We wanted to talk about something else. But regardless, what matters is that we ended up here: what is positivism and interpretivism – and does that distinction even matter anymore to information systems research in the age of digital traces and computationally-intensive methods? And so this is how you end up with a debate about philosophy without any preparation whatsoever. As usual, the references to all the articles we mention are listed on http://www.janrecker.com/this-is-research-podcast/.