Best of 2024

It’s all finally over

It was a year filled with milestones at Riskgaming in 2024, including the debut of our first scenario (and then numbers two and three), 47 newsletters and 69 podcast episodes plus several hundred of our Lux Recommends from across the Lux partnership.

I’ll list out my favorite newsletter columns and podcasts in a bit, but what were some other Riskgaming highlights this year?

• Building an AI election security riskgaming scenario for senior leaders of CISA and the Department of Homeland Security plus officials from across local and state governments.
• Hosting multiple three-star generals (including one who just got promoted to four stars), congressmen, think tank leaders and others around Pentagon procurement of AI technologies in partnership with Mike Bloomberg. “No Man’s Land” was my most synoptic game design ever, and it will be published publicly in early 2025.
• Giving a briefing down at Fort Liberty on AI and national security for the U.S. Army.
• Helping people all across the world host their own Riskgaming parties using our scenario materials available online on the Lux website.
• Recruiting and installing Laurence Pevsner as our new Director of Programming.
• Publicly launching our AI election security game in New York and DC with Senator Mark Warner.
• Lecturing and seminar-ing at Yale, Cornell and Wharton — I’m really excited by the energy and intense intellect of the next generation.
• Launching our China electric vehicle scenario by Ian Curtiss all around the world and having dozens of journalists, tech executives and policy leaders play out the future of the auto industry.
• Finally, great profiles and coverage of our Riskgaming scenarios in The Wall Street Journal, The Information, NBC News and Foreign Policy.

As always, please sign up for future runthroughs of our scenarios – we’d love to have you (yes, you!) at our next events.

The Best Newsletters of 2024

• Hochul Hokum — New York’s embarrassing governor became a laughing stock after reversing herself on congestion pricing and then reversing the reversal. Then she bombed at the Democratic National Convention. America’s most important state deserves better.
• TechCrunch+ Termination — I built up Extra Crunch (later rebranded to TechCrunch+ by over-paid marketing Yahoos) and then watched as the media economy and company leadership tore a multi-million-dollar business asunder. Here’s the inside story.
• TikTok Tantrum — TikTok appealed to the Supreme Court this week but in this column from March, I argued that moral grounds around free speech and market competition should be central in debates over the future of the Chinese company.
• Democratizing WMD — I continue to fight back against the notion that somehow access to bioweapons manufacturing can be restricted in any meaningful way in the age of AI. This column pushed back against a new benchmark, while reminding everyone of the near impossibility of censoring information that we can all look up in textbooks.
• Pacific Stratagems — It’s the Pacific century, and America still hasn’t mastered the tenor of a region at the center of the future. With South Korea’s president declaring and then un-declaring martial law this month, the crisis in U.S. diplomacy is only getting more acute.
• The closing door to global tech riches — AI is an extraordinary development; it’s also leaving emerging markets behind. They lack the energy, talent and compute resources to catch-up with the industrialized world, and no one knows how to build a path forward for the billions of people in these countries.
• AI and the Death of Human Languages — Almost all large language models are trained in English. So what happens with the thousands of human languages that are spoken by fewer people and lack the massive corpuses of data required for training? The answer is simply extinction – and so what can we do to save this diversity?
• America’s reindustrialization dilemma — America needs to reindustrialize, but exactly who should join? The dilemma is that we need millions of workers to move back into factories at precisely the moment those workers are trying to secure remote jobs and more balanced lifestyles.
• America’s mollycoddled industries – America used to be an industrial powerhouse, and then we protected our companies from global competition and guided them to failure in the international marketplace. We can’t make the same mistake again.
• The Productivity Precipice — Productivity is the alchemical magic of economics, making more out of less. But inefficiency is spiraling in industries from construction to defense, and immediate action is necessary to fix the crisis.
• “Founder Mode” is really Survivor Mode — Paul Graham’s essay unleashed a torrent of discussion earlier this year on the power of founders to run their companies. Here’s how I reconcile his notions with my own experience in venture and the tech industry.
• What’s Next? — Trump’s election surprised some and shocked others, but either way, we are in the unique position of having a returning president re-enter the White House. What’s going to happen to the future of economic policy? In short, everything is changing.

In addition to my favorites (heavily biased to my own writing, of course), two of our most trafficked Riskgaming articles this year were written by my colleagues:

• Grace Isford wrote “The Great Talent Dividend and NYC’s AI Opportunity,” which went viral around the web.
• Shahin Farshchi and our then summer associate Dario Soatto wrote a very popular piece on “The looming labor crisis in chip design.”

The Best Podcast Episodes of 2024

We covered a massive gamut of topics in 2024, while also introducing our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman’s sub-series The Orthogonal Bet. It’s hard to highlight all the great episodes we published this year, but these were some of my favorites:

• Astronauts all lie, but the biggest lie is that we will colonize Mars (Zach Weinersmith, Part 1 of 2) — Zach and his wife Kelly Weinersmith wrote A City on Mars, which won a bunch of awards this year. This is their bear case for human life on Mars.
• The most wasteful infrastructure megaproject that wasn’t — Ian Coss wrote a whole podcast series on the Big Dig in Boston, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in American history. Here’s his argument that it was actually a great deal.
• The three revolutions in astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life — Adam Frank, the author of The Little Book of Aliens, talked about the incredible science underway to find life on other planets.
• How Applied Intuition used the Valley’s hardest lessons to upgrade automotive with autonomy — Lux portfolio founders Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig talked about their unique approach to scaling a startup from the earliest days to one with hundreds of employees.
• Is AI killing journalism? Pitchforks, Perplexity and reporters yelling “Boo!” — Eric Newcomer and Reed Albergotti and I debate the future of media economics.
• The Orthogonal Bet: Unveiling the Complexity of Life: A Conversation with Philip Ball on ‘How Life Works' — Philip Ball is one of the great science communicators, and this podcast demonstrates why. His new book on biology is the only-book-you-need-to-read summary of the field as it currently exists today.
• How many trillions in damage would an invasion of Taiwan cost global GDP? — Gerard DiPippo of Bloomberg (who left his job yesterday, actually) talks about the costs of a potential Chinese blockade or invasion of Taiwan, and what that would portend for the global economy.
• Radical Uncertainty, Rapid Learning and the Success Equation for Catching Up — Oxford’s Paul Collier talks about how left-behind regions can find their footing and catch up with their more prosperous brethren.
• How games, god(s) and chance transformed human decision-making — Kelly Clancy wrote a delightful history of chance and dopamine in Playing with Reality. Here’s how the dopamine cycle, learning, and the historical invention of probability intersect.
• Silicon Valley’s secret industrial spy war — Zach Dorfman is one of my favorite journalists, and this was a delightful episode about a secret operation to prevent the Soviet Union from getting cutting-edge American compute (sound familiar?).
• The how and why of the most successful supply-chain attack in history — Nick Reese, inaugural director of emerging technology at the Department of Homeland Security, talks about the sophistication and operational challenges of Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah earlier this year.
• The dangers of our rapidly narrowing understanding of China — Randal Phillips was the former chief CIA representative in China and we talk about the operational difficulties of that environment and what the rise of Xi Jinping means for global understanding of China’s intentions.

Podcast: The Best of 2024

This year, we had technologists, spies, policymakers, CEOs, authors, artists and all around renaissance wunderkinds on the Riskgaming podcast, and so outside my favorite episodes listed above, I wanted to take a step back and highlight the best moments across dozens of hours. So in one complete package narrated by yours truly, here’s the best 11 moments from 2024 as we head into the holidays.

🔊 Listen to “The Best of 2024”

Lux Recommends

• David Yang and Sam Arbesman were terrified while reading Niko McCarty and Fin Moorhouse’s warning about “The Dangers of Mirrored Life” on Asimov Press. “A mirrored organism would use right-handed molecules everywhere a naturally-occurring organism uses left-handed ones, and vice versa. It could thus elude the typical chiral interactions by which microorganisms hunt their prey. A mirrored bacterium would be totally resistant to bacteria-infecting viruses, called bacteriophages (or just “phages”). It would also be undetectable by key parts of the human immune system. Such mirrored invaders could theoretically spread across the Earth while evading the biological defenses that have evolved to check such threats.”
• My excellent former TechCrunch colleague Rita Liao writes a plangent essay on Jordan Schneider’s ChinaTalk on “How My China Tech Beat Fell Apart.” “Many Chinese-founded startups I subsequently featured began asking me to downplay their Chinese ties. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I couldn’t unlearn the Chinese stories crucial to their success, nor abandon journalistic principles — but I could see the harm arising from discussing them in detail. I felt increasingly conflicted. The stories I wanted to tell — about their upbringing, overseas education, investor network, engineering talent, and work ethic — were all tied to their Chinese background. But these became taboo topics that could unfairly subject them to scrutiny from foreign governments over alleged national-security threats.”
• Sam loved Virginia Postrel’s essay in the latest edition of Works in Progress on “The world of tomorrow.” “To understand the disillusionment with progress that took hold a half century ago, we have to understand why progress seemed glamorous in the first place and what its grace obscured. What exactly was its allure and to whom? What was the nature of its illusion? Only then can we consider how progress might recover its glamour and what the risks might be if it does.”
• Regular Riskgaming reader Josh Zoffer proffers his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on how the popularity of timelines and the multiverse in political discourse is changing how we understand reality. “French philosopher Jean Baudrillard popularized the term ‘hyperreality’ in the 1980s to describe the postmodern condition in which reality and fiction become blurred as simulated experiences come to feel more authentic than the real world. Today, it’s the inverse: The chaos of reality often feels impossible to reconcile with our expectations of social order.”
• Sam recommends Sarah Constantin’s essay “The Dream Machine” on the need for (at least some) admin work. “But occasionally people go overboard and demonize all administrative work, or make fun of ‘email jobs’ or project managers, as though you could do without this sort of organizational work altogether. This is unrealistic. Without organizational work — without someone making sure all the pieces come together, which, yes, usually is done through emails and Zoom calls — projects that involve multiple people simply do not get done. I am literally an administrator right now, and I consider it an honorable and necessary role in the context I’m in. While sclerotic institutions do suffer from too much administration, I’m convinced that a lot of potential ambitious donor-funded projects fail to get off the ground in the first place because of too little (aka zero) administration and infrastructure. That’s what RenPhil is trying to fix. Philanthropy is work; we do the work.”
• I am very worried about the state of American literacy, which is why Natalie Wexler’s article “Scores for Adults Are Dropping on Tests of Basic Skills” is so alarming. “But the connection between scores for adults and those for kids isn’t clear-cut. For one thing, the tests are trying to measure somewhat different things. Beyond that, if recent developments in the U.S. education system were to blame for the decline in adult scores, you would expect to find the steepest decline among younger adults, who emerged from that system more recently. In fact, though, it was older adults whose scores declined the most. Those aged 55 to 65 went down eight 8 points in numeracy, compared to 7 points for those aged 16 to 24 and 5 points for those aged 25 to 34. In literacy, the oldest adults declined by a full 16 points, compared to 11 and 14 points for the two youngest cohorts. Another complicating factor is that the decline in scores is also happening in other countries with different education systems.”
• Finally, for something happy and cheery for the holidays, the series finale of Star Trek: Lower Decks aired on Paramount+ this week. Sam says, “This show is a delight and a treasure, and is essentially a love letter to Star Trek fans.” As a Trekkie myself, I have unfortunately missed the run, but hey, that’s the beauty of streaming and a very long holiday. See you all in 2025!

Finally…

We’ll be on hiatus for a few weeks — see you in 2025! As for 2024, I’ll let our U.S. General CEO who suddenly learned that his tax credits from the Chinese government would be ‘accidentally’ rescinded express my feeling:

That’s it, folks. Have questions, comments, or ideas? This newsletter is sent from my email, so you can just click reply.