All of Juan David Campolargo's Comments + Replies

Eli Dourado AMA

Your latest article was something else! I would love to learn about your process of writing such essays from how you find the graphs to how you create the entire narrative. I'm especially interested in this section, "Are cargo airships startupable?" I enjoyed how you broke everything down using data, math, and other assumptions. 

Unrelated: let me know if you'd be interested in a discussion/debate with a professor (in front of the entire class) with whom I'm taking a class about the future of energy. My professor thinks we should avoid growth, not use electricity and make it really expensive. 

1elidourado1yThank you! The key to the process on this one was first spending several years thinking about cargo airships and how you could make a business around them. I made my first phone call asking if I could buy a cargo airship over three years ago. All charts other than the one I cribbed from the Review of Maritime Transport are original, either to me or to the engineer that did the trade study. Once I sat down to write, the narrative came pretty easily. I just wrote what I thought, trying to explain why I thought airships are interesting and why they could be profitable and why it's hard to get there from here (i.e., why I'm not starting an airship startup).