Robin Hanson is someone who has thought about AI futures the most and in the greatest detail. He’s skeptical of most intelligence explosion stories out there, but he does expect that soon enough, biological humans will be surpassed in all economically valuable capacities by non-biological agents and that we will no longer be the “main characters” of history.

Robin’s view is that these future non-biological agents are going to be a lot like us, at least when they first come on the scene. He thinks that the most plausible versions of them, whether they be something like scaled up LLMs or (his most likely expected outcome) human brain emulations, are going to probably have a lot of our values and psychological features as deeply ingrained design features. He thinks that these values and psychological features will shift over time through the same processes of cultural evolution that humans have undergone. This is worrying to him, not because he thinks these agents will be out of our control, but because he thinks humans have in fact got themselves into a maladaptive state of cultural drift. He worries that non-biological agents could just as easily end up in a state of maladaptive drift in a future civilization.

As far as human control over future non-biological agents does, Robin doesn’t think that we should expect or hope to have much. He thinks that these agents will meaningfully be our descendants, and that we should expect and want to control them only in the same ways and to the same extent that we expect and want to control our biological descendants. To him, this basically means that we probably should not expect or hope to control them very much at all.

In this episode, I try to get a better understanding of all of these views. We start by talking about the unity of intelligence, move into what we should expect culturally or psychologically from AIs, and end up talking about how we should think about values in the very long run.

In this episode I talk with Robin Hanson about AI and cultural evolution. I ask him why he thinks mental capacities are fragmented and why there is no dial to turn in AI systems to simply get more intelligence. We then talk about why he expects cultural evolution to continue in AIs, and why he expects them to take on certain features of human psychology and behavior. We close by talking about making decisions about values in the very long run.

Produced by Helen LaGrand, Music by Yasha Mostert

In today’s episode I’m talking with Anna Grzymala-Busse, professor of political science at Stanford University. We talk about her book Sacred Foundations in which she looks at the role of the Catholic Church in European state formation. We discuss how the church was and was not like a state at the height of its power, and talk about its long historical influence, both on the particular shape of Western European political fragmentation, and on the political and legal institutions of medieval and early modern polities.

Produced by Helen LaGrand; Music by Yasha Mostert

Images:

"Sketch for the Slap of Anagni" By Nicolò Barabino - maon.it, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=150574584

Headshot Photo Credit: https://amgbusse.stanford.edu/

Produced by Helen LaGrand; Music by Yasha Mostert

In this episode I talk to the great early modern historian Steve Pincus about his classic book on the Glorious Revolution and on his current book project on the British Empire. We talk about James II’s project of Catholic modernity, the various Whig and Tory successes coming out of the revolution, and different ideologies behind the British Empire in the 17th an 18th centuries. We also talk about his general theories of revolution, empire, and early modern state consolidation.

Photo Credit: UChicago

Produced by Helen LaGrand; Music by Yasha Mostert

In this episode I talk with UChicago’s Tom Ginsburg. Professor Ginsburg is a comparative political and legal theorist with incredibly broad interests. He writes everything from international law to Buddhist political theory.  In this interview we’re talking about some of his recent papers on monarchy where he asks questions about why this form of government has been successful enough to basically be the default in human history.

Some of Professor Ginsburg’s papers we discuss today:

Monarchy

The Functions of Constitutional Monarchy

An Economic Interpretation of the Pashtunwali

In this episode I talk with UChicago and NYU law professor Richard Epstein. Professor Epstein is a prolific legal scholar who is most famous as a classical liberal/libertarian theorist of the common law. However, as much as Epstein’s ideas are influenced by enlightenment thought and law and economics, his true love in law, as he’ll tell anyone, is Roman Law. In this episode we talk a bit about how why Roman law worked, how it eventually fell apart, and a bit about Epstein’s interest in sociobiology as a way to explain the foundations and limits of legal norms.

In this episode I talk with the political philosopher Kevin Vallier about a variety of intellectual projects that have come out of his journey as an Orthodox Christian defender of public reason liberalism.

We first talk a bit about Vallier’s intellectual background with Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism and his conversion to the public reason liberalism of his dissertation advisor, the late Jerry Gaus of the University of Arizona. We then talked about two of Vallier’s most recent books, All the Kingdoms of the World, a historically-informed philosophical critique of Catholic integralism and other illiberal projects in political theology, and Trust in a Polarized Age, an empirical test of claims about the social consequences of a liberal order. We close by talking about Vallier’s most recent work on modeling the politics of AIs.

This discussion was recorded in late 2025, so much of it is already out of date. Interested listeners should follow Kevin on Twitter/X for more up to date information on his work!

In this episode I talk with Alison LaCroix, an intellectual historian and Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She writes and teaches widely, but in this episode we focus on a long running theme in her work: the history of different conceptions of federalism in American law.

Professor LaCroix’s first book, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism was about the debates around federalism in the founding era and early decades of the republic. Her most recent book, The Interbellum Constitution, is an even larger project, seeking to synthesize the largest constitutional debates and conflicts from roughly the War of 1812 through the Civil War. The book has a wide enough scope to cover both the familiar and unfamiliar legal stories of the era, but it would be worth reading even just for its wonderfully original coverage of two of the most dramatic moments in constitutional history, the nullification crisis and the Cherokee nation’s fight to block its removal from Georgia. We talk about all of this and more.

In this episode I talk with the great economist and legal theorist David Friedman. Friedman is perhaps best known for his advocacy of anarcho-capitalism, but he has made contributions in many areas of law and economics. In this episode we talk primarily about his recent book of comparative legal scholarship, Legal Systems Very Different From Ours (link https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Systems-Very-Different-Ours/dp/1793386722). It is one of my favorite books, and a core inspiration for this blog and podcast.

Friedman wanted to end our conversation talking about his science fiction and fantasy writing, so I think it is fair to describe him as a kind of intellectual wizard with three main powers, as I see it. First, he has Chicago price theory in his blood and thus has great intuitions for describing the incentive structures and equilibrium conditions of different institutional arrangements. Second, he is a devotee of history and science fiction, so has a well trained mind for constructing and reconstructing whole worlds, real or imagined. And third, he exudes a joyful kind of intellectual humility. Both in his normative and his descriptive work, he goes out of his way to explain what he sees as the best alternative theories to his own. He’s always revising his ideas, which he seems to hold very loosely.David Friedman on Governments, Legal Systems, and Fictional Worlds

I’ve not posted in a little bit because I have been working on getting a podcast/YouTube channel started to explore the ideas at the heart of this blog. Today, I’m releasing my first episode, an interview with Bryan Caplan, one of my favorite public intellectuals.

Bryan is an economics professor at George Mason university and he’s probably well known to anyone who would be reading this blog. He’s a libertarian economist in the UChicago/GMU tradition, though as an avowed non-conformist, he would not identify as part of any movement or school. He’s incredibly productive and widely read across history, philosophy, and social science and he’s someone you can ask anything.

In this episode we talk about some essays from a recent volume of his selected works called Pro-Market and Pro-Business: Essays in Laissez-Faire. These essays cover a range of topics, but I was particularly excited to ask Bryan about his ideas on the concept of “state capacity.” Bryan is surrounded by smart economists at GMU who take this concept seriously as a driving force in history, explaining which societies developed hundreds of years ago, and maybe which societies have promising futures today. He remains firmly unimpressed by these ideas.

Produced by Helen LaGrand; Music by Yasha Mostert

Produced by Helen LaGrand; Music by Yasha Mostert

I’m pulled in different directions by this book. On the one hand, I learned a great deal from it. On the other hand, I found its core argument (as best I could make it out) to be thoroughly misguided.

The Fun Parts First

Armitage’s book is most enjoyable for its sections on early modern Europe. The chapters on the 17th and 18th century cover a rebirth of European political theory of civil war, and the birth of the concept of revolution. These are both very neat moments and Armitage gives the reader a lot to think about.

Armitage frames these two moments in purely intellectual terms. For the rebirth of civil war theory, he gives a typical story of classical learning that was lost during the middle ages and reemerged after the renaissance. This seems right, but he doesn’t really discuss how this intellectual history fits in to the long arc of state development in Western Europe. The early modern era was the perhaps the first time that non-Byzantine Europe had states approaching Roman levels of institutionalization since the empire fell. So while the early moderns surely needed Roman sources to have the exact conversations they did about Civil War, there was also an underlying political reality that made it make sense to bring these discussions back. Early modern English writers probably looked back on the Barons’ Wars as “civil wars” partly because they now had the term handy, but they also might have found the term more useful than their predecessors would have. Early modern writers might apply a Roman institutional concept more easily than would have people in the more amorphous state structure of Plantagenet England.

After the great burst of 16th century thought about civil war there came the birth of the concept of “revolutions,” and then eventually “revolution” in the singular. Armitage’s coverage of this genealogy is exciting and suggestive, but it again raises the question for me of whether the history of this specific concept that is used to describe a certain kind of state dissolution and rebirth should be primarily understood as the intellectual reaction to the development of a certain kind of state. A society probably needs a well institutionalized state to meaningfully be described as having a revolution. You need some minimum core of impersonal state power and private organizations to even imagine seizing power or rapidly transforming society through revolutionary action. Of course, many famous revolutions took place in societies where the impersonal state had only loose control in a lot of territories. In those revolutions, it might be the case that much of society experienced the “revolution” more as state building than state seizing. But still, it seems like there needs to be some impersonal core to seize for us as observers (and usually for contemporaries) to see something as a revolution.

The Frustrating Parts

Armitage seems to be animated throughout the book by two outlooks which I think are often misguided. The first I’ll call “elite intellectual primacy,” and the second has been called “global legalism.”

Elite Intellectual Primacy

Elite intellectual primacy (I’m sure someone has a better name for this) is the idea that in causal descriptions of politics, ideas come first, particularly the ideas of the intellectual and political elite. This seems wrong to me, at least as strong generalization. I tend to think that elite intellectuals are very often catching up to events, and not leading them. I think there are big material, demographic, and cultural forces rolling around in society that produce changes in political life, and most of the intellectual record we have of great political thought is smart people reacting to those things and trying to explain what is already under way. I tend to think that elite political ideas only really have causal force during punctuated windows where cultural or institutional changes are in the offing and persuasive or rousing intellectual work (propagated through the right people) can help certain cultural or institutional forms beat out plausible alternatives.

This is of course, not to say that elite ideas don’t matter. The moments where elite ideas are causally most relevant are incredibly important and hinge-y times in history. I think there is plenty of room for legitimate debate about how often and how much elite ideas have causal influence on political outcomes and I don’t think everyone who puts a lot of stock in the power of elite ideas is an idiot. But I do think you can commit yourself to intellectual explanations to a completely implausible degree, and that commitment is what I want to call “naive elite intellectual primacy.”

The way that I see naive elite intellectual primacy present itself in Armitage’s book is that he seems to think that “civil war” – the phenomenon out there in the world that has killed millions of people – needs to be primarily understood as an intellectual phenomenon. He genuinely seems to committed to some version of the claim that people are getting killed because of some causal influence of the very idea of civil war, the way that one might claim people have been killed because of the ideas of Nazism and Marxism. I’m not really sure how else to interpret this passage (particularly the last line):

[W]e should be cautious about assuming civil war is an inevitable part out our makeup–a feature, not a bug, in the software that makes us human. For that would be to doom us to suffer civil war ad infinitum, never to reach Kant’s promise of perpetual peace. To unsettle the notion that we are condemned to interminable civil war, rather than destined for perpetual peace, I here bring historical tools to confront the challenge of civil war. Over the course of this book, I show that civil war is neither eternal not inexplicable. I argue that the phenomenon is coterminous with its historical conception, from its fraught origins in republican Rome to its contested present and its likely no less confusing or controversial future. It has a history with an identifiable beginning, if not yet a discernible end. A historical treatment reveals the contingency of the phenomenon, contradicting those who claim its permanence and durability. It is my aim to show that what humans have invented, they may yet dismantle; that what intellectual will has enshrined, an equal effort of imaginative determination can dethrone. (p. 11)

Perhaps part of the explanation of how Armitage ends up advocating for this very strange position is that he makes too much of the relationship between “revolution” and “civil war.” While I am even resistant to a primarily intellectual explanation of the phenomenon of “revolution” in human history, I will readily concede that there a case to be made that the concept is so ideologically loaded that you need to offer some of its intellectual genealogy to explain the way we use the term, even if you want to give a basically essentialist definition of the underlying concept. There have been so many powerful strands of revolutionary myth-making throughout history (American, French, liberal-nationalist, Marxist, anti-colonial, etc.) and some of these strands are still around, so you have to at least acknowledge that they frame our discourse (e.g. why we don’t we refer to the movements that ended communism in Eastern Europe as revolutions).

But the same is not true of civil war. Armitage seems to think that the lack of great speeches and books theorizing civil war is a tough puzzle for the intellectual historian. But I think it basically just reflects that “civil war” has never been a concept with romantic mass appeal. This is probably because the ones that get romanticized tend to be called revolutions. I think the solution to Armitage’s puzzle is just to accept that “civil war” as a concept is a lot closer to a natural kind than “revolution” is. “Civil war” is probably about as cleanly recognizable and definable as the necessarily related concept of “the state.” Armitage even seems to tacitly acknowledge this, often referring to civil war as “war within states,” which is a pretty good definition!

Global Legalism

I find the idea that civil war is kind of ideology that we need to unlearn so strange that it is hard to know how to respond to it. But Armitage’s second frustrating commitment, his globall legalism, is much easier to pin down and respond to. Global legalism is the idea that international law is morally very good and potentially very powerful, and that the political project of making it much more binding is highly feasible and ought to be pursued.

Global legalism often seems to come together with elite intellectual primacy. This makes sense to me, because elite intellectual primacists tend to be those people most likely to think that, as a descriptive matter, intellectual elites run the world. Given that assumption, it follows that some of our main normative political goals should be to make sure that the intellectual elites are good and have good ideas. To a strong contingent of people with this view, the small group of secular elite moralizers who do the writing and publicizing of public international law seem powerful, and their big ideas seem morally solid.

I hope to write more about the deep problems with global legalism at another time, but for now I will just say that I think Eric Posner and Jack Goldsmith have given it an all-time-classic definitive take down. Their arguments against it can be presented pretty briefly.

• Multilateral international law is only stable and “binding” when it deals with simple coordination problems.

• In terms of real cooperation problems, international law can only help to facilitate bilateral competition. Multilateral cooperation is simply too unstable to be solved structurally. It never has been maintained through international law, and almost certainly never will be.

• International legalism as a normative view is also wildly implausible. It gives a veneer of enlightened cosmopolitanism to what is ultimately a system of state privileges. But most states in world history (and the present!) are gravely predatory and oppressive. It might be prudential to respect their power, but it is not morally desirable in itself.

Armitage’s brand of global legalism comes through in the book most strongly when he presents as his main practical takeaway that we should find a way to regulate civil wars. He presents this task as a question of intellectual effort on behalf of the world’s legal and political elites. He says a number of times that tons of people’s lives hang on whether we get this figured out. But he never really explains what the mechanism would be by which “we” would regulate civil war and end these deaths. The closest he comes is to make clear that he thinks that there was a succesfful intellectual and moral movement that gave us the laws of interstate war, and that we can presumably recreate that for civil war.

Of course, for the average political scientist of a realist bent, the fact that there are laws of war that are often upheld is not an example of a triumphant “regulatory” success. Instead, the existence of moderately binding laws of war mostly just reflects the fact that states generally expect not to annihilate each other when they go to war. This means that there are still opportunities for ongoing bits of coordination and cooperation, even in the context of a shooting war. Much of the nastiness of civil war reflects the fact that belligerents often expect that the war will end with some parties ceasing to exist as political units capable of enforcing promises. This makes it difficult to effectively commit to refrain from doing horrible stuff to each other’s soldiers.

The authors sell the book as a really grand and sweeping narrative of all of human history, but then the empirical scope is actually quite narrow once you get started; it’s pretty much all England, France and the United States. If the theory felt really clearly validated by these cases, that would be one thing, but as I read on I felt that I knew less and less about what the theory even was.

I think it’s fair to say that NWW’s driving idea behind the book is that all societies that aren’t basically some form of liberal democracy live under some system of predation from a dominant coalition of violent actors who buy each other off from starting civil wars by maintaining each other’s predatory privileges. That’s a neat and generative idea, but what it means in practice is incredibly mushy, because NWW obviously have to fit an insanely wide number of cases into that same concept. They have to say Babylon and early 2000s Mexico both fit this mold.

To differentiate within these “natural states” they talk about different kinds of institutionalization that can happen. The state itself can become less personalized. Public law can become more binding. The military can be centralized and brought under political control. That’s all true, but at that point, what are we even talking about? Isn’t a society with an impersonal state apparatus under a binding regime of public law with a tightly controlled military an incredibly different thing from a world where there’s a loose coalition of nobles behind a king? How is the shadow of civil war possibly similar between those two cases? Maybe I just didn’t get it, but this felt less plausible to me as I went.

Particularly disappointing for me (though perhaps not for the average reader) was the coverage of political dynamics in open access orders. NWW acknowledge that open-access orders can fall apart, but they give us very little that would predict when they would or wouldn’t and thus the explanation of why they persist feels almost completely lacking. Several times they seem to say that the underlying glue is that small coordinated interests have to compete with each other through elections and often meaningfully defeat each other. They keep saying “Mancur Olson’s Rise and Decline of Nations Theory would have predicted the US would be dead right now!” The irony of course is that they wrote this book right at the time that sharp people like Ed Glaeser started saying “wow Mancur Olson’s Rise and Decline of Nations Theory is such a good explanation of why the US is dead right now.”

And those kind of complaints are just about US losing its state capacity and optimal institutions for growth! There’s basically nothing to be said about the risks of mass politics and democratic backsliding. They just say that open access orders are stable because people trying to attack them are unpopular and lose elections. That’s clearly only a little bit true! We’re going to figure out soon enough how true it is in the US. Sadly this book does not give us many tools for thinking through what to expect.