Sweet-and-not-so-sour chicken, for the love of science, and getting rich by losing in Vegas. Plus Ian Curtiss and Pijus Krūminas talk wargames.
From Lux Capital
This week, Lux portfolio company Medra, which aims to use AI and robotics to run lab experiments faster and better than humans, launched publicly. In a profile of the company and its founder, Michelle Lee, Endpoints News reports that Lee “saw a ‘huge gap’ between biotech and tech when touring drugmakers’ labs in 2021.” Meanwhile, Until, which is developing reversible cryopreservation for patients in need of donor organs, announced that it has raised more than $100 million.
An item on Business Insider predicting a coming boom in IPOs features a note of caution from Lux’s Peter Hébert. “The bankers assume that companies want to go public, and I don’t think there’s the same desire that there used to be,” he told the paper. “For the largest, most advantaged companies right now, I can’t think of much of a reason to go public.”
Finally, for those of you who did not get to join our Riskgaming runthrough earlier this month, you can read all about it in Business Insider. Reporter Rebecca Torrence, who played, sums it up nicely:
For Pevsner and Crichton, the point isn’t to crown winners, churn out converts, or impart life lessons. They simply want their games to help participants confront complexity head-on. “I always say we don’t give answers — we give better questions,” Crichton said.
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From around the web
1. Umami lost
Maybe you’ve noticed: traditional East Asian dishes are getting sweeter — a lot sweeter. From cuisines that once pursued balance even in deserts to Korean celebrity chefs dumping “comical amounts of sugar” into savory recipes, something fundamental is shifting. The culprit? Mass production, Western adaptation, and the commoditization of sugar, where sweetness has become a symbol of modernity and sophistication. Over in Taste, Mahira Rivers questions what will become of East Asian cuisine.
Across Asia, a touch of sweetness is essential for the ability to shift and shape other flavors, but sugar is, in theory, not an ingredient that should stand out on its own. It is merely there to rein in a pungent fish sauce in Thai and Vietnamese sauces or to tamp down the spice of a Sichuan stir-fry. Even dessert is praised when its sweetness is muted or, as the popular phrase goes, “not too sweet.” “The pursuit of flavour has resulted more often in the blending of flavours,” write Lin Hsiang Ju and Lin Tsui Feng in their distinctive 1969 book Chinese Gastronomy. This philosophy of balance and equilibrium exists in kitchens across the region, from the five key flavors of Thai cuisine to the Japanese concept of gomi.
It isn’t just in Asia. Everything is sweeter than it used to be. But one food may stand apart from the trend in maintaining its perfect balance: ketchup. Editor Katie Salam recommends a burger, some fries, and Malcolm Gladwell’s 2004 New Yorker classic on the sweet-salty-sour-bitter-umami condiment.
2. The thrill of the lab
Maybe food writing isn’t your thing. Luckily, we’ve got a lot of great science picks from the team this week, and I’d urge you to start out with ’s “I should have loved biology too.” It is a beautiful reflection on why kids (including the author) often hate the study of life in school, and how he eventually came around to biology’s wonder, adventure and intrigue.
Pick a field in biology, or a slice of history, and you’ll find countless stories just like this. Mischievous Watson and Crick figuring out the structure of DNA after getting a peek at Rosalind Franklin’s crisp x-ray crystallography photograph; Baruch Blumberg discovering hepatitis B after locating the antigen in the blood of an Australian Aboriginal, and beating NIH to its cure, the world’s first cancer vaccine; James Simpson systematically inhaling various vapors and recording its effects in the search for a better anesthetic, resulting in the discovery of chloroform; Andreas Vesalius taking prisoners’ corpses hanging in the gallows in 16th century Paris and, along with painter Andrea Mategna, publishing nearly 700 incredibly detailed drawings of the human anatomy.
3. Mass appeal
If you’re ready to have your mind opened (or imploded), Laurence flags Ross Andersen’s latest for The Atlantic. Ross writes about the James Webb Space Telescope’s possible discovery of a primordial black hole lurking in the deep cosmos — far past the last visible galaxies. The discovery could potentially upend the tidy story that stars came first and black holes followed as those stars imploded. Or the observation could be a mirage, some other weird cosmic object, or just a really blurry photo of something already well understood. But the truth is out there.
We might find definitive proof that stars are older than black holes, just as cosmologists had long supposed. But even so, black holes would still retain some claim to ontological primacy, because they last so much longer. From their perspective, a star is just a transitory stage, a chrysalis. If the universe continues to expand as cosmologists predict, a day will come when star formation will cease altogether. Tens of trillions of years after that, the final stars will burn out. When that last stellar ember cools and darkens, the age of black holes will still be in its early days. Black holes will exist far, far longer than the entire illuminated age of stars. Of all the forms that this cosmos assumes, they will be among the most enduring. In a deep sense, this universe is theirs.
4. Complexity strikes back
In other new theories about the universe: I liked Philip Ball’s takedown of the second law of thermodynamics in Quanta. What if, instead of an inevitable rise in entropy over time, the universe actually favors increasing complexity — a process of which biological evolution is just one example? The theory suggests that everything from minerals to stars to potential alien civilizations follows the same pattern of growing complexity over time, driven by selection processes that favor entities better at performing specific functions.
5. New problems
We humans do seem to like complexity. As Ed Bradon points out in an article flagged by Katie, we prefer to think of the systems that help order our lives as “deliberate creations, the product of careful analysis. And, relatedly, that by performing this analysis … we can bring unruly ones to heel.” But systems always fight back — a lesson we would do well to remember as we allow computers to create more and more of them.
We will soon be in an era where humans are not the sole authors of complex systems. Sundar Pichai estimated in late 2024 that over 25 percent of Google’s code was AI generated; as of mid-2025, the figure for Anthropic is 80–90 percent. As in the years after the Second World War, the temptation will be to use this vast increase in computational power and intelligence to ‘solve’ systems design for once and for all. But the same laws that limited Forrester continue to bind: ‘NEW SYSTEMS CREATE NEW PROBLEMS’ and ‘THE SYSTEM ALWAYS KICKS BACK’. As systems become more complex, they become more chaotic, not less. The best solution remains humility, and a simple system that works.
6. The house wins?
To round out this week’s selections, I’ll direct you to Luke Winkie’s profile of “Vegas Matt” in Slate. In unflinching detail, Luke describes the man who routinely loses tens of thousands of dollars gambling in Vegas — and has made a fortune doing it.
Scroll through the recesses of YouTube, and you’ll see Morrow offering the exact same apologia for the tough-minded virtues of multilevel marketing to the very people he was trying to recruit: In one memorable clip, Vegas Matt lounges in a colossal living room and makes the case that anyone can live like this, so long as they aren’t a loser. “We’re looking for cool people,” he said, advocating for Vemma. “If you’re some unemployed, broke, annoying person, no one is going to listen to you.”
It’s a sentiment that clarifies the twinge of humiliation I felt after watching him cut out a baccarat bet of roughly the same value as my 401(k). Am I a loser? Are you? Are we, the unwashed masses, simply unlikable—and is that where it all went wrong? Clearly, Vegas Matt is a master at stoking a poisonous sense of inadequacy.
From Riskgaming
The global future of wargaming in Lithuania
Wargaming (of which Riskgaming is but one example) has a long and global history, from Europe and Asia into the Americas. Yet, its utility is increasingly being recognized by business, military and political leaders as a more authentic way to understand the behavior of people across all kinds of contexts. Competition, incentives, risk and decision-makin…
