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 century, only for the Soviets to take the country by force. Estonia gained its independence again in 1991, and has since become one of the most digital-native countries in the world. How did a nation with a feared secret police become so open to the government digitizing data on every one of its citizens? And why did other former Soviet Republics not follow in the same way?

Those questions and more are at the center of Joel Burke’s new book, “Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution.” The nation has outperformed across the board, and Joel takes a full look at the unique institutions and cultures that led to such success.

Joining alongside host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner, the three talk about the early years of Estonia’s existence, why Skype was such a watershed for the nation, why privacy has a very different meaning in Estonia than elsewhere, why eGovernment can actually be even more private than our existing data systems in the United States, and finally, why Estonia’s government has so deeply embraced the private sector.

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 its wake. Everyone loves growth and prosperity of course, but what ultimately matters in local politics is organizing. To build the future in America’s cities, you’ve got to secure petitions, representation and votes, and that’s the subject of today’s show.

Joining host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner are Ryder Kessler and Catherine Vaughn, the two co-heads of Abundance New York. They’ve built up a decentralized organization of several thousand locals looking to expand New York’s prosperity in the 21st century by developing a slate of programming including meetups, petition drives, political endorsements and more. Ryder was formerly a founder of a tech startup, and Catherine built an organization to elect state legislative candidates across America.

The four talk about the crisis facing New York City, why the status quo bias is so heavy, how Abundance New York is changing the narrative around prosperity, what it’s like to organize a community centered on local issues, what’s it like to serve in local politics, and finally, how to grapple with the historical legacy of Robert Moses.

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 scientist-in-residence, Sam Arbesman, just published his new book, “The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World―and Shapes Our Future.” It’s a deep dive into the wonderful conjuring that comes from coding computers, and Sam explores programming languages, spreadsheets, and how code bends reality all in a taut narrative. At its center, Sam is looking to bring the human back into the machine, and create a better computing environment for the future.

Joining Editor-in-Chief of Riskgaming Danny Crichton and Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner, the three talk about the new book and its major themes, the writing, editing and publishing process, as well as also how Sam is feeling about the science and venture world after nearly a decade with Lux.This episode will be published on both the Riskgaming and The Orthogonal Bet podcast feeds.

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 to famine or as an exploitable vulnerability of even the most powerful countries. Russia’s war on Ukraine made it clear that grain could be fought over in the battle for supremacy, with the whole world dependent on the outcome.

Today, we have a special episode of the podcast. Our Riskgaming designer Ian Curtiss hosts Alicia Ellis, an Air Force veteran who is now the director of the Master of Arts in Global Security program at Arizona State University. She and her husband own a regenerative farm in Phoenix’s East Valley, and she has specialized in the future of American agricultural security in her own research. She’s also designing a game of her own, called New War, to highlight the complex interplay of challenges that come with new forms of warfare and particularly so-called “gray zone” tactics.

Ian and Alicia talk about what it’s like to farm in the twenty-first century, Russia and Ukraine’s grain production, Covid-19 and beef prices, and the complete abdication of government investment in the future security of the food supply.

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 the balance between openness and scale when it comes to the competition for the frontiers of AI performance? More compute has traditionally led to better models, but V3 showed that it was possible to rapidly improve a model with less compute. At risk in the debate is nothing less than American dominance in the AI race.

Jared Dunnmon is highly concerned about the trajectory. He recently wrote “The Real Threat of Chinese AI” for Foreign Affairs, and across multiple years at the Defense Department’s DIU office, he has focused on ensuring long-term American supremacy in the critical technologies underpinning AI. That’s led to a complex thicket of policy challenges, from how open is “open-source” and “open-weights” to the energy needs of data centers as well as the censorship latent in every Chinese AI model.

Joining host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner, the trio talk about the scale of Stargate versus the efficiency of V3, the security models of open versus closed models and which to trust, how the world can better benchmark the performance of different models, and finally, what the U.S. must do to continue to compete in AI in the years ahead.

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 more complex, the gap in knowledge between legislators and regulators has dramatically increased. That pattern is even more evident when it comes to high-scale startups and the venture capital industry, a weird niche of the investment world that even other financiers often struggle to grok. So what do you do to help DC understand our little world?

That’s where Bobby Franklin and his team come in. Franklin is the president of the National Venture Capital Association, the trade body that represents the VC industry in DC. He’s helmed the organization for more than a decade, and has experienced the constant treadmill of presidents, members of Congress and staffers as he advocates for the VC model of entrepreneurship.

Joining host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner, the three of us discuss the Trump Administration’s first one hundred days as well as the prospective legislative slate for Congress, including tax hikes and cuts, R&D spending, antitrust, SEC rules and more. We also talk about the rise of new organizations like the Foundation for American Innovation and the Little Tech Competition Summit and how they play a role in the policy process.

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 Prize Winner Danny Kahneman, World Series of Poker champion Annie Duke, legendary investment strategist Michael Maubaussin of Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global, and our own founding managing partner Josh Wolfe. In last week’s episode, the group discussed the value of premortems, the possibility or impossibility of humans changing their minds and dissonance reduction.

Now we turn to the second half of their conversation as they look at the illusions and amplifications of optimism, overconfidence, and whether hot hands exist in real life.

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 Washington DC too. More and more policymakers, legislators and administrators have come to terms with a stark reality: America has left the means of production behind, and in the process, has surrendered some of the country’s most powerful advantages to its adversaries, namely China.

This decline wasn’t inevitable, and neither will its renaissance. But with the right ideas and a renewed force of will, it’s doable. That’s the goal of a brand-new project, the Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook, published this week by a quadrangle of policy institutions from the Foundation of American Innovation (FAI) to the Institute for Progress. Leading the charge as editor is my guest today, Kelvin Yu. Yu is a former staffer on Capitol Hill and investor at In-Q-Tel who is now a fellow at FAI while working on startup projects.

We talk about the genesis of the playbook, how 27 different proposals came together, the highlights from each of the playbook’s three sections, and what America’s prognosis is to reindustrialize in the coming years.

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 Substack. You’ll find all of our archives there, as well as much easier tools to manage your subscription to our Dispatches, Event Announcements, our edited Interviews and after almost a decade, Lux Recommends.We’ve had thousands of new people subscribe and follow us over the past two years, and so I figured this re-launch week was also an opportune time to recirculate one of my absolute favorite episodes of the podcast from three years ago in May 2022. Daniel Kahneman, alongside his long-time research partner Amos Tversky, pioneered the field now broadly known as decision science, exploring the economics, incentives, tradeoffs and psychologies of humans making judgments in moments of uncertainty. Tversky would pass away in 1996, and Kahneman would win the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for much of the work they partnered together on.

In the months after our recording, Kahneman made an extraordinary decision under uncertainty of his own. Concerned about his future risk for dementia, he decided to travel to Switzerland at the age of 90 to pass away through assisted suicide. It was an astonishing final decision by the master of decision-making, and he conducted his final act in secrecy before it was revealed in The Wall Street Journal in a column by Jason Zweig last month.I had the opportunity to host Kahneman alongside World Series of Poker champion Annie Duke, legendary investment strategist Michael Maubaussin of Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global and our own founding managing partner Josh Wolfe for a lunch debate on the current research and trends underpinning risk, bias and decision-making. We merged our four part original series down to two parts. This week, we cover the ideas of pre-mortem as well as dissonance reduction and what circumstances lead people to changing their minds at all.

Europe faces an existential crisis. Long an innovation, technology and manufacturing hub, its greatest companies and wider industries have been hit hard by competition from American tech giants like Google and Chinese manufacturing powerhouses like BYD. Multiple prominent reports have circulated about how the European Union can rapidly respond before its economy struggles even more (this week, Germany announced that its economy will not grow in 2025, for the third year in a row).

Today, Marko Papic makes the case for Europe — even against the tough competition. He’s a macro and geopolitical expert at BCA Research and a delightful guest with a panoramic perspective on the world’s current geopolitics, past and future economic history and the potential for technology to upend the global order.

Joining host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner, Marko talks about why he’s bullish on Europe, counters the idea that America is more deregulated, discusses why Europe needs a 28th “digital state” and why national champions are critical for success, describes how Europe can balance between the U.S. and China and finally, offers why he is optimistic that disruptions globally will actually accelerate innovation rather than slow it down.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko