JP’s favorite college story is the night he built an island. In the fall of 1993, JP was a junior in Stanford’s chapter of Kappa Alpha. The brothers were winding down from Kappa Alpha’s annual Cabo-themed party on the house lawn. “KAbo” was a Stanford institution, a day-to-night extravaganza that would start sometime in the morning and continue long after midnight. The girls wore bikini tops and plastic flower leis, and the boys wore their best Hawaiian shirts.| Palladium Magazine
For the past few years I have been mulling a paradox: U.S. GDP keeps going up, yet it seems like we make less stuff and that most of the smart people I know work fake jobs. Growing up in the nineties, most of my toys and clothes had tags saying “Made in Hong Kong” or “Made in Vietnam.” But the high-skill, high-tech goods—the washing machine, the car, my computer—were often made in America. Now? From my e-bike to my laptop, from my refrigerator to my mattress, very few goods I own,...| Palladium Magazine
Stewart Brand was born in 1938. In 1964, he was hanging out with Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters” at the center of the LSD counterculture described in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In 1966 he realized a satellite image of the Earth could be a powerful symbol for holistic environmental thinking, and launched a campaign to get such a photo released by NASA. In 1968, he succeeded, and the first satellite photo of the whole Earth, taken by the geostationary satellite ATS-3, appea...| Palladium Magazine
In the beginning, the Earth was soaked in a rich but lifeless ocean of organic chemicals. Energy and nutrients abounded, but life could not spontaneously generate without living germs. It all just sat there, uncorrupted, for perhaps a hundred million years. But our world wasn’t made to be barren. Given enough time, life finds a way. Like a warm ocean of milk, no matter how ultra-pasteurized, the primordial soup wanted to rot. The ensuing growth of living intelligence would soon remake the w...| Palladium Magazine
The work of Japanese imperial administrators, planners, and architects had been so thorough that, by the time Viscount Sonoike Saneyasu stepped out of the Seoul railway station in the October of 1925, he would have never had the impression of arriving in a foreign capital. Like many of the buildings constructed by the Japanese in Korea, it was a replica of something from the homeland—in this case, Tokyo’s red brick central station. A mission of local officials enthusiastically welcomed hi...| Palladium Magazine
In 1931, an American dentist named Weston Price closed his practice and began a long tour of the known world. Entering his early 60s, he had already enjoyed a long and illustrious career and could be counted among the most influential practitioners of dental medicine in the United States. As chair of the American Dental Association’s research committee, he had helped lead the charge—later reversed—against root canals and in favor of tooth extraction, and in his research publications he ...| Palladium Magazine
In much of North America, late October brings the first winter snows. In California, it’s still fire season. I took advantage of the t-shirt weather to take a ride through Bohemia Ecological Reserve, a land trust in Sonoma County. | Palladium Magazine
Our governments will fail to respond effectively to climate change. A new world order will arise through the coming period of climate chaos.| Palladium Magazine
Theorists have been imagining a fully artificialized—that is, domesticated and urbanized—planet since the 1700s. This was a kernel ambition of the Enlightenment—to reach a state of planetary mastery in which all of the globe’s flows of matter and energy would be dammed and harnessed by systems of human design and purpose. It was only in the mid-1800s, however, that our ambitions started moving further afield. By the early 1900s, people had begun imagining a fully artificialized universe.| Palladium Magazine
In April of last year, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere reached 410 ppm. This is the highest in over 3 million years, and much higher than the pre-industrial average of 280 ppm. The last time CO2 levels were this high, in the middle Pliocene epoch, the average global temperature was around 3 °C greater than today, and sea levels were 25 meters higher. The time before that, in the middle Miocene, sea level was 40-50 meters higher.| Palladium Magazine
An unprecedented amount of private philanthropy is flowing into science and medicine these days. Multiple private foundations such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Gates Foundation, each with over $20 billion endowments, focus mostly or solely on science, and there are more philanthropists than can be listed who are willing to donate hundreds of millions of dollars in one fell swoop.| Palladium Magazine
Olympiads are international student intellectual competitions in which students from across the world go toe-to-toe answering questions in mathematics, physics, informatics, chemistry, and more. The best performers tend to be from countries like China, the United States, India, and Japan. But, somehow, the southeastern European country of Romania also frequently tops the list.| Palladium Magazine
PALLADIUM 18: Biological Inheritance will ship to all Palladium members on August 14th. Subscribe today to receive your copy of our summer 2025 print edition in-depth essays examining humanity’s stewardship of our biological inheritance. For the first time in our species’ history everything from our genes, to how we age, to how we reproduce, or what kinds of new plants and animals we might share our world with is up for discussion and modification. | Palladium Magazine
For the first dozen or so years of this century, and for some time before that, political violence on the home front was synonymous with jihadist terrorism masterminded by overseas organizations, or anti-capitalist street riots in the vicinity of G8 and other global leadership summits. Since then, the infamous polarization of national politics, which found a lightning-rod in the election of President Donald Trump, has given rise to some remarkably heated rhetoric. What has made it all the mor...| Palladium Magazine
Many of my friends from high school are dead. The worst instance is the loss of two of my best friends that I spent countless hours of adventure with. Those dead also include the brothers, sons, boyfriends, and girlfriends of those close to my family. It includes the guy I looked up to in sixth grade, who mentored me in my social development. Not too unexpectedly, it includes that one kid in elementary school with a single dad. Unexpectedly, it includes that promising and beautiful girl who g...| Palladium Magazine
In the United States, newscasters read out employment numbers and GDP growth figures. In Southern Europe, they read out tourist arrival numbers. In many countries, tourism has become synonymous with future economic prosperity. When put into numbers, the dependence of some countries on foreign tourist spending is staggering. In 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic threw global tourism into chaos, international tourist receipts were equivalent to 53% of Montenegro’s exports; the figures ar...| Palladium Magazine
Palladium is a San Francisco-based non-partisan publication that explores the future of governance and society through journalism, analysis, and philosophy.| Palladium Magazine
The practice of archaeology is almost unique to our contemporary Western civilization rather than universal, and it is unlikely to be continued by future civilizations. The post Will Future Civilizations Bother to Excavate Our Remains? appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
The vast majority of the UK’s mineral wealth lies undiscovered in the vast icy territory. It offers a test and challenge worthy of a national effort. The post Why British Antarctica Should Be Settled and Developed appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
Taking whatever shortcut is available has become common sense to young American university graduates who find themselves with few prospects of productive work. The post Economic Nihilism appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
Humanity and industry can be made compatible, not extinguished for degrowth or AI. The solution is a civilization oriented towards maximum production and challenging megaprojects. The post The Megaproject Economy appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
The technology to grow a baby outside a mother is closer than you think. Even with wide adoption, it won’t raise fertility enough to stop population decline—but will be enough to save lives. The post Artificial Wombs Will Save Lives Not Birth Rates appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
Intentional design is replacing evolution as the main driver of genetic change in humans. To enhance the brain is to rewire the machinery that makes institutions possible. The post Our Genetic Constitution appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
A city best-known for its inauthenticity is in touch with an uncomfortable but important truth about human nature. The post How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love L.A. appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
The ultimate high ground cannot be divided geographically. The threat of stagnant peace under one world government means humanity must once more wrestle with war to thrive. The post The Orbital Authority appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
Hyper-scaling the computational power of AI systems holds great promise, but the Earth cannot indefinitely shoulder their energy needs. The Moon can. The post The Moon Should Be a Computer appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
As space colonization advances, translating rapidly progressing hibernation research into humans may prove necessary. On Earth, human hibernation may help us coordinate multigenerational projects. The post The Case For Human Hibernation appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
The physicist Gerard O’Neill thought a planetary surface isn’t the right place for an expanding civilization. As launch costs fall, we need more ambitious goals to drive technology further. The post A Trillion Tons in Orbit appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
China has launched hundreds of rockets and built a space industry second only to SpaceX. The United States is now in a space race that decision-makers and the public are barely aware of. The post The New Space Race with China appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
Our spring 2025 print edition is now available to all Palladium members. Subscribe today to receive your copy. The post PALLADIUM 17: Universal Man appeared first on Palladium.| Palladium
In Nicolas Poussin’s 1638 painting The Arcadian Shepherds, or Et in Arcadia Ego, unsettled shepherds gather around a starkly cut stone tomb, while one of them traces with his finger the inscription; “and [yet] in Arcadia, [here too] I am.” They are accompanied by an imposing female figure, stylistically based on the Juno Cesi statue currently in the Capitoline Museum. With her diadem, blue and yellow clothing, and hand on the back of the shepherd pointing at the letter “R” on the in...| Palladium Magazine
The state’s role in supporting economic growth is critical. Our wealth comes from industry, that is, from the ability to mass produce goods—more goods, better goods, cheaper goods, produced with fewer hours of labor. The biggest advances in industrial production have required massive investments and social transformations so large they can only succeed with the support of the state, including in countries where the state’s support comes largely via market mechanisms, like the United Sta...| Palladium Magazine
Common wisdom holds that technology disrupts society. That is, a technology is invented, and then a natural and inexorable process of spontaneous order changes society to use that technology. But the reality is that society is itself an engineered system that changes more by deliberate planning than the common wisdom is willing to admit. If anything, it is society that disrupts technology.| Palladium Magazine
During a round of introductions at a recent dinner party, we were polled for takes on the subject of artificial intelligence. Some attendees were researchers, some were company founders or investors, and others worked at think tanks or as commentators. They were all optimistic.| Palladium Magazine
At the close of the Second World War, the United States represented almost a third of world GDP and an even larger share of manufacturing. The proportion is stark: the UN’s World Economic Report for 1948 breaks a chart of global manufacturing down into two roughly equal halves: the United States and “Other”. At the time, it was unquestionable that if there were to be a global reserve currency, it would be the U.S. dollar. At the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, this was codified into a...| Palladium Magazine
Ever since John Winthrop declared from Southampton in 1630, “We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us,” there has been a moral and moralizing dimension to the way Americans view their role in the world. The American exceptionalism that was, for the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a Christian missionary pronouncement, would ebb and flow over the next almost four-hundred years down to the present. But it has never gone away.| Palladium Magazine
In 2005, Paul Otellini became the new CEO of Intel, America’s premier semiconductor designer and manufacturer. He was the first CEO of the company not to have a background in engineering. Sometime shortly thereafter, Otellini entered discussions with Steve Jobs on whether Intel would manufacture the chips needed for Apple’s secretive, potentially revolutionary new project: the iPhone. Ultimately, Otellini declined. He thought the initial costs would be too high and the resulting sales too...| Palladium Magazine
It’s an exciting time to be a futurist. After decades of relative stagnation, things finally seem to be happening. The rockets are launching again and are now landing on their tails, fusion energy is being taken seriously again, and many of us are paying a few dollars a month to use “AI” programs that would have been considered science fiction a decade ago.| Palladium Magazine
In 2006, Sylvain Lesné and seven coauthors published a paper on Alzheimer’s disease, “A specific amyloid-beta protein assembly in the brain impairs memory,” in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. This was a major paper in the development of the “amyloid hypothesis,” a proposed mechanism for how Alzheimer’s disease afflicts its victims. About 50 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, more than the entire population of California, making it the wor...| Palladium Magazine
The boundary between the human world and the natural world has collapsed. PALLADIUM 07: Garden Planet is now available, featuring interviews with Stewart Brand and Isabelle Boemeke.| Palladium Magazine
Social and political theorists have tied the emergence of cities to the origin of civilization since the earliest written records we have found. The perhaps four-thousand-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, which shaped and inspired later literature, including the Bible, opens on what is best understood as an extended meditation on the nature of city life. In it, a wild man named Enkidu, who is created by the gods to humble King Gilgamesh, the ruler of the city, makes his way to the great city of Ur.| Palladium Magazine
I am 25. These next five years might be the last few years that I work. I am not ill, nor am I becoming a stay-at-home mom, nor have I been so financially fortunate to be on the brink of voluntary retirement. I stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it. | Palladium Magazine
A few months ago, I was queued in line between my coworkers for a Bush Gardens’ roller coaster. Day two of corporate team building in our little corner of the government contracting universe. I stood between my bosses, chatting about when they might go down to the gun range; their half-baked plans for doomsday stockpiling; building a panic room or bunker. A couple weeks later, I’d chat with a different coworker about how they wished they could build a network of tunnels under their new ho...| Palladium Magazine
The state looms extraordinarily large in the way of life of the modern West. Its presence and reach is not just a conspicuous, but definitive, feature of that way of life. It has become conventional to characterize our societies simply as liberal democracies, in terms of their state form alone. Individual rights, legal equality, representative government, church-state separation, the rule of law, and above all, political independence have come to replace shared culture and descent as hallmark...| Palladium Magazine
“Honey, don’t worry,” I said, reassuring myself as much as her. “I see a big crowd up ahead. It’ll be fine.” We were wandering down Market Street in San Francisco, after sundown. Despite the towering buildings looming over us, designed to host tens of thousands of people, the streets were quiet and empty. Except, of course, for the shadowy figure shuffling around without direction on the other side of the street, and the occasional and deeply unnerving scream.| Palladium Magazine
PALLADIUM 13: Global Empire is now available to all Palladium members. Subscribe today to receive your copy of our spring 2024 print edition, featuring on-the-ground reports ranging from the core of the empire in Davos, where Jonah Bennett unveils the World Economic Forum, to the very fringes in Afghanistan, where David Oks travels to the Taliban-reconquered country to examine the impact of U.S. occupation. This edition evaluates this global American empire through historical case studies and...| Palladium Magazine
When Portugal will, next year, celebrate its fifty years of democracy, the main event will likely take place in the capital’s main plaza, commonly referred to as Terreiro do Paço (Palace Yard), one of the biggest in Europe, and the former seat of royal power. On one end, the plaza oversees the Tagus river. On the other, former King Carlos I and his heir prince Luís Filipe were assassinated in 1908.| Palladium Magazine
In 2021, scientists radiocarbon-dated pollen found in human footprints at the White Sands National Park in New Mexico and came back with dates of greater than 20,000 years. Critics demanded more evidence, and in 2023, using new data and more advanced methods seems to have confirmed the date. Though there are still skeptics, the White Sands discovery is not the only site that dates to the Last Glacial Maximum between 20-26,000 years ago.| Palladium Magazine
Palladium Magazine is a San Francisco-based, non-partisan publication that explores the future of governance and society through international journalism, long-form analysis, and social philosophy. Palladium was founded in 2018.| Palladium Magazine
On Wednesday, October 14th, Twitter locked the accounts of a White House press secretary and the New York Post, one of America’s largest tabloid newspapers. The accounts shared a story the Post ran on leaked emails which seemingly implicate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son in corruption. When users tried to share the story publicly or privately, they found a message informing them that their tweets could not be sent. Chinese users of Twitter mused on the feeling of déjà...| Palladium Magazine
Industrial visionaries tend to have chaotic and disruptive personalities. Their goals don't neatly fit the social ladder. But societies that make room for them reap immense rewards.| Palladium Magazine
Recognizing the unique signs of a possible civilizational collapse, rather than being blindsided by it, requires a bold thesis as to what the core engine of our civilization is. Without a clear and correct theory of what makes our civilization function, signs of decay will go unnoticed or rationalized, rather than recognized.| Palladium Magazine
The following essay originally appeared in print in Palladium 04. To receive original content in future print editions, subscribe here.| Palladium Magazine
It was almost midnight in Kabul. I was in a Turkish-style café on the top floor of Afghanistan’s only shopping mall with a few young Afghans, waiting for green tea and rice pudding. My Afghan friends were chatting loudly, in a fluid blend of Pashto and English. I, only half-understanding them, was puffing away at a cigarette while I watched Terminator: Dark Fate subtitled in Persian on the television above us. A few tables away, some Talibs were talking quietly and occasionally glancing ov...| Palladium Magazine
Many believe we are undergoing a crisis of meaning as a society. This sentiment is common among my friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I have encountered it far and wide beyond my social circles. The sense is that in the fairly recent past there were social narratives that were both fulfilling and rewarding to participate in, but that for our generation and seemingly subsequent generations to come, it is becoming harder and harder to find and buy into a compelling shared telos. This is...| Palladium Magazine
The universe wants us to take her clothes off. Looking up at the stars, it is not a treacherous void that Grimes—the singer, musician, and now perhaps most prominent artist in favor of machines making their own art—sees, but a temptress veiling vast and incredible knowledge. In the last two years or so, it seems as though a new and potentially murderous arm of this knowledge has been unclothed. Engineers in California have made stunning advances in what has long been both the most promisi...| Palladium Magazine
PALLADIUM 12: Silicon Nemesis is now available to all Palladium members. Subscribe today to receive your copy of our winter 2023 print edition featuring Grimes as the inescapable agent of humanity’s downfall, hauntingly photographed by the inimitable Brian Ziff and interviewed in long-form by Samo Burja on human civilization, the universe, and the dawn of AI.| Palladium Magazine
In an interview in 2019, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained how he had to come up with the “capped profit” structure to prevent investors from getting too much of the pie because the company could “maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe.” This sounds like a hyperbolic rhetorical flourish to induce investor excitement. Actually, it is the straightforward sincere belief of the AI alignment community that has become the center of discourse about what recursively se...| Palladium Magazine
The market society frames transaction as liberation, even renting and selling women's bodies. But the future lies with those who cultivate non-transactional interdependence.| Palladium Magazine
The history of China’s socialist founding is the history of Mao Zedong. The cult of the Helmsman began in his lifetime and the party continued it after his death. Even men exiled and imprisoned by the Chairman have maintained him as the embodiment of China’s rebirth. By design, his reputation is so legendary that he cannot be surpassed.| Palladium Magazine
The goal of the 2009 Sepulveda Pass Freeway Expansion Project seemed simple. A carpool lane was to be added to reduce congestion on a 10-mile stretch of Los Angeles’s I-405 freeway, the second most congested road in the U.S. However, this brought exceptional technical and logistical challenges—the project required carving through a mountain, demolishing and replacing three overpasses, and moving a 60-year-old street, all alongside a freeway that saw 500,000 commuters daily. | Palladium Magazine
On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton announced the completion of the draft of the human genome at a press conference with the two project leads, Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter. A genome is all the genetic information of an organism. Scientists had conceived of the Human Genome Project in the 1980s, and, in the first half of the 1990s, expected it to be an endeavor that would go on for decades. But an unexpected technological revolution of faster computers and better chemistry acceler...| Palladium Magazine
On April 1st, 2022, MIRI (the Machine Intelligence Research Institute)—the people who led the cultural charge on the idea of AGI and AI safety—announced a “death with dignity” strategy:| Palladium Magazine
Ten days after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, a group of 3,000 women gathered at the Cooper Institute in New York City. They met to save the Union. | Palladium Magazine
Do you feel lonely? If so, you’re not alone. The number of people who lack meaningful human connection, intimacy, love, or friendship, has been ever creeping up. According to self-reported statistics, it has doubled in the past 50 years. With it, has come deaths of despair: drug overdose, suicide, and mental illness have accelerated. As Democritus observed millennia ago, “Life is not worth living for the man who has not even one good friend.” Take that as a cold numerical fact, and perh...| Palladium Magazine
We tend to think about physical places, as well as the activities and cultures that come with those places, as being immutable. As an individual, you may have a choice to move to a particular place: to San Francisco for its open and accepting culture or for its AI development scene, to Berlin for the open source hacker culture, or to Asia to be part of a new and rising world. | Palladium Magazine
What ideology guides the star of rising Chinese power? General Secretary Xi Jinping’s answer to this question is unequivocal: “Socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism, not any other ‘ism.’” Xi is adamant that his Party adheres to what he calls the “lofty ideals of communism.” But what exactly do those ideals mean in 21st century China? What does Marx have to do with Zhongnanhai?| Palladium Magazine
When the detonation of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow brought down its onion cupolas into a cloud of dust and dirt, it took a year for the Bolsheviks to remove all the debris. Once that was finally done, a steel frame sprang from the cleared soil. It was intended for the Palace of the Soviets, a concrete wedding cake-like structure planned to be the tallest building in the world at 1,365 feet, crowned with a 300-foot statue of a saluting Lenin.| Palladium Magazine
I will never forget the sunset when I first saw the solar system with my naked eyes. I was standing on the deck of a boat plodding slowly through the Nile River, closer to Sudan than to the Mediterranean Sea. I had not yet seen the Egyptian night sky, so I was excited to be so far south, with so much unlit desert on either side. | Palladium Magazine
My friend had recently gained a renewed appreciation for managing people instead of software. “Why build tech when we have interns?” he asked as we caught up. He had recently made an exit from a successful startup and was now applying his AI skills in a large non-tech industry. “I had an intern manually watch a bunch of footage today and label stuff, and called it AI. If our stakeholders really like it, then we can build the tech later.” It was an offhand comment, but it got me thinki...| Palladium Magazine
If America is a story, then who better to diagnose its ills and prescribe a treatment than a novelist? Walter Kirn was born in 1962 in Ohio and grew up in Minnesota. After Princeton and Oxford he embarked on a literary career in New York media, reviewing books and writing for New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Time, The New Republic, and Harper’s.| Palladium Magazine
John and Tori have two houses, three cars, six kids, and 45 years of parenting experience. One dog’s dead, but the second is alive. When the kids were younger, they had three nannies and one driver. Most of the kids were homeschooled, so Tori stayed home to teach them. The kids played six sports: tennis, golf, sailing, rowing, skiing, and baseball. They grew up and left for 24 years of college, which meant around two million dollars worth of tuition. John spent another half a million on pri...| Palladium Magazine
PALLADIUM 10: Cultural Excellence, our summer 2023 print edition, is available now to all Palladium members. Subscribe today to receive your copy.| Palladium Magazine
One day in August 2021, Zhao Wei disappeared. For one of China’s best-known actresses to physically vanish from public view would have been enough to cause a stir on its own. But Zhao’s disappearing act was far more thorough: overnight, she was erased from the internet. Her Weibo social media page, with its 86 million followers, went offline, as did fan sites dedicated to her. Searches for her many films and television shows returned no results on streaming sites. Zhao’s name was scrubb...| Palladium Magazine
Birth rates are falling much faster than many dominant narratives imply. The global fertility rate for all of Latin America and the Caribbean fell below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman in 2019. India will achieve that status in 2024. China is expected to be at half its current population by 2066. First-generation immigrants to the US fell below the replacement rate in 2019. Already, 115 countries representing about half the world’s population are beneath replacement, and by the...| Palladium Magazine
The following essay originally appeared in print in Palladium 04. To receive original content in future print editions, subscribe here.| Palladium Magazine
Totalitarian governments make extensive use of the appearance of power. Banners, marches, large plenary meetings of officials, and ritual parades of devastating weapons are veritable pageants of this language, scaled up from the logic of small despots to that of mass production. Often, this is a charade concealing the internal chaos and tumult of an elite at war with itself from the broader population.| Palladium Magazine
Those who recalled their time with Qian Xuesen in Pasadena and Cambridge described him as a genius and not much more. He rubbed shoulders with luminaries like Jack Parsons, who would fall to the occult, and Frank Malina, who would be lured away by utopian communism. Qian, meanwhile, cut a conventional figure. He held himself aloof from worldly affairs.| Palladium Magazine
