Everyone loves a good Renaissance man or woman, but it’s hard to do it all with tenacity and verve. There’s also the constant balance between perfectionism and dilettantism — how long should you keep refining a project versus just bringing it to a close? For those of us prone to procrastination, even asking that question might prompt a delay.That’s why I am excited to bring my good friend Uri Bram on the podcast this week. He’s written a book on Bayes’ theory, has been a publisher of a very successful online newsletter, has hosted olfactory gallery parties, and he just published his first party game called Person Do Thing inspired by trying to order vegan food at a restaurant in Thailand. In short, he’s constantly experimenting with new forms of media and ways to bring people together.Together with host Danny Crichton, we talk about perfectionism and whether it helps or hurts creativity; Uri’s experience playing Riskgaming; his new game; communications and the curse of knowledge problems; using Amazon as a social networking tool; and his recent viral blog post, “21 Facts About Hosting Parties.”
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“Collaborating with the entire history of human expression”
We hosted an epic one-day festival to human expression in New York City a few weeks ago called the Lux AI Summit, bringing together hundreds of founders, artists, engineers and visionaries who are redefining the future of media. Two of our speakers, Kirby Ferguson and Ale Matamala Ortiz joined us on the Riskgaming podcast to talk about the future of filmmaking in a generative AI world.Kirby is a filmmaker, and he’s most well-known for his work around remix culture in a documentary series titled “Everything is a Remix.” Ale is the co-founder and Chief Design Officer of Runway, a Lux portfolio company that builds a generative AI studio for anyone producing films.Together with hosts Danny Crichton and Laurence Pevsner, our quad talks about the current economics of the film industry and the recession underway in Los Angeles, why filmmaking would have changed even without the rise of AI, how to think about remixing through software versus remixing through culture, the coming convergence of narrative forms like films and video games, and what the future of artists will look like with co-intelligences.
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Europe, China and the future of open borders in science
While relations between the United States and China have reached a detente in the past week after APEC, it’s the long-term decline of relations between the European Union and China that is worth a deeper look. Over the past two decades, Europe and China cooperated across science, technology and economic development, helping fuel China’s vast labs and manufacturing base that today is at the center of the West’s fears for its primacy in the world. Everything has changed, and so what can we learn from the past?For more than a decade, Halldor Hardarson lived and worked in China as part of EURAXESS, an initiative of the European Union to connect European and Chinese scientists together to accelerate frontier research. From the heady and optimistic early 2010s to the serious challenges of Covid-19, Hardarson saw it all live from Beijing — a far cry from his home fishing village in Iceland. Today, he works at a biotech unicorn in Iceland called Kerecis, which uses fish skin for tissue regeneration.With host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming scenario consultant Ian Curtiss, the trio talk about what Iceland can learn from China and vice versa despite the massive population gap, the transformation in the European Union’s relationship with China, and we throw in some optimistic notes at the end for a nice aftertaste.
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On the frontiers of research at the Lux AI Summit
Last week, Lux convened about 300 AI engineers, scientists, researchers and founders in New York City to discuss the frontiers of the field under the banner of “the AI canvas.” The idea was to move the conversation away from what can be built, to what should be built and why. AI tools have made extraordinary progress since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, and we are still just figuring out all of the ways we can use these miraculous correlation machines.Even so, there remains prodigious work on the research frontiers of artificial intelligence to identify ways of improving model performance, merging models together, and ensuring that training and inference costs are as efficient as possible. To that end, we brought together two stars of the science world to talk more about the future of AI.Kyunghyun Cho is a computer science professor at New York University and executive director of frontier research at the Prescient Design team within Genentech Research & Early Development (gRED). Shirley Ho is Group Leader of Cosmology X Data Science at the Flatiron Institute of the Simons Foundation as well as Research Professor in Physics at New York University.Together with hosts Danny Crichton and Laurence Pevsner, we talk about the state of the art in AI today, how scientific discovery can potentially be automated with AI, whether PhDs are a thing of the past, and what the future of universities is in a time of funding cuts and endowment taxes.
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The present and future of wargaming
Riskgaming is part of the broader movement known as wargaming, playful experiences designed to improve decision-making across domains like defense planning, business leadership and competitive analysis. It’s a burgeoning field, and it has now attracted its very own publication in the form of the Substack newsletter Wargaming Weekly. This week, I talk with the editor Rwizi Rweizooba Ainomugisha. He’s a wargaming fanatic based in Uganda, where he first started learning the gaming world in high school by building an underground casino. He then discovered gamification while working in B2B marketing before eventually entering the wargaming world as a player and now as a designer of two micro-games. He’s also a co-founder of the gamified fintech startup, Lupiiya Books. We talk about Rwizi’s background, how gamification is infiltrating all kinds of different fields, the rise of wargaming and the artificial delineations that still plague the field, the ebb and flow of strategic thinking, and finally, why solitaire games offer a unique on-ramp into this world.
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.
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