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 and yet exciting. There’s never been a better moment to go deep on risk, decision-making, complex scenario analysis and more, and that’s precisely what we did across 45 episodes of Riskgaming this year. We covered the gamut from espionage and defense to artificial intelligence to space technology, and a bunch of subjects in between.To highlight some of the most profound moments of the year, host Danny Crichton teamed up with Riskgaming’s producer Chris Gates to track down the very best clips from the podcast this year. From dozens of hours of episodes, here are our favorite minutes sprawled across 11 clips in one tidy package for your holiday listening.We don’t do a predictions episode — we’re too smart for that in this frenetic and ever-shifting world. If past is prologue, then these 2025 clips offer the best of what’s in store. Scary — and hopeful — times are ahead.

Software kind of sucks these days, doesn’t it? Cory Doctorow invented the word “enshittification” to describe a pattern he repeatedly observed across software platforms. They start generous and flexible, but over time, they increase their value capture to maximize profits at the expense of their users. Software ends up feeling over-optimized and hostile, constantly fighting our desires. But software ultimately is for us, and there must be a better way.Well, there is, at least in theory. A coalition of software and tech luminaries, joined by hundreds of supporters, recently launched the Resonant Computing Manifesto. They want software that is private, dedicated, plural, adaptable and prosocial — the antipode of the offerings available to us today. It’s a fresh vision, one desperately needed as LLMs rapidly democratize software engineering to everyone.Riskgaming host Danny Crichton and The Orthogonal Bet host Sam Arbesman jointly host this special episode with Alex Komoroske, founder of Common Tools, which dubs itself a new fabric for computing.The three talk about the manifesto, how LLMs are changing software design, the same origin paradigm, fully homomorphic encryption, remote attestation, and whether it is possible for software to be good and also be profitable.

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 powerful space lord. For Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the development of SpaceX and Blue Origin respectively is the culmination of a lifetime commitment to technology growth and science fiction. It’s also increasingly a ferocious campaign, one that has turned them from experimental pioneers to aggressive businessmen hoping to seize the future of space’s GDP for themselves.All of this is ably documented in Christian Davenport’s new book, “Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race.” A follow up from his massively popular book “The Space Barons,” the book chronicles the last seven years of the new space race with alacrity and intimate details.Christian and Riskgaming host Danny Crichton talk about how he transitioned from covering Afghanistan and America’s home front in the War on Terror to covering the crazy billionaires at the heart of the space race. Then they talk about Musk’s fight over the United Launch Alliance, why Blue Origin has been taking on more risks in recent years, NASA and the government’s growing dependency on private companies for manned spaceflight, what the next decade of the space economy will look like, and finally, how China is entering the picture in a frenetic way.

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 the most popular products ever shipped. Billions of people now use AI for everything from sundry amusements to mission-critical applications, and it has started to diffuse into nearly every industry imaginable. But along with such power comes great responsibility, or at least, one would hope.Jacob Ward — the former editor of Popular Science, long-time tech correspondent, podcast host of Rip Current and the author of the popular book The Loop — is skeptical. Via his own personal experiences and reporting, he sees AI’s addictive qualities and its lack of safety as a serious challenge for regulators and society as a whole. He analogizes this challenge with the cultures of software and hardware engineers, where software is about “if we ship, then we're going to sort it out” and hardware is about how “scale compounds your problems.”Alongside host Danny Crichton, the two talk about biases and decision-making, the connections between AI and casino gambling, why LLMs are like experimenting on people in the wild, how to think about regulating edge cases, ex-anti legal frameworks, Nita Farahany’s idea of cognitive liberty and why product enthusiasm is not a substitute for safety.

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 perfectionism and dilettantism — how long should you keep refining a project versus just bringing it to a close? For those of us prone to procrastination, even asking that question might prompt a delay.That’s why I am excited to bring my good friend Uri Bram on the podcast this week. He’s written a book on Bayes’ theory, has been a publisher of a very successful online newsletter, has hosted olfactory gallery parties, and he just published his first party game called Person Do Thing inspired by trying to order vegan food at a restaurant in Thailand. In short, he’s constantly experimenting with new forms of media and ways to bring people together.Together with host Danny Crichton, we talk about perfectionism and whether it helps or hurts creativity; Uri’s experience playing Riskgaming; his new game; communications and the curse of knowledge problems; using Amazon as a social networking tool; and his recent viral blog post, “21 Facts About Hosting Parties.”

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 founders, artists, engineers and visionaries who are redefining the future of media. Two of our speakers, Kirby Ferguson and Ale Matamala Ortiz joined us on the Riskgaming podcast to talk about the future of filmmaking in a generative AI world.Kirby is a filmmaker, and he’s most well-known for his work around remix culture in a documentary series titled “Everything is a Remix.” Ale is the co-founder and Chief Design Officer of Runway, a Lux portfolio company that builds a generative AI studio for anyone producing films.Together with hosts Danny Crichton and Laurence Pevsner, our quad talks about the current economics of the film industry and the recession underway in Los Angeles, why filmmaking would have changed even without the rise of AI, how to think about remixing through software versus remixing through culture, the coming convergence of narrative forms like films and video games, and what the future of artists will look like with co-intelligences.

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 between the European Union and China that is worth a deeper look. Over the past two decades, Europe and China cooperated across science, technology and economic development, helping fuel China’s vast labs and manufacturing base that today is at the center of the West’s fears for its primacy in the world. Everything has changed, and so what can we learn from the past?For more than a decade, Halldor Hardarson lived and worked in China as part of EURAXESS, an initiative of the European Union to connect European and Chinese scientists together to accelerate frontier research. From the heady and optimistic early 2010s to the serious challenges of Covid-19, Hardarson saw it all live from Beijing — a far cry from his home fishing village in Iceland. Today, he works at a biotech unicorn in Iceland called Kerecis, which uses fish skin for tissue regeneration.With host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming scenario consultant Ian Curtiss, the trio talk about what Iceland can learn from China and vice versa despite the massive population gap, the transformation in the European Union’s relationship with China, and we throw in some optimistic notes at the end for a nice aftertaste.

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 banner of “the AI canvas.” The idea was to move the conversation away from what can be built, to what should be built and why. AI tools have made extraordinary progress since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, and we are still just figuring out all of the ways we can use these miraculous correlation machines.Even so, there remains prodigious work on the research frontiers of artificial intelligence to identify ways of improving model performance, merging models together, and ensuring that training and inference costs are as efficient as possible. To that end, we brought together two stars of the science world to talk more about the future of AI.Kyunghyun Cho is a computer science professor at New York University and executive director of frontier research at the Prescient Design team within Genentech Research & Early Development (gRED). Shirley Ho is Group Leader of Cosmology X Data Science at the Flatiron Institute of the Simons Foundation as well as Research Professor in Physics at New York University.Together with hosts Danny Crichton and Laurence Pevsner, we talk about the state of the art in AI today, how scientific discovery can potentially be automated with AI, whether PhDs are a thing of the past, and what the future of universities is in a time of funding cuts and endowment taxes.

Riskgaming is part of the broader movement known as wargaming, playful experiences designed to improve decision-making across domains like defense planning, business leadership and competitive analysis. It’s a burgeoning field, and it has now attracted its very own publication in the form of the Substack newsletter Wargaming Weekly. This week, I talk with the editor Rwizi Rweizooba Ainomugisha. He’s a wargaming fanatic based in Uganda, where he first started learning the gaming world in high school by building an underground casino. He then discovered gamification while working in B2B marketing before eventually entering the wargaming world as a player and now as a designer of two micro-games. He’s also a co-founder of the gamified fintech startup, Lupiiya Books. We talk about Rwizi’s background, how gamification is infiltrating all kinds of different fields, the rise of wargaming and the artificial delineations that still plague the field, the ebb and flow of strategic thinking, and finally, why solitaire games offer a unique on-ramp into this world.

In this episode, Danny Crichton and Laurence Pevsner do a special outdoor recording from Carmel, where they reflect on the successful launch of their latest game, Gray Matter, at multiple locations, including the Lux Leaders retreat. The hosts discuss the emergent gameplay that surprised them, from spontaneous character-driven debates to unexpected trading outcomes. They explore the game's core mechanics around information markets, attention economies, and strategic publication decisions—examining how players navigate the tension between keeping information proprietary versus making it public for advantage.

The conversation shifts to Southwest Silicon, their recently launched deep-dive simulation focused on Arizona's semiconductor industry and water security challenges. Danny and Laurence discuss how this immersive format differs from their larger salon experiences, highlighting the complex world of water rights in the American Southwest and how players grappled with resource allocation decisions that mirror real-world policy dilemmas.

Looking ahead, the hosts preview upcoming games exploring urban automation, critical mineral supply chains, university research funding, civil infrastructure security, and the future of international development institutions. They discuss their philosophy of using game design to model emerging technologies and reimagine institutional frameworks for an AI-driven future.