The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Society & Culture:Philosophy
Jon Favreau was President Obama’s chief speechwriter. In those days, he was a frequent critic of the political media, frustrated, as many in the Obama administration were, with its focus on conflict, on ephemera, on appearing even-handed even when reality was persistently skewed.
Today, Favreau is changing the media from the inside. He’s a co-host on Pod Save America, and co-founder of Crooked Media, both of which have seen tremendous growth in 2017.
In this conversation, we look back on 2017, talk through the first year of the Trump White House (“a day-to-day shitshow”); the Democrats he’s watching for 2020; the mechanics of building a podcast empire; Favreau’s concern about the left (“we need to take the time to persuade other people of what we believe”); and the rot in the Republican Party.
To Favreau, the right-wing media is “the real center of gravity in that party; it’s not the Republicans in Congress, it’s not even really Donald Trump, although I guess you could say that he is, in some ways, a creation of that media machine.”
Books:
What Happened by Hillary Clinton
The News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton
All the Truth is Out by Matt Bai
Today's Republicans were made in the 1990s
Yuval Noah Harari thinks humans are unstoppable
Dying with dignity
Finding hope in a world on the brink
The new American Reconstruction
Is America losing its religion?
How we got to January 6th
Neil deGrasse Tyson gets political
Introducing The Gray Area
Best of: Why America's obsession with rights is wrong
A GOP insider on why the party went Trump
How do we fix the harm we cause?
A new philosophy of love
The politics of 'Yellowstone'
How society sexualizes us
The Parent Trap
40 Acres: Reaching reconciliation
40 Acres: The old Jim Crow
40 Acres: $14 trillion and no mules
40 Acres: The original promise
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