10: Josh Wolfe - Illuminating Tomorrow

Welcome to Dialectic. This week's episode is with Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital. Lux is a venture capital firm focused on investing in the future of science and technology and helping bring things from the outer edges of what's possible into reality. Josh's seemingly infinite areas of interest and multi-year history of speaking and writing alongside investing make him a hard person to pin down in one conversation. That said, I made an attempt to cover conversations that I think are representative of who he is and how he approaches his life's work. That starts with stories. Josh Wolfe is an incredible storyteller and is a strong believer that stories and belief play a crucial role in bringing the future forward. We interrogate the patterns that occur across domains in Creative Rebels, from scientists to entrepreneurs to artists. And we talk about the confidence and sometimes arrogance that shows up in these people who assert new realities. Josh Wolfe is also a strong patriot and thinks a lot about where we are relative to the rest of the world in terms of science and technology, as well as the institutions on the educational side and otherwise that are pushing us forward. And finally, we talk about Josh Wolfe, how his childlike curiosity manifests and how he combines a rare combination of both breath and depth to seemingly be able to go deep on almost anything. He is someone who is simply obsessed with finding the new and getting it right before others. And then he reflects on some of the ways that he has evolved over the years, in some part thanks to some of the closest people in his life. Josh Wolfe is an invigorating person to spend time with. I am confident that comes through in this conversation. And with that, here is Josh Wolfe. It's great to be with you.

Good to be with you, man.

I both envy and also am terrified for your one-day biographer, which is to say, like, I think if I had 40 hours, like, I could have probably prepped for that in immersing. Before these podcasts, I like try to just dump people's worlds into my mind for a little while. And man, you are, you contain multitudes.

I contain multitudes.

So I'm not going to cover everything today, but going to cover maybe a few big ideas that felt resonant about you. The place I want to start. You have talked extensively about this theme, whether it be Sci-Fi to Sci-Fact to your recent LP letter, you did the Four Greek Titans. You've, there's this, I, I found an old tweet. You were inspired to do HIV research in high school because of the film and the band Played On.

Yes.

Uh, and then you've quoted Benjamin Franklin, if you would persuade, appeal to interest, not to reason.

Yes.

And so two of the biggest themes in your life to me seem to be this interplay between science and stories. Yes. I'd love to hear you talk about the way you think those connect and why they matter together.

That's a great question. Yes. I, first of all, believe that everybody should be watching copious amounts of TV and reading tons of graphic novels and comic books. All of those things arguably are the condensed compression algorithm of either one or thousands of people that are basically scripting something. So you think about all of the effort, energy, money, creativity that goes into a single Game of Thrones episode. And so that's on one end of the spectrum. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have a single comedian who has no budget and is just riffing on the realities of life. But I find that people that are conjuring these fictions are shaping us. So our stories shape us, we shape our stories in sort of this endless cycle. You can make the argument that everything is a remix, that we're constantly taking stuff from the past, we're recombining it, and we are narrative creatures. We are storytelling animals, and it is the way that we process things. I think it was Einstein that said that the reason that time exists is so that everything doesn't happen all at once, but A happens, then B happens, and it causes C and D, and then it goes back. And sometimes there's a fork in the road, and then there's a conflict, and then there's the hero's journey. And so all of those things are sort of timeless, and they're all stories. And I always say that technologies can change, and markets can change, and governments can change, and leaders can change, but human nature is a constant, literally going back to the Pleistocene and our evolutionary past. And it's the same thing. In fact, there was a startup that we funded. It was recently on deathbed, in its final days. And miraculously, the CEO and the founder ended up, and we had committed financing, but I said, "You need to find an external lead and we'll be all in." And he ended up doing it and exceeded his fundraising target. And it was darkest before the dawn and he did it. And we're all like, "Amazing. Pull the rabbit out of the hat. This was incredible." And then what happens next? Arguably the predictable Shakespearean drama that there's some internal coup. Now they've got capital, they've got resources, and two people are like, "You got to go." And he's like, "But I was focused all on external financing." And they're like, "Yes, but you weren't focused on the company." And so I had to calm everybody by saying, "This is par for the course. This is what happens. This is human nature. This is conflict." So I deeply believe that the more stories you consume, whether they are through lived experience or through fiction, I actually think it doesn't matter. If you've seen a shit ton of movies and you've read a bunch of fiction and you've read lots of graphic novels, you have scenarios that I think can guide you. And there's extraordinary wisdom in all of these things, from Shakespeare to Westworld. The opening scene of Westworld, I was just having a philosophical debate with one of my partners when the guest arrives and he looks at the host with this sort of squinty-eyed skepticism and she intuits what he wants to ask and says, "Go ahead. You want to ask, so ask." And he says, "Are you real?" And she responds, "Well, if you can't tell, does it matter?" And this is the feeling that I have right now in this current moment of AI, which was predicted by, I don't know when that first episode was, 5, 6 years ago?

Yeah, at least.

And I just find that you can get so much inspiration from fiction. We've started companies based on fictions that didn't exist that became real. We've backed founders who were inspired by fictions. I mean, Palmer Luckey in Anduril arguably, and I ended up introducing him to Robert Downey Jr., but was inspired by Tony Stark. He wanted to be Tony Stark. He even started growing the goatee to do it. And Anduril has become this extraordinary success, not because of that, but I believe deeply in the power of narratives to inspire people, to guide them. And by the way, religions, those are stories. There's some people that subscribe to the canon of Christianity or Judaism or Islam, and there's other people that subscribe to the canon of Marvel Universe and Star Wars. I don't personally see a difference between them, but they can be equally inspiring.

There are certainly technologists, maybe this has changed in recent years and there's more appreciation for the storytelling piece in part due to people like Elon, but there's also a view that says, yeah, what people believe and the culture side of it and storytelling matters if you're looking at the super zoomed in, 1 to 5 year, maybe even 10 year time horizon. But if you zoom out, we just have to invent the future. Technology and science will be distributed. Like it doesn't necessarily really matter. Do you think there's merit to that? Do you think that's naive? Do one, one cut on this might be nuclear as an example, or some of the supersonic jet stuff. There's, there's this sort of view amongst many really smart people that like, if you invent something, it's inevitable. And the counter view would be, actually, the stories matter a whole lot and they determine which timeline we go on. Where do you kind of sit in that?

I think it's both in that I believe deeply in the first part that there are directional arrows of progress. There are certain inevitabilities of technology and you don't know necessarily who the entrepreneur is going to be or who the company is going to be or when it's going to happen, if it's going to be in 2 weeks or 2 months or 2 years or 2 decades, but there is an inevitability. So you take nuclear as an example. There is an inevitability of mankind's march through energy density. We went from carbohydrates, which were diffuse and disperse, not a lot of energy density, large fields of fuel that people would effectively burn wood. Then you went to hydrocarbons. We discover oil and natural gas, and you crack those bonds and exothermic reaction releases heat. You can boil water, you spin turbines, you produce electricity. And then you go to uranium, which is arguably today the densest form of energy. And that march from carbohydrates to hydrocarbons to uranium from burning wood to burning fossil fuels to releasing the power of the atom is a directional arrow of progress. Now people have to believe because we broke the atom in 1903, 1904, discovered the atom rather. Thanks to a variety of bad immigration policies, we ended up with Einstein here, bad immigration policies from Germany, to put it politely. And we end up developing the bomb here and splitting the atom. And that gave us made us a global superpower and arguably gave us 104 nuclear reactors and 103 nuclear subs that are going around the world. And that has declined in part because the story has declined. And the story declined in part culturally. 1979, just to spend a few moments on nuclear, you had Three Mile Island, which was an accident. Nobody died. There was no real radiation release, but people were freaked out. At the same time that you had a movie, The China Syndrome, So that's in the cultural zeitgeist and people are primed and they're like, "Oh my God, this is horrible. This is a nuclear disaster." And at the same time, you have the conflation of nuclear power and nuclear war. And nuclear power is a good virtuous thing, particularly if you're on the left side and you're an environmentalist and you want zero carbon and large baseload power and energy to be able to solve human problems and let people live and break out of poverty. Nuclear war is a terrible thing. And so you have my mother's generation of musicians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and James Taylor that literally have a concert in 1979, no nukes. And everybody was just like, no nukes, not just for war, but for power. And so I actually think that that set it back, but that was a cultural zeitgeist that was artists and musicians leading a charge, movie and Hollywood leading a charge that resulted in what you could argue is a rising cost of capital. People wouldn't fund this stuff. People didn't want to work on it. It was socially taboo. And now that's starting to change. In the past 5 years, you have beautiful models that are promoting nuclear, like Isabel. And I was like, where did she come from? Is she paid by the Nuclear Energy Institute? Were they smart enough to actually hire an attractive influencer? And that is just changing the zeitgeist of younger people. So I, not her alone, but just like this, the zeitgeist is changing. And I think that's a positive. So those things take time. But they definitely are like these cultural memes, fads that change what people value. And that comes from storytelling of each other, echo chambers and amplification and people that you heroicize or villainize. If Elon came out, which he hasn't, in part because he has interest in solar, but if he were to say, "We should be developing," and forget about me calling it elemental energy, if he called it elemental energy, the world would be funding nuclear power plants tomorrow because of his influence. Left and right, which would be incredible. So there's a long-winded answer to the first part is that there are these directional arrows of progress and they are also contingent upon people acting and you have to believe to act. And what creates belief is either a contrarian streak in an individual that says, "I'm going to go do this, everybody else be damned," or a collective feeling of, "Yes, I'm part of a movement and I want to do this." you talked a little bit about the, like, the inspiration of sci-fi often actually causing people to try stuff or make stuff.

It sort of seems that much of the inspiration, we, we have this like sci-fi era of the 20th century that everyone is pulling from. And there are instances like Her or whatever, but for the most part, it's like a specific ver— cut of time. Who is imagining the sci-fi future? Of the future beyond? Put another way, are we just perpetually pulling from the same source material? And to what extent do we need people to imagine where we're going to be in 50 years, 100 years?

Well, remember, on the one hand, the same source material are the same stories told through different stages and different characters, right? So Joseph Campbell's Hero of the Journey, Shakespeare, the stages change, the costumes change, the characters change, but it's the same stories. So there's these timeless aspects of that, of conflict, of jealousy, of envy, of love, of betrayal, of camaraderie, of alliances formed against the powerful. Those are constants. I think that the latest sci-fi that is inspiring is coming from China. Think about Three Body Problem. You have a movement away from the dystopian environmental sci-fi, which I find utterly boring, uninteresting, predictable. You have people that mix a little bit of history with a little bit of speculative sci-fi. Neil Gaiman unfortunately has been now canceled, but I think he's a brilliant mind. Neal Stephenson, his latest, I think beginning of a trifecta, Polystahn, talks about the origin of the nuclear bomb and weaves in geopolitics in US and Russia. And somebody actually was just telling me that there was this one character Dick, and he's a really interesting character. He's like this Jewish nerdy scientist and physicist. And somebody's like, "You know that's Richard Feynman." I was like, "What? Oh yeah, Dick. Oh my God." Anyway, so I think that there are people that take history and combine it with speculative futures, and that is super valuable because history doesn't repeat, it rhymes, as clichéd as that is, and it's true. And then I think you have wildly imaginative people, and I actually think AI is helping break through what is imaginable and possible because you can just literally tell Midjourney, imagine this crazy thing that I just imagined. Let me see it. And yeah, and then suddenly it becomes real and you're able to express yourself. And so I do think that there are just creative geniuses out there that can combine ideas and genres and inspire people. But if you think about it, most sci-fi is like, okay, we're going to go populate or colonize outer space. Right. And all of those space operas are still wrought with those same Shakespearean conflicts. There's a coup, somebody's abandoned, they're marauded, it's an individual from The Martian to Aliens. We encounter some alien force. In some cases, like, what was it, District 9, they're metaphors for our time or whatever. And in other cases, it's just H.R. Giger representation of an alien that literally we're going to encounter in outer space. Then you've got the people that I think do the near-term prognostications, like who is it, Charles Brooker from Black Mirror, who I think is just brilliant because those have presaged social implications of the technologies that we're inventing. And that to me is always interesting that Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired, who I think is one of the great philosophers of technology, was like, "The key question is not to ask what happens when one technology exists. You can sort of predict how somebody might use it. The key question is what happens when everybody has that thing?" Of course. And so I think that people that are able to sort of imagine those speculative things are really interesting. There was a recent short film that I actually thought was really good. It wasn't sci-fi so much, but I don't even know where or how I discovered it. It might have even been me querying ChatGPT or Anthropic and it came up with a recommendation, but it was like a 20, 25-minute film about a writer's room. And I think they called it Writer's Doom or something like that. But the premise was that they had to imagine In AI Future, and you had all these 5 different personalities that really did a thoughtful treatise on how AI was likely to develop and going towards superintelligence, and it was done in a scripted way. I could have read one of these long essays, Leopold or whatever, but this was like a beautiful 20-minute human drama in dialogue, almost Aaron Sorkin West Wing-like, That just made it hit. So I'm optimistic of our creative class ever more accessible. And by the way, globally, because now their ideas can be translated as Three Body Problem was. And I think the people that write sci-fi, if we saw a genre of Chinese sci-fi, I'd actually be worried because they're going to be defining the future. So we want to attract talent here to build our companies, but we also want to attract the sci-fi authors here to to write the future that we want to live in.

Yeah. I mean, you think about the way Elon is like literally aesthetically copying iRobot too, or, or the OpenAI Her stuff. There's, I think there's all the ideological stuff you talked about. And then you also just have like a wide set of entrepreneurs blatantly copying the aesthetic of this stuff, which to me maybe is further indication of the influence. And maybe part of the challenge today is that like, to your point, so much of it is pessimistic. Or people almost have an antagonistic relate— so many creatives have an antagonistic relationship to AI. Like this stuff is really, I think, important for us to imagine.

Totally. Creatives, by the way, as though there are some, we're all creative, but like the class of people that are aghast at AI copying. I mean, I feel very strongly, I make my kids watch the Kirby, I think it's now an hour-long thing that came out updated a year ago. Everything Is Remix. Have you seen this?

No.

It's spectacular. It covers 4 parts, I think. Movies.

Is it like a YouTube series?

Yeah.

Yeah, I know of this. I haven't seen it.

Outstanding. Movies, music. And the thing, there are multiple moments where you're listening to a Beatles riff on the section about music and you're like, "Oh yeah, I love the song." And then it goes back 30 years to a blues. And you're like, "Oh my God, they blatantly stole it." That's cool. They blatantly stole it. This poor African American guy in the South made that riff and nobody knows his name. His family never got paid money, all of that kind of stuff. Right?

I guess that's not cool, but that's profound. Right.

Tarantino, all these incredible scenes. You're like, oh yeah, that came from the Japanese film.

Kurosawa.

Exactly. And you're like, what? And literally to the framing and the rectangular symmetry. And so there's all these examples of movies, music, fashion, That he literally, his thesis was everything is a remix. So creatives today that are like, "I created that." No, you are the sum total of all the inspirations and all the visual influences that you saw consciously or unconsciously, the emotions that were tied to those moments. And sometimes people are aware of it, sometimes they aren't. There's a new Lady Gaga song that aired, I think at the Grammys, and my kids were watching it. And there's a hook in there that I recognize that they don't know, from, if you ever saw Donnie Darko. Okay, so there's a Mad, Mad World, and then there's the remix of it. And she literally took the hook from that. And I really, this song was assembled by probably 4 different hooks. I happened to identify that one.

My kids had no idea.

But they're like, this is an original creative work. I'm like, no, it's a derivative work. So everything is derivative. And the artist today, if you took Picasso, you look at the 4 different styles that he had from trying to do realist pictures of fruit and portraits to his abstract cubism to what became this defining style of Picasso. He just ingested everything and copied and then iterated and mutated just like evolution does, just like our genes do. There's copy, mutate, amplify, selection. And the function of selection is usually—

Probably much of science too, I would assume, takes that shape.

All science is. I mean, at least in science, there's a culture that says you have to have a long list of references of prior art. And so that we hold people accountable for not stealing people's ideas. And then science also has this beautiful thing of trying to prove people wrong and do it in public. And so science itself as an institution, as a culture, I think is a beautiful thing that is one of man's greatest inventions in culture. But the idea that AI is stealing, this great irony of OpenAI, Upset that Deepseek stole their underlying—

Installation, yeah.

—algorithm and OpenAI itself trained on the sum total of the repository of everything on the internet and artists upset that if I wanted to create a, I don't know, I love Robert Williams who founded the magazine Juxtapose, which is like the surrealist lowbrow art. And I can describe a scene in the style of Robert Williams and it creates it. And he would be like, "That's theft." But he was an art student who went to the Louvre or went to the Met and just visually absorbed everything that he saw. And that inspired him. And so I just think plagiarism in 10 years will not be a thing. The idea of original work of art, you won't know if it was 5 people that worked on it. You won't know if it was 2 people and a machine. You won't know if it was just insane prompting. Well, yeah, you, you, you play this out and you add infinite compute.

You basically have LLMs or otherwise that are able to produce like the infinite spectrum of possibility. And it's actually about what people like pull out of that. What, what like frame you stop on. Yeah. That's like the creativity. That's cool. What has made you a better storyteller? You're, I don't know that you, I think you've talked in the past about not, it not necessarily being an intrinsic trait yet.

You're, you're clearly quite good at it. Practice, practice, practice, practice, admiration and mimicry of people that I thought were great storytellers. If you heard me speak in high school and probably through most of college, I sounded like this. So, yeah, I grew up in Coney Island. I was horrible. And then you start to see a speaker and you're like, I want to speak like that. I will actually say the first person who was not a famous person that massively inspired me that could command an audience and spoke with the gravitas was a guy, Ivan Hageman. He founded a school called East Harlem School at Exodus House on 103rd between 1st and 2nd. It was a drug rehab center that he and his brother turned into a school, and it would inspire me to go start a charter school in my native Coney Island, Brooklyn called Coney Island Prep. But I heard this man speak. I did an urban semester during college. It was my junior year. 4 days a week or 3 days a week you worked at a job, and I tried to hustle to find a Cornellian or Brooklynite that would get me access to Wall Street. And my mom was a public school teacher, single mom. I had no connections. And 2 days a week you volunteered at a nonprofit. And the nonprofit that I worked at was in East Harlem. This East Harlem school at Exodus House. Exodus House was this drug rehab center. They converted it. Ivan and Hans were the brothers. They ended up having a Cain and Abel-like split, predictable through literature. But their father, they were half Black, half white. They sort of look like light-skinned Arnold Schwarzenegger, jacked. In fact, Ivan's first job out of school, he went to Harvard for education and then He was on his resume an altercation de-escalation engineer. I'm like, "What is an altercation de-escalation engineer?" He's like, "I was a bouncer." Nice. But I heard him speak in front of students, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th graders in East Harlem, and this man commanded the room. It was the depth of his voice, the cadence. And I was like, "Where did he learn to speak to that?" It turned out his father was a preacher. So you listen to great preachers who I don't generally respect. I cannot stand the Joel Osteens of the world because I think they're hucksters pulling the wool over people's eyes. They are extraordinarily commanding presence of telling a story, commandeering that most important currency of human attention. Dave Chappelle, extraordinary storyteller. I don't remember his jokes, but I cannot forget his poignant stories. So there are people When you feel yourself caught by that, you just watch it and you watch it again and again. And I have a friend who is friends with Chappelle. I've never met him. And he says that every facet of that, just like this device in front of us or any product like Apple iPhone that we love is engineered with the kind of precision and meticulous, he's like every gesture that Chappelle does.

The FX, the little pauses, the accidents.

Every puff of the cigarette, every slap on the knee, every eye movement, is practiced and practiced and practiced. None of it is ad hoc. It's an engineered performance. And I admire that deeply.

It's cool. You love storytelling. You're also quite loud. And yet you've talked about secrets.

Now, by the way, when you say loud, projection of voice or I don't stop talking? I mean all of it.

I mean, check the Twitter to loud in all shapes. Yet you've talked about secrets. There's this amazing line, "I know something that the rest of the world doesn't know and they won't until I tell them." It's obviously rooted in science. And then you've also discussed your love of magic. Yes. And this notion that magicians are, magic is almost a form of engineering. And my question is, what has magic taught you about showmanship, storytelling, engineering, and the ways that we maybe bring secrets to the world?

So magic to me, an extraordinary trick, whether it's a sleight of hand or some orchestrated thing. And there are some people that are friends who are these illusionists, they would call themselves something. And it's just, it's to me no different than a technologist that constructs something to produce a feeling in you of awe. There are things, in fact, this morning when I woke up, I had pulled down with my thumb on my iPhone and for a moment, for like 3 seconds, I looked as it faded from my home screen to my notifications with such fluid— I was like, that is just beautiful. And that little subtle thing, they didn't have to do that. I mean, a shitty company would just have it swipe or something, but it was just so fluid and magical and it created this layer of depth of information. And I think that a great magician that engineers a trick, on one hand anticipates and knows how you're going to react. So there's a fundamental understanding of human nature. They know what you're going to do. They know how to force a card. They know what you're going to say. Totally. And that is the perfection of it. Just like a dance is choreographed, there is in that craft, in that artistry, this choreographed control of you. And I admire that because it's a form of influence, it's a form of persuasion. And then sort of like that quote, "People don't remember what you said, people don't remember what you did, they remember how you made them feel." I remember how magicians make me feel, that feeling of, "Oh my God, are you kidding me?" Or that frustration of like, "How did they do that?" And a great piece of technology, a great piece of art, great movie, a great book gives you that same feeling where you need to share it with somebody to be like, "You won't believe what happened." So that's one element of it, which is the act and the performance and the amount of effort and I think intelligence and anticipation of your intelligence because they have to outsmart you. Totally. So that also, by the way, is why I think when I have this propensity to identify people that I think are not in great relationship with the truth or people that I consider frauds and I call them out, it's very much like it isn't, I realize, born in this virtuous pursuit of truth. It's, "No, no, I know what you're doing. You're not going to outsmart me. You're outsmarting all the sheep, but I'm onto you." And it's a competitive intellectual thing.

The little kid watching the magician who's not that good almost.

There's a scene at the end of Man on the Moon, the Andy Kaufman. And Jim Carrey, who is the ultimate prankster, faked his own death. Not Jim Carrey, but Andy Kaufman. And he's dying of cancer. And in this last-ditch effort, he goes to India to one of these healers. And he sits down and he subjects himself on the table to this guy going to do some, I don't know, reishi, reiki, whatever. And the guy picks up a little chicken liver or something in a sleight of hand, And then rubs his stomach and pulls it out. And he looks at it in this simultaneous admiration for the guy's gall to do that and this realization that he's going to die and that there is no magic healing thing. And it was like that moment of the trickster knowing he just got tricked and was just like, "All right, game respects game. I got it." So that's one aspect of magic is the performance of it, the secret of it, the fact that they never reveal it. Is really powerful. And then it's like the meaning of it. There was one particular performance that absolutely caught me and it really changed the way that I think about a lot of things, which was Derek Delgado, who— Yeah, yeah, I've seen this. So in and of itself, you can see it on TV now. We saw it live in Union Square and it's a profound performance, deep, thoughtful, incredible storytelling. I think they had Frank Oz and Neil Patrick Harris, part of the production team, and lots of celebrities came and interesting. But he does this thing where he picks these 5 different objects and he does basically different tricks around these things, but with deep storytelling. And if you remember, there's this one where he pulls out this brick and it's a gold brick and he takes it off the wall and he puts it on a table. And in the somber tone with gravitas and seriousness, he talks about how he was a young teenager living, I think, in Texas with his mom. He had a best friend, same age. They ride their bikes, they hang out after school. One day they come home, they walk in, he opens the door, the mom is on the couch kissing another woman. The friend freaks out and runs. He realizes, okay, my mom is gay and found love. He loves his mother. They talk about it. They're closer than ever. The next morning they're sitting at the breakfast table and a brick comes flying through the window. With a rubber band and a piece of paper, and on the paper it says, "Go home, faggots." And they end up moving, or "Get out of here." And he's telling the story and he builds this house of cards symbolically.

Around the brick. Around the brick. Putting one, yeah, yeah.

And it covers the brick. And then he finishes the story and he says, "Give me a street in New York." And somebody's like, "Essex." And he's like, "Okay, give me a cross street that it intersects with." And somebody's like, "Delancey." And it Unscripted because it was the person that I was with next to me and they didn't know. Really? And then he blows the cards away and the brick is gone. Now obviously it's a sleight of hand, but he's like, "When the show ends in 10 minutes, you go to Essex and Delancey and this brick will be on that corner." Okay. And obviously he had a runner that went and did it, but it doesn't matter. Sure. And people that were in that show would go. Now Essex and Delancey on a Friday night or Saturday night probably has 10,000 to 20,000 people throughout the night that are passing through that corner. And on the corner is this gold brick next to a garbage can, and you can go and you can see it, and people are taking pictures of it and posting it to Instagram or whatever. 99.9% of people that experience that brick have no idea what it is. But the people that were in that show that heard the story and what it meant to this man— It had meaning. And suddenly the idea of an object having meaning was just really powerful to me. A piece of fabric that is like irrelevant to me might be deeply meaningful to you because it was your grandmother's that she carried with her from a war or something. And so thinking about the stories, because they're effectively what they are, that go into a physical object, that the only reason why it has a valence of significance is because of a story that you know, is super powerful. Yeah.

It's exciting to imagine a world where more people trying to bring science and technology into the world take some of these things seriously. You think about the old Steve Jobs stuff, he's pulling the iPod Nano out of his pocket. It's the magician.

He is the ultimate magician. But by the way, he had such care, and whether this was powerful or not, that it didn't just care about what it looked like or felt like in your hand, but his attention to detail inside the stuff that you never saw. It's something I always tell my kids, which is how you do anything is how you do everything. And those little details matter. Hmm.

Belief has been a big part of your life and you've talked about obviously chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. You've talked about how that's been so important for you. I'm curious who, whose belief has been most empowering for you in your life? Maybe outside of, you've talked a lot about Bill Conway of Carlisle. Um, so maybe you can talk about him, but, but maybe broadly who else's belief has been empowering to you?

Well, the three probably most important ones that I have spent the most time with, my mother. I witnessed other parents that were preoccupied. My own father was not present in my life, but my mother believed in me deeply and almost to my wife's chagrin because she was raised differently with parents that loved her deeply but did not dote on her the way that my mother did as a single mom, only child. But my mother was like, "You are destined for greatness." And I literally believed as a young kid, I had ESP or could move stuff with my mind. I don't know if you did too, but I believed I was the special, special kid. And so we try to do that with our kids, not to the point that they're so solipsistic and egotistical, but to make them feel super special. My wife, I mean, is probably the most important person that believes in me. That's the most important decision I think anybody can make is finding a partner or mate, building a family. For me, especially not having that and wanting that, that deep nuclear family was very important. Peter, my co-founder at Lux, we believe in each other. And there are things that I think he's terrible at, and there are things that he knows I'm terrible at. But the things that I think he's exceptional at, that feeling of trust, I call it art, that you admire somebody, you respect them, you trust them, but you effectively believe in them. That to me is super important. Bill Conway, I have talked about publicly, but this was truly a super wealthy and powerful person that whatever the circumstances of that day decided yes and believed. And to this day, I literally texted him 2 days ago just as a note of appreciation. And we first met 25 years ago or something. Wow. And I want to have that effect on some people. Maybe I'm the only one for him. I doubt it. There's probably 20 people like that for him. And that was seeding Lux. Just seeding Lux. And just he sat down and we pitched him and we were full of naivete and ambition. And he said, "I hope you make a billion." And just to have somebody that was older And I'm sure if you put me on the therapist chair, father figure, absent in my life, there's a million things that you can ascribe to this of why that was more meaningful to me. But you had this older man that was like, "I believe in you and I want you to go and do it and go forth." And I've just felt like having somebody in your corner. So we always say at Lux that we like to believe before others understand. That is the best currency that you can give somebody before you actually write a check is just like, "I believe in you." And I'm going to get your back. And it's really powerful.

Obviously you just said it, you believe in people for a living. Beyond capital, which obviously is the primary incarnation of that belief, what are the shapes of belief that maybe manifest for you with entrepreneurs or with scientists or otherwise?

There's the practical and the impractical. The practical ones are, do I believe that they will convince other people to believe? Do I believe that they will be able to fundraise? Do I believe— and inform I don't have faith in my life. I don't believe in supernatural things. But in a form, that's a form of faith. Do you believe that somebody in the absence of evidence will believe in you? So I want to know that an entrepreneur can raise money, that they can convince people to move across the country and quit their jobs or convince their family or their spouse or the kids, "We're going to follow this man or woman into fire." That to me is super powerful. Then there's the belief in themselves, the conviction that you are going to have massive ups and massive downs. You're going to have people that you believed in they're going to quit on you. You're going to have people that go and leave to start their own things. You're going to have people that betray you. And what do you do in those kinds of moments? So I think that the people that tend to have enough self-esteem that they believe in themselves, even if others don't, and the people that have so much enmity and negativity and drive, and this is a debate I get into all the time on Twitter, And I admire the people that are like, "You don't need to have negative beliefs. It's hurtful for you." Or I'm obviously saying this in a mocking tone, or people that are like, "Anybody that thrives on hate is just a negative person that doesn't put good energy into the world." And I always say, it is great for an individual to do mindfulness and meditation and be calm and find inner peace. I want my kids to have that. But if you want progress in society, every single thing we have from our iPhones to Amazon, to rocketry, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Oprah Winfrey, they all had childhoods that you would not wish on your worst enemy. 3 of them were adopted, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos. Oprah Winfrey had a horrific childhood, raped, beaten, lost her brother, I think, to AIDS or drugs. Elon's childhood, also horrific. And so you want troves of disaffected people with chips on their shoulders. As you know, I like to say that chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. And I believe that that is the great motive force that pushes people forward. The founding fathers were not meditating when they came over here. They had hatred, utter hatred for the British and for the monarchy. Steve Jobs had utter hatred for the mediocrity of IBM and these corporate suits and was rebelling against that. So I think that hatred, which is not a virtue that anybody wants to celebrate, is a great motivating force. To this day, you follow Palmer Luckey on Twitter and Palmer will 70% of the time be talking about geopolitics and the incredible products that Anduril is developing, 10% of the time talking about video games and anime and the things that he culturally cares about, and the rest of the time going after journalists from 10 years ago or even just this week. He was going after somebody from ZDNet from like 2018, or maybe it was even 2008, demanding a retraction for something that they said about him. And I love that. I don't want to be the person that's like, no dude, you're a billionaire many times over. Get over it. No, keep going. Fight these people. Let it fuel you. We are better off because of it.

You have an affection for rebels. Obviously that's inside of part of the answer you just gave across artists, scientists, entrepreneurs beyond just the fuel. Are there other through lines you see across those types of creative rebels?

If I wasn't a venture capitalist, it's funny, I was just with Guy Oseary who founded Maverick with Madonna and found one of the bands that I absolutely love or found Deftones. Cool. I love, I would be like an A&R person trying to find like the cool new band or if I was in the art world, I would be trying to find the edgy new thing. It requires an understanding of what the consensus is and a desire that maybe you wish that you were part of the consensus and you were part of the popular crowd, but recognizing that you either can't be or maybe you don't want to be, you're going to go and tack differently and you're going to find the thing that everybody else— and you're doing it maybe because of the intrinsic aesthetic value to you, but more likely when I'm intellectually honest, it's because of the status I get when I am right, that I was there before you. We have companies now that people were like, "That's crazy." And now we invested in them in $50, $60 million valuations. There's an actual way to quantify this. And now they're being coveted at $6 billion valuations. That is a feeling that says, "I was right and you didn't see it, and now you're going to pay the price for that." And so I like that. It's a slightly spiteful, competitive kind of thing. But it's the same thing. When you discover the band or the artist or the author or the TV show or the thing that nobody else has discovered, you get social status by being the person that was the tastemaker that discovered that thing. And so that is driven out of, I believe, a vainglorious, ego-driven pursuit of status by finding the thing that other people are eventually going to come around to, the restaurant, the fashion brand, whatever it is, and the comfort of saying, "I'm okay breaking away from the herd." Yep. And so I admire that in entrepreneurs. And by the way, we have entrepreneurs that come in here that are great technologists, they're good people, and we will have debates as a partnership because I'll be like, "They are not edgy enough. They want to fit in too much." And I like people that are comfortable with the discomfort of being rejected because being rejected is evolutionarily the most painful thing aside from physical pain that you can have, being ostracized from a group. Feeling alone. But if you can weather that and push through and create and then get other people to come to you, you have this everywhere from the internet meme from 20 years ago of the weird dude that's dancing on the hill at LACM. Yeah, the first follower. And that guy was just being himself. Now, he wasn't doing it out of spite. I think he was doing it out of authentic joy for the music. And probably the first few people that joined in were making fun of him, and then it became a thing. And so—

That's a cynical view. Yeah. It could have, the first follower could have been the ultimate believer and advocate too.

But I, they could have been, but my view is that they were probably just like being silly and they're like, wait a second, you know, and, and this is actually sort of cool.

And then boom, you know, you've, you started to tap into an idea that I'm really interested in, which is there's this notion that the people who can really bring new things into the world, those types of rebels, you, you've actually described people who create new things as having arrogance of the highest order. And so there's this radical ability to assert new reality. Part of that is not fitting in with, with the crowd, but you've also been critical of the hero narratives and the great man of history, and you've been super critical of people like Elon. And I'm really fascinated about this dichotomy of like asserting new reality and also having the part humility, part awareness or attunement to actually see reality as it is first. It's this asserting reality on one end and refining reality on the other. And if you, obviously, if you go to, you have Kanye on, on, on one end of the asserting reality. And so I'm curious what it looks like for these quote unquote arrogant, but also honest, truthful people. Like, what does it look like when people strike that balance? Because a lot of the people, people could hear everything you've just said and be like, oh, Josh must love Elon or, or, or someone like that who's so good at storytelling, who's so good at creating a new reality, who's such a rebel. And yet a more simple example might be SBF. Like SBF before everything bad happened was this amazing person asserting reality. But I think the critique of him in hindsight would be he wasn't listening to anyone.

Both of those things are true. And by the way, there are things about Elon that I absolutely admire and love. I love SpaceX. I actually love Doge. I have always been skeptical about Tesla, particularly for what I think is questionable accounting, but he got away with it and it doesn't matter anymore. And I love Jeff Bezos. I think that he's one of the greatest capital allocators of our time, whereas I would say that Elon is the single greatest fundraiser ever in history of mankind. His ability to capitalize attention, talent, money. The difference there where I think it's more deserving of critical of this great man of history, there are so many people, hundreds, thousands of people that made critical decisions that were responsible for things. That are on the periphery of that spotlight that don't get the credit. I think Bezos does a better job than Elon of giving people credit, but it's very hard for people to name the top 4 people at Tesla or the top 4 people at SpaceX. I mean, Gwynne maybe. People leave there and they're like, oh, we backed Tom Mueller, who basically had Rocketeer for 20-something years, employee number 1 at SpaceX. But most people, if you said Tom Mueller, they have no idea who he is. Elon gets away with that because he's like, "Look, I'm narcissistic and I'm a little bit on the spectrum, and so I get away with these things." But I think I have more respect for the people that give credit to the people that took the risk and believed in them and are actually doing the work. And so even here at Lux, I have, because of my own psychological needs, as Peter likes to joke, I was the kid in my underoos jumping on the kitchen table being like, "Look at me." Pete doesn't care. Brandon Reeves here doesn't care. Doesn't even want his name on the website. Doesn't even, his face, doesn't care. They deserve massive credit. This place would not be what it is without every single partner here. And so I like to shine spotlight and bring attention to them. So I think there's a balance between this idea of some of the great entrepreneurs, the great men of history, and the people that actually really help them in all these situations. I think you don't have to be like the extreme humble leader that feels like it's totally contrived.

But let's say somebody new comes in and they're brilliant and they're asserting this totally new vision of reality. You've obviously talked a lot about both that being appealing, but also trying to find like, are they honest? Are they true? How do you actually distill that? I mean, part of that is going and doing the work, but like, how do you distill when somebody is in some rooms asserting reality and in other rooms is actually just really, at least humble in their disposition to what they don't know. That feels like the tension.

The honest answer is you don't know. You don't know if somebody is naive or ambitious or if they're a priori full of malice. You don't know. So SBF, I thought SBF was brilliant. What we didn't know was that the funds from arguably a brilliant highly functioning business were being siphoned and used for speculative bets on the side and political donations and all this kinds of stuff. But I don't know, like, you know, the sum total of what Elon has done, whether it was born out, like, I don't actually believe that Elon bought Twitter for free speech. I don't. I believe that he believes in free speech. He says he's a free speech absolutist. Search on Twitter for one condemnation, one criticism of the Chinese Communist Party or China's culture of oppression of free speech. Just one. You will not find one. And you say, "Well, he's not going to criticize other countries." Okay, but criticizes Germany, UK, France, lots of other countries. Interesting. So I think you want to question people's motives. Is the motive that they're saying and the reason that they're doing the thing the real reason? And you can never really tell because I have friends, as it relates to Elon, who truly believe that he cares deeply about accelerating mankind towards sustainable future of energy and environment, which was the tagline that he used to say forever. Now that has shifted over the past few years. His tagline is extending human consciousness into the galaxy. The galaxy, right. And so, well, if the priority was that before, it's sort of hard to justify burning huge amounts of rocket fuel and carbon in many rocket launches. It's hard to justify private jets and flying everywhere. But if it's now about this bigger mission of extending human consciousness into the universe, then this stuff doesn't matter. Did his values change? Maybe. Did the story change? Maybe. I don't know. Are we all better off for it? Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. There's fuzziness in all of us.

So, but I still like to be like, that's maybe BS.

You care a lot about the US as a leader from a technology standpoint broadly. And I think that obviously manifests across the board from education to the government. Obviously, I think too, a huge amount of the US's historical and current advantage is our quote unquote monopoly over skilled immigration. But recently, I think there's been more questioning or critique of whether or not our homegrown talent on the technology and science and engineering front, at least our advantage there is, is persisting. And I think there's maybe a broad feeling that for many, doing science is like behind some kind of wall or academic hurdle or something like that. And so I'm curious how you think about one, why we don't have more scientists. What it would look like for more young people to either do science or at least have a scientific approach? And how do you actually bolster the next 50 years of American exceptionalism on that front?

Short answer to the last question is cultures get what they celebrate. I think for 20 years, in part because we had an extraordinary boom economy, maybe you can argue since the mid-'80s, declining interest rates, rising stock markets, increasing wealth, even though there was wealth disparity, and people were celebrating celebrities. And you would ask somebody what they wanted to be and they would say rich or an influencer or famous or whatever. And that's a cynical answer, obviously, but those were innocent answers. And in the '50s and '60s, people were like, "I want to be an astronaut," or, "I want to be a Nobel Prize winner." China is doing the right thing in the content that they're feeding their kids around STEM, around achievement, around breakthroughs, because that is what makes individuals distinguished and that is what makes countries distinguished and gives a form of soft power. So I believe that it is a cultural celebration. Elon is a great cultural figure for that. Jeff Bezos is a great cultural figure for that. The space race amongst billionaires that the left media will chastise and say, "These are just guys with their rockets and these phallic pursuits." No, it's ridiculous. It's like, this is amazing that we have a private space sector competing and they're both American companies in Blue Origin and SpaceX. It's amazing. We want that here. It's amazing that most of the AI competition here, whether it's Elon and Groq or Sam and OpenAI or Dario and Anthropic, it's amazing. I don't know how much value is going to be destroyed by some of those companies. I actually would not bet against Elon there, but OpenAI, who knows? But we all benefit from that. Every week new models are coming out and consumers are getting better. And so that is, I think, an amazing—

One reason that's not celebrated, perhaps that people regular people feel like they're not benefiting from those things you just mentioned, AI, rockets, these types of things?

I think people increasingly do feel they're benefiting from AI. They have magic capabilities at their fingers. Now, if they wanted to go into marketing or ad copy or all these kind of historic white-collar jobs, even thinking about being lawyers or in some cases doctors, you ought to be thinking twice about some of those things because where do you truly have the opportunity to be distinguished and indispensable? But I think it's different this time, those dangerous words to say, because I do feel like there's a democratization of the access to this stuff. For $20 a month, you get access to all the world's information, the ability to conjure everything that you might want from images to videos to text is pretty profound. And that's just going to keep getting cheaper and cheaper. So I do believe that that is an inspiration, that people see that there's massive wealth being created, that there's— I just see a ton. Think about what everybody wants to do today. They all want to go work at AI companies in some capacity. They want to So that to me is a positive. And I think going back to your question, what creates that is what we celebrate as a culture. I don't see the AI companies being as demonized yet. Of course it'll come because it's the powerless or OC or somebody picking fights with billionaires, Bernie Sanders and whatever, but they're irrelevant. I mean, those people create nothing. They just try to take capital and poorly redistribute it. And I grew up like center-left my entire life, but I believe deeply that we should be celebrating our entrepreneurs and the people that are creating these extraordinary things that democratize access for everybody.

Doesn't that, just to pause for 2 seconds here, does that disposition from capital and technology create some of the, like one of the reasons it feels, and granted, I think it's worth acknowledging that maybe science and technology, at least culturally, are in 2 kind of different buckets. Science is more lumped in academia. Technology is more the AI software type stuff. But I almost wonder if that division is part of the reason why more broadly scientists or technologists aren't celebrated as the type of person you want to be, at least holistically.

Does that make sense? Yeah. I think we need— go back to where we started the conversation on stories. You need more shows like For All Mankind. You need, uh, you know, I don't think a lot of people watch Halt and Catch Fire, but You need more mainstream shows that celebrate the hero's journey in science and technology. Women in science and minorities in science. And you are right that scientists generally you think of as introverted people in a lab toiling away and nerds and not cool. And technologists, maybe they are a little bit cooler. You see them at parties and they're being invited to stuff and they have more money and the scientists are wallowing away writing for grants. I think that celebrating the culture of both of those is really important. And we had a wake-up call in part because of geopolitics in the '50s with Sputnik and the space race. And it galvanized a lot of people, just like people wanted to join the military after 9/11 and suddenly were like this global war on terror. And I think people see a resurgence of this, whether it's Russia, Ukraine, whether it's Israel, Gaza, whether it's China, Taiwan, whatever the conflicts that are near or soon to be, I think that that is actually inspiring people and culture and the media we consume and produce influences that. So I think we need more content, more shows, more celebrities hanging out with scientists and technologists and celebrating them and being like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." As a backdrop, if you just look at the numbers today, and these in part should be a wake-up call, 50% of all undergraduates in AI coming from China. China is graduating 1 out of every 2 AI undergrad. When you look at the workforce, even domestically in the US, 38% of the AI researchers here are from China, outnumbering domestic US 37%. So that's alarming. Now you want to attract these people regardless of their ethnicities and have them become Americans and have them stay here. And we want to brain drain, but that's not necessarily happening. The number of international students. We used to have 23% of international students that came to American shores to work at our universities and learn, and I would be stapling H-1B visas to them and making them stay here and giving them jobs and discouraging them from going back and in fact encouraging their families to come back. Because one of the great leverage that China has is, okay, you go here, you go to Princeton or Stanford or MIT or Harvard, you get your PhD, but if you don't come back, at some point your family's going to have some problems. And they hold them hostage in a way. So I think that that's a big deal. But we used to have 23% of the international student body. Today it's down to 15%. And so those trend lines should be a wake-up call to people. And those people are policymakers and are politicians. And amongst all the waste that is being highlighted and potential fraud that's being highlighted by Doge, if I were in charge today of the NIH, I wouldn't be shutting down all these grants. I would dictate you probably can't do it on age discrimination. But that it's people that are in their first year of PhD programs or people effectively that are under 30, because I think the average age of grant recipients today is something like 60 or 61. Wow. Wow. So it is young, naive, ambitious people, the very people that we back, that are constantly saying, "Why not?" or "Why does that exist?" or "That sucks. I want to fix it," and giving them the gusto to go and do that as opposed to funding people incrementally and conservatively because they're esteemed and got these political credentials and tenure. No, you want people that are massively driven. That would be the big change I would have to ignite. The fact that people are complaining about people being in the government right now or in DOJ that are 19 years, yes.

Right, right. That's partly cultural. Part of it is maybe an institution problem, which is to say either we don't have enough of them or they're too— Do you think, I mean, you're involved with Santa Fe Institute as an example, You're, you founded a charter school. Is one critique from maybe a slightly more left-minded person would be that some of the institutions being so wrapped up or frankly technologists being wrapped up in commercial endeavors complicates some of this. Do we need more nonprofit or academic-shaped institutions that are, are pushing things this direction? Is, is the root problem that so many of the core academic institutions are corrupt or otherwise? How do you think about that part of the, maybe the educational stack or how do you get people more bought in? How do you get more young people to actually want to work in government?

I think there is a binary classification between the existing systems, the incumbents that are basically comfortable. Go back to the chip on your shoulder or the complacency. And so traditional public schools in New York City, of which I was a product, of which my mother was a public school teacher teaching special ed kids, You have a system that ensures that a teacher that after 3 years gets tenure and they can't be fired. You have removed the competitive drive from these people. You have given them a monopoly on their job. Charter schools are public schools, but the difference is, congratulations, you have a charter and you can operate, but if you fail and your kids are underperforming and the parents revolt, you lose your charter. So suddenly you can fail. You need to have systems that are allowed to fail. If you have a monopoly, whether it is the NIH or USAID or a public school system, You have a single teacher at the front of the room with an asymmetry of 30 or 40 kids in an overcrowded classroom, and they have a monopoly and they cannot be fired. Right. You want people that can be fired because if you can be fired, you are highly motivated to be competitive. So you want systems that are highly competitive. That is why we have SpaceX and Blue Origin, and they're outcompeting NASA in some things because they are highly competitive. And so you want systems that are competitive. Coney Island Prep, the charter school that I founded 15 years ago and have been chair for 15 years, is my last year. It's been an amazing experience. Growing up in Coney Island, kids wanted to be rappers and ballplayers. That's what I grew up on. I grew up on hip-hop and basketball. The odds of being either are infinitely low. And every time that like Puff Daddy or Jay-Z, well, he wasn't actually as bad, but Russell Simmons would come to town and be like, "Keep it real." That was a euphemism for maintaining the status quo and buy my stuff, be a consumer. And what we did was flip the script and said, "No, you're going to be a producer. You're going to produce content, science, writing. You're going to be somebody that is producing something that is valuable to the rest of society." And we're going to change the heroes that you have and you're going to celebrate different people. And so that was really important. Very high expectations. Strip them of having to compete over wearing Air Jordans and everybody's got a uniform and high expectations. And when you enter in kindergarten there, you are entering class of 2035, not kindergarten. There's an expectation that you are going to college. And for 80% of these people, they are the first to attend college in their family. In a family of 4 that's making less than $30,000. It's insane. Go to the other side, Santa Fe Institute, There, it's run by a guy, David Krakauer, who to me is like the ultimate rebel scientist. He is so irreverent and has so many ideas, but he loves to attract outside-the-box thinkers. And the beautiful thing about SFI, the Santa Fe Institute, is you get somebody that's an earthquake seismologist and somebody that's an expert in algorithms for markets, and they're able to connect and be like, "Oh my God, there's a power law distribution of these quakes in the market that follow the quakes in Ecuador or something," and they find these interesting parallels. Is an ant specialist in the behavior of ants and how mathematically ants with no understanding of math perfectly align with 180-degree distance, their food source, and where they put their dead. And so there's all these interesting phenomenons and you get these multidisciplinary people that are these sort of freaks and geeks, irreverent, might not fit into traditional institution, and you put them together and it's like an Avengers sort of legion of science. And so I love being in those kinds of cultures. And they're highly competitive. Scientists love, particularly young, ambitious scientists, to rip down the old guard. That's what you're trying to do. Same thing with musicians. Right, right, right, right. My kids don't want to listen to my music. I mean, they do, but they're defined by their own music and their genres. So it's the same thing with all these fields and you just want competition and the space to let them grow.

It seems like that would be the simplest possible explanation of where we've gone wrong in a lot of the bureaucratic institutionalized government or academic stuff is just simply we have lost the survival of the fittest. We have like allowed those things to calcify. And there are plenty of new consequences that come when you have competition. But like those are, I think, I mean, when I was thinking of when you're talking about the monopolistic academic or educational system is it's, it's similar to when you have a bad monopoly in the private sector, you have bad products that are produced and you actually, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, look, the first time my wife and I both, again, left center left. The first time you have to go to the passport office or the post office or the DMV, you pretty much are destined to become a Republican if you're logical. You're like, "What is going on with the system? Why are there not 4 different competing passport offices fighting to be the fastest, most efficient, cheaper, and best?" The first time Uber came out and you had a monopoly that it was taking on with the Taxi and Limousine Commission and taxis, you're like, "This is so much better. I don't have to jump out into the street and put my hand up and hope that because I'm the wrong skin color, they're not going to pick me up. And I just press a button and they come." There's just a better way, and you want the better ways to be like, we're never going back to that way. And the only way to beat the that way is to destroy monopoly. And the only way to destroy monopoly is with competition. And the way you get competition is by having these institutional imperatives with people that are highly motivated, chips on their shoulders, freedom, capital, rules that let them go and compete and fail.

We have a little bit of time left, and so I want to turn to some questions about you. The first thing I've described you before to people as like this baffling combination of wisdom and child, like almost like childishness or childlikeness. It's this unbelievable fervor and curiosity and energy. There's a, there's a Whole Earth Catalog slash Steve Jobs line, stay hungry, stay foolish, which you feel like, I feel like you really embody. And so I'm curious how you, one, where you get your energy and two, how you bring such a beginner's mindset to so many contexts despite being so accomplished and prolific?

I think it is just entirely intellectually competitive. And at times it does me great disservice because I piss people off. They think I'm a jerk. They think I'm a dick. They think I'm an asshole. And many times I am, but I like to be right and I like to be intellectually competitive. I am almost always asking when I finish a meeting with somebody, "What are you reading? What are you binge-watching? What are you sort of inspired by?" And I get recommendations now. Most of the time somebody's like, "Oh, I just read this book." And I can tell a lot about somebody if they're like, "Oh, I just read the Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson." Brr, boring. Not because it's Walter Isaacson or Steve Jobs, but it's just like everybody's read that. But if somebody's like, "Oh, I was just reading this book from the 1940s that somebody gave me about..." That is interesting because you're going off the beaten path. You're comfortable breaking from the herd. You're not reading the New York Times bestseller list. When I read the papers and I read something like 25, 30 papers in the morning, read them, skimming through, Front page, irrelevant. It's what everybody knows. C22, where the editor has basically said, "Oh, this isn't really worth the news that's fit to print." And I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting. That's a story that nobody has seen yet. That's inspiring." My wife loves top 40 music. I can't stand pop songs. I want the weird edgy stuff. Hacks and Cloak, Mars Volta, Deftones, people that maybe there's 200 listeners or 2,000 listeners, but I find my tribe if I go see them in concert. But otherwise nobody's listening to my stuff. So I like finding that, and it's entirely not by some virtuous pursuit of truth and interest. It is entirely intellectually competitive. I want to know something that you don't know so that I provoke in you a response of like, holy shit, he's smart. It's entirely driven by a vainglorious, now self-aware pursuit of status by being intellectually competitive and knowing something that somebody else doesn't know. And when I find out that somebody knows something that I don't know, I have this deep, almost obsessive insecurity that I need to rectify that and get smart on that as quick as possible. In what we do on a daily basis. I am encountering scientists all the time, and they come in and they talk about this particular biological pathway, or they're talking about this thing in material science for space. And I'm like, "Oh, shit, I don't know about that. I need to learn." So I am confident that we will always be on the frontier because we have a culture here where people are intellectually curious to be open to whoever's coming in with a crazy thing that they want to do, and we're going to believe in them. We're going to research. Sometimes we will invest and then investigate. So we actually put capital at risk, And then try to figure out like what's going on.

Throwing your hat over the wall. Yeah.

And, and that to me, I hope until the day I die or the day that they wheel me out of here because I've gone mentally infirm or something that I get to do that.

Maybe the other side of that would be, you talked about it a little bit, you are so multidisciplinary and I, I probably scratched a tiny element of the surface of, of your world in prepping for this, but like science and research, investing, finance, macro value, media and culture, fiction, history, philosophy, politics. On and on and on. You have this line funnel wide and filter high. You talked about that a little bit, a nice incarnation of the explore-exploit function. You've also said, I want to be able to converse about everything. That's clear. I don't have to focus, but clearly you do focus. You have a rat— like you have a heat-seeking ability to focus. Maybe it's on a shorter time horizon and you go on to the next thing. Do you have strategies or tools or methods that allow you to when you, you're patrolling the surface and then you go like way down in the submarine, how does that like mechanically happen? Because otherwise you, you could easily be the type of person who could talk for 5 minutes on everything, but if you push past that, there's nothing there that I know that's not true. People can tell that in this conversation. So how do you, how do you actually, when, when it comes to, I'm gonna speed go 6 weeks deep on this thing or 3 years on nuclear or whatever it might be, like, how do you actually do that?

It starts with competitive fervor. It starts with an understanding that I think I know what the consensus is in a market, and then I try to find the variant perception, the thing that other people aren't talking about. So it's almost like Sherlock Holmes, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, what's the sound you don't hear? So when I got really interested in nuclear, it was because everybody was talking about solar, wind, biofuels, ethanol. It's like, what are people not talking about? And why? It's the exception. It's the exception. So there was like nuclear. Okay, well, hmm, let me learn as much as I can about nuclear. And then within that, I looked at modular reactors and uranium producers and fuel supply. And then I was like, waste, waste is a really interesting problem. Nobody was focused on waste, and we ended up starting a company, and then we got lucky when Japan got unlucky and we started a company that focused on the Fukushima disaster by accident, and it returned the entirety of our first fund. But that started as a crazy brain fart born in a contrarian idea. I went super deep, went to conferences, talked to probably 350 people over the course of a year and a half, and old guard people, young guard people, people that were discouraging me. So that I just love doing. I love going down a rabbit hole, but it generally is for a short stint of time that I get smart enough, and I learned this from one of our lead partners, Larry Bach, he's like, every scientist you talk to, you need to learn enough so that the next scientist you talk to, you know a little bit from what the last person talked to you, but they're sort of in their own silo, so they may not know what that last scientist— So if you can take a little bit, then it's sort of like Charlie Munger would say, you want to reach into the other person's discipline and then suddenly like, holy shit, how do you know about this? So Alex Wilczko spent his entire life, PhD under Bob Dutta, who trained under Richard Axel, who won the Nobel Prize for olfaction, does a company, starts it, sells Twitter, does another company, goes to Google, Google Research, Google Brain, starts the digital olfaction group. Basically, can we create Shazam for smell? By the time serendipity happened that I'm on another board with a guy, Dave Shankine at Google Ventures on cutting-edge thing for CRISPR delivery called AERA, I share this thesis, "I'm looking for somebody that knows how to digitize smell and reproduce it." That's a directional arrow of progress. It's an inevitability. What are we missing? Is it the sensors? Is it the hardware? Is it the chemical recombinatorial? Is it the map of smells and odors? And he's like, you got to talk to this guy, Alex Wilczek. Totally random and serendipitous. And I meet Alex and he's like, holy shit, I have never met anybody that knows as much about the space. And this is a guy who's obsessive about it.

But part of that is also that it's so niche. You maybe weren't that much of an expert on it, but you had done so much more work than the incremental person.

But I did work in part because I was motivated by that the feeling that I have of either becoming an expert or versed enough when I think that other people aren't. So geopolitics, everybody's like, "Oh, everybody's an armchair geopolitical expert about the thing of the day," which most people are. It's like you get smart, you learn something, and you're posting on Twitter. A lot of people, by the way, talk about the Murray Gell-Mann, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. He's part of it, one of the founding parts of Santa Fe Institute, discovered the quark, wrote an incredible book, The Quark and the Jaguar. And he was famous for the idea that let's say there's something on the front page you know about physics or for him, particle theory, subatomic particles, and you read this thing on New York Times or Wall Street Journal or whatever. You're like, what a piece of crap. These guys know nothing. Then you turn the page, you forget that they know nothing, but now you're reading about war and media and you're like, oh, that's interesting. And so— We all do it. Right. There's an element of that. But I am competitively driven to figure out what are other people not talking about and get smart enough. So geopolitically, everybody's talking about Ukraine, Russia, everybody's talking about Israel, Gaza, everybody's talking about China, Taiwan. What are people not talking about? Sahel and Maghreb in Africa. How do I come across that? Maybe there's a small article in The Economist. Maybe I was at a Council on Foreign Relations event and somebody mentioned this. They say, "Hey, there's a lot of violent extremists that were coming from Afghanistan or Syria and they're going to Mali and Sudan and Niger and Chad." I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting." But nobody's really talking about it. So the thing that people aren't talking about, just like the band, just like that piece of art, just like the neighborhood, just like the new restaurant, is the thing that piques my interest.

Makes it easier to focus in some sense by subtraction.

Because the investment that I'm going to make in getting smart about that is likely to yield social currency to me. So I go deep and learn everything I can about the Sahel and Maghreb, and then I put it into a story and I start telling that story. And so now I have an idea, and when I talk to people, that are experts, that are AFRICOM military folks or former diplomats. And I'm like, look, this is an area that to me is one terror event projected into Europe away from becoming our next Afghanistan. I watched their reaction and they're like, yeah, I agree. I'm like, okay, interesting. I have an interesting thesis. And you've got Russian mercenaries on the ground. They're like, yeah. And you've got Chinese infrastructure plays for telecom and water and roads and dependency. And then you have violent Islamic extremists that are coming in and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, okay, so like in science, you put some of these theses out there. Well, that's not actually right. It's actually this region that's the problem or something, and you correct your thesis, and then the next time I tell it, it gets better. And so it's storytelling combined with a competitive pursuit of having a thesis that other people don't have. Most recently, I was inspired by the fact that everybody, I felt, 2 years ago was racing because the low cost of capital, which I always say the cost of capital is like a tractor beam for the future. When the cost of capital is really low, 1%, 2% interest rates, it's like 20-year far-out ideas that become these 20-month frenzy projects. And Elon has an ability to lower the cost of capital in anything he does. But on average, most people are like, "Oh, we can do Hyperloop and we're going to build space elevators and we're going—" So I'm looking and saying, "Everybody's going from SaaS into deep tech, and we've been here sort of in the wilderness alone, and everybody's coming. What are people not talking about?" So I'm like, "Okay, well, low interest rates, everybody's funding growth." When you think about a financial statement, you've got CapEx, you've got growth and maintenance. Hmm, maintenance. That's really unsexy. Nobody's talking about maintenance. And so suddenly I go deep on this idea of maintenance and I'm like, wait a second, this is logical. If I'm a CFO or the board and I'm thinking about capital allocation for a company, all of a sudden I'm not thinking about how do I spend more money if the cost of capital rises? Well, why would the cost of capital rise? You've got a de-risking or a pivot away from China and more domestic onshoring. You have a slightly more jingoistic new administration. You have a lot of purported dry powder that maybe is actually quote unquote wet because people are under-reserved. There's a lot of reasons that the cost of capital would rise. So if the cost of capital rises, the incremental decision that a big company is making outside of AI and for CapEx is not going to be for growth. It's going to be for how do we maintain our existing systems? And then I go and I start sharing that with people and different disciplines. In military, you talk to Sam Paparo, who's the head of Indo-Pacom, and he'll say, my '69 Camaro properly maintained, will blow your 2024 Tesla out of the water. And the same thing is true in military systems. We spend 20, 30% on operations and maintenance. So I'm like, huh, there's no company today that's really focused on high-tech surveillance, sensors, robotics, automation for maintaining these big systems. And so that's how theses develop. I try to find the weak signal, construct it into a narrative, test that narrative, refine it, and then we go deploy capital.

You're obsessed with illuminating the darker parts of the field of view, if that makes sense.

I think so. And apropos, fiat lux, let there be light.

Right. I'm a strong believer that genius and dysfunction are two sides of the same coin. Are there deficiencies or dysfunctions, at least in the way you viewed them previously, that you have leaned more into over the years or that you wish you had leaned into earlier?

Yes. And this is sort of in that mindfulness meditation thing for the individual. I am highly emotional, highly vengeful and vindictive. It is not a great virtue of a personality that I would want my kids to model in many aspects. And thankfully I have counterparts in both my wife Lauren and my co-founder Peter that have the antithesis kind of personality. So it's a balancing thing. If I was alone, I'd probably be more self-destructive in that way. So I think having a partner that is a yin and yang to balance out the positivity and negativity is one thing. The single most important thing that I wish I would've learned, which I only learned less than a decade ago through family therapy, is the idea of CBT or DBT, cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectic behavioral therapy, which I can condense down all the money and the time that we spent into a few things. When somebody is upset, whether it's my daughter or son, my wife, a partner, a CEO, the worst thing you can do is debate them on why what they're feeling is ridiculous to feel. My daughter's upset because she can't get her shoe on when she was 3 or something. I'm like, "What are you doing? Just get your damn shoe on. We got to go." Yelling at her. My wife would say, I'd be like, "What do you mean?" These things that lead to fights and conflicts, a CEO upset or a CTO upset about their CEO and invalidating an emotion, all it does is add fuel to the fire and them feeling like they don't understand. Calm down. Yeah. Calm down. You're freaking out. Worst thing you could say. So I learned if my daughter's upset, I can say, "I completely understand and can see you're really upset," in a sincere way. Not, "I can see you're really upset," which is totally different, but like, "I can see you're really upset." All of a sudden you can see this feeling of exhalation and validation. So validate the emotion. It doesn't mean you have to agree with the person. So I can say, "I can see you're really upset and you—" You can't punch your sister in the face. The second thing is never say "but." People learn this from improv to inspire creativity. The second you say "but," you invalidate everything that came before. Jackson, I love you, but— And people in relationships say that. Josh, I love you, but— The second you say "but," you invalidate and you're basically presaging that you're about to be critical. And so if you just change that to an "and" of, "I love you and what you did made me feel like—" People are more receptive to it. Because in both cases, you're otherwise provoking them to just be defensive and become more emotional, and you don't get to that. So that would be something that I would say I'm very grateful. My wife, one of her best friends is this woman, Molly Carmel, who's a psychologist and therapist and focuses on eating disorders and has helped extraordinary people in the scions of billionaires and fascinating. And she really helped us with this as a family and has become an integral part of reducing the dysfunction of dysregulated people that are highly emotional. My wife and I are both alpha people. My kids are all alpha people. And so that has made us just a way tighter, more loving, more understanding family. We're imperfect at times, but it's just like, that is something I wish everybody would learn. I wish that we would teach it in schools. It doesn't take any of the ambition or intensity out of your pursuit of wanting to be competitive, but it makes you more effective. And I learned that my daughter doesn't walk into a room and a CEO doesn't walk into a room and one of my partners doesn't walk into a room thinking, "You know what? I really want to say something really stupid and piss everybody off right now with horrible consequences." No, you suddenly become empathetic to say they don't have the skills to walk into this situation and regulate their emotions and be effective. So that is the biggest thing I wish that I would've learned earlier.

And in some sense, that allows you to lean more into being who you are, assuming you have those that scaffolding or those guardrails. You seem to be someone who cares a lot about control, although you've talked also about maybe getting into surfing and some of the zen there, but you're like, you're obsessed with imagining failure. You're obsessed with sort of maximizing outcomes and information. Like, what is your current relationship slash have you eased up on that in any way? Or have you, have you loosened your grip on control in any way?

I don't think so. My, my, my kids, my wife say, oh, you're You're still a control freak. So I believe, I tell myself the story that some of these physical pursuits like surfing or jiu-jitsu, that there's things that you literally can't control. And there's a poetic romantic aspect of it that I'm self-aware of. And it is true, you versus the ocean, the ocean wins every time. But you learn techniques and how to be calm and you end up being better. And by the way, it's the same thing in jiu-jitsu where I try to use strength and force and I lose every time. And then you learn technique and how to be calm and you wait and okay. And in both of those cases, it feels very different than basketball, which I love. Basketball, I feel like through repetition, the basket is not moving. Your defender's going to change all the time. Your teammates are going to change. The situation's going to change. Opportunity to pass or shoot or defend, whatever. But I feel like every time I surf, the waves are different, the water conditions are different. You might be on a different board. Every time you fight in jiu-jitsu, it's the same sort of thing in that it's just different every time. So that at least—

Life's closer to surfing than basketball, I think.

I think so. And yeah, you also are not going to have a risk other than heart attack, maybe, of dying in basketball. But I would say those two pursuits physically, are the closest that I can get to meditation because I cannot really sit still. But if you accept the premise that anxiety is nervousness or forecasting or simulating, but sort of emotional distress about the future and wanting a sense of control about the future, and depression is feeling the exact same thing about a different time, which is the past. People are upset, they're stuck in something, they can't get out of it, they feel regret, but they're basically two different temporal extremes, anxiety in the future and depression in the past. To be in the moment is like you're not thinking about the future or the past. And so when surfing, you're like, "Don't die. Catch a wave." In jiu-jitsu, you're like, "Don't get submitted." The stakes being high actually helps you settle into it. So I think in those cases. Now, I also think that I am emotionally or intellectually aware of where that comes from. And again, this is a story of my life and a story that I tell myself. And you can go to the Ted Chiang story of Story of our lives.

Yeah. Or story of your life, I should say.

My mother was entirely well-intentioned. She was and is an extraordinary loving mother and an incredible model for me of being a mom who sacrificed everything for me. When I was 8, August 28th, 1986, there was a knock on the door and there were 2 detectives and they were coming to take me to my dad. My mother did not prepare me for this. She knew what was happening, but I think she couldn't, I don't know, she couldn't. And so for me, there's a moment that I processed through therapy of leaving my apartment and walking down the hall with these two strangers and going to see my father who I hadn't seen in 6 years or whatever. To me, my world got pulled out from under me. So this pursuit of control to me in a little t trauma psychological sense is very rooted in the world can change in a second. Failure comes from a failure to imagine. Failure is my psychological protective mechanism of trying to avoid the pain, the stress, the panic of what could happen. And so if I'm constantly thinking about all this bad shit that can happen, which is itself this act of sort of negative creativity, then I can be emotionally prepared. Right, right. And I try not to project that onto my kids. I try to do it as a practical thing. But to them, they know another quote from me, which is that it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. So an umbrella, an extra sweater, Some money, extra credit card, toothbrush, whatever. Just make sure you have it.

What's the most important thing you learned from your mom?

High expectations, selflessness. She used to always say when I was younger, as I think probably every parent does, you won't understand until you have kids why I do this or whatever. I say those things to some of my kids now. I've got 3, 15, 12, and 9. And I understand what they don't understand because I didn't understand it when my mother understood it, and eventually they will. But I think that's it. And to me, the single most important asset, the single most important thing that I have in my life is my nuclear family. And I worry that because I didn't have that growing up and I have it now, that my kids might take it for granted. So we talk a lot about my childhood. But yeah, that to me is the most important thing I learned from my mother is the selflessness of her sacrifice for me, truly And you can't understand that until you become a parent, that you go from being basically focused on yourself to suddenly like, I would throw myself in front of a bus for this little alien that is just puking and pooping on you.

My last question, you've talked about, I think you briefly mentioned earlier, both your wife and your partner Peter on the business are optimists, maybe slightly to your cynicism. Where have they swayed you most on the optimistic front?

Both of them say the same thing to me often, which is like, why do you need to pick up a fight with that person? They're like, what do you gain? Pete will always say, what are you solving for? And Lauren will always say, how does that benefit you or us? And oftentimes they're right. But I would say there's some aspect of me that thrives on conflicts and confrontation, and neither of them need that at all. Pete is a total peacemaker. Pete will go into a room, Pete is the number one person that if we have a conflict at a company, we will send in to fix because he truly can understand people. He can empathize with them. When we have conflicts internally, and it is a superpower of his, and I think Lauren is the same way. She has an extraordinary intuition of people and understanding. We'll be watching a TV show and I don't think I'm autistic in this, but I'll be like, "I don't understand." She's like, "How do you not understand what's going on between those two people?" So that is probably the thing that I've learned from them is you don't need to pick a fight with everybody. And a combination of my friends growing up, we all chided each other. Brooklyn is a tough place. I don't know. I thrive on conflict, but they've tempered that.

Has your ability to trust people evolved as a result of either of those relationships?

No. I think I still expect And that is frankly having a good balance because I think Pete's default thing is trust them and if they let you down, okay. My protective mechanism is assume the worst. And if I can't figure out your agenda, then I'm really distrusting. If I can understand what drives and motivates you and I think I at least have a model, a framework, a narrative for what is driving you, then I feel comfortable. Okay.

I know I said last question. One more. You answered a question in the vein of legacy in the past by basically saying you want to be on your deathbed surrounded by kids and people you love, and it's selfish, but you hope they'll really miss you. I don't know when that was, at least a few years ago. Thinking about that now, thinking about that in the context of so much of what we talked about and Lux and your life's work, what do you want to be remembered for?

I read obituaries every day. Sometimes I post them, the interesting ones. And it's never for the achievement that some stranger is going to celebrate. And you think about the great iconic people, Steve Jobs. I used to have this debate with one of my best friends who's a famous journalist, and he was like, "Steve Jobs is one of the most beloved people." I'm like, "By strangers that don't know him." But a lot of the people that were the closest to him resented him. They weren't like, "Good riddance." they were really unsettled. I watched when my grandfather died, he was my step-grandfather, his son at the funeral who he was not close with and did not have a relationship with threw dirt on the grave and not in an honorable way, in a good riddance and walked off and it was this animus. And I was like, holy shit, I do not want that. And I deeply want my kids to very much like that Warren Buffett quote of Don Keough from Coca-Cola, his eulogy, was like everybody loved him. Everybody does not love me and they will not love me. But the people that I care the most about, which are effectively my kids and my wife and my closest friends, they're the people that matter most in my life. Thank you. This was great. Great to be with you, man.

Hey, Jackson again. Before I leave you, a couple of quick notes. One, if you're enjoying Dialectic, I'd really appreciate a rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or a thumbs up on YouTube. The podcast is new and every little bit helps. You can also subscribe or follow on any of those platforms if you haven't found them. I'm posting the videos on Twitter and YouTube as well as the audio. If you'd like to stay up to date on future episodes, you can subscribe on all podcast platforms as well as YouTube. And Dialectic is also on Twitter and Instagram. We also have a Telegram channel that I've linked to in the description, and you can find the full transcript for episodes on my website and also linked in the description. If you have notes on the show, feedback, or even guest ideas, I'm all ears. You can email me at pod@jacksondahl.com or message me on social platforms. Thanks again for listening. It means a whole lot. See you next time.