Welcome to another episode of Dark Renaissance Radio. Today, Owen and I are releasing a conversation with the entrepreneur and intellectual, Brandon Griggs. We were initially interested in speaking to Brandon because of his concept of philosophical startups. With that as our spark, we went onto discuss various dilemmas of living in the digital age. Brandon challenges us on some of our assumptions, which made this a very generative conversation!
Here are some of the other topics we discussed:
Brandons background being raised in a Christian house hold
Losing his faith and discovering the potential of the digital era
Bootstrapping his own companies
Exposure to the Liminial Web
Bard’s invitation to the IDW
the value of intellectual peers
DR Telegram as the entry point into the “extended universe”
Writing more tame essays on substack
How economic success frees you from having to do self promotion
Brandons concept of the philosophical start up
Traditional philanthropy vs philosophical start up
Can we use the ideology as an attractor space to attract people into the community?
Effective Altruism as an example
EA community figures out the messy details of how to implement the ideology
Making Philosophical Return on Investment
Philosophy start ups should take the best practices from the start up world
If this scaled, then we would get competitive market dynamics
Taking philosophy out of the ivory tower and into the market
How Brandon would advise a new philosophy start up
How to weaponize the ideology
Can this ideology transform from theory into practice?
The growth path of Less Wrong to Effective Altruism
How to design the emergence of something like EA
Startups have bottom up and and top down dynamics
Finding the community for a bottom up movement
The importance of a top down ideology
Did pre existing wealth build the success of EA
Giving as status and defense mechanism for big tech
Counter example of Peter Thiel
Making the top down vision clear for wealthy funders
Owen’s substack post Bitcoin Medicis
Bitcoin hasn’t become important enough to take on philanthropy as a status defense mechanism
The role of educational institutions
Why Brandon doesn’t credit his success to his education
The importance of instilling a love of learning
School is a way for kids to socialize, get introduced to friends, get babysat, not be educated
Why Brandon would love being a 22 year old today
The importance of the humanities for thinking the relationship between humans and technology
The “odd substance” of the future
Environmentalism, techno optimism and techno dystopianism as visions of the future
The philosophical start up as a platform for creating a new mythos
The importance of education for resource and cultural transmission between generations
The pathology of technological thinking is that it lacks imagination
An educational paradigm that starts to reorient imagination around old ideas
The absence of civic awareness in the pedagogy on the humanities today
Dominic Cummings and a Odyssean education
Art and technology spring forth from the same core human experiences
The digital native archetype
and much more!
We hope you enjoy this episode. If you like what we are up to, please like and subscribe.
Episode 3: Philosophy Start-ups with Brandon Griggs