Ben Reinhardt: How to Discover New Technology, Playing the Longest Game, and Philanthropy in Technology
I’m so excited to introduce you to Ben Reinhardt. He’s a fellow tech fanatic taking a unique approach to advancing our civilization.
Ben is the CEO of Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit industrial research lab. Their mission is “to create an abundant, wonder-filled future by unlocking powerful materials and manufacturing technologies.”
Ben shares his journey as a non-profit founder and his passion for supporting innovative startups.
Links to Platforms:
Here’s what we explored in the episode:
How studying history helps us see the present and the future more clearly.
Ben’s vision is to work with founders who are not just chasing profits but are driven by the desire to solve meaningful problems.
Most successful concepts emerge from multiple rounds of experimentation.
As institutions evolve, gaps formed around important research that used to be funded by universities or R&D labs of corporations. Ben is building a non-profit to fill that gap.
Ben shared why he chose to invest in startups rather than founding his own.
Ben invests in "physics-enabled" startups that apply scientific principles to solve tough problems.
For startups to be successful, there needs to be an alignment of motivations between investors and founders.
Founders should approach investors with clarity about their vision and expect honesty and support in return.
There are significant global issues that aren't being addressed by startups and opportunity abounds.
Leaders must build complementary teams where members fill each other’s gaps, particularly in technical and strategic expertise.
There’s a need for effective communication to bridge gaps between technical experts and the broader public. (hopefully some of what we’re doing here!)
If you’re looking for non-profit causes for your philanthropic donations, SpecTech may be among the highest-leverage ways to advance human civilization through donations.
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When new technologies meet the market, the world changes for the better. That's why we invest our money into obsessive geniuses building utopian technologies.
We write small checks to 15-20 very different startups each year. Previous investments include Aalo, Atom Limbs, Ouros Energy, Stell Engineering, Astroforge, Airship, Terraform Industries, Longshot, Dirac, Occam, Atomic Industries and more.
Our Website has background on the fund, our past deals, and more.
Accredited Investors: reply to this email, I'll send you our deck, and we'll get you into our deals starting this quarter.
Learn more about Ben Reinhardt:
Additional episodes:
Augustus Doricko: How to Terraform Earth, The History of Weather Control, and The Mandate of Heaven
The Alliance of Entrepreneurs and Scientists with Arkady Kulik of RPV
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Ben, I'm terrifically happy to meet you.
Ben Reinhardt: I'm terrifically happy to meet you. It's like one of those things where you're like, you know that a person exists and you've like interacted on the internet but never really like...
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, and what a wonderful excuse the podcast is to close all those loops. And I love your sweater and I'm so excited to talk to you.
Ben Reinhardt: Right back at you. I love your little statues with the Santa hats.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh, thank you. That's Warren and Charlie, decorated for the holidays. It turns out infant Santa hats fit them perfectly, which I'm extremely excited about, and my wife is ecstatic. So, yeah, that's my little Christmas decoration. I've heard so much about you from, I think, probably first and foremost, Sam Arbison.
Ben Reinhardt: Oh, well, he is on our board of advisors and like a long- I guess, yeah, I've known him for a long time now.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, he's a great dude. He's a great dude... Yeah, he's been on the podcast before. He's an extremely reliable sign of like both intelligence, integrity and energy, which I find to be, that's the thing. Like if he vouches for somebody, I'm like this person's the man and I must meet them.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, I mean, I guess what else do you need besides intelligence, integrity and energy? Like that's what I want from people.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, those are the three. I mean, I think those are famously like Buffett's hiring criteria that is just like perfect, because if you draw those out, and if you lack any one of the three, you're liable to go astray in one way or another. I have artfully preserved my ignorance about everything. So, I've got like a very high level awareness of like you, of Speculative Technologies, of your background, but I'm so interested to learn all of the things. And we may as well start at the beginning, which is as interesting as any other part, which is like, how do you study both- how and why, I suppose, did you study both medieval history and engineering and how is that- how did it happen and what has it gotten you?
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, so the way that it happened was, honestly, I finished all my engineering requirements in three years, and instead of graduating early, I was just like well... during that time, I had an amazing history professor focused on medieval history and just kind of like got completely medieval history pilled, and so I was just like, well, I might as well just take a bunch more classes and write a thesis and and get a history degree as well.
Eric Jorgenson: It's incredible what a good teacher can do, man.
Ben Reinhardt: Oh yeah, like Warren Brown, shout out to Warren Brown. And yeah, that's how that happened, and I am so grateful that it did. Because most of my career has kind of been pulling on the engineer thread, but I feel like having sort of like the... You know how different fields have different ways of seeing the world? Being able to put on the historian hat and think about the world that way, I've found incredibly valuable. So now, I'm like a very big- this will never happen, but I think the world would be amazing if like everybody had both like a technical degree and a humanities degree and could just sort of like switch between those ways of thinking about things.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it is such an important- like humanities, how do you think about it? Like, is it the targeting system for where you apply the technical expertise? Is it how you value the technical expertise? Like, what is the...
Ben Reinhardt: I think it's more thinking about... I think humanity teaches you how to think about people, and the technical expertise teaches you to think about things, is maybe how I would describe it. So, the history is like- because in order to make- like technology is made by people. And so, you always have both at play. Like you ignore one at your peril. You have all the technologists who are like, oh, yeah, we'll just like build the technology and then things will happen. Or you have people who are just like, oh, well, if we just set policy right, things will happen. It's like, no, you kind of need both things to happen.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. So, do they sort of merge for you and you have this, like Balaji talks about this, technologist's view of history?
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, I think that would be a good way of describing it. Yeah.
Eric Jorgenson: And that feels like where- it feels like they have merged. I know you've had like hardcore engineering roles in the past, but I feel like you're merging those in Speculative Technologies, the project that you're mainly working on now. It is a very like zoomed out view of like, all right, we are making history day to day. How do we influence the technologies to make a better future, given the game board, the playing board, the way we have it today?
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, well, I mean, that is probably better than I could have said it. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I think maybe the historical, to some extent, the historical perspective on that is that you can never go back to the past, but you can like try to pull out from it like the rhymes. Like everybody's like, oh, no, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. And I feel like many technologists actually forget that. So, you have lots of people who are like, oh, yeah, we just need to like build Bell Labs again. And it's like, well, the fact of the matter is that Bell Labs was an artifact of a very particular time in a very particular place in a very particular context. But what we can do is we can step back and say, oh, what was the kind of work that Bell Labs was uniquely good at? Why were they uniquely good at it? And how could we try to enable that kind of work, given what's happened, given the differences between the 1930s and 1950s and the 2020s? And so maybe that's to sort of like talk sideways about what we're doing.
Eric Jorgenson: Well, let's talk front ways about it. Just like will you lay out- so, what is Speculative Technologies? What does it do?
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, so I describe it as a non-profit industrial research lab focused particularly on materials and manufacturing technologies to build an abundant future. So just to unpack, there's a lot of- in order to describe it succinctly, I have to use a lot of jargon. So, to like unpack that, so we're a nonprofit organization, in large part just because we believe that and history has shown that a lot of technology research produces public goods, and that is sort of a particularly underserved area right now. I describe this as an industrial research lab because instead of sort of taking the academic mindset towards research, which is like, what is maximally interesting or like maximally new, we take the standpoint of like, okay, what is maximally useful? What can we do? Like, what is the work that we can do that will like actually lead to useful things down the line? And we focus particularly on materials and manufacturing because we have a thesis that both materials and manufacturing technologies basically underpin civilization, and I can dig into that. And also, they are particularly, they're fairly like unsexy and underserved, and especially in sort of the philanthropically funded research world.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, there's so much to dig into there. So, I want to start with the like, let's unpack useful, actually. And this might get us back into the sort of wide zoom lens of your view of history and technology and how it develops. But when you say useful innovations or discoveries or scientific breakthroughs, what qualifies?
Ben Reinhardt: To some extent, it is like porn in that you know it when you see it. But...
Eric Jorgenson: And it's exciting.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, it's that stuff like really frankly, it's that stuff that like if you project say like a hundred years from now, if we look back and say like, man, I'm glad, this thing that I'm interacting with now a hundred years in the future, you can sort of like trace it back. So, it's almost like trying to do future history. I could frame it like that. So like the useful things are the stuff that maybe like have some chance of being future history. So obviously not everything, and in fact many things are not going to play out. You do some stuff, you have some hypothesis of how it will, like the dominoes falling meme. And maybe that's another way of framing it. It's like things that we think can be like the first or second domino in that meme that I'm sure everybody has seen, where you have like a little domino and a bigger domino, bigger domino, and then like a huge domino. I think those are the useful things. And this isn't to say that- and there are many things that are amazing and should be done that are just not useful. So, I'm very much not a utilitarian, and so I think that there are many things that are- for example, understanding the cause of the Big Bang. Like that is a thing, that is an extremely important question that we should absolutely be doing work to find the answer to. I don't think it'll be particularly useful, and it may turn out that it is. Like sometimes things turn out to be useful that are not, but that's an example of kind of a not useful thing, or not useful but worthwhile thing.
Eric Jorgenson: I feel like you've done some pretty methodical work on the very specific tech trees in this area. So, is that a good way to- do you think about those tech trees as dominoes and like building this roadmap of sequential, almost prerequisite discoveries that need to happen to unlock these massive capabilities that we foresee are like possibly maybe futuristic possibilities but humanity has not yet created?
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, I mean, I think that is always a... Yeah, there's sort of like the working backwards and working forwards version of things. So, one way, I guess, I use multiple ways of looking at things. So, there is the working backwards approach, which is saying, okay, there is some set of future technologies that we would love to exist, like space elevators and Mars colonies and flying cars and replicators and interstellar travel. And you can sort of work back and ask, is this work, like could you imagine the work that we're doing being sort of like the first domino on that. So, for example, we have this program that is working on protein-based fibers. So, like spider silk is your classic protein-based fiber. We can make the proteins. We don't have the mechanism that spiders have in their butts to rearrange the proteins and then apply a stimulus to them to actually make spider silk. And there is an insane scenario where the work on these protein-based fibers, sort of like taking all these small pieces and putting them together to make a very long fiber is the domino that leads to like extremely long carbon nanotubes, which then leads to space elevators. So that's one way of looking at it. But at the same time, I think that especially in materials of manufacturing, the nature of it is that the vast majority of the impact happens via second order effects. And so the other way to look at it is like, okay, if we can unlock this, almost like how much space does it open up that we can't even predict exactly what it will be used for. So, it's like you always want sort of like one sort of like dream scenario, but then there's like all these second order consequences.
Eric Jorgenson: That's fascinating. It's really similar, I mean, it's almost the like scientific possibility cone in the way I think about early stage investing as like market possibility cones of like, if there's one really clear, big enough target to justify the company, but there's a lot of adjacent markets or opportunities that the technology could then tackle, that's a great investment to make.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, absolutely. I think that to a large extent, like money investing and research investing are very similar pursuits in the sense that they're dominated by power laws, there's high uncertainty, people really matter, path dependence really matters. There's all these attributes that you can look at, it's just sort of like your metric of success is different. It's like, yeah, but other than that, it's a very similar game.
Eric Jorgenson: So, let's talk about the context of, do you call it Spec Tech for short?
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, that is the contraction.
Eric Jorgenson: All right, fantastic. This is going to be a very long podcast otherwise. So, we've got- where are the boundaries of- because traditionally some of this was done, you mentioned Bell Labs, and there's other famous examples of private, corporate funded fundamental research. And then I know a fair amount is done by universities and governments. Where are the boundaries of different efforts that are taking place, and why did you feel that like a new forum is necessary?
Ben Reinhardt: Why do we need new institutions?
Eric Jorgenson: This is not a landscape I'm familiar with, so I'm fascinated with like the opportunity that you saw.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, so let me- the way that I'll sort of describe it is, to a large extent, the existing institutions and the constraints that they're under and sort of paint in the gap that we're trying to fill sort of like by painting in the negative space, if you will. So I'm sure all of your listeners are very familiar with startups. They are an amazing vehicle for building and scaling technology. The trick is that startups, one, are usually under intense time constraints just because of investors' time scales. And also, the work that you want to do to really grow, sort of do this exponential growth, is different than the work that you want to do to like do research to figure stuff out. Because research very often looks like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, something, nothing, something, something. Which is just not great for like raising a series A, raising a series B. And then there's also just a different mindset that you need when you're doing technology research versus building a technology product. So that's sort of where things are like- so stuff that's too researchy to be a startup. Corporate labs, unfortunately, have, for the most part, been gutted by call it shareholder activism or compressed time scales or decreased margins. But if you look at it, there are many corporate research labs, but they're much more tied to the product lines, existing product lines of a company. So, they either have contracts from operating units to go in and be like, okay, make this product line a little bit better, or they actually have to get their funding from external contracts. So, half the funding for many corporate research labs now comes from government grants. And so they really don't have the ability to sort of do this like exploratory, speculative, ambitious work. And then that sort of brings us to government funding, which, so, I mean, there are national labs that do research, but for the most part we think of the government as actually funding research in other institutions. So, whether they're funding startups or universities or contract research organizations. And with the government, there's kind of this fundamental tension. And maybe you're even seeing a little bit of this in the doge discussions that are currently happening, where as citizens in a democracy, we want the government to be responsible with our money. Like we pay taxes, we kind of want the government to spend that money responsibly. At the same time, in order to do really ambitious, amazing research, you need to be a little bit irresponsible. Like you can't- you actually can't go through and say like, ah, yes, I can justify this step and this step and this step.
Eric Jorgenson: It's the same issue with the, it's the same sort of power law, like incremental progress issue that you run into on the investor side. It's always having to justify.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, exactly. And this is in large part one of the amazing things about venture capital is that like there are people who will just be like take a flyer. They'll be like, oh, this seems insane. I'll go for it.
Eric Jorgenson: That's my mantra, baby. It is actually a frustration that I have with a lot of venture capitalists, especially when it's a deeply technological breakthrough kind of company where no one's ever built the thing before but the theory is that it can be built or the science shows that it can be built, and the whole company is really, can it be built or can it not? And nobody on earth knows because it's never been built before. And so, investors are like, well, I don't know how to diligence this. The price is the diligence. The risk is the diligence. That's the bet.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, and this is- so the government is much more like a PE firm or something. And so there are just many things. And then we can go through a whole litany of things like it moves slowly, it requires you to be part of an existing institution, it's very... X, Y, Z. And then I think the sort of last player that I will bring us to is academia as exemplified by universities. There are many non-university research organizations, but they're still under the broad institutional header of academia. And the issue there, I guess there's two categories of issues. There are the universities themselves as institutions have accumulated at this point dozens of roles over the past several hundred years. Like Mark Andreesen has talked about this where it's like the university is both like a place for 18 to 22 year olds to hang out, do job training, do moral instruction, be a dating app, be a credentialing agency, be a hedge fund, a sports team, and discover the secrets of the universe and build useful technology. Like all of these things have been lumped into one. And the fact of the matter is that they're just, one, they stopped being good at many of them. And I would argue that they are especially bad at creating useful technology, even though that is sort of the paradigm that we have been sort of like incepted into us. Shockingly, relatively recently, the historian fun fact is that this idea that the way that technology happens by spinning out of a lab is actually, was basically invented in the late 1970s. Before that, there was, yeah, that was not the paradigm of universities as innovation engines. So, there's universities as this like- oh, and universities have also become the most bureaucratic institution in existence, and I include the federal government in that statement. And then there's sort of this broader philosophical mismatch between the academic, what I would call like an academic mindset and building technology and where the like academic mindset at the end of the day is this kind of like- it is the descendant of natural philosophy where you're really trying to- sort of the game is to discover the truth of the universe and come up with new ideas and discover new things, which is great and wonderful but does not lend itself to actually building useful technology, because I'm sure you've seen this in investing, where you talk to a technologist and they're like, this is new, this is totally new, no one's ever done it before, and you're like, yeah, but does it do the thing better? And they're like, eh, not really. Because the metric in academia is novelty. So anyway, that is a very long way of saying, so what we're focused on is doing- like our boundaries are stuff that doesn't have a home in these other institutions, is weird, needs to move fast, and needs to be focused on building useful technologies that can scale and get out into the world.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. So like, let's do a few more. I think the like spider silk to carbon nanotubes to space elevators is like a really cool one. I have an infinite appetite to hear sort of what the areas of focus are for you and what you see as the dominoes that might carry on because that's...
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah. So, like areas- So I am a kind of a professional dilettante. So, we can go on for a long time. Like, other areas, we've been incubating this program to build basically a new paradigm of making microelectronics. And so right now, the way that you make microelectronics is you have a big piece of silicon, and then you etch it, and you make chips, and everybody knows this. But the fact of the matter is like that is- we are sort of reaching the limits of that paradigm.
Eric Jorgenson: And it's an insanely expensive process.
Ben Reinhardt: Yes. Well, that's what happens when you reach the limits of paradigms. It's like the best clipper ships happened right before steam ships. It's like we were like peak sailing ships right before they become obsolete. And so it might be possible. Like, again, all of this stuff, very speculative, but it might be possible to actually grow transistors the same way you make chemicals, like grow them in a vat, ship them anywhere in the world, and then lay them down and wire them together to make custom circuits on demand. And that then leads to this world where you basically are just like, instead of needing a chip and putting it in a product, compute is just something that you build into everything. It's no longer a discrete part of the system. So, you could just like have fabric where like compute is built into the fabric or you have like shipping labels or whatever.
Eric Jorgenson: Wait, you're breaking my brain. Please keep explaining.
Ben Reinhardt: So if you imagine that instead of sort of compute living on chips, which have been fabricated somewhere else, but instead like you’re manufacturing the unit, the transistors, and the transistors and circuit components, but then only assemble them as part of the item that you want to make, then it just sort of changes how we put compute into products, and it is no longer like, ah yes, we have a computer or we have a smart appliance. It's just like, in the same way that you have plastic and metal components of a product, you will have plastic and metal and compute components of a product.
Eric Jorgenson: Whoa. Okay, so if my sweater has compute in it, it's a compute sweater, does that make it an invisibility cloak? Does it let me sign into things?
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, you could imagine it keeping track of your vitals. It's like, okay, it could sense you getting stressed. It could sense you're too hot. You can imagine... it's like, oh, Eric's starting to sweat. And then it like talks to your thermostat, and it's like, okay, turn on the air conditioning. Or you have like a smart shipping label, and it's just like, okay, anything can scan this and know its whole history and it can like talk to things. You can build in- and if you can sort of like customize everything, you can make sort of like unique, like build in physical security into things. And again, this is the sort of situation where it's like- you start invoking second order effects, and it's like, okay, this not only changes the things that we're using, but then like the structure, like right now, there's a lot of tension around where we make chips. That is like a geopolitical concern. But then if like you're making- if like building compute into things is just like this completely distributed thing, then nobody really worries about like where you're making chips. And so, there's these second order effects of like-
Eric Jorgenson: Especially if it's cheaper to produce. I mean, we are seeing a lot of- like compute has been a bottleneck and the cost of compute and the amount of compute has been a bottleneck on human progress forever. And so, the more of it we can create, the cheaper we can create it and move into a new like computing substrate or paradigm, that'll be a really exciting multiple on everything else that gets accelerated, especially if it's the AI, like the thing that drives the amount of AI that we can use.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, exactly. And then I guess like the last sort of big area that, and this is slightly fuzzier because I'm still sort of like figuring out what the specific programs and actually like how to execute on this. But to the point of paradigms, thinking about truly new manufacturing paradigms. And what I mean by that is that, for the most part, the way that we have manufactured most of the things that we use hasn't really changed since the 1950s, the 1940s and 1950s. We design a thing, you send it to- you have some set of machines. Yes, we've added 3D printers. Yes, we have CAD, and we have CAM on our mills. But it's mostly the same way like when we have material flow through a system. And the thought there is that, one, in order to drastically reduce the cost of stuff, we need new paradigms. But then also, again, going back to the current topics, I'm sure you've seen things about re-industrialize America and all that. I don't think that we're going to be able to- you sort of can't outdo China on the same game. They've gotten very good at this game. They've gone really far down the learning curve. Like I'm sure your listeners are familiar with learning curves. You do a thing over and over again, it becomes cheaper and you're faster and better at it. And the trick is that you need to actually- like a new paradigm lets you jump onto a new learning curve. And so, we need to actually like create, think about like, okay, what, from like a systems level standpoint, how do we like change how we manufacture things? And to actually tie this back to sort of like the institutional gap, the reason that we need to be working on it is because, to a large extent, like manufacturing is a pretty low margin business. And so, you can sort of like peel off parts of that and start startups that can have VC fundable margins. But if you actually want to redo the whole system, there's way too much uncertainty, way too many moving parts to make a good startup. And at the same time, all of the existing manufacturing companies don't have the margins to do this research. And so that's why you need this organization coming in that's like not focused on maximizing investability but is like, okay, just how do we make this thing get us to a new paradigm so that other people can take this and run with it?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, like that longer, slightly longer time horizon both historically and in the future because the impact of reaching a new paradigm is so massive, but the gamble, yeah, the stones it takes, frankly, to like believe it's there and to invest resources to get us there, even if- it's just a high probability of like chasing an illusion. But the payoff, if it's true, and you can find it, is so massive that the expected value is there every single time. It just is difficult for us, I think, like our programming, to go after it.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, the trick though is that the value is there, it is hard to capture that value. Because what often happens is that you kind of like- the work is mostly to identify a point in design space, that once you've done that, and you're like this is what it looks like, it's very easy for people to sort of follow on. Like, a great example of paradigm shifts is, have you ever seen, there are these pictures when they first started having airplanes, they were like- they knew that they needed airplanes for the Navy, but what they did is they just like had like a little hanger off the back of a battleship that was holding a seaplane, and they're like, yes, this is how we're going to have airplanes on ships. We're going to have like seaplanes that are being like dragged behind battleships. And what they needed to do is actually like step back, basically redesign a ship so that you can actually- so you have an aircraft carrier. But the trick is once you say, oh, this is what an aircraft carrier looks like, it's actually very straightforward for other people to say, oh, okay, that's what an aircraft carrier looks like. Thanks for doing the work. I'm also going to build a ship with a big flat deck that planes can take off of from. And so it requires a lot of work. It's incredibly valuable to figure that out, but then it's very hard to capture that value for sort of any single organization.
Eric Jorgenson: Which is why you are organized as a 501c3, a non-profit and... Yeah, very interesting.
Ben Reinhardt: I just always feel the need to like flag that because, especially when speaking to investors. Like I've worked in a VC firm, I get it. But then sort of like flagging like, hey, this is really valuable. There's just like, there are structural reasons why you shouldn't assume that it should just be a startup. So that's why I like waved a little flag.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and there are exceptions. The exceptions sort of prove the rule of like when the existing mechanisms for discovering these things and just because it's hard to capture the value doesn't mean there isn't value. Like the positive externalities of going through one of these transformations are absolutely massive technological advances. I'm sure you have many examples throughout history that sort of are motivating factors, but like this is how you lift millions and billions of people out of poverty, like discovering and deploying and commercializing, distributing new technology.
Ben Reinhardt: Absolutely.
Eric Jorgenson: Do you want to do some of those historical examples? I also think it's worth mentioning who funds Speculative Technology because it's like an incredible list of visionaries, in my view.
Ben Reinhardt: I mean, I like to think so. Yeah, I mean, our funders are kind of- we've gotten funding from Patrick Collison, Schmidt Futures, Open Phil, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, Sloan Foundation. Yeah, I don't have a list of funders right in front of me.
Eric Jorgenson: Those are awesome. I mean, it's the end of the year and people are like searching for- it's really hard. Everyone wants to sort of like be a good charitable donor. It's very difficult to assess the sort of impact of any individual foundation, even if you love their work, a lot of it is a bandaid on a bullet hole. And this is one of a few nonprofits that I see, and there are a handful that are sort of like in our tech world that have a truly long-term view towards producing massive positive externalities for the entire civilization. There's frankly not that many of them, and you're tackling really important stuff that the government and universities, as you point out, are not necessarily doing as good of a job as they had in the past.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, well, I appreciate that plug. I mean, as further social proof, Open Phil has us on their website as one of their recommended charities. So, it's like don't take it from me, take it from the great folks at Open Phil.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, well, there's no amount of this that is enough. Like, I can't- as a civilization, I feel like humanity is just drastically under-resourcing their frontiers.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, yes, I definitely agree. I think the interesting thing is that, I think that like there's a limit to what any given institution can do effectively. We're nowhere near that yet. But I think that the thing that I would love to see is just like this whole ecosystem of people trying out different structures for trying to attack the frontier. Can I just do a really brief plug for why people in tech should think about funding technology-focused non-profits? Which is just this idea that, to a large extent, most people in tech are able to have the wealth that they have because in the past, someone did work to create a technology that that person probably wasn't able to capture a lot of the value of. And there are structural reasons why I think it is impossible to make that happen. And the best thing we can do is to make it so that in the future, there's someone else whose livelihood depends on some technology that doesn't even exist yet and then just have this pay it forward cycle is the way that I think about it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that's an incredibly important, yeah, we're picking the flowers that grew out of soil that someone else plowed. We owe it to the future to leave the field and soil well nourished.
Ben Reinhardt: So, other historical examples of new paradigms that lift everybody up, I mean, there's everything from- I go back to the fact that we name ages after materials. Like, you have the Bronze Age where it's like, okay, you can make bronze now, and what you can do with bronze, you can plow much better things than you could with just sticks. And you can make much better cutting implements. And then you have the Iron Age which lets you cultivate even more lands and make all sorts of products that you couldn't before, and sort of like, it just goes- the litany goes on. So just think of an age, what it's named after, and it's like, okay, that lifted so many people. Artificial fertilizer, like the Haber-Bosch process, which is how we turn atmospheric nitrogen into, we fix the nitrogen so that plants can use it to grow food. Some ridiculous fraction of the world would not be alive right now if we hadn't shifted from a paradigm where we literally would dig nitrogen out of the desert and harvest bird guano to fertilize things to having these giant factories that just pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere and turn it into fertilizer.
Eric Jorgenson: That's an incredible example, I think, because it's like an inverse genocide. Like, if you look at, if that scientific process hadn't been existed, commercialized, distributed, built out, billions and billions of souls would not ever have been born. And like, what opportunities are we missing that we have not yet discovered because we haven't funded the right research or pushed it the right way or given the right grants? And like that's the, where could we be in 100 years if we organize our resources correctly? I feel like that's the- and how much good might be created, how many people might be born, how many lives might be gifted if we can get that right.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, absolutely.
Eric Jorgenson: I don't know what the word for an inverse genocide... there's like distress and eustress.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, and eucatastrophes.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, what's the like-?
Ben Reinhardt: Oh, yeah. I think the word looks completely different because like side is always killing things.
Eric Jorgenson: I'll text a linguist. We need a lifeline. We'll figure it out.
Ben Reinhardt: Phone a linguist. I am not a linguist. Yeah, and it's just... I think it's almost like hard... It's almost hard to see these things looking backwards because we just don't... They just become part of our lives, and we just sort of like... To some extent, the hedonic treadmill just keeps churning, and we don't realize how terrible it was.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And by the same token, it's so difficult to... Like, it takes real work to imagine something that seems so abstract and then dare to believe confidently in it and like sail towards it.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, absolutely. It's very hard. I think that there are these like broad strokes things that we can talk about how the world could be better. It's like, okay, we can have drastically healthier- I like to describe like you could play basketball with your grandkids, which means that like your heart and your knees and all of that are like fully functional when you're into your 80s. And it's like you can imagine that, but then it's like, okay, what are the enabling things for that? And there's like, there's a lot of sort of like medical technologies. But then you think behind that, and it's like, okay, what underlies those technologies? There's a lot of work that needs to happen. I like to point out that without stainless steel, we wouldn't have vaccines because we make the vats that we grow the vaccines in out of stainless steel. And it's because it has all these antiseptic properties. So, there's the thing behind the thing. Oh, a fun fact about Haber-Bosch that I forgot to mention is that another thing, to the point of second-order effects, I think that a lot of sort of like existential things that people worry about actually end up getting addressed by second-order effects from these new paradigms. So like, it's easy to forget about, but up until like the 1970s and the 1980s, people were genuinely worried that overpopulation was an existential threat to the world.
Eric Jorgenson: I think they still are. There are many people who deeply believe that there are too many people instead of that we have a population crisis on our hands.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah. But I think, there are people who believe that, but I feel like it isn't a dominant narrative anymore. Like, nobody's, or not nobody, but I feel like that's, there's at least a good thread of not being worried about it. And like the reason that it's pretty- the reason that it's pretty clear that it's not really a huge threat anymore is not because someone did something that was like very directly aimed at fighting overpopulation. It wasn't like the anti-overpopulation society. It was the fact that it was just like, okay, we just make artificial fertilizer and farming technologies good enough that we just like have so much food...
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's a really interesting one. And I think like looking forward, we may have solved climate change in 50 years, and it probably won't have been a climate change focused solution. It'll be a fundamental scientific breakthrough, a product of cheaper energy, and a commercial solution.
Ben Reinhardt: Exactly. Yeah. And I don't mean to be like flippant and say like, oh, everything's going to be okay. We don't need to worry about things. Like that's not what I'm saying at all. It's more like, I think that it is worthwhile. It's always worthwhile to work on things that don't necessarily seem like they are going directly at a problem, but instead are sort of like creating general capacity that often has these second order effects to address big problems.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's very much about like just getting closer to the frontiers, expanding the frontiers, like letting yourself, creating the surface area to be surprised by the upside of some of these things. And I think it's another line from the Balaji book, like it is, this is why it pays to be an optimist, and it's like a fundamental tenet of technology that you have to believe that the next problem is solvable. Like every new idea you have might be like, oh, but all right, if we get the spider thing, we get the proteins, we get the carbon nanotubes, we get the space elevators, but what if people die in space elevators? We'll figure it out. Then we'll cross that bridge when we come to it like we always have, we always will.
Ben Reinhardt: I think that is a good framing of optimism, is that- not that there are no problems, but that problems are solvable.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that’s like a David Deutch thing. I don't know if it's articulated exactly that way, but yeah, it's a very optimistic, not optimistic, a realist optimism kind of thing. I'm curious again, I want to get back to like, what is the- we've talked about sort of what the organization does for Speculative Technologies. But what is the day to day? What is the tactical work that happens inside the organization that moves these things forward?
Ben Reinhardt: Like many startups, there's the big aspirations and then there's what we're actually doing day-to-day. So very concretely right now, we have two major spheres of things that we're doing. One is that we are incubating these programs, like the electronics, like the protein-based fibers. And what that concretely means is building roadmaps that create this definite vision of, okay, this is what we- here are the biggest risks to this technology, here's the work that we need to do up front to address these risks, here's the work that we'd need to do after that, if that goes well, here's how it would get out into the world. Like here are different scenarios. So like building very detailed roadmaps, and you can see some of those on our website. And that's like the incubation. And then, frankly, trying to get those programs funded. And like working with the program leads to get those funded. And then we sort of have this other program that we call the Brains Accelerator which is meant to help people start ambitious nonprofit research programs whether that is something that they do with us, whether it's starting what's called a focused research organization that your listeners may have heard of, or going off and starting a ARPA program, or something else entirely. And so that's sort of like our way of trying to push forward the ecosystem on top of just the work that we're doing internally. So, we have lots of ambitions of like, okay, would love to build a lab, would love to have a ton of money going into these programs and sort of all that. But day to day, it's a lot of planning, fundraising, helping people start their own organizations.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, which is a cool, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding from that description is that this is a place where, if you put a thousand dollars in and you guys deploy it well, you're helping someone go zero to one on a project or process that then- and helping them multiply the money available to that effort.
Ben Reinhardt: Absolutely. Yes. We like to think of ourselves as very high leverage.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Okay. Cool. What is the- and so you're working in this whole ecosystem to like pull in the money and the people and the time to move these things forward as much as you can. What fascinating work. This just seems so cool.
Ben Reinhardt: I like to think so, but I'm biased.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, I imagine there's a lot of interesting updates that have come. I mean, when did you get started on this? You're a couple of years in now.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah, it depends on when you- I think we like officially launched in February 2022. So we're about two and a half years in. And yeah, I mean, we've learned a lot of things. And like this accelerator program is new. One of the big things that we've learned actually is when we first started, we really thought we were going to be like a private ARPA, like that was how I was thinking about it, that's how I was projecting it. And to a large extent, I've realized that progress in the research ecosystem is actually bottlenecked by where people are physically doing the work. So, the whole idea with an ARPA is like, okay, you like fund other institutions, you fund universities, you fund startups to do work, and then you're like, okay, now kiss, get things out into the world. And I didn't realize how strong the constraints on all of those were. And so a big update is like, okay, no, we need to actually be able to be a home for people to actually do this work instead of just being a funding puppet master sort of thing. That was a big learning.
Eric Jorgenson: Which, yeah, that sounds like a lot more work.
Ben Reinhardt: It is. Well, I mean, it's all work. It's different work. But yeah, that's a big update. And also, over time, it's just like learning... it's like everything is fractally deep and like, okay, what's actually going on in manufacturing research? What's going on in materials research? Like what is going- I mean, over that time, like AI for materials discovery really sort of exploded. But then... and so like once that happens, I'm always thinking about like counterfactual impact. So I'm like, okay, cool, like we don't need to do that. But you look at it and sort of at this point, discovery is not the bottleneck, it's like scaling. So it's like, okay, how do we like much more effectively scale new materials and get them out into the world? And that's still like a big open question. So you like learn lots of sort of nitty gritties like that.
Eric Jorgenson: That's so cool, man. I'm fascinated by everything that you're working on and the materials in particular. Like, this is, yeah, you've just really opened a few doors for my imagination to wander here.
Ben Reinhardt: Good. That's my job. I mean, partially, it's just like you build the future by helping people concretely imagine it, and that sort of acts like a shelling point, and then people can start building at it.
Eric Jorgenson: I've got a map hanging in my office that is the, it's called the Salviati map, and it's the point at which like Europe understood Europe, Asia, and Africa, and that's all mapped perfectly. And then only the eastern shore of North and South America, and there's just half of the map is just blank white space. And I love- and the story is at least like that white space is what like launched the thousands of ships to go, oh my God, we have to chart this thing. Like there's something over there. There's a frontier that we haven't discovered, like let's go explore it. And so, every time we can like just even trace the faintest outline of a potentially wondrous future technology or state or thing that we can move towards, like that's what I love about sci-fi, and you're making sci-fi concrete. It's such a fun thing.
Ben Reinhardt: Yeah. I think the trick is really, how do you make it concrete enough? It's like, with the map, it's like, not only is there blank space, but there are hints at how you get to the blank space. It's like, oh, we can get to the blank space by going around the southern tip of South America. And I think like that's the hard part, is like what are these intermediate steps that we can really take?
Eric Jorgenson: Well, I'm really grateful to you for charging at this and drawing the map for us. So tell people where they can find you, how they can support you.
Ben Reinhardt: So you can find, our website is spec.tech, S-P-E-C dot T-E-C-H. You can find- I'm on Twitter @BenReinhardt, and there's a donation page on our website. You can also subscribe to our, there's a paid subscription on our blog, which is just basically another way of donating. There's articles. That's blog.spec.tech. Or if you just Google Ben Reinhardt or Speculative Technologies or Perplexity or whatever people are doing these days, then you can find us.
Eric Jorgenson: It's awesome. Thank you, thank you so much. Don't pay taxes, give your money to Ben, and let's fund some...
Ben Reinhardt: Pay the taxes that you should pay or like the IRS might come knocking at your door.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, all right. Pay the taxes that you have to pay. But if you can take a dent out of the tax you have to pay...
Ben Reinhardt: You can reduce them by giving us money.
Eric Jorgenson: Yes, there you are. All right. Fine. Be specific and helpful if you must. No, thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time, for doing what you do.
Ben Reinhardt: And thank you for having me on. This was amazing.
Eric Jorgenson: This is awesome. I think, yeah, we are certainly like in the alliance of future progress, abundance oriented, and I'm just really excited to see where this whole crew goes. Like months, years, and decades ahead.
Ben Reinhardt: To the stars. That's where we're going.
Eric Jorgenson: Hell yeah. Ad Astra, baby. Let's go.
Ben Reinhardt: Ad Astra.