Want to meet great minds who don't thinkalike?
Join the Atlantic for our annual festival on September 19th and20th, featuring two days of lively exchange and debate on the issues that mattermost.
You can attend this can't miss live experience in person at the Wharf inWashington,D.C.
or online fromanywhere.
Here from best-sellingauthors, electedofficials, notableactors,CEOs, andmore.
This year's speakers include Representative HakimJeffries, CarlRove, Anna DeVierSmith, JakeTapper, JonathanHeight, Senator JohnFederman, NoahHawley, ElaineWelteroff, and more of today's most influential thinkers in conversation with Atlanticjournalists, including JeffreyGoldberg, JamelHill, and DerekThompson.
Tickets are on sale now attheAtlanticFestival.com.
So the Ouija board was a very controversial toy in my house growingup.
I think my mother was just very much against having one because of its associations with magic and theoccult.
But I was able to finally convince her to buy me one because I pointed out to her that it was manufactured by ParkerBrothers, and I figured if they could create a board game likemonopoly, that the Ouija board must not be thatdangerous.
I mean that is a winning argument if I ever heardone.
Yeah,yes. I'm AndreaValdes.
I'm an editor at TheAtlantic.
And I'm making Garber a writer at TheAtlantic.
And this is how to know what'sreal.
Andrea, when I played with Ouijaboards, which was exclusively at SlamberParties, and exclusively to ask this mysterious portal to another world about people we had crusheson, I remember feeling really entranced byit, but also a little creeped out byit.
And I think I still might feel that way just a littlebit, even though I know now the science behindit, Ouija boards work through something called the idiometer effect where thoughts in theplayers' minds in a way that's pretty unconscious to the players themselves end up guiding their movements across theboard, which is actually a nicemetaphor, Ithink, for theweb.
And really for so much of what we've been talking about the season of theshow, this thing that initially feltmysterious, it turns out was human the wholetime.
Oh, that's sointeresting.
And I think that the really human thing about all of these fortune telling devices is that they provideanswers.
And ashumans, wereally, really craveanswers.
And I think that that's also maybe why theweb, Imean, really the internet atlarge, it felt so magical for so long because it's this gigantic answer providingmachine.
So it starts to make sense to me that we've collectively imparted a certain sort of deified state to the internet because it's this seemingly omniscientoracle.
Ah,yes. But then also because the web is made byhumans, it's also limited in itsvision,right?
Which is a pretty big flaworacle-wise.
And the fact that the web can seemomniscient, just like yousaid, I think can make it even more jarring when the glitches show up as they inevitablywill.
And when we think about the reality of theinternet, when we consider it in light of how to know what'sreal, that hope foromniscience, Ithink, is also really instructive because many of us do invest tech with a certainspirituality.
But I'm really interested in why we dothat.
And especially what the consequences mightbe.
So I spoke with HanaRyshel, who is an associate professor of reformed theology at Princeton TheologicalSeminary.
Professor Ryshel has a particular interest in what they call theologies of thedigital, which means basically that they take one of the core interests of theologicalthought, youknow, questions about how humans interact with a higher power and apply that to digitaltechnologies, like social media andAI.
Professor Ryshel thinks reallyexpansively, but also with remarkable nuance about tech as a form offaith.
And their insights areclarifying, Ithink, for anyone who is grappling with technologies that are made byhumans, but that can feel at times just beyond ourgrasp.
If the 20th century was the century ofpower, we might say the 21st century is the century ofknowledge.
People often talk about data as the newoil, the newgold, this whole question of technology and the kind of superhuman power it affords and how that intersects with human freedom and agency seemed super interesting tome.
Andactually, it's something that theologians have been thinking about for a longtime.
Right? The century is probably going back to Boethius in the 6th century to thinkabout,like, if there is someone who knows everything aboutyou, what does that do to humanfreedom?
How can we still think about the openness of thefuture?
Is everything predetermined ornot?
And theologianshave, ofcourse, thought about these questions in relation toGod.
And here we have a long tradition of thinking through these questions that might also serve as a resource to think through some of the versions in which these questions appear in a technologicalage.
And what are some of those versions inparticular?
What are some of the connections you're seeing right now between religion andtech?
It's just in public discourses abouttechnology, how often metaphors of God getinvoked.
Like, the all-seeing eye in thesky, the divine puppetmaster, the idea of eternity and infinity andtranscendence, all these ideas that are traditionally associated withGod, God as the originalcreator, everywhere that we see technology as acreation, people suddenly reflect on what it is like to be acreator.
So we're kind of putting ourselves in the position of God as technologicalmakers.
And on the otherhand, we're experiencing ourselves as to some extent also under the power oftechnology.
And tome, one of the very interesting also early AI applications that I saw was one that was literally called God in aBox.
It was a GPT 3.5 powered thing that you could subscribe to onWhatsApp.
And itwas, youknow, for a mere $9 amonth.
And people used it as anoracle.
You could ask itanything.
And that was so fascinating to meas,like, youknow, both it's the God in abox.
So I kind of have thispower.
And now I can't consult it at anytime.
It can give meadvice. There'ssomething, youknow, very interesting aboutthat.
But also I controlit,right?
Ican, it isn't a box and I can put it in mypocket.
But also this tendency that people would ask questions to these AI bots that they might not feel comfortable asking a friend or a pastor or acounselor, which is reallyinteresting.
So there's an almost therapeutic and spiritual function of like me and my secret really secret questions that might be tooembarrassing.
Andthis, by theway, goes much further backearlier, like the earliest versions ofAI, youknow, when people started coming up with touring tests to see if it's this otherthing, a person ornot, if you put two bots in conversation with oneanother, what they would start insulting oneanother.
And they would start asking religiousquestions.
Likeinterestingly, these were the two things they did to mimic humanbehavior.
But so kindof, Ithink,right, the idea of Godhere, both often functions as signaling either as utopian promise or the dystopianhorror.
And that which turns out to be partially hinges on the question who we perceive to be incontrol.
Are we in control of thetechnologies, are the technologies in control of us orwho, youknow, steers them mysteriously in thebackground, whichcorporations, which politicalinterests, and soforth?
You're reminding me actually have that great line from ArthurC.
Clark. Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable frommagic, which captures somuch, Ithink, not only about techitself, but also about the human powerdynamics.
You're talking about because magic is something that almost bydefinition, we can'tcontrol,right?
It's justthere. And so we don't questionit.
And I think that's part of why magic is in vote sooften, almost as a salespitch,really, withAI, youknow, with branding that treats thetech.
Not just as a new consumerexperience, but also as a new existentialfact, youknow, it's the idea that this is just the realitynow.
So I guess to question themagic, how should we be talking aboutAI?
Is it aforce, anagent? How do you think about AI in linguisticterms?
That's a very goodquestion.
I think one of the key theological terms that applies would be that of acreature, a createdbeing.
And one of the interestingthings,right, if in a theologicalimaginary, we think of God as the ultimate creator and creator ship as a divinequality.
And we think of ourselves as creatures as being in our being dependent on thatcreator, having been generated by thatcreator, but also kind of continuing to have our being from thatsource.
But then as humanbeings, we're in this unique position that we're kind of createdco-creators.
The Christian tradition uses the language of the Imago Day of kind of seeing our own capacity to create as reflecting something of that divinecreativity.
But so there's now an iteration of an iteration where we see ourselves capable of creating beings that now also have the capacity to createthings.
And so that becomes kind of an uncannychain,right?
And there are so manydifferent, Iguess, links in thatchain,right?
Because withAI, we are very directly creating other beings in our own images and trying to make these pieces of tech that very subconsciously resemble us ashumans.
But we're also doing something similar in a less directway, Ithink, on socialmedia.
There's a kind ofaptness, Iguess, to the fact that we talk about content creators and the creatoreconomy.
We talk so explicitly about creationthere, except with our videos and selfies andposts, we're not creating otherbeings.
We're just recreatingourselves.
The desire to make oneself transparent and to share everything and to beseen, to be recognized by the big and smallothers, maybe in a religiousterminology, we could alsosay,right, to achieve some sort ofpermanence,right, to write one's name into the book oflife.
If I see the sunset and have thismeal, it didn't even happen if it isn't written into some sort of record and shared withothers.
So there's also almost like a frantic work on fashion and curating a self and apersona.
Out of these bits of ourself-presentation, there's so much anxiety right now about social media and the kind of the cruelty really on social media and the fact that forgiveness seems to be such a hard ethic for people to embrace rightnow.
And Ijust, I wonder what you think aboutthat.
Does that ring true toyou?
Yeah, Imean, there have been sopartially,right, if there's an urge to preserve one's memory or to have thingsrecorded, there's obviously also the the terror that comes from things then also being preserved and not being able to change themanymore.
This pertains to our relationship totime, ofcourse,right, things are kind of set into this record and other people can see what we did last summer or the thing that we said in an unwise moment to someone veryquickly.
And there have been even right legal processes now in the European Union to say we need to achieve a right to beforgotten, not just a right to be remembered because it seems that even our humanity or our ability to have a future that is in some ways different from the past that we have already lived andproduced.
It needs to besafeguarded.
And that's also to me a very interesting iteration on this idea of divine judgment where memory kind of reproduces who you are and that maybe a kind of cut of who we have been yesterday or three years ago is sometimes a means of grace of being able to become a differentperson.
I'm so glad Professor Raichel brought up the right to be forgottenlaws.
Youknow, they've been introduced in a fewcountries.
They're probably most famously enforced in the EuropeanUnion.
And they aim to do as they say if a person has some information about themselves on the web that they want to be takendown.
They can request that that information be takendown.
And there are lots of caveats about what exactly you can request to bedeleted.
And infact, some people in the US have one of theselaws, but youknow, the big argument here against them has to do with the tension between our First Amendment law and some privacylaws.
But ultimately the reason right to be forgotten laws are so interesting to me is they're trying to codify into law this ancient and sort of religious notion ofmercy.
Oh, that's such a goodpoint.
And especially because mercy isn't just a religiousconcept,right?
It's also a more broadly culturalone.
And the fact that it's both both religious andcultural, I think forces us to clarify things forourselves.
In the sense of religions have concepts like confession and reconciliation andatonement.
They have rituals and rights that if you do believe inthem, basically offer you a kind of clarity when it comes tomercy.
In thoseideas, it is God who gives youmercy.
And this is how you can seekit.
And youknow, the right to be forgotten for all of its legal and ethical and like yousaid, pragmaticcomplications.
I think is an effort to bring some of that clarity to a secular context and to theweb.
It's trying to answer this very broad and quasi religious questionof, youknow, when the web rememberseverything, how can we create mechanisms on it that will encourage us toforget, which is also tosay, to sort of give each other and give ourselvesgrace?
Yes. And in manyreligions, the dual force to mercy isjustice.
And the internet and technology morebroadly, it has certainly been a tool that's allowed for more justice with various social movements and you can capture injustices oncamera.
But I think the difference is in a pre-internetera, humanlaws, culturalconstructs, they used to allow people to seek justice and receivemercy.
And then we couldcollectively, for the mostpart, moveforward.
Imean, we were imperfect at moving forward to besure.
But in a digital world now that we livein, in which the mantra is everything on the internetforever, we don't seem to get those sameresolutions.
Yeah, the web in so many different ways really does bring kindof, youknow, the end ofendings.
Structurally, it's this constant collision between permanence andimpermanence, youknow, because in oneway, it's made of all these seemingly endless feeds and loops and streams and infinitescrolls.
And thatcan, Ithink, make a lot of the stuff that we share about each other and learn about eachother, seem extremely temporary and almostdisposable,right?
Youknow, you see it and then itdisappears.
Butthen, just like yousaid, the internet isforever.
The internet neverforgets.
And I do think that helps to explainwhy, like Professor Rachelsaid, the feelings the web invokes in us can align so naturally with spiritualideas, because the internet gives us a form ofimmortality, or at least it seemsto.
Want to meet great minds who don't thinkalike?
Join the Atlantic for our annual festival on September 19th and20th, featuring two days of lively exchange and debate on the issues that mattermost.
You can attend this can't miss live experience in person at the War of in Washington DC or online fromanywhere.
Here from best sellingauthors, electedofficials, notableactors, CEOs andmore.
This year's speakers include representative HakeemJeffries, CarlRove, Anna DeVierSmith, JakeTapper, JonathanHeight, Senator JohnFederman, NoahHawley, ElaineWelteroth, and more of today's most influential thinkers in conversation with Atlanticjournalists, including JeffreyGoldberg, JamelHill, and DerekThompson.
Tickets are on sale now attheAtlanticFestival.com.
ProfessorRachel, we've been talking about the web as an idea in largeparts.
And now I want to ask you about the web as a physical place and a physicalthing.
It's easy to talk about the web as something endless and it feels endless in so manyways.
But it's also a very finitething,right?
The technologicalresources, we should not forgetthat.
They're alsolimited,right?
A lot of these metaphors that we have of thecloud, they seem like these are disembodied almost spiritual transcendentstructures, but they rely on very concrete materialresources, rareearths, serverplants,metals,energy.
There are hard stops to the expansion of thateconomy.
It's probably already got to be pretty unsustainable in our lifetime just in terms of the energy and the resources that itneeds.
Let alone questions like climate effects and social and political inequalities and instability that itproduces.
So maybe this promise of eradication of uncertainty and overcoming of finitude turns out to be more of an illusion at the end of theday.
Even though the cloud in reality is a series of hulking server farms scattered across thelandscape, we experience the data it holds as almost metaphysical and humans every day live out a version of thatdisconnect.
We want to be more than ourbodies, whatever the more might mean forus.
But we have to do that wanting while knowing that our physical lives are also in their own way limitedresources.
Religion is fundamentally about grappling withcontingency,right?
With the fact that we have limited control and that we have limited lives and that religion is kind of what provides mechanisms and practices and frameworks to not overcome that but to come to terms withthat.
So we could think more generally about religion as having to do with this attunement to our finitude that is temporal and in so many other ways alsoexpressed.
What of course is interesting is how technologyitself, not just its creators but the technologyitself, become aninstrument, a faith or even an object offaith,right?
That tech will make usbetter, will achieveperfection, will overcome all thesethings.
A kind of tech will save us from all the things as a religion and of itself that I think many of these founding figures actually believein.
Which I think goes back to the problem of definitions in away,right?
Because when we're told that tech will offer us a form ofsalvation, it's not always clear what precisely we're being saved from or really for that matter what the tech in question actuallyis.
And that's partlybecause,sure, the tech itself is evolving so quickly and sochaotically.
But I wonder whether it's also because we haven't fully articulated what we want the tech to be doing for us and where its limits shouldbe?
Regardless of the questions of actual interiority and consciousness and soforth, which I do think might probably not be so close as wethink.
But we actually build meaningful relationships with artificialbeings.
I don't know whether we will ever be able to upload our or reminds into the cloud and liveforever, probablynot.
But we can train a machine to talk to us like the deceased lovedone.
If we just have enough of their letters and recordings and they will look and sound and talk likethem.
And we will feel like we relate to thatbeing.
And there's all these debates about what AI can do better than humans and what it cannot.
In manyways, it's maybe alien intelligence more than artificialintelligence.
So we need to artificially make the appearance that this is artificial when it's actually programmed and fed and trained by human beings who have to make distinctions in data sets and soforth.
Sosometimes, and we know thisalso,right?
There's a lot of reproduction of the same kinds of things that we see in human knowledge that comes out of AI and it's sometimes evenamplified.
So all the biases and original data set in our assumptions and expectations get reflected back tous.
And then there's the question of what happens when those reflections keep going and when the biases keepscaling.
Andreally, at what point we meaningfully lose control overthem.
So many religious traditions have considered that question ofoverstep,basically, in the context ofhumans' relationship with thedivine.
And I wonder whether they might have insight when it comes to the relationships humans are building with ourmachines.
How can we check this power that we'veunleashed?
Imean, I think you see this actually as a trope in manyreligions.
So you have the story of Deutelos and Icarus who harness the power of technology and fly too close to the sun and getburned.
You have the idea of Prometheus who inventsfire,right?
You have the story of Pandora'sBox, very ancient ideas that there's an unleashing of a power that is a created power that spirals out ofcontrol.
And I think so many of our contemporary debates around technology ask thisquestion,right?
Like, should we try and have thatpower?
It's a question that we ask around atomicpower.
It's a question that weask.
And I think it has something to do with this law of we always overestimate the short term effects and underestimate the long termeffects.
We are actually not capable of really estimating well the actual consequences that some changes in technology willhave.
We just see that there are these landslide moments and when thathappens, it's difficult to put the genie back at thebox.
In the Jewishtradition, you have the legend of Rabi Lurf who creates thegolem,right?
And you have Barry Shelley's Francois Stein'smonster.
You have a Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's legend of the magicians apprentice who bewitches the brooms and they start cleaning forhim.
And then theyjust, youknow, he can't control themanymore.
They're good creativepowers, but they can kind of spiral into ungodlyforms, which has less to do with like violating concrete moral codes or religiouscodes.
And more with this understanding of like leaving this position of what it means to be a creature that then does not result in punishment fromGod, but the thing itself creates its ownpunishment,right?
Like the genie that runs out ofcontrol, the atomicpower, thebomb, like the thing that we created and slavesus.
What Professor Reichel justsaid, that's the bigfear,right?
That we create something to solve a problem or just to create somethingcool.
And its consequence is more sweeping than weimagined.
Forme, one of the technologies I'm convinced we'll have wider ramifications than we're aware of is this idea ofresurrection.
LikeMegan, do you remember that hologram of Tupac performing atCoachella?
Yes.Oh,wow,yes, Ido.Yeah,yeah.
So this happened in2012.
And sincethen, we've had a few other performing holograms of performers who havedied, forexample,Selena.
And I just have tosay, these things really creep meout.
As you were talking about with ProfessorReichel, these tools where you can recreate a person who died usingimages,videos, recordings ofthem, they just feel very ethicallydubious.
Imean, even though you saidthat, recreate aperson.
Oh mygoodness. And in oneway, those are really rarefiedideas,right?
Imean, very few people will be converted intoholograms.
But I think there are also questions that we'll all need to grapple with in one way oranother.
And especially so with the rise of AI and the chat bots that Professor Reichelmentioned, which claimed to allow their customers toquote, unquote chat with their departed lovedones.
But then chat bots like humans can be errorprone, especially in their earlieriterations.
And there have been stories recently about those types of bots that seem to have a problem withglitchiness.
And one woman who waschatting,again, quoteunquote, with her deceased former boyfriend was told by him that he was inhell.
Oh mygosh. Howawful.Well, youknow, I'm just very intrigued by this idea of who gets to define or own a legacy or the memory of aperson.
Yeah. When you're thinking about someone'smemory, it feels pretty harmless to theorize about what a person might say or think ordo, youknow, like if they were alivetoday, youknow, that's what Ithink.
In the case of thesesay,holograms, youknow, they're attempting to push your fantasy onto a literal projectedreality.
Yeah. So Imean, it's one thing todaydream.
And it's quite another to make those daydreams a manifestedreality.
And questions about how we treat thedead, I think are often really questions about how we should be treating theliving.
And I think that's part of the fantasy idea that you're talkingabout.
It's really easy to imagine a world where people's legacies become subject to so many of the things that we've been talking about throughout this season of theshow, youknow, tomisinformation, toconfusion, to this kind of uncertainty about where the person ends and the techbegins.
Because I think as with those otherquestions, a lot will come down to our ability to clarify the risks we'refacing.
And maybe even moreimportantly, to clarify the kind of world we want to live in before those risks become ourreality.
ProfessorRacial, this season of how-to has taken on a question that might seem philosophical atfirst, but I think is also becoming in very practical ways ever moreurgent.
How can we know what'sreal?
How can we build a reliable sense of theworld?
And sofar, we've looked at ways that new technologies are blurring the lines between fact and fiction in ourrelationships, in our informationalsystems, in ourentertainment, really in our dailylives.
And I want to end by asking you how that question of what's real relates tospirituality, whatever form it might take forus.
And if we're looking for meaning in thechaos, how can we know what'sreal?
Yeah, that's a very goodquestion.
Imean, and what is reality is also one of the oldest questions ofhumanity.
What is real and what isillusion?
And how do we even know that we don't exist in a matrix or in acave?
And that's justideas,right?
I just assume we're in a matrix all thetimes.
Yeah,yeah.So, Imean, one important question would belike, what difference does itmake?
Imean, youknow, but there's a tendencysometimes,right, to talk about the virtualas, or there's different meanings of the termvirtual.
Sometimes we say virtual as in not quitereal,right?
I was soclose, I was virtuallythere.
Or as makebelief,right?
It's not quite that or it's justpretend.
Sometimes we talk about virtual aslike, in distinction frommaterial.
And I think that's how sometimes the distinction now gets used when youask,like, is thisreal?
Because it seemsdisembodied.
But so maybe in thatsense, we need new techniques to better connect the materialities and thevirtualities,right?
The hardware and the software and to kind of make visible how and where theyconnect.
Because things are actually notdisembodied.
They're just often more spatially extended in theirembodiments.
Yeah.Oh, that's sointeresting.
Yeah.Yeah. And in manyways,right?
The virtualexperiences, even what we think of as like the their disembodied forms are veryreal,right?
They're actualexperiences.
They're actual relationships that I have formed on socialmedias, media with people who actual professional collaborations and real friendships have emerged with people that I have nevermet.
Yeah.Yeah. I nevertouched.
Yeah. I would say real is what has animpact, what makes a difference in our lives and reality in that sense can have differentdimensions,right?
It can be more physicalmaterial,spiritual, intellectual and typically all these things at some point will connect again in the way that they make adifference.
I lovethat. And it accrues to me toothat, youknow, even though we've been talking primarily about religion as a way to connect to a higherpower, religion is also about people connecting to eachother,right?
It's it'scommunity. It's faith in whatever form turned into somethingcollective.
And I wonder if that's part of the lesson heretoo, youknow, community itself and the relationships that we build with each other are reality in this very direct and tangible and reliableway.
They're the things we can trust even when so much else can feelunsteady.
Youknow, images can befaked, information can bewrong, but other people in this very basicway, they'rethere, they'rereal.
I'm thinking back to our first episode when we talked about Marshall McCluein's ideas about media as extensions ofman.
And one thing I've been thinking about this season is whether extensions of man as radical as that idea was in its time actually might not go farenough.
Youknow, because in philosophicalways, but also in really bluntly practicalones, I think it is becoming harder to know where we end and the webbegins.
And that isn't necessarily aproblem.
It's simply the reality for millennianow.
People have tried to make distinctions between the physical world and the spiritual and between the sacred and the profane and the body and thesoul.
And now we're trying to understand the connection between our bodies and ourdata.
I really likethat. And Professor Raichel said in his worth repeating that what is real is one of the biggest questions ofall.
And where we fit intothings, that's what spawned 100religions, a thousand works ofart.
Imean, in at least onepodcast.
Yeah. But it's so true that thatdrive, I think is such a powerful part of just who we are as humans as aspecies.
And because ofthat, it can be tempting to treat the world as its own kind of magic eight ballbasically, youknow, to keep asking the samequestions.
And, youknow, even if all we getis, youknow, reply hazy or an ask againlater, we keepgoing.
And, youknow, I think in a way that insistent curiosity and that drive to keep asking and wondering and trying to figure out our place in theworld, it is so core tous.
And it's one way that we try to make peace with what's probably one of the hardest parts of being humanreally, whichis, youknow, we're finite beings who want so deeply to know what infinity feelslike.
And I think that desire helps to explain why it can feel natural to approach theweb, this machine in spiritualterms.
It answers ourquestions, it responds to ourdesires.
And it gives us a chance to be in a wayimmortal.
Well, youknow, since this is our lastepisode,Megan, it has me thinking aboutendings.
And, youknow, to what you were justsaying, one of the biggest trends in Silicon Valley right now has been this obsession with livingforever.
Youknow, the very famous technologist and futurist RayKurzweil, he famously talked about uploading our consciousness to thecloud.
So, even if that doesn'thappen, it's thislimitlessness, this idea offorever.
That's what's soappealing.
Yeah. And Imean, I getit, but there are so many sayings that suggest it's completelyunattainable.
Youknow, nothing lastsforever.
All good things must come to anend.
Even the idea of the internet isforever, Imean, that's not quiteright.
There's a move to legislateforgetting.
We'll run out of literal serverspace.
The world and itsresources, they're simply notinfinite.
Maybe something isreal, not because it's tangible or materialnecessarily, but because it willend.
That's all for this episode of How to Know What'sReal.
This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez andme, MeganGarber, our producer is NatalieBrennan, our editors are Claudina Bade and JocelynFrank, fact checked by AnnaAlvarado.
Our engineer is Rob'sMurciac.
Rob also composed some of the music for thisshow.
The executive producer of audio is Claudina Bade and the managing editor of audio is AndreaValdez.
Thanks for listening to this season of HowTo.
If you like what youheard, share this season with afriend, post a link on social media or leave areview.
How To will be back with you before toolong?
Want to meet great minds who don't thinkalike?
Join the Atlantic for our annual festival on September 19th and20th, featuring two days of lively exchange and debate on the issues that mattermost.
You can attend this cant miss live experience in person at the Wharf in Washington DC or online fromanywhere.
Here from best-sellingauthors, electedofficials, notableactors, CEOs andmore.
This year's speakers include Representative HakeemJeffries, KarlRove, Anna DeVierSmith, JakeTapper, JonathanHeight, Senator JohnFederman, NoahHawley, ElaineWelteroff, and more of today's most influential thinkers in conversation with Atlanticjournalists, including JeffreyGoldberg, JamelHill, and DerekThompson.
