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 l...
Jul 26, 2024•36 min
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-cen...
Jul 24, 2024•21 min
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, explorin...
Jul 19, 2024•10 min
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 lo...
Jul 19, 2024•33 min
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 notori...
Jul 17, 2024•25 min
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 learn...
Jul 12, 2024•35 min
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 tr...
Jul 10, 2024•42 min
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 Phili...
Jul 05, 2024•44 min
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...
Jul 03, 2024•38 min
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 ...
Jun 28, 2024•26 min
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 ...
Jun 25, 2024•29 min
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...
Jun 21, 2024•23 min
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 podca...
Jun 14, 2024•23 min
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 l...
Jun 07, 2024•43 min
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 wal...
May 31, 2024•55 min
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...
May 24, 2024•29 min
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...
May 17, 2024•21 min
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 e...
May 03, 2024•34 min
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 scien...
Apr 26, 2024•34 min
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...
Apr 16, 2024•24 min
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 uniqu...
Apr 12, 2024•10 min
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 ...
Mar 15, 2024•24 min
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 th...
Mar 07, 2024•33 min
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 durin...
Feb 21, 2024•33 min
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...
Feb 14, 2024•45 min
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, howev...
Feb 08, 2024•36 min
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...
Feb 02, 2024•28 min
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 M...
Jan 24, 2024•26 min
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 tim...
Jan 24, 2024•25 min
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...
Jan 17, 2024•16 min
