Episode 31 - Brian Earp

Struggle to Understand

In this episode, I speak with Brian Earp. Brian is the Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University and The Hastings Center, and a Research Fellow for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford and is currently finishing a joint Philosophy and Psychology PhD at Yale University. Given Brian’s wide experience, this conversation traverses a wide range of topics. We first speak about graduate school: its promise, problems, and our experiences with it. We then transition into a discussion about ethics and social science, taking up what’s been called the replicability crisis in social science as well as some of the perennial questions within the subfield of bioethics. The combination of these two elements leads us to a topic that is close to Brian’s heart: circumcision. We speak about male and female circumcision, why the latter is often called female genital mutilation but the former is rarely spoken of at all, as well as some of the myths and bad science that surround this topic. As you will see toward the end of our conversation, we seemingly have just begun to explore some of these topics when the reality of time intervenes in our conversation. Brian was tremendously gracious with his time and I hope to speak with him again soon, picking up from where we left off here. Find Love and Other Drugs here. Brian's other work can be found here. He can also be found on Twitter here. Introductory music was written by Alex Yoder. Find him here Please consider supporting the podcast here and following it on Twitter. Thank you for your support!