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 joy of uncertainty
A pro-worker work ethic
How psychedelics can reinvent learning
Seeing ourselves through the darkness
Living Mindfully
Taking anarchism seriously
3,000 years of The Iliad
Late-stage liberalism
The case against free will
A Jew and a Muslim get honest about Israel and Gaza
How to keep panic from attacking
We Are What We Watch
Werner Herzog’s ecstatic truth
The lessons of Sam Bankman-Fried
Is America getting meaner?
Naomi Klein on her doppelganger (and yours)
Should we press pause on AI?
Democracy’s existential crisis
Conservative socialism?
The benefits of utopian thinking
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