Episode Catalog
The Humanities of Mathematics
On this episode, Oleg talks through what it actually looks like to predict which companies are worth betting on, how math shaped his path from Wall Street to venture capital, and whether AI could ever get close to a "perfect" investment model. Spoiler: he has thoughts.
What Really Happens To The Wealthy During Financial Shocks
We tend to assume high earners are the ones who come out fine when the economy dips. Dr. Patrick Adams, a finance researcher finishing his PhD at MIT before heading to Wharton this fall, spent years digging through two decades of tax data to check that assumption, and it didn't hold up the way you'd expect.
Mechanobiology In Cancer Treatments
Releasing 9/12
During his PhD, Andy Feng spent full days alone in a dark, freezing room, testing about ten T cells using optical trapping. Ten cells a day gets you to roughly 400 a year, which is not much when the thing you're trying to understand is the immune system. So he built something faster. His lab at Northeastern now runs high-throughput microfluidics that can assay millions of T cells in parallel, which he describes as putting a T cell in a gym and letting it work out. That's the whole arc of his field, mechanoimmunology: from ten cells a day to millions at once, and from a curiosity to something that might change how T cell therapies actually get built.
The Dangers of Data Analysis
On this episode, Hari talks about what it's like building and selling companies at the intersection of medicine, math, and risk, and how predictive models are reshaping insurance from the inside out.
The Beauty Of Research
Releasing 8/29
Dr. Sri Sridhar has left more fields than most people ever enter. He got hooked on physics during his master's in India, watching Brian Josephson win a Nobel for the Josephson effect, and decided right then he wanted to work on superconductivity. He went to Caltech and did exactly that, later building the first high temperature superconductor in New England.
Then he moved on. Quantum chaos, then metamaterials, which led to a 2003 paper that Science named a breakthrough of the year.