This is a NotebookLM podcast audio summary of a Substack essay on a key idea of Thomas Hobbes expressed in Leviathan.

We all remember Hobbes. Not Calvin’s pet tiger, regrettably, but the Leviathan one: the cheerful fellow who looked at human beings and concluded that, left to themselves, they would make life ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. A line so good it almost excuses the anthropology. Almost.

Read the full essay on Substack.