The Gray Area with Sean Illing15 Jan 2018

You will love this conversation with Jaron Lanier, but I can’t describe it

Oftentimes it’s easy for me to describe these conversations. This one is on Trump and Russia. That one is on health care. But not this time. I want you to listen to this conversation, because Jaron Lanier is brilliant and his mind is unusual and spending some time within it is a privilege. But I don’t know how to describe it to you. It begins with the story of Lanier tripsitting Richard Feynman, the famed physicist, when he was dying from cancer and decided to try LSD, and it goes from there. Lanier is a VR pioneer and a digital philosopher. He coined the term "virtual reality,” founded one of the first companies in the space, and has been involved in both the practice and theory of creating and living in virtual worlds for decades now. He's one of the most trenchant critics of Silicon Valley's business model, and the way it's screwed up both the internet and the world. And somehow, all this has made him a much more humanistic, insightful analyst of what it’s like to live in this world, too. His latest book, “Dawn of the New Everything,” is one of my favorites of the last year — it’s thrilling to read a memoir that smart, and that strange, in an era that is so focused on making us dumber and angrier. And in person, Lanier is just as exciting — every answer has an insight worth hearing in it. This is one of my favorite conversations I've had on the pod. Give it 15 minutes. If you don’t love it, I’ll give you your money back. Books: Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse I and Thou by Martin Buber Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(764)

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...

1 Sep 202553min

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 ...

25 Aug 202551min

So, what exactly is the “New Right?”

A loose movement of radical intellectuals is driving American politics. They’re called the “New Right,” and they share a basic hostility to American liberal democracy, a real desire to fundamentally ...

18 Aug 202551min

America is losing big on sports betting

Almost every tech platform is designed to grab and hold your attention, to keep you clicking, scrolling, and buying for as long as possible. Sports gambling has become one of the clearest examples ...

11 Aug 202553min

It’s time to get weird

The internet was supposed to set us free. But somewhere along the way, it became a tool for surveillance, extraction, and control. What happened? And is there still time to reclaim the weird, untapped...

4 Aug 20251h

What if humans went extinct next Friday?

What comes after the human? We’re living through multiple crises — ecological, technological, political. But beneath all of that is something even deeper: a crisis of the self. Who are we, really? ...

28 Jul 202559min

Can college survive Trump?

American higher education is under attack. Project 2025 laid out the battle plan pretty clearly: Get rid of the Department of Education, shut off federal funding, take control of the accreditation sys...

21 Jul 202557min

Hopeful pessimism

We live in a culture obsessed with hope. We are trained to believe that being hopeful is the key to success. Stay positive. The sun will come out tomorrow. Keep the faith. But maintaining that kind of...

14 Jul 202551min