Podcast Episodes

What counts as progress?

We’ve never had more wealth, more data, or more ways to be entertained. So why doesn’t it feel like progress? 

Sean’s guest today is Brad DeLong, an…

2 months, 3 weeks ago

How to survive awkward encounters

We all know what awkwardness feels like. It's that jolt of discomfort when the social script breaks down, and no one knows what to do next. But what …

3 months, 1 week ago

Truth in an age of doublethink

We use “Orwellian” to describe everything from campus dust-ups to authoritarian crackdowns. But what did George Orwell actually stand for, what did h…

3 months, 2 weeks ago

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…

3 months, 3 weeks 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…

4 months 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 con…

4 months, 1 week 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. S…

4 months, 2 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 stitch…

4 months, 3 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 m…

4 months, 4 weeks 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 S…

5 months ago