Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 256th episode of Objectively Speaking, where she interviews award-winning author Jimmy Soni about his 2022 book "The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley."

Jimmy Soni is the author of "The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley," which explores PayPal’s turbulent early days and the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success. As an award-winning author, speechwriter, and former managing editor of The Huffington Post, his previous books include "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age" and "Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar."

Join Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for the 255th episode of Objectively Speaking (formerly The Atlas Society Asks), where she interviews Extropic founder Guillaume Verdon.

Guillaume Verdon, or Gill Verdon, is the founder of Extropic, a startup AI hardware company to meet the demanding power and computation requirements of generative AI. A physicist, applied mathematician, and researcher in quantum machine learning, Gill is also known under his online persona, @BasedBeffJezos, and for his creation of effective accelerationism (e/acc), which advocates for rapid technological progress as an ethically preferred path for human progress, emphasizing optimism and proactive efforts to shape a better future.

Join Atlas Society founder and Senior Scholar David Kelley, Ph.D., along with Senior Scholar and Professor of Political Economy at Duke, Richard Salsman, Ph.D., for a special webinar exploring how influential ideas often fail to persuade when their terms are misunderstood, emotionally charged, or used unequivocally.

"Intellectual influencers often fail to convince others of the truth of their concepts and principles when their targets don’t 'hear' what’s meant--or hear its opposite. Connotation (felt meaning) doesn’t always track denotation (literal meaning). Examples include atheism, selfishness, capitalism, power, equality, liberal, democracy, and progressive. Ideally, we define our terms and don’t equivocate, but each is likely amid today’s conceptual confusion, epistemological nominalism, and moral emotivism. People 'talk past each other' or dismiss debates as futile--'mere semantics.'"