A (4:49)

Yeah, let's do that. Because when we first talked about it, I like the sequencing you put in place here because it's one thing to like be a visionary and have all sorts of ideas, right. But they have to be. You have to make the vision a reality.

B (5:06)

Right.

A (5:07)

And so I'm very interested in the roadmaping and the risk. Let's get deeper into that. Do you find that a lot of, say, startups, for example, that take funding from VCs or other sources, do you think they're doing this right? Or do you think that they're just so consumed by like, what they're focusing on, that roadmapping, risk assessment, etc. Often gets overlooked?

B (5:33)

I think that it often gets overlooked. Right. So obviously there are some startups that do it very well, but it both gets overlooked. And also to some extent the incentives are not, not to do that. Right. Because the whole idea with first roadmapping and then doing de risking experiments is that there are sort of like Many stages at which, if you're being honest, you would say, like, actually this is not a good idea. We should not be pursuing this. But you know, you take a bunch of money and your investors are not going to say, oh, okay, like that's, that's fine, like shut it down. Like, you know, it's like, we tried, like, everybody go home. The push is much more towards, like, okay, now you, like, you need to like pivot and really try to find, okay, where could we build this technology towards it, which is not necessarily bad, Right. Like, that can lead to great things. Right? Like this is how like Slack became Slack. Right. Like it started as a video game and then they were like, okay. But I also see it very often when it's. There's sort of like more general purpose technologies. Right. Like where, you know, there's like this very broad vision for this technology that could be applicable and applicable in many different areas. And then this sort of like pressure to just do something then pushes them towards some like, very, very niche thing where it gets stuck and then never sort of realizes its full potential. So I think that, yes, in many situations this is not sort of the, the way that startups operate.

A (7:07)

Yeah. And I think the interesting thing there is, like Charlie Munger used to always say, everything comes back to incentives. Right. And the, the forcing function often of like getting big funding often leads, at least in my experience, to situations where people just feel so compelled to stay on the path. Right. Yep. That if you did the right road mapping, you would have said, oh, wait a second, like, maybe not. Do you think that there is a way around that in startup space? Or is it organizations like yours, for example, where you're a nonprofit, you don't have that pressure, as it were. As you said in the beginning, you play the long game. All of which I completely am sympathetic with you on. Do you think that there is a way that a startup, like, what best practice could they follow? And more importantly, could investors follow? Yeah. Where they would be more flexible with startups and pivots.

B (8:21)

Yeah, I think, I mean, I certainly think that there are ways to improve it. Like, I mean, one thing is like tranching, I think is to some extent underused, sort of outside of like biotech. Right. So biotech to some extent is kind of amazing at getting technology out into the world because you have these very, very clear milestones coupled to FDA trials. And so instead of sort of like the start of needing to raise this huge war chest all at once, they can have these negotiations where they're like, okay, if we do these very clear experiments, right? It's sort of like the de risking experiments. If we succeed at success at those looks like this, everybody agrees on that. And we know like, okay, if we hit those, then we'll get more money and because sort of like both the startups and the investors and everybody agrees on what success looks like, what successful milestones look like, and then also knows what sort of like the whole, the whole pipeline is very sort of like certain in a way, right? Like the outcomes are uncertain, but like the structure is very certain. Then that sort of lets this process happen to a large extent. Whereas in other technologies there's you know, like people argue like, okay, like is this data good, is this bad? You know, like the goal, the goalposts will constantly move. Investors will be like, ah, I said that this would be something that I would want to like if you, if you showed this data, I would invest. But now I'm like rethinking it. And so there's much less certainty. So somehow it's almost like this coordination problem, right? Investors were both were more on board with making hard commitments around milestones. And then also I think this is not something that anybody can control, but if somehow we could have more certainty about the outcome, right? In the sense that with pharmaceuticals you're pretty sure if you pass through all the FDA trials, you will unlock a $10 billion market. Whereas with many other technologies the market uncertainty is much higher. And so figuring out that piece, the market uncertainty at the end also lets you then backpropagate all that value through the chain. But I think that that's how I think the system could be improved. There's also the thing of like just funding scales, right? Like most VC funds are 10 year funds. And going back to incentives, it's not just that they're 10 year funds, but that they are always raising their next ten year fund like three to five years into that ten year fund. And then they need to like they're going to their limited partners and saying, hey, they need to show results in those first three to five years that they can then take to their LPs. And so that actually compresses timescales even more. And so yeah, I think that there is something where if you had a 30 year timescale, you'd be able to do very different things than these much more compressed timescales. But then time value of money comes in and the returns that you need on that 30 year timescale are much larger than on the compressed timescale. So It's a tricky problem. That's all to say, I don't know. What do you think? Have you thought about, you know, much more about finance than I do?

A (12:11)

Yeah, I actually have thought a lot about it and I think the temporal aspect of investing vexes many, many investors, both professional and amateur alike. You know, there's this concept of hyperbolic discounting which is you collapse your view to like a quarter or you know, at best in public markets, a three year window. And one of the findings from the research that I did and published in what Works on Wall street is that literally the worst strategy can look good over a three to five year, sometimes even a ten year look back. And so this problem is incredibly intriguing to me because now that we're doing the work that we're doing, we're seeing it in venture as well, we have a mismatch between the timescale of the investors. As you quite rightly say, they've already got the ten year fund, but they're already raising for the next ten year fund. Any normal investor is going to say how have you done? How have you done in that last fund? And so it creates tremendous pressure on the general partner to show results over shorter periods of time. And one of the things that intrigues me so much about what you're doing is you definitely recognize that and therefore most of your commitments are over three to five years, if I'm right, if I remember my reading correctly. And so what I would put back to you, pharmaceuticals are a really interesting example that you gave because many public market investors look at biotech, for example, as lottery tickets. Right? Yeah, it's like there's no traditional form of analysis for public market investors. Very different in private markets. But for public market investors to have even a coherent thing so they get the label right, which is, oh, that's a lottery ticket, which is a horrible label to carry if you're trying to do like world changing species changing advancement and innovation. So you're absolutely right that there is a huge disconnect both on incentives, on timescales, on all of these things. And one of my other ideas which kind of went nowhere was I used to have this idea that I got from a guy, I can't remember his name, but I've read it in the Journal of Portfolio Management and he called it, I think his name was Kirby. He called it the coffee can portfolio. And what he meant by that, that shows you when he wrote it was a long, long time ago.

B (15:05)

He did not come again.

A (15:08)

It's also called the Rip Van Winkle portfolio. And it is this idea that if you could get investors to commit to a much longer timescale, you could literally do things and create things that are not possible if you're looking at the next quarter. And so I definitely like the way that you are setting things up and the benefits of your type of model. The question then becomes, to go further down your list, how do you get that tech out? Let's say you, you achieve because you have this longer timescale. You, you achieve great things because you have a very different class of investors or contributors, et cetera. What happens like when you have a team with a Eureka moment?

B (15:59)

Yeah.

A (16:00)

How do you get that out into the wild?

B (16:02)

The frustrating answer is it depends in the sense that it really depends on the technology. And to a large extent, like, that is one of the big things that we actually try to address in roadmap, right? Like, so you say, okay, assume that we crush it. What happens? And so it could like, and to some extent you need to be so of like doing the work to make that happen throughout the program, right? Like, you can't just get to the end and then say like, okay, cool, let's get this out to the world, right? So the obvious ones are like, okay, it's at the point where it actually makes sense to start a startup or like license it to a large company that can manufacture the thing at scale. It could look like, you know, is it, is it like the. If maybe our theory of change was like, okay, the thing that this technology really needs is like this huge data set that a whole bunch of other people can use to like discover new things. Maybe it looks like open sourcing that dataset or licensing it to a number of different organizations that could use it, right? Like, one example of this would be potentially like building a massive dataset about materials properties, right? Like inputs and outputs that someone could then use to discover a new superconductor or whatever. Like, it could look like potentially like spinning out a nonprofit or like low profit company, right? So you could imagine if the work was to make some kind of new scientific instrument that would be very valuable to the world. But it's like, okay, the market for it is, you know, $10 million a year, right? Like that's not a venture investable thing. But if you get it to the point where you can just sort of like, you know, like sell a product and then use that money to keep people employed, that's a really valuable thing. And then like, so those are sort of like, and then you can start to be like more clever. An example from DARPA is that this one program manager actually went to, I believe it was a biomedical device company and said like, okay, if we get this crazy technology to work, will you promise to integrate it into your products and start selling it? And they're like, we don't think that you'll, it'll ever work, but sure. Right. And so sort of like lining up things beforehand. And so like there's sort of like this whole and then the sort of like a long tail just being clever about how it gets into the world. And like that, that depends. Like it requires planning. It also requires like it puts non obvious requirements on the technology while you're developing it like the way that you want it. Like maybe it needs to interface with this thing that has these like very tight tolerance requirements. And so you need to make sure that you can make a fiber that hits exactly the specs or it won't be able to work. And often and I flag that because if you don't know that you're targeting that even while you're doing the real science behind the technology, you can miss the mark. And that is one of my criticisms of academic technology development where it usually happens in a vacuum and they're like, oh, it works great, but there's some very specific requirement for doing the thing that they claim it need it's able to do. That means that they don't actually doesn't get out into the world successfully.

A (19:40)

And this has been a problem and one of the interests of, one of the reasons I was so interested in the work you are doing is this, this seems to be a problem that has persisted, persisted and gets all sorts of things attached to it that maybe shouldn't be. Let me explain the whole thing with OpenAI being a nonprofit and then suddenly, wow, we discovered an amazing world changing technology. We're not going to be nonprofit anymore. That can often lead people who have very good intentions. Right. I think the intentions when they set up OpenAI were spectacular. Right?

B (20:25)

Yeah.

A (20:26)

Let's make it a nonprofit. Let's be open, let's make it open source, let's do all of these things and then the profits come in and we want, we, we, we want to get them. And so I think that what happens is in my view obviously that colors the views of people who might be disposed towards. Yeah, we need all of this stuff. Right. Like I, I, I don't think they come much more free market adherent than me. But free markets fail in certain circumstances.

B (21:01)

Exist. Yeah.

A (21:03)

And like the idea behind that is yes, the reason free markets work is because there is a failure correction mode usually built into them. And sometimes that can be regulated away. You can get regulatory capture, you can get all of these things that we actually see every day happening, especially in innovative technologies. And I just wonder where the solution lay because DARPA is a perfect example. All very like, I would maybe even love to do a documentary on dar. On darpa because so many people are unaware of everything. DARPA either created itself or helped nurse along and birthed into reality. And yet there seems to be again this tribalism of today I think is toxic because there's the camp that is, no, we don't want any government involvement in this. That's just like they're nothing. Or it's the startup versus the academic. Listen, there is room for all of these and they should work with one another. And I know that's something you're working on. Take us through how you convince people because you're very compelling.

B (22:25)

Well, I mean honestly I'm still trying to figure that out. You are maybe one of the people who are convinced, but it is a smaller number of people than I would like there to be. I just like, I exactly share your sympathies where if a market can solve the thing. Absolutely. Like right, like people, people think that I'm like, like anti market. Like it's, you know, it's like I'm running a non profit. I'm like the only reason I'm doing that is because like I can't go to investors with a straight face and say like I will, I will make you stock market beating returns. Right. Like, like that's the only reason I'm, I'm doing that. But yeah, I think it's the trick is stepping back the way I see sort of like every institution as having some set of work that it does really well and some work that it does poorly and various constraints on sort of like it's like action space or institutional moves that it can make for audio listeners and making air quotes around those. And I think the trick is just being very honest about what different institutions do well and what they do poorly, where the gaps are and then what new institutions we can create to fill those gaps and bridge between them and sort of support this like, like these flavors of work. Right. And so it's like the government is good at some set of things, right? And then we can like break that down as like the NSF is like, the NSF is actually like quite good at funding like really sort of like, I cringe a little bit at the terms like basic and applied science, but like really basic science. Like what happens if we like mix these chemicals together, right? Like that really basic stuff. And like DARPA is quite good at funding like military focused, like weird research. But then sort of like the thing to do is that we need to start like breaking it down and say like, oh, there's this set of work that isn't happening. So for example, the thing that I see secular technologies as really becoming good at doing is enabling work that does not make sense as a product yet is biggest true, but at the same time needs to be useful, right? So we're constantly pushing on like, okay, yeah, but is it useful? And I think that we need many, many more institutions that sort of COVID the landscape to some extent. My bigger theory is that we've almost had institutional consolidation, right? So we've gone from a world where you have this thriving ecosystem of many different institutions and big ones and small ones, to everything being either at least in sort of like the again, air quotes innovation landscape. It's like you have academia and then you have big companies and then you have startups and you have government and that's it. And it's like there are many other potential things and there have been many other potential things. And so I'm like trying to make there be this world again where you have many different institutions and people and ideas can kind of smoothly move between them.

A (25:51)

One of the things that originally attracted me to you and speculative technologies was exactly that. We seem to be in a kind of a holding pattern, at least to me, where the camps that would benefit greatly from working together have an animosity towards doing so. And so you see, on the one hand, in the old days we got a Bell Labs because AT&T had a monopoly on telephones. And so they were essentially kind of a quasi governmental company. Even though they were a private company, they could afford the largesse of funding a Bell Labs that did that type of basic research that you are talking about. And now in the era of efficiency, in the era of breaking monopolies up, not supporting them, that seems to have gone by the wayside. Then you look at government and a lot of the things going on there seem to me at least to be not funding the kind of big, audacious hairy breakthroughs, right? Like moonshots. That to me seems like a missed opportunity. I mean like everyone's on and on about the government spending is out of control and everything. And in many aspects they are correct. But like the amount that we're giving towards research, moonshots, whatever you want to call it, like that seems to me to be an ideal role for a government agency to either oversee and work with all of what we've been talking about, work with academia, work with nonprofits, work with startups to make those things happen. Why isn't that happening?

B (27:48)

I think that there's a fundamental tension around government research where on the one hand, as taxpayers, we want the government to be responsible with our money. On the other hand, in order to do these, these like this really ambitious research, you need to be a little bit irresponsible. Like it is not, like really good research is not a priority, justifiable. And sort of like the, like number one prerogative of government bureaucracies is make sure everything is justified. And so that's, that's, I mean, one big reason why. Like, like I think that sort of, I don't believe that government can and should fund all work that doesn't make sense as a for profit company. Right? Like, like notionally, yes, like governments should respond to market failures. But I think like, that's one piece that really does leave a gap. The other piece is at the end of the day, all government spending, it needs to sort of like go through politics, right? And like you have all the senators and representatives from all the states and each one sort of like is like their incentive is to look out for their state and their state's interests. But what that leads to is sort of like, and not just states, but like there's many different things going on. And so what that leads to is like the government sort of tried to overload the goals of any funding. And so an example that I always go to is the fact that many research grants going to academics, to do science, to do technology, are simultaneously training grants. And so they specify this money must be spent on grad students because not only do we want more science, but we also want a technically trained workforce, which is true, right? Like we, we do want a great technically trained workforce in the US but what that then does is, is now that that money has this dual purpose and it makes it so like, okay, like this money is only earmarked for grad students. So one, not only do you have your technology being developed by actively like trainees, right? It's like saying like, okay, we're going to have this new product, we're just going to have the interns build it. You wouldn't do that. And then two, it means that, say you're a scientist and you're running a big lab and you see potential ways to increase your productivity. There's a way that you could bring in machines to do automation and do all that. You, A, have, have very little incentive to do that because all your grants are going towards just more labor. And B, you're often not allowed to do that. You are literally not allowed to spend that money on equipment. And those requirements are all downstream of the political process that is deciding how to spend this money. And so I think those are both the responsibility piece and then the multipurpose piece are the two reasons why government funding really does have constraints on the amount of, like, really ambitious research that it can go towards.

A (31:20)

In my view, politics itself is downstream of culture.

B (31:25)

Yeah, totally.

A (31:26)

And I wonder whether if we could get a culture that was more focused on making the future a much better place for our. You know, I have six grandchildren. One of my goals with everything we're doing at o' Shaughnessy Ventures, is I want them to live in a great world. I want them to live in a world that is, you know, still coming up with awesome discoveries and innovations and everything. Yeah.

B (31:55)

Heck, yeah.

A (31:55)

And I worry. You mentioned the restrictions put on these grants. It's one of the reasons, in our tiny, tiny way with our fellowships and our grants, we have no restrictions on them. And we do that for this very reason. Right. Who am I to say to tell you how you should run your nonprofit? Right, yeah. And so I think training also becomes important, and that's something that you do. For example, talk a little bit about the Research Leaders playbook, because one of the things that I also like about what you're doing is you're creating material and tools that allow people to get trained in a very different mindset. Right. And so if you wouldn't mind taking us through kind of the seven phases of the research Playbook, that would be helpful.

B (32:51)

Yeah. So just for context, the Research Leaders Playbook is this effectively kind of like a. It's a playbook. It's a textbook for people who are running what we call coordinated research programs. So this is sort of a made up umbrella term for basically ambitious research programs aimed at doing useful stuff but don't make sense in academia or companies. And so, for example, DARPA programs or focus research organizations are sort of two examples of these. But, like, there's this skill set that is very hard to pick up on the job that you need to run these because you both sort of like, need your hat of to some extent, you're an entrepreneur. Right. Like, you're figuring out new ideas, you're bringing together teams to build them, you're getting them out into the world, right? Like, those are all things that entrepreneurs do. But at the same time, to some extent, you're also a scientist in the sense that, like, the thing that really matters is getting to the truth, making the thing work. It doesn't matter, like, how well you can sell it. And so the skills that. This is the playbook. We also run a research accelerator that's sort of like a. Like Y combinator, but for inculcating these skills and getting people to do it. So anyway, that's a lot of background. Let's see. I do not have the exact phases memorized, but the way that I would sort of break it down is like, there's kind of like, program design, right? So this is everything from roadmapping, as I mentioned, but also like talking to lots of people, figuring out, you know, who's on board with a vision, what are their incentives. How do you structure this program, as I was talking about before, so that it will both produce a useful thing and then have it be able to get out into the world, right? So it's. The program design is sort of all around that. And then there's like, actually running the program. And so that's everything from how do you manage misaligned incentives? When do you kill a project? Right? Like, that's really hard. Like, when do you. When you fire people. And then there's like really sort of like technical things, like, you know, like, how do you think about making a Gantt chart for all of these things? And then finally there's like. I think there's being, like, selling this whole thing where at the end of the day, even if you're not selling a product, you still need to sell idea to someone, whether it is. Whether you're pitching, you know, a DARPA program officer or, sorry, DARPA office director, that they should, like, pay you to run this program, whether you're pitching a philanthropist. And then you also need to, like, sell it to the people who are going to sort of join you on the journey. And so that's like a broad overview of the sorts of things that. And I think it's like something that I wish I learned much earlier in my life is that you need all of this, right? So you need the science planning, you need the sales, you need being able to talk to people, but then go really deep on a technical subject. And sort of our current ways of training people don't sort of COVID all.

A (36:00)

Of those One of the natural communities, I would think, that might be interested in funding these type of moonshot, type of basic research that leads to really cool things maybe would be the people who made a pile in other technology and other innovation in any of those things. Are you finding that they're the most receptive to your donor base?

B (36:31)

Not really. There's this attitude that I'm gonna caricature, right? So very few people actually have this level of it. But the thought, and this is really sort of common among the Silicon Valley tech people crowd, which the thought goes, if something is valuable to the world, you should be able to capture enough of its value to make it a good investment, assuming that you have investors who are willing to take on sufficient risks. And if you are unable to capture that value, if you're unable to basically build a company that is super valuable, then either that thing is not actually value, like not actually valuable, or it's a skill issue. And it's just like you are not the right person to capture that value. And so to a large extent, like a lot of tech people don't do philanthropy. And yeah, this is just a thing that I've found over time and I love to. And I think it's also very coupled to this attitude, which is again, kind of well founded, that nonprofits are very inefficient and are kind of a waste of money. And they're not wrong, right? A lot of nonprofits are a waste of money. And so it's like, it's very hard to say, like, no, like, you know, it's like we, we operate like a startup in the sense that, like, we are very conscious of like, how we spend money and we try to be incredibly efficient. And so I think those two couple things actually make it so that a lot of technology people don't fund us. I guess the last piece is that many of the people who made their money off of technology themselves did not do the research to create that technology, right? So most of the, like, they, they definitely created like the software, but like very few people who, who made their money like in the dot com boom or more recently, like did research on transistors, right? Like, they didn't go from, from doing that. And so they don't quite have a great mental model of research and how that works and the things that one should expect from it. And so to some extent I'm trying to educate people and make this pitch that no, this is actually important. An idea I'd love to inculcate in culture is this idea of Paying it forward, basically that like many, many people in tech, like made a lot of money because someone in the past did really important research and that person is not going to be able to capture the value of their research both because like, it's like often there'll be someone who tried something, it failed, and then like, but it gave someone else the idea and it's just like, you can't propagate it back. The timescales are long enough that like, they might be dead. So we can't really pay it back, but we can pay it forward and enable people to do the research that will then enable someone in the future to make a fortune off of some new technology. That is a thing that I would love to incept in culture. I'm not sure how to incept cultures, but very open to suggestions.

A (40:04)

It does seem to me that there is an opportunity there though, because I had a guest on Will Store who wrote I love all of his work, but his probably best known work is the Status Game. And he talks about how I was convinced that I didn't play status games. And so I started reading his work and other works and I sadly concluded that we are all playing status games, all playing status games. And it seems like it's deep in our DNA. And so one of the suggestions that he has in the book, which I heartily endorse, is there's various status games, right. And one is the one we're talking about right here. In other words, you can play a game, a status game, get massive prestige. Let's say you put together a consortium of all of these seemingly unwilling people in technology who have made huge generational fortunes in the pre market. Like, what about putting together a consortium that does this type of funding and what is the rewards you're getting? You're getting a psychic return on value invested. There's a charity that I support called the Acumen Fund and they treat it like venture investing, like the returns that they're getting from their donors. Right. It's like, wow, how cool is it that. And you know, fill in the blank. This person solved microfinance in Indonesia, et cetera. And it does seem to me like if I was trying to orchestrate this, I would maybe turn it into a virtuous status game or prestige game.

B (41:56)

Totally, yeah. I mean, like, I 100% agree. I think, like being honest in front of a whole bunch of people, like, I think operational, like I'm. I'm still figuring out how to operationalize that. Right. Like to some extent you kind of need to bootstrap it somehow, right. Where it's like once it becomes a thing in people's heads that like doing this is high status, then people will continue doing it. But it's like to some extent you need someone weird to have some like, high status wins. And I mean, one thing that some folks have talked about is like, kind of like, you know, like Forbes lists, like having some kind of list for like people who have done the most interesting things with their money or something like that. That's sort of one way. But yeah. And to some extent there's also this tension where I think sort of has almost like a holdover from previous eras of philanthropy, like, you know, like the Rockefellers and Carnegie. There's like, to some extent, like that era sort of put an emphasis on the philanthropists stepping into the background of like not taking credit for the things that they funded. And to some extent, I think that was actually a huge mistake where it's like, yeah, people fund these hundred million dollar buildings at universities, then put their name on it. And it's like, okay, why not just fund a warehouse, spend the rest of that money on actual work and then just put their name on the actual work. And it's like you come up with a new technology and you name it. The names of technologies last, and theories and ideas last much longer than buildings. Right. You know, name units after people. Like, people should be able to like buy units named after them.

A (43:50)

Yeah, I think we're onto something. Because if you look at what gets celebrated, your idea of the Forbes list. Every industry has an award, right? So, yeah, for those who love entertainment, of course, the Academy Awards are the. The King over there or Queen. And TV has it. It has Emmys, et cetera. And it seems to me that those types of things would be not only helpful, but also really great because if you did them right, they would be a celebration. They would be a celebration of that person's contribution toward advancing ourselves as a species. Right?

B (44:34)

Yeah.

A (44:34)

And so it definitely seems to me that that would be a thing that would be good to work on. As you were talking, I was thinking of, I don't know if you're a curb your enthusiasm fan, but I am. And Larry David gave a big section of a building, but he gave it anonymously. And then he, of course got into a very, very tricky situation that he was trying to escape from and was trying to escape into the building which was locked. And there's a scene of him pounding on the door saying, I'm anonymous, I'm anonymous. And So I definitely think that you're right about that in the form of, I mean, like, Andrew Carnegie, classic example. All of the libraries that the United States have are not all. Of course, many of the libraries, especially in smaller towns, they have these beautiful libraries because Carnegie built them all. And those types of things should be, in my mind, celebrated and, you know, encouraged.

B (45:46)

Can I riff on the Carnegie Library, please? Actually, like, back to our previous point about, like, the role of government. I think that the Carnegie Library is actually a really interesting example of collaborations between philanthropy and government that I think we could take lessons from for research in the sense that. So Andrew Carnegie would go to these towns and he'd say, hey, I will pay for this library to be built, but you, the town, need to commit to paying operational expenses for this library. And because, like, a lot of philanthropists just, like, don't want to be on the hook forever for things. And so I think, like, there aren't a lot of things where there's actually, like, something where a philanthropist says, like, okay, like, I will to some extent, like, take on the risk. Right. Like, so I was saying, like, government's not great at doing things that are, like, weird or irresponsible. So it's like, okay, the philanthropist does, like, the, like, the pays for the. To get it to the point where it's responsible enough, and then somehow, like, has this, like, very explicit hand, like, handoff to. To a government, and it actually can tie even further back into the conversation of tranches and milestones, of having more explicit, like, okay, having philanthropy fund some research institution to the point where it has this track record. And then the government's like, oh, okay, now that it has this track record, we'll take it over. I think that's a very underused way of doing things.

A (47:16)

Yeah. I think that if we could get a structure in place where that goes very smoothly, great, great things can come from that. Switching gears a little bit to what you're focused on right now, why the heavy focus on materials and manufacturing?

B (47:35)

Yeah, so in addition to them being awesome, like, I will assert that basically, materials and manufacturing underpin civilization. You know, it's like, we think of. When you think of technologies that really help people, often you think of medicine, you think of things that are addressing climate change. Right. Like, you think of technologies that are really addressing burning problems. But at the end of the day, materials and manufacturing are the things that enable those. So, like, for example, like stainless steel, invented in 1915, you could not have the syringes that we use to deliver Vaccines, you could not have the steel vats that we use to produce most of our medicines. And then you just look like, I put on my historian hat. And you look back in history and just like new materials and manufacturing methods to turn those materials into useful stuff is what enabled all the things like human flourishing. Right. So it's like you unlock, you make iron, and that lets you make things like nails and plows that can plow much more land than you could with copper. But, like, copper was really useful, and bronze still, you do plow a lot more things than equipment like a stick. Right. And then stone tools that let us conquer the world. And so just sort of like looking at the arc of history, it's like we name ages after materials because that's really sort of the foundational thing. So in addition to them being very important, I think they're actually underlooked at. Right. People don't. They're always the thing behind the thing. And it's like most of us don't think about how all the stuff around us was actually manufactured, but that was all manufactured with technology that someone had to invent. And then we're focused on things that I describe as being too researchy to be a startup, but too coordination or engineering heavy to be in an academic lab. And materials and manufacturing fall into that gap much more often than other technologies. And so between that sort of neglectedness, falseness of the gap and importance, those are why we have that focus.

A (49:57)

As you were responding, as you know, we also have a book publisher called Infinite Books. And I was listening to you, and you almost titled a book, you could write the Thing behind the Thing. And harking back to your example of stainless steel. I've never gone down that thought process. Right. Like stainless steel. Yeah, that's the thing behind the thing. But look at everything that resulted from that basic discovery in 1915. What a great. Because again, keeping with the idea, culture is up here. Politics itself is downstream of culture. One of the objectives of what we're trying to do at Autonomous Ventures is look for things to root for. Right. And that sounds like a great use case. Like, I would certainly read a book about, you know, I always quip, we didn't leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones. Right. Yeah. We left the Stone Age because out of the human mind came all of these other concepts like iron and everything else. Steel doesn't exist in nature. It came out of the human mind. Right. Yes. And so that would also kind of tie in with trying to create a very prestigious Calling, if you will, for these new basic materials. Like, for example, I know you're working on nano modular electronics on demand without etching silicon or expensive facilities. Like, how cool would that be? And like, I'm creating in real time here, audience. So let's see if you agree with me. Like the book, for example, or the show, or this could be a movie. This could be a lot of different things, right? To ignite. I. I always think I was so impressed by that JFK speech that.

B (51:55)

Yeah.

A (51:56)

Created the Apollo mission. Created.

B (51:59)

We choose to go to the moon and do the other things.

A (52:03)

Exactly. And. And yet that speech ignited the culture that was like, God damn it, we're going to do it. Even though we had no means at the time that he gave that speech to even conceive of how we're going to get there. Right. And I think, like, right now, musk with the chopsticks catching the rocket, like, believe it or not, people get really inspired when they watch that stuff. And it predisposes many. I hope to think, wow, what if. Right? And so the idea that you could look at things like stainless steel, show all of the things that sprung from that, but then do a speculative one that says what might spring from nanomodular electronics.

B (52:59)

Right. To some extent, that's part of the roadmapping process. Right. This is also a tension with a lot of these technologies, with speculative technologies. Is that little s. Little T. Is that you can have a guess about what it will be used for, but you don't actually know. I suspect the people who are making stainless steel originally, I had no idea that it was like, they couldn't conceive of a bioreactor. Like, the idea, like. Like the idea that it's like, okay, we'll be using the stainless steel as this vessel for, like, E. Coli that we have genetically, like, DNA hadn't been discovered that we were going to go in and like, modify the DNA of these organisms. But these organisms will need this, like, stainless steel vat in order to.

A (53:52)

To grow.

B (53:53)

Right. Like. Like, they wanted to make nice knives and forks, which is great, right? Like. Like, I really like stainless steel knives and forks. But it's both, like, you both want to speculate, but also be aware that there's like, so many other things that one can't even imagine yet.

A (54:15)

Yeah. And that's why I'm such a huge fan of David Deutsch and his book the Beginning of Infinity. If we could get people to reframe things and understand, it seems to me to be part of Our basic human os, to believe that we know everything there is to know. And your example of the stainless steel is a great example. If you look back at the history of innovation, what you find is the original. When they originally came up with motion pictures, motion picture cameras, what did they do? They filmed plays because that's what they were used to. Right. It takes a while for the new use cases to percolate, to bubble up and do all of that sort of stuff. And so it definitely seems to me that if we could change the idea. He's got a great line in the book the Beginning of Infinity where he says, you know, what were people saying about the Internet and Quantum physics in 1900? Well, they weren't saying anything about Internet or quantum physics in 1900 because we hadn't invented them or discovered them yet. And so, as someone who's in the trenches, literally, how do you try to negotiate these seemingly intractable conflicts? Another thing that we've talked about and you've written about is there's. There's a tension right now, and it seems to me to be growing right between, you know, show us your. Your work, your. Yeah, you know, we don't care about what your credentials are. And then, of course, academia cares very, very deeply and in many circumstances, quite correctly, what your credentials are. Like, how do you navigate those two worlds?

B (56:18)

I think, to some extent, like, maybe in one word it would be. Or two words maybe it'd be like, trust and iteration in the sense that are, like, feedback loops where, like, I'm naturally a very trusting person. And so, like, I tend, like, I like to believe that people are capable of great things. So to some extent it's like, okay, like, instead of just going off of, like, having some sense and also thinking about, like, what's behind a credential. Right? So it's like the, like, credentials to some extent, are like a way of just like, of compressing information about what someone's capabilities are. And so instead of just going off of credential, kind of being, like, sort of spend, like, being unlazy and thinking, like, okay, sure, what do I actually want from this credential? So I think about program leads in the playbook. One might think of a PhD, but it's like, you don't need a PhD, but you do need to have been in the trenches, like, doing the hard technical work with deep, deep uncertainty. And that is a thing that one often gets with a PhD, but is also possible to get in many different ways. So that's one way of doing it. And Then also just. I think that you also to some extent build up taste. You can kind of talk to someone for a while and sort of see if they're full of crap. Am I allowed to say that?

A (58:01)

Of course.

B (58:01)

That's. No, this is.

A (58:03)

You can, you can say this is a fully swearing.

B (58:07)

Yeah, so. So, like. Yeah, to some extent. Yeah. You just also have to like tune your BS detector. Right. Like, there are people with like tons of credentials who are completely useless. And so. So I think that's the. So it's like some combination of like, not being lazy and willing to spend the time. And that goes for the technologies too. Right. Where it's like really spend the time to dig into. What are we actually talking about here? Let's unpack it. Let's explore a little. And to your point about the problem becoming worse, I think everybody's attention span has been collapsing. Everybody wants your 30 second elevator pitch. And if they're not excited after a 30 second pitch, they're like, oh, clearly this is worthless. And so I think the trick is to some extent, just like not having that attitude and being willing to really engage with something and dig into it.

A (59:08)

Yeah, I think that the challenges are numerous. Right. Because of everything you just said. And the idea behind the elevator pitch, like what you do is specifically not suited to an elevator pitch. Right?

B (59:24)

Yeah, yeah.

A (59:25)

It is suited to a longer conversation, to a memo to get them to understand exactly what's going on. And it also does seem to me to require pretty high agency, not just on the part of the people who are doing the research. Right. But also on the part of the people who are funding it. Right?

B (59:46)

Oh, yeah.

A (59:47)

Because it seems to me that we have a lot of great historical examples of how we. And again, I'm being nativist here, and I don't mean to, but I live in America and America has a really good history of the private sector endowing libraries a la Andrew Carnegie, of doing a lot of things that in other countries, I used to be the chairman of the board or of the board of the Chamber of Music, Society of Lincoln center, and we had European guests. And they're like, we still can't get over the fact that in America it's all privately funded. All of these amazing orchestras are privately funded because in Europe they're all government funds fund it. And remaining neutral as to which is superior, it seems to me that specifically in America, we should really be leading the way on this, I think, because it's part of our DNA in this country. And what other roadblocks are you seeing? Because to me you're creating aspirational cultures, culture of excellence adventures. This seems to be a tale that makes a ton of sense. And I'm just wondering, have you found that certain funders are more natural funders of this type of research? Could you get, for example, I think of the huge endowments at the Ivies, could you ever convince them to fund something like this and do it in a consortium so that it's not just Yale or not just Harvard or not just Princeton?

B (61:37)

Yeah, I'll certainly try. I don't know. It's a great question. Yeah, I mean talk about institutions that should have a long enough timescale, right. I did a Monte Carlo simulation of our organization. And so I said earlier, I don't think I could say to an investor that we beat the stock market, but on a 30 year timescale, I can say that I think that there's a one in a thousand chance that we will, we will like drastically outperform the stock market. Just like based on this idea that like, okay, there's some chance that like some company will spin out. Right. I don't know. I think it's, it's certainly worth trying. And to your previous point, like, so I'm kind of unabashedly American and I think that like sort of our history of civic organizations, right? Like private civic organizations, to some extent we've moved away from that a little bit and I'd really like to bring it back. It's like, I'm sure, you know the like de Tocqueville story where he's like, the difference between the Americans and the Europeans is like when there's a tree that falls across the road, the Americans just like get a crew together and move the tree. And then the French people just sort of like sit around and wait for the government to come move the tree. And to some extent I really like that culture and I think, I worry that we've moved away from it a little bit. And so I think to some extent, and to some extent I think we are leading. We still. There's way more philanthropy in the United States than anywhere else in the world. We do have a lot of philanthropic funding towards a lot of science. I think that the sort of logical jump that I'm trying to push is one both sort of helping people see that it's not just funding health related things or things that address very immediate problems that will unlock the future and are the market failures, but things that are the thing behind the thing. And that's Just, it's hard for people to wrap their heads around. And so, like, if. Like, yeah, in media. In infinite media and infinite books, like, if you can help people see that, I think that that's incredibly powerful.

A (64:05)

Yeah. I just think that our mission in particular is we think things need rewrites. We think that things need to be reframed. As an example, science fiction. Science fiction, which I love, used to be very, very positive, and then it just became almost in one fell swoop, very dystopia. And no, listen, I get that I loved the road by Cormac McCarthy and literally talk about a downer of a foot, but so beautifully written. And so I'm not saying we all have to be rah rah all the time. I just think that we need to rebalance culture. And like you, I am also unabashedly American. And the thing that I love about this country is that we were kind of. We almost have a different DNA. Right. Because all of the people who came here were. What were they typical? Absolutely not. These were people who would be willing to give up their home country in many circumstances, their families, their loved ones, everything they knew to come take a risk in this country that is not the profile of a normal human being. Right. There's even a book called the Hypomanic what Makes America Unique. Right. And so I definitely think that trying to change the culture is even. Again, that sounds so grandiose. It isn't meant to. It's like, hey, why don't we just get some more books in science fiction that are really not dystopia, that are like, look at all of these cool things that could happen and speculate about them. So it's not Pollyannish or Panglossian. Like, the future so bright, we got to wear shades. We just definitely think a little nudge. A little nudge. Where we celebrate these types of people, where we celebrate the crazy idea like Kennedy's, okay, Mr. President, we have no tools right now to get to the moon, but we're on it. We're on it. Right? And so I definitely think that. That what you are doing is something that I personally want to see much, much more of. And I definitely think that, you know, another thing that might change it is, do you have right now a thing right now with all the various projects that you're working on, what looks the most promising? Because again, if you get a tipping point where something where there was a lot of naysayers and everyone's saying, ah, that'll never work, it's like yeah.

B (66:58)

And then you just need the one win.

A (67:00)

Yeah. Yeah.

B (67:02)

So the honest truth is that most of the projects that we're working on are kind of bottlenecked upstream of showing those results. So we've done some of the de risking projects on this. Making air quotes again, Nanomodular electronics program, which is basically this idea of making a new paradigm for making electronics where instead of etching silicon the way that we've been doing for the past 70 years to make your CPUs and your GPUs, it might be possible to actually make transistors kind of the way that you make chemicals in a mat, ship them anywhere in the world, and then lay them down and wire them together on demand. So we've done some initial work that shows that this is not impossible. Right. So that's the closest thing. But the frustrating part is that I think that the nature of the work that we're doing is it's very hard to tell what's promising until we've actually run. The whole point of these programs is to show what's promising. Whereas if we knew a priori that something was the most promising one, then you almost wouldn't need to do these research programs at all. You'd just be like, okay, this is super promising. Let's go start a company. There's this concept that I have where I call things like lean ideas or fat ideas. And lean ideas are ideas that you don't need that much money to tell whether it's a good idea or not. You don't need that much time or resources. And, like, I think that the market is like, very efficient in. In lean ideas. Right. Like, you can try them out and they. If the ones that are good, they go on to do awesome things. The real trick is, like, these fat ideas where you actually need to. There's just this deep nighty and uncertainty that you need time and resources to even resolve whether it's a good idea or a bad idea. And people are not, as, I mean, for good reason. It's much harder to show whether those are good or bad. So to answer your question, I think nanomodular electronics is the most promising just because that is the one that we had the time and money to put some into. But it's also kind of like asking someone to say which of their children is, like, the smartest. Right. Like, you know. But are you really gonna say it?

A (69:27)

No, you are not. As the father of three and grandfather of six, you are never, ever going to say that.

B (69:35)

Exactly.

A (69:35)

And what I think is Great. And I would invite people listening or watching this podcast if you. If you think of a great way to frame this. Right. Because it seems to me that, like, so much is the way you frame a thing. Right. Totally. I often give the. Probably apocryphal, but I think I saw it actually somewhere. The idea of reframing insurance. Right. When they originally came up with it, it was called death insurance. Guess how many death insurance policies they sold? Like, none.

B (70:09)

Yeah.

A (70:10)

And then some genius came along and said, no, no, no, no. What we're talking about is life insurance. Trillion dollar industry. And so if we have a listener or viewer with this kind of ability to reframe, I think that would be really helpful and it would be great if you put it in the comments, because I don't think that anyone would argue that the goals of what you're doing are stupid, misspent, any. Like, there are. To me, at least there seemed to be. Like, no. If we were de. Risking something. Right. Like, the risks here are obvious. Like, you spent a lot of money and you don't. Nothing happens. Right.

B (70:54)

Yeah.

A (70:54)

But it seems to me that the first reframe should be, hey, this is very important because. And then all of these examples that we've been discussing here and like a way to get people to also elongate their time horizon. The challenges are very numerous. And yet I think that if we can get it all, if we get it reframed to the point where, hey, it's very prestigious to not only work on this basic type research and speculative research, but it's really cool to fund it. And look at this guy. He just won the equivalent of the Academy Award or the Nobel Prize because he or she was the one who just funded, like, the discovery of X. Right.

B (71:48)

Yeah.

A (71:48)

Whatever X happens to be. Because it does seem that you're creating a new natural home. Right. Like, when I first came across what you were doing, my immediate thought was, wow. I thought, like, academia was doing all of this and they're not. And then I thought, well, gee, wouldn't it be great if there was Xerox PARC or if there was Bell Labs? And well, that's passed by too, because of just externalities. So the idea of creating a new home again, I guess the Princeton where Einstein was the center for Advanced Research.

B (72:31)

Yep, that's right down the street.

A (72:33)

Yeah. Yeah. And it just seems to me that to reignite that purpose within academia, that might be a rich vein to mine. I'm sure you've tried that. And like, what are the reactions? Yeah.

B (72:48)

Well, so I think that there's, there's actually a, like, I would say that there's a tension in the, with the incentives in academia between the sort of structure you need to like discover the secrets of the universe, which I think academia is actually very well suited for. You know, it's ultimately an outgrowth in philosophy, right? Like natural philosophy, science. And so there's like this heavy focus on novelty, there's this heavy focus on like, oh, what's interesting. And there's a heavy focus on the individual and sort of all of that. And that's really great for discovering the secrets of the universe and coming up with new ideas. Like, oh, maybe this is what dark matter is, right. I think it's not well suited for what I would call invention or the creation of new useful technologies where it doesn't matter how new the idea is. You know, it's like people like will dismiss it like, oh, that's not new. And it's like, sure, but like nobody's gotten it to work and, but like we've gotten this old idea to work and you need like large teams of like professionals. And so like, I'm also to some extent like, I am a radical in the sense of like, I think very much in terms of like creating new institutions and I don't have as good a sense of like how to reform old ones. But I think to some extent we need to actually unbundle what I call pre commercial technology research from the university and create a new home for it. And perhaps what one could imagine happening is that competitive pressure on academia getting them to up their game. But I also can think of it, I also think that to some extent that's what allows specialization. Like one of the problems with the university more broadly, and this is a completely other conversation, but like as a society we have lumped so many roles into the university that it just is not performing any of them well anymore. And so I think that a thing to do is to really sort of say like, okay, we have this institution that's specialized in doing pre commercial technology research. This institution that's focused on, you know, educating like 18 to 22 year olds. This institution that's really focused on discovering the secrets of the universe. And so, so like that's, that's sort of where I'm like, maybe, maybe we can get academia to reform. But I think the better bet is, is sort of like pulling off different pieces of that into and giving sort of like creating homes for those specific things that can really sort of specialize and do them well.

A (75:24)

Yeah, well, I'm getting the hook here from my producer. That means that we've been talking for an hour and a half. It seems fascinating conversation as, you know, massive supporter of what you're doing.

B (75:37)

Appreciate it.

A (75:38)

It's a thorny topic because if you get it right, the things that can result from this are just so spectacular and so good for our species, good for the planet, good for everybody. And it just seems to me to be one of those questions of fitting the pieces together, just like you said. Maybe it's decoupling, maybe it's like having this is the group that is trying to discover the secrets of the universe, et cetera. But I think we have a true need for it now. I think people are primed for it now too, quite frankly. Yeah, like, yeah, people are just so tired of the, you know, that'll never work. And, you know, that's just like so contrary to the. The basic DNA of at least America and hopefully of many societies around the world. So I.

B (76:36)

Absolutely.

A (76:39)

Well, we'll get. Actually, now the team's going to hate me, but, like, I'm going to say, hey, start thinking about this because I think there might be something there. Right? I think there might be something there. Well, Ben, as you know, our final question on Infinite Loops is you get to be emperor of the world for one day and you can't kill anyone and you can't put anyone in a re education camp, but what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can speak two things into it that will incept the entire population of the world for the next day. Whenever their next day is, they're going to wake up and they're going to think that the two things that you incepted them with were their own ideas. And they're going to say, you know what? Unlike all of those other times when I had these great ideas and didn't act on them, this time I'm going to start acting on these two things today day and continue. What are you going to incept in the world's population?

B (77:40)

So I don't know if this counts as the first one, but I figured out the, like, equivalent of wishing for more wishes with this question, which is basically incepting everybody to wake up and read everything that I have written on the Internet and take all of it very seriously. That's the hack. Right. So I'll use that one as my first one.

A (78:00)

Well done. Well done. Okay, first, so they're doing that. What's number two?

B (78:04)

The second one is this idea that frontiers are absolutely critical for humanity and we A, don't really have physical frontiers anymore. B, they are what leads to positive sum games that I know you talk about a lot. And C, that we really do need new technology and new technology paradigms to create new frontiers that benefit both the people on the frontiers and the people who stay at home. And so I think that that's. That's the other thing I would leave people with.

A (78:40)

I love both of them. How can people find you, Ben, online and otherwise?

B (78:45)

Yeah, so I too active on Twitter.

A (78:51)

You and me both.

B (78:53)

My handle is just benreinhardt. So just my name. You can find our website at Spec Tech. That's like Spec Tech. Between those two things, I think those are probably the best place to pay attention to what we're doing.

A (79:11)

Fantastic. Ben, thank you so much for your time. I'm a big supporter.

B (79:15)

Jim, thank you so much for inviting me.

A (79:17)

Let's hope that 10 or 20 years from now, if I'm still around, I hope to be do it.

B (79:21)

Well, that's the whole. That's the other point. Right. Like invent stuff so that.

A (79:25)

Exactly. Let's still doing this. Yeah. So I'm still kicking. All right, Ben, thanks so much for joining.

B (79:30)

Thank you, Jim. Take care.