EIR Live

Send me your weirdos. Like, just interesting people, interesting ideas, things that don't fit. Like, send them my way. This is the kind of stuff that I love. This is this is my catnip.

Welcome to EIR Live, where we dive into the lives and lessons of entrepreneurs and residents. I'm Ilya Tabakh, together with my cohost Terance Orr, ready to bring you closer to the heartbeat of the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. Every episode, we explore the real stories behind the ideas, successes, setbacks, everything in between. For everyone from aspiring EIRs to seasoned pros, EIR Live is your gateway to the depth of the entrepreneurial journey and bringing innovative insights into the broader world. Check out the full details in the episode description.

Subscribe to stay updated and join us as we uncover what it takes to transform visions into ventures. Welcome aboard. Let's grow together. All right. Today we have an amazing and, know, need I say special?

You know, all of our episodes are special in their own way. But today, Sam Arbisman joins us and he's the first scientist in residence that we've had. And in fact, in sort of the preparation for the episode, Terrance and I were talking, he's one of the first scientists in residence that we've ever run across. And so kind of from the standpoint of what's going on here, how does that work? It's pretty exciting to be able to dive in and really learn a little bit more about kind of Sam's story, how he got started, and then ultimately dive into what that role means and go beyond.

So Sam, maybe we'll start with the beginning. And we really like to go really to the beginning, of growing up in Buffalo and things like that. But let's just talk about your first chapter and that academic background and how you kind of got started and then we may peel that back a little bit and go from there.

Sure. No, it's great to be talking with you both. Thanks so much. This is super exciting. Yeah, I guess I can start by discussing a little bit about little Sam and kind of his origins.

And so, yeah, I grew up in Buffalo area. And in terms of, I guess, kind of various touchstones and influences when I was younger, certainly I would say one big influence was my grandfather. He lived to the age of 99. He was a dentist. But he also an artist and he was also a longtime reader of science fiction.

So when you live that long, you basically read science fiction since like the modern dawn of the genre. So he I think he read he read Dune when it was serialized in a magazine. He was like a lifelong reader of all these different things. He read, it's like Analog Science Fiction and Fact, one of these kind of longtime science fiction magazines, and he would hand me shopping bags of old issues, and I would go and read them. And I remember when I went to camp, I would bring a whole bunch of these.

And so he really got me excited about not just science, but also sort of science fiction, kind of like the visions of the future and kind of how we think about what the world might look like. And so I was really excited about that. Another kind of related early touchstone was the world of Star Trek. And so my I think my father grew up on the original series and so I grew up on Next Generation. And so I was exposed to that from a very young age and kind of seeing these ideas and these stories that are used as allegories about our own time, but also kind of how to think about the future and kind of what a positive vision of the future might be.

Alongside this, I was, steeped in LEGOs and played with lots of LEGOs, did a lot of stuff around that, and then also was steeped in technology. So my father happened to be a very early adopter of personal computers, and so we so our first family computer was the Commodore VIC-twenty. Actually, so William Shatner was actually the pitchman for it, I think he referred to it as the Wonder Computer of the 1980s and so it kind of overshadowed by the Commodore sixty four, but the Commodore VIC-twenty was this kind of boxy keyboard setup that you connected to your television. You stored information on this modified tape recorder called a Commodore dataset. It was pretty impressive and it was actually even to when I was very little, I didn't know how to program or anything like that.

But because early computers, and you could, I guess you could actually purchase, computer programs like on cassette tapes or whatever it was, but one of the really common ways in which you acquired computer programs was you would type them in manually. Like these are called type in programs. Think there would be magazines of pages and pages of code. And I have a clear memory of like sitting with my father and him like typing it in. Actually, not sure I have that many clear memories of that.

I remember seeing errors. It's like when he would make mistakes and there would be some weird glitch thing or whatever like that. And I began to learn about the kind of this clear relationship between text and the program and kind of how things worked. Then we at a certain point several years later we moved to the Macintosh and I guess we've actually been like an Apple Macintosh family since then to varying degrees. But another touchstone kind of related to this was because my father was affiliated with a local university, we got internet access.

And so internet access, this was like really pre web. I actually, I think I still have the, our family's first edition of the Internet for Dummies and the entire thing, so it's like many, many pages. I think there's like two pages about the web because it was so new and such a kind of side thing. But I remember when our first download of, I don't know, downloading like a translation of Plato's Republic from like Project Gutenberg and jumping for joy and this thing took like twenty minutes for like a tiny text file. So as a kid, I was steeped in these very deeply science y and nerdy and technological ideas and kind of thinking about the future.

So those are the kind of things that I really wanted to study. And so when I went on to college, I ended up majoring in computer science and biology, trying to really think about, I was actually very interested in trying to understand the origins of life and evolutionary biology, but I was also very, very interested in thinking about how these things, how biology and other areas could be modeled using mathematics and computational models and computer programs. And I was also just very interested in doing research and I really wanted to become a scientist and kind of continue on in that area. So after undergrad, went to graduate school and got a PhD in computational biology. And so I initially was going to do things around origins of life and evolutionary biology, but I was also part of this interdisciplinary fellowship program around what were described as like nonlinear and dynamical systems or kind of these complex systems where it's looking at how systems of huge numbers of interacting parts interact, and then in doing so, yield these sort of emergent behaviors.

Like there is something to be said for a network that there are the structure of network and its behavior sometimes cannot be necessarily understood by just the individual parts. It's kind of when these things all interact, you get these new behaviors. You might get whether it's like flocking birds or ants in an ant colony or how all these computers interact in the internet or certain things in biology like the nature of a cell. These are all complex systems and this fellowship brought together people from I think like sociology and physics and biology. There might have been I think like applied math.

So there are all these different people in these different domains and I realized, oh this is an unbelievably powerful set of tools, these kind of mathematical and computational tools. This is the kind of thing that I want to really end up studying. And so even though I was in computational biology, my dissertation actually ended up having no biology in it. Kind of got did all the coursework in evolutionary biology and biology, and I said I want to go do this other stuff about networks of individuals in cities and how innovation occurs and all these other kinds of things. And my committee basically said, if you want to go off and do this weird thing, like you've taken all the coursework, so like by all means, like maybe this is like shooting yourself in the foot, but it's the use.

You seem to be wanting to actually do this. And so I said, great, I'm going go off and do that. And so, so I did the PhD.

And maybe just to jump back a little bit.

Yeah, sure.

I'm in sort of strikes me a little bit and I maybe have found this in my own kind of beginning story also. In some ways, I got lucky to be sort of raised in the age of I don't know if I'll call it like wonder. Right. But there is sort of all of these pockets of kind of new and different and complex. Sounds like, you know, in your background, having Legos, having sort of the Internet before it was fully kind of formalized and packaged, you know, because the Internet like two point zero and three point zero pretty commercialized.

And so there wasn't a lot of loose wires. And so in some ways, at least I benefited from being able to get some little shocks when I touched the wrong wire and play around with some stuff and see, oh, that doesn't work. Or hey, you know, and it sounds like there's a little bit of that in your story. I'm wondering, you know, I know that had a big in hindsight on my both curiosity and also probably knowledge that things don't always have to happen, you know, in scripted, prescribed kind of easy bake recipe way. And so I'm curious on just kind of your very high level observations there.

Yeah, no, definitely these sort of wondrous things were kind of maybe not tainted by as many commercial endeavors. Certainly early computing stuff was just very collaborative, maybe in or maybe the right word is like there was almost like a gift economy where people were kind of sharing things. It wasn't quite like open source. Open source was certainly common by those times, I'm thinking like early days of the Mac, there was just this massive shareware and freeware community where people were just trying things out and giving things away and sharing things and letting people try out different pieces of software. Certainly the early internet, it was a lot less slick, but it was a lot easier to get involved with it.

So I remember building websites. My websites weren't pretty, but I mean, be honest, as people on the table have noticed, like none of the websites were pretty during this time because everyone was just trying things out. And I can remember like using GeoCities and these other kinds of things, and so there was this very easy on ramp to a lot of these different kinds of things. And the same thing like in maybe this period of around like the 1990s or so, there was also just a lot of really interesting ideas at the intersection of computer science and science itself and technology. So you have these kind of areas of complex systems.

So for example, like the computer game company Maxis, the maker of SimCity, was doing these unbelievable things, which really, and I think about this, I think back to it now, one of the questions I often have is, could there be a Maxis nowadays? Or was it kind of in this special moment where people were thinking about complexity science and gaming and the nature of cities and urban design and the Gaia hypothesis or whatever it was, because it was Sim Earth. And played the original version of SimCity and it was amazing. And I was just kind of exposed to these kinds of things and you also had people trying things with cellular automata and like John Horton Conway's Game of Life or Fractals. It just felt very playful and weird.

And that being said, on the one hand, maybe it's not like for the most I think for most people who engage with science and technology or even the Internet nowadays, it might not feel that way, but I do actually think that there is this undercurrent of a lot of these kinds of wondrous things still. And so actually there's a number of people who kind of talk about this, like, for the Internet, it's like the poetic web, where people are just doing weird experiments and, like, trying weird things with with HTML and just kind of experimenting with ideas and or building small things. Actually this is and and we can discuss this more, but, like, this is actually one of the things that I that I discuss in in my forthcoming book, the magic of code, which is alongside this kind of utilitarian feel of computing, there's always been this kind of enchanted, wondrous feel as well. Even back in the earlier days, I mean, you could say like my childhood had all these wonderful things, but the truth is that was also the same time as when, I don't know, people were playing with Microsoft Office and certain things like that.

Was like spreadsheet. Being said, I actually think spreadsheets are one of these I don't necessarily use them that often. They are one of the most powerful on ramps to coding for non coders in kind of this unexpected way. And so they're and we can talk about spreadsheets as well. But you're right.

Like, the spreadsheet is much maligned and there's the world of enterprise software and spreadsheets, but alongside that were all these other kind of wonderful things. And so I do think I happen to be exposed to a lot of these exciting things and being able program and delve deeply into the world of screensavers and just kind of that weird playful place. But I do actually think all that stuff is always there no matter what time you are growing up, you kind of just have to search for it. And I feel very fortunate that I was exposed to it at an early age and I was able to find it and maybe it was a little bit easier to find. But I do think it's kind of always there you look.

Yeah, well, and the thing that I was sort of picking up for me, a lot of that exploration was really sort of curiosity driven and sort of folks being in some cases just curious, in other cases, in a search for understanding, in another case, of connecting the dots for stuff. And in some ways, the way that you were talking about and my experience also with kind of chaotic systems communities, if you're either talking about the Southwest Research Institute or IASCA or sort of some of these weird places where chaotic and complex systems have been studied over the decades at this point, I find that a lot of the folks show up there in like a similar search. So that's sort of one of the reasons I wanted to pick at it because as you started talking about sort of these communities, cause they're very interdisciplinary and they sort of bring a lot of different perspectives to be able to put, you know, sort of the pieces together to understand what's actually going on here.

Oh yeah. Actually you mentioned with like the Santa Fe Institute for Complex Systems, I actually spent a summer there as an undergrad, so that was definitely part of my formative times in terms of thinking about these ideas and just seeing this intellectual ferment and going back to this curiosity of just people saying, Okay, there are all these things around us. There are these weird phenomena. We can either take them as they are or really try to interrogate what makes them so. And are there relatively simple mathematical rules or computational, like, methods of actually trying to generate these kinds of phenomena.

And it turns out if you abstract away a lot of the details, you can do these kinds of things. And of course the details still matter, but it's still unbelievably powerful. But yeah, but I agree that there is also this deep power to being curiosity driven, and that's certainly been a through line in my career. But I mean, going back to like Little Sam, I think about it. I spent probably an inordinate amount of time getting collection so there was a writer Martin Gardner.

He wrote this column for Scientific American, I think it was called Mathematical Games, but it was about kind of this recreational mathematics, and so there were things around like cellular automata and just kind of other weird things, and he eventually collected these columns into volumes. And I remember going to the library and just reading like, devouring these different books and just, like, finding all this weird stuff in the world. And I yeah. And and also just more generally, just going to the library and, like, yeah, certainly public libraries were another major touchstone of my childhood and, like, and basically just combing the stacks and the shelves trying to find weird interesting things oftentimes in kind of like the science area or whatever. And and and just, yeah, pulling this stuff off off the shelves and just being delighted by it.

And I I really think that kind of non directed curiosity, or I would say driven by curiosity rather than a specific direction, is an incredibly powerful way of finding interesting things. But then eventually, kind of going back to also my network science approach, all these different things are going to eventually be connected and you kind of just have to let them simmer for a little while, but there's a great deal of power in that.

You know, I want to double down on this theme of curiosity because there's a there's a theme already starting to emerge. Even though you're our first scientist in residence, there's this theme of exposure, access, and curiosity leading to a bridge to other things or weird things that people will do in in their lives, in their in their careers. And you you mentioned something earlier, which was, you know, I said all of these things to this, professor in in the university, and I said, you wanna do all of these weird things? Go go ahead and have at it and talk to us about some of those weird things that you started to do and tinker with versus taking a non linear sort of academic route.

Yeah, so sir, I mean certainly there was kind of were the topics I was studying. So for example, rather than kind of focusing very deeply on certain aspects of bioinformatics or evolutionary biology, I was jumping around and studying how innovation occurs in cities or I think I was looking at collaboration among scientists and trying to quantitatively understand that. But I also had research that eventually was part of my dissertation about how language is processed in the mind and actually using kind of these network science models to understand how networks based on similar sounding words actually affects how language is processed. I collaborated with cognitive scientist on that. Super fascinating.

Then I also had, I think, a chapter or two on hitting streaks in baseball and just this totally different area. And it was just whether it's like someone asking a question or reaching out or I just kind of find something interesting. Yeah, there were all these different directions. But I think but also in addition so that was the kind of the topic approach. But I also then began a little bit when I was in graduate school, but especially after I got my PhD and started doing a postdoc, I also started experimenting with, I guess, different modes of publication.

So traditionally in science and academia, you publish scientific papers. I was publishing some of those scientific papers in journals and things like that. But I also was really interested in writing for popular audiences. I felt that there was a great deal of power in engaging with the public, being able to explain ideas, but also going back to kind of this idea of like connecting lots of different things together, you can do that in a way for general audiences that you often can't do for academics, where I could write something about, I think I had I wrote something about like fractals, but also something related to like movies. It was like fractals and mathematics at the movies or and then I written yeah, you can just combine things in a different sort of way.

And so especially during my postdoc, I began writing articles for the ideas section of the Boston Globe, where it was kind of like people writing about big ideas, and I started writing essays for them, which was a lot of fun. I think I wrote a little bit for The Atlantic, and then actually began writing a book my first book for general audiences, which is about kind of the rules and regularities behind how knowledge changes, kind of like how science changes over time. This book was called The Half Life of Facts. And so I began writing this during my postdoc and quickly realized that due to kind of my interdisciplinary interests and the fact that I didn't just want to write for other academics, but I wanted to write for general audiences as that these are the kind of things that are not a good fit for an academic career. It was a lot of fun.

I had a great time, but I also knew that I was definitely not grooming myself for a traditional academic career. It took me a little while to realize that and so actually there was a certain point where I thought I'm going to still kind of do the traditional academic route. Went on the job market, began looking at faculty positions. I think a dean at a school at one point when I was being interviewed said, We like you a lot, Sam, but how would you fit into our department? And I began thinking, Okay, is probably a sign that academia might not be a fit for me.

Luckily I've since been able to kind of carve out a career kind of adjacent to a lot of those things, But I do think that trying to pigeonhole yourself I mean sorry, I'll take a step back. Deep expertise in kind of playing according to certain roles or categories can be very, very powerful and very, very useful. I think, and I don't want to discount that, but I also think that refusing to be pigeonholed and trying other weird kinds of things can also be really, really valuable. And I think it's sort of it is another way to build a career. It is far less clear.

There's not a map or a guidebook or a clear direction, and it can be often very frustrating, but it can also be very rewarding because you're then allowed to do the things that you want to do. If you want to do some deep expertise thing and that accords very nicely with some specific role, that's great. But I realized that the way I wanted to do things and the kinds of things I wanted to do did not accord with that. And luckily, I've been able to kind of carve out that path.

I just want to jump in real quick. You know, in some ways, because you had so many sort of translational and interdisciplinary encounters early, you sort of were already kind of playing the role that we see many entrepreneurs in residence play, where they have sort of a background or a context and they sort of bring it into another land and then they translate. Right. And real translation isn't about just, you know, sort of saying, here's word for word how it plays out. But you have to sort of, you know, kind of bring in the context and the vocabulary and, you know, help people really understand.

So I just want to sort of highlight that part. I think the other part that I didn't realize until way later is valuable is operating in that environment and understanding motivation and understanding how people kind of engage and where whether it's interest or kind of whatever drives a person to because in research endeavors, you ultimately have to have willing participants that are collaborating actively to make forward progress. And that, you know, sort of that collaborating actively in that bandwidth attached to each project is sort of a dynamic. It's not a static thing. And it's not money typically, right?

Or salary even or whatever, although that that plays a role. But I think it's really important, you know, because I've seen a lot of folks jump up and talk about university programs not commercializing technology and things like that. And I think a lot of it is because of sort of a fundamental misunderstanding of motivation and alignment of incentives. And I think it's, you know, sort of important. And I just wanted to highlight that that experience and spending enough time, you know, and having enough at bats there is really, you know, kind of an interesting thing and is important later when you go into startup entrepreneurship, things like that.

The motivations are a little different, but aligning those things and understanding them, found to be very helpful, at least in my encounters and career.

I love that. And I think that kind of alignment is also there are some similarities also in terms of the way in which you think about this kind of like role of translation because you have to be able to say not just topic wise, okay, this kind of thing is actually something else you're familiar with, but also here's the reason, like here's the incentives that I'm operating under or this other person's operating under, and here's how they are actually in accord with some other person. You kind of try to do this kind of translational role. But I actually, going back to the translation stuff, I often describe in my own role as scientist in residence, we can kind of discuss what it entails. But to a certain degree, it involves this importexport of ideas and people.

It's kind of like, I'm not necessarily innovating new things specifically, but I'm finding, oh, this other area has been thinking about this kind of thing you might not necessarily realize it exists, or this person could be really valuable to this other thing that this other person is doing, And being able to kind of create that translation or making people understandable to each other or helping them find these ideas, I think can be really valuable. And actually and related to, and maybe partly one of the reasons I'm kind of more comfortable with it, going back to what you're saying, I've been doing this for a long time, of in this kind of uncomfortable in between things, in the world of network science and complexity science, these worlds draw together people from lots of different fields. And I can actually remember when I was, during my postdoc, I think I was part of some email list about network science and it drew people from lots of different fields. I feel like fairly often, like every week or two, someone would say, oh, how anyone know how to make some, like measure the relationship between the network nodes or some mathematical thing?

And then someone would invariably pipe up like, oh, this has been, this was done like thirty years ago in sociology or some other field or whatever it was, and no one just knew. And so there is this really interesting thing that you have to be willing to engage with other domains because there are often these very clear similarities and like one thing can map onto another, but we often don't feel that and that being that kind of intermediary can be very valuable.

Well, and there's some really well known examples like calculus, right? And then there's a lot of less known examples. And part of the excitement about sort of connecting the unconnected that's possible through some of this kind of AI and LLM stuff is that especially at the intersection of disciplines, there's a lot of still untilled knowledge, if you will. So I think there's going to be a lot more than just us weirdos can surface, which is actually a funny deal.

So in my first book, The Half Life of Facts, actually discussed there's this information scientist by the name of Don Swanson. And he has this unbelievable paper called, it's called Undiscovered Public Knowledge, and I think it was written in the mid 1980s. But basically, his he creates this thought experiment. He says, Okay, imagine somewhere in the scientific literature, there's a paper that says A implies B, and then somewhere else in the scientific literature could be another a similar subspecialty, could be a totally different field, there's another paper that says B implies C. And so if you read both, you would say, Oh, maybe actually A implies C.

You can kind of combine them together. But because no one has actually read these two things and combined them, there is this undiscovered public knowledge. And so he wasn't content kind of leaving it as a thought experiment. He decided to actually use the cutting edge technology of the day, which was like keyword searches in some medical database, so well before LLMs and things like that. And he was actually able to make medical advances.

And I think he actually ended up publishing a paper in a medical journal about the relationship between, I think, consuming fish oil and helping reduce some sort of circulatory condition. Even though and he was an information scientist, he wasn't coming at this as a physician. And so and that was just like a quick proof of concept. And of course, since then, we have all these unbelievable tools to try to surface more of this undiscovered public knowledge. So, yeah, I mean, we can try to do some of it, but I definitely think more and more as science grows exponentially, and there's just so much more literature than we can possibly imagine and possibly read, we need to work in partnership with our machines to do this kind of scientific and technological innovation.

Absolutely, guys. Well, let's talk about your connectivity, right? And speaking of translation and connecting things, like, let's talk about your bridge to the scientist in residence role. Right? At a very well known venture capital firm, your your role today is basically being a connective tissue, right, of ideas and peoples for emerging science areas and things that you like to weird out on anyway, Sam.

So tell us, A, how you how the roll about, you know, came about at Lux Capital. How did you become a scientist in residence and what do you do there? Walk us through your day to day.

Sure. Yeah. So I joined Lux as their scientist in residence now about a decade ago. So I've been with them for a while, for a pretty long time. And I had known so one of the co founders of Lux, Josh Wolfe, he and I had known each other for a number of years and I had been helping them out with various ideas and topics.

And before I joined Lux, I was previously at the Kaufman Foundation, so it's a big philanthropic foundation devoted to entrepreneurship, innovation, education, and at the time they had a research and policy division certificate, an in house think tank. I'd been working for them. It was kind of this nice bridge between me coming from academia to kind of actually being in the real world and doing things around entrepreneurship. And so at Kaufman that had kind of given me my first taste of the world of startups and the world of venture kind of from the outside. At least from the outside, I had thought, oh, the venture world could be a place where someone who's a kind of more generalist, kind of a little bit more weird, could fit well.

And so after I left the Kaufman Foundation, I had been working on my second book, then once that was kind of in a good enough place to kind of think about the next thing, I began thinking, okay, what should I do next? And I thought maybe the venture capital world could be something interesting or a possibility. And so I was talking to Josh Wolfe about this and we kind of created this idea of scientists in residence. And it was initially very much an experiment. I guess it's been a decade, so hopefully the experiment has been deemed a success.

But one of the things that I realized since and once I joined Luxe and now having been there for ten years, certainly being at Luxe has vastly exceeded my expectations and it's an unbelievable environment and unbelievably intellectually fertile and there's so many ideas and things like that, but I also now know that other than Lux, basically no other firm would know what to do with me, and so I was very, very fortunate that I kind of ended up with the firm that really kind of got me. But yeah, so in terms of what I do, I would say the way to think about my role is I survey the landscape of science and technology. And Lux, we operate at the frontier, and so I survey this landscape and I try to find interesting ideas at that frontier. Oftentimes, would say the way I operate is I'm not doing the investment, and so I'm either upstream or downstream from investment. So downstream, I might find ideas or people or topics that could be relevant to our portfolio of companies that we've already invested in.

But much more often, I'm engaged upstream from investment, kind of like finding ideas that are maybe not ready for investment, or maybe are just kind of areas or communities that we want to be involved with. Sometimes those areas maybe will never be good investment ideas, but they're just kind of interesting communities that we want to kind of bring into the orbit of Lux, and so a lot of what I do takes the form of, I mean, sometimes finding potential people that we maybe want to invest in, but often it's a lot of writing and speaking on behalf of Lux, but just engaging with these communities and bringing them into the orbit of Lux. And so the kinds of things that I've explored are everything from computational tools for thought to certain things around AI and coding, certain things around nontraditional research organizations. We can talk more about that, but that's definitely one thing I think about. But kind of just trying to find interesting area and actually, I mentioned earlier the idea of the poetic web.

The poetic web is certainly not a good business investment, and certainly not a venture investment, but it happens to have some of those interesting people around. And and these people are great to have kind of in the orbit of of the of the kinds of things that Lux is doing. And so those are the kinds of things that I spend a lot of my time exploring. I definitely so in terms of more practically, I have this Trello board of all these ideas that I'm thinking about. I'm jumping from them sometimes like every hour to hour, talking to interesting people, reading a ton, writing, just reaching out to interesting weird people who are thinking about things that I didn't even know existed and then just learning about them.

So yeah, it really allows me to kind of scratch that curiosity itch and then kind of bring those things that I'm curious about into the orbit of Lux.

You know, what's really interesting is that sort of a I'm always not caught off guard, but surprised how folks are militant about efficiency versus resiliency. Right. And there's kind of the operators that are really focused on throughput efficiency, you know, no waste, that kind of thing. But also, you know, definitely within my biological history, but even within my professional history, I've also seen folks like the A. I.

Community come out of research mode and go into scale mode. Right. And folks like the computer engineering and computer science community go from algorithm mode to, you know, kind of value at scale mode. And so it's really interesting to sort of think about, you know, I think the role you described is one of the pockets that is sort of doubling down and maybe mapping, identifying, giving a little bit of light to where some of this resiliency lives. But yeah, it's just it's interesting to think about because I think that, you know, maybe seven years ago, ten years ago, we would have had a different discussion about sort of the AI and computer science community and what their commercial impact is on the world.

I'm curious how you kind of think about that and whether that sort of rings true with you or not.

It definitely rings true. I mean, the way I think about this is I think there's a lot of these kind of like slow simmering ideas that hopefully will eventually become relevant. So like for example with I mentioned like the Tools for Thought community. This community and depending on how you count it, like it's been thinking about some of these ideas for decades. Maybe in the past few years it's become more prominent, but like these things have been around and so and the same thing with AI.

Like these kind of ideas, they've been around for a long time. Actually even if you look at like computer magazines from like the 80s and 90s, like there are advertisements for things that are pretty rudimentary neural networks, but the kinds of things that we think about now. And so these ideas are not necessarily new, they have been developed and maybe they're qualitatively different and quantitatively different, but there is this kind of clearer trajectory and being able to take the time to explore these things that don't have that immediate payoff, kind of like having a little bit of slack in the system, I think is really powerful. And this is kind of more broadly, I think, lot about the need for outlier roles in organizations. Because it's great that we have experts and people kind of very focused on their specific role, I think that's very important.

But if everyone in a company or an organization becomes kind of so busy and specialized that they don't have that bandwidth for exploration, then the organization might not necessarily be able to be as resilient or adaptive to the things that are going to be changing. So one of the ways I think about and so certainly, yeah, you want to have space for randomness and kind of longer time horizons, and I certainly think of my role kind of in this category, but one of the ways more broadly I think about this is also in the context of there's this great book by Ken Stanley and Joel Lehman called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. And basically the idea behind it is, and it's from certain ideas within computer science and evolutionary computation and optimization, but when you have some high dimensional search space, some really complicated thing you're trying to optimize for, oftentimes going directly for it is not the right way to operate. Rather, what you need to do is have this undirected approach where you kind of just focus on interestingness and novelty and kind of collect individual what what they refer to as stepping stones.

And then and then these stepping stones that are kind of interesting, you eventually recombine them. And so and maybe this is just a way of me kind of justifying my far less systematic and more undirected approach, but I really do think there is a great deal of power in kind of taking the time to follow your curiosity, what seems interesting, and especially from an organizational level, having space within an organization that for individuals or maybe a team of people who are kind of outside that core function who are just doing that kind of weird stuff or being willing to entertain ideas that are not yet in the mainstream, that can be really powerful. Which is why and maybe this is kind of just like an overly contrarian streak, but oftentimes when something becomes very popular, I almost just like physiologically, like, no, no, I'm done with that. I need to go on to the next thing. And I try not to overcome that, or I try to I try not to always do that, But I think you you sometimes need people like that in an organization who are always looking for the weird thing, not necessarily the next thing, because you really can't predict what is going to be the next thing.

But if you follow your curiosity and maybe cultivate a sense of sense of taste on just weird interesting things, then some of those things will pay off, some will not. I mean I've gone deep in rabbit holes of just things that I think are really interesting, and they are interesting. I think they're legitimately interesting. They're not necessarily going to become like the next big thing, But I definitely think that it's valuable to kind of have that space in an organization.

Yeah, I think what's interesting is the how do you where I see a lot of organizations kind of miss at what you're talking about is they don't sort of understand how the pieces could potentially fit together because there's sort of a both cultural and operational posture on what we do here and what we don't do here. There isn't, for example, university research with corporates, right? There's sort of a misalignment on where kind of the market is and sort of what the goal of engagement is. And so it's interesting to sort of think about how can people navigate that a little bit from the metacognition of how do you get different types of people to be able to work together, right? Or at least understand that, hey, this is my lane.

This is your lane. Here's some overlap. You know, here's a way we can all row in the same direction, at least the same quadrant, if not the same direction.

Well and that's there's the kind of well known dichotomy of like the hedgehog and the fox, which is kind of I'd say, so Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher, he kind of developed this by analogy with he used it based on, I think it was like an ancient Greek poet where it's like the hedgehog or like the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing or whatever the poetic line is. And he says, Okay, this is an interesting way of categorizing thinkers, where there's kind of like the foxes who are maybe jumping from thing to thing or have multiple different mental models, and the hedgehog has one big idea that kind of organizes the things they do. And I feel like, especially when it comes to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, oftentimes startups, they have to be hedgehog like to a certain degree because you have to be like founders have to be monomaniacally focused on the success of their organization. While certainly at Venture, they have a little bit more space to be Fox like. So I think that being said, there are many VC firms that would still not know what to do with me, as I mentioned earlier, but luck certainly leans into kind of the Fox like nature, the fact that they are willing to have me.

But I do think also, especially as an organization gets larger, they need to create space for both hedgehogs and foxes recognize it as such and say, Okay, like, these are both really important roles. It's not like, Oh, we need one or the other, or we need like, only the hedgehogs are the most important, but occasionally we'll just kind of throw in some fox like kind of stuff. Like, no, to really be able to do everything well under conditions that are maybe not changing as much, Hedgehogs work really well. But going back to the resilience kind of thing, when things are changing really rapidly or there are lots of unknowns or we can't really figure out what that direction of progress is going to look like, then you need a few foxes in there. And being able to have both of them allows an organization to adapt well, and thrive.

And just to double down on this point, change is hard for large organizations, as we both know, especially as they're growing. And it's certainly hard for them to incentivize entrepreneurial people inside those organizations in in ways that the external market can, as I've seen time and time again. And it's interesting because it speaks to sort of the need that you talked about earlier for outlier roles in organizations. And and in many regards, you're not only the the first scientist in residence that we've we've spoken to, but also you've also held the in residence role longer than anybody that we've ever spoken to. And I think that's unique in a sense that you didn't feel the need to go anywhere else to to diversify your career.

So you've you've built a portfolio career inside of Lux, doing and tinkering with different things and exploring different ideas. So I almost look at your role in three parts as part ecosystem builder, part internal r and d almost to to lux, if you will, and almost part sort of connectivity to the ecosystem as it relates to sourcing interesting people and communities and ideas, which sort of leans itself into the the ecosystem building sort of capacity. So as you think about all of these balls that you have in the air and you're juggling these different things inside of Luxe, in in the the resident weirdo role, as you would phrase it, Sam, how do you evaluate, you know, like, things that are just way out there, you know, like, what might be feasible in in in in some time period versus things that might not be? Like, can you give us a little bit more around like under the hood around how you think through ideas? And I know you don't have a systematic way of how you do it, right?

So high level.

I would say one of the things I've realized is that I'm not very good at predicting the future. I like thinking about the future and I have maybe a vision of what I want the future to look like, but in terms of being able to predict it or forecast, that's not necessarily my strength. And so to a certain degree, and I think about those kinds of things from time to time, but I'm less interested in being able to forecast where like what is going to be happening and more kind of just finding the things that excite me and sometimes up upend my expectations. And so for example, I mentioned this like poetic web earlier. That certainly upends my expectations of this kind of like corporate kind of like walled garden approach to the internet that we often see right now where it's like, okay, everything is kind of within like various social media sites or kind of run by large organizations, but then under the hood there's some people just doing some weird stuff and being playful and that feels different.

That feels kind of this like counter trend to the kinds of things that I would normally see. Now I don't know if it's going to be something that is going to take the world by storm. It probably will not be, but it's still something that excites me, it surprises me, and it's worth exploring. So I would say those are the kind of examples that I often try to kind of just take. Another way to think about this in terms of trying to find these things is for all that search engines are really powerful and LLMs and Generator.ai are doing some really interesting things, sometimes one of the best ways to understand a topic or to learn about new people or new ideas is through people search and just talking to other people.

And so I definitely think there's a lot there's a great deal of power in just finding some of the most interesting people you know and just checking in with them or seeing the things that they're excited about and kind of using that as a way of navigating and crawling through a space. Sometimes it can be used in a more utilitarian way, like when I'm trying to learn a new topic or understand a new space, having people recommend who else I should talk to, and at a certain point, hopefully, they'll start recommending people I've already spoken to. And then at that point, I'll say, okay, I don't necessarily understand this topic really well, but it kind of I I I have a sense of the boundaries of this space and kind of the shape of it, and so that kind of people search can be very powerful, but also just following the other people that you know that have really interesting tastes and are thoughtful about things, that also is a really good way to kind of explore some of these kinds of things. So even yeah, so I would say, certainly my approach is not systematic and more undirected, but there are certain heuristics you can use to kind of begin to think about these kinds of things.

You know, I'm wondering if I remember early in my entrepreneurial career, there wasn't really kind of as much of a placemat on how that worked. And I found that it really was more of an apprentice sport, but nobody ever mapped out where the apprentice programs were. And so I remember I was sitting down with sort of one of the smarter early A. I. Entrepreneurs I knew and kind of talking through, you know, how do you make a career out of this entrepreneur thing?

And he's like, Oh yeah, this is super doable. Know, here's the, you know, kind of walk through the but as you know, I essentially spent a good chunk of my life training to be a scientist and was still pretty new to the entrepreneurial thing. And so I just didn't know where some of that is. I'm wondering if there's a little bit of that in sort of this nontraditional role beyond entrepreneur land as we talk about it. And then maybe one thing would be interesting.

You kind of as we were kind of preparing for the episode, you talked about sort of your dark night of the soul moment. Know, kind of You probably got a chance to think about that a little bit, so would love to dig in a little bit on that topic with you.

Yeah, sure. I mean, so certainly, so I'll start with kind of like how I kind of thought about the scientist in residence role and kind of the career, and then I can kind of step back and kind of even before that and then kind of like a dark night of the soul or whatever. With the like when I first around the time I started as a scientist in residence, I actually reached out to a number of other people who had somewhat similar titles kind of in the venture world. I think that there was like some data scientists in residence, maybe like chief scientists, and just to kind of get a sense of what they were doing. And it turns out we all did completely different things.

Like we all it was like it was one of these things where, especially with these outlier roles, oftentimes what is like what it says on the tin does not necessarily match the contents. So like so so that was of limited value. But I would say oftentimes the way to think about these kinds of roles is, yeah, sometimes to find other people with somewhat similar titles or somewhat similar roles and kind of see, okay, how are you thinking about these kinds of things? But oftentimes it could be useful to almost look at because often these roles don't really exist, like there's not like a huge cohort of these. One way to think about this, and I'm not really sure to what degree I did this, at least consciously, but you take a few different people who maybe combined would kind of do some percentage of what you do and then try to interpolate and then kind of say, Okay, how did they get to where they were in their career?

Or kind of how do they spend their time? How do they think about these kinds of things? And then use that. And so that maybe could be one particular approach. It's pretty high level.

But in terms of like my own career trajectory, kind of how I got this and kind of thought about this, so after I left the Kaufman Foundation, and so I was working on my book, or my second book, this book Overcomplicated about complex and incomprehensible technologies, when it was kind of in good enough place that I could begin thinking about my next step, I began looking around. And I initially had this realization of, Oh my god, I've been spending my time doing so many different things that I've kind of painted myself into this corner, that I've become this weird, like hyper generalist that is so far removed from any specific expertise that I no longer have any value to any organization. Now eventually that passed, but it was one of these things where it can be very worrisome, because I thought on the one hand, like the kinds of things that I think about and do could be very valuable and very interesting, but I also felt like I didn't fit anywhere. Since I've and since like in the decade since I since I've joined Luxe, I've realized increasingly not only is there a need for the kinds of roles and kinds of things that I do, but there are ways of crafting these.

But one of the things that made me realize is that it involves a much more sort of proactive approach to career building. Like there are no job postings really for the kinds of things that we're talking about here. You kind of really have to have a relationship with an organization and kind of craft something together or be willing to kind of just go out on your own and say, I'm going just do some weird thing because I know it is actually valuable. And so for me, I'm not really sure I have kind of any deep wisdom of kind of how to think about this, but I do think the world is recognizing more and more the need for these kinds of roles. I will say one of the way to think one of the ways to think about this, though, is oftentimes the more you have to convince an organization that you are a fit, the less likely you're going to last there for a long for a long time, because, like, you might just have a patron who kind of buys into it and then they change their mind or there's a downturn or they leave the organization.

You don't necessarily want to be dependent on that kind of thing. And so you want an organization that understands it and like deeply recognizes the need for something as opposed to constantly trying to have to justify your existence and your fit with an organization because one, that takes a big emotional toll. But even separate from that, like there's probably just a good chance it's not going to be a long term fit.

Well, it's funny because I think that actually aligns really well with what we've been talking about. You need to be an effective entrepreneur in residence. We sort of break it down into three things. One is know what your secret sauce is and what you can contribute and be able to enunciate it to a group of people that may not understand what you're talking about. Right.

So make it relatable, you know, because some folks on the entrepreneurial side have really good sort of go to market or really good technology or really good kind of empathetic design. But for somebody that hasn't built anything new, maybe none of those things are valuable. And so thinking about how is that useful? You know, how are you differentiated from sort of the bunch of folks that they could be interacting with? The second one is, you know, find an organization that's already done some of the work and declared this is their strategy, put budget behind it, leadership support and sort of have a financial and risk posture that aligns with all that other stuff.

And then the third thing actually came a little bit later in a bunch of conversations as most entrepreneurs are not, you know, good spiritual leaders with deep understanding of like large organizations. And so there's a little bit of like a reskilling that has to happen on, you know, understanding how do you sort of become a spiritual leader and sort of understand the pieces. And there's probably some version, you know, because like and it's the same thing you said, if you're not able to communicate why you can contribute in a positive way or in a meaningful way to the organization, then you're probably not going get very far. If the organization hasn't bought in and is moving in a direction that's aligned, then you're pushing a boulder up a hill, you know, and that boulder will run you over. And then ultimately, you know, kind of that, you know, you're connecting with a lot of people and a lot of moving pieces.

And if that's not sort of your background or your strength, there's a little bit of a I think there's at least the things that rhyme in that frame to to the way that you're describing it.

Absolutely. And you have to unlearn a lot of things, right? I remember when I became an entrepreneur in residence at SAP, right? I was like, oh, I just can't email the CEO like if I have a question. You know, it was sort of like, no, you don't you don't do that in this environment.

Right? And in in in my world, you know, why not? They have the answer to the question that I need. Right. So and and, okay.

I guess not. You know? So being the weirdo in the organization, trying to navigate those muddy waters is very fascinating in every regard. But thank goodness I wasn't a scientist in residence. Their heads would have blew off, Sam.

Yeah, no, I think, you know, we're already kind of into it. I think maybe one thing that's worth jumping into a little bit is just thinking about how this role and these types of roles evolve, right? We definitely have spent a lot of time on the podcast thinking about how entrepreneurs jump into residences, what that means. It's interesting because I think you opened up our aperture here a little bit from the perspective of what a scientist or a researcher or data scientist in residence could do, at least your version of it. Where do you see kind of that role going and evolving, if at all, right?

Just you've thought about this probably a little bit more than I have, but just curious on your, you know, speaking of talking to people and what excites and how they're thinking about it. What's your thought there?

To be honest, I'm not sure. I'm not sure I have a good sense of kind of how these things evolve. I would love to see more roles like me. Certainly when I first joined Lux, I initially thought, oh, deep expertise in lots of different scientific fields, that's going to be kind of the true differentiator. And it was valuable, but I also realized that the real coin of the realm in venture is kind of the depth and breadth of your network.

And so for me it was realizing that the fact that I had played in all these different realms of like philanthropy and different scientific domains and academia and now I, then I was in the venture world, that network was the thing that was actually probably in some ways more valuable than just kind of the content inside my head, which I found very interesting. And I imagine so that kind of thing I think will continue to be valuable, especially in the venture world. For me, one of the things I've done also Lux, in addition to kind of the core role that I've been talking about, is I'll often try experiments kind of throughout my tenure at Lux. So in addition to kind of all the different things I was doing, for example, I spent a little bit of time at one point connecting science fiction authors to startups and like connecting them to founders and like, because one of the groups that can think very deeply about the societal, ethical, legal, regulatory implications of technologies in kind of this very holistic way are science fiction authors. And so and I have to admit, it was the result was very hit or miss.

Even when it missed, was still a lot of fun. We had a great time. Not really doing that quite as much, but like, but then like beginning last year we started doing this podcast where I've been doing a lot of just talking to interesting people, everyone from novelists to scientists to people who are people I actually talk to a graphic novelist and talking to like all the science fiction, just kind of interesting I spoke to someone who wrote about the history wrote a book about the history of SimCity. There's kind of all these different things. And so that's another I'd like to think it's more of an experiment.

Hopefully this will be a very, very long term project. But I think so I think the only thing in terms of, like, the direction is just a constant willingness, not necessarily to reinvent yourself, but just constantly experiment and try new things, because that's where kind of the interesting new unexpected directions come from.

I love this sort of out of the box thing that you did with the science fiction authors. I think that's, like, super interesting. What they used to do at Techstars is they used to bring in people who were good at acting or took acting class acting classes or theater and would send the founders to that, right, to help them with pitching and to, like, be animated and to keep the same energy every single time they're in front of, in front of an investor. And it just sort of made me think about the science fiction thing that you just talked about, which was sometimes hit or miss, But oftentimes, it made them really good storytellers along the way about the business or the future of the thing that they wanted to build for the world and why it was the right time to do it. And I think it's something to be said, for your second point around relationships and networks make the world go around.

You know, sometimes you can know everything in the world, but if the right person don't know you, then, it's it's hard to, deploy that knowledge in a place that's meaningful. And and you found a residence that was meaningful for you to deploy your knowledge. What what advice would you give people? I'm gonna flip it on his head a little bit. What advice would you give a GP at a firm, you know, that's thinking about they're on the they they invest in frontier tech.

They're doing deep tech, and they want to try to find or recruit somebody like a Sam. Right? That's very weird. What two or three pieces of advice would you give them to be open to try to attract people like like you to their firm?

I mean, certainly a lot of firms think in terms of like scouts or people who kind of have very broad deal flow and things like that. And I think the the equivalent for something like my role is like idea flow or kind of like being a scout but just for like interesting weird stuff but not necessarily needing it to cash out in immediate like deals and companies. In terms of where those people are, I don't necessarily think they have to just come from academia. I mean, certainly, I was actually talking to, this is years ago, I think soon after I started Ed Lox, a scientist in residence, I was talking to one of our founders and he said, What are the like, what are your friends from graduate school kind of like think about your path? And I'm like, I gotta be honest, like, I don't think anyone is surprised.

Like, this is like actually, I remember, I think I was talking to a friend of mine. He and I, we overlapped in grad school, we shared the same advisor, and apparently they had he and my and our advisor were having a conversation. They're like, Yeah, we don't know where Sam's going to end up, but it's going be somewhere interesting. And I think fine and so oftentimes when I have conversations with academics, scientists, we'll talk about their research, and at the end I'll say, And by the way, I know there is at least one or two people in your lab who don't necessarily know what they want to do or don't necessarily want to continue in academia, send them my way. Because if I can kind of help them think about their path And I think talking to a GP, like that's the kind of people you want, like the people who are just who are the kind of like the round the round pegs in the square holes or whatever it is, like the people who don't quite fit in whatever they're doing, those those are going to be the really interesting people and worthwhile people to at least take a look at.

It's great to find these, like, monomaniacally focused undergrads who have already accomplished huge amounts by the time they're 20 or whatever and doing all these things. I think those people might be top notch entrepreneurs or founders or other kinds of things. But in terms of the kinds of people who are going to be good at pursuing their curiosity or kind of having this broad approach to exploring different ideas, you kind of have to optimize for different things. And it's going to be, yeah, the people who don't necessarily fit or are thinking about, I don't know, ancient Near Eastern mythology one day and then thinking about cellular automata the next day. Like those are the people that are worth looking at.

You know, I'd love to spend a little bit of time. You know, you have a book coming out, The Magic of Code, and in some ways sort of thinking about things computationally. We've kind of crossed this theme of land, orient, figure out what's going on, connect things, understand where you are. I would love to have you spend a couple of minutes talking about the big concepts and sort of what you're excited about in the book as it's getting ready to come out here.

No, thank you so much. Yeah. The book, The Magic Code basically takes, well one of the ideas that I've actually discussed earlier, kind of this idea that it's not kind of an either or when it comes to computing of just like either boring utilitarian things or kind of wonder. These things are deeply intertwined and we need to be able to appreciate both of them. But kind of more broadly, it's this idea of, like, exploring that undercurrent of the wonders and weirdness of computation.

But from the perspective of computing is not just an engineering discipline, but when properly viewed, it can almost be this, like, humanistic endeavor or liberal art that when you so when you think about computing, you're not just writing computer programs. You are also thinking about the nature of language or how we think or aspects of biology or philosophy or the nature of reality. And and so the book looks at these different ideas, starting with the nature of code itself and the ways in which it's similar and different to magic and how we think about language and the features of machines, but then spirals out to thought and how we think about the world and then reality itself and kind of simulation and biology and physics and all these different ideas and tries to give this kind of like rekindle this sense of wonder in computing, which, I mean, coding is constantly changing, with LLMs coding is continuing to change. But despite all of these changes, there are still these underlying deep ideas that affect kind of how we think about the world. So for me, when I think about kind of this like rekindling this wonder.

And so I mentioned my grandfather who was who loved science fiction. So when the iPhone first came out, I went with my grandfather and my father to the Apple Store. And we went and we're kind of playing with the iPhone, we're looking at it, and at a certain point my grandfather says, this is it. This is the object I've been reading about for all these years. And it was like, oh, this is a thing dropped from science fiction, from the future, and we now have it for real.

And then very quickly as a society, we started complaining about camera resolution or how apps don't work or the apps or whatever it is. And we kind of forget that we are living in this age of wonders. And so for me, the book was kind of this approach and this attempt to rekindle that that wonder and almost kind of like re weirden and, like, get us I don't even know if re weirden is a word, but, like like, get us to make become more aware of how deeply strange and exciting all the different things that not only computing can do, but how it can lead us to think about these things. So it's very far from a tutorial from programming. It's designed to create an appreciation and reintroduce it as this liberal art.

Well, just love, you know, kind of if you take your writing together, right, sort of the quality and input and half life, you know, ultimately the shelf life of knowledge, right? Then sort of the understanding of complexity and then sort of deployment of both of those things and kind of connecting the dots. It's sort of a I won't call it an opus, but it's a it's a cool set of thought that fits together. And I think then when you look at some of the stuff that you do in the orthogonal bet on the podcast and also on your substack, I think in many ways we're very lucky to have you helping us think through some of these kind of exciting, interesting, seemingly not connected, but in many ways related issues. I would encourage kind of our network to go check your content and the things that you're putting out pretty broadly.

And I'm excited to get my hands on a copy of the book as well. I have a couple of books behind me. It'd be cool to add your book to that collection. You know, we always like to ask before we let folks go, what can sort of the EIR Live and the community of entrepreneur in residence that we're putting together due to sort of support and engage. So I would be remiss if we didn't ask you that same question.

I appreciate it. Of all, thank you for your kind words about my work. I really appreciate that. Yeah, certainly check out The Magic of Code. It's coming out in June.

And certainly I have a newsletter called The Cabinet of Wonders, my podcast, The Orthogonal Bet. And if you go to my website, arbisman.net, that has links either directly or indirectly to all these different things. And but, yeah, more broadly, would say, send me your weirdos. Like, interesting people, interesting ideas, things that don't fit. Like, send them my way.

This is the kind of stuff that I love. This is this is my catnip.

And one question for you. Where can people find you? Where should they send those things? Can they find you on LinkedIn or what's the best place to reach you?

So if you go to arbisman.net, I have my email yeah, my email address is there. That's probably the best way to reach out.

And number two, I can't let you go with this massive amount of books in the background. So I have to ask you. You've it's not your your first book. It's not your second book. It's your third book, and and it's gonna come out in June.

And clearly, you're an avid reader. You grew up that way, right? This is second nature. It's in the fabric of your your life and in your family. What are you reading right now?

What would you recommend to our audience?

So I'm currently reading I'm in the midst of this fantastic book. It's called, Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer. So she's a historian, she's actually also a science fiction author. And so the book is about the not just the Renaissance itself, but kind of the idea of the Renaissance and how the Renaissance was created. Because on the one hand, we have this very positive vision of the Renaissance, like art and the nature of the human and certain kind of maybe like the first hints of enlightenment ideas, but also at the same time, it was incredibly violent and there was lots of turmoil and it was like this kind of horrible time to live, depending on where you were.

And so people were still trying to kind of grapple with what this was. And so she's trying to explore what the Renaissance is, kind of how this idea was created. It's fascinating. It's really well written. It's a fast read.

So I'm reading that and currently also at the same time rereading The Baroque Cycle, which is a series it's a trilogy of novels by Neil by the novelist Neil Stevenson. It's sort of this, I mean, they're huge. Like, each one has got a thousand pages long, so it's like you're reading like 3,000 pages. I'm not necessarily sure I would recommend it, let alone rereading it like I'm doing it. But it kind of takes place a little bit later than the Renaissance, kind of around the scientific revolution and sort of the it's about scientific revolution and the dawn of the modern monetary system, but it also is just kind of fun, gripping, massive story about the world.

And so that's yeah, so I'm reading that a lot and really enjoying it.

Incredible. Thank you for sharing with the audience. And I have to get this one more thing because I'm so intrigued. Okay, Sam, I got to ask you this one more thing. So outside of EIR Live, in your own podcast, recommend one podcast where people can listen to weird things and interesting ideas and topics.

I'm not sure how much he's still updating it, but there's there was a there's a podcast called Idea Machines by, Ben Reinhardt where he looks at organizational structures and the ways in which these organizations are used to create innovation. He'll talk to people from DARPA, but also other people who are inventing new types of organizations. And I find that fascinating and really interesting as well.

Incredible. Thank you. Thank you, Sam.

Thank you. Always, we went over time. Could go another hour and a half. We're not going We really appreciate sort of the open dialogue and allowing us to connect seemingly disconnected topics even on the podcast here.

Just the way I operate. That's how

it's Yeah, no. And to a certain extent, same with us. It's a good fit from that standpoint, but really want to thank you for your time and sort of introducing a pretty interesting, unique and maybe important perspective in the sort of broader in residence family. So thank you.

Thank you so much. This is a pleasure. I really appreciate you both.

It's been an absolute privilege. Thank you. Oh my goodness. My head is still ringing from that episode. So many insights, so so many gems that that Sam was able to to walk us through.

And what what's really sticking out to me is the how how early influences of of family and friends, in his case, his grandfather and his father, and, you know, them being into science fiction and having early access to to the Internet and a number of other different things. That exposure, that access, you know, sort of led to, you know, Sam growing up and working on interesting things, weird things as he would as he would call them. And those weird things just happened not to be the traditional path. And he carved out his own path and has had a very, very fruitful career that is filled with curiosity that he can deploy day in and day out. And I think that is is something that most people aspire to.

So even though you're working on weird things like Sam was, it can lead to other interesting things like becoming a scientist in residence or something that you never even heard of before. Lastly, you know, I think was what's true in a lot of the people that we talked to in in an interview on the podcast is that networks are key. Relationships matter, and and they matter in the sense of, you know, how you discover new knowledge and new things and and new ideas. And he leaned into that a little bit around, yes, science matters and the things that I know matter, but also relationships, you know, adjacent to those things also matter. And it continues to be a theme.

And building valuable relationships lead to things, when you're working on and tinkering with things early on, just like Sam would. So so many other things that I could talk about. But tell me, what's top of mind? What did you take away, Ilya?

Yeah. Mean, just to lean into that network piece, I like that we kind of framed up this idea of instead of deal flow having idea flow for the scientists and residents. And I think that's sort of an interesting way to start to frame up a conversation because I actually think that there's probably, you know, very much like in VC, there's a power law distribution for kind of the companies that win. It's interesting to start to think about what's the kind of distribution? Is it power law?

Is it something else for kind of the gravity of ideas? And so as you think about your idea flow, you know, are there, sir, you know, kind of bigger ideas that have met their time? Or, you know, how do you think about that? And I think we didn't get to dig into that so much, but it's always fun when you, you know, sort of go out looking for something and you're like, oh, that's curious. Like we should scratch on that some more.

So I think that's something that I think is the probably beginning or maybe even middle of an interesting conversation I'd love to kind of keep pursuing and dig into. I think the other thing is, you know, from kind of engineering education days, kind of my time when I was training to be a professor, one of the things that people were really highlighting and encouraging was as as kind of part of your early education, encouraging kids to take things apart and put things together, you know, sort of disassemble computers, for example, because that builds a really good understanding of kind of interconnectedness and how sort of systems fit together and the fact that, you know, a certain change will cause a system to behave differently. And I think, you know, kind of Sam's background with Legos and HyperCard and sort of all these things where he got to put things together, reshuffle, experiment, probably had a pretty big impact on, you know, him from kind of a very early formative, you know, as as you were talking about kind of that that access and exposure, especially in kind of early years is really important. And so, you know, it's really interesting to sort of think a little bit and at least highlight that, you know, those two things seem to be a good way to highlight each other.

So, you know, very much like you, there's a lot of sort of topics that we had to pull back a little bit on and we could have done another hour and a half. But I think it's a very rich episode. Lots of sort of content and ideas and kind of free flow interconnecting them together. So I just loved how it came together.

Likewise, man. Can't wait for this one to come offered you valuable insights into the entrepreneurial journey. Remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes and check out the description for more details. Do you have questions or suggestions? Please reach out to us.

Connect with us on social media. We really value your input. Catch us next time for more inspiring stories and strategies. Keep pushing boundaries and making your mark on the world. I'm Terrance Orr with my co-host, Ilya Tabakh signing off.

Let's keep building.