Palladium Podcast: Recent Episodes
Palladium Magazine
The Palladium Podcast explores the future of governance and society. Hosted by Jonah Bennett, Wolf Tivy, and Ash Milton.
Palladium editors Wolf Tivy and Matt Ellison join Skinner Layne of Wild Studios. We discuss why Palladium and Wild Studios are hosting the AI Conclave in Spain this November. Learn more and join us: https://aiconclave.io
The AI Conclave is a month-long pop-up campus for deep study of the biggest questions—in Mediterranean nature: for healthy bodies, minds, and souls. November 1-30, 2023. Apply now. Full funding and scholarships are available.
Tea Törmänen and Marco Visscher join Ash Milton to discuss their recent article on how Finland's Greens chose nuclear energy and the differences between degrowth and ecomodernism.
Recently, the Finnish Green Party has been leading the way among green movements in embracing nuclear energy. Tea and Marco tell us why that came to be and how it could be the future for the rest of Europe. The trio also discuss how human demography has and will shape energy consumption, and the question of degrowth-oriented environmental solutions that seem to prioritize "punishing" humanity more than redeeming it.
Tea Törmänen is a Finland-based biologist and member of Finland’s Green Party. She is the International Coordinator of RePlanet.
Marco Visscher is a Netherlands-based journalist and author of Waarom we niet bang hoeven te zijn voor kernenergie (Why We Need Not Fear Nuclear Energy).
Jesse Velay-Vitow joins Ash Milton to discuss how recent geopolitical realignments, energy crises, and migration patterns will shape the rest of the twenty-first century.
Recent energy crises in Europe have helped to put nuclear energy back on a strong footing. But does that mean that powers like Iran will be able to build them? How will industrializing nations vulnerable to climate change like India balance economic growth with ecological stability? What will mass "climate migration" look like, and what will be the political structures needed to address it? These are all questions that Jesse and Ash take on in this episode.
Jesse Velay-Vitow is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto Department of Physics, researching paleoclimate and ice-ocean interactions. He tweets @JesseVelay, and his article "Climate Change Is Inevitable" is available in print in PALLADIUM 07: Garden Planet. Palladium members receive our quarterly print edition and invitations to exclusive events.
Dylan Levi King joins Wolf Tivy to discuss his featured 07 article on North Korean environmentalist policies, Japanese whaling, and the ecotheology that undergirds them.
When Kim Il-Sung, the founder of North Korea, was fighting against Japanese occupiers, environmentalism and folk mythology were interwoven parts of his legend—it was rumored he could turn pine tree cones into flaming bullets, preventing the Japanese from harvesting the pine forests for their imperial wars. It was only one part of a much wider "ecotheology" that characterizes North Korean environmentalist policies even today.
Wolf and Dylan also discuss the recent history of Japanese whaling—how global initiatives, beginning in the 1970s, aimed to curtail the practice with mixed results. The Japanese still continue to hunt whales, but argue that is done so on sustainable terms. Ecosovereignty and ecotheology are concepts that will define a world that is now beginning a long climactic and geopolitical shift.
Dylan Levi King is a Tokyo-based translator of modern Chinese literature and a writer on contemporary online culture. You can follow him on Twitter @dylanleviking. His article "Environmentalism in One Country" can be read here, and it is currently available in print in PALLADIUM 07: Garden Planet.
Ash Milton joins Alexander Gelland to discuss his recent article on the life of the Abbé Henri Gregoire, a priest who was one of the leaders of the French Revolution.
Henri Gregoire is a mysterious figure. Both revolutionary and clerical, universalistic and patriotic, he embodies many of the contradictions of the Revolution. Walking us through his biography and elite-level political life during the Enlightenment, Ash makes a case for how Henri Gregoire's beliefs anticipated those of future revolutionaries around the world.
Ash Milton is the Managing Editor of Palladium Magazine.
Eron Wolf joins Wolf Tivy to discuss alternative computing and the trappings of the streamlined user experience.
As computing technology has become more widespread, the possibilities it offers the user have been narrowed. DRM restrictions, software bloat, and "appification" have made tinkering more difficult. Attempts at fixing this, such as the open-source software movement, have not been able to halt the trend. How can it be done differently?
Eron Wolf is a Software Author at FUTO, an organization dedicated to improving tech sovereignty for the user. He founded Yahoo! Games and was a seed investor for Whatsapp. He tweets @eron_wolf.
Mathis Bitton joins Ash Milton to discuss his PALLADIUM 05 article on state centralization under Charles de Gaulle, the institutional history of French liberalism, and how a nation is built.
France occupies a unique position among the Western powers. With public spending at two thirds of its GDP, the French bureaucratic state has historically required a powerful executive. Charles de Gaulle refounded the state after the end of World War II and built a system that ensured the French executive is representative of the people's will, able to instantly reorganize the government when needed, and a living embodiment the nation's traditions.
Mathis Bitton is a student of political theory at Yale University. His writing focuses on liberalism and institutional development. You can follow him on Twitter @mlbitton.
Nicolas Villarreal joins Ash Milton to discuss his 05 article on how capitalist giants use socialist cybernetic planning, cybernetic methods of organizing supply chains, and their impact on the worker.
Socialist Chile centrally planned its economy using Project Cybersyn, which used computerized feedback loops to give production managers live updates on changes in demand and other production indicators. This helped solved the “bullwhip” problem, where producers belatedly learned of changes in demand that originate further down the supply chain.
Capitalist supergiants like Amazon and Walmart use similar systems to maintain efficiency. But ultimately the workers are made to work at the tempo of an automated feedback system that leads to injury and exhaustion. Nicolas and Ash also discuss how industrial rationalization and efficiency can lead to worker organization. Nicolas’s article "How Capitalist Giants Use Socialist Cybernetic Planning" is featured in PALLADIUM 05: Centralizing Society.
Nicolas Villarreal works as an analyst for a government contractor and formerly worked in federal banking regulation. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary, and author of the novel Caeruleus. He tweets @NicolasDVillar1.
Charles Smith joins Alexander Gelland to talk about his 2020 article Confronting Modernity Means Overcoming Humanism, featured in PALLADIUM 05: Centralizing Society. The emancipating power of modernity has escaped our control and begun to resemble its opposite. But, if we have the vision to see it through, new technologies promise a radical reshaping of our society for the better.
Join Alex and Charles as they discuss how posthuman societies resemble those of the past, where legitimacy comes from, and the unutilized power of digital communities.
Erik Hoel joins Ash Milton to discuss the current state of education, how it succeeded aristocratic tutoring, and what it means for progress. Up until the creation of mass schooling in the nineteenth century, tutelage was the most common form of education. Only aristocrats were able to afford this, and with the disappearance of aristocratic society so too has tutoring fallen out of practice.
But its advantages are what enabled great works of genius to emerge over the past three hundred years. Scientists like Bertrand Russell, William James, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were all given individual instruction at a young age, which was a key part of their success. Erik and Ash discuss the history of the practice and if there is a viable future for it.
Erik Hoel is a research assistant professor at Tufts University. He recently published his debut novel, and his other writing can be found at his Substack.
Dylan Levi King joins Ash Milton to discuss his PALLADIUM 05 article on the cult of Jiao Yulu and China's convergence with Western technocracy. Local Communist Party cadres of the 60s and 70s experimented with economic reforms that seeded China’s economic success. Jiao Yulu was their model.
Since then things have changed. China has become no less susceptible to demographic change, financialization, and reliance on opinion polling than its Western counterparts. But there will always be potential for experimentation on China’s frontiers—something that Dylan will go on to capture in his latest article, Empire of The Golden Triangle.
Dylan Levi King is a writer living in Tokyo. His Twitter handle is @dylanleviking.
Palladium Correspondent Fin DePencier joined Ash Milton from the northeastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, where he has been reporting on the ongoing Russian invasion. In addition to events on the ground, they discussed the wider implications of this war for Russia's sphere of influence, given its recent history of frozen conflict and continuing involvement in Central Asia and the Middle East.
One recent example of this influence occurred in Kazakhstan during its widespread protests and riots in January 2022. A Russian-led intervention by the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) quelled these protests and secured the position of its new president against his own predecessor. Fin reported on these events for Palladium.
Fin has left Kharkiv since this podcast was recorded. The city has come under escalated assault. Follow on Twitter and Instagram for ongoing updates and for his other work.
Richard Hanania joins Ash Milton to talk about the U.S. confrontation with Russia and why it keeps enduring. With the U.S. keeping the door open for future NATO expansion in eastern Europe, Russia is continuing its own military build-up in the region. Most recently, tensions rose again over Ukraine and its future. What drives the ideologies behind the foreign policy? And what does it really take to update entrenched political worldviews?
Richard Hanania is President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI) and a research fellow at Defense Priorities. He also writes via Substack.
Charles Coulombe joins Ash Milton to discuss the rise and fall of the WASP ruling class, which he also covered in Palladium 04. America's upper class went from disparate networks of families to a national elite in only a few generations. Then, they lost it all. Topics include the WASPs' intentional cultivation of their internal culture, the decay of their ideologies and institutions, and more.
Palladium 04 is our latest quarterly print edition, including an anthology of work and original art. To receive this and future copies, subscribe now.
Samo Burja joins Wolf Tivy to discuss his article in Palladium 04 on how rising classes become new elites. Historically, cycles of violence often break out at these moments, and yet elites are surprisingly good at surviving the resulting turnover. Are there better ways of integrating new players into a society's elite?
Palladium 04 is our latest quarterly print edition, including an anthology of work and original art. To receive this and future copies, subscribe now.
Avetis Muradyan joins Ash Milton in Brazil to discuss his article in Palladium 04 on why elites often rise from the criminal underworld. Other topics include observations on the Brazilian favelas, the importance of frontiers, and how one learns to be human.
Palladium 04 is our latest quarterly print edition, including an anthology of work and original art. To receive this and future copies, subscribe now.
Palladium 04 is coming out in Winter 2021. The theme is Cultivating Elites. In this special episode, Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discussed why developing the consciousness and culture necessary to act as an elite is not an easy task, but one that requires institutional and personal investment. They also previewed some of the articles included in this upcoming print edition: a new piece from Wolf about why you should quit your job, as well as articles on Skull and Bones, America's WASP elites, the criminal underworld, and more.
This special episode is available to all listeners. To sign up and receive copies of Palladium 04 and other print editions, subscribe here.
Members also receive the full editions of regular episodes, in addition to other benefits.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss why scientific management driven by digital technologies is becoming a dominant philosophy of governance in both China and the West. Other topics include why governments no longer want to mobilize their populations, whether chaos in society is really a bad thing, and Dylan Levi King's recent article on Chinese digital technocracy.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Geremie Barmé joins Ash Milton to discuss his decades of experience in China and what previous upheavals in its leadership can teach us about the Xi era. Topics include his time studying alongside red guards at Chinese universities during the Cultural Revolution, Mao's return in modern Chinese ideology, and the real heritage of neo-Confucianism.
Geremie is an Australian sinologist and author. He currently edits China Heritage and is founder of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Kevin Kelly joins the salon to discuss his new book and photographic travelogue: Vanishing Asia. Covering decades of Kevin's travels through 35 different countries across the Asian continent, this three-volume project records the traditions and pasts that are vanishing in the face of Asian modernity.
Other topics include the value of printed work, why futurists should care about history, and why Kevin doesn't regret the vanishing of the past too much.
Kevin is co-founder of Wired magazine, where he continues to hold the title of Senior Maverick. He is also co-chair of the Long Now Foundation and a prolific writer, photographer, and traveler.
Palladium Magazine previously interviewed Kevin about his philosophy of technology and related topics. Check out that discussion here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss the logic behind a centralized society and what life looks like inside it. Despite the psychological stresses of living in a world where everything is tracked and legible, societies around the world seem to move increasingly toward this model. What are its actual strengths and weaknesses? Is our problem too much scale or insufficient social complexity? And what's the real lesson of the Tower of Babel?
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss what defines elites and how to cultivate them. Could it be that we do, in fact, only have an upper middle class today? Other topics include why money doesn't grant elite status, the reason why privilege is necessary for founding new institutions, and where people should go to escape the social conditioning of the rat race.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss China's embrace of high modernity. Since the early 20th century, America has been the core of industrial civilization. Now, China is its most powerful rising periphery. But while China is currently ascending, it is already reaching important inflection points, like demographic stagnation and uncertain political succession. Does its rebirth contain the beginnings of a new stagnation? Additionally, the team discusses why China seems to act as a proxy for questions about the nature of our own society.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Dr. Michael Zargham joins Wolf Tivy to discuss the dynamics of complex systems and what they can tell us about governing entire societies. Topics include how to think about local and global levels of action, why technological decisions are ultimately decisions about governance, and how to train people to embrace subjectivity.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Dr. Viren Murthy joins Ash Milton to discuss the philosophy of world order in modern Japan and China. Topics include Pan-Asianism in the Japanese Empire, Miki Kiyoshi and the Kyoto School, and the thought of Chinese intellectuals Zhao Tingyang and Jiang Shigong. In the second half, they delve deep into the Chinese concept of tianxia (All-Under-Heaven). Do tianxia's advocates have what it takes to build a world order beyond the West?
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Jesse Velay-Vitow joins Ash Milton to discuss how we can reconcile industrial disruption, ecological stewardship, and the destiny of our species. Topics include how people have terraformed the Earth for millennia, whether our society's risk tolerance is unacceptably low, and why we need a strong conception of telos to discipline humanity's world-making power. Jesse recently wrote about the consequences of inevitable climate change for civilization.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Samo Burja joins Wolf Tivy from Turkey to discuss why civilization is older than we thought. Samo's research into ruins like Göbekli Tepe inspired him to ask just how ancient civilization could really be. Topics include why national politics can end up yielding archaeological progress, whether the Dunbar number is a false limit on human development, and why Samo is willing to bet on finding cities that predate the last Ice Age.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Charlie Smith joins Wolf Tivy to debate the real future of crypto. Its advocates promise radical transformation, but skeptics can point to a long list of scams and schemers. By examining the projects doing something real, we can better understand how crypto lets people coordinate in new ways. And are the schemers just a facet of life on any new frontier? In the second half, Charlie and Wolf discuss what a more rigorous bullish case for crypto looks like.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss the moral logic that drives industrial progress. The industrial revolution has been left halted across its most important domains. The 20th century's major advances were never fully developed. Returning to the path of industrial progress isn't just a policy matter. Instead, we need to re-develop the complex ecosystem of mastery, tacit knowledge, and material practice that can bring about our society's advancement.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss cults as society's real foundation. Cults channel and condition the highest desires of human consciousness. The stories they tell about the world give meaning to every other aspect of our lives. Their authority can make demands for people to act in ways that no other kind of organization can dream of. Sometimes, they inspire members to sacrifice their lives. Cults and cultic activity are not a luxury that societies indulge when all other needs are met. They are the first-movers, setting the stage for everything else that follows.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss the Qing-era Chinese thinker Yan Fu and how to understand liberalism as a political project. Political systems exist downstream of a governing class that tries to create a certain kind of society. The liberal thought of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith proposed increasingly broad participation in political and economic power. But its mission was not permanent rebellion. Instead, applying the virtue of liberality to power would create a strong society and a dynamic state.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss the GameStop rebellion and why such outbursts almost always fail to bring about the changes they want. The reality is that power exists as a set of deals, and only those able to coordinate on the same level have the potential to rewrite them. Most movements end up becoming recuperated instead—but this presents its own set of opportunities.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss the ultimate impact of human beings on Earth, and why neither green energy tweaks nor radical degrowth and return to nature are solutions. Instead, we need to envision what the Earth could be if we used our powers properly. We also need to reconcile our ethics of respect towards non-human parts of the world's ecosystem, and our disruptive role within it.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Mike Solana joins Wolf Tivy to discuss how San Francisco's governance works, how it has gone wrong, and what he thinks it would take to fix it.
This episode is available in full to all listeners. Most of our podcasts are only available in full to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss what kind of economy we want to build, accumulative versus developmental orientations to industry, what classes are actually interested in investing in growth, and the necessity of a class of the state with interests beyond individual finance.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are often based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss Charlie Smith's recent piece on posthumanism and its implications. Other topics include the ways in which a complex society impacts our agency, why the idea of discourse is a mind virus, and thinking of humanity as a hypothesis for life.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Galen Wolfe-Pauly discuss what's wrong with social media and computing as we know it, as well as a new paradigm for humane computing. Galen is the CEO of Tlon, which runs Urbit, a personal computing server that is designed to give users personal control over their data on social networks and other applications.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss the concept of progress and whether it should continue to have a central role on American consciousness. Other topics included how far we can distinguish between types of progress and whether it makes any sense in describing the cycles of human civilizations.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Dr. Nicholas Christakis joins the salon to discuss his new book on COVID-19, extreme crisis, and what we can learn about the relationship between pandemics and human nature.
Dr. Nicholas Christakis is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. He is also Director of the Human Nature Lab and Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His research focuses on topics such as biosocial science, behavior genetics, and network science.
He is author of the newly-released Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, in which he explores the impact of the pandemic on our institutions and what lessons it teaches us about our evolved social nature.
The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss the role of billionaires, how to think about personal wealth, and the inherent tensions between capital and state. They also delve into whether this kind of power can be reconciled with the greater goals of a society.
The first half of the show is available to our listeners, but the full discussion is available solely to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Roman Krznaric joins the salon from UK to discuss his book, intergenerational thinking, and how we can be good ancestors. His latest book is The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking, coming soon in the U.S. as of November 2020.
Roman grew up in Sydney and Hong Kong. He studied at the universities of Oxford, London and Essex, and gained a PhD in political sociology. He is a Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation, and founder of the Empathy Museum. His previous books, including Empathy, The Wonderbox, and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 20 languages.
The first half of the show is available to our listeners, but the full discussion is available solely to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.
To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.
Samo Burja comes on the podcast to talk about when it's appropriate to regulate online speech and the proper relationship between state and media.
Samo Burja is the founder of Bismarck Analysis, a political risk consulting firm. He is also a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation. You can follow him on Twitter @SamoBurja.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss what we can learn from ancient Greek modernity, the collapse of the scientific mythos, and how both knowledge and statecraft can find new grounds for legitimacy.
The weekly editor's podcast draws from discussions in the Palladium Community Salon. To participate in these conversations, register here.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss the postmodern condition, the failures of objectivity and neutrality, and how truth and meaning can survive. They also responded to a number of themes brought up in David Chapman's recent Twitter thread on these topics.
The weekly editor's podcast draws from discussions in the Palladium Community Salon. To participate in these conversations, register here.
Mary Harrington comes on the podcast with Wolf Tivy to build out a model of relational vs. transactional conceptions of justice and morality, and to discuss bringing back the mirror of princes literature.
Mary Harrington is a columnist for the UK current affairs magazine UnHerd. She can be found on Twitter @moveincircles.
Laura Deming joins the salon to speak with Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton about education, where talent comes from, and the state of longevity research. Discussion topics included how to cultivate talent, where the most fruitful life extension research is happening, and whether intellectually productive communities are necessarily doomed to stagnation.
Laura Deming is the founder of The Longevity Fund, a Venture Capital firm that focuses on life extension. She was homeschooled in New Zealand, taught herself mathematics, literature, and history, and was working in a biological research lab on aging research by age 12. She was accepted to MIT at age 14, but later dropped out for the Thiel Fellowship.
Michael O'Sullivan joins the salon to speak with Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton about his book The Levelling: What's Next After Globalization, which includes discussion on the future multipolar world, Europe's increasingly cohesive development as a geopolitical pole, and how to fix economic inequality produced by globalization.
Michael O’Sullivan is a member of the World Economic Forum's Council on the New Economy, a Forbes contributor, and a speaker at the 2020 TED Talk conference. He is a former Chief Investment Officer in the International Wealth Management Division of Credit Suisse, where he worked for 12 years. He was also the lead contributor to Credit Suisse’s think tank, the CS Research Institute. He also writes a weekly blog called The Levelling.
John Dulin comes on the podcast with Wolf Tivy to discuss recent advances in weapons systems, how war is one of the most important drivers of technological progress, and the role of both the public and private sectors in fundamental research and mass marketization.
John Dulin is CEO and founder of a defense industry startup. Previously, he was a machine learning research engineer at Numerai and Freenome. He can be found on Twitter @JohnDDulin.
His Serene Highness Prince Michael of Liechtenstein speaks with Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton about his perspective on changes in international politics and economics—especially the importance of statecraft for small countries as the moral fashions and taboos of the great powers become more influential through a globalized internet culture.
Prince Michael is Executive Chairman of Industrie- und Finanzkontor Ets. as well as Founder and Chairman of Geopolitical Intelligence Services AG Vaduz. He is also co-founder of the International Institute of Longevity.
Byrne Hobart comes on the podcast to talk to Wolf Tivy about what parts of the American economy are real, the phenomenon of inequality increasing during crises, and the impact of COVID-19 on the real economy.
Byrne Hobart works in the financial services industry and writes one of the top newsletters on Substack called The Diff. He has worked at research companies, a hedge fund, and a cryptocurrency startup.
Matt Parlmer talks with Wolf Tivy about the recent protests, their effects on state legitimacy in America, and whether Christopher Dahlke's 2018 article Mass Political Violence Won't Happen in America still holds in 2020.
Matt Parlmer is a software engineer, who works on research and development at Utility Computing. He can be reached on Twitter or his website.
Bruno Maçães joins Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton to discuss why America is ripe for a re-founding, stagnation in Europe and China, and why liberalism has stopped delivering on progress.
Bruno Maçães is the former Europe Minister of Portugal from 2013 to 2015. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and the author of two recent books, The Dawn of Eurasia and Belt and Road. The Dawn of Eurasia was selected as a book of the year by both the Financial Times and Foreign Affairs. His new book, History Has Begun, is available now.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton talk with Stephen Wolfram about the role institutions play in generating intellectual progress in science, as well as his development of a new computational paradigm for understanding fundamental physics.
Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; the originator of the Wolfram Physics Project; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of more than four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking—and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.
Saffron Huang joins Wolf Tivy to expand on her recent Palladium article on Harvard, particularly about the ways in which elite education can be re-imagined to route around the problem of managerialism.
Saffron Huang is a graduating senior at Harvard in Applied Mathematics and Government. She is currently working on various projects related to Chinese institutions, technology ethics, and AI. She can be found on Twitter at @saffronhuang.
Samo Burja joins Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton to discuss how great founders make history through the institutions they create, how political transitions actually work, and what intellectual dark matter exists in our society today.
Samo Burja is the founder and president of Bismarck Analysis, which applies the foundational sociological research that Samo and his team have produced over the past decade to deliver unique insights to clients about institutional design and strategy. Samo’s studies focus on the social and material technologies that foster healthy human societies with an eye toward understanding and restoring the structures that produce functional institutions.
Samo has authored numerous articles and papers on his findings, including his manuscript, Great Founder Theory, available here. Samo is a Senior Research Fellow in Political Science at the Foresight Institute and a Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation. He speaks about his work to audiences around the world, including at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Y Combinator’s YC 120 conference, the Reboot American Innovation conference in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Samo spends most of his time in California and his native Slovenia. He can be followed on Twitter at @SamoBurja.
Author and professor Michael Lind joins Wolf Tivy and Matt Ellison to discuss economic pluralism, the new class war between America's elites and its working class, and how to fix it.
Michael is the author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, including The Next American Nation and Land of Promise. He has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic, and The National Interest. He has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and is currently a professor of practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
In his most recent book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, Michael debunks the idea that recent populist insurgencies in America are primarily the result of bigotry, traces how the breakdown of mid-century class compromises between business and labor led to the conflict, and reveals the real battle lines: the managerial overclass on one side and the working class on the other.
Marc Fasteau and Ian Fletcher join Wolf Tivy to discuss the economic foundations of industrial policy, why manufacturing is more valuable than other economic activity, and what went wrong in the economics profession.
Marc Fasteau is the founder and former chairman of American Strategic Insurance Group and board member of the Coalition for a Prosperous America. He formerly served on the staffs of the House Banking & Currency Committee, of Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, and of the Joint Economic Committee. He holds a JD from Harvard Law School and was a partner at the investment bank Dillon Read & Co. He is currently writing a book on Industrial Policy with Ian Fletcher.
Ian Fletcher is the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work and a member of the Advisory Board of the Coalition for a Prosperous America. From 2010 to 2012, he was Senior Economist of CPA, and prior to that, Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council. Educated at Columbia and the University of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco. He is currently writing a book on industrial policy with Marc Fasteau.
Luka Jukic comes on the podcast to talk with Matt Ellison about his recent reporting in Ukraine and the war for the country's soul.
Luka Jukic is a graduate student at the UCL School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies. He has lived in and reported from many countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
Political theorist and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin joins Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton to discuss mechanism design, governance, and blockchain technology.
Vitalik Buterin is best known for co-founding Bitcoin Magazine and the Ethereum project, but he has been recently expanding his attention into more general problems of political theory, governance, and society. This journey has led to collaboration with the Taiwanese government, among other projects. It's going to be very interesting to talk with him.
Isaac Wilks and Natalia Dashan join Ash Milton to discuss the Ivy Leagues and elite culture. Topics include the future of Yale, the death of Skull and Bones, how universities maintain their power, and why ritual is a necessary part of education.
Isaac Wilks is an undergraduate at Yale University, studying political science and the Chinese language. He is interested in institution building, geopolitics, and urbanism. He can be found on Twitter at @wilks_isaac.
Natalia Dashan is an associate editor at Palladium Magazine. She graduated from Yale in 2016 with a B.S. in psychology. Follow her on Twitter at @nataliadashan.
Founder, investor and philanthropist Jaan Tallinn joins Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton to discuss the frontier of artificial intelligence research and what an A.I. future means for humanity.
Jaan Tallinn is a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa. He is a co-founder of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Future of Life Institute, and philanthropically supports other existential risk research organizations. Jaan is on the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, member of the High-Level Expert Group on AI at the European Commission, and has served on the Estonian President's Academic Advisory Board. He is also an active angel investor, a partner at Ambient Sound Investments, and a former investor director of the AI company DeepMind.
Jeremiah Johnson and Ash Milton discuss the Neoliberal Project. Topics include democratic peace theory, housing maximalism, the roots of institutional decay, and why the west coast is bad at politics.
Jeremiah Johnson is the co-founder of the Neoliberal Project, a partner organization of the Progressive Policy Institute. He also hosts discussions on policy and economics at the Neoliberal Podcast. The Neoliberal Project tweets @ne0liberal.
Award-winning environmentalist and author Michael Shellenberger joins Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton to discuss ecomodernism, the history of the atomic age, and why nuclear is the real green energy.
On June 30, Harper Collins will publish Michael Shellenberger’s timely new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, which is available for pre-order on Amazon and has received strong pre-publication praise from Harvard’s Steven Pinker, Pulitzer-winning author Richard Rhodes, and climate scientists Kerry Emanuel and Tom Wigley. Apocalypse Never is a comprehensive debunking of environmental misinformation about everything from climate change and rainforest destruction to nuclear energy and renewables.
Professor John Vervaeke joins Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton to discuss the contemporary crisis of social meaning. We explore the specter of death during pandemic, how to surpass self-deception, and the role of community in creating meaning.
John Vervaeke is an assistant professor in cognitive psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. His work centers around the relationship between science and spirituality and the meaning crisis. He is on Twitter at @vervaeke_john.
Ash Milton and Samuel Hammond discuss America, China, and the future. Topics include tech optimism, whether the Bay Area can remake American politics, whether China thinks like Confucius or Marx, and more.
Samuel Hammond is the director of poverty and welfare policy at the Niskanen Center. He can be found on Twitter @hamandcheese.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton hold a digital salon with Robin Hanson to discuss possible coronavirus insurance mechanisms, prediction markets, and ideology
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and influential writer. He is known for his challenging views on human motivations and biases, futurism and artificial intelligence, and information markets. He previously worked at Lockheed and NASA. He is the author of The Elephant in the Brain, about human cognitive biases, and the Age of Em, on the prospects for society after the development of computer-emulated human minds.
Fiat currency has made it easy for states to get away with unbalanced spending and hidden inflation. Nic Carter joins Wolf Tivy to discuss how Bitcoin disciplines monetary policy and can benefit American power.
Nic Carter is the founding partner of Castle Island Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on public blockchain projects. Prior to Castle Island, Nic Carter worked as Fidelity's first cryptoasset analyst. He holds an MSc in finance and investment from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in philosophy from the University of St. Andrews. He can be found on Twitter at @nic__carter.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton hold a digital salon with Robert Zubrin and a few select audience guests to discuss how humanity can settle Mars.
Robert Zubrin is President of Pioneer Astronautics, an aerospace R&D company located in Lakewood, Colorado. He is also the founder and President of the Mars Society, an international organization dedicated to furthering the exploration and settlement of Mars by both public and private means. Formerly a Staff Engineer at Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, he holds a Masters degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Washington.
Zubrin is the inventor of several unique concepts for space propulsion and exploration, the author of over 200 published technical and non-technical papers in the field, and was a member of Lockheed Martin’s “scenario development team” charged with developing broad new strategies for space exploration. In that capacity, he was responsible for developing the "Mars Direct" mission plan, a strategy which by using Martian resources, allows a human Mars exploration program to be conducted at a cost 1/8th that previously estimated by NASA.
In addition to his many technical publications, Dr. Zubrin is the author of seven books, including The Case for Mars: How We Shall Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization, Mars on Earth: Adventures of Space Pioneers in the High Arctic, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror, the humorous How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet, and Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudoscientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.
Palladium editors Wolf Tivy, Ash Milton, and Matt Ellison discuss Ash's recent article on decentralization. They contemplate a new paradigm of renewed functionality in government and industry.
Wolf Tivy and Mary Harrington discuss her experience learning to recover meaning within postmodernism, and the larger philosophical growing pains we are facing as a society.
AI technology will increasingly be a superweapon for totalitarian social and geopolitical control. Wolf Tivy and Daniel Faggella discuss this disturbing potential impact, geopolitical strife, and the long-term problem of species dominance.
Wolf Tivy talks to Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz from the Long Now Foundation about philosophical reflections on the pandemic. It is a chance to step back into a longer now, listen to what the world teaching us, and find confidence in our callings.
Palladium senior editor Wolf Tivy holds a digital salon with William Eden, Matt Parlmer, and a few select audience guests, to discuss the coronavirus pandemic, why we took it seriously early on, and what we're doing now for the public good.
William Eden is an entrepreneur-in-residence at Ulysses Diversified Holdings and a former biotech investor at Thiel Capital. Prior to that, he worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve.
Matt Parlmer is a software engineer, who is now dedicating his time to the Open PPE Project, a venture to re-shore N95-style mask manufacturing in the U.S. as fast as possible and is looking for an infusion of capital. He can be reached at Twitter or his website.
Jonah Bennett interviews Mwiya Musokotwane, who is building Nkwashi, a new city in Zambia.
Deep in Siberia, Nikita Zimov is restoring the Pleistocene ecosystem to combat climate change and undo the damage done by ancient over-hunting. Wolf Tivy interviews him to find out how and why.
To get involved or donate, visit the Pleistocene Park's official site and check out the Patreon.
Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy interview Sean Pawley on his work developing a new bank in East Africa, how Rwanda has developed under a Singapore-style model since 1994, and Chinese geopolitical strategy in Africa.
Wolf Tivy interviews Ben Landau-Taylor and Oberon Dixon-Luinenburg on their recent Palladium piece about state-directed industrialization around the world, the relationship between economics and political power, and why we should care about the development of machine tools.
Ash Milton interviews Jason Crawford, author of the blog The Roots of Progress, about the development of progress studies as a new field of research and community.
Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy discuss Seth Largo's article The University System Isn't Going Anywhere, why the bachelor's degree is the new citizenship, and what it would take to actually build a status-generating alternative to the university.
Wolf Tivy and Pasha Kamyshev discuss Pasha's latest article on AI grand strategy, and the deeper foundations of the problem: we are building digital totalitarianism, but we don't know how to reconcile that with creating a good society.
Ash Milton discusses his review of economist Mariana Mazzucato's tour de force book The Value of Everything with Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy and further dives into the topics of the economic value debate and its fallout, how states create wealth, whether finance is productive, and the challenge of policing rent seeking.
Jonah Bennett, Wolf Tivy, and Ash Milton are joined by Palladium writer Jean Fan to discuss her recent narrative piece on the psychological experience of observing rapid progress and change in China.
Jonah Bennett, Wolf Tivy, and Ash Milton are joined by Palladium writer Siavash Tahan to discuss his recent piece on urban housing politics in California. Topics include the class dynamics of housing, social community, the future of cities, and how cruise ships reveal that land is a scam.
Welcome to the eighteenth episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. Jonah Bennett and Ash Milton are joined by Palladium writers Avetis Muradyan and Ryan Khurana. They discuss Avetis' recent narrative piece on landlordism and economic pessimism, as well as the power of storytelling in producing optimism.
Welcome to the seventeenth episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy interview award-winning investigative journalist Ben Westhoff on his new book Fentanyl, Inc., a monumental effort that discusses the inception of the fentanyl crisis in America and reports on Westhoff's infiltration of Chinese labs to get to the bottom of the problem and the top of the drug supply chain.
Welcome to the sixteenth episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. Jonah Bennett, Wolf Tivy, and Ash Milton discuss the themes of social alienation and reintegration embedded in a number of recent Palladium articles. Topics include collective action, substantive goods, and the private market for cults.
Welcome to the fifteenth episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. This week, Jonah Bennett, Wolf Tivy, and Ash Milton interview Glen Weyl, founder and board member of RadicalxChange and Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft, about his book Radical Markets, where he introduces new ways of re-imagining property ownership and voting.
Welcome to the fourteenth episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. This week, Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy talk about science fiction with Hannu Rajaniemi, a New York Times published science fiction writer and biotech startup founder. He’s currently CEO of HelixNano, which works on developing novel therapeutic modalities for cancer.
Welcome to the thirteenth episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. This week, Jonah Bennett, Wolf Tivy, and Ash Milton interview Gladden Pappin, assistant professor of politics at the University of Dallas and deputy editor of American Affairs, about liberalism, the state, and Pappin's recent article Toward a Party of the State.
Welcome to the twelfth episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. This week, Jonah Bennett, Wolf Tivy, and Ash Milton discuss Jonah's recent article on the U.S. national security state's move to ban the export of advanced microprocessors to Huawei, a full-scale technology company with links to the Chinese government.
Welcome to the eleventh episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. This week, Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy interview Nick Cassimatis, a former tenured AI professor, on artificial general intelligence, AI and unemployment, and the current state of the field. Nick is a former tenured AI professor and the founder of Dry.io, a platform that makes software 1000x faster to write, and lets people create and moderate their own social networks, search engines, and other software services.
For suggestions or questions, email editor@palladiummag.com.
Welcome to the tenth episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. This week, Jonah Bennett, Wolf Tivy, and Ash Milton interview Mark Lutter, founder of the Center for Innovative Governance Research, on the future of charter cities.
For suggestions or questions, email editor@palladiummag.com.
Welcome to the ninth episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. This week, Jonah Bennett and Wolf Tivy interview Samo Burja, founder of Bismarck Analysis, a political risk consulting firm, on his recent Botswana piece and his thoughts about China's Belt & Road in Africa. You can find Samo on Twitter and YouTube.
Welcome to the eighth episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. This week, Wolf Tivy interviews Will Eden, a biotech investor at Thiel Capital, on the impact of biotech advancements on society, Will's proposed health plan, immortality, and whether health care is even real at all.
Welcome to the seventh episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. This week, Jonah Bennett, Wolf Tivy, and Ash Milton discuss the recent coup in Venezuela and Luka Jukic's article on how the Balkans are hanging by an American thread.
For suggestions or questions, email editor@palladiummag.com.
Welcome to the sixth episode of the Palladium Podcast, where we explore the future of governance and society. This week, Jonah Bennett, Wolf Tivy, and Ash Milton interview Matt Ellison, author of the recent Palladium piece on Gustav Hilger, the German strategic mastermind behind the American post-war order.
For suggestions or questions, email editor@palladiummag.com.
This week, Wolf Tivy interviews Nick Pinkston, founder of Plethora, a rapid manufacturing company in San Francisco, about manufacturing and industrial policy.
This week, Jonah Bennett, Ash Milton, and Wolf Tivy discuss the role of romantic adventurism at the end of history and also Daniel Weissman’s fantastic piece on post-globalization Istanbul.
This week, Jonah Bennett, Ash Milton, Wolf Tivy, and Miguel Morel discuss Miguel’s on-the-ground Venezuela article and the Palladium team’s experiences in Caracas, Bogotá, and Buenos Aires. The panel also delves into Luka Jukic’s piece on the post-Soviet sphere and Sonya Mann’s piece on cypherpunk culture and gun printing.
This week, Jonah Bennett, Ash Milton, and Wolf Tivy review Stephen Borthwick’s article on China and Pasha Kamyshev’s piece on Facebook and how the state is supposed to grapple with the phenomenon of centralized social media and rival power centers.
This week, Jonah Bennett, Ash Milton, and Wolf Tivy review the magazine’s opening article, discuss Jonah’s adventures in Davos, and expand on the recent piece about geoengineering.