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 moral philosophy of The Good Place (with Mike Schur and Pamela Hieronymi)
When doing the right thing makes you a criminal
Peter Singer on the lives you can save
Best of: The age of "mega-identity" politics
Because podcast
There’s more to life than profit
Having a bad day? Dave Eggers can help.
How Whole Foods, yoga, and NPR became the hallmarks of the elite
How social media makes us antisocial
ICYMI: Edward Norton’s theory of mind, movies, and power
Introducing Reset
What a smarter Trumpism would sound like
The climate crisis is an oceans crisis
We live in The Good Place. And we’re screwing it up.
Neoliberalism and its discontents
The four words that will decide impeachment
We don’t just feel emotions. We make them.
How politics became a war against reality
The loneliness epidemic
Ibram X. Kendi wants to redefine racism
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
On with Kara Swisher
Today, Explained
Re/Code Decode
The Vergecast
Explain It to Me