Summer Reading List 2026

Josh Landy
Are we living through a crisis of dishonesty?

Devon Strolovitch
Or is it more a crisis of meaning?

Josh Landy
Do either of those matter if it’s the end of the world as we know it?

Devon Strolovitch
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Devon Strolovitch
And I’m Devon Strolovitch, sitting in for Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosopher’s Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy.

Devon Strolovitch
And that continue here at the radio station, where I produce Philosophy Talk.

Josh Landy
Yes, Devin Strolovitch is senior producer of the program. He’s a former linguist who also hosts his own blues show here on KALW. Today, he’s out from behind the mixing board and sitting in as co-host for our annual summer reading special. Welcome, Devon!

Devon Strolovitch
Thank you! I picked quite a year to make my debut right in the middle of what some people call the “polycrisis.”

Josh Landy
Which apparently doesn’t mean a trouble in the world of parrots, but just a bunch of terrible things happening at once.

Devon Strolovitch
Later in the program, we’ll think about the crisis of dishonesty that’s taken hold of our democracy, if not society at large. And we’ll talk with Christian Miller from Wake Forest University. He’s the author of a new book, “The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World.”

Josh Landy
Another of today’s crises is an increasing sense that many of us just don’t matter anymore. So we’ll also talk to an old friend of the show, Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein. Her new book is “The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.”

Devon Strolovitch
But whatever the crisis du jour, we do seem to be living through some decidedly dangerous times.

Journalists
Earth is warming up much faster than we thought. What the UN report calls a code red for humanity. The window to make sure AI is safe is closing fast.

Geoffrey Hinton
It’s smarter than us, right? There’s no way we’re going to prevent it getting rid of us if it wants to. 10 to 20% chance they’ll wipe us out.

MSNBC
The President of the United States. posting on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.

Geoffrey Hinton
We have to face the possibility that unless we do something soon, we’re near the end.

Devon Strolovitch
Are we facing… the end of the world as we know it?

Josh Landy
The good news is that we aren’t the first generation to think things are coming to an end. In fact, there’s a new book with a whole bunch of ancient philosophers saying pretty much the same thing. It’s called How to Face the End of the World: An Ancient Guide for apocalyptic times. It’s edited by Christopher Starr, who’s professor of classics at Middlebury College, and it brings together writings by Lucretius, Seneca, and other doom scrollers of ancient times.

Devon Strolovitch
Now, all of them seem to be thinking differently about the end of the world, right? I mean, Plato is thinking about the end of just one community, the mythical Atlantis, sometime in the past, but He see it, he’s thinking about the possible annihilation of the whole human species in the future, that’s much more scary, right?

Josh Landy
And that’s not even to mention the Epicureans, who said the entire universe is going to die out, sort of a little bit like what we now refer to as the heat death of the sun.

Devon Strolovitch
Well, those guys make the Stoics look pretty mild by comparison. The Stoics agree that everything’s going to end, but it’s part of an endless cycle where things keep coming back and back and back.

Josh Landy
I mean, I guess if I had to choose, I’d pick that one anyway. We’ve got there four different end times stories, and we began our conversation with Christopher by asking him which one’s his favorite.

Christopher Star
For me, most of my research has been on the Stoics, so they’re sort of the ones I find most interesting. They thought that fire ruled the universe, that was the primal building block of the element, and eventually the world would be destroyed by fire, and then it would be reconstituted again.

Josh Landy
Like a phoenix from the flames.

Christopher Star
Like a phoenix from the flames, exactly.

Josh Landy
Does it mean that literally everything, every single thing that I’ve experienced that I’m doing will come back exactly the same way. Is that part of it?

Christopher Star
The Stoics debated that, and some Stoics even rejected this idea. But what I find interesting about it, especially, is we’re sort of told that history is linear and there’s no other way, right? It goes in a straight line. Whatever has happened has happened, and there’s nothing that you can do, but I think it’s an interesting idea that maybe things will happen differently, maybe they’ll happen the exact same way. We don’t know, the Stokes were unclear about that, and I’m often talked to, even in modern ideas, the unbearable lightness of being. If you’ve ever read that novel, it deals with the same idea, then, right? The only way you can have meaning is through repetition, as opposed to things just happening once and for all. But for the Stoics, I think one way that it’s been interpreted, not sort of being seen as ridiculous, was to say that well, you can look at if you’re in a difficult time, you can say, well, I must have made it through this difficult time in some other cycle, so I know I’ll make it through this time as well, right? This, this idea that your consciousness and your lives and your choices do have weight, and they are repeating, and you will make it through this difficult time. So, I find that interesting, and as I said, sort of as a counter narrative to the idea of time is only linear.

Devon Strolovitch
So that’s that’s a cycle and recurrence, but there is a version of these kind of stories where it’s all over, or some part of it is all over, and the ancients had their views, their stories about, about the end, you know. These days, some of us might also be thinking about certain things coming to an end in very different ways, but maybe, you know, nuclear war was our the first big one in my lifetime. The heat death of the sun at some point is a physical reality or just some sort of collapse of human civilization that we’re looking at with climate change or whatnot, maybe with a few survivors, but a pretty unpleasant time of it. And I’m constantly caught between thinking this, it’s worse than it’s ever been, it’s we’re really facing down something, or come on, people have written about this before, imagined worse things, and you know you’ll get through it in one form or another. Am I any more worried about any of today’s end of the world crises than the ancients were?

Christopher Star
Fascinating question, it’s one that drew me to this years ago already. One, because when we think about the end of the world, typically from the ancient world, we think about the Bible, Revelation, and Daniel, and those texts, and we don’t really think of it as a philosophical question, although some modern philosophers are starting to turn to it as well. Zizek just wrote a book about it, and so what got me thinking about this, and what I found so interesting about the ancient thought, as was already mentioned, there’s a lot of different theories of the end of the world, right? We don’t have to just take the Bible as telling us how the world is going to end. If you don’t like one idea, if you don’t like eternal return, you can go to the Epicureans, or if you don’t like their idea, you can go to Plato, so the Epicureans were the real people who said this is it, our planet will be destroyed. However, they did believe in multiple worlds, so not all planets would be destroyed for them. Plato also believed in cyclical rebuilding and catastrophe, and that humanity always would survive catastrophes and could rebuild. So, by thinking about the end of the world, we are in this paradox that on the one hand things do seem terrible, and they do seem unprecedented, a word that’s thrown a lot, but we do have to remember that there is this 2000 if not even longer tradition of speculation of people feeling that the world was going to end, so I think maybe that ties into this idea that on the one hand, yes, things are bad, but the feelings that we have are also feelings that people have had through the centuries, and we can read the feelings that they wrote them down, we can read their speculation.

Josh Landy
Were they responding to any particular events, so you could imagine, for example, you know, Pompeii, or or you could imagine changes in the political structure in Rome, because there are lots of those, at least for the Stoics, you know, obviously you’re writing about authors from from a very long period of history, but is there a particular event that you think is especially salient in generating this feeling in some of these writers that things are looking bleak.

Christopher Star
Excellent question. Again, in my book, the majority of the texts, you’re absolutely right, are from the end of the Roman Republic, Lucretius the Epicurean, and the beginning of the empire, the Julio-Claudian period, the first emperors, and that was a period, certainly the Romans definitely probably had a feeling that their world, at least the old republic, was coming to an end, no question. So, Lucretius, thinking about that, I think, no question, he’s responding to the civil wars that had happened in Rome, and that were brewing as he was writing. And then Seneca, the Stoic, writing under the Julio-Claudians, and especially under Nero, is interesting, because Nero is the antichrist, most likely in Revelation. So, there seems to be some sort of crossover between Christian thought, early Christian thought, thinking Nero’s as bad as it can get, and Seneca, although he never specifically mentions Nero, and sometimes he praises Nero, actually, in some of the texts that he writes about a catastrophic flood he thinks is going to come soon. So, it seems that this idea of the end of the republic, this transition to autocracy, to one man rule, and the emperors did get the Romans thinking that, that maybe things were coming to an end.

Devon Strolovitch
No relation to current events.

Christopher Star
No relation to current events, but yes, this idea of a of an evil ruler bringing things about certainly goes back to in the biblical tradition, in Daniel, the Seleucid Greeks, and then in Revelation, Nero, and so there is this, this lineup, especially during the Roman period, we’re thinking that the Roman emperors are somehow maybe bringing about an end of history.

Josh Landy
I want to shift gears a little bit and think about psychological reasons for these beliefs. I think about something that the cultural critic Frank Commode said about all of these stories of apocalypses, and how they seem kind of like horror stories, but there’s something psychologically appealing about them, because they sort of give an ending to the. Story right, and so that was Kermode’s thing, you know. Thought was that every individual life gets a shape only because there’s an end to it. And well, guess what? The same thing is true for human existence as a totality. It only gets a shape if we can imagine an end. Do you think there’s something of that going on in these ancient stories of the end of times, that there might be something a little bit, you know, paradoxically psychologically appealing about them.

Christopher Star
I think that’s right. And Kermode makes an excellent point that comes back to the earlier question of are we are we living in a different time where the end is actually coming, that most likely, and we can certainly hope that we’re sort of in the middle of things, as Kermode says, is that, and that’s sort of boring to be living in the middle of things, you know. It’d be good to be at the beginning, we miss that, but maybe we’ll be at the end, right? Maybe we’ll be lucky enough, or unlucky enough, for everyone to think about it, to witness the end, that there is this idea of, you know, feeling that we’re living in a privileged or somehow a lucky time we’re able to see the end of everything, and that’s I think Kermode speaks, and I think there’s something about these stories as well that why they’ve been so popular and why they seem to be only gaining popularity post-apocalyptic fiction and movies and things like that, because they give us this ability to see the end of things, to know how things end, whether it’s real or imagined, but also for the ancient philosophers, part of it, I think, was as it ties into this idea of everything dies, right, everything has a beginning, everything grows, and then everything is going to come to an end, and that I think is also sort of preparation to understand your own death and to write philosophy as learning how to die, as Plato famously said, to also understanding that the bigger picture about the cycles of nature and how the world itself fits into it.

Devon Strolovitch
I want to ask about a more contemporary philosopher, who therefore is not in your book, but I know you’ve written about him. Some people call him Robert Zimmerman. We most people know him as Bob Dylan, and he’s been writing about, we’ve been making reference to some kind of end of the world, going as far back as The Hard Rain’s Going to Fall, one of his earliest songs through the Gospel period in the 70s, where his lyrics are right out of the book of Revelations to more recent songs like things, things have changed. If the Bible is right, the world will explode. I wonder, do these ancient writers and this contemporary songwriter, do they ever come together for you?

Christopher Star
Great question. Certainly, in my mind, I haven’t really done any scholarship on it, but I think they’re in the liner notes to what is it, the free will, and Bob Dylan, where there’s the hard rain, is on. He says every one of these lines could be a whole separate story, right? You know, thinking about these apocalypse, how apocalypse Dick stories almost sort of can breed more stories. Christopher Ricks wrote an interesting book on Bob Dylan, called Dylan’s Visions of Sin, and he has this one line, I think it’s to where he looks at different songs, and he looks at Not Dark Yet, and I think he says something to the effect of Apocalypse soon is scarier or more anxiety inducing than Apocalypse Now, right? And I think what’s interesting about Bob Dylan is, if you can track this arc of over 60 years about sort of Apocalypse always deferred, and there’s something, perhaps, to come back to the earlier question of thinking about reliving at the end, you know. There may be some sort of relief, knowing, you know, this is how it’s going to end, as opposed to sort of constantly waiting for, and I think I think Dylan, sort of his lyrics, can really capture that, that sense of Apocalypse soon, as opposed to Apocalypse Now.

Josh Landy
So Christopher, I’m just wondering if you have any words of advice or words of comfort from the ancients for our listeners who may be worried along with us that you know climate change is going to wreak some pretty significant irreversible damage, or yeah, maybe there will be asteroid 2028 or whatever it is that we’re worrying about. What words of wisdom and encouragement do you have from these ancient writers?

Christopher Star
Right, well, I suppose it may be two things. One is to remain optimistic in the sense that apocalypses haven’t happened, despite the millennia long tradition of expecting them and predicting them, down to sometimes down to the specific day that is supposed to happen, but also the paradox that speaks to the times we’re living in, in that, in a sense, we’ve all become doomsday preppers in various ways, that it’s not less of a fringe thing, and if you’re not ready to build a bunker or get a go bag, even ready to go, that there’s something to be said for reading apocalyptic stories, whether they’re in my book or in the Bible or modern post-apocalyptic fiction. I think the ancients thought that these stories can help us prepare psychologically for crises. It doesn’t have to be a crisis of the end of the world, but it can also be just sort of preparation for any sort of crises that may hit you throughout the day that the. Idea of foresight and forethought, thinking about the worst possible scenario, not that you should be completely negative about it, but preparing for the worst and perhaps expecting the best.

Devon Strolovitch
Well, I hope the world, if it comes to an end, won’t be before this program airs. So, Christopher, thank you so much for joining us.

Christopher Star
You’re welcome. Thank you for having me>

Josh Landy
Christopher Starr from Middlebury College, editor of “How to Face the End of the World: An Ancient Guide for Apocalyptic Times.” You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. And today we’re putting together our annual summer reading list.

Devon Strolovitch
Coming up: in our current cultural moment, is it hopeful or foolish to value honesty? Can we even figure out what to value if we don’t know what really matters?

Josh Landy
Making honesty matter. When philosophy talk continues.

Josh Landy
This is Philosophy Talk, and it’s our annual summer reading list. I’m Josh Landy.

Devon Strolovitch
And I’m Devon Strolovitch, sitting in for Ray Briggs. We’re talking to the authors of new and recent books that speak to our dangerous times.

Josh Landy
One of the biggest dangers is the gigantic increase in lying.

Devon Strolovitch
I don’t believe you.

Josh Landy
Yeah, nice one, Devon. Do you really not remember what’s been happening over the last few decades?

Richard Nixon
People have got to know whether or not their president’s a crook, well, I’m not a crook.

Bill Clinton
I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

Donald Trump
They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating, they’re eating the pets.

Devon Strolovitch
Look, I know politicians have been bending the truth since time immemorial, and politics is hardly the only domain where people act dishonestly, but as a huge fan of truth, I’m pretty dismayed at the increase in flagrant mendacity.

Josh Landy
Yeah, me too. So we spoke to Christian Miller, professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, and author of the new book, “The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World.” we asked him why honesty matters.

Christian Miller
So, I think it matters in all kinds of ways. It matters from a religious perspective, it matters from an individual perspective, but maybe we can start with why it matters from a societal perspective. So, imagine what the opposite would be like. Imagine a society where there’s not honesty. We would instrumentalize other people, treat them merely as means to our own ends. We would not have genuine relationships with other people, and I think most importantly, we would live in fear in a society like that. We would always be worried, are people going to take advantage of us, cheat, lie, steal, and that’s not a society we want to live in.

Josh Landy
So, that sounds like something Immanuel Kant would say, right? He had that nice way of thinking about why honesty is valuable in relation to what he called the categorical imperative, right. So, the idea that if you’re thinking about a principle of action, if that principle is one that you can live with everyone abiding by, then that’s okay, but if you can’t, then you shouldn’t do it. You shouldn’t allow yourself to do it, and that sounds like the argument you’re making here. You’re saying, look, I don’t want to live in a society where everyone just lies all the time, so that means I shouldn’t lie, I shouldn’t license, shouldn’t just allow myself to say whatever comes into my head at any given time. Is that part of your inspiration here?

Christian Miller
Part of my inspiration, I think you could support it from a variety of perspectives, though. From a Kantian perspective, yes, thinking about universalizability. From an Aristotelian virtue, ethical perspective, it’s just not a virtuous way to live or have a society. From a utilitarian perspective, focusing on maximizing the overall good, that’s not going to happen in a society where there’s dishonesty. However, there’s a caveat to all this, though, which is, although it might be important for society to be honest, doesn’t automatically follow that it’s important for me to be honest. So, we have to think about, can we make a good case to convince the individual to be honest, as well as stress how important it is for society to be honest.

Devon Strolovitch
Well, and that was going to be my follow-up question. This is why it’s good for society. Why is it good for me as an individual?

Christian Miller
Yeah, so I’ll play devil’s advocate for a second. Here’s a case for why it’s not going all the way back to Plato. There’s this idea of maybe the best life is one of public virtue and private vice, and so in this context I project myself as having an honest character that wins me lots of friends, a good reputation, society, but in private I might cut corners, cheat on my taxes, do things on the internet I’m not supposed to, tell some lies here and there, and maybe that’s the best kind of life. However, now I’ll go back into my own view, which is to say I think the best life for the individual is also one of not just a society, but the individual is also one of genuine honesty. Why, well, there is something that’s missing from that double life, that fake life of outward virtue and inward vice. And I think it’s something that’s really important that we care about a great deal, and it’s genuine relationships. If I want to have loving relationships. Deep friendships, I need to have honesty. I can’t just fake that. I can’t just pretend like I’m friends with you and be really friends with you. I have to care about you for your own sake and value you for your own sake, and that’s what’s missing. I think it’s so important from the life of the fake honest person,

Devon Strolovitch
So your book is called “The Honesty Crisis.” You think honesty is in trouble today in a way that it hasn’t been? Is that, is that right?

Christian Miller
That’s correct. So, an honesty crisis has two features: one is that dishonesty is more tempting than it’s been in the past, and also dishonesty is easier to get away with than it’s been in the past, that’s a bad combination. It’s more appealing to be dishonest, and it’s easier to do it and get away with it, and not get caught.

Josh Landy
All right, let’s, so let’s take those two things one at a time. Why is it easier to do now? That is to say, why is it easier to lie and cheat and deceive than it has been in the past.

Christian Miller
So, the kind of underlying thread throughout all these honesty crises is technology, and it’s not saying that technology is inherently dishonest or honest, it’s technology I think is value neutral, but it provides us with new capacities that we didn’t have before to engage in behaviors like dishonest behaviors, and that we couldn’t before, and to get away with them an easier way, so that’s pretty abstract. Maybe I can take a case study. One of the ones I look at is AI student cheating. Students have cheated for a long time, going all the way back to classrooms, whenever they started. That cheating ramped up when we had the internet, where they could go online and extract material and put them into their papers, not cite their sources and claim that this was their work, and now we have this newfangled thing, which can write a paper given the prompt, match the style of students’ previous work, have an output that looks really good, and here’s the thing, undetectable, at least as of now, undetectable that it was not written by the students, and it was actually written by the AI. So, the technology is helping us mask the dishonesty in ways that are weren’t available in the past, and that does seem like a case where, if successful, that kind of dishonesty will be rewarded.

Devon Strolovitch
Are there new incentives for dishonesty that weren’t there before? Has something made it more compelling to people to go with their dishonest selves.

Christian Miller
Yeah, students would have been tempted to do this if they didn’t think it was rewarding in some way. What are the rewards? Well, first of all, there’s efficiency, greater efficiency. It’s much less time consuming than writing a paper the traditional way. Secondly, the end product is often better than what the student would have produced themselves if left to their own devices, so they’re saving a lot of time, and they’re likely going to get a better grade. So it’s perceived as extremely rewarding, and you’re not likely to get caught and punished for doing it. So the temptation to use it is very strong, very hard to resist. In fact, this is an area where I’m pretty pessimistic will be able to do anything to defend honesty, other than just taking AI out of the students’ hands, and like many professors, I’m making them do all their graded work in the classroom now.

Josh Landy
Which is a huge loss, because you know, you and I and Devon, we all know how important it is for students to fine tune their thinking and reasoning capacities by doing things like writing a research paper, right, right, writing a writing an answer to a really interesting and thorny philosophical question using their own brain, and spending a couple of weeks and thinking about objections and counter arguments, and so we have a kind of a perfect storm today. On the one hand, new technologies that make it easier to cheat, and, of course, in the case of social media, easier to disseminate lies, and on the other hand, a set of incentives, these perverse incentives that make it really attractive for people to cheat and lie, we haven’t talked about those incentives at the level of, for example, corporations or politicians. I mean, presumably it’s not just, you know, a student who feels like they don’t have enough time to finish their paper. It’s also, you know, could be a political party, it could be an oil company. Is that, is that something that’s changed, or is it kind of, you know, an age-old thing, but just ramped up with new technologies.

Christian Miller
Well, that’s my theme in the entire book – is honesty crises are not brand new, they’re taking what has already happened in the past and ramping it up and accelerating it and making it more, more appealing and harder to detect. I don’t think, though, to address your question directly, I don’t think it’s just limited to the individuals. There’s no reason to think that there’s every reason to think that it’s happening at the corporate level, it’s happening at the political level, it’s happening at the religious level. So, in one of my chapters, I also focus on how religious institutions are struggling with this phenomenon too, which I think is probably less well recognized and less well appreciated. So, yeah, I think it’s just. Just, just pervasive.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s our annual summer reading special, and we’re talking to Christian Miller from Wake Forest University, author of “The Honesty Crisis.”

Devon Strolovitch
I wonder if I could inject a little perverse optimism here, only insofar as it seems like not to tie things to the current moment too much, but the current US administration seems to actually be heading in a more honest direction. You know, they’re dropping a lot of dog whistles and saying openly what their project is. The Equal Employment Office is encouraging white Christian men to file civil rights lawsuits. The Secretary of Defense is, you know, describing what he wants to do with American power in pretty plain terms, is there anything the open corruption is in some sense less dishonest? Is there what’s going on there given the crisis you’re writing about?

Josh Landy
Is that supposed to be an optimistic question?

Christian Miller
Yeah, I’m not sure what to say about that one thing I’ll note, though, as in passing, is that you’re rightly pointing out an interesting feature of honesty, which is that honesty doesn’t have to be with respect to something that’s morally correct or truthful, just needs to be with respect to how you happen to see the world, so if they see the world this way, if they think, for example, that there was an election stolen from them. If that’s really how they see the world, and they communicate that to the world, they’re being honest. And if they really think that this is the right way to live today and behave it today, whether they’re right or not, if they think that, and they’re communicating that, not pulling a fast one on the audience, they are actually satisfying the demands of honesty, because honesty tracks how you see the world. It doesn’t track how the world actually is, or what’s actually right or wrong. So, interestingly, you may not be able to accuse the contemporary administration of dishonesty in some of these areas, even though they might be seriously mistaken.

Devon Strolovitch
Cold comfort.

Josh Landy
I often think of that line from the French philosopher La Rochefoucauld, who said that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, and I think maybe sometimes hypocrisy is better than outright, you know, cruelty, and so on. Right? I would love it if there was more of a culture of honor and integrity, which I feel like you know has been not that everything was great in the past, don’t get me wrong, but like there was at other times in human history a greater emphasis on integrity and on honor. I don’t think that the media in the United States are helping. I don’t think they are taking a principled stand against dishonesty. Instead, they just run as a headline whatever it is that somebody just said, very often without giving an indication that there might be a reason to doubt what the person just said, or whether, without saying, this person has a track record of telling an enormous amount of falsehoods, or whatever it is, so is that one place that we can and should intervene as a society, that is to say, at the level of media, which you know they don’t, they’re not omnipotent, but they have some degree of say in how our culture sees itself.

Christian Miller
Yeah, I think that would be very helpful in the book. I focus, in particular on social media and political misinformation and fake news, although I think the points can extend more broadly than that, but I’m especially worried about honesty crisis here, in which there’s good empirical evidence that people are willing to share misinformation online, even though they know that as misinformation, and extraordinary stat.

Josh Landy
You point out that it was something like 51% of Republicans in a survey said they would share something that 16% believed to be true.

Devon Strolovitch
Only 16.

Josh Landy
16%. And you all, you also point out that falses are 70% more likely to be shared than true statements. I mean, these are terrifying statistics!

Christian Miller
And they are. And the one in particular, the example you’re referring to, was this headline: over 500 migrant caravanners arrested with suicide vests. So, didn’t sound true to most of the participants here, and yet, as you said, 51% of Republicans were willing to at least say they were willing to share it, and it’s not just Republicans here, that was what was in that particular study. This is alarming and shocking, I think, and disturbing. So to now pivot to what can we do about and try and be a little bit optimistic here, I think this makes a case for more intervention, as you called for. It’s just a question of what form is that intervention going to take, or which, what should that look like. And experimental research is toying with a variety of different forms. I think they look promising, for example, fact checking. We’re familiar with how. Having some kind of disclaimer afterwards, saying this has been fact-checked, and this has been found of dubious authenticity. Another thing that you would also allude to your point is source checking, so flagging a piece of news as coming from a dubious source, not the particular piece of news, but the source in general, giving us a kind of filter for how to process that particular news story, and a third thing that’s being investigated is accuracy prompts, so not saying that that particular story is questionable, but making sure people are in an accurate state of mind, so they’re not caught up in a social media state of mind trying to get followers and likes and grow their presence, but they’re really keeping in mind the importance of accuracy in their belief formation and in their social media sharing, and these prompts, I think, actually, of anything that I’ve seen so far, these kind of accuracy prompts, when given people, are pretty effective and pushing back against sharing misinformation. So I’m pretty encouraged there.

Devon Strolovitch
Okay, so Christian, if you had one last piece of advice for a listener who wants to navigate and even mitigate this honesty crisis, what would it be?

Christian Miller
It’s easy, I think, to go after other people, especially today, go after certain politicians or corporations or whatever. I would say by all means, but there’s also this point of looking at ourselves and thinking about our own character, and that’s what I really try and do in the book, is not just to make it a matter of them, but making a matter of us, and saying, look, most of us are probably not honest either, and for us, with ourself, we’ll realize we’re probably not honest, and so let’s start in a very concrete way with ourselves first, getting a better understanding of what honesty is. Then thinking about in our own lives, where are some impediments to honesty? Where are we tempted to lie, cheat, steal, BS, and self-deceive ourselves? And then finally, what can we concretely and practically do to improve our own lives in these areas where we struggle and fall short. So, I like to make the focus be on us, as opposed to them.

Devon Strolovitch
And what could be more philosophical than self-examination?

Josh Landy
Sounds good to me.

Devon Strolovitch
Well, Christian, thank you. I can honestly say this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

Christian Miller
Honestly, I’m very grateful for you having me on the show. Really appreciate it.

Josh Landy
Christian Miller from Wake Forest University, author of “The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World.” You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and today we’re compiling our annual summer reading list.

Devon Strolovitch
Coming up: what’s the matter with mattering, plus summer reading suggestions from you, our listeners—when Philosophy Talk continues,

Josh Landy
it’s a philosophical summer reading list. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Devon Strolovitch
…except your intelligence. I’m Devon Strolovitch sitting in for Ray Briggs, and we’re talking about thought-provoking books for dangerous times.

Josh Landy
Not all books out this year have been about the end of the world, and here are a couple of great suggestions from our listeners.

Wayne
Hi, Wayne from Redwood City. This is my summer read suggestion: “Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness” by Kathryn Page Harden. This book is an exploration of why people and other creatures do bad things, from original sin to genetics, nature versus nurture, determinism versus free will, upbringing versus societal forces, and combined with her lived experiences, it nicely ties things back to the human equation, often starting with case history, she melds together logical, non-logical, and contradictory threads from religion, philosophy, culture, animal behavior, genetics, criminal justice, etc. Never giving fixed answers, but rather leaving one with much to ponder and hopefully to discuss with others.

Tom
Hi, Tom Lockard, San Francisco. I’m recommending Daniel Kehlmann’s latest book, “The Director”, which is about G W Pabst, a German filmmaker who left Germany, went to Hollywood, then went back to Germany. Kehlmann’s story is historical fiction, deals heavily with the curiosity and the complexity and the complicity of working with an authoritarian regime and the compromises that were made under his circumstances, and while it’s historical fiction, a lot of the story does ring true and stands in contrast to other German actors and artists and directors, such as Morenau or Lang or Billy Wilder, who came to the US, but then, in Pabst’s case, went back to Germany. Highly recommended. It’s a popular book, and I believe it’s just now gone into paperback.

Devon Strolovitch
Thanks very much to Tom and Wayne for those recommendations. You can find more about those books, along with others. Speak to our dangerous times over at our website, philosophytalk.org.

Josh Landy
Now, one of the deepest dangers these days, at least around these parts, is that many people feel they no longer matter, that their projects have been blocked, their sources of value have disappeared.

Devon Strolovitch
An old friend of the show, Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein, has a new book on this subject. It’s called “The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drive drives us and divides us.” She says there are four different ways to feel like your life matters.

Josh Landy
Right, so some people feel like what they do matters to God or the universe. So, those folks reckon each of us was created for a particular reason with a specific purpose, and Rebecca calls those folks the transcenders.

Devon Strolovitch
Then there are the socializers who feel like what they do matters to the people around them, their family, their friends, their community.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and I feel like I’m in Rebecca’s third category, what she calls the strivers. We feel like what we do matters for its own sake, or at least we hope it does. To me, for example, it’s just important to think about beautiful novels and discuss deep philosophical questions. Other people are trying to tell us more about the cosmos, or making great paintings, or climbing a mountain, because it was there.

Devon Strolovitch
Now that’s very different from Rebecca’s final category, the competitors. Those are people who think their life matters only because they’re doing better than the next guy. They always have to have more than everyone else. Basically, their life matters because your life doesn’t.

Josh Landy
So we wanted to know which way of mattering Rebecca thinks is the best.

Rebecca Goldstein
The best in terms of what seems to be the most satisfying, that is delivers the greatest wallop of I really matter, is transcenders. It really is, you know, I was created by a purpose by the Almighty something or other, right? God, whether you call it God or not, and I matter to to that whose own mattering can’t be doubted.

Josh Landy
So nice work if you can get it right, if you can believe that.

Rebecca Goldstein
If you can believe that. Yeah, nice work if you can get it, exactly.

Josh Landy
But you don’t rule out the others, and you know you’re you’re refreshingly pluralist, right? You have you quote this lovely line from Rumi. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground, and it seems like your thought is, you know, whichever one works for you. Is that about right?

Rebecca Goldstein
You know, with some moral provisos that you’re not undermining anybody else’s right to pursue their mattering as they best can do, and even better if you’re kind of adding something of that, you, but most of all, it has to give you your reasons to pursue, pursue your life with as much enthusiasm as you can, kind of light up, light you up, and not undermine anybody else’s right to be lit up.

Devon Strolovitch
Is there a way to be a competitive matter without undermining other people?

Rebecca Goldstein
Well, you can hide it. Well, one example that I really love is a scientist that I know who did tremendous work. He won a Nobel Prize, right, because the work was so.. this is a real contribution, and as somebody else who knows him better than I, we were talking about him, his work, and he said he was happy for all of 15 minutes when he got the call from Stockholm, and then, you know, it occurred to him, other people have also won Nobel prizes, that’s the end of his happiness, so you know, but he did the best he could with his temperament, his very competitive temperament.

Josh Landy
So that’s the case, right? So the this fourth strategy for battering this competition strategy seems like it’s gonna be hard to find a powerfully strong good version of it, but in the other three cases there are good and bad versions, right? So, yeah, you can be a transcender whose faith causes them to do good things in the world, or you could be a transgender who you know becomes a kind of violent fanatic, and similarly you can be a socializer who spreads love and joins the community, or you can join a cult, and you can be a striver who makes great art, or you can be a striver who sort of ruins your life by being fanatically devoted to something that doesn’t matter very much. How do you avoid following the wrong path and get yourself onto the right path.

Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah, well, it’s strangely hard, and we do, if it’s working for us, we do also have a tendency to universalize this. This is the way it ought to be done for everybody, which makes us very annoying.

Josh Landy
And dangerous in some cases, right?

Rebecca Goldstein
And dangerous, right, and I collect such statements, you know, false universalizing, I call them mathematicians who say, you know, the purpose of life is to hypothesize and prove, fashion designer who said if you don’t dress well, basically you’re nobody, you’re nobody, you have. Have no right to live, so you know we have this universalizing capacity, which we ought to watch. So, what? How do we? Well, I think the most important thing, these three things, you know, is it working for you good? Is it undermining anybody else’s? Well, you know, the last thing is, you know, to perhaps you can even do something that would abet some of the good things in life: peace, justice, knowledge, beauty. This is an added bonus, I think, so that there are some objective criteria by which to judge these things. It’s not all just how you feel now.

Devon Strolovitch
The instinct itself to matter to yourself, or whatever, the way I feel it most is having a downside is not with one of the particular strategies, but just the potential for existential crisis of lacking a project, or even maybe not worse, but somewhere just short of total existential despair, I have a project that matters to me, but you know it’s just what fell into my lap. Owen Flanagan was on this program some years ago. Finding meaning in a material world was the episode, and he said something. He said that our values are given to us largely without our conscious consent, and that should make us more humble, and that works, but it also means my whole constitution, my character was, you know, I had no role in the making and deciding what mattered. What do I do then?

Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah, well, I do think that actually we should take responsibility for it. That’s actually one of the reasons I wrote the book, that we should look at this and we should not be passive participants in our own lives, and you know, I was given a set of directions that came with my birth. It truly was not working for me, you know. It made me not want to grow up, you know. I would think with despair as a child, I’m going.. you know, I have no enthusiasm for my life. That is a very bad thing, you know. So, look, sometimes it works. We’re born into, you know, we inherit from our parents, who we might be very similar to, and so it worked for them. So it’s going to work for us, but sometimes not, or teachers, or society. I think you know that society itself is handing out certain, you know, this is the way to do it, and it’s leaving many people feeling as if they don’t matter. In fact, that we’re having a crisis at mattering. Money, fame, and power, you know, that’s kind of hogging mattering, and that’s the worst thing to hog.

Josh Landy
That’s really interesting, Rebecca. So, you were talking about money, fame, and power, and that’s one of the things I find most compelling in your book, I mean a terrific book from start to finish, but one of the things I like the most is this account that it gives of our contemporary moment and what’s going wrong, because as you point out, many things in the world around us are, if anything, a little less horrible than they were in the past, right? So, for example, extreme poverty, things like that. And yet, from a subjective standpoint, a lot of people feel pretty miserable, pretty bleak. And part of the answer to that conundrum has to do with the way we’re being encouraged to chase these zero sum objectives, things that if one person has it, the other people can’t have it, money, fame, power. Why? I mean, why are we in this predicament? Why are the old forms of mattering seeming to diminish and perhaps even disappear?

Rebecca Goldstein
I think it’s a confluence of many factors, one is something that actually, as a secular humanist, I very much applaud, and that is the eclipsing of the transcender mode of, you know, the most people are not looking for it in terms of religion, they may outwardly be, but that is often just a form of power and dominance and but you know the real transcenders who see their life in this, and the one thing you can say about many of the forms of religion is, you know, that there was, we all matter in the eyes of God, I mean, that you know it may not have played out that way, but that’s the line, and there was something about that as democratizing, and the other thing again, which, oh my goodness, I certainly applaud, is previously marginalized people, people of color, women coming up, getting their rights, being seen as equal and mannering to other people who have been left, feel that they’ve been left behind and overshadowed. They’ve really taken to a zero sum sense of mattering, only it’s sort of group zero sum. This group is rising at the expense of me. I’ve spoken to many people. Of this sort, including an ex-neo Nazi who felt that extremely strongly, you know, and when a leader – it won’t mean any means – but when a leader themselves seems to suffer from some kind of privation of mattering, although this leader ought not to, considering how powerful this leader is, but, but that’s the psychological makeup, so that the leader is genuinely aggrieved, he knows how to work up this agreement on a very large scale. Don DeLillo had said that longing on a large scale is what makes history, and I would say, yeah, longing to matter. This decor of us, nothing can make history like that. And I think that’s what’s been going on.

Josh Landy
So, in a way, maybe your diagnosis is something like that. More and more people these days are suffering from a sense that their lives don’t matter in the ways that they would want them to matter, they’re being made not to matter, and then politicians or rabble rousers or people who themselves just want to get famous on the internet are inviting those same people to blame somebody, and in particular to blame scapegoats, to blame immigrants, and so on, rather than understanding that actually no, that you know, ultimately, what’s happened is that things like technology, new technologies, and other social changes have stripped you of these old ways of mattering,

Rebecca Goldstein
and look, we may all be radically stripped, you know, if AI takes away some of our noblest, even ways of trying to pursue our manner, and you know, solves the mathematical problems for us, and physics problems, and you know, creates better novels and composes better music, right? Yeah, so AI itself is looming as something that could radically transform how we seek our mattering.

Josh Landy
So lest we remain within the bleak, what sort of rays of hope do you see? Do you do you see any possibilities, or at least you have any recommendations for how we can move beyond this mattering crisis that we’re in right now and help people to find ways of mattering, ways of making their lives matter in spite of all the forces arrayed against them.

Rebecca Goldstein
Well, you know, we created technology to serve human flourishing, and I think that we ought to keep that utmost in our mind and not rob us of some of the noblest endeavors. I also think that there are certain things that humans can do that, hey, I will never be a human to human kind of thing. In my happiest moments, I think, well, wouldn’t it be amazing if you know, if you are of a heroic striver type. Heroic striver has come basically in four flavors: intellectual, and it can be several of these, but intellectual, artistic, athletic, and ethical. Well, wouldn’t that be great if we became ethical human strivers, seeing how much we could do for each other, for sentient life in general, for the planet, you know, so that our heroic efforts would go towards something that could not be replaced by machines.

Josh Landy
I think that’s the key. I mean, that’s again one of the things I liked in your book, is this sense that it’s not just a matter of individuals finding solutions, which, of course, you know, you encourage people to do, and to, you know, to do the most good that that we can, that that seems absolutely right to me, but also to encourage institutions to do things.

Rebecca Goldstein
Exactly right.

Josh Landy
To reward people for, for doing good, and for also, you know, not only for doing good, but also for helping other people to have lives that matter. That seems like a super important thing for us.

Rebecca Goldstein
Yes, yes, yes. People, yes, people do matter in virtue of their being people, but you know, other things also matter. Beauty matters, you know. I mean, it might just be tending your garden. It’s there are creative ways, and there are destructive ways of serving this mattering instinct, and for creativity, I think we all are.

Devon Strolovitch
Rebecca. I think this conversation mattered. It mattered to me, and I hope it matters to our listeners. Thank you so much for the book, and for joining us today.

Rebecca Goldstein
Well, thank you so much. Thank you. This has been a pleasure for me.

Josh Landy
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of “The Mattering Instinct: Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.” Got more summer reading recommendations? Email them to us. We’re at comments@philosophytalk.org.

Devon Strolovitch
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2026

Josh Landy
Our executive producer is James Kass. The senior producer is the guy sitting next to me, Devon Stralovitch. Special thanks to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, Karen Ajluni, Steve Choi, and Linda Fagan.

Devon Strolovitch
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW Local Public Radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Devon Strolovitch
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues at our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can subscribe to our free podcast and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Josh Landy
I’m Josh Landy.

Devon Strolovitch
And I’m Devon Strolovitch. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.