Riskgaming
Episodes
Trouncing career regret with famed VC Bill Gurley
25 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
An astonishing majority of Americans claim that they hate their job and wish they could do something else. Often though, what might drive our passions...
Can sports betting overthrow Iran?
28 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
I’m going to admit, sports betting isn’t really my thing. I don’t know my parlay from my parler (that’s a French joke), and I can barely keep ...
The risks no one talks about
21 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The world is overwhelmingly chaotic as the international system buckles. The practically placid era of cooperation that marked the 1990s and early 200...
What are the origins of efficiency?
14 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
If you live in a city in North America or Europe, you almost certainly have had the experience of watching a construction site slowly morph into a bui...
The long game of American reindustrialization
07 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Reindustrialization is the word du jour in American policymaking circles. The hope is that a reinvigorated manufacturing base will bring back middle-c...
11 Clips That Defined 2025
22 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Well, 2025 is already running by with a massive whoosh sound. It goes without saying that every year feels like it is getting more chaotic, intense an...
Can software platforms reverse enshittification?
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Software kind of sucks these days, doesn’t it? Cory Doctorow invented the word “enshittification” to describe a pattern he repeatedly observed a...
The inside story of the billionaires fighting for space
10 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The space race was once between the United States and the Soviet Union; now it’s between two tech billionaires trying to seize the mantle of most po...
Why AI safety is like a bolt in a croissant
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As we’ve crossed three years since OpenAI debuted ChatGPT in 2022, AI technologies have gone from a curiosity among academic scientists to one of th...
How to be a polymath
19 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone loves a good Renaissance man or woman, but it’s hard to do it all with tenacity and verve. There’s also the constant balance between perf...
“Collaborating with the entire history of human expression”
12 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We hosted an epic one-day festival to human expression in New York City a few weeks ago called the Lux AI Summit, bringing together hundreds of founde...
Europe, China and the future of open borders in science
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
While relations between the United States and China have reached a detente in the past week after APEC, it’s the long-term decline of relations betw...
On the frontiers of research at the Lux AI Summit
29 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, Lux convened about 300 AI engineers, scientists, researchers and founders in New York City to discuss the frontiers of the field under the ...
The present and future of wargaming
22 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Riskgaming is part of the broader movement known as wargaming, playful experiences designed to improve decision-making across domains like defense pla...
Riskgaming State of the Union
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Danny Crichton and Laurence Pevsner do a special outdoor recording from Carmel, where they reflect on the successful launch of their ...
The global future of wargaming in Lithuania
24 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 increasi...
Behind the scenes of our new scenario, Southwest Silicon
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of the best parts of running a game studio and policy shop here at Riskgaming at Lux Capital is the actual public launch of a new game. That day i...
How compute and AI will create next-gen superapps
10 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The launch of OpenAI’s GPT-5 has ushered in a panoply of views on the future of AGI and end-user applications. Does the platform’s aggressive rout...
America’s degrowth lawyers need to learn from China
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s fun to play a game of superlatives with China. From the awe-inspiring and cyberpunk scale of the metro trains cruising through apartment blocks...
The CIA in the 21st Century
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Few agencies have been more central to global affairs than the aptly-named Central Intelligence Agency. Often shrouded in mystique both cultivated and...
The challenges of complex risks in game design
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Building great Riskgaming scenarios is far more of an art than science. The designer needs to understand the players — what they know and what they ...
Intel, chips and America’s future
13 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
By now, we’re all familiar with the crisis that has faced America’s chip manufacturing industry. Intel remains the last bastion of homegrown chips...
What’s next for European defense autonomy
07 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There has been a massive influx of defense funding into Europe since Putin’s war on Ukraine started in early 2022. A sea change is underway, with Ge...
The future of science in an age of spending cuts
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Science feels under attack. The Trump administration has proposed budget cuts of up to one-third of all basic research funding, breaking a generations...
Can AI teach us critical thinking?
24 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI and education seem like a match made in heaven, and certainly, much work and dollars are being spent trying to bring the two together. As more and ...
Finding a Third Way on the AI singularity
16 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our guest today, Mike Sexton, believes that the AI singularity has arrived, and somehow, it ended up “on page C3 in the newspaper.” What he’s ge...
How Jane Jacobs got Americans stuck
09 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past few decades, an astonishing pattern has taken place: Americans no longer migrate. From a peak of roughly one third of the country moving...
What America can learn from the rebooting of Estonia
27 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Estonia is a nation of 1.3 million people, situated in a dangerous neighborhood on the Baltic Sea. It gained its independence early in the 20th centur...
The relevant axis of political conflict is change versus stasis
20 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Abundance has become the word of the year in politics, led by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book and a slew of articles and podcasts trailing in i...
Samuel Arbesman on his new book, The Magic of Code
10 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s not every day that we get to fete the launch of a new book by one of our colleagues at Lux Capital, so today is a very special day. Lux’s sci...
Can we ever defend against agricultural warfare?
06 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Food is one of the great bedrocks of human existence. Given its primacy to survival, it has also increasingly become a locus for conflict, either due ...
For America, is big or open best for AI models?
30 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Since the launch of Project Stargate by OpenAI and the debut of DeepSeek’s V3 model, there has been a raging debate in global AI circles: what’s t...
It’s really hard to get DC to understand Silicon Valley
23 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. Congress and the executive branch have an extraordinary level of influence over all aspects of business. Yet, as businesses have become ever ...
Remembering Daniel Kahneman on optimism and self-confidence (Part 2)
16 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, we recirculated one of my favorite episodes in the entire archive, our May 2022 lunch debate on risk, bias and decision-making with Nobel P...
How to turn around America’s tech-industrial decline, now
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Reindustrialization has been a persistent theme in Silicon Valley circles the past few years, and now it’s having its moment in the sun in Washingto...
Remembering Daniel Kahneman on Risk, Bias and Decision-Making (Part 1)
30 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This is a big week for us, since we officially re-launched the newsletter on our gorgeous new web address Riskgaming.com, which we are now hosting on ...
Europe needs national champions, now
25 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Europe faces an existential crisis. Long an innovation, technology and manufacturing hub, its greatest companies and wider industries have been hit ha...
How can we make the internet fun again?
19 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Something is rotten in the state of the internet. Social networks that were once meant to be entertaining diversions have become riven with vituperati...
Making shoes isn’t the right strategy
12 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The markets have massively gyrated the past few weeks as hourly pronouncements from the White House and Mar-a-Lago seize investors with terror or reli...
The hyper-competition of U.S.-China trade relations
04 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With the launch of President Trump’s trade war this week, few countries are more at risk than China. Faced with a sudden and massive expansion of ta...
“You can cause a lot of havoc with a cell phone and a cheap DJI drone”
28 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Chaos is the rule of the day, with markets, companies, governments and individuals being rapidly buffeted by events and change. Technology is exacerba...
Why immersion — and not realism — is critical for wargaming
21 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Despite centuries of experience designing and playing war games, there is still very little rigorous research on how to evaluate what makes a good gam...
“We have an addiction to prediction”
14 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Humans hate uncertainty, which means we are constantly looking for means to narrowly consider the future and its implications. Planning, predicting an...
“Every system can be gamed”
07 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI and democracy are in great tension with each other. AI models are built by a priesthood of research specialists, unmoored from the will of the publ...
Americans are an incredibly generous people
01 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Amidst the upheaval in Washington, D.C. these days, one of the most notable and controversial decision from the second Trump administration has been t...
How America holds it all together
22 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There are two sides of America. One is the country’s world-leading innovation centers, which offer the highest salaries and potential wealth creatio...
Luck rules our lives, so why don’t we teach more about it?
14 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Cruel, petty and occasionally magnanimous, fates rule our lives, determining everything from our careers and romances to our financial success. Despit...
How Russia is bringing the cost of global sabotage to zero
06 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When Russia launched its war on Ukraine in early 2022, it became the first land battle on European soil since World War II. Warfare has changed dramat...
Can you (or DOGE) product manage the government?
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a growing movement to apply the best practices of technology to the U.S. government. Whether it’s Elon Musk and DOGE (the so-called Depart...
The on-going collapse of the global commons
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s been a bad few months (and years and decades) for the global commons. Chinese trawlers have repeatedly knocked out internet cables in internati...
Which companies will suffer with globalization’s reversal?
17 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Washington Consensus of the past few decades that called for open markets, free trade and reduced regulation will officially die on Monday as Tr...
Why financial booms and busts are the key to our progress
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When we think of booms and busts, we often think of waste. The dot-com bubble, the 2008 financial crisis, and the late 2010s crypto craze drew insane ...
The Best of 2024
21 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It’s been a year for the record books, and so it is with the Riskgaming podcast. We published 68 episodes this year across our main show and The Ort...
Introducing our new scenario, “Powering Up”
14 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are really excited to announce the publication of our third and latest Riskgaming scenario, "Powering Up: China’s Global Quest for Electric Vehic...
Why does America have the most expensive elevators in the world?
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Recently in the Riskgaming newsletter (“The Productivity Precipice”), host Danny Crichton wrote about one of the biggest challenges facing America...
The Titanic Lessons of VC with Josh Wolfe
27 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Every quarter, Lux sends an update to our limited partners observing the macroeconomic environment, the changes in venture capital, and our current th...
The Orthogonal Bet: Dave Jilk on AI, Poetry, and the Future of AGI
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
Elections, global threats and happy hour with the Riskgaming team
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It’s not every day that we can get our distributed Riskgaming team into one podcast studio, but we actually managed to do it from our NYC base, and ...
The future of defense manufacturing with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Anduril has become one of the most-watched companies in Silicon Valley, and for good reason. Its vertiginous rise from small hardware laboratory to ne...
The Orthogonal Bet: Embracing Second Acts with Henry Oliver
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
The energy economics of our civilization’s digital cathedrals
08 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The sudden widespread usage of advanced artificial intelligence models has massively increased global demand for data centers that can handle inferenc...
The Orthogonal Bet: How deep science ventures redefines deep tech innovation
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
Introducing our new scenario, DeepFaked and DeepSixed
02 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We’re really excited to talk about the launch of our second public Riskgaming scenario, “DeepFaked and DeepSixed: AI Election Security and the Fut...
The Orthogonal Bet: Exploring the history of intelligence
30 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
Previewing our upcoming Riskgaming scenario, “Powering Up: China’s Global Quest for Electric Vehicle Dominance”
25 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The automobile industry is one of the most pivotal in the world, both due to its scale and its nexus at the heart of the manufacturing systems in coun...
The Orthogonal Bet: The role of complexity in world-building
23 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
The dangers of our rapidly narrowing understanding of China
18 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
China’s pivot from open to closed over the past decade has been striking. It wasn’t so long ago that tens of thousands of students and thousands o...
The Orthogonal Bet: The Wonders of Graph Paper and Algorithmic Art
17 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
Even with China’s rise, America’s best days are ahead
11 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
China’s vertiginous rise over the past three decades has finally dawned on the Washington DC foreign policy blob. The hopes and dreams of China’s ...
The Orthogonal Bet: Complex economics is applying complex systems methods
09 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
The Orthogonal Bet: Artificial Life and Robotic Evolution
02 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
From Satellites to Submarines: The Power of Open Source Intelligence in Global Conflict
01 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the RISKGAMING Podcast, host Danny Crichton sits down with columnist Michael Magnani to dissect the explosive rise of legalized spo...
Josh Wolfe: Our new world order is one where algorithms can wield as much influence as armies
27 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Science is the world’s greatest force for progress, but how are the people and institutions that compose this critical activity performing? More spe...
The Orthogonal Bet: From Online Communities to In-Person Programming
25 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
The how and why of the most successful supply-chain attack in history
21 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This week, Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon were injured and killed by the thousands across two waves of attacks when their pagers and walkie-talkies exp...
The Orthogonal Bet: The Art of Naming
18 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
AI is spiking chip design costs – can it solve them too?
16 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The old adage of “If you build it, they will come” might be translated into chip design better as, “You can’t build it, since they don’t exi...
The Orthogonal Bet: How to Navigate Complexity Within a Large Organization
12 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
Silicon Valley’s secret industrial spy war
06 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Silicon Valley couldn’t be farther from the confines of Langley or Fort Meade, let alone Beijing or Moscow. Yet, the verdant foothills of suburban s...
The Orthogonal Bet: Bio Trajectories and the Importance of Long-Term Thinking
04 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
How games, god(s) and chance transformed human decision-making
30 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Gaming has enveloped our world. A majority of Americans now gamble at least once every year, and popular video games like Fortnite and Roblox count hu...
The Orthogonal Bet: The Harsh Realities of the Soviet Space Program
28 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
The Orthogonal Bet: Understanding Embodied Intelligence
23 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
Radical Uncertainty, Rapid Learning and the Success Equation for Catching Up
21 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Global inequality has grown over the past two decades, concentrating an enormous amount of wealth and power on an elite number of individuals, cities,...
The Orthogonal Bet: The Quest to Build the Fruitful Web
16 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
Industrial literacy and the fate of American progress
15 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It’s good and bad times in America. Inflation is down and wages are up in real terms, but there’s a rising challenge: how can we provide the housi...
The Orthogonal Bet: : The Art of Cultivating Curiosity
09 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
Why engineers are using chaos to make computers more resilient
08 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The CrowdStrike meltdown on July 19th shut down the world with one faulty patch — proving once again the interconnected fragility of global IT sys...
The Orthogonal Bet: Building a Fractal Combinatorial Trope Machine
02 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the ongoing mini-series The Orthogonal Bet. Hosted by Samuel Arbesman, a Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at ...
How many trillions in damage would an invasion of Taiwan cost global GDP?
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to the so-called DC foreign policy “blob”, few scenarios have been more sketched out, analyzed and wargamed than a potential Chinese...
The Orthogonal Bet: Using Computational Biology to Understand How the Brain Works
26 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the ongoing mini-series The Orthogonal Bet. Hosted by Samuel Arbesman, a Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at ...
Evolved Technology: Why technology is counter-intuitively pushing us back to natural products in pharma development
24 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The history of pharmaceutical development has traditionally been one of exploration on the frontiers of life on Earth. From fungi to molds, we’ve so...
The Orthogonal Bet: What the Microsoft Outage Reveals
19 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the ongoing mini-series The Orthogonal Bet. Hosted by Samuel Arbesman, a Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at ...
The Orthogonal Bet: The Quest to Find the Poetic Web
19 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the ongoing mini-series The Orthogonal Bet. Hosted by Samuel Arbesman, a Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at Lux Ca...
Pivoting to the Expert Economy
17 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The media world has been rocked by artificial intelligence, labor strife, the creator economy, the decimation of business models and so much more. But...
The Orthogonal Bet: What AI Can Learn from Human Cognition
12 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hello and welcome to the ongoing miniseries The Orthogonal Bet Hosted by Samuel Arbesman, Complexity Scientist, Author, and Scientist in Residence at ...
Can we be optimistic about America’s future?
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If we had to rebuild American politics to be more positive, could we do it? And what would a positive or even optimistic politics look like? What woul...
The Orthogonal Bet: Unveiling the Complexity of Life: A Conversation with Philip Ball on ‘How Life Works'
05 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ...
“The commons are under attack” from TikTok and subsea cables to data centers and elections
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
2024 is the year of democracy, with more than half of the world’s population voting in elections across India and Indonesia to the European Union, U...
The Orthogonal Bet: How to fund R&D that is for the public good?
28 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Sam speaks with Ben Reinhardt, an engineer, scientist, and the founder of a new research organization called Speculative Technologies...