This August, we launched our new PALLADIUM lecture series, bringing out some of our most popular and influential contributors to present their freshest, most cutting-edge and often still unpublished ideas in-person to a live audience in San Francisco. In a matter of weeks, we have held six events with hundreds of attendees in total, many of them repeat attendees, and have had to find bigger and bigger venues to meet all of the demand.
The lecture series began with Marko Jukic explaining the significance of space to the continued development of industrial civilization. You can watch that lecture online here. Next, Samo Burja delivered a long-awaited update on his research on complex societies that existed before recorded history. You can watch that lecture here. James Poulos lectured on the “Dostoevskian moment” facing us in the prospect of recursively self-improving artificial intelligence. Razib Khan presented the scientific knowledge we have about the lost peoples who populated the Americas before the Native Americans as we know them. Wolf Tivy lectured on the problem posed by AI to our anthropological philosophy, Ben Landau-Taylor lectured on the recurring societal fear that new technology will cause an apocalypse, and there are more speakers to come. You can follow the full lecture event calendar here.
Every lecture is an opportunity for attendees to meet the speaker and directly ask questions about their work, whether during Q&A or before and after the lecture when the speaker is available for social discussion. You are also encouraged to bring your copy of a PALLADIUM print edition or a speaker’s book to get an autograph—or you may be able to acquire one at the event. The lectures are formal and ticketed events, bringing out the intellectual community of the city and its frequent visitors from elsewhere in a relaxed but stately atmosphere. Food and drink are provided, as well as live piano.
Both before and after the lecture itself, there is plenty of time for lively discussion, introductions to new friends and perhaps future colleagues, and, truly without exaggeration, meeting some of the most interesting and original thinkers and doers in the entire world, not just as speakers but as fellow attendees too. While the lectures and Q&A are recorded and later made accessible to PALLADIUM subscribers, all other discussion at the lectures falls under the Chatham House Rule, as it does at our other events.
There is nothing quite like listening to a speaker articulate carefully prepared, original thought on the past and future of civilization in a packed house of one’s peers. You could hear a pin drop. The atmosphere crackles with a sense that great changes for the better are indeed possible, when gatherings to think, debate, and drive many divergent perspectives toward a new consensus become a living community’s regular practice, rather than something that remains stillborn as many individuals’ solitary pastime.
We sensed a need for intellectual life to evaluate new technological, scientific, and cultural developments outside the bounds of the tech industry or established political machines with their own vested interests. San Francisco thrives on new ideas. So what better format for an event than a lecture to present a new idea? And what better magazine to host these events than Palladium Magazine? No other comparable non-partisan, nonprofit organization has made such a principled stand to explore new and sometimes uncomfortable intellectual frontiers. We not only tolerate strange new ideas and we not only encourage them, we in fact collaborate to develop them and bring them to fruition.
The PALLADIUM lecture series will be the place where you can hear the public intellectuals of tomorrow speak today; the room where the next intellectual fashion began. There are some such rooms already, but why not accelerate the process further? We see this role as core intellectual infrastructure for our entire civilization and we are glad to see that hundreds—and perhaps soon thousands—of our readers agree.
As they say, incredible things are happening in San Francisco. Come join us.
The next lecture in the series will be “Why Civilizations Collapse” with Samo Burja, which will be held in downtown San Francisco at 8pm, Sunday, October 18th. See the full details and buy tickets here:
If you are unable to attend any events in San Francisco, spread the word to your friends who can. And do not worry: as we grow, there will be future events in New York City, Washington, D.C., London, Austin, and perhaps elsewhere.
Sincerely,
The Palladium Editors