Podcast Episodes

The case against free will

We all think of ourselves as authors of our lives. The difference between our happy ending and someone else’s tragic one are the choices we each make. But what if none of that’s true?

Sean’s guest t…

Published on 12 hours ago

What the climate story gets wrong

The story we tell about climate change is mostly a story about loss. But look to the data, and that story starts to fall apart. Emissions are peaking in key sectors. Clean energy is scaling faster th…

Published on 1 week ago

The Great Enshittening

Open a browser and you can feel it instantly: everything online just feels… worse. Search results that look like ads. Social feeds that you don’t control. Streaming platforms that are packed with ads…

Published on 2 weeks ago

America chose violence. Now what?

Is America at a tipping point?

Sean Illing talks with Barbara Walter, one of the world’s leading experts on violent extremism and domestic terror. She’s the author of How Civil Wars Start, about how…

Published on 3 weeks ago

What's worth remembering?

We like to think of memory as a record of the past. But that’s not really what it is. Memory doesn’t keep the past — it can also remake it. It stitches fragments into stories, and those stories — tru…

Published on 4 weeks ago

Why TikTok matters

This week, Sean talks with Emily Baker-White, author of Every Screen on the Planet, about why TikTok feels uniquely addictive, how it turned social media into a push-not-pull entertainment feed, and …

Published on 1 month ago

The sun will save us

Bill McKibben has spent four decades warning us about climate change. Much of what he predicted has come true. And yet, his new book Here Comes the Sun is more hopeful than you might expect. That’s b…

Published on 1 month, 1 week ago

How much free speech is too much?

Free speech is often treated as a timeless and sacred right. But what if it’s more myth than reality?

This week, Sean is joined by historian Fara Dabhoiwala, author of What Is Free Speech? They trac…

Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago

Imagine there's no billionaires

How much money is too much?

In today’s episode, political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns tells Sean that we need to cap the amount of wealth a person can accumulate. They talk about how extreme inequalit…

Published on 2 months ago

America's lawyers vs. China's engineers

America has a hard time building stuff. Roads. Trains. Bridges. Housing. Everything takes seemingly forever. Meanwhile, China seems to have no trouble at all: high-speed rails, solar panels, electric…

Published on 2 months, 1 week ago