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.
51
The benefits of utopian thinking
Why it’s not unreasonable to imagine a better future.
50 min
52
What Clarence Thomas really thinks
And why he's the most misunderstood Supreme Court justice, according to the author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.
60 min
53
The new crisis of masculinity
How to redefine what it means to be a man.
58 min
54
How we all became a brand
A brief history of how self-invention became personal branding.
49 min
55
The therapeutic potential of MDMA
How did MDMA go from club drug to breakthrough therapy?
44 min
56
Is the journey to self-discovery pointless?
What does it mean to know ourselves, and are modern methods like personality tests helping?
49 min
57
Parenting through the climate crisis
If we owe our children a safe and healthy future, what are parents supposed to do about our rapidly warming world?
43 min
58
Seeing ourselves through darkness
A philosopher's new book on dark moods aims to help us escape the damage of our culture's most pervasive metaphor
52 min
59
Best of: A new philosophy of love
55 min
60
The future of tribalism
An evolutionary anthropologist's new book aims to explore mankind's tribal past — and foresee our tribal future
49 min
61
When you can't separate art from artist
How to reckon with consuming the art of someone who’s done something terrible.
49 min
62
The case for not killing yourself
Clancy Martin's new book is a portrait of the suicidal mind — his own
54 min
63
What comes after Black Lives Matter?
Three summers after the death of George Floyd, what is the future of the racial justice movement in America?
54 min
64
Clickbait’s destructive legacy
How the media’s pursuit of traffic dented democracy.
49 min
65
Simone Weil’s radical philosophy of love and at...
How 20th-century philosopher Simone Weil built a legacy of caring for others.
53 min
66
Peter Singer on his ethical legacy
The world's most famous utilitarian talks about the state of animal liberation and effective altruism — two movements he helped found
61 min
67
Why the poor in America stay poor
We’ve built a society that shields us from a lot of the cruelties we participate in. Here’s what we can do to change that.
51 min
68
The spiritual roots of our strange relationship...
Revisiting the German thinker whose narrative of the origin of capitalism explains some of the weird ways we think about jobs
49 min
69
Mysteries of the mind
Do you understand your own mind? Does anybody?
49 min
70
Why we can’t just blame capitalism for everything
Exploring the big divide on the American left
45 min
71
Being human in the age of AI
As machines start to get more intelligent, do we need to rethink what it means to be human?
49 min
72
A philosopher's psychedelic encounter with reality
Justin Smith-Ruiu's experimentation with psychedelic drugs led him to fundamentally reevaluate his understanding of time, death, his job — and the nature of reality.
48 min
73
The project of Socratic love with Agnes Callard
Philosopher Agnes Callard on the benefits of making your personal life public
49 min
74
The chemistry of connection
Sean talks with a psychiatrist about how our brain chemistry — and psychedelics — can help take on the "loneliness epidemic"
49 min
75
What a slow civil war looks like
What if January 6th was only the beginning?
52 min