399 TIP. The Real Life Tony Stark w/ Josh Wolfe

Welcome to the Investors podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerbie, and today I'm super excited to have with me Mr. Josh Wolfe. Welcome to the show, Josh.

Hey, Trey. Good to be here.

You are one of the more interesting folks I've had to research. And when I was kind of going down the rabbit hole on you, it became very clear very early on that this conversation could go any myriad of ways. There's such a wide breadth of work in your career already. I even posted on Twitter, what should we ask Josh? And I got everything from what does he think about investing in soccer clubs, to scent technology to travel, to war simulation with China? I mean, it's just all across the board, and I'm super excited to dig in. But one of the questions I just got on Twitter, which seemed appropriate given all this, is what's your morning routine look like? How does Josh get his day going, and where do you start?

Well, I've got an eight sleep bed, so 7am I wake up. Little vibration buzz. I think it's like at 84 degrees. My first 40 minutes are with our kids. So we wake up and I've got three and we're up and out the door. I take them to school every morning, jump on the subway. I live in Tribeca downtown, and our kids are in Brooklyn, and so we shuttle them to school. And my two older girls get dropped off first. My son and I have another 30 minutes to spend learning and talking. He's the youngest of the three. And then at 8:30, I will leave after drop off and either walk three and a half miles or bike three and a half miles to Lux's New York City office in Midtown on 20th and Broadway. And during that time, I will either take calls or listen to podcasts or listen to a book and sometimes walk and talk and take meetings. So that's typically till about my first meeting, which typically are not before 10am Very interesting.

So I want to talk about the origin of Lux a little bit. Were you always a polymath like this? Because as I understand it, you started Lux kind of more focused on hard sciences, and it seems to have broadened quite a bit from there. So how does the origin of Lux look compared to today?

Well, there's constraints in pursuits of things, and then there's like, nudges. And so I'd say my own personal push and nudges have been really born out of intellectual competition. So, you know, I find something that I think other people don't yet know about. And I have a natural propensity and interest to pursue that. And particularly if I think that I and our team can know something that others don't know. So that has pushed us into new spaces. And then the constraint is often, you know, negative feedback, whether it's from Internal or my partner Peter, who I trust a lot in shaping what we might go and pursue and go after. And so there's times where I might go down a rabbit hole into something that feels really far afield, and I've got people that thankfully will pull me back. And so we're always trying to protect sort of the core of what we began with at Lux, which is really cutting edge emerging technology and things that other people don't understand oftentimes has a hue of complexity to it that might scare people away. And we're generally drawn towards those things that others are not looking at because we always like to talk about these arrows of inevitability and these arrows of impossibility. The arrows of inevitability are being students of history. And looking at the way that technology trends are likely to evolve, even if it doesn't point specifically to a precise entrepreneur or a precise company, you have a very high probability of being correct if you follow that sort of trend, technological trend, that arrow of progress. And when it intersects with what we call these hours of impossibility, which is a measure of what other people think is possible or likely, it's a beautiful thing, particularly because if everybody else is massively underestimating how advanced something is, or they have all been informed and subscribed to a narrative which we believe is not true, then we're entering, typically at a low price, because the crowd isn't there. And so it's entirely driven by two things. A desire to be right and have social currency and reputational currency. By knowing things that other people don't know. And then oftentimes that intersecting, although it's not always with making money, because you are right. And so that's also a balance of wanting to be right versus wanting to be rich. And sometimes my desire for the former can hurt our results in the latter. And that's why we've got a team. Yeah.

That idea of you want the consensus, but you don't want it right away or early on, you want it eventually. Yeah, exactly.

We always say that we don't want to be contrarian for contrarian sake. We want people to agree with us just later. A lot of what we've pursued is if you take something like metamaterials, this is a breakthrough in physics. It allowed for Beam steering, electromagnetic waves without see moving parts. And we can talk about that later as it relates to, say, space communications and antennas. But that started with a breakthrough in physics that was poorly understood by many, and then it had all of these end applications in all these different markets that frankly, we knew nothing about. And then you get deep because you understand where's the white space? What's the unmet need? What are the criteria in performance and price that a product has to have so that it can be competitive in that market? And you start to learn about the players, their interests, where there are sunk costs from incumbents, where incumbents are motivated to compete. And a simple breakthrough in technology can suddenly provoke the questions of how is this going to be adopted or rejected by industry? And it can lead you to figure out who the winners and losers are likely to be.

This is a perfect example of how this conversation could go so many different ways, because with that metamaterials example, which, as I understand it was a new CO that you guys developed from scratch almost just after finding one in particular very smart individual who had uncovered this technology. So were you recognizing the optionality of that early on, or were a lot of these things happy accidents along the way?

Well, most scientific breakthroughs are happy accidents that we ascribe this linear narrative to in metamaterials. As with anything, all new discoveries, I contend, come from combinations of old. And this was a combination of physics and microelectronics and electromagnetism.

And.

The early progenitors of this were not just one individual. And this is a theme that is recurrent now, increasingly so, but many individuals, and often at the same time. And so even if you look over the past 150 years, some of the great breakthroughs that we ascribe, you know, whether it's theory of relativity or whether it is the invention of the radio or TV or Darwin's theory of evolution, like there are lots of people involved in those discoveries. And we tend to give the great man theory, you know, so that we give credit to one individual and they sort of get the alpha status and credit. But increasingly, and as evidenced by the number of authors on any given scientific paper for a breakthrough, whether that's something that's involved in, say, DeepMind using AI to look at the combinatorial space in biotech for new molecules or protein folding, or whether that's for some breakthrough in metamaterials, you used to have one or two or three authors, or maybe there was a lead principal investigator, what we call a PI, who was the head of the lab, who's typically the last author on the paper. And they give all first author credit to the junior people who actually did all the work but don't get any pay. And increasingly now it's like 100 people on a paper. And the list of asterisks and crosses that denote all the different institutions or companies in some cases that they might be part of is just a multiple of what it used to be even a decade ago. So success has many fathers failures and orphans. I mean, there truly is, in scientific success, many, many mothers and fathers that are involved in this. So in that case of metamaterials, it was John Pendry at Imperial College, it was David Smith at Duke. One was the former was focused on sort of the theoretical aspects of these metamaterials, which was how do these materials that don't exist in nature have performance capabilities that can do things that we've never seen before? And so the big holy grail, which, being from the uk, the BBC picked up on, was the idea of an invisibility cloak, that wavelengths of light might bend around an object. The object would physically be there, but it would be undetectable at the visual wavelength that we see things in. And so they were Harry Potter, invisibility cloak. Very BBC. It turned out that the physical reality of that does not lend itself to invisibility, but it does lend itself to beam steering with no moving parts. And the reason that that would be important is if you were doing communications with a satellite instead of having a big parabolic dish that tracks a geostationary satellite, as we move, that satellite is locked onto a position on Earth. Increasingly, you want to be able to just switch off to satellites the same way that we switch off of cell phones. As you navigate through a city, going from tower to tower, and your phone doesn't have a mechanical antenna that is looking for it. It's electronically steerable. And so it's the same phenomenon. And that just was never possible before until these materials were embodied into a flat planar surface that's like basically an iPad. And, yeah, that took off in a company called Kymeta that we funded and I served on the board with Bill Gates. And then it lends itself to all these other applications that we never imagined.

I'm glad you brought up Bill Gates. He's someone we've talked about often on the show, given that it's called We Study billionaires and he's been the richest man in the world for many decades, until late. But I'd love to just quickly take the scenic route a little bit over here and explore what it was like to work directly with Bill Gates, because as I understand it, you've now worked with him on a number of different companies. So what's maybe something you've learned personally from him or something that maybe about him that you feel has helped set him apart?

Well, I think he's one of the few people that I've heard very articulately get to the 9010 of something in like seconds, by which I mean whether it's a board deck or whether it's a technical breakthrough or whether it's the key business decision that has to get made. There might be, you know, 100 things that need to be discussed. 90 of them don't matter. 90 of them are, you know, BS or are non consequential. And he's able to zero in on the 10 things that are really of consequence. And then I think there's an appreciation for the uncertainty that might surround those 10 things. Like the things that tend to be very important don't necessarily have clear absolute views of what you ought to do. And so then it's sort of a probabilistic exercise of like, okay, like why would we not do this or why would we do this? And what would be the pros and the cons? And I've seen many people that are more conservative at saying like, okay, this is going to cost another 50 or $100 million to turn over that next car. If you were to think of poker terms. And he would look and say, well, okay, the cost of doing that is known and let's even apply a multiple to it. I always joke that everything times PI in time and money. But what if we don't do that? What if a competitor does that? And what would be the consequence if they were to capture the market share and the economic value associated with that? And so more often than not, he has given the license to founders and management to say we really should aim high and go for that thing. Now he is in a position, and this is something that I've always been mindful of feeling like on the one hand we are partners and co investors. On the other hand, I'm like the guy with the short stack at the poker table. Because Bill has, for all intents and purposes, infinite capital. And we have finite capital with Duration of typically 10, give or take a few years. And so there's a little bit of incentive mismatch in that Bill can play the poker game all night long and not run out of cash. And so we might be guiding the company towards milestones like, okay, we need to hit this milestone so that we can reduce risk and show that something works, so that we can attract new investors. And Bill would typically say, like, why do I need new investors? I don't need any external validation. I don't need to report to LPs, I can just keep funding the company. And so that is obviously not something that's like a learned lesson that the average person can take away. But I do think that the learned lesson that you can take away from watching Bill is getting to the 9010 of something very quickly. And of the 10%, the things that have high degrees of uncertainty, weighing the risks and deciding, let's go for the bigger, more consequential thing. His Persona in private, in boardrooms is a bit different than the public Persona. He'll speak freely, he'll curse, he will chew somebody down pretty quickly. So I think anybody that's in a room knows that they're sort of girded for an intellectual battle, not one of ego, that it's ad hominem, but you have to defend an idea. I've never heard him attack a person, but I've heard him say that is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. And then people might be defensive and you either have to defend that and he'll be like, oh, okay, good point, or you have to concede that he's right and it's a stupid idea.

I love that. Well, keeping it back focused on investment, I'm curious. One, what you think are maybe the tenets of a great investment and maybe what you've seen from Bill and what he's seeing as what makes a great investment. Is there any overlap there or do you have different philosophies?

I think that there are two things that we both prize, which is the primacy of technology and being able to do something that you can't do. We are both psychotically competitive in very different ways. Bill has established, but I think is still to this day in that sort of classic Revenge of the Nerds case, like a very competitive person, he's way more diplomatic and I think has been publicly groomed for a very long period of time. So whereas I might disagree publicly with Elon and you'll even see Elon sort of take on Bill and take jabs. Bill never does that. He finds the sort of almost presidential high ground and maybe except when it came to some of the anti vaxxers or things where he truly felt it was detrimental to public health. But I Think the primacy of technology and competitive advantage related to the technology, things that you can do that nobody else can do. And then the people. He has always been a big believer in giving management the rope to go and either build or hang themselves. And I've been surprised at that. I think other board members that I've seen have sort of held management a little bit tighter, a little bit more accountable. And I think being a founder, Microsoft grew because he was able to sort of have relatively free reign, to make big, aggressive strategic decisions, often extremely competitively, and not really have to answer to a board in the way that many companies with older boards that think they know better than the founder might.

That is interesting because, yeah, it's easy to assume that with. With that kind of money and success and ego even, and experience, you would be tempted to apply that to the people you're investing in and not let them be as autonomous as maybe you have. So that's an interesting point. Bill's also very interested in nuclear, and I am as well. I'm just kind of hopeful for that, for the future of energy. And you've got experience in the space as well. And I'd like to just maybe take a minute and explore what the future of nuclear looks like. In your opinion.

Well, in part, the future of nuclear is going to look like the past, or I think ought to, but we'll get to that in a second. Bill funded a company called TerraPower, which is a traveling wave nuclear reactor, and he was quite bullish on that. And frankly, pre Covid and pre some of the tensions between us and China, it looked probable that China was going to become a big early customer, whether because they truly believed in it, or maybe they were going to take the IP and try to steal it and run with it themselves. You know, I don't know, but we spent a few years going back 10 years here at Lux looking at every part of the nuclear fuel cycle and studying it. And we did this as an exemplar of what I was discussing before being intellectually competitive and looking where other people were looking. Everybody in the venture world, going back to the early 2010s, was looking at clean and green, and they were looking at biofuels, ethanol batteries, electric vehicles, wind, solar, things that were mostly talked about in Al Gore's movie of the time, Inconvenient Truth, which helped to light a fuse under the movement. And it became a little bit of a religious movement. Most of the people praying at the altar really did not talk about nuclear. Nuclear still had a. What I would consider generational and celebrity taboo, the generational being going back to the 60s and 70s, and the celebrity being people like Neil Young and Patti Smith, who were rockers of the day, who basically were like, you know, singing at concerts, being like, no nukes. And there was a conflation for the everyday person that no nukes as a form of nuclear weapon versus no nukes in the form of power, which is clean and green. And at the time nobody was really focused on low carbon. And so the conflation of nuclear war and nuclear power I think has set us back many generations. I think It'll take another 50 years really, until we see widespread nuclear use. So we looked at every part of the nuclear fuel cycle. We decided that uranium miners were mostly hucksters and fraudsters, as many mining companies are in Nevada and Montana. And we basically said, leave that to somebody else. The other unique thing about nuclear, as opposed to say oil and gas, was a characteristic that the marginal price of the input in oil or gas is basically defined by your marginal cost of extraction and it's what guides markets. The marginal price of uranium is just a very small percentage of the total operating cost for nuclear. Most of it is the operations, the regulations, the capex that goes into the physical equipment, the maintenance, the human labor. It's a very different construct. It's a, it's a small sub single digit, you know, single digit percentage. So that when uranium fluctuates, as it did going back a decade from like 25 to 30 to $70 per pound of uranium, it just, it didn't matter. And so we did not look at the mining people, we did look at modular reactors. And while Bill Gates had funded that in TerraPower, and there are probably six or seven other different constructs for fission modular reactor. Instead of building a gigawatt power plant that might cost a billion dollars and could serve a million people, the idea was, could you build something that was smaller, maybe $100,000 or a million dollars, and build hundreds of them, you know, and put on power as you need in a very modular way? I think it's a great idea. I just unfortunately think that it's going to take a very long time. You're going to have to have safety and approval in manufacturing. You also increase the chance that there's a risk on any one thing that creates a failure point that could actually cripple everything. Which normally in a redundant system you would be okay with, but in this you're increasing more failure points. The history of traditional nuclear power, particularly in the Us is, I mean, somewhere between exceptional and extremely exceptional. You had Three Mile island, which was a disaster. Zero people died. There was more evidence of the efficacy of the fail safe systems that basically shut the system down. That also unfortunately happened to coincide with the movie, the China Syndrome. So this is going back to 1979, I think. And again, it captured the zeitgeist of a nuclear meltdown. And so that was just unfortunate. In contrast, Chernobyl was an absolute certifiable disaster. You know, that's been well documented, literally in documentary or you know, dramatized movie, I think on HBO or Showtime about Chernobyl. And I think it really talks not so much to the engineering failure, but to the human failure of being able to report truthfully a chain of command to prevent things from getting worse. And then Fukushima was also a disaster, less a human disaster. Maybe you could say it would be the equivalent here of like an army corps of engineers, but in failing to anticipate this super low negative back swan event, a super low probability, high magnitude consequence. It wasn't nuclear failure. It was a failure of the architecture to be able to prevent a breach from a tsunami. And so, you know, that set it back. But already you see Japan beginning to restart and rebuild for nuclear. So one would have imagined that that would have been a generation or two before people would embrace nuclear again. Or already they are. You're seeing the consequences both in energy scarcity in Europe, the rise of the Green Party in Germany, the increased leverage it has given Putin and Russia with natural gas pipelines. France has always generated about 80% of its electricity. Southern California had shut down nuclear power plants and had to import electricity from Arizona, which was producing it by nuclear. And so unfortunately, the religious zeitgeist around no nukes has I think created some worst devils in the world. And I believe that the future is going to be a combination of speculative investment that is going into fission, primarily large dollars will go into fusion. I expect that. Of course, there's a very low probability that many of those things will ever actually produce energy. Obviously this entire planet is premised on receipt of power from a fusion reactor that is the sun. But I'm more skeptical about it being on a timeline that's investable. And so I would advocate that there just needs to be a rebranding of nuclear. I talk about it as elemental power. So people could talk about the sun, which they like, the wind that they like. So solar and wind. You talk about natural gas to an extent. And then you could talk about uranium, this wonderful yellow Rock that, you know, when enriched slightly can boil water with no, no carbon released and turn turbines and produce beautiful clean electricity. As I joke that if elemental power were discovered, you know, in recent weeks, we would be screaming with joy and it would grace every cover of every publication, you know, exalted that we just solve the climate crisis. So I think it more than any engineering or investment, it just needs a rebranding and a zeitgeist to capture young people that advocate and demand for elemental power. And I think that would be the best thing for society.

I love it and I love that you get to live in the future. So much exploring the companies you've invested in, there's such a broad range, but they're all very futuristic and exploring these really big goals. And I can't think of anything more futuristic than the future of space. So I'd like to walk through a couple of the prospects for space. Farda, for example, is very interesting because as I understand it, it's setting out to essentially establish manufacturing in space. So maybe talk to us about why we need manufacturing in space.

Well, it's why we need anything. I mean, why do you need an iPhone or why do you need Internet? You don't know that you need it until you have it and then you can't live without it. I think the premise of manufacturing something in space, which really when we even first thought about it seemed quite absurd. It was akin to some things that we had seen some years ago, which was like space mining, that you were going to send vessels or probes out to be able to collect rare materials. And we never got around to funding that. We thought it was a little bit too huckstery. This was interesting because you had people that had come out of SpaceX, they were super deep engineers and entrepreneurs. There were two founders, Delian and Will. Will came from SpaceX. Delian is a partner at Founders Fund making pretty cutting edge investments. And their hypothesis was relatively simple. One, when you look at the input costs, each of the elements was dropping precipitously and so it was at least allowing the possibility of more experimentation. The main input costs were rocket launches. So SpaceX's continue to plummet. Increasing competition from Rocket Lab and others only mean that that trend will exacerbate. So the cost per kilogram to launch something up into space was dropping. Increasing communication systems, some of which we've invested in, increasing software and logistics to be able to manage launch operations. Increasing engineering talent that come out of SpaceX with very high expectations. In this case, I think actually, well Said by Gwyn, Chalwell and Elon to be able to move and iterate very rapidly against slower incumbents. And so that culture, the combination of available technologies, launch capabilities, better software, optics, positioning, all of that has just allowed 1,000 flowers to bloom. And so you have people that are launching small satellites, we've invested in some of those companies like Planet, that's now going public, capturing imagery thrice daily on Earth. You have people that are launching communication satellites to cover the Internet, to cover the globe with high speed Internet, particularly for on the move, planes, train ships, boats, et cetera. And so they said, well, what if we launched a bus, not a transportation bus, but a term of phrase used in the space industry that's basically a vessel that would be able to house something that could manufacture exotic materials that inverse to the launch costs. Where you want cost per kg to be very low, here you want the cost per kg to be very high. You want to be able to make something where it's an exotic material, maybe special doped fiber optic cable, for example, maybe pharmaceuticals or certain compounds that there's some advantage in either the rate of production or the output of what you are producing in doing it without gravity. And that the way to achieve low gravity is not by being on one of these very expensive and short time period vomit comets that you see, but to actually have something in low Earth orbit. And then the question is if you can make that, which is the first test. And that is still a question. It's a hypothesis, but it's what we are in the business of. We believe that that is a risk, It's a hard one. If they are able to successfully launch, and they've already contracted with Rocket Lab for the bus and SpaceX for launch and be able to produce their first set of products, which I don't know if they publicly talked about what that is, but it's along the lines of some exotic doped material and then have a capsule that is able to capture that and take it back down and deliver it to Earth. Then you have really advanced towards what I would consider the Bezosian vision as opposed to the Muskian vision. The Bezos vision says let's take some of the industries that are on Earth that are as many of our robotic efforts go after, dull, dirty, dangerous, take them off Earth as opposed to escaping Earth to go to another planet. I'm much more in that Bezos camp. I think that there will be exotic things that are manufactured in low Earth orbit, in low gravity. They will have high dollar value per kilogram. And the people that are able to develop those materials are going to have for some period of time, a monopoly. And then they will parlay that into an increasing interesting portfolio suite of products.

Now, when we're saying manufacturing, obviously it's such a broad word, my mind goes to 3D printing, which you're also invested in other companies. So I'm curious, is there some overlap there or some synergy there between the 3D printing aspect in this company?

Well, the number one overlap is that you don't have humans in the loop. You might have humans designing software, designing the machines, but these are basically things that are autonomously printing or making stuff. And so, you know, if Varda has, you know, a sequence of steps in a mechanically engineered system that can operate and offset effects of gravity and rotation and then produce a thing being a little bit circumspect, and then be able to have that thing go into almost like off a conveyor belt, it's not actually a conveyor belt into a vessel and drop that back down. That's really interesting. If you think about 3D printing is it is akin to our 2D printers, of course, but in a Z dimension. So not just xy.matrix printers, that evolved into laser printers, but now you're physically adding layers. So that is oftentimes why the less sexy nomenclature may be more timeless of additive manufacturing. And we have a whole slew of companies in this desktop metal run by Rick Fulop, who's an amazing entrepreneur, former venture capitalist, started this business to say we're not going to just do trivial trinkets and plan plastic pieces and small parts and gamers and hobbyists kind of stuff. We really want to change the economics of manufacturing for certain specialty industries. So this might be an impeller for a water pump for a BMW car. This might be part of a GE turbine for a jet engine. It might be something like Tiffany's and the entire jewelry line that they produce using handcrafted artisans that you might be able to do on just a handful of machines. And he decided that they were going to build sort of a small desktop machine, a medium sized and then this large sort of main event, so to speak, which is a full production system. And what started as this entirely speculative thing now has just hundreds of machines being sold around the world and dozens of major customers. And it is changing the economics of how you manufacture things. Then we have another company called Shapeways which is actually partnered with them. And I think even today it was publicly announced, there are some people who Say, you know, I can't afford one of these desktop machines, but I would love to be able to use it. And so there's a long tail of people that won't be able to buy the machines themselves, but want to be able to access the capability. And so a company like Shapeways, you can think of them sort of as like a Kinkos, I'm the chairman of the board, they're now publicly traded, but you can think of them as, we don't make the equipment, we're going to use the equipment and then we're going to figure out of all the orders that are coming in, whether they're from small, medium sized businesses or a long tail of individuals that are trying to make something. We can figure out algorithmically how to put all of these orders into one batch, that a single machine can print 40 orders instead of doing them serial one by one. And it's a beautiful thing to watch, but the common thing amongst all these is you're basically for all intents and purposes hitting a button and watching this thing go and do its thing. And the main job of people is generally to make sure that other people aren't touching these machines. And I think this is the future of manufacturing across a whole range of industries. You look at the current supply logistics problems that are coming in ships lined up in ports and generally low cost manufacturing in one part of the world in Asia and another part of the world, say in South America or Africa, where raw materials are being sourced and mined and then sent to Asia so that they can then be packaged based on IP that was basically emailed over from Cupertino, say in Apple. All of that is going to start to change. You know, you've had 30 or 40 years of that process and increasingly you are going to be able to manufacture much closer to where the customers are and you're going to be able to bypass the ships. Not, you know, not with 99.9% of stuff for a long time, but for 0.1% of global products. There will be increasing penetration where you put the printers near the customers and the customer just orders by basically emailing a file and the file is printed and that thing is delivered locally.

Another space company that our listeners might be also interested in because it is going public, it looks like is Planet or Planet Labs. And this is an interesting one because that's one of those things that someone like me never thinks about. A shortage of imagery of the earth. I wasn't aware that there was such a demand for something like that. But talk to us about the prospect of Planet Labs and maybe why the investors should be interested in that SPAC deal is happening.

Well, first of all, the founders were amazing. Will, Robbie and Chris. Chris actually was just on a Bezos rocket with William Shatner and sort of evidence that the decreasing gap between science fiction and science fact just keeps getting smaller and smaller. To actually ride to space with Captain Kirk, I think it was pretty cool. But these are the kinds of people that Lux loves to back. People that are dreaming of science fiction and then making it real. So these were three guys that basically said we hear all the time about more computing power inside of your cell phone than there was like in the Apollo, you know, 8, 9, 10, 11 missions. What if we actually took these cell phones and launched them up into space? And so they created these small cubesats and on rockets in the desert in California, ended up launching these phones and to take pictures and basically have them record. And sure enough, like a few survived. They came back, three of them were called Alexander Graham and Bell, you know, to be cute. And that became the early origin of Planet Labs. At the time it was called Cosmogia, then it became called Planet Labs, then it became called Planet. They would end up buying. Google had a satellite division that they bought called Skybox, which was doing slightly higher resolution images with larger cubesat, maybe the size of a fridge, and also taking 30 frames per second video. And they have a whole suite of products now that are basically competing with like Maxar, which was Digital Globe and others that preceded it. And they're taking thrice daily images of the Earth. So they're able to get what used to be, you know, if you pulled up like Google Maps a few years ago, you know, you would look at an image and maybe you're standing next to your neighbor's house and on Google Maps it was like three, four, five year old imagery, right? It was like a sandlot or something. And today you're able to get imagery three times a day of almost every spot on the Earth. You don't need to task a satellite as a government or an intel agency would and basically say, you know, go over there and look at what's going on. And so that's a great thing. Generally, if you believe that technology can be in the service of revealing truth and shining sunlight on things, whether that's a humanitarian crisis, whether that is agriculture or climate issues, whether that is nuclear silos in China, movements of troops in the Russian Ukraine border, any signs of, of human rights abuses, it has become an invaluable tool and literally a God's eye in the sky. And then the data that is coming off of that platform is increasingly valuable because you can do longitudinal analysis on it over time, looking at something from a day, six hours or six months and see and detect change. And then that change is important for investors because they can look at everything from number of cars in a parking lot as a proxy for retail sales at a Walmart or Lowe's or Home Depot. They could look at shipping yards and progress or lack thereof. It just, it gives you better sense of quite literal ground truth today run by CEO Kevin, who is serving actually as president, an incredible product guy, you know, from Twitter and Instagram and just understands how to take technology and make it available to the masses. So yeah, very optimistic and bullish on on them and their prospects and their place in the ecosystem.

Well, that certainly gives a little bit more color to the TAM potential for a company like that. I mean almost infinite. It sounds like as far as who wouldn't want that kind of knowledge and how broad ranging it can be. What about the concern about just, I mean these are micro satellites up in the sky, but how many are we talking about long term? And is there ever a concern about the cluster forming around the earth and kind of debris, so to speak, building up?

Well, every new technology solves a problem that prior technologies might have caused and then it itself becomes a problem for future technologies to solve. So there are scientists, astronomers that are complaining about say Starlink, the number of satellites that Starlink is launching. The virtue of Starlink, it will beam down static satellite Internet. Others OneWeb and beyond will do mobile. And so there will be a lot of assets up in space. That itself invites new opportunities. So we've already funded a company that is actually co founded by Steve Wozniak, co founder of Apple, that is tracking things in space and using a combination of both off the shelf publicly available satellite data and then actually probes themselves that are visually tracking and identifying objects. Now that's going to be really useful not only for protecting your own assets. If you are a private company or like planet or SpaceX with Starlink or if you're a government that is trying to detect sabotage of assets or potential threats and there is a space war and it's beyond a space race. When China blew up a weather satellite nearly a decade ago, they were showing a kinetic capability. They were not blowing up their own weather satellite, they were showing what they could do to any other sovereign satellite system. And there's just a lot of Competition, a lot of interests competing over private space stations where assets are. You know, we had a US surveillance satellite that was looking at a China surveillance satellite and the China surveillance satellite was able to do a quick navigation maneuver. And this was publicly reported about two weeks ago. So it's pretty wild. And it is the sci fi vision of, you know, Star wars and space race that is already underway. It's very sophisticated engineering software. It quite literally is rocket science. And I think it's a frontier that is going to define a lot from communications to governance and sort of everything in between. So geopolitically quite critical.

Yeah, let's go there next because as you described it, there's obviously that defense appeal to the technology at hand with Planet. I've heard you say that, I've heard you talk about being anti war, but pro defense. So maybe walk us through this framework and how you use it for your investment decisions.

Well, the default morality that we look at, the lens of technology that we fund is a very simple question which is, is it reducing human suffering? And you could look at something like Facebook and say pro or con? Is this good for society or bad for society? Is it good for teenage girls or bad for teenage girls? Is it good for distant relatives or bad for. And a lot of it is. It depends on what the incentives of the system are. Well, it's the same thing when we fund a breakthrough cancer detection technology or a cancer drug. There's very little question if we're reducing human suffering. When it comes to defense. It's a tougher question is what we are funding, particularly if it is literally involved in a kill chain doing something to reduce human suffering. Now I would argue that in some of our companies where they're able to use artificial intelligence to dissect aerial imagery, whether that's from a plane or a drone or satellite, and discriminate between a honest, hard working father who is coming home from a field with a pickaxe over his shoulder and a malevolent violent extremist who has an AK47 over their shoulder. And they're going to a school of girls, you know, to either shoot them up or kidnap them. There is a very clear, I think, moral use of force in reducing human suffering. And so being able to use technology to understand again, better ground truth and have more precision, which I think is something that has been a trend over, over time, the sort of directional arrow of progress, we have greater and greater moral precision, the more technological precision you have. And so that has just made me generally supportive of wanting to See good technology in the hands of good people at a time when we have peer competitors, where it is very clear, if you take China, and specifically authoritarian CCP China, not the Chinese people, nobody wants crypto or satellite imagery or social media or technology more than Xi Jinping. It is very clear that these. In the same way Shakespeare might have said that tis nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. It really depends where and in whose hands the technology, advanced technology is. And so I feel that there's a moral imperative not only to invent technology, but to make sure that it's in the hands of the women and men who are quite literally on the front lines fighting against people that have a quest to either suppress, surveil, decrease human rights and increase human suffering. And right now in China in particular, you see that very clearly. And we have a zeitgeist in the US that is increasingly afraid or economically deterred from speaking out against it.

What are your thoughts on the privatization of defense? Just more generally speaking, there's this movement, it seems, just by proxy, saying Silicon Valley, you're based in New York, but there's this trend of sorts of more and more VCs and tech, smaller companies privatizing defense. Is that a good thing overall, you think, in your opinion, or something to be concerned about? Because I also wonder if that just opens up more and more opportunity for investors to find more opportunities to partake.

Well, again, you have multiple dimensions here. You have a geopolitical consideration, you have an investment consideration, you have moral consideration, societal consideration. You know, we were warned by we, American society was warned by Eisenhower, going back to, you know, the talks of the military industrial complex. And you didn't want to create a system where there was, you know, sort of call it big defense that had incentive to go to war so that they can crank the war machine and produce material, produce rockets and bombs and ships and aircraft carriers. And you know, even when you see now the incentives of something like the F35 Joint Strike Fighter in hundreds of congressional districts where, you know, sort of pork barrel politics of money just being doled out to all these congressional districts, that to me is a corrupted system. When you go back to the very early roots of. And so if you take that, by the way, the sort of military industrial complex is something we don't want, you contrast that to what China has said, not only that they want, but that is a effective state mandate, which is military civil fusion. It's that in the service of the nation and the nation's interest, even if that in that case is decided not by democracy, but by a small set of men in rooms in the Politburo. It is very clear that technology that is developed by Alibaba or technology that is developed by tencent or foreign interests and investments that they make are in the service of one China. They're very overt about this. I think that for the past 20 years there has been a growing reluctance. Some of that organic and natural. Seeing a relatively jingoistic rah rah American, you know, foreign interventionist, Bush too, seeing a more embracing, but, you know, imperfect war on terror with Obama, and then, you know, seeing a super jingoistic populist, you know, anti, I don't know, anti civility, Trump that if you were an engineer, an entrepreneur, it would be hard pressed for most of those administrations, for a variety of different forms to say, like, I really want to work, you know, for, for that man or those people. And so for 20 years, I think you've had a zeitgeist where people have said, like, I don't want to pursue that. And now increasingly, I think it's not a choice that, you know, and see in daily headlines the tactics that are being used by China, by Russia and by others. So it used to be non state actors that were a threat, but now it's very clearly, you know, peer competitors and state actors and technological demonstrations that increasingly they're showing in domains that we have been surprised by, you know, are increasingly worrisome. So I think that there is again, a moral imperative that the best and brightest women and men working on cutting edge technology should be working with the country, not because they're hardcore patriots, but just because protecting the freedoms and the interests and the markets and the very thing that we all take for granted. Why would you want the women and men on the front lines to be disadvantaged with inferior technology? And yeah, so I feel pretty strongly that we should be working with the government and that you should be working with good people to put good technology or better technology in the hands of good people.

My mind went back to our earlier discussion on optionality because I've spoken with a number of investors and it's a recurring theme as of late and just identifying optionality early on and how much of an advantage that can be, I wonder, is that part of the appeal in investing in defense, given that so much tech that comes out of defense sometimes trickles down and becomes other technology or other use cases, not so much use for defense?

Yeah. And in fact, while there is an early history, again, remember the roots of venture Capital itself were not just like these halt and catch fire kind of movies and orchards and Hewlett and Packard in a garage. It was all electronic warfare in service of defense. And many of the most cutting edge things in Silicon Valley ended up coming out of that. But it was really entirely funded by the Pentagon and defense. Lockheed Martin started in Sunnyvale with basically zero people, had tens of thousands of people later were working on major submarine and aircraft missions. And so I do think that there are a lot of things that historically have come off what happened again. And going back 20 or 30 years now is increasingly the military was sourcing things the inverse way. So instead of the military being at the most cutting edge and spinning off commercial things, now you had the military reaching in and saying, my gosh, Google or Apple are doing these things better than we can. And so there's even simple software capabilities. Like I've used an example publicly that I've been privy to, a blue dot tracking. You can pull up your iPhone and find my friends. And if you were part of a small five or six person team in Southeast Asia trying to track some of your peers in special operations, even that capability is, is inferior to what we have on our iPhones today. And so there are clear low hanging fruit where commercial off the shelf technologies can be used in the service today of government. To your question on optionality, I do think that increasingly companies that are explicitly focused on defense, which have not really existed until say Anduril, which is one of our companies that's really unapologetically and exclusively focused on defense, will end up spinning off commercial things. But most people have sort of hedged well, government's too bureaucratic, it's going to take too long. The entrenchment of the incumbents are really hard to overcome. And so let's make sure that we have sort of a quote unquote, dual use technology, something that we can sell to the commercial markets and something that we can sell to the military. We have become increasingly comfortable and maybe three or four other firms, a very small minority of venture capitalists, are comfortable funding something that is entirely focused on the US Department of Defense, the Pentagon and US allies.

Very interesting. I'd like to explore a few concepts that may or may not be overhyped in your opinion. And one of the things that's coming to mind is quantum computing, because I have heard you mention that that word quantum can be overhyped. But there is a company in the portfolio called Rigetti that I think is built around quantum computing. I'm kind of curious what the appeal of that company is and why, what prospects it has.

We were early investors with Chad Rigetti, the eponymous founder. Chad came out of Yale. He was doing things in early stages that were scientifically appreciated and competitively advantaged relative to say even IBM or Google or other people. And so it was sort of a speculative investment, betting on the credibility of a scientist. It's an area that I would say generally, I think not specifically to Rigetti, but just overall is fraught with very high expectations, hand wavy hype. And I would caution people, there's a big ignorance, arbitrage gap where people feel like they don't understand it. And just when I hear people talk about it and it's the same thing. It's cryptographic codes that can never be broken or can instantly be broken. The ability to model complex simulations of drugs, the ability to encrypt communications. You know, there's lots of other ways to do this than quantum computing. And, and it's one of these things that I'm on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, and one of the early fathers of the Santa Fe Institute was Marie Gelman. And he would talk about flap doodle, you know, quantum flap doodle, which are people that are just sort of talking about stuff and they don't really understand it. So I just would caution people that, you know, you read things in like major news publications and they talk about the rise of AI and 5G and quantum computing and AI matters, but the other two, not as much. So I would caution people when it.

Comes to quantum, that last point is very timely because as we're seeing right now, inflation is starting to rise and the debt to GDP is massive. And there's some narratives out there around this idea that, hey, don't worry, technology is going to save us. GDP is going to start growing at 20% a year again once AI really takes a foothold. There's a lot of these narratives being thrown around. And someone like you who's sort of living at the helm of the future, so to speak, you're seeing so many opportunities. Does it make you more optimistic or more of a realist or somewhere in between? What's your take on how much buy in we should believe in technology alone being sort of the white knight here?

I would say relatively low. So even though I'm a techno optimist, I'm generally a cynic when it comes to most people. And most people making predictions as Buffett and other stuff say more about the predictor than about the thing that they're predicting, which is generally that they're fools. So I would take a little bit more of a measured uncertainty. Howard Mark stands here, which is I truly have no idea about the inflationary environment. I know that there are very smart people that are saying that inflation is more likely to be persistent than it is to be transitory. And they may be right. And they are looking at recent data and they're seeing supply chains. And there are others that say no, these things are still these rippling waves and aberrations from COVID dislocations and the markets will come back on. Then I have other people that say, well, the measures of inflation particularly dominated by food and fuel are not the things that really matter and the things that really matter that are often not counted in GDP itself. You know, lots of productivity measures in technology. Even what you and I are doing right now, being able to communicate, you know, without having to jump on a, on a plane without the energy or fuel used for that, besides electricity, that's fueling the electrons that are, you know, lighting up, illuminating our displays. You know, we're not really paying for any of this. I mean indirectly through my comcast bill or fiber optic bill and the hardware that's been amortized now already over two plus years. But a lot of that just isn't caught in modern gdp. Technology has been almost deflationary in everything where it has been allowed to compete. And the same elements and components from the semiconductors, the display, the pixels, the bandwidth that I'm just looking around here off the cuff have all gotten cheaper and cheaper over time. So those are relatively non inflationary, they are deflationary and they have become cheaper, become more widespread. There's encouraging signs that technology has gone into many heretofore boring industries, particularly ones that have had high degrees of government intervention, subsidy regulation, and that's things like health care, government itself and civic technology and how government operates, military and defense. And so there's optimism from a technology optimist that it will start to chip away in a deflationary way at some of those sectors which have historically, if you look at graphs, been the most inflationary, including education itself. Obviously the incentive around education is historically give people student loans. Well, if you get a student loan, if I was a college, I'm just going to continue to raise my tuition prices. Does it really cost more to actually educate people? No, it should be costing less. Covid and Zoom and novel versions of these MOOCs and online communities shown that it is a very poor substitute for in person physical learning. But There is massive scale to be gained from recorded lectures and all kinds of other things. So I'm quite optimistic that technology will be a deflationary force as a younger generation starts to route around the institutions in healthcare, education, government. But the idea of AI being this anti inflationary measure, all technology gives some temporary advantage to people who are early adopters. And that advantage is transient because as it becomes cheaper, it becomes more affordable. As it becomes more affordable, it becomes a sort of fallacy of composition, which is, if I'm able to stand on my toes at the stadium and see better, that's fine. But once everybody can stand on their toes, we're all just at a new level. So at some point, the people that were able to instantly communicate because they had early access to email and bandwidth might have been at a communication advantage relative to the people who were still sending faxes or letters. But once everybody had email, you no longer have an advantage. And so I don't see that AI itself will be this mass disinflationary force that will be the savior.

One more concept that may or may not be overhyped is this word now that's in the zeitgeist called the Metaverse. And you've recently posted that the Metaverse is exciting, but not for the reasons that you think. So what do you mean by that?

Well, there's different layers of how you want to describe this. And part of the measure that makes me pessimistic about the Metaverse as a term is the fact that everybody is using it. So it's only imminent time until IBM has launched an ad about how IBM is powering the universe. But Nike is in the Metaverse and IBM is in the Metaverse or will be in the Metaverse. Facebook, of course, in the Metaverse. And everybody's just basically trying to say, like, hey, there's something new and cool and we're going to help define it and you want to be part of it. So if you think about the Metaverse as a series of rectangles, which is the way that I've conceived it, you know, I have this rectangle here. I stared it all day long. If an alien came down, they would see like these humans, you know, with their necks hunted down in this weird pose and, you know, staring at this. Well, the early conception of the Metaverse that Zuck and Facebook have said is, you know what, we're going to take this rectangle and we're just going to slap it on your face. You know, we're going to strap it around and that's basically virtual reality, right? We are going to actually ensconce you in a headset with pixels coming on your retina so that you know, as you move, you feel like you're in this other world. If you've experienced VR, the average person typically wants to be in that, assuming that they do want to be in it for less than 20 minutes. You know, I'd say the average time is somewhere between 6 and 12 minutes. Of course, there's going to be a long tail or some edge on the bell curve of people that are obsessed with it and spend many hours a day, but by and large, it's not that comfortable. I think it massively underestimates our already desired propensity to want to multitask and do many things at a time. You might be at home later watching a show on Netflix, on your laptop, checking your text. You've got multiple screens. So then the next conception is, okay, what if instead of having rectangles that are slap to your face, you take the rectangles that many people already have, which are their glasses, and you put a layer inside of those rectangles, which is augmented reality, which is screen projection, giving you directions, giving you little tidbits of information, allowing you to filter the key things or the key people that you want to see. And I do think that there's going to be really creative content in those layers. It might come from a company like Niantic that sort of already captured our imagination with Pokemon Go. There's a transient and a faddish appeal to that, obviously. Remember, people were running around like Pokemon Go fanatics, and now it's just not a thing. And so you'll see companies that form on that software layer. You will see a lot of companies on the component layer. Just like today inside of the iPhone, there's all kinds of different chips and chipsets. Communications, cameras, increasingly AI embedded on the chips. And there will be a whole new set of players that are not your classic intel or Nvidia or Micro that are governing that. And so there's a hardware layer there. And I just increasingly think that the Metaverse, as pitched and imagined by Zuck, of this sort of ensconced world that you're going to want to go to straight out of Sci Fi, like Ready Player One, which is effectively a playbook for Zuck, is not the one that we're going to experience. I'm much more in the camp that this is going to be an extension of our existing senses, just as this is now. I have a Microphone that is picking up and amplifying my voice. I have a lens that is picking up and amplifying the humanity in front of me and then playing back yours. I have speakers that are amplifying your voice. And so I think we really prefer the amplification of our existing humanity. And I'm more drawn towards the technologies that are going to do that. Every piece of the stack that people are going to compete on this from hardware, software, wearable devices. You know, we funded a brain machine interface company called Control Labs that Facebook bought which is allowing you to do hands free gesture and control devices in many cases just by thinking about moving your muscles so as to control the device. And I think, I think that's really going to be the future of this purported metaverse. But I also think it will be called something else. And I think that whatever it gets called will be defined by some currently 17, 18, 19 year old young kids, probably somewhere outside the US, maybe in Nigeria, maybe in the Philippines, probably in the web3 crypto world, tinkering with protocols and coming across discovery. And I think that Facebook will end up spending tens of billions of dollars annually with thousands of thousands of people will have some pretty cool things. We'll probably get beaten by Apple in AR and then we'll be completely surprised. In the same way that Microsoft was surprised by Google and Google was surprised by Facebook, Facebook will be surprised by somebody else. And I couldn't tell you who that is today, but my job is to go out and try to find who they are.

One of the scents that was missing in your outline there that I just couldn't help but call out is the smell, the smelling sense that I know you had a passion for developing that technology. Is there any update there?

No, it's a constant hunt for me and maybe hunt for a year or 10, I have no idea. But I am primed for the optionality of trying to discover it. What it is just for people who are watching or listening is the idea that I can pick up this phone and it is a remote control for pretty much everything in my life. I'm able to conjure a car, conjure a meal, control devices around me through a savant system or iPhone. I can capture high fidelity sound. I can play that sound back with high fidelity speakers. I can capture high fidelity imagery, static or dynamic in the form of video, increasingly form 4K and you know, 120 frames a second and I can play it back with ever high quality, high density, high pixelated displays. The one sense that I can Capture today. And I already have haptics that are, you know, tapping me on my watch. So I have a sense of feel. I can't capture smell and that. And we say, well, why do you want to capture smell? It is our most salient memory, connected sense. And so whether it's the smell of a loved one, the smell of nostalgia, the smell of a wine or a food, being on a beach and vacation, capturing that dimension, not just of the sound of the waves or the visual of it in a different speed, slow motion or faster, as realistic as possible. But that smell that you know is like the one French word I know, that je ne sais quoi of that moment and being able to share that with somebody. And so that second piece is not only do you have to capture it, but you have to be able to play it back. Now. Capturing. If I would have told you 20 years ago, you can walk into a cafe and hold up a little magic Star Trek device and whatever song is playing it will tell you exactly what that song is. You know, you never have to write it down, you don't have to record it. And the ability to Shazam is effectively capturing a digital signature of sound waves that are permeating through the air. Tied to a central database, it does pattern recognition, figures out what segment that is and what it matches to in the database. It says, ah, it's this Drake song or whatever it is. The same thing will happen with smell. There are volatile organic compounds today. You can use a mass spectrometry machine to be able to look at the chemical signature of that visually. And eventually those technologies will become solid state, they will shrink down. Maybe small scale lasers in the same way that we have like lidar in our iPhone today that can do 3D depth sensing of physical spaces used to require a big machine. And you will be able to get a smell signature and press a button and basically have a Shazam for hey, what is that smell? And then somebody else will have to invent the playback mechanism. So there'll be recording and there'll be playback. And I'm absolutely convinced it will happen because it can already obey the laws of physics. And there's no reason that it can't. We just have to find the right combinatorial, the right combination of technologies to put together to make it happen. And I hope to fund the ones that win.

That's an interesting take on the technology side. I would have thought it would have been more of like a brain implant, you know, that's just sending you little electromagnetic things.

It's a good idea and it's certainly possible that that's the way we go. I'm very skeptical about implants. Obviously if you have a life saving need for epilepsy or heart or stent or something like that, or knee implant or something mechanical like, it makes a lot of sense. The idea that we're going to put in a technology that won't be obsolesced. And I'm way more optimistic about surface technologies that will be driven by ever increasing software. Same thing with these brain machine interfaces. I am not in the camp of neuralink where you're going to have an implant sending signals to or receiving signals directly from the brain and as mass adoption. Whereas you know, something like this, which is effectively one of the few in the wild, control labs bands that Facebook bought that I'm able to put on my forearm and it to detect my intentions and control all the stuff around me, the software will continue to get better. This will be embedded into something like my watch. You know that that is directionally the way that neuroscience and neurotech devices are going to go.

Okay, last question here is you have a number of companies that have gone public. I'm tempted to ask you what your favorite is, but that's too easy. Do you have a company that's nearest and dearest to your heart?

Well, I won't comment on the public ones just because I always want to be very careful and I'm very careful while I talk about and promote a lot of our companies. Even on Twitter, I tend not to talk about the public ones, ones that I'm super bullish on or worried about. And so I will talk about a private company which I'm super bullish on, which I think is the epitome of what we like to fund, which is this n of one company that nobody else is really looking at or thought of. It was inspired by science fiction. The science fiction in this case was Professor X. Professor X of X Men Puts on a Helmet, could spot mutants from a crowd. And those mutants have science fiction capabilities, shooting lasers and conjuring fire from their fingers and true invisibility cloaks in these movies and nonsense. But I got to thinking, if there was an actual human trait that had a one in a billion possibility of existing and there are 8 billion people on earth. Do the math. There might be eight people walking around with a trait like get into an accident, don't break their bones, or only need two hours of sleep a night, or have extreme eyesight in very dark conditions, or can breathe oxygen without assistance at very high altitudes or very low depths of water, you know, have body temperature control at different latitudes of earth that, you know, make them almost superhuman. So, so that is something that I was convinced that there are real life superhumans. And we started a company after going and talking to 100 plus people to find out if this is the stupidest idea or incredible. And we got a whole bunch of PhDs that came out of Cold Spring harbor and people from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and Illumina Chairman and CEO and gene sequencing. And then importantly, this team called Variant assembled a cultural anthropologist and an ethicist because they know that as they were going to go out into the world, they were really looking for outlier traits in outlier people. And those outlier people were going to be in outlier parts of the world. And they had one chance to get it right. They structured a very thoughtful benefit sharing program so that whether it's the science, the technology, the learnings that they get, or actual equity or cash, things go back to in many cases these indigenous tribes so that they can really be part of this versus having been in a history of exploitation by most scientists that interact with indigenous folks. They already have 14 partnerships around the world with some exotic groups of people with exotic traits already found their first hit on a particular area of the body. And I'm just super optimistic that this is going to be a game changing company. Finding people that are sort of almost real life X men mutants and bringing drugs to the masses based on their natural biology.

Fascinating stuff. Well, Josh, we got to do this again. I got to hear more about this company as it develops more and a number of the other ones. I really appreciate your time today. Like I said, this conversation could go a number of different ways and explore lots of different topics and it didn't disappoint. So I really appreciate the time. Before I let you go, Josh, I want to give you an opportunity to hand off where people can find you. Follow along any other resources you want to share.

Yeah. Website luxcapital.com details a lot of the things that we're looking for. We are always looking for new entrepreneurs. And as much as we think that we know where technology might be going, oftentimes it's a conversation with an incredible founder that says this is the way that the world ought to look and we want to follow him or her. You can follow me on Twitter wolfjosh Wolfe Josh and hit me up. My DMs are open and happy to connect and explore. I always say that randomness and optionality of the governing force of my life. And you never know. So I never know who I'm going to get to talk to.

Fantastic. Josh. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time and hope we can do it again soon.

Thanks Trey. Appreciate it. Thanks for watching. Make sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss out on the next video podcast episode and new investing resources. What are your takeaways and thoughts on this discussion?

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