Riskgaming

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...

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 dev...

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 a...

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 plac...

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...

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 fo...

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 Spac...

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,...

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 shou...

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 wond...

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...

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 fron...

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...

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, ha...

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 su...

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 st...

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 s...

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: &qu...

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 comm...

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 Medi...

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 i...

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...

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 fa...

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 qu...

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 h...