Josh Wolfe | Investing in the Future: Meditations on Passion, Randomness, and Optionality

Foreign.

What's up everybody? Welcome to this week's episode of Hidden Forces with me, Demetri Kofinas. Today I speak with Josh Wolf, co founder of Lux Capital, a venture firm that specializes in the hard sciences, supporting scientists and entrepreneurs who pursue counter conventional solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time. Josh is also a found investor and board member with Bill Gates in Kymeta, which makes cutting edge antennas for high speed global satellite and space communications. He's a Westinghouse semifinalist and published scientist and he previously worked in investment banking at Salomon Smith Barney and in capital markets at Merrill lynch, and in 2008 co founded and funded Kurion, a contrarian bet in the unlikely business of using advanced robotics and state of the art engineering and chemistry to clean up nuclear waste. Josh is also a columnist with Ford's who has lectured at mit, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, nyu, and has been invited to the White House and Capitol Hill to advise on nanotechnology and emerging technologies. Josh, welcome to Hidden Forces.

Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Man, what a bio, dude. I've read some people's bios before. That was long. I had to cut it down and figure out what I was going to put in there, what I wasn't going to put in there and make it lyrical.

I like your voice. It's good.

So I'm actually very excited to have you on Josh. You know, when I came across your work, I was like, this guy is a perfect fit for what we do on Hidden Forces. And then I found out that you're a board member at the Santa Fe Institute.

I am.

Which is amazing. Yeah.

And a listener of Hidden Forces.

Now that's exciting. So what have you heard? You've heard Jeffrey West.

I heard Jeffrey West. I heard Ray Monk, which was amazing because it was philosophy and math. Yeah. And let's see what else? What other ones stand out? Throw out some other names, I'll tell you.

Well, I mean, there are a lot. It's like the Tim O'Reilly's really good.

Yes. About the future.

Yeah, Tim O'Reilly's really good because that also fits in kind of with Hidden Forces. There are a bunch of really good ones. It's hard for me to even remember all the different ones. Like, I have my personal favorites. But it depends. I mean, like, in terms of like the sciences. Yeah. I mean, the Jeffrey west one's great. And I think it actually works with the slime mold thing.

Yes.

Because I think that's kind of what you're getting at with Some of that. And I want to actually ask you.

Well, and some of Jeff's analogies are totally apropos for startups, right? I mean, they started as these totally nascent things, and then they grow very rapidly. And you try to understand what are some of the universal forces that might affect a very large company that is plotting slow, like an elephant, and has a low probability of dying, high probability of surviving, but really needs the environment to be totally stable. Whereas then you have very small organisms like shrews and hummingbirds and insects, and they have higher mutation rates, higher reproductive rates, higher probability of failure. And those are basically startups.

Fascinating.

So that continuity in the scale of life between small organisms, heart rate, number of beats per life, and then sort of the kinetic pace of startups, I think, is totally analogous.

You're a total geek. There's also the economies of scale and the multicellular organisms that you sort of touched on with the slime mold, which we covered with Jeffrey, which is that you get these economies of scale as you scale up in physical systems. And that a million cells organized as an elephant. Well, I think it's more than a million, but whatever the number is, are far more efficient than the version of individual. You know, for those who are relatively new listeners who haven't been with us since the summer, I was invited and stayed at Santa Fe. Jenna invited me, and I had an amazing time. It was like camp for, like, nerd. Yeah, totally.

It's nerd camp.

And there are kids there, too, and they're really smart and they're there also, like, there's all sorts of people.

Well, they do a complexity course for kids. And so there are a lot of the people, whether they're trustees or friends or professors. And so you get these scions and the kids that are coming and. Yeah, no, it's total nerd campus.

What's really embarrassing is I tried to, like, be friends with the kids because I thought it was so cool. I was like. I thought they were so cool. Cool. Because they were doing this stuff, and I felt like they thought I was, like, some creepy guy. Questions. I was like, all right, so let's start first with your background, because you have an interesting back. You're an interesting guy, period. You're very sort of just. You kind of fit the mold, kind of what I imagine would be a listener of this show, basically. So give us a little bit of your background. Who is Josh Wolfe? Where did you come from? Where did you grow up, all that.

Well, you know, philosophically and geographically. So geographically, I come From Coney Island, Brooklyn. I was actually born in Cali. Parents split at a super young age. Give me a little bit of a chip on the shoulder. Raised by my mom.

How old were you?

I was two and a half, three years old and moved in with my mom and my grandparents. Grandma was a meter maid. Grandpa was a newspaper delivery man for the Daily News. He used to mark the papers, you know, wrap them, sell them at night. And I'd sleep in his bed. Four of us in a two bedroom, one bathroom apartment in Coney Island. My mom is actually still there. And yeah, so that was the upbringing. And she pushed me to be a nerd. And so she pushed you. She explicitly, she was like, look, this is your path. Right? Be a nerd. That's so funny. And so I was always driven by the meritocracy of it, right. And sort of be the smartest, be the best in the class. And I had highly competitive peers growing up. And so I would come home with like a 98 on the test and my two best friends, a guy, Jimmy and Adam. She would say, well, what did Jimmy get? What did Adam get? And if they got a 99, it was always relative, right? So I was psychotically competitive.

That's hard.

But that also went into, you know, Sundays, people would play football and I'd play football. People would watch football and I wouldn't. Right. I would maybe play video games, but otherwise I would read voraciously and try to learn everything that I could. So I was sort of psychotically competitive about what can I know that nobody else knows? And that's made me.

This is from when you were a kid, you were like this?

Yeah, since I was like, probably 6, 7, 8 years old, just like reading as much as I could and even watching, right. Documentaries or movies or just anything that I could learn. But it was always driven not by this insatiable, just innate curiosity. It was always some competitive aspect. I wanted to know more than the next guy. And she pushed me to be a science nerd. I was a Westinghouse semifinalist, which you mentioned. And that was really born actually from having seen this movie and the band played on. And this was literally like early 90s HBO talking about the AIDS crisis. And I had the gumption and the gall to be like, I'm going to go find something that's going to cure AIDS. And I found a researcher at SUNY downstate, a guy, Dominic Aussie, who was a PhD researcher. And he wouldn't let me into the lab and I wouldn't take no for an answer. And eventually, at 13 years old, started working on the lab, ended up publishing science research on that. And that lab was, counterintuitively, the reason I ended up in finance. Because here's this guy who's spinning down a centrifuge of blood, and I got way enamored with what he was doing while we were waiting, which was basically trading futures and options. I was like, what the heck is that? I knew nothing about finance markets. I didn't know the difference between a stock and a bond. He educated me on that and then went to Cornell, became really enamored with capital markets. And every opportunity that I could get to get an internship or something like that from a Cornelian or a Brooklynite, worked my way in. Then, for me, venture capital was the ultimate hybrid between science and finance. That's where my life is today. It's beautiful because both are sort of these endless frontiers. Science itself is this endless frontier. You never know what new thing, what new discovery, what sort of entropic surprise is going to occur. Then that new surprise becomes the seed kernel to combine with something else that people already know, and it creates some new technology, and then that opens up some new market and disrupts an old one. It's this endless, beautiful frontier.

When you got out of Cornell. So you went to Cornell. First of all, when were you a Westinghouse scholar?

During high school.

What year was it? Because I was a finalist for intel, which replaced Westinghouse, and it was the year right after Westinghouse got replaced.

So I was Midwood High School, Brooklyn, 95, Cornell 99. And so, yeah, okay, early mid-90s.

So you graduated from Cornell at the very height of the tech boom.

Dot com bubble. Dot com bubble, yep. And went into investment banking. And I joked that I wasn't smart enough to collect my first year bonus. And along the way, everybody was chasing dot coms, right? So it was either dot com or optical networking. And I was totally enamored by both science and finance. And we, me and another partner, Peter Heber, decided that we wanted to start a firm, but we wanted to focus on the thing that nobody else was focusing on. And that was all the hard science stuff. So chemistry, physics, material science. And we went out to raise friends and family money. And I joked that I had a lot of friends and I had a lot of family. None of them had any money. Mom was a school teacher, and Pete's parents, you know, didn't make a lot of money. And I got lucky. Met a guy, Bill Conway, who's one of the founders of the Carlyle Group, which is now a giant private equity firm. And it was like the luckiest day of my life.

What year was this?

This was early 2000s. So 2001, 2002.

You slugged a few early on. That's a big deal, getting in with the Carlyle Group.

Yeah, it wasn't Carlisle as an entity, it was Bill specifically. But it was really just appealing to somebody's interest in saying, okay, these are smart guys that are going to do something. I trust them. I think they're going to be ethical, I think they're going to be intelligent and I think they're going to hustle. And those are the same characteristics when we're backing somebody that we want.

That's really cool. So you've been in this game for a long time.

Yeah.

So you started Lux in 2001.

Yeah. So the first few years we basically answered the question, how do we have an edge? And every venture group is the same and they're totally undifferentiated and they claim that they've got proprietary deal flow, they claim that they have special value add. And most of the time it's all bs. We wanted something structural and real. We ended up creating these three different entities. One inspired by Carlyle, which was, let's have close proximity to Capitol Hill, try to influence where the legislature might go, where non dilutive money or three letter agencies might allocate to. Then we started a media business with Forbes. And this was sort of born in this old Ben Franklin quote, would you persuade, appeal to interest, not reason. And here we were appealing to the vanity, the ego of the individuals that we wanted to get access to who otherwise wouldn't have given us the time of the day. Right. And then Peter had the good idea, let's start a research business which basically became Lux Research. You know, very creatively spun from Lux Capital. And the idea here was anytime there's a high degree of information on certainty, people don't know what they're going to do or who's for real or who's full of it. They will spend a lot of money on information to reduce that uncertainty. And just like Gartner Forrester corporate executive board did that in the IT and information service space, we did that in the sort of emerging tech space. And so that became the platform. And then we had the paradox. Had to raise a fund with that track record. How to get a track record? We didn't get no fund. And we went to Conway and in his magnanimous way he put us in business. And that became fund one. And then from there we went and raised a series of ever successive larger funds. So fund two was 100, fund three was 250, fund four, 350, fund five, 400 and another $300 million co invest fund. So now we're a billion and a half across Those funds, over 100 companies, and all kinds of lessons learned along the way.

You structured the offer different investment opportunities. You can invest in them separately.

They're all standard venture funds. So it's a pool of capital committed over 10 years. We raise money from limited partners, from institutions, endowments, families, wealthy individuals, and we manage that. That money is locked up for 10 years. I think that's actually one of the great advantages of a venture, which is time arbitrage. Whereas I have so many smart friends that are hedge fund or global macro guys. And they have to be responsive to coming up with weekly, monthly, quarterly returns because they're competing with other people who are doing that. And therefore their risk of losing capital from their investors is very high. And I think it ends up leading to suboptimal decisions. So we have very uncertain, very high risk, very high probability of total failure. But what matters is frequency versus magnitude. We can be wrong 99% of the time, but on the 1% of time that we're actually right, the magnitude of how big we're right matters less. All the things that we've lost money on.

There are a few things I've heard you talk about that I want to mention at the top. And then I want to go deeper into this. The way you invest, not just your thesis and your model, but also maybe some of the qualitative aspects of how that process happens for you. But I've heard you talk about 1000100 and randomness and optionality. Can you talk about those two for us, for the audience?

So these are defining philosophies, and I think they're sort of timeless, meaning from fund to fund. We might invest in different subsectors, we might invest in different people, we might size our investments differently, we might co invest, but these are constants. The first one is randomness and optionality. This is more specific to me and a handful of people in the firm. It's not the entirety of the firm. Some people are more linear thinkers. They look at point A, they look at point B, they figure out what's the shortest way to get there. I am a little bit more random in that I like to meet and talk to everybody. I am able to find that I can connect dots sometimes after the fact. But I have an intellectual honesty that you never know a priori whether A is going to lead to B. It might be A to D to A, prime to Z and then suddenly and all these things connect back after the fact. So what I call internally is R and O, which is randomness and optionality. You want to expose yourself to as many people as many ideas with the intellectual humility that you don't know what the thing is that's going to matter. And then all of those are effectively free options. Free options in that you've spent time, maybe as little money as possible learning is the greatest free option there is. Reading lots of different books in lots of different sectors and then finding cohesive ideas between them. Meeting lots of people in different disciplines is another way. And then sharing ideas with people and saying, hey, I'm interested in X. And then they connect you to somebody who connects you to somebody. And then just after the fact, this constellation of things is obvious, but beforehand I'm intellectually honest that you just never know. So that leads into this other philosophy that I've dubbed 100 0100. Each is the successive probability that describes some combination of arrogance and ambition and intellectual honesty and humility. So the first hundred is I have 100% certainty. This is the sort of self aggrandizing, ambitious, aggressive thing, which is that Lux will be investing in the most cutting edge crazy things that you can think in the next two years. The 0 which follows is I have close to no idea what those things are going to be. But the last hundred is the certitude of where I will find them. And that's generally at the edge of our already cutting edge companies. And so I can connect the dots afterwards, but apriori again, don't know. But typically if I'm investing in some company that's on the cutting edge and then they're solving some problem, which means by definition the edge of the edge, then that's a clue for me to go find the company that's developing the thing that could solve their problem. Because even though there might be early and nascent and insufficient demand for the masses for that company, it matters, then that's going to lead to the next thing. Then as long as I maintain a little bit of that ambition and the quest to find it and the paranoia that if I don't find it, I'm going to be behind the rest of the herd, then that always makes sure that we're on the cutting edge.

That's interesting. It's kind of like their hunting. Hunting dogs or these companies that you have, they're sort of. Because they're out there at the frontier, they're giving you proprietary information that other people don't have access to. And you're able to use that information in order to leverage your future investments.

Totally. And although it may be less hunting dogs than foraging ants. Right.

It was a herd. Foraging ants. You mentioned a herd. That's what I thought.

Yeah. So the ants go out and then, you know, they find something and they come back and they double back on the signal and like, ah. Then maybe we let the hunting dogs out and then, you know, they go and lead us to the next thing.

And you're in a unique position to capitalize on that because you have access to all of those different companies. They may not have access, but you do. And you're able to sort of see all those different patterns emerge.

Exactly.

There's a quote of Steve Jobs that I love. I've always sort of found him fascinating from when I was a child. And there was a quote of his that I really like, that I thought of when I read some of your stuff and heard you do prior interviews. And it was when he talked about when he was at Stanford and he dropped out, and then he was auditing a course in calligraphy. And he says, and I'm going to have this quote for the audience. You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down and it has made all the difference in my life. That's part of a beautiful speech you gave at Stanford. I am curious. I hadn't actually intended to ask you this, but now it came to me. He says, you have to trust in something. I've definitely found that to be true. And I found that as I've gotten older, in order to have that type of randomness and optionality that you're talking about, I've had to learn to be comfortable with uncertainty and knowing that the dots will connect and not being afraid that I don't know how they will connect. That took a long time for me to get to kind of where I am today, where I can be in that state of flow, which I think is also part of what that's all about. And you see here I have a picture of Michael Jordan, because another person that I've always idolized, Michael Jordan because of the way in which he reveled in that level, in that place of uncertainty, in that place where anything could happen and that he could step in and perform. And I feel like. Anyway, so I'm throwing a bunch out there, but I'm curious sort of for you, because you're a performer, you're sort of very much in that place where you've got to perform. And what's that like for you, that process? How does that happen? How do you sort of.

Well, I'll take two things. So first, Jobs, who I think is on the one hand a genius, on the other hand, and this is almost heresy, slightly overrated in that if you actually look at some of the most amazing things that Jobs is attributed for having commercialized, they were actually really from sci fi science fiction. And so I actually sometimes joke that he of course was a genius, but he was also a great sci fi archivist.

Was he a big reader of sci fi?

I don't know if he was a sci fi reader. I actually haven't read that he was. But he stole from sci fi. So the iPad really came from both Star Next Generation, where Picard's got literally. And you can Google image this, all these tablets on his desk. And in fact, even in the litigation between Apple and Samsung, Samsung invoked 2001 Space Odyssey, the first sort of flat two dimensional screen reader, saying Apple couldn't have invented it because it was invented by Kubrick anyway. But I think there was something in that Jobs quote that you read that caught me, which was almost akin to faith. And it's a weird thing for me to reconcile because I find I have very little faith now as a very empirical, scientific view. I have faith in gravity, right? That gravity exists, but to use that word sort of speciously, but I actually don't know the randomness and optionality in my 100 0100. I have very high certainty that it's going to lead to something. But it's a weird thing that I wouldn't actually call it faith. It's this subtle distinction with a difference. On the Michael Jordan piece, the thing that I love about him, and this was recounted recently by some sports journalist, but was how psychotically competitive he was. He shared the same virtue. I would call it a virtue, some would call it a vice that Tyson did. Tyson would walk into the ring and he would look at somebody and just think, I'm going to destroy him. And Tyson was a fellow Brooklyn guy and Jordan is renowned for like, he would find the vendetta, he would find the thing to get him angry and mad, to draw that inner emotion out.

The log and the fire. He talked about that in his acceptance speech in the hall of Fame.

I think that that is so critical in any domain. It doesn't matter what you're doing. You're an athlete, you're an investor, you're competing in something. You need. That flame I've personally found for me, and I became aware of what I think it is, which tends to be the chip on my shoulder. Having not grown up wealthy and resenting kids who did. Seeing people who got things because of nepotism, not because of meritocracy. Seeing people who had strong nuclear families when mine was sort of all screwed up. I like people. I like betting on entrepreneurs who have something sort of broken inside. I've identified even in some of my limited partners, prominent patriarchs of families, that something happened to them when they were young. Maybe they had a lisp, or maybe they had something that people made fun of, or maybe they weren't the favorite child, or maybe their parents. There's something broken. And it doesn't matter how much success they achieve or how much money they make, they end up with that still that sort of bottomless hole inside that they keep feeding. And it's a weird thing because on the one hand, when you become aware of it, you can heal it, but on the other hand, you need it to continue to achieve progress. So it's another one of those dichotomies. I don't know if it's reconcilable.

I've actually had this conversation before with people, with writers and with other artists. Because I also have the sense that great art and great writing comes from a place of discontentment of some sort. I wonder. And there are people that have argued with me on this, and I'm not sure about it, but I sort of have openly wondered whether you can achieve the types of things that we consider to be success. Great success, if you are content.

In a sense. Success often, not always, is defined by some exogenous approval. You're seeking approval from other people, which could be celebrating your art, could be celebrating the song, could be buying your product. It could be putting you on the COVID of a magazine. It could be standing ovations at a concert hall or at a stadium. But all those things, in a sense, are for other people. It's extrinsic. And I've argued that I think true art is the kind of art that people make in private for themselves. Now, I don't happen to do that. Right. I Do things that I want to touch the world. I want people to celebrate. I imagine myself at 75 years old with famous Nobel laureates applauding not only the great scientific work that I've helped them to pursue, but some of the great commercialized entities that have reached billions of people because of that. But it is a really interesting phenomenon that you raised, that there is this sort of not just the art of war, but the war of art, that there's some internal struggle that some of the best producers have.

I was looking for this quote here because I had put a quote on my Instagram, my Twitter account. I wanted to get the exact quote. I don't think I could find it here. But it's essentially about chaos being the measure of our own ignorance and that really there is no real true randomness here. It is chance is only the measure of our own ignorance. Fortuitous phenomena are by definition those whose laws we do not know. And it's an interesting point that came to my mind as you were talking about faith. And I think this is an interesting conversation to have, which is, what is faith? And what is God? What is the nature of reality? Are these questions you ask yourself at all, or do you sort of say it's not really. You take.

No, I'm being competitive and being fascinated and interested in everything. I've sort of tempered some of my views, but I would say they were for most of my life very atheistic, meaning not believing in any deity, not believing in supernatural forces. Everything for me has some empirical. Even if it's not understandable in the quote. Cause in the quote that you read, it's interesting because I think of laplace's daemon, and if you had sort of infinite computational capacity to be able to look at every molecule, then in a sense there would be no randomness. And I actually don't believe that. I think that that goes against the.

Whole sort of school of thought inside of fe.

Exactly.

You're talking about, to clarify for our audience, you're contrasting a deterministic view of the universe versus a non deterministic one.

Correct. And. And right. So. And that gets into fascinating topics. And you know, I, for example, I've loved watching two brilliant minds in both Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett debate free will. And you know, is there free will if these are ultimately deterministic neural processes inside which themselves are responding to outside stimuli that are producing thoughts and. Or is there some, you know, agent in the machine that, you know, you're able to sort of conjure your own independent thought so, yeah, no, I think about these things a lot. I don't believe in personal God or the existence of God. I'm much more in the sort of Dawkins and Hitchens camp. I would say the only thing that I've tempered is that I used to be sort of militant atheist. And what does that mean? Well, I realized that I was counter indoctrinating, right? The very thing that I was railing against very religious people. I myself was arguing.

That's like Dawkins to me. Dawkins and Dennett, maybe. I don't know if Dennett qualifies for that, but Dawkins comes across to me as very militant.

Well, he's very fervent in his belief. It's probably a euphemistic way. But I much more subscribe to that view of the world. One that embraces science, embraces reason, rejects unnatural thinking. I think that it creates a lot of harm in the world and I understand that, how it pacifies many. But I do think that stultifying curiosity and basically saying we know the answer when at best all we have are tentative answers is a dangerous thing. I mean, science itself is a tentative thing, right? We hold ideas until you find evidence that the thing in which you believed you can no longer believe. Whereas religious doctrine is sort of antithetical to that.

I found that putting aside dogmatic. And there are people who have a religious view of the world that is couched in a materialist way of thinking. It's a very odd thing. It's the same sort of people, I think, that attempt to think that they can prove the existence of God. It's this weird idea. They're using empirical methodology to try to prove a non empirical phenomenon. But there is something for bearing those types of arguments, putting aside those types of arguments, there's an interesting meeting of the minds for me between sort of enlightened religious thinkers who have a particular approach, that sort of mystical sort of approach to the nature of reality and such, and the scientific community. Because for me, when I sort of think about this problem, the one thing that has always been a challenge for me is to understand how to view the world materialistically because I can't account for the distortions of my own subjective experience, right? And I've talked about the Matrix a lot on this show so many times over so many episodes because it was a foundational myth for me seeing it at that age and then subsequently through my experiences, because it spoke to something that I always felt, which was that I couldn't trust my subjective Experience. And then there came a point in my life. I don't know if you had this, but there came a point in my life and it was, I think it was at the end of college, senior year, where I had like a total breakdown. I couldn't get out of bed. It was actually. And it coincided, I think, not coincidentally, with the end of college, which was this just massive level of uncertainty. What is my life? Radical change. And I couldn't get out of bed because I felt fundamentally, did not trust the floor. I lost total sort of confidence. And the crazy thing is that I, and I don't think you know this, but I had a brain tumor later on in my life that caused dementia. And I lost full contact basically with the world around me. And so, like, I actually experienced that physically later, which I experienced sort of metaphysically earlier or sort of just from a philosophical sort of psychological. Psychological. And so I've always found the idea that we can use empirical, the scientific method to answer the deepest questions that matter most. I don't think science can offer those. I've always had the view of I don't know or not always, but I've come to this point in time in my life where I can answer the question of what is the nature of experience, what is the nature of reality? But if I were to have to answer that question, I would rely on my subjective experience and sort of the revelation that comes from that experience than I would any kind of empirical studies.

Well, the last part of what you said before, not trusting reality in a sense, or your perception of it, I actually feel like technology plays a really important role in being able to more objectively measure regardless of who the subjective user of the instruments are. But that's the thing, objective reality. So I don't know how you see red or I see red. Right. This is sort of the classic philosophical qualia problem. But I know that the instruments, every time that they see certain wavelength of light, are going to measure that it's red. Now, what we call red and what you experience as red, I don't believe that it will ever experience. But I think that technology helps us to what I call trend to truth. It helps us to identify a more accurate sense of what the reality is around us.

Well, it addresses the sensorium component of this, which is that we can gather information that we couldn't gather before.

Correct.

But it still doesn't address the subjective component, which is the perceptual, the sort of way that we.

The problem of the experience.

Yeah. Descartes, demon.

Yeah, The Problem of experience. And that by the way, is very interesting even in the artificial intelligence debates that go on now, because we know that artificial intelligence really is about intelligence is able to do an analysis of a problem. It's able to do large fact finding and search, it's able to do pattern recognition, it's able to do intense mathematical calculations. It's able to do predictions from priors, it's not able to, to sense or feel. It's not able to consciously be aware of itself doing that. And so I think that that's still a problem where we don't understand how that works. We don't understand consciousness. It's the classical quote unquote hard problem. And so even some of these terrible prognostications about AI taking over I think are totally improbable in large part because there's no reason why a highly analytic engine should want to do moral bad. So, you know, notwithstanding, we just had a case where an Uber self driving hit somebody. But that wasn't the agency of the car deciding to do something bad. It was a failure of programming to correctly identify a pattern in the world. Right. It didn't detect truth.

Well, that's interesting what you're saying there. I agree that the idea that there would be a Skynet moment and it would be driven by some nefarious sort of motive by the AI, I don't think that's necessary. But I think though it is an interesting question to ask. What sorts of machines would a human being or a race of humans create versus a non human intelligent life form? Is there, you know, the AI could be executing what it thinks is its program and in so doing, you know, drown you.

Yeah. And this is a paperclip problem, Right. That it has a specific end motive and that the best thing that it can do is extract, you know, the iron from your body to be able to continuously make, you know, paperclips. You know, Steven Pinker in particular, I think has a wonderful set of counters to this, you know, and you've got Elon weighing in because he's really, Elon Musk, really subscribed to the super intelligent intelligence view, thinking, okay, if Pinger doesn't understand this, we're all in trouble.

Harris too also takes a dim view of this.

Yeah. And although he's tempered by, you know, his counter would be David Deutsch, who basically thinks that the worst that we're going to experience is sort of the equivalent of, you know, these intelligences gone awry. And he's like, we already have them. But we call them teenagers. And so I'm more optimistic.

Well, isn't there some great myth of a sort of tempestuous God as a child and just wreaking havoc on the universe?

Yes.

I don't know where that.

Yeah, it's not one that I believe in, but yes, but yeah, I think, I mean all of these, this entire set of questions, you know, both the physical, the metaphysical, philosophical. I actually think now in technology these were areas by the way philosophically that were totally ignored. Right. In the same way that neural nets were totally ignored and now have become some of the most important basis for novel AI. Some of the philosophical questions, the moral questions that were left for, you know, the classical liberal arts and the science, you know, the soft sciences, the social sciences are now some of the most pertinent questions. And people that are coming out of programs like at Stanford, like symbolic Systems, they're the most qualified in my view to deal with this intersection of morality and technology and then think about the implications that they're going to have for society. The famous quote that I love from Kevin Kelly, that when you think about technology, the question is not to ask what happens when such a technology exists, it's what happens when everybody has one. And that in turn leads to this sort of moral question of is technology good or bad? And I'm sort of of the view, you know, tis nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. And just the mere existence of a technology, I think tips it one basis point over towards good because again, randomness and optionality, you've created an option and that can be used. Now the problem is all technology, fire, nuclear power, social media can all be used for good or bad. Fire can be used to heat a home and cook, or it can be used to burn a home or village down. Nuclear can be used for perfectly zero carbon, you know, high energy density power, or it can be used to incinerate a city. Social media can be used to connect loved ones and keep them informed with each other or as we're seeing now, you know, influence a populace and corrupt a democracy.

And I think also inherent in that is the rate of change. Yes, because you can adapt to things and then your measure of what is good and what is bad is relative. And change is based on which is why we can't judge past generations based on our current moral compass.

I think that's absolutely right. And in fact, you know, we have these geographic, you know, when you ask me where am I from? There's a philosophical place, I'm from there's a geographic place.

Well, that was your answer to that question, by the way. Completely gave you away. The fact that you broke that down by philosophical and geographical boundaries. I was going to make a joke about that, but. No, go ahead. No, go ahead.

But I think that there's east coast and west coast or sort of coastal elite Silicon Valley and Route 128, Cambridge, and then the rest of the Midwest. And you've got this between the red states and blue states. But I actually think that there's a time signature to these people as well. These people, meaning a lot of the coastal people in Silicon Valley and coming out of academic and research, are by definition, they are trying to invent the future. They're pushing on the boundaries of science. They're trying to look at how they can solve problems. And I think the vast majority of people are doing that benevolently. They're not trying to create ill for society. I think they want to be celebrated by their fellow scientists and researchers, their technologists, the engineers. But they want to produce something that helps to do something that people couldn't have done before and make lives easier. But the net result of that is that they're advancing a future at a rate to your point that almost like a species that isn't mutating fast enough to be able to adapt to its environment, where you have a larger group of people that are trying to live in the present or in the past, and there's nothing to say morally, hey, you need to adapt, you need to change, you need to abandon the old way of doing things. There are people that liked their Farms and their TV shows, and they liked three shows at night, not 30, you know, on 4,000 different stations. It's overwhelming. And so there is this sort of race between people who are trying to usher in the future and people who are trying to protect the past. And, you know, we happen to be situated on that fault line, sort of pushing and funding and fueling the people who are inventing the future. But you can't do it without consideration for the people who are really being disrupted and not being asked permission. Right. They're just, they're saying, like, this is the new way that you have to adapt.

It's interesting to sort of stretch the boundaries of your metaphor. The fact that you. We're talking about the geographical location of these philosophical divide. It's like the coasts are tearing the center apart. They are. And yeah, they are. You're right, and I agree with that. And it's an interesting point. Something else I want to say because you were touching on it before had to do with the fact that some of these disciplines that weren't really important in the practical world forever are now very important. And I think that's nowhere is that more true than in machine learning and artificial intelligence, because it is like applied philosophy. You're taking these questions that we've been asking for millennia and that now we need an answer to because we need to actually create a utility function that incorporates these ideas as we design these machines, these intelligent machines.

I think that's absolutely right. And it's not just the social sciences. In some cases, it's liter literary and poetry in thinking about words and semantics and parsing language. So yeah, this to me is like almost a resurgent renaissance of all these.

Different disciplines and identity. Also, when you talk about free will, these are real issues. We did a show with Jeffrey Rosen of the Constitution of the National Constitution center dealing with this question of what do you do in a judicial system where if you assume that free will is. There is no free will.

Right. How do you punish criminals or mete out justice?

Exactly. You mentioned something else when we were talking about this. I think you were suggesting that somehow the concerns around artificial intelligence getting to that sort of Skynet moment are, if not overblown, premature. That reminded me of something else you mentioned to me when we had a brief call before this interview, which I want to get to, which is your thoughts on climate change. I found those very interesting and forward thinking. I just want to throw that out there because I don't want to forget about it, but I want to continue, try to go along this rundown I've got here. And I wanted to come back to this thing about sort of process. My subtitle here is Geeking Out. I have my own little process that I go through and I've always sort of gone through this where I follow. You've talked about passion and I have this picture here of Michael Jordan just like killing it. Right. Just like on the core, just like, just intense, just so in it. Just in love. Right. And so whenever I've had that feeling as I've gotten older, I've learned really, you know, the first time I probably felt anything like that was I'd say I began to start doing it after college when I decided I turned on a good job and went to Italy instead and just worked in Italy for nyu, managing off campus apartments. And I just started. I didn't always just follow my heart, but as I began to do that more and more, I began to indulge in things and the more I would indulge in them. There were sort of come a point I'd work them over in my head. Like I'll get, let's say recently, for example, and it's not the first time this has happened. We covered a certain bunch of topics on the show for a while and I just took some time off. Like, time off. I literally just didn't work on whatever I was working on and I just let my brain go in an unstructured way. And then I really sort of kept thinking about quantum information theory because it's something that I really wanted to sort of work my mind over with. And it's something that I've thought about in the past and I've always let it go. And I started doing it again and I started looking at some quantum computing stuff and say this were to proceed and I would sort of go down this cyclical route. I would sort of start to obsess. I would find the tail, I'd grab the tail. Somehow I'd grab something sturdy. Because a lot of times I'll go into something like that, for example, and quantum physics is a classic example. I've consistently had problems. I tried to take an online course of Leonard Susskind's at Stanford. I couldn't get through the mathematics. That was like a barrier for me. It's always like, how do I grab the subject? But if I can grab the tiger by the tail, if I can find a way in, then it's like there's this obsessiveness that will happen and I'll start to work through the material and eventually something will come out of it. And yeah, I just wonder sort of how your process like that is. Like, how do you get into something and then create something out of it?

Well, so a few different ways. One is an awareness of others. And so part of that means understanding what the consensus is. What is everybody else talking about? What is everybody else interested in? Now, the vast majority of people, I believe, and arbitrarily, I'll say more than 50%, but probably 70% of people, would prefer to identify what the consensus is and join it. That's the hurdle for sure.

100%.

Maybe it's 90% of people, but I've never been like that. So my personal disposition as manifest in the things I'm interested in, the music I'm interested in, the art I'm interested in, the clothing I'm interested in. It's always been like, okay, identify what the consensus is. And there's an Intentionality to it. Right. It isn't just. I wouldn't say it's like this honest, innate thing. It's what is everybody else doing and what can I do slightly differently?

You don't think it's innate at all for you?

Well, I'm saying it's overt in that I'm doing it. Not because it's just like, oh, that's.

You'Re doubling down on your impulses.

Yeah, I'm not. But in part it's informed. Like I don't know if my interests would. Being intellectually honest and self introspective here. I don't know if my interests would be purely interested in the things that I'm interested in were it not for the fact that I'm able to identify what the crowd is interested in and then said, no, I don't like that kind of stuff. Now some of that is easy, right? I don't like pop music. It's got a certain 4, 4 classic chord signature to it. And I like more discord and weird stuff. I like heavy metal, I like hip hop, I like weird, eclectic experimental music. But mostly because my early days were nobody else was listening to that stuff. You have this opportunity to find white space. When I hunt for ideas, it's the same thing. There's a mathematical basis for this and then just sort of a psychological basis. I'll give you the mathematical one. If you assume whether you're an investor in the public markets or in the private markets like me, if there are 100 companies and you assume that 90% of them are crappy companies, so only 10% of them are actually good, you decide a priori. A priori, let's say that that's the base rate, that 90% of companies in a given market are going to be crap and 10% are going to be really good, you got 10% are good, 90% are bad. Out of our 100 sample, 90 are bad, 10 are good. Now let's say I have an analyst that's working for me and he or she has a 90% success rate at identifying those of the 90 that are bad. She picks 90%, she gets 81 and correctly says that those are bad. She picks wrongly that nine of them are bad, or sorry, are good when they're actually bad. Then of the 10 that are actually good, she only says nine are good and gets one wrong. Now I've been delivered a list of 18 companies, but only nine of them are good. Think about that for a second. When there's a 90% chance that companies are bad and a 90% accuracy rate of being able to identify them. Nine out of 18, I still have a 50% hit rate of being right, so I'm no better. Somebody with a 90% accuracy rate is no better than flipping a coin. Simple Bayesian math on looking at that. When I thought about that, I said, okay, either you can find somebody that's better than 90% accurate, and geez, I'm not even close to 90% accurate, let alone some other analyst or somebody I'm going to trust. I have to find an area where there's a higher percentage of good companies. And good companies could mean themselves that they're intrinsically good or that nobody else is looking. And therefore, as a function of price, it's scarcer. I like to go into areas where other people aren't looking because I think I have a higher probability of finding 1 in 5 instead of 10 in 100. That's a mathematical way to think about how do I look for weird stuff. The reason I do it is the same reason why I liked Life of Agony and Biohazard growing up instead of Bruce Springsteen.

You know, the way I think about that, I used to say that when before this show, I had a television show, and I used to say, because everyone had opinions about how we should do it, and they all based their opinions based on what CNBC was doing and what some of the other big networks were doing. And I just thought it was such a ridiculous idea that we would want to compete with the large media organization on their terms. And it's kind of like, I would say it's like everyone's over here and there's like, you know, abundant. It's like the Hamptons, right? It's like, okay, yeah, it's fully developed. Everything's priced in. Are you going to go and invest there or are you going to go try to find the next Hamptons or something like that?

You know what I mean?

That would be sort of an example. But it's this idea that from my perspective, what you're saying is you want to go where you've got the best.

Odds, go where you have the best odds, which means go where there are fewer people. So whether that's in a neighborhood where you're looking for real estate. Now, look, sometimes there's good reasons why people aren't there, right? I mean, there's a reason that downtown Newark historically wasn't as beautiful as the Hamptons. But the same thing applies in books. Reading the top 10 best sellers on the New York Times List, to me, is like running on the treadmill on Lewis Carroll, the Red Queen. You just have to run that fast just to stay in place. It gives you no informational advantage over your fellow peers if you're competing with them. Whereas if you're reading the obscure thing that nobody's thought about or something going back into the archives that people have forgotten about, that's where the interesting big discoveries happen. Even in my reading on a daily basis, I read four papers, and one of them happens to be USA Today, because I want to know what the masses of Americans are reading and what's influencing them. So I can sort of understand that consensus. But then I read weird, obscure journals and things that I think nobody is reading specifically because I think nobody's reading them.

That's really interesting. So you've got a daily regimen. What is that? Can you tell us? Secret sauce.

It starts with information anxiety, right?

Really? Yeah.

No, if somebody mentioned something to me, the idea that I wouldn't know something about that something is literally like.

See, I can feel that talking to you. That's what I meant, though you do have a wicked level of, like, informedness. I can feel that. That's what I'm trying to say. So you've definitely, like, soaked up a ton of information over a lifetime and put things together.

I mean, my biggest anxiety, I look at, you know, I'm 40 years old and I look at, oh, my God, like, you know, one day I'm gonna die, right? And I do have existential fear, right?

We gotta talk about that.

And I wanna get as much, you know, in it as I can. And. But it's endless exponential production of information. And go back to this technology piece. This medium through which we're talking today Maybe had radio 20 years ago, but it didn't exist. And the proliferation of content is so great with so many interesting people and great minds. I mean, you get to eavesdrop, basically. You and I could be having a conversation on the phone right now and thousands of people get to listen to it 100%.

Oh, absolutely.

The amount of content that's being produced by now, it's like, you can, in my view, be a curious person that wants to know and absorb as much as you can and not have information anxiety. So my morning regimen, I wake up, coffee with my kids, we listen to the news on Alexa, and I'm reading four papers digitally. And I like to read the physical digital replicas of the papers. So New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Financial Times. Why do I read the physical replica instead of the online, because you get to see what the editor said deserve to be on a 1 or C22. And if I have a differing view on what the magnitude of the importance of the story on C22 is, and I think that basically everybody else is going to discount the thing on C22, but I think it's really important, then maybe I've got an analytical advantage. We're all getting the same information, but I'm applying a different weight or probability to the thing. And that to me, is a source of edge, too. I look at the placement of where people are putting news as this meta piece of it as well.

All right, there's so much really cool existential stuff I want to talk to you about, but I also want to get to some practical things. And in the interest of trying to prioritize here, let's talk a little bit about how you apply the amount of information that you gather. You gather tons of information. We talked about it a little bit. How do you allow or enable or cultivate the assimilation of that information into your brain?

I would only come up with a post facto lie. I really have no idea. I mean, if it's a clear quantitative thing, the example of the thing that I was describing, describing where you're looking at a certain pond and how many fish are good in that pond kind of thing, that's Bayesian analysis. The same thing that applies towards getting a misdiagnosis at a doctor and what are the odds, given the base rates that you actually have, that can apply to an investment selection. In that case, that's purely mathematical. That's an arrow in the quiver. That's a mental model. It's something that I can reference. And sometimes you can pull that off the shelf and say, okay, this applies in that case, being able to have the repertoire of a wide set of mental models, sometimes you can apply the right one. The other problem is sometimes those mental models contradict with each other. And so you might use one, but then a different mental model is telling you to do something different, but the other piece is just the pattern recognition. And I love this to the point where I will read multiple books at the same time and sometimes I'm reading a paragraph. So right now, both Nassim Taleb, Skin in the Game and Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now I might. And by the way, I was going to say they hate each other. Nassim does not like Pinker.

He doesn't like a lot of.

Yeah, no, but he specifically, he's a curmudgeon it's so sad because he could be an amazingly celebrated philosopher.

He is grumpy though.

But I might read a paragraph in one and then later on I'm reading a different chapter in the other and I might conflate the sources and oh, this actually reminds me of. And you start to build that same sort of randomness and optionality star map and you start to make connections between things that transcend the boundaries of the actual book or transcend the boundaries of the origin of the medium. And so it would be a total post facto lie if I said how I synthesize these things. But it's trying to absorb as much as I can filter through that information anxiety, which is the motivating force of how I collect all this stuff and then start to connect the dots. And sometimes it's telling stories, it's telling a narrative, it's putting the pieces together into a cohesive way that I can remember.

So for me, sleep, which is very difficult and doesn't come by easily for me, but if I can get sleep, that accelerates everything. Also, art, engaging with different types of art, different types of music and film specifically for me is super useful in helping me piece together, let's say, this kind of raw information that I'm getting from reading books or this hard science.

Stuff or taking film as in watching a doctor or as not a documentary, like a real drama. Again, that's narrative, right? And we are. We are narrative telling, making consuming primates and stories are just such a powerful medium. I mean, even, by the way, if you have looked at some of the memory palace stuff, how do you remember large sets of data, right? And so, you know, without being any quote unquote genius, we could both memorize.

You know, a string of tellerad is now that comes from the. It's an anecdote from a Roman. There was a case of someone in Rome where the palace collapsed and he remembered where everyone was sitting. And that's where the term memory palace comes from, which is that you create a visual representation in your mind for the location of information or things or objects.

Correct. In fact, if I told you let's. Okay, close your mind, close your eyes now and think about your childhood home or an apartment or your work or, you know, you have a very visual memory and you actually traverse that memory in a physical space in your mind and consistently, you know where things are, you know, when you turn left, when you turn right. And so basically taking advantage of why ever. And however we evolved for that, you know, you could see, okay, men Particularly maybe hunter gatherers. You're traveling to a place, hunting for food, coming back. I mean, whatever the evolutionary basis for that. We have these very strong, salient memories of physical places. I remember, you know, the mess hall in freshman year of college. I remember the office that I worked in. I remember jobs going back, like the physical infrastructure, even though I don't remember the people's names or things like that. Right, okay, so. So now if you wanted to do numbers, you would assign to an object, like a number or something else, a character. And so it might be, if you were trying to remember the number 11, you might remember Phil Sims. And you place Phil Sims, let's say, at the front door of your house. And now you're going to remember after 11:56. Well, okay, now Phil Sims is there with Lawrence Taylor, number 56. And by the way, I know these not because I watch football, because I played copious amounts of Madden growing up on Sega Genesis. So that was the way I remembered rosters. Sega Genesis. So you go 1156, but you don't rem 1156. You remember Phil Sims and Lawrence Taylor, but you don't just remember the two of them together. You remember them doing something really weird, provocative and weird and like, oh, and so you can assign anything to that. You can do a grocery list. You can do a set of principles, algorithms. I mean, it's just a mental trick. But it is exactly to what you were saying that you respond very well to movies. It's a narrative, it's a mind movie that you're telling with just really weird objects.

Well, to bring it back to my experience with my brain tumor, there were things like the Matrix. I've always been big in films, and I just didn't appreciate it. Took time to understand sort of why a big part of that is. I'm just a visual learner. But there were certain movies that I've always really loved since I was a kid. The Matrix was one of them. Gattaca was another one of them. The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick, also Days of Thunder, which people always make fun of me about because it seems so. You know, it's like, well, Tom Cruise. But actually, it really. I think it's a great movie.

People make fun of my favorite movie of all time, Point Break.

Really?

I mean, it's just.

It's a great movie.

Yeah, but it's Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. I mean, how cheesy can you get?

But Patrick Swayze was awesome.

He was awesome.

He was so awesome, man. He was in the Outsiders. He was in Dirty Dancing. He was in these epic films. And he. What's great about Patrick Swayze is that he was the masculine and the feminine.

By the way, he was also in a super weird, cultish movie that I loved. Donnie Darko.

Yeah, I haven't seen Donnie Darko. I've seen a little bit of it.

I don't think it's awesome.

Everyone says it's really great. I haven't seen that. But Patrick Swayze was amazing. And so he. I mean, I think I love Patrick Swayze, but this is what I was gonna say. And it had to do with narratives and narrative storytelling. After my brain surgery and I had to develop complete dementia and I had anterograde amnesia and I couldn't remember anything for the duration of months. But then all of a sudden I re accessed all my memories. I've described it as having, like, the reader went offline and then all of a sudden was back online. And I had data dumps and it was out of order. So I had to, you know, everything was like there was metadata and I had to sort of order everything post facto. But when I watched, started watching movies like the Matrix and Days of Thunder and Gattac, A Thin Red Line, they had this sort of arc that was similar throughout all of them. And it. It's something that I've relied on since, and it's helped me make sense of my life. It's kind of like the hero's journey, that sort of thing. Anyway, I don't. I don't know how to tie that back into everything, but. So we talked about your gathering your information, foraging, and you have information anxiety.

Yes.

So you forge like crazy like a squirrel, constantly. So and you gather this information and sort of.

There's, by the way, let me tell you one thing that manifests itself, and this is almost like a tick I'll be flipping through. If I'm in the gym in the mornings, I also go through the magazines.

You work out every day?

Every. Every morning.

What's your workout routine?

So usually three, four days a week, I'm at an equinox and I'm riding the bike for 40 minutes, flipping through, reading or the papers. And then I will do lifting two nights a week. I box one night a week, yoga. One night a week, basketball. And I skateboard to and from the train stops and work. And so sort of slightly unconventional on the sports stuff, but if I'm reading through something and then I quickly flip a page in a magazine and I'm like, oh, and then I get information anxiety. I'm like, maybe I just missed the most critical insight and I have to go back. And it's almost like a obsessive compulsive thing. And I'm aware of it, but it's just for information anxiety, I don't wash my hands. Like, obsessive compulsive. I don't. But that's the one that's really interesting.

I mean, I don't have that. And that's so fascinating.

I skip a page, I have to go back and say, shit, did I just.

Have you found that's a common trait in success?

No, not at all. In fact, the only thing is, I will say there was one time where I remember I went back and it was a key piece of information. I can't even remember what it was now, but I was like, I'm so glad I went back. And then, ever since then, I can't skip pages. I got to flip through. That's fascinating.

Wow, that's fascinating.

Okay, so there are more than fascinating pages.

Yeah, well, I mean, both fascinating. The Aberrans is fascinating. So you're an excellent forager and I can feel it. I told you, I said that from the very beginning. I feel it right now. So you've amassed a tremendous amount of information, but you've also assimilated it. How? We don't know. But you've assimilated so much of it, obviously, and now you apply it as part of your life and your work, and it's how you make money, it's how you feed your family.

Yes.

Right. So talk to me a little bit about how you apply it, where you apply it, and through that application, what that application can tell us about what you think the future is going to look like. Right.

So part of it is, again, going through the consensus, what do people believe? And so, you know, you mentioned energy and we could talk about that.

You don't reject something just because people believe it.

Well, I just, in a sense, I'm arrogant to believe that. I'm not arrogant enough to think that I have some edge over people if everybody else is looking at it. I think that there's so many smart people think about it like this. Again with ants, if ants are going, they find a piece of bread, it's really hard if you're the marginal ant, to then go get a piece of that bread.

That's a really good point. It also sounds like what you're saying is you're kind of putting a check on yourself. You're kind of Trying to find a way to check yourself totally.

And it's like, well, everybody's already there, the crowd is formed. And so why do I need to go there? Can I go and find something else? And there's always something else to find. It starts with really understanding what is the consensus? What is everybody else talking about? Now I'm very happy when everybody else is talking about stuff that they weren't talking about four or five years ago. We generally, as a firm, view ourselves as being contrarian, being independent thinkers. The reality is we want people to agree with us. Just later, we have to be four or five years ahead of where everybody else is thinking. And sometimes we will even throw out false signals because sometimes people will be looking at what we're investing in. And so sometimes we'll throw out some ridiculous ideas. And then we've been amazed at how some of those ideas actually end up sort of getting traction. People are talking about that they're pursuing those ideas, and so then we get a little scared. But it takes something like energy. You started again, this is really interesting. You raised the point about narrative. It started with a narrative, really around Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth.

Wow, that was 2006.

Thereabout. You've got a guy, maybe politically motivated, maybe authentically believes in it, but gives a PowerPoint presentation, and somebody else who authentically believes it and says, this is good for the world. We need to show this to everybody. And so if you watch that movie, it's motivating. He shows empirical data. He shows things that you can do. The world is warming. We're facing low probability, high magnitude catastrophic risk. And if we don't act now, we're all doomed. He talks about solar, talks about wind, talks about biofuels, doesn't mention the word nuclear. That, to me was interesting. Now forward a few months later, John Doerr, one of the most famous venture capitalists in history of Kleiner Perkins, super smart guy, somebody that we aspire to be like his intensity and his intellect and his influence and his ability to both secure deals and help his companies. Once he was in, is on stage at TED and basically is crying now, whether they're real tears or crocodile tears, he's crying about climate change and demanding that for the future of his granddaughter, for his daughter and his kids, that you have to act now. And I started to see something which to me, sort of the pattern went off and it was, there's a religious movement here, and religious movements, whether it's Joel Osteen leading people on Sunday into a megachurch or whether it's a cult leader getting people to drink Kool Aid. I saw religious behavior. Now, it wasn't saying that people were ill intentioned, but there was just the characteristic set of sort of Eric Hoffer true believers, that nobody was being skeptical. And if you were skeptical, you were immediately shut aside. As a right wing climate denier, I took a more nuanced view, which interestingly came from Bjorn Lomborg. Bjorn was one of the early, if not founder, of Greenpeace. And Patrick Moore, by the way, who was a founder of Greenpeace, who I became friends with, was of the same view, which two things. One, nuclear has got to be part of the conversation. And it was such a third rail issue. And particularly for Al Gore, it was the kind of thing he couldn't talk about, right? And so I got really interested in nuclear and nobody was talking about it. Now, there were a few different ways to look at nuclear. You could have done the uranium mining. Mostly people in the mining were like hucksters and fraudsters, seemingly domiciled in New Mexico and Nevada, South Africa, Australia, but generally we said, let's stay away. You could do modular reactors, so small scale nuclear reactors, instead of building a gigawatt power plant for a billion dollars, you could build 30, 30 megawatt one. And that was interesting too. But you had regulatory risk that would take a decade or more to get approvals and licensing. It took a huge amount of capital to test, build, design these things, get permits. We like to have this very, as I joke, sophisticated question, PhD level, which is what sucks? The thing that sucked about nuclear is what do you do with the waste? That led us to go and try to find a company that was doing something in nuclear waste. We couldn't find anything. And so we did the next best thing, which was start it from scratch. We ended up naming that company Curion after Madame Curie, who discovered and died from radiation. We locked up all the very best people in the sector, we licensed all the intellectual property we could, and we decided to focus on this in a way that in hindsight, we couldn't lose.

Sorry, you were making a bet, though implicit in that was the bet that there was going to be a bull market in nuclear energy, despite the fact that there was this religious cult movement happening in parallel for renewables.

So we explicitly wanted to do the opposite of that, that if we were betting on uranium, you would have bet that there was going to be more demand for this, which itself was going to be a function of belief, which Itself is going to be a prescription of what people want totally. Instead we said we want to be totally agnostic. I like being agnostic. If there's more nuclear, great. There's more demand for waste cleanup because you have more nuclear plants producing more waste. Status quo. Nothing changes despite the hype or the disbelievers there. As plants get older, they produce more waste. And plus you have all this defense bomb making, which is a totally different market, which needed to be cleaned up no matter what. Then let's say that the zeitgeist changes and people protest and say shut down nuclear or we don't want it. Then it's all decommissioning and deconstruction. And so it's cleanup. The beautiful thing about that was win, lose or draw, you could win.

Very creative.

If you can find situations like that where you don't care directionally what everybody else is going to believe, you're hedged no matter what. We started this company, co founded it, funded it, and very candidly, it would have been a phenomenal business over some years, but it became a spectacular one overnight, essentially because there was a total negative black swan, a low probability high magnitude event in Japan, which was the Fukushima disaster. And we were the only company picked for the cleanup out of the US and we went from a few million bucks in revenue to 40 to 80, 120, 160 million. We had $40 million of EBITDA. We sold for 10 times to a big French company called Veolia. That all happened in just a few years. That whole ride was amazing and surreal. We made our investors a lot of money. But for me, intellectually it was very gratifying because we were right. We were right when in an area that nobody else was looking at, by the way. We took it to other Sandhill VCs, people that we admired, and they all either didn't get it or didn't want to invest in it. In fact, I even pitched famous Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, who is at a firm nea, and I remember bringing in with the CEO this ball, which was vitrified soil. Vitrified soil means it was soil that was turned into glass and it wasn't radioactive. And this is the guy who discovered cosmic background radiation, won a Nobel Prize for it and understands the stuff. And he looks and he goes, what is that? And I'm like, oh, this is a vitrified ball of waste from outside of Hanford, but it's not radioactive. Get it out, get it out.

He's freaking out like a Woody Allen moment.

Yeah. Anyway, but a lot of people told us no. And so it's the same feeling of being told no, of having that fire, that every no is fuel. Look, some people might be no, and they're right, but in this case it was no. Not on the empirical fact, but on their judgment and the opinion. And I think the opinion's proved wrong.

So much to unpack here. All right. And I do want to get to other examples, too, but just to say two things that I just really love about this. As an example, your success is an indication of a mechanism that is required for the survival of the human race, Right? Which is that you have a herd mentality. That herd instinct is there for good reason, because if we didn't have it, we'd die. But if the entire culture becomes homogeneous and you don't have these sort of contrarian impulses, you don't have the capacity to evolve. This is exactly sort of the fact that you guys did what you did and you invested in this company helped to some degree who knows how much in cleaning up this waste. You need capacity for this type of contrarian investing. It's essential. Which is one of my concerns about what we've seen in the financial markets since the crisis of 2008 and the low interest rates and betting on beta and doubling down on what has worked. We've talked about that. In terms of volatility, I think that's of an interesting conversation. But the other thing is what you mentioned about the Nobel Laureate, and that's kind of like the freaky experience of being sort of on the edge contrarian investor, which is you have this framework, you have this sort of conviction, you believe something and for good reason. But there are many reasons why you've evolved to sort of question that you have someone like this who's so smart and so experienced and says this is a bad idea. I'm not saying that's what he said. I don't know what he said. But let's say you have that and everyone will come to you, right? Everyone else will come to you, including your parents or your friends or whatever. But like, Josh, how is it that you're smarter than this guy? What do you know? You think you're the one guy that figured this out? Like, you know, and like that whole experience. I'm just go ahead.

I mean, like, you're dead on, by the way. And this transcends what I do. I think it's so relevant for life. I think, in fact, by the way, I've got three kids. I want them studying in school. The people who were told by the consensus, by the conforming masses, that will never work. And they were wrong. The people that were doing it were right. And so in my world, it's considered arrogance of the highest order because you're basically saying, this is the way the world should look. Everybody else says, no, it'll never work. But those are the great people that we celebrate. Even go back to your movie analogy. The greatest protagonists in every movie are the sort of Horatio Alger that rises from not nothing, or the person that is told in defeat, that hero's journey. Are told no repeatedly. And then they prevail in spite of the masses. So you understand that consensus. You find the variant perception and then you go and do it. And then you, of course, have to be right. You can't be just contrarian and wrong. You have to be contrarian and right. So, yes, sitting and being able to reject a Nobel laureate because I felt the conviction that what we were doing was right and important. And, yeah, that felt really good.

I think that. And I credit my father most of any person beyond my biology because I do think there's a level of sort of just biologically, you just have a desire to sort of do that. It's okay. You're willing, you're able. You've got that desire to just kind of, you know, I don't know, take the punch or whatever it is. Right. That edge. But I credit my father very much for instilling in me that sense that just because someone else thinks that this is a bad idea doesn't mean anything. They may not know what the hell they're talking about. None of it matters. So I always rely, and I assume you probably are the same way. I can meet anyone. I don't ever care about their resume or anything about them. All I care about is what I experience when I speak to them.

Totally. And I used to. It was these shortcuts, heuristics of like, where'd you go to school? And what was your pedigree? And I increasingly realized, particularly being around really brilliant people, that it doesn't matter. Sometimes they're shortcuts, sometimes it's better if they don't come from totally. So you mentioned something just a moment ago, so about whether it's in markets or belief systems, sort of the homogenized or homogeneity of this. And I think that's so important because, by the way, in ecosystems, take a principle from Santa Fe Institute, when you have a homogenous Population, you're totally vulnerable to risk. I mean, whether it's the bees or some other species, when you have uniform genetic drive in one area, they're totally vulnerable. Whereas when you have diversity, you can have survival. Right? So I actually think that markets are most stable when you have diversity. When interest rates are super low like they have been, you have everybody taking much longer, bigger bets and you have correlations between equities and bonds and everybody just moving as a herd. That, though, I think is also the opportunity for the contrarian to be able to in a meta way identify what is everybody else doing and where are they moving in a homogenous way. They are at risk. Everybody that believed that housing prices could do nothing but go up, Anybody that believes right now that technology can do nothing but go up.

And of course, in retrospect, people look back and they say, oh, of course the housing prices couldn't go up forever. But when you're in that sort of mania, it becomes increasingly emotionally difficult to break through from that unless you have the disposition.

But because you said evolutionarily, we evolved to stick with the herd, that's where it was safe. But if you go out on a limb, as they say, because that's where the fruit is, it's the riskiest place to be. There is no more painful feeling killing than leaving the herd. That is true. If you read these stories, you can read a story and I can find the same principle, even though I'm not particularly interested in their culture. New York Times talks about. And there's a documentary about a woman who is a Hasidic Jewish woman and she left. And there was another one, I think, a documentary about a guy that left and how painful they feel, the physical pain of being ostracized from the tribe. And that's because they were unwilling to conform or questioned the dogma. But if you question the dogma of a scientific sector or you question the dogma of the market, I actually think it leads to great reward. I love the story. Nobel Laureate Peter Mitchell, he was looking at the chemo mechanical way that things transported within cells between membranes. And everybody said, he's totally wrong, he's an idiot. What was amazing was when he actually was proved right and won the Nobel Prize, he presented charts, and the charts showed all the empirical data, but they also showed, and this is the thing I love going back to Jordan. And they showed a list of all of the people who said no, that he was wrong, and the date that they changed their mind. And he kept that grudge and he Showed it publicly. Right.

And I love that totally. I want to talk about that a second. So let's talk about grudge and let's talk about that feeling of pain, of loneliness. Because I do assume that there are people who excel because they don't have that empathic, they don't experience that. The pain associated with being alone or being sort of off on your own. And I personally do experience that and it's a really challenging thing for me to do it, but I still go ahead and do it. Do you experience that as well?

It sounds like you do, yeah, in different ways. I mean, for me it's been a goal of my life in part because I was an only child, dad wasn't there. I had an absolutely loving mom and grandma, but I wanted a really nuclear family for myself. And so I argue that the most important decision I ever made and whatever sequences of events that led to it, and ultimately my wife decided that she was attracted my ambition or whatever it was, that's the single most important decision in anything that I've ever done is marrying Lauren, my wife.

How long have you been together?

We've been together almost 14 years and married almost 11 and three kids, 8, 5 and 2. And to me they for me represent everything I would say like invert, always invert. Carl Jacoby, the mathematician and for me it was won over my dad and I don't think it was ill intention of him, but he was just sort of a selfish guy and. But I learned from him what not to do. So interesting as a husband, as a father. And so me being very present in my kid's life is a function of him being absent and parents splitting, them not talking, terrible fighting that dysfunction for me wanted the pendulum to swing the other way. But I think at a young age, and it was Probably, I was 8, I was living with my father. There was a custody battle. I'm on this random ranch in the desert in California. And I remember that was the time I felt totally alone. But that evolved a very weird instinct, which was hyper introspection. I was totally aware of what I was feeling, why I thought I was feeling it. I remember, I mean, mostly because you're talking to yourself. I was sort of having these conversations with myself. There was a school, I wasn't really friends with anybody, but that was a really important moment in my life.

That's fascinating. You're a fascinating guy, Josh. There's so much to talk about with you, man. We're not going to get any close to all of it.

We'll do another one.

Well, let me ask you this, okay, so that's interesting thing. I've also experienced the grudge thing. And it's a function of the loneliness thing, I think. I don't let being alone get in the way of my decisions. I don't think at all. But the longer I'm alone and the longer I'm wrong, even though I believe I'm right, I know I'm right. And not just believe I know I'm right. Let's say I have total conviction in something. And I don't think I'm deluding myself. It's because I really see it. I have that vision, right? And there's a prolonged period in which sort of, you know, I haven't proven it to the rest of the world. That can create for me that grudge that I hold. And then it takes time for me to let go of it, right? And it takes time of being successful in whatever it was that I had told everyone that it was going to be. I told you guys, I saw it. Now it's happening. Finally it's happening. And I've also experienced. Have had to also learn as I get older, having gone through that cycle a number of times, there is no really prolonged satisfaction in saying, I told you so. It's just kind of something. I just have to accept that that's part of process, that I have to be alone on that journey. And there are certain people who are with me, and those are very valuable relationships. And that's one of the biggest rewards for me of going through a process like that. It's finding the people who believe in you and see what you saw early.

Totally. So I have two reactions to that. And you'll get a little preview of how my mind thoughts. So as you're saying that, I'm thinking of two things. One, Black Panther. I don't know if you've seen the movie.

I haven't.

Okay, so he's got a technological suit that the more shock he gets hit every time, it just sort of absorbs and absorbs and absorbs, and then boom, when he's ready to fire back, it's fire. And so as you're describing that verbally, I'm visualizing that right in my head. And it's sort of like that suit. Now. He developed this protective armor. His sister developed a technological protective armor. But in a sense, what's the protective armor for you? It's maybe a sense of stoicism or confidence and indifference to the judgment of somebody else. And then you're Building, and you're building and you're building, and then you're right. And it's just like now. The other thing which came to mind is the asymmetry, the pain that any of us feel. When you're doing something in solitude, and people are like, you either sense their approbation, they don't believe in you, or you sense that they're doubting you, or the naysayers. But let's say, if you had to put it in mathematical terms, for them, it's just like. It's easy to be a critic, it's easy to be a judge. They throw a negative one to you. For you, you feel a negative 10, because there's 10 different people, each one giving you a negative one. You're like, shit, that makes me feel really, sure, shitty. But for them, it's like nothing. But then when you're right, you feel like 100. And to them, they're like, oh, okay, I was back to zero, right? And so for them, it's really distributed and dispersed and massively asymmetric, waiting on you. But then when you're right. So I think it's important, I don't know, have people around you that sort of share that mindset, right? Because they're going to celebrate that with you. And then just try to vaccinate, inculcate yourself from those negative people and just know that it's a source of fuel.

And there's that thing about finding community, and that goes back to the loneliness.

So for me, I always found community in the misanthropes. People who were slightly off, right? People that came, whether ethnically, they felt they were rejected from where they came from. I was just meeting with a guy who's a writer for the New Yorker, and we hit it off because he has the same musical interest and the same taste. And what was really interesting is I asked him, I said I was trying to figure out what was the source of his pain. And for him, at first, he was ethnically different. He was the lone guy in a certain community, and everybody was white, and he wasn't right. And being different, feeling the pain of that, I mean, that's just simple primate human stuff. But if you turn that into something powerful, I think it's just such a great source of energy and fuel.

I felt that. I mean, I had that growing up. And it's interesting also that as I get older, I want to be different. Whereas when I was younger, I resented being different. It was a conflict for me. There was another thought that I had while you were talking nonlinearities. So it's interesting. What I was thinking about when you were talking there is that I've learned also for me personally over the span of my life that my successes are non linear, whereas most people, I think they sort of climb that ladder or sort of, they're sort of, let's say, running or jogging or whatever. And I used this very particular metaphor recently when I was speaking with my father about this, which was I've experienced this in my life where I'll stop and I'm doing something and people will pass by and they'll be telling me, what are you doing? Like you need to freaking run. And then everyone's. I experience that as like also the narrative I have in my head is, oh, they think I'm a lost cause. They think that I'm just wasting my time. I'm in the wrong place. Demetrius, going off on another tangent again. But I'm sitting here and I'm building a bike and then when I finally fly by you, that's a nonlinear payoff because now you're going to be running for an indefinite period of time and you're not going to be able to catch up and I'm going to be way ahead with that. But then I'll stop again and I'll take a completely another, I had a bike, why'd you stop? But I don't know, I just got this crazy idea in my head and that's what I wanted to follow. And if I didn't follow it, I'd be unhappy. And that's what I've experienced.

That's the most important thing. I mean, I think finding the process, the methodology that makes you happy. Right? And so your body is telling you all the time, like, I'm not happy doing this. Right. I mean, if you think about it, anxiety and depression just as two emotions. Anxiety is being worried about the future and depression is dwelling on the past. I think if you can find ways to resolve both those things. For me, the salve of anxiety is having not that faith, but the confidence that good things are going to happen no matter what. I don't know where and what they're going to be, but the dots are going to connect in some way. The depression is more of a stoic philosophy of this. I can't do anything to change the past. I can't go back. There's no time machine. I can't right that wrong. But that to me can be just fuel for the fodder for the future.

Future, Josh, I'm going to have to. And I mean there's so many things that I want to talk to you about. I got to think of some way for us to continue this conversation again for the show. We're going to be launching a media platform. Maybe I can do some sort of one off little things with you. I want to end it though with one question which brings us back to something you mentioned, which was death anxiety. This is something that I've had sort of since I was a kid in different ways. It became more acute as a result of my brain tumor experience with that. And for me I experienced all of sorts, it very much in terms of loss and loss of others and then ultimately loss of myself. And right before I had gone into surgery when I had been going through this sort of, this whole just really powerful experience, the anxiety I'd felt in that moment was tremendous. And anyway, there's a lot of also really cool stuff that came as a result of that. But it is something that's still sort of. I feel it when I see people getting older, when I see my parents getting older. And I do connect it very much to loss, like I said, loss of others, loss of myself. And I've spent some time as well having gone through what I went through. It gave me the courage to sort of face it in a way. And I read many books and I put on a conference called the Art of Dying New York Open center in New York where we covered these topics. And so it's something I've meditated on a bit. I wonder, sort of when you talk about death anxiety, what does that mean to you? Oh, it's.

I mean, this is a whole other episode, right. I've lost also a lot of people. I lost my brother in law a year ago to cancer, young guy, 43 years old. I lost a business partner two years before that that to pancreatic cancer. And it's surreal because when you think about investment risk, it's what's the probability of permanent loss? Well, that's what that is, it's permanent loss. Now you can salve it and say, okay, well you have memories of people and they live on your mind, they live on your heart, sort of metaphors, but they're gone, they're existentially gone. And that anxiety of being existentially gone. For me now with kids, I want to be there for them for all these great moments. But intrinsically it's a selfish thing. I always go back to. I don't know if it was Hitchens or Dawkins who said what was it like before you existed? Well, you have no memory of that, right? And what's it going to be like after you're gone? Well, you have no idea about that. The best thing that gave me some confidence or comfort on this and just a way to think about it were two books. One was William Irvine, which was the Stoic Guide to the Good Life. And the second, which maps almost perfectly with this, was Stephen Cave Immortality. And the thing that I loved about the Stephen Cave book was he sort of analyzed all the people who have ever tried not to die. So the first one was sort of the Ponce de Leon and the search for the founding youth and all this kind of stuff. And it was like, okay, okay, step one is, I'm not going to die. And there's been countless attempts for that. The problem with that is that one thing that they have in common is that they're all dead. So that hasn't worked. The second one is, fine, I'm going to die, but I'm going to come back. The resurrection myth, by the way, every one of these things has a technological analog today. So I'm going to come back is I'll upload myself into a computer or my likeness can be captured by virtual reality or augmented reality or something. So that also has nothing proven. And then the third one is, I am something that's more than my ethereal self, right? And so there's a soul or a ghost in the machine kind of thing. And so if you suspend belief in any of those things, then what you're left with is the sort of stoic mental model, which is if you took a piece of paper and you folded it in half and on the front of it you put the day you were born, and on the back of it you put roughly plus 80 years, right? It's the day you're going to die. That's roughly the story of your life.

Life.

Now, some people will get unlucky and have a comic, tragic, short strip, comic strip of life. And other people will get very lucky and have this epic tome. But you don't have a control over any of those things. The only thing that you have control is the story that you write in between and the choices that you're making and who you choose to surround yourself with. You may have heard one of my other tropes that I got from Jim Watson, which is avoid boring people. Avoid boring people and don't be boring to people. I think finding those things that you would define living, that Jeff Bezos like way of how do I minimize Regret. If I assume I'm lucky to live, I'm 40 now, another 50 years to 90. What are the things that I would regret? I'm at every kid's baseball game and softball game and basketball game and ballet and dance practice. I've minimized regret in my life. That, to me, minimizes some of the anxiety. But it really. I don't want to die right. I want to live for as long as possible because there's so much to absorb, there's so much to appreciate. There's so much beauty in people producing art and content and arguing. And by the way, even the ugliness that you see in the news today, there's something beautiful of it for the simple thing, how lucky we are to be alive.

You've mentioned Hitchens a number of times. You liked his work a lot.

I thought he was a brilliant orator, linguist, writer, debater, argumenter, and he was eminently rational.

Well, he was a beautiful writer and a great. And a great writer. And his words. He was so weaponized. I mean, he could weaponize language. Did you read On Mortality? Yes, there was a great description. I think it was in On Mortality. I mean, I certainly read the book, but I had also seen a lot of his interviews as he was dying, and he talked about what dying was like for him, and he said it was like being at a really great party and then getting tapped on the shoulder and being told that you had to leave, but as if that weren't bad enough, the party was going to go on without you. That really resonated with me.

That's that feeling totally.

It was that, you know, I read that, you know, there are certain things that I read, many things actually, as a result of my personal experience, my reckoning with death that really resonate and also, you know, emotionally. And that was one of them. When you talked about what comes after death, you know, same question as what was before I lived. There's a great quote by Nabokov in his autobiography where he talks about sort the. Of. I don't know if you know the quote, where he saw a crib and it was sort of had the. Only Nabokov could write this way. He said something like it had the sort of pompous air of a coffin or smug air of a coffin or something, and he saw a video of his mother waving from a balcony or a picture or something. And it was before he was born, and it somehow reminded him of sort of death, in a sense. I butchered the. It's an amazing sort of thing. His Whole autobiography is incredible.

There's another short story about. I think it's called Night in Samarra. And the premise of it is a guy is sent by his master into town to the marketplace, and while he's there, he sees the Grim Reaper and he sees death and he freaks out and he starts running and he gets onto a horse and he. And he flees, you know, two hours, and he goes to another town and he gets there and he's in Somart and he sees death again and he says, ah, now he feels resigned. And he says, why didn't you take me, you know, then and there in the market? And he's like, well, because I had a date with you tonight in Samarra, and it's just like, I was going to catch up with you no matter what. So, I mean, we're going to die, right?

Yeah, for sure. I keep looking for these quotes and I can't. Here it is. I found this one. I'll read the Nabokov coin. There's also another great one about the swan, which I wanted to say, but here's the Nabokov code. The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for at some 4,500 beats an hour. And then he brings up this sort of quote about the young chronophobiac that saw his coffin. But there's also that great quote of the swan, right? And that sort of. To close off that, to talk about the weird ones, you know, the weird people. I don't know if you're familiar with this quote, and I forget who wrote it, but it is sort of what. How awkward and sort of ugly. And you could say a swan looks when it's out of the water, but when it's in the water, it's majestic, right? Because it touches the elemental waters of its nature, right? And finding where you belong and that journey. And that's so, you know, so powerful and important, right? And some of us that's. We long. We really want that. And there's just a quote to bring up one more thing. Another powerful story or image that has always stood in my mind or stood in my mind for years now, is the image of Odysseus sitting on the shores of Calypso's island, looking towards Ithaca, because he knows that's where he longs for Ithaca despite having a goddess tempting him with immortality. Right. And so that sort of just knowing. Knowing where you belong, looking for it, and sort of having that North Star as long as you live, till the day you die, there's something called comforting in that. And we're living that way.

And I think that's beautiful. And if that place ends up being philosophical instead of geographic.

Great way to close. Josh, fantastic having you on, man.

Thanks.

And that was my episode with Josh Wolf. I want to thank Josh for being on the program. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Ecolao. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforcespod. Com, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @HiddenForcesPod, or send me an email at dk@hiddenforcespod.com. thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.