Cliff Sosis sat down to interview Ken Taylor of Philosophy Talk for his series, What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? Part of the interview about Philosophy Talk is excerpted below with the permission of both Ken Taylor and Cliff Sosis.
So how did the radio show with you and John Perry, Philosophy Talk, get started? What was the inspiration? Was there anything like it at the time? What was the mission?
John Perry had the idea of doing a radio show devoted to philosophy long before I met him. His vision was that it would be sort of modeled on the program Car Talk. It would be him and a sidekick, taking philosophical questions from callers. He envisioned doing this just at KZSU, the student radio station here at Campus. His thought, I gather, was that people listen to Car Talk go on and on about cars and that philosophy is way more interesting than cars, and that he himself is at least as funny as either Click and Clack were.
Who isn’t? I’m sorry. Go on…
He thought if he could just find the right partner…why not? Problem was, he couldn’t find anyone willing to take the plunge with him. The people he mentioned it to as a possibility thought he was a little crazy for wanting to do it. Then I came along, many years later, and we became friends, and he realized I was sort of an out of the box kind of guy. So he told me about his long dormant idea for a radio show based on philosophy. I thought it was a TERRIFIC idea. And was all in.
But turning it into a reality…that was a much longer haul then either John or I ever dreamt of. Fortunately, there was a former student of John’s, a guy I’ll call Sam, who was head of something called Media Solutions — it no longer exists — here at Stanford. Their task was to take Stanford generated intellectual content and translate some of it into “media outreach.” We approached Sam about the possibility of making a radio show based on philosophy. He was moderately enthused, or at least he pretended to be. He assigned us a producer to make a pilot. We did. John Fischer and Chris Bobonich were our guests. The pilot was about the question “Would you want to live forever.” We produced the pilot and thought we’d take it to something called the PRC (the Public Radio Conference) which was this huge convention of public radio executives for all over the country that was put on by NPR. Everybody who was anybody in pubilc radio was there. So what better place to shop our pilot and potential series, right? But here’s the thing you have to know. We knew nothing whatsoever about public radio. Neither did our producer. Neither did his immediate superior at Media Solutions, who oversaw all this. For example, we didn’t know that public radio works on a pretty standard “clock.” We didn’t know that most public radio segments are just 8 minutes long. Our producer was actually not a radio guy at all. He was a videographer. And his main specialty was time lapsed photography of plants growing. He was an incredibly sweet man though.
Anyway, so here we are three guys from Stanford, two philosophy professors and a plant videographer, trying to bring our pilot to the attention of the big wigs in public radio. We were nothing if not bold. We shook a lot of hands, did a lot of self-promotion. Though being from Stanford seemed to carry some weight, most people gave us the cold-shoulder as soon as the word “philosophy” came out of our mouths.
One person seemed intrigued. An independent producer named Ben Manilla, who happened to have a shop in San Francisco, and was there marketing his own radio shows. He took our pilot, said he would give it a listen, and maybe set up lunch when we were all back in town. Jump a head a few weeks. Ben gives us a call, we go up to the city to have lunch to discuss our pilot and the prospect of turning it into a nationally syndicated radio show. The first words out of Ben’s mouth, though, are, “I’ve listened to your pilot and I’ve got one piece of advice for you, don’t ever play this pilot for anyone else.” Which we haven’t done, I don’t think, in all these years.
But Ben claimed to see potential in the concept, and in John and me, nonetheless. He thought he could groom us into radio personalities and that some of our ideas might survive in the process. We set out to make a new pilot, this time with a professional radio guy as our producer and with more serious backing from the university. The backing was thanks to John Etchemendy, who was then provost, and, thankfully, a philosopher and former student of John Perry’s. But he probably would not have backed us except for the strong pitch that Ben helped us make that Philosophy Talk had serious potential.
Happily ever after?
Even with two new pilots, much more professional in nature, getting Philosophy Talk on the air was a very long haul. Public Radio is not really hungry for content, especially risk-taking content. They are up to their ears in programming from both from the big three public radio networks, NPR, PRI, and APM and from the many local stations that produce programming of their own. So breaking into that scene was really, really hard. You have to remember that this was way before the days of podcasting (which we do now, of course), way before the time when you could just self-produce and self-distribute. There was and is no market research that shows that people are demanding more philosophy on the public radio airwaves. Plus, there is the essentially risk-averse nature of public radio. Finding an audience for our show was extremely daunting.
We tried KQED here in the Bay Area because that is one of the flag ship stations in the entire public radio system. The program director and general manager there gave the two pilots to here three top assistants and asked if they would put the show on their air if it was their decision to make. Each of them apparently said yes. She decided not to accept their recommendation. Not sure why, except that I once heard her say at one this big radio meetings that there is no room for experimentation on her air, since hers is the “public radio station of record” for millions of listeners in the Bay Area. Which meant I guess that there is no room for failure. By the way, that program director, Jo Ann Wallace, was once married to the philosopher John Wallace – who was a PhD student of Davidson’s, while he was here at Stanford. John Perry was actually a friend of John’s and knew Jo Ann a bit when they were still together. Small world, huh? Though they hadn’t seen each other in years by this time, for all I know, the fact that Jo Anne had once been married to a philosopher and that it ended in divorce may have played some unconscious role in her decision to reject Philosophy Talk.
So who bit? When was your big break?
KALW, also in SF, was willing to take a chance on us. They are the “second” public radio station in the Bay Area. They are more quirky and risk-taking and innovate. Without Nicole Sawaya, who was then general manager there, there would have been no Philosophy Talk. It also helped tremendously that OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting) also had an innovative and risk-taking program director at the time. She too agreed to give us a chance. So that’s how we started, basically on three outlets. KALW, OPB, and a small station in Riverside California — which agreed to air us, thanks largely to the efforts of John Fischer, who remember was on our initial pilot and was an early member of our short-lived board.
So, does Stanford support the project? How is the show financed?
Stanford has supported to show throughout its run. The University has never paid the full freight, except in the early beginning, because that’s just not the way that Stanford runs. We are not a part of the core academic mission of the university and every dollar that goes to us is a dollar that doesn’t go to something else. We have to try our best to raise money from outside sources. Philosophy Talk is actually very expensive to produce and in recent years we have had to make some very tough decisions. The toughest was that we could no longer afford to pay Ben Manilla to be our producer. So we cut ties with him. That was very painful, since we had been together since the beginning trying to grow this thing. We are constantly applying for outside grants, mostly with limited success. We seek charitable donations from listeners and supporters, with some but not overwhelming success. And we try to sell things like subscriptions to our vast archive of episodes and hopefully, soon, merchandise of various sorts. Although lots of people seem to like and even love the show, nobody wants to pay us for anything.
I hear you, dude. Can’t you charge radio stations? Are grants an option?
As an independently produced show not tied to a major distributor, we have found it impossible to charge radio stations carriage fees. We were once warned that we’d probably lose 70% of our stations if we went that route. Partly because of Stanford imposed strictures, partly because of our non-profit status, and partly because of our relatively small footprint, we’ve found selling serious underwriting (we can’t sell advertising) a challenge. Add to that the fact people have been conditioned because of strategies first adopted by online content providers in the early days of the internet to believe that they really shouldn’t have to pay for content. By and large, with the exception of the Templeton Foundation, grant giving agencies have been standoffish. The NEH, for example, has turned us down like 10 times. I once railed online against their stupidity in doing so. Might not have been the best idea, but it sure felt good to get that off my chest. But we keep trying. The bottom line is that keeping Philosophy Talk going as a nationally syndicated radio show, produced to national radio standards, is SUPER challenging. It wouldn’t be possible without the support of the University. But the University is a double-edge sword. It makes people think that the University should just write us a big check and that we shouldn’t have to bother them for money. But Stanford just doesn’t work that way. I doubt that any University would just fork over the kind of money we’re talking about for the number of years we’re talking about as a public service or something.
Not that Stanford hasn’t gotten something out of the show. I mean the show is meant to serve the public good. It’s meant to enliven and deepen, at least in a small way, public discourse. It’s meant to demonstrate that philosophy matters, that thinking matters, that reasoned discoursed matters. And being associated with that kind of effort is a good thing for the University. And that’s why first Etchemendy and now our new administration have agreed to do their part. But we have to do our part too, by demonstrating that people care enough about what we do to chip in a bit.
Right. So what does the future look like for Philosophy Talk?
That’s a little hard to say. If we can’t find a financially viable model, the show will probably just end… perhaps within a year. But if we do survive, the one thing I really want, now that John Perry has officially retired from the program, is to find a female, part time cohost. My colleague Josh Landy and my colleague Debra Satz agreed to each be a part time cohost after John retired. Josh is still with me, and he is terrific. But Debra Satz has become Dean of H&S at Stanford. That’s a very big and important and demanding job. So unfortunately, she decided not to continue with Philosophy Talk. I really miss her. In her short time with us, she brought both a new voice and a new sensibility. I’m hoping to replace her with someone with a similar range of interests. But it’s hard. To help keep the administration fully invested, it would probably be best if the new person were also from Stanford. But so far, the likely prospects have all turned me down. Philosophy Talk definitely requires a non-trivial amount of time and commitment, as you can imagine. Not everybody is willing to do it. The future is very much up in the air.
I hope you figure it out. I hope this interview helps solve some of your problems! 5 favorite episodes of Philosophy Talk?
It would be hard to say what my favorite five episodes are. It’s not just that we’ve done so many shows and they all sort of blend together. It’s also that we do many different kinds of shows, each with a different set of ambitions. For example, we occasionally do episodes on Great Philosopher X, often, but not always a great dead philosopher, but we try to make sure that our dead are not all dead white males. For these episodes, our goal is just to provide an appetizer that will motivate them to dig deeper into some complicated corpus on their own. Three relatively recent examples are Heidegger, Fanon, and De Beauvoir. Other episodes focus on more immediately political, cultural or social issues that lend themselves to philosophical speculation, but may not necessarily be initially framed as philosophical at least not by your average educated person on the street. We measure the success of such episodes by how successfully we manage to communicate the relevance of philosophy to issues not necessarily initially framed as purely or even primarily philosophical. For example, we’ve done Trolling, Bullying and Flame Wars: Humility and Online Discourse, Queerness, or Driverless Cars at the Moral Crossroads. We ruminate a lot on science and its implications and limits, as in Science vs Pseudo-Science, Science and Gender, or Time, Space and Quantum Mechanics. And we don’t skimp on the evergreen topics of philosophy, like The Value of Truth or What is Beauty. We also do more magazine style, pre-recorded, more heavily edited shows a few times of year. Every year, for example, we do a Summer Reading Special this way, and we’ve recently revived our former tradition of doing a Dionysus Award Show, for the most philosophically compelling movies of the year. And lastly we do what we call the Examined Year at the end of the year. We’ve won various awards for these pre-edited magazine style shows.
The most fun and satisfying thing for me personally is when we perform in front of live audiences. We’ve gotten these live shows down to a true art form, I think. They are multi-modal radio and philosophy happenings. They’ve got live music, video, audience interaction, life performances by our on-air personalities and of course serious philosophical conversation. We edit them for later broadcast. Our most recently released effort was a show with Steve Pinker on Can Reason Save Us? We’re about to release one we did about six weeks ago in NYC, called The Creative Life. We’ve done these live gigs all around the country: on college campuses, senior citizen homes, high schools, the halls of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution. We’ve performed at literary festivals, science festivals, festivals of ideas and a whole lot more. If any philosopher out there wants to invite us to their campus, we’re certainly game. It’s a little expensive for the hosting institutions – which needs to pay the freight, since we don’t have a budget for this – but we promise to put on a heck of a live philosophy/radio happening in return.
Clifford Sosis
Cliff Sosis is a philosopher at Coastal Carolina University. He created, and in his spare time he runs What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? in-depth autobiographical interviews with philosophers. In Sosis's words, "Interviews you can’t find anywhere else. In the interviews, you get a sense of what makes living, breathing philosophers tick. How one becomes a philosopher. The interviews show how our theories shape our lives and how our experiences influence our theories. They reveal what philosophers have in common, if anything, and what our goals are. Overall, the interviews give you a fuller picture of how the people who do philosophy work, and a better idea of how philosophy works. This stuff isn't discussed as often as it should be, I think, and these stories are extremely interesting and moving!" He has a Patreon page here and tweets @CliffordSosis.
