The Students

AI Bureaucracy Will Enable Total Surveillance

Samo Burja and Wolf Tivy cover the political economy of AI: How AIs will reshape bureaucracies, how some governments will rely on AI labs like petrostates rely on oil, an

The Students Showcase — Live From San Francisco

One fine San Francisco evening, we got together as many of our channel's guests as we could, and invited them to give brief talks.

Jason Crawford — Where the Industrial Revolution Came From

Jason Crawford and Ben Landau-Taylor cover the Industrial Revolution, the acceleration of technology, and how our increasing awareness of technological progress as a hist

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 th

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.

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 rejuv

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 "authoritari

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 outside

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.

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, a

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 selectio

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 lear

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

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

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 p

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

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 hierar

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

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

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 "posthumanit