“Securities” podcast host Danny Crichton and producer Chris Gates talk about the last two weeks of “Securities” newsletters. The first, from July 9th called “Dissonant Loops”, discussed the chaos and crises plaguing the world today and why our state capacity to respond to them is so limited. The second, from July 16th entitled “Scientific Sublime”, […]

Colloquially, risk and uncertainty are synonyms, and it’s a misidentification that has caused trillions of dollars of damage and is increasingly at the root of modern “securities.” In his new book “Fragile Futures” from Cambridge University Press, economist and long-time IMF executive Vito Tanzi builds upon narratives first developed by John Maynard Keynes and Frank […]

Welcome to “Securities” by Lux Capital, a podcast and newsletter devoted to science, technology, finance and the human condition. I’m your host, Danny Crichton, and today we’re talking about the post-Roe world. Tomorrow, it’ll be 30 days since the Supreme Court announced in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that there is no constitutional basis for the right to abortion, […]

This is a newsletter about “Securities” — national security, economic security, health security and how all those myriad of securities aggregate to human wellbeing. It’s been a slog covering this beat in 2022, with an economic recession driving up hunger in the developing world, Russia’s land war against Ukraine, and the ongoing and growing toll […]

Today we’re talking about the future of American defense with the leadership of Anduril Industries, whose mission is to reboot the arsenal of democracy and become the most innovative defense prime in the United States. Founder Palmer Luckey, co-founder and CEO Brian Schimpf and co-founder and Executive Chairman Trae Stephens joined Josh Wolfe and host […]

Here is my dilemma, I want custom art for the podcast. Ideally, I would have a new image for each episode. Up until recently, my choices were to use stock photography or work with an artist. I now have a third option, AI art generators. As of late, my Twitter feed has been filled with […]

Dissonance reigns. Hard-fought episodes of tranquility are shattered as undercurrents of feverish discontent surges through the surface. The venture industry, slammed by plummeting valuations earlier this year, spent much of the winter and spring fortifying balance sheets and rapidly triaging portfolios. That chaos has transformed into relative calm this summer, with VCs perspicaciously analyzing the […]

SpaceX has grown from nascent dreams of the final frontier into the world’s premier commercial space launch company, with dozens of successful missions that have continually become more and more ambitious. Now, there’s a budding ecosystem of SpaceX alumni who have left the mothership to build their own companies, taking the culture and values they learned […]

Tech has been bubbly, filled with the sultry air of unrealizable marketing. In Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson originated the concept of the “metaverse” and explained the experience of existing within that ethereal plane: Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. They come here to talk turkey with suits from around the world, and they […]

“Where marginal stupidity is about  “how there is a turning point where further information or complexity can befuddle us and simply raise costs without any concomitant value,”  what I am seeing in hard science investing is an outsourcing of thought,  a reliance on the splashy marketing one-pager instead of the agonizingly long technical research with the diligence […]

Exits are the keystone of a robust venture economy. Ambitious entrepreneurs, helpful accelerators and fast-funding venture capitalists are all necessary inputs of course, but what attracts all this talent and capital in the first place is the opportunity to build something incredible and actually make money (and preferably a lot of it) while doing so. […]

“The world is incredibly complicated, and humans necessarily use heuristics and analogies to process that complexity into simpler forms. These mental shortcuts are never perfect, but they should broadly summarize the complexity they represent while affording their user a sense of their limitations. In that vein, I want to call attention to two lazy tech […]

“GPT-3 was trained on is so large that the model contains a certain  fraction of the actual complexity of the world. But how much is actually  inside these models, implicitly embedded within these neural networks? I  decided to test this and see if I could examine the GPT-3 model of the world through the use […]

“One of the most important cognitive tradeoffs we make is how to process information, and perhaps more specifically, the deluge of information that bombards us every day. A study out of UCSD in 2009 estimated that Americans read or hear more than 100,000 words a day —  an increase of nearly 350% over the prior three decades […]