The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Latest Episodes:

Ta-Nehisi Coates on complexity, clarity, and truth. Oct 14, 2024

Show notes

How important is complexity? At The Gray Area, we value understanding the details. We revel in complexity. But does our desire to understand that complexity sometimes over-complicate an issue?

Journalist and bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks so.

This week on The Gray Area, Sean talks to Coates about his new book The Message, a collection of essays about storytelling, moral clarity, and the dangers of hiding behind complexity.

The Message covers a lot of ground, but the largest section of the book — and the focus of this week’s conversation — is about Coates’s trip to the Middle East and the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Coates argues that the situation is not as complicated as most of us believe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Your mind needs chaos Oct 09, 2024

Show notes

In part three of our series on creativity, guest host Oshan Jarow speaks with philosopher of neuroscience Mark Miller about how our minds actually work. They discuss the brain as a predictive engine that builds our conscious experience for us. We’re not seeing what we see. We’re predicting what we should see. Miller says that depression, opioid use, and our love of horror movies can all be explained by this theory. And that injecting beneficial kinds of uncertainty into our experiences — embracing chaos and creativity — ultimately make us even better at prediction, which is one of the keys to happiness and well-being.

This is the third conversation in our three-part series about creativity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Musician Laraaji on the origin of creativity Oct 08, 2024

Show notes

Sean revisits his interview with musician Laraaji, a pioneer of new age music who has recorded more than 50 albums since he was discovered busking in a park by Brian Eno. Laraaji and Sean discuss inspiration, flow states, and what moves us to create.

This is the second conversation in our three shows in three days three-part series about creativity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Is AI creative? Oct 07, 2024

Show notes

What is the relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence? Creativity feels innately human, but is it? Can a machine be creative? Are we still being creative if we use machines to assist in our creative output?

To help answer those questions, Sean speaks with Meghan O'Gieblyn, the author of the book "God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning." She and Sean discuss how the rise of AI is forcing us to reflect on what it means to be a creative being and whether our relationship to the written word has already been changed forever.

This is the first conversation in our three shows in three days three-part series about creativity.

Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)

Guest: Meghan O'Gieblyn (https://www.meghanogieblyn.com/)

References:

God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn (Anchor; 2021)

Being human in the age of AI. The Gray Area. (Vox Media; 2023) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-human-in-the-age-of-ai/id1081584611?i=1000612148857

Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happiness isn’t the goal Sep 30, 2024

Show notes

Children live with a beginner’s mind. Every day is full of new discoveries, powerful emotions, and often unrealistically positive assumptions about the future. As adults, beginner’s mind gives way to the mundane drudgeries of existence — and our brains seem to make it much harder for us to be happy. Should we be cool with that?

We wrap up our three-part series on optimism with Paul Bloom, author of Psych: The Story of the Human Mind and Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. He offers his thoughts on optimism and pessimism and walks Sean Illing through the differences between what we think makes us happy versus what actually does.

Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)

Guest: Paul Bloom (@paulbloom), psychologist, author and writer of the Substack Small Potatoes

Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A message from Sean Sep 27, 2024

Show notes

Sean Illing has a special message for all you listeners: Look at me!

We’ve made our first-ever video episode. See Sean in conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. Watch it with your friends and family and your friend’s families and their family friends. It’s on YouTube right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhx1sdX2bow

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What if we get climate change right? Sep 23, 2024

Show notes

Climate change has become synonymous with doomsday, as though everyone is waiting for the worst to happen. But what is this mindset doing to us? Is climate anxiety keeping us from confronting the challenge? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson thinks so. In part two of our “Reasons to Be Cheerful” series, she talks to Sean Illing about her new book, What If We Get It Right?and makes the case that our best chance for survival is acting as though the future is a place in which we want to live.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yuval Noah Harari on the eclipsing of human intelligence Sep 16, 2024

Show notes

Humans are good learners and teachers, constantly gathering information, archiving, and sharing knowledge. So why, after building the most sophisticated information technology in history, are we on the verge of destroying ourselves? We know more than ever before. But are we any wiser? Bestselling author of Sapiens and historian Yuval Noah Harari doesn’t think so.

This week Sean Illing talks with Harari, author of a mind-bending new book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks, about how the information systems that shape our world often sow the seeds of destruction, and why the current AI revolution is just the beginning of a brand-new evolutionary process that might leave us all behind.

Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)

Guest: Yuval Noah Harari (@harari_yuval)

Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why cynicism is bad for you Sep 09, 2024

Show notes

There’s a certain glamor to cynicism. As a culture, we’ve turned cynicism into a symbol of hard-earned wisdom, assuming that those who are cynical are the only ones with the courage to tell us the truth and prepare us for an uncertain future. Psychologist Jamil Zaki challenges that assumption.

In part one of The Gray Area’s new three-part series, “Reasons to be Cheerful,” Sean Illing asks Jamil Zaki about why cynicism is everywhere, especially if it makes no sense to be this way — and what we, as individuals, can do to challenge our own cynical tendencies.

Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)

Guest: Jamil Zaki (@zakijam) psychologist at Stanford University and author of Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness

Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Poetry as religion Sep 02, 2024

Show notes

Sean Illing speaks with poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, whose book The Wonder Paradox asks: If we don't have God or religion, what — if anything — do we lose? They discuss how religion accesses meaning — through things like prayer, ceremony, and ritual — and Jennifer speaks on the ways that poetry can play similar roles in a secular way. They also discuss some of the "tricks" that poets use, share favorite poems, and explore what it would mean to "live the questions" — and even learn to love them — without having the answers.

Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area

Guest: Jennifer Michael Hecht (@Freudeinstein), poet, historian; author

References:

The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives by Jennifer Michael Hecht (FSG; 2023)
Doubt: A Historyby Jennifer Michael Hecht (HarperOne; 2004)
Rainer Maria Rilke, from a 1903 letter to Franz Kappus, published in Letters to a Young Poet (pub. 1929)
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855)
"Why do parrots live so long?" by Charles Q. Choi (LiveScience; May 23, 2022)
"The survival of poetry depends on the failure of language," from The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind, and Ecologyby Robert Bringhurst (Counterpoint; 2009)
"Traveler, There Is No Road" ("Caminante, no hay camino") by Antonio Machado (1917)
"A Free Man's Worship" by Bertrand Russell (1903)
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas (1961)

Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox member: https://www.vox.com/support-now

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected