For the final episode of 2025, we are joined by a guest who embodies the spirit of exploration: Eric Wang.

By day, Eric works in private equity in New York City, managing commercial real estate deals on Wall Street. On weekends, he trades his spreadsheets for a chef's knife, running 81 Eats – a supper club and pop-up series featuring "Chinese-inspired comfort food."

From growing up in Shanghai and attending boarding school in the US at age 12, to training at Wharton and a top-tier French culinary school, Eric is turning the journey inward.

We discuss how he balances a high-pressure finance career with the grounding nature of cooking, his solitude during the pandemic in Tokyo, and his personal philosophy rooted in nature ("touch grass" to feel alive) and gathering people together.

Today on Floating Questions, we sat down with Shaka Mitchell - Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellow, Senior Fellow at the American Federation for Children, constitutional law lecturer, long-distance runner, creator of the Come Together Music Project, and father of three.

Shaka has spent decades building bipartisan coalitions in education and civil discourse, guided by humility, principled thinking, and a deep commitment to humanizing others. In this conversation, we explore:

• Music as a bridge: why “every memory has a soundtrack” and how sharing a song helps people humanize each other before hard political conversations
• Values, faith & principled living: “to give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift,” and why humility matters when advocating for what you believe
• School choice & civic engagement: how diverse motivations still build coalitions, and the tension between plural school options and the demands placed on parents
• AI in the classroom: how AI can support learning and where it can’t replace teachers, plus emerging policy questions as AI enters education

Shaka shares stories from his coalition-building work, his family, and his faith - offering a grounded look at how people with very different backgrounds and beliefs can still learn from one another.

You can also follow his work and thoughts here https://shakamitchell.substack.com/

Timothy Chen’s story isn’t your typical Silicon Valley success arc.

He didn’t start as a hotshot coder - Microsoft once slotted him into the IT track, nothing more. Yet he went on to become a member of the Apache Software Foundation, contribute to open-source projects like Kafka and Mesos (the one-time rival to Kubernetes), and now runs Essence VC, where he backs infrastructure founders with a hands-on approach.

In this episode, we talk about:

• The underdog mindset that turned rejection into reinvention.
• How working in dysfunctional and even toxic environments taught him what builds a great startup.
• The messy reality of politics and consensus-building in open source - and why, contrary to myth, it’s the trust circle, not the crowd, that makes progress happen.
• How he’s building the fund he wished existed when he was a founder.
• A thrilling story of Mesos vs. Kubernetes - and how arrogance, not tech, killed the former.

This conversation blends the human and the technical - a reflection on what it means to build trust, whether in code or in capital.