All Episodes
Riskgaming — 185 episodes
Trouncing career regret with famed VC Bill Gurley
Can sports betting overthrow Iran?
The risks no one talks about
What are the origins of efficiency?
The long game of American reindustrialization
11 Clips That Defined 2025
Can software platforms reverse enshittification?
The inside story of the billionaires fighting for space
Why AI safety is like a bolt in a croissant
How to be a polymath
“Collaborating with the entire history of human expression”
Europe, China and the future of open borders in science
On the frontiers of research at the Lux AI Summit
The present and future of wargaming
Riskgaming State of the Union
The global future of wargaming in Lithuania
Behind the scenes of our new scenario, Southwest Silicon
How compute and AI will create next-gen superapps
America’s degrowth lawyers need to learn from China
The CIA in the 21st Century
The challenges of complex risks in game design
Intel, chips and America’s future
What’s next for European defense autonomy
The future of science in an age of spending cuts
Can AI teach us critical thinking?
Finding a Third Way on the AI singularity
How Jane Jacobs got Americans stuck
What America can learn from the rebooting of Estonia
The relevant axis of political conflict is change versus stasis
Samuel Arbesman on his new book, The Magic of Code
Can we ever defend against agricultural warfare?
For America, is big or open best for AI models?
It’s really hard to get DC to understand Silicon Valley
Remembering Daniel Kahneman on optimism and self-confidence (Part 2)
How to turn around America’s tech-industrial decline, now
Remembering Daniel Kahneman on Risk, Bias and Decision-Making (Part 1)
Europe needs national champions, now
How can we make the internet fun again?
Making shoes isn’t the right strategy
The hyper-competition of U.S.-China trade relations
“You can cause a lot of havoc with a cell phone and a cheap DJI drone”
Why immersion — and not realism — is critical for wargaming
“We have an addiction to prediction”
“Every system can be gamed”
Americans are an incredibly generous people
How America holds it all together
Luck rules our lives, so why don’t we teach more about it?
How Russia is bringing the cost of global sabotage to zero
Can you (or DOGE) product manage the government?
The on-going collapse of the global commons
Which companies will suffer with globalization’s reversal?
Why financial booms and busts are the key to our progress
The Best of 2024
Introducing our new scenario, “Powering Up”
Why does America have the most expensive elevators in the world?
The Titanic Lessons of VC with Josh Wolfe
The Orthogonal Bet: Dave Jilk on AI, Poetry, and the Future of AGI
Elections, global threats and happy hour with the Riskgaming team
The future of defense manufacturing with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf
The Orthogonal Bet: Embracing Second Acts with Henry Oliver
The energy economics of our civilization’s digital cathedrals
The Orthogonal Bet: How deep science ventures redefines deep tech innovation
Introducing our new scenario, DeepFaked and DeepSixed
The Orthogonal Bet: Exploring the history of intelligence
Previewing our upcoming Riskgaming scenario, “Powering Up: China’s Global Quest for Electric Vehicle Dominance”
The Orthogonal Bet: The role of complexity in world-building
The dangers of our rapidly narrowing understanding of China
The Orthogonal Bet: The Wonders of Graph Paper and Algorithmic Art
Even with China’s rise, America’s best days are ahead
The Orthogonal Bet: Complex economics is applying complex systems methods
The Orthogonal Bet: Artificial Life and Robotic Evolution
From Satellites to Submarines: The Power of Open Source Intelligence in Global Conflict
Josh Wolfe: Our new world order is one where algorithms can wield as much influence as armies
The Orthogonal Bet: From Online Communities to In-Person Programming
The how and why of the most successful supply-chain attack in history
The Orthogonal Bet: The Art of Naming
AI is spiking chip design costs – can it solve them too?
The Orthogonal Bet: How to Navigate Complexity Within a Large Organization
Silicon Valley’s secret industrial spy war
The Orthogonal Bet: Bio Trajectories and the Importance of Long-Term Thinking
How games, god(s) and chance transformed human decision-making
The Orthogonal Bet: The Harsh Realities of the Soviet Space Program
The Orthogonal Bet: Understanding Embodied Intelligence
Radical Uncertainty, Rapid Learning and the Success Equation for Catching Up
The Orthogonal Bet: The Quest to Build the Fruitful Web
Industrial literacy and the fate of American progress
The Orthogonal Bet: : The Art of Cultivating Curiosity
Why engineers are using chaos to make computers more resilient
The Orthogonal Bet: Building a Fractal Combinatorial Trope Machine
How many trillions in damage would an invasion of Taiwan cost global GDP?
The Orthogonal Bet: Using Computational Biology to Understand How the Brain Works
Evolved Technology: Why technology is counter-intuitively pushing us back to natural products in pharma development
The Orthogonal Bet: What the Microsoft Outage Reveals
The Orthogonal Bet: The Quest to Find the Poetic Web
Pivoting to the Expert Economy
The Orthogonal Bet: What AI Can Learn from Human Cognition
Can we be optimistic about America’s future?
The Orthogonal Bet: Unveiling the Complexity of Life: A Conversation with Philip Ball on ‘How Life Works'
“The commons are under attack” from TikTok and subsea cables to data centers and elections
The Orthogonal Bet: How to fund R&D that is for the public good?
Is AI killing journalism? Pitchforks, Perplexity and reporters yelling “Boo!”
The Orthogonal Bet: SimCity, Maxis and the ambitious modeling of everything
Why high-throughput bio research needs better tools immediately
The Orthogonal Bet: Novelist Robin Sloan’s Love for Books with Maps on the First Page
How Applied Intuition used the Valley’s hardest lessons to upgrade automotive with autonomy
Orthogonal Bet: A technology vibe shift from utopian Star Trek to absurdist Douglas Adams?
The soon-to-be-solved protein problem that will accelerate drug discovery
Margaret Mead and the psychedelic community that theorized AI
The nightmare specter of designer bioweapons and the people trying to stop them
Lux and the Art of Startup Maintenance
The Zone of Totality with Sam Arbesman
Biology is becoming engineering and not just science
The three revolutions in astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life
“I am basically a cosmic Fluke” and the chaos of science, policy, and human narratives
How an anonymous blog during the neural network winter led to Japan’s national AI champion
The most wasteful infrastructure megaproject that wasn’t
The stove hasn’t changed in decades. It’s time to upgrade.
Astronauts all lie, but the biggest lie is that we will colonize Mars (Zach Weinersmith, Part 1 of 2)
Why a Mars settlement could never be a libertarian paradise (Zach Weinersmith, Part 2 of 2)
How Impulse Space’s Helios will democratize access to Earth’s farthest orbits
Why Tokyo’s Sakana AI is pioneering a new vanguard of national AI foundation models
WTF Happened in AI in 2023?
Eliot Peper's new novel 'Foundry' and the Future
Erik Hoel (part 2): Dreaming, AI, and the Future of Education
Erik Hoel (part 1): The Consciousness Winter
Techno-Pragmatism: Looking Beyond Blind Optimism and Hopeless Pessimism
AI: Disruption, Regulation, and the Road Ahead
Navigating the Crossroads: Technology, Democracy, and National Security with Miles Taylor
Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan on rebuilding trust between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon
Simulating Evolution: Playing God or the Next Frontier?
How many creators will survive generative AI?
We need to go deeper with the inception of deep geothermal energy
The Science of Survival: Adapting Human Life for Other Planets
The p-zombie theory of consciousness
Fertility Rules from wildfire sperm death and microplastics to the potential of AI w/ Leslie Schrock
“There are more astronauts alive than there are perfumers”: the complex supply chains of scents
“It subverts the structure even of other stories that are told about creation”
“Smell can be art, and it also can be science”: AI/ML and digital olfaction
How exponentials on top of exponentials in single-cell analysis is transforming biology today
First impressions of OpenAI’s new GPT-4 AI model
Chatphishing, veracity and “two years of chaos and a reset”
May the AI be ever in your favor
“That’s 100% what keeps me up at night”: Gary Marcus on AI and ChatGPT
Why quitters are heroes with “Quit” author Annie Duke
“I have three girls; the second one is bionic”
We will observe a battle for the true openness in AI
There’s always been a global race to develop chip technology
Perhaps our greatest achievement is not being present
Web3 is so far behind in terms of reliability and security
How to recapitalize America’s bloated defense industrial base
The utopian visions of Stanford’s generations of entrepreneurs
The geopolitics and digital future of agricultural commodities
Reputations are always a trailing indicator of truth
Crypto and incentive design with MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab’s Christian Catalini
VC 101: the denominator effect
How new communities are propelling the future of tech + bio
Maybe the world is effing amazing and I am just reading the wrong things
How health tech startups are responding to the post-Roe world?
The United States has never won a conflict with the hardware that it had going into it
How will AI art generators affect human creativity?
Shoving the rocket into space with your bare hands
Vaporware skepticism
Lazy tech analogies
Alternate Histories and GPT-3
Marginal Stupidity
The ESG Mirage
Jonathan Haidt on American structural stupidity and the post-Babel world (Part 1)
Jonathan Haidt on how tech can change social media and save democracy (Part 2)
Speculative fiction is a prism to understand people
Will Malthus or human ingenuity win out in these chaotic times?
If you’re not solving for pain, then what the hell are you doing?
Risk, Bias and Decision Making: Pre-mortems
Risk, Bias and Decision Making: People never change their minds
Risk, Bias and Decision Making: Defying the odds
Risk, Bias and Decision Making: Hot hands
Shredding the endowment investing playbook w/Scott Wilson, CIO of Washington University in St. Louis
The future of biotech is moving from bench to beach
Chip demand and the future of the climate with Mythic AI’s Mike Henry
Redlines for diplomacy and business with former USSOCOM commander Tony “T2” Thomas
The VC Power Law with CFR senior fellow Sebastian Mallaby
Is web3 really just looking for Web 2.5?
Josh Wolfe on “There will be chaos, and that chaos will be caused by people”
Rethinking the science of science funding with Sam Arbesman
Episode 01: Silicon Valley’s dependence on American foreign policy
Episode 0: A Pod is Born, Alife is Funded, and A Decade is Defined