Deep Future

Chris Kantrowitz and I talk about fundraising from both sides of the table: why founders should interview VCs, why authenticity beats a rehearsed pitch, and why the right investor is someone you want beside you when the dark times arrive.

Then we get into impact funds, family-office money, AngelList carry fights, and the instant-decision investing style Chris admires in Paige Craig. We end with Chris moving Bicycle Day Ventures beyond psychedelics and into fungal technologies, starting with dissolvable ear tubes that could open a path to new cartilage.

Chris Kantrowitz and I dig into the Varroa mites driving bee-colony collapse, why Amitraz is failing, and how deformed wing virus turned a manageable parasite into a one-two punch.

Then we get into Quorum Earth’s fungal answer: Varout, a prophylactic biopesticide built on Metarhizium. Chris explains the regulatory shortcut hidden in the genetics, the New York lab that will grow spores on rice, and the platform he wants to aim at spotted lanternflies, ticks, termites, mosquitoes, and other invasive pests.

Chris Kantrowitz and I trace the hustles that took him from selling Madonna bracelets in sixth grade to buying wholesale stereo gear, testing unreleased video games, and getting hired by Sony at 14.

We also dig into the late dyslexia diagnosis that reframed his intuition and pattern recognition, the systems he built to survive school and big-company expectations, and the chain of mushroom research, Burning Man friendships, and bee science that led to Quorum Earth.

Chris Kantrowitz and I get into the social cost of fame, sudden wealth, and people who turn every room into a performance.

Chris grew up around Frank Zappa, built concert shows for major artists, and later kept Gobbler alive with a John Legend booking while he waited on a corporate investment. It is a wild route to a sharp founder lesson: authenticity is not something you can manufacture, and venture money puts every company on a clock.

New York, Los Angeles, and what gets lost when people stop building lives in place. That turns into a blunt look at remote work. Automattic made it work by hiring for written communication; most companies just broke the culture they already had.

Then we go somewhere stranger. Chris explains why he sees language as a technology, what his non-speaking son has taught him about communication, and why being in the same room still matters. We get into The Telepathy Tapes, blindfolded perception, psychedelics, lucid dreams, brain filters, and the experiments that might tell us what is actually happening.

It lands back on startups. Shared belief is not fluff. If a team cannot feel the same mission, no stack of tools will manufacture a heart-and-soul company.

Chris Kantrowitz and I start with the strange advantage of operating before deal flow: the people who spot talent before anyone else, whether they are venture investors, music lawyers, or agents.

Then we head into Hollywood. I tell Chris about advising hacker stories from an abandoned WarGames remake to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Here Comes the Flood, and we unpack how CAA built a machine that Andreessen Horowitz later adapted for founders.

Byron Reese and I get into the uncomfortable gap between what intelligent systems know and what they can explain. Machine learning can expose the biases buried in our data, but it can also leave us staring at an answer without a satisfying reason.

Then we turn to the stories that teach us what futures feel possible: Hollywood’s dystopian AI, Star Trek’s optimism, the real Tricorder XPRIZE, and Byron’s idea of Agora. If we want people to build a better future, we need better stories about technology worth building.

Byron Reese closes the loop from stories to dice to rocks that think. Probability gave us numbers for future events; computer chips gave us machines that can model thousands of possible futures.

We get into Agora, the superintelligence built from accumulated human knowledge, then connect SimCity, spreadsheets, Tesla fleet learning, and my daughter’s stuffed-animal classroom to the same idea: models help us test what-if scenarios and choose a better future.

Byron Reese asks one of those questions that sounds ridiculous until it rearranges your brain: where are the Bronze Age beavers? Why did no other animal build even a primitive civilization?

We follow that question from Homo erectus hand axes and the cave paintings at Chauvet to language, memory, and the moment humans became a superorganism. Byron calls that superorganism Agora: the collective intelligence that lets us imagine a future, coordinate around it, and build it.

Byron Reese wrote one of my favorite books so I wouldn’t have to. Infinite Progress makes an optimistic, accessible case for using technology to solve huge problems, and I give it to everybody.

We also get into The Fourth Age and Wasted, where a recycle bin can make people use more cups. That weird incentive exposes the real problem: feel-good rituals do not scale. Clean, cheap energy does.