We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP399: The Real Life Tony Stark w/ Josh Wolfe

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. On today's episode, we explore many futuristic concepts and companies with Josh Wolf of Lux Capital. Jim O'Shaughnessy has called Josh the real life Tony Stark, and for good reason. His VC firm Lux has a portfolio of emerging science companies that are bringing futuristic ideas to life. In this episode, we discuss investing in being a board member alongside Bill Gates on many companies, the future of nuclear energy, manufacturing in space, and ice, iPhone-sized satellite technology, the privatization of defense, quantum computing, 3D printing, virtual reality and the metaverse, what is and isn't overhyped, and a whole lot more.

Starting point is 00:00:40 Josh has encyclopedic knowledge on so many topics and shares a wealth of wisdom in this discussion. So without further ado, let's get a glimpse of the future with the one and only Josh Wolf. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Welcome to the Investors podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerby, and today I'm super excited to have it with me, Mr. Josh Wolf.

Starting point is 00:01:20 Welcome to the show, Josh. Hey, Trey. Good to be here. You are one of the more interesting folks I've had to research. And when I was kind of going down the rabbit hole on you, it became very clear, very early on that this conversation could go any myriad of ways. There's such a wide breadth of work in your career. I even posted on Twitter, you know, what should we ask Josh? And I got everything from

Starting point is 00:01:43 what does he think about investing in soccer clubs to sent technology to travel to war simulation with China. I mean, like, it's just all across the board. And I'm super excited to dig in. But one of the questions I just got on Twitter, which seemed appropriate given all this, is what's your morning routine look like? How does Josh get his day going and where do you start? Well, I got an eight sleep bed. So 7 a.m. I wake up, little vibration buzz. I think it's like at 84 degrees. My first 40 minutes are with our kids. So we wake up and I've got three and we're up and out the door. I take them to school every morning. Jump on the subway. I live in Tribeca downtown and our kids are in Brooklyn. And so we shuttle them to school. And my two older girls get dropped

Starting point is 00:02:24 off first. My son and I have another 30 minutes to spend, you know, learning and talking. He's the youngest of the three. And then at 8.30, I will leave after drop off and either walk three and a half miles or bike three and a half miles to Lux's New York City office in Midtown on 20th and Broadway. And during that time, I will either take calls or listen to podcast or listen to a book and sometimes walk and talk and take meetings. So that's typically till about my first meeting, which typically are not before 10 a.m. Very interesting. So I want to talk about the origin of Lux a little bit. Were you always a polymath like this? Because as I understand it, you started Lux's kind of more focused on hard sciences. And it seems to have

Starting point is 00:03:02 broadened quite a bit from there. So how does the origin of Lux look compared to today? Well, there's constraints in pursuits of things, and then there's like nudges. And so I'd say my own personal push and nudges have been really born out of intellectual competition. So, you know, I find something that I think other people don't yet know about. And I have a natural propensity and interest to pursue that. And particularly if I think that I and our team can know something that others don't know. So that has pushed us into new spaces. And then the constraint is often in negative feedback, whether it's from internal or my partner, Peter, who I trust a lot in shaping what we might go and pursue and go after. And so there's times where I might go down

Starting point is 00:03:40 a rabbit hole into something that, you know, feels really far afield. And I've got people that, thankfully, you know, will pull me back. And so we're always trying to protect sort of the core of what we began with at Lux, which is really cutting edge emerging technology and things that other people don't understand oftentimes has a hue of complexity to it that might scare people away. And we're generally drawn towards those things that others are not looking at because We always like to talk about these arrows of inevitability and these arrows of impossibility. The arrows of inevitability are being students of history and looking at a way that technology trends are likely to evolve, even if it doesn't point specifically to a precise entrepreneur or a precise company, you have a very high probability of being correct if you follow that sort of technological trend, that arrow of progress. And when it intersects with what we call these arrows of impossibility, which is a measure of what other people think is possible or likely, it's a beautiful thing, particularly because if everybody else is massively underestimating how.

Starting point is 00:04:29 how advanced something is, or they have all been informed and subscribed to a narrative, which we believe is not true, then we're entering typically at a low price because the crowd isn't there. And so, you know, it's entirely driven by two things, a desire to be right and have social currency and reputational currency by knowing things that other people don't know. And then oftentimes that intersecting, although it's not always with making money because you are right. And so that's also a balance of, you know, wanting to be right versus wanting to be rich. And sometimes my desire for or the former can hurt our results in the latter, and that's why we've got a team. Yeah, that idea of you want the consensus, but you don't want it right away early on. You want it

Starting point is 00:05:07 eventually. Yeah, exactly. We always say that we don't want to be contrarian for contrarian sake. We want people to agree with us just later. And a lot of what we've pursued is if you take something like metamaterials, you know, this is a breakthrough in physics. It allowed for beam steering electromagnetic waves without, say, moving parts. And we can talk about that later as relates to, say, space communications and antennas. But that started with a breakthrough in physics. that was poorly understood by many. And then it had all of these end applications in all of these different markets that, frankly,

Starting point is 00:05:34 we knew nothing about. And then you get deep because you understand, where is the white space, what's the unmet need, what are the criteria in performance and price that a product has to have so that it can be competitive in that market? And you start to learn about the players, their interests, where there are sunk costs from incumbents, where incumbents are motivated to compete. And a simple breakthrough in technology can suddenly provoke the questions of how is this going to be adopted or rejected by industry?

Starting point is 00:05:58 and it can lead you to figure out who the winners and losers are likely to be. This is a perfect example of how this conversation could go so many different ways, because with that Metamaterials example, which as I understand it, was a new co that you guys developed from scratch, almost just after finding one in particular very smart individual who had uncovered this technology. So were you recognizing the optionality of that early on, or were a lot of these things happy accidents along the way? Well, most scientific breakthroughs are happy accidents that we ascribe, you know, this linear narrative too. In metamaterials, you know, as with anything, all new discoveries

Starting point is 00:06:33 I contend come from combinations of old. And this was a combination of physics and microelectronics and electromagnetic research electromagnetism. And the early progenitors of this were not just one individual, and this is a theme that is recurrent now increasingly so, but many individuals and often at the same time. And so even if you look over the past 150 years, some of the great breakthroughs that we ascribe, you know, whether it's theory of relativity or whether it is the invention of the radio or TV or Darwin's theory of evolution. Like, there were lots of people involved in those discoveries, and we tend to give the great man theory, you know, so that we give credit to one individual and they sort of get the alpha status and credit. But increasingly, and as evidenced by the

Starting point is 00:07:13 number of authors on any given scientific paper for a breakthrough, whether that's something that's involved in, say, deep mind, using AI to look at the commentatorial space in biotech for new molecules or protein folding or whether that's for, you know, some breakthrough in Metamaterials, you used to have one or two or three authors, or maybe there was a lead principal investigator, what we call a PI, who was the head of the lab, who's typically the last author on the paper, and they give all first author credit to, like, the junior people who actually did all the work, but don't get any pay. And increasingly, now it's like 100 people on a paper, you know, and the list of asterisks and crosses, you know, that denote all the different

Starting point is 00:07:47 institutions or companies in some cases that they might be part of is just a multiple of what it used to be even a decade ago. So, like success has many fathers, failures in orphan. I mean, there truly is in scientific success, you know, many, many mothers and fathers that are involved in this. So in that case of metamaterials, it was John Pendry at Imperial College. It was David Smith at Duke. One was the former was focused on sort of the theoretical aspects of these metamaterials, which was, you know, how do these materials that don't exist in nature have performance capabilities that can do things that we've never seen before? And so the big Holy Grail, which being from the UK, the BBC picked up on was the idea of an invisibility cloak that that wavelengths of light

Starting point is 00:08:23 It might bend around an object. The object would physically be there, but it would be undetectable at the visual wavelength that we see things in. And so they were, you know, Harry Potter, invisibility cloak, you know, very BBC. It turned out that the physical reality of that does not lend itself to invisibility, but it does lend itself to beam steering with no moving parts. And the reason that that would be important is if you were doing communications with a satellite, instead of having a big parabolic dish that tracks a geostationary satellite

Starting point is 00:08:50 as we move, that satellite is locked onto a position on Earth. Increasingly, you want to be able to just switch off to satellites the same way that we switch off of cell phones as you navigate through a city going from tower to tower. Your phone doesn't have a mechanical antenna that is looking for it. It's electronically steerable. And so it's the same phenomenon. And that just was never possible before until these materials were embodied into a flat, cleaner surface that's like basically an iPad.

Starting point is 00:09:13 And yeah, that took off in a company called Chimeta that we funded. and I served on the board with Bill Gates. And then it lent itself to all these other applications that we never imagined. I'm glad he brought up Bill Gates. He's someone we've talked about often on the show, given that it's called We Study Billionaires, and he's been the richest man in the world for many decades until late. But I'd love to just kind of quickly take the scenic route a little bit over here

Starting point is 00:09:40 and what it was like to work directly with Bill Gates, because as I understand it, you've now worked with him on a number of different companies. So what's maybe something you've learned personally from him or something that maybe about him that you feel has helped set him apart? Well, I think he's one of the few people that I've heard very articulately get to the 90-10 of something in like seconds, by which I mean, whether it's a board deck or whether it's a technical breakthrough or whether it's the key business decision that has to get made. There might be, you know, a hundred things that need to be discussed.

Starting point is 00:10:11 90 of them don't matter. 90 of them are, you know, BS or are non-consequential. And he's able to zero in on the 10 things that are really of consequence. And then I think there's an appreciation for the uncertainty that might surround those 10 things. Like the things that tend to be very important don't necessarily have clear, absolute views of what you ought to do. And so then it's sort of a probabilistic exercise of like, okay, like, why would we not do this or why would we do this and what would be the pros and the cons? And I've seen many people that are more conservative at saying like, okay, you know, this is going to cost another $50 or $100 million to turn over that ex car, you know, if you were to think it's for poker terms. And he would look and say, well, okay, the cost of doing that is known.

Starting point is 00:10:48 And let's even apply a multiple to it. You know, I always joke that everything times pie and time and money. But what if we don't do that, right? What if a competitor does that? And what would be the consequence if they were to capture the market share and the economic value associated with that? And so more often than not, he has given the license to founders and management to say, we really should aim high and go for that thing.

Starting point is 00:11:08 Now, he is in a position. And this is something that I've always been mindful of feeling like on On the one hand, we are partners and co-investors. On the other hand, I'm like a guy with a short stack at the poker table because Bill has, for all intents of purposes, infinite capital, and we have finite capital with duration of typically 10, you know, take a few years. And so there's a little bit of incentive mismatch in that Bill can play the poker game all night long and not run out of cash. And so we might be guiding the company towards milestones, like, okay, we need to hit this milestone so that we can reduce risk and show that something works

Starting point is 00:11:43 so that we can attract new investors. And Bill would typically say, like, why do I need new investors? I don't need any external validation. I don't need to report to LPs. I can just keep funding the company. And so, you know, that is obviously not something that's like a learned lesson that the average person can take away. But I do think that the learned lesson that can, you can take away from watching Bill

Starting point is 00:12:00 is getting to the 90-10 of something very quickly and of the 10 percent, the things that have high degrees of uncertainty, weighing the risk and deciding, let's go for the, you know, the bigger, more consequential thing. His persona in private, in boardrooms, you know, is, is a bit different than the public persona. He'll speak freely. He'll curse. He will chew somebody down pretty quickly. So I think anybody that's in a room knows that they're sort of girded for an intellectual battle, not one of the ego, that it's ad hominem, but you have to defend an idea. I've never heard him attack a person, but I've heard him say, you know, that is the stupidest idea

Starting point is 00:12:30 I've ever heard. And then people might be defensive. And you either have to defend that. And he'll be like, okay, good point. Or you have to concede that he's right. And it's a stupid idea. I love that. Well, you know, keeping it back focused on an investment, I'm curious. One, what you think are maybe the tenants of a great investment and maybe what you've seen from Bill and what he's seeing as what makes a great investment. Is there any overlap there? Or do you have different philosophies? I think that there are two things that we both prize, which is the primacy of technology and being able to do something that you can't do. We are both psychotically competitive

Starting point is 00:13:03 in very different ways. Bill has established, but I think it's still to this day, you know, in that sort of classic like Revenge of the Nerds case, like a very competitive person. He's way more diplomatic and I think has been publicly groomed for a very long period of time. So whereas, you know, I might disagree publicly with Elon and you'll even see Elon sort of take on Bill, you know, and like take jabs. Bill never does that. Like he finds the sort of almost presidential high ground, maybe except when it came to some of the anti-vaxxers or things where he truly felt it was detrimental to public health. But I think the primacy of technology and competitive advantage related to the technology, things that you can do that nobody else can do. And then the people.

Starting point is 00:13:43 He has always been a big believer in giving management the rope to go and either build or hang themselves. And I've been surprised at that. I think other board members that I've seen, you know, have sort of held management a little bit tighter, a little bit more accountable. And I think being a founder, you know, Microsoft grew because he was able to, you know, sort of have relatively free reign to make big aggressive strategic decisions often extremely competitively and, you know, not really have to answer to a board in a way that, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:09 many companies with older boards that think they know better than the founder might. That is interesting because, yeah, it's easy to assume that with that kind of money and success and ego, even, an experience, you would be tempted, right, to apply that to the people you're investing in and be not let them be as autonomous as maybe you have. So that's an interesting point. Bill is also very interested in nuclear and I am as well. I'm just kind of hopeful for that for the future of energy. And you've got experience in the space as well. And I'd like like to just maybe take a minute and explore what the future of nuclear looks like, in your opinion? In part, the future of nuclear is going to look like the past, or I think ought to, but we'll

Starting point is 00:14:48 get to that in a second. Bill funded a company called Terra Power, which is a traveling wave nuclear reactor, and he was quite bullish on that. And frankly, pre-COVID and pre some of the tensions between U.S. and China, it looked probable that China was going to become a big early customer. But we spent a few years going back 10 years here at Lux, looking at every part of the nuclear fuel cycle and studying it. And we did this. As an exemplar of what I was discussing before being intellectually competitive and looking where other people weren't looking. Everybody in the venture world, going back to the early 2010s, was looking at clean and green. They were looking at biofuels, ethanol, batteries, electric

Starting point is 00:15:22 vehicles, wind, solar. Things that were mostly talked about in Al Gore's movie of the time, Inconvenient Truth, which helped the light of fuse under the movement. And it became a little bit of a religious movement. Most of the people praying at the altar really did not talk about nuclear. Nuclear still had a, what I would consider generational and celebrity taboo, the generational being going back to the 60s and 70s and the celebrity being people like Neil Young and Patty Smith who were rockers of the day, who basically were like singing at concerts being like no nukes. And there was a conflation for the everyday person that nooks as a form of nuclear weapon

Starting point is 00:15:55 versus nooks in the form of power, which is clean and green. And at the time nobody was really focused on low carbon. And so the conflation of nuclear war and nuclear power, I think, you know, has set us back many generations. You know, I think it'll take another 50 years, really, until we see widespread nuclear use. So we looked at every part of the nuclear fuel cycle. We decided that uranium miners were mostly hucksters and fraudsters, as many mining companies are in Nevada and Montana. And we basically said, you know, leave that to somebody else. And the other unique thing about nuclear as opposed to say oil and gas was a characteristic that the marginal price of

Starting point is 00:16:29 the input in oil or gas is basically defined by your marginal cost of extraction. And it's what guides markets, marginal price of uranium is just a very small percentage of the total operating cost for nuclear. Most of it is the operations, the regulations, the CAPEX that goes into the physical equipment, the maintenance, the human labor. It's just, it's a very different construct. It's a small sub-single-digit, you know, single-digit percentage so that when uranium fluctuates, as it did going back a decade from like 25 to 30 to $70 per pound of uranium, it just, it didn't matter. And so we did not look at the mining people. We did look at modular react And while Bill Gates had funded that in Terra power, and there were probably six or seven other

Starting point is 00:17:09 different constructs for efficient, modular reactor instead of building a gigawatt power plant that might cost a billion dollars and could serve a million people? The idea was, could you build something that was smaller, maybe $100,000 or a million dollars, and build hundreds of them, you know, and put on powers you need in a very modular way? I think it's a great idea. I just unfortunately think that it's going to take a very long time. You're going to have to have, you know, safety and approval and manufacturing. You also increase the chance that there's a risk on any one thing that, you creates a failure point that could actually triple everything, which normally in a redundant system you would be okay with. But in this, you're increasing more failure points. The history

Starting point is 00:17:43 of traditional nuclear power, particularly in the U.S., is, I mean, somewhere between exceptional and extremely exceptional. You had three-mile island, which was a disaster. Zero people died. There was more evidence of the efficacy of the fail-safe systems that basically, you know, shut the system down. That also unfortunately happened to coincide with the movie the China syndrome. So this is going back to 1979, I think. And again, it captured the zeitgeist of a nuclear meltdown. And so that was just unfortunate. In contrast, Chernobyl was an absolute certifiable disaster. That's been well documented, literally in documentary or a dramatized movie, I think, on HBO or Showtime about Chernobyl. And I think it really talks not so much to the engineering

Starting point is 00:18:21 failure, but to the human failure of being able to report truthfully up a chain of command to prevent things from getting worse. And then Fukushima was also a disaster. Less a human disaster, maybe you could say it would be the equivalent here of like an Army Corps of Engineers, but in failing to anticipate this super low negative-backed swan event, a super low probability high magnitude consequence, it wasn't nuclear failure. It was a failure of the architecture to be able to prevent a breach from a tsunami. And so, you know, that set it back, but already you see Japan beginning to restart and rebuild for nuclear. So one would have imagined that that would have been a generation or two before people would embrace nuclear again already. They are. You're seeing the consequences

Starting point is 00:18:56 is both in energy scarcity in Europe, the rise of the Green Party in Germany, the increased leverage it has given Putin and Russia with natural gas pipelines. France has always generated about 80% of its electricity. Southern California had shut down nuclear power plants and had to import electricity from Arizona, which was producing it by nuclear. And so unfortunately, the religious zeitgeist around no nukes has, I think, created some worst devils in the world. And I believe that The future is going to be a combination of speculative investment that is going into fission, primarily large dollars will go into fusion. I expect that, of course, there's a very low probability that many of those things will

Starting point is 00:19:33 ever actually produce. Energy, obviously, this entire planet is premised on receipt of power from a fusion reactor that is the sun. But I'm more skeptical about it being on a timeline that's investable. And so I would advocate that there just needs to be a rebranding of nuclear. I talk about it as elemental power. So people could talk about the sun, which they like, the wind that they like. So solar and wind. You can talk about natural gas to an extent. And then you can talk about uranium,

Starting point is 00:19:57 this wonderful yellow rock that, you know, when enriched slightly, can boil water with no carbon released and turn turbines and produce beautiful clean electricity. As I joke, that if elemental power were discovered, you know, in recent weeks, we would be screaming with joy and it would grace every cover of every publication, you know, exalted that we just solve the climate crisis. So I think it more than any engineering or investment, it just needs a rebranding and a zeitgeist, Zykegeist to capture young people advocate and demand for elemental power. And I think that would be the best thing for society. I love it. And I love that you get to live in the future so much. You know, exploring the companies you've invested in, there's such a broad range, but they're all

Starting point is 00:20:37 very futuristic and exploring these really big goals. And I can't think of anything more futuristic than the future of space. So I'd like to walk through a couple of the prospects for space. Farta, for example, is very interesting because as I understand it, it's setting out to essentially establish manufacturing in space. So maybe talk to us about why we need manufacturing in space. Well, it's why we need anything. I mean, why do you need an iPhone or why do you need, you know, internet? You don't know that you need it until you have it and then you can't look without it. I think the premise of manufacturing something in space, which really when we even first thought about it seemed quite absurd, it was akin to some things that we had seen some years ago,

Starting point is 00:21:15 which was like space mining, that you were going to send vessels or probes out to be able to collect rare materials and we never got around to funding that. We thought it was a little bit too hoxery. This was interesting because you had people that had come out of SpaceX. They were super deep engineers and entrepreneurs. There were two founders, Delian and Will. Will came from SpaceX. Delian is a partner at Founders Fund, making pretty cutting edge investments. And their hypothesis was relatively simple. One, when you look at the input costs, each of the elements was dropping precipitously. And so it was at least allowing the possibility of more experimentation. The main input costs were rocket launches. So, SpaceX's continue to plummet. Increasing competition

Starting point is 00:21:53 from Rocket Lab and others only mean that that trend will exacerbate. So the cost per kilogram to launch something up into space was dropping. Increasing communication systems, some of which we've invested in, increasing software and logistics to be able to manage launch operations, increasing engineering talent that come out of SpaceX with very high expectations. In this case, I think, actually well set by Gwen Chowell and Elon, be able to move and iterate very rapidly against you know, slower incumbents. And so that culture, the combination of available technologies, launch capabilities, better software optics, positioning, all of that has just allowed a thousand flowers to bloom. And so you have people that are launching small satellites. We've invested

Starting point is 00:22:30 in some of those companies like Planet that's now going public, capturing imagery thrice daily on Earth. You have people that are launching communication satellites to cover the internet, to cover the globe with high-speed internet, particularly for on-the-move, plane, train, ships, boats, etc. And so they said, well, what if we launched a bus, not a transportation bus, but a term of phrase used in the space industry, that's basically a vessel that would be able to house something that could manufacture exotic materials that inverse to the launch costs where you want cost per kilogram to be very low. Here you want the cost per kilogram to be very high. You want to be able to make something where it's an exotic material, maybe special doped fiber optic cable,

Starting point is 00:23:08 for example, maybe pharmaceuticals or certain compounds, that there's some advantage in either the rate of production or the output of what you are producing in doing it without gravity. And that the way to achieve low gravity is not by being on one of these very expensive and short time period vomit comments that you see, but to actually have something in low Earth orbit. And then the question is, if you can make that, which is the first test, and that is still a question. It's a hypothesis, but it's what we are in the business of. We believe that that is a risk. It's a hard one. If they are able to successfully launch, and they've already contracted with Rocket Lab for the bus and SpaceX for launch, and be able to produce

Starting point is 00:23:43 their first set of products, which I don't know if they publicly talked about what that is, but it's along the lines of some exotic dope material, and then have a capsule that is able to capture that and take it back down and deliver to Earth. Then you have really advanced towards what I would consider the Bezosian vision as opposed to the Muskean vision. The Bezos vision says, let's take some of the industries that are on Earth that are, as many of our robotic efforts go after, dull, dirty, dangerous, take them off Earth, as opposed to escaping Earth to go to another planet. Much more in that Bezos camp, I think that there will be exotic things that are manufactured in low Earth orbit, in low gravity. They will have high dollar value per

Starting point is 00:24:22 kilogram. And the people that are able to develop those materials are going to have for some period of time a monopoly. And then they will parlay that into an increasing interesting portfolio suite of products. When we're saying manufacturing, obviously, it's such a broad word, my mind goes to 3D printing, which you're also invested in other companies. So I'm curious, is there, is there some overlap there or some synergy there between the 3D printing aspect in this company? Well, the number one overlap is that you don't have humans in a loop. You might have humans designing software, designing machines, but these are basically things that are autonomously printing or making stuff. And so, you know, if VARTA has, you know, a sequence of

Starting point is 00:25:02 steps in a mechanically engineered system that can operate and offset effects of gravity, in rotation and then produce a thing being a little bit circumspect and then be able to have that thing go into almost like off a conveyor belt. It's not actually a conveyor belt into a vessel and drop that back down. That's really interesting. If you think about what 3D printing is, it is akin to our 2D printers, of course, but in a Z dimension. So not just XY, you know, dot matrix printers that evolved into laser printers, but now you're physically adding layers. So that is oftentimes why the less sexy nomenclature may be more timeless of additive manufacturing. We have a whole slew of companies in this. Desktop metal, run by Rick Fulock, who's an amazing

Starting point is 00:25:42 entrepreneur, former venture capitalists, started this business to say, you know, we're not going to just do trivial trinkets and plastic pieces and small parts and, you know, gamers and hobbyist kind of stuff. We really want to change the economics of manufacturing for certain specialty industries. So this might be an impeller for a water pump for a BMW car. This might be part of the GE turbine for a jet engine. It might be something like Tiffany's. And you know, you know, entire jewelry line that they produced using handcrafted artisans that you might be able to do on just a handful of machines. And he decided that they were going to build sort of a small desktop machine, a medium size, and then this large, you know, sort of main event, so to speak,

Starting point is 00:26:20 which is a full production system. And what started is this entirely speculative thing now has just hundreds of machines being sold around the world and dozens of major customers. And it is changing the economics of how you manufacture things. Then we have another company called Shapeways, which is actually partnered with them. And I think even today it was publicly announced. There are some people who say, you know, I can't afford one of these desktop machines, but I would love to be able to use it. And so there's a long tail of people that won't be able to buy the machines themselves,

Starting point is 00:26:45 but want to be able to access the capability. And so a company like Shapeways, you can think of them sort of as like a kinko's. I'm the chairman of the board. They're now publicly traded. But you can think of them as we don't make the equipment. We're going to use the equipment. And then we're going to figure out of all the orders that are coming in, whether they're from small, medium-sized businesses or a long tail of individuals that are trying to make something.

Starting point is 00:27:03 We can figure out algorithmically how to put all of these orders into one batch that a single machine can print 40 orders instead of doing them serial one by one. And it's a beautiful thing to watch. But the common thing amongst all these is you're basically, for all the sense of purpose, is hitting a button and watching this thing go and do its thing. And the main job of people is generally to make sure that other people aren't touching these machines. I think this is the future of manufacturing across a whole range of industries.

Starting point is 00:27:30 You look at the current supply, logistics problems that are coming in ships lined up in ports and generally low-cost manufacturing in one part of the world in Asia. Another part of the world is, say, in South America or Africa, where raw materials are being sourced and mined and then sent to Asia so that they can then be packaged based on IP that was basically emailed over from Cupertino, say, an Apple. All of that is going to start to change. You know, you've had 30 or 40 years of that process. And increasingly, you are going to be able to manufacture much closer to where the customers

Starting point is 00:28:00 are and you're going to be able to bypass the ships, not with 99.9% of stuff for a long time, but for 0.1% of global products, there will be increasing penetration where you put the printers near the customers and the customer just orders by basically emailing a file, and the file is printed and that thing is delivered locally. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating, saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo

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Starting point is 00:32:37 And this is an interesting one because that's one of those things that, you know, someone like me never thinks about a shortage of imagery of the Earth. You know, I didn't think, I wasn't aware that there was such a demand for something like that. But talk to us about the prospect of Planet Labs and maybe why the investors should be interested in that SPAC deal is happening. First of all, the founders were amazing. Will, Robbie, and Chris. Chris actually was just on a Bezos rocket with William Shatner and sort of evidence that the decreasing gap between

Starting point is 00:33:02 science fiction and science fact just keeps getting smaller or smaller, you know, to actually ride to space with Captain Kirk, I think it was pretty cool. But these are the kinds of people that Lux loves to back, right? People that are dreaming of science fiction and making it real. So these were three guys that basically said, you know, we hear all the time about, you know, more computing power inside of your cell phone than there was like in the Apollo, you know, 8, 9, 10, 11 missions. What if we actually took these cell phones and launched them up into space? And so they created these small cubesats and on rockets in the desert in California,

Starting point is 00:33:31 ended up launching these phones and to take pictures and basically have them record. And sure enough, like a few survived. They came back. Three of them were called Alexander, Graham, and Bell, you know, to be cute. And that became the early origin of Planet Labs. At the time, it was called Cosmogia, then it became called Planet Labs. Then it became called Planet. They would end up buying Google, had a satellite division that they bought called Skybox,

Starting point is 00:33:52 which was doing slightly higher resolution images with larger cubes sat, maybe the size of a fridge, and also taking 30 frames per second video. And they have a whole suite of products now that we're basically competing with like MaxR, which was Digital Globe and others that preceded it. And they're taking thrice daily images of the earth. So they're able to get what used to be, you know, if you pulled up like Google Maps a few years ago, you know, you would look at an image and maybe you're standing next to your neighbor's house And on Google Maps, it was like three, four, five-year-old imagery, right?

Starting point is 00:34:20 It was like a sandlot or something. And today, you're able to get imagery three times a day of almost every spot on the earth. You don't need to task a satellite as a government or an intel agency would and basically say, you know, go over there and look what's going on. And so that's a great thing. Generally, if you believe that technology can be in the service of revealing truth and shining sunlight on things, whether that's a humanitarian crisis, whether that is agriculture or climate issues, whether that is nuclear silos.

Starting point is 00:34:47 in China, movements of troops in the Russian-Ukraine border, any signs of human rights abuses. It has become an invaluable tool and literally a God's eye in the sky. And then the data that is coming off of that platform is increasingly valuable because you can do longitudinal analysis on it over time, looking at something from a day, six hours or six months and see and detect change. And then that change is important for investors because they can look at everything from A number of cars in a parking lot as a proxy for retail sales at a Walmart or Lowe's or Home Depot, they could look at shipping yards and progress or lack thereof.

Starting point is 00:35:24 It just gives you better sense of quite literal ground truth. Today, run by CEO Kevin, who is serving actually as president, an incredible product guy from Twitter and Instagram and just understands how to take technology and make it available to the masses. So, yeah, very optimistic and bullish on them and their prospects and their place in the ecosystem. Well, that certainly gives a little bit more color. to the Tam, you know, potential for a company like that. I mean, almost in infinite, it sounds like as far as who wouldn't want that kind of knowledge and how broad ranging it can be.

Starting point is 00:35:54 What about the concern about just, I mean, these are micro satellites up in the sky, but how many are we talking about long term? And is there ever a concern about the cluster forming around the earth and kind of debris, so to speak, building up? Well, every new technology, you know, solves a problem that prior technologies might have caused and then it itself becomes a problem for future technologies to solve. So, you know, there are scientists, astronomers that are complaining about, say, Starlink or satellites that Starlink is launching. The virtue of Starlink, it will beam down static satellite internet, others, one web,

Starting point is 00:36:29 and beyond will do mobile. And so there will be a lot of assets up in space. That itself invites new opportunities. So we've already funded a company that, you know, is actually co-founded by Steve Wozniak, you know, co-founder of Apple, that is tracking things in space. and using a combination of both off-the-shelf publicly available satellite data and then actually probes themselves that are visually tracking and identifying objects. Now, that's going to be really useful not only for protecting your own assets if you are a private company or like planet or

Starting point is 00:36:58 SpaceX with Starlink or if you're a government that is trying to detect sabotage, you know, of assets or potential threats. And there is a space war beyond a space race. When China blew up a weather satellite nearly a decade ago, they were showing a kinetic capability. they were not blowing up their own weather satellite. They were showing what they could do to any other sovereign satellite system. And there's just a lot of competition, a lot of interests competing over private space stations, where assets are. We had a U.S. surveillance satellite that was looking at a China surveillance satellite,

Starting point is 00:37:29 and the China surveillance satellite was able to do a quick navigation maneuver, and this was probably reported about two weeks ago. So it's pretty wild, and it is the sci-fi vision of Star Wars and Space Race that is already underway. It's very sophisticated engineering software, it quite literally is rocket science. And I think it's a frontier that is going to define a lot from communications to, you know, governance and sort of everything in between. So geopolitically quite critical. Yeah, let's go there next because, you know, as you described it, there's obviously

Starting point is 00:38:01 that defense appeal to the technology at hand with planet. I've heard you say that I've heard you talk about being anti-war but pro defense. So maybe walk us through this framework and how you use it for your investment decisions. Well, the default morality that we look at the sort of lens of technology that we fund is a very simple question, which is, is it reducing human suffering? And you know, you could look at something like Facebook and say, you know, pro or con is this good for society or bad for society? Is it good for teenage girls or bad for teenage girls? Is it good for distant relatives or bad for it? And a lot of it is it depends on what the incentives of the system are. Well, it's the same thing, you know,

Starting point is 00:38:41 when we fund a breakthrough cancer detection technology or a cancer drug, there's very little question if we're reducing human suffering. When it comes to defense, you know, it's a tougher question. Is what we are funding, particularly if it is literally involved in a kill chain, doing something to reduce human suffering? Now, I would argue that in some of our companies, where they're able to use artificial intelligence to dissect aerial imagery, whether that's from a plane or a drone or a satellite, and discriminate between a honest, hardworking father who's coming home from a field with a pickaxe over a shoulder and a malevolent, violent extremist who has an AK-47 over their shoulder and they're going to a school of girls, you know, to either shoot

Starting point is 00:39:21 them up or kidnap them, there is a very clear, I think, moral use of force in reducing human suffering. And so being able to use technology to understand again, better ground truth and have more precision, which I think is something that has been a trend over time, the sort of directional arrow of progress. We have greater and greater moral precision, the more technological precision you have. And so that has just made me generally supportive of wanting to see good technology in the hands of good people. At a time when we have peer competitors where it is very clear, if you take China and specifically authoritarian CCP China, not the Chinese people, nobody wants crypto or satellite imagery or, you know, social media or technology more than

Starting point is 00:40:11 Xi Jinping. It is very clear that these, in the same way, you know, Shakespeare might have said that, you know, tis nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. It really depends where and in whose hands the technology, advanced technology is. And so I feel that there's a moral imperative not only to invent technology. But to make sure that it's in the hands of the women and men who are quite literally on the front lines, you know, fighting against people that have a quest to either suppress, surveil, decrease human rights and increase human suffering. And right now in China in particular, you see that very clearly. And we have a zeitgeist in the U.S. that is increasingly afraid or economically deterred from speaking out against it. What are your thoughts on the privatization of defense, just more generally speaking, there's this movement, it seems, just by proxy saying Silicon Valley, you're based in New York,

Starting point is 00:41:00 but there's trend of sorts of more and more VCs and techs, while our companies privatizing defense. Is that a good thing overall you think in your opinion or something to be concerned about? Because I also wonder if that just opens up more and more opportunity for investors to find more opportunities to partake. Well, again, you have multiple dimensions here, right? You have a geopolitical consideration, You have an investment consideration, you have moral consideration, societal consideration. We were warned by, we, American society, was warned by Eisenhower going back to, you know, the talks of the military industrial complex.

Starting point is 00:41:31 And you didn't want to create a system where there was, you know, sort of call it big defense that had incentive to go to war so that they can crank the war machine and produce material, produce rockets and bombs and ships and aircraft carriers. And, you know, even when you see now the incentives of something like the F-35 joint strike fighter in hundreds of congressional districts where, you know, know, sort of pork barrel politics of money just being doled out to all these congressional districts. That to me is a corrupted system. When you go back to the very early roots of, and so if you take that, by the way, the sort of military industrial complex is something we don't want.

Starting point is 00:42:04 You contrast that to what China has said, not only that they want, but that is a effective state mandate, which is military civil fusion. It's that in the service of the nation and the nation's interest, even if that in that case is decided not by democracy, but by a small set of men in in rooms in the Paule Bureau, it is very clear that technology that is developed by Alibaba or technology that is developed by Tencent or foreign interests and investments that they make are in the service of one China. You know, I mean, they're very overt about this. And so I think that for the past 20 years, there has been a growing reluctant, some of that organic and natural, seeing a relatively jingoistic, rah-rah American foreign interventionist Bush, too, seeing a more

Starting point is 00:42:45 embracing but, you know, imperfect war on terror with Obama. And then, you know, seeing a super jingoistic populist, you know, anti-civility, Trump, that if you were an engineer or an entrepreneur, it would be hard pressed for most of those administrations for a variety of different forms to say, like, I really want to work for that man or those people. And so for 20 years, I think you've had a zeitgeist where people have said, like, I don't want to pursue that. And now, increasingly, I think it's not a choice that you know and see in daily headlines the tactics that are being used by China, by Russia, by others. So it used to be non-state actors that were a threat, but now it's very clearly, you know, peer competitors and state actors. And technological demonstrations

Starting point is 00:43:29 that increasingly they're showing in domains that we have been surprised by, you know, are increasingly worrisome. So I think that there is, again, a moral imperative that the best and brightest women and men working on cutting edge technology should be working with the country, not because they're hardcore patriots, but just because protecting the freedoms and the interests and the markets and the very thing that we all take for granted, why would you want the women and men on the front lines to be disadvantaged with inferior technology? And yeah, so I feel pretty strongly that we should be working with the government and that you should be working with good people to put good technology or better technology in the hands

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Starting point is 00:47:38 investors and it's a recurring theme as of late and just identifying optionality early on and how much of an advantage that can be. I wonder, is that part of the appeal in investing in defense given that so much tech that comes out of defense sometimes trickles down and becomes other technology or other use cases, you know, not so much use for defense? Yeah. And in fact, you know, while there isn't an early history, you know, I mean, again, remember the roots of venture capital itself were not just like these, you know, and catch fire kind of movies and orchards and Hewlett and Packard in a garage. It was all electronic warfare, you know, in service of defense. And many of the most cutting edge things in Silicon Valley

Starting point is 00:48:12 ended up coming out of that. But it was really entirely funded by the Pentagon and defense. Lockheed Martin started in Sunnyvale with basically zero people, had tens of thousands of people later. And, you know, we're working on major, you know, submarine and aircraft missions. And so I do think that there are a lot of things that historically have come off. What happened again in going back 20 or 30 years now is, is increasingly the military was sourcing things. the inverse way. So instead of the military being at the most cutting edge and spinning off commercial things, now you had the military reaching in and saying, my gosh, Google or Apple are doing these things better than we can. And so there's even, you know, simple software capabilities, like I've used

Starting point is 00:48:46 an example publicly that I've been privy to of blue dot tracking, you can pull up your iPhone and, you know, find my friends. And if you were part of a small, you know, five or six person team in Southeast Asia, trying to track some of your peers in special operations, even that capability is inferior to what we have on our iPhones today. And so there are a clear, low-hanging fruit where commercial off-the-shelf technologies can be used in the service today of government. To your question on optionality, I do think that increasingly companies that are explicitly focused on defense, which have not really existed until, say, Anderil, which is one of our companies that's really unapologetically and exclusively focused on defense, we'll end up

Starting point is 00:49:22 spinning off commercial things. But most people have sort of hedged, well, government's too bureaucratic. You know, it's going to take too long. The entrenchment of the incumbents are really hard to overcome. And so let's make sure that we have sort of a quote-dual-use technology, is something that we can sell to the commercial markets and something that we can sell to the military. We have become increasingly comfortable in maybe three or four other firms. Very small minority of venture capitalists are comfortable funding something that is entirely focused on the U.S. Department of Defense, the Pentagon and U.S. allies. Very interesting.

Starting point is 00:49:49 I'd like to kind of explore a few concepts that may or may not be overhyped in your opinion. And one of the things that's coming to mind is quantum computing, because I have heard you You mentioned that that word quantum can be overhyped. But there is a company in the portfolio called Raghetti that I think is built around quantum computing. I'm kind of curious what the appeal of that company is and what prospects it has. We were early investors with Chad Rurgetti, eponymous founder. Chad came out of Yale.

Starting point is 00:50:19 He was doing things in early stages that were scientifically appreciated and competitively advantaged relative to say even IBM or Google or other people. And so it was sort of a speculative investment, you know, betting on the credibility of a scientist. It's an area that I would say generally, I think, not specifically to Ragedi, but just overall, is fraught with very high expectations, hand-wavy hype. And I would sort of caution people, you know, there's a big ignorance arbitrage gap where people feel like they don't understand it. And just when I hear people talk about it and, you know, it's the same thing. It's, you know, cryptographic codes that can, you know, never be broken or can instantly

Starting point is 00:50:55 be broken, you know, the ability to model complex simulations of drugs, the ability to encrypt communications. There's lots of other ways to do this than quantum computing. And it's one of these things that I'm on the board of the Santa Fe Institute and one of the early fathers in the Santa Fe Institute is Marie Gelman. He would talk about flap doodle, you know, quantum flap doodle, which are people that are just sort of talking about stuff and they don't really understand it. So I just would caution people that, you know, you read things in like, you know, major news publications and they talk about, you know, the rise of AI and 5G and quantum computing. And AI matters, but the other two, Not as much. So I would caution people when it comes to quantum.

Starting point is 00:51:33 That last point is very timely because, you know, as we're seeing right now, inflation is starting to rise and the debt to GDP is massive. And there's some narratives out there around this idea that, hey, don't worry, technology is going to save us. You know, GDP is going to start growing at 20% a year again once AI really takes a foot holder. There's a lot of these narratives being thrown around. And someone like you who's sort of living at the helm of the future, so to speak, you're seeing so many opportunities, does it make you more optimistic or more of a realist or somewhere in between? What's your take on sort of how much buy-in we should believe in

Starting point is 00:52:08 technology alone, you know, being sort of the white night here? I would say relatively low. So even though I'm a techno-optimist, you know, I'm generally a cynic when it comes to most people and most people making predictions as, you know, Buffett and others should say, you know, say more about the predictor than, you know, about the thing that they're predicting, which is generally that they're fools. So I would take a little bit more of a measured, you know, uncertainty, Mark stands here, which is, I truly have no idea about the inflationary environment. I know that there are very smart people that are saying, you know, that inflation is more likely to be persistent than it is to be transitory. And they may be right. And they are looking at recent data and they're seeing

Starting point is 00:52:41 supply chains. And there are others that say, no, these things are still these rippling waves and aberrations from COVID dislocations. And, you know, the markets will come back on. Then I have other people that say, well, the measures of inflation, particularly dominated by food and fuel, you know, are not the things that really matter. And the things that really matter that are often not counted in GDP itself, you know, lots of productivity measures and technology, even what you and I are doing right now, being able to communicate, you know, without having to jump on a plane, without the energy or fuel use for that besides the electricity that's fueling the electrons that are, you know, lighting up the illuminating displays. You know, we're not really paying for any of this. I mean,

Starting point is 00:53:22 indirectly through my Comcast bill or fiber optic bill and the hardware that's been amortized now already over two plus years. But a lot of that just isn't caught in modern GDP. Technology has been almost deflationary in everything where it has been allowed to compete. And the same elements and components from the semiconductors, the display, the pixels, the bandwidth, you know, that I'm just like looking around here off the cuff have all gotten cheaper and cheaper over time. So those are relatively non-inflationary or deflationary, and they have become cheaper, become more widespread. There's encouraging signs that technology has gone into many here to for boring industries,

Starting point is 00:54:03 particularly ones that have had high degrees of government intervention, subsidy, regulation, and that's things like health care, government itself, and civic technology and how government operates, military and defense. There's optimism from a technology optimist that it was. will start to chip away in a deflationary way at some of those sectors, which have historically, if you look at graphs, have been the most inflationary, including education itself, obviously. The incentive around education is historically give people student loans. Well, if you get a student loan, if I was a college, I'm just going to continue to raise my tuition

Starting point is 00:54:35 prices. It does it really cost more to actually educate people know it should be costing less. You know, COVID and Zoom and, you know, sort of novel versions of these MOOCs and online communities have shown that it is a very poor substitute for in-person physical learning, but there is massive scale to be gained from recorded lectures and all kinds of other things. So I'm quite optimistic that technology will be a deflationary force as a younger generation starts to sort of route around the institutions in healthcare education government. But the idea of AI being this anti-inflationary measure, you know, all technology give

Starting point is 00:55:14 some temporary advantage to people who are early adopters. And that advantage is transient because as it becomes cheaper, it becomes more affordable. As it becomes more affordable, it becomes a sort of fallacy of composition, which is, you know, if I'm able to stand on my toes at stadium and see better, that's fine. But once everybody can stand on their toes, you know, we're all just at a new level. So at some point, you know, the people that were able to instantly communicate because they had early access to email and bandwidth might have been at a communication advantage relative to the people who were still, you know, sending faxes or letters, but once everybody had email, you no longer have an advantage.

Starting point is 00:55:46 And so I don't see that AI itself will be this mass disinflationary force that will be the savior. One more concept that may or may not be overhyped is this word now that's in the zeitgeist called the metaverse. And you've recently posted that the metaverse is exciting, but not for the reasons that you think. So what do you mean by that? Well, there's different layers of, you know, how you want to destroy. describe this. And part of the measure that makes me pessimistic about the Metaverse as a term

Starting point is 00:56:16 is the fact that everybody is using it. So it's only imminent time until IBM, you know, launched an ad about how IBM is powering the universe. But, you know, Nike is in the metaverse and IBM's in the Metaverse or will be in the Metaverse, you know, Facebook, of course, in the Metaverse. Everybody's just basically trying to say like, hey, there's something new and cool and we're going to help define it and you want to be part of it. So if you think about the Metaverse as a series of rectangles, which is the way that I've conceived it, you know, I have this rectangle here. I stared it all day long. If an alien came down, they would see like these humans, you know, with their necks hunched us down in this weird pose and, you know,

Starting point is 00:56:48 staring at this. Well, the early conception of the metaverse that Zuck and Facebook have said is, you know, we're going to take this rectangle and we're just going to slap it on your face. You know, we're going to strap it around. And that's basically virtual reality, right? We are going to actually ensconce you in a head set with pixels coming on your retina so that, you know, as you move, you feel like you're in this other world. If you've experienced Experience VR, the average person typically wants to be in that, assuming that they do want to be in it, for less than 20 minutes. I'd say the average time is somewhere between six and 12 minutes. Of course, there's going to be a long tail or some edge on the bell curve of people that are

Starting point is 00:57:24 obsessed with it and spend many hours a day. But by and large, it's not that comfortable. I think it massively underestimates our already desired propensity to want to multitask and do many things at a time. You might be at home later, watching a show on Netflix, on your laptop, checking your text, like you've got multiple screens. So then the next conception is, okay, what if instead of having rectangles that are, you know, slap to your face, you take the rectangles that many people already have, which are their glasses, and you put a layer inside of those rectangles, which is augmented reality, which is, you know, screen projection, giving you directions, giving you little tidbits of information, allowing you to filter the key things or the key people

Starting point is 00:58:02 that you want to see. And I do think that there's going to be really creative content in those layers. It might come from a company like Nyantic that sort of already captured our imagination with Pokemon Go. There's a transient and a fattish appeal to that. You know, obviously remember like people were running around like Pokemon Go Fanatics and now it's just not a thing. And so you'll see companies that form on that software layer. You will see a lot of companies on the component layer, just like today inside of the iPhone. There's all kinds of different chips and chipsets, communications, cameras. increasingly AI embedded on the chips.

Starting point is 00:58:40 And there will be a whole new set of players that are not your classic Intel or Nvidia or Micron that are governing that. And so there's a hardware layer there. And I just increasingly think that the metaverse as pitched and imagined by Zuck of this sort of ensconced world that you're going to go to straight out of sci-fi like Ready Player 1, which is effectively a playbook for Zuck, is not the one that we're going to experience. I'm much more in the camp that this is going to be an extension of our existing sense, is just as this is now.

Starting point is 00:59:08 I have a microphone that is picking up and amplifying my voice. I have a lens that is picking up and amplifying the humanity in front of me and then playing back yours. I have speakers that are amplifying your voice. And so I think we really prefer the amplification of our existing humanity and I'm more drawn towards the technologies that are going to do that. Every piece of the stack that people are going to compete on this from hardware, software, wearable devices, you know,

Starting point is 00:59:36 We funded a brain machine interface company called Control Labs that Facebook bought, which is allowing you to do hands-free gesture and control devices in many cases just by thinking about moving your muscles so as to control the device. And I think that's really going to be the future of this purported metaverse. But I also think it will be called something else. And I think that whatever it gets called will be defined by some currently 17, 18, 19-year-old young kids, probably somewhere outside the U.S. maybe in Nigeria, maybe in the Philippines, probably in the Web 3 crypto world, tinkering with

Starting point is 01:00:11 protocols and coming across discovery. And I think that Facebook will end up spending, you know, tens of billions of dollars annually with thousands of thousands of people. We'll have some pretty cool things. We'll probably get beaten by Apple in AR and then we'll be completely surprised in the same way that Microsoft was surprised by Google and Google was surprised by Facebook. Facebook will be surprised you know by somebody else. And I couldn't tell you who that is today, but my job is to go out and try to find who they are. You know, one of the first. You know, one of the first of the first. You know, of the sense that was missing in your outline there that I just couldn't help the call out is the smell, the smelling sense that I know you had a passion for developing that technology.

Starting point is 01:00:44 Is there any update there? No, it's a constant hunt for me and maybe a hunt for a year or 10. I have no idea, but I am, you know, primed for the optionality of trying to discover it. What it is, just for people who are watching or listening, is the idea that I can pick up this phone and it is a remote control for pretty much everything in my life. I'm able to conjure a car, conjure a meal, control devices around me through a response system. or iPhone. And I can capture high fidelity sound. I can play that sound back with high fidelity speakers. I can capture high fidelity imagery, static or dynamic in the form of video, increasingly

Starting point is 01:01:18 4K and 120 frames a second. And I can play it back with ever high quality, high density, high pixelated displays. The one sense that I can't capture today, and I already have haptics that are, you know, tapping me on my watch, so I have a sense of feel. I can't capture smell. And then you say, well, why do you want to capture smell? It is our most salient memory connection. sense. And so whether it's the smell of a loved one, the smell of nostalgia, the smell of a wine or a food, being on a beach and vacation, capturing that dimension, not just of the sound of the waves or the visual of it in a different speed, slow motion or fast, or as realistic as possible, but that smell that, you know, as like the one French word I know, that geneseecois,

Starting point is 01:01:55 of that moment, and being able to share that with somebody. And so that second piece is not only do you have to capture it, but you have to be able to play it back. Now, capturing, if I would have told you 20 years ago, you can walk into a cafe and hold up a little magic Star Trek device. And whatever song is playing, it will tell you exactly what that song is. You know, you never have to write it down. You don't have to record it. And the ability to Shazam, you know, is effectively capturing a digital signature of sound waves that are permeating through the air tied to a central database. It does pattern recognition, figures out what segment that is and what it matches to in the database. It says, ah, you know, it's this Drake song or whatever it is. The same thing

Starting point is 01:02:28 will happen with smell. There are volatile organic compounds. Today you can use a mass spectrometry machine to be able to look at the chemical signature of that visually. And eventually those technologies will become solid state. They will shrink down. Maybe these small scale lasers in the same way that we have like LiDDD depth sensing of physical spaces. You used to require a big machine. And you will be able to get a smell signature to press a button and basically have a Shazam for, hey, what is that smell? And then somebody else will have to invent a playback mechanism. So they'll be recording and they'll be playback. And I'm absolutely convinced it will happen because it can already obey the laws of physics. And there's no reason that I can't. We just have to find the right commentatorial.

Starting point is 01:03:03 the right combination of technologies to put together to make it happen. And I hope to fund the ones that win. That's an interesting take on the technology side. I would have thought it would have been more of like a brain implant, you know, that's just sending you little electro-magnetic things, no. It's a good idea and it's certainly possible that that's the way we go. I'm very skeptical about implants. Obviously, if you have a life-saving need, you know, for epilepsy or heart, you know, or a stent or something like that or knee implant or something mechanical, like it makes a lot of sense. The idea that we're going to put in technology that won't be obsolesed, and I just, I'm way more optimistic about surface technologies that will be driven by ever-increasing software.

Starting point is 01:03:43 Same thing with these brain machine interfaces. I am not in the camp of Neurrelink, where you're going to have an implant, you know, sending signals to or receiving signals directly from the brain as mass adoption, whereas, you know, something like this, which is effectively one of the few in the wild control labs bands that Facebook bought, that I'm able to put on my forearm and it to, detect my intentions and control all the stuff around me. The software will continue to get better. This will be embedded into something like my watch. That is directionally the way that neuroscience and neuro tech devices are going to go.

Starting point is 01:04:14 Okay, last question here is you have a number of companies that have gone public. Do you have sort of a company that's nearest and dearest to your heart? Well, I won't comment on the public ones just because I always want to be very careful. I'm very careful while I talk about and promote a lot of our companies, even on Twitter. I tend not to talk about the public ones, ones that I'm super bullish on or worried about. And so I will talk about a private company, which I'm super bullish on, which I think is the epitome of what we like to fund, which is this end of one company that nobody else is really looking at or thought of. It was inspired by science fiction. The science fiction in this case was Professor X.

Starting point is 01:04:48 Professor X of X men puts on a helmet, can spot mutants from a crowd. And those mutants have, you know, science fiction capability, shooting lasers and conjuring fire from their fingers and true invisibility cloaks in these movies and nonsense. But I got to thinking if there was an actual human trait that had a one in a billion possibility of existing and there are eight billion people on Earth, do the math, there might be eight people walking around with a trait like get into an accident, don't break their bones, or only need two hours of sleep a night, or have extreme eyesight in very dark conditions, or can breathe oxygen assistance in very high altitudes or very low depths of water, you know, have body temperature control at different latitudes of earth that, you know, make them almost

Starting point is 01:05:26 superhuman. So that is something that I was convinced that there are real-life superhumans. And we started a company after going and talking to 100 plus people to find out if this is the stupidest idea or incredible. And we got a whole bunch of PhDs that came out of Cold Spring Harbor, people from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina chairman and CEO and gene sequencing. And then importantly, this team called Variant assembled a cultural anthropologist and an ethicist because they know that as they were going to go out into the world, they were really looking for outlier traits in outlier people, and those outlier people were going to be an outlier part of the world. And they had one chance to get it right. They structured a very

Starting point is 01:06:02 thoughtful benefit sharing program so that whether it's the science, the technology, the learnings that they get or actual equity or cash, things go back to, in many cases, these indigenous tribes so that they can really be part of this versus having been in a history of exploitation by most scientists that interact with indigenous folks. They already have 14 partnerships around the world with some exotic groups of people with exotic traits, already found their first hit a particular area of the body. And I'm just super optimistic that this is going to be a game-changing company, finding people that are sort of almost real-life X-Men mutants

Starting point is 01:06:34 and bringing drugs to the masses based on their natural biology. Fascinating stuff. Well, Josh, we got to do this again. I got to hear more about this company as it develops more and a number of the other ones. I really appreciate your time today. Like I said, this conversation could go a number of, of different ways and explore lots of different topics and it didn't disappoint. Before I let you go,

Starting point is 01:06:55 Josh, I want to give you an opportunity to handoff where people can find you, follow along, any other resources you want to share. Yeah, website, Lux Capital.com, you know, details a lot of the things that we're looking for. We are always looking for new entrepreneurs. And as much as we think that we know where technology might be going oftentimes is a conversation with an incredible founder that says this is the way that the world ought to look and we want to follow him or her. You can follow me on Twitter, Wolf Josh, W-O-L-L-F-E, J-O-S-H, and hit me up, but my DMs are open and I'm happy to connect and explore. I always say that randomness and optionality is the governing force of my life and you never know. So, you know, I never know who I'm going to get to talk to.

Starting point is 01:07:27 Fantastic. Josh, thank you so much. Thanks, Ray. All right, everybody. That's all we had for you today. If you're loving the show, please don't forget to go to your favorite podcast app and follow us. Please also leave us a review. And you can always find me on Twitter at Trey Lockerby or go to AsktheInvesters.com if you want to have a question answered on this show. And with that, we'll see you again next time. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to millennial investing by the Investors Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence.

Starting point is 01:08:00 To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision consult a professional, this show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting. Thank you.

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