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PODCAST

Riskgaming

A podcast by venture capital firm Lux Capital on the opportunities and risks of science, technology, finance and the human condition. Hosted by Danny Crichton from our New York City studios.

technology

All Episodes

00:37:30

Can sports betting overthrow Iran?

Riskgaming ·

2026/01/28

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 three balls in the air at work, let alone track the balls across dozens of matches every weekend. But I’m an odd duck, since that is what Americans — and increasingly the world — do for entertainment. Nearly a majority of men in the United States have a sports betting account, and now the betting markets have opened to politics, culture and much more through

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00:37:28

The risks no one talks about

Riskgaming ·

2026/01/21

The world is overwhelmingly chaotic as the international system buckles. The practically placid era of cooperation that marked the 1990s and early 2000s is increasingly looking like a winner-takes-all competition among a handful of great powers, even as the world is succumbing to the opportunities of new technologies and the challenges of climate security. It all boggles, and that’s not even including all of the risks that don’t make it to the top of the charts.Lily Boland wants to help policymakers

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00:34:38

What are the origins of efficiency?

Riskgaming ·

2026/01/14

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 building over the course of many years. You might ask, “why’s it taking so long” as you traipse through a dirty sidewalk shed, frustrations mounting. You are not wrong, since construction has flatlined on efficiency even as other industries find ever novel ways to maximize productivity.The search for efficiency and its disappearance is at the heart of

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00:40:35

The long game of American reindustrialization

Riskgaming ·

2026/01/07

Reindustrialization is the word du jour in American policymaking circles. The hope is that a reinvigorated manufacturing base will bring back middle-class jobs and ensure our strategic autonomy in what looks like a tough century ahead. It’s a towering task, and it will take many strategic decisions to undo the last several decades of deindustrialization.One person who has made it his mission to fix America is Charles Yang. He most recently served in the Biden administration at the Department of

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00:56:28

11 Clips That Defined 2025

Riskgaming ·

2025/12/22

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

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00:38:18

Can software platforms reverse enshittification?

Riskgaming ·

2025/12/17

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

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00:43:23

The inside story of the billionaires fighting for space

Riskgaming ·

2025/12/10

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

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00:48:13

Why AI safety is like a bolt in a croissant

Riskgaming ·

2025/12/03

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

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00:39:40

How to be a polymath

Riskgaming ·

2025/11/19

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

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00:19:19

“Collaborating with the entire history of human...

Riskgaming ·

2025/11/12

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

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00:40:37

Europe, China and the future of open borders in science

Riskgaming ·

2025/11/05

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

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00:17:52

On the frontiers of research at the Lux AI Summit

Riskgaming ·

2025/10/29

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

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00:39:50

The present and future of wargaming

Riskgaming ·

2025/10/22

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

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00:26:22

Riskgaming State of the Union

Riskgaming ·

2025/10/01

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

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00:44:08

The global future of wargaming in Lithuania

Riskgaming ·

2025/09/24

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 increasingly being recognized by business, military and political leaders as a more authentic way to understand the behavior of people across all kinds of contexts. Competition, incentives, risk and decision-making flow together in a way that traditional policy memos and consultant-written PPTs can’t compare.That’s part of the work that Pijus Krūminas is

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00:27:53

Behind the scenes of our new scenario, Southwest Silicon

Riskgaming ·

2025/09/17

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 is today, because we are dropping Southwest Silicon to the world. It’s a game that models the tensions between residents, farmers as well as old and new industries in the context of the rise of chip fabs in Arizona. Water security is one of the most challenging and complex issues facing the American Southwest, and through the lens of nine characters in

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00:43:46

How compute and AI will create next-gen superapps

Riskgaming ·

2025/09/10

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 router presage a future of lobotomized AI responses driven more by compute efficiency than quality? Will new chip models be able to make up the difference? And how will OpenAI, which recently hired Fidji Simo from Instacart to become CEO of Applications, expand its revenue beyond API calls and consumer subscriptions?These are huge questions which will ricochet

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01:00:51

America’s degrowth lawyers need to learn from China

Riskgaming ·

2025/09/03

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 in Chongqing to the stupendous rate of its shipbuilding, housing construction and waterworks, China has shown that it can build like no other. That includes the just-announced Medog Hydropower Station, which at $167 billion would be one of the largest and most expensive construction projects ever seen. Behind all of this activity is a state organized

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00:38:17

The CIA in the 21st Century

Riskgaming ·

2025/08/27

Few agencies have been more central to global affairs than the aptly-named Central Intelligence Agency. Often shrouded in mystique both cultivated and unasked for, the agency has been at the center of some of the most important foreign policy successes of the United States — such as the search for bin Laden — and also some of the country’s gravest errors, including the Iraq War WMD debacle. Yet, the agency faces profound pressure today on what its present and future mission should be in a world of

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00:45:45

The challenges of complex risks in game design

Riskgaming ·

2025/08/20

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 don’t — and then carefully construct a landscape of decisions that has fidelity to the real world while not being overwhelming. Parsimony is key, and that means a designer really has to grok the fundamentals of the issue under hand to be able to offer the best experience.That’s where Randy Lubin shines. Through his studio Leveraged Play, he has designed

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184 results

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