Insight
Wolfe: Mindfulness harms societal progress, which requires bitter, driven people
“Society benefits from everybody being plagued by these kinds of things, because it leads to human progress and, you know, woe to the
Bay Area, you know adherent to mindfulness and meditation, you know, to find calm and peace.
Like we don't get peace from pro…”
Opinion
Wolfe praises Bezos as rational capital allocator, criticizing Musk's truthfulness
“And the quibble is with his relationship with the truth. And I look at Gates and I look at Bezos, both of whom I admire for different reasons. Bezos in particular, who I consider one of the greatest and most rational capital allocators, the amount of capital t…”
Opinion
Wolfe: Musk's Twitter bid was a smokescreen to dump Tesla stock
“You know, he has sold eight and a half billion dollars of stock. This was a wonderful way, just like his Twitter poll before to sell stock, to get out of Twitter. Now you could, I mean, sorry to get out of Tesla.”
Assertion Partly supported
Wolfe: Kurion technology removed 99% of radiation at Fukushima
“This thing that was just conceived In our New York office ended up removing 99% of the radiation from the Fukushima disaster, particularly around cesium and strontium”
Opinion
Wolfe: Nuclear energy faces a PR problem, not a technology problem
“It's not really so much even a technology or an engineering problem. It's not even, we have hundreds of reactors that are working globally and we have decades of safety experience and know how. And even though you have an aging workforce, there's just like tre…”
Prediction Held up
Wolfe predicts the digitization of human scent and machine olfaction
“The digitization of human scent is coming.
Shazam for smell.
The ability to identify a single molecule in a room is coming.
The ability, not only a single molecule that has meaning to you.
I mean, literally a molecule, a structure actually conveys to you know,…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Josh Wolfe: Modern AI research will help unlock human consciousness mysteries
“I think we are going to learn more about human consciousness as we interrogate the systems and try to understand how much of the modern approaches in an AI are working to sense, make models, make predictions on those models, iterate and learn.
And I think that…”
Insight
Wolfe: Success requires both confidence and insecurity
“And then the other piece of that, which is sort of a toxic combination, if in the wrong hands, and I think a productive one, if in the right hands is you need confidence to be able to believe in yourself and go and do something and persuade other people, you k…”
Insight
Wolfe: Scientific progress requires balancing intellectual arrogance with humility
“A scientific worldview is basically trying to come up with better explanations and at best they can be tentatively held until a better explanation yet further comes along. And so part of that is a, is that similar mix, right? Of arrogance that you can know bet…”
Disclosure
Wolfe: Lux Capital's strategy relies on randomness and optionality
“A manifestation of Lux itself is looking at all of these different disparate fields. Post facto, we can often find this, you know, nice connective narrative thread, but it's what I call randomness and optionality. So randomness and optionality is another, so, …”
Disclosure
Wolfe: Kurion hit $40M EBITDA and sold to Veolia for 10x EBITDA
“We end up going from a million in revenue to 40, 8020, 160 forty million of EBITDA. We sold that for 10 times EBITDA to Veolia.”
Insight
Wolfe: Cheap nuclear power unlocks abundant water and agriculture
“The cheaper your electricity and the more power you have, you can desalinate water. You could have abundant water. You could have abundant crops and agriculture, but it all starts with how do we get clean, abundant energy? And to me, the answer is elemental po…”
Insight
Josh Wolfe: High Modern Mobility Makes Ostracizing Cheaters Less Effective Than in Ancestral Times
“In our ancestral environment you know, when you go to like a Dunbar's number of, I don't know, a 150 people, you had a smaller group of people. And so it was more effective to punish a cheater. And they would be publicly ostracized, you know, from a small grou…”
Assertion Supported
Wolfe: Illumina originally focused on chemical sensing, not gene sequencing
“Illumina was not focused on gene sequencing when they first started. They were doing like chemical sensing and other kind of random stuff. That was the intersection of like microfluidics that were based on a microchip and biotech and then ultimately genetics.”
Assertion Supported
Wolfe: Larry Bock took 14 of 17 startups public, generating $50B
“This was a guy who had made hundreds of millions of dollars, and had founded 17 companies from scratch, taking 14 of them public, cumulative market cap over fifty billion dollars Illumina, Pharmacopia, Ida, and Athena, NeuroKrin, just incredible, and had the c…”
