Riskgaming

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 prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi.Will predictions become reality — or can reality be made to conform to predictions? That’s just part of the conversation I have with Dustin Gouker. Dustin is the writer of The Closing Line and The Event Horizon newsletters covering prediction markets and the sports betting landscape.He and I (Riskgaming host Danny Crichton) talk about why prediction markets remain a small sliver of betting, how new underwriting models are taking market share from incumbents, the interface between betting and parametric insurance (because why not?), why sports will always dominate the industry, how performativity is increasingly interacting with international relations, and whether betting markets can be optimized for propaganda value.

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 get a greater handle on these future risks, both to understand them individually and how they intersect with each other. She is the Strategic Foresight Fellow at the Converging Risks Lab of the Council on Strategic Risks. In that role, she designs unique foresight games that bring people together to explore alternative realities and their implication for our own.Alongside host Danny Crichton, the two talk about the techniques of foresight and how it differs from forecasting, what can be learned through games, how and why people change their mind, and what are the most under-reported risks that we should all pay more attention to.

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 Brian Potter’s new book, The Origins of Efficiency. Through the book by Stripe Press and his popular Substack newsletter Construction Physics, Brian has tried to explain to an angry if curious public how construction actually works in the real world and why it’s an industry both ripe for innovation yet also mired in antiquated techniques.With host Danny Crichton, the two talk about the challenges of construction, why the variability of site selection is a huge problem, the lack of economies of scale in construction, and the regulatory burdens plus NIMBYs that make building so difficult. Then the two talk about why Brian doesn’t think aesthetic uniformity has improved efficiency over time before talking about his writing process and how he does such in-depth research.

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 Energy, and spun off with the change of admins to start a new think tank called the Center for Industrial Strategy. He’s not just focused on research and publishing, but also building a network of likeminded souls who have the skills needed to bring industrial tech discussions into Washington. Through the Knudsen Fellowship, he is constructing cohorts of sophisticated and fervent believers that America can manufacture the future once again.With host Danny Crichton, the two discuss Charles’s transition from government service into Silicon Valley, the persistent cultural divide between engineering and politics, how to balance being a generalist versus a specialist, what think tanks really do, and how experiential tools like Riskgaming can change the policy discourse.

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 the most profound moments of the year, host Danny Crichton teamed up with Riskgaming’s producer Chris Gates to track down the very best clips from the podcast this year. From dozens of hours of episodes, here are our favorite minutes sprawled across 11 clips in one tidy package for your holiday listening.We don’t do a predictions episode — we’re too smart for that in this frenetic and ever-shifting world. If past is prologue, then these 2025 clips offer the best of what’s in store. Scary — and hopeful — times are ahead.