PALLADIUM 10: Cultural Excellence

Master your craft. Excellence is timeless. PALLADIUM 10: Cultural Excellence, our summer print edition, is now available, featuring exclusive interviews and custom artwork.

PALLADIUM 10: Cultural Excellence, our summer 2023 print edition, is available now to all Palladium members. Subscribe today to receive your copy. PALLADIUM 10 ships June 21st.

What makes a culture accomplish great things and stand out from history? 

This question of excellence rears up whenever we encounter works of genius or set out to push the limits with our own. It comes to you while walking out of an art gallery or theater. Or, just as likely, while working in a library or on the factory floor. We spend a great deal of our lives working in the shadow of humanity’s great works of culture. But what is it that ultimately makes them happen?

PALLADIUM 10: Cultural Excellence assembles seven essays and two interviews on the ways that a culture achieves greatness. Our heroes design spaceships, buildings, and societies. They conquer the frontiers of art, geography, and knowledge. Inspired by visionaries and predecessors, they master their craft and push on to new heights of accomplishment. Their greatness has founded whole cultures of excellence and their deeds will inspire future generations.

Build on these insights in your ambitions. We hope to hear of your exploits.

Subscribe today to become a Palladium member, receive a copy of the print edition, and get invited to future events.

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PALLADIUM 10’s cover features Pietro Boselli, the Italian model and mechanical engineer. In his interview with Palladium, he discusses the value of many sources of experience, trusting your instincts, and death-defying solo trips into the unknown.

Pietro holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and was the WBFF European Fitness Model Champion in 2014. His adventures have taken him from the deserts of the Namibia to the depths of the ocean near Sicily.

Undergirding his many accomplishments is a vitalistic philosophy that both emphasizes the interrelatedness of all things:

When you think of the cosmos, you reach those depths of thought that almost make your heart afraid because you’ve understood something. For me, the most recurrent one is the classic moment when you stargaze at the universe and you realize how weird it is that matter arranged itself in such a way that it eventually gained self-consciousness. I am an expression of that, looking up at the stars. I’m an expression of this consciousness, which is a continuum. Life was formed in a simple way: nature learned how to store information. And that is the inception of consciousness if you think about it. You can even take it a step further and say, “Well, the moment in which matter is formed is a kind of expression of consciousness because something that didn’t exist before, exists now.”

Check out the rest of the interview online or in PALLADIUM 10: Cultural Excellence.

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Here’s what’s been on the front page lately:

“At the Edge of Life” With Pietro Boselli. The world’s most handsome engineer explains the advantages of drawing on many sources of experience and trusting your instincts.

School Is Not Enough by Simon Sarris. Children need purposeful work to develop agency and self-possession. That education is unlikely to happen in school.

Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis by Harold Robertson. Complex systems like air traffic and energy operate on rigorous competency. With the managers of these systems prioritizing goals like diversity, these networks are now eroding.

Industrial Civilization Needs a Biological Future by Adam Van Buskirk. The core “WEIRD” populations of industrial society are getting consumed by it. They need to biologically assert themselves for technological civilization to survive.

ESG Is the Opium of the Investors by Nicolas Villarreal. ESG has created a luxury good out of symbolic pro-social investing. In practice, it mainly replicates consensus ideology. Those who want to go beyond it must act directly on the world.

That’s all for now.