Solomon & Smith

Solomon & Smith
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Solomon & Smith discuss literature, philosophy, history, film, and the meaning of the universe.

  1. 11h ago

    Epstein, Lolita, and the P*rnification of Childhood

    00:00 Introduction 04:38 Lolita Summary 10:50 Did Epstein actually read/like Lolita? 14:32 Epstein's upbringing - boomer sexuality 19:51 Did male boomers create modern sexuality? 24:21 Differences between Epstein and Humbert 28:29 Do we all want to be children forever? 30:35 Our desires have been created for us 32:27 The modelling industry 34:55 Creation: of oneself, of others 36:30 Britney Spears, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter 38:37 Piper Rockelle: the Gen Alpha twist on the American Dream 41:53 Creation in Lolita - The ending 45:34 Lolita - controversial then and now, for different reasons 48:19 To write a book properly, it needs to be misread 50:48 The paradoxes of our age around children and sex 53:13 Why Gen Z are turning away from boomer sex 57:10 Conclusion - Epstein is a boring loser.

  2. Oct 2

    Does Artistic Genius Come From the Devil? | Faust, Yeats, and the Poetic Sublime

    Please help us continue having these discussions on Patreon, or follow us on other Podcast channels here: https://linktr.ee/solomon_smith Richard Barakat's *Faust the Magician* is available here: https://shorturl.at/CDWx0 See also the below discussions: Richard Barakat: The Literary Collective (Spring 2025): https://youtu.be/rwecUdt0p28 Richard Barakat: Philosophic Dialogues from La Frontera (Spring 2024): https://youtu.be/YiiZbUErFcA Richard Barakat joins us to explore the strange relationship between poetry, magic, and the Devil, beginning with Marlowe and Goethe’s Faust tellings and ending with Richard’s own apocalyptic Faust for the 21st century. Along the way: Pindar raises men towards the gods, Ovid turns poetry into immortality, Yeats makes images into magical powers, paganism and Christianity collide and combine, artistic genius edges towards possession, and Faust’s desire to transcend the human becomes inseparable from the old suspicion that the arts are, somehow, the Devil’s domain. 00:00 – Are the Arts the Devil’s Domain? 06:24 – What Is the Magic of Poetry? 10:15 – Marlowe, Goethe, and their Fausts 19:37 – Pagan Gods, Christianity, and Syncretism 27:43 – Pindar and Becoming Like the Gods 38:52 – What Makes Great Art Ineffable? 41:42 – Writing a Darker Faust for the 21st Century 49:50 – Faustian Knowledge, Faustian Power 52:32 – Yeats the Magician 57:20 – Ovid, Transformation, and Artistic Immortality 01:07:16 – Yeats: Leda and the Byzantium Poems 01:22:33 – Satan's Faustian Bargain 01:30:13 – Can Art Create Gods?

  3. Sep 25

    Is the Quran the EXACT Speech of God? Islamic Theology Explained | Ramon Harvey

    Please help us continue having these discussions on Patreon, or follow us on other Podcast channels here: https://linktr.ee/solomon_smith 00:00:00 Intro 00:05:30 Ramon arrives - poetic epigraph 00:06:30 What does it mean for God to Speak? 00:09:47 Is Arabic Special? Is it older than Nature? 00:12:04 Is the Quran translated into Arabic from Transcendent Speech? 00:14:11 Could putting God's words in a human language degrade them? 00:18:41 Are Arabic speakers especially chosen by God? Is Islam exclusive? 00:23:05 Should all Muslims learn Classical Arabic? 00:25:48 If you have two sentences that say the same thing in different words, could they both be from God? 00:32:49 What is the basis of the Quran's authority? 00:39:21 Variants of the Quran 00:48:22 The first printed Qurans. Literacy. 00:52:55 Can deaf illiterate people experience the Quran? 00:56:55 The mysteries of meaning. How do words mean things? 01:01:40 Is beauty truth? Is the Quran beautiful? 01:12:37 Would God choose to reveal himself in common language? 01:16:13 Did anyone ever try to write a better Quran? 01:22:25 The proof of the Quran lies in its effect on people. 01:27:16 Why did God stop revealing himself? Why are there no prophets after Muhammad? 01:32:10 Is God active in the lives of all humans? 01:34:22 Did the companions' editorial power cease after their death?

  4. Sep 18

    Consciousness is NOT an illusion... REALITY IS | William Seager

    Please help us continue having these discussions on Patreon, or follow us on other Podcast channels here: https://linktr.ee/solomon_smith 00:00:00 Intro 00:07:38 Why Does Consciousness Break Science 00:10:40 Is Life Special? Biophychism: Is Life Consciousness? 00:14:40 Are Observations (Quantum Physics) Dependent on Consciousness? 00:18:10 A Unique Element of Consciousness, distinguishing it from Life 00:21:25 Why is Consciousness Not A Vague Concept? 00:26:40 Are Our Brains Lying to Us? Is Consciousness an Illusion 00:32:58 Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious? 00:35:00 Epiphenomenalism 00:39:25 The Matrix and Divorce of Mind and Reality 00:42:25 How Much of Our Awareness Relies on Sense Data? 00:48:40 Pure Being and Pure Consciousness 00:52:12 Panpsychism, and how it solves the problem of consciousness 00:56:45 Mysterianism and Colin McGinn 00:59:06 Is Panpsychism just sexed-up materialism? 01:03:17 Weak vs. Strong Emergence 01:07:25 Is Panpsychism an Imaginary Science? 01:10:45 Consciousness is Integrated Information 01:14:08 Cosmopsychism 01:20:13 Physical Reactivity is the Signature of Consciousness 01:23:39 Could dark matter or antimatter be without consciousness?

  5. Sep 15

    The Dark Religion of American Literature | Taylor Caron on the Neo-Gnostics

    Please help us continue having these discussions on Patreon, or follow us on other Podcast channels here: https://linktr.ee/solomon_smith Taylor returns to take Milo and Jack through ten great works of American "Gnostic" literature, beginning with Emerson’s Nature and ending, exactly a century later, with Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Along the way: Jones Very believes himself to be Christ, Hawthorne discovers the stain in creation, Ahab declares war on visible reality, Whitman meets the “real Me”, Dickinson confronts an inaccessible God, and Melville, Bierce, West, and Faulkner push the American suspicion of the world into ever darker territory. Part two of our Gnostic Bonanza; the first part - on the original Gnostics - available here: https://youtu.be/brOyXDlaA-Y?si=DQGCLCq61lwZm4PG CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction 03:24 I. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature (1836) 11:15 II. Jones Very – Essays and Poems (1839) 18:48 III. Nathaniel Hawthorne – Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) 24:46 IV. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick (1851) 34:55 V. Walt Whitman – Sea-Drift / “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (1860) 41:21 VI. Emily Dickinson – Poems (1861–65) 50:53 VII. Herman Melville – Clarel (1876) 59:01 VIII. Ambrose Bierce – Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) 1:04:10 IX. Nathanael West – Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) 1:07:38 X. William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom! (1936) 1:21:04 American Gnosticism – Final Thoughts

  6. Sep 11

    The Christians Who Thought God Was Evil | Taylor Caron on the Gnostic Gospels

    Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith Solomon & Smith on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/solomon-smith/id6808681930 On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2DkVPzTS5lHkynSlHMyOL2?si=FsVpIakbR861Vg9jM3WZvQ&utm_source=copy-link On Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7ca1e4c1-2e5a-4691-9c32-35c05fc01f05 On iHeart: https://iheart.com/podcast/343165456 In this episode of Solomon and Smith, Jack and Milo speak with Taylor Caron about the Gnostics: those strange, alluring, heretical early Christians who believed that the physical world was corrupt, that its creator was not the highest God, and that salvation came through secret knowledge of the divine world beyond this one. This is the first part of a two-part conversation. In this episode, we begin with the original Gnostics: the lost gospels, the Nag Hammadi texts, the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Judas, Valentinus, the Gospel of Truth, Thunder, Perfect Mind, the Epistle to Flora, the Gospel of Philip, and the Second Treatise of the Great Seth. In the next part, we turn to American Gnosticism and the strange afterlife of these ideas in modern literature. What is Gnosticism? Is the material world evil? Was Yahweh the demiurge? Who or what is Barbello? Why does Jesus keep appearing as a child, an old woman, a voice, a double, a robe, a cosmic emissary, or a being laughing from outside the crucifixion? And how did a collection of bizarre early Christian texts found in Egypt in 1945 come to haunt modern religion, literature, conspiracy, pop culture, Harold Bloom, The Da Vinci Code, and the idea of hidden knowledge itself? Chapters: 00:00 Was Valentinus better than the Bible? 01:10 Introduction 05:47 Taylor enters 07:50 What is Gnosticism? 09:30 Nag Hammadi and the lost texts 11:01 The basic Gnostic worldview 15:18 I. The Gospel of Thomas 20:30 II. The Secret Book of John 23:18 Barbello, Sophia and the demiurge 29:42 III. The Hymn of the Pearl 34:15 IV. The Gospel of Judas 38:38 Crucifixion, flesh and anti-natalism 40:09 V. Valentinus' Fragments 45:24 VI. The Gospel of Truth 52:16 VII. Thunder Perfect Mind 56:20 VIII. The Epistle to Flora 1:01:18 Jesus and the Hebrew Bible 1:05:27 IX. The Gospel of Philip 1:10:46 X. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth 1:15:48 Orthodoxy, heresy and the stakes of the crucifixion

  7. Sep 8

    Youtube Just Made Views Worthless | Hyper Viewflation

    Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith What is a view? What is attention? Does a number become more real if it is larger? Are advertisers being ushered into a hall of mirrors? And if every video, every creator, every athlete, every billionaire, and every man on earth can be given a bigger number, have we made the world better — or simply made value meaningless? We discuss YouTube views, attention inflation, dead internet paradise, advertisers, Zimbabwean trillionaires, egalitarianism, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, cinema box office inflation, World of Warcraft stat squish, the psychological horror of decline, the impossibility of measuring attention, the parable of the workers in the vineyard, angelic value, Christianity, equality, and whether every mote of dust has infinite worth. Chapters: 00:00 The number goes up 00:51 Introduction 04:45 YouTube changes the view count 08:02 Advertisers and the fantasy economy 12:40 Do labels change reality? 14:47 Egalitarianism, power and resentment 19:03 Do big numbers hide inequality? 22:35 Cinema, inflation and fake success 24:22 Stat squish and the horror of smaller numbers 27:14 What can value actually measure? 31:07 Can attention ever be quantified? 36:01 The workers in the vineyard 38:01 Earthly numbers and angelic value 42:36 YouTube views in heaven 43:38 Christianity, equality and infinite worth

  8. Sep 4

    Why We May Never Understand Consciousness | Colin McGinn on Mind and Language

    Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith Thinkers mentioned: Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Charles Darwin, Paul Grice, Fred Dretske, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague, Iain McGilchrist, Alfred Tarski 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:49 Knife Throwing, Other Athletic Activities 00:11:57 Poetic Epigraph 00:13:05 How to integrate Philosophy, Linguistics, and Biology? Should philosophers read Dawkins? Should biologists read Tarski? 00:20:15 Origins of language. Are any aspects of language as old as consciousness? 00:27:39 Can we only discuss language in language? 00:29:06 Are all philosophical problems linguistic? Analytic philosophy 00:32:45 Fodor and the Language of thought. Language without communication 00:34:50 Consciousness and the limits of knowing 00:39:38 Can something exist without you knowing it? 00:42:40 Can we understand/build a mind? 00:43:49 Links between Mysterianism and Apathatic theology? 00:48:13 Does McGinn's Mysterianism conflict with his Naturalism? 00:50:10 Why do we have introspection? 00:55:28 Do our brains see the world dualistically to support the existence of language? 01:01:35 Wittgenstein's Investigations. Split brains. McGilchrist. 01:03:43 The brain has over-invested in spatial reasoning. 01:06:16 Communication without symbols, without linguistic utterance. 01:11:38 Philosophers don't pay enough attention to animals. Darwin, etc. 01:14:35 Philosophers read too much psychology, and don't understand it.

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About

Solomon & Smith discuss literature, philosophy, history, film, and the meaning of the universe.

Information

  • Creator
    Solomon & Smith
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    52
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Solomon & Smith

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