![[10-Josh Wolfe.png]] *Dialectic Episode 10: Josh Wolfe - Illuminating Tomorrow is available on [Spotify](), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/10-josh-wolfe-illuminating-tomorrow/id1780282402?i=1000695732710), and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/1UvHOTdCf9I?si=sizG1aUr23_6YpEr).* <iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/1qKzDAngYfMxWdZ4c9T6Z9?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/10-josh-wolfe-illuminating-tomorrow/id1780282402?i=1000695732710"></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1UvHOTdCf9I?si=hTG7Xb7PqU44hIJY" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> # Description Josh Wolfe ([Website](https://www.luxcapital.com/team/josh-wolfe/), [X](https://twitter.com/wolfejosh)) is co-founder and Managing Partner of [Lux Capital](https://www.luxcapital.com/), a venture firm focused on emerging science and technology at the outermost edges of what is possible. Josh is a masterful storyteller who moves seamlessly between science, culture, and markets. As an investor, he seeks the counter-narrative—what others aren't talking about—and has backed countless breakthrough companies in AI, space, biotech, robotics, defense, and beyond. Beyond investing, Josh founded [Coney Island Prep](https://coneyislandprep.org/) charter school and is a trustee at the [Santa Fe Institute](https://www.santafe.edu/). Our conversation explores the interplay between science and storytelling, the power of belief in both doubters and advocates, patterns in creative rebels, and what makes someone both "arrogant" enough to assert a new reality while remaining grounded enough to see reality clearly. We discuss America's scientific competitiveness, the value of competition in institutions, Josh's voracious appetite for the new, and his personal journey with control, trust, and family. Josh is one of my favorite examples of someone who is radically unhedged on himself: he leans into his genius—and thus sometimes, disfunction—in ways that make him authentically effective. Throughout the episode, he demonstrates his rare combination of wisdom and childlike curiosity, competitive drive, and deep care for the things that matter to him. His ideas on storytelling, science, and human nature offer a guide for thinking about bringing new things into the world. # Timestamps - (2:12): Science & Stories - (6:30): Are technology outcomes and timelines determined or variable based on cultural movements, societal reaction, and stories? - (11:14): Who is Imagining the Future of Tomorrow? - (16:34): Originality, AI, and Everything is a Remix - (20:52): Improving as a Storyteller - (23:55): Secrets & Magic - (31:35): Josh's Biggest Believers - (34:20): Belief Beyond Capital, Motivation, and Fuel - (37:53): Patterns in Creative Rebels - (40:53): "Arrogance of the Highest Order" in Entrepreneurs, Asserting Reality, Great Men of History, and Elon - (47:02): US Exceptionalism and Celebrating Science & Technology - (55:23): Institutions, Academia, Government, and Competition - (1:00:56): Josh: Accomplished Yet Childlike - Finding the Edges - (1:04:07): Breadth and Depth: a Heat-Seeking Ability to Go Deep - (1:12:03): Managing Dowsides and Lessons that Could Have Been Learned Sooner - (1:15:58): Control, Past, and Future - (1:19:57): Learnings from Mom - (1:20:57): Trust and learning from Optimistic Partners - (1:22:54): Legacy # Links & References - [Kevin G's Josh Wolfe Compilation](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I9Ip6HSaS46600GSJIMCov_wlg-HaFf9/view) - [Kevin's much shorter twitter thread summary of Josh's spikeyness](https://x.com/kevg1412/status/1257394062438682624) - [Lux Q3 2024 LP Letter - Four Parables of Four Greek Titans](https://x.com/wolfejosh/status/1860442246648152229) - [Various Lux LP Letters](https://x.com/search?q=Josh%20Wolfe%20LP&src=typed_query&f=top) - ["And the Band Played On" / HIV Work Inspiration](https://x.com/wolfejosh/status/1684638579513839617) - [Josh's music taste](https://x.com/wolfejosh/status/860320589445255168) - [Isabelle Boemeke](https://x.com/isabelleboemeke) (Nuclear Energy Influencer) - [The Three Body Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)) - [Neil Gaiman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gaiman) - [Neil Stephenson - Polestan](https://www.amazon.com/Polostan-Bomb-Light-Neal-Stephenson-ebook/dp/B0CQHP8258) - [Writing Doom](https://youtu.be/xfMQ7hzyFW4?si=tLV9GaGtMR_qmPxN) (Short Film) - [Everything is a Remix](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc) - [Man on the Moon (1999)](https://letterboxd.com/film/man-on-the-moon/) - [Derek Del Gaudio's In and of Itself (2020)](https://letterboxd.com/film/derek-delgaudios-in-of-itself/) - [A Conversation with Josh Wolfe: Macro, Mentors, Motivation - Compound Manual - Frederik Gieschen](https://manual.compoundplanning.com/chapters/a-conversation-with-josh-wolfe) - [33: Josh Wolfe - The Mind Financing The Future - The Portal](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4SL5hcAEtW2KnSRdlNYkZA?si=bdcd58983fb847bb) - [Josh Wolfe - This is Who You Are Up Against - Invest Like the Best, EP.76](https://open.spotify.com/episode/5aEcJyMrS4B1NRJ5EOBfyp?si=f0e5f6382564409c) - [EP 115: Josh Wolfe (Co-Founder, Lux Capital) On Uncovering Hidden Opportunities - The Logan Bartlett Show](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6kM82tGISyJzkv6LDqqlqQ?si=VvN4nE8MSBWKjkn1IZRMzg) Dialectic is available on all platforms. [Join the ⁠telegram channel⁠](https://t.me/dialecticpod) [Follow ⁠on Twitter⁠](https://x.com/dialecticpod) [Follow on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/dialecticpod/) [Subscribe on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@Dialectic) # Transcript **Jackson:** [00:00:00] Welcome to Dialectic. This week's episode is with Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital. Lux is a venture capital firm focused on investing in the future of science and technology and helping bring things from the outer edges of what's possible into reality. Josh's seemingly infinite areas of interest and multi-year history of speaking and writing alongside investing make him a hard person to pin down in one conversation. That said, I made an attempt to cover conversations that I think are representative of who he is and how he approaches his life's work. That starts with stories. Josh is an incredible storyteller and is a strong believer that stories and belief play a crucial role in bringing the future forward. We interrogate the patterns that occur across domains in creative rebels, from scientists to entrepreneurs to artists. We talk about the confidence and sometimes arrogance that shows up in these people who assert new realities. Josh is also a strong patriot and thinks a lot about where we are relative to the rest of the world in terms of science and technology, as well as the institutions on the educational side and otherwise that are pushing us forward. Finally, we talk about Josh how his childlike curiosity manifests, and how he combines a rare combination of both breadth and depth to seemingly be able to go deep on almost anything. He is someone who is simply obsessed with finding the new and getting it right before others. Then he reflects on some of the ways that he has evolved over the years, in some part thanks to some of the closest people in his life. Josh is an invigorating person to spend time with. I am confident that comes through in this conversation. And with that, here is Josh. **Jackson:** [00:01:47] It's great to be with you. **Josh:** [00:01:47] Good to be with you, man. **Jackson:** [00:01:48] I both envy and also am terrified for your one-day biographer. I think if I had 40 hours, I could have probably prepped for that. In immersing before these podcasts, I like to try to just dump people's worlds into my mind for a little while. And man, you contain multitudes. **Josh:** [00:02:05] I contain multitudes. Jackson [00:02:06] So I'm not going to cover everything today, but going to cover maybe a few big ideas that felt resonant about you. ## [00:02:12] Science & Stories The place I want to start: you have talked extensively about this theme, whether it be sci-fi to sci-fact, to your recent LP letter. You did the four Greek Titans. There's this, I found an old tweet, you were inspired to do HIV research in high school because of the film *And the Band Played On*. **Josh:** [00:02:31] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:02:32] And then you've quoted Benjamin Franklin, "If you would persuade, appeal to interest, not to reason." **Josh:** [00:02:37] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:02:37] And so two of the biggest themes in your life to me seem to be this interplay between science and stories. And I'd love to hear you talk about the way you think those connect and why they matter together. **Josh:** [00:02:48] That's a great question. Everybody should be watching copious amounts of TV, reading tons of graphic novels and comic books. All those things are the condensed compression algorithm of either one or thousands of people scripting something. Think about all of the effort, energy, money, and creativity that goes into a single Game of Thrones episode. That's on one end of the spectrum. At the other end, you have a single comedian who has no budget, just riffing on the realities of life. People conjuring these fictions are shaping us. Our stories shape us; we shape our stories in this endless cycle. You can make the argument that everything is a remix, that we're constantly taking stuff from the past and recombining it. We are narrative creatures. We are storytelling animals, and it is the way that we process things. I think it was Einstein that said that the reason that time exists is so that everything doesn't happen all at once. A happens, then B happens, and it causes C and D. Then it goes back, and sometimes there's a fork in the road. Then there's a conflict, and then there's the hero's journey. All of those things are timeless, and they are all stories. Technologies can change, markets can change, governments can change, and leaders can change, but human nature is a constant, literally going back to the Pleistocene and our evolutionary past. There was a startup that we funded. It was recently on its deathbed, in its final days. Miraculously, the CEO and founder ended up—we had committed financing, but I said, "You need to find an external lead, and we'll be all in." He ended up doing it and exceeded his fundraising target. It was like darkest before the dawn, and he did it. We're all like, "Amazing, you pulled the rabbit out of the hat. This was incredible." And then what happens next? Arguably, the predictable Shakespearean drama: there's some internal coup. Now they've got capital, they've got resources, and two people are like, "You gotta go." He's like, "But I was focused all on external financing." And they're like, "Yes, but you weren't focused on the company." So, I had to calm everybody by saying, "This is par for the course. This is what happens. This is human nature. This is conflict." I deeply believe that the more stories you consume, whether they are through lived experience or through fiction—I actually think it doesn't matter. If you've seen a shit-ton of movies and you've read a bunch of fiction and you've read lots of graphic novels, you have scenarios that I think can guide you. There's extraordinary wisdom in all of these things, from Shakespeare to Westworld. I was just having a philosophical debate with one of my partners about the opening scene of Westworld. The guest arrives, and he looks at the host with this sort of squinty-eyed skepticism. She intuits what he wants to ask and says, "Go ahead, you want to ask, so ask." He says, "Are you real?" She responds, "Well, if you can't tell, does it matter?" This is the feeling that I have right now in this current moment of AI, which was predicted by—I don't know when that first episode was—five, six years ago? **Jackson:** [00:05:42] Yeah, at least. **Josh:** [00:05:43] You can get so much inspiration from fiction. We've started companies based on fictions that didn't exist, that became real. We've backed founders who were inspired by fictions. Palmer Lucky and Anduril, arguably--I ended up introducing him to Robert Downey Jr.--but he was inspired by Tony Stark. He wanted to be Tony Stark. He even started growing the goatee. Anduril has become this extraordinary success, not because of that, but I believe deeply in the power of narratives to inspire people, to guide them. Religions are stories. Some people subscribe to the canon of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, and other people subscribe to the canon of Marvel Universe and Star Wars. I don't personally see a difference between them, but they can be equally inspiring. ## [00:06:30] Are technology outcomes and timelines determined or variable based on cultural movements, societal reaction, and stories? **Jackson:** There are certainly technologists--maybe this has changed in recent years, and there's more appreciation for the storytelling piece, in part due to people like Elon--but there's also a view that says what people believe in the culture side of it and storytelling matters if you're looking at the super zoomed in, one- to five-year, maybe even 10-year time horizon. But if you zoom out, we just have to invent the future. Technology and science will be distributed. It doesn't necessarily really matter. Do you think there's merit to that? Do you think that's naive? One cut on this might be nuclear as an example, or some of the supersonic jet stuff. There's this sort of view amongst many really smart people that if you invent something, it's inevitable. And the counterview would be actually, the stories matter a whole lot, and they determine which timeline we go on. Where do you kind of sit in that? **Josh:** [00:07:20] I think it's both. I believe deeply that there are directional arrows of progress. There are certain inevitabilities of technology. You don't necessarily know who the entrepreneur or company is going to be, or when it's going to happen. It might be in two weeks, two months, two years, or two decades. But there is an inevitability. Take nuclear as an example: There is an inevitability of mankind's march through energy density. We went from carbohydrates, which were diffuse and dispersed, not a lot of energy density, large fields of fuel that people would effectively burn as wood. Then we went to hydrocarbons. We discover oil and natural gas, and you crack those bonds and exothermic reaction releases heat. You can boil water, you spin turbines, you produce electricity. Then you go to uranium, which is arguably today the densest form of energy. That march from carbohydrates to hydrocarbons to uranium, from burning wood to burning fossil fuels, to releasing the power of the atom, is a directional arrow of progress. Now, people have to believe. We broke the atom: 1903, 1904, discovered the atom. Thanks to a variety of bad immigration policies, we ended up with Einstein here. Bad immigration policies from Germany, to put it politely. We end up developing the bomb here and splitting the atom. That gave us, made us a global superpower, and arguably gave us 104 nuclear reactors and 103 nuclear subs that are going around the world. That has declined, in part, because the story has declined. The story declined, in part, culturally. In 1979, just to spend a few moments on nuclear, you had Three Mile Island, which was an accident. Nobody died. There was no real radiation release, but people were freaked out. At the same time, you had a movie, *The China Syndrome*. So that's in the cultural zeitgeist. People are primed and they're like, "Oh my God, this is horrible. This is a nuclear disaster." And at the same time, you have the conflation of nuclear power and nuclear war. Nuclear power is a good, virtuous thing, particularly if you're on the left side and you're an environmentalist, and you want zero carbon and large baseload power and energy to be able to solve human problems and let people live and break out of poverty. Nuclear war is a terrible thing. So you have my mother's generation of musicians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and James Taylor that literally have a concert in 1979, "No Nukes." And everybody was just like, "No nukes," not just for war, but for power. I actually think that set it back. But that was a cultural zeitgeist. That was artists and musicians leading a charge, movies and Hollywood leading a charge that resulted in what you could argue is a rising cost of capital. People wouldn't fund this stuff. People didn't want to work on it. It was socially taboo. And now that's starting to change. In the past five years, you have beautiful models that are promoting nuclear, like Isabelle. I was like, "Where did she come from? Is she paid by the Nuclear Energy Institute? Were they smart enough to actually hire an attractive influencer?" That is just changing the zeitgeist of younger people. So not her alone, but the zeitgeist is changing, and I think that's a positive. Those things take time, but they definitely are cultural memes, fads that change what people value. That comes from storytelling of each other, echo chambers and amplification, and people that you heroicize or villainize. If Elon came out (which he hasn't, in part because he has interest in solar), but if he were to say, "We should be developing..." and forget about me calling it elemental energy, if *he* called it elemental energy, the world would be funding nuclear power plants tomorrow because of his influence, left and right, which would be incredible. So there's a long-winded answer to the first part, is that there are these directional arrows of progress, and they are also contingent upon people acting. And you have to believe to act. What creates belief is either a contrarian streak in an individual that says, "I'm going to go do this, everybody else be damned," or a collective feeling of, "Yes, I'm part of a movement and I want to do this." ## [00:11:14] Who is Imagining the Future of Tomorrow? **Jackson:** You talked a little bit about the inspiration of sci-fi often causing people to try stuff or make stuff. It sort of seems that much of the inspiration is from this sci-fi era of the 20th century. There are instances like *Her*, but for the most part, it's a specific cut of time. Who is imagining the sci-fi future of the future beyond? Are we just perpetually pulling from the same source material? To what extent do we need people to imagine where we're going to be in 50 years, 100 years? **Josh:** [00:11:53] The same source materials are the same stories told through different stages and different characters. Joseph Campbell's hero of the journey, Shakespeare: the stages change, the costumes change, the characters change, but it's the same stories. There are these timeless aspects of conflict, jealousy, envy, love, betrayal, camaraderie, and of alliances formed against the powerful. Those are constants. The latest sci-fi that is inspiring is coming from China, like *Three Body Problem*. You have a movement away from the dystopian environmental sci-fi, which I find utterly boring and predictable. You have people that mix a little bit of history with a little bit of speculative sci-fi. Neil Gaiman, unfortunately, has been canceled, but I think he's a brilliant mind. Neal Stephenson's latest, the beginning of a trifecta, *Palandston*, talks about the origin of the nuclear bomb and weaves in geopolitics in the US and Russia. Somebody actually was just telling me that there was this one character, Dick, a really interesting, Jewish, nerdy scientist and physicist. And somebody's like, "You know, that's Richard Fineman." I was like, "What? Oh, yeah, Dick. Oh, my God." So I think that there are people that take history and combine it with speculative futures, and that is super valuable. History doesn't repeat, it rhymes, as cliche as that is, and it's true. I think you have wildly imaginative people, and I actually think AI is helping break through what is imaginable and possible because you can just literally tell Midjourney, "Imagine this crazy thing that I just imagined." And then suddenly it becomes real, and you're able to express yourself. So I do think that there are just creative geniuses out there that can combine ideas and genres and inspire people. But if you think about it, most sci-fi is like, "Okay, we're going to go populate or colonize outer space." And all of those space operas are still wrought with those same Shakespearean conflicts. There's a coup, somebody's abandoned, they're marauded. It's an individual, from *The Martian* to *Aliens*. We encounter some alien force. In some cases, like in *District 9*, they're metaphors for our time. Jackson [00:14:16] Yeah. **Josh:** [00:14:16] In other cases, it's just H.R. Geiger's representation of an alien that we're literally going to encounter in outer space. Then you've got the people that I think do the near-term prognostications, like Charles Brooker from *Black Mirror*, who I think is just brilliant. Those have presaged social implications of the technologies that we're inventing. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired and one of the great philosophers of technology, said that the key question is not to ask what happens when one technology exists. You can predict how somebody might use it. The key question is what happens when everybody has that thing. People that are able to imagine those speculative things are really interesting. There was a recent short film that I thought was really good. It wasn't sci-fi so much. I don't even know where or how I discovered it. It might have even been me querying ChatGPT or Anthropic, and it came up with a recommendation. It was a 20-25 minute film about a writer's room, I think they called it *Writer's Doom* or something like that. The premise was that they had to imagine an AI future, and you had all these five different personalities. They really did a thoughtful treatise on how AI was likely to develop and go towards superintelligence. It was done in a scripted way. I could have read one of these long essays, Leopold or whatever, but this was like a beautiful 20-minute human drama in dialogue, almost Aaron Sorkin, West Wing-like. That just made it hit. I'm optimistic about our creative class, ever more accessible and, by the way, globally, because now their ideas can be translated as *Three Body Problem* was. I think the people that write sci-fi, if we saw a genre of Chinese sci-fi, I'd actually be worried because they're going to be defining the future. We want to attract talent here to build our companies, but we also want to attract the sci-fi authors here to write the future that we want to live in. **Jackson:** [00:16:15] You think about the way Elon is literally aesthetically copying iRobot, too, or the OpenAI *Her* stuff. There's all the ideological stuff you talked about, and then you also just have a wide set of entrepreneurs blatantly copying the aesthetic of this stuff. To me, maybe it's further indication of the influence. ## [00:16:34] Originality, AI, and Everything is a Remix **Jackson:** Maybe part of the challenge today is that, to your point, so much of it is pessimistic. Or people almost have an antagonistic relationship. So many creatives have an antagonistic relationship to AI. This stuff is really, I think, important for us to imagine. **Josh:** [00:16:49] Creatives, by the way -- as though there are some -- we're all creative. But the class of people that are aghast at AI copying, I mean, I feel very strongly. I make my kids watch the Kirby. I think it's now an hour-long thing that came out, updated a year ago, "*Everything is a Remix*." **Jackson:** [00:17:08] No. **Josh:** [00:17:09] It's spectacular. It covers four parts, I think: movies... **Jackson:** [00:17:12] It's like a YouTube series? Yeah. I know of this. I haven't seen it. **Josh:** [00:17:16] Outstanding: movies, music. There are multiple moments where you're listening to a Beatles riff on the section about music. You think, "Oh yeah, I love this song." Then it goes back 30 years to a blues, and you're like, "Oh my God, they blatantly stole it." **Jackson:** [00:17:30] That's cool. **Josh:** [00:17:31] They blatantly stole it. This poor African-American guy in the South made that riff, and nobody knows his name. His family never got paid money, and all of that kind of stuff. **Jackson:** [00:17:41] I guess that's not cool, but it's profound. **Josh:** [00:17:43] Tarantino. All these incredible scenes. You're like, "Oh yeah, that came from *Sawa*." Exactly. And you're like, "What?" It's literally down to the framing and the rectangular symmetry. There are all these examples of movies, music, and fashion. His thesis was everything is a remix. So creatives today that are like, "I created that." No. You are the sum total of all the inspirations and all the visual influences that you saw, consciously or unconsciously, the emotions that were tied to those moments. Sometimes people are aware of it, sometimes they aren't. There's a new Lady Gaga song that aired, I think at the Grammys. My kids were watching it, and there's a hook in there that I recognize that they don't know. If you ever saw *Donnie Darko*... **Jackson:** [00:18:27] Yeah. **Josh:** [00:18:27] Okay, so there's *Mad World* and then there's the remix of it. She literally took the hook from that. I read that this song was assembled by probably four different hooks. I happened to identify that one. My kids have no idea. **Jackson:** [00:18:38] That's awesome. **Josh:** [00:18:38] But they're like, "This is an original creative work." I'm like, "No, it's a derivative work." Everything is derivative. If you took Picasso, and look at the four different styles that he had, from trying to do realist pictures of fruit and portraits, to his abstract cubism, to what became this defining style of Picasso. He just ingested everything and copied, then iterated and mutated, just like evolution does. Just like our genes do: copy, mutate, amplify, selection. The function of selection is use. **Jackson:** [00:19:12] I would assume science very much takes that shape, too. **Josh:** [00:19:15] All science is. At least in science, there's a culture that says you have to have a long list of references to prior art. **Jackson:** [00:19:23] Right, right, right. **Josh:** [00:19:23] And so we hold people accountable for not stealing people's ideas. Science also has this beautiful thing of trying to prove people wrong and do it in public. Science itself, as an institution, as a culture, is a beautiful thing, one of man's greatest inventions. But the idea that AI is stealing, the great irony of OpenAI upset that DeepSeek stole their underlying algorithm, and OpenAI itself trained on the sum total of the repository of everything on the Internet. Artists are upset. If I wanted to create a scene in the style of Robert Williams, who founded the magazine *Juxtapose*, which is the surrealist lowbrow art, and it creates it, he would be like, "That's theft." But he was an art student who went to the Louvre or went to the Met and just visually absorbed everything that he saw and that inspired him. I just think plagiarism in 10 years will not be a thing. The idea of original work of art, you won't know if it was five people that worked on it. You won't know if it was two people in a machine. You won't know if it was just insane prompting. **Jackson:** [00:20:37] Well, yeah, you play this out and you add infinite compute. You basically have LLMs or otherwise that are able to produce the infinite spectrum of possibility. It's actually about what people pull out of that. What frame you stop on. That's the creativity. That's cool. ## [00:20:52] Improving as a Storyteller **Jackson:** What has made you a better storyteller? I don't know that you... I think you've talked in the past about it not necessarily being an intrinsic trait, yet you're clearly quite good at it. **Josh:** [00:21:03] Practice, practice, practice. Admiration and mimicry of people that I thought were great storytellers. If you heard me speak in high school, and probably through most of college, I sounded like this. I grew up in Coney Island. I was horrible. And then you start to see a speaker and you're like, "I want to speak like that." I will actually say, the first person who was not a famous person that massively inspired me, that could command an audience and spoke with gravitas, was a guy, Ivan Hageman. He founded a school called East Harlem School at Exodus House, on 103rd between 1st and 2nd. It was a drug rehab center that he and his brother turned into a school. It would inspire me to go start a charter school in my native Coney Island, Brooklyn, called Coney Island Prep. But I heard this man speak. I did an urban semester during college, it was my junior year. Four days a week, or three days a week, you worked at a job. I tried to hustle to find a Cornellian or Brooklynite that would get me access to Wall Street. My mom was a public school teacher, a single mom; I had no connections. Two days a week you volunteered at a nonprofit, and the nonprofit that I worked at was in East Harlem, this East Harlem School at Exodus House. Exodus House was this drug rehab center they converted. Ivan and Hans were the brothers. They ended up having a Cain and Abel-like split, predictable through literature. But their father...they were half-black, half-white. They sort of look like light-skinned Arnold Schwarzeneggers, jacked. In fact, Ivan's first job out of school, he went to Harvard for education, and then he was on his resume, an "altercation de-escalation engineer." I'm like, "What is an altercation de-escalation engineer?" He's like, "I was a bouncer." **Jackson:** [00:22:35] Nice. **Josh:** [00:22:36] But I heard him speak in front of students, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth graders in East Harlem. And this man commanded the room. It was the depth of his voice, the cadence. And I was like, "Where did he learn to speak to that?" It turned out his father was a preacher. So, you listen to great preachers, who I don't generally respect. Like, I cannot stand the Joel Osteens of the world, because I think they're hucksters pulling the wool over people's eyes. They are extraordinarily commanding presences of telling a story, commandeering that most important currency of human attention. Dave Chappelle: extraordinary storyteller. I don't remember his jokes, but I cannot forget his poignant stories. So there are people, when you feel yourself caught by that, you just watch it, and you watch it again and again. I have a friend who is friends with Chappelle; I've never met him. He says that every facet of that, just like this device in front of us, or any product like Apple iPhone that we love, is engineered with the kind of precision and meticulous... He's like, every gesture that Chappelle does... **Jackson:** [00:23:39] The effects, the little pauses, the accidents, every puff... **Josh:** [00:23:41] ...of the cigarette, every slap on the knee, every eye movement is practiced and practiced and practiced. None of it is ad-libbed. It's an engineered performance, and I admire that. ## [00:23:55] Secrets & Magic **Jackson:** It's cool. You love storytelling. You're also quite loud, and yet you've talked about secrets. **Josh:** [00:24:01] Now, by the way, when you say loud: projection of voice, or I don't stop talking? **Jackson:** [00:24:06] I mean all. Check the Twitter; loud in all shapes. Yet you've talked about secrets. There's this amazing line: "I know something that the rest of the world doesn't know, and they won't until I tell them." **Josh:** [00:24:15] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:24:15] This is obviously rooted in science. And then you've also discussed your love of magic... **Josh:** [00:24:20] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:24:20] ...and this notion that magicians are... magic is almost a form of engineering. My question is, what has magic taught you about showmanship, storytelling, engineering, and the ways that we maybe bring secrets to the world? **Josh:** [00:24:34] Magic, to me, is an extraordinary trick, whether it's sleight of hand or some orchestrated thing. There are some people, friends of ours, who are these illusionists. It's no different than a technologist that constructs something to produce a feeling of awe. There are things--in fact, this morning when I woke up, I pulled down with my thumb on my iPhone. For a moment, for three seconds, I looked as it faded from my home screen to my notifications with such fluidity. I was like, "That is just beautiful." They didn't have to do that little subtle thing. A lesser company would just have it swipe or something, but it was so fluid and magical. It created this layer of depth of information. I think that a great magician, that engineers a trick, on one hand anticipates and knows how you're going to react. So there's a fundamental understanding of human nature. They know what you're going to do. They know how to force a card. They know what you're going to say. And that is the perfection of it. Just like a dance is choreographed, there is, in that craft and artistry, this choreographed control of you. And I admire that, because it's a form of influence, a form of persuasion. Then, sort of like that quote: People don't remember what you said. People don't remember what you did. They remember how you made them feel. I remember how magicians make me feel, that feeling of, "Oh my God, are you kidding me?" Or that frustration of, "How did they do that?" A great piece of technology, a great piece of art, a great movie, a great book gives you that same feeling where you need to share it with somebody, like: "You won't believe what happened." So that's one element, the act and the performance and the amount of effort and intelligence, and the anticipation of your intelligence, because they have to outsmart you. So that also, by the way, is why I think when I have this propensity to identify people that I think are not in great relationship with the truth, or people that I consider frauds, and I call them out. It's very much like--it isn't, I realize, born in this virtuous pursuit of truth. It's: "No, no, I know what you're doing. You're not going to outsmart me." "You're outsmarting all the sheep, but I'm on to you." It's a competitive intellectual thing. **Jackson:** [00:26:59] It's like the little kid watching the magician who's not that good. **Josh:** [00:27:02] There's a scene at the end of *Man on the Moon*, the Andy Kaufman movie. **Jackson:** [00:27:06] Yeah. **Josh:** [00:27:07] Jim Carrey--who is the ultimate prankster--faked his own death. Not Jim Carrey, but Andy Kaufman. He's dying of cancer, and in this last-ditch effort, he goes to India to one of these healers. He sits down, and he subjects himself on the table to this guy going to do some, I don't know, reiki, whatever. The guy picks up a little chicken liver or something in this sleight of hand and then rubs his stomach and pulls it out. He looks at it in this simultaneous admiration for the guy's gall to do that, and this realization that he's going to die, and that there is no magic healing thing. It was like that moment of the trickster knowing he just got tricked, and was just like, "All right, game respects game. I got it." So that's one aspect of magic: the performance of it. The secret of it, the fact that they never reveal it, is really powerful. And then it's like the meaning of it. There was one particular performance that absolutely caught me, and it really changed the way that I think about a lot of things, which was Derek DelGaudio. **Jackson:** [00:28:11] Yeah, I've seen this. **Josh:** [00:28:13] You can see it on TV now. We saw it live in Union Square: his profound performance. Deep, thoughtful, incredible storytelling. I think they had Frank Oz and Neil Patrick Harris as part of the production team, and lots of celebrities came. He does this thing where he picks these five different objects and does different tricks around them, but with deep storytelling. He pulls out this gold brick, takes it off the wall, and puts it on a table. In this somber tone, with gravitas and seriousness, he talks about how he was a young teenager living in Texas with his mom. He had a best friend, same age. They'd ride their bikes and hang out after school. One day they come home, they walk in, he opens the door, and his mom is on the couch kissing another woman. His friend freaks out and runs. He realizes, okay, my mom is gay, but fell in love. He loves his mother. They talk about it, and they're closer than ever. The next morning, they're sitting at the breakfast table, and a brick comes flying through the window with a rubber band and a piece of paper. On the paper, it says, "Go home, faggots." They end up moving. He's telling the story, and he builds this house of cards symbolically around the brick, covering it. Then he finishes the story and says, "Give me a street in New York." Somebody says, "Essex." He says, "Okay, give me a cross street that it intersects with." Somebody says, "Delancey." Then he blows the cards away, and the brick is gone. Now, obviously, it's a sleight of hand, but he says, "When the show ends in 10 minutes, you go to Essex and Delancey, and this brick will be on that corner." Obviously, he had a runner that went and did it, but it doesn't matter. People that were in that show would go. Now, Essex and Delancey on a Friday night or Saturday night probably has 10 to 20,000 people throughout the night that are passing through that corner. On the corner is this gold brick next to a garbage can. You can go, and you can see it. People are taking pictures of it and posting it to Instagram or whatever. 99.9% of people that experience that brick have no idea what it is. But the people that were in that show, that heard the story and what it meant to this man, it had meaning. Suddenly the idea of an object having meaning was just really powerful to me. A piece of fabric that is irrelevant to me might be deeply meaningful to you because it was your grandmother's, you know, that she carried with her from a war or something. So thinking about the stories, because that's effectively what they are, that go into a physical object, the only reason why it has a valence of significance is because of a story that you know, is super powerful. **Jackson:** [00:30:59] It's exciting to imagine a world where more people trying to bring science and technology into the world take some of these things seriously. You think about the old Steve Jobs stuff. He's pulling the iPod Nano out of his pocket. It's the magician. **Josh:** [00:31:13] He is the ultimate magician. He had such care, and whether this was powerful or not, that it didn't just care about what it looked like or felt like in your hand, but his attention to detail inside the stuff that you never saw. It's something I always tell my kids: how you do anything is how you do everything. Those little details matter. ## [00:31:35] Josh's Biggest Believers **Jackson:** Belief has been a big part of your life, and you've talked about chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. You've talked about how that's been so important for you. I'm curious who? Whose belief has been most empowering for you in your life? Maybe outside of Bill Conway of Carlisle, so maybe you can talk about him, but maybe broadly, who else's belief has been empowering to you? **Josh:** [00:32:02] Well, the three probably most important ones that I have spent the most time with: my mother. I witnessed other parents that were preoccupied. My own father was not present in my life. But my mother believed in me deeply, almost to my wife's chagrin, because she was raised differently with parents that loved her deeply but did not dote on her the way that my mother did as a single mom, only child. But my mother was like, you are destined for greatness. I literally believed as a young kid, I had ESP or could move stuff with my mind. I don't know if you did too, but I believe that I was like this special, special kid. And so we try to do that with our kids, not to the point that they're so solipsistic and egotistical, but to make them feel super special. My wife, I mean, is probably the most important person that believes in me. That's the most important decision I think anybody can make is finding a partner or mate, building a family. For me especially, not having that and wanting that deep nuclear family was very important. Peter, my co-founder of Lux, we believe in each other. There are things that I think he's terrible at and there are things that he knows I'm terrible at. But the things that I think he's exceptional at, that feeling of trust. I call it art, that you admire somebody, you respect them, you trust them, but you effectively believe in them. That to me is super important. Bill Conway, I have talked about publicly, but this was truly a super wealthy and powerful person that, whatever the circumstances of that day, decided, yes, and believed. And to this day, I literally texted him two days ago just as a note of appreciation, and we first met 25 years ago or something. **Jackson:** [00:33:30] Wow. **Josh:** [00:33:31] And I want to have that effect on some people. Maybe I'm the only one for him. I doubt it; there's probably 20 people like that for him. **Jackson:** [00:33:37] And that was seeding Lux? **Josh:** [00:33:39] Seeding Lux. And just he sat down and we pitched him and we were full of naivete and ambition. And he said, I hope you make a billion. And just to have somebody that was older. I'm sure if you put me on the therapist's chair, a father figure absent in my life; there's a million things that you could ascribe to this of why that was more meaningful to me. But you had this older man that was like, I believe in you, and I want you to go and do it and go forth. I just felt like having somebody in your corner. So we always say at Lux that we like to believe before others understand. That is the best currency that you can give somebody before you actually write a check, is just like, I believe in you, and I'm going to get your back. And that's it's really powerful. ## [00:34:20] Belief Beyond Capital, Motivation, and Fuel **Jackson:** Obviously, you just said it. You believe in people for a living. Beyond capital, which obviously is the primary incarnation of that belief, what are the shapes of belief that maybe manifest for you with entrepreneurs or with scientists or otherwise? **Josh:** [00:34:35] There's the practical and the impractical. The practical ones are: Do I believe that they will convince other people to believe? Do I believe that they will be able to fundraise? I don't have faith in my life. I don't believe in supernatural things. But in a form, that's a form of faith. Do you believe that somebody, in the absence of evidence, will believe in you? I want to know that an entrepreneur can raise money, that they can convince people to move across the country and quit their jobs, or convince their family or their spouse or their kids, "We're going to follow this man or woman into fire." That to me is super powerful. Then there's the belief in themselves, the conviction that you are going to have massive ups and massive downs. You're going to have people that you believed in that are going to quit on you. You're going to have people that go and leave to start their own things. You're going to have people that betray you. What do you do in those kinds of moments? So, I think the people that tend to have enough self-esteem that they believe in themselves, even if others don't, and the people that have so much enmity and negativity and drive... This is a debate I get into all the time on Twitter. I admire the people that are like, "You don't need to have negative beliefs. It's hurtful for you." I'm obviously saying this in a mocking tone. Or people that are like, "Anybody that thrives on hate is just a negative person that doesn't put good energy into the world." I always say it is great for an individual to do mindfulness and meditation, and be calm and find inner peace. I want my kids to have that. But if you want progress in society, every single thing we have, from our iPhones to Amazon to rocketry... Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Oprah Winfrey: they all had childhoods that you would not wish on your worst enemy. Three of them were adopted: Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Jeff Bezos. Oprah Winfrey had a horrific childhood, like raped, beaten, and lost her brother, I think, to AIDS or drugs. Elon's childhood was also horrific. So, you want troves of disaffected people with chips on their shoulders. As I like to say, "Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets." I believe that is the great motive force that pushes people forward. The founding fathers were not meditating when they came over here; they had hatred, utter hatred for the British and for the monarchy. Steve Jobs had utter hatred for the mediocrity of IBM and these corporate suits and was rebelling against that. So, I think that hatred, which is not a virtue that anybody wants to celebrate, is a great motivating force. To this day, you follow Palmer Luckey on Twitter, and Palmer will 70% of the time be talking about geopolitics and the incredible products that Anduril is developing, 10% of the time talking about video games and anime and the things that he culturally cares about, and the rest of the time going after journalists from 10 years ago, or even just this week. He was going after somebody from ZDNet from like 2018, or maybe it was even 2008, demanding a retraction for something that they said about him. And I love that. I don't want to be the person that's like, "No, dude, you're a billionaire many times over. Get over it." No, keep going. Fight these people. Let it fuel you. We are better off because of it. ## [00:37:53] Patterns in Creative Rebels **Jackson:** You have an affection for rebels. Obviously, that's inside of the answer, part of the answer you just gave. Across artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, beyond just the fuel, are there other through lines you see across those types of creative rebels? **Josh:** [00:38:09] If I wasn't a venture capitalist, I would be an A&R person trying to find the cool new band. Or if I was in the art world, I would be trying to find the edgy new thing. I was just with Guy Oseary, who founded Maverick with Madonna and discovered one of the bands that I absolutely loved, Deftones. It requires an understanding of what the consensus is, and a desire. Maybe you wish that you were part of the consensus and you were part of the popular crowd. But you recognize that you either can't be, or maybe you don't want to be. You're going to go and tack differently, and you're going to find the thing that everybody else. You're doing it maybe because of the intrinsic aesthetic value to you. But more likely, when I'm intellectually honest, it's because of the status I get when I am right, that I was there before you. We have companies now that people are like, "That's crazy." And now, we invested in them at $50-60 million valuations. There's an actual way to quantify this. And now they're being coveted at $6 billion valuations. That is a feeling that says, "I was right, and you didn't see it, and now you're going to pay the price for that." I like that. It's a slightly spiteful, competitive kind of thing. But it's the same thing when you discover the band, or the artist, or the author, or the TV show, or the thing that nobody else has discovered. You get social status by being the person that was the tastemaker that discovered that thing. That is driven out of a vainglorious, ego-driven pursuit of status by finding the thing that other people are eventually going to come around to: the restaurant, the fashion brand, whatever it is. And the comfort of saying, "I'm okay breaking away from the herd." I admire that in entrepreneurs. We have entrepreneurs that come in here that are great technologists. They're good people. We will have debates as a partnership because I'll be like, "They are not edgy enough. They want to fit in too much." I like people that are comfortable with the discomfort of being rejected, because being rejected is, evolutionarily, the most painful thing aside from physical pain that you can have: being ostracized from a group, feeling alone. But if you can weather that and push through and create, and then get other people to come to you. You have this everywhere from the internet meme from 20 years ago of the weird dude that's dancing on the hill at a music festival, the first follower. That guy was just being himself. He wasn't doing it out of spite. I think he was doing it out of authentic joy for the music. Probably the first few people that joined in were making fun of him. And then it became like a thing. **Jackson:** [00:40:37] The first follower could have been the ultimate believer and advocate too. **Josh:** [00:40:43] They could have been. But my view is that they were probably just being silly. And they're like, "Wait a second, this is actually sort of cool." ## [00:40:53] "Arrogance of the Highest Order" in Entrepreneurs, Asserting Reality, Great Men of History, and Elon **Jackson:** You started to tap into an idea that I'm really interested in. There's this notion that the people who can really bring new things into the world, those types of rebels, you've actually described people who create new things as having arrogance of the highest order. **Josh:** [00:41:06] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:41:07] There's this radical ability to assert a new reality. Part of that is not fitting in with the crowd. But you've also been critical of the hero narratives, the "great man of history," and you've been super critical of people like Elon. I'm really fascinated by this dichotomy of asserting a new reality and also having the humility and awareness to actually see reality as it is. It's this asserting reality on one end and refining reality on the other. Obviously, you have Kanye on one end of asserting reality. I'm curious what it looks like for these, quote-unquote, arrogant but also honest, truthful people. What does it look like when people strike that balance? A lot of people could hear everything you've just said and think, "Oh, Josh must love Elon or someone like that, who's so good at storytelling, who's so good at creating a new reality, who's such a rebel." And yet a more simple example might be SBF. Before everything bad happened, he was this amazing person asserting reality, but I think the critique of him in hindsight would be he wasn't listening to anyone. **Josh:** [00:42:13] Both of those things are true. And by the way, there are things about Elon that I absolutely admire and love. I love SpaceX. I actually love Doge. I have always been skeptical about Tesla, particularly for what I think is questionable accounting, but he got away with it, and it doesn't matter anymore. I love Jeff Bezos. I think that he's one of the greatest capital allocators of our time, whereas I would say that Elon is the single greatest fundraiser ever in the history of mankind. His ability to capitalize attention, talent, and money. The difference, where I think it's more deserving of criticism of this great man of history idea, is that there are so many people, hundreds, thousands of people, that made critical decisions that were responsible for things that are on the periphery of that spotlight, that don't get the credit. I think Bezos does a better job than Elon of giving people credit. But it's very hard for people to name the top four people at Tesla or the top four people at SpaceX. I mean, Gwynne, maybe. People leave there and they're like, "Oh, we backed Tom Mueller," who was basically head rocketeer for 20-something years, employee number one at SpaceX. But most people, if you said Tom Mueller, they have no idea who he is. So, Elon gets away with that because he's like, look, I'm narcissistic, and I'm a little bit on the spectrum, so I get away with these things. But I think I have more respect for the people that give credit to the people that took the risk and believed in them and are actually doing the work. And so even here at Lux, I have, because of my own psychological needs... As Peter likes to joke, I was the kid in my underoos jumping on the kitchen table being like, "Look at me!" Pete doesn't care. Brandon Reeves here doesn't care. Doesn't even want his name on the website, doesn't even, you know, his face doesn't care. They deserve massive credit. This place would not be what it is without every single partner here. So I like to shine a spotlight and bring attention to them. I think there's a balance between this idea of some of the great entrepreneurs, the great man of history, and the people that actually really helped them in all these situations. I think you don't have to be the extreme humble leader that feels like it's totally contrived. **Jackson:** [00:44:18] Let's say somebody new comes in, and they're brilliant, and they're asserting this totally new vision of reality. You've obviously talked a lot about both that being appealing, but also trying to determine if they are honest. Are they true? How do you actually distill that? I mean, part of that is going and doing the work. But how do you distill when somebody is, in some rooms, asserting reality and in other rooms is actually humble in their disposition to what they don't know? That feels like the tension. **Josh:** [00:44:48] The honest answer is you don't know. You don't know if somebody is naive or ambitious or if they're a priori full of malice. Take SBF. I thought SBF was brilliant. What we didn't know was that the funds from arguably a brilliant, highly functioning business were being siphoned and used for speculative bets on the side and political donations. I don't know the sum total of what Elon has done. I don't actually believe that Elon bought Twitter for free speech. I believe that he believes in free speech. He says he's a free speech absolutist. Search on Twitter for one condemnation, one criticism of the Chinese Communist Party or China's culture of oppression of free speech. Just one. You will not find one. You say, well, he's not going to criticize other countries. Okay, but he criticizes Germany, UK, France, lots of other countries. **Jackson:** [00:45:52] Interesting. **Josh:** [00:45:53] You want to question people's motives. Is the motive that they're saying, and the reason that they're doing the thing, the real reason? You can never really tell. I have friends, as it relates to Elon, who truly believe that he cares deeply about accelerating mankind towards a sustainable future of energy and environment, which was the tagline that he used to say forever. Now, that has shifted. Over the past few years, his tagline is extending human consciousness into a galaxy. And so, well, if the priority was that before, it's sort of hard to justify burning huge amounts of rocket fuel and carbon and many rocket launches. It's hard to justify private jets and flying everywhere. But if it's now about this bigger mission of extending human consciousness into the universe, you know, then this stuff doesn't matter. So did his values change? Maybe. Did the story change? Maybe. I don't know. Are we all better off for it? Yes. Jackson [00:46:56] Yeah, there's fuzziness in all of us. **Josh:** [00:46:58] But I still like to think, that's maybe BS. ## [00:47:02] US Exceptionalism and Celebrating Science &amp; Technology **Jackson:** You care a lot about the US as a leader from a technology standpoint, broadly. I think that obviously manifests across the board, from education to the government. I think, too, a huge amount of the US's historical and current advantage is our monopoly over skilled immigration. But recently, I think there's been more questioning or critique of whether or not our homegrown talent on the technology and science and engineering front, at least our advantage there is persisting. There's maybe a broad feeling that for many, doing science is behind some kind of wall or academic hurdle. I'm curious how you think about why we don't have more scientists, what it would look like for more young people to either do science or at least have a scientific approach, and how do you actually bolster the next 50 years of American exceptionalism on that front? **Josh:** [00:47:54] The short answer to the last question is, cultures get what they celebrate. For 20 years, in part because we had an extraordinary boom economy—maybe you can argue since the mid-80s—declining interest rates, rising stock markets, and increasing wealth, even though there was wealth disparity, people were celebrating celebrities. You would ask somebody what they wanted to be, and they would say rich, an influencer, famous, or whatever. That's a cynical answer, obviously, but those were innocent answers. In the 50s and 60s, people were saying, "I want to be an astronaut," or, "I want to be a Nobel Prize winner." China is doing the right thing in the content that they're feeding their kids: stem, achievement, and breakthroughs. That is what makes individuals distinguished. That is what makes countries distinguished and gives a form of soft power. I believe that it is a cultural celebration. Elon Musk is a great cultural figure for that. Jeff Bezos is a great cultural figure for that. The space race amongst billionaires that the left media will chastise and say, "These are just guys with their rockets and these phallic egos…" No, it's ridiculous. This is amazing, that we have a private space sector competing, and they're both American companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX. It's amazing. We want that here. It's amazing that most of the AI competition is here, whether it's Elon and Grok, or Sam and OpenAI, or Dario and Anthropic. It's amazing. I don't know how much value is going to be destroyed by some of those companies. I actually would not bet against Elon there, but OpenAI—who knows? But we all benefit from that. Every week, new models are coming out, and consumers are getting better. So that is, I think, an amazing… **Jackson:** [00:49:33] There's one reason that's not celebrated, perhaps: people—regular people—feel like they're not benefiting from those things you just mentioned: AI, rockets, these types of things. **Josh:** [00:49:40] I think people increasingly do feel they're benefiting from AI. They have magic capabilities at their fingers. Now, if they wanted to go into marketing, or ad copy, or all these historic white-collar jobs—even thinking about being lawyers, or in some cases, doctors—you ought to be thinking twice about some of those things. Where do you truly have the opportunity to be distinguished and indispensable? **Jackson:** [00:50:03] Mm. **Josh:** [00:50:04] But I think it's different this time—those dangerous words to say—because I do feel like there's a democratization of the access to this stuff. For 20 bucks a month, you get access to all the world's information. To be able to conjure everything that you might want, from images, to videos, to text, is pretty profound. And that's just going to keep getting cheaper and cheaper. So, I do believe that that is an inspiration. That people see that there's massive wealth being created. I just see a ton of… Think about what everybody wants to do today. They all want to go work at AI companies in some capacity. They want to… So that to me is a positive. And I think, going back to your question, what creates that is what we celebrate as a culture. I don't see the AI companies being as demonized yet. Of course, it'll come because, you know, it's the powerless, or AOC, or somebody picking fights with billionaires, Bernie Sanders and whatever. But they're irrelevant. Those people create nothing. They just try to take capital and poorly redistribute it. And I grew up center-left my entire life. But I believe deeply that we should be celebrating our entrepreneurs and the people that are creating these extraordinary things that democratize access for everybody. **Jackson:** [00:51:11] Doesn't that disposition from capital and technology create some of the... one of the reasons it feels... And granted, I think it's worth acknowledging that maybe science and technology, at least culturally, are in two kind of different buckets. Science is more lumped in academia; technology is more the AI software type stuff. **Josh:** [00:51:33] Sure. **Jackson:** [00:51:33] But I almost wonder if that division is part of the reason why more broadly, scientists or technologists aren't celebrated as the type of person you want to be, at least holistically. Does that make sense? **Josh:** [00:51:46] Yeah, I think we need to go back to where we started the conversation on stories. You need more shows like *For All Mankind*. I don't think a lot of people watch *Halt and Catch Fire*, but you need more mainstream shows that celebrate the hero's journey in science and technology: women in science, minorities in science. You are right that scientists are generally thought of as introverted people toiling away in a lab: nerds, and not cool. Technologists, maybe they are a little bit cooler. You see them at parties, and they're being invited to stuff. They have more money, and the scientists are wallowing away writing for grants. But I think that celebrating the culture of both of those is really important. We had a wake-up call in part because of geopolitics in the '50s with Sputnik and the space race, and it galvanized a lot of people. Just like people wanted to join the military after 9/11, suddenly we're in this global war on terror. I think people see a resurgence of this, whether it's Russia/Ukraine, whether it's Israel/Gaza, whether it's China/Taiwan. Whatever the conflicts that are near or soon to be, I think that is actually inspiring people. Culture and the media we consume and produce influences that. So I think we need more content, more shows, more celebrities hanging out with scientists and technologists, and celebrating them and being like, "Oh my god, this is amazing." As a backdrop, if you just look at the numbers today – and these in part should be a wake-up call – 50% of all undergraduates in AI are coming from China. China is graduating one out of every two AI undergrads. When you look at the workforce, even domestically in the U.S., 38% of the AI researchers here are from China, outnumbering domestic U.S. at 37%. So that's alarming. Now, you want to attract these people regardless of their ethnicities and have them become Americans and have them stay here. We want to brain drain, but that's not necessarily happening. The number of international students... We used to have 23% of international students that came to American shores to work at our universities and learn. I would be stapling H-1B visas to them and making them stay here and giving them jobs, discouraging them from going back and in fact encouraging their families to come back. One of the great leverages that China has is: "Okay, you go here, you go to Princeton or Stanford or MIT or Harvard, you get your PhD, but if you don't come back, at some point, your family's going to have some problems." They hold them hostage in a way. So I think that that's a big deal. But we used to have 23% of the international student body. Today it's down to 15%. So those trend lines should be a wake-up call to people, and those people are our policymakers and our politicians. Amongst all the waste that is being highlighted and potential fraud that's being highlighted by DoJ, if I were in charge today of the NIH, I wouldn't be shutting down all these grants. I would dictate – you probably can't do it on age discrimination – but that it's people that are in their first year of PhD programs or people effectively that are under 30. Because I think the average age of grant recipients today is something like 60 or 61. **Jackson:** [00:54:45] Wow. **Josh:** [00:54:46] It is young, naive, ambitious people—the very people that we back—that are constantly saying, "Why not? Why does that exist? That sucks; I want to fix it." We should give them the gusto to go and do that, as opposed to funding people incrementally and conservatively because they're esteemed and have political credentials and tenure. No, you want people that are massively driven. **Jackson:** [00:55:10] That. **Josh:** [00:55:11] That would be the big change I would have, to ignite. Like the fact that people are complaining about people being in the government right now or in Doge that are like 19 years. **Jackson:** [00:55:19] Like, yes. Right, right. That's partly cultural. ## [00:55:23] Institutions, Academia, Government, and Competition **Jackson:** Part of it is maybe an institution problem, which is to say, either we don't have enough of them or they are too... Do you think — you're involved with Santa Fe Institute as an example. You founded a charter school. Is one critique from maybe a slightly more left-minded person would be that some of the institutions being so wrapped up in, or frankly technologists being wrapped up in commercial endeavors, complicates some of this? Do we need more nonprofit or academic-shaped institutions that are pushing things this direction? Is the root problem that so many of the core academic institutions are corrupt or otherwise? How do you think about that part of the maybe the educational stack, or how do you get people more bought in? How do you get more young people to actually want to work in government? **Josh:** [00:56:08] I think there is a binary classification between existing systems. The incumbents are basically comfortable. Go back to the chip on your shoulder or the complacency. Traditional public schools in New York City, of which I was a product, have a system that ensures that a teacher, after three years, gets tenure and can't be fired. You have removed a competitive drive from these people. You have given them a monopoly on their job. My mother was a public school teacher, teaching special ed kids. Charter schools are public schools, but the difference is you have a charter, and you can operate. But if you fail and your kids are underperforming and the parents revolt, you lose your charter. So suddenly, you can fail. You need to have systems that are allowed to fail. If you have a monopoly, whether it is the NIH or USAID or a public school system, you have a single teacher at the front of the room with an asymmetry of 30 or 40 kids in an overcrowded classroom, and they have a monopoly, and they cannot be fired. You want people that can be fired, because if you can be fired, you are highly motivated to be competitive. You want systems that are highly competitive. That is why we have SpaceX and Blue Origin, and they're out-competing NASA in some things, because they are highly competitive. Coney Island Prep, the charter school that I founded 15 years ago, has been an amazing experience. This is my last year after being chair for 15 years. Growing up in Coney Island, kids wanted to be rappers and ball players. That's what I grew up on: hip hop and basketball. The odds of being either are infinitely low. Every time that Puff Daddy or Jay-Z, well, he wasn't actually as bad, but Russell Simmons, would come to town and be like, "Keep it real." That was a euphemism for "maintain the status quo and buy my stuff; be a consumer." What we did was flip the script and said, "No, you're going to be a producer. You're going to produce content, science, writing. You're going to be somebody that is producing something that is valuable to the rest of society, and we're going to change the heroes that you have, and you're going to celebrate different people." So that was really important: very high expectations, strip them of having to compete over wearing Air Jordans, and everybody's got a uniform. When you enter in kindergarten, you are entering class of 2035, not kindergarten. There's an expectation that you are going to college, and for 80% of these people, they are the first to attend college in their family, in a family of four that's making less than $30,000. It's insane. Go to the other side, Santa Fe Institute. It's run by a guy, David Krakauer, who to me is like the ultimate rebel scientist. He is so irreverent and has so many ideas, but he loves to attract outside-the-box thinkers. The beautiful thing about SFI, the Santa Fe Institute, is you get somebody that's an earthquake seismologist and somebody that's an expert in algorithms for markets, and they're able to connect. They find these interesting parallels, like a power law distribution of quakes in the market that follow the quakes in Ecuador. Somebody is an ant specialist in the behavior of ants and how mathematically ants, with no understanding of math, perfectly align with 180-degree distance, their food source, and where they put their dead. There's all these interesting phenomenons, and you get these multidisciplinary people that are sort of freaks and geeks. Irreverent, might not fit into traditional institution, and you put them together, and it's like a legion of science. So I love being in those kinds of cultures. They're highly competitive. Scientists love, particularly young, ambitious scientists, to rip down the old guard. That's what you're trying to do. Same thing with musicians. My kids don't want to listen to my music. I mean, they do, but they're defined by their own music and their genres. So it's the same thing with all these fields, and you just want competition and the space to let them grow. **Jackson:** [00:59:34] The simplest explanation of where we've gone wrong in a lot of the bureaucratic, institutionalized government academic stuff is simply that we have lost the survival of the fittest. We have allowed those things to calcify. There are plenty of new consequences that come when you have competition, but those are... It's similar to when you have a bad monopoly in the private sector: you have bad products that are produced. **Josh:** [01:00:04] The first time my wife and I, both again, left-center-left, had to go to the passport office, or the post office, or the DMV, we were pretty much destined to become Republican if we were logical. You ask: "What is going on with the system? Why are there not four different competing passport offices fighting to be the fastest, most efficient, cheaper, and best?" The first time Uber came out, taking on the Taxi and Limousine Commission monopoly, you think, "This is so much better. I don't have to jump out into the street and put my hand up and hope that, because I'm the wrong skin color, they're not going to pick me up." I just press a button. There's just a better way, and you want the better ways. You think: "We're never going back to that way." The only way to beat "that way" is to destroy monopoly. The only way to destroy a monopoly is with competition. The way you get competition is by having these institutional imperatives with people that are highly motivated, with chips on their shoulders: freedom, capital, and rules that let them go and compete and fail. ## [01:00:56] **Josh:** Accomplished Yet Childlike - Finding the Edges **Jackson:** We have a little bit of time left, so I want to turn to some questions about you. I've described you before to people as this baffling combination of wisdom and childlikeness. It's this unbelievable fervor and curiosity and energy. There's a *Whole Earth Catalog*/*Steve Jobs* line, "Stay hungry, stay foolish," which I feel like you really embody. I'm curious: one, where do you get your energy; and two, how do you bring such a beginner's mindset to so many contexts despite being so accomplished and prolific? **Josh:** [01:01:34] I think it is just entirely intellectually competitive. At times, it does me great disservice because I piss people off. They think I'm a jerk, a dick, an asshole. Many times I am. But I like to be right, and I like to be intellectually competitive. I am almost always asking, when I finish a meeting with somebody, "What are you reading? What are you binge-watching? What are you inspired by?" And I get recommendations. Now, most of the time, somebody says, "Oh, I just read this book." I can tell a lot about somebody. If they're like, "Oh, I just read the Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson," boring. Not because it's Walter Isaacson or Steve Jobs, but just like, everybody's read that. But if somebody's like, "Oh, I was just reading this book from the 1940s that somebody gave me about..." That is interesting, because you're going off the beaten path. You're comfortable breaking from the herd. You're not reading the New York Times bestseller list. When I read the papers—and I read something like 25 or 30 papers in the morning—I skim through them. Front page, irrelevant. It's what everybody knows. C22, where the editor has basically said, "Oh, this isn't really worth the news that's fit to print," I think, "Oh, that's interesting. That's a story that nobody has seen yet." That's inspiring. My wife loves top 40 music. I can't stand pop songs. I want the weird, edgy stuff: Haxan Cloak, Mars Volta, Deftones. People that maybe there are 200 listeners or 2,000 listeners. But I find my tribe if I go see them in concert, but otherwise, nobody's listening to my stuff. So I like finding that, and it's entirely not by some virtuous pursuit of truth and interest. It is entirely intellectually competitive. I want to know something that you don't know so that I provoke in your response, "Holy shit, he's smart." It's entirely driven by a vainglorious, now self-aware pursuit of status by being intellectually competitive and knowing something that somebody else doesn't know. When I find out that somebody knows something that I don't know, I have this deep, almost obsessive insecurity that I need to rectify that and get smart on that as quick as possible. In what we do on a daily basis, I am encountering scientists all the time, and they come in, and they talk about this particular biological pathway, or they're talking about this thing in material science for space. I'm like, "Oh shit, I don't know about that. I need to learn." So I am confident that we will always be on the frontier because we have a culture here where people are intellectually curious, to be open to whoever's coming in with a crazy thing that they want to do. And we're going to believe in them. We're going to research. Sometimes we will invest and then investigate, so we actually put capital at risk and then try to figure out what's going on. **Jackson:** [01:03:45] Throwing your hat over the wall. **Josh:** [01:03:48] And that, to me, I hope until the day I die, or the day that they wheel me out of here because I've gone mentally infirm or something, that I get to do that. ## [01:04:07] Breadth and Depth: a Heat-Seeking Ability to Go Deep **Jackson:** You are so multidisciplinary: science and research, investing, finance, macro value, media and culture, fiction, history, philosophy, politics, and on and on. You have this line, "Funnel wide and filter high." A nice incarnation of the explore/exploit function. You've also said, "I want to be able to converse about everything." That's clear. I don't have to focus, but clearly, you *do* focus. You have a heat-seeking ability to focus, maybe it's on a shorter time horizon and you go on to the next thing. Do you have strategies or tools or methods that allow you to do that? When you're patrolling the surface and then you go way down in the submarine, how does that mechanically happen? Otherwise, you could easily be the type of person who could talk for five minutes on everything, but if you push past that, there's nothing there. I know that's not true. People can tell that in this conversation. So how do you actually do that? When it comes to, "I'm going to spend six weeks deep on this thing," or "three years on nuclear," or whatever it might be, how do you actually do that? **Josh:** [01:05:06] It starts with competitive fervor. It starts with an understanding that I think I know what the consensus is in a market, and then I try to find the varying perception, the thing that other people aren't talking about. So it's almost like Sherlock Holmes, *Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time*, what's the sound you don't hear? When I got really interested in nuclear, it was because everybody was talking about solar, wind, biofuels, and ethanol. It's like, what are people *not* talking about, and why? **Jackson:** [01:05:24] It's the exception. **Josh:** [01:05:25] It's the exception. I started learning as much as I could about nuclear power, including modular reactors, uranium producers, and fuel supply. Then I thought waste was a really interesting problem that nobody was focused on. We ended up starting a company, and then we got lucky when Japan got unlucky. We started a company that focused on the Fukushima disaster by accident, and it returned the entirety of our first fund. But that started as a crazy brain fart born in a contrarian idea. I went super deep, went to conferences, and talked to probably 350 people over the course of a year and a half. I spoke with old guard people, young guard people, and people that were discouraging me. I just love doing that. I love going down a rabbit hole, but it generally is for a short stint of time. I get smart enough, and I learned this from one of our lead partners, Larry Bach. He said, "Every scientist you talk to, you need to learn enough so that the next scientist you talk to, you know a little bit from what the last person talked to you." They're sort of in their own silo, so they may not know what that last scientist knows. If you can reach into the other person's discipline, then, suddenly, they wonder how you know about this. So, Alex Wiltschko spent his entire life getting a PhD under Bob Datta, who trained under Richard Axel, who won the Nobel Prize for olfaction. Alex does a company, starts it, sells it to Twitter, does another company, and goes to Google. At Google Research, Google Brain, he starts the digital olfaction group, asking, "Can we create Shazam for smell?" By the time serendipity happened, I'm on another board with a guy, Dave Schenkein, at Google Ventures on a cutting-edge thing for CRISPR delivery called Aera. I share this thesis: I'm looking for somebody that knows how to digitize smell and reproduce it. That's a directional arrow of progress. It's an inevitability. What are we missing? Is it the sensors? Is it the hardware? Is it the chemical combinatorial? Is it the map of smells and odors? He says, "You got to talk to this guy, Alex Wiltschko." Totally random and serendipitous. I meet Alex and he's like, "Holy shit, I have never met anybody that knows as much about the space," and this is a guy who's obsessive about it. **Jackson:** [01:07:16] Part of that is also that it's so niche. You maybe weren't that much of an expert on it, but you had done so much more work than the incremental person. **Josh:** [01:07:23] I did work, in part, because I was motivated by that feeling that I have of either becoming an expert or versed enough when I think that other people aren't right. Geopolitics is another example. Everybody's like, "Oh, everybody's an armchair geopolitical expert about the thing of the day." **Jackson:** [01:07:37] Right. **Josh:** [01:07:37] Most people are like that. You get smart, you learn something, and you're posting on Twitter. A lot of people talk about the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. He was one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute, discovered the quark, and wrote an incredible book, *The Quark and the Jaguar*. He was famous for this idea: Let's say there's something on the front page about physics, or, for him, particle theory, subatomic particles. You read this thing in the *New York Times* or *Wall Street Journal*, and you're like, "What a piece of crap. These guys know nothing." Then you turn the page, and you forget that they know nothing. But now you're reading about war and media, and you think, "Oh, that's interesting." We all do it; there's an element of that. But I am competitively driven to figure out what other people are not talking about and get smart enough. So, geopolitically, everybody's talking about Ukraine and Russia. Everybody's talking about Israel and Gaza. Everybody's talking about China and Taiwan. What are people *not* talking about? The Sahel and Maghreb in Africa. How do I come across that? Maybe there's a small article in *The Economist*. Maybe I was at a Council on Foreign Relations event, and somebody mentioned this. They say, "Hey, there's a lot of violent extremists that were coming from Afghanistan or Syria, and they're going to Mali and Sudan and Niger and Chad." I think, "Oh, that's interesting," but nobody's really talking about it. So, the thing that people aren't talking about -- just like the band, just like that piece of art, just like the neighborhood, just like the new restaurant -- is the thing that piques my interest. **Jackson:** [01:08:54] It makes it easier to focus, in some sense, by subtraction. **Josh:** [01:08:57] The investment that I'm going to make in getting smart about that is likely to yield social currency to me. So I go deep and learn everything I can about Sahel and Maghreb, and then I put it into a story, and I start telling that story. Now I have an idea. When I talk to people that are experts, Africom military folks or former diplomats, I say, "This area is one terror event projected into Europe away from becoming our next Afghanistan." I watch their reaction, and they agree. I have an interesting thesis. I continue. "You've got Russian mercenaries on the ground." They agree. "You've got Chinese infrastructure plays for telecom and water and roads and dependency. You have violent Islamic extremists that are coming in." They respond affirmatively. In science, you put some of these theses out there, and you get feedback. Maybe it's actually this region that's the problem, or something else. You correct your thesis, and then the next time I tell it, it gets better. So it's storytelling combined with a competitive pursuit of having a thesis that other people don't have. Most recently, I was inspired by the fact that everybody, I felt two years ago, was racing because of the low cost of capital. The cost of capital is like a tractor beam for the future. When the cost of capital is really low, 1% or 2% interest rates, it's like a 20-year far-out idea becomes a 20-month frenzied project. Elon has an ability to lower the cost of capital in anything he does. But on average, most people were pursuing things like Hyperloop and space elevators. So I'm looking, saying, "Everybody's going from SaaS into deep tech, and we've been here sort of in the wilderness alone." What are people not talking about? With low interest rates, everybody's funding growth. When you think about a financial statement, you've got CapEx, you've got growth and maintenance. Maintenance is really unsexy. Nobody's talking about it. Suddenly, I go deep on this idea of maintenance. I'm like, wait a second, this is logical. If I'm a CFO or the board and I'm thinking about capital allocation for a company, all of a sudden, I'm not thinking about how do I spend more money if the cost of capital rises. Why would the cost of capital rise? You've got a de-risking or a pivot away from China and more domestic onshoring. You have a slightly more jingoistic new administration. You have a lot of purported dry powder that maybe is actually wet, because people are under-reserved. There's a lot of reasons that the cost of capital would rise. So if the cost of capital rises, the incremental decision that a big company is making outside of AI and for CapEx, is not going to be for growth. It's going to be for how do we maintain our existing systems. Then I go and I start sharing that with people in different disciplines. In the military, you talk to Sam Paparo, who's the head of INDOPACOM. He'll say, "My '69 Camaro, properly maintained, will blow your 2024 Tesla out of the water." The same thing is true in military systems. We spend 20-30% on operations and maintenance. There's no company today that's really focused on high-tech surveillance, sensors, robotics, and automation for maintaining these big systems. That's how theses develop. I try to find the weak signal, construct it into a narrative, test that narrative, refine it, and then we go deploy capital. **Jackson:** [01:11:53] You're obsessed with illuminating the darker parts of the field of view. **Josh:** [01:11:57] I think so. And, apropos, Fiat Lux: let there be light. ## [01:12:03] Managing Dowsides and Lessons that Could Have Been Learned Sooner **Jackson:** I'm a strong believer that genius and dysfunction are two sides of the same coin. Are there deficiencies or dysfunctions, at least in the way you viewed them previously, that you have leaned more into over the years that you wish you had leaned into earlier? **Josh:** [01:12:19] Yes, this relates to mindfulness meditation for the individual. I am highly emotional, vengeful, and vindictive. It is not a great personality trait that I would want my kids to model. Thankfully, I have counterparts in both my wife, Lauren, and my co-founder, Peter, that have the antithesis kind of personality. So it's a balancing thing. If I was alone, I'd probably be more self-destructive. Having a partner that provides a yin and yang to balance out the positivity and negativity is important. The single most important thing that I wish I would have learned, which I only learned less than a decade ago through family therapy, is the idea of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). I can condense down all the money and the time that we spent into a few things. When somebody is upset, whether it's my daughter, son, my wife, a partner, or a CEO, the worst thing you can do is debate them on why their feelings are ridiculous. My daughter might be upset because she can't get her shoe on. I used to react by yelling at her, "What are you doing? Just get your damn shoe on. We gotta go!" My wife would say something, and I'd respond, "What do you mean?" These things lead to fights and conflicts. A CEO or CTO might be upset about their CEO, and invalidating an emotion just adds fuel to the fire and makes them feel misunderstood. Saying, "Calm down, you're freaking out," is the worst thing you can say. So I learned that if my daughter's upset, I can say, "I completely understand and can see you're really upset," in a sincere way. Not, "I can see you're really upset," which is totally different. But genuinely saying, "I can see you're really upset" leads to a feeling of exhalation and validation. Validate the emotion. It doesn't mean you have to agree with the person. So I can say, "I can see you're really upset, and you can't punch your sister in the face." The second thing is never say "but." People learn this from improv to inspire creativity. The second you say "but," you invalidate everything that came before. People in relationships say things like, "Jackson, I love you, but..." The second you say "but," you invalidate, and you're basically presaging that you're about to be critical. If you just change that to an "and," such as, "I love you, and what you did made me feel..." people are more receptive to it. In both cases, you're otherwise provoking them to just be defensive and become more emotional. I'm very grateful. My wife, one of her best friends is this woman, Molly Carmel, who's a psychologist and therapist. She focuses on eating disorders and has helped extraordinary people. She really helped us with this as a family and has become an integral part of reducing the dysfunction of dysregulated people that are highly emotional. My wife and I are both alpha people. My kids are all alpha people. So that has made us a way tighter, more loving, more understanding family. We're imperfect at times, but it's just like, that is something I wish everybody would learn. I wish that we would teach it in schools. It doesn't take any of the ambition or intensity out of your pursuit of wanting to be competitive, but it makes you more effective. I learned that my daughter doesn't walk into a room, a CEO doesn't walk into a room, and one of my partners doesn't walk into a room thinking, "You know what? I really want to say something really stupid and piss everybody off right now with horrible consequences." No. You just suddenly become empathetic, realizing they don't have the skills to walk into this situation, regulate their emotions, and be effective. So that is the biggest thing I wish that I would have learned earlier. **Jackson:** [01:15:52] In some sense, that allows you to lean more into being who you are, assuming you have that scaffolding or those guardrails. ## [01:15:58] Control, Past, and Future **Jackson:** You seem to be someone who cares a lot about control, although you've talked also about maybe getting into surfing and some of the Zen there. But you're obsessed with imagining failure. You're obsessed with maximizing outcomes and information. What is your current relationship? Have you eased up on that in any way? Have you loosened your grip on control in any way? **Josh:** [01:16:19] I don't think so. My kids and my wife say, "You're still a control freak." I tell myself the story that some of these physical pursuits, like surfing or jiu-jitsu, involve things that you literally can't control. There's a poetic, romantic aspect of it that I'm self-aware of, and it is true: you versus the ocean, the ocean wins every time. But you learn techniques and how to be calm, and you end up being better. It's the same thing in jiu-jitsu, where if I try to use strength and force, I lose every time. Then you learn technique and how to be calm, and you wait. In both of those cases, it feels very different than basketball, which I love. I feel like through repetition--the basket is not moving. Your defender is going to change all the time. Your teammates are going to change. The situation is going to change, opportunity to pass or shoot or defend, whatever. But I feel like every time I surf, the waves are different. The water conditions are different. You might be on a different board. Every time you fight in jiu-jitsu, it's the same sort of thing in that it's just different every time. **Jackson:** [01:17:27] So life's closer to surfing than basketball, I think. **Josh:** [01:17:28] I think so. And you also are not going to have a risk, other than heart attack maybe, of dying in basketball. But I would say those two pursuits physically are the closest that I can get to meditation, because I cannot really sit still. If you accept the premise that anxiety is nervousness, forecasting, or simulating--but sort of emotional distress about the future, and wanting a sense of control about the future--and depression is feeling the exact same thing about a different time, which is the past. People are upset; they're stuck in something; they can't get out of it. They feel regret. They're basically two different temporal extremes: anxiety in the future and depression in the past. To be in the moment is like you're not thinking about the future or the past. When surfing, you're like, "Don't die, catch a wave." In jiu-jitsu, you're like, "Don't get submitted." **Jackson:** [01:18:18] The stakes being high actually helps you settle into it. **Josh:** [01:18:21] So, I think in those cases. Now, I also think that I am emotionally or intellectually aware of where that comes from. Again, this is a story of my life and a story that I tell myself. You know, you can go to the Ted Chiang story about... **Jackson:** [01:18:36] "Story of Your Life," I should say. **Josh:** [01:18:38] My mother was entirely well-intentioned. She was and is an extraordinarily loving mother and an incredible model for me of a mom who sacrificed everything for me. When I was eight, on August 28, 1986, there was a knock on the door, and there were two detectives. They were coming to take me to my dad. My mother did not prepare me for this. She knew what was happening, but I think she couldn't. And so for me, there's this moment that I've processed through therapy: leaving my apartment, walking down the hall with these two strangers, and going to see my father, who I hadn't seen in six years. My world got pulled out from under me. So this pursuit of control, to me, in a "little t" trauma psychological sense, is very rooted in the idea that the world can change in a second. Failure comes from a failure to imagine. Failure is my psychological protective mechanism of trying to avoid the pain, the stress, the panic of what could happen. If I'm constantly thinking about all this bad shit that can happen, which is itself this act of negative creativity, then I can be emotionally prepared. **Jackson:** [01:19:43] Right. **Josh:** [01:19:44] I try not to project that onto my kids. I try to do it as a practical thing, but to them, they know another quote from me, which is that it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. So, an umbrella, an extra sweater, some money, an extra credit card, a toothbrush, whatever, just make sure you have it. ## [01:19:57] Learnings from Mom **Jackson:** What's the most important thing you learned from your mom? **Josh:** [01:20:02] High expectations. Selflessness. She used to always say when I was younger, as I think probably every parent does, "You won't understand until you have kids, you know, why I do this," or whatever. I say those things to some of my kids now. I've got three: 15, 12, and 9. And I understand what they don't understand, because I didn't understand it when my mother understood it. Eventually, they will. But I think that's it. To me, the single most important asset, the single most important thing that I have in my life, is my nuclear family. I worry that because I didn't have that growing up and I have it now, that my kids might take it for granted. So, we talk a lot about my childhood. **Jackson:** [01:20:38] Yeah. **Josh:** [01:20:39] But yeah, that to me is the most important thing I learned from my mother is the selflessness of her sacrifice for me, truly. You can't understand that until you become a parent, that you go from being basically focused on yourself to suddenly, I would throw myself in front of a bus for this little alien that is just puking and pooping on you. ## [01:20:57] Trust and learning from Optimistic Partners **Jackson:** My last question, you've talked about, I think you briefly mentioned earlier, both your wife and your partner, Peter, on the business are optimists, maybe slightly to your cynicism. Where have they swayed you most on the optimistic front? **Josh:** [01:21:12] Both of them often say the same thing to me, which is, "Why do you need to pick a fight with that person? What do you gain? What are you solving for? How does that benefit you or us?" Oftentimes, they're right. But there's some aspect of me that thrives on conflicts and confrontation, and neither of them need that at all. Pete is a total peacemaker. If we have a conflict at a company, Pete is the number one person we will send in to fix it because he truly can understand and empathize with people. It is a superpower of his. I think Lauren is the same way. She has an extraordinary intuition and understanding of people. We'll be watching a TV show, and I'll say, "I don't understand." She's like, "How do you not understand what's going on between those two people?" So that is probably the thing that I've learned from them: You don't need to pick a fight with everybody. A combination of my friends growing up, we all chided each other. Brooklyn is a tough place. I don't know. I thrive on conflict, but they've tempered that. **Jackson:** [01:22:19] Has your ability to trust people evolved as a result of either of those relationships? **Josh:** [01:22:25] No. I think I still expect -- and that is, frankly, having a good balance. Pete's default is to trust people, and if they let you down, okay. My protective mechanism is to assume the worst. If I can't figure out your agenda, then I'm really distrusting. If I can understand what drives and motivates you, and I at least have a model, a framework, a narrative for what is driving you, then I feel comfortable. ## [01:22:54] Legacy **Jackson:** Okay, I know I said last question, but one more. You answered a question in the vein of legacy in the past by basically saying you want to be on your deathbed surrounded by kids and people you love. It's selfish, but you hope they'll really miss you. I don't know when that was, at least a few years ago. Thinking about that now, thinking about that in the context of so much of what we talked about and Lux and your life's work, what do you want to be remembered for? **Josh:** [01:23:17] I read obituaries every day. Sometimes I post the interesting ones. It's never for the achievement that some stranger is going to celebrate. Think about the great iconic people like Steve Jobs. I used to have this debate with one of my best friends, who's a famous journalist. He was like, "Steve Jobs is one of the most beloved people." I'm like, "By strangers that don't know him." But a lot of the people that were the closest to him resented him. They weren't like, "Good riddance," but they were really unsettled. I watched when my step-grandfather died. His son at the funeral, who he was not close with and did not have a relationship with, threw dirt on the grave, not in an honorable way, but in a "good riddance" way, and walked off. It was like this animus, and I was like, "Holy shit, I do not want that." I deeply want my kids to -- very much like that Warren Buffett quote of Don Keough from Coca-Cola. His eulogy was like, "Everybody loved him." Everybody does not love me, and they will not love me. But the people that I care the most about, which are effectively my kids, my wife, and my closest friends, they are the people that matter most in my life. **Jackson:** [01:24:25] Thank you. This was great. **Josh:** [01:24:27] Great to be with you, man.