The Free Mind Podcast

Benji Backer is the founder and Executive Chairman of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), which is the nation’s largest right-of-center environmental organization. He has been named to Forbes’ and GreenBiz’ 30 Under 30 lists, Fortune’s 40 Under 40, and the Grist 50. He is also the author of the book The Conservative Environmentalist, which has received praise from voices across the political spectrum, including Van Jones and Dave Rubin. We discuss the book, the ACC, and what it means to be a conservative environmentalist. 

Sam Abrams is a Professor of Politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a non-resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and a board member of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). He is the author of multiple books and numerous articles, in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among many others. He has written several articles over the past decade on the lack of political diversity in higher education and the challenges it causes. More recently, he has written about antisemitism on college campuses. We discuss both of these issues, as well as his views on what universities can do to address them.

Brandon Warmke is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, and the Spring 2024 Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy here at the Benson Center. He is co-author of several books including Grandstanding: The use and abuse of moral talk, Why it’s ok to mind your own business, and Conservatism, the basics, which will be published in 2024. We discuss his book, Why it’s ok to mind your own business, as well as the state of conservative academic and intellectual life.

Cory Clark is Executive Director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also Visiting Scholar in the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences. The Adversarial Collaboration Project brings together scholars who have contrasting views on important scientific questions to work out their differences through rigorous collaborations. It is based on the idea that viewpoint diversity produces better science. We discuss this project, as well as Dr. Clark’s other work on trust in academia, nuances in gender bias, and more.

Todd Zywicki is the George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law. He is also the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy here at the Benson Center. He previously served as Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law, Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Law & Economics in 2019, and Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. We discuss the rule of law, its importance to economic development and western civilization, and the threats it faces in our society today. 

Sasha Breger Bush is an Associate Professor of political science at the University of Colorado Denver, who studies international political economy, and the author of Derivatives and Development: A Political Economy of Global Finance, Farming, and Poverty. Prof. Bush has recently sounded the alarm on what she calls the whole world debt crisis. We discuss her work, as well as recent public debates about debt and deficits in the United States.  

Roger Pielke Jr. is a Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, who studies the politics of science and authors a popular Substack blog called The Honest Broker. Never one to shy away from controversy, Prof. Pielke has done high-profile research and writing on climate change and natural disasters, the origins of COVID-19, and the inclusion of transgender and intersex women in women’s sports. We discuss the relationship between science and politics and what can go wrong when science is politicized.

Alexandra Coţofană is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. Dr. Coţofană is a cultural anthropologist who studies a range of topics including the cultures of political elites. Our conversation focuses on one of her quite unique study topics: the role of beliefs in magic and the occult in the elite politics of Romania. 

Brad Wilcox is Professor of Sociology and Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a non-resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. We discuss two-way interactions between family structure and stability, socioeconomic outcomes, and culture in the U.S. context, and the important role families must play in any project of civic renewal. 

Smriti Mehta is a Ph.D. student in Psychology at the University of California Berkeley, and the co-chair of UC Berkeley’s new Heterodox Academy (HxA) Campus Community, which is dedicated to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement on their campus. I (Matt) co-chair a similar group at University of Colorado Boulder. We discuss what it’s like to start an HxA Campus Community, why it’s needed, what the hurdles are, and how we might overcome them. Smriti's podcast can be found here: Nullius in Verba | a podcast by Smriti Mehta and Daniël Lakens (podbean.com)