Disrupting the Battlefield: How Venture Capital is Changing Modern Warfare | Josh Wolfe

What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and to learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in today's episode is Josh Wolff, co founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, a venture capital firm that invests at the cutting edge of technology and the hard sciences. Josh and I spend the first first hour of today's conversation discussing the problem of information, specifically the rise of narrative warfare facilitated by technology and enabled by historically high levels of public distrust in government and the media. We discussed potential solutions to this problem, what those solutions might look like, and what we can do on an individual basis to become more discerning consumers of information and better able to identify misleading narratives meant to persuade us in one direction of or another. In the second hour, I asked Josh about the state of venture investing, the opportunities, challenges, and risks posed by artificial intelligence, and how the venture community and the portfolio companies of firms like Lux Capital are disrupting the defense industry, including a discussion about the future of warfare, automation on the battlefield, the geostrategic competition with China, the militarization of space, and much more. If you want access to that part of the conversation and you're not already subscribed to Hidden Force, you can join our premium feed and listen to the second hour of today's episode by going to hiddenforces IO Subscribe. All of our content tiers give you access to our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis in person events and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to infoiddenforcesio and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this expansive and awesome conversation with my guest, Josh Wolff. Josh Wolfe, welcome back to Hidden Forces.

Good to be with you again, man.

It is. It's great.

I think only one of us has aged.

Dude, I don't know that you look older than I do. I think you probably age backwards. You got no gray hair, you pro. Well, thank you. You, I think, probably have access to not. It's not just that. The nature of the work that you do gives you probably Access to the coolest shit and like most advanced biotech medicine stuff. But also, I was actually thinking about this ahead of this interview. I would be hard pressed to come up with someone that I think is more ambitious than you that I know. And I know a lot of people. I don't know maybe, I certainly don't know as many sort of like high performers as you do, but I've met a lot through the work that I do. How would you rank yourself in terms of ambition and drive relative to every other person that you know?

I would say most of the people that we spend our time with are more ambitious than me or us. In fact, my entire job is predicated on finding people who are more ambitious. You know, we just closed a billion plus new fund and I was reflecting on this. We're now 5 billion under management. And I feel the same way as when I had less than $10,000 in a bank account. I literally still feel this drive inside that I have something to prove. The nature of that audience changes, the people that I'm doing it for, whether it's family or friends or foes, changes. But I still have that chip on my shoulder.

Sure.

And I always like to say that chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. And whatever that affliction is when people are growing up, it is this propulsive force that I find never changes. But in terms of relative ambition, the people that we back here at Lux, the entrepreneurs, the men and women who are starting companies and have something to prove, most people consider this arrogance of the highest order. But they quite literally are saying, this is the way that I want the world to look. Everybody else is an idiot. I'm going to prove them wrong. And that's what we do. We try to believe before others understand. We find these entrepreneurs, we back them, and their ambition is way higher than ours.

I could see that they're also presumably a lot younger than you guys are.

That's a nice way of saying you got really old, Josh.

No, I'm just assuming that they're. I would assume, maybe it's a default thinking, but I feel like people that are starting companies like that are in their 20s or maybe early 30s.

It's interesting because the average age of the entrepreneurs that we back is probably late 20s, early 30s. And part of that is if you had a very software centric practice of investing in venture capital, the vast majority of those people tend to be college dropouts like the great ones. Right. When you're dealing with sophisticated biotech or you're dealing with aerospace and Defense, you have people that are often through PhDs in electrical engineering and material science and biology and genetics. Those people are early career scientists, but they're later stage entrepreneurs relative to the software entrepreneurs. So most of the age is 28 to 34 would be the sort of sweet spot of people. They might have even done a startup in some cases, gone back and gotten a PhD and gone rigorous into a space. But it definitely skews slightly older. But the ambitions are just off the charts.

Like Thomas from Control Labs. I mean, he has a PhD in neuroscience, he has a medical degree. And that was after he led the build out of Microsoft Explorer.

Right, A web browser. He did a show with me.

Show with me, yeah.

And it was incredible. I mean, this just so people remember and you should reference the show and people should listen to it. He is a very special person. I mean, my wife actually calls him my intellectual mistress because I truly love his brain. He is a very special human. 17 brothers and sisters. 10 biological. 7 adopted. I think he was the youngest of the 10. 1990. He's auditing classes at MIT. This guy out on the west coast up in Seattle hears about him. That guy is Bill Gates taps him, says, come work with me at Microsoft. He spends a decade there, single handedly codes and creates Internet Explorer, which we all used. He gets addicted to this feeling of what is it like to create a product that a billion people in the world are going to use. He ends up retiring from Microsoft, relatively wealthy and technologically renowned. And then at the age of 33, having never gone to college, does what anybody would do. He goes to college and he gets a degree in classics and Latin from Columbia, and then spends another eight years in absurdity getting a PhD in neuroscience, which is where our paths intersected. And he was working on this crazy phenomenon called the myoelectric response. In very simple terms, how do you put a wristband on your wrist that can detect all of the neural activity without any sort of injectable or implantable like Elon would have. And this became Control Labs, which Facebook would then buy for a little under a billion dollars a few years later.

Yeah. No, man. I mean, obviously the guy's absolutely brilliant and preparing for that conversation taught me so much. And you brought up neuralink. Whenever I would see stuff, like when they did that whole thing with the pig. And I hardly interject when I see people talking about stuff like that, but I remember one time I said something guy's like, how would you know this? I was like, because I interviewed Thomas Reardon. I Learned some things. I learned the difficulty of doing the difference between encephalography and. It's been a while now, but I forget the terminology, but the difference between trying to read brain waves versus reading the signals that come down the spine.

Exactly. One of the maddening things from that company, by the way, was the observation that no matter how there was this experiment where you would press a button with your finger, so you were activating your brain, was telling your muscles, activate and press the button. And control labs would be able every single time to detect before you actually press the button, that you were about to press the button. And so it opens up all these questions of the nature of free will and how computers are going to be faster than us in manipulation of things. But Riordan is a special guy, and I got to tell you, he's probably early mid-50s right now, still ambitious like crazy. He has one of those perennial chips on his shoulder that will put chips in his pocket. He is a guy that you want it back time and time again until he's, you know, being wheeled out.

Yeah. And of course, the chips aren't the goal. They just come with the ride.

Totally. And one of the bizarre things is no matter how much money people make, the great entrepreneurs, no matter how much fame they get, they always have something to prove. Take Palmer, Lucky Palmer, young guy, founds Oculus Facebook, buys it a few billion dollars. He becomes very wealthy, makes FU money, has some FU views, and then decides after being fired from Facebook, too, for political reasons. Says, I have a big mission. I want to prove people wrong. And I also think that this idea that we have some James Bond like lab that the military is sourcing cutting edge technologies from is a total myth. It's completely false. And so can we create the real life Stark Industries? Can we create cutting edge technologies for the war fighters? And I'm sure we'll talk about that. But that became the birth of Anduril.

So I wish that I had actually gone back and listened to both my episodes with Thomas Reardon and my episode with Chris Broughs, who heads business development in Otteril, because that's another episode that I would love for people to listen to and they can find in the library. I can't remember the episode number. So as listeners can tell, we're going to probably range pretty widely here. We have free will conversations about philosophy and the nature of free will and national defense and medicine. But before we do any of that, Josh, I think for people that haven't heard your first appearance on the show, which I think was episode 37 or 36, something like that? I would love for you to tell us a little bit about you. And of course you're a venture capitalist, but I'm curious, if you didn't have to use the word investor or VC to describe yourself professionally, how would you describe who you are and what you do?

If I had to put it in trivial terms, I would say I'm a talent scout. If I had to put it in slightly cringeworthy, futuristic word, I would say future forming. We are trying to find people who are forming the future.

How do you see yourself? Let's say this might sound a little ridiculous, but do you ever think of yourself in almost comic book character terms? Because, dude, you really do invest in the future and you invest in all these incredible people and you've came from very humble beginnings and you're in this place today where you interface with some of the most powerful, influential people in the world. Do you ever think about yourself in those terms again? Not like megalomaniacally, but no.

Part of the time I have imposter syndrome. I pinch myself. I'm like, how am I in a room with this person? And then part of the time I'm looking at them and I'm like, they're just a regular person. They do the same stuff that we do and the same indignities that we suffer and the same hopes and wants. In fact, some of the people that I've met that are the wealthiest that people would celebrate are the least happy people and they're not celebrated or loved by their family. And there are people that I've seen that are extraordinarily happy. And there was a trip that we took and there was a surf instructor that our family had. This guy had literally nothing. He had a shirt on his back, he had a moped and he lived in a little shack. And I have never met somebody happier than this person. Constant perma smile. Life is great. He would just like, let's go in the ocean. And it was just an eye opening experience. If your pursuit is happiness, money is not the end state. Being around influential or famous people is not the end state. It's being loved and finding people that you love and finding joy and happiness and pursuits and purpose and. Yeah, so no, I don't feel like a comic book hero, but I like finding the comic book heroes. To me, Palmer Lucky is more of a comic book hero. How do I find the guy or the girl that has that chip on their shoulder? They've got this huge ambition. Nobody believes in them and we get to believe in them, and we get to believe in them psychologically and emotionally and also financially, we give them their first money. And that just feels really great when you believe before others understand.

What is your mission? What is it that drives you and gets you out of bed in the morning?

I'm very competitive. So intellectually, I want to find the thing that other people haven't found yet. I want to find the entrepreneur, the scientist, the insight before others have. And I think that will never change, Right? So that's something that's probably just rooted in deep personal insecurity. And I hope for my investor's sake and my partner's sake that that never changes. So part of the purpose and the mission is how do I find the thing that other people haven't found? It is a thrill and a joy, and that has been since I'm young. Whether that's the band that people didn't know about, where you get the social curr for discovering the thing. It's the same thing today. Finding that entrepreneur, that scientist, reading that paper, having the insight, connecting two ideas before somebody else has. I'm constantly on the edge trying to find that thing. So that's a personal motivator and it's entirely done by competitive drive, status seeking. How can I be better than somebody else? For my family, and this is something that only experienced. My oldest is 13. The first moment after the birth of my first child, things changed. My. My mission changed in that it wasn't just about money for myself or my investors. I want my kids to be proud of. And that started to define some of the stuff that we invest in. We would talk about matter that matters. I feel really good about the things that we invest in because I feel like they're making a world positive impact. But my kids would look at this and they wouldn't cringe. They would be like, oh my God. My dad helped to fund that thing. And I just had a group of their middle school peers that came to visit us and they got to see some of the technologies and it made my day hearing they're like, that was the coolest thing we've ever seen. And like, oh my God, how do I work for your dad? And so making my kids proud makes me feel extremely proud.

What did you show them?

Well, we had a guest appearance From Robert Downey Jr. The Real Life iron man, who is, you know, talking to the kids. We had displays of some of the autonomous systems out in the ocean Saildrone and things that were going up in aerospace, we talked about brain machine interfaces that people had never seen. They thought that that kind of stuff was not real. We did a whole segment on artificial intelligence, which are tools that these kids are starting to use, whether it's Chat GPT, which is being in some cases banned perversely by schools. I think that's a terrible idea. The number one way to make any kid who didn't know about chatgpt want to pine for its daily use is to tell them you can't use it. So schools will eventually get that right. To me it's like a calculator for the mind and linguistics. But maybe we talk about that bit more. Robots, automation, neuroscience, biotech, gene therapy, I mean they got an exposure to it all. But it's anything that's on the edge. I mean, when you think about Lux itself, it's a Latin word for light looking where other people aren't. And the more that that spotlight expands, on the one hand it's revealing what we do know inside the spotlight. But on the edge of that, the circumference of that is all of the ignorance of the stuff that we don't know. And that's where the most interesting things happen. On the edge of what we don't know. The combinatorial possibilities between different fields that keep expanding that searchlight. So it's a never ending infinite quest.

That's a fascinating way of describing it. So I want to put a pin in a conversation about childhood intellectual development and maybe how to get the most out of these technologies while also protecting kids internal space and their ability to grow neurologically. That's not something we've talked about and it was not something else we're going to talk about, but maybe it's something we'll get to. So I have another question and I don't really have this properly formulated, but it folds into a kind of larger set of conversations that I've been having both on the podcast and with friends over the last several years, which is that there seems to be a kind of crisis of identity in society in all forms and all sorts of ways. And one of them is in the larger in group of the nation state. It seems that, and this is for a result, I think for all sorts of reasons that go back to the Iraq war, maybe the 2008 financial crisis. What it means to be an American, what my larger in group is, my larger sense of community and who I'm responsible to has become more difficult to ascertain for people, it seems like. So I'm curious, I Don't know if you agree with that, but I'm curious how you think of your in group and also what it means for you to be a patriot.

So identity politics is a difficult, controversial topic. I think that anytime a group has a common third enemy, lots of individual differences disappear. And if you go back to some of the, you know, cliched psychological studies like the Robbers Cave, you know, this was an iconic example. You take a bunch of kids, you put them in a summer camp for a day or two. I forget how long the actual experiment ran. So I'm going to get this roughly right. And you split them into two teams, let's call it Red and Blue. They came up with different names, they came up with different dances, they came up with different activities, and, and they were basically, by the end of this day, and I think it only took a day, absolutely at war with each other. And it wasn't even a playful thing. They were trying to sabotage each other, et cetera. The experimenters then broke a central water pipe. So these kids together did not have water and they had to come together. In this case, it wasn't an anthropomorphic enemy. It wasn't some common actual threat. It was, in this case we didn't have water. And so they had to come together as a team. Anytime you have a common third enemy, you can create more unity and you start to dissolve the individual differences. And it's my view that anytime we have a thriving economy, when money is flowing and everybody's doing really well, we actually have a lot of disunity. People are free to express themselves more, they're free to try experiments. They have the luxury, and it truly is a luxury of being able to attack other people, et cetera. Now one of the virtues of that is that you end up advancing human rights. And if you look through history, all the way from Mexican American war, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam, all the way up through the Iraq War, and some of those things had ill defined enemies. The strong defined enemy that was actually scary and existential was the Soviet Union in the 80s. And we haven't really had a big foe that threatened our way of life, had a big ideological threat. The war on terror was a very diffuse one and it was one that over time became controversial. War of necessity, war of choice. I actually think that we are on the precipice of another central enemy, and that would be not China, not the Chinese people, not Chinese Americans, but the Chinese Communist Party. In the same way that Nazi Germany became the National Socialist Party became a threat to the world in the same way that the USSR and communism became a threat to the world. I think that people are increasingly seeing the CCP and some of the tactics that they're using globally and particularly in the US to divide us as one that might counterintuitively unify us. And you see it already in the political domain where Democrats and Republicans are both quote, unquote anti China in some case. I don't think that it should be anti China, but I do think that the CCP deserves criticism and scrutiny.

Yeah, so this is really interesting. So like we had, there was an attempt to try to turn climate change into this national unifying threat. And I don't think that was very effective. And I wonder, was it not very effective because it was this environmental force or was it more because it was so theoretical and not immediate? And it's more the immediacy of the threat that unifies people, regardless of whether it's an asteroid or if it's a Chinese Communist Party.

I think it was amorphous, I think it was abstract and I think it was less individually threatening. Okay, individually threatening as in like, oh, that won't affect me or it won't affect me because we know how we are in hyperbolic discounting with time. I mean, this is something that Bjorn Lomborg, whether you agree with him or not, would say this is a hundred year problem that can be solved in 50, whereas there are 10 year problems like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, that should take priority and should be solved in the next five, because people that you love and know are going to suffer more from this than they will from climate change. And so a lot of people just didn't feel that same palpability. And then very quickly it became this debate between trust the science and then it became a left right thing and it became about resources and regulation and all of that just made it this political issue. So I unfortunately think that that is not the enemy that will ever unify us, that has only divided us more.

It also, like you said, it became part of the culture war. It feels like nothing can escape the culture war these days. I mean, even the U.S. china conflict, it's. I mean the war in Ukraine is folded right into the culture war. Right. I mean, in fact, I actually think that. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on this because I'm sure you've thought about it much more than I have. I feel like part of the propaganda strategy from Russia is to kind of take advantage of that and portray Putin as the champion of tradition and culture and religion, et cetera. And there are a lot of people in the US and Europe who side with Russia, whether they recognize it or not on their foreign policy or excuse the invasion of Ukraine more because they feel a greater amount of kinship with Putin. And this goes back to my observation about who are we? Who is my brother, who is my sister? What does it mean to be an American? What is the common cause that I have? And what does it mean to be a patriot? What do I defend? Who do I defend?

I see people less sympathetic. Obviously there are minority groups that are sympathetic to Putin, but I see them less sympathetic to Putin and I don't see that as concerning. I see people sympathetic to the Chinese way of life, that there's increasing popularity, influence, acceptance for a variety of incentive reasons for countries around the world to say, wait a second, you know, China seems to have some things doing right. I mean, you know, it takes us forever to rebuild the Freedom Tower. It takes them a year to be able to manufacture and build a giant bridge. So there's something to an authoritarian state directed economy that can get stuff done. That said, you know, there are of course visible empirical exceptions. We, through our messy democracy, were able to come up in record time with a vaccine. Now, whether that vaccine became political or not and people would take it or wouldn't, people would wear masks or wouldn't is a different story. That's one of the things that plagues a democracy. China to this day has not come up with a vaccine as effective as what we came up in the US Even though it was a state directed economy. So through history, usually it is the messy, vibrant and chaotic democracies and capital markets that end up solving problems because of the free flow of information and the competition between good ideas and bad ideas that don't get suppressed that end up winning out. It's why on the national stage, we have very few if any consumer products globally. From Russia, you can basically point to two that are military, which are the AK47 and the MiG fighter jet. Nothing else has really made it onto the global stage. China, for the longest time being the manufacturing hub for most of the world, really didn't have anything. And that changed maybe 10 years ago or so with the DJI drone that became the first real consumer hit product that was made in China, designed in China, marketed from China, and then only years later did people say, whoa, wait a second. This is a platform that has not just GPS, but glonass, which is the Russian GPS alternative system to ours. It can surveil, it can report, it can record, it can send information back. And then they started making ground based robots as toys that you could put into your home and start surface mapping everything. So that created some concern of, wait a second, what are the real incentives. But going back to the point, China actually developed the first real consumer product that people went crazy for, which was a category killer in the DJI drones.

So when you look at the national security space, how would you rank the challenges and threats to the US and its allies and partners?

I think our greatest threat arguably is internal. Having just complete chaos of people that are disaffected and either disinterested or in some case unpatriotic of simple philosophical systems which are the basis for what the US was born upon. So the Constitution, you read some of the works that the founding Fathers were inspired by and influenced by itself, Roman, Greek history, ideas of what it means to live a good life, of what it means to be a free person, of what your duty is to your fellow citizen, rules a family. A lot of these things have been lost in philosophical discourse in modernity, and that's why you see some competing systems starting to say, well, wait a second, look at the chaos in the us look at these market failures, look at the infighting, look at the racism, look at the corrupt justice system. And China's able to say, no, no, we are going to be this great source of stability in the world. It is insane that we would think that China is able to sit and take one hand and the other hand and bring them together between Saudi Arabia and Iran to start symbolically presenting themselves as a source of stability and peacemaking in the world. And it's a great tactic, it's a very effective information operation, but it's one that is sending a very clear message that the US is not the Camp David Accords, being the peacemaker of the world that. Wait a second, something's wrong over there.

So that's super interesting. I also want to point listeners to two episodes. One was with Thomas Raikes, who was famously the author that wrote Fiasco back in the day. And he wrote recently a book on the influence of the Greeks and Romans on the founders. And that was an episode we did. Very interesting. Also one with Thomas Ridd on the subject of disinformation and active measures. Because the truth is that the Soviets have always been trying to exploit race relations in the US and seed conspiracies and confuse people. But we're more vulnerable today than we've been at any point in My lifetime.

In part because technology is a great amplifier. Always you think about basic human senses. Most of our great technologies extend those senses. You know, the telephone, the television, the microphone, the earpieces, all of these things, what we're communicating to today and how we're broadcasting that are all amplifications of basic human senses. But the one sense that is the most manipulable now with technology is our emotional sense, the ability to create outrage, to create fear, and to see the effectiveness in that. In campaigns to create fear of immigrants that are on your doorstep, about to take your jobs or rape your wife and children was something that has been utilized, whether it was for Brexit with Turkish immigrants, whether it was for us with Mexican immigrants. And it's a nasty, dirty trick that people play. And technology amplifies it. As I said, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed. And so the proliferation of falsehoods, which is only going to get worse with technology that we have, that is able to generate not just images, but full stories, conversations, before people can actually test the veracity. That, to me, is really interesting. Thinking about abundance and scarcity, it's very easy if you look back 20 years as a quick aside and say, okay, with the proliferation of tools like blogging and 15 years ago, Twitter and whatnot, all of the text online, what became really abundant was lots of information, whether it was true or not, but lots of information. Ergo, in hindsight, what was scarce search, okay, a lot of haymaking, being able to find that needle in the haystack became very valuable. Now, you didn't know if it was going to be AltaVista or Lookout or Yahoo or Google, but you knew in hindsight that search was going to be really valuable. Today, not only do you have the proliferation of content, you have proliferation of misinformation, fake content. And I don't just mean innocuous fictions, but truly malicious intent to manipulate and influence people's actions, behaviors, attitudes, et cetera. What becomes scarce with the abundance of that production of that kind of misinformation is veracity. And there will be tools that will tell you, is this an actual human? Can we fact check this? Is it verified? And the problem is only a minority of people will actually care about that. And the vast majority, some of it segmented by demographics, older people, some of it segmented by intelligence, less intelligent people will be very easily influenced and manipulated, in some cases by foreign adversaries.

So let's stick on this point a bit because I think I would agree with you that the biggest threats and challenges are domestic, amplified by technology. Though I think also the failures of our leadership, of our institutions, the distrust that has stemmed from, again, the Iraq war, the way the 2008 financial crisis was handled. COVID 19, I think was another example, have obviously played a role in that as well. This whole thing about disinformation and misinformation has also become subsumed by the culture wars. And I absolutely agree with you. I think we're in this kind of narrative warfare space, and you have state actors that are weaponizing that environment, and then you also have domestic actors who are doing it, either in part because they feel some sympathy, but I think more often than not, it simply benefits them commercially to do it. And I'm curious, what can we do about this problem? What are people in the industry that you're talking to saying about this? Because the Twitter files situation, that whole thing that happened to me was an opportunity to have a real conversation about how do we take out all the culture war bullshit and politics bullshit and look at this really serious problem and either build regulation around it, or something has to happen to make it so that these platforms in this, quote, public arena or marketplace of ideas is a place where we can exercise a greater degree of epistemological discovery. Because right now it's not. It's a total shit show. So I'm curious how you think about that. Who might be having some interesting ideas, like, Any thoughts?

Well, let's compare today to history and just ask was it better at any point in time? And you could make an argument at some point, maybe when you only had three news sources and there was a very trusted Walter Cronkite that was really just trying to give you the facts without the valence of whether this was good or bad, and just presenting the news. News over time, as it became fragmented, became forms of entertainment. How do we keep people hooked and how do we make. If it bleeds, it leads. How do we create those stories that are just sensationalist and provoc and people can't look away and it drives them. But we've always had this, whether it was yellow journalism back in the day and muck racking, whether it was dirty politics and read some of these ancient stories or ancient 200 years ago, 100 years ago, of some of the political campaigns and racism that they used then to weaponize against people. And there were always fears that were being stoked. A new immigrant class that was coming in, and they were the ones that should be Demonized. It might have been the Irish, then the Italians and the Jews, might have been the Mexicans, the Pakistanis. Whatever came next. There's. That is a human condition. The constant tribal weaponization of us versus them and the groups that assimilated into that and didn't. In that sense, as we were talking a little bit about the sense of national identity. And what is that? That's a myth, right? In the sort of Yuval Harari sense. We rally around a flag, we rally around an origin story, we rally around a set of principles. But it's a myth, it's a shared myth. And the stronger that that myth is, the better it is. But it's a myth that we believe in. So I think that's one element technologically. All of these things amplify. Podcasts, blogs, newsletters, email, websites, tv, a million channels, fake news. You had back in the day, these crazy radio shock jocks. Today you have them, they have different names, they use different mediums, but it's the same thing. Anybody that can tap into that great power, just like we try to as venture capitalists to trap into that great power of ambition, there are people that can tap into anger and fear, galvanize people around that emotion, target that emotion against almost like this giant ray gun against a different class of people. And yes, foreign state actors can look at every fraction and fissure in society that would define somebody and exacerbate it. So black, white, men, women, gay, straight, rich, poor, old, young, any facet that you can create a divide, you can create an us versus them. And somebody for sure in their self interest, commercial or political, financial currency or social currency can weaponize that. I don't think that that will ever go away. We are human. We have this natural propensity from birth to see like and dislike. And I think that the one commonality tends to be when you have a hegemon that isn't a regulatory force, but the hegemon is the sense of us and you redefine us. I did not like in schools when they were creating affinity groups and the affinity groups were basically causing people to almost segregate into a black affinity group or a white affinity group. And I remember my eldest had come to me and said, I don't know what to do. So I go to the all race group because I don't want to be part of the white group and they won't let me into the black group. And so I just think that that kind of stuff, like to be part of a community, the school community, to Identify as a New Yorker to identify as a different tribe. A Yankee fan, a Mets fan, a Nets fan. You go to one of these games and you see that tribal allegiance. It's no different than the shared myth of a country. People that are going crazy, you know, the Celtics versus the Knicks or the Red Sox versus the Yankees, those sort of tribal warfare. It's a different form. It's far less serious than Israel versus Palestine, but it's just different. Birds of a feather.

Yeah. You know, that's super bizarre because, you know, like how when we were growing up, what you had there was busing from inner city neighborhoods to other neighborhoods in order to integrate. Also in New York City, I mean, I grew up as a little kid and we eventually moved out of Astoria, Queens, and then we came back to New York. In New York, the interesting thing about New York culture is you do have identities. People that are Asian, Korean, Greek, Italian, Jewish, Irish. So there's a strong sense of, like, this is my group, this is my identity. But there's also, I don't know, it's different. New York's a different kind of. At least it has been. I don't know how it is now, but. But it does feel like we've gone off the rails with all that stuff, man.

I don't know. I think part of it is what you can direct your attention to. See, I see a thriving, diverse downtown New York City, right? And I've always felt that there was this homogenous Upper east side and Upper west side. Upper east side were more waspy whites, and Upper west side was more educated Jews, and downtown was more immigrant class. And where I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn, it was this total melting pot. Now, the different genres and ethnicities and cultures sometimes wouldn't mix. I would always say that in Coney island, on the boardwalk, you would see Hasidic Jew next to break dancing, Puerto Rican next to Ghana, immigrant next to Italian. And it was just this beautiful melting pot. Now, they didn't all interact with each other. And you would get neighborhoods that were enclaves next to enclaves that were self sorting because somebody would come from Korea and join the Korean immigrants. Somebody would come from Russia and join the Russian immigrants in Brighton Beach. And so over time, though, whether it's through workplace or cultural institutions or sports, people start assimilating and having these shared values and the things that they celebrate, the things that they root for. You look at the classrooms in Coney island, it is way more diverse than, of course, Greenwich, Connecticut, similarly. And this was something that used to eat at me. In Coney island, there is an army recruiting station right on Cropsey and Stillwell near the cyclone, near, near where I grew up. When you went to Main street in Greenwich Ave. There was not an army recruiting station. And so there's all these sort of tribal divides that touch race, ethnicity and of course socioeconomic class. And I think that the more that we can rally around and leaders today do not get social currency for trying to be a moderate, for trying to unite people. I think that we could see a great uniter again when people really get sick of this. Going back to your earlier question, what do you do about this? Is it a technological thing? I think the best thing is inculcating yourself, immunizing yourself, growing skepticism. You know, what am I reading? There are some people who will read both left and right papers that want a diverse viewpoint. They are a minority. Most people just want reinforcing information of what they already believe. And one of the amazing things, and I think you've talked with Danny Kahneman before, Danny will tell you that if you think you believe something for a rational reason, that you have empirically gone through the logic and said, this is why I believe it, you are deluding yourself that the reason that most people believe what they believe is because their peer groups and their friends and the people that they care about believe it. And we're just these virally social influenced culture creatures.

So I want to push back on this idea that we can exercise discretion when it comes to the information that we take in. I think on some level that's true. And for some people like you and me, it's even more true because we're more disciplined. But I think also we're in this information environment where we're constantly being manipulated by companies that are becoming exceedingly good at deploying technology and the latest behavioral insights into pushing our buttons. I wonder, is there not a role for some kind of overarching regulation? We did this in the banking system in the 1930s. We didn't go out and say banks are going to lend this specific amount to this specific person, but we created overarching regulation to try and regulate the space. Isn't there something analogous that would be appropriate when it comes to this overall information landscapes, let's say social media companies, because it's become so deleterious to our political discourse, which basically puts us, our whole society, at a disadvantage, we can't seem to move forward.

I'm skeptical of regulation that you could point to in the past that really fixed a problem without somebody figuring out, as people will have propensity to do, to figure out how do we exploit that system? You change the rules, you set some guardrails and some boundaries and somebody else figures out how do you exploit that. And so I'm skeptical that we can regulate social media in a way you have some self regulation where Twitter, for example, started to come out with little messages and this was pre elon of this information might not be accurate or it's not verified. Do people really register that and say, oh, let me really give a heightened sense of scrutiny to this. I think people that are generally skeptical will. Now that doesn't mean that skeptics, people who identify as a skeptic, I still get fooled. I get fooled by people. And by the way, why did I develop that skepticism? Growing up in Coney island, everybody had an agenda, everybody had a scheme. Somebody was trying to rob you, somebody was trying to con you, somebody was trying to trick you. And so you develop this sort of squinty eyed skepticism at people's motives and agenda. And if I truly understand somebody's motives, then it's cool. I feel like this great sense of honesty and I can grok it. But otherwise, whether it's that picture of the Pope in the big puffy jacket, I looked at that. I'm like, really? There were a bunch of people like, oh my God, he's wearing. I don't forget if it's a Balenciaga.

That looks so fake though.

Well, to you, right? But to somebody else, they fall for it. There's a reason that people fall for the Nigerian prince email scandal. There's a susceptibility and a gullibility of a significant portion of the population. You could say the extreme end of that wins the Darwin Awards. But people, we're fallible, we're gullible. We can easily be tricked. We believe things that we want to believe, we believe things that our friends want us to believe. I don't think that any regulation is going to change that facet because it is one of the beautiful and ugly things that make us human.

All right, so two things. One is yes, when you're meeting someone in person, one of the things I love about doing in person interviews and I'm starting to do a few more now. It's a bit of a commitment because I have to drive in and move down in New York. Back when I first had you on the show, we were living down in Granch village, but now we live like two and a half hours away.

Studio in Times Square.

Yeah. Well, right. Well, the studio was. The Hip Hop studio was premiere, which was next to Quad, which is where Tupac got shot in the elevator. And you remember it smelled like weed in there and everything. It was a lot of fun. It was a great place to start. But I love doing these in person because it's a different. Especially when I haven't met the person we've met before. So we have a relationship. And even if we did it remotely, I have a sense of who you are. But when I haven't met someone before, when I get to meet them in person, there's way more information than I'm getting from them. And I have a way of getting a sense of taking a measure of them, their integrity. I can evaluate the information that's coming from them with a greater degree of confidence. That's much more difficult to do remotely. So that's one thing. Another thing is, though I agree with you, ironically, the thing is that people have become hyper skeptical. This is also kind of part of the problem. So to bring it back to this thing, just to ask you one more time about the regulations. I'm not saying this is the solution, but it's a good example of what I mean, let's say you prevented social media companies from making money through advertising. Okay. I don't know how that would be solved. Maybe it would require some kind of PBS equivalent fund that sort of funds these. These companies and subsidizes them so that they can serve a public interest. But is there not some kind of role for that type of broad based regulation?

Well, regulation, I guess that's the wrong term. Do we want to regulate? This comes down to. And I actually think. I don't know if you've had him on your show yet. You should if not. But Jonathan Rauch, who I think is absolutely.

No, I have not.

Brilliant Constitution of our knowledge. And he makes a simple argument that is sort of paparian Karl Popperesque or David Deutsch in that societies need free speech. Okay? First principle. They need free speech, totally. And you need free speech so that you can have the crazies and the brilliants that can come up with conjectures, ideas, hypotheses. And then you need free speech on the counter side of that, which is to criticize those ideas, the good ones, the bad ones. You go back to like, you know, the identity in the culture wars for a moment. I think it was 15 or 20 years ago. I can't remember the exact date, but in New York City at Columbia University, you had Ahmadinejad who was invited by then Columbia President Lee Bollinger. And people were protesting like crazy. How can you let this awful person who's calling for the eradication of Israel and human atrocities and all this kind of stuff actually INV him to New York City and give him the stage today? That would be deplatformed. He wouldn't be allowed. The protests would be intense. Lee Bollinger's argument was the way to fight bad ideas is with good ideas. I'm going to put him on the stage, he's going to speak, I'm going to speak, we're going to debate. And when he leaves, he will be embarrassed. And that's effectively what happened. Better ideas beat out worse ideas. So in the marketplace of ideas, you need freedom of speech. That's one of the key things that Rauch champions, as well as the preservation and protection of the institutions that allow that. So institutions of science. The institution, even if it's not a physical building of journalism, of integrity, of fact checking, if you have seen the movie, she Said, which is the sort of dramatization of the New York Times reporters, the duo that really went after Harvey Weinstein and revealed and opened up what effectively really became the MeToo movement, it really prized the institution of journalism. Now, I have friends at the Times that are journalists that are like, I didn't like the movie. I didn't. But to me, it was eye opening of the degree of accuracy sourcing that they required in that quote, unquote, institution of journalism, which I think is a beautiful thing that needs to be protected. Whereas you have other people that are political entrepreneurs like Trump, that were trying to destroy that because it threatened the variability of somebody like that to lie without any sort of punitive repudiation on their reputation or on what they're saying. So regulation, if we were to say, my God, there's so many books that are coming out now with these lies, shouldn't we regulate them? To me, that's a form of censorship. And I'm not a free speech absolutist in this sense, but I do think that you just want to let bad ideas out there so that good ideas can attack them. Now, you make a second point, which is, should we have some sort of regulation on the business models of these groups now, over time, again, unfortunately, what's effective? And I had this debate, I used to view this as Shakespearean, as nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so that social media itself wasn't good or bad, that any technology intrinsically wasn't good or bad. In fact, the mere existence of it created an option. It was a pro positive thing. And it was actually Reardon who said, no. Technologies do have a moral valence and it depends upon their business model. Social media is amazing if you accept that FaceTime is social media. My ability to communicate with a relative far away is a beautiful thing. Social media based on advertising is a corrupting thing. And so yes, the business models matter. And that's the logic.

The logic that animates the technology.

Yeah. And I don't know that that was foreseen, like hey, advertising, Google uses advertising. I don't know that it's complet corrupted. Google, Facebook uses advertising. It's completely corrupted. Arguably the political process, democracy, people's addictiveness to this. And so I unfortunately think that these things have to like pets go out in the wild and then we sort of look at how they are operating and then you have as we are a natural corrective. People are like turning on Facebook, people are deleting Facebook. People don't want to use Instagram. TikTok was this infective thing. It's completely banned in our household. Our kids are not allowed to use it in part for security reasons. But over time that is growing. And so I think that you have to allow these things. We probably wish that they would all happen sooner, this being the reaction and the repudiation of systems and technologies and social networks. But I think you want a free society to flourish and allow bad technologies to go out there and for them to be criticized and killed. And some people will continue to use them. Some people are still on 4chan and these kinds of things. Should we eliminate those ridiculous conspiracy groups that people go down into the these rabbit holes and you know, think that there are child molestation rings and pizza and you know, the crazy guy that stormed the Capitol, unfortunately, like I think you need to allow those things to flourish, that they can be squashed over time by the resentment of people and shame of society to say, my God, these people are idiots. You raised another point which I think is a good one, which is the PBS in the US or the BBC in the UK are public goods. Right. That's taxpayer money that goes towards and has a certain standard of the institution that over time has the most important trait that oftentimes I always say is lacking from any Facebook product. And that trait is trust.

Yeah. And so what's also interesting about that is there's no perfect regulation. And also the constitution of a society, and I don't mean the piece of paper constitution, I Mean the mental constitution of the public changes over time and. And the integrity of the operators of these companies and of the government changes over time. Some of the best programming ever that I've watched or taken in as a kid or as an adult even, was from PBS or C Span, which isn't government, but it's kind of like an organization of private companies that put some.

Money aside because you rely on it for nonfiction. You believe that you're seeing the truth. Even if you see politicians on C Span that are lying, you believe that you're seeing the truth.

And it's easier to parse their lies because of the way that the medium operates. And we'll now move past this because there's so many other questions I want to ask you. But I think another interesting or important distinction between the media environment of the past and the current media environment and why for me, this idea of let bad information out there and let the marketplace of ideas sort of parse it out, is that words in the printed age were inert. I'm actually quoting now Michael Sacasis, who used this word in one of his articles. We had Michael on the show recently, and he blogs at the Convivial Society as his blog. Now those words have become more active. And I think this is part of the problem with the term censorship. When people talk about censorship on the Internet, it's so kind of just like it's an irrelevant term really, because everything is censorship. It's content moderation. Everything is amplified or suppressed. And private companies have much more power over the information landscapes today than they used to. So I think it's a huge issue and it's a source of constant distress for me because I work in this space and I'm really trying to understand stuff all the time and trying to be a good faith actor. And I don't know, I'm encouraged by your sort of optimism around our ability to sort it out. And I hope that that is true, and I hope that we can do it in time.

I will give you a controversial, very cynical take which I think spans the arc of time, which is if you were to take populations and say, okay, let's have the people that are cynical skeptical understand these tools and use them to make money or gain status. You will have pure opportunists and you will have political entrepreneurs and you will have brilliant investors that are actually trying to trend closer to truth so that they can beat out other investors or other entrepreneurs because they have a better view of the world that is closer to reality, and therefore they Win. And you think about that in scientific or engineering terms. Somebody that is able to engineer and figure out the mathematics of a projectile and develop a rocket is going to beat out the person that can't. They can't fake that, right? Something performs or it doesn't. Through the arc of history, we have had people who were able to tell a story, spread that story, influence people, galvanize them into a mass, and then move that mass for their interests. That interest might have been population rules to encourage or discourage people from having children. It might have been to create a tribe of us versus them. But of course, I'm talking about religion. And so somebody could be lambasting the same thing. My God, what are we going to do about this religion thing that is taking people by storm. They're believing all kinds of stuff. They hate each other. No information that you can give them will make them change their mind. The more you try to convince them, the more tribal they become. So again, it sort of goes back, not in a nihilistic sense of despair, but just that this is part of our human nature. I will say with these new tools, the thing that you and I are doing right now, we are not on a zoom. We are sitting across from each other. We can read each other's body language, we can read the gesticulations, the facial expressions. All of that matter matters. The more AI that is part of our daily information flow, whether it's the emails you're getting, which are now bypassing spam filters and more custom tailored to you, that will dupe a certain segment of the population, there will be older demographics for sure, that just fall for this stuff. And there will be a younger population in some cases. By the way, my kids don't use email, so they're less susceptible through that channel. But the middling mass of people that do email will be, hey, Dimitri, it was great to see you, blah, blah, blah. There's something that they pulled from your Twitter, something they pulled from your LinkedIn, perfectly targeted to you. You click on the link, right, or you click on the video and it's more susceptible to you. I think that over time, people will start to grow skeptical of the information ingest that they're having because they think that there's a bot or an AI or something on there that isn't true, isn't real. And I think we end up with a movement and it'll be a minority of people that say, no, no, I'm not doing the zoom. I don't want my call recorded. I don't want the AI summarizing it. I'm doing an in person personal meetings 100%. And you see that already with comedians, they don't want their stuff recorded, they don't want it scaled out to the Internet. You go to a chappelle show, your phone's locked in a bag, you can record. Just like you had a fast food movement, you had a slow food movement of Alice Waters. So I think that there will be a natural reaction and I actually prefer in person meetings. I don't want to do the zoom. Yes, it's convenient. I don't want to do the call in part because there's so many technological devices that can parse, record, steal my ideas. And it's almost like a privacy thing. I just want to be personal and connected to somebody. I think you're going to see lots more small group gatherings. They're going to be more intimate. On the one hand, they're going to be more red velvet robe gated. So people are going to be pining. I want to be part of that. In the same way, when you look at the effect that technology had, on the one hand the democratization of music and the production of it beautiful thing, on the other hand, it destroyed the ability for artists and musicians that were lucky enough to get selected or signed, they couldn't sell records anymore. So how do they make their money today in person concerts and increasingly they prevent people from recording that kind of stuff. So I think that the irony of the proliferation of all these technologies that will create a growing distrust will be more humanity. It'll be much more in person, stripped of technology and back to the roots.

I have said the exact same thing and I totally agree. I hope so. I mean, I've sort of described it as kind of rejecting the program, that it just becomes too, like you said, the issue of trust and also the experience isn't as satisfying. So much is missing.

But I also think this is a weird idea. You and I will have Demetri and Josh bots that are out there and some of those bots will be responding to your fan mail or to your membership base. Some of them will be just like today, we have auto reply on emails and you have auto generated responses of great, see you later. Looking forward to it. Or you start typing and it fills it in for you. You we're going to see that to the nth degree where some segment of your mail which is not your priority inbox like Google does for you today, it will create 75 replies and then you'll just Quickly go through. Just like it creates edits or spellcheck or grammar in a Google Doc. And you'll say, yes, accept, accept, accept. And it'll fire off those emails, but it won't be actually you that's communicating with those people. The great example of this, which I saw just a few weeks ago, was brilliant podcast, one of my favorite ones. After you. Yours, which is Midnight Miracle.

I haven't heard of that.

It's beautiful soundscape. It's the way if you first heard Radiolab back in the day, that audio quality and the richness of the production was just amazing. This is Dave Chappelle, Mos Def, now known as Yassin Bey and Talib Kweli. And they just get together and they riff.

You're allowed to like them more than me.

Oh, the sound quality is incredible. It's amazing. But the stuff they talk about is great. But Chappelle tells the story in it where he woke up one day, he tried to sign up for Twitter, and he couldn't do it because somebody had actually stolen Dave Chappelle's name. And there was like a Dave Chappelle that got like blue check mark or whatever, and it wasn't Dave Chappelle. So at first he says, I gotta do something about this. And he's reading the guy's tweets and he's like, actually, this fake Dave Chappelle is pretty funny. So he thinks, you know what? I'll let this guy do his thing. It's like, only enhancing my brand. Then he says, all of a sudden, Dave Chappelle, fake Dave Chappelle on Twitter is attacking some of real Dave Chappelle's friends. So Katt Williams, another comedian, and he's going at him hard. All of a sudden, Katt Williams on Twitter, Twitter goes back at fake Dave Chappelle. And real Dave Chappelle is feeling hurt. He's feeling upset. Long story short, he goes to a party, he sees Katt Williams. He goes up to him, he says, listen, I got to apologize, but I need you to know something. I don't have Twitter. I'm not on Twitter. Katt Williams turned to him and says, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not on Twitter either. And so you had a Dave Chappelle bot, or effectively somebody impersonating him, arguing with a Katt Williams bot that was impersonating. We are going to have a world of that. That which is going to be like almost a Neal Stephenson like plot, where Demetri and Josh will have a Bot or set of bots for different purposes that are doing responses and communicating and engaging. And we allow it to. We authorize it, we approve it.

Like a war of the doppelgangers, I guess. So my bots competing with other fake unauthorized bots of me.

And in fact, you will probably even have an authorized bot that people are like, okay, this is. Dimitri actually authorized it, even for a scripted. And then there will be a check mark that's like verified here, human, that I know that the actual communication came from you. Maybe it's a biometric thing. Maybe it's your foot, your fingerprint, your voice print, your eyes or something that I know that I actually got a direct message. Just like now when I send you a text, I might get a check mark or double check mark on WhatsApp. There might be some mutual confirmation that this is actually Demetri and Josh talking.

Yeah, but there you go. Even voice prints, I mean, how reliable is that going to be? We're seeing how effective some of these deepfakes are.

You saw that Jay Z song from a week or two ago is incredible.

So, I mean, again, that's why I completely agree. And we have a community tier now and we do a lot of in person events and dinners precisely because you can't fake those. You can't fake those. And it's just a completely different experience. And I think people crave it. Josh, I'm going to move us to the second hour of this conversation. We just began to scratch the surface of the national security stuff. I want to get into that a bit more, and I also want to specifically ask you about some of the companies that you've invested in, in what some of the technologies that you're most excited about are, and what maybe are some of the most important technologies to help strengthen U.S. and European and allied national security infrastructure, et cetera. Also, to the extent that we have a chance to get into it, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the state of venture capital and how it's been affected and some of the changes that result from the higher cost of capital, et cetera. Again, you and I can find so much to talk about. For anyone who is new to the program, Hidden Forces is. Is listener supported, we don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want Access to the second hour of today's conversation with Josh, head over to HiddenForces IO. Subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our Premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app. Just like you're listening to this episode right now.

I am a subscriber, by the way.

Well, that's wonderful, Josh. So stick around, Josh. We're going to move the second hour onto the Premium Feed. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to HiddenForces IO, subscribe and join our Premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces IO, you can follow me on Twitter at cofinas and you can email me at infoiddenforcesio. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.