fizzled out, from at least the popular imagination, as an outsider, again. I mean, where are we on CRISPR?

Eli Dourado (9:55):

Well, CRISPR, has, I think revolutionized a lot of science, or a lot of biology, like a lot of labs are using it as a tool in their research. And so, that’s not a small thing, but it’s not as big as the full potential of CRISPR. Right? And the full potential of CRISPR is actually applying it in treatment, in therapeutics, to a range of diseases. I think that the first ones will be the things that you really can’t fix any other way, things where there is a genetic defect, you could use CRISPR to address that in a therapeutic way.

And what we’ve had is just progress along the way to making therapeutics with CRISPR, but not final approval of any CRISPR treatment. It was discovered over eight years ago. We had a Nobel Prize awarded for CRISPR. But it still hasn’t hit medicine, it’s hit research, but it hasn’t hit medicine. I think we could start to see some cures coming out, actually, in the next couple of years, I think we’ll have some approved CRISPR treatments, and over the course of the decade, hopefully more. But I think it’s very important to distinguish between sort of the conceptual breakthrough, and the product being on the market, and actually sort of affecting people’s lives, and that CRISPR is a great example of that phenomenon where we’ve had the conceptual breakthrough, we can do amazing things with DNA, in terms of editing DNA, but that hasn’t really affected anybody’s life yet.

Bilal Hafeez (11:11):

Yeah. And then, last year, we heard about AlphaFold, you know, so we heard about all the various alphas related to games, whether it’s chess, or go, but this seems to me as quite a big sort of breakthrough. So do you want to kind of talk a bit about what AlphaFold is, and its significance?

Eli Dourado (11:30):

Sure, yeah. So AlphaFold is a program by DeepMind that is able to simulate protein folding. And so, proteins are the fundamental thing about life, right? They are what makes you alive. The protein. Remember back to the Human Genome Project, when they sequenced the genome, and you have like, I don’t remember exactly, but Bill Clinton giving a speech about how we have unlocked the secret of all human life, because we have sequenced one genome. And that’s laughable now, right? It’s so much more complex than that.

What’s actually going on is that your DNA has the ability to code for hundreds of thousands of proteins, and it expresses different proteins at different times, and the collection of proteins that are in your body all the time, is… The study of that is called proteomics, and the ability to understand how these proteins actually… We can know their amino acid sequences, if you kind of stretch them out, but the way that they fold up, and the way that they operate, as basically little machines inside your cells, at such a small scale.

That ability is what AlphaFold does, is it makes it easier to understand that, and to then be able to do things like target drugs, given the shape, the structure, and function of these proteins, as they sort of curve up, according to the laws of physics, that enables much better targeting of those proteins, and over time, it will be a much stronger ability to control, essentially what’s going on in the body.

Bilal Hafeez (12:56):

Yeah, yeah, it seems quite revolutionary. I mean, it seems like there was this kind of mystery of how we went from DNA to protein, like, it’s very difficult to map the code to the final shape of the protein. But now we’ve got this breakthrough, where we have some idea of how the mapping kind of works. And so, presumably, this gives us some control over biology, which we never had before. In terms of like when this will come to market, so to speak, which is obviously a big focus for myself, and our audience, I mean, is this a case of something for the 2020s? Or is this something that’s more for the 2030s, that we need another 10 years for this really, to kind of see the results of it?

Eli Dourado (13:33):

So, I think probably more of the latter, because even if we are able to use this tool to identify promising drug candidates today, you still have to go through the clinical trials, and all the usual… Not just clinical trials to prove stuff to the regulators, but actually to prove it works to ourselves. So, it accelerates one phase of drug discovery, essentially. The very first phase of identifying the promising molecules. So, I think it’s very positive, but it doesn’t accelerate the other phases, that will take a lot of time and cost billions of dollars.

Anti-ageing and Blood Plasma Transfer

Bilal Hafeez (14:12):

Okay, so it sounds like the mRNA stuff is more immediate, is very exciting. CRISPR, we could see some breakthroughs in terms of therapeutics. AlphaFold might take a bit longer. Now, another thing that you’ve talked about is all of the life extension, longevity work that’s been going on. Obviously, this is a huge area amongst the Silicon Valley Bros, and all of those guys on the coast, blood transfusions, and so on. Do you want to talk a bit about some of the breakthroughs there, and some of the things that could come to market?

Eli Dourado (14:39):

Sure, yeah, I think 2020 was a really big year for the Conboy Lab at Berkeley, and this was the lab that back a couple decades ago, figured out about the mice, you could stitch their circulatory system together, if you had an old mouse, and a young mouse, and you stitched their circulatory system together, the old mouse got younger, and the young mouse got older, right? And that’s what led to the Blood Boys, and the crazy ideas about young blood.

They published a couple of very interesting papers this year, on a different way of doing what seems to be the same thing, which is just, it’s not anything in the young blood that seems to be making the older mice get younger, rather, it is harmful stuff in the old mouse blood. And so what they’ve figured out is, you could dilute the plasma, and what they do is they basically take out essentially half the subject’s blood plasma, and replace it with with saline, like saltwater, and albumin, which is a protein, that is part of plasma, and that they take out.

So, they’re basically replacing the albumin that they take out, but otherwise putting back saline. And by doing that, they’re able to basically get the same results that they got with this weird freakish vampire sort of procedure of stitching together young and old mice. And so, what’s interesting about that to me, given the focus on, how quickly can this come to market, et cetera, is that this procedure of taking out blood plasma, replacing it with something else, that is already approved by FDA, other regulators, et cetera. It’s used for a number of conditions.

And so, it’s not approved for ageing, right? I think you wouldn’t be able to market this as an ageing cure, but doctors can prescribe it. And by the way, there are machines that you can buy for a couple thousand bucks online that will do this for you. So, it’s not super complicated, and it is, from a regulatory perspective, it’s super easy.

Bilal Hafeez (16:23):

And what it does is it improves your quality of life as you get older. What’s the expectation?

Eli Dourado (16:28):

That’s a great question. So, the Conboy Lab, they had two papers, and one of them showed that it rejuvenated germ tissues. So, like the tissues that are needed to replenish your cells and so on. It did that. And then they also showed there was some brain improvement, reduction in inflammation, and sort of like neuronal tissues. So, it’s pretty broad based.

I think of it… You have an economics audience, right? I’m trained as an economist. I think about it in terms of multiple equilibria. And the body is in one equilibria, and it has one equilibrium, and it has this like high protein concentration, and you remove a lot of that, and it puts it into a different equilibrium, and sort of potentially makes you able to have gene expression that is younger, given the protein concentrations in the plasma.

So, I think it’s super interesting. I think another thing that’s really going on in the life extension world is people are coming up with better, and better metrics of biological aging. So, looking at things like, they call them clocks, right? Biological clock, so analyzing DNA, and figuring out how much methylation there is, and how much molecules are changing in a particular way, measuring that is very useful for coming up with sort of a metric of how biologically old is this subject.

And then again, proteomics, sort of like measuring gene expression, and which proteins are actually being expressed by the subject, that is also a useful tool. So, that is sort of a prerequisite for being able to target drugs, or target treatments, or do clinical trials, to see if you’re getting younger, right? And ultimately, what we need is a regulator to sort of accept some class of biological clocks, to be a target that can be evaluated in a randomized controlled trial, to say, “This is making me younger.”

Bilal Hafeez (18:03):

Otherwise, it could take centuries, I’m guessing, if you went for the other routes of waiting for someone to die, and the other random part of the trial, where they’re not dying.

Eli Dourado (18:11):

Makes it a very expensive trial if you’re having to give somebody a treatment, and then wait 50 years to see if they get old or not. But then, I mean, the other interesting thing about these clocks is that they are available on the market. You can go online, and buy a DNA methylation test, that will tell you, biologically, how old are you? And they’re not perfect, but you could imagine doing various interventions on yourself, and see, do they work?

And so I think there’s definitely a group of people that are interested in self experimentation, and bio hacking, and so on. But, they’re going to have a field day. They’re already pretty affordable, $300, or something like that.

Bilal Hafeez (18:54):

And speaking about affordable tech, obviously, there’s been an explosion in all these health sensors in various devices. So, the Apple Watch, Fitbit, all of these sorts of things. Presumably, as these get more sophisticated, that should, I guess, have an impact on the health system, I’m guessing, at least primary care, in terms of, at least some part of it. I mean, what are your thoughts there?

Eli Dourado (19:19):

Yeah, the thing I always think about with the Apple Watch, is they come out with a new one every year, and it always has a new health capability. Every year, every model, it’s got something new, right? But the latest one was blood oxygen, a blood oxygen sensor, so it could tell you if your blood oxygen level drops to an unhealthy level, or a level that indicates you might have COVID.

As sensors get better, they will be adopted, I think, in this industry, and Apple in particular is really positioning themselves as a company that will be a good steward of your health data, for example, they’re not selling your data to other people, they’re one of the few tech companies that explicitly refuses to engage in that sort of behaviour. Think about, fast forward 10 years. That’s 10 new Apple Watch releases, that’s probably 10 new, at least, health capabilities they’re able to do. And when you add that all up, and sort of have the continuous monitoring, you can imagine a pretty sophisticated understanding of your body’s state at any given time, that may be better than the understanding that your doctor gets at your annual health check-up. Right?

What do they do at annual health check-ups? They listen to your lungs, and your heart, and shake a stick at you, and it’s pretty minimal. And so, you don’t have to go that far until the Apple Watch actually provides a better understanding.

Bilal Hafeez (20:37):

And if we take that, and all the other things that you mentioned so far in our conversation, I mean, do you think that, taken together, these will be able to move the dial in terms of the health system for a country like the US, over the next 10 years, say? I mean, do you think it will make a dent, or not?

Eli Dourado (20:55):

Well, I think there’s a lot of dysfunction in the health system, and this doesn’t cure the dysfunction, the way it’s structured, and so on. I think probably the biggest lever is the life extension technology, because what that actually does, is over time, I think it compresses morbidity, until you are very old. So, you don’t spend as many years of your life with the chronic illnesses of aging, which is where a lot of the medical expense is concentrated.

And if you could sort of get to the point where you live to your late 90s, and six months before you die, you start getting sick, and then you die six months later, that compresses a lot of the medical care into a relatively short period of time. And that’s kind of how you could get health costs under control, because in the US, it’s ridiculous. 20:02It’s almost 18% of GDP.

Bilal Hafeez (21:33):

Yeah, yeah. It’s shockingly large. Yeah, I mean, the health system, it just really strikes me. It’s like the education system, you kind of think that, there’s been so many advances in technology, yet, why does the cost going up? I mean, why does it just feel so anachronistic, and so bureaucratic, and just not very dynamic? And hopefully, some of these things… Obviously, there’s a lot of politics involved as well, and lobby groups, and all that vested interest, and so on, which makes the whole picture a lot more complicated.

The Problem of Energy Storage and Renewables

Bilal Hafeez (22:01):

But, maybe let’s kind of shift gear a bit. Let’s think about the energy sector. There’s this huge focus, obviously, at the moment about a shift to electric, and environmental concerns, renewables, and so on. What’s your thinking around that?

Eli Dourado (22:16):

Well, I think it’s great that we’re finding new, low carbon ways to produce electricity. Right? And the past decade has been so impressive, in terms of the cost reductions that we’ve seen in solar, and wind. And so, those cost reductions are not repeatable for another decade. You cannot have another 90% plus decline in the cost of solar and wind, that just won’t happen. But, what we are going to start to see, I think, is a deployment of those renewable technologies, and that is good from a carbon perspective. It’s probably bad from a grid stability perspective.

So this is, I think, something that people don’t understand enough about electricity, or the electricity grid, is that it’s got to be in complete supply demand balance, every second of every day. And so, the number of electrons going on the grid has to be the same as the number of electrons going off the grid.

All the time. And you have things, you do have very sudden, unexpected variations in wind. Of course, during the day you have sun, and at night, you don’t. Some days, you have more sun than other days. So, I think another underappreciated thing about the grid is that you have to build transmission to support it, especially long distance transmission, especially if you’re talking about renewables that have to be located in specific places.

So, I think there’s going to be a lot… As we deploy more renewables, as much as I appreciate their low carbon potential, I think that it could create a little bit of instability, of the same kind that we’ve seen in in California, in the past year, as natural gas, and coal come offline, and as intermittent sources ramp up.

Bilal Hafeez (23:51):

And I mean, is energy storage technology improving or not? Because obviously, with some of these renewables, if you can store it… There’s the Tesla storage units. Where are we on that side? I mean, are those the sort of panacea for this, or?

Eli Dourado (24:02):

So, no. They have come along very impressively. There are continued improvements in the pipeline, but my view is that they will not, in the next 10, or maybe even in the next 20 years, reach the price that we need them to reach, to be like the solution for the grid. In part, I think it’s just because demand for batteries will be just so off the charts for electric vehicles, because we’re going to also need batteries for electric vehicles. But, they’re still quite expensive, and not really able to compete with things like natural gas, the prices that that are available there.

Breakthroughs in Geothermal Energy

Bilal Hafeez (24:27):

So, what are the other energy sources we could have?

Eli Dourado (24:30):

Yeah, so what you really need to solve this problem is a low carbon, or zero carbon base load energy, and the one I think is most promising is advanced geothermal. So, most people think about geothermal as like, you go somewhere near a volcano, and you find exactly the right kind of rock formation, and you inject water into it, and you pull water out somewhere else, and it’s hot, and you can use that to make electricity. And that’s like the traditional geothermal industry. But, what we’re starting to see is, and a lot of this is because of the advances in drilling that we’ve seen in shale oil, but that those advances in drilling make it more viable to engineer the subsurface, to provide exactly the right kind of rock formations anywhere that you need.

So, you’re engineering the subsurface, and then the other thing that enables, as drilling costs go down, it becomes more feasible to just go deeper. And if you go deep enough in the ground, anywhere on the planet, there is heat, right? So, there’s assuredly heat everywhere, under your feet, if you go deep enough. And so, there are people coming out of the oil and gas industry, who are very familiar with the drilling technology, that are developing concepts for geothermal that could be done anywhere. And I think the most advanced, the most promising in the long run, a version of this, is a closed loop system, where you circulate a fluid through a pipe, down about 10 kilometres, if necessary. It gets hot, it comes back up, you extract the heat with a power plant at the surface, and then you send it back down. And so the fluid just circulates in a pipe, and you add heat at the bottom, take out heat at the top, and by being able to drill very deep, and very cheaply, you can pull out electricity, potentially at very, very low prices.

Bilal Hafeez (26:06):

And is this happening already, say in the US, or in other countries?

Eli Dourado (26:09):

Well, I’ll say there are already start-ups that are drilling, working on, or planning to drill wells, maybe early this year. To start doing some of these similar techniques. Probably no one’s doing just the pure closed loop yet. But, this is all moving forward.

Bilal Hafeez (26:20):

And what’s the downside of geothermal? Presumably, is it the same issues as the shale, where you’ll get complaints around the environmental impact?

Eli Dourado (26:30):

Yeah, no. So, there really is much lower downside than really just about anything. Some of the engineered geothermal systems, the non-closed loop ones, the ones that don’t use just a pipe circulating fluid, some of those do have some kinds of fracking involved with them. But it is different, generally, it’s not as much the kind that could induce seismicity. It’s not polluting, it’s not… It’s a much cleaner form of it, and I think that’s part of their challenges, is basically a PR problem, being like, “Yes, we are fracking, but actually fracking, per se, wasn’t what was wrong with the fracking that was done in natural gas.”

And so, that may be a little bit of a challenge, a public accessibility challenge around that. But, with the closed loop systems, there really is almost no downside. There’s a couple barriers. One is improving the drilling technology, especially for high temperature drilling. So, this is something the oil and gas industry hasn’t had to do, because they don’t go down to where it’s 300 degrees Celsius.

And then the other issue that remains, is a permitting one. So, in the US, on a lot of this exploration, and drilling in the oil and gas industry is on public lands, and for oil and gas, there’s a very expedited permitting process.

And for geothermal, you want to drill the exact same well, it takes years. So, that’s a policy factor that needs to be fixed. But, I think once that does get fixed, there’ll be a lot of learning by doing… A lot of progress in the technology that will move things forward pretty quickly.

Bilal Hafeez (27:54):

Yeah. And then how about nuclear fusion? So, that’s been… I remember back when I was at university in the 90s, it was talked about as the next big thing, and every sort of five years, it gets talked about. Is this still far away, or is there something going on there?

Eli Dourado (28:05):

Well, it’s close in one sense. There are a bunch of fusion start-ups right now. There are active fusion programs that I think, within, I would even say first half of this decade that will demonstrate energy positive… Taking out more energy than they put in. So, I think that that will happen. I don’t know that the price will be worth it, at least for what’s coming out as sort of the first generation. It might not be able to compete with the current energy market, which has changed a lot since we first started researching fusion reactors. So, wind, and solar, and geothermal, we’re talking about two cents a kilowatt hour.

And, a lot of the fusion reactors will have very large capital costs to actually put into production, and I think there’s a very open question about whether that will be worth it. And I do think nuclear, and fusion could be very promising in places where we don’t have access to those technologies, such as on the moon. You’re not going to be able to do a lot of those other… You could do solar, but you couldn’t do a lot of other stuff.

The Future of Transportation

Bilal Hafeez (28:58):

Yeah. I mean, there’s other things we could talk about in the energy side, but let’s move on to transport. What are the big technology trends on the transport side? Obviously, electric cars, I suppose, maybe we start with that. That’s the big thing that we’re seeing.

Eli Dourado (29:12):

So, I’m very bullish on electric cars, I think that they’re better than internal combustion engine cars. I think there was a lot of doubt that Tesla would succeed in its mission, initially, just because the car business is hard. It’s hard to manufacture something at scale. But, in terms of the product, in terms of, would you rather have an electric car, or a combustion vehicle? The answer is, like, clearly, you’d rather have an electric car.

The maintenance costs are lower, there’s fewer moving parts, the fuel costs are lower, it’s actually more convenient, if mainly you drive to and from work, you never have to stop for gas. It’s a zippier… It’s sort of more fun to drive experience, like you get a lot of low end torque, that lets you accelerate very quickly, if that excites you. So, I think just about everyone would rather have an electric car, and with all of the advances that we’ve even had with smartphones, that make electronic components a lot smaller, a lot better, and so on, the electric cars are smartphones on wheels, essentially.

And a lot of that technology translates pretty directly. And they’re just great vehicles. I think every car company is going to have to start producing them, and people will, over the course of the decade, I think switch over to them pretty dramatically.

Bilal Hafeez (30:16):

But what about like larger vehicles, like trucks, or lorries, as we call them here in the UK, these much bigger vehicles? Presumably, electric isn’t a particularly efficient way of operating those types of vehicles.

Eli Dourado (30:28):

Yeah, so towing a heavy load uses a lot of power, and the battery storage to tow a load a very long distance, I think just isn’t going to be there for a while. And so, my hypothesis is that, given that we need to decarbonize all forms of transport, essentially, that hydrogen fuel cells would probably be the best fit for those vehicles. Hydrogen is much more energy dense than batteries are. And so, you could have a truck that has, at least the range, even under load, has the range of a diesel vehicle today.

Bilal Hafeez (31:04):

Yeah. And what about on the aviation side? Because presumably, they’ll struggle with electric, I’m guessing.

Eli Dourado (31:11):

Yeah. So, I think on the aviation side, I think probably the thing that will gradually shift, and take over the whole jet fuel industry, is sustainable alternative fuels. There’s a lot of competing ideas about how you can make these. But in general, it’s already possible, and certified, and so on, to be able to make them out of various forms of alcohol, so you could have ethanol to jet fuel, there’s a pathway that’s approved to make fuel out of that.

And then, there’s a bunch of different ways to make ethanol, right? And actually, it’s pretty easy to make it on a chemical basis, it’s pretty easy to make it out of atmospheric CO2. So, you could just capture the atmospheric CO2, convert it to a range of alcohols that are in water, and then the tricky bit is separating the alcohols from the water without using too much energy. But if you can do that, you can upgrade the alcohols to essentially kerosene, and just put it in your jet engine, just as any other jet fuel, and then you burn that, you put the carbon back into the atmosphere, but it was carbon that you took out of the atmosphere to begin with. And so, over the lifecycle of the fuel, it’s a zero carbon solution. So, the company that I’m most excited about there, is a company called Prometheus Fuels. When I was at Boom, I was their first customer. So, I think I was the first person in the world to buy zero carbon jet fuel. And so, there’s technology essentially for separating the alcohol from the water… They have a nano membrane that only they know how to manufacture, and basically without using any significant energy input, they can separate those components.

SpaceX Starship Could Open a New Frontier in Space Travel

Bilal Hafeez (32:43):

Okay, that’s really interesting. And how about on the space side? It seems like with Elon, it seems like we have made some quite big leaps in recent years.

Eli Dourado (32:51):

Yeah, and the story for the next decade or beyond, I think is SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, which they’re developing right now in Boca Chica, Texas. And it is just so far beyond, in terms of capabilities, of anything else that is currently in development anywhere else, or has ever been in service anywhere else. It’s a 150 ton to low Earth orbit vehicle. It’s completely reusable, both the space vehicle, and the rocket booster are both reusable. It’s made out of more inexpensive materials, it uses much cheaper fuel, it uses liquid methane instead of traditional rocket fuel. And so, Elon is figuring it’s going to cost like $1.5 million to launch this thing at scale.

$1.5 million to launch 150 tons into orbit is two orders of magnitude cheaper than we can do today, even on Falcon Nine, SpaceX’s current workhorse vehicle. So, even if you don’t hit Elon’s target, right? Like, say, “Okay, only a 20x reduction, instead of a 200x reduction in launch costs.” It’s still extremely significant.

The other thing that’s really interesting about Starship is that they are planning to do on orbit refueling. Which means that you don’t get a reduction in payload capability, just because you’re going somewhere else in the solar system. So on a normal rocket, you can launch, say you can launch 20 tons to orbit, well, that same rocket might only be able to launch four tons to Mars.

Because of the extra fuel you need to get the extra delta V. So, with Starship, you launch into orbit, you refuel, again, and then you can go on your merry way to Mars with the same payload. So there’s no payload reduction. So, anyway, it’s just an extraordinary, extraordinary set of capabilities. It’s going to revolutionize access to the entire solar system. And it just… It’s hard to overstate how big of a change it’s going to be for the space industry, I think.

Bilal Hafeez (34:37):

Yeah, okay, that sounds really, really quite impressive. I don’t actually know much about the Starship, I’m going to have to look them up after this interview.

Minitiarisation of Chips and Circuits and ‘Escaping’ Moore’s Law

Bilal Hafeez: (34:39)

Let’s move on to the more traditional IT sector, which is where you kind of framed this as being the area where most people tend to focus. What’s the interesting things happening in that space?

Eli Dourado (34:53):

Well, I think, again, it’s something that’s coming out of phones. So, traditional computing has been like, okay, you have a central processor, and you put it on a motherboard, and you attach a graphics card, and you put this on a motherboard. What’s happened instead in phones is they’ve combined that all into a system on a chip. So, it’s basically one chip that has all the components that you would need on a computer on it. It’s just a higher level of integration than what we’ve had in the past.

And that is making the leap now, from phones to other kinds of devices. This is what Apple has done on their new M1 platform for their own Apple silicon for laptops, and it’s getting just extraordinarily rave reviews. People love these machines. They’re faster than machines that cost two or three times as much money, built without that. And it’s also being used other places as well, this sort of idea. So, if you look at Tesla’s self-driving computer, full self-driving computer, which is perhaps a bit of an overstatement of the actual capabilities of the computer, at least right now. But basically, it is a very, very impressively performing device, and it’s because they’re taking advantage, again, of the system on a chip idea.

So, I think you’re going to see that idea extend a lot further, in terms of application specific… Maybe system on a chip, for machine learning. So, we’re seeing this already, people developing custom silicon that does, that specializes at one task, such as deep neural networks. It has the potential to sort of outpace, in an experiential sense, outpace Moore’s Law, right? So, you can actually experience subjectively, in terms of your computing speed, you can experience more than double computing power every 18 months, as we saw with smartphone speeds. I kind of noticed this, I don’t know, five or six years ago, when Apple’s phones were getting like three times faster every year. And it’s like, “Well, that’s faster than Moore’s Law, what’s going on here?” And it was, they’re doing this deeper integration between all the components.

Why Ethereum has a Brighter Future than Bitcoin

Bilal Hafeez (36:47):

Obviously, we’ve covered lots of ground. I mean, maybe I could just ask you kind of a final question around the sort of tech area, and this is something that many people in our audience are focused on is the whole crypto space right now. Obviously, Bitcoin prices continue to shoot higher. And there’s all sorts of different views around this. Some people view this as just a bubble, others view this as a way to completely disrupt the global financial system. Not just Bitcoin, but Ethereum, and blockchain, and so on. What are your thoughts around the whole kind of crypto blockchain space?

Eli Dourado (37:21):

Yeah, so, personally, I’m an Ethereum bull, and a Bitcoin bear in the long run. I think crypto needs to be… It needs to find an actual at scale use case for it to succeed in the long run. And I think Ethereum is really focused on scaling, on adding capabilities that might lead to sort of day to day use, retail payments, ultimately. Right?

And so, I think the move to proof of stake in Ethereum is something that’s very important to watch, sort of in the next two years. Are they able to migrate the sort of Ethereum One main net to the proof of stake system that they’ve just launched last month? And so, if they’re able to complete that transition, Ethereum becomes a very, very interesting platform with sort of technological capabilities that are far ahead of where Bitcoin will be.

Essentially, they’re just moving faster than Bitcoin is. I’ve followed Bitcoin for quite some time, since 2011, I think. I was following it very early, and was quite enamored with the idea of a decentralized payment system. And I think that the narrative has changed, right? On Bitcoin, it’s no longer about payments. It’s more about this sort of digital gold thing, that wasn’t in the original Satoshi white paper. And so, I think there’s been a switch in sort of mission, as people have sort of realized, “Oh, wait, this is making me rich, this is great.”

Bilal Hafeez (38:43):

Yeah. I think there’s nothing more alluring than getting made rich by buying an asset. Whether it’s fine wine, it’s art, whatever it can be, that that will kind of trump everything else.

Eli’s Personal Productivity Habits & Most Influential Book

Bilal Hafeez (38:55):

Okay, cool. Okay, so maybe… What I like to do to sort of round things off, I like to ask some personal questions of my guests. One thing I like to think a lot about, is how I manage my information, and research flow, because especially in today’s era, we’re just overwhelmed by information. And it’s we get the notifications everywhere, telling us to open something, what’s your strategy, what’s your approach for managing information?

Eli Dourado (39:21):

I just try to find high quality sources. It’s signal to noise ratio, right? I just try to be very, very conscious of that. My sources that I get the most value out of are Twitter, where I try not to follow too many accounts, right? Curated it quite well. Blogs, and people don’t use RSS anymore, right? Ever since Google Reader got killed off. But I still use it.

Bilal Hafeez (39:40):

I do, as well.

Eli Dourado (39:41):

And my view is like, the nichier the blog, the better, right? So the narrower, the more obscure, the better. Subreddits, right? What’s great about Reddit is you can find super niche-y communities, and just lurk on them, and just listen in on what they’re saying, even if you don’t want to participate. I read technical books, even in areas I’m not trained in, and one of the things that I’ve found is, there’s a huge advantage. With a book, you can go through it as slow as you need to.

So, being able to sort of self-teach, give yourself almost like a graduate level education in whatever topic you want, I think is really, really valuable. And you can do that, if you just find the book that they’re teaching this stuff in grad school, and just buy it, and read it slowly. You can read it very, very slowly if you need to, but you can learn it. Then, I think the other thing is there’s not really a substitute for actually talking to experts, and just getting to know some of them, and making friends, and asking questions. And people are usually pretty happy to talk about their area of expertise. And so, that’s kind of how I… Piecing all those things together, is kind of how I learn about a topic.

Bilal Hafeez (40:41):

Yeah, and understood. And kind of on a related area, I mean, do you have any productivity hacks that work really well for you?

Eli Dourado (40:47):

Yeah, I don’t know if I’m the most productive person in the world. But, I always have multiple projects going at a time, with different priorities, of course, and so on. And my sort of philosophy is I try, to the extent possible, I try not to struggle against myself to do them. So, if I’m struggling to focus on one, I’ll say, “Well, okay, it’s time to just switch to another one, find the path of least resistance, and make sure that I am productive that day.” Right? What kills you is the days where you don’t get anything done, right?

So, make sure that you’re always doing something, and if necessary, find the path of least resistance. That is different than struggling with material, right? Like sometimes you have to push through, and so on. But you don’t want to be fighting yourself. And so that’s sort of my philosophy on it, is you don’t want your cortex fighting with your limbic system. I try to align them as much as possible.

Bilal Hafeez (41:42):

And you mentioned books earlier, but are there a book, or some books that have really influenced you, at a personal level, or in a work context?

Eli Dourado (41:51):

Personally, the book that I think has made the biggest impact on me is a book called Finite And Infinite Games by James Carse, he was a professor at NYU. He actually died last year, I believe. And it’s basically just sort of a life philosophy book, and fundamentally, it’s about openness, and it’s about sort of seeing the future as a world of possibility, rather than as a rigid thing that you have to shape in a particular way. Just experience it with a lot of openness, and curiosity about what will happen, rather than approaching it with the attitude of, “It’s really important to make sure that this thing doesn’t go wrong.”

Bilal Hafeez (42:22):

I haven’t heard of that book before, but I’ll definitely add it to my list of books to read. I also know that you’re a fan of TV shows as well, and movies, and things? Any recommendations? Anything good that you’ve seen recently?

Eli Dourado (42:34):

So, I’m watching The Expanse now, the new season of The Expanse. That’s just phenomenal. It’s such great world building. So, I’m grateful to Jeff Bezos for saving that from cancellation. But, yeah.

Bilal Hafeez (42:44):

Okay, well, on that note, it’s really great chatting to you. In the show notes, I’ll add a link to your blog, and also to your Twitter account. I’m presuming those are the two best places to find you.

Eli Dourado (42:55):

Yeah, those are great. Yeah. Those are perfect.

Bilal Hafeez (42:56):

Yeah. Well, yeah. Aside from that, it was great chatting to you, and I hope you have a very good year, and I’ll be following your work very closely.

Eli Dourado (43:03):

Oh, well, thanks so much. It’s been great chatting, and I really appreciate you having me on.