Elucidations

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Episode 157: Robin Hanson discusses prediction markets

July 21, 2026

In this episode, Matt and Joseph sit down with Robin Hanson, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, to discuss prediction markets. A prediction market is a kind of betting market, wherein people place bets on whether or not some future event is going to happen by investing in market shares associated with that event. If the event happens, the people who predicted it correctly get paid. If not, they lose the money they invested. So far, so good: all that is pretty normal ...

Episode 156: Oliver Traldi discusses political expertise

June 07, 2026

For this episode, Matt Teichman and Joseph Diller sit down with Oliver Traldi (University of Toledo, Mercatus Center) to talk about political expertise.What does it mean to be an expert in something? Our guest opens by noting that we use the term expert in two different ways: in the normal sense, a person is an expert in something if they know a lot about it, but in the social sense, a person is an expert in something if they have the social status of knowing a lot about it—like maybe they ha...

Episode 155: Rebecca Lowe discusses speaking freely

May 01, 2026

Last episode, we talked about free speech, and this time, we sit down with Rebecca Lowe (Mercatus Center) to discuss the related but slightly different topic of speaking freely. Speaking freely: the thing you feel entitled to do when a superior says to you: “you may speak freely.” But although speaking freely is the phenomenon our guest is interested in characterizing, rather than trying to characterize it directly, her approach is to get granular about what it means not to speak freely. Wha...