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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. The Puck: Venture Capital & Beyond https://thepuckpodcast.com

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. 🎙️ [link in bio]

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.

Yuval Levin joins The Puck to explain why Americans have stopped trusting their institutions — and what it would take to rebuild that trust. Levin argues that institutions are supposed to shape people into responsible citizens, leaders, professionals, and neighbors. But today, too many people use institutions as platforms for attention, status, branding, and political combat. Jim Baer and Yuval Levin discuss why trust has collapsed across politics, media, finance, and civic life — and why the answer is not nostalgia, but a renewed sense of responsibility, restraint, and shared ownership. At the center of the conversation is one urgent question: Can America learn to say “we” again?

In Episode 122 of The Puck: Venture Capital & Beyond, Jim Baer sits down with Katherine Baicker, one of America’s leading health economists, for a clear-eyed conversation about what is broken—and what still works—in the U.S. healthcare system. Baicker explains why America spends enormous sums on healthcare without always getting better outcomes, and why the real problem is not simply “too much care” or “too little care,” but too much low-value care and too little high-value care. She and Jim explore the difficult tradeoffs behind insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, emergency-room care, prevention, innovation, and the uncomfortable reality that healthcare is already being rationed—just not in a rational or transparent way. The conversation also tackles one of the hardest questions in American politics: how much healthcare should be guaranteed as a basic right, and how much should individuals be free to buy beyond that floor? Baicker offers a pragmatic framework: preserve incentives for medical innovation, create a universal safety-net layer of high-value care, and allow supplemental coverage for those who want more. Jim and Katherine also discuss why prevention matters but does not always save money, how AI could improve risk prediction and healthcare targeting, and why evidence-based public debate is increasingly difficult in a media environment driven by anger, algorithms, and political tribalism. This is a nuanced, data-driven conversation about healthcare, economics, morality, and what a serious democracy must be willing to confront.

In this week's episode, Jim sits down with Dr. Ashish Jha — physician, health policy expert, and former White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator — for a candid look at what the pandemic revealed about how America actually works under pressure. This conversation moves well beyond COVID. Dr. Jha explains what happens inside government during a crisis, why emergency powers quietly reshape policy across the entire system, and how short-term urgency consistently crowds out long-term planning. From there, the discussion turns to the deeper structural issue: healthcare. The U.S. is on track to spend roughly $70 trillion on healthcare over the next decade — a number that sits at the center of federal debt, state budgets, and household finances. But the real problem isn’t how much care we use — it’s what we pay for it. Jim and Dr. Jha break down: Why prices — not utilization — are driving costsHow innovation is both life-saving and financially destabilizingWhy hospitals lack real surge capacityAnd why meaningful reform continues to stallThey also tackle harder questions around personal responsibility, prevention, and whether a system can be both compassionate and financially sustainable. At the core of the conversation is a broader insight: There is a reasonable 70% of Americans — not the extremes — who could support real solutions. But they are not the ones driving policy or public discourse.  This episode is about healthcare — but more importantly, it’s about whether a polarized system can still solve complex problems before a crisis forces the issue.

China looks unstoppable from the outside — record exports, dominant EVs, and a relentless push into AI, robotics, and advanced manufacturing. But beneath the surface, a very different story is unfolding. In Episode 120 of The Puck, Jim Baer sits down with Dinny McMahon — former Wall Street Journal Beijing journalist and author of China’s Great Wall of Debt — to unpack what’s really happening inside the Chinese economy. China didn’t have the financial crisis many expected. Instead, it chose a different path — one that’s led to quiet austerity, stressed local governments, and weakening confidence across households and businesses.  At the same time, Beijing is making a massive strategic pivot: away from property and consumption, and toward productivity, innovation, and industrial dominance. The question is whether that model can actually deliver. In this episode: Why China avoided a financial crisis — and what replaced itThe “hidden austerity” hitting local governments and the private sectorThe collapse of the property-driven growth modelWhy China is rejecting consumption-led growthThe bet on productivity, AI, and industrial upgradingInnovation vs. imitation — can China create at the frontier?What China’s strategy means for the U.S. and global marketsThe real goal behind China’s currency push and de-dollarizationThis is not the China story you hear every day — but it may be the one that matters most.

What happens when Iran gets the bomb—and the missiles to deliver it? In this episode of The Puck Venture Capital & Beyond, Jim Baer sits down with Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, for a clear-eyed look at one of the most consequential geopolitical risks of our time. As tensions escalate in the Middle East—with the Strait of Hormuz under threat, oil markets on edge, and U.S. and Israeli forces actively engaged—Dubowitz lays out the real stakes: not just nuclear weapons, but a broader strategy for regional dominance and global leverage. They break down: Why Iran’s nuclear ambitions are about far more than deterrenceThe strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz to the global economyHow missile capability + nuclear weapons changes the balance of powerThe three-phase strategy: military degradation, weakening the regime, and supporting the Iranian peopleWhat history (from WWII to the Cold War) teaches about acting too lateWhether the U.S. and its allies are facing a once-in-a-generation decision pointThis is a sober, strategic conversation about power, timing, and the cost of inaction. If you want to understand where this is heading—not where it’s been—this episode is essential listening.