Hello and welcome to Money Talks from Slate Money, the show where I, Felix Salmon, and occasionally my co-host, Emily Peck, will talk to the most interesting people in the world about the most interesting things in the world.

And right now, quite amazingly and wonderfully, we get to talk to

Barry Lamb about philosophy. This is a money show, I promise, but this is going to be a very

philosophical money show. Barry, welcome to Money Talks. I'm so happy to be here. You know,

philosophy's polarizing. Either you've turned it off or you're like, oh, that's going to be great.

Yeah, at this point, the only people still listening are the people who are like nerding out and going,

this is really cool.

So now we can just be total nerds.

We are going to talk about all manner of philosophical things and specifically how they apply

to the current budget debate. And we bring in some

great philosophers, starting with Descartes and Hume and running all the way through Willard van

Orman Quine and Saul Kripke and other wonderfully named people. It's all coming up on Money Talks.

We are kind of sort of colleagues, even though we've never actually met, because you have

your very own podcast under the slate umbrella.

That's right.

I've been here for, what, I don't know, three, four years.

So, Hi-Fi Nation, new episodes coming back later on this year.

I've been gone for a couple years, but yeah, happy to have a new episode. And that's hi-fi with a P. That's right, H-I-P-H-I. Because apparently, if you're going to abbreviate philosophy, it becomes phi. You could say fee, which, I don't know, what's the proper, like, Latin way? I mean, because it's a Greek letter, but people speak in Latin. I don't know. Some people say fee. Some people say phi.

I'm going to have to brush up on my Latin. I am very rusty indeed when it comes to Latin. I'm slightly less rusty when it comes to the philosophy of language. Well, I don't even know if it's the philosophy of language. Well, it's both. It's

philosophy of language and it's this thing that is, yeah, it's the philosophy of language or

epistemology, you might say. I feel like this is a real epistemic problem here. And the problem

that we are that we are struggling with is the very simple or deceptively simple statement that people will make about

...