John and Steve kick off by asking: What are the real frontiers of progress, and what’s holding us back?

Topics:

• Apple vs Google

• E/ACC vs Philosophy of Progress: Is acceleration always good, or should tech serve human flourishing?

• Why innovation thrives in extremes (war, prosperity) and stalls in the middle.

Subscribe for deep dives into technology, society, and the future.

(00:00) Introduction
(01:00) Life-fit vs self-fit and Charlie Munger’s “inner scorecard”
(03:00) the “Great Lock-In,” and escaping the permanent underclass
(05:00) Apple vs Google — stagnation, innovation, and Banana by Google
(07:00) Product plateau and the equilibrium state of hardware
(10:00) Apple as luxury brand; design vs technology
(12:00) Enduring design
(14:00) Flip phones vs. brain interfaces
(16:00) Dangers of AI autonomy
(17:00) “Techno-Humanist Manifesto”
(18:00) 1960s optimism
(20:00) Techno-humanism vs effective accelerationism (E/acc)
(23:00) Doom vs E/acc vs Crawford
(26:00) Human well-being as the metric for progress
(29:00) Luddites vs. automation
(31:00) Taking modern infrastructure for granted
(33:00) Automation & translation

(36:00) Why physical tech lags behind software
(40:00) Defense tech as the engine of innovation
(44:00) Conflict as a driver of technological progress
(47:00) Forgetting pre-modern misery
(49:00) Bridging the global development gap
(50:00) Modernity as a bundle
(52:00) Slopware vs. real innovation
(54:00) Hard science vs SaaS
(57:00) Funding moonshots
(59:00) Oddball geniuses
(01:01:00) Anglo-Celtic inventiveness and prosperity cycles
(01:05:00) Ingenuity in prosperity