John Dulin comes on the podcast with Wolf Tivy to discuss recent advances in weapons systems and how war is one of the most important drivers of technological progress.
HSH Prince Michael of Liechtenstein joins Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton to discuss elite education, the importance of high-trust institutions, and how small states survive.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has failed to build state institutions to guarantee his country’s sovereignty. Now, amid a moment of weakness, Moscow is stepping in.
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.
America has insisted that its allies converge on liberal democratic values. This is increasingly untenable in a world of multipolar competition and faltering confidence in liberalism.
Matt Parlmer talks with Wolf Tivy about the recent protests, their effects on state legitimacy in America, and whether mass political violence is a realistic prospect.
India’s recent TikTok ban is just one part of its digital sovereignty plan. Like the U.S. and China, it is converging on a strategy that uses markets to create national champions.
The most powerful members of our society work in predictable ways. So do those who join them.
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.
Early Singapore’s authoritarian competency is a model invoked by leaders from China to Rwanda. But its rise was complex, messy, and the result of long factional battles. There are hard limits to how far it can be exported.
The Great Steppe of Eurasia has variously been a bridge and battleground between civilizations. But one thing is now certain: it will be China that will shape the Steppe’s future and the future of those living along its vast plain.
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.
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.
Harvard prides itself as the training ground for American elites. But that goal has given way to striving managerialism, myopic career goals, and a stunted appetite for risk.
Wolf Tivy and Matt Ellison talk to Charles Fishman about how the capacity and practical expertise built by grand projects like Apollo transformed the American economy.
The consolidation of industrial labor in the 19th century and the rise of the consumer-citizen in the 20th introduced a new moral paradigm of work that has now become fake, leaving workers alienated and loyalties betrayed.
Putin’s Russia is reconciling Stalin, Orthodoxy, and the modern state by crafting a new historical narrative. Beneath the seeming contradictions, the Kremlin is building the first Russian nation-state.
The Apollo Program took an impossible goal and achieved it within a decade. Charles Fishman has written an invaluable history of how social engineers, institution builders, and political deal-brokers made it happen.