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 Orthogonal Bet sub-series with Sam Arbesman (which we will have more to share next year!). We’ve had technologists, spies, policymakers, CEOs, authors, artists and all around renaissance wunderkinds on the show this year, and so we wanted to take a step back and highlight the best moments of some of our episodes. With host Danny Crichton narrating, here’s the best 11 moments from 2024 as we head into the holidays.

Produced by ⁠⁠Chris Gates⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠George Ko⁠

We are really excited to announce the publication of our third and latest Riskgaming scenario, "Powering Up: China’s Global Quest for Electric Vehicle Dominance.” Designed by Ian Curtiss over the course of the last year, we started beta trials of the game a few months ago with dozens of playtesters and just hosted launch runthroughs across the United States in NYC, DC and SF as well as a worldwide tour in London, Romania and Tokyo. It was great fun bringing together dozens of policymakers, tech executives and journalists over the past few weeks.

While we previewed Powering Up on an episode back in October, now that we have played the game with so many diverse groups, we wanted to talk about some of the lessons learned from its design, the patterns of strategies we’ve witnessed among players and the wider implications of those strategies for how the world will change in the years ahead.

So we gathered together host Danny Crichton, Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner and Ian himself live in our Menlo Park studio to talk about all the results. Come tune in, and then sign up so you can play the next scenario we release in 2025.

Recently in the Riskgaming newsletter (“The Productivity Precipice”), host Danny Crichton wrote about one of the biggest challenges facing America: how many of our industries — and particularly those in construction and building — are becoming some of the least-efficient in the industrialized world. Today’s podcast episode identifies yet another problem, and it regards elevators.

Elevators aren’t just a conveyance of convenience, they are also crucial infrastructure for millions of Americans who struggle with mobility and anyone who has ever carried heavy luggage or groceries in or out of a building. Yet, the cost of America’s elevators is often multiple times more expensive than similar elevators in Europe and certainly Asia. Why?

That’s what we’ll discuss today with Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Center for Building, a think tank that studies building codes in global comparative context. His viral op-ed in The New York Times earlier this year has been read by everyone, and he’s continuing to do more research on how zoning and building codes collaborate to drive up prices for everyone. We’ll talk about that, as well as why America remains so suburban, the insider interests and negotiations that constrain construction efficiency, and why the West Coast is particularly bad for overhead.

Every quarter, Lux sends an update to our limited partners observing the macroeconomic environment, the changes in venture capital, and our current thinking regarding the present and future of science and technology. This time, we focused on “Titanic Lessons,” four classic parables from Greek mythology that elucidate our understanding of the world. Joining host Danny Crichton is letter writer Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital.

Whether it is Prometheus offering fire as a form of “extensionalism” that expands the bounds of human powers, or Atlas taking on the burdens of the world in pursuit of the next intrepid voyage, Josh discusses how new technologies can rapidly augment human potential — but only if they are unlocked and unleashed. Unfortunately, so many of the world’s best innovators remain shackled in research labs and corporate offices without the resources and autonomy to succeed. That’s where our four investment strategies of Lux Labs, corporate spin-offs, tactical global opportunities and fixware come in. We discuss the potential of each in turn.

Then there’s a wider set of warnings from Epimetheus and Menoetius, two Greek Titans whose arrogance and hubris would prove their downfall. We bring them up in the course of discussing the future of AI infrastructure, its expansive energy needs, the power of decentralized compute technologies and finally, the potential for Apple to emerge from behind as an AI winner.

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Dave Jilk. Dave is a tech entrepreneur and writer. He’s done a ton: started multiple companies, including in AI, published works of poetry, and written scientific papers. And he’s now written a new book that is an epic poem about the origins of Artificial General Intelligence, told from the perspective of the first such entity. It’s titled Epoch: A Poetic Psy-Phi Saga and is a deeply thoughtful humanistic take on artificial intelligence, chock-full of literary allusions.

Sam wanted to speak with Dave to learn more about the origins of Epoch as well as how he thinks about AI more broadly. They discussed the history of AI, how we might think about raising AI, the Great Filter, post-AGI futures and their nature, and whether asking if we should build AGI is even a good question. They even finished this fun conversation with a bit of science fiction recommendations.

Produced by⁠⁠⁠ ⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

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 with some drinks to boot. Joining host Danny Crichton is Lux’s Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner and our researcher, part-time columnist and all around utility handyman Michael Magnani.

We talk about the U.S. presidential election and which threats from our AI deepfake election security scenario DeepFaked and DeepSixed actually took place — and which didn’t. We then cover Germany’s sputtering industrial economy, the future of the war in Ukraine and trade tensions with China. Finally, we close out with a discussion of the three threats that the world isn’t thinking about today, and what should be done about them.

Anduril has become one of the most-watched companies in Silicon Valley, and for good reason. Its vertiginous rise from small hardware laboratory to next-generation defense prime has entranced engineers and investors alike, and it has also garnered an increasingly long record of success in Washington DC, including its victory in securing the U.S. Air Force’s flagship Collaborative Combat Aircraft contract earlier this year.

Yet for co-founder and CEO Brian Schimpf, the real magic of Anduril has been its ability to scale design, manufacturing and its culture from a dozen early employees to more than 4,000 today. Brian’s maniacal focus has been on ensuring that Anduril never becomes a legacy defense prime ploddingly delivering half-baked products to the disappointed faces of warfighters. Instead, he and his team have tenaciously strategized on business models, contract negotiations, tuck-in M&A, engineering culture and manufacturing centralization and decentralization to ensure that Anduril always offers the highest-quality and most cost-effective products in the marketplace.

Alongside Lux’s own Josh Wolfe, Brian talks about his own founding journey at Anduril, the company’s burgeoning portfolio of products, and how it’s rebuilding the arsenal of democracy in the years ahead through clever and strategic leadership.

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with the writer Henry Oliver. Henry is the author of the fantastic new book Second Act. This book is about the idea of late bloomers and professional success later in life, and more broadly how to think about one’s career, and Sam recently reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal. Sam really enjoyed this book and wanted to have a chance to discuss it with Henry.

Henry and Sam had a chance to talk about a lot of topics, beginning with how to actually define late bloomers and what makes a successful second act possible, from experimentation to being ready when one’s moment arrives. They also explored why society doesn’t really accept late bloomers as much as one might want it to, how to think about the complexity of cognitive decline, what the future of retirement might look like, along with many examples of late bloomers—from Margaret Thatcher to Ray Kroc.

Produced by⁠⁠ ⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠

Music by⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno

The sudden widespread usage of advanced artificial intelligence models has massively increased global demand for data centers that can handle inference and training. That’s been a boon for Nvidia’s stock, but it has also added massive new demands to our energy grid. Microsoft recently announced that it intends to re-open the ill-fated Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, while Google has announced investments and partnerships with nuclear startups like Kairos Power.

Yet, much of the obvious analysis of this market is far less obvious than meets the eye, or at least the eyes of Mark Mills. Across decades of studying the energy markets, Mark is currently a distinguished senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, and a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

We talk about the contradictions in much of today’s energy analysis, including the misdirection of attention toward AI instead of traditional compute which vastly dwarfs it; the misapplication of economic development incentives by cities and state to data center construction; and the misunderstanding of energy transitions — a mirage according to Mark since we are always seeking to expand all forms of energy to power our civilization.

Welcome to The Orthogonal Bet, an ongoing mini-series that explores the unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Hosted by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Samuel Arbesman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

In this episode, Sam speaks with Dominic Falcao, a founding director of Deep Science Ventures (DSV), which he created in 2016 after leading Imperial College London’s science startup program. Deep Science Ventures takes a principled and problem-based approach to founding new deep tech startups. They have even created a PhD program for scientists specifically geared towards helping them create new companies.

Sam wanted to speak with Dom to discuss the origins of Deep Science Ventures, as well as how to think about scientific and technological progress more broadly, and even how to conceive new research organizations.

Dom and Sam had a chance to discuss tech trees and the combinatorial nature of scientific and technological innovation, non-traditional research organizations, Europe’s tech innovation ecosystem, what scientific amphibians are, and the use of AI in the realm of deep tech.

Produced by⁠ ⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠

Music by⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & Suno