Is ignorance truly bliss?

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Is ignorance truly bliss?"

Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing (Vox)
Host: Sean Illing
Guest: Mark Lilla, Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, author of Ignorance and Bliss
Date: February 17, 2025

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Main Theme

This episode explores the philosophical tension between the desire to know and the equally strong desire not to know. Host Sean Illing and guest Mark Lilla probe the famous adage "ignorance is bliss" by asking whether there are circumstances where ignorance is rational, necessary, or even healthy, both individually and socially. Drawing from Lilla's latest book, the conversation moves through ancient philosophy, psychological self-defense, political manipulation, and the nostalgia for simpler states of being, seeking nuance in one of humanity's oldest dilemmas.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Parody of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (03:00–05:15)

• Sean Illing opens by referencing Plato’s allegory of the cave—a foundational metaphor about enlightenment and ignorance—and invites Lilla to expand on how he "plays with" the story in his book.
• Mark Lilla’s twist: In his version, a companion of the freed prisoner desperately wishes to return to the cave, suggesting coming into the sunlight (truth) isn’t necessarily desirable for everyone.
  • "I start the book saying, you know, it's an open question whether coming out into sunlight is a good thing." (04:56)

The Human Impulse to Not Know (05:15–06:49)

• Lilla critiques Aristotle’s claim that “all human beings want to know,” arguing it’s incomplete:
  • "The struggle to know and not know is going on in all of us all the time." (05:15)
• There are both trivial (wrapped presents, movie spoilers) and serious (taboos, childhood innocence) examples where not-knowing is rational.

The Social Dance of Admitting Ignorance (06:49–08:41)

• People resist admitting ignorance due to the intimacy of their opinions—having them challenged feels emotionally invasive.
• Lilla describes opinions as "prostheses, like an extra limb," making intellectual challenges feel deeply personal.
  • "You're constantly trying to patch things together, to show to yourself and others you understand." (07:14)

Wise Ignorance and the Socratic Example (08:41–11:59)

• Is it justifiable to reject the pursuit of knowledge and retreat to ignorance?
  • Lilla proposes learning from your own ignorance is key, highlighting Socrates' use of uncertainty to spur inquiry rather than paralyze it.
• The changing nature of knowledge (e.g., COVID shifting scientific consensus) shows the discomfort people feel with uncertainty.
  • "We have a yearning to live standing on solid ground, but we don’t stand on solid ground." (09:04)
• Sean suggests there are limits to the value of an “examined life.”
  • "A life that's nothing but examined is equally unworthy, that there's more to life than knowing and understanding." (11:03)
• Lilla agrees, especially regarding the need to take some things (like parental love) for granted.

The Power of Ignorance (13:44–16:02)

• Knowledge is famously "power," but Lilla notes ignorance has power too.
  • "We thought a lot about the power of knowledge, but we haven't thought about the power of ignorance." (14:25)
• Social life would grind to a halt if we knew everything others thought; some ignorance is necessary for stability and self-coherence.

Political Manipulation and the Exploitation of Ignorance (16:02–18:35)

• Exploiting ignorance is a timeless political tool; people crave certainty amid complexity, making them susceptible to demagogues.
  • "People need certainty and they will demand it. And so political leaders... can provide simple answers to things that seem very complicated..." (16:35)
• Modern societies struggle with overwhelming complexity (global economy, novel challenges), intensifying the temptation of simplistic (ignorant) answers.

The Purpose of Knowledge and Its Limits (18:35–23:57)

• Is knowledge inherently valuable, or only if useful?
  • Lilla suggests appetite for knowledge is a function of character—some are compelled by it, others by avoidance.
• Self-knowledge, on review, is not always beneficial; too much can paralyze or horrify, as in Augustine’s Confessions.
• Socrates’ optimistic view—that knowing oneself makes one good—is questioned.
  • "Socrates assumes that all self-knowledge is in the end going to be helpful..." (19:46)
  • Both agree that’s overly simplistic; self-knowledge can reveal painful, irresolvable contradictions.
  • Lilla raises Montaigne as a figure who advocates for embracing contradiction.
• Is self-knowledge required to know the external world?
  • Lilla offers multiple perspectives: some scientists lack self-awareness yet make discoveries, but inquiry into “what constitutes knowing” does require self-reflection.

Nostalgia and the Longing for Innocence (25:43–32:27)

• Illing connects nostalgia to knowledge/ignorance dynamics: when does society or the individual long to return to a time before painful knowledge?
• Lilla posits nostalgia grows when "the present becomes illegible," fueling fantasies of a more understandable, ordered past.
  • "Dissatisfaction with the present and an absence of knowledge about how to improve things are spurs to imagine... a time when life was ordered in a better way." (26:23)
• Childhood as an idealized state: ignorance confers simplicity, happiness, and freedom—but, as Lilla notes, the awareness of such innocence means it’s already lost.
  • Sean Illing: "There are real things in the world about which to be anxious and insecure. And there are many, many more things that we conjure up in our minds..." (28:53)
  • Mark Lilla: "The very fact that you were able to describe it means that you’re past it, right?" (30:03)
• Adult wonder is different from childlike wonder: it is tinged with the knowledge that not all is wonderful, making moments of awe more precious by contrast.

Personal Takeaways and the Role of Philosophy (32:27–33:26)

• Illing asks Lilla if the book changed his relationship to ignorance.
  • Mark Lilla: "Philosophy that is aware of our ignorance is a step forward. The greatest cognitive achievement of human beings is getting to maybe." (33:02)
    • Sean Illing: "I like that. I'm going to leave it right there." (33:17)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• "It's an open question whether coming out into sunlight is a good thing."
  — Mark Lilla (04:56), reflecting on the desirability of enlightenment.

• "The struggle to know and not know is going on in all of us all the time."
  — Mark Lilla (05:15), highlighting universal ambivalence toward knowledge.

• "Our opinions feel like prostheses, like an extra limb."
  — Mark Lilla (07:14), on why challenges to opinions feel so personal.

• "We have a yearning to live standing on solid ground, but we don’t stand on solid ground."
  — Mark Lilla (09:04), summarizing modern discomfort with uncertainty.

• "We thought a lot about the power of knowledge, but we haven't thought about the power of ignorance."
  — Mark Lilla, quoting George Eliot (14:25).

• "The very fact that you were able to describe it means that you’re past it, right?"
  — Mark Lilla (30:03), on the paradox of lost innocence.

• "The greatest cognitive achievement of human beings is getting to maybe."
  — Mark Lilla (33:02), offering a humble view about the limits of certainty.

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:00–05:15 - Rethinking Plato’s Cave: Is the truth always desirable?
• 06:49–08:41 - Why we resist admitting ignorance and defend our beliefs.
• 09:04–11:59 - The dangers of excessive self-examination; some ignorance is necessary for bonding and stability.
• 14:25–16:02 - The double-edged sword of ignorance as a form of social and psychological power.
• 16:35–18:35 - How political actors exploit the need for certainty via manufactured ignorance.
• 18:35–23:57 - Is knowledge valuable for its own sake? The distinction between useful, dangerous, and paralyzing knowledge.
• 25:43–32:27 - The connection between nostalgia, knowledge, and lost innocence; adult vs. childlike wonder.
• 32:27–33:26 - Lilla’s personal philosophical takeaway: embracing the uncertainty of "maybe."

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Final Thoughts

The episode challenges the simplistic binary of knowledge as good and ignorance as bad. Both, Illing and Lilla agree, are inextricably part of the human condition—sometimes necessary, sometimes dangerous, and often deeply entwined. The wisest stance, they suggest, may be philosophical humility: a readiness to ask, examine, but also accept the limits of what can be known, and the inevitability (and occasional necessity) of not knowing.

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For those seeking a nuanced, philosophical take on the limits of knowledge, the dangers and comforts of ignorance, and the role of uncertainty in individual and collective life, this episode is essential listening.

Transcript

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The app Download Today who hasn't heard the phrase ignorance is bliss a thousand times? Like all cliches, it's stuck sticks because it's rooted in truth. But it's worth asking why ignorance can be so satisfying. If you read the history of philosophy, you don't find all that much interest in the delights of ignorance. Instead, you hear a lot about the pursuit of truth, which is assumed to be a universal human impulse. As Aristotle famously claimed, all human beings want to know. And that's not entirely wrong, of course. Most of us do want to know. But denial and avoidance are also human impulses. Sometimes they're even more powerful than our need to know. These drives, a need to know and a strong desire never to find out are often warring within us, shaping our worldview, our relationships, and our self image. Which raises the question, when is ignorance really bliss? When isn't it? And how can we tell the difference? I'm Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area. Today's guest is Mark Lilla. Mark is a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and the author of a new book called Ignorance and Bliss on Wanting not to Know. The questions I just asked are the questions Mark grapples with in this book. It's short, elegantly written, and maybe the highest compliment I can give is that it reads like a book that could have been written at almost any point in modern history. What I mean by that is that it's not reactive to the moment. It engages one of the oldest questions in philosophy, to know or not to know, and manages to offer fresh insights that feel relevant and timeless at the same time. So I invited Mark on the show to explore why we accept and resist the truth and what it means to live in that tension. Mark Lilla, welcome to the show.

[Mark Lilla]

Good to see you again. Sean.

[Sean Elling]

Likewise. And it's great to talk about this lovely book of yours. Obviously, the book is about Our will to know and our will to not know. And, of course, the book opens with a kind of parody of Plato's famous allegory of the cave. And, you know, I think people know the basic story of Plato's cave. You know, you have these prisoners who spend their whole life bound by chains in a cave, looking at shadows being cast on a wall, and they mistake those shadows for reality because it's the only reality they've ever known. Why don't you take it from there and just say a bit about how you. You play a little bit with that story?

[Mark Lilla]

Yeah. Well, in Plato's copyrighted edition of the story, a stranger comes in and turns one of the prisoners around so that he realizes that he's been living in a world of shadows and is invited to climb up to the sun and then lives up there until he's told to come back down, get other people. In my version of the story, he's got a little friend with him, a young boy who also goes up. And when it comes time to go back down, the man tells him he can stay up in staring at the. At the forms and being in the pure sunlight and seeing what is. And it turns out he's desperate to return. It's a cold life. All of his fantasy and imagination have dried up. He misses his virtual friends, and eventually he's taken back down. And so I start the book saying, you know, it's an open question whether coming out into sunlight is a good thing.

[Sean Elling]

So when Plato's most famous student, Aristotle, rights that all human beings want to know, do you think that statement is just very importantly, incomplete? That the impulse to not want to know is just as strong and maybe just as important?

[Mark Lilla]

Yeah, I think it's incomplete. And it's not as if there's a certain class of people who are resisting knowledge and we, the enlightened, do not. But rather that the struggle to know and not know is going on in all of us all the time, and that we ought to be aware of that and be able to try to sort out when that's a healthy instinct and when it's not.

[Sean Elling]

When is it rational to not know?

[Mark Lilla]

Oh, there are all sorts of cases. A lot of them are trivial. You know, we. We wrap presents. Why do we do that? Because we want to build the suspense. Some people don't want to know the sex of their unborn child because they want to have a surprise. We don't want people to recount the entire plot of a movie we want to see. We tell them spoiler Alert. And then there are more serious situations where we have to think about how to raise children and when they are prepared to absorb new information and knowledge and to have certain experiences. We also have to think about whether there are healthy taboos in society, that there are places where we try to not have people look in order that we can somehow keep our society together.

[Sean Elling]

One of the problems you play with a little bit is that, you know, we. We need to be ignorant. We want to be ignorant of certain things, but we also really, really hate to admit our own ignorance. So we're constantly playing this game of hide and seek with ourselves. That's a bit of a strange, untenable dance, don't you think?

[Mark Lilla]

It is. It is. People don't want to feel that they're incurious and holding things at arm's distance and not thinking about them. And I'm not sure where that comes from, but certainly it's the case. It certainly is the case. And part of it, I think, is that, to use a metaphor, that our opinions are not things that we just have in a bag that we pull out when they need expression, but rather they feel like prostheses, like an extra limb. And if someone refutes our argument or mocks it, it feels like something quite intimate has been touched. And so that is an incentive to not admit your ignorance and to build up all sorts of defenses and appeal to bogus authorities in order to remain convinced of your own rational capacities and your independence. And so it becomes a kind of perverse thing where you're constantly trying to patch things together, to show to yourself and others you understand. And in. In the meantime, you can start pulling in some preposterous things that become part of. Part of your worldview.

[Sean Elling]

Is there a good model of a wisely ignorant person, a sort of counter? Socrates, you know, someone who climbs the mountain of knowledge and says, once they reach the peak, you know what? I like it better down there in the cave or in the matrix or whatever metaphor one prefers. Is that ever a justifiable position?

[Mark Lilla]

I think you're leaving out an option. And that option is something that Socrates explores in the other Platonic dialogues, which is learning from your own ignorance. That is, to recognize that you're genuinely and generally ignorant about things and to continue inquiring with the understanding that what you come up with is tentative, especially right now. We live in a world where we're more and more aware of the uncertainty of our knowledge because things change so quickly. It was very striking to me during COVID just How frustrated people seemed to be by the fact that the public health authorities kept changing their advice. First they said it was all about washing your hands, and then they said it was all about masks and so on. And they get angry about that, but that's the way science works. But people don't like to live that way. They like to hear from an authority that this is what you do. They want a doctor who doesn't hem and haw and doesn't constantly change the meds and say, let's try this, let's try that. It's very destabilizing. And so I think we have a yearning to live standing on solid ground, but we don't stand on solid ground.

[Sean Elling]

Part of what made Socrates so annoying is that he went around pretending not to know anything, yet undercutting everyone else's claims to knowledge. So there is that. But, you know, he also says that the unexamined life isn't worth living. I think if anyone knows a line from Socrates, it's that one. And that's fine up to a point. But I would also say, and I don't know if you would say this as well, that a life that's nothing but examined is equally unworthy, that there's more to life than knowing and understanding. Do you agree with that?

[Mark Lilla]

Oh, I do. If by. Yeah, if by that you mean that certain things in our lives we need to take for granted. That's for sure. I mean, when you think about parental love and not just with young children, I mean, if you were really convinced that every morning your parents wake up and have a working hypothesis of whether they love you or not, whether you're lovable or not, that would be very destabilizing to feel and it would keep us from establishing bonds that presume that the bonds will continue. You know, Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. He did not say that the thoroughly examined life is worth living or that it was livable.

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[Sean Elling]

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

[Mark Lilla]

Oh come on.

[Sean Elling]

They called it truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of the trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

[Mark Lilla]

Whatever.

[Sean Elling]

You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel I think everyone knows the the dictum knowledge is power. And I think that's sensible enough. Right? You can do a lot of things in the world if you know and understand. Do you think that ignorance also has a kind of power that maybe we overlook?

[Mark Lilla]

Yeah. I begin the book with a quotation from George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda, saying that we thought a lot about the power of knowledge, but we haven't thought about the power of ignorance. And what she means there in the novel is the power of people who are ignorant to mess things up in life. That it's a. It's a kind of social force out there. And I think which is certainly the case. But ignorance is also power. If not knowing certain things or leaving certain things unexamined permit you to in fact continue in your life and not be paralyzed. I use an example at the beginning of the book. What would happen if we each had an LED screen on our embedded in our foreheads and we could read the thoughts of everyone around us? I mean, social life would grind to a halt because every you can't control your thoughts, right? You control what you say. And we would constantly be looking to see how people are thinking about us and we could never develop a stable sense of ourselves. And so we need not to know what other people think about us, even if we're going to live a philosophical life.

[Sean Elling]

There are lots of people who are willfully ignorant, and there are lots of people who are ignorant of their ignorance. But then there's this other species of cynicism you talk about in the book that knowingly exploits ignorance. And historically that has been a potent source of political power. I mean, is this just an eternal challenge for society?

[Mark Lilla]

Yes, and the reason is, one reason is that people need certainty and they will demand it. And so political leaders, demagogues in particular, can provide simple answers to things that seem very complicated and that stir people in a way that can be directed. That's classically how a demagogue works and how a demagogue becomes a tyrant. And so especially now, you know, I'm not surprised that we're facing the kind of aggressive ignorance among the. Among populists and those who are moved by populace, because making sense of things right now is. It's just very difficult because we just don't know various things because our experience is so new. For example, what do you do about the fact that the state of any nation's economy depends on an international economy and that no country has a say, full say in how that international economy operates and it will continue to affect everyone in every country. So it's hard to accept the fact that our political leaders do not control the economy. And so you go to whoever says he's the answer man or she says she's the answer woman. And so it's very hard to confront the present with an open mind and a very sense of the tentativeness of how you understand it.

[Sean Elling]

You know, there's a deep philosophical question lurking in all this. And, and the question is, what is the actual point of knowledge? Do we want knowledge for the sake of knowledge because it's inherently good? Or is knowledge only valuable if it's useful? And if knowing something isn't useful, or if it's even worse than that, if knowing something is actually painful, why would we want to know it?

[Mark Lilla]

The question of that you're asking for me, at least in the book, is really a question of different kind of human characters. There are some people who simply something quickens within when the opportunity of new knowledge presents itself. And so why the soul responds like that is a mystery. And Socrates tells various myths about why that might be, but it just seems to be a fact and not everyone has it.

[Sean Elling]

Do you think there's anything worth knowing, regardless of the cost?

[Mark Lilla]

Self knowledge can be harmful if it's partial or if just the way you are is such that one of your failings or limitations is that you're paralyzed if something in you unpleasant is revealed. You know, that's the story of Augustine in the Confessions at the moment where he says, God, you know, ripped off the back of me, which was this other face and everything that everyone else could see, I couldn't and holds it in front of me and I see myself and in that moment I'm so horrified that something clicks and I give myself over. Right. And so there could be limits to that. But Socrates assumes that all self knowledge is in the end going to be helpful because you are now clear to yourself and that knowing itself makes people good. That once you know the power of your, of your ignorance is no longer holding you, so it just goes poof. And now you are in the driver's seat. And do you think that's true?

[Sean Elling]

I'm not sure.

[Mark Lilla]

I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true. And it's so it's hard to believe whether Socrates, whether he thought that and the reason is that the way he deals with other people in the Platonic dialogues, you see that he has a lot of knowledge about how people fall short of that.

[Sean Elling]

Yeah, I could definitely make a case or I could see a case being made for always wanting to know, you know, abstract truths and truths about the external world. But when it comes to self knowledge, sometimes when you peer inward, what you find is that you're just a bundle of contradictions that can't be squared. And I'm not sure it's necessarily good to be intimately acquainted with that and to get hung up on that.

[Mark Lilla]

There is one way in which it is and that's the Montaigne option. You know the picture Montaigne gives of us in the essays is that we're exactly what you just said and his advice is lipicit, just go with it. You're a contradiction.

[Sean Elling]

I think that's easier said than done, but perhaps still wise, but easier said than done. But do you think there is a, a link, maybe even an, a necessary link between self knowledge and knowledge of the external world? In other words, on some level do we have to know ourselves in order to know the truth about the world outside ourselves?

[Mark Lilla]

I can think of a couple answers to that. I'm not sure which one would be mine. One is that these things are detachable if you meet scientists or. I remember spending a year at the Institute for Advanced Study and I would sometimes go and sit in this place where the scientists and mathematicians were and you could tell these people just had no self awareness in terms of how people reacted to them. Perhaps they were just wrapped up in their problems and they were discovering things. On the other hand, one barrier to us in knowing things about the world is to know what constitutes knowing and that requires an analysis of ourselves. So self knowledge in the sense of knowledge of the human animal and then the third sense. While not strictly necessary, the exercise of trying to know oneself is a kind of training exercise for inquiring about the world outside.

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[Sean Elling]

I do want to talk a bit about nostalgia before we we get out of here, which you've written about, we've spoken about before. And I think a conversation about knowledge and ignorance is also a conversation about nostalgia. The truth is, we can't unsee what we've seen, though we can, I guess, repress and delude ourselves. I think my question to you is at what point in our journey of knowledge as individuals and societies are we overtaken by nostalgia? At what point are we just longing to go back to a previous time when we didn't know what we now know?

[Mark Lilla]

When it comes to whole societies being nostalgic, I think that it has to do two things. One is illegibility, if I can use put it that way. And that is when the world becomes illegible, the present becomes illegible that means you don't know how to act. And if you don't know how to act, it's deeply disturbing because you want to be able, that's the second point, to control your environment and control things so you can reach your own ends. And so it I. A dissatisfaction with the present and an absence of knowledge about how to improve things are spurs to imagine that just as being 8 years old seemed less complicated and easier than being 68 years old, that there was a time when life was ordered in a better way in which we knew less about various things or certain changes hadn't happened. And maybe we can reverse the machine or reverse the train, that desire to go back.

[Sean Elling]

I mean, even on the more individual psychological level, there's always a connection between individual and the social manifestations here. But I mean, it's part of the reason why we, we romanticize childhood so much, right? I mean, it's that innocence, it's the simplicity, it's the freedom from anxieties. It's the freedom to be ignorant and happy without judgment or guilt. I mean, I think maybe the most beautiful thing about my 5 year old son is precisely this kind of freedom. He's not a self competing for status among other selves. He is ignorant of all the posturing and insecurities that come with being a fully self conscious person in a social world. I mean, I realize we cannot remain in that state of ignorance forever, but surely there's a lot to learn from it.

[Mark Lilla]

What do you think is to be learned from it? I'd be interested to, to hear you elaborate on that.

[Sean Elling]

I think there's something to be learned about happiness, that there are, there are real things. There are real things in the world about which to be anxious and insecure. And there are many, many more things that we conjure up in our minds because of our own neuroses and pathologies and anxieties. And to the extent we can be free of that and to the extent we can be like children, which is to say, just be present in the world moment to moment without any real concerns about the past or the future, I think we're better for that. And of course you have to be responsible and you have to take accountability, right? You can't be the child forever. But surely there's some tension between those poles that we can live in.

[Mark Lilla]

See, I don't think you can. And the reason you can't, not even a little bit.

[Sean Elling]

You don't think?

[Mark Lilla]

No, but. Well, what you can preserve is something else. But the very fact that you were able to describe it means that you're past it, right? That you're.

[Sean Elling]

Well, shit.

[Mark Lilla]

Yeah. I mean, you're aware of naivete. The child doesn't know that he's naive. Right. But what I do take from what you say is that it can get you refocused on. Yeah. On being more in the moment, being perhaps not trying to control your life so much and to let things happen and to take opportunities for play, just play and. And how.

[Sean Elling]

It is play in a sense of awe and discovery, which we tend to lose as we move through the world. You know, year after year after year, that sense of freshness and awe dissipates. And to the extent we can. We can still grab a hold of that instinct, I think it's. It's useful.

[Mark Lilla]

Yeah. Well, the first thing with play, certainly it's something that's totally absent from Plato and Aristotle and the philosophers until they come to Montaigne, where he reflects at various points about play. And he famously says, so what is it? Am I playing with my cat or is my cat playing with me? But for me, there's a difference between adult wonder and childlike wonder, where trying to think myself back into a child or just observing children that when. When novelty is. Affects them, wow, here's something new. And so a lot of it has to do with that, but they don't walk away with warm feelings about our wonderful world. They just. New things happen and they get excited about them and you see their smiles and they're running around the room. But with us, the wonder, at least for me, is tinged with knowledge that everything in the world is not wonderful. And so when you have these epithetic moments of wonder, it's the contrast between that and our daily lives that seems like manna from heaven when it happens.

[Sean Elling]

I do wonder, as we kind of careen towards the end here, what the upshot of all this thinking and writing was for you personally. We've already sort of gone in a personal direction, but, I mean, have you changed your relationship to your own ignorance as a result of this project?

[Mark Lilla]

I would hope so. I would hope so. I think I have a better understanding of. Of what philosophy is and what philosophy can do.

[Sean Elling]

What is the answer to that? What. What. What is it that philosophy can and can't do?

[Mark Lilla]

That philosophy that is aware of our ignorance is a step forward. The greatest cognitive achievement of human beings is getting to maybe.

[Sean Elling]

I like that. I'm going to leave it right there. Once again, the book is called Ignorance and Bliss. Mark Lilla, always a pleasure my friend. Thanks for coming in.

[Mark Lilla]

Thanks so much, Sean.

[Sean Elling]

All right, friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode. You already know I did. But as always, you know we want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray [e-mail] and if you have just a little bit of extra time, please rate and review and subscribe to the podcast. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe. This show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.

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[Mark Lilla]

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