33 Josh Wolfe - The Mind Financing The Future

Hello, this is Eric with a few thoughts to share that have been on my mind this week. Before we get to this episode's conversation, I want to share a line of thinking that many of you initially may find somewhat unsettling. Nevertheless, I believe that at least some of you will find it interesting and perhaps ultimately even liberating or useful. The theory is when powerful people use their advantage to engage in new involuntary transfers of wealth, safety, or freedom from those too, we themselves, the winners, are almost always forced to create an idealism as a cover for their siphoning. In simpler terms, these idealisms are actually cover stories or bespoke fig leaves which almost exactly fit the extraction or taking that they are tailored to mask. Once this is understood, we realize that to test this theory, each wave of idealism would have to be matched to a highly specific, effective confession for an injustice that pervaded the era in which it was found. This concept of idealism as disguising theft is of course an upsetting cognitive shift. It is therefore naturally, initially difficult to come to see the waves of idealism that characterized each era that we have lived through not as the best of our aspirations for a better world, but rather as the photographic negative of the greed of our own ruling classes. For example, the idealism of United States competitiveness was Everywhere in the 1980s and early to mid-1990s. At that time it seemed to be about the need for all Americans to pull together and get back into fighting shape as a country. Looking below the surface, however, it was not really about the need of managers, owners and workers to pull together through shared austerity to reinvigorate American industry. Rather, it was a false idealism that instructed organized American labor to give up hard won gains that were then not matched by comparable sacrifices from the other groups. Once United States labor had been sufficiently humbled and attenuated in its power by the mid-1990s, the drumbeat of patriotic competitiveness gave way to the post national Davos idealism of a world without borders singing the praises of financial inclusion, trade, immigration and philanthropy with the maudlin sentiments of 1985's We Are the World as its anthem. The purpose of the post national movement was not to include those overseas, but instead to allow the wealthy of the industrialized world to break the bonds with their fellow citizens of the working class and to access cheaper labor pools abroad using far flung supply chains. Likewise, the idealism of so called constructive engagement with governments like Communist China's would be seen through this lens as the rationalization for ignoring issues of human rights and strategic risk in such a way as to benefit economically in the short term while selling out American interests in the long term. Meanwhile, back home in the States, the techno utopian perspective that arose to dominate the Bay Area of California held that information just wants to be free and that now transcendental transparency is king because privacy is dead. Perversely, as you would expect in this theory, this hippie dippy sounding digital vision is exactly what ushered in the surveillance economy as the platforms became not windows but half silvered mirrors through which the social media barons learned every intimate detail about their users. These startups turned techno behemoths turned the most intimate personal details of our private lives into their proprietary business data, which was as far from free or transparent as one could possibly imagine. The idealism of gender and identity too, fits this exact pattern. Second wave feminism seemed to be about recognizing the intrinsic worth of women in the workforce, but it may also be seen as an employer's dream to push out the labor supply curve in such a way as to make the previous single breadwinner household require a second income just to keep pace. The politics of identity which caught fire in the wake of the 2010 Colorado Senate upset, are explained largely by economist p.m. alani's theory that identity is the cheapest substitute for the labor voting bloc, which demanded far more significant economic concessions. More bizarrely, the strange media ritual of pointing the finger of Islamophobia at anyone who dares ask about a mass murder in which the killer triumphantly shouts Allahu Akbar amidst bloody and sadistic mayhem may well be about protecting transfer payments from oil rich monarchies, While the official admonition to see the niqab, hijab, burqa and clitorectomy predominantly as ethnic differences or symbols of female liberation, and is so absurd as to go a long way towards establishing the need for some theory as this to fill the space. The left leaning idealism of making housing affordable for all led to many bad loans that inflated the housing bubble, while the right leaning Ayn Randian idealism of self regulating markets practiced by Alan Greenspan allowed the banks to privatize gains while socializing the risks and losses. The Giving Pledge too may well be an attempt to keep governments from clawing back unpaid taxes from carefully sheltered fortunes or establishing wealth and asset taxes in a period of radical inequality. In this sense it can be seen.

As something of a bargain.

If I promise to screw over my own children for charity, I hope that you will leave me alone and unquestioned to enjoy my vast and carefully sheltered wealth while I am alive. And as we have just seen with the Biden endorsements from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and former Senator Hillary Clinton, the MeToo movement appears to be less about sexual assault and more about adding a tool for extrajudicial vigilantism which can be wielded selectively or kept sheathed according to taste. Suffice it to say that believeallwomen has now given way to believeconvenientwomen. So you may ask, why bring this up now? Well, in my opinion what we need now is someone who is not part of any of the official idealisms. Of course that would have sounded quite weird in isolation if I had simply said that we need an anti utopian to lead us. Wouldn't we want someone of vision, a dreamer, do or hybrid to point the way? No, we want someone who has not signed on for any of these horrible anti patriotic charades from either party. Someone who never believed in free trade, free markets, post nationalism, housing for all, deregulation, competitiveness, etc etc. We need someone who is not close with Jeffrey Epstein and who does not possess significant financial relationships abroad. Additionally, someone alienated by both the hardline pro life and pro choice perspectives would be perfect for where most Americans are today. Since the time of Nixon we have been in an era of predatory idealism with our best impulses used against us from both right and left. It is now time to get back to the hard work of cleaning up from two disastrous generations of failed business people, politicians, reporters and professors. And perhaps most importantly, we need to flush our dependence on near totalitarian communist China out of our system before it is too late. So I will leave you with this. One of the false idealisms that I have held back is the fight against ageism. The current seniors in firm control of our world benefited immensely from mandatory retirement policies for their elders and a general sense that used to be common this was that long term policy should be made by those who will have to live for many years in the world that they will create. By 2009 when Joe Biden, for example left the Senate to become Vice President, he was already quite advanced as the fourth most senior senator at the time. But he had actually been a senator at that point for 37 years since 1972 when he was first elected at the age of 29. As luck would have it, this is almost exactly the year in which wages suddenly and mysteriously stagnated after 25 or so magical years of post war technologically led growth. This stagnation is what ushered in all of the false idealisms that we have discussed here previously. We need young and dynamic people again to reinvigorate our society, but 50 years of fake idealisms have now piled up to create an unequal nation that cannot be explained by productivity. Most all of our idealisms have been poisonous and from both left and right. In that at least, we have been relentlessly bipartisan for almost 50 years. After a few brief words from our sponsors, I'll be back with the introduction to today's episode. Returning Sponsor Persona has been making razors for almost 145 years, and I've recently shifted over completely to Persona's men's five blade razor.

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In previous eras I have heard many different names, but lately I've been hearing the name Josh Wolff from some of the people I respect most. Josh is a founder of Lux Capital and the owner of a powerful and unusual mind the thing I always have to remind myself about venture capital is just how many different skills it requires to do well. Even our best ideas are subjected to numerous hazards on the way to implementation, including intellectual property challenges, fraud, fierce competitors, interpersonal dysfunction, loss of funding, marketing failures, regulatory hurdles, and a host of other concerns. Thus, rather than talking about venture capital specifically, I thought I would try to explore the idea that most all leading venture capitalists are great intellectual generalists, conversationalists and contrarians. Now, why would that be? Well, first of all, investing in technology requires having a broad analytic base, because when you are trying to invent the future, you never really know how to prepare for the next large opportunity that is going to walk through your door. Thus, the generalist's ability to integrate many different areas of interest will typically be able to out compete the specialist's advantage in a very narrow silo of knowledge. Next, conversational skill seems to be very important, but at a technical level this is true in part because it is often easier to tell whether someone is genuine and on top of their game by testing them on intellectual flexibility and insight well outside of their carefully prepared pitch. And it is easiest to do this if you can put that person at ease. Lastly, I wanted to say something about contrarianism, namely that it is actually misnamed. Simply putting a minus sign in front of whatever the crowd appears to believe is an excellent way to go bankrupt quickly and really has nothing to do with being a contrarian. If you think about it, contrarianism is usually not so much about whether the crowd is wrong, but about exploring in what highly specific ways the world may not be alert to possibilities or courageous enough to consider their implications. In this episode I think Josh reveals that his mind and approach exemplifies all these traits in spades. This first meeting took place at the end of 2019, and I have become an eager consumer of his thinking in the time since. If you want to hear what the crest of the new wave of venture capitalists sound like in 2020, you could do worse than to listen to Josh Wolf of Lux Capital for the ease and fearlessness with which he appears to explore any landscape of new ideas. We will be right back with my uninterrupted conversation with Josh after these words from our sponsors. 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Foreign. Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and today I'm joined by none other than Josh Wolf, the co founder of Lux Capital. Josh, welcome.

Great to be here.

So I've heard a lot about you. You have a tremendous amount of respect right now from a lot of the innovators that I'm listening to in technology, and they think that maybe you've got the ball with respect to venture capital. Can you tell me a little bit not about venture capital, but about what you can see from the perch of venture capital that the rest of us might not be able to see at the moment, in terms of this moment in time in our innovative history?

Well, I think the probably cliched thing of venture generally, and this extends beyond us specifically, is the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And the people who are inventing it are the scientists and typically engineers that, often inspired by science fiction, say, I want that thing to be real. And then they go and make it so. And our job is to basically find them before others have and take this asymmetric view. It's sort of the power of somebody who has a secret. I think it was the Nobel laureate who had the quote that, you know, I know something that nobody else knows, and they won't know until I tell them. And it's that sort of power and that asymmetry that we're trying to find just as investors. So we go and scour the world trying to find really cutting edge technologists and engineers and entrepreneurs that are building the future. And then we have to figure out if they're full of shit or not.

That's a great place to be. There's a famous story about Eddington, who I guess was the first person to Sort of test Einstein's general theory that he was courting his lady love on a bench, looking at the night sky and his gal said something like, how beautiful are the night stars? And he says, yes. And right now I'm the only person on earth who knows why they shine. Talk about great patter. So you're looking for secrets, but you actually stepped into an area that I'm passionate about, which is I'm terrified that our actual innovators, the people who really break the new ground, get completely screwed over in the feeding chain because they have to invent the future out of personal need. And so they're not watching the ball. And you see the same thing in music, that the people who love the music are often preyed upon to some extent by the industry, which is extremely extractive. If you don't survive long enough to learn how the game goes, very often you wind up as prey for the predators that are supposedly simply helping the value chain along. Do you see that at the moment?

Well, I think that's a firm by firm kind of thing. So if we were predatory upon.

Oh, sorry, this has nothing to do with Lux Capital.

Yeah, no, no, I know, I know. But I think generally this is a sidebar. If I can go off on a tangent here, which is the transactional nature of certain businesses. I think about Turkish rug salesman or something, you go to the Blue Mosque and you go to the bazaar, you have a one time interaction with that person. The game theory of it is that they can completely screw you over because they're never going to see you again and they'll churn three people in venture capital. Generally I think that it's a game theoretic where I'm only as good as the last deal that I did and I've got to maintain a long term reputation that's compromised if somehow you exploit somebody because your reputational very quickly spread in a negative way.

That assumes that the person who's going to be exploited is the CEO that's coming to seek the venture capital. But what if, for example, the real innovator is buried inside the company and the person who's claiming to be the technologist is sort of the visible head at the top. Maybe that person gets a good enough deal because of the repeated games aspect, just to take the game theory part of it seriously, but that in fact the problem is that the person who is actually the technologist is in fact too busy solving problem writing code or soldering joints or doing something that means that they can't actually watch all of the games that are getting played.

Yeah, it's possible. I think that the best ones that I see tend to attract really talented people. And most of the really smart technologists can identify if somebody is really trying to exploit them or not. I think the best entrepreneurs, the people who are maybe taking a technology and trying to commercialize it, I think they have that same sort of game theoretic of wanting to be good actors of the long term. There's no doubt there's bad scientific actors who are liars and bullshit artists, there's bad technologists, there's bad entrepreneurs. But I don't know that there's an epidemic of scientists or PhDs that are toiling away and being exploited. I'm more worried about the deception or the BS artists who are faking it and are actually bilking investors.

Well, it's from the other side. In other words, I see a two way game where you have predatory investors and predatory charlatans. Sometimes you have to of course adjust for the fact that people are fooling themselves. They're at least being kind enough to fool themselves before fooling anyone else.

Right. And self deception is probably the best evolve mechanism to deceive somebody else.

Right. As we were, we were talking both to each other.

That's interesting. I would think that the payback that the consequence of an investor exploiting somebody who was maybe gullible, naive or just scientifically innocent, I think it would be pretty swift. I think somebody would say wait, what happened? You only owned what percent? And I think that person would end up getting a really bad rep pretty quickly. I think there's a natural.

Mariana Matsucato has made an economics career out of claim that the majority of the work happens government for right is funded by government, effectively by taxpayers and that the taxpayer effectively socializes the cost of developing and then the sort of last mile towards invention is handled by the industry where the rewards are incredibly handsome.

Yeah, I think there's elements of her argument that have merit. A lot of the things that government has historically funded that she talks about are these base infrastructure things, the substrates upon which an inventor then has some novel, often variant idea. And then they say okay, let's take that and run with it. And then you still need somebody to then take that risk and say okay, we're going to turn that into a product, we're going to build a company around it. And that typically is a profit seeking venture capitalist or a co founder that says let's go do it.

Sure.

But like a Tim Berners Lee or a Francis Cricket or a Jim Watson or a Bill Shockley or Rosalind Franklin. Yeah. Although I'm not a huge fan of the Rosalind Franklin theory of the double helix construction, I think that she was a much better scientist than Watson or Crick from the perspective, or Wilkins, maybe even from the perspective of regularity and skepticism. But they were wild eyed risk takers. And the fact that they were perhaps great scientists but not good scientists at that point. And so there's this the way it shakes out. She was a really great, she was a really good scientist. They were great scientists, but not good scientists. Like they decided it had to be a helix on the basis of the Maltese Cross, which was scant evidence. And she quite correctly said that you guys are probably too influenced by Linus Pauling's alpha helix. But anyway, I mean that's a contrarian view that we can't hold because for some reason, because so many women have been treated unfairly in science, it's become very popular to say, well Rosalind Franklin did the work.

No, but it's not about the work in her case. It's more just like the attribution of credit. There are a lot of women, they.

Were extractive upon her work. So there's no question in my mind that we have to acknowledge that that's true.

No, I'm not trying to give her more credit than she deserves, but I, that history treated her and now it's sort of rectifying itself.

But yeah, I think, I think there's an aspect, but, but Watson and Crick were huge value adds in that system.

Yeah, nothing to take away from them.

Yeah, sure.

But Jim by the way, gave me the best advice I ever got. Tea at his house. And you know, and, and they don't let him go out very often now because he says you had it recently, five years ago, six years ago.

Okay, I think I had him three years ago.

Okay, so, so, and I'd love to hear, you know, but, but his, his, his, his quote, which I think is a beautiful double entendre is avoid boring people and avoid boring you and avoid people who are boring. And I think everybody that you hang out with I think are not boring people. And I think he, his standard is even higher.

Well, I think actually we should talk about this because I'm very frustrated that his boorishness and his desire to stick his finger in the eye of sensibilities has cheated us of one of the great sages of science. And so my quote I think is that Jim Watson is far too important to be left to Jim Watson, that we can't afford to have Jim Watson screw up all of the stuff that he figured out.

Well, this is interesting because it ties back to the thing we were just talking about, about whether it's capitalist exploitation of a scientist or a scientist's own reputation against the political correct environment. How do you separate, and this is, you know, something that I think transcends into Hollywood and elsewhere. How do you separate the artist from the art? How do you separate the scientist from their discoveries when they might behave in a way that is socially unacceptable?

Well, there's a certain amount of gym that is fugu. Right. So you have to. You're served up pufferfish. It's not that you can't eat it. In fact, a little bit of toxin plays beautifully on the tongue. But if you consume the wrong organ, that's going to be really fatal. Jim had all sorts of positive characteristics. And the problem is that you've got generations of people who've been taught, if there's anything wrong, then there's no fugu chef that's safe enough.

100% dismissal.

Yeah.

And I do think, I mean, that's generally, and I know it's something that you're drawing, I think, important attention to is the idea of cancel culture, that somebody makes one footfall and the tolerance for that is virtually nil. And so, you know, people who have great contributions for society are going to be shut down and say, you know, they're advised by people who care about them. You got to stay low, you got to stay out of the limelight, you got to stay out of the public. And I actually think he, Jim had people that were trying to help him to, you know, you know, sort of be a council conciliary like when he was going to things, because I think he felt, on the one hand entitled to just speak his mind.

Yeah. This was the great privilege of actually understanding not only natural and sexual selection, but its molecular embodiment in genetics and epigenetics, with the result of his discovery. Now, part of the problem, just to be very blunt about it, is that biology is terrifying. If you actually understand biology, it is in some sense like the worst possible collection of truths you could ever happen upon. There's something to offend everybody for every occasion. So if you believe that the world should be a nice and beautiful place.

You don't want to study biology.

Well, you have no choice but to not be a biologist. You can't do it. And in fact, you have to leave the room. When biology is being discussed. Because if you want any horrific trait that's found in the world to be explained rationally, I can find you a perfect system that serves up that bad.

Traitor.

And shows that motherhood isn't what you think it is, trust isn't what you think it is. Every bad thing happens.

This I actually agree with. In fact, if you think about most of the books that are written about biology, evolutionary biology, psychology, they're all like the true nature of this or why we do these things. And it is in part, I think, that there has been a lot of, you know, papering over or desensitizing of what true human nature is and true human nature is. And maybe this seems too Hobbesian, but, you know, it is dark. We are competitive social primates. We try to outwit each other and take advantage of each other. We have idealistic views. That is the thing that is taboo to go against. But I agree with you. I think human nature itself, rooted in biology, is quite dark.

Well, I think once you've paid the price in biology and you've seen all of the darkness and you've reconciled yourself to the fact that there's no escape from the darkness, then a new door opens. And then you start to realize that ethics are in some sense a means of out competing groups that lack them. That if you have an ethical system, you may be able to defeat a prisoner's dilemma that would befuddle your rival. And therefore you're in the position after a while to take their land and their resources because they're always squabbling amongst themselves for position.

Yeah, There's a great Jack Handy quote that I'm going to get roughly right, which is, I imagine Jack Handy, the great evolutionary theorist. Exactly. From snl. I imagine a world where people live in peace and harmony and love. And I imagine us attacking that world because they will never expect it.

That's very funny. Do you remember Steve Martin had this wishes for Christmas or something? It starts off with, my first wish for Christmas is for all the babies in the world to be happy and healthy in their mother's arms. And then 12 wishes in, he wants the aerobics instructor and the Porsche. And it's like, it's just. It evolves, it's completely. Yes. Every politically incorrect thing that you would actually want. So I guess in this framework, one of the things that's really important to realize is that when people can't handle reality and in fact make it impossible to speak openly, you're creating niches of opportunity for people who can Handle reality and who can serve up fugu, who can cut out the bad parts. So I learned more from Jim Watson in a week by learning how to just ignore his incredibly. I mean, he just has a need to be badly behaved in order to keep checking in that he's still a free person.

It's interesting because he may do it for the provocation, the stimulation of the provocation, to be able to see that he gets a rise out of somebody. Right. Which itself is a form of intellect, to know that I'm going to say something wittingly that might piss you off or make you unsettled. There is an entire class of people who we pay to reveal these kinds of truths.

Media.

Yes. And I find them absolutely fascinating because they are, to me, they are investigative journalists, scientists of human nature. You know, scientists study things, social scientists study things, who study things. And comedians, to me, reveal these great truths. And they are given permission on a stage to say the things that people might be thinking but be afraid to say. And, I mean, there's so many people.

I don't think they're given permission. They're given an opportunity.

No, they're given permission because you consent. You consent when you're going in there, that you are going to be offended. And I know clearly there's a minority of people that you hear stories of people walking out. And Chappelle has talked about stories of this with transgender people that have walked out. And he overtly will say, I can't stop telling transgender jokes. And he does this in a funny way and reveals these truths. But I actually think we give them consent when we sit down.

We give them initial consent to try. And then if you look at what happened to Michael Richards.

Well, because you have this issue where.

The cell phone first of all breaks. It used to be that the space.

Yeah, no, that's okay.

It's like namespace pollution in Python. You think that you're having a conversation at 2am with consenting adults who want to be offended.

Right. And there's an.

And then suddenly you're talking to your grandmother on Sunday morning about the video that's circulated.

Right. With no context.

Exactly. Yeah. And in that case, no skill like that was not a funny routine. He tried and he failed, and he paid a very large price for trying and failing. And I think that you have to appreciate that if we are giving them consent, it's very tenuous. It's up to us to retract.

Is interesting, though, because I do think that the funniest things that are both most Psychically relieving the release, like when you have this great laugh, are often the most taboo topics. And again, that's a certain brand of humor. But the people that touch the third rail. We just went to a comedy show last week in New York.

Comedy seller.

No, it was the Stand, and I wish I could remember the comic's name. I'm doing a horrible injustice, but I'm not gonna tell the jokes. But they talked about school shootings, and they talked about the current environmental movement against plastics. In the latter case, he's talking about turtles and straws. And this was a phenomenon that. That amazed me. There's no way a decade ago or two decades ago straws would have been obsolesced like that. Plastic straws. I happen to like plastic straws. I know that's probably taboo. Maybe it's politically incorrect, but, like, I don't. Like I use four paper straws instead of one plastic straw. But he was saying, like, you know, people are saying, save the turtles. Do you know how old the average turtle lives? It's like, people are like 70 years. He's like, 200 years. These things live three times as long as us, you know, and we're telling.

It's very funny.

Okay, so. But it put it in perspective. But then he went on to this school shooting thing, and if I told you without the context that it was a comedy club, that you were going to take 150 or 200 people and put them in a room and talk about school shootings, and they would be hysterically laughing like that moment. That phenomenon was just confounding to me. And everybody in there felt really uncomfortable even laughing at the topic. But he did it in such an artful way.

This is it.

To get to a truth, which is.

In general, we don't have the Indiana Jones ability to steal the thing we want and put the sandbag. And it's exactly the same weight.

Right.

And this is the. And I guess I get really. I discriminate very strongly between comedians of great skill and comedians who are just gonna go for it. And, you know, they're two. They're two very different kinds. Like, one just shocks you for the sake of shocking you. And sometimes you. And sometimes. And sometimes you marry the two. I don't know if you've ever watched the Gilbert Gottfried's version of the Aristocrats joke to signal that it was okay to laugh after nine.

Eleven.

Yes. Yeah. Wait, was this in the pen and Teller produced one. The movie the Aristocrats.

I don't know. I Saw a clip of it.

Yeah. And what's the name, too. Who I never expected was Pop Saget.

Oh, Bob Saget's famous for working blue, but having a squeaky clean image. Lots of people did that. There was another one of these jokes in SNL where I think Lorne Michaels turns to Rudy Giuliani and says, is it okay to be funny? And he says, why start now? And there's this moment where it's the first time after something traumatic that you're.

Saying it's okay to laugh.

Well, there's that. Or there's another version of this, which is. Was it. Yves Saint Laurent was the first one to introduce sumptuous fabrics after World War II to signal rationing is now over. Or coming back to Eddington. Eddington's discovery of the bending of light in the crook of Africa around Sao Tome was the first positive thing that a European had done other than mowing somebody down in trench.

But that is interesting, generally. And even the way that you phrase the earlier question about, you know, where. Where we are in this moment of science is like, there are these moments, and those moments are shared moments. And suddenly it's like, there's a temperature. There's an emotional temperature, you know, in society, in the room. And, like, where are we? Is it okay to laugh? Is it okay to be silly? Is it okay to be. And. And that. That itself is an interesting phenomenon of, like, what is the. You know, what is the shared collective temperature? And who gets to set that? And sometimes it is, you know, the. You know, sometimes it's the shocking moment. It's. It's Kanye in the Katrina. You know, when you stand next to Mike Myers and shocks people, right. And changes the conversation, and it's a completely diverted shift.

I love watching Mike Myers.

No, he's just like, wait, what?

Wait, wait.

And that itself is genius because, you know, he himself is a master of comedy and delivery and surprise. And the fact that he had, like, no idea that that was coming, that moment with a white guy and a black guy, and the context and, like.

The play is, like, so clean cut. He just looks.

I mean, but that was, like a great defining moment. And there's nobody predicted that. That informational surprise in that moment, it made it okay to talk about this uncomfortable thing that was there but nobody was actually comfortable talking about anyway. So in that moment, I think he did it with deep gravitas, but it was a funny moment. And so going back to this idea, comedians revealed great truths. I also think it's why. And I'm making a horrible generalization because I know you're also friends with a lot of comedians, but I think a lot of them are like, seriously depressed because they see truth.

Oh, dude. They all talk about how screwed up comedians are. You don't have to worry. They're aware of badly broken people, so.

They see reality, I think, in a way that other people don't. And they reveal it to people in a comfortable way, in the same way a chef might prepare a meal. And like, I'm gonna prepare this for you so that you can digest it in a way that might be comfortable to you.

But.

But I admire them because I think they're burdened. They have to carry truths that they see that I think make them depressed. And so it's this great irony and weird paradox of like, they're on stage making these people hysterically left. But I think deep inside they're like, oh my God, like, I can't believe reality and nature and people are like this.

Yes.

It's a beautifully dark thing.

Well, it is. So I think this is broader than comedians. I have a general theory that says reality is a second best strategy. That's the bumper sticker. And what it means is that if you're born into a functional universe, so you take the Anna Karenina principle, that all happy families are exactly alike, but each unhappy one is unhappy in its own way. I believe that reality is only discovered when social reality breaks. So if you think of social reality as the matrix like thing that was actually being referenced in that movie, you discover underlying reality. When you can't maintain social reality, something cracks it open. And it's like, if you think about it. One analogy that I like to talk about is separated regimes. If you have an ice hockey game, you only discover that it's taking place over a frozen lake. When the ice cracks.

Yeah.

And then it's like, oh, okay, there are fish down here and it's quite cold. And you learn a lot. I think that comedians are one group of people who are not able to maintain the ice illusion that this is solid ground. And I think we're entirely dependent on so called dysfunctional, broken people. And this is like the dirty. Interesting, wonderful.

To tell us the truth.

Well, not just to tell us the truth, to create, to take risks, to manage those risks. When I first saw Rodney Mullin skateboarding, I thought something went wrong in this guy's life. Boy, did he spend a lot of time alone. Nobody would overinvest. But the explosion of creativity. I talked to my producer, Jesse Michaels about this I said, should we get Eddie Van Halen and Rodney Mullen in for one common interview? Because they're sort of the same guy. They both came up with so much in terms of a vocabulary that no one had known was present in either the guitar or the skateboard, that it's pretty clear that something in common happened to both people. Now, that may be a bad idea for a show.

No, I think it would be awesome. I mean, I think actually this. This is. I think you're hitting on something that transcends not just skateboarding and heavy metal or rock, but I think human nature, which is that I think great artistic expression comes because somebody wants to communicate. They find their medium to communicate and the way that they express it. I am always caught by that thought experiment of imagining a world in which a particular person existed, but the technology didn't. So imagine a world in which Hendrix exists, but the electric guitar didn't. Imagine a world in which.

Oh, this is good.

I really want to know where you go with that.

Where Spielberg exists, but the 8 millimeter camera doesn't. Where Mozart exists, but the harpsichord doesn't. Where Gates exists, but the PC doesn't. All these things were instruments for them to express some sort of genius. Now, maybe the geniuses, hindsight, post facto, but there was something in them. Now, if you look at all of those things, it could be you're the African American guy that, like, people don't want to hear from. In a white club, you are the nerd that's being picked on. So you spend your time in a more solitary state programming. But there's something that is sort of broken in you, and you want to express it. You almost by definition don't feel understood, and you need to communicate and you find the instrument to express yourself. And I think the common thing between skateboarding and rock and programming and scientific entrepreneur, they all are like, I have something to say and I'm going to express it in this different instrument.

Okay, you hit on the Hendrix one, which has been an obsession of mine. So let's just do an analogy here. Urethane wheels and the drought in the early 1970s or mid-1970s. I forget exactly when it was created. A universe in Southern California of impromptu skate parks where you could actually grip the walls of the pool, the dry.

Pools with no water, right?

And that weird collision was like the electrified guitar. Now, Charlie Christian had been like the first electric guitarist, but he wasn't really fully exploring what was new, which was the instrument is no longer the guitar. It is the guitar. Amplified System. Now, Les Paul had been there with using the recording studio and the multi track recording and all sorts of trickery. What would Hendrix have done? Because the reason I love what you brought up is we have almost no recordings of him visually on acoustic instruments. I've seen him playing Hound Dog at some party and I've seen like hear My Train of Comin, which is like the famous video of him with the 12 string guitar. But it's not like with Stevie Ray Vaughan where you actually see just the absolute mastery of the acoustic guitar. Hendrix was really fused with the amplified system as the total instrument, including the feedback.

I mean, that's really interesting though, because I don't know, to your point, was he classically trained before? Did he just pick this thing up and started breathing like Picasso? You know, we see the crazy Picasso paintings, but he was his classical before that. I mean, it was like you would look at it, you think it's something, you buy it. Like a, you know, a comes in a photo. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, it's horrible, right?

No, it's not.

It's not horrible.

It's outstanding. Okay. I can't draw.

I don't want to kibitz. Keep going.

But, but, but, but, so, so he was really classic. Costa was really classically trained and then, you know, found his voice. Right. Found the confidence or the comfort to basically do something totally different. I think there's a lot of examples of that where Dylan was another one, you know, who like, you know, copycatted people and.

And really Woody Guthrie at the beginning.

Right. Really studied and then found his own voice and his own comedy. So I wonder, and I don't know, I'm speaking of ignorance, Hendrix.

I have some information that Dylan was actually the one who told Hendrix which path to go down. He said, your thing should be psychedelic rock, psychedelic bl.

But he must have heard him doing something else and said, no, no, that genre is already taken. You need to find your white space.

Yeah. So this is my obsession, which is, how does someone know that there is space to break into? That's the portal.

So I am psychotically focused and obsessed in my companies. And when I look for things on competitive advantage and looking at things where somebody else isn't there either, because they've. It requires an understanding of the consensus. So you have to understand. And this is interesting, it goes back to sort of those shared realities.

Yeah.

And it's a very analogous phenomenon that's just like the comedian or somebody else breaking that shared reality and, you know, cracking through the ice. The entrepreneur the engineer, the scientist, the inventor, the person who says, I'm gonna create a new company. It is considered arrogance of the highest order. They are basically saying, this is the way that the world ought to look and I'm gonna go create it. Or I've invented something and nobody else knows about it. But in any of those cases, I think it requires an understanding of what everybody else believes and then having that confidence to say, I'm going to go orthogonally in this different direction. And so whether it's Hendrix being told or identifying like, okay, he had to have a survey of what everybody else started doing.

He started as a left handed guitarist with a right handed guitar flipped over. So that's already a pretty clear indication you're not in Kansas anymore. Right. It's not completely unheard of, but it's.

But there had to be an intrinsic general desire to say, I want to stand out, I want to be different. And that itself requires whether it's an acknowledged or it's innate or implicit understanding of what everybody else is doing. Whether you're in rock music or you're writing, or you're doing a podcast, or you're doing math, or you're inventing something. You have to understand, like what does everybody else believe? What is everybody else doing? And then what's the, the thing adjacent or orthogonal that I can do that nobody else is doing? I mean, in a sense that that's the status seeking, identity creating thing that I think leads. I think that's what we call creativity.

What I find is that they're two separate things. Do you have creativity to break into new space? And do you have the disagreeability in your nature to tell everyone else, no, you're all wrong. Let me do my thing. The number of times I've seen somebody innovate something and they cannot find the bad attitude necessary to carry that thing to market. We're both friends with Peter Thiel, and here's a guy who, his conviction gets stronger the more people tell him he's an evil idiot.

I think it's a secret weapon. Yeah, it's one of these things where everybody wants to be a contrarian. So then everybody's like this consensus contrarian. I think he is an authentic contrarian, but also he has a measure of what does everybody else believe.

Sure.

He's also running. Maybe I shouldn't be giving away his secrets. But one of the things that I'm very impressed by is that he's cornered the market on first order contrarians, and so he runs them all as subroutines because everybody loves talking to him because he's an amazing judge of talent and risk and strategy. So he's an authentic genius. And it's weird because I think a lot of business doesn't really require genius. It requires other traits more than it requires that. And then he's got the strength to tell absolutely everyone that they're wrong. And what I look at is the number of times where if you told me the end result that he was going to get was going to be positive, and I said, okay, let's imagine that you told a thousand people that if you just hold this position for two years, you're going to be fabulously rewarded. But it's going to be so painful, you're going to lose friends, you're going to be denounced in the press. Almost everyone would drop the hot coal rather than carry it through to completion. And that is a separate trait from the ability to break into new territory. It's not the same thing.

It's the comfort with discomfort. It's the willingness, as you said, it's the ability to be the bad guy, to stand out.

The ability to be misunderstood for extended periods of time.

But not just misunderstood, disliked. Well, yes, because you could be misunderstood, but liked. But it's being misunderstood and disliked. It's the comfort ridiculed.

I mean, it's the whole nine yards.

Which, going back, we are social primates. The most painful feeling, aside from like somebody like slicing you or stabbing you, is being socially ostracized. So having the thick skin, I mean, literally, like, it is why we have epidemics of depression and suicide. And it's when somebody is socially ostracized, whether by means of technology or just, you know, mean girls, it is a horribly painful thing. It is why when you watch some of these documentaries about people trying to leave the Orthodox Jews or any section, the spite, the pain, the tribal exclusion. And so if you are part of some tribe in society, whether it's a tribe of venture capitalists or a tribe of San Franciscans or what, you know, and you don't have that willingness to stand out from the pack with comfort, knowing these people are going to talk about you behind your back, they're going to ostracize you. I agree with you. I actually find it interesting when I hunt for entrepreneurs, there's a common trait that I find, which is that chip on their shoulder. I always say that chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. And there's something that they could have been the fat kid, they could have been the low minority they could have been from a broken family. There's something that they have to prove, and it's this inextinguishable flame. Doesn't matter how much money they make. Doesn't matter how much success they have.

Have.

It's this thing inside that is going to propel them forward. And it's often or always in the face of some adversity that they suffered where everybody else was over here. And they're okay being the lone person.

Or they can't be other.

Yeah. And in some cases, they can't be.

Other than that thing.

But in some cases, maybe the rejection from the others have defined them. Okay, you're not one of us.

Well, so why don't we teach this? I. I have had a curriculum somewhere in a drawer in which you graduate people based on the question, can you pass the Asch conformity test? Can you pass the Milgram obedience test? And can you pass the Zimbardo Immersive Reality Reduction experiment? Yeah. So you've got these three great experiments, and a bunch of people now leave.

They're questioning on the second and the third.

Yeah, those things have been debunked.

ASH still holds up. And it's amazing because I think Milgram.

I think all of these things hold up because we're done in the.

There's elements of truth. But the ASH experiment is interesting because two times, twice is what it takes for social conformity.

Right.

Because the first time you watch him, the guy in the red sweater on the sort of famous video of it, and he's like, it's two, you idiots. He's confounded at. And then they do it again. And it's just like that quickly, as a social primate, to feel the pressure when you know objectively the truth and you see everybody else as wrong. And you're like, you know what? It's not worth pursuing truth. I'd rather pursue the comfort of being accepted.

Amen. And the other thing is that all it takes is one other person. For most people, if that person goes first, like you have seven confederates before you get asked, and one person out of those seven, then you feel comfortable, says the truth. Then you're willing to say the truth as well.

Yeah, you need an ally.

You need not to be the only lunatic. That it's a question of fitness versus truth.

There was one of these playful videos that surfaced, I don't know, five, ten years ago of the guy who was freakishly dancing at the festival by himself.

And then everybody's freakishly dancing.

But it starts out in at first, he's the joke because he looks like maybe he's on drugs or he's just too happy or. I don't know what it is, but he's got a shirt off and people are laughing at him. I think the first person that joined him probably joined him to mock him. Maybe the intent. It felt like on observation or.

I think a previous Portal victim was Timur Koran in one of our first episodes. I think maybe it's the third or something like that. And he studied exactly this phenomena. What happens when you get the second person, which is like the curating role? I am willing to say that I see what that person who has previously been isolated says, and then you start to find this chain reaction that is incredibly powerful. And so this is how. I don't think we've talked enough about it. Do you know Jeff Tenenbaum?

No, but before we go to Jeff, to Peter's Teals, and to what we do in venture capital, that sense of belief, especially if you have an entrepreneur, an engineer, an inventor, who feels like they haven't had somebody believe in them, and suddenly they're doing something, and somebody says, yes, I agree with the way that you. The world you want to create. That is omg. I mean, that sets it off. Yeah.

You're catalyzing something. So this is.

We like to say that we like to believe before others understand.

Oh, really? Is that your line?

Well, it's a line.

I love that.

Yeah. But. But we also have to be careful because, you know, we talked about this before. At the moment of inception or conception of a company, you don't know whether that person is a true visionary and genius with good intentions or is trying to defraud you.

Yeah, but even when somebody's trying to defraud, I mean, this gets into really crazy territory. So if I have a great personality flaw, it's that I don't think I see people as they are. I think I see people as I believe they could be.

That's a very optimistic take.

Well, it's not always functional.

So you see the better nature of somebody.

All I see is limitless potential.

You give them the benefit of the doubt.

Just about everyone.

Okay, so it's amazing because I am the polar opposite. It tell me, I meet somebody, and it's like my favorite line from Shakespeare, there's daggers and men smiles, Somebody smiles. And I'm assuming that there's an ulterior agenda, an ulterior motive. I remember my first day. I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Everybody's running some scammer game. You're always on guard, you don't make eye contact. My first day in college, somebody was like, hey, nice hair. They were being authentic. They were being nice. They were giving me a compliment. Yeah. My reaction is, what are you trying to say? So I think it totally depends. I mean, it'd be interesting of, but.

I don't disagree with that.

But your default first impression when you.

Meet somebody is, we're not having a conversation yet. So the way I would say it is, let's imagine you and I both meet somebody who's got an ulterior motive and they start flattering you. My feeling is, wow, look at them trying to scam Josh. That skill could be repurposed with huge rewards if they only realized that sometimes you have to tell a narrative about something that's actually positive. And by fraud, that's the shortest ride in the world. You're not going to get the value out of that thing.

Okay, so that's interesting. So you view the temporary liability as a long term asset should it be repurposed.

I'm trying to de risk the deal and I'm trying to figure out what is the value of the resource. Now, if the person turns out to be pathologically committed to the short term, you can convince it's not recoverable. Yeah, but if I met a fraudster or a murderer or a psychopath or any one of these things, there would at least be a period of time where I would say, wow, that's a really unusual trait. I wonder if it could be used positively.

I admire your curiosity. I think as a protective mechanism. I am way more quick to dismiss that. When I sense somebody, I'll run for cover.

No, it's not a commitment to martyrdom. It's not like I don't feel free.

No, but you'll sit in it it and explore it, curiously. Is there some virtue.

Well, so I gave this example. I forget which show it was. Have you ever listened to Charles Manson's music?

No. Is it good?

Well, there's one song called look at your game girl. If you really want to creep yourself out, listen to that song because it's pretty terrific.

Now, meaning if you played it for me without telling me who this was.

Yeah, you'd love it.

Really?

I mean, this goes back to what we were talking about before.

Exactly.

Between the artist and the art. And are they separate?

Okay. You know, one of my favorite mathematicians or physicists is this Nazi named Pascal Jordan. The son of a bitch. No good.

Nick, I kid you not horrible, man. I came from an entrepreneur in LA today. Yeah, brilliant, brilliant entrepreneur.

Yeah.

Incredible branding. And he made a comment that so unsettled me.

To your.

To your point. Maybe I. Maybe I need to give myself a little bit more credit. He said, you know, we were talking about his logo and the design of the logo, which was very thoughtful. And he said, you know, the SWAT sticker was a brilliant logo. And it. And I was like. I was shocked now, you know, same sort of Jim Watson style. I don't know if he said it as a measure of provocation.

No, no, no.

Or as an objective thing of this symmetry. But I sat there thinking, like, I'm sitting here and maybe he's right, maybe there's something. But there's so much meaning in the object.

So if you go to India, right, So I don't exactly know what the etymology is, but SWA is going to be indic for beautiful. And you've got a fourfold symmetry, so It's Z mod 4. And then there's. I forget how you say this word, like a posomatics, where you use colorations that are used as warning symbols. So you have like a white, black and red field. So, you know, just in terms of design, you know, this is extremely powerful now. It is so colored by the horrible fucking things that were done under it that I can't have a normal reaction. So that when I go to India, even though the thing is turned the other way around, it's not on a tilt.

The dots in the middle, the emotional.

Invention of it, I'm still going through. Right. You know, it's like.

So this is interesting, by the way, too, because I think one of the purposes, as I listen to your journey through the portal, is about the meaning of meaning.

Yeah. Thank you. It sounds like the wallpiece. Yes.

And I've been caught. So I invest in technology. I love engineering. I love magic. Magic is a form of engineering. I saw this one guy, maybe he's an LA guy, Derek Delgado. Have you heard of him?

No.

He did this show in Union Square called In and of Itself, and it had great production. It was Frank Oz. It was very thoughtful. And I like thoughtful magic. I don't like hocus pocus bs. I like people that are philosophical. Ricky James and Penn and Teller. And so he had five props that he did different magic pieces in. But this one thing, it's sort of like in the same way I say when I see Chappelle or somebody else, like, I can't remember the jokes, but I remember the socially Poignant points that they make. He takes one of the five objects, which is a gold brick, and he tells a story about how he was a teenager and he came home with his friend, and he opens the door and he sees his mother on the couch, and she's making out with another woman.

Woman.

And his friend feels really uncomfortable and runs away. And he felt slightly uncomfortable, but then he said, you know what? My mom, who's single, she found somebody she loves, and it was his mother. And he felt love. They talk about it, and it's totally cool and calm and whatever. And he wakes up the next morning, they're having breakfast, and a brick gets thrown through the front window of their house with a paper on it that says, go home, faggots. And it was either his friend or somebody that his friend told or whatever it was. And so he does this magic trick. Now, having told you this story. And I'm getting chills, you know, thinking about it.

Sure.

And the gold brick, and he builds this house of cards over it. And then with this flourish, he blows the house of cards away, and it and the brick are gone. Now, earlier in the show, he asked people for two intersecting streets. And it was sort of out of context, and you didn't understand why. But let's say he said delancey and Essex. He said, now, I want you to know that when you leave the show in about five minutes, because it was pretty much either the ultimate or penultimate trick he did. If you go to Delancey in Essex, you will see that brick on the corner of Delancean, Essex. But the notable thing, and this is the thing that shakes me, and when we were just talking about the symbol that shakes us to this day because of the historic meaning that's put into it, he's like, 10,000 people will walk by that brick, that gold brick on a corner, and they won't think a thought about it. But because you know what this brick means to me, what it caused in the relationship between me and my mother, the betrayal of a friend, all of this meaning that was narratively injected into this physical, solid object, to me, it was really powerful. And so I offer that as a story because I think just in this quest that you're on, on the meaning of meaning and just thinking about the objects around us and the stories that are in the ether, there's something really powerful there to explore.

Well, in particular, just to riff with you in a world in which we can no longer be certain. Like, for example, if I see a Nazi flag, am I seeing it as part of a documentary which changes its meaning, as opposed to somebody's decided to fly it in the front lawn, as opposed to it's being used in an. An art exhibition by somebody who was a survivor of the Holocaust context. Well, you know, this is the odd thing that. And I always use this example of Python's namespaces, where you have a variable that means different things depending upon what context. And then you have this beautiful concept of namespace pollution. So that when we referred earlier to Peter Thiel, if I know that we're in a VC context, I might just say Peter. But if we're in some other context, it might be describing robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it has nothing to do with Peter, that other Peter. So part of the problem is that what we've built now is technology that has created universal namespace pollution. And we can't tell whether somebody's using something for a scholarly reason, whether they're using something as a troll. The Pepe image, I've had it used maliciously against me so many times. And then somebody says, wow, you're just reacting to a frog. It's a joke. Don't you even know the history of it?

But it's an anti Semitic or.

Well, the point is, it isn't any of those things. It's an ambiguous object with mysterious ties, some of which can be anticipated. Why is somebody choosing to play with this it.

But it's intent. There's an embedded intent.

Well, but sometimes it's not even the intent. Maybe somebody has good intent and they're a skilled player and they're using it correctly. But you're so afraid that there are unskilled players that you want to make sure that nobody even reproduces the image. Like you have this thing with the Christchurch shooters manifesto in New Zealand, which I think it's a crime now to possess the manifesto.

Wow.

I mean, so what if I need to? Oh, well, we have an exception for scholars. They can possess it in a safe space. Well, and what we don't realize is that embedded, for example, in the First Amendment were assumptions about the context of a pamphleteer, let's say. Now, what happens when you've got some channel that can broadcast something instantly to 25 million people within five minutes that isn't being checked for its impact. We have no idea as to whether or not we should be clinging to the original letter of free speech, to the intent of free speech, to the embedded context of free speech. And we're terrified that if we open that up, we're going to have so many bad, unskilled actors talking about it that we're never going to get something as good as the original intent of our constitution. Like. Or that you're fusing a culture where you can't talk about something like, Pakistan has been making these legal complaints that Twitter agrees to pass along, saying, I know that you have never been to Pakistan and you're not Pakistani, but you are apparently violating Pakistani law and we are obligated to tell you that you're doing this. We now have no idea what anything means. And I give this example of. If you see C, the letter C in Roman orthography on a water faucet, what does it mean?

I mean, I would have assumed a hundred. But what does it mean?

Well, it could mean cold or it could mean caldo or caliente.

Right.

So depending upon. Well, if it's a Teutonic derivative, it's going to be cold. And if it's.

But these are meanings that are lost in translation, right? I mean, the Pinto, right as the car. And there's all these examples where something was done with good intent but with ignorance.

Pinto because it explodes, or do you mean the Chevy Nova because it doesn't go.

Yeah, exactly, yeah, right, yeah. Oh, was it the Nova?

Yeah, I think.

Well, I don't know either way. But the point is, the intent was not malicious, but it was ignorant of the context of another culture. And it's almost impossible to know the. I don't want to say near infinite, but there's so many different uses of certain things that in one case it's dangerous.

Right?

And in one case, you know, nobody cares. And these people who find it dangerous are really offended by the thing. And so that is complicated on how the sort of meta labeling of these things, you know, and you know, that's why we're getting these. I mean, you know, I know you've talked extensively about this, but like trigger warnings and the Jonathan Haidt view, the antithesis of the heterodox in the academy is like, it's really complicated. You have these minefields of being able to speak freely. And I know that's what this space is for, but it isn't.

See, people even get this wrong. I mean, this was very disheartening to.

Me, is that the media needed an.

Extremely simplistic thing to say, which is these people wish to have every possible conversation. There is no holds barred. There are no safe spaces, absolute free speech. Are you kidding me? No, that's not how it works. We've had Brandenburg versus Ohio. We've had all sorts of adjustments. Slander isn't necessarily okay. You can't create clear and present dangers. There's all sorts of barriers to free speech. Well, to. We call free speech the thing that we have. That's a remainder after we've fenced ourselves out of the things that we all agree are pretty dangerous. Child pornography probably won't be counted as free speech. And I watch people get into error because they start off with this idea. Well, Christopher Hitchens really had it right. You should be able to say anything. I did this riff. I opened for Jordan Peterson doing a harmonica, little harmonica solo. I said, well, will you guys. This was in Long Island. I said, will you indulge me? I have a song that I love that I want to sing, but I don't remember all the words. I said, you know that it would be untrue. You know that I would be.

She goes, liar.

If I was a girl, I couldn't get. So I build it up. Come on, baby, light my. And everybody goes, fire. I said, congratulations. That was the sound of 2,000 people screaming fire in a movie theater.

Well done, context.

Well, and that was. The whole point, is that we don't notice this stuff, and that's what scares me, is that we don't realize that there were embedded hypotheses in the First Amendment. We don't realize the role that context plays. And now we're exploring every flavor of stupid with respect to trying to put this back together.

So is it a function of speed? Would it be better if we slowed down so that you could sit and adjust? And in the same way, when you approach somebody, like, let me give them the benefit of the doubt, or let me see how this could be used as an asset in the future. The person, like, if I relayed factually, 2000 people just screamed fire in a theater. But without the context, which requires time and space to explain at a time where arguably people's attention spans are shorter, we spend less time getting nuance and details and things can very quickly flutter away and lie. Travels halfway around the world before the truth has gotten out of bed or whatever the appropriate quote is. Is it a function of time? Is there a case where we could chastise people for, no, no, you went too quick. Is there something that shames people back into a civility of slow.

Well, I'm glad you're asking the question. Let's play with it and see where it goes. To me, the real problem is that for almost 50 years, we sold people on the idea that they could get, get by with very simplistic heuristics. And the thing that allowed that to happen was the fact that very few people had a seat on what I call the gated institutional narrative. It's like an exchange of ideas, but you need to have a seat on the exchange in order to participate. And so people were participating, discussing these issues at home. But it was Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather opining or William F. Buckley, and nobody else could get in on that. Now you've got a lot of skilled actors, you've got unskilled actors. All walls have broken down. And the main thing that we need to say is, you know that situation where for 50 years you could get by with like just talking about free speech or let's slow things down or let's be kind to each other or inclusion and diversity. None of those things are workable. And it's the complexity level, stupid, that's the issue. The reason that I have an audience at the moment is in part due to the fact that these people have figured out there's no workable solution with simplistic primitives, to use another computer term, they're not expressive enough. I can't get these heuristics to work. And if you really want to know what you can and can't say and why somebody's offended and what we should be doing, there is no Christopher Hitchens simple answer. Because the technology changed too much and revealed. It's a little bit like you were in a Newtonian realm and Newtonian physics worked. And then you get close to the speed of light or you get very, very small or something happens and you're in a quantum or a relativistic the picture. And you have to realize that you were in a simplification and the simplification worked in a regime, and the regime is blown away.

So go back to the three anchors on three major networks, and technology then blows that apart and now you have thousands of people and you don't know who to trust. And I actually contend that in this moment it isn't a function that people are just gullible sheep, although many are. But it's that people have grown so cynical that they don't know who to trust, Right? And I mean, I've listened to you, right, that you, you know, whether it was the Times or Washington Post or these institutions that were once beacons of trust, that you say, I see games that they're playing on both sides, right? And so this is one of the.

Reasons I run ads on my program, which is this is a commercial enterprise, right. And I listen to a lot of my friends who refuse to run ads. I'm very uncomfortable. I don't want to sell people and I think that they're more honest than I am, but I think I'm more meta honest than they are.

Interesting.

In other words, the message is, hey, I'm just some guy and I'm opining and I lie and I misrepresent and I'm self kind and I do all sorts of things to make myself look better or smarter and I'd love to be open about that. And no, I'm not going to stop doing those things because that's preposterous. What am I supposed to do? Self extinguished? Should I just fund this out of my own pocket? Bankrupt myself? Reveal all of my warts, all of my failings? Make myself absolutely unappealing to every.

No, but by the way, that would open up a new audience and there would be a whole lot of people that would appreciate that raw honesty. Right. So you'd blow up one audience maybe, or a portion of it, but gain another.

Well, but people who can't. You see, there's the Howard Stern sort of appeal or there's a new thing called the dirtbag left, let's say. And the idea there, I think we are entitled to tell certain basic societal lies about ourselves.

Like what? Well, I mean, this is a lie, right?

That's exactly right. By wearing clothes, we disguise whatever it is that we are. Or should you be allowed to color your hair? Right.

And that's a shared reality. Right. Which itself is interesting. Breaking through the ice again, we all know that we're naked under these clothes.

No, we don't.

We don't know we're naked under our clothes.

No. As much I can try to picture it, but it's actually quite shocking when somebody becomes naked. My brain actually doesn't even accept it. I can know it in some corner of my mind. But if I say we all know, I know, I really don't. I fall for the illusion.

So I have a crazy.

Like we were just talking for example, about this bizarre animal, the spider tailed viper from Iran.

Insane. Insane.

I know that that tail of that snake is a fake spider because its movement of the spider in this kind of weird ape pattern is so realistic that I would fall for it even knowing that it's a lure. So that if I was a bird, I will try to prey on the spider and I'm going to get eaten. So even knowing it, I still Fall for it.

Yeah, but that's true of illusions. It's true of cognitive biases that we educate ourselves on. Just because you know it doesn't mean you won't fall for it. But you don't not know it. You know, again, I know you're naked under there. And if I sat down here in the chair and you said, hey, let's do this episode of the Portal and you were sitting there naked when I walked in, that would be shocking, but it would confound my expectations. Right. I would have an.

I'm going to do that when the show starts to fail. That's when we jump the shark, my friend.

You just have. By the way, you should just do a whether or not you're actually just a blurred thing. And people be like, oh, my God, is he really naked?

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, but what I'm trying to say is that part of the problem is the lie isn't in the nakedness. It's in the multiplicity of self that somehow I'm stupidly calling Josh or Eric. I both know this and I don't know this, and this is again the same thing. Most of the time it's sufficient to say, well, Josh says this, or Josh feels this, or Josh thinks this. But there are lots of situations where I say, okay, we're now in the non Newtonian realm. Josh thinks a bunch of different things and they're completely different.

I contain multitudes.

Right. And this is the thing with Sam Harris. Sam Harris is trying to be the unified mind. And I think it's beautiful, but I also think it's completely bizarre. I've never seen anything like it.

Well, but that is interesting too, because we each have lots of different selves. Each one is different in context. I mean, the way that I am with you or the way that I am with an entrepreneur in a board meeting might be very different. The way that I am with my children is very different. Each one of those things requires a different power dynamic, a different set of expectations.

Some of those don't even know about each other.

Other.

Right, right. So in a sense, yeah, we have these hidden selves, but I don't know that it's a overtly hidden. Right. I'm not hiding from you that I father or parent a certain way. It's just irrelevant for this particular context.

Yeah, but there are things that you could do that I would totally change my concept of you. And the point that.

Which actually is true, because that's what's happening when going back to this art and the artist Thing you find out about something in somebody's life, it could be their personal life or something else, and they get canceled.

Well, and this is the really scary part about this. Every single private life would be shocking if it were moved into the public.

I've always thought that the greatest act of terrorism in the United States would not be an attack on a building. It would be the revelation of the last year's worth of emails and texts.

Well, it's interesting, you know the record producer, Rick Rubin, so he's very interested in the question of whether if all emails were revealed simultaneously, that would be a positive. It's the selective revelation that's terrifying.

It would be a negative in that it would destroy individual relationships. The perception that people would have. The things that they assumed about other people, the things that they were led to believe about other people, would be revealed to be untrue in many cases. They would find out about infidelities. They would find out about betrayals. They would find out about all the things that make us these complex humans. The dark side of biology that we spoke about earlier. And I think it would destroy that fundamental fabric of trust. So in that same way that we have this story layer with the ice that's there, it's stable. I mean, that is a lie. I didn't write to you like this, but. Dear Eric, yours truly, Josh. That's a lie, right? That's a lie of civility. Sure it is.

Why is that?

Because it's not natural to speak with those kind of pleasantries. That is a confirmation to an expectation of civility which maintains a presentation of self. That is.

I don't buy this at all, Ritesh. My belief is that when you. I mean, when you brush your hair or when you attend to your grooming.

It'S an act of dishonesty.

No, it isn't.

Sure it is.

It's an act of signaling.

Okay, fair, fair.

Right. Or it's hybrid. It's chimeric between signaling and dishonesty.

Because I'm presenting a self. I'm presenting something I want you to believe.

Well, do you imagine that theater is untrue?

Is theater untrue or is it hyper true?

I mean, this is this old point that I make about Updike where somebody said, why is it that you write fiction? He says, as opposed to what? Somebody says? Well, the truth, he said, my good man, what is it you imagine fiction to be?

So this is an area that I'm at the moment obsessed with, because the gap between reality and simulation, I think, is shrinking Technologically, I think that's true in our ability to measure and model the world around us with ever greater resolution. The machines that we are inventing are relying on models not of reality, but of models. When a robot or autonomous vehicle is going through, they're not relying on actually looking at the road. They're looking at a model of the.

Road that's coming through as we do.

As we do. And so. So put that aside for a moment on technology. The machine does not know the difference between a game simulation that is teaching it how to drive on a road and actually driving on the road. And I would actually, to your point about the truth of fiction, argue that the more movies you watch, the more books you read, the more simulated virtual reality experiences you have through literature. I don't know who's to say that certainly the emotional experience is as real. The feeling of horror, of shock, of awe, of sadness, of empathy, of introspection, all the things that fiction can invoke in you is a very real, authentic reaction to something that is entirely fake. And so I'm sort of intrigued.

I'm very confused by this. See, Josh, you and I have never met. The thing that I am talking to now is the projection of you inside of my head, which I have never left. That comes from the stimulation. I mean, I believe that I have eyes. I don't want to get completely jiggy, but just assume that reality is the standard picture of reality. I see you as being across the room from me, but that's not the thing that's really happening. What's really happening, if everything I know is correct, is that the thing across the room from me generated a model in my mind, which is the only thing I've ever interacted with. That is Josh. And what is astounding, if you know the phrase the map is not the territory, is the other part of that, which is. But, wow, what a goddamn map it is because it's so close to the territory that we. We are astounded when we find the discrepancies, the deltas between the map and the territory.

So all these things to me are related. The technological gap that shrinks between the simulacrum and reality, the expectation that we have that we're sitting across model to model, the awareness which others might not have, that I am actually looking at the you of a tenth of a second ago in the past and. And not you.

David Eagleman says we live 43 milliseconds.

In the past, which is fascinating, right? But true.

Assuming that there is a David Eagleman.

Right, exactly.

But.

The idea of the model itself and something you said about confounding expectations or surprise the most. Can we talk about consciousness for a second?

Sure.

The most persuasive argument that I've heard about consciousness goes back to Jeff Hawkins when he wrote on intelligence and I think he took from the hierarchical structure of Santiago, Ramon y Cajal, and the idea of memory prediction. So if you see my shoes and you say, okay, that's Josh, and you have a model. Now you see me again, maybe just see the element of the shoe and you see, you predict from the specific to the general and you say, that's going to be Josh. But if it wasn't Josh, if it was your brother, if Brett is sitting here and he's wearing my shoes, you'd be like, oh, you have an emotional surprise. The surprise adjusts the weight of your model biologically, physiologically, and says, whoa, that's a surprise. And it's an informational surprise. And it shocks you into updating your model. And this phenomenon of memory prediction in technology, in us thinking about ourselves, in the gap between fiction and reality, in the work of philosophers that at the moment I find really interesting, like Carl Friston and, and Andy Clark, they're all thinking about how this model of reality that we hold then interacts with the real world, assuming that exists and.

Right.

And then just is constantly feedback between the two. To me, where technology is trending is right at this nexus where it's becoming harder and harder to know where model and reality, that line is becoming thinner and thinner. And I think there's going to be a whole suite of engineers and technologists that go mad because of.

Well, at the moment we're experimenting because Joe Rogan has left so much of his voice in the world.

We can train deep fake Rogans.

Yeah.

And deep fake Weinstein's.

Well, increasingly I'll leave a larger corpus and the machines will get better.

Right.

So now you have deep fakes everywhere. And then there's going to be increasingly an issue about what is authenticity, what is its dependable signature. We'll be able to manufacture a haystack around everything we wish to hide as a needle.

So if you think about finding opportunity between abundance and scarcity, in the late 90s, the thing that became really abundant was everybody producing blogs and information online. And the scarce thing was being able to find that needle in that haystack. And so ergo, search engines, Google, it wasn't maybe obvious amongst the 20 that preceded it, but post facto, in hindsight you say? Okay. Of course, today, with the abundance of the tools we have, whether they're video editing or photoshopping or audio or whatever comes next.

Yeah.

Where the simulacrum and that distance between reality and simulation keeps shrinking in what we're using to train our technologies and in our own perception of reality and news and information. The abundance of that means that there's something scarce. And the scarce thing is being able to accurately detect veracity. And so I feel like there will be an increasing weight of value put on tools that can detect. Is that photo real? Is there some aberration in that voice? And it's still going to be somewhat perceptible and detectable. If you watch these deepfakes of Obama or Zuckerberg, you know, the things that people post online, to the native eye, it's very hard to detect. It's past the uncanny valley. But there's still this weird.

Yeah, but that's going to shrink.

It will. This gap is absolutely shrinking. But technology can still detect that.

You'll have an arms race as we've always seen in nature. So we were talking before about Batesian.

And Mullerian mimicry, deception and detection.

Yes. And the idea that if two things are different, then there's almost always going to be something that can tell the two apart, but that becomes increasingly expensive and invasive. And I don't think that. I mean, I don't think that this game that we've been living in and calling life is long for this planet.

Okay, that's provocative.

Well, this is the portal. We have to get out of here.

Where are we going?

Well, there's one phrase that constantly recurs in my mind and I've decided to give it a non zero weight value just to shut it up. But the phrase is our home is in the stars or not at all.

Okay.

And my belief is that we can talk about uploading, we can talk about an outbreak of wisdom that allows us to be good stewards of our planet. But more or less in the mid 20th century, around 1952-54, we had two discoveries that almost certainly we should all be able to calculate. Start at a clock, where if we don't get out of here and spread out and try a bunch of different experiments, and of course that's probably impossible. And it's also probably impossible to diversify it enough. And where would we hide from each other? All sorts of issues.

But is your implication a metaphor? That a literal. That we're going to the stars, we're going to go to Mars or wherever it might be, we're going to outer space, we're leaving this planet. Or is it a metaphor? Poetic metaphor of.

I wish it was a metaphor. I wish it wasn't what I'm actually saying. But if I say it straight, say it straight. We are about to hack our own source code. And there's this very bizarre thing that has happened in technology which is we are very afraid that we, the ones who can simulate humans, let's say with Boston Dynamics, and we can simulate speech with deep learning and all of these sorts of things. Okay. We are afraid that our technology is about to become artificially generally intelligent and self aware, or begin to run out of control and outwit us. But we're also at the same exact moment wondering are we part of a simulation where there are programmers? Now the obvious implication is almost never discussed, which is we are the emergent artificially general intelligence and we are on the verge of learning our own source code. And is the simulator afraid that we are going to arise in the system with powers that the simulator does not possess? I don't know. Why are we worried about it in one direction? Like. Like we've become deeply nonsensical. Because if you look at the decision tree and this is the really hard thing to grasp and push the decision tree out 500 years, there is no branch of the decision tree that does not look insane.

That part I might agree with because I like.

Either we're going to upload or we're going to become wise and kind, or we're going to diversify into the three rocks that we can reach without violating the Einstein speed limit and somehow that'll be enough. Or we're going to get around the Einsteinian speed limit or we're going to reboot from tardigrades, whatever it is.

Yeah, but those things need not be mutually exclusive, right? There might be different camps that pursue each of those different strategies.

There is no branch of that decision tree that looks like us continuing on more or less as we are, with a little bit of improvement here.

That's probably true. By the way, when you say the we, I realize there's a large subset and maybe a growing subset and even a growing specific in technology. But I am staunchly not in the Bostrom camp and I think even the Sam Harris camp about AGI. I am much more in the David Deutsch camp. And this is a subtle and maybe very long argument, but I actually posed this to David recently on the idea about simulation and we were talking about mathematical concepts.

Can you just sort of say what those camps are, because I generally don't. You don't follow these.

Well, Bostra makes a philosophical argument that I think is widely celebrated and has. In the same way that if you go back 20 years in nanotechnology, you had Eric Drexler that was proponing a sort of pseudo scientific, but had elements of science argue about nanobots, you know, run amok. And he had his credible and wealthy technology champion, which at the time was Bill Joy. And so BillJoy was basically warning, you know, nanobots are going amok. And so today you have Bostrom. And Bostrom's equivalent of BillJoy today is Elon, Elon Musk. And very smart people are very concerned about us becoming paperclip factories and being harvested by intelligent, sentient machines that are going to run amok. And David Deutsch's view is a little bit more, and this was something that I posted him recently that are we a simulation? That a simulation can take all of the tools and principles that we have inside of a simulation, it can have all the tools that we give it, but it need not have or may not have and probably won't have all of the tools that are outside the simulation. And so he makes to me a more logical argument that the more dangerous thing is not an AGI run amok, but your average 15 to 17 year old teenager.

The cost of everything coming down and what power is put within reach.

Yeah, but we get more processing power, we get more memory, we have better algorithms. And everything in fairness, that everybody said was going to be a limit of some human ability has been eclipsed. From checkers to chess to go to even artistic creation and now generative text. That's another area technologically we had maybe five years ago an ImageNet moment where you had had greater than 90 or 95% computer accuracy of what a human could do in detecting objects in a picture. And there's still lots of errors and comical ones that people poke fun of online. Surprisingly, images are less complex than text. And today we're approaching sort of a Turing like moment of Turing Test like moment of being able to have greater than 95% accuracy in being able to construct text, complex conversational text, conversational text taken from your library of words and phrases that you're apt to use and sort of in your voice where it would fool. If you were texting with Peter or with Joe Rogan or me, you would be fooled.

I don't think you could fool me about Peter.

No.

Why the level of surprise?

Okay, that's an interesting test because we have a company that's doing this. Maybe that's a. I mean, I think.

I can run Peter as well in emulation as many people I know.

And you would still confound yourself.

I mean, his operating system is not built the way the rest of ours is.

Okay, all right, so let's put him aside as an escapable anomaly. But all of these things are still parametrically constrained in the system. They can do that particular thing extremely well. They can look at images extremely well. They can can navigate a road extremely well. They can search query from Jeopardy extremely well, but they can suddenly come out of that system. So if you accept that premise of it's a simulation and it has the tools that you've put inside of it, but it can't go and create other tools that are outside of it.

Well, have you heard my riff on the square root?

No.

Yeah.

The square root is the really dangerous mathematical operation.

Why?

Because it allows you to ask questions within a system that have to be answered within another other. Okay, so for example, there's something called the determinant of a matrix, but the square root that might exist is called the fafian. That really requires an extra leap. Same thing with vectors become spinors. The square root of the anti symmetric tensor system brings out this thing out of the vacuum that you sort of didn't know was lurking around. It's like the square root of negative one. There's no answer in the real number. You pose the question in the real number. So this is the question of finding the portal. I've said it's the psychedelic of mathematics. Now, if you allow me to train a machine, and I find it very surprising that nobody talks about this, but the square root is the most dangerous operation known to mathematics. And if you teach a computer all of the instances in which a square root allowed humans to find. Even humans don't think of this, right? They don't think, how many times have we taken the square root and found a new universe waiting for us?

I've never thought that.

Weirdly, nobody does.

I mean, wait, but you were saying if you could train a computer to what? Finish that thought?

I've got an N that includes fafians, spinors, spin groups, norm division, algebras. All the best stuff in my life comes from the square root.

Mathematical geometry complex.

There's nothing like it, man. Square root is heroin. There's no operation that is as cool as the square root. And we don't. I don't tell people this. And it's because of Flatland. I was born into Flatland, but I learned from the masters. I learned from the people who innovated. And I noticed this pattern that many of them didn't notice. To this day, I'm not aware of anyone teaching this. I'm now doing this at scale. I think I did this on Joe Rogan. Mostly. I don't talk about it. But you want to teach people to bust out of the cognitive prisons. Teach them the square root.

So if you could program into a machine the ability to detect the square root of any of these aspects to.

Ask the question, like you could ask the question. Assume you're given a system.

Yes.

Assume that you're given an operation that is the square root that is functional in part of that system and returns nonsensical answers in some other part. Ask yourself the question, what can I adjoin to the original system so that the square root will become meaningful? It's like you want to find the panic room in a house.

Yeah.

That's how you find the book in the shelves that when you pull it out, swings open the bookcase and shows you the magnificent crystal palace that was hidden in your two story walk up.

That's your book. The danger of the square root. Danger squared.

Well, no. Well, we're headed. Look, this program is trying. This is my distribution channel. My entire life I have had my access to the world gated by people who I have come not to respect.

And now that gate is open. You've created a gate.

You've created your own portal until they've noticed.

Yeah, right. And then they're going to say, well, I think Dan Dresner, columnist for the Washington Post, Professor Tufts, said about me that everything that I think that's true isn't new, and everything that I think that I say is new isn't true. So I am miraculously incapable of generating anything of interest. And I'm really looking forward to having him on the podcast.

Have you invited him?

He's being invited right now for the first time.

Awesome.

I hope he accepts.

Josh, I could talk to you forever. I hope you're going to come back to the portal. And I don't think we talked a lot about venture capital, but I think what we did do is we talked about the thing that you do that infuses venture capital with hope and wonder and transcendence. And I hope to have another conversation with you soon, which doesn't necessarily talk about venture capital either.

I'd love to love what you're doing. Thanks, man.

All right. You've been through the portal with Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital, and I hope that you will subscribe on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then head over to YouTube and subscribe to our channel there. And remember to click the bell so that you'll be notified when our next episode drops. Be well.