About the show
Why "for us"
Philosophy isn't the property of universities or credentialed experts. It's a generalist capacity for living and reasoning well — the shared, effortful work of a public educating itself. This show is made for citizens engaged in that practice, not for specialists to be deferred to.
What you're in for
Each series takes one live question of modern life and works through the philosophy you need to think about it clearly and decide where you stand. No prerequisites. We bring the positions, the traditions, the cases, and the hardest counter-arguments — you bring your own judgment. Neither side is improving the other; we're thinking together.
The show is built around questions, not the history of the subject. A thinker turns up when a question needs them, not in date order. Every series ends with the question handed back to you, sharper, and open: we are not neutral about what is worth asking, but no episode ends with advice. The point isn't to tell you what Singer or Kant or Beauvoir thought. It's to leave you able to use it, on a case they never considered.
How it's made
Philosophy for Us is written by AI, under my direction. I used to teach, and I've spent the years since on philosophy and on AI. What I built is the process: how a question is researched, turned into a curriculum, and then into a series — the steps, the checks each draft has to pass, and the standard the whole thing is held to. I didn't write the episodes, and I didn't pick the questions by hand; that came out of the process too. I authorised every recording.
Claude, Anthropic's model, does the research, designs each series and writes every episode. A second model from a different company, OpenAI's Codex, reads the drafts blind and checks that arguments are attributed to the right people, that opposing views aren't quietly softened, and that no episode slips in a verdict. The voice is synthetic too. Nobody is reading this aloud. AI is why there are three hundred and sixty-three episodes rather than six; the price of that is saying so, and showing the reading each series was built from — it's under every series, with a note on what has been checked and what hasn't. The whole process is on the How it's made page.
This show is independent. It has no connection to Harvard University or Project Zero, whose teaching framework it adapts, and none to Anthropic or OpenAI, whose models were used to make it. None of them has seen it, reviewed it, or endorsed it.
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Add the feed to any podcast app: philosophyforus.org/feed.xml. The show is on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.