Society & CulturePhilosophy

The Students

Weapons-grade political philosophy.

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42 episodes
a few times a week
Avg 1 hr 10 min
English

Episodes 42

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Yesterday · 1 hr 5 min
Danielle Fong — Technology Doesn't Just Happen
Danielle Fong and Ben Landau-Taylor talk about invention—how new technology depends on specific individuals, successfully not burning down the science shed while doing the early experiments, taking advantage of AI energy demand, and more.
Friday · 1 hr 6 min
Every Ideology Starts as a Book Club — Duncan Umphrey
Duncan Umphrey and Ben Landau-Taylor cover the power of book clubs, how and why you should start your own, and how new ideologies develop from these seeds.
October 13 · 1 hr 5 min
Forming Brazil’s New Elite — Guilherme Freire
Guilherme Freire explains why his elite training program uses the classics to cultivate virtue and action in business, and how this can lead to social and political rejuvenation.
October 9 · 53 min
Samo Burja — What the Greeks Would Call Our Government
Samo Burja and Ben Landau-Taylor explain how the Greeks understood the basic forms of government, what their ideas catch which today's idea of "democracy" vs "authoritarianism" misses, and how they would diagnose today's dysfunctions.
October 6 · 1 hr 36 min
Renan Santos — How We Built The Mission Party
Renan Santos tells how he built the Free Brazil Movement and worked out the doctrine, mobilized it into Brazil's Mission Party, and how the lessons of building an outsider movement apply in America and around the world.
October 1 · 45 min
What Americans Should Learn From Brazil's Mission Party — Victor Antoun
The Mission Party has risen by mobilizing a young, sharp, online demographic which was traditionally checked out of politics. Victor Antoun explains how.
September 29 · 1 hr 22 min
You Cannot Predict the Singularity
Ben Landau-Taylor argues that techno-singularitarian predictions are unfounded, while Wolf Tivy defends his xenohumanism program. They cover why theology is inevitable, and why the dominant theology keeps predicting techno-apocalypses.
September 26 · 1 hr 11 min
When AIs Pay Their Own Bills — DC Posch
DC Posch and Wolf Tivy discuss the coming of economically self-sufficient AI—how these "digital replicants" could navigate the ecology of the digital market, the selection pressures on their reproduction, and how they could organize themselves. ============================DC on Twitter: https://x.com/dcposchWolf on Twitter: https://x.com/wolftivyFollow The Students on Substack to receive email alerts for new episodes and events: https://www.thestudentsmedia.com/
September 22 · 38 min
How To Turn Your Research Obsession Into A Career — Elizabeth Van Nostrand
Elizabeth Van Nostrand tells Ben Landau-Taylor how she turned her idiosyncratic interests into a career as a professional research hobo, and the business lessons she learned along the way.
September 20 · 1 hr 35 min
We Need A Theory Of Consciousness To Navigate The Singularity — Michael Edward Johnson
Michael Edward Johnson and Wolf Tivy get into the weeds on consciousness. What type of theory is the "theory of consciousness" that so many people are searching for, and what is it trying to explain? How will we know when we have it?
September 15 · 1 hr 22 min
How Nations Fight Over Industry — Ian Fletcher
Ian Fletcher describes the fundamentals of industrial policy, how economic theorists ignore the practice of successful businesses and successfully industrializing nations, and why the US has the institutions it needs for strong industrial policy.
September 13 · 32 min
Where New Industries Come From: Ben Landau-Taylor lecture
Sober, risk-averse, rational businessmen make great captains of industry—in established industries which someone else already built. But the new industries which drive progress come from wild half-mad ideologues. This lecture covers the psychology of the men behind the major breakthroughs, from the steam engine to the large language model.
September 12 · 55 min
Samo Burja — How Bureaucracy Defeated Democracy
Samo Burja and Ben Landau-Taylor cover bureaucracy—why the golden age of bureaucracies worked so well in the early 20th century, how bureaucratic class interest overcomes checks and balances, and bureaucracy's role in today's Western governments.
September 8 · 2 hr 9 min
Richard Ngo — What Makes Hierarchy Legitimate (Human Or Not)
Richard Ngo argues against Wolf Tivy’s xenohumanism lecture. (https://open.spotify.com/episode/0XmEjgRaBpp3OxDrV3WXLD) What is the moral ground for cooperation and hierarchy? We need the answer to build a good society today, or to build a good AI future tomorrow.
September 4 · 1 hr 46 min
Stop Waiting For AGI And Go To Space
The long-awaited Marko Jukic episode. We all expect AGI to colonize the stars because it's the obvious thing any healthy expanding system does naturally. So why aren't we? Marko explains the elaborate cope keeping us on Earth.
September 1 · 46 min
Where "Open Source" Came From
The internet can feel like a part of the landscape, but all our software was intelligently designed—and so were the social systems which produce that software. Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute tells Ben Landau-Taylor about the struggle to define "open source software".
August 30 · 1 hr 12 min
The Problem Of Humanity: Wolf Tivy lecture
Our concepts of "humanity" and "humanitarianism" are usually taken as the eternal bedrock of morality. Today, artificial intelligence raises the prospect of "posthumanity", and magnates and regulators discuss what “humanity should do” about this. But in fact, the concept of "humanity" is a relatively recent and flimsy creation of the postwar political order. We need to abandon it to find our place in the future.
August 28 · 1 hr 15 min
Will Technocapital Outlive Our Civilization?
Samo Burja and Wolf Tivy discuss the forces raising our civilization higher vs the forces pulling it down. Is techno-industrial progress made of social and intellectual components which will take it down when they go, or can it outgrow the decay?
August 25 · 2 hr 8 min
Joscha Bach — Consciousness Builds the Mind
Joscha Bach and Wolf Tivy discuss how consciousness may be a convergent strategy for organizing both human and machine minds, whether powerful AI minds will resolve conflicts by merging or by fighting each other, and much more.
August 23 · 1 hr 16 min
The Dutch Revolt: Jonathan Wallis lecture
In 1572 twelve Dutch cities - less than a million people - began a war for independence against a global superpower and won. Over the next century they went toe-to-toe with the Spanish, English, and French and built the institutions which have defined the modern world. Jonathan Wallis explains how.

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