One thing I love about design is that you can never be done. There is always something to improve in a product, technology, novel, etc. Just made a massive improvement to my game Hampton at the Cross-Roads from a suggestion – why didn't I think of this great improvement before?

I just learned that the U.S. is 30th in the world for public bathrooms per capita. Can we get a Make America Poop Again (MAPA) initiative going? (for those curious, Iceland is apparently number one)

New post: Why adversarial ambiguity makes prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi extraordinarily challenging to operate. Words like "invasion" and "war" are intentionally avoided in order to not trigger their consequences. Example: The U.S. hasn't declared war since WWII

New post from me: why countries like Korea have learned the art of the straddle and how to extract tech, wealth and influence from the great powers without getting pulverized. Link below:

First essay from me for 2026: "Our 'just take it' era" – The Hobbesian nightmare stealing positive-sum growth, covering Venezuela, California's wealth tax, my home state of Minnesota's welfare fraud, Park Chan-wook, Battle Royale and venture growth. Link below:

After 15 years in and around VC, I still have one person to thank for getting me started, and that's Niko Bonatsos. He "discovered" me, got me my first job, mentored me and has remained a great friend. Few are made like him in VC. Excited for his next steps: www.wsj.com/articles/ea...

41 books, 26 movies, 32 live theater performances and thousands of essays later, these are my culled favorites from 2025: www.dannycrichton.com/2025/12/31/...

Check out your top reads of the year: including parties, lying, AI, Zelda, Legos and more. riskgaming.substack.com/p/your-top-...

This is a good read on the AWS outage and how such events will become more common. I'd agree that's probably inevitable and individually we can only seek to "survive" them - but I wonder if they'll happen often enough that companies will see uptime during them as a competitive advantage?

Top reader click of the year: JA Westenberg’s “Boarding Group One,” on how airline boarding groups have become a perfect microcosm of our status-obsessed culture. www.riskgaming.com/i/181733882...

"Throughout history it’s been said that mathematics is the language of nature, but I couldn’t even grasp something as simple as the relationship between the language of mathematics and the laws of the physical world." Close out your year with Karl Ove Knausgård. www.riskgaming.com/i/181733882...

Like Spotify Wrapped, but for Riskgamers: riskgaming.substack.com/p/your-top-...

LegoGPT is an AI tool to help you generate LEGO structures from text prompts. What would you build first? youtu.be/b4Bq1EF1EB4

Just watch. It doesn't even matter if you're a Zelda fan. youtu.be/gcS1HIci4hQ

Din Tai Fung, which debuted in the United States as a family-run suburban LA strip mall restaurant 25 years ago, is now America’s highest-earning restaurant chain. www.riskgaming.com/i/181733882...

Making the stock equity of defense primes less valuable is a very weak and roundabout way to push them to be more efficient. Perhaps just holding them accountable to the costs and timelines they sign on the dotted line in procurement would be a lot easier?

Airport lounges may be the truest mark of modernity there is. www.riskgaming.com/i/181349587...

World models are extremely important to the future of AI. They allow for rapid and parallel learning, and can help AI agents learn edge cases faster and more realistically than other approaches. Excited to see Runway launch their first world model: techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/...

The future of the biolab and the life sciences is parallelized automation. We shouldn't be running one experiment at a time, but rather thousands all at once. That's why I am so excited for what Medra is building. Excited they have $52M to keep building: www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...

How much of our sleep problems can really be blamed on light pollution? www.riskgaming.com/i/180714225...

Fix your life by fixing typewriters? Appealing www.riskgaming.com/i/180714225...

Zen and the art of typewriter maintenance from the NYT: www.riskgaming.com/i/180714225...

We're already losing the AI battle. www.riskgaming.com/i/180714225...

A former FBI agent just spent years tracking down a North Korean hacker who ransomed a Kansas hospital. Then he offered them a job building a crypto casino. www.riskgaming.com/i/179468812...

Check out Brian Moore's new project: Every minute, nine different AI models are asked to generate a new analog clock showing the current time. The results have me puzzling over what, exactly, makes this exercise so complicated. www.riskgaming.com/i/179468812...

Internet writing needs more feedback. If you’re an intellectual and someone tells you you’re wrong, it galvanizes you, it goads you. www.riskgaming.com/p/how-to-be...

Lessons from a new wargame: By forcing players to take on the Chinese perspective, the exercise exposed a blind spot in U.S. military planning — we neglect China’s incentive to pursue coercive strategies that exploit American political hesitancy www.riskgaming.com/i/178807966...

Fascinating new war game from Syracuse University: What would happen if you were forced to inhabit the Chinese calculus on Taiwan. www.riskgaming.com/i/178807966...

My latest interview: Kirby Ferguson and Ale Matamala Ortiz on the economics of the film industry and the recession in Los Angeles; why filmmaking would have changed even without the rise of AI; how to think about remixing; and the future of art. open.spotify.com/episode/13V...

The transition from sci-fi to sci-fact is underway with xenotransplantation. This is what happens when you bring the best scientists in the world to bear on the problem: human-made magic becomes possible. NYT on the optimism for 100,000s of patients: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/...

Chatted EU-China ties & future of intl science collab w/ old friend & @dannycrichton.com on Lux Capitol’s latest podcast. #foresight #science #China #EU #geopolitics #wargaming #strategy podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/r...

Read more about Majestic and what they are doing here: www.cnbc.com/2025/11/10/...

AI will require a much better server architecture to improve the price-performance envelope. The forcing function to make fundamental changes to old models hasn't been there – until now. That's why Lux invested behind Majestic and the future of the server: www.cnbc.com/2025/11/10/...

Thinking, fast and slow www.riskgaming.com/i/177567986...

Does AI "think"? Robin Sloan says we cheapen the term when we say it does. www.riskgaming.com/i/177567986...

Christopher Leonard's deeper dive on the problems in the U.S. defense manufacturing sector is a real-life version of our Riskgaming scenario “Hampton at the Cross-Roads.”

China’s Belt and Road strategy Part Deux: DeepSeek is dominating Africa’s emerging AI market by offering open-source models that are dramatically cheaper and require less computing power than American versions. www.riskgaming.com/i/177567986...

Contra the Trump team, modern wars are won through industrial production capacity and logistics rather than battlefield valor. www.riskgaming.com/i/177567986...

The Economist has declared “the end of the rip-off economy.” You know who is benefitting besides consumers? Sabatuers for hire and their patrons. www.riskgaming.com/p/make-gray...

The problem with aging is that you eventually become out-of-sync with the youth. Like, if you had told me that a panel on VC secondary transaction mechanics and legalities would sell out, I'd ask to see your fentanyl dealer in Washington Square Park. Secondaries are the new primaries!

We've let our adversaries get away with too much, for too long. Time to make gray-zone war expensive again. www.riskgaming.com/p/make-gray...

Democratic countries can’t keep taking blow after blow from adversaries with nary an attempt at a hybrid-war response. Here's what we have to do: www.riskgaming.com/p/make-gray...

More on EnduroSat via Reuters: www.reuters.com/science/sat...

Europe deserves a cutting-edge sovereign satellite installation capability. That's why Lux and our friends are excited to invest $104 million today into EnduroSat, which will help the company build out its new space center and increase capacity. More: finance.yahoo.com/news/enduro...

Major partnership + $50M investment from Lockheed Martin into Saildrone, which will add $LMT's air-to-ground missile launchers onto Saildrone's unmanned surface ships. Affordable, capable, and ready-to-go – that's the future of defense. More here: breakingdefense.com/2025/10/loc...

Mamdani should not be denaturalized or deported. Instead, small-d democratic voters should look at his economic record and divisiveness and simply reject it. People have the power to determine the future of NYC at the ballot box, and they should use it

As American power relatively declines economically, scientifically, industrially, and technologically, we have to use our abundant resources (energy, innovation, talent) ever more effectively to compete. America's assets + credible strategy = long-term 21st century success

It's really hard to see how America can stay the biotech superpower of the world this century against China when we can't even get Tylenol right

Get ready for “EtherHiding,” a novel technique that stores malware in blockchain smart contracts to make it nearly impossible to take down through traditional methods. North Korea is apparently all over it. www.riskgaming.com/i/176924823...

This seems like a worthy effort: GiveDirectly is piloting a program that uses Google’s AI-powered flood forecasting system to deliver cash payments to vulnerable Bangladeshi farmers up to four days before floods hit. www.riskgaming.com/i/176924823...