-
Instruments of Order Under Pressure: Alexander Stubb’s Values-Based Realism and the Re-Specification of Europe at Davos 2026
The recorded session stages Finnish President Alexander Stubb at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as a a compact, highly mediated instance of public geopolitical reasoning in which a head of state and a policy-intellectual moderator attempt to render “order” thinkable under conditions of accelerated volatility. The central problem-space is articulated as a transition…
-
Procedures of Autonomy: NATO Integration, European Capability, and the Public Grammar of Defense at Davos 2026
The recorded session titled “Can Europe Defend Itself?” stages a concentrated test of what “defense” means when it is spoken in the same breath as alliance law, industrial capacity, fiscal mobilization, health sovereignty, and the management of intra-alliance conflict. Its governing ambition is practical—assessing Europe’s ability to sustain security under conditions of strategic uncertainty—yet its…
-
Permanent Change, Structured Independence: Ursula von der Leyen’s Davos Address as a System of European Self-Authorization Across Trade, Security, and Arctic Sovereignty
The recording of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Davos, Switzerland, stages a distinctive problem-space: how a supranational executive voice can reconceive “Europe” as an agent of durable self-determination within a world presented as structurally and irreversibly altered. The address, framed by the World Economic Forum’s theme of “a spirit of dialogue,” treats…
-
Europe as Rule-Form Under Pressure: Macron’s Davos Address on Sovereignty, Multilateralism, and the Political Economy of Protection
The event of Emmanuel Macron at Davos is a case study in how a head of government tries to convert a diagnosis of systemic disorder into a program of institutional retooling, while speaking inside a venue that is simultaneously a deliberative forum, a media stage, and an investment-facing showcase. The address is framed as a…
-
Freud’s Journey as an Outsider: Exploring Identity and Antisemitism in Vienna’s Complex Culture
The ARTE documentary Outsider. Freud. presents Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) through a deliberately biographical and experiential lens, treating his theoretical production less as an abstract “system” and more as a sequence of intellectual responses to lived ruptures. It frames Freud’s work as developing under persistent conditions of exposure—social, familial, bodily, and political—and argues that these conditions…
-
Infrastructure as Intelligence: Huang and Fink on AI’s Platform Shift, the Energy–Compute Stack, and the Political Economy of Broad Participation
Convened at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the conversation stages a highly legible problem-space: how a set of technical claims about artificial intelligence, computational architecture, and industrial capacity can be translated into a public account of economic development that remains intelligible to non-specialists while still functioning as a justification for an immense redirection of…
-
Dependence and Dominion: A Critical Description of Trump’s Davos Address as an Economy of Security, Tariffs, and Ownership
The event was hybrid: a presidential address staged inside a global business-and-governance convocation, then partially reframed as a conversational “fireside” exchange whose very possibility is jokingly placed in doubt by the speaker. Its central problem-space is the relation between economic narration and sovereign claim: prosperity is asserted as an accomplished fact, then treated as warrant…
-
Syria at a Precarious Hinge: Ceasefire Fragility, Kurdish Inclusion, and the ISIL Detention Risk in the Northeast
At a United Nations Security Council briefing on 23 January 2026, senior UN officials and national representatives described a rapidly evolving security and humanitarian landscape in Syria, with particular emphasis on the volatility of the north and northeast, the fragility of recent ceasefire understandings between the Syrian authorities and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and…
-
Thermostatic Alliance: Sovereignty, Procedural Reason, and the Re-Coding of Greenland into NATO’s Arctic Grammar
The press briefing staged in Stockholm with Sweden’s foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergård, and Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, constitutes a compact but conceptually saturated instance of public reasoning under alliance pressure. Its central problem concerns how Nordic actors can affirm principled commitments—sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-determination, and the authority of international law—while managing an…
-
Ending Europe’s Groundhog Day: Zelenskyy at Davos and the Critique of Actionless Order
The event can be read as an attempt to convert a familiar diplomatic lament into a diagnostically organized indictment of European agency. The speech treats political paralysis as a repeatable form of life, and then tests that claim by moving across disparate crises—Greenland, Iran, Venezuela, frozen assets, sanctions, tribunals, maritime oil flows—so that “Europe” appears…
-
Cleareyed Partnership in an Age of Force: Friedrich Merz at Davos on Power, Trust, and European Competitiveness
What appears under the title “Special Address by Friedrich Merz, Federal Chancellor of Germany | WEF Annual Meeting 2026” is an event that stages, in compressed form, a particular European self-description under conditions of accelerated geopolitical drift: a self-description that tries to hold together, within a single rhetorical economy, the language of rules and partnerships…
-
Scaling the Candle: Engineering Optimism, Energy Constraint, and the Public Justification of Abundance in the Davos Musk–Fink Dialogue
The Davos conversation between Laurence D. Fink and Elon Musk is structured as a public exercise in justified optimism under institutional conditions that demand legibility, investability, and procedural civility. Its central problem-space concerns the possibility of presenting a single, integrated orientation toward “AI, robotics, energy, and space” as a coherent engineering project and, simultaneously, as…
-
AI as a Truth-Procedure: Davos, Alex Karp, and the Exposure of Institutional Reality
The recorded exchange at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 in Davos, framed as a “conversation” between Laurence D. Fink and Alex Karp, stages artificial intelligence as a problem of institutional judgment rather than a mere problem of computational capability. Across a compact sequence of prompts and answers, the event concentrates on how sovereign…
-
After Apollo, Before Babel: Progress at the Edge of Imitation and Apocalypse
The conversation unfolds as an extended attempt to diagnose what both speakers treat as a historically specific change in the character, tempo, and moral psychology of “progress,” especially in the West. Jordan Peterson frames Peter Thiel as an unusually philosophically oriented investor and entrepreneur, and presents the discussion less as a business interview than as…
-
Peter Thiel on René Girard: Mimetic Desire, Contrarian Strategy, and the Management of Rivalry
In this conversation, Peter Thiel describes how he first encountered René Girard’s work and how, over time, Girard’s account of imitation became a durable interpretive framework for Thiel’s thinking about human behavior, institutional dynamics, and business leadership. Thiel situates the encounter in the late 1980s, when he was an undergraduate philosophy student at Stanford. He…
-
The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free
At the center of The War on Warriors lies a problem that is neither narrowly political nor merely institutional but existential: the degradation of the very principle by which a republic sustains the moral and functional distinction between those who defend it and those who are defended by it. The book examines the dissolution of…
-
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Zero to One can be read as a sustained attempt to isolate what “newness” means when it is treated as an object of practical reason rather than as a decorative label for novelty. Its governing problem-space concerns how a finite agent, acting under uncertainty and inside institutions oriented toward repetition, can nonetheless form determinate commitments…
-
Entrepreneurship After Repeatability: Peter Thiel at USC Annenberg on Uniqueness, Monopoly, and the Search for Secrets
The USC Annenberg event titled “Zero to One: Peter Thiel speaks at USC Annenberg” presents itself as a public exercise in how entrepreneurial discourse tries to claim conceptual seriousness without turning itself into a repeatable recipe. Within a format that begins as an institutional welcome, shifts into a semi-prepared lecture, and then is reworked by…
-
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Complete Works: The Critical Study Edition in 15 Volumes
The Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) of Nietzsche’s Sämtliche Werke presents Nietzsche’s philosophy as to be best read as a complete documentable sequence of textual operations—publication, revision, self-retrospective framing, and posthumous drafting—whose conceptual force depends upon philological exactitude and chronological intelligibility. It fuses, within one portable architecture, the biblical works Nietzsche authorized for print, with the Nachlass…
-
Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
Origins of Modern Japanese Literature analyses the historical constitution of “modern literature” by treating it as an institutional and epistemic formation whose apparent self-evidence is produced through determinate operations of perception, language, and social organization. Karatani’s distinctive contribution is in a method that reconstructs “origins” as effects of inversion: the modern system retroactively posits the…
-
From Zero to One: Peter Thiel on Monopoly, Differentiation, and the Politics of Innovation
At an event hosted at USC Annenberg and livestreamed to additional viewers on campus, Peter Thiel was introduced as an entrepreneur, investor, and author whose career had moved from PayPal’s early ambition to rethink money and payments to the creation and funding of technology companies across Silicon Valley. The moderator emphasized Thiel’s role in PayPal’s…
-
From Zero to One, and Then to Nowhere Else: Thiel’s Case for Uneven Technological Progress
At Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, the Institute of Politics and Harvard’s Program on Constitutional Government convened a public conversation in which historian Niall Ferguson moderated a wide-ranging discussion with technology entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel. The exchange unfolded as a structured interview followed by audience questions, moving across the near-term condition of Silicon…
-
From Stanford to Harvard: Campus Conflict as a Proxy for Civilizational Legitimacy
At the inaugural Conservative and Republican Student Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Peter Thiel—introduced by the host as a prominent technology entrepreneur and investor—used his keynote to revisit a set of campus conflicts from his years as a Stanford student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that those disputes anticipated larger and more enduring…
-
The University Against the Future: Peter Thiel on Stagnation, Risk, and the Return of Total Control
At a Stanford Academic Freedom Conference in early November 2022, Peter Thiel was introduced by Stanford faculty member Russell Berman as a technology entrepreneur and investor with an unusually visible public profile, associated with PayPal, Palantir, Founders Fund, and early involvement in Facebook. Berman situated Thiel’s presence within a longer arc of campus controversies and…
-
Stagnation, Founders, and the New Machine Intelligence: Peter Thiel at Aspen on Risk, Power, and the American System
In a wide-ranging conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival, investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel presented a composite view of Silicon Valley that joins venture practice, institutional critique, and a set of political and cultural interpretations about the United States’ present trajectory. Interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Thiel framed his central investment thesis around a particular…
-
“Operational AI” and National Power: Alex Karp’s Case for American Technological Primacy
At the Economic Club of Chicago on May 22, 2025, Palantir Technologies co-founder and CEO Alex Karp held a wide-ranging conversation with moderator Sean Connolly, the president and CEO of Conagra Brands, moving between autobiography, corporate culture, the operational use of artificial intelligence, and what Karp framed as the strategic requirements of American power in…
-
Agency Under Acceleration: Peter Thiel on Risk, Innovation, and the Next Discontinuity
In a wide-ranging onstage conversation at the All-In Summit 2024—later published by the All-In Podcast under the title “Peter Thiel: The Coming Collapse No One Is Prepared For”—technology investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel frames contemporary politics, geopolitics, and technological change through a single organizing preoccupation: the distribution of agency under conditions of accelerating uncertainty. He…
-
The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State
Michael Steinberger’s The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State offers a rare, methodically reported, philosophically alert portrait of a firm whose practical vocation consists in rendering heterogeneous worlds legible to power. Its contribution lies in treating Palantir’s rise neither as a purely technical success story nor as…
-
Inside Palantir: How a Secretive Tech Titan is Shaping the Future of AI, Warfare, and Global Data
J. Hayden Elsen’s Inside Palantir: How a Secretive Tech Titan is Shaping the Future of AI, Warfare, and Global Data puts forward a claim about contemporary power: the decisive institutional transformation of the present is realized through software platforms that convert heterogeneous data into actionable, governable, and contractible forms of knowledge. The book’s contribution lies…
-
Peter Thiel at Cambridge Union
Peter Thiel appeared at the Cambridge Union on May 8, 2024, for a talk and extended discussion that combined institutional critique, political economy, and a characteristic skepticism toward fashionable explanatory frames. Speaking as a technology entrepreneur and investor—known for co-founding PayPal and Palantir and for early involvement with Facebook—Thiel used the setting to revisit arguments…
-
Peter Thiel on Classical Liberalism
At a bicentenary event of the Oxford Union—an institution that frames its mission around debate, scrutiny of entrenched assumptions, and protection of free expression—Peter Thiel delivered an address that positioned the contemporary university, and “classical liberalism” more broadly, as systems under sustained stress. Thiel, a U.S. technology entrepreneur and investor known for co-founding PayPal and…
-
🎶 The Official 2025 GROS Christmas Music Playlist
🎶 The Official 2025 GROS Christmas Music Playlist: Link: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaBkV53aFEksgOUr4tDDzAVgutjPrdgfT 1. Money youtu.be/BYUGCit0u4E2. First Date youtu.be/SLUpSY2xv7E3. What’s Her Name? youtu.be/QK8VG5fBGKw4. A Hundred Million Dollar Victim youtu.be/kltXvPFd9wo5. Different Types of Infinity youtu.be/AFYPrpN9J6s6. System Error youtube.com/watch?v=nUvbpmFW1Xk7. Who Said “Fuck the Police?” youtu.be/rd1X1aXYJ0Y8. Marsh Mask (Not-Diss) youtu.be/SWi9GQlk6CM9. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock youtu.be/mvjVfxH1tlc10. Collateral Murder youtu.be/mdzWVwdkAyY11.…
-
Hegel’s World Revolutions
Richard Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions claims that Hegel’s historical and political philosophy yields its central diagnostics only when reconstructed through the sequence of revolutions that, in Hegel’s account, generate modern freedom while repeatedly placing it at risk. Bourke’s distinctive contribution lies in combining source-driven intellectual history with conceptual analysis in order to reinsert Hegel into…
-
‘Opera’s Second Death’ by Slavoj Žižek & Mladen Dolar
Opera’s Second Death is not simply a philosophical reflection on opera, but as a sustained theoretical experiment in which opera is treated as a privileged site for thinking some of the most intractable problems of modern philosophy: death and repetition, enjoyment and loss, subjectivity and its dissolution, the relation between symbolic order and bodily excess,…
-
Richard Wagner – Der fliegende Holländer (Karl Böhm, Bayreuth 1971)
Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer was recorded live at the Bayreuth Festival in 1971 under Karl Böhm and released by Deutsche Grammophon in the familiar multi-LP configuration. Sung in German, it documents Bayreuth’s festival forces at full intensity in one of Wagner’s most tightly coiled and elemental works, a “sea opera” in which storm, oath, and…
-
Richard Wagner – Tristan und Isolde (Karl Böhm, Bayreuth 1966)
This post presents Tristan und Isolde as captured live at the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 1966 and issued on Deutsche Grammophon in the classic multi-LP configuration. The present edition is sourced from the original vinyl plates and has undergone a restrained digital remastering by Simon Gros, undertaken not to modernize the sound but…
-
Cosmopolitan Right at the Borderline: Strict Hospitality, Material Interdependence, and the Juridical Conditions of Peace
Roberta Picardi’s lecture advances a precise thesis: it seeks to determine, within Kant’s Perpetual Peace and the juridical architecture presupposed by it, what cosmopolitan right is as a peace-promoting factor when its content is explicitly restricted to “universal hospitality.” The distinctive contribution consists in a methodical narrowing that refuses two familiar assimilations at once: the…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Simon Gros 