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
The benefits of utopian thinking
What Clarence Thomas really thinks
The new crisis of masculinity
How we all became a brand
The therapeutic potential of MDMA
Is the journey to self-discovery pointless?
Parenting through the climate crisis
Seeing ourselves through darkness
Best of: A new philosophy of love
The future of tribalism
When you can't separate art from artist
The case for not killing yourself
What comes after Black Lives Matter?
Clickbait’s destructive legacy
Simone Weil’s radical philosophy of love and attention
Peter Singer on his ethical legacy
Why the poor in America stay poor
The spiritual roots of our strange relationship to work
Mysteries of the mind
Why we can’t just blame capitalism for everything
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