The Puck: Venture Capital and Beyond

Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, joins Jim Baer on The Puck to talk military space, missile defense, Golden Dome and the Pentagon budget: are we already in a Cold War in space, and can America build or afford the defenses it wants? They also get into why America now pays more in debt interest than it spends on defense, where America's edge over China really lies, the myth about what spy satellites can actually see, and the four space races happening right now.

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Planetary scientist Pascal Lee joins Jim Baer on The Puck to challenge the consensus on space exploration: why the Moon's south pole may be the wrong place for humanity's first base, why Mars isn't the escape plan people think it is, what Antarctica teaches us about living on other worlds, and why android astronauts may be the most underestimated idea in space.

The Puck: Venture Capital & Beyond

https://thepuckpodcast.com

Sara Seager joins The Puck to talk about her search for life beyond Earth, including a privately funded mission to Venus, her post-traumatic growth after losing her husband, being diagnosed as autistic in her 40s, and her return home to Toronto after 30 years at MIT.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb - former chair of Harvard's Astronomy Department, head of the Galileo Project, author of Extraterrestrial and Interstellar - joins Jim Baer for a conversation that isn't really about aliens. It's about how serious people think about the unknown.

"This is a blind date of interstellar proportions." Loeb makes the case that the search for intelligent life deserves the same funding urgency as the $2.4 trillion the world spends on defense every year - and that the biggest discoveries of all time are the unknown unknowns.

Topics: 'Oumuamua, the Loeb Scale, AI training data, Mars vs. building in space, and why curiosity beats certainty.

My guest today is Michael Moritz. He started as a journalist at Time Magazine, then spent 35 years at Sequoia Capital backing Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and YouTube. Before any of that, he wrote The Little Kingdom, the first inside account of Apple, written with unusual access to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and later relied on by Walter Isaacson for his own Jobs biography.

In this conversation, Moritz reflects on what made Jobs different before the world caught on (he calls him a bit of a mystic), what he learned from Sequoia founder Don Valentine about spotting talent, and how adversity shaped the best leaders he backed.

The conversation then turns personal: his new book Auslander tells his family's story as refugees from Nazi Germany, what he uncovered after his mother's death, and why, despite deep ties to San Francisco, he became a naturalized German citizen as an insurance policy. He also shares an update on Crankstart's $150M challenge to improve San Francisco.

The Puck: Venture Capital and Beyond, hosted by Jim Baer.

Lori Garver spent years inside NASA making an argument most of the agency didn't want to hear: that commercial partnership wasn't a compromise, it was the strategy. On this episode of The Puck, Jim sits down with the former NASA Deputy Administrator to unpack how that case got built and sold from the inside — what institutional resistance actually looks like, and where she sees the current moment: a commercial-background NASA administrator, private capital flooding the sector, and real geopolitical competition for orbit and beyond.

The conversation doesn't stay in space — it moves through what NASA's procurement playbook gets right that healthcare gets wrong, and into a candid take on fixing Social Security.

New episode of The Puck: Venture Capital & Beyond, out now. 🎙️

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He edited Harper's. He almost lost his faith to cancer and the new atheists. Now he's written a book called Why I Am Not an Atheist — and he's not backing down from the hard questions.

Christopher Beha joins Jim to go toe-to-toe on Darwin, the Big Bang, and where science hits a wall it can't get past. They talk truth, doubt, AI's grip on our attention, and why "love your neighbor" is easier to preach than practice.

If you've ever wrestled with faith, doubt, or just wanted someone to admit they don't have all the answers — this one's for you.

🎧 New episode of The Puck: Venture Capital & Beyond

Harvard economist and former Obama CEA Chair Jason Furman joins Jim to unpack the risks hiding beneath a strong economy — from a potential Strait of Hormuz oil shock, to whether AI valuations are a bubble (and if so, dot-com or housing-crash style), to why private credit could be the market's biggest blind spot. Plus: the 6%-of-GDP deficit, the "Goldilocks" pace of AI growth, and Furman's #1 worry for the economy.

Is healthcare the real driver of the national debt crisis? Avik Roy joins The Puck to discuss one of the most important questions in American public policy.

Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, argues that the United States has built the worst of both worlds — neither a true free-market healthcare system nor a fiscally disciplined universal system. Instead, employer-sponsored insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, tax subsidies, and distorted incentives have created what he calls an “open bar” healthcare model where patients, providers, employers, and government rarely confront the real cost of care.

Jim and Avik discuss why healthcare costs are central to America’s rising deficits, how Federal Reserve policy and asset inflation have delayed the reckoning, why the Congressional Budget Office may be too optimistic, and why America may have no more than 20 years to get its fiscal house in order.

They also explore what a realistic reform path could look like: means-tested subsidies, more consumer choice, defined-contribution health benefits, catastrophic coverage, and a Swiss-style private universal coverage model built around competition and innovation.

This is a conversation about healthcare, debt, inflation, markets, politics, and whether Washington can act before a crisis forces its hand.

Everyone says AI is going to transform healthcare. Annie Lamont explains why this time may actually be different — but also why Epic, Medicaid, misaligned incentives, and China’s rise in drug development could determine whether American healthcare gets fixed or keeps breaking.