Episode Details

In January of 2022, during one of Toronto’s never-ending pandemic lockdowns, I launched Lean Out from the tiny kitchen of my 485-square-foot apartment. I had just left legacy media, somewhat loudly. I had been a current affairs radio producer at Canada’s national public broadcaster, the CBC. And I was worried that journalists were getting some of the biggest stories of our age wrong. I was fed up with our incuriosity on a range of hot-button issues, from pandemic policy to race and gender. The newsrooms felt increasingly stifling. It had become more and more difficult to engage in debate during story meetings, to stray from established narratives, and to put alternative voices on the air.

At the same time, I was hearing from a public that was increasingly furious with the press that was supposed to serve them. Time and time again, people would ask me: Why are you all ignoring the views and concerns of so many of our fellow citizens? What is going on with the media?

This, at a time when a strong fourth estate had never been more important. The public square was nasty and polarized. I watched wave after wave of online pile-onsand cancellation campaigns. Whole newsrooms joined in, too, purging established journalists for the slightest of infractions. The range of acceptable opinions for polite society became breathtakingly narrow. In private, journalists told me they were terrified. I feared we were losing some of the pillars of Western liberal democracy — and fast.

And me? I was bereft. Thinking and reading and writing and talking about ideas had been the great joy of my life. It had never occurred to me that that might be taken from me.

So, I decided to take a stand for civil dialogue and for open debate. I decided that we needed to stop having candid conversations in private and start having them in public. Lean Out was an appeal for speaking freely.

At the Lean Out Substack, we began publishing essays and op-eds and news roundups and written Q&A interviews, and hosting guest columnists. And on our first podcast, I posed some questions that I hoped to delve into on the program: Why is there now so much that we cannot say? Why are so many things off the table for discussion and debate? Why does all of this social justice talk feel so elitist? And why are so many of the people that progressives are supposedly fighting for just not that interested? Why are so many people tuning the media out?

Five years on, we have some answers to these questions — and we’ve found them together. Our show has listeners in more than 150 countries and 7,000 cities worldwide. This summer, we hit a milestone of one million downloads. It’s not bad for a niche Canadian current affairs podcast, largely focused on heterodox non-fiction books (and sometimes articles). Lean Out has published 256 episodes, featuring authors and journalists and academics from around the world and across the political spectrum. Our listeners, too, represent every political persuasion. We hear from Marxists, but we also hear from staunch conservatives — and, of course, from the politically homeless. Somehow, we’ve all managed to forge a little common ground.

What is that common ground? I think it rests on the conviction that most people are reasonable. That they are generally thoughtful adults that are doing the best they can to chart a path through this turbulent time. This common ground rests on the conviction that what most people want to better understand the moment we are living through, in all its complexity. That most of us can disagree without disparaging. That most of us are open to heari