Ex nihilo - Podcast English Archiv
59 Episoden
1 Stunde 11 Minuten
Wie ist es möglich, dass eine Gesellschaft in den Niedergang abgleitet? Nun muss man es nicht gleich mit Otto von Bismarck halten, dem ein bitterböses Bonmot über die Logik des Niedergangs zugeschrieben wird (»Die erste Generation schafft Vermögen, die zweite verwaltet Vermögen, die dritte studiert Kunstgeschichte«). Man sollte vielmehr vorsichtig erwägen, dass man es hier mit einem großen Rätsel zu tun hat.
Zu diesem Rätsel fand der junge Altphilologe David Engels auf einem Umweg. Auf eine Reihe von Themenvorschlägen antwortete sein Doktorvater mit der trockenen Bemerkung: »Aber wollten Sie nicht immer mal eine Dissertation über das römische Vorzeichenwesen schreiben?« Der geneigte Leser mag dabei, sofern er kein geschulter Altphilologe ist, an die heiligen Hühner denken, die vor der Seeschlacht bei Drepana das Futter verweigerten. Der Feldherr Publius Claudius Pulcher ließ sie kurzerhand über Bord werfen: Wenn sie nicht fressen wollten, sollten sie eben trinken. Die Schlacht ging verloren.
Auf Engels’ Liste hatte dieses Thema nicht gestanden. Dass er, heute Präsident der Oswald Spengler Society, sich ihm dann auf gut 800 Seiten genähert hat, hat selbst etwas von einem Omen. Denn so wurde er für die abergläubischen, unbewussten Seiten einer Epoche sensibilisiert. Und weil er zudem ein kritischer Zeitgenosse ist, erschien ihm der langsame Niedergang der römischen Republik und ihr Abrutschen in den Autoritarismus wie ein Menetekel unserer Gegenwart.
Mag der Spenglersche Blick auch tiefe Wahrheiten über Dekadenzphänomene zutage fördern, so führte er Engels doch ebenso die Grenzen dieser Kulturkritik vor Augen. Ausgerechnet die Künstliche Intelligenz, dieser »Pygmalion par excellence«, wie er schreibt, lässt ihn an der Zyklizität des Geschichtlichen zweifeln. Umso drängender stellt sich die Frage, wie und warum man sich just in dem Maße, in dem man die Kontrolle über das Geschehen verliert, in Autoritarismus und Totalitätsphantasien flüchtet. Ist das Autoritäre bloß ein Symptom des Verfalls? Oder ist es der verzweifelte Versuch, ein Geschehen zu bannen, das sich längst jeder Steuerung entzieht?
David Engels ist ein belgischer Althistoriker und Publizist. Er lehrte Römische Geschichte an der Freien Universität Brüssel (ULB), arbeitete als Chefanalyst am Instytut Zachodni in Posen und lehrt heute am Katholischen Institut für Höhere Studien (ICES) in La Roche-sur-Yon. Daneben ist er als Herausgeber tätig, betreibt einen YouTube-Kanal und schreibt den Substack »memoria mundi«.
David Engels hat (u.a.) publiziert:
Themenverwandt
Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe
Zu diesem Rätsel fand der junge Altphilologe David Engels auf einem Umweg. Auf eine Reihe von Themenvorschlägen antwortete sein Doktorvater mit der trockenen Bemerkung: »Aber wollten Sie nicht immer mal eine Dissertation über das römische Vorzeichenwesen schreiben?« Der geneigte Leser mag dabei, sofern er kein geschulter Altphilologe ist, an die heiligen Hühner denken, die vor der Seeschlacht bei Drepana das Futter verweigerten. Der Feldherr Publius Claudius Pulcher ließ sie kurzerhand über Bord werfen: Wenn sie nicht fressen wollten, sollten sie eben trinken. Die Schlacht ging verloren.
Auf Engels’ Liste hatte dieses Thema nicht gestanden. Dass er, heute Präsident der Oswald Spengler Society, sich ihm dann auf gut 800 Seiten genähert hat, hat selbst etwas von einem Omen. Denn so wurde er für die abergläubischen, unbewussten Seiten einer Epoche sensibilisiert. Und weil er zudem ein kritischer Zeitgenosse ist, erschien ihm der langsame Niedergang der römischen Republik und ihr Abrutschen in den Autoritarismus wie ein Menetekel unserer Gegenwart.
Mag der Spenglersche Blick auch tiefe Wahrheiten über Dekadenzphänomene zutage fördern, so führte er Engels doch ebenso die Grenzen dieser Kulturkritik vor Augen. Ausgerechnet die Künstliche Intelligenz, dieser »Pygmalion par excellence«, wie er schreibt, lässt ihn an der Zyklizität des Geschichtlichen zweifeln. Umso drängender stellt sich die Frage, wie und warum man sich just in dem Maße, in dem man die Kontrolle über das Geschehen verliert, in Autoritarismus und Totalitätsphantasien flüchtet. Ist das Autoritäre bloß ein Symptom des Verfalls? Oder ist es der verzweifelte Versuch, ein Geschehen zu bannen, das sich längst jeder Steuerung entzieht?
David Engels ist ein belgischer Althistoriker und Publizist. Er lehrte Römische Geschichte an der Freien Universität Brüssel (ULB), arbeitete als Chefanalyst am Instytut Zachodni in Posen und lehrt heute am Katholischen Institut für Höhere Studien (ICES) in La Roche-sur-Yon. Daneben ist er als Herausgeber tätig, betreibt einen YouTube-Kanal und schreibt den Substack »memoria mundi«.
David Engels hat (u.a.) publiziert:
Themenverwandt
Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe
1 Stunde 19 Minuten
There is nothing better than when a difficult topic dissolves into light-hearted banter, leaving you accidentally face-to-face with a true comédie humaine. And, despite the somber subject matter, our conversation with Sabrina Joy Stevens was marked by a wonderful lightness. Now, having survived several apocalypses in quick succession, one begins to harbor deep doubts about the meaning of political activism. That’s why, after more than two decades in the Outrage Industry, Sabrina Joy Stevens turned her back on Groupthink Inc. in 2020. Then again, this period has provided her with a veritable treasure trove of experiences. Anyone wishing to understand the fascinoma of woken thinking – and, by extension, the mystery of how our political discourse has slipped into the realm of Moral Economics – will find such insider knowledge worth its weight in gold. If the road to hell, as one wise thinker has observed, is paved with good intentions, introspection reveals that these lofty goals often serve as little more than a veneer, beneath which entirely different motivations lie. On the one hand, there is the downright addictive dopamine rush that sets in when a petition just posted online grows into a viral campaign; on the other, there is the fantasy of self-empowerment, almost obsessively fixated on bringing down a supposed wrongdoer. Viewing this Erotic Resentment through the lens of individuated psychology reveals that Wokistan’s political activism is inextricably linked to the rise of the Smartphone, Social Media and the triumph of the Attention Economy. In any case, being trapped in one’s own echo chamber amounts to declaring war on reality itself.
Since starting her Leaving Groupthink Inc. Substack, Sabrina Joy Stevens has been working as a speaker and strategy consultant, helping her clients to navigate the complexities of the Moral Economy. Her work and commitment have been widely recognized in various media outlets, including The Boston Globe, MSNBC, TIME.com, Education Week, and The Hill.
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Since starting her Leaving Groupthink Inc. Substack, Sabrina Joy Stevens has been working as a speaker and strategy consultant, helping her clients to navigate the complexities of the Moral Economy. Her work and commitment have been widely recognized in various media outlets, including The Boston Globe, MSNBC, TIME.com, Education Week, and The Hill.
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Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe
1 Stunde 16 Minuten
If you’d asked if the market for urban singles looking to date might be organized simply with the swipe of a finger in 2010, most people would disbelievingly have shaken their heads—and with great conviction. But just how much the World has changed since then is evident from a look at the numbers alone. More than half of American couples who married in 2024 met on a dating app. Naturally, this shift has serious implications, one of which is evident in the observation that a decisive bottleneck for young men lies in their inability to make a lasting impression in a photograph. Consequently, what is ominously labeled the Attention Economy has become a highly personal, even intimate matter—an issue that, for Orion Taraban, a San Francisco-based psychologist who treats young men, isn’t merely a daily practice but has led him to understand the Dating Market as a form of Economy.
Orion Taraban is a truly unusual figure in his field, having specialized in coaching a large cohort of young men in the art of having a successful and fulfilling life—and sharing his insights with a large audience through his highly successful PsycHacks YouTube channel. And because he’s a product of his time, Taraban isn’t just available for personal conversations—he can also be experienced as an Avatar—an AI entity that carries his voice and thoughts and can serve his clients 24/7.
Orion Taraban has published
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Orion Taraban is a truly unusual figure in his field, having specialized in coaching a large cohort of young men in the art of having a successful and fulfilling life—and sharing his insights with a large audience through his highly successful PsycHacks YouTube channel. And because he’s a product of his time, Taraban isn’t just available for personal conversations—he can also be experienced as an Avatar—an AI entity that carries his voice and thoughts and can serve his clients 24/7.
Orion Taraban has published
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55 Minuten
When the remarkable anthropologist Mary Douglas observed that a civilization begins where someone cannot be held responsible for misdeeds committed in the dreams of others, we can conclude, by extension, that a culture begins its decline when it succumbs to phantastical enemy stereotypes. The current Free Speech crisis we’re witnessing is symptomatic of this decline. And having enacted blasphemy laws in the name of diversity—Great Britain stands out in particular. This brought our attention to Ben Jones, who, as Director of the Free Speech Union, deals daily with cases where an overreaching State punishes unwelcome expressions of opinion in a manner reminiscent of George Orwell’s Thoughtcrimes.
Dr. Ben Jones is the Case Management Director at the Free Speech Union, founded in 2020 by Toby Young. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Warwick after completing his dissertation titled The Lived Experiences of Ex-Muslims in Great Britain. His interest in issues of Freedom of Speech began when he was elected President and Chair of the Exeter Union Debate Society, which was originally founded in 1893 at the University of Exeter. His book, Island of Strangers, was published in 2026
Bewn Jones has published
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Dr. Ben Jones is the Case Management Director at the Free Speech Union, founded in 2020 by Toby Young. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Warwick after completing his dissertation titled The Lived Experiences of Ex-Muslims in Great Britain. His interest in issues of Freedom of Speech began when he was elected President and Chair of the Exeter Union Debate Society, which was originally founded in 1893 at the University of Exeter. His book, Island of Strangers, was published in 2026
Bewn Jones has published
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1 Stunde 5 Minuten
Es ist unübersehbar, dass die heutige Gesellschaft in eine tiefe Identitätskrise hineingerutscht ist. Mag sich dies im bürgerlichen Lager als diffuses Unbehagen an der digitalen Moderne artikulieren, spricht der flagrante Terrorismus eine unmissverständliche Sprache. Aber weil die politischen Beobachter dies an politische Ideologien zu knüpfen bestrebt sind, wird leicht übersehen, dass man es im wesentlichen mit einem Jugendphänomen zu tun hat. Denn zwei Drittel der Terrorverdächtigen haben, weil jünger als achtzehn Jahre, noch nicht einmal die Strafmündigkeit erreicht. Der Politikwissenschaftler Florian Hartleb, dessen Räsonnement mit der Frage des Populismus begann, wurde auf dieses Phänomen aufmerksam, als er im Jahr 2016 zum Gutachter des Terrorismusfalls am Münchner Olympia Einkaufszentrum bestallt wurde. Dies war für ihn insoweit erhellend, als dieser Fall die überkommenen Deutungsschemata außer Kraft setzte: Denn der Mörder, der mit Hilfe eines gefälschten Facebook-Accounts (der eine attraktive junge Frau zeigte) neun Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund in eine Mac Donalds-Filiale gelockt und getötet hatte, war selbst ein Deutsch-Iraner, der, um nicht mit den verachteten Türken verwechselt werden, sich den Namen David zugelegt hatte und sich in rassistischen Überlegenheitsphantasien entging. Es war das Aktenstudium dieses psychologisch verwickelten Falls, der Florian Hartleb tiefer in die Frage einsteigen ließ und ihn mit einem weitgehend unverstandenen Phänomen konfrontierte: dem jugendlichen Terrorismus,
Florain Hartleb, der als Politikwissenschaftler verschiedene Professuren innehatte, lehrt seit 2025 internationale Beziehungen an der Modul Universität Wien. Er schaut zudem auf eine wechselvolle Karriere im politischen Betrieb zurück, im Bundestag, beim Bundesverband der mittelständischen Wirtschaft, sowie in der Konrad Adenauer- und der Bertelsmann-Stiftung. Zudem war als Forschungsdirektor beim Europäischen Forschungsinstitut für Terrorismusbekämpfung und Konfliktprävention (EICTP) tätig.
Florian Hartleb hat veröffentlicht
Themenverwandt
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Florain Hartleb, der als Politikwissenschaftler verschiedene Professuren innehatte, lehrt seit 2025 internationale Beziehungen an der Modul Universität Wien. Er schaut zudem auf eine wechselvolle Karriere im politischen Betrieb zurück, im Bundestag, beim Bundesverband der mittelständischen Wirtschaft, sowie in der Konrad Adenauer- und der Bertelsmann-Stiftung. Zudem war als Forschungsdirektor beim Europäischen Forschungsinstitut für Terrorismusbekämpfung und Konfliktprävention (EICTP) tätig.
Florian Hartleb hat veröffentlicht
Themenverwandt
Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe
49 Minuten
There are those words whose effects are so powerful that many using them are unaware they are standing before an idealized reflection of themselves. Undoubtedly, the word Liberalism falls into this category. Everyone using it thinks they know what it means, but if you take a closer look, you realize you’re dealing with a Protean entity that eludes understanding precisely to the extent that you try to grasp it. Historian Helena Rosenblatt, who had previously studied 18th- and 19th- century French thinkers, such as Rousseau and Benjamin Constant, but also the Parisian Salon of Madame de Staël, was asked by her publisher to write a history of Liberalism. Upon embarking on this task, she discovered the concept was not as evident as it seemed, and to elude becoming lost in the labyrinth of grand ideas, she did something highly unusual: namely, she looked into the word itself and found that Liberalism didn’t appear on the political scene until 1813. Tracing its conceptual origins back to Cicero, she found that liberalitas refers to a free Roman citizen’s civic virtue of behaving liberally toward one another by giving and receiving to promote the common good. But because this points not only to a class-based privilege but also to a gender–based one, she notes with wonderful self-irony that when applied to women, it meant something entirely different: »Being a liberal woman wasn’t something women aspired to.«
What emerges from our conversation is that Liberalism is a Protean entity whose meaning has fluctuated radically over the centuries. From Roman civic duty to the Enlightenment’s tolerance to today’s polarized debates—each era has produced its own liberal precursors. And while today’s discourses, in their rhetorical exuberance, are quick to proclaim a post-Liberal Age, The Lost History of Liberalism serves as a kind of admonition, or rather, a reminder of just how much we owe to this desire for freedom.
Helena Rosenblatt is a Swedish historian specializing in intellectual history. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a member of the Board of Editors for both the Tocqueville Review and Global Intellectual History Review. Dr. Rosenblatt is currently researching and writing a biography on the life of Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein.
Helena Rosenblatt has published
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What emerges from our conversation is that Liberalism is a Protean entity whose meaning has fluctuated radically over the centuries. From Roman civic duty to the Enlightenment’s tolerance to today’s polarized debates—each era has produced its own liberal precursors. And while today’s discourses, in their rhetorical exuberance, are quick to proclaim a post-Liberal Age, The Lost History of Liberalism serves as a kind of admonition, or rather, a reminder of just how much we owe to this desire for freedom.
Helena Rosenblatt is a Swedish historian specializing in intellectual history. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a member of the Board of Editors for both the Tocqueville Review and Global Intellectual History Review. Dr. Rosenblatt is currently researching and writing a biography on the life of Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein.
Helena Rosenblatt has published
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1 Stunde 38 Minuten
If, precisely to the extent that the field of education has championed lofty principles, a decline in education has set in, the question arises: Where did this come from? Psychologist Peter Gray, for whom the question of learning has become his life’s work (and who, for many years, wrote his widely read Freedom to Learn column in Psychology Today), recalls his school days in the 1950s, especially the great deal of freedom he had. No homework in Elementary School, no lugging materials back and forth between home and classroom—once you were outside, you were outside and free to play. And in our conversation, this seemingly trivial detail becomes the litmus test, revealing a fundamental shift: School is no longer a confined space but a totalizing system permeating every aspect of children’s lives.
Guided by his own son’s school experience, Peter Gray has spent decades researching how children learn when they are allowed to—in Hunter-Gatherer societies, where teaching is taboo, and at the Sudbury Valley School, where there are no curricula or grades, only radical autonomy. His thesis: Conventional schools have degenerated into disciplinary institutions that hit the most successful students the hardest. The rates of anxiety and depression do not merely reflect the parental pressure weighing on students; even more serious is how misguided ideals of perfection go hand in hand with the loss of free play—and thus the very sphere where creativity and critical thinking are fostered.
Peter Gray worked for many years as a research professor at Boston College. While his research initially focused on the brains and hormonal balance of mice, the issue of Education and Learning became a cause close to his heart. Author of a widely used introductory text on Psychology (now in its 8th edition), he’s also written numerous texts on how children learn. His Psychology Today column made him an influential voice for the Alliance of Self-Directed Education.
Peter Gray has published (selection)
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Guided by his own son’s school experience, Peter Gray has spent decades researching how children learn when they are allowed to—in Hunter-Gatherer societies, where teaching is taboo, and at the Sudbury Valley School, where there are no curricula or grades, only radical autonomy. His thesis: Conventional schools have degenerated into disciplinary institutions that hit the most successful students the hardest. The rates of anxiety and depression do not merely reflect the parental pressure weighing on students; even more serious is how misguided ideals of perfection go hand in hand with the loss of free play—and thus the very sphere where creativity and critical thinking are fostered.
Peter Gray worked for many years as a research professor at Boston College. While his research initially focused on the brains and hormonal balance of mice, the issue of Education and Learning became a cause close to his heart. Author of a widely used introductory text on Psychology (now in its 8th edition), he’s also written numerous texts on how children learn. His Psychology Today column made him an influential voice for the Alliance of Self-Directed Education.
Peter Gray has published (selection)
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1 Stunde 8 Minuten
Because the second volume of The Psychology of the Machine series is set to be released in a few days, we sat down for a brief workshop to discuss why such an undertaking is necessary and the potential gap that must be bridged along the way. In a curious way, the story leads back to the suppressed childhood questions of our history, which we encounter today in ghostly form as social puzzles that are difficult to decipher, if not even as a form of collective psychological inflation. When Nietzsche said that madness is rare in individuals, »but the rule among groups, parties, peoples, and eras,« this implies that people may, without realizing it, work themselves up into a form of collective delusion. And this disorder becomes all the more serious in that it can confront us not only in the form of an economy but also as a supposed reality principle. Deciphering this collective unconscious is the purpose of the Psychology of the Machine, which is an attempt to gain clarity regarding the prevailing Gesellschaftstriebwerk, or our Social Drive Mechanism. Strangely enough, this brings back that conceptual figure which Freud had relegated to the private boudoir with his superego, but originally, in Johann Christian August Heinroth’s Textbook on Disorders of Mental Life, was held to have a collective significance he’d termed the Über-Uns—as that shared fate affecting us all, whether it comes in the form of populism, artificial intelligence, or whatever else.
Weil in ein paar Tagen der zweite Band der Psychologie der Maschine herauskommen wird, haben wir uns hingesetzt und ein kleines Werkstattgespräch durchgeführt, das zum einen die Frage behandelt, warum ein solches Unterfangen nötig ist, zum anderen, was das Potenzialgefälle ist, das dabei überwunden werden muss. Auf eine kuriose Weise führt die Geschichte zu den ausgeblendeten Kinderfragen unserer Geschichte zurück, die uns heute, in gespenstischer Form, als schwer entzifferbare Gesellschaftsrätsel, wenn nicht überhaupt als eine Form der kollektiven psychischen Inflation begegnen. Wenn Nietzsche gesagt hat, dass der Irrsinn bei Einzelnen etwas Seltenes ist, »aber bei Gruppen, Parteien, Völkern, Zeiten die Regel«, so impliziert dies, dass es Zeiten geben mag, die sich, ohne sich darüber im Klaren zu sein, in eine Form der kollektiven Verblendung hineinsteigern können. Und diese Störung ist umso gravierender, als sie uns in Gestalt einer Ökonomie und damit als vermeintliches ›Realitätsprinzip‹ gegenübertreten kann. Dieses kollektive Unbewusste zu entziffern ist der Sinn der Psychologie der Maschine, der Versuch mithin, sich über das obwaltende Gesellschaftstriebwerk Klarheit zu verschaffen. Auf eine kuriose Weise ist damit eine Gedankenfigur reaktiviert, die Freud mit seinem Über-Ich ins Boudoir des Privaten verlagert hat, die aber ursprünglich, in Johann Christian August Heinroths Lehrbuch der Störungen des Seelenlebens, als Über-Uns eine kollektive Bedeutung besaß – als jenes gemeinsame Schicksal, das uns allen widerfährt, mag es nun als Populismus, als Künstliche Intelligenz oder als was auch immer daherkommen.
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Weil in ein paar Tagen der zweite Band der Psychologie der Maschine herauskommen wird, haben wir uns hingesetzt und ein kleines Werkstattgespräch durchgeführt, das zum einen die Frage behandelt, warum ein solches Unterfangen nötig ist, zum anderen, was das Potenzialgefälle ist, das dabei überwunden werden muss. Auf eine kuriose Weise führt die Geschichte zu den ausgeblendeten Kinderfragen unserer Geschichte zurück, die uns heute, in gespenstischer Form, als schwer entzifferbare Gesellschaftsrätsel, wenn nicht überhaupt als eine Form der kollektiven psychischen Inflation begegnen. Wenn Nietzsche gesagt hat, dass der Irrsinn bei Einzelnen etwas Seltenes ist, »aber bei Gruppen, Parteien, Völkern, Zeiten die Regel«, so impliziert dies, dass es Zeiten geben mag, die sich, ohne sich darüber im Klaren zu sein, in eine Form der kollektiven Verblendung hineinsteigern können. Und diese Störung ist umso gravierender, als sie uns in Gestalt einer Ökonomie und damit als vermeintliches ›Realitätsprinzip‹ gegenübertreten kann. Dieses kollektive Unbewusste zu entziffern ist der Sinn der Psychologie der Maschine, der Versuch mithin, sich über das obwaltende Gesellschaftstriebwerk Klarheit zu verschaffen. Auf eine kuriose Weise ist damit eine Gedankenfigur reaktiviert, die Freud mit seinem Über-Ich ins Boudoir des Privaten verlagert hat, die aber ursprünglich, in Johann Christian August Heinroths Lehrbuch der Störungen des Seelenlebens, als Über-Uns eine kollektive Bedeutung besaß – als jenes gemeinsame Schicksal, das uns allen widerfährt, mag es nun als Populismus, als Künstliche Intelligenz oder als was auch immer daherkommen.
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1 Stunde 20 Minuten
As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a seemingly endless summer of globalization began—thirty golden years in which the only question worth asking was how to stimulate demand. But what happens when the world turns on its own axis and the problem is no longer finding consumers, but actually producing anything at all? David Baverez, a financial strategist who has spent the past decade observing China from Hong Kong, argues that 2022 marks precisely such a rupture: not only the return of geopolitical conflicts but also a fundamental shift from a peace economy to a war economy—an economy measured not by GDP per capita, but by who controls the supply bottlenecks. The question is whether Europe, caught between American financial hegemony and Chinese dominance in production, still has anything to offer—or whether the freedom to think is already a luxury of the past. Despite the somber topic, the conversation with David Baverez was laced with lightheartedness, due in no small part to Baverez’s exceptionally witty way of bringing big issues down to earth and driving the point home.
David Baverez is a forward-thinking French private investor and author who sometimes describes himself as a Business Angel/Demon on his Medium page. After spending 15 years between London and Boston — including a decade at Fidelity Investments managing European and Global Equity funds — he co-founded KDA Capital with Krishnan Sadasivam in 2005, returning all funds to investors at the end of 2010 in an early and contrarian bet against European sovereign debt. He has since lived in Hong Kong as a private investor and author who has written on the emergence of the New China on global economics, including Welcome to the War Economy! He is also a columnist for various media outlets, including L’Opinion, Les Echos, and Sans doute.
David Baverez has published
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David Baverez is a forward-thinking French private investor and author who sometimes describes himself as a Business Angel/Demon on his Medium page. After spending 15 years between London and Boston — including a decade at Fidelity Investments managing European and Global Equity funds — he co-founded KDA Capital with Krishnan Sadasivam in 2005, returning all funds to investors at the end of 2010 in an early and contrarian bet against European sovereign debt. He has since lived in Hong Kong as a private investor and author who has written on the emergence of the New China on global economics, including Welcome to the War Economy! He is also a columnist for various media outlets, including L’Opinion, Les Echos, and Sans doute.
David Baverez has published
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37 Minuten
There’s a certain irony in how the American Dream—that grand promise of merit-based advancement—has begun devouring its own children. In 2011, Jacob Savage arrived in Hollywood with modest expectations: a Princeton degree, solid writing skills, and a reasonable hope of landing a mid-level television writer’s job. But what he found was a system that had quietly rewritten its own rules. When he submitted a pilot episode that a TV studio executive liked enough to invite him into the writers’ room, that same executive ultimately decided that having another white person on the team wasn’t appropriate. »I was told very specifically on several occasions that the reason was because of things I couldn’t change about myself.« Paradoxically, it was primarily older white men who enforced such corporate policies. What led Savage to view this fate not as a personal failure but as the lot of an entire lost generation was a weekend trip with old friends who, like him, had completed Ivy League educations but, with one exception, had all found themselves in precarious jobs. This made him write essay, The Lost Generation in Compact magazine, which was widerly read and brought him to our attention. In it, Savage goes a step further, backing up the logic of the closed door with hard statistical data that reveals how DEI policy ultimately amounts to systematic discrimination against young white men:
»But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox, whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when Ezra Klein came under fire for his startup’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By 2022, the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025, leadership was 73 percent female.«
Jacob Savage, who laconically describes himself as a suburban dad from Los Angeles, spends his time selling concert tickets when he’s not taking care of his two sons. His article on The Lost Generation has earned him significant media coverage across various podcasts and newspapers. He also runs the Substack Jacob Savage.
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»But nothing explains the New Media story quite like Vox, whose explainers dominated 2010s discourse and whose internal demographics capture the decade’s professional shift. Back in 2013, when Ezra Klein came under fire for his startup’s lack of diversity, Vox Media was 82 percent male and 88 percent white. By 2022, the company was just 37 percent male and 59 percent white, and by 2025, leadership was 73 percent female.«
Jacob Savage, who laconically describes himself as a suburban dad from Los Angeles, spends his time selling concert tickets when he’s not taking care of his two sons. His article on The Lost Generation has earned him significant media coverage across various podcasts and newspapers. He also runs the Substack Jacob Savage.
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52 Minuten
Given that we’re said to live in an Information Society, the idea that an entire Nation could succumb to a form of mass hysteria similar to medieval delusions of sacrilege and infanticide would normally be unthinkable. The Canadian scandal involving the Kamloops child deaths, which kept all of Canada on edge for quite some time, exemplifies such an incident—a moral panic that led the Canadian Prime Minister, in a display of national shame, to lower the country’s flags to half-mast. And because the public held the Catholic Church responsible for the alleged murders, Pope Francis was also asked to apologize—a request he humbly fulfilled during a six-day penitential pilgrimage to Canada. The fact that the affair eventually faded away did not, of course, lead to a full reckoning—and this is precisely why we should turn our attention to this question of how such a moral panic could have emerged in the Information age. It was Tom Flanagan who caught our attention because, as a political scientist, he has published two books on the subject (along with others); additionally, he is not only a recognized expert on Canadian colonial history but also has a deep familiarity with how politics operate, thanks to his long tenure as an advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Tom Flanagan taught political science at the University of Calgary until his retirement. His academic interests centered on Canadian Indigenous peoples, especially the Métis, who, led by the millenarian Louis Riel, initiated a rebellion against the Canadian government in 1885. Alongside his academic pursuits, Flanagan also served as a political consultant and columnist for major Canadian newspapers.
Tom Flanagan has recently puplished
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Tom Flanagan taught political science at the University of Calgary until his retirement. His academic interests centered on Canadian Indigenous peoples, especially the Métis, who, led by the millenarian Louis Riel, initiated a rebellion against the Canadian government in 1885. Alongside his academic pursuits, Flanagan also served as a political consultant and columnist for major Canadian newspapers.
Tom Flanagan has recently puplished
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57 Minuten
What do you do when you’re a public relations spokeswoman sitting in a BBC studio, being grilled by a relentless host who is insisting that you defend Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam’s absurd claim that climate change will claim billions of lives in just a few years? In actuality, her answer would have been simple — she needed only to follow the group’s creed, drilled into her before the broadcast: just break down in tears. »People need to see crying mothers...« That Zion Lights didn’t bow to the activists’ peer pressure in this situation is a sign of great intellectual integrity — which may have something to do with her family’s history: her parents were Indian rice farmers before moving to the UK, a background that taught her energy poverty is even worse than CO2 emissions — and how technology has done more to liberate women than any hand-wringing or crocodile tears ever could. And this was precisely what prompted us to start a conversation with her, tracing the path of this woman who went from being the press spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion—perhaps the most radical of all Environmental Movements—to becoming an advocate for Nuclear Power: a coming-of-age story that highlights the internal doctrine of this cult — as Zion Lights herself now calls it — while reminding us that demonizing technology is a luxury belief that few people can afford — and one that, as off-grid societies have shown, leads to the worst cognitive dissonance imaginable.
Zion Lights is a writer who was an early environmental activist and press spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion from 2018 to 2020. After parting ways with the group, she shifted toward a pragmatic, technology-oriented environmental movement. She recently published her journey from »grassroots activism to becoming one of the UK’s leading advocates for nuclear energy,« titled Energy is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear. She has contributed to the Huffington Post for several years and has recently begun writing for Quillette and Human Progress.
Zion Lights has published
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Zion Lights is a writer who was an early environmental activist and press spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion from 2018 to 2020. After parting ways with the group, she shifted toward a pragmatic, technology-oriented environmental movement. She recently published her journey from »grassroots activism to becoming one of the UK’s leading advocates for nuclear energy,« titled Energy is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear. She has contributed to the Huffington Post for several years and has recently begun writing for Quillette and Human Progress.
Zion Lights has published
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51 Minuten
What happens when, in a society that considers itself free of all intellectual taboos, you pursue a question perceived as highly embarrassing, even awkward? This is exactly what happened when Fiona Girkin (after a disturbing personal experience) decided to write a doctoral thesis exploring how female narcissism manifests in the workplace. While male narcissism is well known as the Napoleon complex and even as a form of delusions of grandeur, the female variant is a much more psychologically complex issue, with many candidates portraying themselves as pitiful victims—a strategy that makes deciphering their behavior extremely difficult and even a social taboo. After all, who would want to accuse such a pitiful person of being the real culprit, namely the workplace bully? That Fiona Girkin was prepared to juxtapose the male hero’s journey with a »victim’s journey« was an institutional scandal for the Tasmanian police force, for which she worked as a trainer and consultant. Even though all the stories the police officers told her while on duty supported her version, merely mentioning the possibility of dark personalities in women touched on a long-held social taboo.
Dr. Fiona Girkin is an Australian counselor who studies and teaches about female narcissism. In addition to her counseling practice and consultation services, she also runs a YouTube channel.
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Dr. Fiona Girkin is an Australian counselor who studies and teaches about female narcissism. In addition to her counseling practice and consultation services, she also runs a YouTube channel.
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1 Stunde 36 Minuten
If the term Caste has recently entered the Human Sciences, this may be taken as evidence that European-style universalism has lost its appeal, and even as evidence that the idea has spread that here we’re dealing with an injustice that’s only been cloaked in a human, universalistic guise. When Indian theorist B.R. Ambedkar, ranked as the greatest Indian after Mahatma Gandhi in surveys, described the Indian caste system as »unknown to humanity in other parts of the world,« this finding becomes even more puzzling. This observation has given us the opportunity to speak with Suraj Yengde, who has not only addressed the caste system in two books but also experienced it firsthand as a member of the untouchable Dalit community—despite its prohibition under Indian law. Making this conversation even more interesting is his critical stance towards today’s culture of outrage, identifying Victim Olympics as a discipline that downplays or denies actual discrimination for its own benefit.
Suraj Yengde received the 2019 Canadian Dr. Ambedkar Social Justice Award and is a fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Center, where he teaches and serves as a research associate in its Department of African and African American Studies. He was named one of the 25 Most Influential Young Indians of 2021 by GQ India.
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Suraj Yengde received the 2019 Canadian Dr. Ambedkar Social Justice Award and is a fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Center, where he teaches and serves as a research associate in its Department of African and African American Studies. He was named one of the 25 Most Influential Young Indians of 2021 by GQ India.
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27 Minuten
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
I want to share a few thoughts with you on the peculiar relationship our society has with Artificial Intelligence. It confronts us with the uncanniness of how it’s taken on an almost religious-like quality—why else would the phrase curse and blessing instinctively come to mind when talking about it? To make sure the ideas I present to you are not completely out of touch, I would like to share a few video clips we’ve published on our ex nihilo Substack, created in collaboration with Dall-E and Google VEO using our in-house, proprietary Company Machine. This software is quite unusual insofar as it transliterates classic essays and transcribed conversations into visual metaphors, and because our brain—or more precisely, our language—is a veritable magic box, these produce the most daringly audacious image compositions—things that even the most fantastical mind could hardly conceive. In a curious way, a remarkable reversal can be observed here. When we talk about the power of imagination, when some extremely daring theorists of the 1990s conjured up as the visual turn, it must be said that advanced image production had long since left the visual sphere—and gone to our heads. This is noteworthy as we are witnessing the return of a medieval concept of Signs. At that time, it was believed that the closer a Sign was to God, the more valuable it was – or, as we would say today, the more abstract it was. Consequently, thought was considered the most valuable Sign, followed by the spoken word, then the image, and finally the worldly traces one leaves behind. This changed with the Renaissance, which actually brought about the visual turn that cultural theorists of the 1990s diagnosed with considerable delay – and Leonardo da Vinci reflected on the fact that music is the little sister of painting, simply because it fades away, while painting releases works of eternal value into the World. So today, while claiming we live in a visual culture may still appear to be true for large parts of the population, the intellectual and aesthetic drive that feeds this world has shifted its metamorphic form. If Hollywood’s dream factory went on strike recently, it’s because the advances in our computer culture are truly revolutionizing filmmaking. You only have to think back to one of those epic historical films of the 1950s and 1960s, where entire small towns in southern Italy were recruited as extras – and you see the difference. Today, CGI (computer-generated imagery) provides directors with a whole armada of hyper-realistic, malleable actors. And this rationality shock affects not only the extras, but also the set and stage designers, as well as the musicians, whom Bernard Hermann once invited to the recording studio in the form of an entire symphony orchestra. All this is now accomplished by someone like Hans Zimmer or by anonymous CGI artists who conjure up the most phantastical things on screen, which means that what used to be called a set is now little more than just a studio warehouse where a few actors perform in front of a green screen. Now, this threat of rationalization posed by Artificial Intelligence affects not only the immediate production process but also post-production. Today, when voices can be cloned at will, and even translation and dubbing can be done by AI with perfect lip synchronization, the radical revolution of the dream factory is a fait accompli.
Now, I could launch into a dystopian tirade about the changes to our audiovisual tools—and I would be justified in doing so, insofar as the coming surges of rationality are likely to affect the entire industry. But that is not what I want to do right now. Why not? Well, simply because I am convinced that a) this is a matter of inevitability, and b) well, I personally find the aesthetic and intellectual possibilities opening up with this world both sublimely wondrous. The dilemma we face is more intellectual, if not philosophical, in nature—a humiliation that surpasses anything Sigmund Freud recorded in his Civilization and Its Discontents. As you may recall, he identified three intellectual humiliations: 1) The Copernican Revolution, which meant we could no longer feel like we were the center of the Universe; 2) Darwinian Evolutionary Biology, which called our Anthropological Supremacy into question; 3) The Subconscious self, which made it clear to individuals that they cannot even feel at home in their own thoughts, that they are no longer masters in their own house. Now, let’s keep in mind that when these upheavals happened, they only really affected a small number of people (the so-called elite, if you will), but with the Digital Revolution, we are now facing a new and much more serious situation: it impacts everyone, absolutely everyone in this World.
The dilemma we face today can best be compared to what Günter Anders once aptly called Promethean Shame—which can be understood as a form of schizophrenia: I am, but I am not. If Blaise Pascal once said that all human unhappiness stems from the fact that humans cannot remain quietly in their rooms, then it’s evident that networked humans are, by definition, social creatures—or, as I would put it: dividuals who thrive on their divisibility and their urge to communicate. But because that sounds so harmless, I will tell you, who are largely familiar with the practices of our public broadcasters, a little personal story. It has to do with how, as a young man, I couldn’t quite decide whether I wanted to be the next Thomas Mann or a composer. In any case, I realized quite early on that the heroic history of the modern author belonged to the tempi passati. That was in the mid-1980s, and since I had been working with a musician from Tangerine Dream for many years and was deeply involved in the world of recording studios and electronic sound processing, I eventually realized that some unquestioned fundamental assumptions had exceeded their shelf life. When you have a sequencer in front of you that allows you to chase your fingers across the piano, or more precisely, the keyboard, at unprecedented speeds, you wonder why you ever bothered with scales and Czerny’s School of Velocity. Even deeper than this doubt about virtuosity was the discovery that, with sampling, the whole world had actually become a musical instrument, that even the sound of a toilet flushing could be a great aesthetic experience, not to mention that a sampled sound is actually a multitude, a multiplicity. In short: What caught my attention was nothing other than the threat of proliferation posed by digitalisation.
Fast forward three or four years, when I conducted an intensive seminar at the University of the Arts together with an editor from the RBB [Berlins public Radio], where I was working, and Johannes Schmölling, the musician from Tangerine Dream, during which we prepared actors and sound engineers to work together—and because it was going to be broadcast, this wasn’t just any ordinary practice session, but the real deal. And then my colleague from the station, Wolfgang Bauernfeind, had the idea of showing the sound engineers how the professionals at the station work. But since I had worked as a director in large companies and knew that the sound engineers weren’t even willing to touch the multi-track machine in the studio – whereas the studio at the University of Fine Arts was already fully digitalised – I told him that wasn’t such a good idea. But he insisted – and so, at some point (it was around 1992), half a dozen sound engineering students entered the hallowed halls of the station, the T5. But after just fifteen minutes, barely had the professionals begun their work, the first student came up to me and whispered in my ear: »Tell me, Martin, are they serious? « Which was, of course, a very valid question. At any rate, a few years later, I ran into one of the sound engineers in the station hallway, who asked me if I thought someone like him would be employab…
Get full access to Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt at martinburckhardt.substack.com/subscribe
I want to share a few thoughts with you on the peculiar relationship our society has with Artificial Intelligence. It confronts us with the uncanniness of how it’s taken on an almost religious-like quality—why else would the phrase curse and blessing instinctively come to mind when talking about it? To make sure the ideas I present to you are not completely out of touch, I would like to share a few video clips we’ve published on our ex nihilo Substack, created in collaboration with Dall-E and Google VEO using our in-house, proprietary Company Machine. This software is quite unusual insofar as it transliterates classic essays and transcribed conversations into visual metaphors, and because our brain—or more precisely, our language—is a veritable magic box, these produce the most daringly audacious image compositions—things that even the most fantastical mind could hardly conceive. In a curious way, a remarkable reversal can be observed here. When we talk about the power of imagination, when some extremely daring theorists of the 1990s conjured up as the visual turn, it must be said that advanced image production had long since left the visual sphere—and gone to our heads. This is noteworthy as we are witnessing the return of a medieval concept of Signs. At that time, it was believed that the closer a Sign was to God, the more valuable it was – or, as we would say today, the more abstract it was. Consequently, thought was considered the most valuable Sign, followed by the spoken word, then the image, and finally the worldly traces one leaves behind. This changed with the Renaissance, which actually brought about the visual turn that cultural theorists of the 1990s diagnosed with considerable delay – and Leonardo da Vinci reflected on the fact that music is the little sister of painting, simply because it fades away, while painting releases works of eternal value into the World. So today, while claiming we live in a visual culture may still appear to be true for large parts of the population, the intellectual and aesthetic drive that feeds this world has shifted its metamorphic form. If Hollywood’s dream factory went on strike recently, it’s because the advances in our computer culture are truly revolutionizing filmmaking. You only have to think back to one of those epic historical films of the 1950s and 1960s, where entire small towns in southern Italy were recruited as extras – and you see the difference. Today, CGI (computer-generated imagery) provides directors with a whole armada of hyper-realistic, malleable actors. And this rationality shock affects not only the extras, but also the set and stage designers, as well as the musicians, whom Bernard Hermann once invited to the recording studio in the form of an entire symphony orchestra. All this is now accomplished by someone like Hans Zimmer or by anonymous CGI artists who conjure up the most phantastical things on screen, which means that what used to be called a set is now little more than just a studio warehouse where a few actors perform in front of a green screen. Now, this threat of rationalization posed by Artificial Intelligence affects not only the immediate production process but also post-production. Today, when voices can be cloned at will, and even translation and dubbing can be done by AI with perfect lip synchronization, the radical revolution of the dream factory is a fait accompli.
Now, I could launch into a dystopian tirade about the changes to our audiovisual tools—and I would be justified in doing so, insofar as the coming surges of rationality are likely to affect the entire industry. But that is not what I want to do right now. Why not? Well, simply because I am convinced that a) this is a matter of inevitability, and b) well, I personally find the aesthetic and intellectual possibilities opening up with this world both sublimely wondrous. The dilemma we face is more intellectual, if not philosophical, in nature—a humiliation that surpasses anything Sigmund Freud recorded in his Civilization and Its Discontents. As you may recall, he identified three intellectual humiliations: 1) The Copernican Revolution, which meant we could no longer feel like we were the center of the Universe; 2) Darwinian Evolutionary Biology, which called our Anthropological Supremacy into question; 3) The Subconscious self, which made it clear to individuals that they cannot even feel at home in their own thoughts, that they are no longer masters in their own house. Now, let’s keep in mind that when these upheavals happened, they only really affected a small number of people (the so-called elite, if you will), but with the Digital Revolution, we are now facing a new and much more serious situation: it impacts everyone, absolutely everyone in this World.
The dilemma we face today can best be compared to what Günter Anders once aptly called Promethean Shame—which can be understood as a form of schizophrenia: I am, but I am not. If Blaise Pascal once said that all human unhappiness stems from the fact that humans cannot remain quietly in their rooms, then it’s evident that networked humans are, by definition, social creatures—or, as I would put it: dividuals who thrive on their divisibility and their urge to communicate. But because that sounds so harmless, I will tell you, who are largely familiar with the practices of our public broadcasters, a little personal story. It has to do with how, as a young man, I couldn’t quite decide whether I wanted to be the next Thomas Mann or a composer. In any case, I realized quite early on that the heroic history of the modern author belonged to the tempi passati. That was in the mid-1980s, and since I had been working with a musician from Tangerine Dream for many years and was deeply involved in the world of recording studios and electronic sound processing, I eventually realized that some unquestioned fundamental assumptions had exceeded their shelf life. When you have a sequencer in front of you that allows you to chase your fingers across the piano, or more precisely, the keyboard, at unprecedented speeds, you wonder why you ever bothered with scales and Czerny’s School of Velocity. Even deeper than this doubt about virtuosity was the discovery that, with sampling, the whole world had actually become a musical instrument, that even the sound of a toilet flushing could be a great aesthetic experience, not to mention that a sampled sound is actually a multitude, a multiplicity. In short: What caught my attention was nothing other than the threat of proliferation posed by digitalisation.
Fast forward three or four years, when I conducted an intensive seminar at the University of the Arts together with an editor from the RBB [Berlins public Radio], where I was working, and Johannes Schmölling, the musician from Tangerine Dream, during which we prepared actors and sound engineers to work together—and because it was going to be broadcast, this wasn’t just any ordinary practice session, but the real deal. And then my colleague from the station, Wolfgang Bauernfeind, had the idea of showing the sound engineers how the professionals at the station work. But since I had worked as a director in large companies and knew that the sound engineers weren’t even willing to touch the multi-track machine in the studio – whereas the studio at the University of Fine Arts was already fully digitalised – I told him that wasn’t such a good idea. But he insisted – and so, at some point (it was around 1992), half a dozen sound engineering students entered the hallowed halls of the station, the T5. But after just fifteen minutes, barely had the professionals begun their work, the first student came up to me and whispered in my ear: »Tell me, Martin, are they serious? « Which was, of course, a very valid question. At any rate, a few years later, I ran into one of the sound engineers in the station hallway, who asked me if I thought someone like him would be employab…
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