The Students

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, and how AI apocalypticism will struggle against careerism.

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 and Ben Landau-Taylor cover the Industrial Revolution, the acceleration of technology, and how our increasing awareness of technological progress as a historical force has altered society.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Mission Party has risen by mobilizing a young, sharp, online demographic which was traditionally checked out of politics. Victor Antoun explains how.

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.

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/dcposch Wolf on Twitter: https://x.com/wolftivy Follow The Students on Substack to receive email alerts for new episodes and events: https://www.thestudentsmedia.com/

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.

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?

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.

​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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

​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.