It's just really interesting to think about lock-and-skill and if you really are humble to how much luck there is in the world and in whatever pursuit and domain you're doing,

then it opens you up to the possibility that there's randomness and optionality and you try to maximize that as cheaply as possible.

Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish and this is the Knowledge Project, a podcast exploring the ideas, methods and mental models that help you learn from the best of what other people have already figured out.

Learn more in step to date at fs.blog slash podcast. This conversation is with Josh Wolfe, a founding and managing partner at Lux Capital in New York.

Now Lux is a VC firm but not your typical VC firm, they spend most of their time in the hard sciences.

Josh is a believer in the idea that inventing the future is the best way to predict the future.

As you'll see in this conversation, Josh is exceptional. We talk about learning, finding ideas, information processing and our shared interest in old school wrap. Let's get started.

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Check them out at metalab.co. That's metalab.co. And when you get in touch, tell them Shane sent you.

Josh, I'm so glad to be here with you today, man. Shane's like to be with you. Can you tell me a little bit about what Lux Capital does?

At Root, we are trying to find brilliant people and back them and get really, really lucky.

I mean, if you think about it as a midwife, we raise money from endowments and foundations and wealthy families and individuals.

And then we deploy it into people who are inventing the future as the old adage goes that the best way to predict the future is to invent it.

And then we are basically trying to figure out who's full of shit and not and who is real and who is faking it and we try to deploy money to the people who are real.

And typically there's a people that we're drawn to who have irreverence and slight arrogance and they have a conception of the world that some people would conflate with arrogance of the highest order.

And then we basically say, this is the way that the world ought to look and I disagree with the consensus.

And then we try to find those people and back them and give them the resources that they need to recruit and raise further money and execute on some plan.

But we, in essence, are trying to fund the future and trying to bet against the past and find the people that are inventing it.

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