Riskgaming

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Can we ever defend against agricultural warfare? Jun 06, 2025

Show notes

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.

For America, is big or open best for AI models? May 30, 2025

Show notes

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.

It’s really hard to get DC to understand Silicon Valley May 23, 2025

Show notes

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.

Remembering Daniel Kahneman on optimism and self-confidence (Part 2) May 16, 2025

Show notes

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.

How to turn around America’s tech-industrial decline, now May 08, 2025

Show notes

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.

Remembering Daniel Kahneman on Risk, Bias and Decision-Making (Part 1) Apr 30, 2025

Show notes

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 needs national champions, now Apr 25, 2025

Show notes

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

How can we make the internet fun again? Apr 19, 2025

Show notes

Something is rotten in the state of the internet. Social networks that were once meant to be entertaining diversions have become riven with vituperative political combat that leaves all but the most blinkered acolytes running for the safety of a funny YouTube channel. Bots swarm through the discourse, as do trolls and other bad actors. How did we let such a crucial communications medium become enshittified and can we build something else in its stead?

Joining host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner is Renée DiResta. She is a leader in the field of internet research and is currently an Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown. She’s written recently on the surges of users migrating from one internet platform to another, as well as on the future of social platforms in the age of personal agentic AI.

Today, the three of us talk about how social networks like X, Reddit, Bluesky and Mastodon are each taking new approaches to mitigate some of the dark patterns we have seen in the past from social media. We then talk about how the metaphor of gardening is useful in the course of improving the internet, and finally, how private messaging spaces are increasingly the default for authentic communication.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko

Making shoes isn’t the right strategy Apr 12, 2025

Show notes

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 relieve them of stress. At the heart of the vociferous debate around tariffs and trade is nothing less than the future economy of the United States. What should be built here? What should we outsource? Who pays for that new economic structure?

Joining host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner is Josh Zoffer. Josh was formerly special assistant to President Biden for economic policy, and today, he’s a principal at Clocktower Ventures. He’s penned a number of recent op-eds on trade policy and global interconnectedness (as well as one on the rise of metaverses).

The three talk about all of the news this past week around tariffs, what kind of manufacturing we want in America, why globalization remains critical, the challenges of administrability, workforce development and finally, why it is so hard for governments to take on high-risk investing in emerging technologies.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko

The hyper-competition of U.S.-China trade relations Apr 04, 2025

Show notes

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 tariffs as well as changes to the de minimis parcel rule, the export-led development model that has led China to great wealth is now under serious threat. What should we learn from the past of U.S.-China relations in order to understand their future?

Joining host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner are Neil Thomas and Kate Logan of the Asia Society Policy Institute. Neil is a fellow and researches the elite politics and political economy of China, while Kate is director of the China Climate Hub and Climate Diplomacy. They have written extensively on China’s industrial strategy and foreign relations, and even more notably, they both participated in the launch of our Chinese electric vehicle Riskgaming scenario Powering Up in Washington DC back in December.

We talk about their experiences playing the game, and why processing information overload is a crucial skill, particularly in competitive markets like cleantech. Then we talk about the lessons of China’s manufacturing rise, why America ignored its industrial strategy for so long, and how U.S. policymakers and business leaders can approach the future of the most critical trade relationship in the world.

Produced by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Christopher Gates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠George Ko

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