It’s the end of 2025, the holidays are here, and that means it’s time to recap what was an extraordinarily busy and crazy year for the world. We published about 45 episodes this year ranging from espionage, security and defense to the breakthroughs at the heart of artificial intelligence, space technology, hardware and more. With so much material, I wanted to bring additional attention to some of my favorite moments on the podcast in 2025. I’ve selected 11 clips that I think are both profound and also show the breadth of the Riskgaming cinematic universe.
1.
First up, Europe may be a technological backwater, but it is the center of the geopolitical world. Here’s Laurence Pevsner chatting with Marko Papic, the chief strategist at BCA Research, about Europe’s adaptability in the face of threats like Russia.
Pressure makes diamonds. That’s what I would say. I think our two oceans have made us fat and lazy in many ways, geopolitically at least… I think that pressure makes diamonds. I mean this is what human history tells us.
2.
Europe, and particularly the European Union, seems like one big stream of regulatory ooze. Well, America is hardly immune to the same depredations as Yoni Appelbaum makes clear. In his book Stuck, he describes how housing growth has halted in vast regions of the United States, forcing Americans to stay in place rather than seek opportunity elsewhere. Here, Yoni talks about the history of zoning and some very Riskgaming-esque incentive patterns in local communities.
One of the stories, one of the arcs I trace in the book, as you say, is that wherever you get a polity which gives a local community the power to police who gets to belong to that community, over time, it will tend toward exclusion, and there’s a very good reason for this. Even if it is populated by a band of angels, the politicians who are running that community, the members of that community will prioritize the interests of long-term residents over the interests of prospective residents.
3.
Democracy versus authoritarianism is a challenge we discussed repeatedly in 2025. To what degree in a democracy like America should we quote-unquote just build, at the expense of endless due process. One of the most popular books on the subject came from Dan Wang’s book Breakneck, which chronicled his six years in China through the Covid-19 pandemic. Here’s Dan on China versus the U.S.
As a meta point I would say, let’s think a little bit more about what it is that people really want. Maybe sometimes it is the case that they want to feel that the contract on how to build the subway and who is subcontracting, that process is fair, but maybe often what they care the most about is having that new subway at all.
4.
These debates about governance are high-minded, but we also live in a whole new world where terrorists have highly-scaled access to cheap drones and generative AI that’s revolutionizing their businesses. We talk defense the next few clips, first with Colin P. Clark, who is a Senior Research Fellow at The Soufan Center. He talks about how technology is radically lowering the barriers to global terrorism.
Technology is changing the way that we look at terrorism, tremendously. I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg. And so there’s often a lag effect to these things. And in general, terrorists tend to be early adopters, right? Because technology can be what we call a force multiplier. So if you are a small insurgent group based in the Sahel in West Africa, and you’re now tinkering around with generative AI that can set it and forget it in terms of your propaganda, you’ve now freed up a significant amount of manpower hours to go do what terrorists do, which is plan, plot, and conduct attacks.
5.
It’s not just non-state actors like terrorist networks that are taking advantage of the enabling power of technology. Even large nation-states like Russia are updating their models, taking advantage of cheap freelancer labor to revolutionize the clandestine war behind Europe’s front lines. Next up, we have Daniela Richterova, a Senior Lecturer in Intelligence Studies at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, talking about the “gig economy of Russian Sabotage”.
We’re seeing a shift from these well-trained and tested agents executioners to basically amateurs who are being recruited in all walks of life from all sorts of countries. There was one from Latin America, a number of Eastern Europeans who were recruited, but also other nationals, some western nationals as well. And from what we saw, this recruitment happens online now, and that’s where the whole gig economy idea comes from. Google platform such as Telegram, these individuals are able to basically volunteer for a job.
They are told how much this job would cost, where this would take place. They’re not always told what the purpose is. They can bid for a job as if they were an Uber driver.
6.
Russia is adapting its espionage playbook by cutting costs and outsourcing its activities to third parties. Meanwhile, China is fully embracing the digital- and data-centric world that we find ourselves in. The country’s aggressive counterintelligence program has cost the CIA and its assets dearly. Next, we have Tim Weiner talking about his new book, “The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century” and how the agency is struggling to adapt its tradecraft.
Espionage in an age of ubiquitous technical surveillance is a whole new thing, and the American intelligence community has been desperately trying to stay at the curve or ahead of the curve in AI and particularly in quantum computing.
7.
Sabotage and skullduggery are changing rapidly in 2025, with countries taking advantage of new forms of hybrid warfare that allow them to sap their enemy’s capacity without attribution. One new domain of concern is agricultural security, which can be easily and wrongly confused with food security. Here is our Riskgaming scenario design consultant Ian Curtiss talking to Alicia Ellis, professor at the Global Security program at Arizona State University, about why ag security is an emerging new threat we should all be worried about.
If you’re talking about agriculture, economic warfare or cyber information and narrative warfare, all of these things are not simple responses. Most of them don’t even traditionally fall under the purview of the Department of Defense, so who handles it? Especially when you’re talking about agencies that don’t typically think of it from a security perspective. So those hybrid threats are almost perfectly designed to not so much counter as slip past the way US systems are designed to respond to threats.
8.
Let’s pivot a bit from the world of espionage to the world of defense primes. War came to Europe when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. The stasis that was the hallmark of Europe’s post-Cold War defense infrastructure has since flowed away, and a vital new energy has been restored on the Old Continent. Mirroring some of Marko Papic’s views on the dynamism of Europe, here is Eric Slesinger, founder and general partner of 201 Ventures, talking about European defense autonomy and its new wave of startups.
There are things that European founders are watching happen in the US and doing differently. As an example of that, a lot of the M&A heavy capital intensive plays in the US, I think European founders are asking if there’s enough ground support for that to actually work in Europe. Are there enough acquisition targets? Is there enough capital to be formed to be able to do that strategy? I think that’s going to be a little bit different.
9.
Eric was mostly talking about defense startups and the funding required to get them to scale in Europe. Over here in America though, we have a bigger problem: how to protect critical companies like Intel and its fabs. The U.S. government swooped in to buy 10% of Intel’s equity this year, a shocking change to the traditional libertarian views of the Republican Party. Was it the right choice? Dylan Patel, founder and CEO of Semianalysis, joined to talk about the hard choices for the U.S. on semiconductors.
I don’t like state capitalism either. I think that’s a terrible idea. We win by being an economy that’s competitive and an economy that is capitalistic. And there’s certain ways to do state investment into industries that actually improves that, right? Look no further than Chinese auto. It is the most cutthroat competitive market in the world. Yes, there are some SOEs, yes, there were a lot of subsidies, but actually it’s extremely competitive, which is why prices are falling so fast and which is why they’re out-innovating any of the traditional auto OEMs in the world.
10.
We finally made it to chips! Artificial intelligence, of course, was the major theme of 2025, a watershed year when AI diffused into more and more workflows and it became clear that everything is going to change in the years ahead. But how will humans co-exist with AI? That’s the question Jacob Ward explores in his work, including his book “The Loop.” Here we talk about the cognitive harms of AI and surveillance, and how those harms might be ameliorated.
Once upon a time, if you asked your average cigarette smoker in 1957, “do you like cigarettes? Do you want to keep going with the cigarettes?” They’d say, “Yeah, it’s a positive refresher. I love this cigarette. This is a fantastic experience.” The enthusiasm we will have as people for the experience of the product is not going to be, I think, the right measure of whether that product is okay to be selling to people.
11.
Privacy is a major challenge on the web, and it’s not getting any better with AI. But that doesn’t mean smart builders and hackers aren’t trying to improve the status quo. To close us out for 2025, here’s famed internet researcher Renée DiResta talking about the 2026 midterms and what new tech like generative AI will mean for the future of elections.
My friend Katie Harpeth has this phrase, panic responsibly. You don’t want to say, “Oh, the sky is falling and everything’s going to be terrible.” I think this was for the 2024 election. I think it was important to say, these are the risks. This is what could happen. Recognizing that this could happen, how do we think about mitigating it if it does, or making the public aware that there’s potential there? I think that’s responsible risk management. Let’s just educate as many people as we can about this.
Well, from the economics of Europe and China, to the security threats of the gig economy and digital authoritarianism, to the next generation of hybrid war and onwards to chips, AI and the future of the internet, we had a whirlwind of topics to discuss on the Riskgaming podcast in 2025. I am sure 2026 will be so quiet that we won’t know what to talk about. For now though, enjoy the holidays, and listen again soon. I’m Danny Crichton, and my f’ing god, we’re done with another season.