Base Layer Episode 147: Josh Wolfe (Lux Capital) on learning from history, Robotics/AR post COVID, Digital Assets & more

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Please do your own research. This podcast is presented by blockworks Group, one of the best digital asset, event and media production companies that I know of. For exclusive content and events that provide insight into digital assets, visit them at blockworks Group IO. You won't be disappointed. This is David and this is your new episode of Baselayer. And it's a real privilege and an honor to have Josh Wolfe with me today. Josh is the co founder and managing partner at Lux Capital. Lux Capital, in my opinion, is probably one of the premier investment firms out there that is focusing on innovation of tomorrow. Actually, their mission statement is investing in emerging science and technology ventures at the outermost edges of what is possible. Josh is someone that I have been very closely watching for years as a family office investor. And so if you don't know about Lux, please go look into what they're doing there. It is special. Josh, thank you for coming on Baselayer today. How are you?

I'm doing great. It's good to be with you and yeah, delighted to get into it.

Awesome. There's a bunch of things that we want to talk about today. There's a lot going on in the world. Obviously, we've been dealing with a global pandemic. We've been seeing social upheaval and so many other different things that are happening around here. What I really would love to do. You and I connected on Twitter a few months back on something very special. I know you've talked about it before, but it's really kind of interesting that you and I both had this as a catalyst. So when I was a teenager and the band playing on was a special movie for me and I know you've talked about it before, that it was a special movie for you, but I'd love to hear kind of what in terms of your upbringing, something personal from my side too. My mom helped raise me. My dad mom broke up when I was very young and my mom really took it on. She raised me. And so there some corollaries between your brain and mine. And so I'd love to hear kind of in thinking about what has created Josh today, the investor and the person that the father and everyone else, you know, everything else that you do. What kind of has, you know, what in your upbringing has kind of led that, you know, what has really created that so far?

Well, there's the story that I tell and the story I tell myself, and, you know, I'm sort of intellectually honest to know that the story that I tell myself may not be entirely, you know, 100% accurate, but the narrative that has defined me as my parents split when I was young. I was raised by my mom and my grandparents in Coney Island, Brooklyn. The absence of my father for me would sort of inform my presence as a husband and father. So sort of the, you know, reciprocal or invert, always invert, as Karl Jacoby said. And so for me, it was one over my dad. It was the presence of, you know, nuclear families of friends who I admired or was jealous of. And, you know, I sort of, at a young age, had a chip on my shoulder for a variety of reasons. I was short. We were relatively poor compared to everybody else. I grew up in a neighborhood that was, you know, sort of a heterogeneous or hybrid between Eastern European, mostly Jews and black and Latinos in Coney Island. And so I grew up with a chip on my shoulder. Years later, I, you know, sort of coined this phrase, the chips on shoulders. Put chips in pockets. And obviously you can either become sort of bitter or you can become motivated. And I think I had a very competitive streak at a young age. I think part of that was having high performing peers, and part of that was having a high expectation mom. That drove me. But I think that sort of combination of competitive spirit, chip on your shoulder. I personally don't buy into today's zeitgeist of meditation and mindfulness and happiness. And I think all progress comes from dissatisfaction. And most of the people that have achieved greatness and most of the progress that we look at happens because somebody looked around and said, geez, that sucks, or I want to do better. And oftentimes it's, you know, people thriving not in spite of some hardship, but because of it. So that's, you know, at least the story I tell myself of, you know, what my motivating factors were and what drove me.

That's awesome. Yeah, it was, you know, very similar to me, is that, you know, nothing is ever going to be given to you. You got to go and get it. That was kind of inbreded. It was kind of imprinted in my kind of cloth, if you will, in my fabric, is that nothing's going to be given to you. You got to go and get it.

And so I think that's right, and I think it's interesting because my career is venture capital, and I have to invest in people that are inventing the future. And oftentimes they have a conception of the world that one might consider with arrogance of the highest order. This is the way that the world ought to look. And we pride ourselves that we often believe before other people understand. And so a lot of people say, well, how do you reconcile the fact that you're such an optimist, investing in people, inventing the future, but at the same time, you're such this sort of skeptic and cynic? And I think the difference is this notion of optimism that can be sort of parsed two ways. You can be a complacent optimist or conditional optimist. And if you're a complacent optimist, just like you were saying, you expect the world to come to you. You're like a kid on Christmas Eve waiting for presents to come, or on Hanukkah waiting for presents to come. And if you're a conditional optimist, you see what could be. But you go out and get it done. And either you do it through hard work and perseverance, or you do it through Tom Sawyer, like controlling or manipulation of peers. We call that leadership in many fronts. But, yeah, I'm definitely a conditional optimist.

Yeah, it's interesting because with my kids, I always teach them that. They always ask me, well, oh, that kid was lucky. That kid was able to get this. He's so lucky. I'm like, luck is not really something. It's about timing and being there and being ready for it. Do you agree with that?

Well, yeah, I mean, for sure. I mean, our old cliche of luck favors the prepared. But look, there are people that are born lucky and sort of the classic social justice conceit of Rawls, veil of justice. If you imagine a world in which you're going to be born tomorrow and you get to decide all the rules, and the only thing that you don't know is whether you're going to be born white or black in America or Brooklyn or Bangladesh, tall, short, smart, not, you know, able, bodied, strong, how would you decide society? And the truth is, you know, for the vast majority of people, they are born on third base, you know, with bases loaded. They are born, you know, when I say vast majority people who are successful and so luck and circumstances that had nothing to do with their choosing, you know, put them on this path, dependent path forward. And if you're born into that and you have no sort of appreciation for it, then, you know, I think that's why we end up with a lot of the social injustices we have. On the other hand, you know, some of the greatest entrepreneurs and the people who go and strive and achieve, you know, come from these really unfortunate circumstances. And you look at some of the most, you look at some of the most famous people, you know, from iconic entrepreneurs or media titans like Oprah to even Steve Jobs, like, if you knew their life stories or Larry Ellison, you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy, you know, but at the same time, these are sort of heroes that we hail post facto. But, you know, a priori, you know, before all their success, these people were born in fire. I mean, they were orphans, they were rejected, they were raped, they lost loved ones. It was just, you know, sort of the worst of any Shakespearean tragedy that, you know, ends up becoming sort of this great hero story.

And so, again, I don't want you to go into, obviously you've talked about this a lot, but with the movie that kind of inspired you and me, you took a much different trajectory, obviously, Westinghouse, and you took it really on. I kind of played around at Rockefeller for a little bit. Thankfully, I was able to get a short little internship and I realized that in my opinion, and again, this is interesting in hindsight, 2020, if I would have had the mindset I have Today as a 41 year old adult, as I did as a teenager, I would have been like, dude, stop, just stick with it, man. But you really took it on. This has been a driving force for you. And so I'm curious in today's time, what we're seeing with the global pandemic. Obviously back then in the 80s with HIV and AIDS, it took a long time to get public opinion changed. It took a long time to get policymakers to acknowledge it. Do you think that we are seeing a different cycle now? That with Dr. Anthony Fauci being out there very publicly, a lot of the things that we're seeing on the cdc, do you see a stark differential or do you see it very similarly? I kind of see it as a similarity between the 80s and now with HIV and AIDS. It seems that we're kind of trying to tuck this away with COVID Do you agree with that?

Well, at Any given point in time. I feel like there are certain again, sort of Shakespearean stories that play out in the cast or the stage changes, but the sort of arc of the story is the same. I mean, today we see outrage around a few different fronts. One that is not controllable, meaning we don't have the knowledge yet to address it. We have tactics to address it, wear masks. I happen to be more optimistic about therapeutics as opposed to vaccines, but that is a. An enemy or one that we label enemy, which is relatively indifferent or not relatively absolutely indifferent. It only cares about spreading. You could argue that the meme with the ideas in ignorance or intolerance or racism are another form of virus. It's a mind virus and it's infectious, it's social. And the counter to it is also infectious and social. The sort of sad thing about the concurrent sort of trip taker triumvirate. At the moment you have a health crisis, which is the COVID driven pandemic, but you could argue that there are 10 other health crises that are occurring below the surface. And I'll tell you what, I think the main difference is across all three of these, you have a social and injustice crisis. You had a very salient, visible event that catalyzed people to take to the streets. But that is an event that is taking place dozens, if not hundreds of times a week against black men and women, against Muslims, against all kinds of people that are often powerless as a minority. And then the third is the economic. And depending on where you want to focus the turn of your ire, whether it's something more theoretical like Fed's abuse and monetary policy and, you know, gross fiscal spending better than a neighbor policies, you know, municipalities or pension funds. I mean, there's all kinds of ills that you can point to, but that is going on on a daily basis. The difference at the moment is it's the centrality of the focus. And so when everybody is focused on Covid, it is the most important thing. When everybody is focused on social injustice, it becomes the most important thing. Part of the thing that worries me is, you know, a lot of people in the environmental movement talk about sustainability. You know, how do you sustain something, in a sense, and how do you sustain outrage against social injustice? Because outrage is what's required to get a critical mass of people to want to change something. When you have a critical mass, then it becomes unstoppable. And then, you know, politicians have to look to the people when sort of in that classical, you know, French politician, you know, there go My people, they're running, I am their leader. I must follow. You get a phenomenon where there gets change. And unfortunately you see so many comparisons, you know, whether it's to 1919 on a pandemic, 1968 on racial issues, or 1929 on the economic issues. Of course it's not like any of those three things, but they rhyme. And the commonality is the centrality of everybody's focus. The disturbing thing is that it was just a year ago when the centrality of focus was on women and gender issues and discrimination and the MeToo movement. And you saw a good thing in that, in all that bad, which was that there was a mass dragnet, a roundup of all of these bad men. And of course there were extremes between a Harvey Weinstein and a Louis CK but everybody was being taken out today, the attention on that. I was sort of understandably surprised, but surprised nonetheless to see the female entrepreneur of the wing who started this movement really to empower women that was carried out because she was insensitive and didn't have the right social policies to racial and inequality. And so there's this constant cloud and winds of change that sort of go from one movement to the next. And if you look back today, it's race and it matters. And we say never again and change happens, but the change only happens so long as the, the outrage is sustainable. And a year ago the outrage was on me too. And then two years ago the outrage, if you remember, was on guns.

That's right.

And you had a young movement which was marching in the streets with just people saying enough, you know, like, like this has to change.

And then it fizzles out.

It fizzles out. And you look at May, you had 80% increase in gun sales. You know, most of the people that were raising tons of money for anti gun policies and legitimate change and, and you had corporations putting out statements the same way that they did for Black Lives Matter. And all of that has abated. So part of me cynically anticipates that in six months the world will have moved on to a different issue and it's just unfair. So to me, almost one of the great inequities is that we don't have this sort of sustainable outrage. Because if you have the sustainable outrage, that's how you get change.

You are talking my language. It's something that I talk at home a lot about with my wife. And we come from polar opposites on the political spectrum. And I think that's a beautiful thing because at the end of the day we are able to be harmonious and we love each other and we're able to obviously share our opinions in a format. And unfortunately, we don't do that as a country anymore, and we don't do that as a people anymore en masse. But one of the things that we talk about a lot is this idea of fizzling out and this idea that we are all becoming kind of prone to adhd, where we go on Twitter, we go on social. We go on TikTok now, and you get that 30 seconds kind of hit, and it feels good, and then you move on, and it's, you know, the whole swipe left, swipe right type of movement. And it's unfortunate, but I want to focus on you and focus on what you guys are doing there. Lux, so where are you drawing your inspiration today?

But I will say one thing about that. I'm always torn by these. The absence of nuance. And it's very hard in the current moment to suggest that. That there is nuance, that there's gray area when issues are so clearly right or wrong, when somebody needs to be canceled or not, you know, but the swipe right and swipe left phenomenon, on the one hand, you know, is like an indication or an indictment on our short attention spans and, you know, quickly dismissing things and not judging them with, you know, appropriate time. On the other hand, you know, I think 70% of, or, sorry, 40% of, you know, new relationships sort of began online. And it's interesting phenomenon. I think a lot of people are finding love that might not have ever been. And it's addressing loneliness. I think about a picture or video I saw yesterday where, on the one hand, people are outraged about drones and surveillance being seen as instruments of a police state. And on the other hand, I saw this beautiful drone footage that zoomed out of the Pride and Black Lives Matter protest in Los Angeles, showing just the enormity of the people and the scale and the scope of it, which was this very poetic visual. And so everything has sort of a pro and a con. And to me, part of the thing that has been lost in all of this is any space for nuance and almost an intolerance of it to understand that, you know, people contain multitudes, that there are good people that are doing amazing things that have, you know, shown forms of hatred. There are. It's just. It's, you know, as the old Facebook, you know, status was, it's complicated for a lot of things. It isn't just strictly blackrock, you know.

It'S getting on that. And then I want to dig into what you guys are doing there, because it's super interesting. In my opinion, we have lost objectivity. It's either this way or that way. There's no kind of middle in there. Back in the 80s with the Reagan era, there are people out there who were able to broker deals and were able to bring some sort of a piece, and we didn't have this divisiveness and there wasn't this kind of hatred or echo chamber that we now have. And you're saying nuance, but I call it objectivity and the ability. And Charlie Munger, I think, talks about this. He doesn't really, you know, unless he knows both sides of an opinion or both sides of an argument, he's not really going to interject himself. He wants to be able to know both sides equally, if not better than actually the people who are making that argument. And so I don't think that we have that anymore. We've lost that ability where, yes, this is my opinion, but you have an opposing opinion, and I'm going to know everything factually that I can about what is deriving that opinion, and then I'm going to be able to have a conversation with you. Do you agree with that?

Yeah, I think it's an ideal. I think as humans, we tend to agree with people that agree with us or think like us. And you can name all the biases, and Danny Kahneman happens to be a friend, but Danny will say that even if he wrote the books on so many of the biases, he still falls for them. It's like understanding an illusion, but still falling for. It's just our cognitive apparatus is structured for a certain way. So, yes, Munger has an ideal of being able to look at the other guy's argument or girl's argument and be able to argue it and understand it before making a decision. But that's unfortunately not the way that our operating systems really work. It takes a lot of effort to do that. That kind of effort takes patience. And increasingly, the vast majority of people, it is a quick dopamine hit to be entertained. That's right. The great poet Kurt Cobain. Here we are now. Entertain us. I think it's just easier to get a quick hit and get a quick laugh. I think it's why, you know, my politics are very clear, but I think it's why we have the president. We do. People like to be entertained. Even if they didn't want to take Trump, you know, literally or seriously, it was sort of funny at first, you know, my God, until it became serious. So it would be great if we could all be more objective and rational, you know, but that is the label that everybody who doesn't agree with you is generally, you know, pejoratively insulted as they're being irrational. Just because you don't agree with me doesn't mean. But, you know, we just don't have the patience to sit and read long nuanced arguments and reflect and think. Things just move too quick. And particularly, you know, the mob can move very quickly and you know, people are getting canceled in ways that are shocking. But I'm optimistic that this will actually change, that there will be a reversion. But, you know, maybe that's misplaced complacent optimism and I have to be conditionally optimistic about it and you know, do something.

I hope you're right. And I don't think that we wake up in the morning thinking the worst. Obviously we're hopefully building a better world for our children, our children's children, and that obviously is part of it. So I want to dive in because there's so many things that you guys are doing there. So from just a broad stroke, one of the missions or the mantras there is that at Lux you are pursuing counter conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles. What are some of those puzzles today?

Well, it's typically, and it sounds a little bit sanctimonious when we say it, but we like to invest in matter that matters. So, you know, it sounds a bit righteous, but we like to invest in physical things that are affecting very large forests of society. So what would that be? If you look at energy for us, we had a very non consensus contrarian view that if you truly care about baseload zero carbon power, you have to care about nuclear. And unfortunately, being tribal social primates, we tend to follow the prominent voices. The prominent voices going back a decade where Al Gore and John Doerr and Vinod Khosla and famous venture capitalists that were basically promoting solar and wind and biofuels. And then later you had Elon and electric cars, which is great. But we were very bullish about nuclear was an area that we thought was under invested and had insufficient attention. And then we looked at the biggest problem that existed and it turned out to be what do you do with the waste? And we ended up starting a company and got quite lucky when Japan got unlucky. And we sold that company for a great return for our investors. And it's very, very intellectually gratifying and very financially Rewarding. You look at something like surgery and you say, my God, we have all of these procedures. And whether it's need for organs or transplants or waiting lists, is there an opportunity for robotic surgeons to be able to do things more efficiently so that you could process more people more safely with almost digital control and more precision and more data? And the answer was yes. And you had a giant 50 plus billion dollar company, Intuitive Surgical, there was white space for an opportunity for a second entrant. We ended up backing the founder of Intuitive Surgical in a company called Oris, and that's sold to Johnson Johnson last year for $6 billion. So we like doing these things that are big, that can have giant outcomes, that are financially rewarding, but also when you look back, I feel very proud to be able to say to my kids, not that I developed or invested in some app that consumed their attention and sought to monetize them through advertising, but we have invested in things like brain machine interfaces and robotic surgery and nuclear waste cleanup, life saving, cancer drugs. And those for us feel meaningful. And so we like to invest in matter that matters. We like to manage money for families and endowments and institutions who in turn, when we make them profits or are putting those things back into missions that we care about. And it just gives meaning to the work that we do.

And so digging back into a kind of a post COVID 19 world, you mentioned robotics. And so I'm curious, I had a conversation with Jeff Morris Jr. The other day on the show about this. There's been this movement towards contactlessness where even Domino's Pizza, if you see their TV spots, they keep hyping this and you're seeing this more and more. If you go to Walgreens or you go to some store, they keep talking about this idea of contactlessness. And so I'm curious, do you think that robotics is going to play a bigger role moving forward after our post Covid world?

Well, it's interesting because we have this dichotomy. On the one hand, the thing that we crave so much is human interaction. And while our technologies can evolve, our emotions are still based on the savannah and wanting to be with, you know, our tribe and wanting to rally and plot and scheme and be together and be with colleagues. And so I'm not of the view that we are an entirely new normal. I think that there will be a interim period where there'll be a lot of flexibility. And you know, that applies to work and schooling and restaurants and all kinds of stuff. But I think that, you know, In a few years, and whether that's, you know, one or four, we'll look back and I think things will more closely resemble the near past than they will the far future. You know, as we might imagine, certain things are here to stay, for sure. You know, so video conferencing and people, you know, on video when they normally wouldn't have felt comfortable, you know, or that's here to stay. People able to do remote work, people able to do hybrid schooling, you know, that's here to stay. People able to run cloud kitchens, you know, all those things are here to stay. And I think it's widely understood that things that might have taken three or four or five years have been basically accelerated and pulled into the future because of the crisis. On the other hand, contactless payment, Sure. I mean, that's relatively benign. It's an extension of Bluetooth, low energy or another wireless contact form of payment, non contact form of payment. The area where I actually think that I can see the technological trend and the social acceptance will be for 24. 7Delivery of goods using autonomous vehicles. And so I would expect a group like Amazon or other that is running fleets of autonomous vehicles almost in bike lanes. But instead of bike lane being on the far right or left side, you're going to have a designated lane that, just like a bus lane, is primarily for use for autonomous vehicles, that 24. 7, 365 days a year are delivering drugs and groceries and packages and intelligently routing our physical atoms just like our routers route our bits around the city and you'll have a human inside that does the very last mile. I'm not convinced that the robots that are working on the last mile delivery can do all the edge cases or the heterogeneous instances that are very hard to program. So that to me is probably an area. And then once you have 24. 7 delivery and you have humans that are going from vehicle to door, then I think you're going to have companies like one of our companies is a company called Latch. And Latch access lets you do contactless entry and you can do permissioning in the same way that I might grant you access to a file in a Dropbox digitally. I can grant you access to my home or part of my home. And as long as I have accountability and trust and a choke point technologically, then I will continue to use it. Same reason why I might use Uber or Lyft is I have accountability and a choke point if something goes wrong.

Right. Super interesting. So another company you've talked about a lot publicly is Matterport. And so in this world that we're in right now, you mentioned obviously working from home, obviously we talked about the zoom type of nation that we've become. What role do you believe AR VR is going to play going forward? Do you think it's. You mentioned, obviously, this kind of accelerant that has been poured on technology and society. Do you think companies like Matterport with the use of AR and VR are going to be a large part of that?

Yeah. So let's look at this near term and intermediate term and long term. And what I think. And in some cases, what I think doesn't matter. Well, in most cases, what I think doesn't matter. In the short term. I've been very skeptical about VR particularly the reason I say what I think doesn't matter is other people who do think it matters are going to invest very significantly. Facebook in particular, Zuck has been very clear that it's a major focus area. They're investing tens of millions of dollars into studios and gaming and titles. One would have thought critically that if ever there were a time for VR to take off, would have been down. On the other hand, I hear that Quest is crushing it. Oculus Quest. And so I still find the headsets to be a bit cumbersome and uncomfortable and the amount of time that I'll spend in it would be very low. Ar, I'm far more optimistic. And like any technology, I think it starts with the trivial and, you know, face filters and overlays and Snapchat and that kind of stuff. But I think it's going to become much, much more sophisticated. And so, you know, Matterport is very interesting because it had a great tailwind behind it that suddenly became the spectacular one. And none of that was presaged. We saw the directional trend of the ability to very quickly capture three dimensional physical spaces down to millimeter accuracy, and the utility of that, whether that was for maintenance or real estate or selling homes or brokers or insurance. But with COVID obviously with brokers really unable to do showings. That's right, you've had just hundreds of millions of dollars of sales now that are happening because somebody has had a Matterport scan that you can navigate every single inch of that, of that home like you would playing Doom or Call of Duty, navigating a physical space. And it's absolutely exceptional. So people have been raving about it. It's caught a viral movement. One broker sees that, another broker has, and it's become the social phenomenon. So I think that's going to become a staple. And I think it's driving the commerce for real estate. But it's a very near term thing and I think it's going to extend itself into really interesting future applications on the long term. Architect I am at the moment obsessed really between the decreasing gap of simulation and reality. And I don't mean that in a are we living in a matrix? Sort of philosophical question, but the observation, not a speculation, that we have two converging trends. One is a hardware trend where our ability to capture reality with ever higher resolution keeps increasing. And so whether that's a matterport camera that can do millimeter or centimeter scans that used to be sort of kludgy that are now high resolution, whether that is a satellite like planet lab that capture centimeter resolution from space, whether that is a new life science microscope that can capture inside of cells with high resolution, whether that's a high speed camera, just every facet that you might think about how we capture, using sensors and data, information of the real world with high fidelity, high resolution, higher than our own senses can sense. It is very powerful. The related trend is our ability to model. Much of that came from defense and video games. The first real modeling was being able to look at the trajectory of a projectile, a missile, and anticipate where it was going. But you look at the unity and the unreal engines that are driving video games today, and the resolution and the physics analogies and approximations are just insane. Their ability to model light, to model texture of small pebbles of physics and interactions of fluids and solids, it's just absolutely stunning. And you can see the path of how it just keeps getting better. The same sort of progression we saw from going from like 240p to 480 to 720 to 1080p to 4K to 8K. So when you take those two trends, the ability to capture reality better and the ability to model reality better, and then you have this computational layer between the two where you're constantly doing this memory prediction framework, which I think is basically how consciousness works in humans. Machines are constantly iterating between what they're sensing in the real world and a prediction that's being made and just going back and forth between the to in a super powerful way that I think is going to let us navigate and predict the world around us in ways that we never have.

I agree. And this is a phenomenon that I've witnessed to obviously we were talking before the recording that we are getting out of our prison here in the city. And we're going to the woods and trying to find a place to do that. You know, obviously we were in New York and under lockdowns and so we had to do a lot of those virtual kind of tours. And so I agree with you that the short term, you know, that definitely a big one. So before we finish up, I want to get your opinions on this. I see you guys are also investors in Anchorage and Blockstack. I would love to be able to hear your take on digital assets today, especially in light of the unprecedented activity from the Fed that many have speculated, from Paul Tudor Jones to other family offices, that it could have some potential destructive value to fiat around the world here and around the world. So any takes on what the state of the state of digital assets?

Well, those two investments in particular were really bets on people. People who we thought were smart, had a differentiated view, were not like hipsters or hucksters and the jury is out long term. But it's a speculative investment on an area with high conviction. Bet on people as relates to cryptocurrencies themselves or as an alternative to fiat currency. I see a lot of merit in it in that I think there's going to be a bifurcation. I speculated before all of this craziness happened going back into fall of last year that I thought it was going to be an Occupy the Fed movement. And I thought that it would be driven by Trump. And I thought it would be driven by Trump in response to Powell maybe being intransigent, maybe not lowering rates or being accommodating to Trump's wishes for a booming stock market and that he would start to throw the Fed under the bus. And most people really in the masses and particularly Trump followers, not really understanding what the Fed does, would just see these, the columns and the symbols of Washington institutional power and holding the people down and unemployment going up and blaming them. And so if that kind of thing happened, instead of an occupying Wall street that Trump turned the turret of attention towards Occupy Fed, then you would have two camps. You would have an old school camp and a new school camp. The old school camp would basically be non fiat currency of gold. And there's really smart coaching people that can say gold is nothing but a shiny piece of metal and other people that say it's great store value in an otherwise fiat currency world. The other end would be the neo, which would be young people that are basically saying Bitcoin or other alternative cryptocurrencies as a store of value. And I think both make logical sense in the fact that money itself is obviously an intersubjective view. And the only thing that really matters is what do other people believe that other people believe that other people believe at inside of. And if you can speculate about what other people are speculating about, it's sort of the infinite beauty contest, then you can take a measure of a currency. Obviously any particular sovereign, their currency fluctuates with people's perception of their military might, their ability to pay, their indebtedness, the measure of their imports and exports, the growth of their economy, the stability of their society. But long term, whether it's some combination of gold, a basket of currencies, some reconfiguration of digital currencies, bitcoin, I still am bullish in a buffet like way about the US notwithstanding all of the very A1 newspaper stories related to everything from the pandemic to social injustice to economic crisis. Because I still think, compared to every other country, that we've got a system that allows a guy like me to come from a poor mom in Coney island and a guy like you in Queens. And I just think that over time it's a very long arc, but we're seeing more and more people included with more freedoms and more opportunities. And I just think if we can bend that arc steeper and quicker, a lot more people would be better off.

I love it. And I also talk about the arcs as well too. It's a great way to think about how we're progressing as a society and progressing as an economy too. So I love that. Before I let you go, one quick thing that we like to do before the end, and I'm sure you can go on about this for hours because I know you're very well read, but any book or books that you've read recently that really inspired or something that you just had to tell everyone else around you, your family, your friends about. And then I know this can also be another few hours, but any music that you're digging on right now, because I know you love music.

Well, probably the book that I've been talking about the most is burn in from P.W. singer and August Cole. Their prior book, Ghost Fleet I thought was a great sort of almost pre black mirror combination of near term prognostications of what would happen technologically with an amazing story and great protagonist. And so this new one is really about AI and robotics and surveillance and espionage and counterterrorism and it's just, it's awesome. So I highly recommend that. And then in terms of music, I mean, I really listen to everything. I have a particular affinity for hip hop and heavy metal. So I'd say the new Run the jewels, Run the Jewels 4 is just. Just almost amazingly prescient in the lyrics and the tone. You know, coming out right before Minneapolis and coming out after, but written before and George Floyd. So I think that was just awesome. And then I don't know anybody that has, you know, never listened to Deftones or Mars Volta or at the Drive In. I just love tough tones.

Yeah, love Deftones. I was also gonna say Rage against the Machine, because that's been a big one, you know, obviously, with some of the.

Yeah, I mean, they're supposed to, you know, come back. Actually, Zach De La Roque is on the new run the Jewels 4, so you can get a little taste of. Of their lead singer, you know, with these incredible social rattles.

Josh, thank you so much. Yeah, and we'll make sure that everyone has the. The location to find you guys. This was Josh Wolf, a very special conversation. Thank you, Josh, for joining us. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay positive. Thank you for coming on.

Take care.

Thanks for listening in to Baselayer. If you like the show and all the different guests that we've brought on, please give a a like and subscribe on Apple or Spotify or wherever you do listen to the podcast. Also, if you want to have a conversation or reach out to me, you can reach me out on Twitter at David J. Nage and let's talk there. Or also you can find me on LinkedIn. And I look forward to having great conversations with you all about digital assets.