Eli Dourado | On Accelerating Progress

Eli Dourado of the Abundance Institute on Accelerating Progress

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[00:00:00] Beatrice: Welcome to another episode of the Existential Hope podcast, where we explore the minds and visions of some of the world's most forward-thinking individuals. I'm your host, Beatrice Erkers, and today we have a very special guest, Eli Dourado. This episode is an Edge Esmeralda special, featuring my co-host, Allison Duettmann, who will be interviewing Eli.

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Eli and Allison met at Edge Esmeralda, a pop-up village for people working on building a better future. The event took place in Healdsburg, California in June 2024. It offered participants an opportunity to learn from experts across various fields, incubate novel technologies, and explore new ways of living.

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This gathering also serves as a prototype for a permanent new town called Esmeralda. I recommend keeping an eye out for upcoming EDGE events, including EDGE City Lanna in Thailand this October. For more information, visit edgecity.live. We'll also link to that website from this episode.

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[00:01:03] Beatrice: Now, back to Eli. Eli is the chief economist at the Abundance Institute, where he is on what he calls a sacred quest to accelerate American economic growth, which has stagnated since the early 1970s. Eli focuses on addressing the uneven productivity growth across different industries, which you'll hear more about in this episode.

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Before joining the Abundance Institute, he was a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity. He led global policy and communications at BOOM and directed the technology policy program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he also holds a PhD in economics.

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For a full transcript of today's episode, a list of recommended resources, and other exclusive content, visit existentialhope.com. Don't forget to sign up for our newsletter to stay updated with the latest episodes and community updates. Now let's welcome Allison Duettmann interviewing Eli Dourado on the Existential Hope podcast.

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Meet Eli Dourado: Chief Economist at the Abundance Institute

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[00:01:57] Allison: Welcome to the Existential Hope podcast. I'm delighted today to be joined by Eli Dourado. Eli is the Chief Economist at the Abundance Institute. He focuses mostly on the hard tech and innovation needed to drive large increases in economic growth. You've worked on many different topics, always applying a progress-oriented, optimistic lens to issues dear to Foresight's heart.

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You write about these topics, do some investing, and try to encourage policy change. You educate people on many important areas and you're an all-around optimistic, pragmatic, progress-driven individual.

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I met you a few years ago at our Vision Weekend, through an introduction by Jason Crawford, who highly recommended you. Since then, I've been trying to keep up with your various Substacks, Works in Progress articles, and other publications. It's been a wild ride following you because you have a wide breadth of topics that you apply your progress lens to.

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I'm excited that you're here. Thank you for joining. Maybe you could start by introducing yourself, mentioning anything I missed, and giving our listeners some perspective on what got you started on your current path. It's quite unusual, and I'm excited to hear more.

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[00:03:23] Eli: Thank you, Allison. You're too kind. Let's see, what got me started on my path? I was trained as an economist, very interested in political economy and that broad topic. As I was doing my PhD and on track to enter academia, I realized that wasn't the life for me.

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I veered off into the tech policy world, spending a few years at the Mercatus Center where I developed a real appreciation for hard technology. I left to work on hard technology, spending a few years as the first policy hire at Boom, a company building supersonic airliners. This involved pragmatic interactions with policymakers in that space.

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When I left Boom, I returned to nonprofits, spending time at the Center for Growth and Opportunity and now at the Abundance Institute. I apply an economic lens to what actually drives economic growth. If we were trying to significantly increase economic growth, how would we do it? We would try to increase productivity, deploy technologies that increase productivity widely, and saturate the economy with maximum productivity-generating technologies.

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That's the lens I look through, thinking about how we could actually increase economic growth if we were truly trying. This principle guides my work.

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The Abundance Institute's Mission 

[00:05:01] Allison: Could you share more about the Abundance Institute, especially the levers through which you're trying to implement change? You do a lot of writing. What other levers do you have in your toolbox?

[00:05:11] Eli: Sure. The Abundance Institute is a fairly new nonprofit. We're really focused on making the future look like the future. Currently, we're concentrating a lot on AI and energy. Over the next year, we may also delve into biotech. We're thinking about both the necessary policy changes and the cultural shifts that need to happen.

A key challenge is addressing people's fear of change, which is a common human response to powerful new technologies. We're thinking broadly about how to achieve both the wide-scale cultural change needed and the more specific policy changes required to support it.

[00:06:04] Allison: Great. I'm excited to dig deeper into some of the technologies you mentioned in a moment. You've been at various institutions and organizations over your rich career path at this point.

Cultural Shifts in Progress Studies

[00:06:16] Allison: In this field of broadly progress studies, or however you define it, how have you seen the cultural shift in how people think about the future from when you started getting interested to now? I definitely see that there's finally a wave of people coming out of the closet and being excited about progress again. How did you perceive that cultural moment or shift over the years you've been involved?

[00:06:41] Eli: The shift in my thinking happened around 2014. That year, I took over the program I was working on, becoming a boss for the first time. I also read Peter Thiel's book, "Zero to One," which influenced my thinking and led me to shift my own work.

The current moment in progress studies can be traced back to the Collison and Cowen article in The Atlantic, which called for a new science of progress. This catalyzed many people to start thinking in these terms. The movement has evolved from that article. Initially, I thought they might be suggesting a university department, but now it's combined with other movements.

For instance, there's Ezra Klein's "supply-side liberalism" movement, and Derek Thompson wrote about the "abundance agenda." There's been a general recognition across different groups that many of our problems stem from our inability to build and deploy things in the physical world quickly enough. If we could identify and address the granular obstacles, we could achieve a much faster rate of progress cumulatively.

This viewpoint is continuously onboarding more people as it's discussed on the internet. It's been organic so far, which I think is good. I don't want it to be too institutionalized yet; I like its grassroots nature.

[00:08:33] Allison: Yes, it's continuously evolving. There's now the Progress Conference with its abundance theme. When I heard "abundance" popping up again, it reminded me of Eric Drexler's book on nanotechnology. More broadly, there's been a big EA (Effective Altruism) moment in the cultural zeitgeist. Now you have various evolution of other accelerationist sub-movements that are more specific, like Human Act, Longevity Act, Don't Die Act, BCI Act. So various people interested in specific fields are trying to accelerate them with their own "act" now. Can you explain what you're trying to handle?

[00:09:21] Eli: I sometimes say I'm a "TFP act," which is cheating. TFP is Total Factor Productivity, an economic concept measuring how much output you're getting for your input. How much GDP can you produce with a fixed amount of labor and capital? I think that's the right framing as I think about the economy.

We don't necessarily want higher GDP if it means working twice as many hours. We want to consume too, not just save and apply more capital. So it's getting away from value judgments about how long or hard we should work, and just looking at how well the economy is operating as a function that turns labor and capital into output.

I really like this concept, and I think it's the most important thing. It's also very grounding. When people get excited about a new technology, I ask, "What will this actually do to the TFP?" If TFP isn't really moving up yet, then we know our work isn't done.

[00:10:41] Allison: So what was most influential in moving it up, and what could be most influential in doing so in the future?

[00:10:49] Eli: It's a good question.

Challenges and Solutions for Economic Growth

[00:10:50] Eli: I think the period of fastest TFP growth in the U.S. was from about 1928 to 1973. During this time, you had a lot of economic change. The Great Depression, interestingly, was a time of consolidation and figuring out how to make things work under severe economic hardship. World War II was perhaps the only time in American history when people were really not complacent at all. We pulled out all the stops to make things happen, leading to incredible innovation and rapid change.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a very palpable sense of optimism. This is when "The Jetsons" came out - the culture believed things were progressing rapidly. However, starting in the 1960s and into the 1970s, skepticism began to emerge. Some argued that the economic growth of the past was "fake." Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" highlighted environmental concerns, while Ralph Nader focused on safety issues.

Since 1973, TFP has grown much more slowly. We've done better on environment and safety, but it's become somewhat stifling. These are good values, but combined with the idea that we can't inconvenience people (leading to NIMBYism and extensive community input processes), things have slowed down.

Today's economic hindrances are that it's hard to inconvenience people, do things that might be unsafe, or destroy jobs. During World War II, we didn't care about these things as much, which allowed for more rapid progress.

[00:13:25] Allison: So it's institutional mission creep. It's much easier to add more safety regulations and policies than to remove them. Reforming institutions like the NIH or FDA is challenging because they accumulate red tape over time.

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[00:13:46] Eli: Interestingly, we've seen some agencies admit they've gone too far on safety. The FAA, for example, realized their stringent safety requirements for small personal airplanes were pushing people towards less safe experimental aircraft. They're now considering weakening safety standards to actually make things safer overall and promote innovation. Getting more agencies to see things this way could drive a lot of progress.

[00:14:45] Allison: I wonder how that applies to AI and AI safety. There's a movement calling for an FDA-like organization for AI safety or more regulation like the FAA. We'll have to see how that plays out, given the potential for mission creep and unintended consequences.

[00:15:23] Eli: Yes, we'll learn something soon.

[00:15:35] Eli: Looking to the future, I think the number one thing that could increase TFP is speeding up permitting processes. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) from 1970 mandates lengthy environmental reviews for many agency decisions. While it doesn't set environmental standards, it creates a long process that slows down projects like high-speed rail, congestion pricing, or new geothermal power plants.

These procedural rules, put in place because we didn't trust federal bureaucrats to consider the environment sufficiently, slow down many things throughout the economy. If we could speed up permitting, it would allow for quicker deployment and more iteration, which are what actually drive economic growth. There's often too much focus on R&D and scientific breakthroughs, but these don't affect economic growth until they're deployed at scale and perfected in the real world.

[00:17:46] Allison: Stuart Buck from the Good Science Institute had some great ideas for reforming various institutions. But how would you actually go about implementing these changes? It seems like a collective action problem, where it's difficult for one organization to change because there's always a department that would be blamed if something went wrong.

[00:18:24] Eli: For permitting speed in general, we actually need policy change. It's hard to move faster on permitting without literally making some requirements go away, at least in certain contexts. More generally, it's very hard to change organizational cultures. In the corporate world, we often give up and rely on new, hungrier startups to change industries. It's probably easier to create a new SpaceX than to reform Boeing.

With government agencies, we don't have that choice. We can't have a new startup government take over. So it's always going to be somewhat unsatisfactory, but we have to try our best within the confines of the existing system to get agencies to operate more efficiently and to get Congress to care about efficient governance.

[00:19:36] Allison: I guess you have somewhat of a little bit of competition, at least to the extent that there's regulatory arbitrage.

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Regulatory Arbitrage and Digital Innovation

[00:19:46] Eli: Yeah, I'm a big fan of regulatory arbitrage. However, there are many areas where it doesn't work at all. For example, in the supersonic industry, you can't just fly supersonic within a charter city like Prospera or Singapore. You need approval from the biggest travel markets globally.

Similarly, in pharmaceuticals, the U.S. represents about 58% of global revenue. Drug companies primarily care about the U.S. market because many European countries have price controls that make them less profitable. So most decisions are made based on what will allow access to the U.S. market.

There's some regulatory arbitrage through medical tourism and a few other innovations, but it's limited. In more digital areas, there could be more opportunities for regulatory arbitrage.

[00:20:57] Allison: I guess in the longevity sector, at least a few companies and projects have moved to Prospera. And Singapore too - it's funny you mentioned that because many longevity biotech companies have decided to move there when they've had enough of their current regulations.

[00:21:18] Eli: Yeah, I think medical tourism could really work. When I was in Prospera, I had some medical tourism ideas and was tempted to start something there. We'll see.

[00:21:34] Allison: Interesting. You briefly mentioned the digital part as well. Are you referring more to the concept of network states or coalescing around issues with like-minded people online, using that to increase bargaining power as a group, regardless of physical jurisdiction?

[00:21:53] Eli: Yeah, I think a lot of that. Remote work, and to some extent, crypto can help get around many state-based jurisdictional impositions. We're not as limited by single jurisdictions in those areas.

[00:22:13] Allison: Okay. Maybe we can discuss one more societal or governance topic. You've also written about different voting systems and how we could use those to create change within the U.S. without having to look elsewhere.

Reforming Voting Systems for Improved Governance

[00:22:26] Allison: Could you bring people up to speed on what you wrote about voting systems?

[00:22:29] Eli: I think the danger in our current political system is polarization, with people arguing over performative issues instead of important substantive ones. I was thinking about how to empower the middle of the political spectrum. Right now, the primary system empowers the fringes on both sides, leading to a ping-pong effect between extreme views.

Political scientists and economists understand this to some extent. We could use ranked-choice voting or even a Condorcet method, which is my favorite, to produce candidates closer to the median voter's preferences. This would lead to more moderation in elected officials and encourage them to cater to the middle of the distribution.

Currently, politicians try to win their party primary, then cater to the middle to get elected, but still appeal more to their party bases than to the average person when governing. A different voting system could make this healthier overall.

[00:24:21] Allison: Andrew Yang popularized ranked-choice voting in public consciousness, but I always thought it's almost a chicken-and-egg problem. You need ranked-choice voting to make ranked-choice voting happen. It seems there's little incentive for the current government to push for that.

[00:24:40] Eli: A couple of states have implemented ranked-choice voting - Maine and Alaska. New York City has it for mayoral elections. In these systems, it works reasonably well. Moderates tend to win, though activists, especially more extreme ones, often dislike it, feeling it's unfair when they win the first ballot but lose the election.

There are better and worse forms of it. Many places use instant runoff voting, which is easiest to understand but maybe not the best. I think it would be great to see it spread more widely. It could "make politics boring again" by electing more moderates, making things less dramatic and sensational.

[00:25:49] Allison: Making politics boring again is definitely not the path we're currently on, but even toning it down a bit would probably make a big difference, giving people more time to work on other things.

[00:26:04] Allison: Okay, so now we've covered a lot of the societal and regulatory issues. Let's talk about the future.

The Forward-Looking Perspective

[00:26:12] Allison: One refreshing thing about you is that while you're pragmatic, you're also deeply optimistic about the future. I'm curious, were you always this way? Did you read something that influenced you, or is it more an inherent attitude towards life?

[00:26:35] Eli: I think I've always been forward-looking in every way that counts. Cognitively, I'm an economist not just by training, but by disposition and preconceptions. When I discovered economics in college, it all automatically made sense to me. That's how I think.

Part of that is understanding that the past is a sunk cost. You can't change the past, and you shouldn't make decisions based on sunk costs. You have to look at where you are now and where you want to be. For example, you shouldn't invest in something just because you've invested in it in the past and don't want to see yourself lose money - that's throwing good money after bad.

By disposition, I've always been interested in what the future might look like. I have a memory of being seven or eight years old, looking at GDP statistics in the World Almanac and projecting forward to what it would be like when I'm an adult. I think we've undershot that trend, but yeah, I think I come by this outlook honestly. It's just part of my disposition.

[00:28:03] Allison: That's wonderful. I think many economists I know have a similar disposition - very forward-looking with an appetite or ability to hold large time spans and changes over time in their heads.

Imagining Positive Futures

[00:28:17] Allison: And if they have an interest in the future, they're at least willing to consider quite ambitious worlds. That's nice. Okay, could you share more specifically - if you could wave a magic wand, even though economists hate that saying because there is no magic wand and it's all humans cooperating with each other - what would a positive future look like to you? If we get the world that you think of when you say "the future looked like the future again," what would it look like?

[00:28:42] Eli: I tend to divide things into four key sectors of the economy: health, housing, energy, and transportation. 

Revolutionizing Healthcare

Health is currently about 17-18% of GDP, a huge expenditure. I think about how we can drive costs down while getting better health outcomes.

I've been considering what's scalable in health. Manufacturing stuff is scalable, while services provided by humans are not. We need more drugs and devices, and fewer medical procedures and hospital stays. We should accelerate drug and device development to reduce surgeries and hospital stays.

For example, statins, which lower atherosclerosis, have led to about 60,000 fewer hospital stays. The endpoint in science fiction is something like the auto doc from "The Expanse" - a device that monitors your vitals, diagnoses issues, and synthesizes and administers drugs. With something like that, we'd spend almost 0% of GDP on healthcare with much better outcomes.

[00:30:28] Allison: When you say the service part isn't easily automatable, we saw productivity increase when people switched to Zoom calls with doctors. Also, with AI healthcare agents being trialed, it feels like services could be automatable if we allowed them to be.

[00:30:50] Eli: Absolutely. In the UK, where there are long waits to see primary care physicians, people are using telemedicine with doctors in Singapore or Romania for a fraction of the cost. In the U.S., we loosened telemedicine rules during the pandemic, allowing cross-state consultations, but then reverted after the pandemic.

It'll be interesting to see how quickly AI chatbots or their successors can substitute for doctors in some capacity. I've already asked many medical questions to ChatGPT. The question is to what extent this capability improves and becomes officially allowed, which may or may not matter in the end, but probably matters to some extent.

[00:32:21] Eli: So yeah, definitely a way to scale things better than having another human dedicate their full attention to you, which doesn't scale well.

[00:32:32] Allison: Fair enough. Okay.

[00:32:33] Eli: That was only one of four topics.

Innovations in Housing

[00:32:35] Eli: That was health. Now, let's talk about housing. I think it's relatively conventional - we should build more. Not everywhere has to be high-rises or even multifamily housing. I would look at specific parts of various cities where we've found a zoning tax, and we should liberalize zoning in those areas.

One thing people often don't recognize is that we can have both more affordability and more neighborhood character at the same time. People often oppose density because of neighborhood character concerns, but we should be able to have more of both. I'm really interested in how we can create places that are dense but lovely, and have a lot more of those.

We need to cater to the broad range of preferences people have in housing. Not everybody has to live in a dense, urban, walkable neighborhood if they don't want to, but we should have at least some of that for the people who do want it. I think that's uncontroversial territory.

Energy and Environmental Challenges

[00:33:41] Eli: Now for energy and transportation. In energy, we just need a lot more deployment. We have many tools, but we make it hard to build new capacity. Building a big solar farm requires going through lots of environmental reviews, getting permission from the grid to connect, and dealing with opposition from local groups or big environmental organizations. For example, about one-seventh of all NEPA lawsuits are from the Sierra Club.

[00:34:22] Allison: Recently in Germany, protesters stormed the Tesla factory. That's a high bang for the buck protest.

[00:34:38] Eli: There are new energy technologies we need to take advantage of. Nuclear isn't new, but we can do a lot more with it. There are different modalities of nuclear energy. For big plants, I think we should design one and stamp out a hundred copies instead of designing each one uniquely. There's also interest in small modular and micro reactors, which is promising if we can increase iteration.

[00:35:25] Allison: So you'd push for nuclear over, say, solar?

[00:35:31] Eli: I'd push for both. I'm actually a big fan of geothermal energy - it's a huge resource, bigger than nuclear fission. Solar panel price drops have been impressive. If it continues, panels will be almost free, with costs mainly in deployment, installation, and interconnection.

I'm really excited about batteries, particularly future chemistries. I invested in a company called Oros that's building a new cathode that is denser and cheaper than current options. That's the bottleneck in batteries right now. Nature wants us to have dense and cheap batteries, and I think that's going to happen and be super exciting.

Falling solar and battery prices are good for nuclear and geothermal too, as they allow easier power ramping.

[00:37:08] Eli: Really good batteries mean not just electric cars, but flying electric cars, laser weapons, and other applications. Many people are working on flying electric vehicles, and some might get certified as early as next year. They'll probably have relatively short range initially but could be useful in many applications.

[00:37:34] Allison: I've just seen the electric foil boat zooming around San Francisco. It's very aesthetically pleasing to watch.

[00:37:44] Eli: Yes, very cool stuff.

The Future of Transportation

[00:37:46] Eli: And then the other thing in transportation that I'm super excited for is the return of supersonic flight.

[00:37:52] Allison: Could you share more about that? What's your picture?

[00:37:54] Eli: We had Concorde from 1976 to 2003 in service, flying at Mach 2 - about twice as fast as our planes today. It could fly between New York and London in three and a half hours. It went out of service because they only had 14 planes, making it expensive to operate and maintain. You need to get costs down to have a bigger fleet and spread maintenance costs over more vehicles.

We've had advancements in engine efficiency, materials for airplanes, and computational fluid dynamics since then. Amazingly, Concorde was designed with pencils on slide rule paper - they didn't have computer-aided design at all. We can do much better today.

Another thing that would increase the market size is allowing supersonic flight over land, which is currently banned worldwide. Concorde only flew supersonic over the Atlantic Ocean.

[00:39:27] Eli: The sonic boom is actually not that annoying at high altitudes, but it was partially banned for sonic boom reasons and partially for protectionist reasons. The U.S. didn't want Europeans to overtake Boeing, so they didn't allow it over the U.S., and Europe followed suit.

We know a lot more today about softening the boom. If we relaxed the overland ban, we'd quickly see smaller planes and business jets designed with softer booms to fly over land. This would get the industry investing in supersonic-specific technologies. I think it's totally possible to have Mach 3, maybe even Mach 4 travel, at the price of today's economy class with further advancements.

[00:40:36] Allison: It seems like the market is much bigger now naturally, with more people trying to get places ASAP but not having money for a private plane.

[00:40:46] Eli: Absolutely. When I analyzed this a few years ago, I found that since Concorde went out of service in 2003, premium transatlantic passengers have doubled. So there are twice as many people paying at least for business class on transatlantic flights. Concorde, a plane designed in the 1960s, would absolutely be profitable if it was still operating today. That shows the value of speed, and we could definitely design something better and make it profitable now.

[00:41:30] Allison: Love it. You've picked a niche area that I haven't heard much discussed. Thanks for focusing on that. Was there a fourth one or did we cover them all?

[00:41:39] Eli: We did energy and transportation. Those were the four I mentioned: health, housing, energy, and transportation.

[00:41:45] Allison: Right, I forgot the housing part. It's more talked about, a little more cultural here.

[00:41:50] Allison: Okay, wonderful.

Overcoming Technological Barriers

[00:41:51] Allison: We've talked about what you think is holding general societal progress back. Is there anything specific holding these technologies back? Or if we're on a good path in five years, what are indicators of that versus stagnation? Are there any universal factors holding all of these areas back that we haven't discussed yet, or what's blocking that world right now?

[00:42:15] Eli: I think the biggest blocker is complacency. People get very caught up in their own lives or narrow problems, and they don't think about the bigger picture - how we can drive progress and move technology and humanity forward. That's the biggest issue.

I'm optimistic in the sense that we can realize the future, but pessimistic in that we're not on track to do so. Something needs to change for us to realize it. As a society, we need to be less complacent, more unified, more focused on clearing away obstacles and renewing our institutions to make progress happen.

[00:43:12] Allison: The topics we've discussed are well-known to the general public. But you've mentioned others you might want to focus on more in the future, such as biotechnology and AI. You published an interesting Alzheimer's and longevity study with Johan Peng, and you've had some controversial takes on AI.

Within these newer domains, do you think it's easier to get people excited about them, even though they're not truly new, rather than shifting thinking about familiar domains? Is that why you focus on these newer areas? Is there anything we can learn from these new domains to push for progress?

The Role of Imagination

[00:44:01] Eli: I think what's scarce is people's imagination. If you can explain to people what's possible with new technology like longevity tech - that we could cure or prevent many age-related diseases, extend healthspan and lifespan - most people aren't naturally thinking about that. You have to raise it to their consciousness. Being on the cutting edge and explaining the implications if we get it right has to be part of the vision that drives people forward.

[00:44:45] Allison: I love how in "Nanotechnology Spring" you laid out the potential impact. The challenge with nanotechnology is that it's a multiplying factor affecting many areas - energy, medicine, materials for space travel, carbon sequestration. The application space is so vast that it's not one specific thing, making it hard to convey. You did it exceptionally well, and that article really reinvigorated interest in the field within our community.

[00:45:35] Eli: Thank you so much. It was a really fun piece to write. I'm delighted to continue working to get the ball rolling faster on some of that. I think a lot about what could be the first application - what's the first thing we should build, even if it's not the self-replicating version at first? What's the first molecularly assembled product? I don't have an answer yet, but I think about it a lot.

[00:46:06] Allison: We're actually having another workshop this year with Eric Drexler, who's worked on this molecular systems engineering platform, and another effort with Jeremy Barton to create a roadmap for functional nanomachine systems, possibly with an institute around that. That's definitely the question we'll be asking at this workshop - what's the MVP that could get the idea across and also set up a flywheel for more applications? Even if it's still somewhat distant and expensive, requiring lots of interdisciplinary progress, what's that one thing? I'll let you know if and when we have the answer to this question because it seems really difficult.

Communicating Complex Ideas

[00:46:54] Allison: We've covered a lot of ground, thanks to your exceptional skill in conveying difficult concepts in an easily digestible way that gets people excited. How did you develop this writing talent? For someone new entering the "progress universe," what should they read, listen to, or do to get up to speed and think the way you do?

[00:47:22] Eli: The way I think is very broad. I try to know a lot about many different things. I think many people don't read broadly enough. A lot of people have technical expertise in a narrow domain but don't know anything about geopolitics or taxation, for example. Everything is related to everything else, and people should generally read more broadly.

I'd also encourage more people to write more often and share their ideas earlier. I've been writing on the internet for about 20 years now. It's definitely a skill you hone with practice. There's no real shortcut. I wouldn't say I'm naturally a talented writer; it's just a lot of practice.

[00:48:22] Allison: Are there any blogs or outlets or Substacks that you really loved and that changed your way of thinking?

[00:48:29] Eli: My friend Maxwell Tabarrok has one called "Maximum Progress" that I read all his posts and they're always good and thoughtful. Works in Progress is always interesting. There's such a wealth of good content. I should also mention the Roots of Progress blogging program - they're trying to help cultivate the next generation of writers, which I think is great. If you read what those people are putting out, it's a lot of good stuff. There's definitely a lot of material these days. The hard part is just that there's so much it's hard to keep up with everything.

[00:49:11] Allison: Yeah, there are a few podcasts that use AI voices to read out lots of writing. If Substack and other blogs could enable a listening feature across all blogs, that would help me a lot. It's hard to get through all that content.

[00:49:30] Eli: Maybe it's like the OpenAI GPT mode - you could tell the AI to follow all your favorite blogs. Then you go for a walk, have your headphones on, and just ask "Samantha" what's been going on in the blogs lately. Then she tells you, and you can ask questions and have a conversation about it. Maybe that's a way to get through it all.

[00:49:52] Allison: And that's how we're getting a little bit closer to the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

[00:49:55] Eli: Yes, absolutely.

[00:49:58] Allison: Okay.

Final Thoughts

[00:49:58] Allison: Thank you so much. Is there anything else you wish I would have asked, or any action item you want people to take away from this? Any final bits? Or how can people find you? That would be very useful to know.

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[00:50:08] Eli: Yeah, I'm on Twitter at @EliDourado and elidourado.com on the web. I have a blog/newsletter there, and I'm at the Abundance Institute at abundance.institute. It's been great talking to you, Allison. I really appreciate you and your energy and everything you put into this movement.

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[00:50:28] Allison: It was very fun, and I'm sure we could have covered much more. I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks a lot for all the work that you do. I'm excited to hopefully see you in person soon, maybe in October for the Progress Forum?

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[00:50:44] Eli: Sounds good. Yes, I'll be there.

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[00:50:44] Allison: All right. Thanks a lot, Eli. Have a good day.

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[00:50:53] Beatrice: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Existential Hope podcast. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast for more episodes like this one. You can also stay connected with us by subscribing to our Substack and visit existentialhope.com if you want to learn more about our upcoming projects, events, and explore additional resources on the existential opportunities and risks of the world's most impactful technologies. I would recommend going to our Existential Hope library.

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[00:51:18] Thank you again for listening, and we'll see you next time on the Existential Hope podcast.

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