Speculative Technologies (Ep. 248)
My conversation with Ben Reinhardt
Ben Reinhardt is the founder of Speculative Technologies “a nonprofit industrial research lab that’s working to unlock a wonderful, abundant future through technologies that don’t have a home in other institutions.”
He has previously worked at NASA and Bay Area startups/VC firms, founded a startup building robotics for eldercare, and helped entrepreneurs start companies in Singapore. Oh, and he has a Ph.D. in space robotics from Cornell University and is one of the few people with a B.Sc. in history!
Ben, who brings his expertise in emerging technologies to the OSV advisory council, joins the show to discuss why tech people don’t do philanthropy, when to trust a credential, why there aren’t more government moonshot programs, why academia is beholden to the new, and MUCH more!
We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
Highlights
Why Tech People Don’t Do Philanthropy
“I'm going to caricature. 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. 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're 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 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, a lot of tech people don't do philanthropy.”
Pay It Forward
“An idea I'd love to inculcate in culture is this idea of paying it forward basically, that many people in tech 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, because often there'll be someone who tried something, it failed, but it gave someone else the idea. And it's just like, you can't propagate it back. The time scales are long enough that they might be dead. So we can't really pay it back, but we can pay it forward and enable 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.”
The Carnegie Model
“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." Because a lot of philanthropists just don't want to be on the hook forever for things. And so I think there aren't a lot of things where there's actually something where a philanthropist says, okay, I will sort of, to some extent, take on the risk. So I was saying government's not great at doing things that are weird or irresponsible. So it's like, okay, the philanthropist pays to get it to the point where it's responsible enough and then somehow has this very explicit handoff to a government.”
Academia is Too Focused on the New
“I would say that there's a tension with the incentives in academia between the sort of structure you need to discover the secrets of the universe, which I think academia is actually very well suited for. It's ultimately an outgrowth of philosophy, like nephrophilosophy, science. And so there's this heavy focus on novelty. There's this heavy focus on, "Oh, what's interesting?" And there's a heavy focus on the individual and all of that. And that's really great for discovering the secrets of the universe and coming up with new ideas of like, "Oh, maybe this is what dark matter is." 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. People will dismiss it like, "Oh, that's not new." And it's like, "Sure, but nobody's gotten it to work. But we've gotten this old idea to work." And you need large teams of professionals.”
On Institutional Consolidation
“To some extent, my bigger theory is that we've almost had institutional consolidation. 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 the, again, air quotes, innovation landscape. It's like you have academia and then you have big companies and then you have startups and then have government. And that's it? And there are many other potential things and there have been many other potential things. And so I'm 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.”
Books & Articles Mentioned
What Works on Wall Street, Fourth Edition: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time; by Jim O’Shaughnessy
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World; by David Deutsch
The Road; by Cormac McCarthy
The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America; by John D. Gartner
The Coffee Can portfolio; by Robert G. Kirby
Transcript & Links
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, hello, everyone. It is Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I am very excited to announce today's guest, Ben Reinhardt, who is on the O'Shaughnessy Advisory Council and runs Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit lab working to unlock tech that hasn't quite found a home yet and also, as I learned about it from you at our off-site and reading all about it, that often is at odds with a startup mentality.
But first, Ben, welcome. You've been incredibly patient with me. We've had to cancel this three or four times in a row, and I just keep thinking, "Wow, Ben is just going to stare at me during the whole thing." Welcome.
Ben Reinhardt:
Thank you. I play long games, so this is just yet another version of that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, let's get into that a little bit. I was really attracted to you and Speculative Technologies because I believe that we really have to take as many paths towards innovation and discovery as we possibly can. And I'm very intrigued by the model that you are using based, am I correct, on DARPA, for the most part?
Ben Reinhardt:
In part, yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And if you wouldn't mind, for our listeners and viewers, just taking us through what Speculative Technologies does and the goals.
Ben Reinhardt:
Totally. The goal, at the end of the day, is to get more awesome technology into the world and all the good downstream things of that, abundance and flourishing and going to space and all that good stuff. So that's the goal, and the trick is that there are a lot of constraints preventing a large set of technologies from doing that.
And so the way that we are attempting to address that problem, you could think of our model very broadly as finding awesome program leads and giving them the tools and resources to sort of do whatever needs to get done to get that technology to a point where it can get it out into the world. And so when I say getting it out into the world, many people think of spinning off startups, but it could also look like licensing IP, spinning off a nonprofit, open-sourcing things, many different ways.
And within these programs, we sort of divide them up into four major phases. So the first phase is roadmapping. So we really believe that planning is actually really important for successfully building technology, and then during that planning, we identify the biggest risks that would be like, okay, if this fact were true, this technology would be completely worthless. And so we have a de-risking phase where we do quick, fast experiments to address those questions.
And then there's the actual build-the-technology phase, and that could look like everything from coordinating a number of other entities, academic labs, startups to work together to push the technology forward, but could also look like spinning up a team in-house and the whole spectrum between those.
And the last phase is the actual getting the technology out into the world. I feel like many people neglect that part, where they're like, "Okay, we're going to get it to... It's going to work, and then magically it will get out into the world." So we really try to explicitly build that in. And so I'm happy to unpack any of that, but that's kind of our broad model.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, let's do that, because when we first talked about it, I liked the sequencing you put in place here, because it's one thing to be a visionary and have all sorts of ideas, but you have to make the vision a reality, right?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so I'm very interested in the roadmapping 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 what they're focusing on that roadmapping, risk assessment, et cetera, often gets overlooked?
Ben Reinhardt:
I think that it often gets overlooked. Obviously, there are some startups that do it very well. But I think it both gets overlooked, and also, to some extent, the incentives are not to do that, because the whole idea with first roadmapping and then doing de-risking experiments is that there's many stages at which, if you're being honest, you would say, "Actually, this is not a good idea. We should not be pursuing this." But you take a bunch of money, and your investors are not going to say, "Oh, okay, that's fine. Shut it down." It's like, "We tried. Everybody go home."
The push is much more towards, okay, now you need to pivot and really try to find, "Okay, where could we build this technology towards..." which is not necessarily bad. That can lead to great things. This is how Slack became Slack. It started as a video game, and then they were like, "Okay." But I also see it very often when there's more general purpose technologies, where there's this very broad vision for this technology that could be applicable in many different areas, and then this pressure to just do something then pushes them towards some very, very niche thing where it gets stuck and then never realizes its full potential. So I think that, yes, in many situations this is not the way that startups operate.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, and I think the interesting thing there is, like Charlie Munger used to always say, everything comes back to incentives, right? And the forcing function, often, of getting big funding often leads, at least in my experience, to situations where people just feel so compelled to stay on the path that if you did the right roadmapping, you would've said, "Oh, wait a second. 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 simpatico with you on... Do you think that there is a way that a startup... What best practice could they follow and, more importantly, could investors follow where they would be more flexible with startups and pivots?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah. I certainly think that there are ways to improve it. One thing is tranching, I think is, to some extent, underused outside of biotech. So biotech, to some extent, is kind of amazing at getting technology out into the world because you have these very, very clear milestones and coupled to FDA trials.
And so instead of the startup 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..." It's sort of like the de-risking experiments. "Success at those looks like this, everybody agrees on that, and we know, okay, if we hit those, then we'll get more money."
And because both the startups and the investors and everybody agrees on what success looks like, what successful milestones look like, and then also knows what... The whole pipeline is very certain, in a way. The outcomes are uncertain, but the structure is very certain. Then that lets this process happen, to a large extent, whereas in other technologies, people argue, like, "Okay, is this data good? Is this bad?" The goalposts will constantly move. Investors will be like, "Eh, I said that this would be something that I would want to, if you showed this data, I would invest, but now I'm rethinking it." And so there's much less certainty.
It's almost like this coordination problem, right? If investors both were more on board with making hard commitments around milestones, and then also, I think this is less something that anybody can control, but if somehow we could have more certainty about the outcome, in the sense that with pharmaceuticals, you're pretty sure if you pass through all the FDA trials, you will unlock a N-billion dollar market, whereas with many other technologies, the market uncertainty is much higher.
And so figuring out that piece, the market uncertainty at the end, sort of also lets you then back-propagate all of 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 just timescales, right? Most VC funds are tenure funds, and going back to incentives, it's not just that they're tenure funds, but that they are always raising their next tenure fund like three to five years into that tenure fund. And then they're going to their limited partners and saying, "Hey, I need to..." 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. What do you think? Have you thought about... You know much more about finance than I do.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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. There's this concept of hyperbolic discounting, which is you collapse your view to a quarter or, 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 10-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 10-year fund, but they're already raising for the next 10-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.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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, which is, "Oh, that's a lottery ticket," which is a horrible label to carry if you're trying to do world-changing, species- changing advancement and innovation.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So you're absolutely right that there's 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 read it in the Journal of Portfolio Management. 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.
Ben Reinhardt:
Not coffee cans.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It's also called the Rip Van Winkle portfolio. And it's 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, because you have this longer timescale, you achieve great things because you have a very different class of investors or contributors, etc, what happens when you have a team with a eureka moment? How do you get that out into the wild?
Ben Reinhardt:
Well, so to some extent the answer, the frustrating answer is it depends in the sense that it really depends on the technology. And to a large extent, that is one of the big things that we actually try to address in road mapping, right? So you say, "Okay, assume that we crush it." What happens? And to some extent, you need to be doing the work to make that happen throughout the program. You can't just get to the end and then say, "Okay, cool, let's get this out to the world."
So the obvious ones are like, okay, it's at the point where it actually makes sense to start a startup or license it to a large company that can manufacture the thing at scale. It could look like if maybe our theory of change was like, okay, the thing that this technology really needs is this huge data set that a whole bunch of other people can use to discover new things. Maybe it looks like open sourcing that data set or licensing it to a number of different organizations that could use it.
One example of this would be potentially building a massive data set about materials properties, like inputs and outputs, that someone could then use to discover a new superconductor or whatever. It could look like potentially spinning out a nonprofit or low-profit company. 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 $10 million a year, that's not a venture investible thing. But if you get it to the point where you can just sell a product and then use that money to keep people employed, that's a really valuable thing.
And then you can start to be more clever. An example from DARPA I like is that this one program manager actually went to, I believe it was a biomedical device company, and said, "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 it'll ever work, but sure." And so sort of lining up things beforehand. Then there's sort of a long tail of just being clever about how it gets into the world, and it requires planning. It also requires... It puts non-obvious requirements on the technology while you're developing it, the way that you want it. Maybe it needs to interface with this thing that has these very tight tolerance requirements. And so you need to make sure that you can make a fiber that hits exactly these specs or it won't be able to work.
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 I mean 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's able to do. That means that it actually doesn't get out into the world successfully.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And this has been a problem, and one of the reasons I was so interested in the work you are doing, is 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 non-profit, and then suddenly, wow, we discovered an amazing world-changing technology. We're not going to be non-profit anymore. That can often lead people who have very good intentions. I think the intentions when they set up OpenAI were spectacular. Let's make it a non-profit, 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 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. I don't think they come much more free market adherent than me, but free markets fail in certain circumstances.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah. Market failures exist.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And 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. DARPA is a perfect example.
I would maybe even love to do a documentary on DARPA because so many people are unaware of everything DARPA either created itself or helped nurse along and birth 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 involved in this. It'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.
Ben Reinhardt:
Well, I mean honestly, I'm still trying to figure that out. You were maybe one of the people who are convinced, but it is a smaller number of people than I would like there to be.
I exactly share your sympathies, where if a market can solve the thing, absolutely. People think that I am anti-market. I'm running a non-profit. The only reason I'm doing that is because I can't go to investors with a straight face and say, "I will make you stock market beating returns." That's the only reason I'm doing that.
But yeah, the trick is... Stepping back, the way I see 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 its action space or institutional moves that it can make for audio listeners. I'm 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 these flavors of work.
And so it's like the government is good at some set of things, and then we can break that down as like the NSF is... NSF is actually quite good at funding really, I cringe a little bit at the terms basic and applied science, but really basic science. Like what happens if we mix these chemicals together? That really basic stuff. And DARPA is quite good at funding military focused weird research.
But then the thing to do is that we need to start breaking it down and say, "Oh, there's this set of work that isn't happening." So for example, the thing that I see Speculative Technologies as really becoming good at doing is enabling work that does not make sense as a product yet, is big if true, but at the same time needs to be useful. So we're constantly pushing on, okay, yeah, but is it useful?
And I think that we need many, many more institutions that sort of cover the landscape. To some extent, my bigger theory is that we've almost had institutional consolidation. 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 the, again, air quotes, innovation landscape. It's like you have academia and then you have big companies and then you have startups and then have government. And that's it? And there are many other potential things and there have been many other potential things. And so I'm 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.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
One of the things that originally attracted me to you and Speculative Technologies was exactly that. We seem to be in a kind of holding pattern, at least to me...
Ben Reinhardt:
Me too.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... 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 largess 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, like moonshots. That to me seems like a missed opportunity. I mean, everyone's on and on about the government spending is out of control and everything, and in many aspects they're correct. But the amount that we're giving towards research, moonshots, whatever you want to call it, 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?
Ben Reinhardt:
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 this really ambitious research, you need to be a little bit irresponsible. Really good research is not a priority justifiable. And the number one prerogative of government bureaucracies is make sure everything is justified.
One big reason why... I don't believe that government can and should fund all work that doesn't make sense as a for-profit company. Notionally, yes, governments should respond to market failures, but I think that's one piece that really does leave a gap.
The other piece is, at the end of the day, all government spending needs to go through politics. You have all the senators and representatives from all the states and each one, their incentive is to look out for their state and their state's interests. And not just states, but there's many different things going on. And so what that leads to is the government sort of trying 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. We do want a great technically trained workforce in the US.
But what that then does is now that money has this dual purpose and it makes it so like, okay, this money is only earmarked for grad students. So one, not only do you have your technology being developed by effectively, trainees... It's like saying, "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 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 both the responsibility piece and then the multipurpose piece are the two reasons why government funding really does have constraints on the amount of really ambitious research that it can go towards.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
In my view, politics itself is downstream of culture.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah, totally.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And I wonder whether if we could get a culture that was more focused on making the future a much better place for our... 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 still coming up with awesome discoveries and innovations and everything.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah, heck yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And I worry, like 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. Who am I to tell you how you should run your nonprofit?
And so I think training also becomes important. And that's something that you do. For example, talk a little bit about the Research Leader's 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. So if you wouldn't mind taking us through the seven phases of the research playbook, that would be helpful.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah. So just for context, the Research Leader's Playbook, effectively, 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 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 need your hat of... To some extent, you're an entrepreneur. You're figuring out new ideas, you're bringing together teams to build them, you're getting them out into the world. Those are all things that entrepreneurs do. But at the same time, to some extent, you're also a scientist in the sense that the thing that really matters is getting to the truth, making the thing work. It doesn't matter 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 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. The way that I would sort of break it down is there's kind of program design. So this is everything from road mapping, as I mentioned, but also talking to lots of people, figuring out 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? So the program design is all around that.
And then there's actually running the program. And so that's everything from how do you manage misaligned incentives? When do you kill a project? That's really hard. When do you fire people? And then there's really sort of tactical things like how do you think about making a Gantt Chart for all of these things?
And then finally I think of there being selling this whole thing, where at the end of the day, even if you're not selling a product, you still need to sell an idea to someone, whether you're pitching a DARPA program officer, or sorry, DARPA office director, that they should pay you to run this program, whether you're pitching a philanthropist. And then you also need to sell it to the people who are going to join you on the journey. And so that's a broad overview of the sorts of things that... And I think something that I wish I learned much earlier in my life is that you need all of this. So you need the science planning, you need the sales, you need to be able to talk to people, but then go really deep on a technical subject. And our current ways of training people don't cover all of those.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And one of the natural communities that 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, in other innovation, in any of those things. Are you finding that they're the most receptive to your donor base?
Ben Reinhardt:
Not really. There's this attitude that... I'm going to caricature. 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. 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're 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 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, a lot of tech people don't do philanthropy. And this is just a thing that I've found over time, 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. A lot of nonprofits are a waste of money. And so it's very hard to say... We operate a startup in the sense that we are very conscious of how we spend money and we try to be incredibly efficient. So I think those two coupled 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. So they definitely created the software, but very few people who made their money in the dot-com boom or more recently did the research, like did research on transistors. They didn't go 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 many people in tech 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, because often there'll be someone who tried something, it failed, but it gave someone else the idea. And it's just like, you can't propagate it back. The time scales are long enough that they might be dead. So we can't really pay it back, but we can pay it forward and enable 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.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It does seem to me that there is an opportunity there though, because I had a guest on Will Storr 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. 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, 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 free market. What about putting together a consortium that does this type of funding. And what is the reward 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. The returns that they're getting from their donors, it's like, wow, how cool is it that, and fill in the blank, this person solved microfinance in Indonesia, etc.
And it does seem to me, if I was trying to orchestrate this, I would maybe turn it into a virtuous status game or prestige game.
Ben Reinhardt:
Totally. Yeah. I mean, I 100% agree. I think, being honest in front of a whole bunch of people, I'm still figuring out how to operationalize that. To some extent, it's like, you kind of need to bootstrap it somehow, where it's like, you need... Once it becomes a thing in people's heads that doing this is high status, then people will continue doing it. I think to some extent you need someone weird to have some high status wins. I mean, one thing that some folks have talked about is Forbes lists, having some kind of list for people who have done the most interesting things with their money or something like that. That's sort of one way.
And to some extent, there's also this tension where I think as almost like a holdover from previous eras of philanthropy like the Rockefellers and Carnegie, to some extent, that era sort of put an emphasis on the philanthropists stepping into the background, of 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 people funded these a hundred million buildings at universities to 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 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. Name units after people, people should be able to buy units named after them.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. 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. So for those who love entertainment, of course the Academy Awards are the king over there or Queen. And TV has its, it has Emmy's, etc. 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. 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, Andrew Carnegie classic example. All of the libraries that the United States have, 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 encouraged.
Ben Reinhardt:
Can I riff on the Carnegie libraries?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Please.
Ben Reinhardt:
Back to our previous point about 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." Because a lot of philanthropists just don't want to be on the hook forever for things.
And so I think there aren't a lot of things where there's actually something where a philanthropist says, okay, I will sort of, to some extent, take on the risk. So I was saying government's not great at doing things that are weird or irresponsible. So it's like, okay, the philanthropist pays to get it to the point where it's responsible enough and then somehow has this very explicit handoff to a government. And it actually can tie even further back into the conversation of tranches and milestones of having more explicit... 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.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah. So in addition to them being awesome, I'll assert that basically materials and manufacturing underpin civilization. When you think of technologies that really help people, often you think of medicine, you think of things that are addressing climate change. 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 for example, 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, I put on my historian hat, and you look back in history and new materials and manufacturing methods to turn those materials into useful stuff is what enabled all the things like human flourishing. So it's like 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 copper was really useful, and bronze, still let you plow a lot more things than you could with a stick. And then stone tools, that let us conquer the world. And so just looking at the arc of history, we name ages after materials because that's really the foundational thing.
So in addition to them being very important, I think they're actually under looked at. 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 falls into the gap, and importance. Those are why we have that focus.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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 the 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. 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 O'Shaugnessy Ventures is look for things to root for. And that sounds like a great use case. I would certainly read a book about, I always quip, we didn't leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones. 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.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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. For example, I know you're working on nanomodular electronics, on demand, without etching silicon or expensive facilities. How cool would that be? And 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. I always think I was so impressed by that JFK speech that created the Apollo mission, created-
Ben Reinhardt:
"We choose to go to the moon and do the other things."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Exactly. And yet that speech ignited the culture that was like, Goddamn it, we are 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. And I think right now, Musk with the chopsticks catching the rocket, believe it or not, people get really inspired when they watch that stuff. And it predisposes many, I hope, to think, wow, what if? 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?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah. Absolutely. To some extent, that's part of the road mapping process. 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. The people who were making stainless steel originally had no idea that, they couldn't conceive of a bioreactor. The idea that it's like, okay, we'll be using the stainless steel as this vessel for ecoli that we have genetically... DNA hadn't been discovered. That we were going to go in and modify the DNA of these organisms, but these organisms will need this stainless steel vat in order to grow. They wanted to make nice knives and forks, which is great. I really like stainless steel knives and forks. But yeah, so I think you both want to speculate, but also be aware that there's so many other things that one can't even imagine yet.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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, excuse 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. 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, "What were people saying about the internet and quantum physics in 1900? Well, they weren't saying anything about the 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 a tension right now, and it seems to me to be growing between, show us your work, 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. How do you navigate those two worlds?
Ben Reinhardt:
I think to some extent, maybe in one word it would be, or two words, maybe it'd be trust and iteration, or feedback loops. I am naturally a very trusting person. And so I like to believe that people are capable of great things. So to some extent it's like, okay, instead of just going off of... And also thinking about what's behind a credential. So credentials, to some extent, are a way of compressing information about what someone's capabilities are. And so instead of just going off of credential, being unlazy and thinking, 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 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 I think that you to some extent, build up tastes, like 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?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Of course. No, this is fully… you can say fuck, shit…
Ben Reinhardt:
Sweet. To some extent, you just also have to tune your BS detector. There are people with tons of credentials who are completely useless. It's some combination of not being lazy and willing to spend the time. And that goes for the technologies too, 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 not having that attitude and being willing to really engage with something and dig into it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I think that the challenges are numerous because of everything you just said. And the idea behind the elevator pitch, what you do is specifically not suited to an elevator pitch, right?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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?
Ben Reinhardt:
Oh, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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 à la Andrew Carnegie-
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... of doing a lot of things that in other countries... I used to be the chairman 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 funded 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 culture, a 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? For example, I think of the huge endowments at the Ivys, 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?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah, I'll certainly try. I don't know. It's a great question. Talk about institutions that should have a long enough timescale, right? I did a Monte Carlo simulation of our organization. And so like I said earlier, I don't think I could say to an investor that we would beat the stock market. But on a 30-year timescale, I can say that I think that there's a one in 1000 chance that we will drastically outperform the stock market just based on this idea that like, "Okay, there's some chance that some company will spin out." I don't know. I think it's certainly worth trying.
To your previous point, so I'm kind of unabashedly American, and I think that our history of civic organizations, 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. I'm sure you know the Tocqueville story where he's like, "The difference between the Americans and the Europeans is when there's a tree that falls across the road, the Americans just get a crew together and move the tree, and then the French people just sit around and wait for the government to come move the tree."
And to some extent, I really like that culture and I worry that we've moved away from it a little bit. And to some extent I think we are leading. 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 logical jump that I'm trying to push is one, both 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 it's hard for people to wrap their heads around. And so, in Infinite Media and Infinite Books, if you can help people see that, I think that that's incredibly powerful.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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 listen, I get that. I Loved The Road by Cormac McCarthy and literally talk about a downer of a book.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And like you, I am also unabashedly American. And the thing that I love about this country is that we almost have a different DNA because all of the people who came here, were they typical? Absolutely not.
Ben Reinhardt:
No.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
There's even a book called The Hypomanic Edge: What Makes America Unique. 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's 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."
And so I definitely think that what you are doing is something that I personally want to see much, much more of. And I definitely think that another thing that might change it is, do you have right now a thing... Right now, with all of 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 the Wright brothers, right?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah, and then you just need the one win.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right, and then boom. Yeah.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah. So the honest truth is that most of the projects that we're working on are bottle-necked 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 the way that you make chemicals in a vat, ship them anywhere in the world and then weigh them down and wire them together on demand. So we've done some initial work that shows that this is not an impossible. 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...
Like sort of the whole point of these programs is to show what's promising, whereas if we knew a priority 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 I think that the market is very efficient in lean ideas. You can try them out, and the ones that are good, they go on to do awesome things.
The real trick is these fat ideas where there's just this deep Knightian 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've 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 the smartest. You know, but are you really going to say it?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
No, you are not. As the father of three and grandfather of six, you are never ever going to say that.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah. Exactly.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And what I think is great, and I would invite people listening or watching this podcast, if you think of a great way to frame this, because it seems to me that so much is the way you frame a thing. 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 was called death insurance. Guess how many death insurance policies they sold? Like none.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And then some genius came along and said, "No, what we're talking about is life insurance." Trillion-dollar industry.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so if we have a listener or a 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... To me, at least, there seem to be no, if we were de-risking something, right? The risks here are obvious. You spend a lot of money and you nothing happens. Right?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And 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 reframed to the point where, "Hey, it's very prestigious to not only work on this basic type of 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 the discovery of X," right?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Whatever X happens to be. Because it does seem that you are creating a new natural home. When I first came across what you were doing, my immediate thought was, "Wow, I thought academia was doing all of this," and they're not. And then I thought, "Well, gee, wouldn't it be great if there was a Xerox PARC or if there was a 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-
Ben Reinhardt:
Yep. That's right down the street.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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 what are the reactions?
Ben Reinhardt:
Well, so I think that there's actually a... I would say that there's a tension with the incentives in academia between the sort of structure you need to discover the secrets of the universe, which I think academia is actually very well suited for. It's ultimately an outgrowth of philosophy, like nephrophilosophy, science. And so there's this heavy focus on novelty. There's this heavy focus on, "Oh, what's interesting?" And there's a heavy focus on the individual and all of that. And that's really great for discovering the secrets of the universe and coming up with new ideas of like, "Oh, maybe this is what dark matter is."
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. People will dismiss it like, "Oh, that's not new." And it's like, "Sure, but nobody's gotten it to work. But we've gotten this old idea to work." And you need large teams of professionals. To some extent, I am a radical in the sense of I think very much in terms of creating new institutions, and I don't have as good of a sense of 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 think that to some extent that's what allows specialization. One of the problems with the university more broadly, and this is a completely other conversation, but 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, "Okay, we have this institution that's specialized in doing pre-commercial technology research, this institution that's focused on educating 18 to 22 year olds, this institution that's really focused on discovery and secrets of the universe." And so that's sort of where I'm like, maybe we can get academia to reform, but I think the better bet is sort of pulling off different pieces of that and creating homes for those specific things that I can really specialize and do them well.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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.
Ben Reinhardt:
Appreciate it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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, etc. But I think we have a true need for it now. I think people are primed for it now too, quite frankly.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
People are just so tired of the, "Oh, that'll never work." And that's just so contrary to the basic DNA of at least America and hopefully of many societies around the world. So I absolutely-
Ben Reinhardt:
I appreciate you brainstorming with me.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... support and applaud... Well, actually now the team's going to hate me, but I am going to say, "Hey, start thinking about this," because I think there might be something there. 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 reeducation 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've incepted them with were their own ideas. And they're going to say, "You know what? I'm like all of those other times when I had these great ideas and didn't act on them this time, this time, I'm going to start acting on these two things today and continue." What are you going to incept in the world's population?
Ben Reinhardt:
So I don't know if this counts as the first one, but I figured out the 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 in my first one.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well done. Okay, so they're doing that. What's number two?
Ben Reinhardt:
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 the other thing I would leave people with.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I love both of them. How can people find you, Ben? Online and otherwise?
Ben Reinhardt:
Yeah, so I'm too active on Twitter.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You and me both.
Ben Reinhardt:
My handle is just Ben underscore Reinhardt, so just my name. You can find our website at spec.tech. That's S-P-E-C dot T-E-C-H. Between those two things, I think those are probably the best place to pay attention to what we're doing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Fantastic. Ben, thank you so much for your time. I'm a big supporter.
Ben Reinhardt:
Yep, Jim, thank you so much for inviting me.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And let's hope that 10 or 20 years from now if I'm still around, I hope to be-
Ben Reinhardt:
Well, that's the other point, right? Invent stuff so that you're still doing this.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Exactly, yeah, so I'm still kicking. All right Ben, thanks so much for joining me.
Ben Reinhardt:
Thank you, Jim. Take care.