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PODCAST

Riskgaming

A podcast by venture capital firm Lux Capital on the opportunities and risks of science, technology, finance and the human condition. Hosted by Danny Crichton from our New York City studios.

technology

All Episodes

00:22:52

The Orthogonal Bet: SimCity, Maxis and the ambitious...

Riskgaming ·

2024/06/21

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

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00:23:26

Why high-throughput bio research needs better tools...

Riskgaming ·

2024/06/14

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

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00:42:31

The Orthogonal Bet: Novelist Robin Sloan’s Love for...

Riskgaming ·

2024/06/07

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

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00:55:10

How Applied Intuition used the Valley’s hardest...

Riskgaming ·

2024/05/31

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,

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00:28:47

Orthogonal Bet: A technology vibe shift from utopian...

Riskgaming ·

2024/05/24

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

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00:20:46

The soon-to-be-solved protein problem that will...

Riskgaming ·

2024/05/17

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

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00:34:17

Margaret Mead and the psychedelic community that...

Riskgaming ·

2024/05/03

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

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00:33:58

The nightmare specter of designer bioweapons and the...

Riskgaming ·

2024/04/26

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

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00:24:16

Lux and the Art of Startup Maintenance

Riskgaming ·

2024/04/16

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

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00:09:35

The Zone of Totality with Sam Arbesman

Riskgaming ·

2024/04/12

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

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00:24:27

Biology is becoming engineering and not just science

Riskgaming ·

2024/03/15

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

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00:32:30

The three revolutions in astrobiology and the search...

Riskgaming ·

2024/03/07

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

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00:33:01

“I am basically a cosmic Fluke” and the chaos of...

Riskgaming ·

2024/02/21

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

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00:45:15

How an anonymous blog during the neural network...

Riskgaming ·

2024/02/14

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

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00:36:22

The most wasteful infrastructure megaproject that wasn’t

Riskgaming ·

2024/02/08

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

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00:28:26

The stove hasn’t changed in decades. It’s time to...

Riskgaming ·

2024/02/02

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

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00:26:09

Astronauts all lie, but the biggest lie is that we...

Riskgaming ·

2024/01/24

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”

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00:25:05

Why a Mars settlement could never be a libertarian...

Riskgaming ·

2024/01/24

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,

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00:15:55

How Impulse Space’s Helios will democratize access to...

Riskgaming ·

2024/01/17

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

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00:09:48

Why Tokyo’s Sakana AI is pioneering a new vanguard of...

Riskgaming ·

2024/01/16

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

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184 results

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