So Stargate ran all the way from the ‘70s. It was terminated in ‘95, and then it was declassified in ‘95. So it’s not like I was able to infiltrate the CIA headquarters and get these material. These are all publicly available. I’m sitting at Rice University right now. These are housed in, what is called, the Archives of the Impossible. They’re available upon public request. Anyone can come and just see them.

So this is how one of these remote viewing sessions worked. Okay. As a leader of one of these sessions, you sit down with the remote viewer that was selected through the U.S. Army, and you start with one of these worksheets. And here’s what you do. You provide an anonymized reference number to the target, which could be a military base, a location, and your remote viewer tries to psychically tap into the target and sketches out and records all kinds of sensory input he or she receives, before analyzing it later. Which I know sounds really crazy, but wait till you see the results. I know you’re dying to see some of the actual hits, some of the best examples of remote viewing, and that is found in box 12, folder 3.

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America is the land of freedom. She’s the protector of self-evident rights. In my mind, there can be no doubt about America’s genuine achievement in world history. How then, do we make sense of her founding? Of the systematic elimination of the natives’ freedoms whose rights were not so evident? America’s founding act violated her most deeply held principle. How do we make sense of this? This is the paradox that the great Machiavelli scholar, Leo Strauss, introduces to help us tease out Machiavelli’s central political insight. Principles need to be violated in order to be actualized. It’s not hypocrisy, it’s necessity. For Strauss, as for Machiavelli, the modern left and right are both deluded about America’s founding. The right wants to whitewash, whereas the left wants to denounce; but neither own up to the actual cost of doing politics in the real world. In this lecture, I will withhold my own opinion and critiques for the end, but not before explaining the terrifying cost of building an equal, free, and lawful society, according to Machiavelli.

1. American Founding

1.1 American Founding: Geography

I quote to you, the great Machiavelli scholar, Leo Strauss,

“Machiavelli would argue that America owes her greatness not only to her habitual adherence to the principles of freedom and justice, but also to her occasional deviation from them. He would not hesitate to suggest a mischievous interpretation… of the fate of the Red Indians… there cannot be a great and glorious society without the equivalent of the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus.” - Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli

So I’m going to save, as always, my personal reservations... And believe me, there’s a lot... Towards the end of this lecture. And we’re going to start just by trying to understand the most charitable interpretation of Machiavelli. And we’re going to do it by unpacking Strauss’s example here. So what is he gesturing at? This mischievous interpretation of the founding of America. Up to 90% of the Native Americans were wiped out in the first phase through contact of disease alone. Think about ten of your best friends and family. Nine of them dead. And then came a brutal, centuries-long, westward push. Massacres, war, fraud, contracts that were agreed to, but blatantly violated. By the time the frontier closed, only a sliver of the native population was still surviving. And it was not much better for those who survived. Families were confined to reserves, children were ripped out of those families, forced into boarding schools, punished for practicing their own religion, speaking their own language, until the native way of life was all but eliminated. Why does Strauss think Machiavelli would highlight this fact of founding? Is it to condemn America? No, not even close. We can tease out what Machiavelli would say about America’s founding, as Strauss suggests, by seeing what Machiavelli has said about the founding of Rome.

Rome, too, was founded on at least two crimes. The first crime, Romulus literally killing his brother Remus. The second crime, Rome subjugated, colonized, enslaved her way to greatness. And the way she did it was absolutely treacherous. Machiavelli tells us when Rome was just a small city-state, what it did was it forced... It invited the city-states around it to become her junior partners. You get to keep all of your ruling class, you get to keep your laws, most of your property, your language, your religion, but you listen to us. And what Rome commanded her junior partners to do, was to go further out and subjugate the people in further regions. So not as inviting them as junior partners, but getting them in as subjects. Killing off the ruling class, taking their land, enslaving some of them, absorbing others as citizens. And when Rome’s junior partners collected enough subjects for her, Rome turned on those junior partners, with the very subjects she got, and subjugated everyone until Rome ruled alone. Blatant fraud is the heart of Rome’s greatness. This is what Machiavelli tells us. And a not too dissimilar strategy was used by America in her expansion. And the most infamous example of this is the Creek War.

In the Creek War, Andrew Jackson, as general, was fighting against the Creeks. And one of the pivotal reasons he won, was because he allied himself with the Cherokee tribe, the Cherokees, who helped America defeat the Creeks. A Cherokee leader even saved Andrew Jackson’s life. Andrew Jackson called the Cherokee, My dear and faithful friends. Now, Andrew Jackson becomes President, and he pushes through the Indian Removal Act, which would exile the Cherokee from their native land... His own allies who saved his life... It would exile them from their native land that they’ve been living for centuries, and push them west. What makes this even more treacherous is that the Cherokee at this point, had done everything they were supposed to do to assimilate. They adopted a written constitution modeled after the US’s constitution. They created a written alphabet. Many of them even stopped practicing their own native religion and rituals, and converted to Christianity. The Cherokee literally had treaties with the American government recognizing its sovereignty. So the Cherokee, again, they did everything they were supposed to do. They fight this legally, not through terrorism. They fight it legally. They take it to the Supreme Court. It’s a bit nuanced, but eventually the Supreme Court sides with the Cherokee. They recognized the Cherokee’s authority, over what Jackson said. What does Jackson do? He ignores the Supreme Court. He does an under-the-table deal with an illegitimate group of Cherokee leaders, get them to sign over the land in an illegitimate treaty, and use that as legitimacy to exile them from their land. This resulted in the infamous Trail of Tears, where the Cherokee were exiled from their native land. A quarter of them died on the journey as they went out west. Why did they go out west? Because the government told them: west of the Mississippi, native land forever.

Machiavelli’s lesson about the founding of Rome is this: Rome could not have been the free state par excellence, a beacon of freedom inspiring all the great nations that have come since, if she actually respected the freedom of others. And if you are going to conquer, if you are going to go to war, I quote to you Machiavelli,

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Johnathan Bi: Your true potential is higher than you can possibly imagine. It is literally superhuman. But modernity is suffocating that potential. Whether it’s the materialists, the religious, or the technologists, they’ve trapped you squarely as a herd animal. This is why you need to learn to not fit in, to not be normal, to give up health and maybe even sanity if you want to realize this superhuman potential. This is the seductive invitation of my guest, Jeff Kripal, who’s gonna give us a mystical reading of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch. Now, Jeff himself is a scholar of mysticism who had a transformative mystical experience while researching Hinduism in Calcutta as a young man. As you’re gonna hear in this interview, Jeff came face to face with the erotic presence of a Hindu goddess as a grad student decades ago. He literally had an experience with divinity and has since been wrestling with his experience through his writing. Jeff’s ambition is for his writing to engender similar mystical states in your life, to realize your superhuman potential. And he sees the same mystical inspiration and impulse in Nietzsche. Jeff’s claim is that Nietzsche must be read primarily not as a political, philosophical, or literary thinker, but as a mystical and religious one.

Johnathan Bi: And he thinks this is true for all the great thinkers. They are all mystics inspired by their own supernatural experiences. What you’re gonna hear in this interview, then, isn’t just a new way to read Nietzsche, but a new way to read the entire canon as mystical. Jeff is mounting nothing less than a Copernican revolt against the materialist worldview. If you want to be invited to online and in-person lectures, seminars, and events I host across the world, then please join my email list at johnathanbi.com to be kept up to date. Without further ado, Jeff Kripal.

1.  Nietzsche as Mystic

Johnathan Bi: Who is the Ubermensch for Nietzsche?

Jeffrey Kripal: The Ubermensch is the future human. It’s where humanity is evolving or transitioning toward. And we are a transitional species, not just a transitional person, but a transitional species.

Johnathan Bi: We are to apes what the Ubermensch is to us.

Jeffrey Kripal: That’s the image Nietzsche used, of course, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that we’re on this tightrope and when we look in one direction we see the ape and when we look in another we see the Ubermensch. And we’re sort of in the middle of this. We’re on our way, as it were. But Nietzsche was not a Darwinian in the sense that he didn’t think that this was a random process, that there was some role here, some central role for the will, as he called it. And so it’s unclear how we get to the Ubermensch or to the superhumans, but again, it has something to do with culture, it has something to do with will, it has something to do with intending it. I suspect there’s certainly time travel that goes on in the Nietzschean text. So it’s, I think it’s an occult or an esoteric practice that produces the Ubermensch.

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Johnathan Bi: Not only is my guest James Liang, the co-founder of Trip.com, now with $50 billion, he was also a prodigy academic who started college at 15, got a PhD at Stanford and then became a professor at China’s top university, PKU. James straddles not just the active and contemplative life, but elite circles across US and China. Now, sitting at this unique intersection, helps James articulate his most important idea, that demography is one of the most overlooked factors that impacts innovation. The problem with an aging population is not just the financial strain on pensions, but a cultural technological stagnation that will suffocate any creative act. James believes the technological race between US and China will be in large part decided by which population ages first. In this interview, you will learn about the coming population collapse from one of the world’s foremost demography experts and what to do about it from one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurs. I’m Johnathan Bi, a founding member of Cosmos. We deliver educational programs, fund research, invest in AI startups and believe that philosophy is critical to building better technology. If you wanna join our ecosystem of philosopher builders, you can find roles we’re hiring for, events we’re hosting and other ways to get involved on johnathanbi.com/cosmos. Without further ado, James Liang.

Johnathan Bi: Most employers view their employees having children as a drag on their business. Yet you pay your employees 50,000 for every baby they make. You are starting a one billion fund to pay PhD students to have babies. Why is that?

James Liang: Well, I believe profitable companies should provide better benefit. But on top of that, I believe increasingly low fertility problem is becoming a more serious social and economic problem for many countries, especially for China. So in general, I believe young people need a lot of support, financial support, give them more money and time to have more children. That’s a small step to help them.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. So in the middle of your career, while you were building Trip.com, and it was very successful, you decided to leave and pursue a PhD at Stanford to study demography. But back in the day, demography wasn’t this... And low fertility wasn’t this issue that everyone is talking about. So what initially attracted you to demography?

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Johnathan Bi: The supernatural is real. Levitation, reincarnation, near death experiences, remote viewing; not only do these events happen, they are well documented. Not only that, but they are well documented by secular, serious scholars and scientists. There are entire labs out of Duke, Stanford, Princeton, UVA, that have come up with compelling evidence of the supernatural that cannot be absorbed into a materialist frame. This is the claim of my guest Dale Allison, who himself is a Princeton historian and a highly respected scholar. So why haven’t we heard any of this? When I read Allison’s impressive survey, my first reaction was not just shock, but anger. Why haven’t I, in my 20-plus years of education, ever been told any of this, of this radical data and the Copernican shift it seems to suggest? My guest Dale’s answer is that all of this has been systematically suppressed by not just atheists, but the religious as well. This data is threatening not just for the materialist worldview, but most religious traditions as well. In fact, you’re going to learn how atheism itself is an outgrowth of certain sects of Christianity. In this interview, you’re going to hear about all the mind-blowing empirical data for the supernatural, and what this means for the world you and I live in.

Johnathan Bi: You wrote a book called, ‘Encountering Mystery,’ about... It’s a survey, really, of the different metanormal experiences across traditions and across cultures. Let’s say you were talking to a die-hard materialist right now, what examples of the metanormal would you give that you think is the least likely to be absorbed into a purely materialist frame?

Dale Allison: Okay. Well, the first thing I would do would be to refer to two books. The first book I would refer to is a book called,’Irreducible Mind: Towards a Psychology for the 21st Century,’ edited by Edward Kelly, which is an empirical refutation of materialism. And the second book is by a man named David Bentley Hart, which is called, ‘All Things Are Full of Gods.’ One of those books takes an empirical approach, and the other takes a philosophical approach. I would simply say, go read those two books and if you’re still a materialist, I can’t help you. But if you’re going to ask me for experiences from my book, one thing I do talk about, is near death experiences which have veridical elements... Or apparently veridical elements. This is when a patient is out of it, let’s say, being operated on, and then they wake up, and then they talk to the doctor and they say, “By the way, I noticed that you had red tennis shoes on.” And the doctor is very puzzled and says, “Well, yeah, there’s no way you could know that.” There are quite a few stories now, from doctors and nurses, who say so-and-so told me something that he or she could not have known, should not have known, but did, because the person was out when what they saw happened.

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Johnathan Bi: This is a very special interview for me. My guest, Axel Honneth, is not just one of the greatest philosophers alive, but one of my first teachers who made me fall in love with philosophy. Back in college, my biggest struggle was dealing with my own craving for external validation. I found myself racking up achievements I didn’t need, to pursue careers I didn’t want, all in order to impress people I didn’t particularly like. And when I realized this as a 19, 20 year old, I decided that I needed to be free from external validation altogether in order to build a healthy self esteem. So I went the opposite extreme. I deleted all of my social media. I moved to Nepal to practice in a Tibetan monastery. I was genuinely considering renouncing the world. But then I encountered, among others, Axel’s work on Hegel. And it showed me that I’d set up a false dichotomy. The way to build a healthy self esteem, it turns out, is not by rejecting validation altogether, it is by gaining the right kind of external validation. The key question then is not how do I stop caring, it’s how, from whom and when should I care?

Johnathan Bi: This is the most important lesson that Axel taught me and will also teach you today. But what really moved me back then, even more than Axel’s ideas into philosophy, is who he is as a person, as one of the most important and busy scholars, he spent hours every month taking me some random undergrad at the time, one-on-one, carefully through his works. His generosity showed me what a philosophical life was all about. This interview is special then, because it gave me the opportunity, almost a decade later, to revisit the works that started my journey into philosophy. In this interview, we’re going to tease out the relevance of Axel’s ideas by examining a common tension within the modern left between class conflict and identity politics, before providing you with a systematic roadmap for how to live a life not just for others, but authentically your own. Without further ado, my teacher, Axel Honneth.

1. Class Conflict Vs. Identity Politics

Johnathan Bi: I wanna begin by critiquing examining one of your most interesting and controversial opinions. In classical leftist progressive movements, it has been politics of sameness, class conflict. Workers of the world unite to fight against what many people see is the major injustice and inequality, namely the material one. In the recent decades, there’s been a rise of identity politics, and that has been interpreted as a politics of difference. Not only do we need to care for African Americans, but African American women, but disabled African American women. And so it becomes intersectionality. It’s a kind of a force of difference. Most scholars seem to think that recognition and redistribution are opposed, or at least distinct. But your opinion is that all forms of moral struggle are actually at the bottom, struggles of recognition.

Axel Honneth: Yes.

Johnathan Bi: Why is that?

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Johnathan Bi: Conquest has been completely disavowed by our culture. We are told that expansion is bad. Boys are chastised for showing the slightest aggression in school. And the only way you are allowed today to attack another country is in the name of defense. Machiavelli warns us that our modern obsession with peace is actually a lot more dangerous than first meets the eye. For easy times make soft men, but soft men make hard times. Now, we might think, look, conquest is morally repugnant, that even if it is successful, the conqueror’s soul becomes corrupted. But Machiavelli flips this logic on its head. It’s precisely those who know only peace, those are the people who are morally decadent, becoming soft and effeminate. In other words, what’s so shocking about reading Machiavelli is not just that he urges us to conquer, but why he does so. Machiavelli believes that there is something spiritually and morally healthy in conquering others. Danger cleanses your soul, war brings sobriety, and violence is a moral teacher. This is what we’re going to cover in this lecture today. Part one, why Machiavelli urges conquest. Part two, how Machiavelli believes we should conquer. And part three, my own critiques, reserved for the end. Because clearly we cannot follow Machiavelli’s advice of geopolitical conquest in our age of nukes and mutually assured destruction. So I will end this lecture by sharing how we might adapt his insights on the necessity of conquest to the 21st century.

1.1 Why Conquest: Decadence

Johnathan Bi: We all want to live in a state that is peaceful, that is stable, that has some luxuries and leisure. But Machiavelli warns us that there are great spiritual dangers with living in luxury. And conversely, there are great spiritual luxuries, if you will, to be had. Living in danger, living up close and personal with what he calls necessity. This idea is going to form the backbone of why Machiavelli advises us to conquer. And so we’re going to begin part one with three examples to try and build this intuition. The first example is a conversation I had with a friend who went to UChicago. I’ve always been amazed about how UChicago, compared to our elite counterpart schools, seemed better at protecting free speech and resisting political trends and fads. So I asked him, why does UChicago have such great free speech? Is it the Constitution? How you hire the faculty? Is it the students? He said, “No, it’s the violence there. It’s the fact that we live in a very dangerous neighborhood in the south of Chicago, Hyde park. And that kind of violence strikes constant fear into your souls, into the student body. We have one of the largest... “ He continued, “Private police forces in the world. And even the absence of violence is felt all the time on campus, not just the patrol cars, but every few blocks there would be this big police lamp post with a big button you could press for help.” And my response was, okay, let’s say I grant you the premise.

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Johnathan Bi: You believe that Jesus never claimed to be God, that he was a failed prophet.

Dale Allison: There are real differences between the Gospels. Real differences. They contradict each other on historical level. The Church took a wrong turn after Origen. Jesus hoped, expected, and even taught that the end was near. This is not something that pleases most Christians. They don’t want to hear this. And it’s a conclusion that I struggle to reach.

Johnathan Bi: What you think are the most cleared cases of failed prophecy in the Old Testament?

Dale Allison: They are probably in Daniel. So there would be two places in Daniel that come to mind; The first is...

1. Did Jesus Claim to Be God?

Johnathan Bi: So professor, you believe that Jesus never claimed to be God. You believe that he was a failed prophet, in some sense, and that the historical evidence for the resurrection is inconclusive. And yet you still call yourself a Christian nonetheless. And I want to spend this interview investigating how you balance the demands of a critical scholar and that of a believer and practitioner of the faith. But let’s begin with examining each of these claims, starting with the first one; why do you think Jesus never claimed to be God?

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Johnathan Bi: Mackenzie Price is the co-founder of Alpha, a K-12 school whose entire curriculum is taught by AI. Her students spend only two to three hours a day on academics and yet consistently score in the 99th percentile on standardized tests before going on to study in the best colleges in the world. In this interview we’re going to investigate what enables Alpha’s results to be so remarkable and through that, gain valuable insight into the perennial questions in the philosophy of education. Can virtue be taught? Does nature overpower nurture? And what is the relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation? My name is Johnathan Bi. I’m a founding member of Cosmos, where we deliver educational programs, fund research, invest in AI startups and believe that philosophy is critical to building technology. If you want to join our ecosystem of philosopher builders, you can find roles we’re hiring for, events we’re hosting and other ways to get involved on johnathanbi.com/cosmos. Without further ado, Mackenzie Price.

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Johnathan Bi: It’s rare to find someone who combines action and contemplation. And that’s my guest, Jim O’Shaughnessy, a legendary Wall Street financier who has an unquenchable thirst for the humanities as a student, patron and writer. I met Jim a couple of years ago when he first interviewed me on Girard, and we became fast friends because of how rare that combination is. And then I met one of his sons, Patrick, who’s also become a friend. Patrick studied philosophy and is now one of the top venture capitalists. And then I thought, huh, rare still. But then, as I was preparing for this interview, I came across a book written about Jim’s grandfather, IA O’Shaughnessy who was one of the most successful oil men in the 20th century.

Johnathan Bi: He trained in the liberal arts. He was the then largest donor to Notre Dame, who endowed the Humanities Building. It’s rare enough to synthesize action and contemplation in one individual. How does one sustain that across now four generations? That’s what we will begin this interview discussing before talking about how Jim’s love of the humanities shaped his varied career across finance, media and philanthropy. My name is Johnathan Bi. I’m a founding member of Cosmos. We deliver educational programs, fund research, invest in AI startups, and believe that philosophy is critical to building better technology. If you want to join our ecosystem of philosophy builders, you can find roles we’re hiring for, events we’re hosting, and other ways to get involved on johnathanbi.com/cosmos. Without further ado, my friend, Jim O’Shaughnessy.

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Guest 1: Yes. You’re reading of Machiavelli that he’s perfectly genuine in his intentions, in writing ‘The Prince’, that he’s just trying to inform these, like, great men of history with the tactics that will make them most effective at like creating types of societies that he would favor or... Because it seems like somewhat of a reckless act to sort of hand these tactics over indiscriminately to like the public, to both great men of history that he wants leading, but probably, probably many more sort of bad leaders. So is there, like, some Straussian reading we should be taking in terms of his intentions?

Johnathan Bi: So, first of all, there is a reason why Strauss went to town on Machiavelli. Right? Machiavelli is one of his, I would say, most engaged with thinkers. His thoughts on Machiavelli is canonical work. And the reason is because Machiavelli is so difficult to pin down of what he actually thinks. One reason is just how he writes. Machiavelli would sometimes, in the same paragraph, say Agathocles, we cannot call this virtue when he betrays his friends, and then he just calls them virtue, virtue, virtue. He just uses virtue all the time. And Machiavelli does this a lot. Remember when I said he ranks founders higher than philosophers and he actually ranks religious leaders higher than founders of political states? He potentially changes that later on in the book. So Machiavelli is so hard to pin down, especially in the ‘Discourses’, because he is someone who kind of entertains ideas in their extreme mode. The reason he does this, like, back and forth and it seems completely inconsistent because he says X here, he says Y over there, and he oscillates a bunch with conquest and expansion as well. And I read that as him... How should I put this? I read him as him thinking that the extreme form of an idea is able to tell us more than its ordinary form.

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Machiavelli wrote his books to teach the few and not the many. He wrote to teach those rare and marvelous men that come once every few hundred years how to achieve the grandest political projects. The founding of states, civilizations, and even religions. And Machiavelli’s chief lesson for them is this, “Always being good makes you weak and effeminate, and you will lose to those who aren’t. Good people, people who are altruistic, public-spirited, compassionate, make terrible leaders.” As a leader then, you must operate on a different set of rules than everyone else. It is good that you are selfish, it is good that you have a lust for glory. You must be willing to cheat, lie, murder, steal, if necessary. But you must do all of this while appearing to be good, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This is what you will learn in our lecture today, why and how to enter into evil.

1. “Evil” Moses

1.1 “Evil” Moses: Massacre

So in part one of this lecture, I’m going to try to ease you in to Machiavelli’s ideas by helping you understand his leader par excellence, Moses. Almost more so than any other leader, Achilles, Caesar, certainly, Alexander, it is Moses that he holds up as the prime model of how to enter into evil. Now I know what you’re thinking, “How can that be?” This is blasphemy. Moses is the greatest political leader in the Jewish tradition. He remains one of the greatest prophets in the Christian tradition. At Jesus’s transfiguration, when his divinity is revealed, this is Matthew, there’s only two people next to him, Elijah and Moses. When we think Moses, we think good, we think honest, humble. We think compassionate, generous. When we think Machiavelli, we think evil, deceptive, prideful, self-absorbed.

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Johnathan Bi: Albert Wenger is one of the partners at USV, a legendary venture capital firm that invested early in Twitter. And yet it is precisely companies like Twitter, now argues Albert almost 20 years later, that have wreaked havoc and siphoned our attention away from the seismic shifts that are about to upend your life. As a lifelong student of philosophy, Albert thinks about technology in terms of centuries, if not millennia. In this interview, you’re going to learn about the tsunami waves that are about to hit humanity and Albert’s radical proposals to steady the ship. My name is Johnathan Bi. I’m a founding member of Cosmos, where we deliver educational programs, fund research, invest in AI startups, and believe that philosophy is critical to building technology. If you want to join our ecosystem of philosopher builders, you can find roles we’re hiring for, events we’re hosting, and other ways to get involved on johnathanbi.com/cosmos. Without further ado, Albe…

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Johnathan Bi: Elites today are often internationalists, globalists, cosmopolitans. These are people who want to accelerate immigration, who see little reason to preserve race, language, culture, or even the nation state itself, who want you instead to be a citizen of the world. My guest today, Princeton’s Maurizio Viroli, argues that this is extremely dangerous, if only for the fact that it gives rise to a counter-populist movement, nationalism. People who would elevate their race, religion, and culture above all others. As an alternative to both extremes, Viroli argues for patriotism, and we will spend this entire interview explaining what it is, how it is different from nationalism, and why it is the only solution for a rapidly globalizing world. Professor Viroli isn’t just theorizing. I strongly encourage you to listen to the end of this interview where he shares how as a consultant for the President of Italy, Viroli himself helped win an election and implement the p…

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Looks don’t matter. It’s what’s on the inside that matters. This is probably what your mother told you when you were a kid, but we all know it’s a lie. Pretty people get paid more. They win more elections. Attractive defendants even receive lesser jail time. Mary Shelley Frankenstein exposes this lie and shows us that looks do matter. And it’s even stronger than this because it’s not just our outsides that are more important than our insides. It’s that in some sense our outsides are our insides. That beauty is goodness and the ugly are wicked. In this video you’re going to learn why being ugly makes you a bad person. The forgotten discipline of physiognomy and what all this means for you living in an appearance obsessed world.

1. Context

First some context. So Shelley’s Frankenstein tells the story about a very young and gifted scientist, Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein has figured out a way to create life. And so his scientific hubris leads him to want to become the fi…

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Johnathan Bi: A true Christian is ready to lie, massacre innocents, and break their word to protect his fatherland. The primary teachings of Jesus are not about eternal salvation, or confession, or purity, but patriotism, liberty, and this worldly action. This is Machiavelli’s interpretation of Christianity, and my guest today is one of the greatest living Machiavelli scholars, Princeton’s Maurizio Viroli. Professor Viroli is going to show us why Machiavelli’s this-worldly Christianity is not an anomaly, but the dominant form of Christianity in his time. Even more interesting, it is precisely Machiavelli’s Christianity that laid the foundations of the great republican movements of modernity, including the founding of America. Now if you find yourself turned off by the brutality, by the ruthlessness of Machiavelli, then I strongly urge you to watch until the end, where Professor Viroli tells us about who he was actually like as a person. Principled, compassionate, and ev…

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Johnathan Bi: Michael Gibson studied philosophy and classics at NYU, UChicago and Oxford. And now his life mission is to destroy the university system. Michael considers universities to be part of what he calls the Paper Belt, a series of centralized bureaucracies whose power relies on printing paper, money by the government, laws passed in DC, newspapers printed in New York, and diplomas given by universities. As an anarchist, Michael believes that this Paper Belt today is just as corrupt as the Catholic Church was when it was selling indulgences. And as a venture capitalist, Michael thinks universities are a source of stagnation and will offer an alternative path for how to engender innovation instead. My name is Jonathan Bi. I’m a founding member of Cosmos. We deliver educational programs, fund research, invest in AI startups, and believe that philosophy is critical to building better technology. If you wanna join our ecosystem of philosopher builders, you can find r…

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Johnathan Bi: Aristocracy gets a bad rap. But Joe Lonsdale argues that the lack of a natural aristocracy is precisely what is missing today. Because when we disposed of aristocracy, we didn't unleash democracy. We got bureaucracy, a geriatric, misaligned slop that will suffocate a civilization if not eradicated. That is what is plaguing America today. Joe Lonsdale is the closest thing you'll find to a Roman senator today, someone who acts courageously in politics, commerce, and the military, all informed by a classical understanding of virtue. This interview will tease out Lonsdale's political philosophy that underlies all of his ventures, Palantir, University of Austin, Cicero and 8VC. My name is Jonathan Bi. I'm a founding member of Cosmos. We deliver educational programs, fund research, invest in AI startups, and believe that philosophy is critical to building technology. If you wanna join our ecosystem of philosopher builders, then you can find roles we're hiring for, events we're hosting and other ways to get involved on johnathanbi.com/cosmos. Without further ado, Joe Lonsdale.

1. The Importance of Aristocracy

Johnathan Bi: Your ecosystem I think it combined two very rare qualities. Because there's a lot of tech ecosystems that are focused on building, but there's no deep philosophy there. Whereas some ecosystems are very much contemplative about the philosophical side, but they're not really doing a lot in the real world. Whereas for you, there is, underneath the building, a deep kind of core political philosophy that motivates all of it.

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Johnathan Bi: Marcus Ryu, was top of his class at Princeton and Oxford, before abandoning his philosophical career and founding Guidewire, now worth $15 billion. Marcus attributes a great deal of his entrepreneurial success with applying a simple philosophical technique to startups, which we'll talk about in the very beginning of this discussion. But philosophy also prepared Marcus in a much deeper and humanistic way. In this interview, you're going to learn how Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, and Wittgenstein, became invaluable resources through the toughest moments of Marcus' journey, and how we may synthesize action and contemplation in our own lives. My name is Johnathan Bi. I'm a founding member of Cosmos. We fund research, incubate and invest in AI startups, and believe that philosophy is critical to building technology. If you want to join our ecosystem of philosopher builders, you can find roles we're hiring for, events we're hosting, and other ways to get involved on Johnathanbi.com/cosmos. Without further ado, Marcus Ryu.

1. How To Unalienate Labor

Johnathan Bi: In our last conversation, you said that Marx is one of the most brilliant thinkers you’ve ever read. So what do you think Marx got right? And why do you still self describe as a capitalist, nonetheless?

Marcus Ryu: Oh, yeah. Well, so Marx had an incredibly acute description of what capitalism was. Now, he was writing in the 19th century, but so much of what he said feels salient today. He characterized a tendency to monopoly capitalism, and what happens in that. And I think there are clearly parts of our world today, where we're seeing the corrosive effects of monopoly capitalism. He talked about the way that the cultural production is an expression of an underlying material world, and a relationship between the different factors of who owns the means of production. And I think the thing that Marx talked about that I really identified at a personal level with, was alienation. He talked about alienation, and he has a very poetic description of alienation, which is, what did he mean...

Johnathan Bi: Hold on. When building Guidewire or McKinsey?

Marcus Ryu: No, my whole life. My whole life. Even my first summer jobs. So what is alienation? Alienation is when you are divorced from the results of your own efforts, your own labor. We're endowed with these faculties to change and move the world, and you are exerting yourself, but the product of what you are creating belongs to someone else. And this is the characteristic experience of capitalism, for the vast majority of people. You're a barista, you're sitting there making coffees all day that other people are drinking, and you're just a robot. You are, in a way, unplugging from your human faculties of creativity, of expression, and so forth, in order to be a beast of burden to get something done. And his description of that alienation is... And of course, he was talking about people doing...

Johnathan Bi: Factory work.

Marcus Ryu: Yeah. Doing the most brutal kinds of agricultural or industrial work. But poetically, I really, really... Who has not related to that? That feeling of alienation, and the way that that alienation is intensified and it seems to be accelerating.

Johnathan Bi: Yeah. Gig work, for example, where you're... Even from your workforce and stuff.

Marcus Ryu: And the thing is, it's not necessary. It's not like, well, that's just necessary. There's no other way that work could get done. That's not true. That's not true. Work can be done in an artisanal way. People can have great pride in its creation. Just the fact that the work itself is not glamorous, doesn't mean that it has to be alienated. And he says there is something structural in capitalism, that drives ever greater alienation, that turns people more and more, treats people more and more like instruments. And there is some truth to this. There is unmistakably some truth to this and our current crisis.

Johnathan Bi: Did you feel less alienated when you were building your own company?

Marcus Ryu: Well, that's the difference, and that's yet another motivation. Because when you start a company... And of course, I was poetic about this with people... But I said, look, I don't know if we're going to succeed. We're up against much bigger competitors. And the work we're doing, let's be clear, it's very, very difficult, and it's very difficult to build our software, it's very difficult to sell it, and it's very difficult to implement it. There's lots of reasons that we may fail. But we're going to do it as a craft. You're going to be treated as ends, not means. And we're going to build something great together, or we're going to fail together. Within the four walls of our shabby little office here, the work is not alienated. We are all one. And we may have different roles, we have different ownership, even, in this company. We're taking different levels of risk, but we are part of one larger project which treats each of us like an end.

Johnathan Bi: Wow! So in, Estranged Labor, that is his essay where he mostly outlines the different forms of alienation, alienation from the end product, alienation from your co-workers, for example. Guidewire's, sort of, values is almost an attempt to respond to Marx within capitalism.

Marcus Ryu: Yes. Well, I didn't frame it that way. In a very high minded sense, we said, the one thing that we have under our power is that we get to... This is not a workers' collective. We're trying to succeed in a capitalist world, ultimately. But the way that we are going to work here, is not going to be alienated.

Johnathan Bi: Right. Not just for you, but also for your employees.

Marcus Ryu: No, no. For everyone. And that's going to be our offer to you. And everything else here is humble. We cannot offer you any glamour, any possibility of riches. We can offer you below market wages because that's what we're paying ourselves. But you will, at least, not be alienated here. You are going to be afforded full transparency in the project. You will know your role within it. And we were going to succeed and fail together. And the people who are calling the shots, the leadership of this company, are going to be working harder than you.

Johnathan Bi: Okay.

Marcus Ryu: And that was incredibly high minded idea that had nothing to do with our market, the fact we were selling to insurance companies. It doesn't matter. But I believe there was something magical about that. Early stage companies talk about culture all the time, but I think they talk about the wrong aspects. Like, we're going to move fast, we're going to be honest with each other. It's a lot of superficial bullshit. Not that it doesn't matter, of course you should be honest with each other, of course, whatever. But the deeper sense that this is a collective in which everyone is an end, not a means, is incredibly powerful, l if you can actually instantiate that and live up to it.

Johnathan Bi: What does that look like?

Marcus Ryu: Well, it's not true of the company today, for example. Things change. And I have regrets about that because I actually have a theory, if I could replay the tape, that I could have extended that much, much longer.

Johnathan Bi: Oh, so now it is alienated again?

Marcus Ryu: It's a strong word. I'm saying it's lost that crucible, like collective sense of feeling that it had during the really formative years.

Johnathan Bi: What does it mean to treat employees as ends and not means?

Marcus Ryu: Well, it's to say that you are as indispensable as any other one of us.

Johnathan Bi: But they aren't, right?

Marcus Ryu: Well, the founders of the company are not indispensable in that sense. You're indispensable in that you're not just a unit of labor. You have interests in the success of this collective, and your interests will be folded in. And your health, your well being, your sense of professional fulfillment, your advancement, all of these things, are part of the calculus of what we're going to do because we're trying to create a successful company, but we're trying to create a successful collective. And those two things are not incidentally related. We will be successful as a company precisely because the people here are bound in a deeper way than the alienated serfs that work for our competitors, right?

Johnathan Bi: Right.

Marcus Ryu: That was a very high minded idea. And you could say it was naive. But the people who were part of those early years, were intensely bound by it and came to believe it. And it made all the difference.

Johnathan Bi: Marx's critique in Estranged Labor, is aimed not at specific manifestations of capitalism, but aimed at all kinds of capitalistic enterprises. So you would basically push back against that. You'd say, there is a way to un-estrange labor within capitalism itself.

Marcus Ryu: Oh. Well, he has this brilliant critique of the way that capitalism is alienated. And of course, the deepest part of his critique of alienation was that the capitalist is alienated.

Marcus Ryu: The person who owns the means of production is actually the most alienated. And why? Because he no longer knows how to make anything. He's useless. He's just an owner. And this is the most beautiful argument, in a literary sense. It's so beautiful.

Johnathan Bi: It's kind of like the, X is not X, kind of post modern intuition.

Marcus Ryu: Yes. That the guy who seems to have all the power, has lost his power because he no longer understands how anything is built. Or he can no longer do anything. He's useless. And amazingly, the oppressed end up finding a new source of power that allows for that inversion. There is a deep psychological truth, I think, to that estrangement. And I see it here, in Silicon Valley. I know... Not just in Silicon Valley, just in the world. I know some incredibly wealthy people that are deeply estranged and have lost... Have found unhappiness in the midst of astronomical abundance because...

Johnathan Bi: Precisely because of the abundance.

Marcus Ryu: Because of the abundance and because they've lost a mastery. Like, their only mastery is further accumulation. They've lost a mastery, a creativity, an ability to be anything constructive. I have witnessed that. And there's other kinds of emotional and familial dysfunction that can unfold from that. But where does Marx, where is he incoherent obviously, where does this lead? Well, first of all, he's part of this... As you know, he adopted the Hegelian framework, which is, all of these things have to happen. All of these painful stages of feudalism, and brutal capitalism, all that has to happen because they all unfold into something better. What's that better thing? Well, it's a socialist utopia where the wellspring of abundance just opens. And suddenly, there's so much surplus that...

Johnathan Bi: We'll go fishing in the morning, we'll critique in the evening.

Marcus Ryu: We'll paint in the afternoons, and we'll write philosophy in the evening. And that's fantasy, of course, and you have to just stop reading at that point. It's wishful thinking. But I think that diagnosis is where aspects of it are profoundly relevant.

Johnathan Bi: I see. Let me give you another quote from yourself.

“Severe inequality in income and wealth are not in the long-term interests of any citizens, not even the very wealthy. Extreme inequality is corroding our civil society, poisoning our politics, and undermining our effectiveness as a nation.” - Marcus Ryu, “Why Corporate Tax Cuts Won't Create Jobs”

Johnathan Bi: Is inequality, today, in America, too much?

Marcus Ryu: I think so. And I say this as a wealthy person, a very wealthy person. There's no question that a certain level of inequality is very helpful. It's motivating, it's necessary. You can't have a meritocracy if people aren't allowed to reap the rewards of their differentiated effort and talent.

Johnathan Bi: Of course.

Marcus Ryu: But there's clearly a level at which it becomes corrosive. There's clearly a level where you end up with political capture, and cultural capture, informational capture. And where you end up with profound estrangement of a huge number of people, and where civil society itself, just can't function anymore because it's dominated by just too few individuals, whose whims just carry too much weight. There's a deep incompatibility with that and a healthy civil society. Now are we there? I don't know. I'm not sure. But there are things that are really worrying. And I say that as a very patriotic American, a person who's profoundly grateful to this country.

Marcus Ryu: My parents came here... They weren't impoverished, but they were very limited means. And I was able to live every aspect of the American dream to the hilt. But I see the enablers of that happen... I see, in full retreat, everywhere.

Johnathan Bi: For example?

Marcus Ryu: The contempt for institutions. I mean, I revered... My parents came here in reverence of those institutions. That the highest attainment in culture was to perform at Lincoln Center. The highest achievement in education was to go to Harvard University. The highest achievement in journalism was the New York Times. And that kind of reverence maybe was a little bit fetishized, but it was a beautiful thing. They anchored our understanding of the world. Now, everyone's a citizen scientist. Maybe injecting horse hormones is a way to insulate ourselves against vaccines, because there's a global conspiracy that... Some crazy straw reasoning that lead to places of complete incoherence, distrust and paranoia. This is terrifying. And many, many people have spoken about this, but the epistemic collapse, where we can no longer agree on a shared set of facts, is deeply terrifying. And this is happening. We're seeing it.

Johnathan Bi: And you attribute the causality, the root cause, as inequality? Or that's another manifestation that's unrelated?

Marcus Ryu: Well, I think that there's a particularly demonic connection between the shattering of collective, epistemically coherent universe, and inequality, precisely because some of the greatest engines of extreme inequality, have been control of information. If I had to pick a single enemy in all of it, it would be social media, what's happened with it. Because it has somehow shattered our understanding of a common reality, of a common set of facts. A really tiny number of individuals have extremely outsized influence on people's basic understanding of the facts, basic information. And that is profoundly undemocratic, that's profoundly dangerous. The natural monopolies that are in the information ecosystem are crushingly powerful. They're more powerful than any monopoly that existed in the physical world, or the extractive industries in the past.

Johnathan Bi: You're talking about Instagram, Facebook, X?

Marcus Ryu: Indeed, yeah. I mean, they are crushingly dominant, and it's because of this completely unappreciated power of the ad-tech model, until it was too late. And we're living in an era of monopoly capitalism now, where a ludicrous portion of the total enterprise value, of even publicly traded companies, is concentrated in less than 10 companies. And that deforms everything. It deforms talent, it deforms entrepreneurship, it deforms innovation. And everyone knows this, everyone in Silicon Valley understands this. But nothing is changing it. In fact, we're just ending up with more regulatory capture, ever greater concentration of power. And it's actually distressing when you are... Because part of the Silicon Valley ideology, of course, is that no matter how mighty the incumbent, no matter how powerful the emperor, it's always possible for...

Johnathan Bi: To blow up the Death Star.

Marcus Ryu: It's always possible. The rebels can get there. But one has to question, one has to wonder now. And that's disturbing to me as a capitalist, as an entrepreneur. One of the most obvious and pernicious aspects of monopoly is that the products just stagnate, things get worse. There was a time in, let's say the early 2000s, where Google was magical. And year after year, it would release new products that were completely mind blowingly magical. Like, the geolocation of every single useful destination that you may want to go to. And it's free. You have all the movie times that you may want. Oh, you have Google Docs. You can now collaborate in real time on documents, for free. Just, incredible sequence of innovations. It's been complete stagnation, 20 years of a company that's now just been in extractive mode. Everything has gotten worse. Search has gotten worse. Google Docs has gotten worse. Geolocation has gotten worse. Everything has gotten worse. Right?

Johnathan Bi: Right.

Marcus Ryu: And you could argue the same for Microsoft. You could say the same for many other tech products. And so that's the clearest indicator.

2. Synthesis

2.1 Synthesis: How Philosophy Helped Entrepreneurship

Johnathan Bi: What are the most important ways, you think, your training in philosophy, if however subtly, prepared you to build this deca billion dollar company?

Marcus Ryu: Well, we had the strategy right. And then we executed on that. Sounds so straightforward. Well, a philosophical training is very helpful for defining what a strategy is. For example, one of the things that professional philosophers do, at least in the analytic tradition, is that they value simplicity and clarity in their communication, and they tend to write things as propositions. When they get to the real heart of their argument, they will often number their points and propositions.

Johnathan Bi: 1, 1a, 1b... Yeah.

Marcus Ryu: And they say, well, Point 3 follows from Point 2, intrinsically. Point 5 is only true if either 1 or 2 must be correct. And it's a basic propositional logic that you learn as a basic language in philosophical training. And this is immensely helpful, because... It's what I urge entrepreneurs to do a lot, is to take your own beliefs about the market, your own diagnosis of the market, and your own intentions, and to write them as propositions, in the simplest form, unadorned with marketing or self promotion. And then you can interrogate the actual logical relationships between

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Johnathan Bi: Almost a decade ago, Francis and I sat down and recorded six hours of conversations on philosophy, entrepreneurship, God and romance. At the time, Francis was by all accounts a failure. But I saw this unquenchable, borderline delusional fire in him, the same fire I recognized in myself, and we became fast friends. A decade later, Francis is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of his generation, who's built one of the fastest growing AI unicorns. So I've invited him back to see how success has changed his perspectives. The first part of this video, is the conversation in 2025. And the second audio only part, are the highlights from 2018.

Johnathan Bi: And what's so beautiful is if you watch them together, you'll see how Francis' obsession with philosophy, which made him seem a complete buffoon in 2018, was ultimately the cause of his success. You'll see how because of his continued study of the great books, Francis was able to come up with ideas no one else saw, persevere through the most dire challenges, take his company to the most ambitious extremes, and ultimately enjoy and share his newfound wealth in a dignified way. My name is Johnathan Bi. I'm a founding member of Cosmos. We fund research, incubate and invest in AI startups and believe that philosophy is critical to building technology. If you wanna join our ecosystem of philosopher builders, then you can find roles we're hiring for, events we're hosting and other ways to get involved on jonathanbi.com/cosmos. Without further ado, Francis Pedraza.

Johnathan Bi: The last time we had a conversation like this was almost a decade ago and I wanna paint a picture for our audience. I invited you to my sophomore Columbia dorm, cold email outreach after some crazy stuff that you wrote about online. We were doing this podcast setup where there was a drawer, there was no table, there was a drawer we put in right in the middle of us. So it was deeply uncomfortable because there was no place for the legs to go. And we had these tiny, tiny mics. And then we were hunched over trying to talk into it like this for two hours. And we enjoyed that so much that we did that three times. When we were filming those sets of interviews, I had just failed a company, came back to Columbia, I was a sophomore. You had just failed a company, Everest, and you were just starting Invisible. And now, a decade later, I started something with Joe Lonsdale that's going quite well. Invisible is going extremely well. And we get to have this conversation again as made men. How does it feel?

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