YouSaid · the spoken record

Brett McGurk

lines on the record: 68
first: 2025-12-08
most recent: 2025-12-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'll give you two more quick ones do aliens exist? My answer is yes, but not extraterrestrial aliens. If you ever watch any of these Nova shows, you see these underwater creatures, there are aliens. They're here. They didn't come from outer space. But my gosh, truly Darwinian endless forms most beautiful? It's insane. And the last mystery, which I think I've solved, and I'm going to upset a lot of people. I am convinced that Tiramasu, which dates back to the nineteen sixties, here's what I think happened. They ran out of chocolate powder. They were trying to make a cake, and the guy was like, oh shit, let's just use coffee. They won't know the difference. We'll give it a fancy name. Charge him more money. We'll convince him that it's really a delicacy. I think that Tiramasu is one of the great hoaxes pulled on us. And I'd like to know the mystery of where it actually came from because it's disgusting.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mysteries in the immediate. The great thing about parenthood, you see the world through these very fresh little eyes. My daughter had a phase of planets and learned the planets, and we'd go out and look at stars, asking the basic question, where does space end? Can't explain it's kind of infinite. How do you explain that? Not a physicist, not a scientist, but those basic human questions that people have always been asking are still unanswerable. And that to me is fascinating.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kids and with your spouse. The origin of the universe, how do you get something from nothing without a theistic explanation and just understanding people? It's still a confounding mystery.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Default obvious one How do you get something from nothing is confounding? I still find human nature endlessly perplexing. Markets change and business change and technologies change, but human nature is a constant. What makes us tick why we do the things we do? There are compelling arguments, evolutionary psychology, status, tribalism, Dan Kahneman was a friend and he would say that the reason you believe the things you believe is not because you reason through them and empirically calculate in your head, but because the three or four people in your life that you care about or respect or whose respect or caring you want, you believe what they believe. That's probably the most important thing in our business and it's something that I don't think I'm ever going to feel like I solved is just understanding people, what drives them, what motivates them, why they do what they do, how to get people to change their minds. Really hard thing to do. When you're in a marriage, when you have kids, you learn these things all the time. You're negotiating with your kids.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was right. As power comes in handy, you got to know what you're talking about when I'm first in the Oval Office briefing President Bush a lot. I was talking to Josh Bolton, who was the chief of staff in 2006 time framer. He had such a good rapport with the president. Good news, bad news. I remember asking Josh, hey, what's your advice? He just said, Hey, brought it simple. Tell the president the truth in five minutes every morning. To do that takes a lot of work. You got to know what you're talking about. That was good advice. Now as a father, I have a young daughter thinking about how to instill that in her is something I think about all the time.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Jacksonville, Florida program for the World Affairs Council as part of the program they run with their local high schools and all these top kids who are interested in history and foreign affairs or high school kids, many of whom are first-generation families, about 80 kids in there. I just spoke to them about this very point. One of the kids asked, how do I not doubt myself such a revealing question because I wouldn't even have thought to ask that question in high school. attributes of discipline I got from football coaches or hockey coaches, you didn't realize Mind for the future, don't doubt yourself. Prepare. You got to work hard. Nothing beats hard work. A law clerk after Columbia and the Second Circuit for Dennis Jacobs. I remember him telling me the secret to this job is ass power. You gotta sit and work.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brett may not want to go here, but I'll just say we have similar family situations, relationships with dads. He, to me, is also the epitome of somebody that had a chip on his shoulder, put chips in his pockets in different kind of way. Wrong side of the track, origin, went to school and important schools with people that grew up very differently. I think he was probably rejected by some of those peers. I think the vast majority of them envy him, look up to him today.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was saying that the next domain that he wanted to pursue was subterranean warfare. I laughed. I'm like, that's ridiculous. Underground boring. And you look at Gaza envelope in Israel and this is real, whether they're inspired by sci-fi or have this prescient speculation, that's the business that we're in. Find the low probability, high magnitude impacts, either identify them as threats and do things to thwart them or get behind them as investors and get along for the ride.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People did it with our commercial airliners 24 years ago. They're doing it with our information access today. The thing that is optimistic for me is I have no idea in two years where we're going to be investing. I know we will be at the cutting edge. A lot of it is finding people that have amazing vision and signals. Some of them are inspired by science fiction. Some of them have a chip on their shoulder. You look at Palmer Lucky. This is a guy who founded Anderil. He was twenty, twenty-one years old, made nearly a billion dollars with the sale of Oculus to Meta, got fired because he was an early Trump supporter back in twenty sixteen, decided I'm going to start. The real life Stark Industries out of Ironman. There is no secret lab that the U.S. government has with DARPA or the Pentagon that is developing the James Bond Q stuff. It is going to rely on the next Howard Hughes type person, the next person that is going to build the general dynamics and general atomics. And that's what Andrew and I hope many others will do. Palmer's six and a half, seven years.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private credit, it gets overdone. Why is due in the beginning? The fool does in the end. Secondaries are going to do really well. It's part of our strategy to do these special situations. Investing in a late stage business at an early stage price where somebody else took the risk but didn't get paid for it. There are some secondary funds that are going to do really well because LPs are overexposed, don't have DPI, don't have returns of cash coming in from their managers are going to divest from some of the ones that are wrongly positioned. Worried about the horseshoe theory of the far left and the far right domestically why can't we have moderate candidates? They don't win elections. We need strong leaders that are proud Americans but are not in the extremes. United we stand, divided we fall. We got to find the things that bring us together whether that's innovation, economic growth, common enemies. I am worried about the information vector. I'm worried about anybody that is able to weaponize the very things that we create.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On an economic vector, we've got extraordinary guy and Scott Besson and Treasury. I have no idea what's going to happen with the Fed. The cost of capital is going to rise in venture. When you have so much money, 60-something percent of venture dollars went into AI, you have to start looking at where's their scarcity of money. Because the number one determined in a future returns is never the hockey stick curve that the banking sell side or the consultants put out. It's how much capital is going into a sector. The more capital that goes in, the lower the future expected returns. Biotech is interesting. 91,000 people laid off in Boston alone in August from pharma and biotech companies, higher cost of capital, stock prices down, working on 10 different programs. They got to shut it down to one. Even if you just take 1% of that 91,000 people, you've got 910 people who are absolutely brilliant and amazing that you can put into companies and start new things and spin out bullish on whatever others are bearish on. Personally worried about...”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have different interests to have geopolitical power. Some of that is going to be through economics, some of that is going to be through information and media influence. Some of it is going to be through religion. Some of it is going to be through technology and trade. So having an appreciation for how complex the world is and not taking what I would consider very naive black and white views is really important. And then seeing the primacy and value of relationships. We had venture partners early on that were senior people when we were younger and they had gravitas. We wore suits instead of t-shirts because we were trying to show we're adults. Bred is a real doer. I get off the phone with a shake in one of these regions. Within four hours, Bret has a document ready to seize the moment in the window. Time is not our friend. We don't want to let this slip to entropy. Let's get it done. Let's move. He's biased towards action in ways that create win-win-win for everybody. He's helped people in ways that the public will never know, that I will never know. It's created a lot of good will.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First and foremost, Brett is a diplomat. He just has a really nuanced appreciation for things that aren't black and white. Some of that is over a time frame, thinking about something in a 10-year period versus a one-year period. Some of it is a deep understanding of history, of the personalities of what's motivating them. I have a nuanced appreciation in the same way years ago when we did all kinds of family therapy that made me just a better person in interacting with partners at work. Having an appreciation that you can't just be zero sum on these things. You can't be black and white, that there's a lot of nuance, that these things are really complex. Enemies yesterday can be allies tomorrow. There are coalitions and alliances that form understanding interests and means and ends and capabilities. Who has leverage and where and why? Having an appreciation for the distinctions of the assets and the liabilities that many of these countries have. All these groups have leverage in different ways.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cost is not just the time asymmetry of having to react quick to something that's 15 minutes away. It's crazy. That's why they have shelters and they get rushed to the shelters and sound an alarm, assuming that you can do early detection, then to be able to counter that, to scramble jets with missiles or to fire missiles that can counter decades of technological development. The cost of those things, if you're talking about one to five million dollars of missile to shoot down something that's $500,000 is a big problem.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very attack that Brett was involved in helping to defend massive coordination amongst multiple countries, multiple technologies. Speeds which they move, the heights, and the altitudes. You think about Israel's different systems from Irndome, Iron Beam, David's Arrow, Sling, this is a long arrow, pun intended. People used to punch each other, and then they threw rocks at each other, and then they threw arrows at each other, and then they shot bullets and then rockets and then missiles and then hypersonic missiles. Mankind, unfortunately, has been throwing projectiles at each other since the dawn of time. What's different now is economic and technological asymmetry. Economically, to fire the drones, which take roughly Brett can correct me here, but nine hours maybe to get from Tehran to Israel, whereas the cruise missiles are maybe 90 minutes and the ballistics are like 9, 10, 12, 15 minutes.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world is going to be a more dangerous place. That's why I feel so strongly about our defense tech sector and investments in that sector, making sure we're doing everything we can. One thing that always attracted me to Luxe was their early investment in Androil and our great NeoPrimes and everything that is happening in that space. But that directional area of progress. Adversarial systems are going to get better and better and better and harder to defeat. We need to keep up with that live that in real time. That's sinking feeling. I've been in a situation a lot over 20 years. That's the one time I bowed my head and said a little prayer because you just didn't know what was about to happen. It was complete silence. That ended up being a fairly successful defense. The Israelis responded by taking out all of Iran's air defenses last October, which set the stage to what happened this past June. Progress is not the word. Directional arrows of threats.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“White, you're just hoping that the technology that's been developed over decades works in that fog of war. Our first report that came into the Situation Room was that we had a direct hit on a dormitory at Tel Aviv University. That turned out not to be true, but that was what we were facing. When the dust settled, the defenses we had set up and established and things that are known and not known were extremely effective. I was thinking in that moment all the work that went into anti-missile systems, radars, technology, being able to coordinate across multiple militaries in real time, all the practice that that took not knowing it ever to be used, it worked. The missiles will get better, the drones will get better, they're going to get smaller, faster, more lethal. If we don't keep up with this threat, the”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recent experience, we had the largest aerial attacks Iran launching against Israel. 200 ballistic missiles in the air at the same time. That was a worst case scenario to get that many missiles in the air at the same time. They launched them in waves of like 30 to 40. You're in the situation room with the president on screen is generally our kerrilla, our CENCOM commander, our secretary of defense, all the way down to commands in the theater. We had built a coalition of destroyers and aircraft to coordinate the defense. It's a 13 minute flight from Iran to Israel for the first eight or nine minutes, you can see the streaks coming across the screen, like the movie war games back in the 80s. There's nothing you can do. You're captive to what's about to unfold. And as the defense is engaged, the screen lights up.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beach in the Bahamas, dial up the experiment, it runs, the results come out, they immediately published in a paper. The AI scientist then contacts the scientist who came up with the experiment and says, hey, a paper from two years ago, a paper from 20 years ago, these might be spurious correlations. Would you like to rerun the experiment tweaking these parameters? And you just having been reverse prompted click yes. And then you go back to sleep, wake up in the morning, new scientific paper. The companies and the countries that get that right are going to produce massive amounts of knowledge in materials, in drugs. They're going to produce massive amounts of wealth, and they're going to have competitive advantage. So there is going to be a race, but that is an absolute directional arrow of progress, of decoupling the scientist from the wet bench and putting them in front of the computer.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to write a song, you don't need to get the instrument. You can go on to garage band and pro tools and logic. You can put a virtualized instrument into the machine in a temporal sequence and play the song, collaborate with others, digitize the entire experience, turned it from a physical CapEx decision to basically paying a cloud fee to access these instruments. Biology and science are going to experience the same thing as happened in computing. Compute used to have to go have a data center. Then you went to co-located, then you went to cloud, going from an CapEx decision to an OpEx decision treating it like utility, then you can get off of Amazon or Azure, Microsoft, or Google Cloud. Today, if you're a scientist, you have to go to a scientific lab, a wet bench, a white lab coat. You're working with pipettes and beakers, centrifuges, shaking tables. All of that is going to be done by robots. Completely automated labs operated in the cloud where a scientist can pick up the iPad on the cloud.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Standing up next to a giant ENIAC computer 50 years ago, then 25 years ago having desktops and towers, 12 years ago having laptops where you give rise away from the mouse to a trackpad, you're still tickling the keys, but now it's touching your lap and your thighs, then phone held in your hand 18 hours a day, first thing you touch in the morning, last thing you touch at night, then watch and air pods. The next thing was gestures. I'm sitting here gesticulating wildly while I'm talking. The ability to go like this and turn a computer on or off or change a song by swiping in free space without a camera, that became the basis for our investment in control labs. Coincidentally, Meta bought that for a little under a billion dollars, started by this guy Riardon. He joined, along with Brett as a venture partner, about to start his next company, another directional hour of progress. My newest directional hour of progress, the way that science itself is done. If you are a musician, you take your instrument and you go to a studio and you play guitar.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You start to hear a rattle, a fan belt, something's off a little bit from its normal pattern. Robots for remote repair. We're not going to send astronauts up. Remember, there's only eight people in that space to maintain these satellites. We're going to send robots that can go and detect them, manipulate them, and in some cases prevent or conduct sabotage. That's another directional arrow of progress for maintenance. On the AI and BIO side, there's one that I feel very strong conviction on. And the thing about these directional arrows of progress, You don't know who the entrepreneur is. You don't know who the company is, but you have high conviction it's inevitable. That thinking led us from seeing an energy. We went from carbohydrates to hydrocarbons to uranium, directional arrow of progress, more and more energy density per unit of raw material. I got excited about nuclear. What's the big unsolved problem with nuclear? Nuclear waste. We start a company called Curion, Big Success for Us, and Japan. Brain machine interfaces. Idea here, we went from”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the big ones is maintenance. Why am I excited about maintenance? For the past 10 years, driven by the cost of capital was an abundance of growth CapEx. Everybody was funding new buildings, new HVAC systems, rail, train, planes, automobiles. They were putting data centers, military installations, satellites, anything that you can imagine people were deploying. Now, if you are a good CFO or a good capital allocation committee or a good activist investor or a good governance, you were like, enough with the spending. Why don't we take the assets that we've put in the ground for the past 10 years and maintain them? If you are a student of accounting or financial statements, there's two parts of CapEx, growth and maintenance. The pendulum is going to shift. Maintenance is going to be in high demand. That means that there's an opportunity for new technologies to help maintain existing assets. Software for asset maintenance, low-hanging fruit, software plus sensors for acoustic detection, aberrations of machines that might be breaking down.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just bought it. We funded them, and then the nonprofit arm ends up acquiring them. Why? Because Mark is so competitively motivated to be Demis Hasebus and DeepMind and wants to win a Nobel Prize and he thinks this is the group to do it. Crazy story, bio and AI is going to continue to be a big deal.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Known as Pi that is the leader doing that, we had a company called Evolutionary Scale. It's a quick, amazing story. I backed this guy 10 years ago in a biotech company. His name is Alex Reeves called Caliope, focused on the gut brain access. Alex then goes, gets a PhD in computer science at NYU. Why? Because he believed that the future of AI was going to be computer science and AI meeting bio. Amazing, prescient. He goes to Meta, builds a group, has 50 million a year of budget, builds a 12-person team, is competing with Alpha Fold Deep Mine, publishes a paper on protein structure prediction. Amazing. You should spin this out of the company. He says, Josh, love you. I'm getting a lot of budget here at Meta. I'm good. Six weeks later, he comes and visits me with Eric Lander of the Brod Institute. He says, Josh, they're shutting down my group in a few weeks. I offer money on the spot. He does the right responsible thing. Says, thank you very much. Goes to market, gets me to pay a higher price, and own less. We bring in Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Amazon, Nvidia, and a bunch of other investors, and CZI.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Microsoft then pays CoreWeave, CoreWeave then pays Nvidia. That $1 that I'm paying translates into $8 of revenue and $100 of equity market. That's a house of cards that's going to collapse. The next wave that I'm bullish about is going from two-dimensional AI in this current wave, which is pretty much saturated. That is everything from voice, video, images, text, code, anything that's popping off a screen to thinking about the next wave of three-dimensional AI. What that means is going into biology and robotics. Biology and robotics are interesting because there is scarce data sets. If I wanted to raise money and train the next large language model, I could take the repository of the internet, everything on Reddit, everything on X, and be able to train the model. If I wanted to train a new robot, there is no repository that I can go to. I have to create it. What is scarce becomes valuable? There's a company called Physical Intelligence.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the capital market side, you see hundreds of billions of dollars destroyed of people that play the same game that you did back in 2000 with fiber optic cables. The counter to that, if you listen to some of my friends, would say, well, back then you had dark fiber. Today there's no dark GPUs. I still beg to differ what the individual company does rationally collectively. It's irrational. There's going to be a glut and there's going to be a collapse. Debt has not really entered the system until now. Debt is the thing that causes bubbles to collapse. We've got Facebook issuing $25 billion of debt. You have this crazy structure with Grock and XAI from Elon. You've got Core Weave. These things are messy. Dave Einhorn had a good recent snippet in one of his recent quarrely letters that was talking about how a dollar of open AI revenue results in $8 of seeming revenue. It's a dollar to open AI than they pay Microsoft $2, so they're losing money, 50% negative margin.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They will start with third party pendants and rings and necklaces, hardware microphones, recording passively 24-7 every day. The young people will be comfortable with this as digital natives. You can start to see the breadcrumbs. Some people, when they're on Zoom, they have fireflies or granola or otter that are recording things. You can then summarize the transcript. You can unearth insights. There's going to be more demand for the flash memory in addition because there's going to be so many devices, whether they're integrated into watches, jewelry, wearables, 24-7 recording, same thing with glasses. Glasses will be able to detect if a scene is changing, you got to record every three seconds, little snapshots, little videos. If it's static and not changing that much, you only have to record every three minutes or 30 minutes. You will have entire daily archives of your daily experience ingested, processed by AI, unearthing insights that you didn't realize. And there's going to be a whole”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For video, they've got notebook LM to be able to put in hundreds of PDFs and audio files and be able to generate stuff. It truly is getting better and better and more cohesive from what seemed a bit chaotic two years ago. Those are my two bets that both public market and private market, you will see edge inference chips and memory chips becoming more and more important. And then the second, Google is a sleeper here. Apple is a little bit of a sleeper. I was sharing this with an LP, this thesis around Google. And they're like, Josh, I got to tell you, I just got a Bloomberg alert that said that Apple had just chosen Google to be the main AI as replacement for Siri. That's a big deal. Google was paying Apple $10, $20 billion a year for the search inside of Safari. That ecosystem is a lot more vulnerable than consensus linear predictions will make. The other adjacency that I talked about is something that we call it Lux Life Cording. There will be lots of little devices.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Billion of revenue at OpenAI, 70% of that revenue is from $20 a month paying subscribers like me. Google 20 years ago looked at Microsoft's main cash cow of office, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and Outlook, and they gave it all away for free because they could because they have this advertising model in search. Google can give away Gemini, which was the laughing stock when it was called Bard about two years ago. Today, Gemini is the most performative model. largest context window. Young companies run on G-Suite. I allow it entrusted to search my Google Drive and my files and my Gmail and so forth. I don't trust OpenAI to do that in the same way I didn't trust Meta and many of their products. I did trust Apple. I did trust Google. I did trust Amazon. It's trust is a feature of these companies. Google can give it away for free and completely undercut. And people will say, why am I spending 20 bucks a month for this when I'm getting it for free? They've got nanobanana for images. They've got VO3.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Locally hosted on models that are either etched into the silicon or using flash memory. There was a paper a year ago that gave me that insight. The paper said we could do large language models on small devices using flash memory. I immediately went and looked and said, okay, you've got SK Hynix, Samsung on the Korean side. SK Hynex has been delivering through the roof, backlog for the next two years. Samsung will probably come in and take some of that. Micron, US, I was worried that they were going to face some export restrictions from Trump. So far, doing well in thriving. Two main markets for all these memory guys. High bandwidth memory that's attached to the GPUs and is needed. And then this next cycle of on device. Small chips, flash memory, being able to run locally. That's the first thing that cracks the consensus narrative of endless demand for chips and data centers and power. The second is Google. Google can Microsoft these large language model players and the presumptive revenue growth at OpenAI and Anthropic, et cetera, would get hit. Today, roughly thirteen.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of each 100 chips and these clusters of data centers, which in turn fuel a demand for next generation energy of people funding modular reactors, speculative companies that I think are borderline fraudulent. All of that is premised that you need all of this. I use five different large language models at any given point in time. I open up five different tabs in the browser, or if I'm on my phone, I'm using five different apps. I've got Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude. They're all competing for 100% of my Mindshare. I'm allocating them 20%, but they're spending 500% on CapEx. When anthropic trained Claw, the first model was $100 million to train, they got $100 million of revenue. Amazing. Then they spent a billion dollars to train the next model, got a billion of revenue, still amazing. Then they spend $10 billion. Now they have $7 billion of revenue. The asymptote of revenue growth starts to hit this plateau. It will continue to grow, but the”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Wind me up. We've known each other for a very long time. I think it was back in 2015 or 2016. We were in a company called Zux, which was doing self-driving cars. It was inside of the doors of Zux where we recognized that they were training these cars outside, ingesting all the sensor data, and they were processing it at the rate of one second per second, what we call reality. I got upset because I thought that they were messing around and playing Grand Theft Auto. It looked like they were literally playing video games. And they said, no, no, no, relax. What we're doing is training the vehicles in silico, on computers, using physics engines. Are those supercomputers? I asked. They said, no, they're NVIDIA chips that aren't even on the market yet. Now, this was at a time when Nvidia was a $15 billion market cap company. Nvidia was ascendant and it made a ton of sense to see with convolutional neural nets and the rise of the transformer and ultimately what we know as large language models, transformers being the T of GPT, all of that made sense. Fast forward to today, the amount of money that is being spent and encouraged by Jensen and Nvidia that you need hundreds of thousands of...”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other vectors that are interesting space as a vector is going to be hotly geopolitically contested. There's great opportunities for collaboration, also great near-peer competition. The ISS was this technological and scientific diplomacy that has now fractured. China and Russia are out. China has gone to the dark side of the moon. Russia is going to the moon with China. US is going back and we've got our internal competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin and others. Space is going to be a contested domain in a very big way. Huge opportunity, but huge risks. There's going to be sabotage, counter-sabotage, detection, deflection. It literally is going to be Star Wars and there's going to be a lot of contested battle space there.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In tech, our best companies, our best startups working seamlessly with our national security sector and the advancement of protection of our country, working with allies, partners, strengthening them as our comparative advantage against China and others adversaries.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out there, particularly the risk I've been associated with, are quite acute, however, the opportunities are massive. We've been talking a lot about the Middle East and we at the G20 back in 2023 rolled out this initiative called the IMEC India Middle East through Jordan Israel into Europe, overseen by the dynamic American entrepreneurial ecosystem. It is a ship to rail transport. It's tech, it's trading ideas and technology. That is very much the wave of the future trading relations between UAE and India, how they spiked since they closed a free trade agreement a few years ago. Once we emerge from this horrific Gaza crisis, that agenda is very much the direction of travel. I hear it on almost every capital. That's where they want to head. People want to build stuff that's going to change the world in the heart of our national security space. There is a recognition that we have to have our best mind.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd love to ask under this thought process of the duration of venture investing long term and the macro perspective you have The biggest geopolitical risks that you're now thinking about as part of Lux over a long period of time, not just the next year or two. Counterterrorism keeps me up at night. I go back to that foundational experience. I'm on one track and the world's on one track. And then we got hit out of left field. There's still groups out there that want to do that again. We got to stay on top of that in a smart, sustainable way. There's increasing nuclear risk. We're entering a world of all the guardrails of arms control are eroding if you project ahead 10, 15 years, particularly as the Chinese built up, there are arsenal. And of course, AI and where that's heading and military applications of AI is something that jumped to the top of our national security agenda when I was in the White House in the last four years, particularly starting in 2022. And that intersected a lot with the Middle East because of the advancements and the ambitions of some of these Middle East partners.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want in the world tasking a satellite, sunlight as a service. Solar cells could be performative 100% of time instead of 50% of the time. Yes, you can shine it on something trivial like a concert in the middle of the desert at night or search and rescue for military operations when you don't want the cloak of darkness. If it works, it could be huge. There's a lot of countries where Brett and others have relations that might really care about this. We are a priority thinking about how could we light up no pun intended here their business by opening doors that they might themselves never have access to.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great example to what Brett said. Half or more of the team, when they heard the pitch, they're like, that's ridiculous. We want to be at the cusp between what seems impossible, and then you hear the pitch from the founder. Oh, no, no, this is inevitable. That gap from impossible to inevitable is powerful. Believing in this founder who came from SpaceX got these extraordinary people who were some of the best and brightest material scientists, satellite builders, rocketeers, et cetera. It all made logical sense. And it was all obeying the laws of physics. The way to think about this simply is you have those Mylar birthday balloons, those mirror-like super thin but super reflective. If you could have that unfurl into a giant mirror on a big boom that sprawls out and redirect the sun to flash and have a satellite hovering, shining a flashlight in the middle of darkness.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to take bigger engines. It's going to take big resources, not with our risk, but you can do it. When JFK set that objective, you had an ends ways and means. You could wait to tell that story. That's very important in making investment decisions. It's got to be grounded in the founder, the team, and where it's going to go. Reflect Orbital is a company that is launching satellites to redirect the sun to the dark side of the earth for all sorts of applications from solar to military applications. They're launching their first satellites here in the second quarter of the coming year. That's just one example.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way Josh described Venture, it might look like you're painting in such a broad canvas, you can make a lot of bets, some of which don't pan out. And yet the same thought process comes to bear, I have found. We've had examples of a founder coming in with crazy ideas that a first brush might sound nuts. Then you get to know the founder, you get to know their background, counter to what I just said about that more disciplined strategic thought process. Take JFK's moon speech in 1962. People say, look, a leader's got to point to where we want to go. If you study JFK's moonshot speech, before he made that speech, he had on his desk a commission study completed overseen by LBJ's vice president with the best rocket scientist in the world, Werner von Braun and these Nazi scientists who came over to work with us. That's another lesson of history. And they said, we can get to the moon. Here's what it takes.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's how Xi Jinping thinks. That's how Putin thinks. That's how a lot of leaders around the world with longevity think. That's why it's important for us as a country to get back to some sense of things stop at the water's edge and when we're out there in the world, we try to speak generally with the same voice. That's an ideal, but we've kind of lost some of that. That is how a lot of leaders around the world see us. It makes getting things done difficult, particularly when you have these wild swings between one administration to the next. I've spanned those administrations. Some of it I say to foreign counterparts is exaggerated. Our interests still are, generally speaking, within a zone of agreement between both parties of whatever comes into office. That is not just a cultural difference, but a geostrategic difference that we have to grapple with. As the United States, as an American official, as an American business person.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Negotiated with the Iranians, I've done very difficult back channel with them during the crisis in the Middle East in the past couple years and warning various things and leading to military confrontation. If you're making a hard demand, say with Iran on whatever it might be, whether it's on the nuclear file or the Hostit negotiation or warning them against ongoing attacks against us or else type demand, they point to our constant turnover in Washington. The anecdote I heard across the table was if I'm taking a bus from Tehran to Isfahan and it might be a three-hour bus ride and someone gets on the bus that is obnoxious making a mess of things, I'm going to stay on the bus. I'll get to my destination. And he said, United States, you're that obnoxious guy on the bus. You're going to have a new president in four years. You have a new administration, totally new policies. Whether I like him or don't like them, we're staying in the court.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're face to face with anyone senior, try to understand what he or she across from you wants to do. Every country's different, the way Saudi Arabia is developing its data center buildout, its ambitions, it's different from what Abu Dhabi's doing. Trying to find that fit is important. It's not the easiest environment to raise capital right now. They are looking for opportunities that benefit themselves domestically as they're looking ahead with a young population trying to create jobs, particularly in Saudi Arabia. I've been in and out of the region for so long. I have a decent sense for where these different leaders are trying to take their countries. And that can be Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Saudi and Iraq, Israel, Egypt. It's important to understand their objectives and then trying to find where interests can align.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are so many threads to pull through this. As you were working in the Middle East, one of the things in building great relationships is understanding cultural differences. What are some of the things that you learned from your time that an investor in the United States might not understand about the region?”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sci tech diplomacy. And you think about the diplomatic vectors of military and economic and political, science and technology is another vector for diplomacy. A breakthrough that happens in American university or a breakthrough that happens with an American entrepreneur and the ability to take that and scale that globally and introduce them to sovereign partners who might say, wait a second, we can get a competitive advantage relative to our regional peers or our domestic population needs this, or we can put money into it and help to be a major distributor in the region of the world. Those are big deals.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of it is this old joke that I used to tell Scott Besson, a mutual friend of ours, would say, Why do you care so much about macros? And I would say the act of venture is the most micro thing you could do. You're analyzing a little technology where you're analyzing an individual. If you were to imagine trying to do this downward selection, not just of a security selection, but an individual or a company, it's the same thing as picking the best dish on a menu, having selected the best menu from the best restaurants in town and having pick the best neighborhood in which to dine from the best city and all these concatenated decisions. And you're about to take this delicious bite of this delicious morsel of food. And then all of a sudden, Godzilla comes and just steps on you. Ignorance of the macro is no virtue. It plays another way. There's themes and feces that we've developed thinking about what if we bring this technology globally? What if we bring it to the rest of the world? One in particular fits this theme that Brett and I have been working on that we call”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This interesting polarity of talking about finding some niche technology that you can invest in maybe you're creating from scratch. Someone like Brett geopolitical relationships around the world, how do you think about the importance of macro? In your investment process at such early stage technologies.”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies between two of the administrations that he served passed four White Houses starting with Hush 2 and then Trump built a counter ISIS coalition there between Trump and Biden where he would then be the main Mideast envoy responsible for some of the most high stakes negotiations that our country faced He was on the board of one of our companies that was focused on signal intelligence and AI. We got to know him, respected him, admired him. When he left the Biden administration, he came and joined us some weeks later. The relationships that Brett has developed, particularly in the Mideast region, of geopolitical significance, of capital, economic significance, are extraordinary. We have our portfolio lined up to spend time with Brett to get intros that many people can't get. It's been a real unlock and a hack for us. It delivers value to our companies, delivers values to long-term partners that Brett knows in the region, particularly in UAE and Saudi and elsewhere. That is the major unlock. And thinking about the scale of that value from”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Andreessa that I admire that have built out an entire platform team where they have dozens of folks that are helping with these different attributes, we try to do it individually as a partner. And then we add on venture partners who add something unique that the partnership doesn't have across the entire firm. It's true in our accounting and finance department, it's true in our operations group, our legal group, our platform group, and the partnership itself. If two people are the same, one of them is unnecessary. I want people thinking differently. I want people able to add different value. Ted, if you were starting a company and we were backing you, I might be the one that finds you sources you, helps win the deal. The entire partnership is going to smother you, consume all your time, prevent you from going to see our competitors, do everything we can to lock you up. Once we're invested, somebody might be helping with recruiting, somebody might be helping with syndicate intros, somebody might be helping with competitive intel, somebody might be helping with PR marketing. We operate as what you call unemployees. Brett was on the board of one of our”
2025-12-08 · Capital Allocators · Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source