No recs this week, but I’m thrilled to share that after a slightly-longer-than-hoped holiday hiatus, Dialectic is back in 2025. I am excited for what this year will bring, and excited about this show. It’s been a joy to research and shine a light, via conversation, on some of my favorite people. Weekly programming begins again now, and I’m recording more this week. Much to look forward to.
For now, I’m excited to share a conversation with one of the most intellectually rigorous people I know, Chris Paik. The podcast is available here, on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. Transcript is available here.
Chris is a venture capital investor and co-founder of Pace Capital. I got to know him through periodic visits to NYC in the months and years following COVID, when I always made sure to stop by Pace for a conversation with Chris that would challenge, expand, and subvert my ideas.
I’ve never met someone with a mind like Chris’s: he combines a prepared mind of first-principle explanations and frameworks for how the world and its people work (usually following a trail of stacking incentives) with an infinite appetite for the new. For him, this means surfing the internet for the incremental strange novelty that might one day become relevant to everybody else.
In this conversation, we discuss his intentionality, approach to explanations, how culture follows a pendulum, the efficient market hypothesis and other frameworks for evaluating businesses and markets—including his newest on top-down vs. bottom-up companies, how he finds new stuff, the pros and cons of the internet and capitalism, Pace Capital’s values, and the inner-workings of Chris’s unusual mind. I hope you enjoy and are inspired to think more deeply.
Thank you for your consideration, as always. Your attention means a lot to me, and I hope to honor it with these conversations.
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