How Tech Can Help Defend The US with Josh Wolfe

Hey everyone, this is Lucas Bagno, an investor at Village Global and I'm here with my co host Ian Cinnamon. Welcome to SolarPunk.

In this podcast we cover topics related to space and defense and discuss how technology can contribute to a better and safer world.

Hey everyone, this is Lucas Bagno at Village Global. I'm here today with my co host Ian Cinnamon, EIR and investor hero Village. And today we have a very special guest, our gu, Josh Wolf. Josh is managing partner and co founder at Lux Capital, a multi stage venture firm based out of New York City and Menlo Park. With 4 billion AUM, Josh invests in deep tech companies that are turning science fiction into science fact. Ranging from space and advanced manufacturing to biotechnology and defense. Josh, welcome to the show.

Great to be with you guys. How are you? Doing great, doing great.

We're lucky to have you.

So Josh, at Lux, you've backed multiple companies that either work directly with the US government or enable America's strategic capabilities, like Andro, Hadrian, Applied Intuition and others. What drives you and why is that important to you?

Well, I think each one of those companies first and foremost has a founder who has some sort of technical insight, some inspiration that some existing way of doing something is inferior, a confidence and near certitude that they're going to be able to do it better, and a mission that they want to put technology in the hands, hands of the women and men that are on the front lines fighting adversaries that are at once growing revanchist, manipulative, deceitful, and that it's a virtue to be able to defend the liberal democracy of the west and use technology at the forefront to be able to do that, that's great.

When you think about a lot of the companies that you just named, the companies that you back, the companies that you focus on and you think about what are the important problems that they're solving, especially with regards to the west and the United States. What are the particular issues or areas that you're most focused on? What's keeping you up at night?

Worried?

What are you hoping that companies are trying to solve?

Well, each of those companies, when you look at whether it's Anduril or Hadrian or Saildrone or Vardar or Applied, are solving different aspects. Some of those companies started with a direct, overt and sole interest in, in being a tech supplier to the Pentagon, dod, US and our allies. Others started with a different mission and then realized or were told, were asked by the government to get involved in work that was useful, strategic, beneficial, so Anduril is the one pure play company. I think that there was a fascinating founding moment where they decided we are not going to be a one end, sort of like Palantir, where we're going to make technology that could be used by corporate and defense. Nor are we going to be apologists saying, hey, we're going to make technology and not sure how our customers are going to use it and sort of dance around this ethical line. They were very overt. They said, look, we're going to be making technologies. Those technologies are solely for the service of US Army, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, et cetera, Pentagon and our allies. And you have to be comfortable as an investor that some of these technologies may be used in the kill chain. And that's a very odd thing to be asked and consider. And so that was a rare formation of a company that was exclusively focused on being one of the next great defense primes. There are lots of companies that want to be subprimes, that want to develop technology and partner with Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, et cetera, and Androll. I think over time will do that in some domains. But in other domains they decided we are not going to be a cost plus contractor. We're not going to raise money and then try to get some small contract and play the games that the Bellway Bandits have played. Instead we're going to rely on billionaires and large funds like Lux and others that are going to support us, put the equity in and ultimately develop technologies and showcase them and then win competitive contracts. So it's a very different mindset. It's one that is singularly and solely focused on defense with no interest or business plan or aspiration or hedge to say we're going to focus on commercial markets or things that are ancillary. And they started with one key set of technologies for base protection, which itself was a confluence of radar and lidar and optics and communications, being able to put sentry towers all over the place. And then they have a whole long portfolio now of products that range from aerial detection and drones. Battlefield management, where you're able to synthesize different sensors and different platforms into this advanced battlefield management system. They've got large counter uas, so counter drone systems. And those are very important because what started with fleets of cheap off the shelf DJI drones that ISIS or Syrian fighters were strapping, you know, small bombs, basically doing suicide missions with the drones, have now evolved into things that you might have seen in like the Armenia, Azerbaijan conflict, things that are being made by Israel or Turkey, which are these large loiter and long loiter drones maybe they're you know, 20, 30 foot wingspans and they're able to stand over a target and then you know, effectively dive bomb like a missile. So you need a counter to that. It's a different nature of an evolving threat. They're very effective weapons, totally autonomous, unmanned. And so that's another area where there's been big programmatic wins. There was news as we talk now in February of 2022 of up to a billion dollar contract for Anduril with US SOCOM specifically for that. And then there's acquisitions that they're beginning to make as a company, which I think is fascinating and one that is going to be exactly what a great company with momentum is going to do. Building a war chest of cash, using its growing stock currency to be able to get people really along for the ride. The last time you saw this really was somebody like Henry Singleton with Teledyne making very shrewd acquisitions and building a great defense contractor over time They've done this now with three or four. The most recent being announced was Dive Technologies which is subsea Autonomous Systems which is a different front of warfare and defense. And they've got things in optoelectronics, things in aerial launch. And so it really is an exciting platform and portfolio of both amazing cutting edge technologies integrating with software and then most importantly, really smart, relatively young entrepreneurs and engineers that have great ambitions and are very patriotic about the mission and the threat set. So that's Anduril. When you look at somebody like Applied Intuition, when you look at somebody like Saildrone, those are companies that really started with a different focus in apply to intuitions focus. It was really can we be the leader in helping all the other OEMs and automotive players that are getting into autonomy to be able to do real time simulations, train their vehicles, have best of breed and really just focus on that. Turns out that that same software technology AI ML that's being used for those processes is very applicable to things that the military wants to do increasingly to put people out of harm's way and have machines controlled by central systems. So that was an area where Applied has now prov and it's being adopted by the military. In Saildrones case you had a totally research driven, mission driven, but research driven organization focused on noaa, National Oceanographic association looking at fisheries overfishing, looking at environmental protection, weather management, better prediction of weather systems. We have assets, vehicles, sail drones that have been the first in man's history. To fly into the center of a hurricane and record what was happening, both bathymetric information sensors and of course video and report that back, which was totally stunning. But it turns out that having a fleet of autonomous drones is exactly what the Navy and the U.S. navy and our allies are looking for. As you have fleet transformation going from very large scale aircraft carriers that are very expensive and depending on what the current nature of the theater of war is, maybe less relevant than having very nimble fast vessels that can both carry payloads, carry information, relay them, set up redundant sensor networks, be sort of discreet. And so those are two companies where they started with commercial interests and the capabilities that they developed were very valuable for the defense market. Hadrian is really interesting because what they're really focused on is saying look, there's this growing boom in aerospace and you have large companies and you have small companies and whether you are a Blue Origin or SpaceX or you're a small long tail of somebody that's starting up even a company like Varda, which is going to be very relevant for aerospace and defense, but particularly in space doing manufacturing, whether you're a company like Kymeta that is doing satellite communic also for first responders and mission critical military applications, to have abundant bandwidth beaming down from space, all these people need to manufacture and forge. And the current infrastructure manufacturing base is roughly 3,000 mom and pop shops around the country. Many of these family owned, some of them long and reliable, but very inefficient, labor driven old school equipment really haven't been updated in a long time. Chris Power, who runs that is just absolutely incredible, really private equity mindset, a skeptic at heart, which I love, a great technologist and has been on an absolute tear of momentum recruiting some of the very best people from SpaceX in particular, people that ran the rocket manufacturing and forging program for a lot of the for Dragon and rockets. And he's building the machine that builds the machine where the product really is the factory. And I think it's going to capture a significant portion of market share for new aerospace and defense and be sort of our own domestic TSMC for that industry. So very excited about that.

Absolutely. We're really excited to be backing Chris alongside you. One of the things that you mentioned when you're talking about Anduril was getting involved in the company that was taking place in the kill chain. Could you first define what do you mean by that for those who don't know and then could you say a little bit more of how you think that Investor sentiment and entrepreneurs interest is evolving in taking place in the kill chain.

So you know, this is really something that has nuance to it, but at root is whether there's offense or defense. We were never interested in funding things that were offensive weapons. We're only interested in really providing defense. Now sometimes in defense. And again, you can look at this as sort of two sides of a coin. But you may have a commander that says there's a terrorist, the terrorist is right now walking towards a school building and intends to either blow himself up or children or shoot up a mosque or a church. And with that information, a commander human in a loop is going to make a decision to say in sort of the God's decision that they're going to take a direct action. That direct action may be to capture or kill an enemy. And so there's technology at every facet of that. And we really view it as a benevolent moral thing that if you can discriminate between, you know, a father that is coming back from the fields with a pickaxe over his shoulder and a terrorist with known mal intent that's coming with an AK47 over his shoulder, you know, those are two very different situations that you want to discriminate against. And so technology has a role. The more precise, the higher the resolution, our technology, arguably the more moral and ethical the decisions can be. You know, when you had very imprecise, very large scale defense systems, you know, you would drop a bomb and you know, lots of innocent civilians would die and it would be awful and tragic. And I think that the more precise you can target a vehicle or a building or communication infrastructure or energy sources, supply or whatever you need to thwart an active offensive threat from an enemy is something where you're involved there along the chain. I think what has changed is you've really had a generation that I would consider, I'm just going to arbitrarily mark around 2000 that grew either disinterested, indifferent, possibly negative about the idea of working on technology for defense. And part of that is you had a jingoistic president in Bush too. You had a more peaceful, benevolent outreach of Obama, but you had drone strikes and innocent deaths. You had a super far right jingoistic Trump. And a lot of people just looked at this and were like, are these the administrations? Are these the American values that you grew up standing for? And you contrast that with the 1980s where you had lots of immigrants coming from Russia in particular who were escaping atrocities or suppression surveillance. Germany as well, West Germany, East Germany and You saw this flood of people in the 80s that were mathematicians, scientists, physicists, that really wanted to work on great noble things and they wanted to do it in service of this country that was providing safe haven for them. And so I think we lost that. We lost that narrative for a good generation. You also had people that were coming as immigrants, not as emigres fleeing their country, but as seeing America as a place where, hey, we can go start a company, get some equity, make it rich, come back. And so there was sort of a transient, almost tourist like culture and in the bases historically in Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Cambridge and in New York and elsewhere. And now something has changed. It may be that the prior threats, whether it was of Al Qaeda or violent extremists or Islamic jihadism or terrorism, was too diffuse and too abstract for many people. But I think that there are rising threats now, whether it's Russia interfering with elections and democracy and sowing seeds of dissent. There are measures somewhere between 50 and 80% of a lot of the social media activity, particularly on topics like Black Lives Matter, MeToo and other things that cause great divisiveness between people that are American citizens are being conducted as information operations by foreigners. When you look at China, China is an amazing country. Chinese people are amazing people. The CCP is authoritarian regime and bordering on totalitarianism. And it is using technology in the antithetical way that the liberal democracies of the west are. It is much more about surveillance and control and suppression, implementation of social currencies where you say the right thing, you get social credit. You say the wrong thing, you can be thrown into prison. You've got a million plus Uyghur Muslims that are being put into concentration camps. And I grew up in, though I'm an atheist, Drew everything that I ever heard at the dinner table on Friday nights was never again. And remembering the Holocaust and looking at the kind of oppression that the world, for largely either indifferent or economic reasons, people are saying, it's below my line, they don't care. I think it's just, I think it's that itself, indifference to injustice is the gate to hell. So you have a situation, particularly in China and the ccp, where Chinese people, not bad China, not bad ccp, quite dangerous. And you should have people on the left that are looking at this and saying, we've got human rights abuses and atrocities, we've got environmental abuses. And as much as China might jawbone and talk about a transition to green energy, the largest coal producer in the world You've got people on the right that might be concerned about bellicose or belligerent actions, people that might be concerned about Taiwan, people that might be concerned about IP theft, currency manipulation, 3, 4% of our outstanding treasuries. And so you see a situation where I think people are starting to see that there is a threat and that those threats, in particular Russia and China, but elsewhere are using technology, in many cases our own technology against us, and they see an opportunity to sort of defend the homeland and take the fight. Right.

And as you alluded to, technology plays a role in this in a completely unprecedented way. A couple months ago, Jacob Holberg published a book that was very influential called the Wires of War. And Jacob argue that we are already in a war with Russia and China. Do you agree with that framing?

I do. You know, it's not a kinetic war. People are not being shot directly. They're not being killed. You know, battlefields are different domains. And so, you know, let's take a few of them. Cyber. There's no question, you know, you've got cyber attacks coming from Russia that are directed in many cases, in many cases by Putin or certainly condoned. Same thing with China. Very sophisticated systems to exploit. We already talked about the information operations to sow seeds of dissent. Germany in particular, I think, was particularly susceptible and vulnerable. If we were sitting around as evil geniuses in a Putin war room and decided, okay, how do we get more influence over Europe? Do we need to invade? No, all you need to do is foment dissent against nuclear power in Germany. Let's give fuel and money and protest promotion to the rise of the Green Party and let the internal populace basically shut down nuclear. Once they do that, they'll be dependent upon NOR2 and natural gas, and Russia will have a grip basically on Western Europe. I think it was a beautiful, brilliant and evil coup, but it was one that was done without firing a shot or sending a single troop. So I think the information domain, which includes cyber, is very sophisticated. Exploitation of social media, exploitation of certain narratives. Letting us turn ourselves on ourselves is one of the greatest tactics throughout Back from Sun Tzu. So that's one domain which is the information operations in cyber. Another is financial. We were not as intertwined financially really at all with Russia during the Cold War. Nobody was buying any products. The only arguably competitive Russian products that you had were the ones that had to compete on a global stage, which was a MiG fighter jet and an AK47. But you weren't buying toasters or Tata cars or Lata Cars or pretty much any other consumer product because they just weren't competitive. China is the main manufacturer and factory for the vast majority of the world. And it's significantly intertwined economic partner. It's hard to undo. They own vast amounts of our Treasuries, an extra trillion dollars of our $20 trillion of outstanding. So while not a huge percentage significant potential mover. So you've got the economic domain and interdependency. You increasingly have censorship on the soft power side. I think that there are opportunities there, but there certainly are challenges. Where historically the US would export media, music, mtv, Hollywood, today many of those things are suppressed. If they are saying the wrong thing, you've got Hollywood actors like John Cena taking a knee and pledging fealty to China, apologizing in Chinese for calling Taiwan a country. You've got Kodak and Instagram removing pictures and images of Xinjiang province where the Uyghurs are being held in concentration camps and saying that it was an Orwellian dystopian nightmare and being forced to remove those online. So there's foreign countries that because of economic influence and threat of not distributing goods or products, NBA of course being a prominent other example, significant leverage over the US and ultimately the values and the cultures and the things that we say and believe. And then you've got space, which I think is a huge and important domain. You know, the US and Russia had great diplomatic and scientific ties with the International Space Station. Now, Russia was the first to announce that they're going to be pulling out of the ISS over the next two years. They're going to be developing their own systems. China already has their own space station that they're launching different modular parts to us will be playing a little bit of catch up there. US did approach Russia about doing a joint lunar base. Russia said, no thank you, we're going to do with China. And so, you know, there are all kinds of alliances and allegiances that are in a shifting, you know, sort of centripetal force up up above, there's a lot of space assets and satellites that are up there. There's increasing odds that while China has already blown up its own weather satellite to show a kinetic capability in space, and Russia has blown up its own satellite from ground to show, you know, its ability to blow up somebody else's satellite, there's increasing risk that there's an accident, that there's debris, that something is framed as an accident when it was intentional. And so I think there's going to be a lot of surveillance Sabotage different technological assets up in space to both detect and deceive and then ultimately perform kinetic actions. So that's another domain where I think we are increasingly at war. And it's straight out of science fiction, sort of Star wars. And then you've got traditional air, land and sea. And China would like to remove influence from Taiwan. You can think of it as a fullback that's blocking its ability to project power into the Pacific Ocean. U.S. and allies would prefer to keep that contained. You've got serious economic interests, of course, with TSMC on the island and late stage scramble for the US to rebuild the semiconductor manufacturing facility along with one of our company's resilience where we're trying to rebuild drug and biological manufacturing capabilities here. Domestically there's a lot of conflict and a lot of very clever moves that have happened over the past 10, certainly 20 years to gain leverage over the United States. And that's going to require a coordinated effort, better technologies, better leverage to be able to push back.

I think that's incredible perspective. One thing I wanted to hone in on a little bit there was your commentary on space and how it's effectively another domain of war that we're currently in. I'm curious how you would characterize what you just described versus the idea that we're currently in a space race or we might need to stimulate another space race in order to further increase the innovation that's happening in the US in that domain we've seen a lot of great venture backed companies popping up that are trying to further space and America's dominance in that region. Everything from Hadrian that we talked about before, where we're co investing with you or another co investment in Epsilon 3. But I'm curious how you think we kind of invigorate the US venture companies and the west to really take space seriously and not just see it as something that is this science fiction, pie in the sky type area.

So here's where I will surprise you because as you know, I am quite critical of Elon when it comes to Tesla, but I think what he's done with SpaceX is extraordinary. Not only in the execution of what they've done, and there's issues about, you know, the total addressable market on the launch cost and the need for Starlink and all this kind of stuff, but the most important thing that SpaceX has done is truly inspired a generation of great engineers. You know, a lot of engineers over the past 20 years sort of took the mantle from computer science and you know, call themselves software Engineers, but like hard engineers that are working on physics and plasma and thermal materials and acoustic and electro optical systems. I mean, these are very sophisticated, long trained, deeply technical people. Many of them had interests in rocketry, some of them had interest in automotive racing. But there's an ethos of basically wanting to make machines, control them and have them go fast to compete. And so everyone that I have met that has come out of SpaceX and as you know, Hadrian has hired a lot of folks from there, Will Brewey and Delian and the founders of ARD have hired incredible group of people from SpaceX. Almost all of our companies that are touching space in some way have really trained at SpaceX. And SpaceX I think, truly has a culture driven by Elon and ultimately by Gwynne, of very high expectations. We're going to do more than anybody thinks possible, with less than anybody thinks possible. Mission critical kind of things. Critics not in the same way of Tesla. So I really think that Elon has done a tremendous job. The visuals that you see of rockets launching or landing, I think that is inspiring and it's been done with style and panache and the coolness that I think has reinvigorated broad swath of American interest in designing space systems. So that to me feels way more important than any sort of patriotic, jingoistic, we gotta be the Russians to space kind of thing. I think mostly it has been intrinsic of, hey, we're going to be the upstarts here and we're going to take on the old Lockheed and Raytheons and Orbitals and Aerojet Rocketdynes and build better systems and so super smart people that are really coming out of there. And I would very publicly loudly praise Elon for inspiring, I think, a generation. That's great.

I think that's great to be able to also see the nuance between how Elon thinks about Tesla versus SpaceX and.

Kind of the execution there.

So in the same way that you can argue that SpaceX and the style and the way they do these launches and the kind of culture of new engineers that they put out has almost created a Sputnik moment to wake up a generation to be more excited about it, to bring this back a little bit to China and what you were saying earlier and the dangers of the ccp, do you think we need some similar Sputnik type moment to wake people up to? Again, not the dangers of China, China's an amazing place, but specifically of the ccp. And on our side we're seeing a tremendous amount of money, VC funding flowing between the US and China. We're seeing apps like TikTok that are potentially under control, influenced by the CCP becoming pervasive in the US and it seems like people might raise a fuss about this and talk about it, but how much action is really being taken to change that and confront that head on? Would be curious to get your take there.

I think that there is a growing awareness there are kooky far right people that I think are very anti China. I think it has to be a very nuanced thing that it really specifically is about the government right now, the Chinese Communist Party, if one were to fully take the counter view, which I think is important in understanding the situation rather than being just totally polar. You have a billion people that have been lifted out of poverty and you have 100 million ish people that are along the coasts that sort of live in the Shanghai's and Beijings and akin to the way we do in New York and elsewhere. The hundreds of millions of people there have been really asymmetrically and disproportionately benefited. I think Xi and the CCP realize that for them to stay in power it really depends on the support of the masses that are still in rural areas right now. You're seeing sort of situation where you're going from a few hundred dollars of GDP per capita to 9,000 upwards to 20,000 or so. And where in the US at I don't know, 40 or 50,000. And so there's still a way for China to go. One could argue until you have a substantive middle class. And one could say that what she is doing right now is a rational engineered program over the next generation to spread wealth, have people have true sense of ownership over property and cars and apartments and the economy. And then maybe you see a democracy. That would be the optimistic view, or not a democracy, but certainly a more liberal communist culture. What you've seen in the past few years, which again may be a temporary thing or maybe symptomatic of something much more serious, is a total lockdown. A lockdown as she seeks to be ruler for life. Which will basically come to a head in the fall of this year of 2022. A permissiveness to see the capitalization of technology companies, web companies, e commerce companies, education companies and then the relatively rap decapitation of their leaders and a redirection of the not so invisible hand. It is a very visible hand that has said okay, people are not going to be making money there anymore, or certainly not as much money anymore. And that includes domestic VCs. And if you've ever heard Neil Shen from Sequoia put on the spot by, I think it was the Economist years ago. It was just such an awkward moment because you can't win answering these questions of do you feel uncomfortable with the ethical abuses or whatever. You are completely served at the pleasure of the ccp. And so the next wave, where the visible hand is directing capital to flow is in many of the things that Lux and you and others fund, which is in a lot of the deep tech, cutting edge areas. So semiconductors, biotech, technologies for defense, that is what will be celebrated culturally. It'll be directed formally with five year programs you already see. Amazingly, I forget the name of the show, but there's a 40 episode Netflix equivalent series in China. It is a highly rated, widely watched show about a U.S. semiconductor engineer who came back to China and basically decided to rebuild or build up the most competitive semiconductor company in the world. That's just astounding that they had the foresight to create a fictional narrative as propaganda to indoctrinate the people of this and create new heroes. I've always said that as a country and as a culture, you get what you celebrate. And when they're celebrating the symbolism of a semiconductor engineer who came from the US and then decided to patriotically rebuild the great soul of the new machine, the new chips for the future of China, and we're celebrating Kanye and Kim Kardashian. It's ridiculous. We're at a disadvantage. I do think more attention has to go on human rights abuses. I think that there should be zero tolerance. When we see atrocities around the world, it doesn't count. The US is imperfect. We are fallible. We have a stained history. We have a gross and disgusting history of slavery, of abuses against women, gay, I mean, every marginalized group. And the good thing is, over time, those groups have gained more rights and more recognition. That's deserved. But you know, anytime you see, you know, a totalitarian government suppressing and, you know, systematically, you know, whether it's imprisoning, detaining, killing, sterilizing, quote, unquote, re educating, you can look at the arc of what started as political protesters put in prison by the Nazi regime in the 30s, but then became larger and larger until it was a systematic annihilation of an entire group of people, the Jews. So I think more attention is needed. I think at the moment it's probably a great opportunity for the left and the right to unify, if not with a strategy around China, certainly around an attitude around China, which is probably the latter being a prerequisite for the former. Right.

And Josh, to what extent do you see the rise of nihilism and the general societal malaise that we've seen in the United States over the last couple of years leading for us to not take these problems seriously? You might have seen this. There was a survey a couple of months ago that asked how Americans feel optimistic about their future. And we've had, for the highest time ever, the majority of people thinking that their children will be worse off than they are, putting the US as the fifth most pessimistic country on the planet. Do you think that these are interconnected at all? How do you look at these?

I think that there has been apathy and indifference. I think there's been a focus on the individual about self aggrandizement. I think, you know, social media, media have all allowed people to, you know, just be hyper self promotional about, you know, being celebrities and being famous for being famous and that kind of stuff. And like I said, you get the culture, you celebrate. And that's what we've celebrated. You know, the great generation of the greatest generation, which was World War II. And, you know, you had people that were entirely shifting and reimagining and rebuilding American industry. Whether it was, you know, automotive air, you had women entering the workforce. There was just an amazing time of coming together in solidarity in the face of a, you know, existential threat of a common enemy. When you go back through the history of the United States, maybe it's a bit cynical, but it is roughly accurate observation that since the Mexican American War, you know, following the Civil War, we were reunited every time we had a great power conflict of some sort, the country came together. And it's cynical in that, you know, we sort of only come together in the presence of the third common enemy. When World War II had abated, you had the Roaring Twenties. Everything was great. You know, money's flowing, liquor's flowing, despite prohibition. But you also have the rise of the kkk. And so during those moments of domestic peace against an external enemy, we end up really turning on each other. That would be abated by World War II and Korean War come together again. We'd turn on each other again. And then Vietnam, which was really a flawed and failed war in many ways. Then we'd be reunited against the Cuba missile crisis and Cold War and duck and cover and threats of Russian bombs and mutually assured destruction and nuclear. Then we had the raging 90s of.comxs and everything was fine. Then 2001 September 11th happened. And that was a very diffuse, not necessarily hegemon. It was a fearful, terror induced, collective. I think the one thing that we started to celebrate again, there was a lot of people that used to protest soldiers, particularly post Vietnam. And I think there was an embrace of just American heroes and women and men on the front lines. So that was a virtuous thing. But we haven't really had a big common third enemy. And so I think that's quite important. When you look at the domestic issues again, in self interest, politicians and media have done a wonderful job in serving their own interests to divide and conquer. And so we went from having a national hearth or a fireplace that we gather around Channel 2, 4, 7, ABC, NBC, CBS, into an infinite number of channels. You know, that's a good thing, more expression of democracy. It's a bad thing in that everybody ended up in their own little ipod. People just hearing the echo chambers of what they want to hear. People want community, they want meaning, they want purpose. They would find it in their political tribes. And so they became increasingly isolated to the other side. We now have a situation where half the country thinks that the other half the country is a total idiot. The other half thinks the exact same thing. And in many cases they think not only the idiots, but that they're actually evil. It was amazing stat thinking about the politicization of this. 53% of Republicans, 56% of Democrats got their flu shot before COVID in 2019, going into 2020 flu shot. And then this year so far, I think it's 40% of Republicans and 68% of Democrats either have gotten or intend to get. So it's. The idea of getting your flu shot has now been conflated with COVID which has been conflated with this idea of like government control and some political aspect of it. And so we are easily influenced, very tribal, very heavily polarized. And you know, I think it's. I think it's tragic. But by the way, one other dimension that we didn't talk about before, which I failed to mention, was health. And obviously the origins of COVID forgetting about any sort of conspiratorial thing, if it's lab leak or whatever, but came from China. And probably the greatest scourge on US society right now is the epidemic in opioids and the flooding of fentanyl, which very much mirrors almost a snarky evil retribution that the Chinese had from the Opium Wars. So I think these are all things where there's an opportunity for a leader to come point out our differences, point out those outside the country that have ill intent and tend to do us harm and how we need to rally around some basic things and we can fight about all the other stuff. You can love the NFL and like the jets or hate the Giants, but we got to be on the same league here in the United States. So I am actually optimistic when I hear these reports that domestic tension is at all time highs, or nihilism is at all time highs, or people feel despondent because I feel like it's likely to get better, not worse. There is growing concern I have around the growing normalization, books being published, op eds being written, maybe in light of the anniversary of January 6th insurrection, Trump's direction, but the talk of civil war. And while I don't think we will actually have a civil war because of the very complex, diffuse, both geographic and other integrated, we're not gonna have a north, south civil war. But I do see a situation I've been persuaded or convinced by that is probably more akin to the Northern Ireland troubles, where you will have a long period of sustained low level conflict, meaning domestic terrorism, bombings, kidnappings, killings, in some cases conflated with companies that people patronize, some resulting in economic fear to go on a certain airline or go to a certain Walmart or something like that, go to certain restaurants like Chick Fil a or not. And I think that's going to be a really sad thing. And eventually what ended that was very strong leadership, some external third party intervention. And hopefully we don't see pictures of children dying and people saying enough is enough. But I worry about that domestically.

100% makes sense. So to bring this home a little bit, if you are one of our listeners and you're thinking about the future of the west, the future of America, Western values, and then especially if you're an entrepreneur or technologist wanting to help build tools or utilities to solve for a lot of the things that we discussed. What would be your recommendation to our listeners?

Well, this is a mix of history, the past, current events, the present, and technology and science, which I think is the future. And so I would encourage people. I was not a big history buff when I was young. As cliched as it is, those don't know history are condemned to repeat it. But many things are constant, so they repeat. And while technologies change and businesses change and markets change, human nature is a constant conflict. Opportunities where people are seeking leverage, influence. Just sort of studying history and seeing where things repeat and being able to identify those current events, being aware of what's going on in the world. Having a healthy dose of skepticism from the varied sources that we have so that people do not take everything at face value, understand there are nuanced points of view and try to get what some would call a consilience of inductions. Getting multiple data sources, different viewpoints, and then when you see something that is highly probable to be true, giving it more credence. That itself is a domestic education thing. Unfortunately, the current news has been perfectly algorithmically engineered to induce fear, anger, joy, surprise, whatever, and just keep hitting you like a Pavlovian dog or a skin or rat in a cage or pigeon in a cage and so be skeptical but engaged and present current affairs. And then future is for somebody that really sees the opportunity and there is an opportunity that both. I think people are going to make enormous fortunes in pursuing this because the tailwinds of demand are there domestically and abroad. And I think that there's a great feeling of moral purpose that you might work on a technology that ends up saving lives, you know, is the same way that we feel when we fund a cutting edge microscope that is discovering drugs or a cutting edge farm or biotech company that is making those drugs, to know that an entire stadium worth of people might be saved because of that science that was funded and advanced and de risked. It's what we call matter that matters. It sounds a little bit righteous, but it feels really good. The same thing feels really good to know that there might be a conflict underway and that a technology that you funded can help to thwart or stop that conflict or save lives. I would encourage people, open your eyes, look around, read history, look at current events and then get involved in the things that you think can shape history or the future, really in the in the right direction.

Awesome. Josh, this is a great note to end on. We really appreciate having you here today.

My pleasure. Really good to be with you guys. If you're an early stage entrepreneur, we'd love to hear from you. Check us out at VillageGlobal VC SA.