Riskgaming
Episodes
Is AI killing journalism? Pitchforks, Perplexity and reporters yelling “Boo!”
25 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 o...
The Orthogonal Bet: SimCity, Maxis and the ambitious modeling of everything
21 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Orthogonal Bet is an ongoing miniseries of the Riskgaming podcast that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our wo...
Why high-throughput bio research needs better tools immediately
14 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There have been data revolutions in most areas of human activity, and biological research is no exception. The rapidly shrinking cost of collecting da...
The Orthogonal Bet: Novelist Robin Sloan’s Love for Books with Maps on the First Page
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hello, and welcome to the ongoing mini-series, The Orthogonal Bet, a show that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape ou...
How Applied Intuition used the Valley’s hardest lessons to upgrade automotive with autonomy
31 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 b...
Orthogonal Bet: A technology vibe shift from utopian Star Trek to absurdist Douglas Adams?
24 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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-...
The soon-to-be-solved protein problem that will accelerate drug discovery
17 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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, pr...
Margaret Mead and the psychedelic community that theorized AI
03 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 exper...
The nightmare specter of designer bioweapons and the people trying to stop them
26 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ever since the invention of CRISPR technology about a decade ago, biologists have gained increasing power to discover new DNA sequences, cut and mash ...
Lux and the Art of Startup Maintenance
16 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Every quarter, Lux publishes our latest quarterly letter to our limited partners, highlighting the key themes we’re working on as a partnership. The...
The Zone of Totality with Sam Arbesman
12 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This week’s solar eclipse captured the imaginations of millions of Americans throughout an arc across the continent. One of those entranced was Sam ...
Biology is becoming engineering and not just science
15 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
During a recent interview, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized his interest in how Nvidia’s AI processing chips could transform the science of life. ...
The three revolutions in astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life
07 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Astrobiology has seen a series of revolutions over the past three decades that have completely reinvigorated the field. Scientists who were curious ab...
“I am basically a cosmic Fluke” and the chaos of science, policy, and human narratives
21 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 witness...
How an anonymous blog during the neural network winter led to Japan’s national AI champion
14 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Connections are the key ingredient for careers, society and AI neural networks to boot. Sometimes those connections arise spontaneously and other time...
The most wasteful infrastructure megaproject that wasn’t
08 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
The stove hasn’t changed in decades. It’s time to upgrade.
02 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Home appliances are some of our most used and time-saving technologies, but they have barely evolved since their invention. A “smart” movement fro...
Astronauts all lie, but the biggest lie is that we will colonize Mars (Zach Weinersmith, Part 1 of 2)
24 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Colonizing Mars has gone from the speculative fiction section of the bookstore right into the halls of Congress. Entrepreneurs led by Elon Musk have m...
Why a Mars settlement could never be a libertarian paradise (Zach Weinersmith, Part 2 of 2)
24 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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. ...
How Impulse Space’s Helios will democratize access to Earth’s farthest orbits
17 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The cost of launching a payload into low-earth orbit has shrunk dramatically over the past two decades as SpaceX has aggressively expanded its capabil...
Why Tokyo’s Sakana AI is pioneering a new vanguard of national AI foundation models
16 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 e...
WTF Happened in AI in 2023?
21 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hey, it's Danny Crichton. 2023 was an incredibly busy year, and nowhere was there more fervent attention than on artificial intelligence. OpenAI l...
Eliot Peper's new novel 'Foundry' and the Future
15 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In a world where science fiction often paints a pessimistic picture of dystopian futures and critiques of modern technology, novelist Eliot Peper stan...
Erik Hoel (part 2): Dreaming, AI, and the Future of Education
13 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ever wonder if your dreams were more than just dreams? Dive into an intriguing conversation with Erik Hoel on our latest “Securities” podcast with...
Erik Hoel (part 1): The Consciousness Winter
08 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the "Securities" podcast, host Danny Crichton leads a discussion on consciousness with guests Erik Hoel, Josh Wolfe, and ...
Techno-Pragmatism: Looking Beyond Blind Optimism and Hopeless Pessimism
01 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to "Securities," a podcast and newsletter about science, technology, finance, and the human condition. In this episode, Danny Cric...
AI: Disruption, Regulation, and the Road Ahead
17 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of “Securities” by Lux Capital, host Danny Crichton joins guests Brian McCullough, host of the Techmeme Ride Home podcast and Gene...
Navigating the Crossroads: Technology, Democracy, and National Security with Miles Taylor
15 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to this enlightening episode of "Securities” Podcast with host Danny Crichton, where we navigate the intricate crossroads of technology...
Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan on rebuilding trust between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon
30 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As the birthplace of semiconductors and computers, Silicon Valley has historically been a major center of the defense industry. That changed with the ...
Simulating Evolution: Playing God or the Next Frontier?
18 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial life, aka “A-life”, is an intellectually vital field simulating life within computational systems. By allowing simulations to run unint...
How many creators will survive generative AI?
15 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Think AI can't touch the creative world? Think again. Writers, directors, illustrators - none are safe. AI models, despite their glaring flaws, ...
We need to go deeper with the inception of deep geothermal energy
04 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 o...
The Science of Survival: Adapting Human Life for Other Planets
28 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to "Securities," a podcast and newsletter devoted to science, technology, finance, and the human condition. In this episode, Josh Wo...
The p-zombie theory of consciousness
14 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The rise of generative AI and large-language models (LLMs) have forced computer scientists and philosophers to ask a fundamental question: what is the...
Fertility Rules from wildfire sperm death and microplastics to the potential of AI w/ Leslie Schrock
07 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
“There are more astronauts alive than there are perfumers”: the complex supply chains of scents
11 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ti...
“It subverts the structure even of other stories that are told about creation”
04 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
“Smell can be art, and it also can be science”: AI/ML and digital olfaction
29 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We perceive the world through our senses, watching the sunset, hearing the staccato of a violin soloist, smelling and ultimately tasting the chocolate...
How exponentials on top of exponentials in single-cell analysis is transforming biology today
21 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It’s been a long road to mastering the cell, but biological scientists think they are getting closer and closer to understanding the fundamental mec...
First impressions of OpenAI’s new GPT-4 AI model
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
ChatGPT has overtaken the cultural zeitgeist faster than any consumer service in the history of technology, with some analysts estimating that it has ...
Chatphishing, veracity and “two years of chaos and a reset”
14 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Lux LP quarterly letter has become an institution for its intricate weave of pragmatic cynicism about human nature and unbounded optimism about th...
May the AI be ever in your favor
03 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 cra...
“That’s 100% what keeps me up at night”: Gary Marcus on AI and ChatGPT
10 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence has become ambient in our daily lives, scooting us from place to place with turn-by-turn navigation, assisting us with reminde...
Why quitters are heroes with “Quit” author Annie Duke
27 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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? ...
“I have three girls; the second one is bionic”
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ec...
We will observe a battle for the true openness in AI
12 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
No technology has as many dual-use challenges as artificial intelligence. The same AI models that invent vivacious illustrations and visual effects fo...
There’s always been a global race to develop chip technology
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Semiconductors are ubiquitous in modern life, powering our appliances, smartphones, cars and electronics. That’s led to soaring demand from consumer...
Perhaps our greatest achievement is not being present
30 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 copiou...
Web3 is so far behind in terms of reliability and security
27 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Episode reading list: The future of crypto regulation: Highlights from the Brookings event Lux + Tactic funding announcement Fourteen years after the...
How to recapitalize America’s bloated defense industrial base
21 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Episode reading list: Forging the Industrial Network the Nation Needs Defense Fordism and AI Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy The Return of In...
The utopian visions of Stanford’s generations of entrepreneurs
16 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 e...
The geopolitics and digital future of agricultural commodities
10 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Reputations are always a trailing indicator of truth
23 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Securities” podcast host Danny Crichton and producer Chris Gates talk about the latest newsletter issue, “Truth and reputations.” Reputations...
Crypto and incentive design with MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab’s Christian Catalini
17 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Humans have been bartering and trading for millennia, building extraordinarily complex mechanisms of exchange centered on fiat currencies, contracts, ...
VC 101: the denominator effect
03 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Recently in the Lux Capital office, my colleague Chris Gates, the producer of the "Securities” podcast, along with biotech investor Shaq Vayda were ...
How new communities are propelling the future of tech + bio
01 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There has been a massive expansion in data emanating from bio labs, and that means next-generation AI algorithms and machine learning models finally h...
Maybe the world is effing amazing and I am just reading the wrong things
25 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Securities” podcast host Danny Crichton and producer Chris Gates talk about the last two weeks of “Securities” newsletters. The first, from J...
How health tech startups are responding to the post-Roe world?
23 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to “Securities” by Lux Capital, a podcast and newsletter devoted to science, technology, finance and the human condition. I'm your host, D...
The United States has never won a conflict with the hardware that it had going into it
15 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
How will AI art generators affect human creativity?
09 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Here is my dilemma, I want custom art for the podcast. Ideally, I would have a new image for each episode. Up until recently, my choices were to use s...
Shoving the rocket into space with your bare hands
02 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
SpaceX has grown from nascent dreams of the final frontier into the world’s premier commercial space launch company, with dozens of successful missi...
Vaporware skepticism
25 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
"Where marginal stupidity is about “how there is a turning point where further information or complexity can befuddle us and simply raise cost...
Lazy tech analogies
18 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
"The world is incredibly complicated, and humans necessarily use heuristics and analogies to process that complexity into simpler forms. These mental ...
Alternate Histories and GPT-3
17 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
"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 &nb...
Marginal Stupidity
14 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
"One of the most important cognitive tradeoffs we make is how to process information, and perhaps more specifically, the deluge of information that bo...
The ESG Mirage
11 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
"The activities of an extremely complicated phenomenon like a multi-national corporation cannot be reduced to five-star ratings, particula...
Jonathan Haidt on American structural stupidity and the post-Babel world (Part 1)
04 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 sh...
Jonathan Haidt on how tech can change social media and save democracy (Part 2)
04 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In part one of this interview, Jonathan Haidt described his recent article in The Atlantic on America’s structural stupidity and why the classical m...
Speculative fiction is a prism to understand people
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Speculative fiction is a long-running but increasingly popular genre of science fiction that uses a variety of imaginative techniques to envision alte...
Will Malthus or human ingenuity win out in these chaotic times?
21 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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’...
If you’re not solving for pain, then what the hell are you doing?
17 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Tony Fadell is the consummate Silicon Valley builder, having conceived, designed and executed such iconic products as the Apple iPod and iPhone as wel...
Risk, Bias and Decision Making: Pre-mortems
14 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Recently at Lux in New York City, Josh Wolfe invited three celebrated decision and risk specialists for a lunch to discuss the latest academic researc...
Risk, Bias and Decision Making: People never change their minds
14 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Recently at Lux in New York City, Josh Wolfe invited three celebrated decision and risk specialists for a lunch to discuss the latest academic researc...
Risk, Bias and Decision Making: Defying the odds
14 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Recently at Lux in New York City, Josh Wolfe invited three celebrated decision and risk specialists for a lunch to discuss the latest academic researc...
Risk, Bias and Decision Making: Hot hands
14 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Recently at Lux in New York City, Josh Wolfe invited three celebrated decision and risk specialists for a lunch to discuss the latest academic researc...
Shredding the endowment investing playbook w/Scott Wilson, CIO of Washington University in St. Louis
07 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
University endowments are one of the key nexuses by which finance influences the future of science, tech, and the human condition, and what happens at...
The future of biotech is moving from bench to beach
30 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Chip demand and the future of the climate with Mythic AI’s Mike Henry
23 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a huge expansion in demand for compute power going on, with AI models, cryptocurrencies, autonomous vehicles and our social media algorithms...
Redlines for diplomacy and business with former USSOCOM commander Tony “T2” Thomas
16 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“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 chemi...
The VC Power Law with CFR senior fellow Sebastian Mallaby
09 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the Future,” Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Sebastian Mallaby bring...
Is web3 really just looking for Web 2.5?
05 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
web3 technologies have received prodigious funding the past two years as founders and VCs collectively search for the path to the next evolution of th...
Josh Wolfe on “There will be chaos, and that chaos will be caused by people”
02 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Josh Wolfe and Danny Crichton talk about the influx of TV shows covering startup busts including WeCrashed, Super Pumped, and The Dropout; strategic a...
Rethinking the science of science funding with Sam Arbesman
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 scienc...
Episode 01: Silicon Valley’s dependence on American foreign policy
25 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Danny Crichton talks with TechCrunch Global Affairs Project special series editor Scott Bade about the passing of Madeleine Albright, the intricate an...
Episode 0: A Pod is Born, Alife is Funded, and A Decade is Defined
22 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Episode 0 of “Securities” by Lux Capital, Danny Crichton and Chris Gates talk about why the world needs another podcast; Deena Shakir joins to ...