We Are Not Saved

I had a discussion with a friend recently who claimed that I other similarly dispassionate blogs (read rationalists) were providing intellectual cover for bad people, in particular men's rights activ…

In the 90s there were two theories for the future. Fukuyama's "End of History" and Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations". Now that more than two decades has passed it seems obvious that Huntington wa…

A recent book asks, "What's Wrong with China?" Well perhaps a lot, but for the purposes of this podcast I'm just looking at how very different China is from the US or the West, far different than mos…

On June 1, 2009 Air France Flight 447 crashed into the mid-atlantic killing all 228 people aboard. In this episode I look at how it happened and whether it provides any larger lessons on the limits o…

There are a lot of ways to spend our time, money and attention, and all three are limited. How do we decide what to spend them on, how do we decide what to worry about? This is the topic I examine on…

Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth is a book about a future where brain emulation becomes commonplace, by Robin Hanson. The future Hanson describes is a mixed bag, and I look a…

I have long positioned myself as something of a deficit hawk. A few weeks ago I heard a podcast about Modern Monetary Theory, an economics ideology which declares that debts and deficits don't matter…

I decide to add myself to the long list of people talking about the Kavanuagh nomination. But I look at it from the standpoint of what standards a Senator might use to make a decision when it really …

Recently I attended the Moral and Ethical Leadership Conference put on by the BYU Management Society, the unofficial theme of which appeared to be civility. I take three speeches from the conference:…

On a recent episode of the Art of Manliness Professor Benjamin Ginsberg discusses his book The Value of War and makes the claim that war has several positive values which have been recently overlooke…

How will people a thousand years from now view this era? Will they see us as visionaries creating utopia or will they see us as hopelessly naive, ignoring obvious risks in favor of selfish short-term…

I just finished reading Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday, which is the story of Gawker being taken down by Peter Thiel. And someone on reddit pointed out that if Gawker was what they claimed to be, they sh…

There are lots of ways things could go poorly in the future without going catastrophically bad. In this episode I take a recent article by Tyler Cowen where he speaks on this idea and I expand on som…

A review of the book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou. I discuss how the many failsafes against this sort of fraud were circumvented by Holmes and her accomp…

Nietzsche claimed that "God is dead", and predicted that as this became apparent the world would descend into nihilism. But what if there are god-like extraterrestrials out there? Or what if we can c…

I introduce the idea of "The Mistake of Dramatic Timing" which affects most of the thinking about Fermi's Paradox. I review a particularly egregious example of it in the Bobiverse series. I then go o…