Palladium Podcast

Tea Törmänen and Marco Visscher join Ash Milton to discuss their recent article on how Finland's Greens chose nuclear energy and the differences between degrowth and ecomodernism.

Recently, the Finnish Green Party has been leading the way among green movements in embracing nuclear energy. Tea and Marco tell us why that came to be and how it could be the future for the rest of Europe. The trio also discuss how human demography has a...

Jesse Velay-Vitow joins Ash Milton to discuss how recent geopolitical realignments, energy crises, and migration patterns will shape the rest of the twenty-first century.

Recent energy crises in Europe have helped to put nuclear energy back on a strong footing. But does that mean that powers like Iran will be able to build them? How will industrializing nations vulnerable to climate change like India balance economic growth wi...

Dylan Levi King joins Wolf Tivy to discuss his featured 07 article on North Korean environmentalist policies, Japanese whaling, and the ecotheology that undergirds them.

When Kim Il-Sung, the founder of North Korea, was fighting against Japanese occupiers, environmentalism and folk mythology were interwoven parts of his legend—it was rumored he could turn pine tree cones into flaming bullets, preventing the Japanese from harvesti...

Ash Milton joins Alexander Gelland to discuss his recent article on the life of the Abbé Henri Gregoire, a priest who was one of the leaders of the French Revolution.

Henri Gregoire is a mysterious figure. Both revolutionary and clerical, universalistic and patriotic, he embodies many of the contradictions of the Revolution. Walking us through his biography and elite-level political life during the Enlightenment, Ash makes a case...

Eron Wolf joins Wolf Tivy to discuss alternative computing and the trappings of the streamlined user experience.

As computing technology has become more widespread, the possibilities it offers the user have been narrowed. DRM restrictions, software bloat, and "appification" have made tinkering more difficult. Attempts at fixing this, such as the open-source software movement, have not been able to halt the trend. How can it be do...

Mathis Bitton joins Ash Milton to discuss his PALLADIUM 05 article on state centralization under Charles de Gaulle, the institutional history of French liberalism, and how a nation is built.

France occupies a unique position among the Western powers. With public spending at two thirds of its GDP, the French bureaucratic state has historically required a powerful executive. Charles de Gaulle refounded the state after the end of Worl...

Nicolas Villarreal joins Ash Milton to discuss his 05 article on how capitalist giants use socialist cybernetic planning, cybernetic methods of organizing supply chains, and their impact on the worker.

Socialist Chile centrally planned its economy using Project Cybersyn, which used computerized feedback loops to give production managers live updates on changes in demand and other producti...

Charles Smith joins Alexander Gelland to talk about his 2020 article Confronting Modernity Means Overcoming Humanism, featured in PALLADIUM 05: Centralizing Society. The emancipating power of modernity has escaped our control and begun to resemble its opposite. But, if we have the vision to see it through, new technologies promise a radical reshaping of our society for the better.

Join Alex and Charles as they discuss how posthum...

Erik Hoel joins Ash Milton to discuss the current state of education, how it succeeded aristocratic tutoring, and what it means for progress. Up until the creation of mass schooling in the nineteenth century, tutelage was the most common form of education. Only aristocrats were able to afford this, and with the disappearance of aristocratic society so too has tutoring fallen out of practice. But its advantages are what enabled g...

Dylan Levi King joins Ash Milton to discuss his PALLADIUM 05 article on the cult of Jiao Yulu and China's convergence with Western technocracy. Local Communist Party cadres of the 60s and 70s experimented with economic reforms that seeded China’s economic success. Jiao Yulu was their model.

Since then things have changed. China has become no less susceptible to demographic change, financialization, and reliance on opinion polling...

Palladium Correspondent Fin DePencier joined Ash Milton from the northeastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, where he has been reporting on the ongoing Russian invasion. In addition to events on the ground, they discussed the wider implications of this war for Russia's sphere of influence, given its recent history of frozen conflict and continuing involvement in Central Asia and the Middle East.

One recent example of this influence occu...

Richard Hanania joins Ash Milton to talk about the U.S. confrontation with Russia and why it keeps enduring. With the U.S. keeping the door open for future NATO expansion in eastern Europe, Russia is continuing its own military build-up in the region. Most recently, tensions rose again over Ukraine and its future. What drives the ideologies behind the foreign policy? And what does it really take to update entrenched political world...

Charles Coulombe joins Ash Milton to discuss the rise and fall of the WASP ruling class, which he also covered in Palladium 04. America's upper class went from disparate networks of families to a national elite in only a few generations. Then, they lost it all. Topics include the WASPs' intentional cultivation of their internal culture, the decay of their ideologies and institutions, and more.

Palladium 04 is our latest quarterly p...

Samo Burja joins Wolf Tivy to discuss his article in Palladium 04 on how rising classes become new elites. Historically, cycles of violence often break out at these moments, and yet elites are surprisingly good at surviving the resulting turnover. Are there better ways of integrating new players into a society's elite?

Palladium 04 is our latest quarterly print edition, including an anthology of work and original art. To receive th...

Palladium 04 is coming out in Winter 2021. The theme is Cultivating Elites. In this special episode, Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discussed why developing the consciousness and culture necessary to act as an elite is not an easy task, but one that requires institutional and personal investment. They also previewed some of the articles included in this upcoming print edition: a new piece from Wolf about why you should quit your job, as ...

Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss why scientific management driven by digital technologies is becoming a dominant philosophy of governance in both China and the West. Other topics include why governments no longer want to mobilize their populations, whether chaos in society is really a bad thing, and Dylan Levi King's recent article on Chinese digital technocracy.

The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The ful...

Geremie Barmé joins Ash Milton to discuss his decades of experience in China and what previous upheavals in its leadership can teach us about the Xi era. Topics include his time studying alongside red guards at Chinese universities during the Cultural Revolution, Mao's return in modern Chinese ideology, and the real heritage of neo-Confucianism.

Geremie is an Australian sinologist and author. He currently edits China Heritage and i...

Kevin Kelly joins the salon to discuss his new book and photographic travelogue: Vanishing Asia. Covering decades of Kevin's travels through 35 different countries across the Asian continent, this three-volume project records the traditions and pasts that are vanishing in the face of Asian modernity.

Other topics include the value of printed work, why futurists should care about history, and why Kevin doesn't regret the vanishing o...