Podcasts about Plato

Robert sits down for a two part Q&A episode, answering listener questions on Bitcoin, money, body, TRT, and health. He shares his Bitcoin price prediction, why the US dollar is headed for hyperinflation, the best way to protect your Bitcoin, MSTR vs. self custody, why all non Bitcoin crypto including Monero is centralized, advice for stacking sats while living paycheck to paycheck, and leaving Plato's Cave to pursue Bitcoin. In the second part Robert covers whether to start TRT, peptides and cancer fears, libido on anabolic compounds, his best sleep hacks, and how often to run blood work.// SPONSORS //Blockware Solutions: https://mining.blockwaresolutions.com/breedloveMind Lab Pro: https://mindlabpro.com/products/mind-lab-pro/breedlove// PRODUCTS I ENDORSE //Protect your mobile phone from SIM swap attacks: https://www.efani.com/breedloveLineage Provisions (use discount code BREEDLOVE): https://lineageprovisions.com/?ref=breedlove_22// UNLOCK THE WISDOM OF THE WORLD'S BEST NON-FICTION BOOKS //https://course.breedlove.io/// JOIN THE COMMUNITY //Telegram: https://t.me/TheWiMCommunity// TIMESTAMPS //0:00:00 - Intro0:01:06 - Bitcoin Price Prediction and the Dollar's Hyperinflation0:05:26 - How to Store Bitcoin, The Case for Multisig0:10:03 - MSTR vs. BTC and Counterparty Risk0:15:01 - Why Bitcoin Over Monero0:17:01 - Stacking Sats While Living Paycheck to Paycheck0:22:45 - Sponsor: Blockware Solutions0:24:09 - Hitting a Wall in the Bitcoin Journey0:31:23 - Is the Bitcoin Space Saturated0:34:23 - Ask What You Can Do for Bitcoin0:44:47 - Sponsor: Mind Lab Pro0:45:55 - Do You Recommend Starting TRT0:56:03 - Peptides, Cancer, and Fasting1:02:24 - Libido on Anabolics and TRT1:13:28 - Sleep Hacks, Breathing and Jaw Techniques1:26:23 - Blood Work and Tracking1:28:54 - Unlock the Wisdom of the Best Non-Fiction Books// PODCAST //Podcast Website: https://whatismoneypodcast.com/Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/25LPvm8EewBGyfQQ1abIsERSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/MLdpYXYI// SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL //Bitcoin: 3D1gfxKZKMtfWaD1bkwiR6JsDzu6e9bZQ7Sats via Strike: https://strike.me/breedlove22Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/RBreedloveVenmo: https://account.venmo.com/u/Robert-Breedlove-2// SOCIAL //Breedlove X: https://x.com/Breedlove22WiM? X: https://x.com/WhatisMoneyShowLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breedlove22/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breedlove_22/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@breedlove22Substack: https://breedlove22.substack.com/All My Current Work: https://linktr.ee/robertbreedlove

Philosopher Stefan Molyneux argues the mind comes from the brain and ends when the brain ends, and that not knowing how it works is no reason to invent souls or magic. He also takes listener questions on trauma, blank slate ideas, equality, religion and why philosophy should help real life.Intro to Philosophy series: https://freedomain.com/playlist/intro-to-philosophy/ABCs of UPB: https://fdpodcasts.com/562/universally-preferable-behavior-for-childrenQuestions:I hear you offer therapy and perhaps healing for my wounds?Is a mind an emergent property of the brain? If it is emergent, does that imply the mind ceases to exist once the brain ceases to be? (I would assume yes but I am curious about your thoughts on this).People of color have ancestral land rights in America, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Philippines etc. There is no White race that has any ancestral land rights. Did all White people just fall down from the Sky?You not only have a high quality philosophy show, but you also have give high quality insights into psychology. Have you considered doing some more psychology episodes? It'd be extremely helpfulStef, i very much enjoyed your intro to philosophy series. I have noticed discussing these topics with people educated in philosophy that they're more like philosophy historians - Kant said this, Plato said that, etc without a real grasp of how any of it applies to life or makes any sense. Have you noticed the same and how do you address it if so?People have been conditioned to accept the premise of voting & always of voting for a "lesser of two evils, inferring that not only is evil necessary but acceptable. How would you structurally dismantle such mass mind conditioning & apathy?what are your thoughts of the resurrection or view of it as historical paradigm shiftYou talk about bloodline a lot. How about the facts like genetic ghosts?Are all people equal?Have you been un-cancelled ?What are your thoughts on the afterlife ?Will you ever sell physical instead of digital copies of (all) your books offered on your freedomain website?why are humans sentient but not dolphins?How can I teach UPB to my 3 year old? If it is in one of your books I am happy if you just point me to it.Why do people play team based video games & sports to not work as a TEAM?! Blows my mind that i work hard to look out for teammates but they dont. They will quit in sports when we are losing, or only plug their mics in to insult our team in gaming

Description:Julianna Glasse was a Christian pop singer playing megachurches and arenas, married to a Major League Baseball player, and in January 2017 she sang at Donald Trump's National Prayer Breakfast weekend after voting the way her husband voted. Two years later she walked away from her faith, her marriage, and nearly everything she had built. Jen and Julianna trace the unraveling: the question she asked while holding her newborn daughter, the friend who handed her Plato's allegory of the cave, the "Christian drinkers" who changed clothes in the car after her concerts, and the day her then husband threw her books on the floor and said the sentence that became her title. They talk about love versus fear as a compass, why storytelling reaches people that shouting never will, and what Julianna would say to evangelical women quietly questioning how they vote. Now an Oxford alum, Julianna leads the This Is What Happens When Women Read foundation, which partners with Oxford's Saïd Business School to fund MBAs for women leaving high-control religions and cultures and has reached more than four million people in nearly 67 countries. Her memoir, This Is What Happens When Women Read, releases October 13.Thought-provoking Quotes:“You cannot know that which you do not know, but once you do know, it becomes your responsibility.” – Julianna Glasse“Does it feel like love or does it feel like fear?” – Julianna Glasse“This is actually what happens when women read. We notice the systems of oppression that we are in.” – Julianna Glasse“Bare your teeth at the institution, at the dogma, at the policy. Do not bare your teeth to the human.” – Julianna Glasse“It's just the teeniest taste of hope and freedom, and that is the most powerful taste you will ever have.” – Jen HatmakerResources Mentioned in This Episode:This Is What Happens When Women Read by Julianna Glasse (pre-order)Oxford Saïd Business SchoolMaria Popova, The MarginalianPlato's Allegory of the Cave (The Republic)Rebecca GoldsteinWalt Whitman and Ralph Waldo EmersonThe Measure of a Woman by Gene A. GetzGuest's Links:Website - https://www.juliannaglasse.com/Foundation - https://www.thisiswhathappenswhenwomenread.org/Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/juliannaglasse/Foundation Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tiwhwwr/Foundation Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/people/This-Is-What-Happens-When-Women-Read/61566356275917/LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliannaglasse/Connect with Jen!

Our second episode in celebration of reaching the 500 mark fills a significant gap: Melissa Lane helps us to understand the ancient Greek historians Herotodus and Thucydides, including their relationship to Plato.

Vince Wu, The Learning Phone (Atari PLATO Terminal)   Vince Wu worked at Atari for about two and a half years. He was the programmer of The Learning Phone, the PLATO terminal for Atari 8-bit computers. Before that, he worked with PLATO at the University of Illinois, then in California for Control Data Corporation. PLATO was the first generalized computer-assisted instruction system, a groundbreaking graphical client-server computer system aimed at education.   To assist in this interview, I was joined by Thomas Cherryhomes and Michael Sternberg, who were on a road trip to a Vintage Computer Festival conference. In 2018, Tom Cherryhomes created IRATA.ONLINE, a modern working version of the PLATO server and terminals. Michael Sternberg helped reverse engineer the Atari PLATO cartridge for that project.   This interview took place on September 10, 2026. Video version of this interview 1984 "PLATO Rising" article in Antic magazine The Learning Phone review in ANALOG Computing magazine The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture Computer History Museum PLATO@50: PLATO Computer Learning System 50th Anniversary IRATA.ONLINE, a modern PLATO server and terminals ATARI PLATO Users Guide version 3.1 (1983) ANTIC Episode 49 – Thomas Cherryhomes and PLATO ANTIC Interview 10 – Mark Rustad ANTIC Interview 117 – Landon Dyer ANTIC Interview 183 – Lane Winner Early versions of Atari PLATO released PLATO on Wikipedia Vince Wu – Follow the Arc of Justice Vincent Wu's birthday memories—jailed at Selma in 1965, worked security for MLK at the March finale

Welcome to Episode 353 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.This week we are continuing our series reviewing Cicero's "Academic Questions" from an Epicurean perspective, which gives us an overview of the issues that split Plato's Academy and helps us understand Epicurus' position on the same issues. This week will continue in Section 17 of Book Two, with the material that starts:But while these visions are being beheld, they assume the same appearance as those things which we see while awake. There is a good deal of real difference between them; but we may pass over that. For what we assert is, that there is not the same power or soundness in people when asleep that there is in them while waking, either in intellect or in sensation. What even drunken men do, they do not do with the same deliberate approbation as sober men. They doubt, they hesitate, they check themselves at times, and give but a feeble assent to what they see or agree too. And when they have slept off their drunkenness, then they understand how unreal their perceptions were. And the same thing is the case with madmen; that when their madness is beginning, they both feel and say that something appears to them to exist that has no real existence. And when their frenzy abates, they feel and speak like Alcmæon; —But now my heart does not agreeWith that which with my eyes I see.Our text will come fromCicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We'll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we'll also refer to the Rackham translation here: Cicero On Nature Of Gods Academica Loeb Rackham : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archivehttps://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/5275-episode-353-eataq35-the-worthless-argument-of-those-men-who-wish-to-throw-everyt/

In this podcast, we will be talking about 8 Free Everyday Habits That Make Life Radically Rich from the philosophy of Epicurus. His philosophy is often referenced as Epicurean hedonism or simply Epicureanism. So here are 8 Free Everyday Habits That Make Life Radically Rich from the philosophy of Epicurus -  01. Natural Necessities02. Simple, Satisfying Food03. Freedom from Bodily Pain 04. Daily friendships05. A Safe Retreat06. An Unnoticed Life07. Good Memories08. PhilosophyI hope you enjoyed listening to this podcast and hope these 8 Free Everyday Habits That Make Life Radically Rich from the philosophy of Epicurus will add value to your life. Epicurus is one of the most important figures in the history of philosophy, as well as of science. He is less known than Plato or Socrates, but, nonetheless, his teachings are precious and timeless. He lived between 341 to 270 BC, and wrote more than 300 works during his lifetime. Most of his work has been lost, but what remains is extremely relevant even today. In science, he was one of the first to describe the natural world as made of atoms and he rightly understood that all the natural phenomena are in fact based on the movement of atoms. Also, he strongly stressed the importance of basing our beliefs on empirical evidence and logic. In philosophy, he was part of the hedonist movement and he was most famous for his skilful insights into the concept of happiness, starting his own School of Happiness, also known as Epicurean hedonism or simply Epicureanism. If stoics believed that living justly and virtuously is the highest good and that we should be indifferent to pleasure and pain, Epicureanism believed that we should seek to maximise the pleasures in life. There were some rumours that in his school people lavished  themselves in orgies, luxury and decadence, but these rumours were unfounded. Epicurus didn't have any interest in orgies and expensive meals. His idea of pleasure is far from the classical one. He departed from the classical school of hedonism for which pleasure is the highest good, adding that the pleasure of the mind, not the pleasure of the senses, is the true ‘highest good'. He believed that the greatest happiness comes from reducing suffering, achieving an inner state of peace which he called ataraxia. Ataraxia means being content with simple things in life, like having philosophical conversations about the meaning of life, in your small garden, with your best friends. According to Epicurus, the pleasure from pursuing wisdom is the highest form of pleasure, and the most valuable as it is the one that leads us to true happiness.

In this episode of The Jim Fortin Podcast, Jim makes a bold statement about the self-help industry: It's built to keep you coming back, not to set you free. While personal development should be the goal, Jim explains that sometimes other things take precedence. One thing in particular is boosting the ego. He explains that instead of helping you work through your issues, some programmes focus on short-lived joy.  To illustrate this, Jim draws on Plato's allegory of the cave, in which people chained to the wall began to believe their shadows were real. He explains that constantly trying to fix yourself has a similar effect. However, in this case, the idea that you're broken becomes the reality. To help listeners break free, he offers a simple mantra stating that true freedom comes from understanding that you're not trapped and recognising the power of your own consciousness.  What You'll Discover in This Episode:  (00:36) The self-help trap — Jim explains why an industry built on feeling good rarely leads to deep, lasting healing.  (05:49) Jim shares how a friend's response revealed that the industry thrives on repeat customers, and why his own measure of success is clients who never need to come back.  (14:11) Jim uses Plato's allegory to show how most personal development simply rearranges chairs on the Titanic of the human ego.  (16:20) The self-improvement paradox — Jim reveals how wanting to fix yourself telegraphs lack, prompting the universe to keep reflecting it back.  (22:38) Jim explains that recognizing yourself as the awareness observing the human identity is where true power begins.  (27:53) Jim invites listeners to stop fixing a story that was never theirs and simply learn to be.  Listen, apply, and enjoy!  Transformational Takeaway  You are not your past, your trauma, your bank account, or even your name. Those are labels you learned, and every one of them keeps you searching for the next fix. The moment you stop trying to repair a story that isn't truly you, it loses its grip. There is nothing left to fix because nothing was ever broken. Today, pause and ask yourself what would change if nothing were wrong with you right now, and let that question open the door out of the cave.  Let's Connect:  Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | LinkedIn  LIKED THE EPISODE?  If you're the kind of person who likes to help others, then share this with your friends and family. If you have found value, they will too. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts so we can reach more people.  Listening on Spotify? Please leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!  With gratitude, Jim 

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author, Ayad Akhtar joins us to talk about craft,  the campus novel, autofiction, and his latest book, The Radiance, with host Miwa Messer. This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.   Featured Books: The Radiance by Ayad Akhtar Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar American Dervish by Ayad Akhtar Junk by Ayad Akhtar McNeal by Ayad Akhtar The Invisible Hand by Ayad Akhtar Poor Folk and Other Early Stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky Fifty-Two Stories by Anton Chekhov The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy Herzog by Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow Seize the Day by Saul Bellow Ravelstein by Saul Bellow The Republic of Plato translated by Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia Antiquities and Other Stories by Cynthia Ozick Nature and Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson Hawthorne's Short Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser The American Canon by Harold Bloom The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation by Harold Bloom The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford The Complete Odes and Epodes by Horace

Should my PDA child stay in the public school system, move to a private school, or homeschool? There is no single answer, and this episode is not going to give you one. What it is going to give you is a framework for making the decision that fits your child, your constraints, and this specific season of your family.In this episode I walk through all five characteristics of PDA as they play out in a school or home setting, then move into the three schooling scenarios I see families navigate most: staying in the public school system and advocating for accommodations, finding a private school that is structurally more aligned with a PDA nervous system, and pulling your child out entirely to unschool, deschool, or homeschool. For each one I share what to watch for, what has worked for the families I have coached, and how to use the cost-benefit framework to make and hold a decision even when it is hard.Key Takeaways Why Traditional School Is Structurally Activating and What That Looks Like | 00:01:42 Traditional schools are designed to standardize: every child doing the same thing at the same time in the same way. For a PDA nervous system, that structure produces continuous perceived losses of autonomy, and the behavioral expression of that activation, whether it is equalizing behavior in the classroom or a collapse at home after a day of masking, is what most families are already living with when they find me. What I want parents to understand is that the equalizing and collapse is not defiance. It is not willfulness. It is a nervous system doing exactly what it is wired to do when it perceives repeated losses of autonomy and equality. Advocating in the Public School System: Be Strategic, Not Educational | 00:33:27 When advocating for a PDA child in a US public school, leading with the PDA label rarely works. I give families permission to describe their child as high functioning autistic with severe anxiety or a nervous system disability, using language that the people in the room already have a framework for. From there, the most effective tool is the PLATO nonviolent communication framework: making one specific, granular request that includes a person, location, action, time, and object, so the school can only say yes, no, or propose an alternative. Each answer is data, not a defeat. What to Look for in a Private School and Which Models Have Worked | 00:42:38 The question I ask every private school when evaluating fit is: does every child have to do the same thing at the same time in the same way? The models that have worked most consistently for families I have coached are Montessori and Reggio Emilia for their mixed-age classrooms, built-in choice, and absence of homework and grades; Sudbury Democratic Schools for their consent-based, student-governed structure; and trauma-informed schools that do not default to exposure as the primary intervention for anxiety. Even within the public system, some charter schools and schools of choice have been workable when a parent has been able to build a genuine relationship with specific staff. Unschooling Is Not Independent Play: The Four Regulating States | 00:53:59 The most common mistake families make when they begin unschooling is assuming the child will go off and self-direct once the external structure is removed. What I observe is that PDA children need nervous system scaffolding to engage with anything. The four regulating states that help during this period are screens, another safe nervous system offering undivided attention, special interest or flow, and dopamine-intense or sensory-seeking activity. If a child is in burnout, they may only be able to access two of these. Starting there, without expectation or timeline, is the beginning of recovery, not a sign that unschooling is failing. Strewing, Declarative Language, and Letting Go of the Timeline | 00:54:42 The three tools I return to most consistently with unschooling families are strewing, declarative language, and releasing the timeline. Strewing means leaving things out in the environment that the child can engage with or not, without expectation. Declarative language replaces direct questions and imperatives with observational statements so the child retains autonomy over whether and how to engage. And letting go of the timeline is the hardest but most necessary piece, because a parent's urgency about reading, socialization, or catching up is itself perceived by the PDA nervous system as an agenda, which activates the very resistance we are trying to reduce.Relevant Resources Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where the five-characteristic framework, cost-benefit decision making, the PLATO advocacy tool, and the full unschooling and accommodation approach described in this episode are taught across twelve weeks of live coaching.Mentioned in this episode:Free Live WorkshopI'm offering a free live workshop this month: "Supporting your PDA child or teen through burnout without breaking yourself in the process."Free Live Workshop Registration

This lecture discusses key ideas from the ancient philosopher Plato's dialogue, the Lysis, focused on the nature of love and friendship This lecture focuses specifically on the end of the dialogue, which ends in aporia, the interlocutors considering themselves to be friends, but not being able to arrive at a satisfactory account of what friendship is or how it arises and works. They do consider one promising idea, however, which is that friendship in some way is between those who have an affinity or affiliation with each other (oikeios). To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM You can find over 4000 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler Purchase Plato's Lysis - https://link.amazon/B06g9uelJ

Matthew Ehret hands the mic over this week to researcher Rick Hines for a guest deep dive into one of history's favorite unsolved mysteries. Recorded while Ehret was touring occult sites in London, this episode tackles the Atlantis question head on, but skips the usual theosophical detours into Aryan super races and alien space operas. Instead, Hines builds his case straight from Plato's Critias dialogue, tracing the conversation between Solon and Egyptian priests about a forgotten cataclysm and what it might actually reveal about a lost antediluvian civilization. Expect a personal origin story involving Edgar Cayce, new age music, and a surprisingly earnest appreciation for C.S. Lewis, alongside a serious attempt to separate credible ancient testimony from decades of pop culture mythmaking. It is a bit of a change of pace for the show, and a fun one at that.  

Today on Ascend: The Great Books Podcast, we are preparing to read Plato's Republic (we start next week!). Before turning to that long and demanding text, we ask a simple question: how do you read Plato well?Plato does not write treatises or lectures. He writes dialogues, and the setting, the characters, the irony, and even the moments of confusion (aporia!) are part of the teaching. The podcast takes up the questions that help a first-time reader get started on the right foot. Overall, however, we do not read Plato to “be smart” or brag we've read Plato. We read Plato to have a beautiful soul. We take him seriously as a teacher who can help us pursue the true, good, and beautiful.Here is a list of the major questions that are discussed on the podcast today:Why read Plato?Why is the drama important?Are the dialogues historical transcripts?What is the Socratic method?What is Socratic irony?What is the art of dialectic?What is aporia?What is eros?What is pleonexia?What are the parts of the soul?Again, we read Plato to better understand the good life and to have a good, healthy soul.Be sure to check out the MASTER CALENDAR for our reading schedule for Plato's Republic. Also, if you're interested in a deeper dive into eros, see "Rediscovering Holy Eros” (one of the most popular articles on Ascend). Moreover, you can read more about pleonexia and its dangers at “The Greatest Threat to Your Freedom is You.” Last week, to prep for the Republic, we published “How to Read Plato's Republic like C.S. Lewis.” Finally, regarding Socratic irony, read “How a Man Pretending to be Drunk Helps You Read Plato.”Chapters00:00 Introduction to reading Plato and its significance01:00 Why reading Plato is essential for philosophy02:20 Understanding Plato's teaching through dialogues06:29 Preparing for the Republic: preliminaries and questions09:07 Why read the Republic and its moral importance13:23 How to approach reading Plato's dialogues26:06 The Socratic method and dialectic explained33:01 Understanding Socratic irony and its purpose39:31 Recognizing patterns in Socratic teaching47:11 Eros, love, and the soul in Plato55:43 Upcoming plans for studying the RepublicNext week we start Plato's Republic! Everything you need to know is here: "How to Read Plato's Republic with Ascend."

Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and novelist, author of American Dervish and Homeland Elegies, joins host Tess Callahan to talk about his new novel, The Radiance. The book follows a writer (also named Ayad) who wakes from a hit-and-run accident into an unbidden state of heightened perception that unfolds over eight months as he navigates an academic scandal in a politically divided town. Ayad talks about writing as “melding” with a register of experience rather than executing a plan; the idea of autofiction as “doing the truth, but better”; the influence of Montaigne, Rousseau, and Plato's cave; and what it means to come back down the mountain after a genuine experience of grace. He asks the political meaning of grace. We also get into Falstaff, Ayad's father, and what constitutes greatness in a person.The Radiance was published September 29, 2026.  Ayad is touring 28 cities this fall, dates available here:  https://ayadakhtar.com/Support the showHost: Tess CallahanSubstack: Writers at the WellInterview Podcast: Writers at the WellMeditations on Insight TimerMeditations on YouTubeTess's novels: https://tesscallahan.com/Music (unless otherwise noted above): Christopher Lloyd ClarkAudio Editing: Eric FischerBy tapping "like" and "follow" you help others find the show. Thank you for listening!DISCLAIMER: Meditation is not a substitute for professional psychological or medical healthcare or therapy. We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred by you acting or not acting as a result of listening to this recording. Use the material provided at your own risk. Do not drive or operate dangerous equipment while listening. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.

This lecture discusses key ideas from the ancient philosopher Plato's dialogue, the Lysis, focused on the nature of love and friendship This lecture focuses specifically on the portion of the text right after Socrates and his interlocutors seem have reached some sort of solid understanding of friendship, namely that it is between the good and the neutral on account of the bad. Socrates then sees a complication in this, and begins to explore this "on account of" or "because" in terms of things or people that we value for their own sake, and those that we value instrumentally. To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM You can find over 4000 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler Purchase Plato's Lysis - https://link.amazon/B06g9uelJ

Watch the video:https://youtu.be/Juoxi8xM5eQSocialism is often sold as justice, necessity, or the only way to win. This Exploring the Psyche episode asks a harder question: what does that bargain do to the soul?In Mythic Mind episode 192, Dr. Andrew Snyder takes up a live Right-wing temptation around redistribution, democratic appetite politics, and seizing power "for our side." He grants the real injustice (vote-buying, short-sighted majorities, a disenfranchised base), steelmans the classical and Lewisian fears about democracy's degeneration and spiritual leveling, then refuses the conclusion that remakes persons into instruments. The court can sentence Socrates. Only Socrates can harm Socrates.Drawing on Plato and Aristotle, C. S. Lewis, Kierkegaard (and Gregory Beabout), Dostoevsky's Crystal Palace, and Tolkien on the Machine and coerced wills, the talk argues that envy baptized as entitlement, managed security without risk, and power that treats neighbors as tools all shrink the self before God. Freedom requires gratitude, courage, and faithful action. A managed win for any base is still a loss for the person.Topics include democracy and demagoguery, envy and false entitlement, facticity and possibility, despair and the spiritless crowd, welfare soft slavery, Tolkien's Machine versus sub-creation, and why refusing the smaller victory is the psyche's first win.Join the Mythic Mind Fellowship:https://mythicmindfellowship.comFellows receive Academy courses (including The Psychology of Søren Kierkegaard: Life in Anxiety and Despair, beginning the week of October 4), Inkwell essays, and the fuller life of the community. Since the fall season began, podcast downloads have nearly doubled. Membership is the deeper layer of the work you hear here.Listen to and watch Mythic Mind podcasts:- Mythic Mind- Mythic Mind Games- Mythic Mind Movies & Shows#MythicMind #ExploringThePsyche #Socialism #Kierkegaard #CSLewis #Tolkien #Philosophy #Theology #PsycheBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/mythic-mind--5808321/support.

"Phaedrus" by Plato explores profound themes of love, rhetoric, and the nature of the soul through a dialogue between Socrates and his companion Phaedrus. This philosophical work delves into the intricacies of human relationships and the power of persuasive speech, raising questions about truth and the pursuit of beauty that remain relevant today. Its exploration of the connection between love and knowledge invites listeners to reflect on their own understanding of these timeless concepts. The enduring relevance of "Phaedrus" lies in its ability to provoke thought about the dynamics of communication and the essence of human connection, making it a compelling listen for anyone interested in the foundations of Western philosophy.

This lecture discusses key ideas from the ancient philosopher Plato's dialogue, the Lysis, focused on the nature of love and friendship This lecture focuses specifically on a dialectical examination at the heart of the dialogue, bearing on determining how friendship works, and who can be friends with each other. Socrates considers whether good, bad, or neutral people can be friends with each other, and what the basis for friendship is. He will end up eliminating a number of the possible combinations of friends, and settle upon friendship as taking place between the good and the neutral on account of the bad. To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM You can find over 4000 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler Purchase Plato's Lysis - https://link.amazon/B06g9uelJ

Before you knew the face in the mirror was yours, you waved at it like a playmate. Then the verdicts came. A parent's face went still, and your stomach learned what love costs. Rogers called that fine print conditions of worth, and culture kept adding clauses until your natural way of being felt, in Brach's words, not okay. Fromm traced anxiety to separateness. Belonging runs so deep that self-esteem gauges acceptance. Aristophanes spun the hunt into a myth of lost halves, which Buddhism would diagnose as thirst and Japanese psychiatry as amae, the ache to be indulged. Plato's lovers could never say what they wanted. We let familiarity pass for fate. Freud watched people circle back to pain, and Hendrix built a therapy on the childhood picture we chase. Exposure alone breeds liking, and new partners resemble old ones. Swann found low self-regard clinging hardest to the spouse who agreed. So the wound recruits, loyal to its confirmers even when confirmation bruises. Maltreatment raises later risk, and harm belongs to whoever caused it. Healing before blaming asks what you were taught to accept. Improvement chasing applause keeps worth leashed. Self-compassion carries people further. Nearly everyone believes they're self-aware. Few are. Glenn Schiraldi calls worth unconditional, an ancient idea with a workbook. Seneca counted befriending yourself as progress. Buddhaghosa's kindness begins with May I be happy, and before Hillel asks who will be for you, the Chandogya has answered That thou art. Keats named Earth the vale of soul-making. Relationship is the classroom, feedback the curriculum, the self a training ground for a higher division. Krishnamurti found thought fragmentary and love beyond its reach, and Popper never called the unmeasurable unreal. We arrive fractured, each a WIP. Yoshimasa's cracked bowl came home clamped and grew priceless. Gold goes in the seam. 

This lecture discusses key ideas from the ancient philosopher Plato's dialogue, the Lysis, focused on the nature of love and friendship This lecture focuses specifically on he early discussion between Socrates and Menexenus about the connections between love or desire and friendship, aiming at determining who has to feel love towards the other. They waver between the view that friendship requires both the lover and loved person to love each other mutually, or that it can be more of a one-way street. To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM You can find over 4000 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler Purchase Plato's Lysis - https://link.amazon/B06g9uelJ

Shari Foos is the founder of The Narrative Method, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that connects people to themselves and each other through creative writing. She is a marriage and family therapist and spent many years as a writer and performer before that. The program began in 2012 as an in-person practice. It now runs mostly as free online writing salons where people write to prompts, read aloud in small groups, and receive no feedback or criticism. Her book, The Narrative Method: A Writing Practice for Not Hating Yourself and Discovering Who You Really Are, comes out from HarperCollins on April 6 and is available for pre-order. Episode Summary Bill and Shari begin with a shared question: who gets to call themselves creative? Bill describes the days in 2020 when he couldn't accept the word. Shari describes creative expression as a right, and the doubt most of us carry about it as something learned. She calls the source "the cult of culture," her term for the steady message from media, advertising, and politics that we aren't enough. From there the conversation moves through the ideas in her book. Shari walks through "Lantern in the Cave," which draws on Plato's allegory, and explains how writing to a prompt can produce small moments of recognition. Bill brings in the Odyssey and a recent interview he heard with Miley Cyrus, which leads to a discussion of why vulnerability draws people in more than success does. They talk about the difference between being known and being famous, and about community as a practical response to isolation. Shari talks about what parents can pass on when they weren't given permission to dream themselves. Topics Discussed - Why creative expression can be treated as a right, and how self-doubt gets learned - The "cult of culture" and the habit of comparing and judging ourselves - Being known versus being famous, and what intimacy and legacy have to do with it - Vulnerability in public life, illustrated by Bill's account of the Miley Cyrus interview with Zane Lowe - Community and human contact in everyday transactions - "Lantern in the Cave": Plato's allegory, the shadow we see when we turn around, and aha moments - Letting yourself imagine the ideal, and tolerating disappointment when reality falls short - Awe, and the way facing painful feelings can open into connection - Parents, protection, and dreams handed down across generations - How a salon works: prompts, breakout rooms, witnessing, and no feedback - Working with veterans, and the difference between being thanked and being listened to - Ideas Worth Sitting With - Shari's view is that feedback of any kind, including praise, interrupts a person's first experience of their own voice. - She argues that people can tolerate disappointment better than they can tolerate a world with no possibilities. - She says that listening to someone read is a way of making them feel more whole, and that the listener benefits too. - Her position on imperfect writing is that misspellings and rough language are part of what makes a piece relatable. Salons are free. Sign up at thenarrativemethod.org under Events, then Salons. Each salon has its own link. There is no commitment to attend again. Connect Website: thenarrativemethod.org Salons: thenarrativemethod.org/salons Book: The Narrative Method, HarperCollins, April 6 (pre-order link: [add]) Email: info@thenarrativemethod.org Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube: @thenarrativemethod

Earlier this month, world model company Runway introduced GWM Worlds 2, a research preview that “turns high-fidelity video and audio generation into real-time interactive simulation.” Runway calls this an “autoregressive diffusion” model; with autoregressive describing how it generates over time.One new feature in particular caught our eye: WorldPrompt, a proposed input format for specifying a generated world and the actions within it. It allows you to fix some aspects of a simulated environment — including the first frame — and then create a series of timestamped events. The events, or actions, can even be prompted in real-time.To understand the implications of WorldPrompt, we spoke to Kamil Sindi, Runway's CTO, and Robin Kahlow, its Principal Research Scientist for generative video and multimodal AI. We also have exclusive comments from Anastasis Germanidis, co-founder & co-CEO of Runway, courtesy of a podcast swyx and Vibhu did with him.Who's building real-time interactive world models?First, some context about world models that can generate interactive video and audio in real-time.Runway is reportedly valued at $5.3 billion, based on its most recent fund raise of $315 million in February. Its first release, GWM Worlds, was launched last December.Alongside Runway, there are several other notable projects in this domain: Google DeepMind's Genie 3 (which also generates at 720p and 24 fps), Odyssey-2 Pro, and World Labs' RTFM (Real-Time Frame Model). We've summarized their differences in the following table:Given the complexity and massive latency demands of real-time video and audio generation (which we'll get into below), all of the projects listed above have limitations. For instance, Google notes that Genie 3 “can currently support a few minutes of continuous interaction, rather than extended hours.”But as our interviews with Runway show, real progress is being made.The central idea of WorldPromptWorldPrompt, a new feature in GWM Worlds 2, helps differentiate Runway from its competition. You can think of it as a control layer for characters, cameras and the environment. As Kahlow put it, it's a way to “control all the different subjects in the world” — similar to a computer game.“Like, if there's an NPC [Non-Player Character] somewhere, the NPC might walk up to you and say something. So you could achieve the same thing with this kind of model, where you can have very detailed control over everything in the scene.”As the name suggests, WorldPrompt is a prompting mechanism — not a programming language. So, unlike virtual world games like Minecraft or Roblox, GWM Worlds 2 doesn't offer scripting capabilities or the ability to control state. But there's a power to that, as Sindi pointed out.“You can create promptable worlds on-demand with video and audio in sync, across all these different domains and environments. That's not a distant-future hypothetical thing,” he said.But there are also limitations to prompting a world model. We asked how reliably the model would follow an instruction to create, for example, a law of gravity or a certain ability in a character?“Yeah, so it's a research preview,” Kahlow replied. “So it's not perfect, of course, and there are still flaws. It really depends on how difficult the action is. I would say movement works quite reliably.”Sindi added that more training plus scaling the data and models is resulting in “better following.”How a video model becomes a real-time runtimeDespite the current limitations of GWM Worlds 2 — especially if you compare it to pre-designed and scriptable worlds like Minecraft or Roblox — the true promise of world models like Runway is that they'll eventually lead to fully self-generated, real-time games and experiences. Which is an extremely hard engineering problem, as Kahlow reminded us.“There are two challenges. One is making the model not generate a whole clip at once. So instead, you want it to generate frame by frame while you're looking at it. And the other challenge is actually making the generation fast, so you can play it in real time.”GWM Worlds 2 offers real-time interactive worlds streamed in continuous 720p video at 24 frames per second (fps) and audio at 48,000 Hz.Runway achieved this firstly by taking its foundational audio-video generation model and fine-tuning it to the new WorldPrompt format, so the model can follow that. It then post-trains the model to generate autoregressively.“And after that, we work on making it real-time through distillation methods,” Kahlow added.Co-CEO Anastasis Germanidis offered more technical details in our podcast with him. He told us that the process starts from “bidirectional diffusion that basically generates an entire video at once and [makes] it autoregressive.” This allows the model to “generate one frame or a few frames at a time.”Germanidis described two possible forms of distillation in order to make it real-time: distilling a larger model into a smaller one or reducing its diffusion steps. As a general example, he said a model might go from around 50 denoising steps to four, with some quality loss but potentially comparable results.The challenges of real-time generationGermanidis admitted that there were issues with how it generates real-time interactive video.“The biggest challenge with autoregressive models is error accumulation,” he said. “You're feeding generated frames back into the model to generate the next frames, and if there are any small errors, they accumulate over time.”Sindi told us there are also challenges dealing with “infinite generations” of content.“There's all these challenges around what context to keep, what to discard that's not important. And so there's all these optimizations we have to think about, so we're not blowing up our GPU memory.”Another current limitation is long-term memory. “The model does not have perfect memory,” Kahlow said. “That's still an open research problem.”Causality and correctnessWhile performance is the primary challenge for Runway at this time, its world model also has to produce plausible consequences when a user takes different actions.Germanidis used the example of simulating football; he pointed out that online video training data contains more successful goals than failed goal attempts, so a video model might render the first more convincingly.“If I take this action versus this action, you want it to generate equally realistic outcomes,” he told us. “That's, I think, the big gap between video models and world models: that idea of counterfactual generation.”Sindi told us that evaluation gets harder the more complex interactions get.“If you have this multi-prompt, multi-character, multi-scene [environment], how do you really understand what was causal and what was not?”To try and solve that, Runway has some automated verifiable tests. But since GWM Worlds 2 is a research preview, Kahlow noted that doing tests yourself is also advisable — “trying out your model to see what doesn't work is really important.”More than gaming — there are agent use cases tooGaming is the obvious use case for what Runway is building, but there are others. Kahlow mentioned robotics — for example using a simulated environment to test how a robot works.Another, more intriguing, use case is to use it to test agents at scale.“Having thousands of simulated environments is much less challenging if you have a suitable model like GWM Worlds,” Kahlow said.But how does an agent know what's changed in the world — is there a structured state that it can read, or is it just the generated video and audio that it's consuming and understanding?“So there's no structured state here,” Kahlow replied. “It's just observing the same thing you might observe in real life, just [in this case] from cameras.”Sindi noted that GWM Worlds can also be used for “synthetic data generation for agents.”Finally, Germanidis suggested there's potential to use these world models alongside reasoning models.“You're maybe using some reasoning [for] planning of the scene, and then you're passing it into the diffusion head that's actually generating the pixels.”Anastasis Germanidis* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agermanidis/* X: https://x.com/agermanidisTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:05:17 Runway's Origins and the Bet on Generative Video00:12:23 The Stable Diffusion Story00:18:44 Gen-2, Controllability, and the Weekend Hack00:23:02 From Video Generation to World Models00:28:03 Learning From the World, Not Just Language00:35:04 Sora, Runway's Existential Crisis, and Gen-300:39:39 Why Real-Time Video Is Inevitable00:43:06 Interface World Models: Software Without Code00:50:25 The Fully Neural Operating System00:55:11 World Models for Robotics01:02:32 Robot Policies and World Action Models01:07:47 The Lucid Dream Test01:11:41 Video Agents and Omni Models01:23:12 Artists, AI, and Creative Workflows01:27:14 Physical AI and the Future of World ModelsTranscriptIntroduction: Runway, Creative AI, and the Early ThesisSwyx [00:00:00]: Okay, we're here with, Anastassios from Runway, with, me and Vibhu in the studio. Welcome.Anastasis [00:00:08]: Good to be here.Swyx [00:00:09]: Congrats on all your success and progress with Runway. You're opening offices all over the world. Did you envision this when you first started out?Anastasis [00:00:16]: Not quite. I think even when we started, we had this idea that, It was more a matter of when, not if, we were seeing the early generative models of 2016, 2017, and just extrapolating, assuming, we resolution, quality increases predictably over time. There's gonna be a point where most of content will be generated, and that was maybe the initial thesis of Runway was we will need, as a result of those generative models, rethink how creative tools are made. and as we built out the research behind, our generative models, it then became clear that they were useful far beyond that as well.Anastasis' Background: Art, Simulation, and Machine LearningSwyx [00:00:57]: And it is more obvious now with, like, the real-world stuff and the world models that we'll talk about later. I'm just kinda curious how you go from a background in, like, Zocdoc and, computer vision into Runway. Like, take us back to that early conversations with Chris and, whoever else is on your founding team.Anastasis [00:01:14]: I was always splitting through those two worlds. One was the I had my own art practice. I was making a lot of interactive art, I think for a long time. and then on the other side, I was working in startups, and I was working as a ML engineer, as a backend engineer at different companies. I've always been interested in, coding and computation, and especially interested in simulation and brought it back into my early artwork as well. And at the same time, I was interested inSwyx [00:01:43]: The personal site has a few, right?Anastasis [00:01:44]: Yeah.Swyx [00:01:45]: Is there one that we should pull up? Just in case there's something that's like. I just like to go down memory lane.Anastasis [00:01:50]: Yeah.Swyx [00:01:50]: Okay, what is this?Anastasis [00:01:51]: So this was, a project that I made, I think back in 2015, where I built this software that would give, voice instructions to people in a gallery space. So it would coordinate interactions between people. And so it will first give you an identity, like you're an, architect, you're 30 years old, and, you like sports. and then it would match you with another person, and you have this completely generated interaction. language models were not quite there at the time, and so it was it was a mix of some templates and some, like, some Markov chain-generated text, and it would just completely simulate these small talk conversations between, everyone in the gallery space. so was always very fascinated on the one hand with, generative models and, like, the early machine learning work that was being at that time. But at the same time, there was this separate thread of simulation and what it means. Like, what can we learn about humans by creating those very simple models of their interactions and their behavior?Early Generative Art: pix2pix, GANs, and Uncanny ValleyVibhu [00:02:56]: Did you generate the prompts or, the 30-year-old, whatever? Was it you generating them? How'd you, how'd youAnastasis [00:03:03]: Exactly. So the program would just generate- those, from. Yeah, a lot of it would be Mad Libs style of justVibhu [00:03:10]: YesAnastasis [00:03:10]: You have lists of different professions, lists of different,Vibhu [00:03:14]: HobbiesAnastasis [00:03:15]: Personality types, lists of different, ages, things like that. And then it would just combine those things together. And then maybe the next project we go is, Uncanny Valley, Uncanny Road, which wasSwyx [00:03:27]: GansAnastasis [00:03:27]: One of the first projects that, we built with, one of my two co-founders, Chris. This was taking, pix2pixHD, which was one of the early image-to-image models that NVIDIA released back in 2016 or 2017. and it was a model that would take a semantic map of a scene and then generate a photorealistic, let's call it, output. very early days, so it was not very high-fidelity outputs, but it w I think was the first image-generation model that could generate at 1K resolution. And it was all trained on self-driving datasets. So the semantic categories it would support were only, things you would encounter on the road. So it would be pedestrians, traffic signs,Vibhu [00:04:16]: StoplightsAnastasis [00:04:17]: Bikes, stoplights. And so that was one of our first indications that we built this and people were making all this, like, very surreal imagery of, yeah, a million plus a million pedestrians or a million traffic signs or, like, gigantic humans. And it was a indication that you could take a model that was trained on this very boring dataset, essentially, of, like, not that many interesting things happen when you're on the road, and then you can repurpose it and go very out of distribution and make something that was artistically compelling. And that was It's a summary of the thesis of Runway in some ways, that you can take the same generative models, and if you look at them from another direction, if you build interesting tools around them and you give them to artists, they're gonna do things that you don't expect.Vibhu [00:05:02]: Very cool. I like the, UX of it. You're just given an empty canvas, try whatever, do whatever. And then the other one, like, you see everyone with wired headphones? Like, that's, that's a sign that it's, it's veryAnastasis [00:05:16]: The AppleVibhu [00:05:17]: YeahAnastasis [00:05:17]: Apple, your version.Vibhu [00:05:17]: Original ads. Yeah. Take us to today. You've been doing this for seven years at Runway. How have we got to this? Like, how do we go from driving simulator data to all this? And you cover the whole stack of generative media?From Creative Tools to a Research LabAnastasis [00:05:33]: Interestingly, we're almost back in, we're, we're full circle. We're, we're now applying our models and beyond creative tools into real-world scenarios. But it was a, it was a long journey. It was very early on we realized the first version of Runway was a way to easily use the, all the open source model of the day, things like pix2pix to. and give them to artists. That was the initial idea, is those models are too difficult to use if you're not a machine learning engineer. Like, what happens when you give them to artists? Very quickly, we realized we needed to build a research org, inside of Runway, and that happened maybe on year one. And, a lot of the mandate there was. The image-generation models of the time, the video generation models of the time, or there were barely any video generations all the time, but they were not quite there where they could be productionized and brought into tools that would be part of creative workflows. so we need to push the frontier of the research. And so maybe the first four years of Runway, research was almost happening on the background until there was a moment in 2022, with latent diffusion, with, DALL-E 2, where, there was that step function change, and you guys maybe remember around the time.Swyx [00:06:49]: I started in this space because of latent diffusion and Stable Diffusion.Anastasis [00:06:54]: Yeah.Swyx [00:06:54]: Because I was like, “Wow, this is not only, like, feasible, it is doable on consumer hardware.”Anastasis [00:07:01]: Exactly, yeah.Vibhu [00:07:01]: I think the delta is also huge. Like, I learned pix2pix. Like, this was intro to ML, the TensorFlow, like, Jupyter, Google Colab notebooks were like this, and then you have a sudden step function change, with diffusion and whatnot. Any other ones since that. Like, there were clear examples of what early diffusion were to get to here. Any other changes in key technology research?Green Screen, Rotoscoping, and Early RunwayAnastasis [00:07:26]: Between, 2018 when we started and 2022?Vibhu [00:07:29]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:07:29]: So one of the early work that we did in Runway was solving segmentation, image and video segmentation. It was a very important problem because most VFX involves essentially separatingSwyx [00:07:42]: RotoscopeAnastasis [00:07:42]: Subjects. Yeah, rotoscoping. Extremely manual process. Nobody enjoys doing that. and so a lot of the early days of Runway was building this tool. It was called Green Screen, and it was for a long time the main thing that people were using Runway for. It ended up being used in, Everything Everywhere All at Once and a bunch of other high-visibility films and series. But that was essentially, Runway for a long time was a post-production tool until latent diffusion and generat- Gen-1, Gen-2, happened.Swyx [00:08:12]: Cool. let's, let's go past that moment. You've come a long way. Then you started releasing your own models. Maybe describe that journey as well.Scaling Video Models and the Bet on 1,000 A100sAnastasis [00:08:20]: Yeah, so we go to the other point, yeah, in mid-2022 when it became clear that we're doing research at a fairly small scale of compute, and it became clear that, like, scaling laws would apply to, image and video gen in the same way that we're applying to language generation. So we made a big bet, and I think at so at the time, we signed this deal to build a cluster of a thousand A100s, which at the time we were a Series B startup. That was a almost, slightly irrational decision maybe, but we really believed that if we trained a video model at a large scale, we would get, like, a great model at the end. And at the time, the goal or we set the goal around fall of 2022 of what is, what does the latent diffusion, Stable Diffusion moment look like for video? And at the time, the best model of the time was called CogVideo. it was one of the early video models. It was very 256 by 256 resolution, very not very high quality. and so we decided we're gonna build out this cluster, and we're gonna just invest in, like, in building out our own video model. it became clear as we're training Gen-1 that it was difficult to get to fully. we wanted to build text-to-video, but it became clear to us that an easier starting point would be to start from video to video. Because when you have a stronger conditioning, it's, it's an easier problem to restylize an existing video versus generate the video from scratch. And so we released Gen-1 first back in, it was January of, 2023. Yeah.Vibhu [00:10:04]: It's just a fun visual podcast, honestly. Like, if we can see February 2023, what was the state of stuff?Gen-1: Video-to-Video and Depth ConditioningAnastasis [00:10:10]: It's so interesting ‘cause at the time when you see those results, you think this is so incredible, and this is like, it's almost like image generation or video generation is solved. And then you look back a few years after, and it's like, it's It's just like you get used to the results very quickly, with those models. But at the time when we started seeing those results, it was, it felt quite incredible, and the level of, like, quality that you could get. And, so the Gen-1 was a depth-conditioned video model, so it would turn. it would take a input video, it would predict. it would it would first convert it into the depth map, and then we would generate, pixels with a latent diffusion model.Swyx [00:11:01]: Yeah, very effective.Vibhu [00:11:02]: Yeah. I didn't realize how distracting the blog post would be. Sorry.Anastasis [00:11:05]: Yeah, but, one of my favorite examples of on those, on Gen-1 was both, if you go up to mode three or mode two, there was this storyboard use case where people would makeVibhu [00:11:18]: OohAnastasis [00:11:18]: WouldVibhu [00:11:20]: You can mess around with theAnastasis [00:11:20]: Make a city out of books or out of boxes, and then they would shoot a video with their phone and then translate it into a photo-photorealistic output. There was all these ways in which those models were starting to be used for storyboarding and also for really. and then if you go to mode four, like, of taking untextured 3D scenes and then turning them into photorealistic output. So we saw a lot of use cases early on where people that were familiar, were power VFX editors would just take a blender, render, and then they would get translated in with Gen-1 or create a scene in Unity and then take a capture a video of it and then translate into, restylize it. So I still think video to video is powerful. I think we had a recent video-to-video model as well, and it's one of my favorite ways of using those models is essentially using them to use ground truth video as, like, the initial inspiration and then translate into different styles or different outputs.Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, and Open SourceSwyx [00:12:23]: But I think we're gonna go into, like, the rest of Runway and catch people up to speed today. I did wanna cover the, let's call it the Stable Diffusion controversy, or, what happened with Stability AI, whatever. I think there was a two sides of the story. I think there's part of that is a normal thing of, like, people, join and leave companies, but what is the, retrospective now that, there's been some years behind it?Anastasis [00:12:49]: Yeah, it's a very, it's a very long story to go into. I think it wouldSwyx [00:12:53]: Which I remember you wrote a really long post about.Anastasis [00:12:56]: We would probably cover the whole hour to go into it in more detail. But, essentially, there was the latent diffusion paper that came in, I think that was at the end of, 2021. And then Patrick Esser, who was one of the researchers behind, latent diffusion, and he worked at Runway at the time, he built latent diffusion in collaboration with Robin Rumbach and a few other folks back, in the in, CompVis, which was, a labSwyx [00:13:26]: Like a research group, yeah.Anastasis [00:13:27]: And, after releasing the early latent diffusion model, they, essentially they were. the goal was to keep working on versions of the model, scale it up, incorporate new data, incorporate new tasks. And Stable Diffusion was the same model, but trained on more compute, and then with a few more tricks, like a classifier-free guidance paper came at some point, I think in the early 2022. And thatSwyx [00:13:52]: Which, like, was a big prompting improvement.Anastasis [00:13:55]: Yeah.Swyx [00:13:55]:?Anastasis [00:13:56]: That improved results. it was trained on better data, so like, the esthetic subset of LAION, but it was effectively, the same underlying architecture. And there was that big training run, that, happened on Stability's cluster. Stability financed that run. And looking back at that story, I think it was the work to build and train that model was done. It was a, it was a research project. It was done as part of, like, continuation of the latent diffusion work. It then, I think it the model became very successful, and it, I think there were the. And I think as a result of its success, other companies tried to, figure out the commercialization path for it. But for us, it was very important that we try to, we make sure that we. It was meant to be an open source research project, and so the we decided that we should continue releasing versions of it, since that was the original goal of Stable Diffusion, and that led to releasing Stable Diffusion 1.5. There was maybe a day of, a bit of, miscommunication there, but ultimately that was resolved very quickly within hours. so yeah, there wasSwyx [00:15:12]: OkayAnastasis [00:15:12]: Not a niceSwyx [00:15:13]: I just wanted to. you have toAnastasis [00:15:15]: Yeah.Swyx [00:15:15]: You're one of the main players in that journey, and so it's nice to hear from the source of, like, what happened. Yeah.Anastasis [00:15:22]: Yeah. I think it's all, it's all in the past nowSwyx [00:15:26]: YeahAnastasis [00:15:26]: I would say. and, like, both companies, Stability took its own path, Runway took its own path.Swyx [00:15:32]: Yeah. There's still. James Cameron is backing the new Stability, whatever they're doing with the Hollywood studios.Anastasis [00:15:38]: Right.Swyx [00:15:38]: I don't know what they are doing. I think one thing that impresses me, and I'm happy to move on, is that back in the that time, let's say, like 2021, 2022, there was this community of people that you were involved in that was researching all this stuff, right? And, like, from everyone I talked to who was active then, it seemed like it was fairly obvious that somebody would do the hero training run that would produce Stable Diffusion. So, like, I guess the question is, like, you had the you were you had made investments. You were you had the foresight. Is it accurate to say, like, that is reflective of, like, what people were thinking at the time? Or was it still very much like, “Well, we'll use it as, like, a post-production tool or something. I don't know.”? Like, where in the sentiment were we that maybe you can think back to, like, what the community was like back then?The Early Creative AI CommunityAnastasis [00:16:28]: I reminisce and I think very fondly those early years, from like 2018 to 2022, because it was a very small community that, as you said, were very convinced that this was gonna be a big thing. And at the time, anyone who. Because it was such a small circle and, everyone who would, like, be part of that circle and, like, make projects with it would, immediately get, go viral. so likeSwyx [00:16:55]: And you didn't know who they are, right? They're just some name on a, GitHub or Hugging Face somewhere.Anastasis [00:16:59]: Exactly, yeah. So I remember one of the first big viral moments of creative AI was, there was the neural style transfer paperSwyx [00:17:09]: HuhAnastasis [00:17:09]: ThatSwyx [00:17:10]: Something dreaming?Anastasis [00:17:11]: I think it was called neural style transfer.Swyx [00:17:14]: Okay.Anastasis [00:17:14]: There was also Deep Dream, the puppy sliceSwyx [00:17:16]: YesAnastasis [00:17:16]: Which was, also really cool. but, yeah, there was this project that, Jim Kogan, who was an early advisor of Runway and one of those,Swyx [00:17:25]: Marketing guysAnastasis [00:17:26]: Big, creative AI, folks, he literally just, like, showed a video of himself taking the New York Subway and going over the Williamsburg Bridge and then stylized it with, I think in the style of Van Gogh or, like, one, painter. And that was. Like, at the time, that was, like, so cool and it went viral and it was completely revelation to people that you could do this with generative models. And that was only, it was less than. It was maybe 10 years ago. So just, like, as an indication of, like, how quickly things have gone.Vibhu [00:18:02]: It's pretty crazy. Like, even since then, you've got people at every level of the stack. You've got devs, creatives, artists, hobbyists. You've got everyone using it. And for people that tried stuff early, they'll remember how hard it was to use regular diffusion, right? Like, nowadays, you can use your favorite ChatGPT image gen or whatever, give a sentence, get a beautiful output. But diffusion was like, the whole ultra HD, 4K, high resolution. Like, prompting these things was very different. anything you learned on the tooling side, like from the offerings you guys have now, so like creatives, devs, you really took the. Research and brought it to everyone to use. anything interesting there to share?From Gen-2 to Controllable Video GenerationAnastasis [00:18:44]: We had to build the entire model serving infrastructure for video diffusion models. There was nothing else, already, like, because we had Gen-2 was the first text-to-video model, I think, out in the market. So many things that we learn over time. I think the I think the biggest one was, like, we. it was very clear early on that text-to-video was not gonna be the answer. Like, you. Like, people wanted a lot more control than that, and so we invested in, like, control building on top of those models very quickly. how do you use the camera trajectory as control? How do you use an initial input frame as control? So that was a very early learning for us. With text-to-video was, like Gen-2 was an amazing, step function improvement in the quality of video models, but it was used much more in an exploratory way because there was nothing to ground it to. There was no reference that you could bring into it. There was no. You couldn't really control the camera motion. You couldn't control the object motion. And so the first year, in 2023, was really all about what are all the interesting ways in which we can condition those models? And it was a lot of just post-training rounds on top of the base model to figure out, like, what, -- how do people wanna control them? And so there was, like, this quick succession of the we it was called Motion Brush, which was you could, like, you could draw arrows and dictate where things should move in the scene.Vibhu [00:20:09]: That's so cool.Anastasis [00:20:09]: There was camera control that was you could just describe, like, how you want the camera to move in the scene. And because we work with filmmakers from the most of the history of Runway, we immediately got this feedback and got this, decided that this was worth investing in. And so control ability became a big theme, I think, very early on as we were building, as we were building those models. Something fun that I haven't really talked about too much was just how Gen-2 came to be out of Gen-1. So it was a bit strange because we announced Gen-2 two months after Gen-1 andHow Gen-2 Came From a Weekend HackVibhu [00:20:43]: We're accelerating.Anastasis [00:20:44]: It was before Gen-1 was even generally available. But Gen-1 was a depth-to-video model, so it would take a depth map and it would convert it into RGB. and we couldn't get, text or image-to-video to work directly, and that's why we started from depth to video. but, and we had discussions of like, okay, we need to spend the next six months investing in text-to-video, maybe increasing the compute scale or the model scale, like train a larger model. And I had this weekend project idea, which was, what if I take a model that, starts from text input and converts to depth maps and then use Gen-1 to convert the depth maps Into RGB?Vibhu [00:21:29]: It would probably work.Anastasis [00:21:30]: And so Gen-2 was that.Vibhu [00:21:32]: Oh. The hackathon pipeline.Swyx [00:21:35]: The weekend hackathon pipeline.Anastasis [00:21:36]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:21:37]: But it looks good.Anastasis [00:21:38]: And it worked pretty well. there were if you, with the knowledge that it has this, like, two-stage pipeline, you can tell in some cases that the structure of the video looks a bit off because you had to generate the depth first before you go into the output video. But it worked and it allowed us to bring this to our, to users very quickly. But it's now it's interesting because, like, people are coming back to this almost two-stage approach. Like, if you look at the Reve text-to-image model that came a few months ago, it had this planner model that would generate bounding boxes before it fed that into the diffusion transformer.Swyx [00:22:19]: Yeah, Ideogram also the same day.Anastasis [00:22:22]: Yeah.Swyx [00:22:22]: I remember that was very strange that both of them came out the same day with the same exact innovation.Anastasis [00:22:26]: It's a small community, I think.Swyx [00:22:28]: I'm like, this is like, this is completely coincidental, right?Anastasis [00:22:32]: People talk. So yeah, there's, there's definitely something into this approach. And, now, like every single like, video generation model in production uses a complex prompt completion pipeline under the hood. I think that's no secret that there is. ThatSwyx [00:22:48]: Humans are terrible at prompting.Prompt Rewriting, Camera Control, and the Seed of World ModelsVibhu [00:22:51]: I think across the board.Anastasis [00:22:51]: Yes.Vibhu [00:22:52]: But yeah, I think like the original Sora one blog post even told you that what happens after your input is rewriting your prompt. It's much more descriptive about what you would want.Anastasis [00:23:02]: Exactly. I, And there was the DALL-E 3 paper beforehand that, was the first public, description of the fact that synthetic captions and really detailed captions work really well. And then Sora built on that. Yeah, so it was 2023. We were releasing all these updates to Gen-2, like the camera control, Motion Brush. And there was something very interesting about camera control because it was the first time that you felt that instead of, like, you were creating video, you were creating a short video, you were navigating inside the world. And I think camera control was maybe the seed of some of the ideas that we had around world models and really opening up that research direction. We realized, it was this era and this series of, Gen-1 and Gen-2 models really proved to ourselves, yeah, this is theSwyx [00:23:56]: Cool.Anastasis [00:23:57]: So this is not the original camera control. This was the updated camera control on top of Gen-3. But yeah, I think it made those models usable to filmmakers, I would say. The so camera control was very popular. And so we realized, there is one way of seeing those models, which is, you're just as content creation machines, and there is the other way, which is you're. As you're predicting video in order to predict video well, you need to simulate the world in an increasing and increasing capacity. And if scaling laws apply on video, just like they apply on language models, then as we scale the compute that we put into those models, then they're gonna be able to simulate physics, they're gonna be able to simulate human actions and dynamics increasingly well and predictably well. That was the thesis about around our efforts on world models, and we spin up this research group to just focus on the world models and how do we turn the video generation models that we're building into something broader and something that would be useful beyond, also content creation as well.Swyx [00:25:04]: And that was roughly when?Anastasis [00:25:06]: Yeah, so that was inSwyx [00:25:06]: OhAnastasis [00:25:07]: In late 2023.Vibhu [00:25:08]: Interesting. like, I think, a lot of people have been saying a lot of video gen model companies have all pivoted to world models these days, but like, 2023, you're posting it. oneWorld Models: From Video Generation to SimulationSwyx [00:25:21]: It's, it's debatable whether it's a pivot.Vibhu [00:25:23]: Yeah.Swyx [00:25:23]: Like, arguablyVibhu [00:25:24]: YeahSwyx [00:25:24]: That's what you always had to do anyway, right?Anastasis [00:25:26]: It's in a way an expansionVibhu [00:25:28]: YeahAnastasis [00:25:28]: Of the applicationsVibhu [00:25:29]: YeahAnastasis [00:25:29]: Of the models as they become more capable.Vibhu [00:25:31]: The early signs, it seems like the original models you guy had, guys had, people would say it's very not bitter lesson pilled, right? You're adding, rewriting prompts, you're having all these one-off things, but that's just the state of the tech as it was versus the future of as you said, you can scale it up as, we can scale up to world models.Anastasis [00:25:50]: Yeah. So it just became. And if you looked at the outputs of Gen-2Vibhu [00:25:56]: YeahAnastasis [00:25:56]: It was not. I think it was not obvious to people that this would scale to become a general simulator of the world. Like, you had very limited movement, you had, very low fidelity or low resolution, like obvious mistakes in human anatomy, like all kinds of limitations. But it was just, the idea was that's just GPT-two, and GPT-two, it can barely generate, like, coherent sentences. Similar, Gen-2 can barely create coherent video, but if you scale it up, you're gonna. There is no reason why it shouldn't work in a way. It's, And I think that was. That's, that's always the mindset of Runway is like this extrapolation of, like, if, like, even when we started in 2018 and you looked at the results of the day, you need to look more at the trend of, like, where we were in 2018 versus when we were at the, when the first GAN came out in twenty, four 2014 or twenty, fifteen. And, you started from, like, thirty-two by thirty-two images of faces, and then by the time in 2018, you could generate, street images at the 1K resolution. And it was the same with world models, very early signs of something much bigger.Swyx [00:27:08]: Yeah. I was gonna say, like, it's diffusing into focus. Like, if you look at our visible output from year to year, it looks like a diffusion process itself.Anastasis [00:27:17]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:27:17]: Especially watching the early, like, old blog posts, you can really see the choppiness, the details.Anastasis [00:27:24]: Yeah. Like human civilization starting from random noise and thenVibhu [00:27:27]: YeahAnastasis [00:27:27]: Denoising intoSwyx [00:27:28]: Yeah. Just run it a hundred years.Anastasis [00:27:30]: Civilization.Swyx [00:27:30]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:27:31]: That's how you're on track, you're still noising, right?Swyx [00:27:34]: Yeah. I like the way that you guys phrased it when you, announced it in June, which is, oh, that you had a video essay. “The human mind is no longer the center of AI. Our world is.” Right? Which is, let's, let's call it the past five years of LLM-based AI is very much like trying to emulate human preferences and human speech. But now that's, like, mostly solved. I think that's, like, some of the context of your essay, which you also wrote around the time. And now it's like the focus is on modeling the world accurately.Scaling Laws for Video and Why Predicting Pixels MattersAnastasis [00:28:03]: Exactly, yeah. So the way we see it is, there is that, initial mission statement of DeepMind, which is, solve intelligence and then use it to solve everything else. But I think it's starting from everything else, could be valuable of, like, starting from. there is just so much complexity, and detail in the world that in order to. That it's, it's hard to learn directly from just human descriptions of the world. Like, we're assuming that, like, language models learn from everything that humans have written about the world, like our own understanding as of, the twenty twenties. And there is just so much that we don't know and so much that's not captured by existing text, about both the low level dynamics of the world, like we're not describing in detail. if I tell you to describe, like, how do you tie your shoes, that's a very difficult thing to describe in words, but it's very obvious thing to demonstrate. And so I think there's been. And there's, more of X paradox, like we're constantly underestimating all the complexity that goes into very, like, things that we do subconsciously as humans, and we don't even necessarily always have the words to describe them. And so in my mind, the simulating the world and simulating, physics, simulating the dynamics of the world has always been underestimated, compared to, we place too much emphasis on the things that are easy to talk about. but there is just all this complexity and richness of the world that if we just try and train directly on that observational data instead of training on how people describe the world, we would learn something new that we wouldn't otherwise know.Swyx [00:29:54]: You think that the present architectural paradigm is fine? You don't need, like, another layer, like JEPA, like another famous, New York AI leader would say?Anastasis [00:30:05]: We're a very pragmatic research lab. If, we have evidence that an approach works better than the approach that we're taking, then we have no qualms to taking it. We just have seen no indication that video prediction itself doesn't scale. And even if you look now, not just our work, but the work of others, you're seeing in robotics some of the most promising work, starts from video prediction models, and then you adapt them to also the action models, for example. so there is very little evidence that you need something else and that your time is better spent on a novel architectural change compared to improving data and improving the, and scaling the current approach. And so, We don't have any indication that. the, there is that counterargument that I think there was a tweet by Yann LeCun a few days ago that, understanding the dynamics of the world is very different than, generating, cute videos.Swyx [00:31:05]: And your answer is no, they're the same thing.Anastasis [00:31:07]: Yeah, they're the same thing.Swyx [00:31:08]: My cat videos are the same as understanding physics.Anastasis [00:31:11]: Right, because if you wanna generate. video models can cheat and, like, they could you could give, like, successive dif shots of the scene in a way that doesn't require you to simulate difficult physics. There is like, all these different ways in which you can hide the deficiencies of the model, and it's important not to be too tricked by the performance of the current video models. It's easy to, cherry-pick examples and think that video models are further advanced than they are. So there is a lot more work that we need to do to improve those models. But in my mind, very similar to language, and, like, we've. you go from barely coherent sentences to something that, could hold a conversation with a human to something that could can operate autonomously for a day and, like, create entire code bases. And the main difference, there is some architecture improvements along the way, but the main thing is scale. And so it's the same bet for video, and we have no indications that this is saturating. Like, we have benchmarks that we use for measuring the physics of those models, and we see those predictably improve as we scale those models. So there is. If you want to Google up, Physics-IQ, is one of those benchmarks that measures how well does the model perform at solid mechanics or fluid dynamics or optics.Vibhu [00:32:32]: I'm curious if you've seen any emergence, any scaling law around this.Swyx [00:32:37]: Yeah, he's saying there is a scaling law, right?Anastasis [00:32:39]: Exactly.Vibhu [00:32:40]: Yeah,Anastasis [00:32:40]: So the way those models, those benchmarks work is you. the researchers have gone and, like, captured, a few videos that are representative of different physical phenomena, and then you can take the first frame and then pass it through an image-to-video model and then generate a rollout that shows what should happen next. So you have, a ball hanging from the ceiling, and then you use that as input, and then you the model predicts how the ball should fall on the ground. and this measures. we have an intuitive understanding of physics. I know, you can imagine what will happen next if I drop this bottle. So it's measuring that same intuitive physics understanding of those models, and we've measured that at different model scales, and we see, and compute scales, and we see that the score on physics IQ predictably improves. There's other, tricks and techniques that you can make to improve the score even further, but even scale alone helps, in the model learning better physics.Swyx [00:33:40]: My main sympathy with Yann LeCun is the, Plato's cave allegory, right? Like, you're, you're, like, learning on the output of a thing, not the internal process of a thing, and it's very noisy. And, if only you could observe the internals of a thing. It's hard to observe the internals of a human mind, but you can very much observe, or at least we have a whole branch of science and physics that we're ignoring on how to model Physics and movement and, gravity and, other interactions. and we're just, like, throwing away all of that and just saying just scale data, which is very much the lesson of unsupervised learning, but it feels wrong. that's the main idea.Anastasis [00:34:21]: I think the history of machine learning is, at large, it feels wrong.Swyx [00:34:25]: Yeah. It's a bitter lesson, right? Yeah. It's, it's, it's the simple answer to that.Vibhu [00:34:29]: I guess, how much can you scale? So, like, even on, let's say, the video generation side, like, there's one side of video understanding. Video generation, are we still gonna have tools where it's like, I wanna generate two hours, twenty hours? there's a infra way to do it in batches and stitch it together, but, like, do we just keep scaling? Do we just continue long generation consistency, all that at scale? And, like, tying it into where we're at now from we looked at Runway two to four point fiveGen-3, Sora, and Runway's Scaling InflectionAnastasis [00:34:58]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:34:58]: Like, technically, what advancements have we made to today, and then where do you see things still going?Anastasis [00:35:04]: So part of the answer is definitely scale. and that was. We learned that lesson in a big way for with Gen-3. So Gen-3 was the model we released the year after, like in 2024. That was a few months after Sora was released. so yeah, there's an interesting story of that came to be as well. Gen-3 for us was, the first time that we really needed to build. we had to learn all the lessons that the language model world learned in two in three years in the span of a few months. one of the biggest changes of Sora was using diffusion transformers instead of convnets. So a lot of the early, latent diffusion models were all, convnets for the diffusion model part. And the diffusion transformer paper came at some point in 2023, and it showed scaling laws for image, diffusion transformers. And we realized at that point that we needed to invest in infrastructure for model parallelism, for really scaling training to larger than, a few billion parameter models. And we spent maybe the, most of the fall of 2023 building out our infrastructure for distributed training. And we had a lot of false starts and a lot of failure in trying to scale, image and video diffusion transformers. And at that point, February 2024, Sora comes out, and the results areAnastasis [00:36:35]: Very much superior to what Gen-2 could produce. There were a lot of, a lot of chatter on Twitter about Runway. Runway's done. like, there is no way Runway will catch up. And if you remember, also OpenAI in the early twenty-It felt very, like it's aSwyx [00:36:56]: To the moonAnastasis [00:36:57]: It's a formidable opponent now, but at that point, it, they were on the top of their game. nobody could even get close to them. There was maybe Gemini was just the first version of Gemini had just released. So when OpenAI came with Sora and it was such a big jump of like quality, it gave me, there was like an existential crisis for a few hours. But that, I think the amazing thing about Runway and like I think the, we've been around eight years now, which is almost we're dinosaur in AI, and we had to like, we had there was a lot of those moments we had to learn, adapt very quickly and build out skill set in the team that we didn't have. And so, if you ask anyone what is their favorite time at Runway that was there during that time, it was that push in like three months to get to a model better than Sora. and it, we scaled 10x the model scale, the model size and the, compute that we were training on. we figured out model parallelism. We had zero expertise in that. And then we came out with Gen-3 during that summer. So that was a big turning point, I think, for the company where the research org grew very quickly, and we really started pursuing this vision of the general world model, in earnest, I think after Gen-3 was out.Swyx [00:38:12]: Yeah. that's the amazing thing about building when you're building. There's no stack to. You have to invent everything yourself. You have to be completely full stack. Now I think like there are inference specialists like Fal or whatever that can help with like, model serving, and I think you guys work with them as well. but yeah, like it's, it. But at the time, it was just. It's very interesting to think about what you do when Sora comes out and people are questioning whether your company should still exist.Distillation, Turbo Models, and Real-Time VideoAnastasis [00:38:41]: Yeah. And yeah, there was no, there was no VLM of diffusion models. Like, we had to build the whole model serving infrastructure and make things efficient. And a few months after we released Gen-3, we released the Turbo version, which I think was the first step-distilled model in production.Swyx [00:38:56]: That was a whole trend that we covered as well. Yeah.Anastasis [00:38:59]: So that allowed us, to serve those models at the larger scale, ‘cause I think the first version of Gen-3 was quite, expensive to serve.Swyx [00:39:09]: I think the whole like trend in like consistency models, Lightning and, Turbo and all these things somehow didn't really stick around. I don't know if you have any reflections on this. Because at the time, I was like, “Well, everything should start with a distilled model first, and then you can upscale,” right? It. your bigger models just turn into fancy upscalers, but like you should always draft with a smaller model and faster model, right? Because you can get it so quickly, like near real-time.Anastasis [00:39:39]: Yeah. I would not be so sure to say that didn't stick around. I think that, it's, it's likely to. that there is a lot of step-distilled models that are actively used in production. there is still a gap in quality compared to the, non-distilled model. but in my mind, we're still. there is a two to three year offset from language models. So the things that, So it's just a matter of time before there is better distillation techniques. we use. Right now we have a real-time model core character that I think is the largest deployment of real-time video models, that's a step-distilled model, and it's actively being used. It's a very specific use case compared to a general video model. So this is aSwyx [00:40:27]: Very cool, by the way.Anastasis [00:40:27]: This is avatars stuff, right?Swyx [00:40:28]: Consistency, character.Anastasis [00:40:30]: Yeah. So this is a talking avatar, model. we were able to. we optimized the hell out of it, and it generates at 24 FPS, and it's a, it's a step-distilled autoregressive video model. So if we look at our world model direction, a big component of it is starting from the bidirectional diffusion that generates entire video at once and making autoregressive shows. So you generate one frame or a few frames at a time. so there's a lot that goes into that pipeline of getting to a real-time model. It's first you need to make it into a causal autoregressive model, and then you just turn it into. You need to do some additional step distillation to get it to be real-time. and I think that part is just starting. I'll be very surprised if we're, two years from now, we don't primarily use real-time models. To me, real-time video generation is just inevitable that, it has much better user experience, it's much cheaper to serve, and, the quality gap between the base model and the real-time model is only gonna close as we figure out better, distillation techniques. And we made a lot of progress there internally on maintaining the quality of the base model when we distill them.Swyx [00:41:49]: How much of this is transferable? So is it the same base model? Like if you're doing diffusion across the whole sequence and you're converting it to step autoregressive distillation, is this like distillation where you still need to train both, you can use the same base and converter? What's that process like to go from regular model to something that's real-time on a technical level?Anastasis [00:42:11]: So the nice thing about diffusion models is you have, two axes of distillation. So there is the. You can distill to a smaller model, which resembles what you do in LLMs, or you can distill in terms of taking less steps, less diffusion steps. So you could take a model that generates in fifty steps and generate in four steps and get to, You have some performance, degradation, but very often you get comparable outputs. So you can even take the large frontier model and distill it with step distillation and get to a real-time performance, and that's what we've seen. So, depending on the use case, in some cases we might also serve with a smaller model, but in a lot of use cases, we just use theSwyx [00:42:56]: Step distillationAnastasis [00:42:56]: The frontier model, and we're able to make it work in real-time.Swyx [00:42:59]: I think this might be a good time to cut over to his laptop to show off some of the real-time stuff that you're doing.Interface World Models and Neural SoftwareAnastasis [00:43:06]: This is one of the research updates that we did recently. so we've been working and f in getting our general world models to, different applications. one of them that we think is very compelling is using general world models as essentially, an interface, a universal interface to software. This is a version of our world model that's called an interface world model. and the idea is that it essentially, replaces, the, front end of a software application. It renders the pixels directly of an interface and is trained to predict what happens next as a result of, a click or another interaction you have with the interface. So this is all pixels. it's there is no HTML, CSS, React that's powering this interface. This is directly at the output of our real-time, video generation model, and it takes clicks directly as input.Swyx [00:44:09]: And drags, click and drag.Anastasis [00:44:12]: Right. So it supportsSwyx [00:44:13]: Ooh.Anastasis [00:44:14]: Yeah, clicks. It supports drags. it also supports scrolling. and the amazing thing about this is that you can effectively describe in the prompt how you want different elements, like what do you want the behavior of different elements to be. So it's almost you're you can turn, an interface from, markup language description of, like, an HTML interface, and instead you can just describe the interface. if I press this button, I expect this to happen. If I press this button, this should happen. And it's useful, we believe, both for prototyping, for, like, just testing, like, what different interactions would feel like. you can also add audio to it. So it's a video audio generation model. So you get you essentially can describe both what the visual outcome should be of your click and also what the if there is a sound effect that comes out of it. So we believe that's gonna be a much more flexible way of building software. Just render. It just, in why generate the code that generates the pixels? Just generate the pixels directly.Anastasis [00:45:18]: It's the end-to-end philosophy applying applied to front ends.Anastasis [00:45:25]: So we think there is a few interesting use case. So you can build creative tools on top of it.Anastasis [00:45:32]: We think that, for any use case that involves a lot of exploration or, like, educational use case where you wanna learn about a new concept and you want some visualization and like, and open-ended exploration, we think those this is a very powerful, approach. you can imagine new forms of, design, industrial design software that could emerge as a result of those models. And this is all, generated in real-time as well. So, you can build a lot of interesting camera transitions and forms of interaction that are very difficult to build otherwise. And one way in which we evaluate this is what if you try to generate the same interface with Claude by just, prompting Claude, “Here's an image reference of my interface that I made in Figma or that I created somewhere else. create this particular interaction,” which in this case it's, drag that object, upwards. and beyond it being slower, it's also very difficult to capture some interactions by just fully, with just LLMs. So we think that this is likely to be the way that a lot of the future, like, software in the future will be created. and one of the additional benefits is personalization might be a lot easier done with those models. Like, you can essentially try out different prompts based on who is visiting the interface. You can, more easily, prompt engineer the interface to have larger size, text for more accessibility reasons, or you can make this or, like, if you have a particular aesthetic preferences. So we're very excited about this approach. It's early days, and I think we'll need to, make it more cost-effective as well to serve those models ‘cause, running a real-time video model versus just purely rendering HTML, there's -- the computational needs are much higher. but we do see a lot of potential in this approach to building front-end interfaces.Swyx [00:47:47]: So we covered this similar thing with Flipbook before with our, Ethan Hara episode with Groq, video. And yeah, I think it's very engaging visually. I think it's maybe very good for education, but it's it does sound expensive. I think there's an upper bound to how expensive it will be, though, right? Like, the inference cost will go down over time. You'll figure out ways to optimize it. Effectively, when it pauses, you don't you're not receiving human input. You don't have to generate anything, right? So.Anastasis [00:48:14]: Yeah, you could also. Like, in this case, you have ambient motion, so there is parts of the screen that might. if you're let's say you wanna, visit Paris and then you get this interface that allows you to explore.Swyx [00:48:29]: People walking. Yeah.Anastasis [00:48:29]: You have people walking or, like, things happening. But, it's, it's a no Yeah, it makes it more expensive because you need to run the model all the time. Maybe you have some looping mechanism so you don't need to do that. But all those things, I think, is stuff we'll need to figure out.Toward a Fully Neural Operating SystemSwyx [00:48:44]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:48:44]: I think our first consideration is let's make this clearly find some use cases where it's clearly a much more compelling interaction compared to traditional interfaces. And then it's a matter of time before it becomes more cost-effective to serve.Swyx [00:48:58]: Yeah. When it comes to the people walking, I think the approach that makes the most sense to me is Nick.Anastasis [00:49:04]: Nick.Swyx [00:49:04]: Oh, God. I keep messing up their name. With Chris Manning and Fanny Yan. I don't know if you've come across them, where they. Mapped to some game engine. I think it's Unity or something, or Godot. And they you can script some NPC behavior behind that and train on that. Whereas here, you can really imagine whatever you want. Like, that is a UI, right? Like, and it feels, like, more tractable, I guess, to, create a world model of software that is interactable because we have many of examples of that, and you can, do your fancy RL environment stuff on that than it is scaling up to embodied and real-world physical use cases. But this is a nice first step.Vibhu [00:49:43]: Or, there's the opposite of you have, like, one B models, three 50 million parameter language models. It just gets so small that they're just predicting, like, fishes moving.Swyx [00:49:53]: Small models are now 120 B, so.Vibhu [00:49:57]: Ultra mini on device.Vibhu [00:49:58]: But, no, I think it, like, it puts it into perspective, at least the car one for me, like, the applications, right? The amount of work to do that, sure, you only make one model year car per year, but applying this, it's also a cost-saving to have to manually make all this, right? So it opens up a lot of possibilities, too. I'm curious if you extend this out two, three years, so where do you see things going even further?Anastasis [00:50:25]: Effectively, the end game of something like interface world models is you have, a fully neural operating system. So I think, Andrej Karpathy has written about that quite a while back. But it's, You, I think to me it's, it's a bit, it's a bit odd that, we have, for example, with an interaction with an LLM of today, you have this LLM that can talk to you about anything. It can You can take the conversation in any direction. You can It's very general, so it can solve all those different tasks, but you interact with it through a very rigid interface. And so to me, it's just a matter of time before the interface itself becomes learnable and becomes, part of the whole loop of, like, you're not just delivering. You're delivering an application end-to-end, and that means you're delivering the language model, but you're also delivering the render and the pixels and that's also a learnable component. And the concept of applications might not necessarily. I think we'll need to figure out new abstractions for software. the concept of application comes from this idea that you need, separate code bases to describe, to, for, to power each individual, tool and each individual application. But you might think of something a lot more unified if you're. if you have, a video model that's generating the interface as you go. so it can take context from an LLM and allow you to combine different functionalities that traditionally would live in different applications. So it's a, it's a way to solve, software end-to-end, effectively. We also see this as a powerful way to train computer use agents as well. so this is, one way to see this as. And in general, with world models, there is those two directions. One is world models for humans and world models forSwyx [00:52:24]: AgentsAnastasis [00:52:24]: To train agents.Swyx [00:52:25]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:52:25]: And so for every new work of, world models that we do, we have this both uses become possible. So this is a powerful synthetic data generator for training computer use models. It could become, a live, RL environment that you could use to do online RL with a computer use agent, and you can get wide diversity of different interactions, kinds of interfaces, just generated on the fly that, to improve the how robust the, your agent, becomes. So that's the same also with the world models that we're working on for a robotics use case as well.Long Context, Error Accumulation, and Autoregressive VideoSwyx [00:53:02]: Is there a research breakthrough that you're Waiting for that would unlock the next set of use cases that you really wanna pursue?Anastasis [00:53:10]: Long context is a very important one, so being able to maintain consistency for long periods of time, and that depends on the use case. So for our characters model, for example, or for the interface world model, it's easier to maintain long sessions of interaction. If you go into more open-ended worlds that you navigate and you take arbitrary actions in, we, like, there is more the context at which you can and duration which you can generate becomes limited much more quickly.Swyx [00:53:40]: Yeah.Anastasis [00:53:40]: So we see more degradation and error accumulation happening. so the biggest challenge with autoregressive models is error accumulation, is you're feeding generative frames back into the model to generate the next The next frames. And if there is any small errors, they accumulate over time. That's not a new problem. It's a problem that LLMs also have, and we've seen the ability to generate now really long outputs. So it's a solved problem, but it's definitely still a challenge.Swyx [00:54:08]: Yeah. And what is the state of the art? so for Grok, it would be like 10 to 20 seconds of context going in there for video.Anastasis [00:54:16]: With our characters models, we're able to generate up to 30 minutes of video autoregressively.Swyx [00:54:21]: Yeah. But that's just for the avatars.Anastasis [00:54:24]: Yeah. So if we look at, GWM Worlds, which is more our open-ended world exploration model, it's, it's on the order of a few minutes, which is Yeah, soSwyx [00:54:35]: Probably enough for people because you have to cut to the next scene anyway, right?Anastasis [00:54:40]: Yeah, it's not, it's not the ideal game experience if you have to restart every few minutes. So I think. But, I think it's. Yeah, for certain kinds of game experiences, you can work around it.

Follow Plato down into the proverbial cave on this retelling of his most famous Socratic dialogue, the “Allegory of the Cave”. Written by Plato in 375 BC, the conversation between Socrates and Plato's brother highlights the importance of education and philosophy in creating a healthy modern society — and healthy individuals. Unsurprisingly, the lessons still resonate with eerie precision even now, so grab a seat in our digital Greek garden as Dennis Jerz and Edward Roberts read this allegory out of Plato's Republic. Hosted by Michael Steele. A production of We Are One Body® Audio Theatre. Music Used: "Evening Fall (Harp)" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Boortz contrasts democracy with the American constitutional republic, arguing that majority rule can conflict with the rule of law. Drawing on Plato’s discussion of democracy, he emphasizes the Constitution as the highest legal authority and argues for stronger limits on federal power.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Boortz contrasts democracy with the American constitutional republic, arguing that majority rule can conflict with the rule of law. Drawing on Plato’s discussion of democracy, he emphasizes the Constitution as the highest legal authority and argues for stronger limits on federal power.Atlanta's ONLY All Conservative News & Talk Station.: https://www.xtra1063.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Episode 352 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we are continuing our series reviewing Cicero's "Academic Questions" from an Epicurean perspective, which gives us an overview of the issues that split Plato's Academy and helps us understand Epicurus' position on the same issues. This week will continue in Section 16 of Book Two. Our text will come fromCicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We'll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we'll also refer to the Rackham translation here: Cicero On Nature Of Gods Academica Loeb Rackham : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

I speak with space philosopher Sabine Winters about her visits to telescopes, imagination in space science, and the night sky.   Sabine Winters is a philosopher of space and a PhD candidate at Utrecht University, where she researches the epistemic role of imagination in space science. Her methodology combines qualitative empirical research through interviews with space scientists with philosophical analysis of scientific understanding and progress. She lectures in philosophy at ArtEZ University of the Arts and is preparing her first book on place, space, and the cosmos, forthcoming with Ten Have Publishers.    Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinewinters/ Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/sllwinters/ Substack (Dutch): https://substack.com/@sabinewinters scientificimagination.org  sabinewinters.nl    About an hour into the episode, Sabine mentions this paper: S. Wadia, C. M. Reed, J. M. Chung, L. M. Bateman, A. N. Mamelak, U. Rutishauser, and D. Y. Tsao, "A Shared Code for Perceiving and Imagining Objects in Human Ventral Temporal Cortex," Science 392, no. 6794 (April 9, 2026): 207–215, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt8343   This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/ and my website https://marioveen.com/.  You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book). I hope you enjoy the episode! Mario http://lifefromplatoscave.com/   

Where did we go wrong with the city of Atlantis? From Plato using it as an allegory for the rise and fall of nations, it spun out of control and was co-opted by pseudo-archaeologists and Flat Earthers. Join us as we seek to dive deep and uncover the murky waters surrounding Atlantis. Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of racism, white supremacy, genocide, colonization, antisemitism, and Nazis. Housekeeping- Books: Check out our previous book recommendations, guests' books, and more at spiritspodcast.com/books- Call to Action: Will you join us for year 10, episode 500, and beyond at patreon.com/spiritspodcast??- Submit Your Urban Legends Audio: Call us! 617-420-2344Find Us Online- Website & Transcripts: spiritspodcast.com- Patreon: patreon.com/spiritspodcast- Merch: spiritspodcast.com/merch- Instagram: instagram.com/spiritspodcast- Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/spiritspodcast.com- Twitter: twitter.com/spiritspodcast- Tumblr: spiritspodcast.tumblr.comCast & Crew- Co-Hosts: Julia Schifini and Amanda McLoughlin- Editor: Bren Frederick- Music: Brandon Grugle, based on "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod- Artwork: Allyson Wakeman- Multitude: multitude.productionsAbout UsSpirits is a boozy podcast about mythology, legends, and folklore. Every episode, co-hosts Julia and Amanda mix a drink and discuss a new story or character from a wide range of places, eras, and cultures. Learn brand-new stories and enjoy retellings of your favorite myths, served over ice every week, on Spirits.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This lecture discusses key ideas from the ancient philosopher Plato's dialogue, the Lysis, focused on the nature of love and friendship This lecture focuses specifically on Socrates' dialectic with the youth Lysis bearing upon whether or not his parents love him very much (sphodra philei), which would then imply that they wish him to be very happy (eudaimonistaton), and seemingly would conflict with the fact that they do not allow him to do what he wishes to with most matters, or to rule himself, but actually place other people including slaves in authority over him. Socrates and Lysis together work out a criterion for when a person is allowed to do as they wish with a particular matter they are concerned with, which isn't age, but rather whether they understand the matter. To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM You can find over 4000 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler Purchase Plato's Lysis - https://link.amazon/B06g9uelJ

For years Max would call and ask, “Hey mate, what do you reckon about ___?” This is that conversation, turned into a show. First episode: mind control and influence operations, with a hard look at MKUltra. We walk through history from the priest classes and their drug and sex rituals, war as the original mass psychological operation, Operation Paperclip and the Cold War labs, Sidney Gottlieb, Operation Midnight Climax in New York and San Francisco, Ewan Cameron, Jolly West in the Haight, the moment LSD left the building, Manson and the communes, then the quieter tools that followed: pharmaceuticals, screens, surveillance, COVID-era mass formation. We flag what is documented and what is speculation. We close on how you push back: escape dialectics, Occam's Razor, question with boldness like Jefferson, and John Lisle's eleven questions. MK Ultra, answered with MK Ungovernable. What they cover Ancient roots: Plato's Cave, priests, cults, ritual drugs, warModern U.S. programs: Bluebird, Artichoke, MKUltra, Gottlieb, Church CommitteeSan Francisco: Midnight Climax, Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, West's crash pad, MansonFrom the 1980s to now: corporate influence, pharma, social media, mass formationHow to stay ungovernableBooks they read for this oneStephen Kinzer - Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind ControlJohn Lisle - Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRATom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring - Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the SixtiesMusicThe Exploited – Sex and ViolenceSlim Galliard Trio – Cement Mixer Pu-ti-put-tiJack Kerouac – October in the Railroad Earth (with Steve Allen)Kraftwerk – Computer WorldMarilyn Manson – Rock is DeadThe Beach Boys – Never Learn Not to LoveGot a stone you want turned over? History, intrigue, health, collapse, spirituality, the weird and the unexplained — send topic ideas. X: [@UngovernableMax] and [@prevhashnonce]. Nostr: ungovernablemisfits@nostrplebs.com and meshtadel@nostrplebs.com.Want to sponsor What Do You Reckon? We are looking for sponsors that belong next to these conversations and fit the Ungovernable ethos. Reach out the same places, or start at [ungovernable.network](https://ungovernable.network).A special thank you to Cake Wallet, Foundation Devices, and MyNymBox for already carrying the rest of the Ungovernable network. Question everything with boldness. Stay ungovernable. ungovernable.networkHELP GET SAMOURAI A PARDONSIGN THE PETITION ----> https://www.change.org/p/stand-up-for-freedom-pardon-the-innocent-coders-jailed-for-building-privacy-tools DONATE TO THE FAMILIES w/ USD ----> https://www.givesendgo.com/billandkeonneDONATE TO THE FAMILIES w/ BTC ----> https://pay.zaprite.com/pl_JpxtkLv95T SUPPORT ON SOCIAL MEDIA ---> https://billandkeonne.org/VALUE FOR VALUEThanks for listening you Ungovernable Misfits, we appreciate your continued support and hope you enjoy the shows.You can support this episode using your time, talent or treasure.TIME:- create fountain clips for the show- create a meetup- help boost the signal on social mediaTALENT:- create ungovernable misfit inspired art, animation or music- design or implement some software that can make the podcast better- use whatever talents you have to make a contribution to the show!TREASURE:- BOOST IT OR STREAM SATS on the Podcasting 2.0 apps @ https://podcastapps.com- DONATE via Paynym to JON @ https://paynym.rs/+idealpresident82- DONATE via Monero @ https://xmrchat.com/ungovernable - BUY SOME STICKERS @ https://ungovernable.network/shop/(00:00:00) What Do You Reckon?(00:07:55) Mind Control Through the Ages(00:12:29) The Priest Class & the First Cults(00:23:40) Operation Paperclip & the Birth of MK Ultra(00:51:22) LSD, Gottlieb & the Origins of the Program(01:05:28) Operation Midnight Climax(01:22:55) Jolly West & the Shaver Case(01:35:05) Haight-Ashbury, Manson & Chaos(02:03:00) From the '80s to Now(02:22:00) How to Stay Ungovernable

In this episode of The Jim Fortin Podcast, Jim examines the quest for freedom and what it means to embark on that journey. He opens the discussion with a familiar story about a bishop in the deli. It was at this moment when Jim first realized how deeply people can become attached to a role or narrative. It showed him how human experiences are often confused with cosmic truth, causing people to adopt roles instead of stepping into their autonomy.   Jim explains that real freedom cannot exist inside the container of the 3D ego, adding that doing so only forces you to inherit all the 3D ego's limitations. Instead, he suggests two simple steps to determine your attachments. The first requires you to identify your fears by naming your three greatest obstacles. The second is to determine what you're fighting to defend. The exercise reveals how attached you can be to your human identity. Its purpose is to help listeners step into their authenticity as a spiritual being. Along the way, Jim recounts his studies with the being Kyron and shares the daily practice he uses to shift his mindset from being a body trying to fix its circumstances to seeing himself as divine consciousness.  For anyone ready to move beyond fixing their life and into truly knowing who they are, this episode offers a clear and challenging place to begin.  What You'll Discover in This Episode:  (00:11) The bishop story — Jim recalls a moment in 2017 that revealed how deeply people identify with inherited roles.  (04:31) The container concept — Drawing on material from the channeled being Kyron, Jim explains that every person lives boxed in by assumptions, fears, and routines.  (10:43) Religion, control, and the allegory of the cave — Jim connects Plato's allegory of the cave to organized religion and dogma.  (19:49) Two questions worth asking yourself — Jim leads listeners through a short exercise naming their biggest fears and what they fight to defend.  (25:40) A daily practice for transcending the container — Jim shares the exact thought he holds each morning to shift from managing his life to witnessing it as divine consciousness.  (28:15) A listener's transformation — Jim reads an email from a listener whose life shifted after applying these teachings, and reflects on how many people will recognize themselves in her story.  Listen, apply, and enjoy!  Transformational Takeaway  You are not the container you live in, and you are not the story you were taught. Every fear you carry and everything you fight to defend is simply evidence of how attached you are to a role that was never your truth. Real freedom comes from stepping back from the role and remembering that you are the consciousness witnessing it. The moment you stop trying to fix the container and begin to understand yourself as a soul, the very limitations you believed were permanent will start to fall away.  Let's Connect:  Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | LinkedIn  LIKED THE EPISODE?  If you're the kind of person who likes to help others, then share this with your friends and family. If you have found value, they will too. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts so we can reach more people.  Listening on Spotify? Please leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!  With gratitude, Jim 

In “Imaginal Meditation,” Emily West Horn introduces an approach to imaginal practice—drawing on Vajrayana deity yoga, Jack Kornfield, Chögyam Trungpa, and Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche—to show how invoking, dissolving, and embodying the image of the Buddha can loosen the boundary between self & world, inclining the mind toward non-duality.

Cypher's steak scene in The Matrix exposes a question most people avoid asking about love. He knows the steak is a fabrication. He knows the pleasure has been programmed. He knows the world offering him luxury is a prison. Then he chooses it anyway because the truth demands more from him than the illusion does. “Ignorance is bliss.”[imdb] Some relationships work the same way. Two people can build a life that looks full from the outside while quietly living inside a version of each other that has been edited for survival. They have the routine, the pictures, the plans, the sex, the finances, the shared language, the public proof. Yet neither person says the one thing that would force the relationship to become more honest than it has been allowed to be. A relationship becomes unreal when comfort requires distortion. The distortion may sound reasonable. “I do not want drama.” “I am protecting my peace.” “Everything is fine.” “This is just who I am.” “We have been through too much.” “I do not want to ruin a good thing.” But what if the “good thing” survives because neither person has told the truth that would test it? What if peace means nobody is permitted to name the loneliness? What if loyalty means nobody is permitted to admit that they have changed? What if compatibility means both people have learned how to keep the other person from seeing what is actually happening inside them? The ancient idea of Maya reaches into this question. Maya is often described as illusion, but it is not simply a fake world. It is the power of mistaking appearance for the deepest reality. The danger is not that the relationship has no reality. The danger is that its appearances become more protected than the people inside it.[holy-bhagavad-gita +1] Plato's cave gives us the same warning. People who have lived with shadows long enough can mistake the shadows for the whole world. The light does not immediately feel liberating. At first, it hurts. It disorients. It threatens everything the person once called normal.[sbu +1] A real relationship may carry that kind of risk. It asks whether you can let another person meet you beyond your role, your performance, your self-protection, your need to appear strong, your need to remain wanted, your need to stay comfortable, and your fear of what full honesty might cost. The question is not whether your relationship is perfect. The question is whether it can survive reality. Because the most stable relationship in your life may be stable because both people have agreed that waking up would cost too much.

Today on Ascend: The Great Books Podcast, we end Short Story September with “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” by Melville - a seemingly simple tale about men in a law office that becomes a puzzling, existential tale. Dcn. Garlick is joined by two excellent guests: Mr. Joey Bremer, a teacher at Holy Family Classical School and an iconographer studying at the King's Foundation School of Traditional Arts in London, and “Montana” of Montana Classical College, an anonymous scholar who runs an X account that shares incredible insights on Melville's Moby Dick.Overall, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is a perplexing, existential tale that tends to quietly unsettle you by revealing the realities of modern life.CHECK OUT THE NEW ASCEND BOOK CLUBThis episode of Ascend takes up Herman Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” a quiet, unsettling tale whose central figure answers nearly every request with the same spare formula: “I would prefer not to.” The conversation lingers on the contrast between that stubborn preference and the narrator's own softness—an elderly lawyer who prizes the easiest way of life, cannot quite govern his office, and keeps mistaking indecision for charity. Names, nicknames, dull eyes, and the cramped windows that look onto other walls all become clues: who in this world still possesses a will, and who has already been reduced to a role?Listeners are invited to sit with the story's larger questions rather than resolve them. What does the monotonous labor of copying do to a man? How does a commercial, conventional life flatten thumos and leave even well-meaning people lukewarm? Why does Bartleby's refusal feel at once more human and more deathly than the quirks of his co-workers? Drawing on the textures of Moby-Dick and the aporetic spirit of Plato, the discussion treats the tale as a puzzle that rewards patient attention—an invitation to notice what modernity may have done to the soul, and to return to the text itself with sharper eyes.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Melville and 'Bartleby'00:12 Introduction to the episode and main themes02:05 Biographical context of Melville's life03:47 Overview of 'Bartleby the Scrivener'06:54 Themes of monotony and human will09:59 Character analysis: the narrator and Bartleby14:57 Philosophical and literary connections20:05 Implications for modern life and office culture25:00 Concluding thoughts and interpretations44:30 Dark passages and existential reflections in 'Bartleby'45:25 Repetition of life and the prison of modernity46:24 The loneliness of Bartleby and the narrator's solitude46:56 Prison as a metaphor for societal dehumanization48:02 Bartleby's awareness of death and existential insight50:24 The role of the dead letters office and existential suffering51:29 Melville's possible critique of modernity and capitalism53:06 The dehumanizing nature of copying work and modern labor55:07 Bartleby's refusal as act of will and control57:47 Reason, preference, and the will in Bartleby's choices01:00:20 The significance of small acts and existential meaning01:02:19 Melville's relationship with Plato and classical philosophy01:09:24 The philosophical underpinnings of Melville's critique01:12:10 The aporetic nature of the story and open-ended interpretation01:15:15 Comparison with other literary characters and philosophical figures01:18:36 Fate, free will, and the acceptance of mortality01:21:55 Melville, Plato, and the modern crisis of human nature01:24:52 Final reflections on the story's philosophical depth and relevanceCHECK OUT THE NEW ASCEND BOOK CLUB

Can you teach kids the truth AND prepare them for a secular world?On this episode of Heavy Things Lightly, host John Heers talks with James and Juliana Joyce, founders of St. George's Classical Academy in Boxford, Massachusetts — an Orthodox Christian classical school started from nothing in 2024.James went from astrophysicist at NASA to teaching kindergarten math at a little plastic table. Juliana went from public-school principal of 10 years to head of school, janitor, finance, and furniture-mover. In the middle of writing their business plan during Holy Week 2023, they fell in love, got engaged in October, married in January, and opened with 21 students that September.We dig into: the Constantine vs. Benedict choice, why they DON'T have Divine Liturgy during the school day, classical vs. Orthodox education and the Western canon, Plato, the Enlightenment, why math matters, fuzzy math, and how to live an integrated, purposeful life.St. George's now draws from 12 Orthodox churches north of Boston — plus Catholic and Protestant families — and has seen families return to faith and convert.Learn more about St. George's Classical Academy in Boxford, MA - https://www.stgca.org/Chapters:00:00 Living a purposeful life01:15 Welcome to Heavy Things Lightly + Conrad's Jerky03:10 Meet James & Juliana Joyce — St. George's Classical Academy05:20 From NASA and principal's office to plungers and trash duty07:45 Can you teach truth and prepare kids for an atheist world?10:30 Constantine vs. Benedict — not retreating from the world13:20 Do you have to compromise classical to pay the bills?17:40 Why there's no Divine Liturgy in the school day21:15 School vs. Church — prayer, feasts, and hospitality25:00 Classical vs. Orthodox? Plato, the West, and the Fathers30:45 Sanctifying culture — West Africa, Enlightenment, and math36:20 Math trauma, loving what you teach, and elementary years42:10 Love story — business plan, Holy Week, engagement and marriage50:30 From cassock to date night — deacon, priest, and new life55:00 Final toast — hope, uncertainty, and purposeful direction58:30 John's riff — kids are hard, schools are hard, add more beauty__

INFILTRATED: The DSA's Marxist-Atheist Agenda in Tech, Education & PoliticsLIVE on the Take Your Power Back Show with Peak Performance Master Coach Kim Yeater. Https://Rumble.com/TakeYourPowerBackShow/LiveThis is not “progress.” This is a pipeline. DSA leadership is stacked with Marxists and communist-aligned caucuses. The branding is equity. The target is your children, your churches, your tech platforms, and the highest levels of political power.TODAYS WAR ROOM TABLE: • William J. Federer — historian, author of Socialism: The Real History from Plato to the Present AmericanMinute.com • Scott Shields — verification expert / HaqFre.com — the man who demands the audit trail • Brad Dacus, Esq. — President & Founder, Pacific Justice Institute — free legal defense for faith, family, and parental rights. PacificJusticeInstitute.orgWe name the agenda. We trace the indoctrination. We take our power back.Tag a parent. Tag a pastor. Tag a teacher. Tag a tech worker. Bold local action creates national impact.WATCH. SHARE. LIKE. SUBSCRIBE. TakeYourPowerBackShow.comDonate. Support. Keep Freedom Alive.Sponsors: PatriotsMade.com/kim • FreedomSteaksnow.com • MyPillow.com/kim#TakeYourPowerBack #KeepFreedomAlive #DSA #Education #Tech #ParentalRights #takeourcaliforniabackConnect with Us: • Website: TakeYourPowerBackShow.com • Rumble: rumble.com/c/TakeYourPowerBackShow • Live Stream: rumble.com/TakeYourPowerBackShow/live • All Podcast Platforms: https://takeyourpowerbackshow.buzzsprout.com/Audio Podcasts •Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/take-your-power-back-show/id1516694402 •Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0AHeVO9xI2ZeSGb62tlKj2 •iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/953-take-your-power-back-show-341694025• Social Media: o X: @realkimyeater o Facebook: kimberlyyeater o Instagram: Takeyourpowerback_kimyeater o TikTok: takeyourpowerbackshow • Email: TYPBProducer@gmail.com Related Movement: TakeOurCaliforniaBack.com | TakeOurElectionsBack.com | TakeOurBordeBack.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

In this episode of Dialectic at Work, the dialectic explores the nature of capitalism, its variations across different societies, and the potential pathways for transitioning to new economic systems. They delve into Marxist theory, the history of surplus production, and the future of economic organization. The Dialectic at Work is a podcast hosted by Professor Shahram Azhar & Professor Richard Wolff. The show is dedicated to exploring Marxist theory. It employs the dialectical mode of reasoning, a method developed over millennia by Plato and Aristotle, and continues to explore new dimensions of theory and praxis through dialogue. The Marxist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic that not only seeks to understand the world but also to change it. In our discussions, the dialectic comes into play, aiming to address the pressing life crises that we face as a global community. Follow us for more information on this and other shows we produce. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our channel and join the community of supporters that make all of this possible by signing up on our website: X: @DialecticAtWork Instagram: @DialecticAtWork Tiktok: @DialecticAtWork Website: www.DemocracyAtWork.info Patreon: www.patreon.com/democracyatwork © Democracyatwork.info Inc. 2026 All Rights Reserved

Today is the final episode in our series about the relationship between twentieth-century biography and philosophy. David talks to Nikhil Krishnan about the life and thought of Iris Murdoch, a deeply philosophical novelist and a fully committed philosopher. How was Murdoch influenced by the ideas of Plato? Why did she believe that metaphysics could serve as a guide to morals? What lessons did her novels try to teach about the nature of love and the sovereignty of the good? Was hers a good life? **Available now: a pair of new educational courses to accompany two of our series – The Great Essays and The Lives of the Philosophers. These courses are free for anyone who wants to use them and offer recall tests, extensive reading guides, discussion topics and essay questions for further reading, writing and study around the subjects of our podcasts. For use in schools, colleges or just in your spare time. To explore these courses simply go to https://ppfideas.com/courses Out tomorrow on PPF+: ‘Podcast University', a bonus episode to accompany the launch of our new educational courses in which David lays out the thinking behind them and his own ideas about the relationship between what he used to do as a university teacher and what we do now on PPF. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening – and to help support and keep freely available our educational work – subscribe to PPF+ now https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus. You can find out everything else you need to know about this podcast – who we are, what we do, plus upcoming events and full lists of all episodes including all PPF+ bonus episodes on our website https://www.ppfideas.com Next time the start of a new series – An Ageing World: Increasing Longevity and its Consequences Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This lecture discusses key ideas from the ancient philosopher Plato's dialogue, the Lysis, focused on the nature of love and friendship This lecture focuses specifically on some of the points made in the beginning of the dialogue, where Socrates tells Hippothales that he can tell that he is deeply in love with somebody. Ctesippus reveals this to be Lysis, and tells Socrates that not only does Hippothales constantly talk about Lysis, he is also composing poems and speeches to and about Lysis, which he then subjects his friends to. Socrates says that what he is really interested in with these speeches is their sense (dianoia), and he suggests to Hippothales that although his compositions don't refer to himself, he is really focusing on himself in them. If he succeeds in winning Lysis' affection, it looks like a triumph for him, but if he fails, he will appear ridiculous. There's also the danger of inflating Lysis' self-conception and making him more difficult to catch. To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM You can find over 4000 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler Purchase Plato's Lysis - https://link.amazon/B06g9uelJ

Finally the Delingpod does Atlantis. Author and historian Michael Le Flem guides James through the evidence, from Plato to Atlantic geography to the works of clairvoyant Edgar Cayce and the visionary fiction writer Frederick Oliver. Did our ancient ancestors really have monorails, flying craft, wireless energy and crystal towers? If they were so advanced how come they allowed themselves to be destroyed? Could this be the fate that shortly awaits us too - and for similar reasons? Also on the menu: what it's like being a professor in China; the riddle of the Sphinx; the Hall of Records; the value of ancient myth; and - a great postscript - Adolf Hitler's post-war years in Argentina. Michael Le Flem is the author of Visions of Atlantis: Reclaiming Our Lost Ancient Legacy. https://www.michaelleflem.com https://www.amazon.co.uk/Visions-Atlantis-Reclaiming-Ancient-Legacy/dp/B0BXTCQGJ1/ ↓ ↓ This Delingpod is very kindly sponsored by https://sinacrisps.com The crisp you can eat without the guilt. No seed oils and just 3 ingredients. Use code: JAMES with your purchase for 15% off. ↓ ↓ Sharklings Assemble — Saturday 10th October 2026, my neck of the woods in Northants. My guest is Feargus O'Connor Greenwood, author of 180 Degrees: Unlearn The Lies You've Been Taught To Believe. Unregistered Chickens are playing, there's wood-fired pizza, and there are twenty VIP places for anyone who fancies a chat and some bell ringing thrown in. Standard and VIP tickets here: https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/Events/sharklings-assemble-ft-feargus-o-connor-greenwood-live-event ↓ ↓ How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children's future. In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, James tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming'. This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour cold water on some of the original's sunny optimism and provide new insights into the diabolical nature of the climate alarmists' sinister master plan. Purchase Watermelons by James Delingpole here: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/ ↓ ↓ ↓ Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole To support independent, no-holds-barred journalism and gain first and full access to all James's content, subscribe directly at https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk x

Socialism isn't new.  Plato's "The Republic" outlines an ideal state with elements of socialism.  The Founding Fathers were well aware of the concept and purposefully wrote safeguards against it in our founding documents. Case in point: the Bill of Rights protects private property and Article 1 of the Constitution protects patents and intellectual property.  Please join our special guest, Timothy Sandefur, Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute's Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation, and our student panel for this enlightening discussion.  

Welcome to Episode 351 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote "On The Nature of Things," the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts, and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we are continuing our series reviewing Cicero's "Academic Questions" from an Epicurean perspective, which gives us an overview of the issues that split Plato's Academy and helps us understand Epicurus' position on the same issues. This week will continue in Section 16 of Book Two. Our text will come fromCicero - Academic Questions - Yonge We'll likely stick with Yonge primarily, but we'll also refer to the Rackham translation here: Cicero On Nature Of Gods Academica Loeb Rackham : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archivehttps://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/5261-episode-351-eataq33-heap-big-trouble-for-the-stoic-platonic-approach-to-knowledg/

Suffering can do one of two things: break us or break us open.Beginning with Frederick Buechner's unforgettable image, John Ortberg explores Psalm 110 and one of the deepest ways Christians have read the Psalms: seeing the story of Jesus in their suffering, longing, and hope.Drawing from C.S. Lewis, Plato, and the mysterious biblical figure Melchizedek, John looks at how Jesus brings together two ancient hopes: the victorious king and the suffering servant.Jesus doesn't overcome suffering by avoiding it.He enters it.And because the story ends in resurrection, suffering doesn't have to get the final word.The difference between being broken and broken open is hope.In this episode: Psalm 110 • suffering • hope • Jesus • C.S. Lewis • Melchizedek • resurrection#Psalm110 #JohnOrtberg #Suffering #Hope #Jesus #CSLewis #Psalms

Before asking what is wrong with the world or the person in front of us, perhaps we should ask what might be standing between our own eyes and the light.What if the plank and the speck are not simply about hypocrisy, but about our ability to see? This episode continues the question of human perception by asking what our histories, assumptions, wounds, projections, and certainty bring into every judgment we make. Jesus does not tell us to ignore the speck or pretend that truth is relative. He says to remove the plank first so that we can see more clearly. From the Parable of the Weeds and the Beatitudes to Plato's Cave and autism, the discussion explores humility as the recognition that we are never standing outside the field we are trying to understand. Difference can expose assumptions that remain invisible because everyone else shares them, but no one sees everything.BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR CHROMA'S NEW LIGHTS!!!Elevate How You Navigate with Len & a free call https://elevatehowyounavigate.comMAYU Water, use "autism" for 10% off at https://mayuwater.comDaylight Computer Company, use "autism" for $50 off at https://buy.daylightcomputer.com/autismDaylight Kids (!!!) https://kids.daylightcomputer.com/autism ‪Chroma Light Devices, use "autism" for 10% discount at https://getchroma.co/?ref=autism00:00 The Plank & the Speck; Can We Trust the Way We See?02:00 The Problem Is Vision; What Are You Bringing to What You See?02:56 Remove the Plank First; Self Examination & Clearer Sight03:39 Poor in Spirit; Humility Makes Correction Possible04:38 The Parable of the Weeds; Seeing the Problem Isn't Seeing the Whole Field06:04 Jesus Turns the Question Back on You; You Are Inside the Field06:33 Knowing Yourself; Humility & the Limits of Your Perspective07:24 What Is Obstructing Your Vision?; Where Clear Sight Begins07:56 The Eye Is the Lamp; Light, Two Masters & “Therefore, Do Not Worry”09:06 Autism, Difference & Turning Around in Plato's Cave09:49 Looking at the World Through Yourself; What Stands Between You & the Light?10:17 Closing Thoughts10:55 Sponsors & ResourcesX: https://x.com/rps47586YT: https://www.youtube.com/@FromTheSpectrumemail: info.fromthespectrum@gmail.com

https://www.patreon.com/illuminatiwatcher/posts/diana-pasulka-ai-169552067?pr=true (*UNLOCK the September BONUS episode on Patreon!)On today's episode of the Occult Symbolism and Pop Culture with Isaac Weishaupt podcast we have the September Supporters-only BONUS show! It's a very special interview with one of the most popular guests of the show- Professor Diana Pasulka! She'll tell us about her new book THE OTHERS: UFOS, AI AND THE SECRET FORCES GUIDING HUMAN DESTINY and we get into Plato & Socrates philosophies that were anti-technology, social media algorithm manipulation of empathy, her recent controversial appearance on Joe Rogan and how he got combative about her refusal to meet 'aliens', I ask her if Peter Thiel is the boogeyman I think he is, Thiel's Antichrist lectures, Rene Girard, Arthur C. Clarke, Nikolai Federov, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Noosphere and humanity's future Apocalypse paths: Connection or Extinction!NOW UP AD-FREE ON SUPPORTER FEEDS! Free feed gets a recent YouTube livestream of Trump & the Kabbalah (watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/live/LCzdo-kqVWs?si=mYV3NxSAc0y-7EIZ)!Links:Pickup her new book THE OTHERS: https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/the-others-9781250394866/Follow Prof Diana Pasulka on her Substack: https://dwpasulka.substack.comPREVIOUS INTERVIEWS:Dr Diana Pasulka ENCOUNTERS: Birth of the UFO Religion, A.I. Aliens, Evolution of Man & Sacred Place UFO Debris! https://illuminatiwatcher.com/dr-diana-pasulka-encounters-birth-of-the-ufo-religion-a-i-aliens-evolution-of-man-sacred-place-ufo-debris/Dr Diana Pasulka American Cosmic Book: UFO Disclosure, Secret Societies & Alien Spirituality (AUG 2020) https://illuminatiwatcher.com/revisit-dr-diana-pasulka-american-cosmic-book-ufo-disclosure-secret-societies-alien-spirituality-aug-2020/SUPPORTER FEEDS get bonus content AND go commercial free + other perks:*PATREON.com/IlluminatiWatcher : ad free, HUNDREDS of bonus shows, early access AND TWO OF MY BOOKS! (The Dark Path and Kubrick's Code); you can join the conversations with hundreds of other show supporters here: Patreon.com/IlluminatiWatcher (*Patreon is also NOW enabled to connect with Spotify! https://rb.gy/hcq13)*VIP SECTION: Due to the threat of censorship, I set up a Patreon-type system through MY OWN website! IIt's even setup the same: FREE ebooks, Kubrick's Code video! Sign up at: https://illuminatiwatcher.com/members-section/*APPLE PREMIUM: If you're on the Apple Podcasts app- just click the Premium button and you're in! NO more ads, Early Access, EVERY BONUS EPISODE WANT MORE PODCASTS?... Check out my UNCENSORED show with my wife, Breaking Social Norms where we discuss conspiracies, politics, relationships and more!: https://breakingsocialnorms.com/Merch, MushroominatiWatcher Coffee, shirts, signed books: https://occultsymbolism.com/Isaac's Link Tree with links to EVERYTHING: https://allmylinks.com/isaacw *STATEMENT: This show is full of Isaac's useless opinions and presented for entertainment purposes. Audio clips used in Fair Use and taken from YouTube videos.  

1898 school of PlatoPlato Witnessed Syracuse's Rise Of TyrannyJames Romm, Bard College, author of Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece, Part One: Host John Batchelor interviews Romm regarding Dionysius the Elder's rise to power as archon of Syracuse following the Peloponnesian War. Dionysius consolidated rule using a fortified island peninsula and an unorthodox double marriage on a single day, creating fierce family rivalries. Syracusan court life became notorious for excessive feasting, heavy drinking, and luxury. Plato made three visits to Syracuse, initially connecting through Dion, the ruler's brother-in-law. After Dionysius I died, Dion invited Plato to tutor Dionysius the Younger toward enlightened constitutional governance. However, Dionysius II grew suspicious of Dion's letters to Carthaginian diplomats, exiling Dion and placing Plato under house arrest. Plato was eventually rescued by Archytas of Tarentum. Romm explains that these chaotic Syracusan political experiences directly informed Plato's depiction of tyranny and the philosopher-king in the Republic. (1)

UNDATED ROMAN PLATO ACADEMYDion's Revolution And Plato's Philosophical LegacyJames Romm, Part Two: Romm details Dion's invasion of Syracuse to overthrow Dionysius II. Dion was welcomed as a liberator but clashed with populist fleet commander Heraclides. Dion ultimately orchestrated Heraclides's political murder, plunging Dion into deep depression before he was assassinated by Callippus, a fellow Academy student. Dionysius II later returned to power but abdicated when Corinthian general Timoleon arrived with a mercenary army. Dionysius lived out his remaining years peacefully in Corinth as a music teacher, inspiring the ancient proverb "Dionysius is in Corinth." Romm examines how Plutarch and Plato sought to protect the Academy's reputation despite these political failures. The discussion explores the Republic, including the hierarchy of regimes, the Allegory of the Cave, and the Myth of Er. Finally, Romm assesses Plato's Epistles, noting how the Seventh Letter defended Dion. (2)

9 Hours and 55 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.This is the first 10 episodes of our ongoing Continental Philosophy series with Thomas777. He covers Aristotle, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Grotius, and Hegel.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His sixth choice is Plato's Republic, an episode first released in June 2017. Is it always better to be just than unjust? That is the central question of Plato's Republic, written in c380BC. Plato applied this question both to the individual and the city-state, considering earlier and current forms of government in Athens and potential forms, in which the ideal city might be ruled by philosophers. The Republic is arguably Plato's best known and greatest work, a dialogue between Socrates and his companions, featuring the allegory of the cave and ideas about immortality of the soul, the value of poetry to society, and democracy's vulnerability to a clever demagogue seeking tyranny.WithAngie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of SheffieldMM McCabe Professor of Ancient Philosophy Emerita at King's College LondonandJames Warren Fellow of Corpus Christi College and a Reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of CambridgeProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1998)Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan and Charles Brittain, Plato and the Divided Self (Cambridge University Press, 2012)G. R. F. Ferrari (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007)Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge University Press, 2000)Angela Hobbs, Plato's Republic (Ladybird Expert Book, to be published 2018)Thomas More (trans. Dominic Baker-Smith), Utopia 1516 (Penguin, 2012)Grethe B. Peterson (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values: 18 (University of Utah Press, 1997), especially ‘Culture and Society in Plato's Republic' by Myles BurnyeatGerald A. Press (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Plato (Bloomsbury, 2012)Gerasimos Santas (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Plato's Republic (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006)Malcolm Schofield, Plato (Oxford University Press, 2006)In Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

In Our Time returns for a new series with host Misha Glenny.A world class seminar, every week. In Our Time explores the ideas, people and discoveries that have shaped our world, spanning history, philosophy, religion, science, literature, art and culture. On Thursdays, hear brand-new episodes with Misha Glenny and leading academics. On Mondays, discover Misha's Archive Picks: classic conversations from the In Our Time archive, originally presented by Melvyn Bragg. Recent episodes have featured topics as wide-ranging as the Roman Arena, Handel's Messiah, John Keats, On Liberty and the Mariana Trench, bringing expert insight to pivotal events, influential thinkers and remarkable discoveries. Throughout the archive, you can hear discussions on historical figures such as Marie Antoinette, Nefertiti, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx and Albert Einstein; explore great works of literature such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the poetry of John Donne; uncover the stories behind cultural masterpieces including Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel; or journey from Jupiter and the death of stars, to the theories of Plato and Aristotle. In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas.A BBC Studios Production.