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PODCAST

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

The Gray Area with Sean Illing takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time. New episodes drop every Monday. From the Vox Media Podcast Network.

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

52:16

Truth in an age of doublethink

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/11/10

We use “Orwellian” to describe everything from campus dust-ups to authoritarian crackdowns. But what did George Orwell actually stand for, what did he get wrong, and what can we learn from him about our age of surveillance capitalism and distraction? Sean’s guest is Laura Beers, historian at American University and author of Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century. They dig into Orwell’s defense of truth over ideology, his crusade against euphemism, his experience with propaganda

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58:50

The case against free will

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/11/03

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. But what if none of that’s true?Sean’s guest today is Robert Sapolsky, a biologist and neuroscientist at Stanford University and author of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. They dig into Sapolsky’s claim that free will is an illusion and discuss what the science says about genes, stress, culture, and how all this research might

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49:06

What the climate story gets wrong

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/10/27

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 than anyone predicted. Real progress is happening. It’s just not happening in the way we imagine it. Sean’s guest today is Hannah Ritchie, Deputy Editor at Our World in Data and author of Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change. They discuss why our picture of the planet is so

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47:31

The Great Enshittening

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/10/20

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. Services that used to be free, but are now behind paywalls. It’s not your imagination — it’s enshittification, the process by which good platforms turn bad… and it’s starting to happen outside the internet as well.Sean’s guest today is Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything

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58:23

America chose violence. Now what?

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/10/13

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 how democracies unravel from within, and a professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. Walter talks to Sean about the warning signs she’s seeing in the US, why polarization and party identity become combustible, and what lessons we can draw from other countries. They also discuss

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58:54

You must remember this?

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/10/06

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 or not — are what we end up calling our life, and sometimes, our collective history.Sean’s guest today is Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist and author of a book called Why We Remember. The two discuss the strange alchemy of remembering and how the stories our minds create end up creating us. Host:

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63:38

Why TikTok matters

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/09/29

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 what happens when human editors inside the company can override the algorithm.A few days after they spoke, TikTok was in the headlines again. So they jumped on a follow-up call to unpack the latest twists in the saga of who will ultimately control the app's US-operations. Host: Sean Illing

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47:08

The sun will save us

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/09/22

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 because, for the first time, we have a genuine alternative: Solar and wind energy are now the cheapest, fastest-growing sources of power on Earth. The revolution has already begun. This week, Sean is joined by McKibben to talk about the peril and promise of this moment. They explore how close we are to

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54:26

How much free speech is too much?

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/09/15

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 trace the history of free expression from 18th-century pamphleteers, to John Stuart Mill, to the digital platforms that dominate our lives today. They explore why speech is never just “speech,” how context and power shape who gets heard, the dangers of harmful speech, and the challenges of regulating

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53:51

Imagine there's no billionaires

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/09/01

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 inequality affects democracy, the role of money in politics, and why limiting personal wealth benefits everyone, including the super rich. Host: Sean Illing (⁠⁠@SeanIlling⁠⁠) Guest: Ingrid Robeyns, ⁠⁠professor⁠⁠ and author of Limitarianism: ⁠⁠The Case Against Extreme Wealth⁠⁠ This episode originally aired

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51:37

America's lawyers vs. China's engineers

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/08/25

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 cars, bridges, ports, all churned out at breakneck speed.Why is that? Sean's guest is Dan Wang, author of the new book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. They discuss the policies and mindset that allow China to tackle remarkable feats of engineering, the advantages and drawbacks of

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51:36

So, what exactly is the “New Right?”

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/08/18

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 overhaul it, and real influence in the White House. But why do they think that? How much influence do they really have? And what would a response to their rising prominence look like?Today’s guest is Laura Field, a political theorist who’s spent a lot of time in the conservative intellectual world

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53:49

America is losing big on sports betting

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/08/11

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 of this. The industry has created frictionless apps on your phone that let you bet on everything from March Madness to a pregame coin toss to who wins a minor league British dart tournament. While betting has become easier — and arguably fun — the cost of these apps is much higher than the money that

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60:34

It’s time to get weird

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/08/04

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 potential of the digital world? This week, Sean is joined by Douglas Rushkoff. He’s a media theorist, author of Survival of the Richest and Team Human, and host of the Team Human podcast. They trace the arc of the internet from its utopian beginnings to its corporate capture, and explore what it would

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59:31

What if humans went extinct next Friday?

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/07/28

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? How did we come to see ourselves as separate from the world, from each other, from the systems that sustain us? And what if that way of thinking is what got us into this mess? Today’s guest is Mark C. Taylor, philosopher, cultural critic, and author of After the Human. Mark and Sean discuss the

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61:42

Can college survive Trump?

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/07/21

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 system, and take down diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. And in the end, change what students are encouraged to study and what professors are allowed to teach.The questions we’re left with is why? And is it working? Today’s guest is Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University. He’s a

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55:53

Hopeful pessimism

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/07/14

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 blind hope is hard. When our hopes are dashed, we often feel defeated. In a world that’s filled with lots of dark clouds and very few silver linings, perhaps we need a better way to balance our hope and our pessimism. In today’s episode, Sean interviews philosopher Mara van der Lugt about her new

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59:21

If AI can do your classwork, why go to college?

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/06/30

What’s the point of college if no one’s actually doing the work? It’s not a rhetorical question. In the age of AI, it's incredibly easy for students to offload their assignments. AI tools can write essays, make study guides, and even complete whole assignments.So what is the point of higher education? In today’s episode, Sean speaks with journalist James Walsh about his recent article, "Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College." The two discuss how students are using AI to finish their

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52:31

Is Trump winning?

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/06/16

We’re nearly six months into Donald Trump’s second term as president, and a lot of us are still trying to figure out what that actually means. Not just politically. But culturally. What kind of country are we living in? And what kind of future are we heading toward?In today’s episode, Sean and Vox senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp try to answer these difficult questions. They discuss Trump’s successes and failures, how he appeals to his supporters, and how the left can respond to the Trump

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68:14

A right-wing economist makes his case

The Gray Area with Sean Illing ·

2025/06/09

For decades, the American right has stayed on brand: the economy. Low taxes. Free markets. Deregulation. Those have been the buzzwords for more than half a century. But that doctrine is now being challenged by other conservatives who envision a future in which America’s trade deficit is lower, manufacturing returns to the US, and Americans buy more American-made products. Is this future even possible? Economist Oren Cass thinks it is. In today’s episode, the founder of the think tank America

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