The Examined Year: 2018 – Uncut

Happy new year from your senior producer, here to offer a look behind the scenes at how this year’s end-of-year special really happened.

We spent one long December afternoon in the KALW studio recording the conversations for this episode (at least it felt long, since we did it all following the live broadcast of Foreign Aid — or Injury). Co-host Debra Satz had stepped away from the program since being named Dean of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences last summer, but she’d committed to at least one more program on a topic of political economy. Given that we’d have her in the studio, and Josh available to come by after the broadcast, I reached out to host emeritus John Perry to see whether we might be able to convene an all-host roundtable — the first since last year’s Philosophy of Retirement show with John — in which Josh and Ken asked their erstwhile co-hosts what happened in 2018 that challenged their assumptions and made them think about things in new ways. Needless to say only a portion of the discussion made it to air, but here’s the (more or less) complete conversation:

Once I finally got these old philosophical pals to wrap it up, we called up Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, who’d most recently joined us for a program on propaganda. Jason’s most recent book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, so Josh and Ken asked him about the year in Demagoguery and Propaganda. As usual, most of what they talked about wound up on the cutting room floor:

Finally, in a year marked by extreme weather that broke through the headlines in new ways, Josh and Ken invited Greg Dalton, Founder and Host of Climate One at the Commonwealth Club to the studio to talk about the Year in Climate Consciousness (disclosure: I also work as an audio editor at Climate One). That turned out to work well as the first segment for the broadcast, since Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede would be putting together an aural tour of those consciousness-changing climate sounds from the past year. Anyway here’s Josh and Ken’s uncut conversation with Greg: