Last episode, we talked about free speech, and this time, we sit down with Rebecca Lowe (Mercatus Center) to discuss the related but slightly different topic of speaking freely. Speaking freely: the thing you feel entitled to do when a superior says to you: “you may speak freely.” But although speaking freely is the phenomenon our guest is interested in characterizing, rather than trying to characterize it directly, her approach is to get granular about what it means not to speak freely. What ar...
May 01, 2026•40 min•Ep. 155
In the latest episode of Elucidations, Greg Salmieri (University of Texas) joins us once again, this time to discuss freedom of speech. Free speech talk has been in the air, on the internet, for the past decade. But what exactly is going on with freedom of speech? Do I have the right to criticize my alderman’s second term on my blog without getting thrown in jail? Do I have the right to publish cartoons that make fun of venerated religious figures without being physically attacked Do I have the ...
Feb 28, 2026•52 min•Ep. 154
In the latest episode of Elucidations, Sam Enright ( Progress Ireland , The Fitzwilliam ) instructs us in the delicate art of learning forever. If you’re one of those people who responds well to formal education, chances are you’ve spent 10-20 years of your life as a student. When you finally graduate, it can feel jarring, like you’re kissing all this efficient infrastructure for mastering difficult skills goodbye. How are you going to keep learning, without a teacher you can pester with questio...
Jan 02, 2026•43 min•Ep. 153
This time around, Matt talks to Luca Gattoni-Celli about why it’s so expensive to buy a house. In the 80s, people from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds were able to afford apartments and houses in places like New York City, San Francisco, or London. Now, on the other hand, even many wealthy people are getting priced out of the city. And indeed, the issue is no longer specific to urban areas: the problem of seemingly infinitely increasing real estate prices would appear to be creeping into ...
Nov 22, 2025•43 min•Ep. 152
Note: this episode was recorded in August of 2022. In the latest Elucidation, Matt talks to Witold Więcek about the difficulties that come up for researchers who would like to draw upon statistics. Lots of academic fields need to draw heavily on statistics, whether it’s economics, psychology, sociologym, linguistics, computer science, or data science. This means that a lot of people coming from different backgrounds often need to learn basic statistics in order to investigate whatever question t...
May 03, 2025•46 min•Ep. 151
In this episode, Matt sits down with Shruti Rajagopalan (Mercatus Center) to talk about what the future holds for India. We often have a tendency to think of the current economic and geopolitical situation as simply the way things are. Especially for people who grew up in the United States over the past 50 years, the fact that it is an economic and military superpower sorta feels set in stone. But in this episode, Shruti Rajagopalan encourages us to take the long view, regarding the current stat...
Aug 20, 2024•47 min•Ep. 150
In this episode, we are joined by Lainie Ross (University of Rochester Medical Center) and (once again!) Christos Lazaridis (UChicago Medicine), this time to talk about the different ways of defining death. In our previous episode with Christos, we talked about death and the vexed history of attempts to define it. Prior to the advent of modern life support technology in the 1950s, it was usually enough to check whether a person had a heartbeat and could breathe to determine whether they were dea...
Apr 14, 2024•42 min•Ep. 149
In this episode, Matt sits down with Christos Lazaridis (University of Chicago Medicine) to chat about what brain death is and whether brain death should count as, like, death death. Modern life support technology really hits its stride in the 1960s, allowing doctors to buy themselves more time to save their patients by connecting them to machines that can assist with breathing, blood oxygenation and/or heart pumping. But the flipside to that incredible technological breakthrough was that the me...
Oct 20, 2023•38 min•Ep. 148
In this episode, Matt talks to Gabriella Gonzalez about how basic concepts from the branch of math known as abstract algebra can help us simplify our computer programs and organize our thoughts. Algebra. That thing they make us do in school. What was that again? Oh yeah, that’s right; it’s where you get to manipulate equations containing variables. Like, if I have an equation that looks like this: 2⋅x = 16 Then I can divide both sides by two and get a new version where x stands alone, i.e. solve...
Jul 15, 2023•40 min•Ep. 147
In this episode, Matt sits down with Gaurav Vankataraman ( Trisk Bio ) to talk about how human memory is physically realized. Where do your memories live? In the brain, right? They’re, like, imprinted there somehow? We often think of memories as analogous with recordings, like when you do an audio recording and the air vibrations get translated into an electrical signal which reorients the magnetic particles on some tape. But is that really how it works? Is the brain some tape waiting to get rec...
Mar 30, 2023•40 min•Ep. 146
This episode, Matt and Joseph sit down with Andrew Sepielli (University of Toronto) to talk about metaethical quietism. His new book on the topic, Pragmatist Quietism , is out now from Oxford University Press. Click here to listen to episode 145 of Elucidations . Metaethical quietism is the view that ethical statements—or anyway, a large portion of the ethical statements we’re usually interested in—can’t be justified or disproved by statements from outside of ethics. There’s something autonomous...
Jan 21, 2023•40 min•Ep. 145
This episode, Matt talks to Christopher Beem (Penn State University) about how we can cultivate those skills that conduce to having a functioning democracy. His book on the topic, The Seven Democratic Virtues , is out now from Penn State University Press. The storming of the US Capitol Building in 2021 was an eyebrow-raising event, to say the least. It prompted historians, political scientists, and political philosophers to ask whether deep down, everything was going okay with our democratic sys...
Nov 20, 2022•38 min•Ep. 144
This episode, Matt Teichman talks to Mark Linsenmayer about alternative models of education. Mark is creator and host of the Partially Examined Life, Nakedly Examined Music, Pretty Much Pop, and Philosophy vs. Improv podcasts. He is also the author of the recent book, Philosophy For Teens. There’s going to college and there’s listening to podcasts. Both can give you a way to learn new things, so in that general sense, both can count as forms of education. Going to college has advantages over lis...
Oct 05, 2022•44 min•Ep. 143
In this episode of Elucidations, Matt sits down with Emily Dupree to learn about whether it’s rational or irrational to try to seek revenge. As a culture, we kind can’t decide what we think about revenge. Out of one side of our mouths, we talk a big game about letting bygones be bygones, about how revenge and retaliation lead to cycles of violence, and about how nothing good can really come of getting back at people. But acts of revenge, where clearly warranted, also have a visceral moral appeal...
Aug 02, 2022•36 min•Ep. 142
This time around, Matt sits down with Rob Goodman to talk about political eloquence. Goodman is the author of a new book on this topic called Words on Fire , which you can pick up a copy of wherever you like to get books. Can you think of the last time you saw someone give a rousing speech? They step up to the podium with throngs of onlookers staring at them. Somehow, rather than nervously scampering offstage or melting into a puddle, they speak off the cuff in a way that transfixes everyone lis...
Jun 13, 2022•35 min•Ep. 141
Intro philosophy classes often get stuck in a rut. Some philosophy classes go through a list of old dead people and try to understand excerpts from some of their most influential writings, over the course of a semester. Could be something like: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. Other types of intro classes go through a list of topics that contemporary philosophers feel are canonical and have students read papers on those topics. Could be something like: the problem of...
Apr 10, 2022•44 min•Ep. 140
This month, Jessica Tizzard (University of Tuebingen) makes her second appearance on Elucidations to talk to Matt about pregnancy. Human pregnancy is weird. Try talking to a reproductive endochrinologist about it, and you’ll soon find that there’s a lot we don’t really understand about it even at the scientific level. But even when it comes to thinking about pregnancy at the commonsense reasoning level, puzzles begin popping up the second you start trying to think about it systematically. Like, ...
Feb 13, 2022•32 min•Ep. 139
This month, Toby Buckle, host of the Political Philosophy Podcast, returns to talk about John Stuart Mill’s liberty principle! (Also sometimes called the ‘harm principle’.) The occasion for the episode is the recent release of Toby’s cool new book, What is Freedom?, which is out now from Oxford University Press. Get it while it’s hot! John Stuart Mill is probably one of the most influential intellectuals of the 19th century, having penned treatises on markets, logic, feminism, utilitarianism, an...
Jan 23, 2022•43 min•Ep. 138
This month, I talk to Bryan Caplan (George Mason University) about what a world without immigration restrictions could look like. The work discussed in this episode comes out of Bryan’s incredible non-fiction graphic novel, Open Borders , which I highly recommend checking out. Don’t let the comic-book-iness of it fool you; it is 100% accessible and entertaining, but it is also written at the level of detail you’d normally expect to see in a peer-reviewed research paper. One basic fact about the ...
Jan 02, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 137
This month, Yuezhen Li and I sit down with Christian Miller (Wake Forest University) to talk about how to be virtuous. Also known as how to be good. ‘Virtue’ is sort of an old-timey word. But the concept is still alive and well today, even though we tend to use different words for it. The idea behind a virtue is: there’s such a thing as being a good person and doing good things, and that there are different ways of being a good person and doing good things. For example, you can be good in the se...
Oct 25, 2021•42 min•Ep. 136
This month, Charlie Wiland and I sit down with Sara Protasi to talk about envy. Which she just came out with a whole book about! Awesome. Click here to download episode 135 of Elucidations . You might think that it’s pretty clear what envy is. Isn’t envy just when someone else has something you want, you don’t have it, and that makes you feel annoyed? Well, kind of—but there’s a little more to it. For example, you have to view yourself as similar to the other person in the relevant respect; as i...
Jul 15, 2021•38 min•Ep. 135
This month, Josh Kaufman and I talk to Claire Kirwin about whether things are objectively good or bad, or whether it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Professor Kirwin is a fan of peanut butter cup ice cream, and Josh and I are fans of mint chocolate chip. Is there an objective fact of the matter about whether either is good, or whether one is better than the other? Or are we all just expressing our preferences, i.e. doing nothing more than providing information about ourselves? Can goodness be ...
May 29, 2021•41 min•Ep. 134
This month, Agnes Callard and I talk to Aristotle about his philosophy, including his work on physics, biology, and ethics. Featuring an introduction by our awesome intern, Noadia Steinmetz-Silber ! Click here to download Episode 133 of Elucidations . Not everyone is familiar with Aristotle’s work today, but the case could be made that science, political theory, logic, ethics, and philosophy exist in their current form largely due to the precedent he set. That said, in this episode, Aristotle op...
Apr 04, 2021•45 min•Ep. 133
This month, we sit down with Rebecca Valentine (co-founder of Queerious Labs ) to talk about anarchism, feminism, tech culture, and creative hacking. Hack this, hack that. What is a hacker, anyway? In pop culture, it’s common to use the term ‘hacker’ as a synonym for ‘cybercriminal’—that is, a person who engages in illegal activity over a computer network, usually involving gaining access to something they shouldn’t. But if you’ve ever spent any time in the tech community, you’ll know that there...
Mar 02, 2021•46 min•Ep. 132
This month, Greg Salmieri (University of Texas at Austin) returns for his third appearance on Elucidations, this time to talk about doing right by yourself. What was the last thing you did? The last thing I did was pull a shot of espresso. I wouldn’t say I made coffee as an end in itself, even though I love the taste of the roast I just used. If I had to tell you the main reason I made a coffee, it was in order to speed along my transformation from groggy podcast host to awake podcast host. But ...
Jan 03, 2021•50 min•Ep. 131
This month, Long Dang and I sit down to talk to Jessica Tizzard (University of Connecticut, Storrs) about weakness of the will. You’re at a party hosted by a close friend. It’s been three hours since you got there, and the evening thus far has been chock full of scintillating conversation, a fun round of Charades followed by Assassins, first rate cocktails, and a dessert to die for. You’ve just now been invited to play one of your favorite games, which usually takes about 90 minutes to complete—...
Nov 22, 2020•36 min•Ep. 130
This month, Ben Andrew and I are joined by Nethanel Lipshitz (Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University) to talk about discrimination. If someone treats me unequally--that is, if they give other people a relative advantage but not me--am I the victim of discrimination? Our guest says yes. That is enough for me to count as having been discriminated against, and that is enough for it to be morally wrong. All fine and dandy. But then what's the big deal? The big deal is that the standard view in pol...
Sep 27, 2020•51 min•Ep. 129
One of the foundational ideas behind philosophical logic is that when you say something, that has further implications beyond the single thing you said. Like, if I think ‘every single frog is green’ and ‘Fran is a frog’, then I am committed to thinking that Fran is green. I don't have to have actually thought to myself or said out loud that Fran is green—I'm just required to believe that Fran is green, given that I thought the first two things, and if I fail to believe that, I've made some kind ...
Aug 16, 2020•41 min•Ep. 128
In this episode, Nic Koziolek (Washington University in St. Louis) returns to talk to me and Nora Bradford about self-consciousness. Self-consciousness, as philosophers use the term, is a word for when you know something about one of your own mental states. Like when I really enjoy some pizza and note that I'm enjoying it. Someone else might ask me: ‘Hey Matt, do you like that pizza?’ And I'm typically the best person to ask about that, which is a sign that I typically know whether I like the pi...
Jul 15, 2020•41 min•Ep. 127
Three philosophers. Eight head-scratchers. 50 minutes. In this episode, Agnes Callard, Ben Callard and I respond to the world's most awesome listener-recorded questions. A lot of people have the impression that philosophy is, first and foremost, an enterprise in which college professor types read books that no one can understand, then issue a response in the form of more books that no one can understand. It's not. Don't get me wrong—I love books. I'm constantly trying to talk friends and acquain...
Jun 11, 2020•48 min•Ep. 126
