The Gray Area with Sean Illing21 Touko 2018

Tyler Cowen on the painful end of American complacency

Headlining any conversation with Tyler Cowen is difficult. This one, for instance, covers how to write a book, single-payer health care, political correctness, loneliness, the expanding Overton window, the tech backlash, technological innovation, the case for American optimism, how to change our cultural assumptions about race, and much more. But if there is a theme, it calls back to Cowen’s fascinating 2017 book, The Complacent Class. There, Cowen argued that contrary to the widespread belief that America was undergoing convulsive change, it was actually changing less than ever — becoming geographically, ideologically, politically, and technologically complacent. But surveying the past year or so in American life, Cowen thinks that the age of American complacency is ending faster than he expected — and that change of the sort that’s happening now will prove deeply painful, even if it also kick-starts our economy and builds us a better future. Recommended books: The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno MaCaes Symposium by Plato Grant by Ron Chernow Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The case against free will

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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 tha...

27 Loka 202549min

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....

20 Loka 202547min

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 ho...

13 Loka 202558min

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 — true...

6 Loka 202558min

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 w...

29 Syys 20251h 3min

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 be...

22 Syys 202547min

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 tra...

15 Syys 202554min