The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Want to know why we can’t make any progress on the guns debate? Because this isn’t a debate over policy. It’s a debate over identity. After last month’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I remembered a book Evan Osnos recommended on this show, called Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline by Jennifer Carlson. Carlson, a sociologist, realized that her discipline had missed a major social transformation: that Americans weren’t just buying guns for hunting or home protection. Guns had become part of their everyday lives, structuring how they saw the world, their country, and their role in it. And so she dove deep into the experiences of gun carriers in Michigan, becoming a gun carrier and even certified instructor herself, examining how the NRA’s training programs construct new models of citizenship, and digging into how gun ownership interacts with race, gender, and class. I don’t believe that empathy alone offers a way forward in the guns debate. But I do believe that understanding the identities at play here — both among those who own guns and those who want to see gun ownership restricted — is the only way to have a debate that makes sense. This conversation helped me, at least, see those identities much more clearly. Books Columbine by Dave Cullen Chokehold by Paul Butler The Limits of Whiteness by Neda Maghbouleh  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you’re sitting in front of Rep. Joe Kennedy, it’s clear that you’re sitting in front of a Kennedy. The face, the jawline — it’s all uncannily familiar. But Kennedy, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, is rising in a changed Democratic Party. In the 1950s, the nonwhite share of the Democratic vote was about 7 percent. In 2012, it was about 44 percent — and that number is ticking upward. Kennedy is navigating it smoothly. Tapped to give the Democratic response to the State of the Union — and you’ll want to listen to him tell the story of how that came about — he delivered a powerful performance in a speaking slot that usually buries ambitious young politicians. And he did it by reminding Democrats that their rhetoric can be bigger than their divisions, that a party built on difference can still see its way to a national identity. In this conversation, Kennedy and I talk about the vision and the policies that lie behind that speech. Where should Democrats go on health care, on economics, on drugs? Is the divide over identity politics and economic populism really a “false choice,” as Kennedy argues? And how do Democrats talk about unity when Trump keeps driving the national conversation into divisive issues? Further Reading: Matt Yglesias' piece on Rep. Kennedy's SOTU response The Ezra Klein Show episode with the authors of How Democracies Die Books: Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Human beings are tribal creatures, particularly when they feel threatened. And the reality of living in America in 2018, at a time of massive demographic change and social upheaval, is that we all feel threatened, and so we are all becoming more tribal. In her new book, Political Tribes, Amy Chua argues that America’s foreign policy has long been undermined by our underestimation of tribalism abroad, and that our domestic stability is now being hollowed out by our inability to see it clearly at home. Donald Trump, she argues, is a product of tribal threat — of a country where “race has split America’s poor and class has split America’s whites.” And progressives, she argues, are a big part of the problem — they have become judgmental, exclusionary, and smug. The question that animates much of my conversation with Chua is: What can be done to calm American tribalism? Is it a product of overheated rhetoric and political choices? Or is it the inevitable result of a country teetering on demographic instability, a moment when no group can truly consolidate power so all groups are left fighting for it? Mentioned: The book about sports rivalry that Ezra mentions as an example of the power of divisive sports identities Amy Chua mentioned Better Angels, a group working to depolarize America She also mentioned Sarah Silverman's new show, I Love You, America, which aims to bridge our political divide with comedy Anne Jones' "whitelash" idea is articulated here Ezra mentioned that the Soviet Union exploited American racial tensions. Here’s an explanation of that history. Books: The Possessed by Elif Batuman Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover Ethnic Groups in Conflict by Donald L. Horowitz Amy Chua also did a By the Book with the New York Times recently, so here's a full breakdown of her reading recommendations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 2011, Tristan Harris’s company, Apture, was acquired by Google. Inside Google, he became unnerved by how the company worked. There was all this energy going into making the products better, more addicting, more delightful. But what if all that made the users’ lives worse, more busy, more distracted? Harris wrote up his worries in a slide deck manifesto. “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention” went viral within the company and led to Harris being named Google’s “design ethicist.” But he soon realized that he couldn’t change enough from the inside. The business model wasn’t built to give users back their time. It was built to take ever more of it. Harris, who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, has become the most influential critic of how Silicon Valley designs products to addict us. His terms, like the need to focus on “Time Well Spent,” have been adopted (or perhaps coopted) by, among others, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I interviewed Harris recently for my podcast. We talked about how the 2016 election threw Silicon Valley into crisis, why negative emotions dominate online, where Silicon Valley’s model of human decisionmaking went wrong, whether he buys Zuckerberg's change of heart, what happened when meditation master Thich Nhat Hahn came to Google, what it means to control your own time, and what can be done about it. Further Reading: A Verge interview with Jaron Lanier where he talks about the idea that to maximize engagement, you need to maximize emotional engagement, and the emotions that are most engaging are the negative ones. Tristan mentions Kahneman’s System 1 & System 2 thinking. Here’s an explanation of that. The Onion article Ezra mentioned about the ways meditation is applied in Silicon Valley The New York Times piece with a headline Tristan says is somewhat different from the truth A description of the Facebook earnings call that Tristan mentioned The Stanford Persuasive Technology lab Tristan mentioned to explain the psychology behind the Snapchat Streak Ezra mentioned Ralph Nader’s Consumer Movement. Here’s a description of that. The New York Times article on greyscaling a phone that Tristan and Ezra discuss Recommended books Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves Reprint Edition by Adam Hochschild Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Does the daily news feel depressing? Does the world feel grim? It’s not, says Harvard professor Steven Pinker. This is, in fact, the best moment in human history — there’s less war, less violence, less famine, less poverty, than there ever has been. There’s more opportunities for human flourishing, more personal freedom, more democracy, more education, more equality, more technological wonder, than the world has ever seen. In Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now, he mounts both his case that the world that this moment is astonishingly great from a historical perspective, and argues that there’s a reason for that: enlightenment values of science, reason, humanism, and faith in progress. Values that he says are under attack from a right that is retreating into zero-sum nationalism, a left that has lost faith in progress, and a public that doesn't always appreciate just how much progress has been made. In this conversation, we talk about Pinker’s new book, as well as his views on political correctness on campus, how politics drives us to irrationality, and what future generations will look back on us with horror for doing. There are things Pinker says in here that I’m skeptical of, as you’ll hear, but I agree with his big point: if all you’re following is the daily news cycle, with our deep bias towards what’s going wrong right now, it’s easy to miss how much has gone right to get us to this moment. Books and articles mentioned in this episode: Pinker's piece for the New Repulibic, Science Is Not Your Enemy Leon Wieseltier's reponse to that piece Yuval Noah Harari's, Sapiens Paul Shapiro's Clean Meat Philip Tetlock's Superforecasting Peter Singer's The Expanding Circle Richard Herrnstein's controversial Atlantic piece on IQ E.O. Wilson's book, Sociobiology German Lopez's reporting on "The Ferguson Effect" Books Recommended: Factfulness by Hans Rosling The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brandt Atrocities by Matthew White Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founder and publisher of Jacobin, a journal of “socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.” He launched the publication in 2011 when he was an undergraduate at George Washington University. Today, its print edition has 40,000 subscribers and a million readers monthly online. Jacobin is at the vanguard of a resurgent American left that judges traditional liberalism as too weak and feckless for the times we live in and sees politics as fundamentally about class struggle. And Sunkara has been an able and interesting articulator of that view, as well as a longtime critic of mine. I wanted to have Sunkara on the podcast to talk through what his form of socialism means in America and elsewhere today, what’s wrong with my politics, and what separates traditional forms of liberalism from democratic socialism. If you want to understand what the new American left is thinking, where it’s going, and what challenges it’s facing, his answers are worth listening to. Enjoy! Books: The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher The Other America by Michael Harrington The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century by Eric Hobsbawm Further Reading: Bhaskar Sunkara's piece that he and Ezra discuss  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, co-authors of 'How Democracies Die', dive into the threats against democratic institutions today. They discuss how leaders can erode norms, using global examples, including Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. The conversation touches on historical parallels with authoritarian regimes, such as Hitler's rise, and the moral leadership needed to combat radicalism. Political polarization's impact on American democracy is examined alongside its effects on governance and trust, emphasizing the evolving challenges faced by political parties amidst rising partisanship.

Krista Tippett is the host of the award-winning radio show and podcast On Being. In 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. For good reason. She's created, over decades, something rare in American life: spaces where people of different faiths, disciplines, and ideologies discuss divisive questions without becoming more divided, without losing sight of each other's humanity. Tippett comes from a political family, and spent her early adulthood working on Cold War policy in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. She was a wonk who talked SALT treaties and nuclear policy for a living. But she left that life, believing that there were harder, deeper questions that language wasn’t allowing her to explore, much less answer. I've been wanting to talk with Tippett because I think this is a moment that challenges our humanity as we engage in the daily thrum of politics. Trump makes everything he touches a bit Trumpier, he calls on our worst selves, he makes it seem more acceptable — even more necessary — to act more like him. And he degrades all of us in the process. It has never, to me, felt harder to keep hold of decency in public life than it is now. This is something Tippett has rare skill at. Here, she both offers and models an approach all of us can learn from. Walking the Pastures of Wonder by John O’Donahue Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows Let Your Life Speak, by Parker Palmer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

What really happened between the Trump campaign and the Russian government? The investigation into that question has rocked American politics. The FBI director was fired over it. The attorney general might get fired over it. The president’s former campaign manager and his original national security adviser were charged with crimes as part of it. The president himself might ultimately be charged with obstruction of justice for his response to it. It’s also a devilishly difficult story to follow, with information coming out in half-true dribs and drabs, new names grabbing headlines and then disappearing for weeks, and countless threads that need to somehow be stitched into a coherent whole. Which is why I asked Susan Hennessey to join the podcast this week. Hennessey, a former lawyer at the National Security Agency, is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and managing editor of Lawfare, which has done extraordinary work both tracking and driving this story. And in this conversation, she pulls it all together in ways I found extremely clarifying, and occasionally horrifying. This is a conversation about the big picture of the Russia investigation: what we know and what we don’t know, what Robert Mueller has actually promised to deliver, what collusion really means, how Trump’s aides could have done what they’ve been accused of doing, and much more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices