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Historians survey the past and the Twitterati (X-erati?) process the events of the present day. But what does it mean to search the future for clues of what’s to come — and how much longer will we have to wait for it?

In this episode of “Securities”, Danny Crichton welcomes Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, research partner at Lunar Ventures and the publisher of “State of the Future”, a Deep Tech Tracker whose distinguishing feature is its extraordinarily wide remit to investigate the interstices of science and technology and find the morsels of innovative goodness that will power the planet in the years ahead. Also joining is Lux Capital’s own scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman, who is certainly no stranger to the crazy ideas straddling science fiction and science fact.

Lawrence shares his unique approach to identifying and evaluating emerging technologies such as deep geothermal energy. We then pivot to exploring Lawrence’s approach of finding the future through the methodology of “horizontal scanning.” What’s to come? Listen and find out.

Welcome to "Securities," a podcast and newsletter devoted to science, technology, finance, and the human condition. In this episode, Josh Wolfe and Danny Crichton bring science fiction into science fact with our guest, Christopher Mason, a geneticist and computational biologist who has been a principal investigator of 11 NASA missions and projects.

Mason, a professor of genomics, physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine, discusses his book, "The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds." The book explores the concept of protecting humanity from inevitable extinction by venturing to other planets. While most focus on the technologies to deliver us to these places, Mason takes a different angle, focusing on the biological adaptations necessary for humans to survive in space.

Mason discusses the need for both physical engineering and biological engineering in space travel. He highlights the importance of understanding and potentially engineering our microbiome for space travel, given its significant role in our health and digestion. He also discusses the potential of gene editing, using the example of the vitamin C gene, which we could potentially reactivate to allow humans to auto-synthesize vitamin C.

The conversation also covers the physical changes experienced by astronaut Scott Kelly during his time on the International Space Station and the implications of these changes for future space travel. Mason discusses the potential of engineering the perfect space specimen, considering factors such as gravity, radiation, and circadian rhythms.

The rise of generative AI and large-language models (LLMs) have forced computer scientists and philosophers to ask a fundamental question: what is the definition of intelligence and consciousness? Are they the same or different? When we input words into a chatbot, are we seeing the early inklings of a general intelligence or merely the rudiments of a really good statistical parrot?

These are modern questions, but also ones that have been addressed by philosophers and novelists for years, as well as the occasional philosopher-novelist. One of those rare breed is the subject of this week’s “Securities”, specifically the novel Blindsight, the first of two books in the Firefall series written by Peter Watts back in 2008. It’s a wild ride of dozens of ideas, some of which we’ll talk about today. Spoilers abound so caveat emptor.

Joining Danny Crichton is Lux’s own scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman as well as Gordon Brander, who runs the company Subconcious, which is building tools of thought such as Noosphere, which is a decentralized network of your notes backed by IPFS, as well as Subconscious, which is a social network built around those notes that allows you to think together with others. Think of it as a multiplayer version of Roam.

We talk about a bunch of concepts today, from the distinction between consciousness and intelligence, Searle’s Chinese Room, the Scrambler consciousness test, whether consciousness is necessary for intelligence, and then for fun, a look at intelligence and the Large Language Models that have sprung up in generative AI. Approachable, but bold – just as Watts approaches his works.

"Securities" podcast is produced, recorded, and edited by Chris Gates

The birds and the bees just don’t cut it anymore. With the rising age of first pregnancies in America, optimizing fertility has become the linchpin for potential parents embarking on the journey to childbearing. Even so, we remain beholden to dozens of myths driven by inadequate science, even while we ignore the vast new potential — and limits — of a bountiful set of advanced technologies that aim to make fertility a more understandable and approachable subject.

“Securities” host Danny Crichton is joined by Leslie Schrock, venture investor and author of the new book “Fertility Rules: The Definitive Guide to Male and Female Reproductive Health”, to discuss the complex intricacies of the new science of fertility and why we have so much more to do to bridge the gap between expert knowledge and popular understanding.

The two discuss the connection between general health and fertility, why men need to do more around their health to ensure a successful pregnancy, why environmental pollutants like parabens and microplastics can affect fertility and sperm counts, how climate change is adding the bad kind of heat to the kindling of love, what new technologies are arriving for parents, and finally, what scope these technologies should have on the productive lives of people.

While the natural world is fecund with a dazzling diversity of smells, the landscape of scents in our daily lives is far less organic. A handful of tightly-held fragrance companies and an extremely small guild of perfumers carefully craft the scents that go into every product we purchase, from the scent of clean laundry in our detergents to the orchestrated beauty of scents that make up a modern perfume. Our memories are — without too much exaggeration — controlled by roughly 600 people globally.

Where do those scents come from though, and why are people increasingly concerned about understanding the ingredients that make up spectrum of smells that waft over us every day?

Returning to “Securities” for our second of two episodes on the science of smell, CEO and founder of Lux-backed Osmo Alex Wiltschko joins host Danny Crichton to talk about the extraordinarily intricate supply chains and the astonishingly pricey essences that go into making our products distinctive to our olfactory system.

We cover the dynamics of the fragrance industry, the incredible scale of land required to make scents today, how perfumers perform their craft, the endlessly complicated supply chains of these products, why we have so few alternatives to natural scents, how climate change is causing dramatic shifts in ingredient prices, and finally, a bit on the future of green chemistry.

In a quantified world, the act of creation remains mysterious. Where do ideas come from? How does an artist translate a concept or a feeling into the final work that we get to read or view? The interior drama of that mystery becomes ever more visible as the singular artist expands into a collaboration. How do relationships change the trajectory and originality of creativity?

Few novels have better distilled the essence of these questions than Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which chronicles the multi-decade collaboration between two video game designers as they mature from grade school into the limelight of a cutthroat industry on the cusp of popular success. Inventive, heartfelt, and sophisticated, the novel was a breakout hit and was selected as Amazon’s book of the year for 2022.

This week on “Securities”, host Danny Crichton joins up with novelist Eliot Peper and Lux’s own scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman to talk about the messages that the novel offers our own creative lives. We talk about the building of virtual worlds, the hero’s journey of creation, the uniqueness versus repetitiveness of producing art, whether video games are entering the literary zeitgeist, why the book garnered such popular success and finally, narratives of individuals versus groups.

We perceive the world through our senses, watching the sunset, hearing the staccato of a violin soloist, smelling and ultimately tasting the chocolate and butter of freshly-baked cookies, and of course, feeling the touch of a loving partner. Yet while scientists have answered fundamental questions about color and audio, from understanding their physics to constructing mathematical representations of them, there remains a huge gap when it comes to smell.

Given how much more complex and higher dimensional it is, smell is an extraordinarily hard sense to capture, a problem which sits at the open frontiers of neuroscience and information theory. Now after many decades of discovery, the tooling and understanding has finally developed to begin to map, analyze and ultimately transmit smell.

Joining “Securities” host Danny Crichton is Alex Wiltschko, CEO and founder of Osmo, a Lux-backed company organized to give computers a sense of smell. He’s dedicated his life (from collecting and smelling bottles of perfume in grade school to his neuroscience PhD) to understanding this critical human sense and progressing the future of the field.

In this episode, we talk about smell and memory, the history of sense science, the mathematical challenges of modeling scent, the human physiology of smell and our surprising performance against even the best scientific lab equipment, the importance of chemical sensing, creating the digital olfaction group at Google Brain, how the mixture modeling problem remains the last and key frontier of this science, and finally, why the declining power of insect repellant is an important climate change challenge that the new science of smell can potentially solve.

It’s been a long road to mastering the cell, but biological scientists think they are getting closer and closer to understanding the fundamental mechanics of the kernels of life that make up our bodies. Decades after the sequencing of the first human genome, we now have a much more comprehensive understanding of how to discover a cell’s functions — and increasingly, the tools to actually analyze and prove that our models and theories about them are correct.

That’s been the domain of single-cell analysis and a novel technique in genetic science, which has been dubbed “perturbation biology”: making extremely small changes to the genetic code inside of cells and then observing how that cell’s functions change. What began with 18 cells and limited observational data in a single lab has now grown exponentially to hundreds of thousands of cells and millions of observations globally. That massive increase in data has forced the creation of a whole new set of analytical tools to process this data and derive foundational insights into the workings of cells.

How do all of these new laboratory experiments work and what kind of software tools are needed to progress the most advanced theories today? Joining host Danny Crichton on “Securities” this episode is Rahul Satija, an associate professor at New York University and a core member of the New York Genome Center as well as Lux’s own Shaq Vayda.

We’ll talk about how biological tools like CRISPR power perturbation bio, why scientists are increasingly moving away from indirect experiments to direct experiments and what that means for the future of the field, how we comprehend cell heterogeneity, if we’re getting closer to “fundamental truth” in biology, and finally, why theoretical molecular scientists are increasingly going to need large-scale clinical trials for the next-generation of health treatments.

ChatGPT has overtaken the cultural zeitgeist faster than any consumer service in the history of technology, with some analysts estimating that it has already been used by more than 100 million people. So when OpenAI, ChatGPT’s creator, live-streamed the launch of its new AI model GPT-4, there was a rush of excitement reminiscent of the Apple product launches of the past.

It’s been about 24 hours since GPT-4’s public launch, and all of us here at Lux have already extensively played around with it, so it seemed apt for a rapid response “Securities” episode on our very first impressions. Joining host Danny Crichton is Lux Capital partner Grace Isford, who not only has been playing around with ChatGPT, but also Anthropic’s new bot Claude, which was a bit overshadowed between SVB’s situation and OpenAI’s announcement.

We talk about GPT-4 and what’s new, its new frontiers of performance, the increasingly impenetrable black box OpenAI is establishing around its company and processes, the company’s competitive dynamics with big tech, and much more.