What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal

The Ezra Klein Show | 9 June 2023 | 1h 10m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Kristen Ghodsee about her book Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Draws lessons from the social experiments of communes and intentional communities to critique the way existing structures of family and community life leave so many people devoid of care and connection.

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Joseph Henrich on The WEIRDest People in the World

The Ezra Klein Show | 26 May 2023 | 1h 11m | Listen Later | Spotify
Interview with Joseph Henrich about his book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Discusses Henrich’s theory of how “cultural evolution” leads to psychological – even genetic – changes in humans, the difference between societies that experience “shame” as a dominant emotion as opposed to “guilt,” the unique power of religion in driving cultural change, how cultural inventions like reading have reshaped human biology, why religious communes tend to outlast secular ones, why Henrich believes there is no static “human nature” aside from our cultural learning abilities, how differences in moral psychology across the United States can predict Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 vote share, why higher levels of immigration tend to lead to far more innovation, and more.

See also episodes with Joseph Henrich on Conversations with Tyler and The Insight.

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The ‘Quiet Catastrophe’ Brewing in Our Social Lives

The Ezra Klein Show | 18 April 2023 | 1h 14m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Sheila Liming about her book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. Discusses how the structures of our lives and physical spaces have made atomization rather than community our society’s default setting, the surprising class differences in how far we live from our families, the social costs of wearing headphones and earbuds in public, how technology has enabled us to avoid the social awkwardness and rejection inherent in building community, the fact that the nuclear family is a historical aberration – and maybe a mistake, how texting and “ghosting” affect the resilience of our core relationships, what we are losing in an era of increased remote work, why some parents are revolting against their kids having sleepovers, and more.

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Three Years, Three Very Different Lenses on China

The Ezra Klein Show | 14 March 2023 | 1h 26m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Dan Wang. Discusses the changing narrative about China, drawing from his annual letters. Covers Xi Jinping, covid, China-America relations, Chinese success in solar versus American policy failure in solar, China’s pragmatic approach to economic growth, steering where talent flows, foreign business losing trust in China, semiconductors, Taiwan, and more.

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Rachel Zoffness on The Pain Management Workbook

The Ezra Klein Show | 21 February 2023 | 1h 04m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Rachel Zoffness about her book The Pain Management Workbook. Argues that pain is more than a physical sensation rooted in the body – it is also produced by the mind and deeply influenced by social context. Offers concrete advice to improve your personal “pain recipe”.

 

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Interrogating the Stories We Tell About Our Minds

The Ezra Klein Show | 4 October 2022 | 1h 07m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Rachel Aviv about her book Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us. Discusses how mental states like depression and anxiety can be socially contagious, how mental illnesses differ from physical ailments like diabetes and high blood pressure, how having too much “insight” into our mental states can sometimes hurt us, how social forces like racism and classism can activate psychological distress, what “depressive realism” says about the state of our society, how we can care for one another both within and beyond the medical establishment, and more.

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`We Know So Little About What Makes Humanity Prosper

The Ezra Klein Show | 27 September 2022 | 1h 31m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Patrick Collison exploring his worldview and the world view of Progress Studies – how we can speed up bringing about a better future for all.

I highly recommend Ezra Klein’s 2016 interview with Patrick Collison, which covered Stripe, management, regulation, immigration, problem-solving, “rationalist” bloggers, and the importance of the Enlightenment period.

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William MacAskill – What We Owe the Future

The Ezra Klein Show | 9 August 2022 | 1h 08m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with William MacAskill about his book What We Owe the Future. Distils the longtermist world view, advocating that we take our responsibility to future generations seriously. Considers how we should weigh the considerations of future generations against those of living people, what we do today that future generations will disdain in the same way we look back on slavery, the “moral weirdos” of our time we should be paying more attention to, and more.

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