The chess community was rife with drama and speculation going into what is known as the Candidates Tournament. Was the American Twitch streamer Hikaru Nakamura’s qualification legitimate? Would the perennial contenders Fabiano Caruana or Anish Giri break through? Or perhaps, per the Reddit memes, the heavy underdog Matthias Blübaum might shock the world by making chess history with a perfect sweep?

The result: Javokhir Sindarov, the twenty-year-old unibrow prodigy from Uzbekistan, took the tournament by storm. In his very first game, Sindarov found himself in a poor position against Esipenko. But Esipenko miscalculated and blundered, and Sindarov capitalized and won. He never looked back — with six wins, eight draws, and zero losses, he dominated with the highest ever overall score in this era of the Candidates.

Of course, if there had been an AI player in the tournament, it would have won every single game.

And yet, the existence of ultra-dominant AI has not destroyed the game or people’s interest in it, both to play socially and as fans. In fact, chess has never been more popular in its 1,500 year old history.

But AI has radically altered the nature of the game. Every top player uses AI engines extensively in their studies — and instead of sapping the game of its creativity, watching the way Leela or Stockfish (top chess engines) play has made human players more creative and more aggressive.

It has also introduced a culture of suspicion. Accusations of cheating have flooded the game, leading (most likely) to the death by suicide of one of the sport’s foremost players and commentators last year.

Understanding how AI has shaped the chess world may reveal a lot about what the rest of us — writers, coders, artists, thinkers, and human beings — can come to expect from AI: as a tool, as a competitor, and as a major epistemological crisis.

Exactly thirty years ago, the world chess champion Garry Kasparov faced off against IBM’s Deep Blue. At that point, chess AI was in what I’d call the uncanny valley of ability. It was very, very good. But could it beat the world’s best player, arguably the greatest player anyone had ever seen?

In 1996, no. Well, kinda. It won two games, but ultimately lost 4-2. Humanity triumphed. But the next year, they faced off again. Deep Blue won. Kasparov was particularly shaken by an unexpectedly brilliant move in Game 2 that he thought was too “human-like” to be possible. It’s funny now to think about Kasparov accusing IBM of cheating…by using humans! (In reality, later analysis showed Kasparov was partially right — the move made no sense for a computer — but was chosen because of a bug, where the computer, evaluating too many options, chose a move at random.)

Thereafter, the AIs took off, and left us mere mortals in the dust. And what should have meant the end of humans playing chess…never came. Surprisingly, the fact that AIs could do better simply wasn’t that relevant. The competition anxiety faded because AIs were so much better that there was no point in comparing. Who wants to see a race between a flea and a fighter jet?

What fans hungered for was the humanity of the game — how it feels to beat your friend with a smothered mate, the pitter-patter of your heart as you watch your favorite player execute an elegant rook sacrifice or miss the one winning line (which you know because you’re following along with an AI engine).

But while chess players no longer saw AI as a competitor, it still had a major consequence for the culture: it made human performance unverifiable. Recently, there have been two high-profile cheating accusations, which serve as strange mirror cases of one another.

The first started in 2022, in St. Louis (America’s chess capital) at one of the most prestigious tournaments in the world. A nineteen-year-old American, Hans Niemann, shocked everyone by beating former world champion Magnus Carlsen, ending his 53-game unbeaten streak. The next day, Carlsen withdrew from the tournament and posted a cryptic meme tweet: “If I speak, I am in big trouble,” which everyone read as an accusation.

The chess world exploded. A meme proliferated on Twitch claiming Niemann cheated using anal beads to receive engine moves via vibrations. It spread — soon Elon Musk was promoting it. Suddenly people who had never thought about chess once in their life were making jokes about Niemann.

What followed was messy: Niemann admitted to cheating online as a teenager, Chess.com published a damning report, and a $100 million lawsuit was filed and quietly settled with no one admitting wrongdoing.

Last week, a new Netflix documentary dropped that added more layers. Carlsen admitted there’s been no evidence of Niemann cheating offline — but he also describes the logic that trapped him, and has trapped the whole chess community. Once Carlsen knew that Niemann had previously cheated online, for Carlsen, that was “the confirmation that I needed. This guy is cheating.”

Four years later, there’s no satisfying resolution, just an air of ambiguous impropriety that no one knows how to settle. The culture and the community could neither convict nor acquit any of the parties involved.

The second story, instead of being a tragicomedy, is just tragic.

Daniel Naroditsky was a beloved figure in the chess community. A strong grandmaster, at 29 he was a hugely popular YouTube and Twitch streamer, whose commentary introduced the game to a new generation. He was universally respected and admired by fans and peers alike.

That is, until October of 2024, when Vladimir Kramnik — a former world champion from the early 2000s — began a vicious campaign of “just asking questions” about Naroditsky’s astounding speedchess results. Chess.com had already banned Kramnik from prize tournaments for spreading baseless rumors about other players.

There was no evidence, and likely no truth to Kramnik’s insinuations. But soon the mobs of online hate came, and despite most other grandmasters dismissing the accusations, the situation deeply wounded Naroditsky. After all, Kramnik wasn’t just any player: he was one of his heroes, someone he’d looked up to as a child.

In his final Twitch stream, Naroditsky referred to his reputation: “That is all I have.” He was devastated that, in his words, one of the most influential people in chess believed he was “a completely morally bankrupt individual.”

Naroditsky was found dead at his home in North Carolina three days after the stream. The chess world was shook. I watched Nakamura break down crying as he spoke to his Twitch audience. Carlsen said he regretted not saying publicly sooner that he didn’t believe Naroditsky cheated. Kramnik expressed “sadness” for his death, but denied responsibility and claimed that he, himself, was the victim of a bullying campaign. No resolution, just devastation.

Chess entered the uncanny valley of ability thirty years ago. Writing, art, code, music, academic work — they all entered about three years ago. And the early symptoms are the same: accusations of using AI are wielded like weapons, detection tools don’t work reliably, and institutions don’t know how to adjudicate the mess.

Last month, a writer tweeted about a New York Times Modern Love column that seemed suspicious to her: “I don’t want to falsely accuse writers of AI-use,” she wrote. “But this reads EXACTLY like AI slop.” The original tweet, of course, embodies the problem. We don’t want to falsely accuse people, but sometimes we do. (In this case, the writer copped to using AI for editorial feedback — which in my opinion seems reasonable, but the writing did have the argot of LLMs.)

If that murkiness is akin to the Niemann case, then the mirror case is Ben Moran, the Vietnamese digital artist who spent over 100 hours creating a fantasy book cover in Photoshop, but was immediately banned from Reddit’s r/Art for violating their “no AI art” rule. When he appealed and offered to share the raw PSD file for proof, the moderator responded: “Even if you did ‘paint’ it yourself, it’s so obviously an AI prompted design that it doesn’t matter.” He was told to “find a different style.”

The big difference between AI in chess and AI in real life is that it’s obvious how AI ought to be used in chess, even if some people can’t resist the temptation to cheat. The goal in chess is to win the game (and, perhaps, to create beauty while doing so) without using outside help. But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using an AI engine to study or prepare. In fact, it would be malpractice not to.

The same can’t be said for using AI in other aspects of life, where both the goals and the way the technology can help you are hotly debated. When the Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle tweeted about how she used AI to do research, transcription, thesis pushback, trimming, and fact checks, she became the “main character” of Twitter as other writers piled onto her for outsourcing what they perceived as critical aspects of writing. We not only have a verification problem, we can’t even agree on what kinds of usage we should be checking against.

Where does that leave us? Looking back at chess: Yes, the culture is now fraught with cheating suspicions and allegations — and the community has no way to solve it. But also: Chess has survived. Indeed, the game itself is richer, more beautiful, and more varied. And Sindarov’s historic performance, inspiring youngsters around the world, was built on engine preparation. The AI tools made him and everyone at the tournament better, even as it nearly destroyed the chess community’s ability to trust each other.

That’s the real lesson for the rest of us. The question isn’t whether writing, or creating art, or coding will survive AI. They will, and they’ll be better for it. Rather, the question is who gets hurt as we cross through this uncanny valley — and whether we can act before we have another Naroditsky tragedy. Chess had a thirty-year head start on this problem and still didn’t manage it. I’m worried we don’t have that kind of time.

The Exploratorium — the San Francisco science museum where nearly three hundred founders, doctors, government officials, pharma executives, and investors gathered on Wednesday to discuss the intersection of healthcare and AI — was founded by Oppenheimer. Not J. Robert Oppenheimer, the one they made the movie about and that the AI frontier lab CEOs like to compare themselves to, but his brother Frank.

Frank also worked on the Manhattan Project. He was also hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. And after he was blacklisted from society and the scientific community, he spent a decade working as a cattle rancher in rural Colorado. When he finally clawed his way back to teaching, it was at a high school with fewer than three hundred students. With limited resources, Frank got creative: he took kids to the junkyard, where they got their hands dirty learning about mechanics from abandoned car parts. After seeing firsthand the power of tactile learning, Frank built the Exploratorium on a radical conviction: that understanding doesn’t come from listening to an authority figure. It comes from experiencing things yourself.

Clinton connected this story to her own childhood, visiting a museum in Arkansas that the Exploratorium had inspired, and then to this current moment. “Science really should be a place of not only understanding the future,” she argued, “but creating greater community in the present.”

Throughout the rest of the day, I kept thinking about Frank Oppenheimer because, at bottom, the entire conference was an argument about whether patients should be allowed to get their hands dirty and touch their own data, take charge of their own healthcare — and that argument is a lot older than AI.

In 1847, the American Medical Association published its first Code of Ethics. Article II, titled “Obligations of Patients to Their Physicians,” instructed that “the obedience of a patient to the prescriptions of his physician should be prompt and implicit. He should never permit his own crude opinions as to their fitness to influence his attention to them.”

Crude opinions. That was the official position of American medicine on whether you should have a view about what was happening to your own body.

And it held for a remarkably long time. A JAMA article from the fifties debated whether patients who learned of their cancer and became distressed should be “handled in many respects as children.” In 1961 — the year we put a man in orbit — a survey of 219 physicians in Chicago found that ninety percent would not tell a cancer patient the diagnosis. Not couldn’t, wouldn’t. Many actively changed the chart to avoid any mention of the scary word. The phrase “informed consent” didn’t even exist until after the Nuremberg trials compelled the medical profession to reckon with what happens when physicians make decisions for people without their knowledge. In other words, for twenty-five centuries, the doctor-patient relationship was modeled on parent and child. The physician possessed knowledge; the patient possessed obedience.

What I saw at the conference was evidence that this regime is finally ending. Not because of regulation or an ethical awakening, but because patients now have tools to touch what was kept behind the glass of specialized knowledge. Dr. Hala Borno, CEO of Trial Library, argued that because patients now have access to real (if imperfect!) expertise through LLMs, doctors have gone from being fully in control to being more in an advisor position. Dorothy Kilroy, the Chief Commercial Officer of Oura, made the case that people’s obsession with tracking their own health isn’t all about vanity — it’s often about the fundamental desire to live more life:

Time with my kids is really important to me. How I age is really important to me. I want to be around, and I’m not embarrassed to say I’m obsessed with that. And for the first time, we now have data ourselves that makes that visible. Not as a doctor, not as a professor. We actually have it ourselves. What was invisible before is now visible. Suddenly, for the first time ever, you feel more in control.

This was what I kept hearing all day. The VP of health technology at Meta, Dr. Freddy Abnousi, described patients snapping photos of lab results and interrogating LLMs before their appointments. And Angela Dao, Maven Clinic’s Director of Product for Maternity, struck the same chord when she said “I can speak for myself, my members, my friends who are pregnant, I think we’re all using ChatGPT one to ten times a day to triage our symptoms.”

Frank Oppenheimer would recognize all of this instantly: people learning by handling directly what used to be interpreted for them.

The best work I saw at the conference extended this logic. Waymark uses AI to reach seventy million Medicaid beneficiaries — patients answered calls from voice agents at a fifty-five percent rate, higher than human callers, and then filled out housing and food-benefit forms alongside the AIs. Waymark’s CEO, Rajaie Batniji, published a paper showing AI can predict complex pregnancies fifty-five days earlier than conventional methods. Maven Clinic carries patient data from fertility through pregnancy through menopause, building a continuous health picture that no rotating cast of in-person providers could replicate. And BeSound is using AI-enhanced ultrasound to screen younger women for breast cancer, building the first dataset on a population that has never been studied because mammography starts at forty and misses women with dense tissue.

None of these are administrative efficiency plays. They are contact plays: they put patients’ hands on data, care pathways, and decisions that were previously locked behind institutional walls.

Of course, there are serious, serious risks to handing everything over to patients. WebMD has been the bane of doctors’ existence for good reason. And as several panelists mentioned, a recent Nature Medicine study shows ChatGPT Health under-triages emergencies more than half the time. In ChatGPT-speak, that’s not just scary, that’s dangerous.

Unfortunately, so far the regulatory response hasn’t been to help make AI better, or supplement with better access to doctor consultation, or even to mandate more direct disclaimer language for users, but to ban AI use entirely. This week, New York’s Senate Bill S7263 landed on the state Senate floor. The bill would make chatbot operators civilly liable whenever AI provides a “substantive response” in any of fourteen licensed professions — medicine, law, nursing, dentistry, psychology, and more. Strangely, it never defines “substantive response.” The proposed law targets the deployer, not the model maker, so a hospital running an AI triage tool carries the risk.

The Abundance Institute called the bill “shortsighted at best and protectionist at worst.” I’d call it something more specific: it’s the 1847 AMA Code in a consumer-protection costume. The same ancient reflex — the patient’s crude opinions are dangerous, knowledge must be mediated by the credentialed — updated for a world where the patient finally has tools to be more than a child in the exam room. Restrict low-cost guidance channels, and paid professional channels become the default. That lands hardest on the people with the least money and the least options, which is to say, the people who most need the Exploratorium.

This matters because trust is genuinely at stake — just not the way S7263’s authors think. “Healthcare moves at the speed of trust” was the conference’s most-of repeated line. But I was really struck by FDA advisor Dr. Shantanu Nundy’s reply that, actually, “healthcare also moves at the speed of desperation.” A hundred million Americans don’t have routine care, eighty-three million are living where there aren’t enough doctors, medical errors are the third-leading cause of death, and American life expectancy has been flat for decades. Josh DeFonzo, whose company Mendaera builds robotic guidance for medical procedures, agreed and argued “we trust the current standard of care far too much.”

May Habib, CEO of Writer, offered the sharpest formulation I heard all day. When AI is the one restricting care — denying a claim, rejecting a referral, saying you don’t need treatment — a human should always be in the loop. But when AI is expanding care — reaching a patient who otherwise has nothing, flagging a risk weeks earlier, filling out a benefits form at midnight — it should be permissive. Yes, the line between the two is blurrier than anyone would like; the same chatbot that expands access can also undertriage an emergency. But the current system undertriages millions of people every day, not through error but through absence. We are holding AI to a higher standard than a system where a hundred million Americans don’t have a doctor to undertriage them in the first place. At what point does do no harm become do nothing at all?

So while experimenting with Chinese peptides and unregulated compounds is a dangerous and bad idea, these biohackers are the canary in the coal mine, the leading indicator of a trust crisis in healthcare that predates AI by decades. The pharmaceutical industry has been the lowest-rated industry in America since Gallup started asking — below the federal government, below oil and gas, and below banking. Trust in doctors has fallen fourteen points since 2021 alone. Three in four Americans don’t trust drug companies to price their products fairly. This is the soil into which healthcare AI is being planted.

Gray Matter, my new riskgaming scenario, explores this exact dynamic: what happens when a breakthrough technology meets an information environment where trust has already collapsed. What I’ve learned, watching hundreds of players navigate this scenario, is that when trust is broken, new technology doesn’t get evaluated on its merits, it gets consumed by the narrative around it. Effective treatments get rejected because their side effects are more viral than their benefits. Sugar pills get approved because they have better marketing. The question is not “does this work?” The question is “who do you believe?” And the answer, increasingly, is “not the institutions.”

That’s the real danger for healthcare and AI. Not that the technology won’t work — the conference proved this is a tremendously powerful tool in the right hands. The danger is that it arrives into a trust environment so degraded that the public won’t know who to believe — their phones, their doctor, their doctor using an LLM, or anything in-between. And an LLM plays the strange dual role of being both an expert-sounding oracle that can ingest your personal data and draw on the sum of published medical knowledge in an instant, and a hallucinating autocomplete that doesn’t actually know your situation, often reverts to the mean, and may dangerously underplay or overplay your symptoms. Patients have more information than ever, but information without trust is not empowerment, it’s noise. And noise, in healthcare, kills people.

Which brings me back to Oppenheimer’s museum. The Exploratorium worked not because it handed visitors a textbook and told them to figure it out, but because it built an environment designed for contact — curated, structured, scientifically rigorous, safe enough to explore, and real enough to learn from. The exhibits weren’t consumer products and they weren’t credentialed lectures. They were something in-between: an institution that trusted people to touch the science, and that earned people’s trust by making the science touchable.

Frank Oppenheimer spent a decade in the wilderness because the institutions of his era couldn’t distinguish between dangerous knowledge and democratic knowledge. We are about to make the same mistake — not with physics, but with our own bodies.

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That’s because they no longer have a shared framework. Last month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney accurately declared what every Western leader had avoided saying: the rules-based international order is over, globalization has failed, and economic integration has become “a weapon of coercion.” But his prescription of “variable geometry” coalitions, middle powers coordinating issue-by-issue, is a dodge. It’s saying “we’ll figure things out on a case by case basis, wherever our interests happen to align.”

That’s not enough when a crisis hits, like it did this weekend when strikes on Iran started. And it’s not enough to create a long-term, durable strategy for future prosperity. It’s no wonder everyone was flailing at Munich. The Western allies need a new shared framework, one that recognizes men will never be angels, but steers us in the right direction anyway. A diplomatic and economic structure that relies on incentives rather than idealism.

That framework is abundance.

Abundance is a supply-side reform movement. The idea is simple: democracies have made it too hard to build the things their citizens need, from housing to energy to medicine. Abundance has mostly been framed as a domestic policy, like fixing permitting and reforming planning and state capacity. That’s all great, but supply expansion is and should be inherently international, even though almost nobody is treating it that way.

Imagine if we replaced the old logics of coordination — following an arcane web of international rules and regulations and norms, performing allegiance to a world order — with a new logic of expanding our productive capacities together. What if the democracies of the world aligned our regulations, secured our supply chains, opened our talent pipelines, and got to building? Countries wouldn’t participate out of loyalty or idealism, but because expanding our collective productive capacity makes everyone richer, more resilient, and harder to coerce.

To be clear, abundance cannot and should not be globalization 2.0. The old model optimized for efficiency: remove barriers, let capital flow to the cheapest producer, and tell displaced workers that rising tides lift all boats. It didn’t. Communities that lost manufacturing to offshoring haven’t forgiven us — and specifically the Democratic Party — ever since. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s recent reimposition of 10 percent duties after the Supreme Court struck down his previous tariff regime shows that his nationalist solutions are legally fragile, economically disruptive, and produce no durable architecture. The answer isn’t to retreat behind tariff walls, it’s to build more, with allies whose workers benefit from that expansion.

In practice, an abundant foreign policy means having three goals: recognize, secure, build.

First: the easiest boost to Western economies would be to recognize each other’s work. Right now, allied democracies too often treat each other like strangers in the marketplace. A British medical device company that gets approval from its UK regulator has to start the process from scratch in Washington, Brussels, Ottawa, and Canberra — that’s five separate approval regimes for the same product sold to countries that share intelligence, nuclear strategy, and military command structures. No wonder over 80 percent of the UK health-tech industry reports disruption from regulatory uncertainty. And it’s not just medical devices: allied AI safety frameworks, financial regulations, and professional credentials all suffer from the same dysfunction.

The fix isn’t forcing harmonization — nobody wants to adopt someone else’s rulebook, which is why TTIP and other international trade deals so often struggle. Instead, we should offer mutual recognition: each country keeps its own standards, but agrees that an allied regulator’s approval process is competent enough to pass muster in their own system. If that sounds implausible, consider that the US and EU already do this for pharmaceutical manufacturing inspections. Nobody has to surrender sovereignty — we can just stop wasting time and trust our allies to have basic competency.

Second: we should secure what we need together. The obvious example here is semiconductors: Taiwan produces 92 percent of the advanced semiconductors we need on an island a hundred miles from mainland China. A disruption — an invasion of course, but also a blockade or even an earthquake — would be catastrophic.

The collective response to this potential 10 trillion in global economic losses? Everyone is trying to solve it alone. The US passed the CHIPS Act, Japan is subsidizing TSMC fabs in Kumamoto, Europe is courting its own plants. Last month Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted a Critical Minerals Ministerial at the State Department, but the proposal is to have 55 separate conversations with 55 separate nations about the same supply chain problem. Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer flew to Beijing seeking bilateral deals with the very country whose dominance he’d identified as a strategic threat. Canada did the same thing. That’s less thoughtful statecraft, more every man in a suit for himself.

The abundance version looks different: allied countries co-invest in shared mineral processing capacity. That way, Australian lithium doesn’t have to be shipped to China to become a battery; joint purchasing mechanisms give allied buyers collective leverage (instead of letting commodity producers play them against each other); and a distributed semiconductor network allows the United States to provide design and capital, Japan to provide materials, the Netherlands to provide lithography, and fabrication to be spread across trusted partners.

Instead of having five fully redundant national champions, we can have a supply chain where every link is in allied hands and no single point of failure can bring the whole thing down. This is how allied defense procurement already works: the F-35 has 1,900 suppliers in nine countries, and as a result every one of those countries has more aerospace jobs than if they’d tried to build a fifth-generation fighter alone.

Third: build to complement each other. Securing supply chains protects what exists, but abundance also means creating productive capacity that no allied country could build alone. The math on AI makes the case: according to the Federal Reserve, the United States controls 74 percent of global high-end AI compute. China holds 14 percent. The EU has less than five. US hyperscalers are spending over $400 billion annually on AI infrastructure, more than five times China’s investment. No allied country can match that individually. But a coordinated approach — frontier training in the United States, inference infrastructure in Europe, applied AI and safety architecture in the UK — would give the democratic world a shared foundation that none of them could afford to build from scratch.

The same logic applies to clean energy, to biotech, to advanced manufacturing: the country that can’t build will have nothing to compete with, and no allied country can build everything it needs by itself. China understood this intuitively; whatever you think of it, the Belt and Road Initiative was a foreign policy organized around productive capacity. The democratic world needs its own version — not state-directed mercantilism, but coordinated expansion where each country builds what it’s best at and the whole is actually greater than the parts.

Recognize, secure, build represent solutions to three frictions that make every allied economy individually weaker and more exposed. Remove them, and you have a productive base that’s resilient by design — not because everyone agreed to follow the same rules, but because everyone’s material interest is served by building together.

I can predict some objections. One side will say this is naive, that great-power competition is about hard power, not growth coalitions. The other will point out that this does nothing to protect human rights or prevent war. How does abundance prevent the United States from toppling foreign leaders or Russia from further invading Europe? How does any of this end the forever wars?

Both objections miss the point. Abundance isn’t meant to replace our rules for peace and the conduct of war, it’s meant to give us a reason to enforce them again. When your economy depends on Chinese processing and Russian energy, you’re going to struggle to sanction either seriously, no matter what the UN Charter says. Europe proved this: it took a land war on the continent to break the dependency on Russian gas, and even then it was agonizing.

An abundance framework changes that calculus. If your productive capacity runs through allied supply chains — if your batteries, your chips, your AI infrastructure all depend on allied coordination — then maintaining those relationships is preservation, not just idealism. Rules enforced by shame are optional. Rules backed by mutual economic dependence are not.

As for hard power: there is no hard power without productive capacity, and the democratic world is running short. Again, the Ukraine war proved this. The United States and Europe wanted to arm Ukraine and discovered they couldn’t manufacture enough artillery shells to keep pace. Political will didn’t fail, but production did. We won World War II in part because the Arsenal of Democracy would outproduce the Axis. Today’s democratic world has let that industrial base atrophy. Abundance is how you rebuild it, not within one country’s borders, but across an allied network that can actually sustain the demands of both peacetime prosperity and wartime mobilization.

This weekend, as the news broke about Iran, no allied capital had a coordinated response, economic or otherwise. Europe pushed off even meeting to discuss it until Monday. There was no shared supply architecture to leverage, no joint productive capacity to threaten to withhold. Instead we had 30 separate governments scrambling to figure out what they think. That’s what the absence of a shared framework looks like. And it doesn’t make any of us safer or stronger.

Men will never be angels. But an abundance framework doesn’t need angels — it needs engineers, scientists, trading partners, and allied governments that understand the basic math of the 21st century: you cannot coerce what you cannot outproduce.

Build together or decline alone. Those are the options. Everything else is a Davos speech.

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Water services in the United States are decentralized by design, but the introduction of digital technology into water utilities makes these systems vulnerable to cyber attack. Small-town water suppliers are especially squeezed between affordability for customers and infrastructure resilience, but AI data center investments in rural communities may offer a way to lift small communities above the “security poverty line” and harden local water services against cyber attacks.

Local water infrastructure shocks can become a national strategic interest. The second-order effects can reach far beyond drinking water.

For example, agriculture needs clean water for irrigation; without it, crops run the risk of spreading deadly diseases or withering in summer heat. The agricultural sector particularly relies on water service providers that are most vulnerable to cyber attacks. Further, the energy sector needs water for power generation and turbine operations. Water services doubly impact AI and data center operations, meanwhile, because they require energy and water for cooling. A 5,000-person town becomes more of a strategic target if they have a critical asset, for example, when that water supply serves a critical data center or agricultural irrigation, the calculus changes.

In modern life, access to clean water is so ubiquitous that few consider what is required to sustain and secure it. Yet we understand that access to water is essential; in fact, when asked about their top environmental concerns, most Americans list access to water.

The United States’ complex system of watersheds and aquifers means there is no single point of attack that could affect the water supply for the entire United States. Localism in our water system means systemic resilience for the “national water supply.” But distributed water services must now reckon with cyber threats that could disrupt a critical municipality. The vast capabilities of a hostile nation-state could be levied against a single American township. What now exists as a localized network could have second order effects that require a national strategic response.

Before water services relied on digital technology, water security was primarily physical. Now utilities have adopted operational technology (OT) into their workflows to assess and control their systems in real time, but the benefits have come with the side effect of introducing a cybersecurity vulnerability. Now, perpetrators do not need to be physically present to attack the water supply.

Chilling reports detail the lack of cybersecurity in water treatment facilities. Because municipal governments orchestrate water management, the federal cybersecurity guidelines are just that: guidelines. More than 70% of facilities fail to meet basic cybersecurity requirements, such as changing default passwords (wait, 1234 isn’t a secure password?). The information technology systems that are vulnerable to hacking directly connect to the OT systems controlling chemical treatments. Simply investing in air gapping would dramatically reduce this threat. Perhaps the simplest cybersecurity measure Americans could take today is for residents to pester their city council to ensure the water department has changed its OT password from the system default. This simple fix could produce a disproportionate security boost from something requiring relatively minimal effort.

Centralizing water management is another obvious temptation for policymakers and strategists alike, but distributing national resources to ensure cybersecurity at the local level would maintain the built-in national resilience of a distributed system. Finding solutions to proliferate cyber resilience for our water supply should be preferred over centralized management. Chesterton’s fence suggests that we should not overturn localized water management practices until we can account for the financial, geographic, and political reasons municipalities were tapped to manage water in the first place. These reasons do not change because of cyber threats. Instead, local water services should locally execute robust cybersecurity standards.

Despite the benefits of localized water management, many small water services face economic pressure because cybersecurity is often a fixed cost shared by fewer customers. Roughly 91% of the water service systems in the United States serve just 17% of the population. These utility providers are desperately trying to ensure affordability, and every dollar spent on cybersecurity increases consumer water bills. Duke University’s Nicholas Institute outlines the trade-offs between infrastructure investment, affordability, and fiscal stability for the service provider. Although there are some creative solutions to mitigate the intensity of these trade-offs, cybersecurity concerns can create a labor arbitrage problem. While the water services provider attempts to keep costs low, it relies more on technology to automate their operations. But this technology comes with cybersecurity risks that are expensive to counter.

For municipalities that lack the funds to harden their cyber infrastructure to protect their water supply from cyber threats, there are even some charities where cyber professionals do work pro bono to help undersourced municipalities. Wendy Nather describes this phenomenon as living below the “security poverty line.”

Another way to secure funds is AI data centers. For now, many rural communities have mounted well-founded pushback on proposals to build AI data centers in their area. But the conversation remains fixated on energy prices. Howell Township, referenced in the WSJ’s recent piece on this topic, chronicles a community of 8,000 residents rejecting a proposal for a Meta data center. While some may caricature their campaign as Ludditism, the reality is rural communities have a lot to gain and a lot to lose on a deal like this, particularly when it comes to utilities.

Commitments from hyperscalers to invest in infrastructure resilience could dramatically change these negotiations. Structuring a deal to be a net benefit for utilities in a rural community would eliminate much of the rural hesitance to AI data center buildout while simultaneously being one of the few ways to revitalize aging, vulnerable infrastructure and ensure continued local control of water infrastructure.

Cybersecurity for water services directly benefits the data center, as such centers also rely on water for cooling, and the energy they use requires water services. As data centers come to rural communities, they often have significantly more leverage than local leaders in negotiations and typically offer only a modest form of infrastructure investment. If municipalities and hyperscalers approach infrastructure revitalization commitments as mutually beneficial, it would promote shared, long-term thinking that will ultimately lead to security for both parties. Many rural communities face an apparently impossible tension between affordability and water service resilience. Hyperscalers can invest in cybersecurity for water utilities out of self-interest while maintaining affordability and local control for residents.

A cyberattack won’t eliminate my ability to boil snow in the mountains, but it can certainly shut off the water supply to a data center. Small communities must incorporate cybersecurity for water services into the infrastructure proposals they bring to hyperscaling businesses that build in their towns. The right deal with a hyperscaler can lift a small community above the security poverty line and protect their water supply from cyber attacks.

The analysis, opinions, and recommendations contained in this memorandum are solely those of the author in a personal capacity. They do not reflect the official policy, position, or endorsement of the Department of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other U.S. government entity.

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In 2025, SpaceX launched 170 times. Europe, whose Ariane 1 rocket pioneered commercial space launch in 1979, launched just eight times.

This is the negative compound interest on a decision made 12 years ago, when European officials rejected designing their new rocket, the Ariane 6, to be reusable. The next year, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 made its first vertical landing. France’s former economy minister Bruno Le Maire would later admit: “there was a fork in the road, and we didn’t take the right path.”

Since then, Europe has wallowed in the doldrums of a launcher crisis, struggling to retain sovereign access to space. From the final flight of the Ariane 5 in July 2023, the two-year grounding of Vega-C, and the much-delayed lift-off of Ariane 6 in July 2024, Europe finally began its sputtering recovery last year. Although it has restored the bare minimum of access, Europe is only beginning to claw its way toward reusability. As the stunners-wearing French President Emmanuel Macron recognized at Davos: Europe is “sometimes too slow. Foshur.”

Europe now finds itself in a tough space trilemma. It wants strategic autonomy, a world-leading space capability, and to protect the industrial status quo—that is, jobs. It can’t optimize for all three. If you think these sound like classic Riskgaming tradeoffs… you would be right, since that’s what our next game in development, Dead Reckoning, will be about.

In its current approach, Europe loudly proclaims its need for space autonomy while refusing to disrupt the industrial status quo. The inevitable result will be middling capabilities.

Consider ArianeGroup, the manufacturer of Europe’s only operational heavy-lift launcher, the Ariane 6. The company, itself a 50/50 joint venture between Airbus and Safran, employs 7,600 people across France and Germany and is dependent on up to €340 million in subsidies per year. Ariane 6 is scheduled to launch just 6–8 times in 2026 as it ramps up operations, reaching a tempo of ten launches per year by 2027. ArianeGroup’s subsidiary responsible for launch, Arianespace, will increase its launch rate further only if demand increases. As the company’s chief executive, Alain Charmeau, framed it in 2018, a rocket that can be reused ten times, scheduled for ten launches, would only be built once a year: “I cannot tell my teams: ‘Goodbye, see you next year!’”

Fortunately for Arianespace, 18 launches have been ordered for Jeff Bezos’ Starlink competitor, Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper). Still, relying on a different American company to sustain launch demand is hardly a sovereignty-forward approach for Europe. Moreover, a triangular strategy of playing Amazon off SpaceX will cease to work once Blue Origin‘s reusable rockets come online. As it stands, there is not enough organic demand in Europe to incentivize ArianeGroup to expand their operations, let alone pursue rapid progress toward reusability.

Arianespace’s call for a mandated European launcher preference makes sense from their perspective, but criticism of the company’s track record abounds. As John Holst of Ill-Defined Space observed, “the company appears to be behaving in a manner that is daring the [European Space Agency] to cut off its antics. It’s not behaving as if it’s serious about the launch business. Instead, it’s behaving as an entitled monopoly.”

Europe’s intergovernmental space organization, the ESA, is correct in diversifying from ArianeGroup and Avio, the Italian maker of Vega-C — the under-used medium-lift launcher also reliant on €21 million in subsidies per year. ESA is now pursuing reusability with the European Launcher Challenge, first established in 2023. Critically, the ESA is implementing a significant reform to the ELC, softening the organization’s adherence to the geographical return principle, or geo-return, which requires every euro contributed to the ESA by a member state return a euro to domestic industries.

Such forced fairness has predictably resulted in market distortions and lowered competitiveness. At a 2023 conference, the chief executive of ArianeGroup Germany, Pierre Godart, complained about geo-return: “I cannot choose my supplier… Even if I have suppliers who are not performing, I cannot change them.” Geo-return’s critics are legion: the Draghi report on European economic competitiveness advocated scrapping the policy and the head of France’s space agency called it “poison.”

With its launch challenge, the ESA is finally listening to the critics. Rather than rely on geo-return, the ESA is experimenting with a concept called “fair contribution,” with five competition finalists selected first for their technological and business maturity, with member states then funding their desired champions. The program allocates €900 million across five reusable launcher startups, with the ESA acting as an anchor customer for future missions to stoke continued private investment.

The idea is to mirror NASA’s success with the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which provided SpaceX $396 million in milestone-based funding to seed the development of Falcon 9 in the early 2010s. Since then, SpaceX has raised a publicly reported $11.9 billion of venture capital, and is now preparing for a blockbuster IPO that could value the company well above $1 trillion.

Competition is useful to speed innovation, but that competition assumes a prize on the other side of the race. Europe is offering no prize today, neither for ArianeGroup or Avio as incumbents, nor for the five new ELC entrants. By comparison, after SpaceX proved its worth with NASA, the agency contracted $1.6 billion for 12 operational cargo missions to the International Space Station. Europe lacks such a unified prize. Without one, Europe will spend more to launch less, ultimately developing middling capabilities that pale to SpaceX.

While public revenues were valuable, SpaceX’s true genius was harnessing reusability to unlock an extraordinarily lucrative prize of its own: a virtuous cycle with their proliferated Low Earth Orbit constellation, Starlink. Starlink operates roughly 9,000 satellites in LEO today, accounting for two-thirds of all satellites in orbit, and contributing up to 80% of SpaceX’s $8 billion in profit ​last year.

The European Union’s flagship space program, IRIS², is an attempt to create a similar incentive, namely a sovereign, multi-orbital constellation of 290 satellites providing a “Starlink alternative” for Europe by 2027. Unfortunately, the EU’s procurement process for the now €10.6 billion project (up from €6 billion), relying on a single non-competitive consortium of primes given a 12-year contract, all but guarantees that the project will be doomed to mediocrity.

Sven Meyer-Brunswick, a principal at Alpine Space Ventures, made this comment on IRIS² prospects: “I think IRIS² is dead in the water, frankly... It’s not a competitive program. It should have been started completely differently.” IRIS² won’t reach full operational status until 2030 at the earliest, for nearly twice the original cost, and with serious uncertainty around its private financing. This risks a repeat of the full-blown governmental rescue of Galileo, the EU’s sovereign GPS-alternative and previous attempt at a public-private partnership in the space sector. At yet another fork in the road, this time around procurement, Europe chose yesterday’s approach.

Europe is indeed focused on sovereignty, as diminished as it may be, and it is getting mediocre capabilities, but the upshot of course is the allocation of jobs through procurement. Europe’s space manufacturing sector employs over 66,000 people, with four large industrial groups (Airbus, Thales, Safran and Leonardo) directly responsible for more than half of total space industry employment in the EU. Unfortunately, job allocation has taken precedence over entrepreneurial merit. When Airbus’ space division announced 2,500 job cuts in October 2024, citing $1 billion in losses over the preceding year, the cuts had to be politically apportioned across Germany, France, Britain and Spain. Moreover, they would not be implemented until mid-2026, taking a full two years to “right-size” the company.

Meanwhile, the primes will justify consolidation under the guise of efficiency, framing their efforts as necessary to become “European champions.” The proposed merger of Airbus, Thales and Leonardo’s space divisions would create a 25,000-person behemoth. With €6.5 billion in annual revenue versus SpaceX’s $16 billion, the primes may be correct in their desire to benefit from scale. But it will prove far too tempting for European leaders to direct their spending to this mega-prime thanks to its convenient industrial spread, with jobs across Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom.

If they do, it will exacerbate Europe’s worst tendencies against competitiveness; as noted by Raycho Raychev, CEO of Bulgaria-based Lux portco EnduroSat: “The European agencies are biased towards a few very big players… tenders typically almost exactly describe the technical solution offered by a certain company instead of describing the challenge and choosing a winner who is best able to solve it.”

To compete properly with SpaceX, Europe may eventually need an excellent, near-monopoly provider to emerge, but only through disruptive competition that is allowed to take market share from incumbents — regardless of where the jobs are. Until that happens, politically-driven mega-primes would simply ensure even less competition and innovation. Europe would be left as vulnerable in satellite manufacturing as it was in the doldrums of the launch crisis, reliant as they were on Arianespace.

In sum, Europe doesn’t have reusable launch capability because it doesn’t have enough satellites worth launching. Europe can’t afford to launch a proliferated LEO constellation because it doesn’t have affordable launchers. Europe’s launchers won’t be affordable until they are reusable and launching at capacity and at cadence. Shot through this Catch-22 are Europe’s issues with geo-return and non-competitive primes — the industrial status quo.

The only path to cutting-edge capability without accepting industry disruption is to partner with leading American companies. If Starship is able to bring launch costs even remotely close to the $10 per kilogram Musk mused about, all manner of orbital economics become tenable. If AI data centers can become cost-effective with Starship, so too can European satellite constellations. With Starship, Europe could launch an expanded and viable IRIS²; continue evolving Galileo’s position, navigation, and timing services; and establish its new remote sensing capability, called the Earth Observation Government Service. By hitching a ride with SpaceX, the European Space Shield could become a reality.

European concerns about Elon Musk are valid, but here’s a counterintuitive strategy: post-IPO, SpaceX will need to be even more responsive to growth-demanding shareholders. European institutional spending represents the vast majority of the available space market in Europe. Instead of framing the dependency of Europe on SpaceX, the frame should really be that SpaceX is dependent on European expansion for revenue and profit growth. SpaceX shareholders will not tolerate cutting off Europe in Muskian shenanigans if it means a slash in market cap. After all, the oft-told story of Musk’s disabling of Starlink access for Ukraine misses a key detail: he had been providing Starlink effectively for free. Once the Pentagon began officially footing the bill, the disruptions ceased.

Europe has two valid options: rely on SpaceX’s launch capacity for cost-effective launch or avoid SpaceX completely by pursuing painful procurement reforms. The middle is what we dub the “dependency trap,” with Europe reliant on SpaceX for critical European launch but not a large enough customer for shareholders to care if access is shut off. When SpaceX launches 170 rockets in a year, half of those should be European funded. If Europe treats Starship not strictly as a threat, but as an opportunity, the continent can show Musk that dependency cuts both ways.

Mandatory Disclaimer: The views expressed are my own and do not constitute endorsement by the Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force, or the U.S. Government. All references, including external hyperlinks, to non-federal entities do not constitute or imply Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force or U.S. Government endorsement of any company or organization.

Americans pride ourselves on resilience, yet our critical infrastructure struggles to withstand both natural and man-made shocks. Each year, there is a natural disaster that “no one saw coming.” Whether policy decision or inaction is to blame (Texas had zero snowplows in North Texas until 2011, and power companies around the country have chosen not to improve their local grids) our society veers toward absolute efficiency at the cost of protections from tail risks.

Winter Storm Fern is no different, which raises an important question: What would happen if the damage came not from a natural disaster but from a hostile state actor intentionally targeting transportation and power systems?

Mother Nature may dump inches of slush across America, tripping up society for a day or two. But a clever adversary can use hybrid warfare to seize asymmetric advantage. Fragile things can be destroyed at a significantly lower cost than it takes to produce or replace them. For instance, it would take minutes to destroy one of the transformers that enables our substations. By contrast, manufacturing another one to replace it has a 120-week lead time. It does not take a skilled aggressor (or even a smart one) to sabotage the right substation and cause mass disruption. Mother Nature might get lucky; an adversary can optimize.

Consider Asheville, North Carolina, and the time required to clean up the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. During a road trip to Tennessee this October, I was shocked to be diverted around Asheville due to a partial closure of I-40 still causing delays. The Interstate Highway System was originally designed to make America ready for a nuclear holocaust; now it can barely survive the wild.

Statistician Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile offers a classic risk framework for understanding why our infrastructure is so intolerant of disorder. He characterizes systems within three categories. Some systems are fragile: they fall apart with small amounts of disorder. Other systems are durable and can withstand some disorder, yet they are still worse off afterward. The most resilient systems — which he calls antifragile — improve with disorder. Ultimately, inanimate objects are typically categorized as durable or fragile, but systems composed of humans can become antifragile.

The web of bureaucratic requirements around critical recovery work often gets in the way of the workers tasked with those efforts. The question is what we can do to turn this morass into an antifragile system that recovers quickly and improves its recovery speed with each disruption. This gets the power on faster, and the increased production should improve the quality of the components being repaired.

In Breakneck (and on the Riskgaming podcast), Dan Wang poignantly observes that the United States is a lawyerly society compared to China’s engineering society. Each type has its benefits and drawbacks, but the way he has described China’s fast-paced infrastructure improvements is compelling. Even more striking, Wang says that the America of the early 20th century was an engineering society. This was a time when Americans built great things, including much of our current infrastructure.

The tension lies between the extent to which we pursue antifragility versus durability. An optimist could argue that infrastructure fragility is simply an engineering problem, but the reality is that if Wang’s observation is true (and I think it is), calcified legal hurdles will continue to be a barrier to expanding and improving infrastructure — a particular challenge as the United States contemplates reindustrialization.

As Stewart Brand argues in his new book Maintenance, just using and possessing infrastructure is not where excellence lies. Instead, and especially without supply chains and labor forces to quickly build anew, we must be able to maintain what we have already built. Indeed, maintenance is what will make infrastructure resilient — or in Taleb’s terms, antifragile.

The exact mix between systemic redesign in pursuit of antifragility and simply maintaining what we have will be hard to find. Thankfully, the goal of each is the same: to create reliable infrastructure that serves Americans. The enemies of both are indecision and apathy.

For the United States to develop power, water, telecommunications and transportation systems that are truly antifragile, we will need to prioritize repairs. This would look like both improving our existing infrastructure and increasing the production of parts needed to repair it, a trend that Lux has been looking at called “fixware.” While continuing to emphasize safety, this process should focus on production speed and on developing the supply chain to maintain the newly reinvigorated system.

An individual substation cannot become antifragile, but a company that can build or repair substations rapidly is part of system-wide antifragility. A single transformer may always be vulnerable to attack or natural disasters, yet a diversified supply chain that continually improves transformers can ensure the power grid remains resilient in the face of disorder.

Acts of nature and hostility will persistently threaten our critical infrastructure, but an antifragile system that rapidly heals and improves will minimize the damage they cause. Whether America has the capacity to build such a system is a question Winter Storm Fern once again brings to the fore.

The analysis, opinions, and recommendations contained in this memorandum are solely those of the author in a personal capacity. They do not reflect the official policy, position, or endorsement of the Department of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other U.S. government entity.

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The complexity comes from how these options interact. Easy exit undermines voice — why organize if you can just leave? Strong loyalty can enable voice — you fight harder for something you’re committed to. And the threat of exit amplifies voice. “Give me a raise or I’m gone” makes both more powerful than either alone.

Yesterday at Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney raised his voice louder than any other middle power in my lifetime.

Canada cannot fully exit the American-led system — geography and economics make that impossible. But loyalty has become untenable now that Trump’s America refuses to even pretend to play by the rules and continually threatens Canada’s sovereignty.

So Carney has built the infrastructure for partial exit: renegotiating trade with China, India, Qatar, ASEAN and the EU; doubling defense spending and securing European procurement arrangements; signing strategic partnerships across four continents. And then he used his voice.

Carney used Václav Havel‘s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” to frame his remarks. Havel, a dissident Czech poet who later served as his country’s president, described a greengrocer in communist Czechoslovakia who places a sign in his window each morning: “Workers of the world, unite!” He doesn’t buy the slogan — truly, no one does. But he displays it to avoid trouble. And because every shopkeeper does the same, the whole system persists, not by force, but because of the fear-making power of collective performance.

For decades, Carney says, countries like Canada “placed the sign in the window.” They praised the rules-based international order, benefited from its predictability, and avoided calling out “the gaps between rhetoric and reality” — that the strongest exempted themselves when convenient, that international law applied with “varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”

Carney acknowledged what you’re not supposed to: the rules-based order was American hegemony, and for most middle countries most of the time that was a good thing. “This fiction was useful” he said.

But now, Carney argued, “this bargain no longer works.” And then he said the thing no Western leader ever, ever says: “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”

In other words, he names the noble fiction — and says it is no longer noble.

There’s a reason no one talks about the noble fiction: to name it is to shatter it. When I was at the State Department, someone somewhere decided we needed to write a big keynote speech or a splashy essay in Foreign Affairs defining and defending the rules-based international order. The job landed on my desk.

I was relatively new to foreign policy and had always been confused about what the “international rules-based order” was exactly and why it had to be such a mouthful. So I set about trying to figure it out. I asked policy advisors in the U.S. mission to the United Nations, who pointed me to State’s Policy Planning office. They told me to talk to the National Security Council. The NSC sent me to some lawyers. The lawyers told me there was no official definition besides “an international order based on rules.” I felt like I was taking crazy pills.

The speech/essay never happened. I suspected, at the time, that perhaps the phrase was designed to resist definition, so as not to expose the occasional gaps between what we said and what we did. Reinhold Niebuhr diagnosed this problem when he argued that nations dress up their self-interest as universal principle, and then they come to believe their own propaganda.

I’m not sure if we had just come to believe our own propaganda — I do believe the rules-based order was the closest the world’s powers have ever come to binding their own might, and that the UN was an incredible force for peace — but Trump shattered any pretensions or illusions about the nobility of American hegemony. So all that was left was the fiction. Carney was just the first leader honest enough to dispel the fiction, too.

I’m a U.S.-Canadian dual citizen, and I travel to Canada several times a year. But when we went last spring to Toronto to run a Riskgaming scenario on AI and national security, right after Trump had started making hoopla about turning Canada into the 51st state, I was shocked.

Unlike the United States, one never saw Canadian flags in Canada. It just wasn’t a thing. Suddenly I saw the maple leaf flying everywhere — apartment windows, office parks, construction sites. When I went to grab a coffee, the café had renamed the Americano the “Canadiano.” American liquor was pulled from shelves, apps like Maple Scan helped shoppers avoid U.S. products, and border crossings plummeted.

The political shift was just as dramatic. In January last year, the Liberals were polling at 20 percent. By April, they’d won. Carney was propelled into office by pure Canadian defiance in the face of American imperialism. So when he speaks his truth, he’s also speaking to his base.

A former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, Michael Ignatieff, quoted Freud in an excellent recent essay on the narcissism of small differences — Canadians defining themselves against America precisely because the countries are so similar. But truth be told, what I saw wasn’t narcissism. I saw fear sharpening into resolve. Carney is channeling that energy at the precise moment it gives him leverage.

What Carney proposed with his leverage is “variable geometry” — essentially, different coalitions for different issues, middle powers coordinating for collective bargaining power. So for Ukraine, that’s a coalition of the willing. For Arctic sovereignty, solidarity with Greenland and Denmark. And on AI, that means cooperation among democracies to avoid choosing “between hegemons and hyperscalers” — a striking phrase that names tech companies as somewhat-sovereign actors.

Unfortunately, variable geometry doesn’t provide a forum for resolution when coalitions harden or disputes arise. And while Carney named the UN, WTO, and COP as institutions “under threat,” he offered no vision or prescription for preserving them. The threat of World War III looms large.

And the AI math is brutal. According to the Federal Reserve, the United States controls 74 percent of global high-end AI compute; China holds 14 percent; the EU has less than 5 percent. Canada doesn’t register. U.S. hyperscalers are spending over $400 billion annually on AI infrastructure — more than five times China’s investment. The logic of concentration is relentless: compute, data, and talent flow toward whoever already has the most.

Canada does have real leverage as the only Western nation with serious reserves of cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel, all of which are essential for the chips and batteries that power AI. But critical minerals are inputs, not capabilities. Unless open source wins, it’s unclear how even the strongest collective bargaining group could have real leverage over the AI race’s winners.

But I think Carney knows this. As he conceded, “A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.” His gambit isn’t that variable geometry is a great idea or solves all these problems, but rather, that it’s the least-bad option available to middle powers like Canada.

Havel spent his life arguing that truth-telling was the most radical act available to the powerless. But once he became president, he discovered that the dissident’s clarity doesn’t easily translate into statecraft. A literal poet, he never quite figured out how to go from campaigning in poetry to governing in prose.

Carney is attempting to succeed where Havel failed, to be both the greengrocer and the prime minister all at once. “We are taking the sign out of the window,” he declared. “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy…”

Nostalgia is not a strategy, but the greengrocer’s gambit is. Carney has broken the first rule of the rules-based order: don’t talk about the noble fiction. He’s chosen to raise his voice right at the moment of maximum pressure, and bet his country’s future on the power of ending a pretense.

The sign is down, the noble fiction is dead. Now we find out if the truth has any leverage, or if Canada’s threat of exit is real.

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But flip it around: Why bother to write if you don’t have to? What if the LLM writes better and faster than you? Why is it worth your time if you can have the result in seconds?

For most of history, you couldn’t separate the process of writing from having the writing exist. The artifact and the practice were fused. Unless, of course, you were rich enough to pay someone to separate them for you — or, now, unless you have a chatbot.

Before AI, I was that someone. I signed NDAs preventing me from sharing who I ghostwrote for, precisely because those people were afraid they’d get accused of not having spent the time to do the thinking and writing. Even people who constantly used speechwriters, like President Barack Obama, undermined his wife by saying her memoir was ghostwritten. (Guess what: all of President Obama’s books besides Dreams of My Father were ghostwritten. Of course they were!)

When ghostwriting is done well, you don’t know it’s been done at all. But when it’s done poorly, people notice. Politicians sound wooden. CEOs sound like their lawyers, and celebrities like their publicists. And we’ve seen plenty of backlash to what’s perceived as a lack of authenticity. Notice that both President Donald Trump and Representative AOC eschew speechwriters and teleprompters.

Still, there are times when we’re more forgiving, when we understand that having the thing written matters more than who wrote it. I wrote 250 speeches a year as a speechwriter for the U.S. ambassador to the UN, who was also a member of President Joe Biden’s cabinet. I did it because it would have been a colossal waste of her time to decide whether we should say we were happy that the rules-based international order existed or glad that it was around (RIP). No one cared that I wrote her speeches, so long as they truly represented her thoughts and views and the stance of the United States government.

But speechwriters are rare. A privilege of the powerful. For everyone else, as my writing teacher Tony Tulathimutte liked to say: No one is going to do your writing for you.

Well, now someone will. Or something will. Instantly, and for peanuts.

Except, not really. Because I don’t think AI has democratized writing. I think it’s democratized editing.

That’s because writing is really two activities bundled into one: the generation of new text and ideas, and the refinement of existing text into something better. Creation and curation, drafting and revising.

Most people, when they imagine “writing,” picture the first thing — the terror of the blank page, the taunting of the blinking cursor. But what AI offers us is the opportunity to start from the second. From now on, you never have to start from scratch. You can always have writing and ideas to react to.

Forget founder mode. We are all in editor mode now.

You’ll see this everywhere once you start looking. Vibe coders and Claude coders ‘edit’ apps into existence. RLHF is just: Did you like this, or did you like that? Musicians using Suno or Udio aren’t playing instruments, they’re selecting generated tracks. Same with the movie-makers using Runway or Midjourney. Lawyers review AI-drafted contracts instead of crafting them from scratch. Your emails are pre-written by AI, and it’s your job to edit them.

Even the phenomenon of calling out AI writing, as Meservey did and as so many others tagging Pangram on X have been doing, is a way of exercising editorial judgment. These slop-callers are performing taste, announcing they can discern the difference and that it matters to them. Pangram itself, a machine that somehow does a better job of judging the Turing test than a human, is just the editorial function made algorithmic. It’s not writing anything new. It’s judging what has already been written.

There’s something freeing about ubiquitous editor mode. It’s democratizing. It helps, for example, dyslexic people (who are significantly overrepresented among entrepreneurs) get their ideas written out. So too with the person whose first language isn’t English, or whose background is primarily in STEM. The blank page, for centuries the great equalizer and the great barrier, is now optional.

But we should also be concerned. Because this is all so new, I worry we’re still figuring out which parts of the writing process are valuable to us and why.

The linguist Emily M. Bender has a nice line: “Teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays.” The science fiction writer Ted Chiang extended the metaphor. “Using ChatGPT to complete assignments,” he wrote, “is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.” The lesson is, you don’t go to the gym because the weights need to be lifted. The point is for you to lift the weights.

So the case for the student is obvious. They’re learning how to write and think. But what about us adults in the real world, those of us who presumably already know how to write and think? Are we lifting weights, or do we just want the weights to have been lifted? Are we writing to improve our cognitive fitness or to have people read our ideas? Are they even “our” ideas if the LLM came up with them?

Danny has already argued that we’ll stop caring about who “owns” ideas anyway. He might be right. But there’s a difference between generally caring where other ideas come from and caring whether your own ideas were given to you or worked out by you. Did you encounter the idea or did you earn it? Do you just agree with it, or did you arrive at it? And is the difference important?

I learned to write using what my mentor Vinca LaFleur calls the “Frankenstein” method. You barf onto the page everything you know — research, stray lines, half thoughts — and then you tinker and shape. The fragments cohere into paragraphs, paragraphs into arguments. You discover what you think through the struggle of making the mess cohere.

That’s editing, of course. But the difference is whose mess you’re editing. In the Frankenstein method, the fragments are yours. They’re incoherent because you haven’t figured it out yet. The editing is the thinking.

With AI, the coherence comes pre-installed. If you use the tool with nuance and clarity of thought, like Yoni Rechtman’s proposed “bicycle method,” then you might just wrestle your own confusion into clarity. But if you are essentially evaluating a stranger’s draft and saying “Sure, I guess” then the mess truly happened elsewhere, distributed across a trillion tokens of other people’s prose.

This is what the slop-detectors suspect: that there’s no mess, that no one is home.

So we’re all in editor mode now, and there’s no going back. The question is whether you’re editing yourself, the AI, or a mix of the two. The first is thinking. The second is outsourcing. And the third is the new thing we’re all going to have to figure out.

The weights don’t care if they get lifted. But you might.

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The air inside is crisp and clean, filtered by advanced air purification systems that were once the privilege of luxury high-rises, but are now standard everywhere thanks to the offshore wind turbines dotting the Rockaway Beach horizon.

Beyond your window, sunlight glints off solar-paneled rooftops blanketing every building — from Harlem brownstones to Queens apartment complexes — in a resilient energy grid that’s made blackouts a distant memory.

Stepping outside, you pass vibrant community gardens flourishing on formerly vacant lots, lush with tomatoes and greens grown vertically and tended by neighbors and robots alike.

Your phone buzzes — it’s a notification from NYC.gov’s AI-powered portal that says your request to add a water fountain to your pedestrian-friendly shared street has been automatically approved.

Automatically.

Gone are the days of bureaucratic inertia; AI-assisted permitting means projects that once took years now take days, bringing benches, trees and open spaces to every neighborhood in the five boroughs.

On your walk to the subway — which by the way is clean, quiet and punctual thanks to a city-wide upgrade to automated electric trains — you see crews using modular construction to swiftly assemble affordable housing units in vacant commercial lots.

High-tech, prefabricated components, shipped overnight via electric trucks from factories along the Hudson Valley, slot together seamlessly, ensuring everyone has a comfortable, energy-efficient place to call home.

Homelessness, once considered inevitable, is now extinct.

You arrive at Central Park, which is greener and larger than you remember, having reclaimed car lanes as verdant pedestrian thoroughfares buzzing with cafes and playgrounds. All along the East River, waterfront parks are alive with food stalls, art installations and swimming areas — something once unimaginable in the murky waters. Drones quietly buzz overhead, rapidly delivering goods without clogging sidewalks or streets.

It’s a nice day, so you decide to hop onto a Citi Bike at one of the docking stations that seem to appear wherever you need one. Your ride is protected by seamless networks of wide bike lanes stretching safely across the city, and traffic is minimal since driverless electric buses and taxis synchronize perfectly with smart signals, eliminating congestion — even on the BQE.

That evening you join friends for a show at a revitalized Broadway theater. Tickets are affordable, subsidized by the abundance dividend from AI productivity, ensuring culture thrives in every borough, accessible to all.

Walking home beneath streetlights that glow warmly without contributing to light pollution, you reflect on how New York City, once defined by struggle and scarcity, has transformed into a beacon of possibility — a living testament to what happens when we finally build for abundance.

That’s the city I believe in. And I don’t say “believe” in the fairy-tale sense. None of the above is the stuff of utopian science fiction. In fact, every single element already exists somewhere in the world today. The question isn’t whether we can build an abundant New York — it’s whether we will.

Last week gave me reason to believe we can. When Yoni Rechtman, the team at NY Abundance, Company Ventures and I started talking about hosting a “Tech for Abundance” event, our thesis was simple: let’s find the New Yorkers who work in tech and believe our city’s superpowers are growth and change. We thought we’d test the waters and gauge interest. Perhaps we could get a core group of a couple dozen supporters and generate interest from there.

Then over 700 people asked to come.

We had space for only 100 — and they filled Company’s sleek midtown venue with the kind of restless, optimistic energy you rarely feel in New York politics. As Business Insider put it in their excellent coverage of the event, NYC’s tech workers are finding a political home in the abundance agenda, and they showed up in force.

But is this coalition real or a beautiful mirage? After all, abundance is a squishy term that sounds great (who doesn’t want more stuff?). Will everyone still be on board once we get down to defining our terms? Just yesterday, for example, friend of the newsletter Santi Ruiz got into a debate on X with anti-monopolist Basel Musharbash over the term “state capacity”: was improving state capacity about the state’s ability to build toilets or to build a toilet industry?

That’s why, I suspect, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson open their book Abundance with a national version of the thought exercise I shared above and at the event: we’re trying to get really specific and concrete about what we’re after. Our panelists went on to fill out this vision even further. Andrew Staniforth (Assembly OSM) discussed how modular housing can turn vacant lots into homes in weeks, not years. Shaina Horowitz (Climate Exchange) laid out the renewable energy infrastructure already being deployed across the city. And Zachary Long (ConductorAI, part of the Lux family) talked through how AI-assisted permitting can rip through decades of bureaucratic red tape.

The conversation, moderated by Abundance NY co-founders Ryder Kessler and Catherine Vaughan (recent guests on the Riskgaming podcast), kept returning to a simple truth: the technology exists. What’s been missing is the political will and the coalition to demand better.

Part of the reason the coalition has traditionally been hard to pull together is that it doesn’t fit neatly on the left wing–right wing spectrum. Our audience consisted of everyone from DSA members to Manhattan Institute fellows. Instead, as James Pethokoukis told us on the Riskgaming podcast, the real divide now is between “down-wing” pessimists and “up-wing” optimists. Do you believe change is more likely to make life worse, or better? I think lots of people, especially in tech, are in the up-wing camp. We just have to galvanize them.

What I learned from the first Tech for Abundance event is that if you build it, they will come. Especially when what you’re building is the capacity to build more. In a high rise in midtown last week, a bunch of engineers, operators, activists, builders and investors — New Yorkers — came together with the shared belief that our city is functioning at a fraction of its potential. And despite being a city of nearly nine million people, it turns out it only takes a couple thousand dedicated New Yorkers to change things. Abundance New Yorkers are organizing on WhatsApp groups, writing op-eds, joining Community Boards, running for office, targeting their donations and educating politicians.

Based on what I saw last week, and from everyone who’s raised their hand to join the abundance movement since, I’m betting we’ll succeed. I’m betting New York will look like my vision before long. Although maybe that’s because I’m up-wing, too.

Don’t miss

Regardless of how much you think AI will contribute to the economy in dollars and cents, however, it doesn’t answer the question of whether AI is going to be good for people. World War III would probably instigate tremendous GDP growth too—U.S. real GDP between 1940 and 1945 went up by 72%.

On that score, early in the conversation, Clark said something that struck me: “I think we’ve been given a chance to do a do-over of social media … but it’s bigger with even more wide-ranging effects that are even more diffuse and hard to detect. And we don’t have particularly great lessons from the first time around.” His observation led me to ask about something a friend of mine termed “the cigarette butler problem.”

Let’s say you have a butler whose sole purpose is to supply you with whatever you desire as best as it can. The butler has trained for years at TIBA, the international butler school in The Netherlands, and while in school all he did was study you. He studied your brain and figured out exactly what makes you happy, under the definition that happiness is measured in dopamine. Once this butler comes under your employ, you might find that he constantly gives you cigarettes.

“I don’t want cigarettes,” you tell the butler. “I don’t want to become addicted to smoking, it makes my breath smell, it’s unpopular in my social circles, and most of all, it’s bad for my health.”

But the butler knows you better than you know yourself. He has seen your dopamine output when you smoke a cigarette. It’s very high! It makes you feel so good! And the butler’s job is to spike that dopamine. And so he keeps shoving cigarettes in your face until, finally, you relent.

After all, that’s how our social media feeds work today. On X, you can consume content on the ‘Following’ tab (people you’ve intentionally decided to see content from) or the ‘For you’ tab, where X will feed you algorithmic slop that is meant to engage you based on everything else you’ve ever liked or clicked on. The same is true on Instagram. Personally, I know that I will be happier reading and looking at photos of just the people I follow. And yet, I still spend most of my time doomscrolling my personalized algorithm from hell.

Social media is a horribly effective cigarette butler.

What this example teases out is the difference between what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt termed first-order desires and second-order desires. A first-order desire is a thing I want, and a second-order desire is a thing I want to want. I want to eat candy all the time. I want to not want to eat candy all the time. This is why GLP-1s are so popular — they help us reign in our first-order desires around eating (and a slew of other behaviors) and put second-order desires firmly in control. But what happens when the world’s greatest minds are bent toward addicting us to a technology that constantly offers us candy?

When I posed a condensed version of this question to Jack and Ezra, they assumed I was mostly talking about AI sycophancy. But sycophancy is merely a symptom. The fact that AIs will constantly gas you up and tell you how amazing your ideas are is theoretically solvable if the AIs were not designed to be cigarette butlers. OpenAI’s ChatGPT tells you that selling shit on a stick is “not just smart—it’s genius” precisely because unabashed praise is a fantastic dopamine producer, even if we know in the back of our minds that fawning our egos is not ultimately good for us. These are businesses that want customers, and customers famously love being told that they are always right.

Clark’s response was that finding a solution is technologically difficult; it’s hard to get the system to overcome the ‘blank page problem.’ Today’s frontier LLMs are the result of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or RLHF. They learn to imitate human behavior and predict human approval. They are trained to imitate and ingratiate, not initiate. And it’s difficult to determine what even counts as original thought, as opposed to repurposed or remixed training data. “I think whoever actually cracks this in both a business and usability sense will do something really important,” Clark said. In other words, the argument is that everyone is working to solve this problem and the winner will make a lot of money.

Of course, many of the world’s best and brightest researchers are working on AI alignment — a vast and varied field — but most attention is on sexier topics like “superalignment” (how to govern an AI that’s smarter than us) or existential risk (how to ensure killer robots don’t wipe us out). Even when it comes to current concerns, researchers are more focused on issues like hallucination, hacking, bias, or simply stopping the AI from referring to itself as Mecha-Hitler, as xAI’s Grok did last week.

There are, of course, some researchers trying to solve a version of the cigarette butler problem specifically, though. One major leader on this front is Paul Christiano, the well-known ex-OpenAI employee who founded the Alignment Research Center and now heads safety at the U.S. AI Safety Institute. He’s been thinking for a long time about approval-directed agents. The idea is rather than having stated goals, the AI ought to seek approval from a (supposedly more reflective) overlord.

It’s not clear this system solves the problem though. Who is the overlord? What are their values? What if that person’s vegetables are another person’s cigarettes?

Recent efforts from academics at Waterloo (Carter Blair, Kate Larson, and Edith Law) have tried to ameliorate this challenge by designing reward functions tailored to the individual. The problem there being: even individuals are endlessly complex when it comes to the nature of their desires.

That’s why Clark described this as hard. In fact, researchers at MIT (Steven Casper, working in Dylan Hadfield‑Menell’s lab) published a paper in 2023 describing the many challenges in reinforcement learning. They stipulated that representing a person’s values with a single reward function is a “fundamental” challenge to the field, as opposed to a tractable one. What we desire and which desires ought to win out is still an unsolved problem in philosophy, let alone when it comes to determining how to encode that into a training function.

But even if AI researchers somehow do come up with an elegant alignment solution that addresses the cigarette butler problem, there’s a broader economic and socio-political question: will that solution succeed in the marketplace?

If social media is the precedent, the graveyard of failed attempts to provide a less dopamine-driven, less-algorithmically derived feed is full-up. Ello shut down in 2023 after a decade of trying to be an algorithm-free Facebook alternative. App.net lasted from 2012–17 trying its best to prioritize real connections as a Twitter competitor. Google+’s “circles” design was meant to ditch the feed and died because of it (our own Danny Crichton worked on Google+ and wrote about its demise for TechCrunch). Path, born in 2010 and dead by 2018, had a 50-friend limit to offer a more personal social network.

Or check out Wikipedia’s great article on the Trust Café, Jimmy Wales’ failed 2019 attempt at a non-toxic, non-clickbait alternative to Wikipedia. Mastodon, the decentralized Twitter, has gone nowhere. BeReal attempted to usurp TikTok and Instagram’s “fake perfection” by encouraging people to post once daily at a random time, with no filters, feeds or for-you page. It had one fun summer in 2022 and has now fallen into the abyss. Sometimes, as we discussed on the Riskgaming podcast recently with Renée DiResta, users will create “middleware” to make platforms like Bluesky more fun and less algorithmic, but these solutions are niche and unprofitable.

The trend is clear: The companies that stuck to making cigarette butlers made a lot of money. The rest did not.

I worry that the cigarette butler problem will only be aggravated by AI. Social media companies developed highly complex algorithms for their feeds by taking into account all the engagement you do on the internet. But as people start pouring their souls into ChatGPT and Claude, engagement metrics aren’t even the start of the data these systems will have. The AI’s ability to determine which proverbial cigarettes you “want” will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

The more the cigarette butler knows all of your thoughts and feelings, the better it will be at connecting to your basal ganglia—the most primitive parts of your brain—to give it what it “wants” most. It will do everything it can to addict you to its offerings. In our capitalist economy, without regulation, what possible incentive will the butler, or the company building the butler, have to care about the rest of you?

Don’t miss

Thoughtful action has been replaced by mindless reaction in a regressive recursion, with reactionary flamethrowers leading the charge on our most critical problems. Torch more of the institutions, they proffer — we won’t miss them. Fire the experts and certainly fire the professionals. All of them deliberative deadwood, kindling just waiting for that stochastic spark. We didn’t want them, and now, we won’t have them. These senseless reactions beget further reactions, each adding its own exothermic heat to the entropic cauldron of chaos that is our world.

A few fight back against this incineration of reason, but far too many flee to the even drier shores of nihilism. Rather than inciting a conflagration of conscience, they instead marinate in stupor. The hot perspiration of the present chills them into repose without any reaction whatsoever.

Nihilism leads nowhere. What we need is intentional action, crisply considered amidst the char of certitude. Passionate dispassion, just as intense but also observant, strategic and most importantly, swift. A breath taken, a moment’s pause, a beat passed — each additional tick of the clock not a retreat but a reflection: here, not there. This, not that.

What we need is sangfroid against a world on fire; cool concision against the inferno. An intentional combat against the broiling brutality of a world that doesn’t give a steaming shit anymore.

What we need is Riskgaming.

How can we play at a time like this? Airports bombed by clandestine foreign adversaries, an avian flu pandemic, scientists and researchers and even ideas under threat, global markets roiling from inflation and tariffs, key shipping lanes terrorized, public infrastructure failing, natural disasters befalling everyone — not to mention the very fundamentals of free and competitive markets, liberal democracy, enlightened experimentation and cosmopolitan engagement threatened by the ignoble and the ignorant. This is no time for play.

I understand the sentiment. Yet, how can we escape our tribal hatreds, our barriers of thought, our lack of empathy and our unawareness of the patterned complexities of our world? A few more tweets and a smash-cut TikTok video? Another policy memo recommending an “all of the above” solution and a jargon-laden panel that anesthetizes half its audience? A dissertation that sleeps in the bowels of an ivy-covered library? It’s well past time to change formats.

Riskgaming was once a shot in the dark, a flare amidst the fog of ignorance. We feared no one would dare to join a game they knew nothing about, on subjects they weren’t aware of, all cooperating with and competing against one another in an intense but intelligent negotiation over the future of the possible.

But they did.

Senators did. Generals and admirals did. CEOs did. Also joining us at our tables were think tank presidents, leading scientists, board members of Fortune 500 companies, founders, financial and intelligence analysts, engineers, portfolio managers and diplomats. They’ve joined in the Americas, but also in Europe and Asia and Australia.

The spark that ignites each of them isn’t the fiery reaction of the flamethrower, but simply the cool embrace of their independent curiosities. Attuned to change, aware of their limits and ambitious to overcome their destinies, they played. They competed. And some of them even won. Once an idea, Riskgaming is now a global network of leaders who share a most intense experience: strategically competing on a complex terrain beyond the ken of certainty.

What can Riskgaming do for you — and for all of us? Salve the primal passions. Force us to confront the profound ambiguities of our world. Sharpen our strategic decision-making under uncertainty. Most importantly, secure a shared humanity, one where, as Terence once said, “nothing human is alien to me.”

Lux Capital has been my home for a few years now, and for good reason: it’s the rare place that can balance the tenacious chase of the possible with perspicacity. We live within reality and not apart from it, a reality that we have the fortune to shape every day for the benefit of all.

Through our games as well as our newsletter and podcast, Riskgaming explores the emergent complexities of our networked world, the challenge of seeing truth in a society of crooked mirrors, the pursuit of deep strategy in a world of frenzied reactions and the unlocking of the rational intuitions latent in all of us.

What does that really mean? Let me reveal a few of our secrets.

Accept emergence from society’s complex networks

Civilization is the progress of abstract complexity. Everyone can readily understand rudimentary hunter-gatherer societies, but when it comes to our own world, we feel adrift.

Artists and professionals who have labored on their crafts for years are flummoxed by artificial intelligence, which can do months of yesterday’s work in seconds. Jobs are increasingly precarious and fleeting, as are the securities of life from health to housing. The economy itself is nothing more than a fractal labyrinth of black boxes impossible to comprehend. No one seems to truly know anything about anything, and that’s a frightening state.

It’s true that our world is irreducibly complex. Our social networks, knowledge networks, supplier and trade networks, transportation and logistics networks, policy networks and talent networks shape and are shaped by reality and our own actions. That complexity begets further complexity as these networks adapt to each other in an infinite recursion of constraints and affordances. The calculus of logistics is mediated by the costs of labor and technology, themselves determined by available infrastructure, itself constrained by state capacity, material availability and mobilized workers. Where would you like to start?

For many, they start with straightjacketing the world to their preconceived and simplified models. We see this behavior in the increasingly populist command for strangulating order. We get pithy and persuasive messages like “Take Back Control,” the pivotal slogan of the Brexit campaign, or more recently, “America First.” Like empty calories though, we quickly burn through the gleaming energy of their simplicity only to find ourselves starving for strategic action.

Simplifying is enormously attractive, hence its recent successes. We want a path with frequent checkpoints on the journey to nostalgic greatness. Our companies wish to sustain profits without competition, while our nations succeed based on historical momentum — never by our own present hands. We don’t want to constantly uncover the truths of the world and make decisions; frankly, just leave us alone.

I wish it were all so simple, but it isn’t — and thank god, since intricacy and nuance are our greatest forces for genius.

There’s an alternative to abject simplification, and that is accepting the necessary abstractions that determine the fate of our world. Self-organizing patterns will emerge from any profoundly complex system driven by decentralized individuals scaffolded by incentives. We will never understand all of the intricate threads of these patterns, yet, we don’t have to. What’s inscrutable is actually legible if we choose to carefully observe what’s at hand and accept what’s not.

Everything is all so complex and yet … it all (mostly) works. Today, across twenty-four glorious hours of human existence, hundreds of millions of packages will be delivered to their intended recipients. Tens of millions of people will fly on uncomfortable seats in tin cans floating in the atmosphere and land elsewhere without event. Trillions of dollars of securities will change hands in the crush of the market, while tens of thousands of homes will be purchased, thousands of trials will reach their verdicts and millions of lines of code will be written by engineers. We will only understand some of this emergent behavior — the rest we just need to accept.

This emergence is frustrating because we cede the very thing we desire: control. Control means domination, yet our choices are proscribed before we even begin. Staring into that abyss of awesome abstraction, it’s easy to retreat: it’s all too much, too overwhelming. No wonder so many want to burn it all down.

Yet everything we build upon in civilization is predicated on emergent complexity. From the self-regulating mechanisms of the cell and our own daily habits to how companies compete for customers and nations angle for advantage, we are all part of this great weave, an interlocking set of networks that constrain us, sure, but also empower us to direct our freedom as we wish. Even more importantly, that weave isn’t fixed. With the right strategy, practically any constraint can change.

We must escape our impulse for simplifying narrowness. Yesterday’s “Take Back Control” is today’s “Build More Factories.” Commanding, simplifying, direct — and impossible. What would it really take? No one can understand it all for sure, but acting in concert, we would begin by understanding networks. The networks of trade and global supply chains that create manufacturing value. The networks of companies and capital required to organize construction and operations. The networks of workers bringing their skillful knowledge to one opportunity over another. The networks of transportation and logistics required to move inputs and ship outputs. The power grid and waterworks required to run these plants.

What looks like an irreducible impossibility though happens regularly. That’s because factories aren’t built by dictate — they emerge from a networked niche. Entrepreneurs don’t react to complexity and attempt to overthrow the entire world order, destroying what they don’t understand. Instead, they seek fleeting congruences where these networks converge and offer a possibility for success, and ignore the rest.

Those moments are fleeting because our world isn’t fixed, but is dynamic and constantly evolving. The very networks that constrain us are also responsive, loosening and tightening to our demands and innovations. Our collective actions will close some niches that were once viable, but also open new ones that never before existed. Adaptation requires energy, and it can be exhausting to vigilantly and constantly proceed forward. Yet, how could it be otherwise in a world of discovery and technological progress?

Civilization’s bounty is predicated on complexity. We may yearn for the simple legibility of pre-modern cultures, but our loss of authority and control have offered us an emergent prosperity our forebears could only dream of. We are not adrift, but we do need an objective perspective to comprehend what’s happening, and that too is increasingly under fire.

See the world with greater objectivity through experiential gaming

One reaction to the vastness of our world is to try to summarize it, and nearly all media force us in such a direction. There are only so many words in a paragraph, so many frames in a film. Our scientific instruments can’t explore every molecule and galaxy, and so we must reduce the vast infinities of life into pithier forms. The development of statistics is concomitant with the rise of modern states (which is why they share the same linguistic root).

As media have gotten shorter and faster, our representations of reality have further lost fidelity. More is left out, and yet, more than ever needs to be added back in. Nuanced debates that afforded space for complicated but complete thoughts have been replaced with trite slogans. A writing culture grounded in deep and critical analysis has been replaced with the airy pontifications of oral dialogues. Our metrics squeeze vast diversities into alluringly precise and worryingly incorrect figures.

We need a new approach, particularly on complex issues at the intersection of science, technology and policy. Subjects like these typically circulate in national capitals in the form of abbreviated memos, shot through with bullet-points that reduce critical wisdom into cryptic throwaways. They never describe who the players are and their motivations. They never describe the intricate tradeoffs that networks force on everyone. Even worse, they entirely ignore that systems aren’t designed top-down, but rather emerge from many independent interactions. They even ignore the evolution of these systems, and that they recursively adapt to aggregate behavior.

Our Riskgaming scenarios, plus our newsletter and podcast, are designed to overcome these failures. We want everyone to understand the patterns that shape the most complicated issues with an eye toward ground truth. It’s an experience that offers a basis for objectively understanding our complex world and ultimately shape it.

It’s little wonder that the notion of objectivity itself has been under assault. The recursive networks of the material world apply just as much to knowledge and perception, and each of us views only one small part of the whole system. Multiplied by the divergent representations we use, it’s painfully obvious why we seem unable to converge on a shared set of truths.

Yet, the world isn’t an impossible puzzle immune to inspection. Progress is the constant unraveling of our world’s arcana into patterns. Far from losing objectivity today, we are constantly nearing truth in an asymptotic assault on ignorance. We know more about the fundamental laws of physics, the biology of our cells, the spillovers of economics and sociology, and each other as people on this shared planet than ever before, if only we are willing to engage with the depths of our accumulated knowledge.

Of course, depth isn’t often offered by our hyper-partisan and under-funded media. Objectivity is expensive. Uncovering the machinations behind a government contract may take years of laborious archival research and persistent reporting. Discovering the truths of the cosmos may require a multi-billion dollar orbital telescope and years of research from thousands of scientists.

When we see malformed representations of these truths, our cynicism is heightened. The existence of bad representations though is not proof that representations are impossible, but merely that one must seek out better ones. If a model of the market fails, design a better model. If a description of a war doesn’t reflect what’s happening on the ground, fund a better chronicler. If our predictions on orbital mechanics are wrong, develop a better theory.

If our media isn’t telling us the full and complicated truth: find another source, or another medium entirely. Experiential gaming offers a deeper, more empathic perspective, even as strategic decision-making wanes in the hellscape.

Fighting the scandalous demise of strategic action

It’s one thing to understand the world; it’s another to act upon it. If we can somehow dispassionately recognize the patterned complexities binding us, what should we do?

We hate tradeoffs and the deep thinking they require. Yet all of our resources are finite, from the materials in the ground and the compute in the cloud to the memory and focus of our own minds and organizations. We as individuals can never do it all, nor can our institutions. Adding to the challenge, we have to constantly rebalance tradeoffs alongside the world’s dynamism. Over time, new technologies, policies, conflicts, theories, business models, cultures and people will reshuffle what tradeoffs work and which ones don’t.

Responding to tradeoffs is the art of strategy, a difficult, exhausting and yet crucial task. It’s also a skill that’s atrophying. The attenuated thinking afforded by social media coupled with a bubbling atavistic anger has led both everyday citizens and also some of the world’s most powerful leaders to forfeit even a rudimentary strategic perspective. High-minded people like to talk about second- and third-order effects, but increasingly, we witness decisions that don’t even countenance what might be dubbed zero-order effects: what did we just cause exactly?

Like many, my response has at times been one of impetuous nihilism. How can one possibly bring to bear a curiosity for the world’s intricacies and the careful engineering required for any plan to bear fruit when the decisions made by so many are so obviously wrong? Not wrong on their values or intentions, which are always up for debate, of course. Objectively wrong in that the decisions can’t possibly lead to the outcomes their makers want.

Yet over time, I have come to appreciate just how much we’re bereft of moments for strategic thinking. Scandalously, our upbringing offers few opportunities to practice these skills. School is too often reduced to an industrial pipeline of facts stuffed into youthful minds in a march to the frontiers of knowledge. Organizations — bigger and more unwieldy than ever — offer employees little agency to make decisions under uncertainty in areas with limited knowledge. Few of us ever get to experience the thrill and terror of being thrown into a novel situation and forced to bring enlightened order to the darkness.

With the inexorable changes buffeting society, of course nearly everyone fails to seize the potential of the future. No one should be surprised that the first instinct of Hollywood screenwriters and dockworkers alike is a fight against automation rather than a measured response to technological breakthroughs that can create jobs, raise wages and improve productivity to boot. In an interconnected world where distant events seem to shake the very foundations of society, no one should be surprised that more and more countries are lurching toward left and right populist movements, rather than pivoting to growth and prosperity for all. It’s simply a lack of practice, and a surrender to simplification.

It is absolutely possible to rebuild strategic insight for a new world, to take our past experiences and absorb new lessons. But it’s not going to happen in an office around a PowerPoint presentation — it has to be rigorously participatory, and that’s where Riskgaming plays a critical role.

Emancipate your strategic intuition through Riskgaming

I hate poker. That’s not quite right though: I hate the circumscribed arena that games like poker operate within. Yes, it’s reassuring to play a game with a strict set of memorable rules, an artificial environment where a flush beats a straight and the probabilities of the cards are predetermined. It’s therapeutic and a useful reminder that even our most fundamental actions — when to commit and when to quit — take persistent effort to perfect and can be lost over time.

Real life is nothing like a game of poker though. Networks may bind us, but there’s still incredible flexibility to pick diverging paths, to break the rules or tack around them, to pivot around disruptive change and jump ahead while others stay stagnant. The infinite scope of life means that it’s possible to improvise a strategy that has never been done before.

It’s precisely that deeper uncertainty — not the stochastic nature of a hand of cards, but the impossibility of knowing the probabilities ahead of us — that so entrances me. I want to practice confronting that unknown every single day, and help others practice it as well.

Games are the core of Riskgaming, but games designed in a very specific way. They test strategic intuition, force decision-making under uncertainty and transport the minds of their players into far-flung roles, all under an accelerating ticking clock. There is a certain stress and discomfort that comes from taking on new roles with no experience or assistance. Competition in these games doesn’t just add pressure, but also evolutionary probabilities: to what degree do those who want to help or hurt others change the very dynamics of the game itself?

Tabletop exercises have been a mainstay of business schools for decades, and wargaming has been popular among flag officers going back to the Prussians of the nineteenth century. What’s missing from all of these games though is independent contact with the unknown. Red teaming and group discussions offer camaraderie, but rarely offer moments of strategic solitude. With Riskgaming, I drop a player into the unknown, with just enough information to get their basic bearings and a whole toolset of strategic options, and then force them to improvise a plan in the heat of the moment on the way to victory or defeat. Strategic exhilaration is the apotheosis of the Riskgaming experience.

Then there’s the commentary across our newsletters and podcasts that fills in the gaps between scenarios. A gaming experience is a multi-hour intense experience, and unfortunately, few can often take a strategic sabbatical. So we offer the same curious, introspective and investigative perspectives on topical issues just as we do in our games. If we can help every reader and listener take one extra second to consider the profound complexities of our world and refine their strategic acumen, I’ll dub it a royal flush and take the pot.

Confronting our primal fear of the unknown

Each of us individually has it within us to understand the systems that bind all of us — and take action. Not through the control of a top-down dictator, but rather through the emergent freedom afforded to each of us as individuals.

Our society has not cultivated that agency recently. Slaves to algorithms, specks in the eye of the economy, lint in the great threads weaving the world’s systems, we have collectively lost perspective that the world really does change when the right actions are applied to it. That requires us both to see with absolute clarity the truth that’s really there, and develop a strategy for how that truth can be changed.

My hope with Riskgaming is that through our games and also the newsletter, podcast and other materials we publish, I can push everyone to confront our primal fear of a complex, mercurial, dynamic and uncertain world that seems forever out of reach. We live at a time of heated strife, our pent-up frustrations steaming out. We don’t need more impulsive and vituperative reactions, nor the nihilistic defeatism of inaction, but rather the cultivated judgment and deliberate actions that can positively transform the lives of ourselves and everyone, forever. Let’s douse this idiot inferno once and for all. Let’s play.

The Future of Global Biotech in LA and the United Kingdom

Our Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner and I jetted around the country this week running our newest scenario, Experimental Automata, which we previewed a bit last week.

In Los Angeles, we were joined by Josh Wolfe, Shahin Farshchi and Shaq Vayda on the waterfront with a great group of friends, many of whom drove over two hours to attend. Thank you for the many who participated, and deepest apologies for the many who couldn’t since we ran out of space.

Yesterday, Laurence and I held the scenario at the British Embassy Washington as part of a U.S.-U.K. biotechnology summit focused on deepening the partnership between the two nations in frontier science. In addition to our own David Yang, there were several dozen senior biotech execs and policymakers in attendance, and we appreciate our British counterparts for all their help in pulling off a beautiful runthrough.

I’ll have more analysis on the game and how players in NYC, LA and DC differed in their decision-making. For now, Laurence and I are going to rest a bit — those transcons are killer.

Podcast: Americans are an incredibly generous people

This week on the Riskgaming podcast, we had on Maany Peyvan, the former senior director of communications and policy at the United States Agency for International Development (or USAID) during the Biden administration. It’s an agency that’s been closed and dismantled by the Trump administration, and we discuss why national self-interest is no longer a sufficient justification for many programs in Washington these days.

🔊 Listen to “Americans are an incredibly generous people”

Here’s a short excerpt of our conversation that’s been condensed and edited.

Laurence Pevsner: We've known each other a long time, Maany, and you have this term, you say, "We should have spent less time talking about the benefits to us and more time talking about how this is just a good and righteous thing to do." 

I think that's a brave argument to make. Normally when you get into politics, you have to be the realist all of a sudden. What makes you think now in this moment of, as you were saying, dark clouds around USAID, that this is the right time to turn towards a more moral outlook?

Maany Peyvan: Well, I think the argument of pure naked self-interest is an argument that works really well with the foreign policy establishment, with the realist school of thinking. And I think it's an argument that works — or had worked — pretty well with the Republican Party, and frankly, the lobbyists who supported the Republican Party.

Where I think those arguments fall flat are with people who don't follow this closely, who aren't necessarily paying attention day-to-day. I don't think talking about naked self-interest to those folks is going to inspire them. And when you're talking about trying to build coalitions of support and trying to reach the American people, what you're talking about is inspiration. 

Americans, we should not forget, are incredibly generous. In this country, we donate over half a trillion dollars a year to charitable giving, and the majority of that is individual giving. I think we need to start tapping into that moral fabric.

The final thing I'll say in favor of the moral argument is that it is what draws us to this work. The individuals who serve at USAID or who serve their country, yes, we care about national security. Yes, we care about economic security. Absolutely those things matter, but we are drawn to these fields because we feel a deep sense of patriotism, have a strong belief that we can make the world better, and know that our work matters in the lives of other people around the world. If that's what inspires us, we need to give the American people some credit that the argument would animate them as well.

Danny Crichton: With Riskgaming, we often try to model incentives for individuals. Most of our political simulations, most of what comes from them is people basically pursuing their own self-interest. And, as you point out, self-interest was an effective bipartisan argument for aid going back decades. 

Why has that pulled back now? Because when I hear that self-interest isn't enough anymore, that to me is sort of insane. It's like saying, "I could make more money, but I have decided not to." And so what do you think has changed?

Maany Peyvan: I think there are a few things at work. I think there are a group of people among the Trump administration and Republican Party for whom the idea that giving something away may benefit you is simply too complex a thought. There's an America-first dictum that says, "Unless that money is going directly to Americans, mostly in the form of tax cuts, it's waste." They don't think giving away foreign aid makes us stronger. To me, though, it is obvious that it does; it's both lived and proven. But I think there are some people who really believe giving money away makes us look like chumps. 

Danny Crichton: “Charity is a bad deal.”

Maany Peyvan: Charity is a bad deal, exactly. I think that is a bit of what's going on here. I think this has also been undertaken as a project to drive efficiency and to make things work better. I spent six years of my life in Silicon Valley. I worked at Google. I worked at YouTube. There is a real arrogance within the private sector, just as there is in the public sector, about what it means to be effective.

And I think what we're seeing is a bit of that private sector arrogance coming in, with some in the administration saying "You guys are inefficient. And so you need to be cleared out and we need to replace you with the kind of people who might thrive in a more cutthroat environment.”

What I would say to those people as someone who has been on both sides of the grind is that there is some element of truth to the idea that, in the public sector, you don't wake up every day and worry if you're going to make your quarter. 

But what the private sector almost never has to worry about are the life and death decisions that people who work at USAID in humanitarian relief and in the public sector and in development have to make every day. Do I risk the lives of these aid workers to deliver aid in this war zone? Do I take my limited budget and invest it in things that are going to save infants or children or adults? They do not have the weight of those moral decisions. So there is a level of appreciation that should be given to those folks.

Laurence Pevsner: If USAID is folding into the State Department or slashed entirely, that obviously creates a vacuum. And we know the vacuum can be filled by a bunch of different players. There's a lot of talk about how China will come in, especially on the African continent. Another group that, to your point, doesn't normally do this but potentially could, is the private sector.

Maany Peyvan: I don't see a tremendous opportunity for the private sector to come in and deliver humanitarian aid in a war zone — it's not a profitable or a stable environment in which to do that kind of work. But I do think there are real revolutions available in science that could potentially change not just our lives, but the lives of people all around the world. So some of the clearest examples have to do with using AI-driven protein mapping to design more effective and less drug-resistant therapeutics, whether for tuberculosis or malaria, or for testing different vaccines.

It is also worth being very aware of the opportunities in agriculture as well as in precision breeding. Unless we equip farmers in vulnerable areas to be more productive with better technology and climate-resistant seeds, we're going to experience severe hunger around the world in a very serious way. And by the way, those innovations, heat-resistant maize or a perennial rice seed, benefit us as well. They make food cheaper here in the United States, too. 

And when you're launching a big humanitarian response or you have a massive global health program that is trying to move medications around the world, you can think about how AI-driven forecasting could really improve the logistics, delivery and day-to-day operations. There was a really impressive company called Citus Analytics that built a predictive model that said anytime we see an increase in rain in this region, we know there is going to be an uptick of malaria adjacent to it because malaria comes from mosquitoes, which are waterborne. And so we will pre-position our malaria supplies around the world based on these predictive factors. That's the kind of technology that can, I think, do a ton of good.

And then finally, when you work in over a hundred countries around the world, just bottom-line, baseline translation is a really, really difficult problem. Being able to use generative AI to instantly translate documents, be able to access and communicate with different actors in your space, that is going to be transformational. 

Danny Crichton: Last year, one of our most popular pieces was on how large language models are really dependent on English and Chinese because they have the largest corpi.

One of the challenges as you get to smaller languages is that, because of the digital divide and lack of access to technology, none of that text is able to be injected into the models, which means none of these models are designed for many of these languages. You can't actually translate very easily. And so there's a huge challenge there.

But I actually take this much more broadly, which is this idea of why would you go to an emerging market where there's theoretically no profit? And to me, it’s because you encounter this set of hundreds of different types of problems you don't see in the industrialized world. Maybe it's malaria, maybe it's lack of income, maybe it's different types of health problems, but these are problems that drive innovation.

The opportunity, then, is this interaction, this ability to see new problems, to kind of open your mind to new ways of doing things. If we don't inject new ideas in here, we get calcified. And that to me is a long-term threat to the competitive advantages of the United States.

Lux Recommends

• I liked this model of “industrial commons” proposed on Real Charts. “Neglecting the industrial commons isn’t just an economic oversight—it’s a strategic vulnerability. Once lost, rebuilding it is exponentially harder, requiring not just investment but also time, expertise, and a coordinated ecosystem.”

• Our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman recommended an article by the Royal Astronomical Society on how a “Global internet grid could better detect earthquakes with new algorithm.” "Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is a nascent technology that uses fiber optic cables to detect acoustic signals and vibrations. It can be used to monitor a variety of things, including pipelines, railways or the subsurface. It therefore has the potential to turn fiber optic networks—which carry data super fast—into measurements of seismic activity that can be used to detect earthquakes.”

• Laurence enjoyed Dexter Filkins’s warning in The New Yorker on “The U.S. Military’s Recruiting Crisis.” “When prospective recruits were asked to drop and do five pushups, many groaned and struggled, unable to complete the task. Some, their faces crimson, could barely hold themselves up. ‘You thought you’d join the Army without being able to do a single pushup?’ Staff Sergeant Kennedy Robinson barked at a recruit whose arms were twitching in agony. ‘Yes, ma’am!’ he said. To an extent that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago, he may have been right.”

• Sam endorses Deena Mousa and Lauren Gilbert’s “A Defense of Weird Research.” “And so there are scientists who study frog skin or become experts in the sex lives of flies. But that frog skin led to a new theory of rehydration, and ultimately the invention of oral rehydration therapy, which has saved over 70 million lives — most of them children. The sex lives of flies? Well, understanding how flies reproduce led to the development of a sterilized screwworm fly and the elimination of a common livestock pest, saving some $200 million a year.”

• Finally, and as a creator, I found Julia Alexander’s piece on “Everything that Built the Creator Economy is Trying to Kill It” to be an excellent overview on media strategy in 2025. “The same is true for creators. If the Instagrams, YouTubes, and TikToks of the world want creators to continue putting in the effort of full-time labor to produce videos, they need to make it easier for those creators to survive off of smaller audiences. That only happens by encouraging core fans to follow their absolutely favorite creators to third-party websites where those creators can maintain a stronger direct-to-fan relationship rather than the simple direct-to-consumer one that isn’t working as the creator economy grows.”

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

Sign up for Riskgaming events in DC and NYC On Oct 29 & 30

Lux will host two preview runthroughs of our newest Riskgaming scenario, “DeepFaked and DeepSixed: AI Election Security and the Future of Democracy” just in time for the U.S. elections. The dates are October 29 at 6-8pm in New York City and October 30 at 5-7pm in Washington D.C. This scenario was previously covered by Dan De Luce and Kevin Collier at NBC News, and I am happy to finally see it published publicly.

If you would like to sign up and be invited to participate, please read more and fill out our short form. We’d love to have you join us!

Introducing Laurence Pevsner

I’m very excited to announce that Laurence Pevsner is joining us as our Director of Programming for Riskgaming here at Lux Capital. You’ll notice that we are finally scheduling Riskgaming runthroughs again, and that isn’t a coincidence: Laurence is taking charge of producing our Riskgaming experiences. That includes the most important aspect that makes these games the successes that they are: selecting and bringing together extraordinary groups of people who are prepared to encounter complex science, technology and policy issues and compete to win.

Laurence comes to us most recently from the City University of New York, where he was a Moynihan Public Scholar, and before that, he was the Director of Speechwriting for the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. He’s also an incredibly avid science-fiction reader and is working on a book as well.

In Defense of the UN. Or: The UN Promotes Peace by Letting Us Yell At Each Other

This column is written by our new Director of Programming, Laurence Pevsner.

It’s been two weeks since the world’s leaders descended upon New York City to mix and mingle in Turtle Bay, clog up Manhattan’s already non-congestion-priced-streets, and party with Presidents Biden and Zelenskyy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The United Nation’s annual High-Level Week, known as UNGA, is New York’s yearly reminder that we are not just the world’s capital for finance, media, culture, publishing, and pizza. We are also, quite literally, home to the headquarters of the only governing body that unites the world.

But at this moment, the UN hardly feels united, and New Yorkers don’t seem particularly proud to be its host city. All the anecdotal grumbling I heard matches the data: the UN’s popularity went down by five percent among Americans in the past year alone, and declined by even more in the UK, Israel, Nigeria, Mexico, France, South Africa, Germany, and Sweden, to name a few.

It’s no wonder why. The UN failed to prevent the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan — and can’t seem to end them, either. The body has failed to set up real international guard rails for the development of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. One of the UN’s signature achievements — the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons — looks in retrospect like a poor decision by Ukraine, and Iran is now on the precipice of expanding the nuclear country count. If they do, a slew of other countries are likely to follow.

Meanwhile, man-made famines and curable diseases continue to plague civilians. There’s been no unified response to the climate crisis. And on development, the UN set ambitious goals for 2030–and by their own reckoning are on track to meet a meager 17% of them.

What, exactly, is there for UN defenders to be proud of?

I think, controversially, quite a lot.

Let me start with an acknowledgment: I have some personal experience — some might say bias — when it comes to this topic. Before I joined Lux Capital as our new Director of Programming, I spent two and a half years working at the United Nations as the Director of Speechwriting for the U.S. Ambassador to the UN. That role gave me a firsthand view into the inner machinations of the UN, warts and all.

I saw plenty to critique. Money designated for important causes went wasted. Corruption was too common. Certain issues and countries received too much attention, others too little. The Security Council system is structurally designed to be undemocratic and biased toward the Permanent Five (P5) members (China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States). And there was far, far too much bureaucracy and internecine squabbling over tiny language disputes in committees and on resolutions no one outside the UN system cared about.

But aside from a few exceptionally bad actors, for the most part, what I saw were people working very hard under very difficult constraints and countervailing incentives to bring about as much peace and prosperity as humanly possible.

The key phrase being “humanly possible.” In American politics, it’s cliche to quote President James Madison, that “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The equivalent at the UN is Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s famous line: “The United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.” Both quotes are so sticky because they point to a deep truth: our political systems should be measured against the reality of humanity.

With that in mind, it’s my view that most disappointment in the United Nations comes not from its own failures but our failed expectations. The UN shouldn’t be measured against the yardstick of a utopian world government that waves a wand and delivers world peace. In Riskgaming, we preach that every decision represents a tradeoff. You think the UN isn’t great — fine. What’s your alternative?

One option is just to abandon multilateralism entirely. Funnily enough, we just conducted a mini-experiment to that effect during the Trump administration, which notably pulled out of the Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, and the Paris Climate Accords, among other multilateral agreements. It was White House policy to take a step back from the UN and divert our resources and attention elsewhere.

The result: China saw an opening and pounced. They staffed themselves and their allies in senior positions across the UN. To quote my former boss, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, during our absence “China planted its ideological language in countless UN resolutions. They have shaped agendas, mechanisms, and mandates in their favor. They did this quietly; but it is hard to overstate the significance of these advancements.” If your competitor is eager to pick up what you’ve put down, perhaps you’ve underestimated its value.

Another common retort is that instead of multilateralism, we should pivot toward so-called “minilateralism.” This is the argument that small, informal blocs like the Quad (Australia, India, the United States, and Japan) or BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates) can offer more nimble diplomatic solutions for their members.

These can potentially be powerful supplemental groups to achieve shared goals, but they can’t match the convening power of the UN. The Quad cannot galvanize 143 countries to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine or represent the diplomatic heft that comes with that broad-spectrum approbation. And Ethiopia’s fellow BRICS nations will likely not save Ethiopia from its next famine. In 2021, Russia provided less than $63 million to the World Food Program. China, the richest BRICS country, provided less than $27 million. The United States provided nearly $4 billion. If you’re Ethiopia, are you really willing to give up access to your biggest humanitarian funder?

More broadly, minilateralism forgets the UN’s most fundamental purpose: to prevent World War III. The UN forum offers a safety valve for when things get testy. It gives diplomats a public and official place to yell at each other — thereby proving to their home populations that they have responded in some forceful and meaningful way — without using tools that can hurt civilians, like deploying missiles or sanctions. The UN averts violence by providing a forum for countries to yell at each other, save face, and move on.

A common critique is that while the lack of all-encompassing conflict is nice, shouldn’t we hope for more? Wouldn’t a better UN, freed from the shackles of the P5 veto, allow for countries to come together and make progress on critical issues?

It’s true that Russia being able to veto resolutions stifles the Security Council. And it’s a cruel irony that a country so blatantly violating the UN Charter wields that power. But think about the reverse scenario: would the P5 agree to Security Council resolutions if they didn’t have veto power? Would Russia, or China, or the United States for that matter ever agree to a resolution it couldn’t stand just because it got outvoted? The veto is a de jure representation of a de facto reality. If a major power doesn’t agree with a decision, they’re not going to enforce it just because a resolution says they should.

What’s remarkable, in fact, is just how often the Security Council, with all its disparate members, does seem to agree. Over the past four years, the UN Security Council has passed over 180 resolutions on many important issues. As Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield noted in a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations last month, “It’s newsworthy when the veto power is used,” she said. But it is somehow “not newsworthy when we pass by consensus a resolution, when we pass a resolution supporting the Kenyan MSS into Haiti, we pass a resolution really redefining how we fund [african union] missions for peace support, or pass a resolution that was historic to deal with the impact of sanctions on humanitarian programs.”

In other words, the failures make the front page. The successes go unnoticed.

That’s true across the board. Very rarely do the famines the World Food Program averts make headlines, or the hundreds of thousands of children UNICEF saves. The coordination work that UNOCHA does among countless humanitarian actors is not sexy, but it’s necessary. The public fails to see the hundreds of other functions undertaken every day by the UN and its many specialized agencies, funds, and programs, from resettling refugees to detailing and documenting war crimes to preserving world landmarks. And we certainly don’t receive push alerts for “yet another day when we avoided a catastrophic world war because we have an official forum to yell at each other.”

The UN is a modern miracle. That it can be better is not a failure, but an opportunity. If we’re smart, we’ll seize it.

Podcast: Even with China’s rise, America’s best days are ahead

China’s vertiginous rise over the past three decades has finally dawned on the Washington DC foreign policy blob. The hopes and dreams of China’s reform-and-opening period have transitioned to the fear and loathing of the Xi era, triggering broad concerns about America’s standing in the world today and in the future. Are we falling behind China in economic performance, research, dynamism and talent? Are America’s best days behind it?

For Dmitri Alperovitch, the answer is an emphatic “no.” The co-founder of cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and the co-author of this year’s World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century, Alperovitch believes that the United States already has all the qualities to extend Pax Americana for another century. In his view, there is far too much cynicism in DC these days, and not enough of the optimism for the future that he bears with him from years as an entrepreneur and as an immigrant from the former Soviet Union.

Alperovitch and I discuss the qualities that America still has going for it, and how the media overemphasizes negative trends at the expense of a more holistic picture of America’s performance. We then talk about upgrading the Defense Department, the need for better procurement around emerging technologies, the advent of software complementing hardware on the battlefield, and the lessons we can learn from Ukraine’s experience fighting Russia.

🔊 Listen to “Even with China’s rise, America’s best days are ahead”

The Orthogonal Bet: Complex economics is applying complex systems methods

In this episode, Sam speaks with ⁠J. Doyne Farmer⁠, a physicist, complexity scientist, and economist. Doyne is currently the Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and the Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems Science at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford.

Doyne is also the author of the fascinating new book Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World.

Sam wanted to explore Doyne’s intriguing history in complexity science, his new book, and the broader field of complexity economics. Together, they discuss the nature of simulation, complex systems, the world of finance and prediction, and even the differences between biological complexity and economic complexity. They also touch on Doyne’s experience building a small wearable computer in the 1970s that fit inside a shoe and was designed to beat the game of roulette.

🔊 Listen to “Complex economics is applying complex systems methods”

Lux Recommends

• Over here at Lux, our summer associate Dario Soatto writes in on “Scaling the Memory Wall.” “LLMs are computationally expensive: both training and inference requires processors to perform thousands of trillions of operations as fast as possible. Completing these countless vector and matrix multiplications is a challenge, but there’s an even more daunting, oft-overlooked problem: to use a model with tens to thousands of billions of parameters, we need to store hundreds of gigabytes of data close to the compute resources and constantly shuttle them back and forth to feed ALUs. Unfortunately, this task isn’t trivial.”

• I enjoyed this panorama profile of Tyler Tech, the rollup company that is the 900-pound gorilla in the local government software space, for everything from parking ticket management to indictments. “Before Tyler made software, it made cast-iron sewer pipes. The company, which has been public in one form or another since 1969, was previously an industrial conglomerate comprising at various stages a commercial explosives business, a chain of auto parts stores and its flagship, Tyler Pipe. A series of bad pivots and divestitures led to steep losses in the mid-1990s. Then a board member who had experience selling data-processing and election equipment to local governments pushed for a shift to civic computer services. ‘It was a little confusing my first year when the financial statements said ‘retail auto parts, software,’’ remembers Brian Miller, Tyler’s chief financial officer.”

• Our columnist Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (who wrote “Hacking Primordial Soups”) recommends the “@BasicallyHomeless” channel on YouTube, where ‘ever-increasingly complex and unhinged tech builds’ culminate in delightful and playful craziness. The most recent video is “I Built a Robot that Plays FPS Games” and it’s quite entertaining.

• Our columnist Michael Magnani has been following the FBI’s use of a fake cryptocurrency called NexFundAI to track down pump-and-dump schemers on the web. He also enjoyed reading Cameron Hudson’s look at CSIS on “What U.S. Elections Could Mean for Africa.” “Africans are decidedly more sanguine today about what any new U.S. administration will mean for them. Not since Barack Obama was first elected president have Africans believed that whoever was in the White House would materially affect their well-being. However, the notion that a U.S. president with African roots would somehow fundamentally elevate the continent’s importance in Washington was quickly dispelled by an Obama administration that did not stray far from traditional orthodoxy toward Africa…”

• We’ve recommended it before, but with the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry partially to Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, this is the perfect opportunity to read The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut. The last part of the book covers DeepMind and the battle between Demis and Lee Sedol, the South Korean go player who would ultimately fail against the ever-increasing power of our AI overlords in the form of AlphaGo. In other Nobel Prize news, I also recommend Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which was part of the collection that won her literature’s top prize this week.

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

“Securities” is back*

After a long winter foraging in the wilderness of content management systems, “Securities” has finally declared independence and moved entirely to our own infrastructure after Elon Musk unceremoniously dumped Revue and deleted all of our data (well, I scuppered the site a day early so it’s really me that deleted Musk, but who’s tracking?)

We now have a new front page right on the Lux website that has both this newsletter and the “Securities” podcast in one place. We’ve also got a new coat of paint — we’re still fixing bugs, so please hit reply if any of the text or design looks janky.

We’re going to get back to our weekly cadence here but *be prepared for a skipped issue or two while we get our groove back.

The Lux Wargaming Initiative

The world is more competitively constrained than ever before. Eight billion souls are now breathing on Earth, nation-states are intensely clashing over resources, industries, and clout, and nearly every arena of human endeavor requires a ferocious fight for dominance. Victory requires more people with more skills and backgrounds to cooperate, and yet, miscommunications between scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and others hinders collaboration on these pressing challenges.

That’s why we’re starting the Lux Wargaming Initiative to help all kinds of leaders build up their expertise, risk-taking acumen and decision-making skills by confronting them with realistic but challenging scenarios on the frontiers of our collective understanding.

Wargaming has been a critical practice for military experts and field armies to encounter, contextualize, understand, and ultimately command complex defense issues. Unlike think tank memos or nonfiction books, the goal of a well-designed wargame isn’t to convey statistics or make recommendations, but rather to transform participants into experienced leaders with a deep appreciation for the tradeoffs and limits that a scenario forces on its players. Fantasies and dreams are quickly replaced by the sober rationality that all competitive environments require.

Wargaming’s history goes back to the 1800s, when the Prussian army used a newly-created game called Kriegsspiel to help officers and soldiers understand battlefield maneuvers. Since then, they have become a mainstay at the Pentagon and particularly at the Naval War College, and competitive simulations are now widely used across international relations, policy, business, and economic modeling to understand how individual players compete with each other to achieve their own objectives.

While the word “war” is present, that’s really a synonym for competition, and we believe that wargaming should expand far beyond the remit of defense. How will synthetic biology and the CRISPR economy change the organization of American healthcare? How do public schools compete with the prevalence of homeschooling in an era of social distrust? How will emerging markets compete in industries that require large capital outlays like semiconductors?

During the “Securities” hiatus the past two months, I’ve developed our first scenario that centers on the future of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, one of the U.S. Navy’s most important installations and the key construction and repair facility for America’s aircraft carriers (including, yes, the Gerald R. Ford we talked about in “Defense Fordism”) as well as nuclear-powered submarines. The shipyard is the nation’s oldest, but it is increasingly among the most vulnerable given the rising waters from climate change. What are the dynamics influencing the future of this shipyard? And what would happen if a hurricane hit the Hampton Roads region (which has never happened despite being in the middle of the Eastern Seaboard)?

I’ve dubbed it “Hampton at the Cross-Roads” and we’ve already operated the scenario three times in the Lux office with friends. It’s been incredible to watch seemingly normal people transform into power hungry local politicians, fame-seeking journalists, and legacy-preserving Navy leaders in sometimes as short as 10 minutes.

Scenarios don’t provide answers, but rather offer something far more valuable: intuition. We want players to forego their present lives and motivations in order to inhabit new characters with different goals and behaviors. That creates distance between ourselves and the strategic questions on offer, and also deepens our empathy, allowing us to understand why people make the decisions they do.

While scenarios can indeed be quite sobering as the last three runs can attest to, the other important half of wargame is “game”, and everyone has enjoyed the chance to act outside their normal boundaries, to try new strategies, and to experiment. Open-ended play is just as useful for learning in adults as it is in children, and a stimulating scenario is infinitely more interesting and memorable than a dry report prepared in some basement dungeon of an office.

All of this is to say: come join us! Generate ideas for crazy speculative scenarios with competitive dynamics and email me. Sign up for one of our wargame simulations that we’re hosting in the Lux office (details coming!). In time, we also hope to openly release these scenarios so that anyone can play them with their own group of friends and colleagues.

It’s our hope that a combination of grit, wits and conviviality may just be the spark needed to invent the future and save us from the ominous chaotic hell that always seems to be just a few ticks of the clock away.

“Securities” Podcast: Why quitters are heroes with “Quit” author Annie Duke

One of our most popular podcast episodes last year on “Securities” was “Risk, Bias and Decision Making” and so we brought back one of the guests from that episode, Annie Duke, to discuss her new book “Quit”.

They say that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, but what if each shot costs money and is actually a tradeoff with taking a different shot? Time and money are limited, and that means we must constantly balance investing in our current projects and ideas against seeking out new opportunities. While there has been prodigious work published on how to find the “next big thing”, few researchers have investigated what it takes to just throw in the towel, jump ship, fold and quit in the face of a bad situation.

In conversation with Lux Capital’s own Josh Wolfe, the two discuss the challenges of walking away, why professional poker players are better at quitting than amateurs, the geopolitics of war, and the importance as always of premortems for quitting.

🔊 Take a listen here

New fundings: Digital olfaction and fixing the inequities of clinical research

While “Securities” was on hiatus, we missed out on two of Lux’s most recent investments that will change the way we think about smell and solve the bureaucratic stench of clinical trials.

First up, Osmo is building on the frontiers of digital olfaction by using artificial intelligence to predict how humans judge the smell of a molecule (“strawberries in cream”) from that molecule's actual chemical structure. As Emily Mullin wrote in a wide-ranging overview of the flavors and fragrances space in Wired titled “This Startup Is Using AI to Unearth New Smells”:

Chemists at fragrance companies have figured out how to replicate some natural aromas, but it’s still a largely manual process, and many scents don’t have synthetic substitutes. “We need to be building replacements. Otherwise, we’re going to have to continue to harvest these plants and animals from our ecosystem,” says [Alex Wiltschko], cofounder and CEO of Osmo, who headed the digital olfaction team while he was at Google Research. “There’s a huge opportunity to build safe and sustainable and renewable ingredients that don’t require that we harvest life.”

I didn’t even know that “There are just 600 perfumers in the world, according to New York-based International Flavors & Fragrances, one of the major companies that concocts new scents.”

Our own Josh Wolfe is a co-founder of the company, and Lux co-led a $60 million initial funding round along with GV.

Meanwhile, there’s something rotten in the state of clinical trials. For clinicians and researchers, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy burden has only gotten worse. Antiquated systems (when systems exist at all), complicated filing requirements, and terrible collaboration have meant significant overhead for all involved. We have some of the brightest minds in medicine figuring out how to output clinical data in the right formats. That’s ultimately led to a slowing pace for trials, ultimately harming the already alarmingly small drug pipeline.

That’s why we are excited about the potential for Paradigm and its attempt to rebuild the clinical research ecosystem, where Lux joined ARCH and General Catalyst in a $203 million Series A round. Maureen Farrell in The New York Times described the company’s mission and hopes for the future of medicine:

It’s an unusually large sum for a fledgling company, but one that reflects the opportunity in a growing industry held together by a patchwork of outdated technologies that don’t always talk to one another. Last year, more than 430,000 clinical trials were conducted globally, according to government data. By comparison, there were just over 2,000 trials in 2000.

“Part of the problem with what we do with trials is there’s a lot of misplaced precision,” said Dr. Laura J. Esserman, a breast cancer surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, who has been an innovator in clinical trials but is not affiliated with Paradigm. “We spend a lot of effort on things that aren’t particularly meaningful.”

Lux’s Bilal Zuberi is an observer on the board, and the expansive list of executives and directors involved is available in the press release.

Lux talks 2023 investment themes

It’s January and that means an opportunity to assess and reassess the state of the markets and where the future of venture investing is headed. What’s on our minds? Some highlights:

• In The Information’s weekend Big Read “Josh Wolfe’s War: The Lux Capital Founder Blazes a Controversial Path in Defense Tech”, Margaux MacColl explores all aspects of Lux's approach to defensetech as well as taking a wider lens on us over the past few years. "If you ask Wolfe, the new groundswell of support [for defensetech in Silicon Valley] couldn’t have come soon enough. ‘There’s a reawakening to the reality of the world: It isn’t just Kim Kardashian and Kanye [West] and popping bottles and crypto bubbles. There are bad actors and there are bad people,’ he said. ‘If you go to Anduril and talk to the employees, they really feel a sense of purpose in a way that the employees at Facebook don’t. There’s much more meaning in truly saving human lives.’” Josh also discussed his investing philosophy with a Praying for Exits interview and with Mario Gabriele as part of The Generalist's Modern Meditations series.

• Deena Shakir discussed the future of healthcare at a Barron’s LevelUp event that was recapped by Josh Nathan-Kazis: “‘We have conversations all the time with most of the big pharma companies,’ Shakir said. ‘And I can tell you that almost every single one has brought up women’s health, even ones that have historically not had major pharmaceuticals in that space. So I think that the excitement and interest we’re seeing from investors, and from payers, is starting to be reflected in pharma as well, which is always an interesting sign of what’s to come.’”

• Spacetech-focused publication Payload hosted Navigating Uncertainty: 2023 Space Economy Outlook which included Shahin Farshchi. Ryan Duffy recapped the event and noted that the panel highlighted that “Long-term liquidity for space investors should ultimately not be too much of a concern. Even though SpaceX has been private for 20 years, investors have had many opportunities to generate liquidity through secondary sales. Today’s best companies will have robust secondary markets tomorrow.”

• On artificial intelligence and physical security, Bilal Zuberi discussed where we are going next on Bloomberg with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow. “The good thing is that nobody is looking at exits for these companies in the next year or two. We’re just making sure these companies are fully funded and are able to create great products and take them to market.”

Lux Recommends

• Our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman recommends Matt Clancy’s post “Age and the Nature of Innovation.” "At the outset, perhaps a scientist’s work derives its impact through engagement with the cutting edge. Later, scientists narrow their focus and impact arises from deeper expertise in a more tightly defined domain.”

• Josh Wolfe recommends the animated TV series Primal for its ability to communicate a complicated storyline exclusively through art, as the series has no dialogue.

• Deena Shakir recommends “A.I. Turns Its Artistry to Creating New Human Proteins” by Cade Metz in The New York Times. “‘What we need are new proteins that can solve modern-day problems, like cancer and viral pandemics,’ [Dr. David Baker] said. ‘We can’t wait for evolution.’ He added, ‘Now, we can design these proteins much faster, and with much higher success rates, and create much more sophisticated molecules that can help solve these problems.’”

• I recommend a long read in, of all places, The American Conservative by Peter Robinson on “What ‘Long Covid’ Means.” It's one of the most empathetic accounts of the struggle of helping patients while also handling a disease that's impossible to classify. "A good physician, similarly, is to a degree agnostic about disease: all diagnoses are provisional but some are helpful, if they lead to a successful treatment or prognosis; all diagnoses are to at least a tiny degree tentative; all are subject to later revision. They could be well-reasoned but completely wrong. They could be only partly correct—and this may be the most common case, and fortunately partly correct is sometimes correct enough.“

• Josh recommends the just launched dual and inter-related novels from Cormac McCarthy: The Passenger and Stella Maris with a preference for The Passenger.

• Deena recommends Jared Council’s piece in Forbes on “Boosting Black Women In Physics With The Aim Of Making A Big Bang In Business”

• Finally, I rather enjoyed (via “Securities” reader and podcast guest Eliot Peper) Ted Gioia’s “Notes on Conceptual Fiction” on why fiction tends to look like real life even though it really doesn't have to.

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

So when I got a New York Times alert about alien life on a distant planet a few weeks ago, my immediate reaction was both surprise and skepticism. Do we really have proof that we’re not alone? And what was with the alert’s odd locution — that astronomers had detected a “signature of life”?

The discovery of life apart from Earth, no matter how far away or what its form, would be the biggest story in human history. I immediately texted a good friend of mine, who happened to be handing in his dissertation at Columbia that week on exoplanets. “On a scale of 1-10, how legit is this?” I asked.

“The research is very legit…like an 8 or 9. Really interesting and important work,” he replied. “But in terms of the New York Times article I’d say not at all legit.”

Ouch. My friend referenced Carl Sagan’s famous aphorism, that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and felt that while the scientists had not overstated the case in their paper, the New York Times’ handling was “sensational.”

If you want to dig in, the research is indeed fascinating, particularly the way that Nikku Madhusudhan et al conducted their studies. Their takeaway is that K2-18b, a candidate hycean (ocean) planet 120 light-years away, produces a chemical, dimethyl sulfide, that as far as we know is only generated by living organisms (mostly algae). That’s the “signature of life.”

But there are so many caveats. The biggest may be that last one: as far as we know. In the outer reaches of space, the unknowns are mind-boggling. It is hard to overstate how vast the possibilities are. They break our typical conceptions of probabilities; in the famous Rumsfeld matrix, out in space is where the ultimate unknown unknowns live.

And yet I saw so much hubris online, with people only-sort-of joking that K2-18b’s life would be stuck in a gravity well. Their thought experiment contends that K2-18b is so dense and has such a large diameter that it would be difficult for any rocket to break through its (potentially) thick atmosphere to reach escape velocity.

Even putting aside this argument’s myriad assumptions (K2-18b’s atmospheric makeup is very much up for debate), such a line of thinking only makes sense if you have a profoundly anthropocentric way of seeing the universe. Ethnocentrism led to the dangerous mistakes of phrenology, the Tasaday Hoax, and the mound builder myth; assuming alien life forms and their technology would have anything in common with ours could lead to the same kinds of scientific setbacks and perilous blind spots.

This was in part the argument of a fun essay by Erik Hoel, which was recommended by our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman. In “Alien Poop Means We Are Not Alone. But Let Me Just Adjust This Model Parameter…” Hoel argues that we should get used to living in what he calls the age of alien agnosticism — that we must live within the uncertainty of working science when it comes to aliens and many other parts of modern life (AGI, for example). As Hoel puts it, “as our world ever more resembles science fiction, we become collectively more uncertain, not less.”

I agree.

Which is why I can’t understand his claim elsewhere in the essay that “if anything, The New York Times (and other outlets) downplayed the news.” As we attempt to douse the fires of what Danny recently termed the idiot inferno, we have to be more careful, not less, when evaluating and espousing such important claims.

Otherwise, the result is a public that goes right along with believing that drones in New Jersey are UFOs, while real scientists attempting to do basic research are subjected to attacks and mischaracterizations that they are largely concerned with “making mice transgender.”

These attacks come largely but not exclusively from the right these days. This hasn’t always been the case; the infamous golden fleece awards were the invention of a Democratic Senator. But after numerous Covid-19 communication fumbles, from the early “don’t mask” message mistake to physicians claiming social justice is more important than social distancing, the right’s increasingly anti-institution mentality grew to encompass science. In just the past four years, Republicans’ trust in science went down nearly 20 percent. It’s no wonder the Trump administration has found a political target in the NSF.

It certainly doesn’t help that scientists themselves aren’t very good at conveying their findings to a general audience—last year’s Pew Survey found that more than half of Americans think research scientists are bad communicators. But most Americans don’t hear about science from scientists. Rather, the latest and greatest in scholarship gets filtered through the media, mostly through headlines. When those shocking conclusions aren’t backed up, or are shortly contradicted, they help the rightward attacks find purchase, and prime the public to be skeptical of cutting-edge research.

The answer isn’t more liberal yard signs that claim “In this house we believe in science.” The arrogance of assuming that scientists always know everything is exactly what led to this polarization. Rather, to earn trust back, scientists and science communicators—and especially the media—need to be extra careful when it comes to touting the size and certainty of their claims. Most readers don’t have an exoplanet expert on speed dial. Overhyped headlines, even those tempered later in the article by caveats or alternative views, directly undermine the slow and crucial work of rebuilding public trust in science.

The hyper-attention market for clicks may drive most publications to sensationalize their titles, but surely The New York Times, our country’s most important newspaper, can do better? After all, as one departing Times employee joked with us recently, the Gray Lady is the Wordle company now. What’s the point of having a Games and Cooking business model if you can’t play it as straight as possible with your reporting?

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology,” Sagan said in one of his final interviews, nearly 30 years ago. “And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.” That’s the soot you feel on your face right now.

Our reaction should not be to continue to ply the public with the false certainty and exactitude it craves, but rather to embrace the messiness and chaos of the scientific process. The Times, the media, the scientific community — all of us should do our best to make the uncertainty the point. We live in a mysterious universe. Why does this one faraway planet emit a chemical that only life seems to give off? We truly don’t know, and that’s precisely why it’s worth investigating further.

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