Hi-Phi Nation

By Slate Podcasts

Society & Culture Philosophy

What's Hi-Phi Nation about?

Hi-Phi Nation is philosophy in story-form, integrating narrative journalism with big ideas. We look at stories from everyday life, law, science, popular culture, and strange corners of human experiences that raise thought-provoking questions about things like justice, knowledge, the self, morality, and existence. We then seek answers with the help of academics and philosophers. The show is produced and hosted by Barry Lam of UC Riverside.

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LAST EPISODE

Rise of the Music Machines

05.16.2023

On this show we explore three different AI and machine-generated music technologies; vocal emulators that allow you to deep fake a singer or rapper’s voice, AI-generated compositions and text-to-music generators like Google Music LM and Open AI’s Jukebox, and musical ...

Hi-Phi Nation episodes:

05.16.2023 Rise of the Music Machines On this show we explore three different AI and machine-generated music technologies; vocal emulators that allow you to deep fake a singer or rapper’s voice, AI-generated compositions and text-to-music generators like Google Music LM and Open AI’s Jukebox, and musical ...
05.09.2023 Effective Altruism and its Critics Curtis is setting aside a large chunk of money to donate to charity, and it is up to us to persuade him where he should donate it. Luckily, philosophers, economists, and the nonprofit world have been thinking a lot about ...
05.02.2023 The Problem with Gig Work Willy and Heidi were both gig workers for Shipt, the fast-delivery app for groceries or same-day shopping. In 2020, they both realised: the pay algorithm had changed. Now, they couldn’t tell what a job would pay, or whether it would ...
04.25.2023 Love in the Time of Replika We explore the lives of people who are in love with their AI chatbots. Replika is a chatbot designed to adapt to the emotional needs of its users. It is a good enough surrogate for human interaction that many people ...
04.18.2023 Living in a Zoopolis A zoopolis is a future society that philosophers envision where wild, domesticated, and denizen animals have full political and legal rights. What would that look like? In this episode, we look at how animals were put on trial in medieval ...
04.11.2023 The Digital Future of Grief When Justin’s mom was diagnosed with cancer, he knew he wanted to keep talking to her after she died. So together they made an AI version of her, training it on her speech patterns and memories. Now he is scaling ...
04.04.2023 Season 6 Trailer Coming April 11, 2023, Season 6 of Hi-Phi Nation will look at the future; of work, of love and sex, life and death, our relationship with animals, creativity in music, and philanthropy. Stories include people trying to create digital avatars ...
02.12.2022 Cannibals In our final episode on monsters, we investigate why people who eat people are the funkiest people in the afterlife. We talk to a man who has actually eaten parts of other people, many times, about why he thinks consuming ...
01.22.2022 Zombies The second in a three-part series on monsters in philosophy. We trace the cultural history of zombies from voodoo folklore, George Romero films, and the zombies used in philosophical thought experiments. Folklore, film and philosophy seem to converge on the ...
01.08.2022 Vampires The first in a three-part series on monsters in philosophy. We trace the cultural history of vampires from Eastern European folklore to Twilight, and even look at the practices of real vampires, people who seek out and consume blood or ...
12.18.2021 Memorials When tragedy strikes an individual, a nation, or an entire people, artists and architects are tasked with designing a public display that memorializes the event and its victims. But how do you do that? In this episode, art historian and ...
12.04.2021 Life, Edited The first two gene-edited species meant to be introduced into the wild are currently in their final stages of approval, with trials already underway for the Oxitec mosquito, and the ESF American Chestnut. In this episode, we examine what these ...
11.27.2021 Hi-Phi Nation Presents: Decoder Ring, The Alberta Rat War Barry invites Willa Paskin of Slate's Decoder Ring podcast to talk about their recent episode, The Alberta Rat War, as a set up to next week's Hi-Phi Nation episode on genetic engineering. We then proceed to that episode. Rats live ...
11.20.2021 The Selfless Kidney Donor Penny Lane gave up months of wages and weeks of her life to have her kidney cut out and given to someone she never knew, and who may never thank her. She is one of about 200 people in the ...
11.06.2021 The Man of Many Worlds IV David Lewis steps off a plane from Australia in 2000 and falls seriously ill. In the final year of his life, he decides to take on Christianity, but does not live long enough to write a paper, leaving only his ...
10.30.2021 The Man of Many Worlds III In 1968, David Lewis decides that one truth can unify every theory he's had about the nature of the universe. It is the truth that every possible world is equally real. Lewis not only argues for this view, but devises ...
10.23.2021 The Man of Many Worlds II What was David Lewis like as a person? The consensus is that he did not know how to converse. At Swarthmore, David Lewis discovers he has a knack for philosophy and none at all with women, leading to a lifelong ...
10.16.2021 The Man of Many Worlds I David Lewis was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, who few outside of academia know much about. By the time of his death in 2001, he was the greatest systematic thinker in metaphysics since the Enlightenment. In ...
10.21.2020 Hi-Phi Nation Presents: Into the Zone (When We Were Cyber) Barry updates listeners on what to expect in Season 5 of the show, currently in production. In the meantime, he introduces you to Into the Zone, a Pushkin podcast by writer Hari Kunzru. This episode is about the time Hari ...
06.27.2020 Justice and Retribution A woman spends 40 years in and out of prison for shoplifting and finally gets a break from a judge in her late 50s. She uses the opportunity to abolish a jail and transform her city. This week we look ...
06.13.2020 The Loophole Two men committed a double murder in rural Maine in 1990. Only one pulled the trigger. The state prosecutor decided to try them separately, but that was a mistake, and both were acquitted. Then the Feds came in, and sentenced ...
06.06.2020 Punishment without End A teen-aged girl gets caught with a suitcase stuffed with powdered cocaine, and she comes before a federal judge. That judge learns that a felony conviction carries punishments for life for her. He embarks on a mission to get all ...
05.30.2020 Redemption in Solitary Erick Williams tells the story of how one bad night in the chow hall got him into solitary confinement at Walpole. The path out of solitary, and eventually out of prison, took another decade. On this episode, we look at ...
05.23.2020 Gender Justice On this episode, we look at feminist and progressive prosecution; how does a prosecutor balance the aims of prosecuting more gender-based crimes while also being sensitive to the problems of mass incarceration? We look at the story of one Maine ...
05.16.2020 The Informant This week we go inside investigative operations in NYPD internal affairs and in the war and drugs to look at the police use of discretion to selectively break laws in order to pursue the bad guys. One former FBI special ...
05.09.2020 Police Discretion Is a mobile home a home or a car? Is a car parked inside a home part of the home? The answer to these stoner philosophical questions determine the scope of police power. Over the last 100 years, the Supreme ...
05.02.2020 Hi-Phi Nation Plus: Mens Rea versus Moral Luck In this Slate Plus segment, Barry is joined by Sarah Lustbader to discuss the issues raised in Episode 1: Criminal Minds. Sarah expresses skepticism about the significance of mens rea in ordinary prosecution of street crimes, Barry uses the opportunity ...
05.02.2020 Criminal Minds One place where law and morality are supposed to agree is that there should be no crime without a criminal mind, what is called “mens rea” in criminal law. But there have been a proliferation of crimes that do not ...
04.16.2020 Sponsored: Delivering Extraordinary Experiences with Customer Experience Expert Liliana Petrova When it comes to closing a deal, generating client referrals, or getting repeat business, understanding how to elevate the customer’s experience can make all the difference, and can often be a philosophical approach. So how do you go above and ...
04.11.2020 Season 4: Crime and Punishment (Trailer) From writing criminal laws to rights denied to the formerly incarcerated, every single stage of the criminal justice system runs on unquestioned assumptions about right and wrong, responsibility and excuse, freedom, protection, and discretionary decision-making. This season of Hi-Phi Nation ...
06.22.2019 YOLO Apologetics Drake coined “YOLO,” short for “you only live once” in 2011, and then later apologized for all the douchiness it subsequently engendered. But the spirit is ancient, and cross-cultural, speaking deeply to the kind of decision-making that is supposed to ...
06.08.2019 The Illusionist Pyotr Tchaikovsky composed and conducted his final symphony in 1893. He died 9 days later, after having knowingly drunk an unboiled glass of water during a cholera epidemic. Deep into the symphony, Symphony no. 6, there is a paradoxical passage ...
05.25.2019 Uncivil Disobedience In Australia, vegan and animal liberation activism has recently become intense and disruptive, invading farms, restaurants, and city centers. They’re doing everything from rescuing animals to blocking traffic, and occupying steakhouses. Some argue that these new activists are needlessly victimizing ...
05.11.2019 For Women Only (pt. 2) In the 40 years since the events at Olivia Records, gender categorization seems to pop up sporadically in the mainstream press, leading to what sociologists Laurel Westbrook and Kristen Schilt call "gender panics," and then they disappear only to emerge ...
04.27.2019 For Women Only (pt. 1) It is currently very difficult to get your gender legally changed in the U.K, That might change. In recent months, philosophers have been drafted into making complicated and contentious arguments about what it is to be a man, woman, or ...
04.13.2019 Demons of Democracy Preschool kids get their first taste of democratic participation when they vote on their class name, and democratic private schools try to display the value of democracy by making kids vote on everything, even the school budget. Does it work ...
03.30.2019 Name of God (2019) A few days after the New Zealand Mosque massacre, Dr. Thaya Ashman heard about a woman who was too afraid to come out in public in her hijab for fear of being targeted. So Dr. Ashman had an idea to ...
03.16.2019 The Forever War This year will mark the 18th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, the forever war characterized by regime change, a surge, drawdowns, and then re-engagement across three Presidential administrations. We take a retrospective of the entire war, from the forgotten ...
03.02.2019 No Offense What if you could sue someone for calling you a racial slur? In the 90s, one country that always looked very similar to America decided to allow it, rolling back the rights to free speech in the interest of protecting ...
02.16.2019 Risky Business How many innocent people should we be allowed to arrest and jail in order to prevent a single dangerous person from being free? The Supreme Court has refused to answer this question, but algorithms have, and many courts across the ...
02.02.2019 (Bonus) The Battle over CSOCs On this bonus episode, I go into some of the history between the LAPD police commission and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, and feature some of the tape from the Central station CSOC protest that didn't make it into the ...
01.31.2019 The Precrime Unit Predictive policing technology is spreading across the country, and Los Angeles is the epicenter. A small group of LA activists are in a lopsided campaign against billions of dollars in city, federal, and Silicon Valley money using algorithms to predict ...
01.18.2019 Season 3 Preview After two successful seasons, philosophy in story form comes to Slate on January 31st, 2019. On Season 3, we look at stories of risk, experiments in democracy, the reality of social categories, illusions of the senses. Learn more about your ...
07.23.2018 Chamber of Facts Do people of opposing political parties believe in different facts? The mantra at the moment is that they do, because of media echo chambers, motivated reasoning, and ideological blindspots. But a more careful look reveals a different answer, with perhaps ...
06.19.2018 A Night of Philosophy Hi-Phi Nation stays overnight at the Brooklyn Public Library during the 2018 Night of Philosophy. From 7pm to 7am on a Saturday night, thousands of New Yorkers swarmed the central library for acrobats, musicians, and philosophy. Meanwhile, we present philosophy ...
05.30.2018 Willful Acts Army veteran Jim McKelvey applied for his VA benefits and was denied for willful misconduct. Thirty years later, Julie Eldred was sent to prison for a willful violation of probation. Both challenged, both got to a Supreme Court with the ...
05.01.2018 Creed and Credences Dave has been hunting for the one decisive piece of scientific evidence that will settle one of Christianity's most challenging questions. On this episode we look at two stories of people trying to reconcile their religious and empirical beliefs about ...
03.27.2018 The Self and Survival In ordinary life, it is usually not hard to know who you are and who you used to be. For a small group of children around the world, their knowledge seems to conflict with what modern science believes is possible. ...
02.28.2018 Cover Me Softly When Lori Lieberman was 19 years old, she went to a concert of a singer she didn't know, and ended up writing a poem that would become one of the greatest cover songs of all time. This week we are ...
01.23.2018 Freedom and Hostile Design Some acts of expression are awesome, while others suck, and one philosopher has a new theory about the difference. Using this theory as a guide, we look at some of the suckiest things that ever sucked in urban design, and ...

Older episodes

Hi-Phi Nation

What's Hi-Phi Nation about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Hi-Phi Nation episodes:

Rise of the Music Machines

Effective Altruism and its Critics

The Problem with Gig Work

Love in the Time of Replika

Living in a Zoopolis

The Digital Future of Grief

Season 6 Trailer

Cannibals

Zombies

Vampires

Memorials

Life, Edited

Hi-Phi Nation Presents: Decoder Ring, The Alberta Rat War

The Selfless Kidney Donor

The Man of Many Worlds IV

The Man of Many Worlds III

The Man of Many Worlds II

The Man of Many Worlds I

Hi-Phi Nation Presents: Into the Zone (When We Were Cyber)

Justice and Retribution

The Loophole

Punishment without End

Redemption in Solitary

Gender Justice

The Informant

Police Discretion

Hi-Phi Nation Plus: Mens Rea versus Moral Luck

Criminal Minds

Sponsored: Delivering Extraordinary Experiences with Customer Experience Expert Liliana Petrova

Season 4: Crime and Punishment (Trailer)

YOLO Apologetics

The Illusionist

Uncivil Disobedience

For Women Only (pt. 2)

For Women Only (pt. 1)

Demons of Democracy

Name of God (2019)

The Forever War

No Offense

Risky Business

(Bonus) The Battle over CSOCs

The Precrime Unit

Season 3 Preview

Chamber of Facts

A Night of Philosophy

Willful Acts

Creed and Credences

The Self and Survival

Cover Me Softly

Freedom and Hostile Design