Softbank's Blurry Vision III: The Fall of WeWork
In this episode, as part of our series on the Softbank Vision Fund and its risky investments, we're talking about the rise and fall of a real-estate company that posed as a tech company... WeWork (and...
29 Sep 202047min
Softbank's Blurry Vision II: Uber
In this, the second part of our series on the Softbank Vision Fund, we discuss Softbank's $10bn bet on ride-sharing firm Uber - which burns through capital and regulations in an attempt to establish a...
22 Sep 202032min
Extremely Thermonuclear Takes: Hints of Life on Venus?
So there's a big rumour going around that some scientists may have potentially detected a hint of evidence for phosphine gas on Venus, which they consider to be quite strong evidence of something unex...
14 Sep 202030min
Climate Assembly: The World We Want to See
This year, the UK assembled 108 citizens from across all demographics of the society and from around the country to discuss the best ways to address climate change. In September 2020, they reported ba...
13 Sep 202054min
Climate Assembly: What Is A Citizens' Assembly?
In this mini-series, we'll be discussing the Climate Assembly in the UK - what happens when 100 randomly-selected ordinary citizens are given time and space to debate UK climate change policy. In thi...
13 Sep 202032min
Softbank's Blurry Vision, or, How To (Mostly) Burn $100bn: Part I, The Dream of Masoyoshi Son
In this series, we'll be telling the story of the Softbank Vision Fund, the $100bn technology venture capital fund that was supposed to revolutionise the world and bring forward a glorious techno-futu...
9 Sep 202039min
Rage Inside The Machine: Algorithmic Bias and What It Means to be Human, with Dr Robert Smith
I'm very excited today to talk to Dr Robert Elliot Smith, who – after a thirty-year career working in AI and working with algorithms - has written one of the best books I've ever read about artificial...
3 Sep 20201h 24min
Statistical Mechanics and Information Entropy
As a followup to our series on thermodynamics, the briefest of introductions to one of the most fascinating and beautiful areas of physics - Statistical Mechanics.
27 Aug 202025min
