How This Investor Helped After a Nuclear Disaster

How's it going, Josh? Good. Nice to see you. Meet Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing director at Lux Capital. New York born and bred, Josh doesn't only talk about investing [music] in hard science and tech, he actually does it. Basically, he puts his money where his mouth is. So, so this is the rebels of science. For over two decades, Josh and his partners have been building a portfolio that really reflects their love of That's the world I want to live in. I want to make it so. Most people consider that arrogance of the highest order. We consider it inspiring.

He's an autodidact that's completely self-taught. And like one of his favorite biologists, E.O. Wilson, he values consilience or interdisciplinary that the most interesting companies are at these interstices [music] between psychological element of success. I have a chip on my shoulder, and I always say that chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. This book gave him a desire to prove himself as an investor and likely puts

him on the same wavelength as similarly hungry founders. As they say, like attracts like. In fact, Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda Space, happened to just be working out of Lux that day. Do you know Delian? Of course, I know Delian. What's going on, man? So, what are you up to? Varda's actually a Lux portfolio company, and if you want to learn more about Varda, check out this video we made about space factories together. But the entire premise of your show, right, American Alchemist, it starts whether it's out of a science fiction conception or somebody's inspired by something, and it's a combination of the capital, the talent, which then begets

more capital and more talent, and then it becomes very real. Josh's brain has two speeds, fast and People say that if history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. So, feel free to play this interview at half speed or drink 20 cups of coffee. Regardless, you should get out a notepad and prepare to be educated, charmed, and inspired by this week's American Alchemist, founder of Lux Capital, Josh Different parts of the brain have different activities. But you know that, don't you?

You know people like you who talk a lot. Maybe you should interview me. started with having no money. And so, I grew up in Cornell and Brooklyn, single mom, [music] school teacher, and was reasonably intelligent or thought I was reasonably intelligent, particularly compared to peers who I met in college who were born wealthy, and I resented it. I was jealous of it. I had a chip on my shoulder. And I always say that chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. And it's one of the great character traits I

love finding in entrepreneurs. Venture capital, which is something I didn't even know existed really until like, you know, the late '90s right around the time I was graduating from Cornell. It was the perfect hybridization between science and finance. Science, this endless frontier, brilliant people. It sort of matches my own, you know, undiagnosed ADD of being interested in lots of different things. And venture capital of being able to fund these people and potentially make a fortune was the thing that really inspired me. And then when we ultimately started Lux, Latin for light, we were like, okay, you know, where do we focus in the space? Radioactivity we see in the environment from Fukushima is volatile elements that

came out as it was melting down. In 2008, Lux co-founded the company Kurion, named after the Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie. [music] The company sought to tackle a problem previously thought to be unsolvable, nuclear waste cleanup. Kurion was one of the first companies to be able to mass extract cesium and strontium from high concentrations of salt water. In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Kurion was uniquely positioned to help in the cleanup. This black swan event took Kurion's revenue from 1 million to nearly 200 million in just a

few years. The biggest unsolved problem with nuclear was what do you do with the waste. The really big problem was the waste that you had at the pre- and post-Cold War bomb-making sites. And I never even heard of these things. Most people never heard of Hanford or Savannah River or Idaho National Labs. 25% of the Department of Energy's budget, when you actually read it, and I can assure you it's not scintillating is spent on nuclear waste cleanup. So, the DOE is talking about solar and wind and biofuels and a transition from a carbon economy, but most of the money is going to cleanup of nuclear waste. So, we started this company, I think we had $3 million in at a $3 million pre-money

valuation. Nobody wanted to touch this. In fact, I went to Arno Penzias at NEA who discovered cosmic background radiation, right? And then like won the Nobel Prize. Uh and and I'm sitting with him and we brought in this little ball of non-radioactive glass made in and he was like, "Get this out of here." He was freaking out. It was really great moments in my life. Um nobody wanted to invest in this thing. And um they were like, "It's speculative." You know, they wanted solar, they wanted wind, biofuels, electric cars. Nobody wanted nuclear waste. We end up funding it and then frankly we got very lucky when Japan got very unlucky. The tsunami flooded the nuclear power plant and a hydrogen explosion blew the

roof and walls off reactor four. Nuclear power plants run on super clean water, the kind of water that goes through like semiconductor plants. And the fact that we had this mean that we were the only game in town to set up this giant engineering system for Fukushima and remove 99% of the radiation from Fukushima. What what's happening with nuclear now? So, we have there we do have some portable microreactor companies. There's some companies building building larger uh plants as well, but it feels like somewhat stagnated and like you said, China seems to be eating our lunch. Obviously, there's the Bill Gates funded

project over there, that the superreactor. I don't really know what's going on. yeah. TerraPower. wave reactor where you can actually take some of the waste and and repurpose it to be sort of the next sequence of fuel. Um there's really only one thing in my mind that's needed for large-scale zero carbon or very low carbon base load power, and that is nuclear. And it isn't requiring anything really cutting edge. It's really existing fission plants that we have. So, I think it'll probably take another generation realistically until young people start to embrace it as a complete counter to the Neil Youngs and Joni Mitchells of, you know, my mom's generation who were like, "No nukes."

Right? And they were conflating nuclear war with nuclear power, but it changed the zeitgeist that made people anti-nuclear at a time when we should be absolutely pro-nuclear. It needs to be rebranded, and it my my candidate for be elemental power. Where you get elements of the sun for solar, elements of the wind for wind, and elements of the earth, which is uranium, to have zero carbon nuclear power, but it should be Progress in nuclear is incredibly important, and whether global warming is man-made or accelerated by man, it's definitely real. But we should be less obsessed with aggressive policies like

carbon taxes and carbon capture. Those might work in spots, but they're not going to solve the problem by themselves. In my mind, nuclear is clearly the best renewable energy to solve climate change long-term. Wind and solar are great, but they're volatile, seasonal, and geography-specific on the supply side. Meanwhile, natural gas and fracking only cut carbon emissions. They don't eliminate them. The dangers and downsides of nuclear are completely overstated. The classic example of a nuclear disaster is Chernobyl, but that containment structure is completely

outdated, and with the facilities we use today, we could have avoided those 4,000 deaths. Meanwhile, it's very hard to actually attribute any direct deaths to the Fukushima disaster as horrible as it was. Finally, the dual-use argument, or the idea that our nuclear power plants can somehow be turned into weaponry, is also basically BS. It would take years of lead time for somebody to take plutonium from an energy reactor and create a nuclear weapon, and finding enriched uranium is also incredibly hard. The US is pathetically behind when it comes to nuclear energy compared to

countries like Sweden and Russia. So, I had all these portfolio companies that I wanted to talk about with you. You just showed me one before this interview that was like blew my mind. It was incredibly exciting. It's called Yeah, it's Variant Bio. Can you talk about Variant Bio? Well, one of the themes that is running through the entire Lux portfolio, really since inception, is a love of science fiction that some of us have. We got to thinking about X-Men. And if you've seen the franchise or read the comic books, you got Professor X, and he puts on his Cerebro, which is this helmet, and he's able in a crowd to spot a mutant. And

those mutants, of course, ridiculously are shooting lasers out of their eyes and conjuring fire from their fingers. So, it's not real. But, with 7.5 billion people on Earth, if there's a one-in-a-million chance of some rare phenotype existing, some trait, and instead of shooting lasers and conjuring fire, maybe this is being able to hold your breath underwater for very long periods of time, or survive at super high altitudes, just like the Nepalese Sherpas do. The problem is, most of the people in genetics have really sequenced pale, male, stale, white Europeans. You look at 23andMe and Roche and Genentech, most of those have been Europeans and and United States samples, because that's where the money is. But,

the really interesting outlier traits are in outlier parts of the world, often in island populations where people are very consanguineous, they're Variant Bio is an incredible company. They're going to completely remote, genetically homogeneous societies that have been uncontacted by the rest of the world. [music] They're then finding people with almost mutant phenotypic traits in those populations. Say somebody who has incredible lung capacity, or incredible upper body strength, or they fend off a particular disease. Again, because these communities are genetically homogeneous, it's easy to pinpoint the genes that are

responsible for these phenotypic traits. So, once we find these sequences, we can create amazing new gene therapies. If people had very high metabolic rate at night while they were sleeping, and they were burning fat because where they were to stay warm in a very cold environment, that's the kind of thing that might be a drugable target for the third of the country here in the US that's obese. And you can take something from the outlier people in the outlier regions and bring it back to the masses. That's awesome. All right. Uh there is $152 billion locked into venture right now. The markets seem a little crazy on

the face of it. We were talking earlier, though, there might be sort of a silver lining here in that, you know, a lot of the stuff you invest in, and I think you were early on this, is hard tech that uh is hard by its very nature. Not only in that it's frontier science, but it's hard to make work. There might be a lot of money out there, but if you invest early, is there a way in which the excess money is actually very positive in terms of making these things work because you can get sort of follow-on rounds. Maybe investors are a little less high conviction than you, but you

end up with these companies in hard science, frontier science getting over funded in a way that de-risks it. For sure. And And these are, you know, cycles in capital markets. So, if you think about the cost of capital almost like a tractor beam for the future. Things that were once these, you know, 20-year far-out ideas become these 20-month frenzied projects. So, there's a virtue of that. Lots of stuff are getting funded. It doesn't mean necessarily that everything that's getting funded is good. 90% of people are crap. 90% of music, Spotify, Netflix shows, whatever. 90% of startups are crap. Just statistically. And so, a lot

more stuff gets funded. 90% of them are going to fail. They might survive longer because there's FOMO and a lot of capital flying around, but eventually they fail. And the key is the 10% that are going to go on and change the world. But for sure, in deep tech right now, you are seeing an acceleration of things that might have taken decades rapidly accelerated, funded today, and then the offshoot of all of that stuff, the detritus from the failure and the combinatorial possibilities of the things that are getting funded, is really inspiring. Yeah, I was It's funny. I was talking with Christian Angermayer, and he was

saying that he actually thinks we should print as much money as possible. So, this is a super contrarian, you know, everybody's worried about inflation. And his reason being, you know, this is all it's game theoretic. Who's going to print more money? Us, China, you know, who else around the world? And then, if we can funnel it towards frontier tech, you know, that's that's really exciting. How do you poke at founders and suss out whether they are full of or not? I imagine, you know, being from New York, that gives you a special sort of, you know,

ability to do that. I've, you know, when I went to school here, I I remember landing and getting hustled by the the cabbie on my way to college. I'm like, "Okay, I'm in New York." So, how do you how do How do you write a passage? Yeah. You know, part of it is a default level of skepticism. Now, the truth is if everybody at Lux had my level of skepticism, we would be entirely a group of short sellers, you know, basically betting against fads, frauds, and, you know, technological obsolescence. And we would have, particularly in the last 5 years, lost a ton of money. So, we have a diversity cognitive diversity of different opinions and and dispositions, which I think serves us well. Uh the way to protect yourself

against frauds is just a high degree of skepticism and funding to milestones. I remember I had a friend and they were going to visit Theranos and he said, "What are the things that you would ask when we go to diligence?" And mine was very simple, "Does it work?" And that's a question that so many people just didn't ask. They assumed it works. When we fund something, we ask the simple question, "How much money and how long will it take to prove what?" It's almost like anting in a poker game, you know, "What am I going to have to pay and how long will it take to see the next card to know are the odds better or worse than what I hypothesize before?" And then I've got this other view, sort of rooted in science, which I consider

like the first law of thermodynamics, energy is not created or destroyed, just changes form. Same thing with risk and value. If I can identify very early on the risks, technical risk, product risk, management risk, uh you know, recruiting risk, competition, every risk that with my time and money as an investor in the company, I can kill, a subsequent investor is taking less risk because I've taken it and killed it, and they should demand a lower quantum of return. And something you said early on there about looking for founders is interesting because it almost feels like uh you know, you need an efficient

frontier between credentials and a background in in hard science and sort of an aggressive kind of, you know, I'm going to raise money and sell my product kind of mentality. Is that tough in a world where PhDs are now sort of chronically neglected and underpaid and, you know, their peer-reviewed papers don't get read. Like, do you look for like PhD dropouts? Like, how do you find that kind of efficient frontier? them, in fact, yes, they get frustrated, right? They get frustrated by the field. The best PhDs are the ones that reach over into the other guy or girl's field,

right? And so, friend of mine, Danny Kahneman, won the Nobel Prize in economics. He wasn't an an economist. He's a psychologist. But, he reached over and was like, "Wait a second, I see interesting things here." So, I find that the most interesting companies are at these interstices between disciplines. Somebody that was an expert in AI that is looking at microscopy and slides, you know, in biotech, and the biotech people are like, "What are these people doing? That's the domain of pathologists." And this guy's like, "No, you know, I can use computer vision to be able to do something that these guys can." So, it's the people that have a little bit of rebel irreverence to reach into the other field, which I think is really

Do you have any sector theses that you're thinking about right now as a always. I would broadly say aerospace and defense is one theme. Hardware and software very important. A related theme on this geopolitical stage is what I would consider the race for prestige. Now, this morning, as as, you know, I was reading the New York Times, there was an article about Russia launching the first movie to be filmed in space. Not a documentary, but actually sending actors up to actually film a scene. So, the first scene, okay. Now, you look at that, you say that's silly or whatever, but it's actually a race for prestige. Now, you shift that and you look

historically, where were there races for prestige between countries? It was the Olympics, winning gold medals, it was chess and go, it was the export of movies and music and Hollywood and culture, and it was science. It was winning Nobel Prizes. I'm absolutely convinced that the demand for software and hardware at the cutting edge of science, particularly with China and the is going to see cutting edge new microscopes, cutting edge new software that is enabling productivity in science to win Nobel Prizes, and there's going to be huge demand, universities,

government labs, startups, for the equipment and the software that's going to fuel that. So, that's another big One that's a little bit more micro that has been something that's always on my mind that I'm I put this out there almost as a broadcast to call for the entrepreneurs. Smell is a sense that we haven't yet been able to capture. Your most salient memories for a variety of evolutionary reasons derive from smell. And whether that is being on a beach in a moment with loved one and smelling the ocean, whether it's a food or a wine, whether it's the hair of a loved one, whether it's the nostalgia of your grandpa's old baseball cap in the

bedroom, that is absolutely something that is a solvable physics problem. Today you would use, you know, very cutting-edge mass spectrometry. It's too big and too expensive, but somebody will figure out how to put this on a solid-state chip where I will be able to go and capture whatever volatile organic same way I can pull out my phone today and capture the signature of a song using Shazam and be able to play it back. Now, you need to be able to record it, so you have to capture what's that chemical signature, and then you need to be able to play it back, which is a different set of technologies, but I'm absolutely convinced that that is a huge area and it's something that we're always looking for the entrepreneur that

might be able to do that. I think the olfactory region is next to the hippocampus, which makes smell this like particularly nostalgic sense. And there's a guy named Luca Turin who Yes, the uh scent, professor of scent, enemy of scent, emperor of scent, yes. Exactly, who thinks that the nose actually works more like a spectroscope and that it's vibrational frequencies Almost like a piano, right? Entrepreneurs out there, if you're Yeah, we we want to capture and and play smell. Um I I I think it's a a really big deal. Getting more specific on the space

front, so you guys have some really interesting bets already. You have Relativity Space, which started with small satellite launchers, now looks like they might be competing with Uh you have Anduril, of course, uh which is doing all sorts of interesting things in software and drones. Uh where else can we can we look when it comes to space Well, as clichéd as it is, you know, people say that if history doesn't repeat, it rhymes, and I find it useful look back in history and where was there a great revolution of expanse and pioneering and discovery, and it was

in the railroad. You had people that were competing to literally lay the tracks. So, you had steel makers and and cooking and all kinds of novel material inventions to literally lay down steel tracks. So, now take those railroads and flip them vertically 150 years later. Now, instead of rails, we've got large propulsive rockets that are going straight up to space. The cost is decreasing. You've got reusable rockets. I think it's a beautiful thing, actually. There are two arguably extreme conceptions of how we will evolve space, and they're compatible. One is the Musk vision, which is to me a little bit more escapist. Let's get to

Mars. We have to get off the planet. You know, it's it's it's our ship that might be failing. The other is the Bezos vision, which I'm more partial to, which is let's take the dull, dirty, dangerous stuff off the Yes. And bring it back. And it's sort of Amazon Prime, but you know, made in space and and delivered same day. And And And that's what I'm quite partial to. Geopolitically, US approaches Russia and says, "Hey, why don't we team on a lunar base?" Russia says, "No, thanks. We're doing it with China." So, the machinations in these leagues in space are forming and reforming. China's got a space station. Russia will have a space station. There will be

private space stations. Those space stations will be the equivalent of um just like you saw in the real estate boom with uh the the rise of AWS and and Blackstone creating all these local uh storage and delivery hubs. There will be local and storage delivery hubs up in space. And uh it's going to be a a new frontier and a new new wild wild wild wild west. So, we have all this capital locked up in private markets. It feels like capital is becoming increasingly commoditized. And where you have your edge is what you were talking about earlier, kind of

adding value, but also putting your stuff out there. It feels like we're seeing the rise of like an influencer investor model. You seemed early on that. How do you sort of take advantage of that on a go-forward basis? Well, there's definitely a signaling aspect, right? We want people to know, like, "Hey, we're open for business, and we want to be your partner of choice." When you think about, you know, classic McLuhan, like, "Medium is the message." The mediums that have been adopted by venture guys over time, you know, if you go back um to the early [music] days in the internet, you had um you know, bloggers, and you had Fred Wilson uh from Union Square Ventures, you had

Chris Dixon. Um they were early in that medium, and they were vocal. They were telling the entrepreneur story, they were giving advice, they became a beacon signal. You know, that became less popular over time then you had the rise of sort of the Twitterati and people that are on Twitter and you're actively engaging, right? And so there used to be this thing like you would never have access to a John Dorr or Vinod Khosla back in the day. You know, you could sort of look at 2750 Sand Hill Road and you'd see the glass and see the fancy cars and maybe you can get access and entree, but there's a there's a democratization of access and in some sense you can see, you know, who I am and what I care about and what the values are. And I think as long as you

can develop a reputation that's credible. I mean, we try to be very intellectually honest about like, okay, this is working, this isn't working. I am very critical about people that I think are hucksters and and fraudsters and people that are overly promotional. You know, there's people in the crypto world that I think are just like constant pumping and promoting that it the key in investing is almost to listen to where the signal isn't. You know, like the curious incident of the dog in the night in the classic Sherlock Holmes tale. It's like, where are people making a lot of money and they're not making noise is always very interesting. Are there any investors that were inspirations for you? Oh, tons. I mean, you know, across by

the way, not just in venture capital. Um, you know, I looked up to uh, you know, Don Valentine and in in in in venture capital. I look up to Bill Gurley who's a friend. Um, I think he's both, you know, towering figure and a towering intellect. Um, the competitiveness of Mike Moritz and Doug Leone at Sequoia. I mean, there's there's, you know, Peter Thiel uh, who I I just think in the sort of personification of a contrarian, you know, constantly thinking about in a way that I love like, what is the consensus and what's the variant perception? That's in the venture world. In the non-venture world, you know, Buffett and Munger to me were like life-changing. Being able to understand people that were in pursuit of being rational

capital allocators. Today I would say, you know, Bezos has been sort of that embodiment of a rational capital allocator. You know, somebody that raised $300 million in an IPO and never another, you know, dollar of capital. It's just extraordinary. more genetic data, uh, more GWAS data as as it's called. Uh, and we understand what phenotypes match to what genotypes. Are we going to see embryo selection anytime soon or CRISPR or these things always seem like they're somewhat around

the bend and then they always, you know, seem far off as well. in a in a sense I think that these things happen gradually, right? And so there's two things that amaze me that if you look back 50 years ago and I think that's always a a useful test, right? If you look back 50 years would you be like amazed by this, right? But if you thought back 50 years, my god, you're going to have like six people involved in making a baby, um, you know, it would have sounded absolutely crazy. Even the idea of a surrogate that somebody is able to hold a baby that they didn't actually conceive themselves is is pretty remarkable. So I think that's something that's sort of happens slowly and then all at once where you're like, my god, we've become just completely accustomed. We have three children and

when you are, um, newly pregnant, which is say when my wife is newly pregnant, you, uh, you do genetic tests. And there are some people that make a decision and it's an ethical decision and you get a genetic counselor, but, you know, if you come from a Jewish heritage, you might test for Tay-Sachs, things that are going to be predictive of, um, difficulties for a child. And there are people that say, you know, um, I'm okay with that. I just want to bring a life into the world and that might be a political or religious view. There's other people like, "No, I don't want to them to suffer or or I don't want to suffer." And so they might abort, um, a pregnancy because of that. So the ability to do genetic testing with ever

resolution of what afflictions might be correlated based on genes, um, the body naturally does that with trisomies like Down syndrome and others, but not always, you know, and some get through and and those are beautiful people that live beautiful lives, but there is the ability today because of technology to screen genetically to see if something might be, um, aberrant. And and so I I think that if we can already do gene selection and you already have, um, you know, novel ways of of conceiving, um, through in vitro and others, that, uh, gene editing out certain mutations that might be really

harmful are something that people will elect to do and it will create great societal debates as it should. Uh, you know that in China there are both experiments and activities that they're doing whether they were taking certain dogs and using CRISPR to genetically modify them to make them these whippet dogs that were like hyper-muscular. Um, and and, you know, there's been rumors about the attempts to make super soldiers. So it's it's going to be a wild west in genetics fraught with all the ethical concerns and considerations that it should. And the idea of gametogenesis also seems fairly exciting as opposed to just

embryo selection. So you're sort of extracting a cell from maybe the skin or something. You're molecularly rinsing it and turning it into a kind of a primordial stem cell like cell. Then you can synthetically create a gamete and create a thousand or so variations. That seems fairly interesting Not just interesting. I mean totally wild. Literally wild, right? And and you are doing something outside of the body I mean there's reason that you know, if you think about it just like a deck of cards, we try to vary the deck of cards and you shuffle it, you know, and each time you mix it and you're doing that against pathogens and threats in nature. And if you identify that there's a

pathogen or threat in nature and you were able to actually somehow engineer the gametes and be able to say like, okay, this is going to be protective against that. You are, you know, playing God and but we've been doing that, you know, ever since we you know, started the agricultural revolution and um uh you know, and helping the kinds of plants we want to grow where we want when we want. Last question for you. So we're here in beautiful New York City. Are you long New York City? So it feels like in some ways it's maybe experiencing a Uh COVID obviously hit it hard and fast. It's a cosmopolitan city. You had a lot

of people traveling in here and so that it spread very quickly initially. Um what does it mean for the city on a go forward basis, especially in terms of tech and building tech companies here? You know, I'm a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute and there's some incredible research from a guy Jeff West there that talks about the scaling of cities and looking at scaling in biological systems and ecosystems. But New York City is one of these cities that has superlinear scaling, right? You add a few more people and you get a lot more patents, a lot more business activity, a lot more creativity. And why? Because of the kinetic interactions of this kind of

stuff. New York City is probably one of the top five most vibrant cities in the world. The diversity of people, their interests, their ambitions, the commerce, the trade, the flow of ideas. And and and cities are amalgamations of the infrastructure that we build. Sometimes that fails, you rebuild, and the people that come to it. I am seeing a flood of young people who are ambitious and creative that will repopulate certain neighborhoods, can completely turn them from old, stodgy, you know, upper crust into vibrant young. And this happened in Brooklyn. and, and, you know, first the the

artists come in because it's affordable, and then you get uh, some of the hipsters that follow the artists, and then you get some of the techies, and then you get techies with money, and you get beautiful people, and then rich people want to be around beautiful people, and vice versa. And you get this beautiful neighborhood ecosystem, and New York is one of the great thriving places [music] that truly is modern metropolis. How can people hit you up? Say I'm a super talented hard tech entrepreneur. How do I get in touch with Lux? You can email me, josh@lux.vc. It'll get to me. Josh, thanks for doing this. Really appreciate it. Yeah, it's awesome. If you enjoyed this video and want more crazy ideas,

science, and tech, please hit the like and subscribe button, leave a comment, and tune in next time. I'm Jesse Michaels, and this is American