The Sophisticates is a conversational podcast aimed at covering the most critical issues of today. Like hobos. Hosted by Rajan Mudamni, Ryan Pfister and Matt Patches, the show tackles three topics per episode and strives for understanding, humor and the occasional life-changing revelation.

Rajan Mudambi is a grad student at NYU in computer science focusing on natural language processing. He enjoys reading, singing, playing any sports (but especially the water bottle game), and filling up his brain with useless information.

Ryan Pfister is an IBM business analytics and optimization consultant (but his opinions are his own). He has also worked in the communications and finance industries. In his free time, he enjoys traveling, reading, hiking, and investigating low-technology food storage and consumption. Learn more at his site and follow him on Twitter.

Matt Patches is an entertainment journalist with a penchant for film. His writing can be found at UGO.com, FilmSchoolRejects.com, NextMovie.com, as well as his other podcast “Operation Kino,” hosted at CinemaBlend. When he’s not chatting up these two, he’s having equally mundane/mind-blowing conversations in the real world. Learn more at his site and follow him on Twitter.