The sudden widespread usage of advanced artificial intelligence models has massively increased global demand for data centers that can handle inference and training. That’s been a boon for Nvidia’s stock, but it has also added massive new demands to our energy grid. Microsoft recently announced that it intends to re-open the ill-fated Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, while Google has announced investments and partnerships with nuclear startups like Kairos Power. Yet, much of the obvious an...
Nov 08, 2024•44 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 . In this episode, Sam speaks with Dominic Falcao, a founding director of Deep Science Ventures (DSV), which he created in 2016 after leading Imperial College London’s science startup program. Deep Science Ventures takes a principled and problem-based approach to founding new deep tech startups. They...
Nov 07, 2024•43 min
We’re really excited to talk about the launch of our second public Riskgaming scenario, “DeepFaked and DeepSixed: AI Election Security and the Future of Democracy.” DeepFaked and DeepSixed is a bit different from our previous political and economic simulations, which tend toward groups of 4-8 people negotiating, haggling and cajoling over the course of several hours. Instead, this game centers on an intelligence fusion center at the White House where 54 people come together to offer information ...
Nov 02, 2024•27 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 . In this episode, Sam speaks with writer, researcher, and entrepreneur Max Bennett . Max is the cofounder of multiple AI companies and the author of the fascinating book A Brief History of Intelligence : Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains. This book offers a deeply research...
Oct 30, 2024•45 min
The automobile industry is one of the most pivotal in the world, both due to its scale and its nexus at the heart of the manufacturing systems in countries such as the United States, Germany, Japan, Korea and China. There’s a massive transformation of the industry underway as consumers transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, and China is increasingly leading the way with innovative and affordable cars from the likes of BYD and others. How will the future of the industry...
Oct 25, 2024•27 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 . In this episode, the Sam speaks with novelist Lev Grossman . A longtime fan of Lev’s novels, the host delves into his works, including The Magicians trilogy —a splendid set of books about a university for magic, fantastical worlds, and much more. These books are amazing. Lev’s newest book is the novel ...
Oct 23, 2024•39 min
China’s pivot from open to closed over the past decade has been striking. It wasn’t so long ago that tens of thousands of students and thousands of journalists and researchers were living and studying in the country, with multitudes of ambitious business executives spread across the nation’s financial capitals. Now, the number of Americans traveling and living in China has hit another low. With less grounded information, what are Americans missing about its most important trade partner and its g...
Oct 18, 2024•48 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 . In this episode, Sam speaks with Alex Miller , a software developer and artist known for his work on a project called Spacefiller . This project exemplifies generative art, where computer code is used to create art and imagery. Spacefiller itself is a pixelated form of artwork that feels organic and biol...
Oct 17, 2024•45 min
China’s vertiginous rise over the past three decades has finally dawned on the Washington DC foreign policy blob. The hopes and dreams of China’s reform-and-opening period have transitioned to the fear and loathing of the Xi era, triggering broad concerns about America’s standing in the world today and in the future. Are we falling behind China in economic performance, research, dynamism and talent? Are America’s best days behind it? For Dmitri Alperovitch , the answer is an emphatic “no.” The c...
Oct 11, 2024•44 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 . In this episode, Sam speaks with J. Doyne Farmer , a physicist, complexity scientist, and economist. Doyne is currently the Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and the Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems Science at the...
Oct 09, 2024•41 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 . In this episode, Sam speaks with Tarin Ziyaee , a technologist and founder, about the world of artificial life. The field of artificial life explores ways to describe and encapsulate aspects of life within software and computer code. Tarin has extensive experience in machine learning and AI, having worked at...
Oct 02, 2024•43 min
In this episode of the RISKGAMING Podcast, host Danny Crichton sits down with columnist Michael Magnani to dissect the explosive rise of legalized sports betting in America and its far-reaching consequences. The conversation then pivots to broader geopolitical topics, including the role of open-source intelligence in modern warfare and how technology is changing the defense landscape. They wrap the episode up with a look at Japan’s election results and the shifting political dynamics that could ...
Oct 01, 2024•26 min
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 partnerJ...
Sep 27, 2024•33 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 . 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 t...
Sep 25, 2024•37 min
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 technolo...
Sep 21, 2024•48 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 . 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 subjec...
Sep 18, 2024•31 min
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 a...
Sep 16, 2024•27 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 . 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 wor...
Sep 12, 2024•43 min
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 intellig...
Sep 06, 2024•44 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 . 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 ...
Sep 04, 2024•43 min
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...
Aug 30, 2024•43 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 . 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 Pote...
Aug 28, 2024•34 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 . 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 ...
Aug 23, 2024•44 min
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 ...
Aug 21, 2024•47 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 . 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 Laur...
Aug 16, 2024•23 min
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 ...
Aug 15, 2024•39 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 . 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 jo...
Aug 09, 2024•36 min
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 system...
Aug 08, 2024•34 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, 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. ...
Aug 02, 2024•46 min
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 Taiwa...
Jul 31, 2024•46 min
