In April 2019 I uploaded my first podcast. At the time, it was branded “The Cosmic Skeptic Podcast”, and was practically allergic to anything resembling a schedule. It ran for 21 episodes before stagnating into a quiet death. Then, in 2023, I decided to have another go, but to do it properly. I created the Within Reason Podcast, and uploaded its first episode (with Bishop Robert Barron) that March.
At that time, I had between 600 and 700 thousand subscribers on YouTube, and wasn’t sure how the show would be received. There were growing pains (not least wasting your time with a 15 second musical introduction), but eventually it proved to be a success. Eventually, I killed “CosmicSkeptic” (in a Weatherspoon pub, actually), nervously replacing the familiar moniker with a more familial one.
100 episodes in, and I’m proud of what I (and now my growing team) have accomplished. My channel has existed in serious form since 2016, but almost half of its entire subscriber base (600,000 of you!) “smashed that button” in the past 365 days.
(In theory, this is only episode 79 of Within Reason, since I considered it a continuation of the Cosmic Skeptic Podcast and started the count as such. Perhaps this is controversial, but if so, consider this post a celebration of episode 79. And, reflecting on the arbitrariness of our base 10 counting system, let me know if you can think of an objective reason why it’s any less significant a number, anyway.)
So, golden plaque in hand, I present to you a special episode to mark number 100 (79?). Joe Folley of Unsolicited Advice joins me to pit 16 philosophers — each relevant in some way to the history of my channel — against each other, in what is an unashamedly subjective and relatively fruitless endeavour to figure out who we think comes out on top.
Paid subscribers can watch it now. Here are the timestamps:
01:20 – David Hume vs René Descartes
20:52 – Plato vs Aristotle
29:23 – Peter Singer vs Richard Dawkins
51:10 – Zeno vs Judith Jarvis Thomson
01:13:42 – Christopher Hitchens vs Jordan Peterson
01:28:56 – Friedrich Nietzsche vs Søren Kierkegaard
01:51:51 – Arthur Schopenhauer vs Fyodor Dostoevsky
02:23:43 – Thomas Aquinas vs Jesus of Nazareth
02:31:43 – Quarter Final 1
02:37:08 – Quarter Final 2
02:38:43 – Quarter Final 3
02:47:05 – Quarter Final 4
02:53:46 – Semi Final 1
02:59:25 – Semi Final 1.5
03:02:10 – Semi Final 2
03:03:00 – Winner
