 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode is a special one to celebrate reaching 400 episodes. And if I may take the liberty of quoting one of my favorite television shows, Blackadder, I'm as excited as a terribly excited person who has a really good reason for being terribly excited because I have three other podcasters with me, three of my favorite podcasters whose shows I listen to. And these are all people who host their own philosophy podcasts. So I have Maisha Cherry of the Unmute podcast, Barry Lamb of HiFi Nation and Matt Teichman of Elucidations. So hi, everyone. Hello. Hello. Hi. It's great to have you here on the show. So I thought maybe we should start since we can't assume that everyone who's listening to this knows all your podcasts, although they certainly should. I thought we could start by having each of you just say something quickly about your show. So, Maisha, do you want to go first? Sure. So this podcast is a podcast where I talk to, I'm going to do my tagline here, diverse philosophers from the continental tradition, from the analytic tradition, black, white, transist, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, about social and political issues of our day. And so I try to kind of look at their work and see how we can talk about that in ways that is relevant to our social and political lives. Okay. Barry? I'm Barry Lamb, the producer and host of HiFi Nation. I'm also a professor at Vassar College. HiFi Nation, I would say it's a documentary type show. Our tagline is philosophy in story form. So every episode we have a story from science, the arts, law, history, maybe, and pair it with a piece of philosophy. It's produced in a documentary format, so it's soundtracked and it's a seasonal show. So there's about 10 episodes a year and there's been four seasons. There's about 40 episodes. Okay, Matt? Hi, I'm Matt Teichman and I host the elucidations podcast along with my many and sundry undergraduate interns. And it's a long form interview podcast about philosophy. One of the driving goals behind it, I think has always been to try to represent philosophy in its full breadth. So to try to really get out there, how many different topics can all fall under the kind of umbrella heading of philosophy, really give people a sense of how it draws so many different areas of inquiry together. And you can listen to it wherever you find podcasts and also the websites at elucidations.now.sh. Okay, great. Something I often tell people about my podcast is that it was inspired not by a philosophy podcast, but by a history podcast, namely the history of Rome by Mike Duncan. And I think that's probably true for a lot of podcasters that the reason that they got into it was because they were listening to podcasts, maybe on a similar topic or a different one. And they thought, I really liked that. I'm going to do something like that, but from my topic. So one thing I wanted to ask all three of you is what kind of inspirations you drew on. And maybe I'll start with Barry here, because I think maybe it's in a way the most obvious, like you already said that it's a documentary form podcast, so you must be thinking of other models there. Yeah, absolutely. So This American Lives, your radio labs, your invisibilias, the tradition that came out of public radio in the United States, and to some extent, BBC, the idea of having a stylized news or where news isn't necessarily just news of the day, but ordinary people's lives or off the beaten path stories about weird things that happen. The goal of storytelling in that form is to have what we call in that industry, driveway moments, right? When you're driving home and you stop the car, but you can't get out because you want to finish this little section of the radio piece. That's the inspiration for my show to make a version of that for philosophy, right? Philosophy that has driveway moments. Yeah, I was saying before we started the recording that when I'm describing your podcast to people, I always say that you should imagine this American life, but it's about philosophy. And I think that actually captures what you do pretty well. Right. Thank you. Maisha, do you want to tell us something about what inspirations you drew on when you were sort of coming up with the idea for the Unmute podcast? Sure. It was definitely talk radio and just radio in general. In college, I was host of a talk radio program and there's something about that two-way talk that I always appreciated. And so when I was thinking about a podcast, I wanted it to seem as if someone just turned on the radio and this is what they are encountering. So it was very much influenced by public radio, more specifically talk radio, more specifically two-way talk radio. So the interviews, although it's not a call-in show, it is the interview style, which is kind of a template or copying from the template of that two-way talk format. That was the inspiration. And that actually even comes down to the level of like the music that you have in there. Yeah. Yeah. So the way in which the music, yes. And kind of the breaks in between, et cetera, et cetera, is something that I did when I was in college. And yeah, I wanted to have people to kind of have a similar kind of experience. Actually is that why you wondered that listening to your podcast, where there's this moment sometimes like in the middle of the conversation where these voices come in and sing and then it comes back to it. And presumably it's not because you took a break and went off to have coffee, right? I mean, it's actually- Yeah, it's more of a mental break. So usually commercial breaks kind of fill in that time. I wanted that just to be a time for us to mentally kind of reset in a way. So the breaks are strategic in that regard. But if you were listening to the actual radio, it would be a radio break, right? We would go to a radio sponsor, for example. But I rather use that as a way for just the mind to break into a different kind of conversation. But those breaks, the intro, all of that is definitely inspired by radio. Yeah. I definitely picked up on that listening to it. I mean, especially the intro feels so much like talk radio. So that's really, I think, a successful- Right. And the announcer is very radio-ish. Yeah. Very, very influenced by that medium. Yeah. So how about you, Matt? Yeah. So when I started my podcast, I was really inspired by other podcasts. So let's see, for example, Philosophy Bites, which is another interview podcast. I actually heard you, Peter, on there back in the day before you had your own podcast. I was also really inspired by Planet Money, which is another podcast in the genre of the ones that Barry mentioned. And I really liked calling shows. We mentioned calling talk shows. And I just love the utter anarchy of some completely random person calling in and asking. And you have no idea what they're going to ask, but it's practically guaranteed to be interesting, just in virtue of the sheer chaos of it and make you think in ways you haven't thought before. So I absolutely love that. And in general, what inspired me about the podcast domain is that it seemed to me that the material being put out there was so much more interesting and in-depth than the material being put out by traditional legacy media. And I felt that, yeah, just by picking a bunch of interesting podcasts to subscribe to, you could learn a heck of a lot while you're vacuuming and doing the dishes. So I got a lot of that out of Philosophy Bites, a lot of that out of Planet Money, just really in-depth reporting. It seemed to me that a lot of these shows are going way more into depth, giving you a starting point for doing your own research into these different areas or just getting a taste of what else is out there. And the idea of bringing some of the conversations I was having in my personal life into that pool of resources people could draw on, I found really appealing. One thing I think that's striking about your series is that you do, in fact, get pretty deep into the topics if you compare it to Philosophy Bites. Philosophy Bites obviously is shorter, as the name promises, whereas your episodes are often sometimes even up towards an hour long. And they are accessible, I think, to people without academic training, but you don't really hold back. I mean, you sometimes have pretty detailed conversations about even technical issues in philosophy of logic and things like that. The area that I specialized in when I did my philosophy PhD was philosophy of language, so I certainly had out of the gate a desire to represent, not be afraid of the quote unquote technical parts of philosophy on the show and try to represent, you know, in principle represent every area equally. My podcast is very heavily edited. I think, Peter, you didn't experience this as much because you're a really slick speaker, but with most of my guests, we sit down and like, we talk for a little while, we take a break, we talk about what we just talked about, we talk a little more, we take another break, we record a little more, we go, you know what, that last bit, let's delete that. So I kind of collaborate with the guests on the entire conversation and then edit it later to sound like it was just a conversation we spontaneously had, but that's a lie. Okay, that works actually. I had no idea from listening. I think I've listened to every single episode and they all sound, you know, they just sort of fly by. Probably the vast majority of the time I put into the show is in the editing and try to make it sound like what it isn't, which is sort of a collaboratively structured on the fly, you know, conversation. What Matt and I were just talking about there, I think raises an obvious question, which is how we see podcasting as relating to what happens in academic philosophy, philosophy as a profession, in other words, philosophy as it's practiced at universities. And I think that's a really interesting question because for one thing, it's pretty clear that all of us are drawing on academic philosophy in the sense that we have academics coming on as guests. All four of us do that actually, because Barry does have interviews with his guests as well, although it's not only interviews, what you're doing. And when I write my podcast, which is mostly scripted, what I do is go off and read a bunch of research by people about whatever figure or period I've gotten up to. And then I try to condense it down into a script. So certainly my podcast could not exist without professional academic research and none of ours could. So how did the three of you see the relationship there between podcasting and professional academic philosophy? Yeah, so most of the people that I interview, the content of the conversation is based on something that they've written. So I've read the work and I felt that the work is something that listeners would be interested in. So in some way we might say that part of it is translation, that there was an 8,000 word article or 70,000 word book. In what ways can we translate that from the page into a conversation? But then another way in which I find that it's not just translation, but it's also transcending. So you transcend the academic language, you transcend the inside conversation that you're having with academics, people that you're having with your sub-discipline. And you try to, I guess, think about the ways in which it has import for those who've never heard of your particular sub-fill and we begin to apply it to these other issues. That's kind of how I see the relationship in a certain kind of way. And there's no doubt that I have this belief that, and I've had this experience where the written work may be very difficult to understand. You give someone the podcast and they're like, oh, I get it now. Right. And then some sense in which, you know, people would never thought that that work will have a certain kind of application in people's life that will lead us to kind of think about a social situation or a political dilemma in very different ways. So that's kind of how I see the connection between what we do in the academy, philosophy in particular, with the podcast. It is a work of translation, but also a work of transcending the page and trying to figure out how we can bring what we wrote into the world. One thing that calls to mind for me is the fact that even if you're a professional philosopher, there's going to be areas of philosophy you have no clue about. So I think we fall into this. There's lots of areas of philosophy I have no clue about. Yeah, exactly. Well, all of us, right, is a huge field. And so we fall into this trap maybe of thinking, well, there's the specialists and then there's the popular audience. But actually, like for example, I was listening to an episode from your series recently about Frans Fanon, who, because we haven't gotten to him yet in the podcast I'm doing with Chikay, I don't really know anything about Frans Fanon except very vague stuff. And so in a sense, I was in the position of just anyone who's not a trained philosopher, perhaps learning about something for the first time. And so I think that's something that I also get a lot out of, of the sedations in that direction. Like when you're talking to people who are specialists in philosophy of logic or something like that, that I don't really work on myself, then it's all new to me. That's one of the things I was really hoping to do as well is give people a way to just survey the terrain, get the lay of the land. I mean, I guess the discipline, but maybe more interestingly, just philosophy itself, what has been done, what's being done. You know, a lot of people don't necessarily have time to read a bunch of anthologies and do a bunch of research in every single area because there's just too many areas. But you can get like a glimpse of something on a regular basis from a podcast and then something catches your interest and you can go further on it. And so personally, that's like Philosophy Bites back in the day provided that service to me. Your podcast has absolutely provided that service to me since you started it. It's a great way to broaden your background as an academic researcher. And I think in a time at which academic researchers are really struggling to like have a broad bird's eye view of the discipline. One of the things that what Mahesha was talking about reminded me of, especially something that she does very well on her show, is reveal the difference between the written word and the spoken word. And it's not even just a difference that you as the host see. It's like sometimes the person you're talking to has never had to say the thing in a different way than they had written it down. And then you realize that in the process of doing that, they can articulate something differently than they were in the written word. And I think that one of the things about podcasting is it forces people who are professionals in the field to, you know, it's a weird thing. They're translating their own thing, right? From the written work to the spoken word. And it's a very different thing. The spoken word, they could just read the paper. You could say, hey, could you read that paragraph? But we know that that's not going to work. That's going to be a terrible episode of Unmute. They just read the thing. And one of the things that Maisha is very good at, it's like, okay, it's not just the spoken word. It's the dialogue word. It's like if you're in conversation with Maisha, you're going to say it differently than if you had to just like get on a mic and say it. Something about speaking and speaking to somebody has this translational process to it that I think this medium is forcing academics into when we ask them to be on our show. No, I find that interesting, right? So in some ways we might say that it becomes something else, right? So as much as translation seems like, oh, what you're doing is taking this thing and just putting it somewhere else. That's what's happening in this podcast. And you're taking one thing and you're creating something else, right? You're not just translating it per se. You're remixing it. You're co-creating it with the person that you're talking to. I mean, it's interesting about translation. I was reminded of the email that I send to people that I'm interviewing and always say, listen, there are going to be some words. Here's a warning. You may say big words that may not have a broad understanding. I will ask you, what do that mean? Please know that I'm not an idiot, but we don't want to assume and create kind of a bubble in our conversation, but to make sure that no matter what background people come from, they'd be able to understand our conversation. Yeah. I've done interviews for like medieval philosophy where people just throw in untranslated Latin and things like that. It's like, you know what? Let's try to tell the audience what that means. Yeah. With the documentary style, right? Because I tell them this is not something that I'm going to air as is. So I will say, okay, could you stop and could you say that point again without using the word post inter blah, blah, blah, whatever. I do that too. It's always phenomenology for me. They always say phenomenology and I have to stop them and they're like, just say that again without phenomenology. Yeah. One of the other issues that comes up here, I guess, is what kind of audience we have in mind because in a way it seems like we might have different audiences in mind, right? So as we said, elucidations often goes quite deep into the topic and is at least to some extent aimed at professional philosophers. And at least I don't think of my audience primarily as being professional philosophers, although it's obviously welcomed to me if they listen to it. But I usually tell my, actually I usually tell my interview guests that they should imagine that they're talking to a bright undergraduate. And I guess I kind of have that in mind when I write the scripts as well. And it seems like the target audience of all four of our podcasts might be kind of different. So maybe we can start with Barry, who do you sort of have in mind as your ideal audience member? My audience, the one I produce for in my mind is somebody who doesn't know, care, or maybe even has an active kind of hostility towards the word philosophy. So maybe it's somebody who has heard it but thinks of it as sort of this elite thing, or maybe it's somebody who hasn't thought too much about it. They know it's something that happens in colleges, but they care about other things, right? They care about the news. They care about economics maybe. They may be science curious, but they have not thought about this term, word philosophy, what it is. And so they're not philosophy geeks. So my show is not produced for people who are philosophy nerds or hobbyists. If they are a philosophy nerd or hobbyist, they might consider my show not in depth enough. They might actually be looking for your elucidations or your history of philosophy without any gaps maybe even, to fill in the gap to complement their knowledge of it. I'm tailoring it for the person who likes to read magazines, who likes to listen to public radio, who considers themselves an intelligent person, probably a college graduate, and will stumble across it and think, yeah, if I'm going to spend 0.01% of my time on philosophy, that's more than I had spent before, right? That's how I think of my audience. And I suppose, Maisha, you must be trying to overturn people's assumptions and expectations about what philosophy is with the Unmute podcast, right? I think that's one of the bullet points. I can't help but say what my audience is without first addressing what my initial audience was when I was thinking about the podcast. So at the time, this was like 2014, I was transitioned from adjuncting to go back into a PhD program. That summer, I had worked with some formerly incarcerated young folk who weren't college graduates, teaching them philosophy. And so when I originally thought about the podcast, this is also mentioned in the book, I was thinking about that demographic. I was thinking about black and brown New York folk who were intellectually curious, was hip, wasn't really going to listen to something that was a bore, not listen to anything that was long, like a movie, right? And so those are the individuals that I had in mind. I think in some ways I still have that in mind as my audience. Now, who that is, is quite broad, right? The intellectually curious, right? It could be undergraduate students. What I found is a lot of grad students, a lot of faculty members, people outside of philosophy, just the public in general. So I think for me, I think when I talk to people, I'm surprised about who listens to it and why. And I think what I find is that it's people who are interested in philosophy, yes, but it's also people who are interested in a particular topic that I'm discussing with particular individuals. So whether it's something as broad as Buddhism to Afro pessimism to Fanon, as you mentioned, to grief or joy, I mean, one of the things about these podcast apps is that you enter in something that you're interested in and learn about. And my podcast might pop up and that person was intellectually curious in something and they found it in that particular way. And what about you, Matt? I mean, we may actually have given a slightly false impression by sort of emphasizing how deep and detailed your podcast is, because I don't, the feel of it is actually not that it's aimed only at academic philosophers, I wouldn't say. Yeah, I feel like this has been kind of an ongoing conversation between you and me, but I always wanted my show to be basically just accessible to anyone who is curious and absolutely not only aimed at academics, but it seems like the niche it's sort of landed itself in has, despite my best efforts, been something like that. I think it's an interesting feature of like, you can start with a certain conception of what you want your podcast to be when you start out, but often it'll turn into whatever it's going to turn into because at the end of the day, you're not the only one tangoing like your entire audience is as well. But it's funny how you said, like, you tell your guests to a picture in intelligent undergraduate, it's almost verbatim, I tell my guests to imagine a room full of intelligent 17 year olds who have never heard of any philosophy stuff before. Of course, it doesn't always go that way, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that some of the guests that I have have never actually done this before and they're maybe not used to. I don't teach freshmen seminars that often, but I'm always trying to sort of challenge people and push them more in that direction. One thing that makes a difference with my podcast, I guess, is that since it's chronological, I mean, it's a history of philosophy podcast, right? So it started with old stuff and is moving steadily, but very slowly towards the present. And so I usually assume that the majority of the audience, if they're listening to a conversation between me and a guest, most of them have probably heard the previous episodes. So they kind of have some background knowledge. So that's why I tell them to think about it in terms of talking to an undergraduate is like, as it were, in the middle of a course. Yeah, that makes sense. But the point is that they're not talking to another specialist on SCOTUS or something like that. In a way, I feel like my intended audience member is basically me 20 years ago. When I was in college, I studied cinema studies and linguistics. I did maybe one or two philosophy classes, but I basically discovered philosophy after college and it was just like fun and interesting. It sucked me in. I started doing fun background reading in it. And this is exactly the kind of thing that I would have loved for there to be at that time when I was learning about this field, which I eventually decided to formally study. But there was a long period of just general kind of curiosity leading up to that. Yeah, I didn't have any real formal academic background in philosophy. I mean, I took intro logic, so that's not really a normal philosophy class, but I only took one normal philosophy class besides intro logic. So I don't know. Maybe we all make the podcast that we wish we could listen to. That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, it's one of these things where if my show existed in the space, I wouldn't be making it. I made the show that I wanted to exist in the space. And if somebody took it over, I think I'd be fine with that. They did it better and they did it well. And I feel, oh yeah, there's this really nice story driven show that incorporates philosophy and it reaches a wider audience. They do it better than me. I think that's great. One thing I want to say when I'm listening to everybody speak is I think that I, and maybe Maisha feels this way, and I think Matt has already expressed that he's felt this way. I've been surprised that there have been professional people listening to the show. When you go and there are academics and colleagues that are like, oh yeah, I listen to every single show. I was definitely surprised. I didn't expect that. My guess is that actually, it turns out we maybe should be pitching all of philosophy at the level that we're doing it at, where our intention is. Because it just turns out, even professionals, yeah, I'd rather listen to that than somebody who's talking about the objection to the objection to the objection to the thing that is in the literature. So maybe all along we're overestimating how much the field itself wants to be super niche. I listened to all three of your podcasts for fun, actually. And I have to admit that I don't usually read published philosophy for fun. Maisha, I think you wanted to say something and then Matt did. Yeah, I find what you just said to be hilarious. So let me just try to get my mind together. Yeah, I'm just thinking about what Barry was saying. And in some ways he have just contributed to a larger argument about should we even be calling what we're doing public philosophy in some kind of way. But that's another discussion for another time. But I think one of the things as Matt and Barry is talking, it made me think about, especially as we've been talking about audience, they kind of alluded to creating a podcast that you wish you would have had 20 years ago or you wish it exists today. And there's no doubt that for me, and I know we're going to talk about this in a little bit as a black woman philosopher, when I tell people that that's what I am, they are like, repeat what you just said, what are you? And so I think for a lot of, you know, I'm thinking about young black kids, particularly who thought that philosophy is what Socrates and Plato did and could not imagine that there would be a black woman with dreadlocks that is doing that professionally. So in some way I do want to amplify that there are individuals that's doing this kind of thinking for a living. And in some ways you can do. And it's not just a black woman, right? As I mentioned, I mean, I talked to that when I mean diverse, I mean diverse in content, but diverse in bodies, diverse, et cetera, et cetera. I want that to be very clear that yes, we're talking about these particular issues, but there are different, a variety of people and diverse people who are approaching these questions. And so philosophy is not something that only a certain body is able to do, but we all can engage this practice. And that's, that's hopefully what I wish existed 20 years ago, as I was contemplating being a philosopher or not. I mean, we talk about representation, but I think it's a little bit more than that, but I want to present that to audience members as well. Is that the thinking behind the opening question that you posed to your guests? Because you often, or you, I guess you always asked at the beginning, how did you get, you asked your guests how they got into philosophy. And I guess subtext there is even that you're the kind of person that people assume doesn't do philosophy. How did you get into philosophy? Right. So here's the interesting thing. I don't even think that's a question that's based on diversity. I think messages are just like, how in the hell did you do, decide to do this in general? So even if I was a white man, I would still ask, because I think that's what audience members are wondering. Why this? What is it about this that got you interested in this? And would you be able to get a PhD for a year? I mean, the joke, I remember the joke in college was, if you're a philosophy major, you don't make any money. And business majors make all the money. So they were just wondering, why were we philosophy majors? Like, what are you doing? And for my mom, she was okay with it. I mean, I'm first generation. So it's like, as long as you are in school. And so I think for lots of people, I mean, they don't know that this is a live profession for one, but I think it's important for individuals to know our story of why we decided to get into this. Because one of the things that I find, hey, I think all of us are born philosophers. As kids, we are so intellectually curious. We think about philosophical questions a lot. I think we lose that as we grow up. And I think that question about your journey into philosophy, in some ways, I'm hoping that people will be able to connect to that. Even if they didn't make the decision, they can connect to that. That's why I ask it. Right. Okay. That sounds like a good reason. Maisha, I think your podcast absolutely wins the award for having introduced me to the greatest number of people and topics that I'd never heard of before in the profession. And I feel like I'm on the lookout in the profession for interesting stuff. Well, thank you for that, Matt. I appreciate it. I definitely agree with that. So actually, as long as you're talking to Matt, let me ask you something that's related to what Maisha was just saying, which is if you have an interview based podcast, then the obvious most important question that you need to answer week by week is who you're going to interview. And in my case, that's usually not that hard a choice, or at least I have a very constrained set of options because I need to interview specialists about whatever historical period I've gotten up to just now. So I'm usually choosing between a fairly small number of people who work on, you know, Ficino or whatever. Back before the pandemic, hopefully by the time this is released, the pandemic will be over. But at the moment, we're still in the middle of it. And it's been a year since I could interview anyone in person. But before that, I always tried to actually sit with the person in the same room. And so that was another constraint. So basically, the guests that I interviewed were people who I could get at who were specialists. But I mean, you've got the whole world to choose from. So especially now. So how do you choose whom to interview? Yeah, you could consider it kind of like an embarrassment of riches, given how many interesting people there are. One constraint that I'm under is what you mentioned, which is I do all my interviews in person. So that does in itself limit to either people that I know who are like around, or people who are coming through town for whatever reason, I can sort of snatch them up now and again. And I also sometimes I'll travel, you know, go on a vacation somewhere, you know, have to do an interview with somebody I want to talk to and have to have a vacation there. But yeah, it's mainly just guided by whatever topics I think are interesting. Yeah, I feel actually very fortunate to know a lot of people who, at least in my estimation, are very interesting and have things to say about stuff that you haven't heard before. I don't know, it's kind of a math-centric process of selecting guests. One thing I did want to mention, because in relation to your earlier question about like, how does this relate to the philosophy profession? I feel like a lot of the philosophy profession is focused on objections. Objections, counterarguments, counterexamples, and sort of the back and forth of that. At least I personally find that, I mean, if the goal and objection is to like deliver as zing or whatever, then okay, fine, you know, you can publish an article and then forget about it. But if the goal of mounting an objection is to really better understand the topic and like maybe be shown to be wrong, I think it's much more interesting to talk to the person about their view. So another thing I'll often do is try to find people who've defended views that I find just sort of questionable and talk to them about it to learn more about it myself. And in almost every case, I come away having changed my mind about whether the position was bunk or not. I usually at least come away thinking, yeah, actually there's some pretty good reasons to favor this idea. It's not as ridiculous as I thought going in. It's always a humbling experience. Like when you're sitting there face to face. Often when I'm in a journal, you know, a philosophy journal, I'm reading an objection to something, I'm like, I want to hear you say that to their face. Actually, one reason I asked you the question is because I sometimes wonder whether you've deliberately chosen guests who have strange views. Part of that is just personal, you know, people you hang out with. Yeah, right now we know what's going on is the people who tends to be in the same room as how strange views. And Barry, what about you? I mean, I guess that in your case, you've got this story that you're trying to tell. So then you'd be on the lookout for someone who can address specifically the question about whatever philosophical topic it is that's relevant to your story in a given episode, right? Sometimes it's like that. It's like that maybe 10, 15 percent of the time. So it's like that I might want to do a story on, you know, so this past season, just because it's on my mind. Let's say I wanted to do a story on a particular element of criminal justice reform. So one of the things that I looked at was mens rea reform. So this is how do you formulate a state of mind requirement in law? And there has been a there was a dispute about that in Congress. Maybe I'll do a story about that and I'll look up a philosopher who's written about mens rea. And I did do that. So it was Gideon Yoffie did that. But that's the exception. The norm usually is that I come across a piece of philosophy first that I think might have a connection to a story. And I reverse engineer it. I find the story from the philosophical work. So what might be an example of that? Oh, my God, there's so many. So an example of that might be I'll talk to somebody who has certain views about immortality, a personal identity and immortality, that we can't rule out the possibility of immortality for various reasons. And they wrote some advanced paper on it. And it's just, okay, I'll go talk to you. And then it's a challenge to me. Like, how do I find a story that connects with this? If it turns out to be a good conversation and an interesting view that I think would push a lot of buttons and so on. Is there a story I can find? Then it's the journalism side. And it's like, okay, now I have to find a story. I ended up finding people who have the genuine, sincere belief that they're the reincarnation of other people, for instance. Right. Or Nick Riegel wrote an essay about YOLO, you know, sort of this existentialist philosophy, analytic philosophy. And I was like, well, what the hell am I going to do with that? Right. And so, like, it took me about nine months to find a good story of people who live by that principle. Something like that. Right. So 85% of the time it's the philosophy comes first and then doing this search for story that will grip people to think about the philosophical issue. That comes second. Yeah. Just to give people an idea of how well that can work. I always listen to podcasts when I'm running. And I know that a podcast of that was particularly good when I can remember where I was running. So I actually know exactly where I was running when the person started talking about their reincarnation and connections. Oh, it's such a weird... Personal identity theory. Yeah. It's a memorable one. Definitely. By the way, we should tell people that YOLO stands for You Only Live Once. That's right. So Carpe Diem. Right. Maisha, you already said something about this before, but do you want to add anything about how you go about choosing your guests? It varies per season. And I must admit, social media has exposed me to so many different philosophers that I didn't know of before. And so that kind of exposed me to their work. And so as soon as I hear someone or hear that they've written something that I've just kind of marked that down. So I usually record in early spring. And now it's the case that I release them all together as opposed to monthly, like I used to do in the first couple of years. And so I usually just write that person's name down, remember that this is a topic that will be very interesting to discuss. But it also depends on the season. I think there was one season in which I think I was just tired of men in the professions. I decided I'm doing a whole season with just women. Right. So a lot of the content was around those kinds of issues. And because I got a project I'm working on, this season is really going to focus more on the moral side of things and the moral psychology side of things. So it all depends what the season is and the work that I run up against before I do recordings in the spring. Maybe something else we could talk about is the political side of the podcasts. My podcast, I would say, has a perhaps quiet political agenda. It covers philosophy in diverse cultures. And, you know, we've done the Indian philosophy podcast. We're now doing Africana philosophy. But I think that the political themes in your podcast are, that is Maisha's podcast, are quite overt. As you mentioned, a lot of the time that's the explicit topic that you're discussing. And although in general, I think that's not true of HiFi Nation, as Barry said, there's a whole season on criminal justice reform, which sort of law and order style works its way through every stage of the criminal justice process. So you have prosecution, police, jails, etc. And so I wanted to ask both of you to comment on that. So do you think that philosophy podcasts have a lot of potential or particular, like surprising potential for what they can achieve in the political domain? Or is it just because that's what you're interested in more? If I was focused explicitly on what we consider moral philosophy, you know, we have moral lives and so my answer would be kind of the same, right? I think our lives are multifaceted. And I think particularly when it comes to value theory in general, I mean, just clearly kind of relate to our lives that I think you'll have a similar impact on the political domain. So I don't want to give that much importance to the political. I mean, I would say I'm being biased here, right? I'm a social political philosopher and very interested at the intersection of moral psychology of those particular things. And so but I think because we live political lives, talking about political topics just seems to have, it has relevance because that's that's kind of what we experience here. But I think the same relevance could be the case in other dimensions. People who are religious or spiritual, etc. Well, like also benefit from a different kind of philosophy or general philosophy topic. So I would say it depends if you're into politics or where the political stuff is going on, interested in that kind of thing. It's going to have the import for you. So I don't think it's strictly confined to politics or the political philosophy in general. What about you, Barry? Yeah, one thing I like to tell my students is that not all of our political problems are philosophical, but some of them are. With respect to criminal justice, which a lot of people are thinking about nowadays, not all of our criminal justice problems are philosophical. In fact, most of them aren't. But some of them are. And so I think my goal is to reveal that some of the problems and some of the particular experiences that people like to think a lot about. I did a whole episode on solitary confinement, the story of one man in solitary confinement. But what about it? Not all of the problems of solitary confinement and the policies of solitary confinement are philosophical, but there might be some that are. And so what I'd like to do in the show is to examine the ones that are right to connect them to the other problems. So there's a lot of justifiable discussion about the history of our criminal justice system and the penal system and its connection with American history, particularly about race. I think that those are the primary problems and not all of the issues there are philosophical, but some of them are there, too. So in my show, for the people who haven't thought about the parts of the political life that are philosophical, I'd like to introduce them to that. And then for the people who have thought about the philosophical issues, I want them to see how much depth philosophical thinking has got to with respect to those issues. So, you know, this is abstract, but something like, should we ever punish at all? That opens up the question of what the goal of punishments should be. The connection with punishment and the moral emotions, the kind of thing that Maisha thinks about in her professional life, her professional side, are the kinds of things that I think lend itself to be part of the discussion in the public sphere. But it's at a level that's just a little bit deeper than what is the discourse in magazines and an existing public radio. So you will get to the discussion of the historical, sociological issues in criminal justice. The philosophical ones, they haven't gotten there yet. And I think of my role on my show is to inject those into the discussion as well, not to pretend that philosophy has the solution to all of these problems, because it doesn't. But that there are a subset of the problems that are philosophical and that philosophers have thought a lot about. I think particularly for me now that I'm thinking about it as Barry speaking, I noticed that particularly when I'm talking about political issues or let's just say philosophical ideas in relationship to politics, I'm always I notice that I'm always convinced that after talking about these issues in a philosophical way, the last question that I usually pose is more of a question of praxis. Because it's something about political philosophy where I think those moments in which I've descriptive projects are important. But being that, you know, our political climate is the way that it is. The question is not necessarily what should we think and then think that thinking is sufficient here. But I'm also interested in the question of given that we've thought about this for the last 40 minutes, what do you suggest that we do? And so I do notice that when I am specifically talking about issues dealing with political philosophy, that it's not just the content of philosophical ideas that I'm interested in. But I think about the listener saying, hey, I've learned a lot. But political philosophy, it seems that it compels me to do something. So what should I do or what should I stop doing? And so I noticed that I challenge guests to kind of engage in the prescriptive because I'm never really content with just talking about political philosophy as if talking about it is sufficient. Yeah, I think something I like about your podcast that I think a lot of the even published work in this field sort of revolves around extremely nuanced. And insightful analyses of the problem, whatever the problem is. So it might be racism or sexism, for example, or, you know, the way trans people are treated. But you also want to know, well, how can how do we address the problem? And I think that seems right to me that merely understanding the problem in a very deep way might not be enough. There's also the question of what to do instead. Matt, so obviously you don't have it's probably not even like the dominant theme in your podcast, political philosophy, but you certainly have had plenty of guests on who talk about ethical, political and social philosophy. So how do you think about this and its role in your own series? I want to actually mention two things. So one is there's this economist, Tyler Cowen, who's been sort of an intellectual and moral mentor to me over the past couple of years. And one thing he said to me about maybe like two years ago was something like one of the things he liked about elucidations is that don't make it too political. So the first thing I want to say is I'm still trying to figure out what he meant by that, because I have no idea and I had no idea then. Anyway, that's kind of fun. By the way, he has a great podcast himself. I don't know if you've listened to conversations with Tyler. Like I've heard the Lithuanian avant garde filmmaker Jonas Mikas said in an interview once that if you're a Bohemian artist living the artist lifestyle, whether you like it or not, you're a political subversive. Because you are just in your very like day to day existence, challenging the basic assumptions of your society of, you know, whatever, working the tedious nine to five. And I think something similar applies to podcasting. I think just doing a philosophy podcast is like a strike back against a lot of the dominant ideology, the discipline, a lot of the elitism and classism of the discipline where it's like, we're the smarty pants experts over here and you're the dumb dumbs over there. We're doing kind of, you know, medium where we're trying to reach out to everybody, not just the quote unquote smart experts within the context of the discipline. I think the discipline skews heavily towards hyper, hyper, hyper specialization where, you know, it's like, I just work on like Leibniz's philosophy from this year, but I don't know anything about Leibniz's philosophy from the next year or whatever, whatever. And just like, you know, uh, like acknowledging that it's possible to be interested in the whole thing and trying to capture the whole thing, I really think is some kind of rebellion against this like hyper specialization where nobody in a philosophy faculty ever talks to each other about what they're doing. And they basically don't even consider the same field. I think I would like to speak up though, a little bit for this might be controversial in this particular group of people, but I'd like to speak up a little bit for the hyper specialized specialists. Yeah. Don't let me, don't let me get away with that. Yeah. Because I mean, I have to say that I guess most of what I read to draw on for writing my podcast is hyper specialized research literature. I mean, just to take the example of what I'm reading about right now, and this will give people an idea of when we recorded this. So at the moment I'm preparing to write an episode about Galileo. So I'm reading articles and books in particular about how Galileo's early scientific work was influenced by the philosophical debates that were going on at the school of Padua in the late 16th century. And I promise you that this is not stuff that you could just sort of hand to everyone. They would think it's interesting. I mean, it's, I have to concentrate to read it and get something out of it. So, I mean, I'm glad that that's there because it's really, that's the material that I'm trying to distill as, as Maisha also said earlier, that there's a kind of translation process where we're taking something that's maybe aimed at a narrow specialist audience and putting it before a broader audience in a way that is accessible. And after all, I mean, even though, of course I agree that it's nice if podcasters get credit for doing podcasts. It's not like every academic philosopher needs to have a podcast. Right? Like, of course that stuff is necessary. And we, that's why we're in the field. The point is that the fact that if everybody just did that, it would just be as just as harmful for philosophy as if everybody just did a podcast. Right? Because if everybody just does that, which is sort of what was happening before any of us started doing any of this, right, it would just be seen by the public rightfully as a super elite thing where it doesn't matter at all to their lives. And why should their tax dollars be subsidizing people who are writing 25 epicycles of infinite coin flips and decision theory, which I love. But, you know, we don't need 5000 papers on that. Yeah, I guess that I agree with that. So what I would say is that it's sort of two sides of a coin or to expand your coin metaphor, or, you know, two or maybe a symbiotic relationship. And it's certainly true that the internet has just given us the ability to complement what was going on in this highly specialized kind of philosophy in a way that wasn't that easy before. I mean, you had to basically get someone to invite you onto TV or the radio or something like that and give you space to talk about philosophy. Let me ask a couple of other things before we wrap up. So one thing that has actually just occurred to me while we're discussing this is to what extent doing a podcast has actually affected what you do on the in the other side of your philosophical activities, like your own philosophical research, for example. I mean, apart from the fact that you wind up spending a lot of time doing podcasting, so it's harder to find time for other tasks. Would you say that the podcasts that you produce have actually made you see things or get interested in topics that you wouldn't otherwise have been working on, for example? For me, absolutely. I don't think since I started the show, I have gone back. I have a little bit to things that I was working on prior, but most of the new things that I've worked on have been more expertly specialized versions of issues that were raised on an episode that I wanted to go more in depth into. I wanted to put on the Philosopher's Hat and develop things that came out of producing particular episodes. So for me, absolutely. The very first episode I ever made and released turned into a paper that's in a peer reviewed journal. Right. Okay. So actually that's a meiotic relationship even exists in your own life. Right. Matt and Maisha, what about you? My audience can't see this, but Maisha is very clearly pondering this. Yes, I am. I'm finding it to be a difficult question. So I'm going to try to answer it as best as I can. As you were answering the question, I just kept thinking about how I get the opportunity to, you know, given that they say yes, to talk to philosophers that I wouldn't typically talk to or encounter on a day to day basis and how much of a privilege that is. We can basically talk about their work. I mean, in some ways they're being like a tutor for me for about an hour. And this is most definitely the case as a graduate student. I mean, you're inviting these professors and they're taking time out to have a conversation with you. So in some ways, I think for me, I mean, as far as translating to like my everyday life, first of all, I realize I've learned so much. And I've learned it at the feet of these individuals in a very different context than it would be professionally given to me, whether that's through a paper, whether that's given a talk. I mean, this one on one is totally different. It's more intimate. And so I'm able to learn something in a very different way from these individuals. And wow, what a privilege to do that. Right. So it's no doubt that I have taken what I've learned from those interviews, not only into my work, but also just into my day to day life. But I've also learned, I mean, like I said, I started this when I was in grad school, also learn kind of the the grace that was shown to me, the respect that was shown to me and people willing to do this and how they continue willing to do this. Just shows me how how important it is to support each other in the field as colleagues, how it's important to be gracious to individuals, no matter what rank they're in. And so I've learned just basic respect and collegiality and the given of your time and how valuable that is and the same grace and gifts that they gave to me. I'm all the more challenged in a lot of ways to do that for others. So in addition to learning a lot and being able to apply that to my professional life, but also learn a lot morally and ethically and as just what being a good colleague is all about and wanted to share that with other people as well. Actually, that's something I've also experienced that I mean, not only the people who come on to do interviews and obviously sort of donate their time because they don't get really anything out of it. But so, for example, when I'm about to embark on a new period in the history of philosophy, to make a long story short, what I do, I try to come up with a potential list of topics to cover or figures and topics and movements to cover. And then I will email it to some colleagues who work in the field, like work on Renaissance philosophy or whatever it is. And it's amazing. I mean, I've never had it fail that they send back detailed responses, suggestions of other things I might cover. And I think actually Miss maybe shows that people are perhaps more favorably disposed towards these kinds of projects than we might think, that when they're given an opportunity to actually help, they tend to do it. I think that's really great. Matt, did you want to weigh in on this as well? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I really agree with that last point, though, like I feel like, you know, there's so many people, you know, they've worked on some obscure figure their whole career. And like, this is a chance actually for like a whole wide new audience actually learn about it. So, yeah, I think, I think there's a really cool thing happening in your show where you like mobilize all this work that's been going on in the background. We're not sure exactly why, but like, you know, maybe this is part of why. Yeah. But yeah, so in terms of like the research question, absolutely. My podcast is how I do my research. I prefer to do my research. So whenever I was interested in learning about some new topic on my dissertation, I go try to find somebody to interview about it. It's much more interesting to me than just going through the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on that topic and like doing the lit review, but I mean, you have to do some of that obviously. But if I really want to like feel my way into like, what is a live burning issue that like needs to be answered? That's the kind of thing I get out of conversations with people rather than engagement with books. You know, I can't object to a book. I can't ask a book questions. And my dissertation is absolutely littered with either references to research that I've discussed on my podcast or stuff that's like come out of that based on a follow up. I have a little bit in my dissertation where I talk about the invention of the adjective, which I learned about on your podcast, for example, in whenever that was 500 AD. I can't remember now. I have a bit where I talk about the notion of virtue as a skill, which I got from Julianus when I had her on my show. Anyway, there's everything that I've done in philosophy has been kind of through and through the work I've done on my podcast. I don't draw any distinction really between my research, the podcast, my teaching. It's all a giant big blur of everything, mutually influencing everything else. I suppose one thing then that all four of us could testify to is that if you want to learn a lot about a lot of different areas of philosophy, doing a podcast is a great way to do it. Yes. Just to wrap up one last question. Obviously, a lot of people are interested in podcasting. And so I wanted to ask each of you if you were going to give just one piece of advice to someone who was thinking about starting their own podcasts, maybe on philosophy, maybe on something else. What would it be? Let's see who wants to go first. I'll go quickly. I think people underestimate the time that it takes to produce even one episode. And I'm talking about, let me rephrase that in this way. The time that it takes to produce a good episode. There's a lot of research that goes behind it. So you have to be willing to take that time. And then actually the actual conversation and also editing. There's a lot of time that goes into this. And so you have the issue of time and then consistency. And I think recognizing the time and the need to be consistent. I mean, we're all creative to some certain kind of extent. We're all technologically capable to some certain extent. We're all smart to some certain extent. But to kind of do this thing, I think people totally underestimate the time that's required and the consistency. If you want to build up an audience to continue to provide a resource to that audience, that requires consistency when you don't feel like it, when you have other things that you want to do or that you need to do. I think if you come in knowing that the time that you're going to need to invest in this and you're willing to invest that time and that you're willing to be consistent and this is a good format for you. But if you think it only takes 30 minutes, you can just fly by night and you're going to want to do this for the next 10 years. I mean, I think that's not necessarily, that's not the case. Think again. Yeah. Think again. Yeah. Barry? If you want to make narrative type audio, be prepared to spend two to 300 times more time than what is and would you end up producing. Right. So for every 45 minutes, expect to spend two to three months working on that thing for narrative type stuff. If you don't want to do narrative type stuff, like you just want to do interview, don't underestimate that too. Yes. That's right. So I have two pieces of advice. One is if you are driven to make audio, make it, go ahead and do it. Don't dither around and think that it's going to take, you don't know anything about editing. You don't know anything about microphones. All the technical stuff is not anywhere close to the biggest issues you'll face. Right. The technical stuff is nothing. It's going to be the actual intellectual work, but if you're going to do it, do it. Don't hesitate to do it. And then the second thing I would say is don't build your own thing. If you want to write, you don't decide I'm going to start my own magazine. Right. That's not the first thing you decide to do. That's what starting a podcast is. Essentially do something for other people, make stuff and pitch it to your other favorite shows. That might be a good way to start at this point. Yeah. At this point with 500,000 podcasts out there, you're going to have a hard time starting your own thing fresh and getting an audience for it. But if you tap into somebody else's audience and you like it and you can make stuff, do that and then go from there. That's great advice. Actually, what you said about the audio reminds me of a conversation I have with people often about learning Arabic, where they say, oh, like, how do you deal with that alphabet? You know, like reading from right to left. And then I always say, so here's the thing about Arabic. It's incredibly difficult in every single way, except the alphabet. That's exactly what I say about everything. Yeah. Yeah. You can learn the alphabet in a weekend. The rest of it, you will need the rest of your life. Yes, exactly. My experience. Matt, do you have a piece of advice for our listeners? I don't know if I could top the advice that's been given so far. Also, I think I'm somewhat influenced by Agnes Callard's anti-advice position. Maybe I'll just sort of reiterate Mahesh's initial advice, which is like, try to come up with a modest game plan where it's going to be, where you err on the side of it's really easy to do this consistently. So maybe just take a personal example. So I started my podcast with my then roommate at the time, Mark Hopwood. He said, well, how often do you think, you know, given you're doing a PhD and blah, blah, blah, other stuff going on in your life, how often do you think you're going to be able to put out a show? And I said, uh, probably about every two weeks, he'd made some tests I've done, you know, and then he said, okay, so we'll double that. Aim to put it out every four weeks. And maybe that gives you a safe buffer. I'm not going to stand by those exact numbers, but like some sort of calculation like that, where you're like, what's the longest it could take me to do this and then double that or triple that or whatever. Yeah, I'm a big believer in consistency. And I mean, not only in quality, but also in terms of when it appears. I've been putting my podcast out once a week since it started, which was a mistake, but, uh, but, you know, I committed to that and I don't, I don't know how long it's going to take. I don't, I don't want it to come out a day late. I want it to come out Sunday morning because I know from being a podcast listener that the podcasts I listened to are part of my routine. Right. So I want to know that it's there from my Monday morning run, let's say. And so I want people who are up to date with my podcast to get it when they can expect it. And I think, you know, if you have a season approach like Barry and Maisha do, then that's another way of thinking about consistency. But podcasts that just kind of come out whenever the host feels like it, that drives me crazy. And that sort of gives me a reason to not listen, to be honest. Okay. Is there anything else anyone wants to add before we say goodbye and disappear back into the ether where we came from? I want to mention, this is the only time I've been on a podcast where every other person on the podcast has at one point been a guest on my show. So that's just, that is true. That is true. Amazing. That is really good. So this is like the, the ultimate confluence. That's right. The sedations. All right. Well, that's a good note to end on. So thank you to all three of you. I was certainly very strongly encouraged listeners to check out their podcasts. There are other good philosophy podcasts, of course, but these are three of the best. So check them out and thank you for listening to my podcast, which as you know, is called the history of philosophy without any gaps.