Johnathan Bi: America and capitalism go hand in hand. Americans idolize their entrepreneurs the same way the Romans idolized their gladiators. Americans devote their soul into their industry and into their ventures the same way the Greeks did their art and their philosophy. For better and for worse, there has never been a society like America prior to it that so elevated work, industry, and productivity. Those are the insights that Alexis de Tocqueville came to when he wrote Democracy in America in this very chateau. Today I brought along five students to read Democracy in America where it was written, to meet the Tocqueville family who are my friends, and to discuss his ideas in the very spaces where Tocqueville himself used to host salons. I chose these five students because they’re from Alpha School, which is a school uniquely American in its focus on entrepreneurship. Alpha has developed a personal AI tutor that enables students to complete their K to 12 academics in just two hours a day, which frees up the most of their day to pursue entrepreneurial ventures. Each of the five students you’re going to meet has achieved quite impressive commercial traction already while still in high school. I wanted to take these students through Democracy in America because I wanted them to better understand themselves. I wanted them to understand the origins, strengths, and of course limitations of an American entrepreneurial education.

Johnathan Bi: And I wanted to share this seminar with you not just so you can learn about Tocqueville’s insights on Democracy in America and capitalism, but so that you may hear what the best and brightest of the next generation have to say about AI, inequality, capitalism, and the future of work. If you’re interested in learning more about Alpha’s flagship private school or the other accessible online and in-person options made possible built on top of Alpha’s AI tutorial software, then please visit alpha.school/jb. Without further ado, welcome to the Chateau de Tocqueville. Come on in.

1. Capitalism, Industry, and Equality

Johnathan Bi: I want you guys to first appreciate just how incredible an opportunity we have here. After we’ve been reading Tocqueville for a month to travel all the way to Normandy, this is the very writing room that Tocqueville wrote the second volume of Democracy in America in. That is the exact desk that he placed that exact quill. And then we took the exact elevator that... no, I’m just kidding. But yeah, it’s incredible. Here’s where I want to begin. America has two defining features for Tocqueville: capitalism, industry, and equality. And that sounds very weird to the modern ear, right? Because when we think capitalism, the dominant critique is that capitalism produces inequality. But Tocqueville was writing in the 19th century at the crossroads of this massive transition between two fundamentally different kinds of modes of existence: aristocracy and democracy.

Johnathan Bi: And capitalism, industry is not the only but one of the strongest forces that destroyed the aristocracy and brought forth American democracy. So which brave soul among you would like to give a first stab at why industry, capitalism, and equality go hand in hand?

Student: Yeah, the main thing about capitalism is it does not seem equal because there are people who are richer than other people and more successful than others. And so how can we have equality if there’s so much inequality in society? But I think what he was looking at is that mobility and freedom is that even though I may not be as successful as somebody else in a capitalistic society, I have the mobility to get there. Whereas in an aristocracy, I was limited. If I was a serf, I was sort of doomed to be a serf no matter my intellect, no matter my merit. And so what I think he means by how they go hand in hand, it’s not so much equality of status where everyone’s at this equal level, but equality of chance.

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If I took away one lesson from the Odyssey, it’s that you gotta choose your wife well. Because here’s the range of outcomes. She starts a war in which almost all of your friends dies, she cheats on you while you’re fighting for your nation, and kills you with the man who she’s been cheating with you on upon your return, or she holds the fort down for 20 years, raises your son, and ennobles your legacy.

The Greek heroes in Homer could not have more different outcomes, and it is strongly determined by the woman that they choose to marry.

Now, of course, Penelope is the classical ideal of an amazing wife. But what makes her so great? Why does Odysseus reject offers from goddesses, from Nausicaa, who’s a woman much more younger, more beautiful, from a much wealthier kingdom, why does Odysseus reject Calypso’s offer of immortality to risk life and limb to go back to Penelope? That’s what I want to answer in this video today. By comparing Penelope, as I think Homer invites us t…

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Who is the greater hero? Achilles or Odysseus? I’ve been rereading the Odyssey while retracing Odysseus’s journey over land and sea all the way here to Ithaca. And I wanted to highlight for you the Cyclops episode as one where you really see the difference between these two heroes.

1. The Cyclops Scene

Now these details are unfortunately omitted from Nolan’s adaptation, but in the Cyclops episode, you see Odysseus use his superpower, his ability to lie, to take on new identities, but you also see him commit a tactical blunder that will cause him unbounded suffering. And it’s a scene whose full significance is only available in the ancient Greek. So let me break this down for you.

Achilles, as the classical conception of the hero, is known for his might. Okay, the Greek word for that is bia. Odysseus, on the other hand, is known for his cunning, and the word for that is metis. So that’s going to be very important later on. Now in the Cyclops episode, Odysseus is trapped in …

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What happens to Odysseus after he returns here to Ithaca? After he’s reunited with Telemachus and Penelope, after he kills the suitors, what happens next? Can you imagine Odysseus settling down and being content, living happily ever after here after 20 years of warring and wandering, of adventuring, excitement and pain and grief? Perhaps unsurprisingly, no notable sequel in the Western tradition tells of such a happily ever after ending. The endings that they do tell are quite shocking. Some say that Odysseus leaves Ithaca again and he’s mistakenly killed by his own son. Some say that he kills Penelope with his own hands. Some say that he goes into the Atlantic, drowns and ends up in the Christian hell. Some even say that he finds out that Penelope did cheat on him with either Antinous or with all of the suitors, giving birth to Pan. But no notable sequel that I could find has Odysseus living happily ever after in Ithaca. Why is that?

I’ve been reading the Odyssey with t…

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Johnathan Bi: Greetings from Ithaca, where I’ve been rereading Homer’s Odyssey while retracing the journey of Odysseus over land and sea. And on this reread, a specific scene jumped out to me that I think will transform your understanding of this epic. So it’s been a few years since the fall of Troy. Odysseus is in disguise in a foreign court, and he hears a poet sing tales about the Trojan War, specifically sing tales about Odysseus. The poet sings about Odysseus’s genius of the Trojan Horse, how he led their best men, and how his genius and guile eventually led to the fall of Troy. This should be Odysseus’s moment of great glory, because every hero dreams of being immortalized in song. And yet, Odysseus does not glory. He starts weeping uncontrollably. Why? It turns out that by answering this question, not only will you gain a better understanding of who Odysseus is, but the very genre of epic. Even stronger, it’s going to teach you the unique and interesting relation…

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Johnathan Bi: I’ve been reading Homer’s Odyssey here in Ithaca, where they proudly display a statue of Homer. But what if they got it wrong? What if Homer never wrote the Iliad, or the Odyssey? What if Homer never existed in the first place? This is not some wild conspiracy theory, but the considered conclusion of my guest to Harvard’s Gregory Nagy after a lifetime of research. Professor Nagy is one of the most respected Homerists alive, who’s published over a dozen books on Homer, and his defining contribution is to uncover who, or I really should say what, produced the Homeric epics. If you are at all engaged in creative work, if you’re interested in how to build creative cultures and creative countries, then this is an incredibly important conversation because the Iliad and the Odyssey are two of the most important creative acts in the Western tradition, and learning about how they are made will help you gain a fundamentally new perspective on your own work, as it ha…

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Americans don’t take their religion seriously. They are rejecting Jesus when they choose peace over the sword. What the hell do you mean you’re going to raise your son half Jewish and half Christian? Who do you tell your son who Jesus of Nazareth is? Is he the one true God? Or is he a great deceiver? All the religions basically teach the same morality. Love and kindness. Really? Yahweh commands genocide against women and children. The Quran put polytheists to the sword. In Odinism, you have to die in combat to end up in Valhalla. The leading progressive feminists actively campaigned against the women’s right to vote. Why are so many of the great technologists homosexuals?

1. Why Democracy Is Hostile to Religion

1.1 The First Force: Toleration

It’s obvious to foreigners like myself and Tocqueville how strange American religious tolerance is and how corrosive it is to your religious life. But not to Americans. So let me tease this out with a story. So, when I just arrived in…

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America used to be the most equal nation in the world. There were no aristocrats who lorded themselves high above everyone else, and the social distance between classes was much smaller. When Tocqueville wrote this book, Democracy in America, in this very chateau in the 1830s, this is why people came to America. People came to America for her equality.

In 2016, I came to America for the exact opposite reason. I came for your inequality. For the dazzling heights you can achieve in America, and for the vertical distance to ascend upwards. And I am not alone. The best and the brightest no longer come to America for equality, but to achieve an unequal greatness.

Much has changed in the last 200 or so years. In fact, in the time of Tocqueville, his worry was that America was so equal that it would produce an impressive mediocrity, but that has completely changed. America is now the only Western nation hospitable to greatness, but at the great cost of not just her equality, but…

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Johnathan Bi: One of the most radical ideas of the American founders is that greed is good.

Thomas Pangle: The pursuit of happiness. It expresses the idea that you never catch it. For the ancients, work is the curse. But in America, that became, no, the more money you have, the more successful you are.

Johnathan Bi: People think the rich man is a playboy, hedonist. Yeah. That couldn’t be further from the truth. He’s a monk. And the God which he devotes himself to is money. Jefferson and Franklin, they’re just outright heretics.

Thomas Pangle: The American founders, I think, have a pretty drastically lowered view of human nature.

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These four books have helped me AI proof my career and life. And if you truly understand their insights, not only will you survive the imminent AI revolution, you’ll thrive. Now, people today are worried about AI and they’re worried about AI taking their jobs. But this first book is going to show you that the problem is actually a lot greater. That the right comparison to our current time isn’t dot com bubble, it’s not 2008. It’s Darwin, okay, which shook the faith of an entire civilization. It’s the industrial revolution which required two world wars to properly sort out. Now, the next three books will teach you where to spend your time right now in this moment in order to thrive in this radically new world order.

Now, I’ve spent the last few years interviewing some of the greatest philosophers, entrepreneurs, and AI researchers alive. And out of all the books I’ve read, it’s these three that have been the most important. And I’ve already made major life decisions based on their insights to AI proof my life and career. But these aren’t self-help books. These aren’t about the latest technical advances either. They’re works of philosophy, and one of which is thousands of years old. Because we need to rethink everything from the ground up, from first principles. And if you’re just stuck on learning how to prompt engineer, if you’re just stuck on following the latest fads on X, that’s the surface level. And you’re underestimating the size of the earthquake that is about to hit us by magnitudes.

Now, this first book by Max Weber will correct that error. Because it correctly frames AI not just as an economic challenge, but a religious threat to the dominant religion of our day, which is capitalism, work, success, achievement.

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Johnathan Bi: Do you see any homoerotic patterns in traditional Islam? My guest, Rice University professor Jeff Kripal, is going to argue for a homoerotic reading of religion. That there’s a special connection, not just between sex and divinity, but specifically homosexuality and divinity. In fact, Jeff’s claim is that in most religions, it is sublimated homosexuality that is orthodox and encouraged, whereas active heterosexuality becomes marginalized. In the Christian context, Jeff not only believes that most of Christian monasticism must be explained as sublimated homosexuality, but also that Jesus himself was queer. Now, I know this is a deeply scandalous claim, so let me just emphasize that, and this is true for all of my interviews, but especially for this one, my guest’s views are not my views, okay? I can’t be both a libertarian capitalist like Joe Lonsdale and a democratic socialist like Alex Ohanian. I can’t be both a Catholic like Dave O’Connor and an atheist like Brian Leiter. I don’t invite guests on because I fully endorse their views, but because they have something revelatory and illuminating to teach us. And what I think is revelatory in this interview are two unintuitive connections between number one, the erotic and the divine, that sex and divinity, sex and God are somehow deeply intertwined. And number two, between homosexuality and inspiration.

Johnathan Bi: If you’ve ever wondered why homosexuals are so disproportionately represented in positions of creativity and power, be it art, media, finance, religion, technology, then Kripal’s theory will begin to give you an answer. If you want to be invited to online and in-person lectures, seminars, and events that 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. Your homoerotic Jesus sounded ridiculous until I read the Bible in the actual Greek. Because you said in your book that the beloved disciple was laying on Jesus’s chest. And so I checked John 13:23, which is that line. And this is what the English, this is the new revised standard edition says.

“One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to him” - John 13:23”

Johnathan Bi: And I’m like, what the hell is Jeff doing? He’s just lying. And then I looked at the Greek:

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1.1 Washington’s Love of Fame

Johnathan Bi: Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that the love of fame is the ruling passion of the noblest minds. Hamilton was obviously Washington’s aid and you speculate he might have had Washington in mind there. Tell us about Washington’s love of fame.

Thomas Pangle: It was a strong part of his makeup, his personality. But I think he was very clear about the fact that the love of fame correctly understood is the love of being famous for admirable qualities, not just being well-known.

Johnathan Bi: Smith said that in the theory of moral sentiments, we not want to only be sympathized with, but sympathizable.

Thomas Pangle: Yes.

Johnathan Bi: In order to — that is to say we want the good recognition but also to be good. So you’ve kind of qualified the fame part. The part I still have problem with in what Hamilton said is ruling passion. That’s where someone like Plato would disagree with him, right? The noblest minds, their ruling passion — they might still want recognition, but their ruling passion is reason. Is that a theoretical difference between Hamilton and Plato?

Thomas Pangle: Well, right. I think Hamilton has a somewhat too overly two-dimensional concept. I don’t think he’s thought it through in the way I think probably Washington had. That you don’t want just the fame of everyone thinking you’re a terrific person. You want a sense and that confirms my own judgment on myself. Another way of putting this I think is that for someone like Washington, and I think he saw this very much in the figure of Cato, Cato is concerned with fame, but he’s concerned above all with being the kind of person he wants to be and getting confirmation of that through the fame.

Johnathan Bi: The great man’s desire for glory is a bit odd because he desires it from usually lesser men. One philosophical manifestation of this is the master-slave dialectic in Hegel and for our audience, the master fails to get the kind of recognition that he wants even after he defeats the person and renders him a slave.

Thomas Pangle: Precisely because he’s made him a slave. And a slave cannot give the master the glory that he desires.

Johnathan Bi: Is the great man tragic in this way as well?

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Johnathan Bi: Two years ago, I witnessed a Christian miracle, but I still did not convert. I didn’t convert at the time, not because I thought it was fraudulent. I think the miracle was genuine, but because of the existence of other genuine miracles in competing religious traditions. But they can’t all be right. So who has the ultimate truth? I’ve been tortured by the question of which religious tradition has the right God ever since. And my guest, Rice University’s Jeff Kripal has given me the most compelling response yet. After years of talking with every scholar of religion I could get my hands on, it is these sets of interviews that I find most compelling by far. And if you are at all curious about the religious question, I cannot recommend Jeff’s work enough for both scholars and seekers. If you want to be invited to online and in-person lectures, seminars, and events that 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.

Johnathan Bi: So, Jeff, I come to you asking for advice as both a scholar and a seeker. And to give you a bit of backstory, I was raised Protestant, like many teenagers, grew away from the faith. And in college, I was working through personal suffering, this worldly suffering about desire. The classic growing angst of a teenager.

Johnathan Bi: And I got into two religious traditions, René Girard’s Catholicism, who problematized desire socially, and certain sects of Tibetan Buddhism who problematized desire ontologically and phenomenologically. And my first foray was to solve just worldly problems, okay? So I wasn’t really interested in the metaphysics, the next world, but what it did do was it convinced me that there was something here. This is not as the modern scientists or materialists say, just complete voodoo, right? Now, my second foray into religion was actually about last year when I read one of your colleagues, Carlos Eire’s book on They Flew, on a historical argument for levitation that I couldn’t find a materialist explanation for. And because of that, I actually witnessed an orthodox miracle myself. So it’s this icon, orthodox icon, yay big of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. It’s in Taylor, Pennsylvania. And it oozes oil, myrrh, infinitely, and I saw it do that for 15 minutes as the priest or the father took it out and proceeded to anoint everyone in the room with it. And my metaphysical worldview was completely blown out of the water. And then to much of my Christian friends’ chagrin, I did not immediately convert to orthodoxy because I felt like that was the wrong conclusion to draw. Witnessing this one miracle gave a lot more credence to the other miracle traditions that I was familiar with, right? Whether it’s the Buddhists, Hindus.

Johnathan Bi: And I feel like my problem with religion is the exact opposite of many moderns. They don’t think that there’s anything here. I think there’s too much here to decipher. And my problem, I framed it as what Sextus Empiricus calls equipollence. It’s not when I think a tradition like Christianity is wrong, it’s that there’s an opposing and mutually exclusive orthodox claim that I can’t determine between. And so my problem is not whether to take a leap, it’s whither to take a leap. So that’s the problem I’ve been stuck in. What do you got for me?

 1. Against Western Monotheism

Jeffrey Kripal: Yeah, welcome. Welcome to the club. That’s my problem. I believe too much as it were. One of the things that I grew up Roman Catholic in the American Midwest and the claim was always that, well, the Catholic Church is right because miracles only exist in the Catholic faith. And that’s just not true.

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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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