Science is the world’s greatest force for progress, but how are the people and institutions that compose this critical activity performing? More specifically, how well is American science competing as more and more countries focus on sci-tech supremacy as a key aspect of building power? The frontiers of technology are determinative of destiny, and so who is pushing those boundaries furthest is crucial to understand.

Those questions and more are what Lux Capital’s co-founder and managing partnerJosh Wolfe and Riskgaming host Danny Crichton talk about. Riffing on Lux’s most recent LP quarterly letter, which emphasized the tension between the nihilist antihero of V for Vendetta against the collaborative community at the heart of scientific progress, the two debate the promise of greater prosperity against the concerning signals of stagnation that are talked about relentlessly in the press.

Among the other topics the two discuss are why scientists continue to compete so ferociously for recognition; the sins of human nature; why the cultures of labs, schools and nations is so vital for progress; recent capital market changes particularly around interest rates; AI’s influence in the sciences; and finally, how VCs will make money in AI — and how they can also lose tens of billions of dollars as valuations evaporate.

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

In this conversation, he speaks with Omar Rizwan, a programmer currently working on Folk Computer. Omar has a longstanding interest in user interfaces in computing and is now focused on creating physical interfaces that enable computing in a more communal and tangible way—think of moving sheets of paper in the real world and projecting images onto surfaces. Folk Computer is an open-source project that explores a new type of computing in this vein.

Samuel engages with Omar on a range of topics, from Folk Computer and the broader space of user interfaces, to the challenges of building computer systems and R&D organizations. Their conversation covers how Omar thinks about code and artificial intelligence, the world of physical computing, and his childhood experiences with programming, including the significance of meeting another programmer in person for the first time.

Produced by CRG Consulting

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

This week, Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon were injured and killed by the thousands across two waves of attacks when their pagers and walkie-talkies exploded. Presumably orchestrated by Israel, it’s one of the most complex and successful supply-chain attacks in world history, and it has mesmerized the global espionage community.

We wanted to go deeper into supply-chain risks, and so we brought Nick Reese onto the Riskgaming podcast to talk more. Nick was the inaugural director of emerging technology policy at the US Department of Homeland Security, where he developed policies across cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and more. Today, he’s the CEO and founder of his own business, Frontier Foundry Corporation, as well as a faculty member at New York University.

Nick and host Danny Crichton talk about the attack on Hezbollah and consider the networked challenges of securing supply chains for the United States. The two then swing wider to the national security challenges inherent in emerging technologies and how public-private partnerships are mitigating some of those risks.

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Eli Altman, the managing director of A Hundred Monkeys, a company that specializes in the art of naming. A Hundred Monkeys works with clients to come up with the perfect name for a company, product, or anything else that requires a name.

The art of naming is a fascinating subject. Throughout human history, the power of names has been a recurring theme in stories and religion. A well-crafted name has the ability to evoke emotions and associations in a profoundly impactful way.

Sam invited Eli to the show because he has been immersed in this field for decades, growing up with a father who specialized in naming. The conversation explores the intricacies of this art, how experts balance competing considerations when crafting a name, the different types of names, and what makes a name successful. They also discuss the importance of writing and storytelling in naming, the impact of AI on the field, and much more.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

The old adage of “If you build it, they will come” might be translated into chip design better as, “You can’t build it, since they don’t exist.” The small but crucial profession of chip design used to be a quieter niche within the broader semiconductor market, with just a handful of companies hiring PhD grads. Now, with trillion-dollar companies like Apple, Google, Meta and more all looking to develop custom silicon, securing chip designers is suddenly an ultra-competitive business — and wages are soaring.

At its source is the rise of artificial intelligence and the need for custom silicon to improve the performance-to-power ratio in contexts ranging from mobile devices to data centers. Apple’s launch this week of its new iPhone 16 line is a case in point: years of design work have afforded Apple the ability to deliver its “Apple Intelligence” product with on-device inference with relatively minimal effect on battery life. Now, dozens of more companies want to compete in this bubbly market and beyond.

Lux general partner Shahin Farshchi and host Danny Crichton talk about the evolution of chip design and how an incumbent oligopoly of electronic design automation companies are now facing new competition from AI-driven competitors. We talk about the history of the EDA market and why custom silicon is really a reversion to historical norms, why designing chips hasn’t changed much in decades and is now rapidly changing for the first time, how large tech companies are using chip design to vertically integrate, the growing exponential complexity of modern chips, and finally, how startups are poised to have access to this market for the first time in a generation.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George K

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with ⁠Alex Komoroske⁠, a master of systems thinking. Alex is the CEO and co-founder of a startup building at the intersection of AI, privacy, and open-endedness. Previously, he served as the Head of Corporate Strategy at Stripe, and before that, spent many years at Google, where he worked on the Chrome web platform, ambient computing strategy, Google Maps, Google Earth, and more.

The throughline for Alex is his focus on complex systems, which are everywhere: from the Internet to biology, from the organizations we build to society as a whole. These systems consist of networks of countless interacting parts, whether computers or people. Navigating them requires a new mode of thinking, quite different from the top-down rigid planning many impose on the world.

Alex is deeply passionate about systems thinking and its broad implications—from making an impact in the world and navigating within and between organizations to understanding undirectedness and curiosity in one’s work.

His more bottom-up, improvisational approach to systems thinking reveals insights on a range of topics, from how to approach large tech companies and the value of startups, to a perspective on artificial intelligence that untangles hype from reality.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Show notes:

Chapters

00:00 Thinking in Terms of Systems

04:11 The Adjacent Possible and Agency

08:21 Saruman vs. Radagast: Different Leadership Models

13:17 Financializing Value and the Role of Radagasts

21:59 Making Time for Reflection and Leverage

25:18 Different Styles and Time Scales of Impact

28:14 The Challenges of Large Organizations and the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation

34:10 The Potential and Responsibility of Generative AI

45:12 Disrupting Power Structures and Empowering Individuals through Startups

Takeaways

Embrace the complexity and uncertainty of systems when approaching problem-solving.

Shift the focus from individual heroics to collective efforts and systemic thinking.

Recognize the value of the Radagast approach in nurturing and growing the potential of individuals and teams.

Consider the different dynamics and boundaries within large organizations and startups.

Take the time to step back, reflect, and find leverage points for greater impact. Focus on your highest and best use, not just what you're good at, but what leads to something you're proud of.

Consider the long-term implications of your actions and whether you would be proud of them in the future.

Large organizations can become inefficient and lose focus due to coordination challenges and the tyranny of the rocket equation.

Open source can be a powerful force for good, but it can also be used as a control mechanism by larger organizations.

Generative AI has the potential to make the boundary between creators and consumers more porous, but responsible implementation is crucial.

Startups offer the opportunity to disrupt existing power structures and business models, giving individuals more sovereignty and control over their data.

Keywords

systems thinking, uncertainty, complexity, individual heroics, collective, leadership, Saruman, Radagast, startups, large organizations, large organizations, values, decision-making, generative AI, startups, data sovereignty

Silicon Valley couldn’t be farther from the confines of Langley or Fort Meade, let alone Beijing or Moscow. Yet, the verdant foothills of suburban sprawl that encompass the Bay Area have played host to some of the most technically sophisticated espionage missions the world has ever seen. As the home of pivotal technologies from semiconductors to databases, artificial intelligence and more, no place has a greater grip on the technological edge than California — and every nation and their intelligence services want access.

It just so happens that almost no national security reporter sits on this beat. Nearly all cover the sector from Washington, or in rare cases New York. All except one that is: Zach Dorfman. Zach has been driving the coverage of the technical side of espionage operations for years, and his pathbreaking scoops about China’s unraveling of the CIA’s network of operatives in the early 2010s were widely read in DC officialdom. Now, he’s published two blockbuster features, one in Politico Magazine on the FBI’s attempts to intercede in the chip trade between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, and the other in Rolling Stone on a deep-cover agent and the very human consequences of state-to-state skullduggery.

Zach and host Danny Crichton talk about Silicon Valley’s history in industrial espionage, the tricky mechanics of intercepting and disabling chip shipments to the Soviet Union, why the U.S.S.R. was so keen on learning the market dynamics of computing in America, the risks for today’s companies around insider threats, Wirecard and Jan Marsalek and finally, some thoughts on Xi Jinping and how China’s rollup of the CIA’s mainland intelligence network affected his leadership of America’s current greatest adversary.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Adrian Tchaikovsky, the celebrated novelist of numerous science fiction and fantasy books, including his Children of Time series, Final Architects series, and The Doors of Eden. Among many other topics, Adrian’s novels often explore evolutionary history, combining “what-if” questions with an expansive view of the possible directions biology can take, with implications for both Earth and alien life. This is particularly evident in The Doors of Eden, which examines alternate potential paths for evolution and intelligence on Earth.

Sam was interested in speaking with Adrian to learn how he thinks about evolution, how he builds the worlds in his stories, and how he envisions the far future of human civilization. They discussed a wide range of topics, including short-term versus long-term thinking, terraforming planets versus altering human biology for space, the Fermi Paradox and SETI, the logic of evolution, world-building, and even how advances in AI relate to science fiction depictions of artificial intelligence.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Gaming has enveloped our world. A majority of Americans now gamble at least once every year, and popular video games like Fortnite and Roblox count hundreds of millions of global players. In social science, game theory and its descendants remain the mainstay for objectively analyzing human rationality, even as a gigaton of evidence shows the limits of these mathematical approaches. Meanwhile in foreign affairs, wargaming (including some of our very own Riskgaming scenarios!) are used to explore speculative futures that can change the fate of nations.

All of these subjects and more are fodder in Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, a broad and open inquiry into the nature of games written by neuroscientist Kelly Clancy. Kelly weaves discussions of dopamine, surprise, chance and learning into a history of human behavioral development over the ages, but then she pivots her discussion. For all of gaming’s success across time and around the world, what are its limits and are we properly critiquing these simulacra of reality?

Kelly joins host Danny Crichton to talk about her book and so much more across an extended show that gets at the very heart of Riskgaming. We talk about the history of games, why the theory of probability arrived so late in the development of mathematics, why game theory works mathematically but fails to capture the complexity and dynamism of human behavior, how AI models use gaming techniques like self-play to evolve, and how the world might change given the explosive popularity of interactive gaming in all facets of modern life.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Samuel Arbesman speaks with John Strausbaugh, a former editor of New York Press and the author of numerous history books. John’s latest work is the compelling new book “The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned.”

The book is an eye-opening delight, filled with stories about the Potemkin Village-like space program that the Soviets ran. Beneath the achievements that alarmed the United States, the Soviet space program was essentially a shambling disaster. The book reveals many tales that had been hidden from the public for years. In this conversation, Samuel explores how John became interested in this topic, the nature of the Soviet space program and the Cold War’s Space Race, the role of propaganda, how to think about space programs more generally, and much more.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Michael Levin, a biologist and the Vannevar Bush Professor at Tufts University. Michael’s work encompasses how information is processed in biology, the development of organismal structures, the field of Artificial Life, and much more.

Sam wanted to talk to Michael because of his pioneering research in these areas. Biology, as Michael’s work reveals, is far more complex than the mechanistic explanations often taught in school. For instance, the process of morphogenesis—how organisms develop their specific forms—challenges our understanding of computation in biology, and Michael is leading the way in this field. He has deeply explored concepts such as the relationship between hardware and software in biological systems, the process of morphogenesis, the idea of polycomputing, and even the notion of cognition in biology.

From his investigations into the regeneration process in planaria—a type of flatworm—to the creation of xenobots, a form of Artificial Life, Michael stands at the forefront of groundbreaking ideas in understanding how biology functions.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Global inequality has grown over the past two decades, concentrating an enormous amount of wealth and power on an elite number of individuals, cities, regions and nations all while stranding the vast masses to ignominy and penury. Yet, history is replete with examples of people and places that have caught up — and in some cases even surpassed — once foregone winners, begging the question: how should those left behind today work to catch up?

That’s the question that Paul Collier addresses in his new book, “Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places.” Collier is a long-time development economist who has diligently brought the spotlight onto the most impoverished people in the world, calling attention to what he famously dubbed the “bottom billion.” With his new book, he explores why some places that were once terrifically wealthy — think Detroit in America — have fallen behind economically, and what steps are needed to overcome that stagnation.

With host Danny Crichton, Collier talks about the economic reversals of places around the world, why evolutionary economics and contributive justice offer new lenses on the problem, how addressing radical uncertainty through rapid learning suggests a path forward, and why global development institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund remain so recalcitrant in their approaches to aid, particularly in offering agency to those affected by their decisions.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Laurel Schwulst. Laurel operates within many roles: designer, artist, educator, and technologist. She explores—among other things—the intersection of the human, the computational, and the wonderful. Sam wanted to talk to Laurel because of this intersection and particularly because of how Laurel thinks about the internet. As part of this, she helps to run HTML Day and its celebrations, promotes what is referred to as “HTML Energy,” and is even thinking deeply about what it would mean to create a PBS of the Internet. In other words, the Internet and the web are delightful and special for Laurel, and she wants more of that energy to exist in the world.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

It’s good and bad times in America. Inflation is down and wages are up in real terms, but there’s a rising challenge: how can we provide the housing, transportation, schooling, health care and amenities that Americans expect when prices for these social services have skyrocketed over the past three decades? Even when new technologies are capable of delivering better services, rules and regulations often stymie their dissemination. America was once the most progressive nation in the world — what happened?

Many analysts focus on policies, from zoning and permitting reform to government procurement modernization, that can accelerate the adoption of frontier tech and increase productivity. But Jason Crawford takes a more expansive and longer view of the challenge. As founder and leader of the Roots of Progress Institute and through his on-going publication of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason emphasizes that we have lost something important: our industrial literacy. America’s leaders no longer understand how prosperity was delivered from the Industrial Revolution onwards, and we’ve lost the ability to rebuild and expand wealth in its broadest conception for the next generation.

I talk with Jason about his manifesto and its focus on humanism, and then we walk through some of the major ideas he’s hoping Americans pick up. These range from more progress studies in high schools and colleges as well as a greater understanding about the value that technology delivers for quality of life to the importance of gratitude for our ancestors who delivered this prosperity to us and why technocrats and reactionaries can both be wrong about managing technological change.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Eliot Peper. Eliot is a science fiction novelist and all-around delightful thinker. Eliot’s books are thrilling tales of the near future, exploring many delightful areas of the world and the frontiers of science and technology. In Eliot’s most recent novel, Foundry, he takes the reader on a journey through the world of semiconductors, from their geopolitical implications to their profoundly weird manufacturing processes.

Sam wanted to talk to Eliot to explore this profound strangeness of the manufacturing of computer chips, but also use this as a jumping-off point for something broader: how Eliot discovers these interesting topics and those wondrous worlds that are incorporated into his books. They spoke about the importance of curiosity, as well as concrete ways to cultivate this useful kind of curiosity, which was fascinating.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

The CrowdStrike meltdown on July 19th shut down the world with one faulty patch — proving once again the interconnected fragility of global IT systems. On Tuesday this week, the company released its Root Cause Analysis as both an explanation and a mea culpa, but the wider question remains: with so much of our lives dependent on silicon and electrons, how can engineers design resilience into their code from the bottoms up? And more importantly, how can we effectively test how resilient our systems actually are?

Kolton Andrus is one of the experts on this subject. For years at Amazon and Netflix, he worked on designing fault-tolerant systems, building upon the nascent ideas of the field of chaos engineering, an approach that iteratively and stochastically challenges systems to test for resilience. Now, as CTO and founder of Gremlin, he’s democratizing access to chaos engineering and reliability testing for everyone.

Kolton joins host Danny Crichton and Lux’s scientist-in-residence and complexity specialist Sam Arbesman. Together, we talk about why resilience must start at the beginning of product design, how resilience is aligning with security as a core value of developer culture, how computer engineering is maturing as a field, and finally, why we need more technological humility about the interconnections of our global compute infrastructure.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to the ongoing mini-series The Orthogonal Bet. Hosted by ⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠, a Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital.

In this episode, he speaks with Hilary Mason, co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door, a startup creating a platform for interactive storytelling experiences within works of fiction. Hilary has also worked in machine learning and data science, having built a machine learning R&D company called Fast Forward Labs, which she sold to Cloudera. She was the chief scientist at Bitly and even a computer science professor.

Samuel wanted to talk to Hilary not only because of her varied experiences but also because she has thought deeply about how to use AI productively—and far from naively—in games and other applications. She believes that artificial intelligence, including the current crop of generative AI, should be incorporated thoughtfully into software, rather than used without careful examination of its strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, Samuel, who often considers non-traditional research organizations, was eager to get Hilary’s thoughts on this space, given her experience building such an organization.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

When it comes to the so-called DC foreign policy “blob”, few scenarios have been more sketched out, analyzed and wargamed than a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. President Xi Jinping’s calls for national rejuvenation coupled with Taiwan’s coalescing autonomous identity apart from the mainland is raising the stakes for both sides and the world writ large.

Given Taiwan’s centrality to global supply chains, I wanted to understand how the world’s economy would transform if a crisis in the Taiwan Strait were to escalate, and few people understand the topic better than Gerard DiPippo. He’s the Senior Geo-Economics Analyst for Bloomberg Economics, and his research centers on the Chinese and Taiwanese economies and their interlinkages with global value chains.

DiPippo and host Danny Crichton walk through different scenarios of what could take place in the Taiwan Strait — from an outright war to a soft embargo — and how we might model the global economic costs of each scenario. We also discuss some of the second-order effects of any conflict in the Strait, from additional sanctions to what goods might substitute for those lost to conflict. Along the way, DiPippo highlights some surprising and counterintuitive findings from his macroeconomic analysis that changes the calculus for all parties involved.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to the ongoing mini-series The Orthogonal Bet. Hosted by ⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠, a Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Amy Kuceyeski, a mathematician and biologist who is a professor at Cornell University in computational biology, statistics, and data science, as well as in radiology at Weill Cornell Medical College. Amy studies the workings of the human brain, the nature of neurological diseases, and the use of machine learning and neuroimaging to better understand these topics.

Sam wanted to talk to Amy because she has been using sophisticated AI techniques for years to understand the brain. She is full of innovative ideas and experiments about how to explore how we process the world, including building AI models that mimic brain processes. These models have deep connections and implications for non-invasively stimulating the brain to treat neurodegenerative diseases or neurological injuries.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

The history of pharmaceutical development has traditionally been one of exploration on the frontiers of life on Earth. From fungi to molds, we’ve sourced many of our most important drugs from some of the unlikeliest places, and it’s all due to evolution. Nature’s intense competition and selection forces has made it the ultimate developer of pharmaceuticals, with potential cures lying in wait for someone to find them.

Searching nature is expensive though, and thus, pharmaceutical companies re-centered around synthetic chemistry over the past few decades, hoping to realize a more reliable and inexpensive drug discovery model. Unfortunately, we have hit a logjam with such an approach, and the evidence is clear that natural products are often regularly superior to synthetics.

We wanted to dive deeper into the future of biopharma, and so we brought together our own Tess Van Stekelenburg and Elliot Hershberg, the writer of Century of Bio, to work on a new two-part mini-series for the Riskgaming podcast, titled Evolved Technology. It’s an extension of a series of talks that Tess and Elliot (“two crazy bio-optimists”) have conducted in SF, and we hope it illuminates a critical scientific frontier with implications for all of us.

In this first episode, Tess and Elliot talk about the editing of life; why thousands head to the Himalayas to find tiny caterpillars in the dirt; the business history of natural products in pharma; the transition from natural products to synthetic chemistry; the limitations of our current biochem toolkits; and finally, how AI/ML are bringing us back to the search for natural products using higher-order models.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Welcome to the ongoing mini-series The Orthogonal Bet. Hosted by ⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠, a Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital.

In this episode, Sam delves into the recent CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage, providing insights on how to understand this event through the lens of complexity science. The episode was inspired by Sam's very timely post in the Atlantic: "What the Microsoft Outage Reveals"

Join us as Sam answers Producer Christopher Gates’ questions, exploring the intricate web of factors that led to this global system failure and offering a unique perspective on navigating and preventing such crises in the future.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Welcome to the ongoing mini-series The Orthogonal Bet. Hosted by Samuel Arbesman, a Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Kristoffer Tjalve. Kristoffer is hard to categorize, and in the best possible way. However, if one had to provide a description, it could be said that he is a curator and impresario of a burgeoning online community that celebrates the “quiet, odd, and poetic web.”

What does this phrase mean? It can mean a lot, but it basically refers to anything that is the opposite of the large, corporate, and bland version of the Internet most people use today. The web that Kristoffer seeks out and tries to promote is playful, small, weird, and deeply human. Even though these features might have been eclipsed by social media and the current version of online experiences, this web—which feels like a throwback to the earlier days of the Internet—is still out there, and Kristoffer works to help cultivate it. He does this through a newsletter, an award, an event, and more.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

The media world has been rocked by artificial intelligence, labor strife, the creator economy, the decimation of business models and so much more. But sometimes it's not collapse and crisis that's the most interesting story, but rather just another day of a assiduously growing a platform. That's the story I want to talk about today on risk gaming, and we're going to zoom in on Medium. It's a venerable media business founded by Ev Williams all the way back in 2012. And one that has become notorious for its pivoting dance to a brighter media future. But under Tony Stubblebine who became CEO two years ago. The company has reached cash flow break even, and he believes Medium has found a balanced business and media model for the decade ahead. I wanted to learn more, so let's dive in.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Hello and welcome to the ongoing miniseries The Orthogonal Bet

Hosted by Samuel Arbesman, Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital

In this episode, Samuel speaks with Alice Albrecht, the founder and CEO of Recollect, a startup in the AI and tools for thought space. Alice, trained in cognitive neuroscience, has had a long career in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Samuel wanted to talk to Alice because of her extensive experience in AI, machine learning, and cognitive science. She has studied brains, witnessed the hype cycles in AI, and excels at discerning the reality from the noise in the field. Alice shares her wisdom on the nature of artificial intelligence, the current excitement surrounding it, and the related domain of computational tools for thinking. She also provides unique perspectives on artificial intelligence.

Episode Produced by ⁠Christopher Gates⁠

Music by ⁠George Ko⁠ & Suno

If we had to rebuild American politics to be more positive, could we do it? And what would a positive or even optimistic politics look like? What would be its program, and how could we all be galvanized to join in a world and at a time when it seems as though every day brings another dampener to human enthusiasm? Those are just some of the questions that James Pethokoukis approaches in his recent book, The Conservative Futurist.

James emphasizes that optimism and pessimism don’t exist on the traditional left-right axis of political analysis (named for the seating arrangement of politicians during the French Revolution). Instead, he divides the world into an “up wing” — people who believe in expanding the bounds of human ingenuity — and those who belong to a “down wing,” which might be simply summarized as degrowthers and others who see limits in all aspects of science, technology and the human condition.

James and I talk about his book, and then I quiz him on just how realistic his futurism is. Is his vision actually possible, or is it the sort of slapstick fantastical science fiction that is great as entertainment but has long since died out as a way to govern? He’s got better evidence marshaled than I expected, and you can be the judge if optimism can guide your thoughts.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world.

Hosted by Samuel Arbesman, Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital.

In this episode, Samuel speaks with Philip Ball, a science writer, and formerly a longtime editor at the science journal Nature. Philip is the author of the fantastic new book “How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology.”

Samuel wanted to talk to Philip because he loved this book. It’s fascinating and deeply provocative, even for someone with a PhD in computational biology—though Samuel’s might be a bit worn and out of date—and yet he still learned so much. The book examines how new advances in our understanding of biology have led scientists to understand that life is far less deterministic than we might imagine. For example, cells are not really machines, as some might have thought, but complex and messy yet robust systems. And while DNA and genes are important, there is so much more going on, from the processes that give rise to the shape of our limbs and our bodies, to how all of this can have implications for rethinking medicine and disease.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

2024 is the year of democracy, with more than half of the world’s population voting in elections across India and Indonesia to the European Union, United Kingdom and  United States. Underneath the usual campaign slogans and stump speeches though is a crucial set of enabling technologies that are increasingly under attack, diminishing the will of voters and raising very challenging geotechnology questions for governments in the years ahead.

That’s why I am excited to bring back the Riskgaming (née “Securities”) podcast’s very first guest, Scott Bade, back on to the show as we approach our centennial episode. Scott is geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group and has been tracking the rising threats to the world’s technological infrastructure and their implications for global politics.

We cover several dozen topics in the show, but focus on three big ones: the killing of TikTok in New Caledonia and what it says about France’s commitment to free speech as Azerbaijan (of all countries) attempts to undermine French democracy. We then zoom in on subsea cables, data centers and AI training, and why there’s been so much more competition in their construction. Finally, we talk about the Global South, and the lack of a new development path for countries in the AI era. Add in some chaos engineering, hybrid warfare, water politics, and the future of Disneyland’s Hall of Presidents and you’ll be demanding an Orthogonal Bet episode just to palette cleanse.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In this episode, Sam speaks with Ben Reinhardt, an engineer, scientist, and the founder of a new research organization called Speculative Technologies.

Ben is obsessed with building an open-ended and exciting future for humanity. After spending time in academia, government, startups, and even venture capital, he set out to build a new type of research organization—Speculative Technologies—that helps to create new technologies and innovations in materials and manufacturing, acting as a sort of industrial lab for these public goods in order to make a positive vision of the future more likely.

There is a lot of optimism and excitement in this episode. The discussion covers the need for new types of research funding and research institutions, why it can be hard for startups to do research, Ben’s vision of the future—and his science fiction inspiration—the ways in which technological innovation happens, why he started Speculative Technologies, and much more.

The Orthogonal Bet is an ongoing miniseries of the Riskgaming podcast that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world hosted by ⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠, complexity scientist, author, and Scientist-in-Residence at ⁠Lux Capital⁠.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Another week, another media tempest in a shrinking tea cup. This time, the internet’s ire centered on Perplexity AI, a startup that offers a layer on top of LLM models that can answer real-time questions about current events. The company got into hot water after it summarized a paywalled Forbes article on Eric Schmidt and his investments in drones with minimal citations. Was this simply fair use summarization of an enterprising investigative article, or something more nefarious and damaging?

We brought a troika of journalists (and former journalists) to talk about the controversy and its implications. First up, Reed Albergotti is technology editor at Semafor and a long-time journalist across The Washington Post, The Information, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Second, Eric Newcomer departed Bloomberg after a distinguished reporting career to start Newcomer, a tech newsletter that’s now complemented by the prominent Cerebral Valley AI conference coming this week in NYC. Finally, host Danny Crichton was formerly managing editor at TechCrunch.

We talk about the norms of journalism and creative work, the economic disruption of creativity by AI, how journalists should adapt to the coming automated world, how legislation might protect these industries and whether the regulatory approach fits the world’s needs, and finally, the limits of knowledge and how much AI still doesn’t know.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

The Orthogonal Bet is an ongoing miniseries of the Riskgaming podcast that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world hosted by Samuel Arbesman, complexity scientist, author, and Scientist-in-Residence at Lux Capital.

In this episode, Sam speaks with game designer and researcher Chaim Gingold, the author of the fantastic new book Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine.

As is probably clear from the title, this new book is about the creation of SimCity, but it’s also about much more than that: it’s about the deep prehistory and ideas that went into the game — from system dynamics to cellular automata — as well as a broader history of Maxis, the company behind SimCity. Chaim previously worked with SimCity’s creator Will Wright on the game Spore, where he designed the Spore Creature Creator. Because of this, Chaim’s deep knowledge of Maxis, his access to the folks there, and his excitement about SimCity and everything around it makes him the perfect person to have written this book.

In this episode, Sam and Chaim discuss Chaim’s experience at Maxis, the uniqueness of SimCity, early 90’s gaming, the rise and fall of Maxis, Will Wright and his role translating scientific ideas for a general audience, and much more.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

There have been data revolutions in most areas of human activity, and biological research is no exception. The rapidly shrinking cost of collecting data like DNA sequences means that there has been an exponential growth in the amount of data that bio researchers have at their disposal. Yet, most biologists still operate on top of general purpose cloud compute platforms, which don’t offer a native environment for them to engage in research at the cutting edge of the field.

On the Riskgaming podcast today, Lux’s Tess van Stekelenburg interviews Alfredo Andere and Kenny Workman, the co-founders of LatchBio who are on a quest to rapidly accelerate the progress of biology’s tooling. The big challenge — even for big pharma — is a lack of access to top-flight AI/ML developers in the ferocious talent wars they face against even bigger Big Tech companies. As Workman says, “They just don't have world's best machine learning talent … And then they're working with usually 5- to 10-year-old machine learning technology, except for a small handful of outliers.” LatchBio and other startups are pioneering new ways of delivering those tools to biologists, today.

In this episode, the trio discuss the changing data economy of biological research, the lack of infrastructure for conducting laboratory and clinical work, why AstraZeneca has improved its pharma output over the past decade, what the ground truth is around AI and bio, the flaws of open-source software, and finally, how academia and commercial research will fit together in the future.

Episode Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Hello, and welcome to the ongoing mini-series, The Orthogonal Bet, a show that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world.

Host Samuel Arbesman, Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital. 

In this episode Sam speaks with Robin Sloan, novelist and writer and all-around fun thinker. Robin is the author of the previous novels, Mr Penumbra’s Twenty Four Hour Book Store and Sourdough, which are both tech-infused novels, with a sort of literary flavor mingled with a touch of science fiction. That’s why Sam was so excited by Robin’s brand new third novel Moonbound, where he goes for broke and writes a sprawling science fiction tale set in the far future.

In this episode, we explore how Robin built this far future and how he thinks about world-building, an exercise regimen for your imagination, science fiction and fantasy more broadly, and of course, novels with maps. And Lord of the Rings obviously makes an appearance as well.

But Moonbound also touches on AI in some really thoughtful and thought-provoking ways, and Robin has also been an early experimenter and adopter of language models. They get into all of that too, talking about AI, the nature of creativity, storytelling, and so much more.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig built Applied Intuition differently from most other startups. At a time of profligate spending at the peak of the tech bubble, they kept expenses low — and the company cash-flow positive for several years now. When every other company was moving toward remote work or a hybrid setup, they doubled down on the in-person, five-days-per-week office (while continuing a no-shoes philosophy). And when it comes to culture, they don’t just post their corporate values on a wall, but encode them right into the very software that runs the company.

The results? Applied reached a new milestone valuation earlier this year of $6 billion as well as announced a strategic partnership with automaker Porsche. It’s a moment of success years and even decades in the making, with both Qasar and Peter growing up amidst the milieu of America’s auto capital Detroit. Yet, it wasn’t just friends and family working in the auto industry that led them to invent the future of the car, but also a willingness to learn from Silicon Valley’s most thoughtful startup growth practices.

Alongside host Danny Crichton and Lux general partner Bilal Zuberi, we weave a conversation about automotive and autonomy while we discuss the key decisions that founders must make when building a startup. We talk about the pressure of capitalism on company execution, using software to manage a growing organization, why Google exported so much talent in the early 2010s, how to protect engineering productivity with a customer-centric culture, how to construct a useful board of directors, and finally, why markets just “whomp” any other factor of success for entrepreneurs.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

This is the inaugural episode of an on-going mini-series for the Riskgaming podcast we’re dubbing the Orthogonal Bet. Organized by our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman, the goal is to take a step back from the daily machinations that I, Danny Crichton, generally host on the podcast to look at what Sam describes as “…the interesting, the strange, and the weird. Ideas and topics that ignite our curiosity are worthy of our attention, because they might lead to advances and insights that we can’t anticipate.”

To that end, today our guest is Matt Webb, a virtuoso tinkerer and creative whose experiments with interaction design and technology have led to such apps as the Galaxy Compass (an app that features an arrow pointing to the center of the universe) and Poem/1, a hardware clock that offers a rhyming poem devised by AI. He’s also a regular essayist on his blog Interconnected.

We latched onto Matt’s recent essay about a vibe shift that’s underway in the tech world from the utopian model of progress presented in Star Trek to the absurd whimsy of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Along the way, we also discuss Neal Stephenson, the genre known as “design fiction,” Stafford Beer and management cybernetics, the 90s sci-fi show Wild Palms, and how artificial intelligence is adding depth to the already multitalented.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

We’ve known for decades that one of the key mechanisms of biology — and of life itself — is the binding of molecules to proteins. Once bound, proteins change shape and thus their function, allowing our bodies to adapt and change their molecular machinery as needed for survival. The challenge that remains unsolved is to predict — across billions of potential proteins and a similar number of molecules — how those proteins change and how they might interact with each other.

The fervent hope of many scientists and entrepreneurs is that artificial intelligence coupled with experimental and synthetic datasets, may finally unlock this critical piece of the biological puzzle, ushering in a new wave of therapeutics.

My guest today is one of those science entrepreneurs, Laksh Aithani, the co-founder and CEO of Charm Therapeutics. He’s made cancer the focus of his work, and through Charm and his team, is building expansive datasets to develop AI models that can predict the 3D shape of proteins.

Alongside host Danny Crichton and my Lux colleague Tess van Stekelenburg, we explore protein folding’s past, present and future, the utility and risks of synthetic data in biological research, how much money and time we might expect for future drug discovery, what individualized medicine might look like decades from now, and how new grads can get into the field as the century of biology kicks off.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

How does science progress? One way to look at the question is to peer into individual fields and observe the flow of ideas from laboratories and experiments into seminars and conferences and ultimately into the journal record. But the reality is so much more complicated since science is truly a creative act, a set of imaginative leaps from incumbent ways of thinking to new possibilities. The milieu that scientists inhabit — and particularly science’s most productive leaders — is often far more expansive than one would expect.

That’s the story today with Margaret Mead and the rise of psychedelic research. Best known as a cultural anthropologist, Mead spanned the sciences, from information theory into the humanities. That range brought her into regular contact with brilliance, and also helped her transmit vital ideas and concepts from field to field. One of the circles she participated in was an emerging group of scholars conceptualizing ideas around computer science, neurology and consciousness, linked together by a curiosity around psychedelics within the paranoia of Cold War politics.

Joining host Danny Crichton on the Riskgaming podcast today is Benjamin Breen, a professor of science at the University of California Santa Cruz who just published his new book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. Also joining me today is Lux Capital’s scientist in residence Sam Arbesman.

We cover Margaret Mead’s early work, her popularization of science, the Macy conference circles that brought disparate networks of scientists together in New York City, the utopian dream of science in the 1920s and 1930s recently depicted in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer movie, the rise of LSD and finally, why there were so many interconnections between these scientists and defense institutions like the CIA.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Ever since the invention of CRISPR technology about a decade ago, biologists have gained increasing power to discover new DNA sequences, cut and mash them up, and then print them in ever larger volumes through biomanufacturers. That freedom and openness is the opening to a long-awaited Century of Bio, with scientists bullish on the potential to discover cures to long-resistant diseases.

On the tails side of the coin though, there are fears that the open nature of these tools afford a rebel scientist the means of inventing and distributing well-known or completely novel pathogens that could threaten the lives of millions. It’s not the premise for a bad Hollywood B-movie, but a top security threat that experts at the White House and in the intelligence and defense communities are rapidly trying to solve.

Today, I have Kevin Flyangolts of Aclid joining us. Aclid is using artificial intelligence to identify what new sequences of DNA might do, scaling up screening efforts that might allow biomanufacturers the ability to verify their customers’ intentions in a more thoughtful and comprehensive way.

Kevin and host Danny Crichton talk about the recent history of bio, the rise of biohacking, the differences between bioweapons, cyberweapons and financial crimes, why we need new approaches to biosecurity, whether executive, legislative or industry approaches might work best, and whether designer bioweapons are as dangerous as many are making them out to be.
Finally, a note: in line with the launch of our first riskgaming scenario on the Lux Capital website, Hampton at the Cross-Roads, we have officially condensed the “Securities” podcast name into just “Riskgaming,” which I think captures in one word the risks and opportunities that come from science, technology, finance and the human condition. Same show, more focused name and a great future.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Every quarter, Lux publishes our latest quarterly letter to our limited partners, highlighting the key themes we’re working on as a partnership. These topics are — unsurprisingly — bold, as the frontiers of science fiction transition into the world of the possible. But this time around, we’re emphasizing a new thesis that we think combines the future and the past, and might just help the entire world to boot.

Lux co-founder and managing partner Josh Wolfe joins host Danny Crichton to discuss Lux’s new theme of “maintenance.” As Josh wrote, “Maintenance is not about preserving the status quo but thoughtfully fueling forward progress by improving on humanity’s past achievements.” Josh discusses the opportunity with maintenance, as well as why the repair of our society and its infrastructure is a growth industry since “the value of maintaining existing systems grows as entropy accelerates, and as we reach the Entropic Apex, that value becomes concomitantly unbounded.”

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

This week’s solar eclipse captured the imaginations of millions of Americans throughout an arc across the continent. One of those entranced was Sam Arbesman, Lux’s scientist-in-residence and a local of Cleveland, which sat in the full zone of totality. Sam also happened to live in Kansas City during the 2017 eclipse, so he has (accidentally) eclipsed-chased in his choices of residence.

Briefly, Sam and host Danny Crichton talk about the eclipse, the mesmerizing impact of science, and the unique community that comes together in cities lying in the darkness. Lux is “light” in Latin, and so what happens when darkness descends across the Earth? Surprisingly, something magical and optimistic, showing how science and mathematics has the ability to transmute our passions into something great.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

During a recent interview, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized his interest in how Nvidia’s AI processing chips could transform the science of life. He noted that this science, when properly understood, could evolve into a new form of engineering. Currently though, we lack the knowledge of how the extreme complexity of biology works, nor do we have models — namely AI models — to process that complexity.

We may not have a perfect understanding of biology, but our toolset has expanded dramatically over the past ten years. Now, with the combination of data, biology and AI, we’re seeing the early signs of a golden era of biological progress, with large-language models that are able to predict everything from protein folding to increasingly, protein function. Entire spaces of our map are being discovered and filled in, and that is leading to some bullish scientists and investors to call the period we are living in the century of biology. But much remains to be done, and that’s the topic of our episode today.

Host Danny Crichton is joined by Lux Capital’s bio investor Tess van Stekelenburg. Tess and Danny talk about Nvidia’s recent forays into biology as well as the new foundational model Evo from the Arc Institute. They then look at what new datasets are entering biology and where the gaps remain in our global quest to engineer life. Finally, they’ll project forward on where evolution might be taking us in the future once unshackled by nature.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Astrobiology has seen a series of revolutions over the past three decades that have completely reinvigorated the field. Scientists who were curious about life and biological organisms across the universe once had to handle the so-called giggle factor: the idea that they were kooky crazies searching for UFOs and little green men. With a dramatic improvement to the quality of our instruments and a torrent of new and better data, that giggle factor is now no laughing matter: we increasingly have the means to make progress here like never before.

My guest today is Adam Frank, the author of The Little Book of Aliens and a professor of astrophysics who is focused on improving our ability to identify biosignatures and technosignatures of life throughout the cosmos. He’s just one contributor to a growing community of scientists reinventing our approach to the search for life, a vitality that is leading to the potential first dedicated satellite focused on the search, the Habitable Worlds Observatory.

Alongside host Danny Crichton and Lux’s scientist in residence Sam Arbesman, we talk about the trilogy of revolutions that have brought new vigor to astrobiology, how artificial intelligence is upending the search for life, and what we can also learn about Earth and our climate in searching space for the answers of life.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Humans are enamored by a good story. The world overloads our mammalian senses, and so we seek any simplifying structure to narrate what we are witnessing and make it more accessible for processing. That simplification doesn’t just reduce the complexity of the world, but also makes it difficult to see the extent by which luck drives the successes of our geniuses — and the failures of others. From scientific discoveries and power-law venture returns to legislative breakthroughs and decisions during war, the world is, essentially, chaos.

That might trigger a bout of deep existentialism for many of us, but for Brian Klaas, the hope is that confronting the stochastic nature of the world can lead to better governance and progress. In his new book Fluke, Klaas argues that we need to upend the simplistic statistical analyses and modeling that are common across social science and other domains and replace it with one that can encompass a theory of flukes. That means understanding timing, path dependency, and how the world is a complex system that is far more of a continuous variable than a binary one.

With Lux’s scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman and host Danny Crichton, we all talk about how chaos rules our lives; how a better understanding of complexity can improve investments, science, and life; Darwin’s luck of publishing his research on natural selection; the dangers of the human penchant for finding narrative; the random luck of our life experiences; and why understanding flukes can be a counterpoint to the ideas of moneyball.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

Connections are the key ingredient for careers, society and AI neural networks to boot. Sometimes those connections arise spontaneously and other times they’re planned, but the most interesting ones tend to be planned that go in unexpected directions. That’s the story of David Ha, the co-founder and CEO of Sakana, a world-class generative AI research lab in Tokyo, Japan.

We previously announced that Lux led a $30 million founding seed round in the company a few weeks ago on the podcast, but we didn’t dive deeper into the ricochets of David’s peripatetic career. Studying computer science and machine learning at the University of Toronto, he worked down the hall from now-famous AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton. He ultimately headed to Goldman Sachs in Tokyo doing derivatives trading, but on the side, he published a shadow and anonymous blog where he posted random experiments in artificial intelligence. A decade later of serendipitous connections later, and he is now leading one of the emerging national AI leaders for Japan.
We talk through the stochastic moments that defined David’s career, why complex systems knowledge would ultimately turn out to be so valuable, the unique features and benefits of Japan, why openly communicating ideas and particularly interactive demos can spawn such serendipitous connections, why industry has produced more innovation in AI than academia, and why Google’s creativity should never be discounted.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

The construction of Boston’s Big Dig highway tunnels has gone down in history as one of the most infamously delayed and over-budgeted infrastructure projects in the sorry annals of U.S. growth and progress. But Ian Coss sees the project radically different. In hindsight, he argues, the Big Dig was a steal: the good kind. Far from being a gargantuan boondoggle, the project resuscitated downtown Boston and ushered in urban economic benefits and spillovers that dwarf the costs of the project, however one might calculate them.

Ian interviewed more than 100 people connected with the Big Dig and spent months editing a nine-episode podcast series titled “The Big Dig” for GBH News, Boston’s National Public Radio affiliate. Through the series, he covers everything from the environmental consciousness of the 1960s and colorful yet idealistic local political figures to the Department of Transportation’s inflation estimate policy and ultimately the decades it took to bring the dream of burying Boston’s unsightly Central Artery freeway.

On today’s “Securities” podcast with host Danny Crichton, Danny and Ian debate the merits of the Big Dig megaproject, the complicated construction policies that made the project seem like a loser in front of the public, and just how hard it is to measure the true impact of a project that forever transformed one of America’s founding cities.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Home appliances are some of our most used and time-saving technologies, but they have barely evolved since their invention. A “smart” movement from major manufacturers tried to upgrade them with random tech features over the past decade, only to frustrate consumers with random crashes and mandatory web updates for a fridge. It was the nadir of user-friendly design and an embarrassing example of tech for tech’s sake.

Impulse Labs wants to improve this miserable status quo. Funded by Lux, Impulse is rethinking appliances from the foundations up, evolving the experience of home appliances for the twenty-first century. What if our stoves could boil water all but instantly? What if we could perfectly and effortlessly cook a steak — every single time. And what if we could do all this while transforming the power grid and the availability of decentralized electricity for ourselves and our neighbors?

That’s just part of the vision of Impulse Labs founder and CEO Sam D’Amico. Sam and host Danny Crichton talk about hardware product design, consumer marketing, what it takes to build the right supply chains as well as standing out during the chaos that is CES in Las Vegas.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Colonizing Mars has gone from the speculative fiction section of the bookstore right into the halls of Congress. Entrepreneurs led by Elon Musk have made “Occupy Mars” a tagline, and companies the Earth over are exploring the logistics of settling humans across the Moon and Mars. But what’s the true viability of a Mars settlement plan? Do we have the technology and legal systems in place to make this one-time fiction a reality?

Popular cartoonist and author, Zach Weinersmith, wrote “A City On Mars” alongside his wife Kelly Weinersmith to explore that very question. Starting with an optimistic lens, they eventually conceded in the book that the project is one of extraordinary difficulty and are pessimistic at its chances. “A City On Mars” won a slew of best-of awards in 2023 for its delightfully engaging and humorous breakdown of complex physical and biological topics.

In this first part of a two-part series, host Danny Crichton and Lux’s scientist in residence Sam Arbesman discuss with Zach the biological and psychological challenges of inter-planetary settlement and why every astronaut lies about their health in outer space. We also explore the challenges of reproduction in space, and what a second generation of settlers might have to endure in the far reaches of our solar system.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

The current drive for a Mars colony revolves around two central axes: one is a fear of existential risk and the other is a search for existentialism. On the former, philosophers and probabilists remain deeply concerned about humanity’s Achilles heel: that our entire existence depends on the sustenance of a single blue dot in the Milky Way. Humanity’s fate is fundamentally tied to this single rock, which gives little redundancy from an asteroid strike, nuclear winter, or pandemic.

At the same time, many entrepreneurs hear a rallying cry when they think about a Mars colony, arguing that a bold and long-term project is precisely what is needed to galvanize humanity to work together, overlook our internecine differences and find transcendence amidst the celestial cosmos. Even if outside our lifetime, a drive toward a space colony could be an existentialism that offers meaning and sustenance to our lives.

In this second and final episode, Zack Weinersmith, who along with his wife Kelly Weinersmith are the authorial duo of A City on Mars, join host Danny Crichton and Lux’s scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman to talk more about their negative prognostication for a Mars colony. Taking a more optimistic view, we also talk with Zach about what we should be doing to prep for a colony, including collecting more laboratory data and expanding science’s understanding of life under microgravity conditions.

The cost of launching a payload into low-earth orbit has shrunk dramatically over the past two decades as SpaceX has aggressively expanded its capability to repeatedly launch payloads into orbit at cheap cost. But accessing orbits farther away from Earth, such as Medium Earth orbit (MEO) and Geostationary orbit (GEO), remain expensive endeavors.

Lux’s portfolio company Impulse Space, which is building the next generation of rocket propulsion for space, unveiled the design specs of its new high performance kick stage vehicle Helios today. The vehicle will allow operators to move objects like satellites from Low Earth orbit to orbits farther away at just a fraction of today’s costs, and it’s coming soon in 2026.

I talked with Impulse Space’s CEO and founder Tom Mueller about Helios, as well as the growing concerns over space junk, a recent satellite emergency over Christmas, the television show The Expanse, space traffic control and what it means to move things in space and bring them back home.

Lux announced big news today: we are leading a $30 million founding seed round into Sakana AI, a Tokyo, Japan-based AI research laboratory that uses evolutionary methods, collective intelligence and character-level training to radically accelerate the training and development of nature-inspired AI foundation models. It’s a marquee check for Lux into the Asia-Pacific region, and represents the continuing democratization of the frontiers of computer science to all regions of the world, a trend we’ve championed for years now.

I, your host Danny Crichton, wanted to spend some time on the economic and technological milieu that is changing the face of startups and entrepreneurship globally in 2024. In this episode, I walk through three themes that are driving Lux’s interest in Sakana AI and other companies, including the rise of national and indigenous AI foundation models, the return of Japan’s dynamic economy after decades of stagnation, and the broader ambitions of the Asia-Pacific region as China recedes from the minds of international investors in the midst of President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on private entrepreneurship.

Music composed by https://www.georgeko.co/ "Securities" is produced and edited by Chris Gates

Hey, it's Danny Crichton. 2023 was an incredibly busy year, and nowhere was there more fervent attention than on artificial intelligence. OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the very end of 2022, and its implications found purchase this year among more than one hundred million users and the regulators who serve them. Those product developments don't even get into the crazy governance crisis at OpenAI a few weeks ago, which saw Sam Altman and then the board of directors toppled in a story that likely outshone the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as the most important tech crisis of the year. Billions of dollars of venture capital flowed into the AI space, with investors funding everything from data infrastructure and better model training to the applications that are already beginning to transform industries across the world. Governments have moved with alacrity to regulate this new technology, but progress is unabated and unstoppable. The "Securities" podcast has aggressively covered these developments throughout 2023, with interviews with more than a dozen experts in all facets of this new technology, from the corporate executives building these products and the generals using these new features for American defense, to the critics who caustically analyze AI's supposed truthful implications and the philosophers debating the theory of mind and consciousness of these systems. So as the final episode of the podcast this year, I wanted to connect all of these separate discourses around artificial intelligence together into one cohesive package. We clipped nine of the best segments from episodes across 2023 — special thanks to our producer Chris Gates on finding these treasures. A retrospective, an incitement to innovation, a warning — it's all here, so let's get started.

This episode was produced, recorded and edited by Chris Gates

Music by George Ko

In a world where science fiction often paints a pessimistic picture of dystopian futures and critiques of modern technology, novelist Eliot Peper stands out with his latest work, "Foundry." a thrilling exploration of the geopolitical intricacies of semiconductor manufacturing. In this episode of the "Securities" podcast, host Danny Crichton engages with Peper to discuss this engaging spy thriller, which goes beyond the surface to delve into how the tiny chips powering our phones and computers play a central role in 21st-century global politics. This book, Peper's 11th, began with a dream and unfolded line by line, leading to an unexpected journey through the complex realities of technological advancements and their impact on world affairs. "Foundry" is more than just a story; it's an invitation to ponder the unseen forces shaping our civilization.

While semiconductors are a key topic, the conversation goes deeper, examining why Eliot continues to weave narratives in speculative fiction amidst a tech industry often bogged down by the weight of relentless pessimism. 

Ever wonder if your dreams were more than just dreams? Dive into an intriguing conversation with Erik Hoel on our latest “Securities” podcast with host Danny Crichton, as we explore the unexpected link between AI, neuroscience, and the enigmatic world of dreams. 

What if dreams are our brain's way of preventing cognitive overfitting, much like synthetic datasets in machine learning? Could dreams be the human equivalent of synthetic data?

This episode doesn't just stop at dreams. We end the conversation with a discussion of Erik’s essay “Why we stopped making Einsteins” delves into the intriguing question of why, despite the widespread availability of knowledge through the internet, there hasn't been a noticeable surge in the emergence of geniuses or a new golden age of intellectualism. Hoel argues that the decline in the production of geniuses, or world-historic figures, is closely tied to changes in education, particularly the decline in personalized, one-on-one tutoring.

Could AI be the revival in one-on-one tutoring that we need to unlock genius? 

With engaging insights from guests Josh Wolfe and Samuel Arbesman. Don't miss this captivating episode that merges the mysterious with the scientific, offering a fresh perspective on the wonders of the human mind and the future of AI. Tune in and be part of a discussion that's reshaping our understanding of consciousness.

In this episode of the "Securities" podcast, host Danny Crichton leads a discussion on consciousness with guests Erik Hoel, Josh Wolfe, and Samuel Arbesman. They dive into "The Consciousness Winter," comparing it to the AI winter in artificial intelligence. This concept highlights how consciousness studies were once sidelined but have since seen a revival. The conversation covers various theories, including Integrated Information Theory (IIT), and the importance of a mathematical approach to understanding consciousness.

Welcome to "Securities," a podcast and newsletter about science, technology, finance, and the human condition.

In this episode, Danny Crichton and Josh Wolfe discuss themes from Lux Capital's Quarterly Letter, where techno-optimism collides with the despair of techno-pessimism.

The conversation dives into the paradoxes of AI, oscillating between its awe-inspiring potential in transforming healthcare and education and the looming existential threats it poses. Danny and Josh dissect the complexities of AI, debating whether it's a Pandora's box leading humanity towards an unstoppable dystopian future or a beacon of hope promising unprecedented societal benefits.

They also look at the critical role of error correction and criticism in the advancement of technology, advocating for a pragmatic middle ground in a world polarized between blind optimism and hopeless pessimism. The duo explores the necessity of competitive open systems in fostering innovation, warning against the dangers of AI monopolies.

Josh sheds light on the concept of instrumental objectivity, emphasizing the urgent need for realism and pragmatism in technological and societal progress. They argue that while we aim for lofty future goals, the focus should remain on developing practical tools and instruments in the present.

It's a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of AI, the role of innovation in society, and the fine line between utopian dreams and apocalyptic realities.

In this episode of “Securities” by Lux Capital, host Danny Crichton joins guests Brian McCullough, host of the Techmeme Ride Home podcast and General Partner at the Ride Home Fund; Shahin Farshchi, General Partner at Lux Capital; and Matthew Lynley, founder and writer of the Supervised newsletter to discuss regulation and competition in AI, questioning whether open-source or proprietary AI will dominate the future. With discussions ranging from the impact of large language models to AI’s encroachment on government agendas, this episode touches upon the battles shaping AI’s future. Are we on the brink of an AI utopia or a dystopia? This episode is a crucial listen for anyone wanting a snapshot of AI’s as it stands today.

Welcome to this enlightening episode of "Securities” Podcast with host Danny Crichton, where we navigate the intricate crossroads of technology, national security, and democracy. Our guest today is Miles Taylor, the author of "Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump."

In this episode, we delve deep into the challenges and complexities of modern governance, the shifting landscape of national security threats, and the role of technology in shaping our society. We explore the impact of generative AI on the creative class and ponder the future of democracy in an increasingly digital world.

Join us for a thought-provoking discussion that will leave you questioning the trajectory of the United States, its people, and where things are headed in this age of rapid technological advancement.

As the birthplace of semiconductors and computers, Silicon Valley has historically been a major center of the defense industry. That changed with the Vietnam War, when antiwar protesters burned down computing centers at multiple universities to oppose the effort in Southeast Asia, as well as the rise of countercultural entrepreneurs who largely determined the direction of the internet age.

Today, there are once again growing ties between tech companies and the Pentagon as the need for more sophisticated AI tools for defense becomes paramount. But as controversies like Google’s launch of Project Maven attest, there remains a wide chasm of distrust between many software engineers and the Pentagon’s goals for a robust defense of the American homeland.

In this episode of “Securities”, host Danny Crichton and Lux founder and managing partner Josh Wolfe sit down with retired lieutenant general Jack Shanahan to talk about rebuilding the trust needed between these two sides. Before retirement, Shanahan was the inaugural director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a hub for connecting frontier AI tech into all aspects of the Defense Department’s operations.

We talk about the case of Project Maven and its longer-term implications, the ethical issues that lie at the heart of AI technologies in war and defense, as well as some of the lessons learned from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the past year.

Artificial life, aka “A-life”, is an intellectually vital field simulating life within computational systems. By allowing simulations to run uninterrupted for extended periods, researchers can observe emergent behaviors, patterns, and even evolutionary trajectories. What's particularly intriguing is that these artificial systems often exhibit behaviors and patterns reminiscent of natural life, reinforcing that certain principles of life and evolution might be universal, whether in a biological context or a digital one.

In this episode of "Securities," host Danny Crichton is joined by Lux scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman and special guest Olaf Witkowski, who is the director of research at Cross Labs and the current president of the International Society for Artificial Life.

Among many topics, the three of them discuss cellular automata, the origins of evolution, and the open-endedness of A-life.

Think AI can't touch the creative world? Think again. Writers, directors, illustrators - none are safe. AI models, despite their glaring flaws, are on the verge of rendering the vast majority of 'creative' work obsolete. The digital age has already flooded the market with so-called 'creatives', and now AI threatens to wash the least original of them away. We're about to witness the dismantling of creative pathways and the death of apprenticeships. So, where does that leave the next generation of creatives? Video based on an essay by Danny Crichton

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Lux Capital Music composed by George Ko Video shot, edited and produced by Chris Gates: Thumb image photography by MJP

Historians survey the past and the Twitterati (X-erati?) process the events of the present day. But what does it mean to search the future for clues of what’s to come — and how much longer will we have to wait for it?

In this episode of “Securities”, Danny Crichton welcomes Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, research partner at Lunar Ventures and the publisher of “State of the Future”, a Deep Tech Tracker whose distinguishing feature is its extraordinarily wide remit to investigate the interstices of science and technology and find the morsels of innovative goodness that will power the planet in the years ahead. Also joining is Lux Capital’s own scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman, who is certainly no stranger to the crazy ideas straddling science fiction and science fact.

Lawrence shares his unique approach to identifying and evaluating emerging technologies such as deep geothermal energy. We then pivot to exploring Lawrence’s approach of finding the future through the methodology of “horizontal scanning.” What’s to come? Listen and find out.

Welcome to "Securities," a podcast and newsletter devoted to science, technology, finance, and the human condition. In this episode, Josh Wolfe and Danny Crichton bring science fiction into science fact with our guest, Christopher Mason, a geneticist and computational biologist who has been a principal investigator of 11 NASA missions and projects.

Mason, a professor of genomics, physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine, discusses his book, "The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds." The book explores the concept of protecting humanity from inevitable extinction by venturing to other planets. While most focus on the technologies to deliver us to these places, Mason takes a different angle, focusing on the biological adaptations necessary for humans to survive in space.

Mason discusses the need for both physical engineering and biological engineering in space travel. He highlights the importance of understanding and potentially engineering our microbiome for space travel, given its significant role in our health and digestion. He also discusses the potential of gene editing, using the example of the vitamin C gene, which we could potentially reactivate to allow humans to auto-synthesize vitamin C.

The conversation also covers the physical changes experienced by astronaut Scott Kelly during his time on the International Space Station and the implications of these changes for future space travel. Mason discusses the potential of engineering the perfect space specimen, considering factors such as gravity, radiation, and circadian rhythms.

The rise of generative AI and large-language models (LLMs) have forced computer scientists and philosophers to ask a fundamental question: what is the definition of intelligence and consciousness? Are they the same or different? When we input words into a chatbot, are we seeing the early inklings of a general intelligence or merely the rudiments of a really good statistical parrot?

These are modern questions, but also ones that have been addressed by philosophers and novelists for years, as well as the occasional philosopher-novelist. One of those rare breed is the subject of this week’s “Securities”, specifically the novel Blindsight, the first of two books in the Firefall series written by Peter Watts back in 2008. It’s a wild ride of dozens of ideas, some of which we’ll talk about today. Spoilers abound so caveat emptor.

Joining Danny Crichton is Lux’s own scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman as well as Gordon Brander, who runs the company Subconcious, which is building tools of thought such as Noosphere, which is a decentralized network of your notes backed by IPFS, as well as Subconscious, which is a social network built around those notes that allows you to think together with others. Think of it as a multiplayer version of Roam.

We talk about a bunch of concepts today, from the distinction between consciousness and intelligence, Searle’s Chinese Room, the Scrambler consciousness test, whether consciousness is necessary for intelligence, and then for fun, a look at intelligence and the Large Language Models that have sprung up in generative AI. Approachable, but bold – just as Watts approaches his works.

"Securities" podcast is produced, recorded, and edited by Chris Gates

The birds and the bees just don’t cut it anymore. With the rising age of first pregnancies in America, optimizing fertility has become the linchpin for potential parents embarking on the journey to childbearing. Even so, we remain beholden to dozens of myths driven by inadequate science, even while we ignore the vast new potential — and limits — of a bountiful set of advanced technologies that aim to make fertility a more understandable and approachable subject.

“Securities” host Danny Crichton is joined by Leslie Schrock, venture investor and author of the new book “Fertility Rules: The Definitive Guide to Male and Female Reproductive Health”, to discuss the complex intricacies of the new science of fertility and why we have so much more to do to bridge the gap between expert knowledge and popular understanding.

The two discuss the connection between general health and fertility, why men need to do more around their health to ensure a successful pregnancy, why environmental pollutants like parabens and microplastics can affect fertility and sperm counts, how climate change is adding the bad kind of heat to the kindling of love, what new technologies are arriving for parents, and finally, what scope these technologies should have on the productive lives of people.

While the natural world is fecund with a dazzling diversity of smells, the landscape of scents in our daily lives is far less organic. A handful of tightly-held fragrance companies and an extremely small guild of perfumers carefully craft the scents that go into every product we purchase, from the scent of clean laundry in our detergents to the orchestrated beauty of scents that make up a modern perfume. Our memories are — without too much exaggeration — controlled by roughly 600 people globally.

Where do those scents come from though, and why are people increasingly concerned about understanding the ingredients that make up spectrum of smells that waft over us every day?

Returning to “Securities” for our second of two episodes on the science of smell, CEO and founder of Lux-backed Osmo Alex Wiltschko joins host Danny Crichton to talk about the extraordinarily intricate supply chains and the astonishingly pricey essences that go into making our products distinctive to our olfactory system.

We cover the dynamics of the fragrance industry, the incredible scale of land required to make scents today, how perfumers perform their craft, the endlessly complicated supply chains of these products, why we have so few alternatives to natural scents, how climate change is causing dramatic shifts in ingredient prices, and finally, a bit on the future of green chemistry.

In a quantified world, the act of creation remains mysterious. Where do ideas come from? How does an artist translate a concept or a feeling into the final work that we get to read or view? The interior drama of that mystery becomes ever more visible as the singular artist expands into a collaboration. How do relationships change the trajectory and originality of creativity?

Few novels have better distilled the essence of these questions than Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which chronicles the multi-decade collaboration between two video game designers as they mature from grade school into the limelight of a cutthroat industry on the cusp of popular success. Inventive, heartfelt, and sophisticated, the novel was a breakout hit and was selected as Amazon’s book of the year for 2022.

This week on “Securities”, host Danny Crichton joins up with novelist Eliot Peper and Lux’s own scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman to talk about the messages that the novel offers our own creative lives. We talk about the building of virtual worlds, the hero’s journey of creation, the uniqueness versus repetitiveness of producing art, whether video games are entering the literary zeitgeist, why the book garnered such popular success and finally, narratives of individuals versus groups.

We perceive the world through our senses, watching the sunset, hearing the staccato of a violin soloist, smelling and ultimately tasting the chocolate and butter of freshly-baked cookies, and of course, feeling the touch of a loving partner. Yet while scientists have answered fundamental questions about color and audio, from understanding their physics to constructing mathematical representations of them, there remains a huge gap when it comes to smell.

Given how much more complex and higher dimensional it is, smell is an extraordinarily hard sense to capture, a problem which sits at the open frontiers of neuroscience and information theory. Now after many decades of discovery, the tooling and understanding has finally developed to begin to map, analyze and ultimately transmit smell.

Joining “Securities” host Danny Crichton is Alex Wiltschko, CEO and founder of Osmo, a Lux-backed company organized to give computers a sense of smell. He’s dedicated his life (from collecting and smelling bottles of perfume in grade school to his neuroscience PhD) to understanding this critical human sense and progressing the future of the field.

In this episode, we talk about smell and memory, the history of sense science, the mathematical challenges of modeling scent, the human physiology of smell and our surprising performance against even the best scientific lab equipment, the importance of chemical sensing, creating the digital olfaction group at Google Brain, how the mixture modeling problem remains the last and key frontier of this science, and finally, why the declining power of insect repellant is an important climate change challenge that the new science of smell can potentially solve.

It’s been a long road to mastering the cell, but biological scientists think they are getting closer and closer to understanding the fundamental mechanics of the kernels of life that make up our bodies. Decades after the sequencing of the first human genome, we now have a much more comprehensive understanding of how to discover a cell’s functions — and increasingly, the tools to actually analyze and prove that our models and theories about them are correct.

That’s been the domain of single-cell analysis and a novel technique in genetic science, which has been dubbed “perturbation biology”: making extremely small changes to the genetic code inside of cells and then observing how that cell’s functions change. What began with 18 cells and limited observational data in a single lab has now grown exponentially to hundreds of thousands of cells and millions of observations globally. That massive increase in data has forced the creation of a whole new set of analytical tools to process this data and derive foundational insights into the workings of cells.

How do all of these new laboratory experiments work and what kind of software tools are needed to progress the most advanced theories today? Joining host Danny Crichton on “Securities” this episode is Rahul Satija, an associate professor at New York University and a core member of the New York Genome Center as well as Lux’s own Shaq Vayda.

We’ll talk about how biological tools like CRISPR power perturbation bio, why scientists are increasingly moving away from indirect experiments to direct experiments and what that means for the future of the field, how we comprehend cell heterogeneity, if we’re getting closer to “fundamental truth” in biology, and finally, why theoretical molecular scientists are increasingly going to need large-scale clinical trials for the next-generation of health treatments.

ChatGPT has overtaken the cultural zeitgeist faster than any consumer service in the history of technology, with some analysts estimating that it has already been used by more than 100 million people. So when OpenAI, ChatGPT’s creator, live-streamed the launch of its new AI model GPT-4, there was a rush of excitement reminiscent of the Apple product launches of the past.

It’s been about 24 hours since GPT-4’s public launch, and all of us here at Lux have already extensively played around with it, so it seemed apt for a rapid response “Securities” episode on our very first impressions. Joining host Danny Crichton is Lux Capital partner Grace Isford, who not only has been playing around with ChatGPT, but also Anthropic’s new bot Claude, which was a bit overshadowed between SVB’s situation and OpenAI’s announcement.

We talk about GPT-4 and what’s new, its new frontiers of performance, the increasingly impenetrable black box OpenAI is establishing around its company and processes, the company’s competitive dynamics with big tech, and much more.

The Lux LP quarterly letter has become an institution for its intricate weave of pragmatic cynicism about human nature and unbounded optimism about the power of human progress in the face of macroeconomic forces. We released the latest quarterly letter on the theme of “From Strife to Strive” just before the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last week. With more strife than ever in the market, where will entrepreneurs strive next?

Joining me (Danny Crichton) to talk about our analysis of what’s coming in 2023 is our own Josh Wolfe, who predicts that Xi Jinping now plays a much larger oracular role for the American economy than even Warren Buffett. China’s competition with the U.S. is forcing venture investors and political leaders to reallocate capital much more aggressively toward the hard sciences — portending important advances ahead.

We also talk about open cultures, reconsideration of established truths and loss aversion, the online furor over induction stoves, Lux’s concept of “inner space, outer space and latent space”, the future of ChatGPT and the rise of what Josh dubs “Chatphishing”, the potential terrorism of 21st century Luddites, and finally, macro dynamics and why the chaos of the next two years will lay the foundation for the entrepreneurial striving in the decade ahead.

While much of the venture world has hit a reset in 2023, you’d never know that in artificial intelligence, where fire marshals are shutting down crammed engineering meetups and startups are once again raising at eye-watering valuations. Why the excitement? Because for founders, technologists and VCs, it feels like the everlasting promise of AI dating back to the 1950s and 1960s is finally on the cusp of being realized with the training and deployment of large language models like GPT-3.

To hear about what’s happening on the frontlines of this frenetic field, Lux Capital partner Grace Isford joins “Securities” host Danny Crichton to talk about what she’s seeing in 2023 across the AI tech landscape.

We talk about her impressions at the recent AI Film Festival in New York City hosted by Lux’s portfolio company Runway, how developers are being empowered with new technologies in Python and TypeScript and why that matters, and finally, how the big tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon are carefully playing their cards in the ferocious competition to lead the next generation of AI cloud infrastructure.

Artificial intelligence has become ambient in our daily lives, scooting us from place to place with turn-by-turn navigation, assisting us with reminders and alarms, and guiding professionals from lawyers and doctors to reaching the best possible decisions with the data they have on hand. Domain-specific AI has also mastered everything from games like Chess and Go to the complicated science of protein folding.

Since the debut of ChatGPT in November by OpenAI however, we have seen a volcanic interest in what generative AI can do across text, audio and video. Within just a few weeks, ChatGPT reached 100 million users — arguably the fastest ever for a new product. What are its capabilities and perhaps most importantly given the feverish excitement of this new technology, what are its limitations? We turn to a stalwart of AI criticism, Gary Marcus, to explore more.

Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University and the founder of machine learning startup Geometric Intelligence, which sold to Uber in 2016. He has been a fervent contrarian on many aspects of our current AI craze, the topic at the heart of his most recent book, Rebooting AI. Unlike most modern AI specialists, he is less enthusiastic about the statistical methods that underlie approaches like deep learning and is instead a forceful advocate for returning — at least partially — to the symbolic methods that the AI field has traditionally explored.

In today’s episode of “Securities”, we’re going to talk about the challenges of truth and veracity in the context of fake content driven by tools like Galactica; pose the first ChatGPT written question to Marcus; talk about how much we can rely on AI generated answers; discuss the future of artificial general intelligence; and finally, understand why Marcus thinks AI is not going to be a universal solvent for all human problems.

They say that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, but what if each shot costs money and is actually a tradeoff with taking a different shot? Time and money are limited, and that means we must constantly balance investing in our current projects and ideas against seeking out new opportunities. While there has been prodigious work published on how to find the “next big thing”, few researchers have investigated what it takes to just throw in the towel, jump ship, fold and quit in the face of a bad situation.

Joining us on “Securities” today is Annie Duke, a World Series of Poker champion who researches cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She recently published her new book “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away,” which explores the nature of quitting, the cognitive challenges in confronting loss, and the tactics required to identify when to quit — and how to do so.

In conversation with Lux Capital’s own Josh Wolfe, the two discuss the challenges of walking away, why professional poker players are better at quitting than amateurs, the geopolitics of war, and the importance as always of premortems for quitting.

Technology’s prime and still growing role in society has led to a crescendo of criticism that it has exacerbated inequality. Critics say that the economic models and algorithms underpinning out apps and platforms are tearing apart our social fabric, fracturing the economy, casualizing labor, and increasing hostility between nations.

But for all the negativity around technology, there is a parallel positive story of how technology can empower people to achieve their best lives. Whether it’s dynamically adjusting insulin pumps that allow diabetics greater freedom to pursue their dreams, or reliable algorithms that can reduce human bias in everything from hiring to dating, technology has also added tremendous value to society.

That’s the theme of “The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future,” a new book by Orly Lobel, the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Employment and Labor Policy at the University of San Diego.

Lobel joins host Danny Crichton to talk about how her daughter became bionic, why alarmist titles of recent critical tech books belie the comparative advantage of algorithms, the actual black box of human minds, feedback loops in doctor’s offices and the medical professions, and finally … sex robots. Because they have feelings (and algorithms) too.

No technology has as many dual-use challenges as artificial intelligence. The same AI models that invent vivacious illustrations and visual effects for movies are the exact models that can generate democracy-killing algorithmic propaganda. Code may well be code, but more and more AI leaders are considering how to balance the desire for openness with the need for responsible innovation.

One of those leading companies is Hugging Face (a Lux portfolio company), and part of the weight of AI’s safe future lies there with Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis, a Spanish lawyer and PhD researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (Munich). Ferrandis is co-lead of the Legal & Ethical Working Group at BigScience and the AI counsel for Hugging Face. He’s been working on Open & Responsible AI licenses (“OpenRAIL”) that fuse the freedom of traditional open-source licenses with the responsible usage that AI leaders wish to see emerge from the community.

In today’s episode, Ferrandis joins host Danny Crichton to talk about why code and models require different types of licenses, balancing openness with responsibility, how to keep the community adaptive even as AI models are added to more applications, how these new AI licenses are enforced, and what happens when AI models get ever cheaper to train.

Semiconductors are ubiquitous in modern life, powering our appliances, smartphones, cars and electronics. That’s led to soaring demand from consumers, companies and governments much to the chip industry’s benefit, but its centrality to the global economy has also brought heightened scrutiny from analysts concerned by the deep dependency we have on a handful of companies around the world producing these products.

The semiconductor industry is now on the front pages of news sites almost daily, but its story and history show that this isn’t a new development, but rather a continuation of decades of globalization and competitions for international economic supremacy.

“Securities” host Danny Crichton is joined by Fletcher School professor Chris Miller, whose new book “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology” offers a panoramic global view on one of the world’s most important industries. The book has already been shortlisted for best business book of the year by The Financial Times.

We live in a time of tremendous focus on … focus and productivity. Scan the shelves of any self-help section in a bookstore and you’ll find copious volumes on how to focus better, deeper, and longer along with a litany of productivity hacks and habits to efficiently glean. What you will often struggle to find however are books advocating doing nothing. But when it comes to creativity and making deep connections, it’s precisely when we are wandering that we are most focused on invention.

To talk more about cognitive science and psychology, I, Danny Crichton, brought local New York City professor Anna-Lisa Cohen on “Securities” to talk about her research into mind wandering and how we balance present actions with future intentions. Her work became a viral hit during the pandemic after a Washington Post op-ed she penned on “mental time travel” struck a nerve (yes, that’s a cognitive sciences pun) for many suffering during the isolation at the heights of Covid-19.

We talk about our brain’s default mode network, why mind wandering shouldn’t get a bad rap, peak performance and generating novel concepts, what it means to focus on not focusing, carrying out future intentions and prospective memory, the psychology of film and particularly a look at Alfred Hitchcock’s “Bang! You’re Dead”, cognitive closure and its effect of information seeking, and finally, future simulations.

Reference list:

The unusual uses task study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22941876/

The freestyle rapper and fMRI study: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00834

Hitchcock film study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26658578/

How the Brain Reacts to Scrambled Stories : https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/linear-storytelling-psychology/431529/

Reading Literary Fiction makes us better decisionmakers: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2013.783735?cookieSet=1

Marginal stupidity: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/lux_capital/issues/securities-by-lux-capital-marginal-stupidity-1209105

Episode reading list:

The future of crypto regulation: Highlights from the Brookings event

Lux + Tactic funding announcement

Fourteen years after the release of the Bitcoin white paper, Web3 and crypto are transitioning into adolescence. Technologies and communities that have collectively been a financial Wild West are slowly but inexorably transforming into mainstream infrastructure powering payments, finance, banking, and even identity and data storage. That transition though is hampered by a data and security stack that remains, let’s just say, well below the norms expected for modern software (which itself is below the expectations for data protection that consumers actually demand).

The gap between the visions of a secure Web3 future and today’s current technology is the opportunity to propel crypto through its awkward teen years.

I, Danny Crichton, wanted to talk more about where Web3 infrastructure is headed, and so I asked my Lux Capital partner Grace Isford as well as Ann Jaskiw, founder and CEO of crypto accounting platform Tactic, to walk through today’s looming clouds in crypto regulations and why the future is about to get a whole lot brighter.

We discuss Grace’s investment in Tactic and how Ann migrated from building secure healthcare technologies to figuring out accounting for the crypto world. We then talk about the Web3 infrastructure stack and its pockmarked reliability, The Merge’s effect on Ethereum’s future and Vitalik Buterin’s leadership role in the energy-saving transition, international dimensions of crypto security, as well as how the SEC is pivoting toward crypto regulation and why crypto founders are increasingly pro-regulation.

Episode reading list: 

Forging the Industrial Network the Nation Needs

Defense Fordism and AI

Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy

The Return of Industrial Warfare

America spends more money on defense than ever, with a budget that more than doubled in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Despite those dizzying appropriations though, America is now down to just 5 big prime defense contractors, consolidated from dozens during the Cold War. It’s a pattern of consolidation, higher costs, and diminished resiliency and flexibility seen in sectors throughout the U.S. economy. As the stakes have grown for American defense, however, there are increasingly acute concerns about what our diminished capacity for defense means for the country’s long-term security.

Today, we bring on James “Hondo” Geurts to talk more about the crisis in the defense industrial base. Geurts most recently performed the duties of the Under Secretary of the Navy and formerly was Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development & Acquisition, in charge of the Navy’s more than $100 billion annual budget.

Lux Capital is also deeply interested in recapitalizing the future of the defense industrial base and bringing more attention to emerging threats across all theaters of defense, including cyber, space, networking, and more in both state and civilian contexts. To that end, Hondo and Lux teamed up to create the Lux Security + Tech Index built on Thematic to offer investors a more methodical way to invest in the future of security. Also joining host Danny Crichton is Steve Carpenter, CEO and founder of Thematic.

In this episode, we talk about the importance of the new “industrial network” era of defense, the consequences of the 1990s post-Cold War peace dividend, how large projects like the F-35 and the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier drive consolidation, the value of simplicity in defense acquisition, the failure of the Defense Department’s high research expenditures, the need to shift from “program of record” to “capability of need”, and finally, details about the new Lux Security + Tech Index and its construction.

As a reminder, all investments are risky, and nothing in this episode should be construed as an endorsement of any specific investment product for any individual listener. Always do your own research.

Stanford University is at the beating heart of Silicon Valley and has become almost a rite of passage for generations of entrepreneurs. But how does each generation form, and what skills and mindsets should they be equipped with given our changing world?

No one has thought more about how to shape that entrepreneurial spirit than Dr. Tina Seelig. Seelig is the Executive Director of the prestigious Knight-Hennessy Scholars program at Stanford among many other leadership roles, and she is also the author of Creativity Rules: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and into the World as well as What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. Joining Seelig is host Danny Crichton and Lux Capital partner Grace Isford.

We talk about Seelig’s class “Inventing the Future” and how she guides students in considering the utopian and dystopian aspects of the future technologies that are shaping our everyday lives. We also talk about generational differences between students over the past two decades, from the 9/11 generation to the global financial crisis and Covid-19 generations and how global events influence the approach of budding entrepreneurs. Then we walk through how to teach leadership, how to increase luck, and why there is such an important correlation between optimism and agency.

Agricultural commodities is a bit like accounting: you only hear news stories about it when things go wrong. And unfortunately for the world in 2022, a lot is going wrong in agriculture. Russia’s war on Ukraine has devastated one of the world’s great breadbaskets, and global climate disruptions are wrecking havoc on food productivity. That’s led to soaring inflation and increasingly contentious politics, particularly in the developing world.

Sadly, that’s not the only problem the industry faces. Commodities are still traded predominantly on antiquated systems, with the UN estimating that more than 275 million emails are exchanged annually to ship about 11,000 vessels of grain across the oceans. That’s one reason why Lux led the $7 million seed round for Vosbor earlier this summer to build the first digital agricultural commodities exchange.

I wanted to understand more of this extraordinarily complex industry, and so I asked two former CEOs of the largest agriculture commodities companies in the world to weigh in. Joining me (@DannyCrichton) on “Securities” today is Chris Mahoney, former CEO of Glencore Agriculture and now known as Viterra, as well as Soren Schroder, former CEO of Bunge.

We’ll talk about the cyclicality of agricultural markets, the cost disease of infrastructure upgrades, the geopolitical strategies of ag firms, the increasing focus on logistics capabilities, and what the future of digitalization and technology have in store for this critical industry.

“Securities” podcast host Danny Crichton and producer Chris Gates talk about the latest newsletter issue, “Truth and reputations.” Reputations are always a trailing indicator of truth. When people and organizations are rising, reputations obviously lag — the public has never heard of these new upstarts, and its opinion remains unformed. Reputations gallop to catch up, and for a brief moment perhaps, the true quality and the perceived quality intersect. Inevitably decline sets in, whether in an individual’s career or in an organization’s penchant for adding listless bureaucracy and complexity. The public reputation remains robust, but the underlying quality has etiolated. Perception has now overshot truth.Last week, we saw three stories that illuminate the dynamics of truth versus perception: Adam Neumann’s $350 million fundraise for Flow; SoftBank’s historic quarterly loss and Masayoshi Son’s investment acumen; and then, the CDC director’s call for a complete reform of her beleaguered agency. We talk about these three stories, plus a Lux Recommends article.

Humans have been bartering and trading for millennia, building extraordinarily complex mechanisms of exchange centered on fiat currencies, contracts, and trust. As cryptocurrencies have emerged this past decade, economists and incentive designers have been forced to consider how to construct new forms of currency without the social lubricant of trust. How can we prove that every market participant is incentive aligned with market goals? What contributions can game theory, theoretical computer science, cryptography and microeconomics make to this newly energized field? 

That’s the subject of this episode of “Securities” with Christian Catalini, the founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. He and his colleagues fuse the fields of economics and computer science together with the goal of analyzing decentralized marketplaces and applications. It’s just the latest endeavor for Catalini, who is also a Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the co-creator of Diem (formerly known as Libra), and the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Lightspark. Joining host Danny Crichton is Lux’s own Grace Isford, who invests in web3 and crypto infrastructure and is based in New York City. We’ll talk about the growing community of crypto infrastructure analysts, the now-famous MIT Bitcoin Experiment, how academics are translating their work into crypto, and how to think about stablecoins in the aftermath of Luna’s collapse this year.

Recently in the Lux Capital office, my colleague Chris Gates, the producer of the "Securities” podcast, along with biotech investor Shaq Vayda were talking about the global macro environment and venture capital. Tech stocks hit their zenith in November 2021, and now a lot of VCs have slowed down their investments over the last couple of months. That's led to something among limited partners and asset allocators known as the “denominator effect”, where portfolio managers move money from one asset class to another as each asset class performs relatively differently.

And so they talked about the denominator effect, they talked about a couple of other different patterns that they’re seeing in the venture world, and I figured that since it's summer, and it's July and we’ve already have talked about enough terrible news on the “Securities” podcast the last couple of weeks, I figured we could do something a little bit different, which is sort of a Venture 101 on the denominator effect, and talking about basically what we're seeing in the world today. So here's Shaq and Chris, take a listen.

Suggested reading:

WTF is the denominator effect? by  Danny Crichton

There has been a massive expansion in data emanating from bio labs, and that means next-generation AI algorithms and machine learning models finally have the grist to transform the future trajectories of biology and health therapies. Yet, there’s a key translation challenge: how do  you get computer scientists and biologists — two types of specialists with very different training — to collaborate with each other effectively?
Two groups, Bits in Bio and Nucleate, have independently spearheaded new ways of bringing all people interested in tech and biology together to share best practices and think through patterns of startup inception and growth. Today, we bring the founders and early champions of those two groups together for the first time in person to talk about their work.
Joining us first is Michael Retchin, a PhD student at Weill Cornell Medicine and one of the founders of Nucleate, a free and collaborative student-run organization that facilitates the formation of pioneering life science companies. Second, we have Nicholas Larus-Stone, the first software engineering hire at Octant.bio, a Lux-backed synthetic biology startup, as well as the founder of Bits in Bio. Finally, joining “Securities” host Danny Crichton is Lux biotech investor Shaq Vayda.
We talk about where tech + bio (versus “biotech”) is coming from, how the two community leaders launched and grew their respective organizations, the coming challenges in biology, and our speculative dreams for the future of what biology could look like in the years ahead.

“Securities” podcast host Danny Crichton and producer Chris Gates talk about the last two weeks of “Securities” newsletters. The first, from July 9th called “Dissonant Loops”, discussed the chaos and crises plaguing the world today and why our state capacity to respond to them is so limited. The second, from July 16th entitled “Scientific Sublime”, was a palette cleanser of sorts focused on the human achievement of the James Webb Space Telescope and how this accomplishment can be shared by everyone on Earth. We’ve got the lows and the highs, and then we talk about a few of the top Lux Recommends selections from the two issues, including: “Postcards from A World on Fire” from The New York Times last year showing the scale and diversity of climate devastation IEEE’s overview of the daunting data challenges that come from transmitting those gorgeous images to Earth CLIPasso, a Best Paper awardee at SIGGRAPH 2022, which uses machine learning to abstract complex photography into simpler sketches “Building an Open Representation for Biological Protocols” Daniel Oberhaus’s book Extraterrestrial Languages, which asks two provocative questions, “If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand?” Finally, Kit Wilson’s analysis in The New Atlantis on “Reading Ourselves to Death”

Welcome to “Securities” by Lux Capital, a podcast and newsletter devoted to science, technology, finance and the human condition. I'm your host, Danny Crichton, and today we're talking about the post-Roe world. Tomorrow, it'll be 30 days since the Supreme Court announced in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that there is no constitutional basis for the right to abortion, overthrowing several decades of precedent. It's a decision with huge implications for tech startups, which will now operate across 50 sets of state laws, covering everything from privacy and data governance to who gets to decide which patients receive women's health and who won't.

Now that we've had a few weeks to digest the decision, I asked my Lux partner Deena Shakir to bring together a panel of guests to talk more about how startups are responding to Dobbs.

Guests:

Dr. Neel Shah is an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and Chief Medical Officer of Maven Clinic.

Halle Tecco is an entrepreneur and angel investor passionate about fixing our healthcare system. She is the founder of Natalist, which was acquired by Everly Health in October 2021, and she is also the host of The Heart of Healthcare podcast.

Paxton Maeder-York is the CEO and founder at Alife Health.

Today we're talking about the future of American defense. And we have three of the leaders changing the trajectory of this important field with us is the leadership of Anduril Industries. First, Palmer Luckey Founder, also Brian Schimpf Co-Founder, and CEO, as well as Trae’ Stephens, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, along with us is Josh Wolf from Lux.

I want to start out by painting the least rosy picture I can of the American defense industry over the last year and 2021. In Afghanistan, we saw a massive pull out of the American forces there. After more than two decades of war, we saw Russia invade Ukraine, in which Turkish drones some of the cheapest on offer in the market today have become the unlikely hero instead of American defense technologies. Meanwhile, America is not producing anywhere near the hardware, or even the software required to supply Ukraine with javelins and other core defense needs. On Capitol Hill, the defense budget process seems to get more chaotic and confusing every year. And we also found in the last year that China appears to be probably ahead of the United States, on hypersonic missiles. And so when I look at the defense industry today, it seems to me it's just negative after negative after negative news. - Danny Crichton

Recommended reading: 

Rebooting The Arsenal of Democracy

The new apex of “Entropic Apex”

SpaceX has grown from nascent dreams of the final frontier into the world’s premier commercial space launch company, with dozens of successful missions that have continually become more and more ambitious. Now, there’s a budding ecosystem of SpaceX alumni who have left the mothership to build their own companies, taking the culture and values they learned and applying it to problems they saw at the front lines of space innovation. On today’s episode of the “Securities” podcast, host Danny Crichton interviews two of those alumni, Laura Crabtree, the co-founder and CEO of Epsilon3, and Will Bruey, the co-founder and CEO of Varda Space. Laura and Will shared a cube at SpaceX, and are now building software and hardware startups, respectively. We discuss how SpaceX’s culture shaped their perspectives as entrepreneurs, why they chose different problem areas of space to tackle, how the 2022 financial markets impact their approach to growth, and how they think about company building and the Los Angeles / Southern California hard tech ecosystem.

Recommended reading for this episode: Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX 

News: Startup Epislon3 hopes to expand Pentagon reach with launch ‘software service’

Epsilon3’s space industry OS powers more than launches as it brings in $15M in new funding

Varda Space Industries closes $42M Series A for off-planet manufacturing

"Where marginal stupidity is about  “how there is a turning point where further information or complexity can befuddle us and simply raise costs without any concomitant value,”  what I am seeing in hard science investing is an outsourcing of thought,  a reliance on the splashy marketing one-pager instead of the agonizingly long technical research with the diligence to match.

None of this bodes well for many of the new VC entrants who have suddenly become enamored by the capital return potential of science. We have a  view that real advances in science are relatively rare, that they are hard to produce, and they tend to be signaled by clear research evidence years if not decades in advance. Venture capital is not a fit for the needs of academic researchers who require long time horizons of open exploration without commercial considerations. Skillful diligence is critical to making thoughtful investments, and investors must have a  well of resilience to draw upon, since most diligence will come back relatively negative in the hard sciences compared to software.

We need the right dose of vaporware skepticism. We can’t allow the excitement of science fiction to occlude the challenges of realizing it into science fact. Condensing fact from the vapor of nuance means finding the rare but tangible scientific advancements and propelling them forward on the path to commercialization. Otherwise, you’re investing in steam, and those returns on capital will just evaporate right through your fingers." - Danny Crichton

Lux Capital's "Securities" newsletter edition: Vaporware skepticism by Danny Crichton

"Securities" podcast is produced and edited by Chris Gates

Lux Recommends: 

The nuclear situation with North Korea has been transformed over the past few months, with changes that will ripple across the Asia-Pacific region and into U.S. foreign policy. Kim Hyung-jin and Kim Tong-hyung in the AP have a great explainer on the latest evolution of nuclear strategy emanating from the DPRK.

Our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman brings us an article from Nature on the Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE), in which scientists have saved tens of thousands of generations of E. coli over 34 years in order to improve our understanding of evolutionary biology. The scientists are retiring and the bacterial cultures are moving homes in order to continue their lengthy evolutionary run.

Shaq Vayda recommends a podcast and attached transcript between Eric J. Topol of Medicine and the Machine and Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind. The two discuss the advancements that deep learning affords medical advancements

Retired lieutenant colonel Alex Vershinin, writing a commentary for the Royal United Services In

"The world is incredibly complicated, and humans necessarily use heuristics and analogies to process that complexity into simpler forms. These mental shortcuts are never perfect, but they should broadly summarize the complexity they represent while affording their user a sense of their limitations.

In that vein, I want to call attention to two lazy tech analogies that I’ve seen lately as examples of the kind of impoverished analogical thinking that the industry needs to actively avoid." - Danny Crichton

Lux Capital's "Securities" newsletter edition: American national security and startups + Lazy tech analogies by Danny Crichton

"Securities" podcast is produced and edited by Chris Gates

"GPT-3 was trained on is so large that the model contains a certain  fraction of the actual complexity of the world. But how much is actually  inside these models, implicitly embedded within these neural networks?

I  decided to test this and see if I could examine the GPT-3 model of the world through the use of counterfactuals. Specifically, I wanted to see if GPT-3 could productively unspool histories of the world if things were slightly different, such as if the outcome of a war were different or a historical figure hadn’t been born. I wanted to see how well it could write alternate histories." - Samuel Arbesman

From Cabinet of Wonders newsletter by Samuel Arbesman

Great tweet thread summarizing his post

"Securities" podcast is produced and edited by Chris Gates

"One of the most important cognitive tradeoffs we make is how to process information, and perhaps more specifically, the deluge of information that bombards us every day. A study out of UCSD in 2009 estimated that Americans read or hear more than 100,000 words a day —  an increase of nearly 350% over the prior three decades (and that was  before Slack and Substack!) It would seem logical that more information is always better for decision-making,  both for individuals and for societies. Yet, that’s precisely the  tradeoff: humans and civilizations must balance greater and better  information with the limits of their rationalities." - Danny Crichton

Lux Capital's "Securities" newsletter edition: The marginal returns of information by Danny Crichton

"Securities" podcast is produced and edited by Chris Gates

"The activities of an extremely complicated phenomenon like a  multi-national corporation cannot be reduced to five-star ratings,  particularly on a definition as squishy as “Environmental, Social, and  Governance.” Rather than trying to strengthen definitions or improve quantification, the industry needs to come to terms with a more basic reality: the mission is impossible, and its failure began before it even started. With this much moolah at stake, the world deserves better."  - Danny Crichton

Lux Capital's "Securities" newsletter edition: The ESG Mirage by Danny Crichton

Produced and edited by Chris Gates

Speech and the right to it has become deeply contested across America in the 21st Century. What is free speech, what are its limits, and what norms should apply to both give everyone a chance to speak while also respecting the needs of a democratic society to function? Investigating these and other critical questions has been Jonathan Haidt, professor of social psychology at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the author most recently of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” which he co-wrote with Greg Lukianoff.He recently wrote an article for The Atlantic headlined “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” and in this first part of a two-part series, Josh Wolfe and Danny Crichton discuss with Haidt his thesis of American “structural stupidity” and why the classical metaphor of the Tower of Babel describes the current political and social environment for Americans.

In part one of this interview, Jonathan Haidt described his recent article in The Atlantic on America’s structural stupidity and why the classical metaphor of the Tower of Babel describes the current political and social environment for Americans.In this second and final part, Josh Wolfe and Danny Crichton discuss with Haidt the potential directions that the tech industry can take to ameliorate the worst aspects of our current toxic social media environment. We’ll also discuss the mental health of members of Gen Z, how corporations can nurture their youngest employees, norms and social contagion as well as why content moderation isn’t the answer to social media’s problems.

Speculative fiction is a long-running but increasingly popular genre of science fiction that uses a variety of imaginative techniques to envision alternatives to our present and coming society. One of its craftsmen is Eliot Peper, a novelist whose tenth book, Reap3r, was just released. Reap3r follows a diverse cast including a quantum computer scientist, a virologist, a podcaster, a VC, and an assassin as they unlock a mystery key to the whole plot. Peper along with host Danny Crichton talk about how Reap3r sheds light on our current world, how Peper thinks about launching a new book as an independent novelist, and how travel and wanderlust can come together to generate innovative ideas, plots, and characters.

It’s been another crazy week of financial news, but how do all these trends add up? This week, Danny Crichton and Josh Wolfe talk about South Korea’s burgeoning desire for nuclear weapons, some themes from the latest Lux quarterly letter and how a 1980s experimental film inspired its theme of “entropic apex,” how Gen Z and others will respond to actions by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates and corporations to raise prices, some commentary on Twitter and Elon Musk and finally, a debate on whether Malthus was right on the future course of humanity.

Tony Fadell is the consummate Silicon Valley builder, having conceived, designed and executed such iconic products as the Apple iPod and iPhone as well as the Nest thermostat. He’s now looking to give back to the community that has given him so much with his new book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, which just came out from Harper Business. He joins Lux's Danny Crichton and Peter Hébert to talk about the time he walked out of a position just two weeks on the job, how the serendipity of the Valley led to Apple, how to build human connections, why he thinks the metaverse as it stands is a waste of time, how to organize a company culture today, and the importance of storytelling and product marketing when building a product.

Recently at Lux in New York City, Josh Wolfe invited three celebrated decision and risk specialists for a lunch to discuss the latest academic research and empirical insights from the world of psychology and decision sciences. Our lunch included Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision sciences. His book Thinking Fast and Slow has been a major bestseller and summarizes much of his work in the field. We also had Annie Duke, a World Series of Poker champion who researches cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books How to Decide and Thinking in Bets have also been tremendously influential best sellers, and she is also the co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education. Also joining us was Michael Mauboussin, the Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global and who has also taught finance for decades at Columbia. His book More Than You Know is similarly a major bestseller.

This is an edited four-part series from our lunch seminar, with each part covering one topic of the conversation for easier listening.

In this first part, we discuss the concept of pre-mortems, an approach of looking at the outcome of our decision and if it were to fail, why we think it would fail. It’s an approach that’s designed to overcome groupthink and avoid the fact that pessimists are really unpopular in group decision-making sessions. However, recent research has shown that they don’t always help people and groups change their mind. We look at pre-mortems, prospective hindsight, legitimizing dissent, self-serving bias and pre-parade or backcasts to see how this tool can affect and improve decision-making given the most recent academic literature.

Recently at Lux in New York City, Josh Wolfe invited three celebrated decision and risk specialists for a lunch to discuss the latest academic research and empirical insights from the world of psychology and decision sciences. Our lunch included Danny Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision sciences. His book Thinking Fast and Slow has been a major bestseller and summarizes much of his work in the field. We also had Annie Duke, a World Series of Poker champion who researches cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books How to Decide and Thinking in Bets have also been tremendously influential best sellers, and she is also the co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education. Also joining us was Michael Mauboussin, the Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global and who has also taught finance for decades at Columbia. His book More Than You Know is similarly a major bestseller.

In part two of our risk, bias and decision making lunch, Danny Kahneman, Annie Duke and Josh Wolfe discuss whether people change their minds, particularly on subjects that matter, why people care about dissonance reduction, and what circumstances lead people to changing their minds at all.

Recently at Lux in New York City, Josh Wolfe invited three celebrated decision and risk specialists for a lunch to discuss the latest academic research and empirical insights from the world of psychology and decision sciences. Our lunch included Danny Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision sciences. His book Thinking Fast and Slow has been a major bestseller and summarizes much of his work in the field. We also had Annie Duke, a World Series of Poker champion who researches cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books How to Decide and Thinking in Bets have also been tremendously influential best sellers, and she is also the co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education. Also joining us was Michael Mauboussin, the Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global and who has also taught finance for decades at Columbia. His book More Than You Know is similarly a major bestseller.

In part three of our risk, bias and decision making lunch, Annie Duke, Michael Mauboussin, Danny Kahneman, and Josh Wolfe discuss optimism, base rates, overcoming negative expected values, population versus individual risks, calibrating risk assessments, and infectious amplification of optimism within groups.

Recently at Lux in New York City, Josh Wolfe invited three celebrated decision and risk specialists for a lunch to discuss the latest academic research and empirical insights from the world of psychology and decision sciences. Our lunch included Danny Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision sciences. His book Thinking Fast and Slow has been a major bestseller and summarizes much of his work in the field. We also had Annie Duke, a World Series of Poker champion who researches cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books How to Decide and Thinking in Bets have also been tremendously influential best sellers, and she is also the co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education. Also joining us was Michael Mauboussin, the Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global and who has also taught finance for decades at Columbia. His book More Than You Know is similarly a major bestseller.

In the fourth and final segment of our risk, bias and decision making lunch, Josh Wolfe, Annie Duke, Danny Kahneman and Michael Mauboussin discuss the phenomenon of the so-called “hot hand,” the idea that a basketball player or an investor can have a streak of good luck that allows them to actually increase the odds of success on their future plays.

While a huge amount of attention is being directed at crypto and media these days, one of the most important wild card investment trends of the 2020s is the coming expansion of biotech. Democratized science tools, improved research networking, and lab automation will revolutionize the practice of biotech, and that means there are huge opportunities for intrepid founders. But there’s a catch: biotech stock performance has been abysmal the past year, and many investors are walking away from the market. Josh Wolfe joins Danny Crichton to talk about what the gyrations in the biotech markets means for startups, some developments around the Human Genome Project, and what strategies existing biotech firms can take to weather the coming consolidation and reinvention of the industry.

There’s a huge expansion in demand for compute power going on, with AI models, cryptocurrencies, autonomous vehicles and our social media algorithms all guzzling more chip cycles than ever before. But we’re also in the midst of a climate emergency, and chips are a major cause of energy demand. How do we reconcile the two? Joining me to talk about this as well as the future of the semiconductor industry, the CHIPS act, and other national industrial policies is Lux’s Shahin Farshchi and Mythic AI CEO and founder Mike Henry.

“Redlines” in war are meant to be objective and unambiguous tests for a country to respond to another nation’s action. If one country uses chemical weapons in a conflict, that might violate the redline of another country and therefore force it to conduct military operations in response to reinforce the international laws and norms against the use of such weapons. Redlines though are often ambiguous, used poorly, and their deterrence effect is often diminished by a lack of credibility. How should leaders — from politicians to entrepreneurs — think about redlines? To answer that, host Danny Crichton was joined by Josh Wolfe and General Tony “T2” Thomas, the 11th Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and venture partner at Lux Capital, to talk all things redlines from a hotel lobby in sunny Miami.

In his new book, “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the Future,” Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Sebastian Mallaby brings his erudite attention from the hedge fund world to venture capital, interviewing the industry’s leading players over the last 50 years to discover what is unique about this industry that “manufactures courage.” In this episode, Mallaby, Josh Wolfe and Danny Crichton talk about the structural and cultural differences between hedge funds and VC firms, the long-term lessons that get re-learned by each generation of VCs, how succession is planned (and not), as well as a side story of a VC and a pile of maggot-filled meat laid by Hunter S. Thompson.

web3 technologies have received prodigious funding the past two years as founders and VCs collectively search for the path to the next evolution of the internet. But how do we bridge the gap between the ubiquitous Web 2.0 world with what we see coming in web3? In this episode, Lux VC investor Grace Isford joins host Danny Crichton to discuss the key infrastructure investments in what she is dubbing “web2.5,” the crypto developer stack, and what’s next for crypto in 2022.

Josh Wolfe and Danny Crichton talk about the influx of TV shows covering startup busts including WeCrashed, Super Pumped, and The Dropout; strategic ambiguity, game theory, and a bit of geopolitics; and what the case for optimism is in this world, including the difference between complacent optimism and conditional optimism. Finally, Danny observes the perilous state of corruption in the world today and the need for a firmer ethical line for all people.

The funding of science is one of the most important leverage points for growth in the global economy. Yet, we’ve barely experimented with how science gets funded or tried to evolve financing models that were invented decades ago. Now, dozens of new organizations have been started to explore novel models for funding scientists to do their best work. Danny Crichton is joined by Lux Capital’s scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman to talk about why this trend has accelerated and what all these new experimental models might mean for the future of science.