Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Toby Buckle

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a conversation between Sara van Goozen and Toby Buckle. Toby Buckle runs the popular Political Philosophy Podcast. He has a BA in PPE from Oxford University and an MA in Political Philosophy from the University of York. He spent many years working with political and advocacy groups in the United States, such as Human Rights Campaign, Environment America,  Working Families Party and Amnesty International. He started his podcast around seven years ago, and has interviewed academics including Elizabeth Anderson, Orlando Patterson, Phillip Pettit, and Cecile Fabre, as well as politicians (such as Senator Sherrod Brown, or Civil Rights Commission Chair, Mary Francis Berry), commentators (such as Ian Dunt) and public figures (such as Derek Guy AKA Menswear Guy). He is the editor of What is Freedom? Conversations with Historians, Philosophers, and Activists (Oxford University Press, 2021). He writes regularly for Liberal Currents. In this interview, we discuss running a podcast, the enduring relevance of historical philosophers, and what young academics can do to build a public profile.

Justice Everywhere: Why were you originally interested in political philosophy, and in doing something with political philosophy?

Toby Buckle: I did a PPE undergrad, and like a lot of people who do PPE I wasn’t quite sure which of those particular branches I was going to follow. History of political thought, political theory and philosophy definitely stood out to me. I love a lot of the key texts in history of political thought. I love Plato. I love Machiavelli. I love John Stuart Mill, I like Hobbes – he’s not super popular with undergrads, but once you wrap your head around it, he’s very interesting.

And then – this was back in the day when University was still a bit more affordable and there were more funding options to do postgraduate study – I applied and got accepted to do MA in Political Philosophy here in York. I ended up moving to the States – I’m a dual national – and I worked in American politics for quite a few years. I never stopped thinking about questions of political values, political morality, but from a more applied perspective.

JE: So what inspired you to start the podcast then?

TB: The podcast started about seven or eight years ago now, and it was in the aftermath of Brexit and then Trump 2016, which were the opening salvos of our current era in a lot of ways. I had been working in a progressive space during that time. I’d been with the Working Families Party of New York during the 2016 primaries. And then I was with Amnesty International USA during Trump’s election. Somewhat unusually, I thought Trump would win, which seems obvious now, but it was very rare at the time; you had models putting Hillary as a 94% favourite and things like that. Even within Amnesty, people thought I was mad when I said I thought he would win, until he did.

And it was in that context, I started to think back to a lot of political philosophy. Michael Freeden was one of my undergraduate tutors, and a lot of his framework made a lot of sense for me in that moment. One of his big things is indeterminacy – political values are essentially contestable. There are political consensuses, and they seem stable and permanent for a while, but then they fail partially or fail totally, and new orders arise. And I think that having those frameworks at some level in my mind made the political moment we were in, which was profoundly shocking to many, many people at the time, more intelligible to me.

That’s why I started the podcast, and I really did it on a whim. I didn’t know if it would stick or be successful. I just wanted to have conversations with people. I came from the point of view of maybe being somewhere between the applied and the theoretic, somewhere between these abstract theories and the reality of how do you message on the ground when Trump has just won?

JE: You’ve got a massive range of different guests on the podcast. Did you start with the idea of getting a particular type of guest, or any particular topics?

TB: I think one thing that’s useful when you’re starting a podcast, is to start with a reasonably narrow focus and then branch out. You have to ask yourself, what are you doing that no one else is? I noticed no one else was doing specifically political philosophy at the time. So I was like, “Cool, that’s my lane”. But as you build up an audience who trusts you, then you can say, ‘hear me out, this thing over here is actually quite interesting’, and they’ll follow you.

I would say I’m still within political philosophy, very broadly understood, inclusive of history of political and religious thought, inclusive of political theory, inclusive of how political values are used in day-to-day political exchanges.

JE: You’ve been doing this podcast for a while now, what were some of the surprising things that you learned while doing this?

TB: I mean, I’ve just learned an incredible amount. I would also say there’s areas I’ve been surprised by my own interest in, and surprised that the audience would follow along with me. One big one is that I’ve been very surprised how interested I’ve been in religion and the history of religious thought, because I’m not religious and I wasn’t raised religious. But I had Dale B. Martin, who was a New Testament professor, quite a few times. He sadly passed away a few years ago, but he’s just been a delight to talk to. He could make the absolute minutia of scholarly theories feel like an invigorating detective story. I’ve spent a huge amount of time with that now, and I’ve been surprised how relevant I found it.

It’s not that, in some areas, religious people are right and secular people are wrong, but academics who study religion have wrapped their head around a framework better than theorists in politics. For instance, why does status dissonance tend to correlate with people who are rebellious politically. Scholars of religion have a better narrative about that than scholars of politics. I’ve also found ideas about purity super interesting. It seems like a very dry, quite technical area of religion. But I’ve come to understand this is a sort of moral framework for thinking and talking about the world that is actually operative in all of us, and understanding what people who studied it directly say is so useful.

JE: And on a more practical level, is there any advice that you have for people that might be interested in doing something like this?

TB: When I started, I reached out to a few people who had already been established in the podcast space in philosophy. Matt Teichman, who does the Elucidations Podcast, and Peter Adamson, who does the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast were both very kind and generous with their time and very useful. And I try to pay that forward. So, if anyone is trying to start a podcast and wants advice, and they reach out to me, I will always say yes!

Anyway, here’s my advice: First, do what I’ve just mentioned, reach out to half a dozen, a dozen people who are in the area that you want to podcast, and ask them if you can chat about your idea.

Second, you need to work out what are you doing that no one else is. You don’t have to stay in your niche, but just to stand out from the crowd, you initially want to find a lane that no one else is doing.

Next, this is a preposterous amount of work. This will kill you, and you have to stick at it, because it takes a while to catch. Some people get lucky and have a viral moment, but I’ve had to work freaking six years to have one of those. Your first 100 followers are harder than your first 1000, and your first 1000 are harder than your first 10,000. While anybody can start a podcast, it’s that getting established bit that will knock nine out of 10 people out.

Finally, networking and connections. This is ultimately a collective endeavour. So pick a social media platform that’s going to work for you – if you are anywhere in politics, philosophy, history, that’s going to be Bluesky. (It used to be Twitter). Then think about who you collaborate with.

This is very much not a zero-sum game. It is a collaborative endeavour between you, other podcasters, the people you might want to interview.  Academic book publishers will be super useful to you – once you get good relationships with the university presses, they will just send you whatever books you want, and they will recommend people to come on your show.

JE: There’s something interesting to me about the way in which the proliferation of podcasts, new media and nontraditional publishing, in an academic context, is also in turn potentially affecting the way a lot of academics and academic organizations work. Optimistically, you could say there is a democratization of knowledge production and sharing. There are opportunities to engage new audiences and to get new audiences interested in, say, New Testament theology. What are the responsibilities that come with that dynamic? Do you think about these kinds of things at all?

TB: Yes, so in terms of how we make the relationship between podcasters and academics work – and just as a note, a lot of times the relationship is in the same person, a podcaster might be an academic – I think we’re in our initial phases of this, and we’re still working it out, and we haven’t quite got all the way yet. I don’t know what the final destination will be, or perhaps even should be. I think where we are now has probably been a net positive overall. The number of people who found things that are just interesting and engaging and they’ve liked is huge, right? And I think it’s also nice for some academics to have a broader reach for their work.

But I think there are definitely concerns. I’ll give you an example – representation in podcasting. And I say this with love, but it is a white male space, right?

I think for a lot of people not a huge amount of thought has gone into which voices you’re elevating. I’ll tell you this from my own experience: if I didn’t take counter measures, 85 to 90% of my podcast guests would be men. Because I’m at the point now where a lot of my guests are people who will invite themselves on, either personally or through a publicist. I welcome this, but I do find such ‘self-referals’ to be overwhelmingly male.

Right now, if I want to even get to parity on gender lines, I have to go through periods where I’m doing kind of an all-women shortlist. If I get the perfect guest who offers to come on and they happen to be a man, I’m not saying no, but I have to self-consciously go against that a bit. And even then, I must still be 60/40 male.

There are asymmetric power disparities on both sides. On my side, I can put you in front of two orders of magnitude more people than any other opportunity you are realistically going to get, and that is a sort of power. On the other side, you as an academic have a stable, if not super well paid, secure job. Whereas a lot of us are doing this essentially for free. So that’s sort of a power disparity. And power disparities are just weird by their nature.

I don’t have a brilliant solution for either of those things. I think overall, this relationship has been a net force for good in the world. I think it’s quite new, and I think we haven’t worked out all the kinks yet.

JE: I just wanted to pick up on some of the articles you recently wrote for Liberal Currents, because I thought it was very interesting how you are combining insights from philosophy, including, in some cases, philosophers that wouldn’t necessarily intuitively go with the topic at hand, in interesting ways to appeal to a broad audience. In what ways do you think using these big philosophical ideas to address these concrete, contemporary, problems, can help us understand the Present Moment better? And what inspired you to go back to philosophers like Mill to talk about these issues?

TB: It’s a cliché to say philosophy isn’t what you think, it’s how you think. But like many cliches, there’s a reason for it.

To take the case of Mill –  In one of my recent articles I wanted to make a very, very basic point, that choice is good. How does that relate to masculinity? Because we as men, living in contemporary, somewhat liberal societies, have far more choice in how we live our lives than past men. We talk a lot, and correctly so, about how women have more options in terms of what they pursue as careers. But there’s been a perception amongst many that that increase in freedom for women has come at the expense of men. And once you think about it for two seconds, that obviously isn’t true. Most men today relative to any other period in history actually have a lot more choice, including choices to be, say, traditionally masculine.

I could have just left it at that, but I think we’re in a moment where agreement with core liberal fundamentals can no longer be taken for granted. What trips people up is that a lot of what might have been seen as the overwhelming consensus is now politically up for grabs. Something like equality before the law is up for grabs. Something like anti-racism is up for grabs. And, in this case, why choice is good is up for grabs. I think that there is – to use your colleagues’ Alasia Nuti and Gabriele Badano’s phrase – a duty to persuade when these core ideals are in the air.

And to my mind, probably your best account of why choice is good is in Mill’s On Liberty. A lot of those arguments stand up, even though in that text, they’re not specifically applied to gender roles and norms about masculinity. I find Mill’s way of thinking super useful for expressing these ideas. You don’t have to start from scratch every time you’re expressing a value. If I want to say why should choice is good, or why equality before the law is good, we have this resource in the history of political thought. So I take Mill and quote him a bit, and then put it into my own words. As someone who talks to large-ish audiences, I find that putting Mill in your own words has a huge cut through. That era of liberalism connects with people in ways that, frankly, a lot of the ways we’ve learned to talk as contemporary liberals don’t. People like the Liberty Principle. It intuitively clicks. But obviously, Mill’s verbiage isn’t particularly modern, so you have to find a way to say it in your own words.

JE: Finally, do you have any advice for early career academics, how they can use social media and the internet, to enhance their profile? Because you’ve done a really good job with that.

TB: Social media, for all its evils, does help. I would approach social media as a collaborative exercise. Again, see this as “how do we all help each other” rather than “how do I get the most out of it for myself?” You don’t have to be on it super often, but do just a few things a week, and that can literally just be sharing updates, articles from your colleagues. Again, it’s collaborative, and then hopefully they’ll do it back for you.

In terms of how to use my side of the world, podcasts, new media, to essentially market yourself – here’s the revealed wisdom. Just ask. If you’re lucky, your publisher will have a marketing person who will send some emails for you. But if you’re an early career academic, that might not be the case. So what I would do is make a list of every podcast, new media, news outlet, whatever that’s even vaguely in your space and then just reach out to all of them. Some will ignore you, but many will say yes. We’re always looking for guests so if you fit the bill, you’ve made our lives easier.

One thing that I’ve found super useful, that I’ve seen some early career academics do, is they’ll have an article published in something popular-facing, so not behind a paywall, that’s like a 2000-word summary of what they’re arguing in their book. That’s a perfect business card. So, you can reach out and say, “Hey, I’ve just written this book. Seems like it would be a good fit for your podcast. Here’s a really short article about it.” And then I don’t have to read the whole book to know if you’d be a good fit.

In terms of actually doing good interviews, that will come with practice. I would say, put yourself out there. If you really don’t want to do it, don’t do it, obviously. But if you’re in doubt, just ask. Podcasters, by and large, want new guests, and by and large, they’re not out to trip you up.

What that will also do is build networks for you of people you can come back to in the future, or who will share your stuff on social media.

Finally, I’d say building yourself a following online, and getting your stuff out there is kind of this Sisyphean thing. Even if you manage to get on a big podcast, that’s probably not going to make or break you – you do it and then you do it again, and you do it again, and you do it again. So, you have to make a decision about what your values are with respect to your time and what you prioritize, academic writing versus public stuff versus family stuff. I can’t tell you what your values should be, but if you do want to establish a public profile for yourself, just keep chipping away at it, and it will come.