Podcast
The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Hosted by Vox · EN
The Gray Area with Sean Illing takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time. New episodes drop every Monday. From the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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Episodes
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Will Storr on why you are not yourself
Dec 6, 2018Tap to summarize“To have a self is to feel as if we are, in the words of neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith, the ‘invisible actor at the centre of the world’.” That’s Will Storr, writing in his fantastic book Selfie. Ignore the very of-the-moment title. Storr dives deep into the cultural, evolutionary, and psychological construction of that thing that feels to us like our self, but is not actually ours, and is not a single thing. This is a mind-bending conversation that should, truly, change your understanding of your self. Definitely in the top five EK Show episodes to listen to stoned. ––– Recommended books: You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] by Andrew Hankinson The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville Personality by Daniel Nettle ––– Notes from our sponsors:LEGO: In today's show you heard advertising content from The LEGO Store. With LEGO, every gift has a story. Start your story today at https://LEGO.build/EKS-Pop Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Why Bill Gates is worried
Oct 15, 2018Tap to summarize“To put it bluntly,” wrote Bill and Melinda Gates in their foundation’s annual Goalkeepers Report, “decades of stunning progress in the fight against poverty and disease may be on the verge of stalling. This is because the poorest parts of the world are growing faster than everywhere else; more babies are being born in the places where it’s hardest to lead a healthy and productive life.” There is no topic in the philanthropic world more fraught than population growth. The history of efforts to analyze and address it is filled with bad predictions and cruel solutions. The Gateses, though, are trying to take a different approach to the issue. Rather than seeing a population problem in the demographic projections, they’re framing it as a poverty problem — and, for that matter, an opportunity. In this conversation, I talk with Bill Gates about the report and about much more: the geographic and political forces that have held African development back, whether economic growth brings political freedom, the risks posed by artificial intelligence, and how we should weigh future human lives and current animal suffering. This conversation also marks the launch of a new Vox podcast and section, Future Perfect, which focuses on evidence-based ways to make the world a better place. You can find the section at Vox.com, and you can find the podcast, which is hosted by my colleague and friend Dylan Matthews, wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy! Recommended books: The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness by Andy Puddicombe Educated by Tara Westover Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio Find the Future Perfect podcast on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | ART19 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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The Supreme Court vs. Democracy
Jul 2, 2018Tap to summarizeIf 75,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had tipped the other way, President Hillary Clinton would’ve named both Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy’s replacements. But they didn’t. And now Donald Trump, in less than two years, will fill as many Supreme Court seats as Barack Obama did in eight. When news of Kennedy’s retirement came down, I knew exactly who I wanted to talk to: Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s exceptional legal analyst, and host of the podcast Amicus. I can’t say our conversation made me feel better about the Supreme Court. If someone as knowledgeable and humane as Lithwick is this alarmed, then, well, it’s alarming. But it at least left me feeling like I understood the stakes. Lithwick is brilliant in tracing the ideological and political trends that have led us to this moment: We talk about how the Court has moved steadily right for a generation, such that John Roberts — John Roberts! — is now the closest thing to a swing vote; how lifetime appointments have collided with deep politicization; what it means that voting rights are under attack from judges who wouldn’t hold their jobs if America was more of a democracy, and much more. The right has won the fight for the Supreme Court for the next few decades, and they have done so because they were more focused, more committed, and better organized. This is how they did it, and what comes next. Recommended book: One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy by Carol Anderson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcribe →The Sam Harris Debate
Apr 9, 2018Tap to summarizeThere’s a lot of backstory to this podcast, most of which is covered in this piece. The short version is that Sam Harris, the host of the Waking Up podcast, and I have been going back and forth over an interview Harris did with The Bell Curve author Charles Murray about a year ago. In that interview, the two argued that African-Americans are, for a combination of genetic and environmental reasons, intrinsically and immutably less intelligent than white Americans, and Murray argued that the implications of this “forbidden knowledge” should shape social policy. In response, Vox published a piece by three respected academic specialists on genes and IQ who argued Murray and Harris got both the science and its implications very wrong. Harris felt slandered by the piece we published and publicly demanded I debate him. After failing to get Harris to debate the authors of the Vox piece instead, I agreed. Over email, he then revoked his invitation to debate me. Harris’s defenders published a few pieces, our authors published a second piece, and everyone moved on. That’s where things sat for months. Then, a few weeks ago, Harris reopened the discussion with me on Twitter, I published a piece on the subject in response, and he published all the private emails we’d sent each other along the way. As you’ll hear him say, that backfired, so he decided, at last, to debate me. Whew. So here we are. For all that, I think this discussion — which is also being released on Harris’ podcast — is worth listening to. Harris’s view is that the criticism he and Murray have received is a moral panic driven by identity politics and political correctness. My view is that these IQ tests are inseparable from both the past and present of racism in America, and to conduct this conversation without voices who are expert on that subject and who hail from the affected communities is to miss the point from the outset. So that’s where we begin. Where we go, I think, is worthwhile: these hypotheses about biological racial difference are now, and have alway been, used to advance clear political agendas — in Murray’s case, an end to programs meant to redress racial inequality, and in Harris’s case, a counterstrike against identitarian concerns he sees as a threat to his own career. Yes, identity politics are at play in this conversation, but that includes white identity politics. To Harris, and you’ll hear this explicitly, identity politics is something others do. To me, it’s something we all do, and that he and many others simply refuse to admit they’re doing. This is one of the advantages of being the majority group: your concerns get coded as concerns, it’s everyone else who is playing identity politics. Even if you’re not interested in the specifics of our debate, I think this discussion goes to some important questions in American life — questions that drive our culture and politics today. I hope you enjoy it. A few links mentioned in the discussion: My piece on this whole debate, which links all the relevant articles. Harris and Murray's original podcast Vox's original response piece The Haier piece Harris wanted us to publish defending him Our authors' response to various criticisms The emails between me and Harris Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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VC Bill Gurley on transforming health care
May 2, 2017Tap to summarizeWashington has been gripped of late by the world’s most depressing, least imaginative, debate over health care. The question, as it stands, is whether Obamacare will survive (while being mildly, but persistently, sabotaged by the Trump administration), or whether it will be rolled back and replaced with a system that covers 24 million fewer people in order to fund tax cuts for the richest Americans. Huzzah!But a better conversation awaits. Bill Gurley is a partner at Benchmark Capital, and an early investor in Uber, Grubhub, Opentable, and more. In 2016, TechCrunch named him venture capitalist of the year. And for the last few years, he’s been studying the American health care system, trying to find an opening where technology can make a difference, and build a business. Now he thinks he’s found it.This is a conversation about what kinds of health care systems are, and aren’t, possible in this country. As you’ll hear in this discussion, I’m much more skeptical than Gurley is about both the need and the desirability for reforms that push costs onto consumers, but I agree with him that Obamacare has moved the system farther and faster in that direction than people realize. We talk about that, as well as why it’s been so hard for technology to cut costs in health care, the Singaporean health care system and the lessons American can learn from it, the way regulation protects incumbents, the government’s strangely structured investments in electronic medical records, and whether Silicon Valley’s move-fast-and-break-things culture can work for something as personal as medical care. We also discuss Gurley’s view that democracy and capitalism will, if given enough time, eat each other, and why he’s looking to China for the next great health innovations. This conversation won’t fix the American health care system, but it was, for me, a refreshing reminder that better, more productive discussions are possible. Books:“Catastrophic Care: Why Everything We Think We Know about Health Care Is Wrong," by David Goldhill"Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure," by Jerry Kaplan“Myth or Magic - The Singapore Healthcare System," by Jeremy Lim"Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike," by Phil Knight Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Tyler Cowen explains it all
Mar 28, 2017Tap to summarizeI have never come across a mind quite like Tyler Cowen’s. The George Mason economist, and Marginal Revolution blogger, has an interesting opinion on, well, everything. He’s a genuine polymath who can talk knowledgeably about more subjects than I even know exist.So coming in to this interview, I had a simple plan: ask Cowen for his thoughts on as many topics as possible. And I think it worked out pretty well. We discuss everything from New Jersey to high school sports to finding love to smoked trout to nootropics to Thomas Schelling to Ayn Rand to social media to speed reading strategies to happy relationships to the disadvantages of growing up in Manhattan. And believe me when I say that is a small sampling of the topics we cover. We also talk about Tyler’s new book, “The Complacent Class,” which argues, in true Cowenian fashion, that everything we think we know about the present is wrong, and far from being an age of rapid change and constant risk, we have become a cautious, even stagnant, society. This as information dense a discussion as I’ve hosted on this podcast. I took a lot away from it, and I think you will too. Books:-Autobiography of John Stuart Mills-Derek Parfitt’s Reasons and Persons-Fisher Black’s On Business Cycles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Sarah Kliff and Ezra Interview Obama About Obamacare
Jan 6, 2017Tap to summarizeTwo weeks before he leaves office, President Obama sits down for a lengthy conversation about the lessons of the Affordable Care Act and the law's uncertain future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show
Jul 26, 2016Tap to summarizeThis is a serious conversation with a very funny man.Trevor Noah is the host of Comedy Central's the Daily Show. He's also a stand-up comic who grew up in apartheid South Africa, the son of a black mother and a white father. That was illegal in apartheid-era South Africa, so Noah grew up hiding his real parentage, only seeing his father in carefully controlled circumstances. Somehow, he managed to turn this into a very funny, very incisive stand-up act. Today, he occupies one of the commanding heights of American comedy, and when you talk to him, you can see why: he's funny, but he's also damn smart, with an outsider's perspective on America's very unique problems. In this conversation, we talk about:- What it was like growing up biracial in apartheid South Africa- Noah's experience watching South Africa’s post-apartheid truth and reconciliation commission, and what an American one might look like- Noah's thoughts on the right to be forgotten on the internet- How Donald Trump's superpower is his lack of shame- The ways in which Obama’s presidency changed – and sometimes inflamed — the conversation about race over the last eight years- What Obama does and doesn’t share with other Black celebrities in “transcending” race- The parallels between experiencing catcalling and experiencing racism- Noah's critique of both "objective" news sources, and biased ones- Why Noah was taken aback by the response he got criticizing Bernie Sanders- Noah's news diet, and why he doesn’t watch as much Fox News as you might think- How Noah develops a joke, from start to finishAnd much more. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hillary Clinton. Yes, that Hillary Clinton.
Jul 12, 2016Tap to summarizeMy interview this week is with Hillary Clinton. You may have heard of her.I won't bore you with Clinton's bio. Instead, I want to say a few words about what this interview is, as it's a bit different than the EK Show's normal fare (though I do ask her for book recommendations!).I got about 40 minutes with Hillary Clinton. I wanted to use that time to try to answer a question I've had about Clinton for years: why is the candidate I see on the campaign trail so different from the person described to me by her staff, colleagues, friends, and even foes? I wanted, in other words, to try to see what Clinton is like when she's working her way through policy and governance issues. And so that's what we talk about. Among the topics we covered are:- Extreme poverty, welfare reform, and the working poor- Is it time for more deficit spending?- Would more immigration be good for the economy?- The difficulties of free college and universal health care- What skills does a president need that campaigns don't test?- What's on her bookshelf?- Why America stopped trusting elites — and what elites should do about itIf you want more on this discussion, I also reported out a long piece on how Clinton governs — you can find it on Vox.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Ben Thompson on how the media business is changing
Apr 19, 2016Tap to summarizeNote: There was a technical issue with the first upload of this show, please re-download if you got to it early.Since starting his site Stratechery in 2013, Ben Thompson has established himself as one of the smartest and most thoughtful analysts at the intersection of media, business, and technology. I’ve become addicted to his commentary, as have many of my colleagues.So getting to geek out with Ben on these topics is a lot of fun. In this conversation, we discuss a couple of issues very close to my heart, including:Whether you can still make it as an individual blogger — Ben is showing you can, but the path has really changed;How to make money as a modern media company;Ben's time working for Apple and Microsoft and what he learned about both companies and their cultures;Why the Innovator’s Dilemma is worth reading even if you think you already know what it says;Why so few companies advertise on podcasts;Why the most important piece of writing on your site is the second one a reader finds;And much, much more.I enjoyed this conversation tremendously, I hope you do too. As always, please do me a big favor and share this podcast with your friends, put it on Facebook, on Twitter, Snapchat, wherever. And please send me your feedback at EzraKleinShow@Vox.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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