My guest today is Matthew T. Segall, PhD. Matt is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He teaches courses on German Idealism and process philosophy and has published on topics including religious studies, metaphysics, psychedelics, media theory, and the philosophical presuppositions of science. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.

Matt’s also a good friend and colleague of mine. I’ve known him now for just over ten years, so this episode was really a lot of fun to record. Matt was an early adopter of YouTube as a means of expressing and sharing his philosophical views—he’s been making his videos for about 12 years—so we started off by talking about the changing nature of academic scholarship in a post-Internet world before diving into some deeper philosophical issues related to science, philosophy, and religion.

In this episode I also tried something new in that I used Twitter to solicit questions for Matt prior to the interview. So the second half of the show is dedicated to answering those questions, which included topics like panpsychism and the nature of consciousness, language and phenomenology, the value of speculative philosophy, and more. I also had Matt respond to a few people critical of his positions, so do look out for that towards the end of episode.