This episode of The Liberal Soul is all about video games. I am joined by my two longtime friends Justin and Matt to list our top five favourite video games. We also chat along the way about why we love video games, what our earliest memories of them are, what they have done for our lives, and much more. Thanks for listening to the show! 

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In this episode I discuss parts of the book The Conservative Sensibility by the American writer George Will. I wanted to branch out a little and read a book that is infused with Conservative philosophy to chew on. I especially was interested in Conservative philosophy that has no time for the modern manifestation of the alt right and QANON thinking; as well as a philosophy that self identifies as not needing theism. George Will manages to eschew both of those liabilities. In the book I talk about:

- The universality of human nature

- Natural Rights at the heart of the American founding - and the political philosophical backdrop to American life today is whether governments job is to secure rights for its citizens (Conservatism) or grant rights to its citizens (Progressivism)

- Natural Rights as a heuristic

- The three liberalisms in American political history

- Ignorance as an inevitable element is mass centralization

- Ingratitude as a function of intellectuals and bureaucrats

- Conservatism without Theism

- Living a flourishing life

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This is the second part of two on the book The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch. In this episode I discuss elements of the book such as:

James Madison as a harbinger for the Constitution of Knowledge, the Falibilist and Empirical rules, earned authority and credibility, the reality based community is not the only community, a lesson from wikipedia, innovation in the social and political world, being thick skinned, cancelling as performance, what to say, free expression as protecting minority rights, walking away and not taking the bait, and sticking to what the reality based community has found to be factually accurate. 

Thank you so much for listening to The Liberal Soul.

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This is part one of a two parter on the book The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch. This book is about how we socially gather knowledge, and how it is distributed and adhered to in what Rauch calls the reality based community. I conceived of this book as being related to the liberal soul in the idea that knowledge is about disconfirmation; thus is something we only have provisionally, but still with degrees of certainty. This formulation always allows for further work to be done without ever having a final goal of knowledge. 

In part one I discuss different backgrounds to Rauch's conception of the Consitution of Knowledge, and what it stands to give us in life (hint: knowledge, freedom and peace). Enjoy!

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For this episode I do a book that I wasn't even thinking of doing for this podcast before I started reading it. It's The Life Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. There were a number of points of this book that struck me as relevant to The Liberal Soul; so I jotted them down. In this episode I discuss: birthdays, seperation from a parent, unjust punishments, slavery and the Soviet Union, rock bottoms, bad faith actors, meritocracy and cheating.

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In this episode of The Liberal Soul I talk all things Ultimate Frisbee with my friends Tobias Gray and Nicole Perrin. We chat about our first encounters with the sport, the physicality of it, the many ways which it differs from other sports, the social and communal elements within it, and why we love to spend our free time engaged in Ultimate. 

This episode was a blast, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you enjoy The Liberal Soul you can find all episodes at this link:

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- Historicism, Fate, many examples of Free Will not existing, our thoughts on how this would shake up our lives, how a lack of Free Will could undermine our institutions, some personal anecdotes on the topic, and how Harris mis-emphasizes what people care about in this debate.

This episode was a ton of fun and I can't wait to have Christian back on the podcast. Please subscribe to the show on the podcast app of your choice to get new episodes when they are released. 

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Welcome to part two of my episodes on the book Letters To A Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens. In the continuation of the book, in this episode I talk about: being a self appointed thinker, how being a good friend sometimes means imposing yourself into your friends delusions, the universalism of people and how everywhere suffers from the narcissism of the small difference, how people everywhere just want the unquenchable sense of dignity, the uses and disuses of humor in dissidence, the next great goals for dissidents, and the importance of inspiration in mental and social life. Please see link for what I think is Hitch's most inspiring monologue: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaBfB-p9Cbg

Thanks again for listening to The Liberal Soul. If you are interested in the full catalogue, here is the link to that:  https://theliberalsoul87.libsyn.com/

Welcome to a new episode of The Liberal Soul. This is part one of a two parter on the book Letters To A Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens. In December 2021 it was the ten year anniversary of the death of Hitch. Because of the impact Hitchens had on my intellectual development, I wanted to do an episode(s) on him. Letters being his most philosophical book, it seemed the appropriate one. In part one I muse on ideas from the book such as: how contrarian is a slightly misleading word considering what this book is about, being principled over partisan, anti-scapegoating, the As If principle and its relationship to Highest Common Denominator, moral triage, don't go thereism, and standing up to a crowd.

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In this short bonus episode I meditate on why Christmas is such a wonderful holiday beyond its religious affiliations.