Introducing The Podium, an insider look into the 17 intense days of competition at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang. In the run-up to opening ceremonies, hear in-depth interviews with your favorite Winter Olympians, explorations of host country South Korea’s culture, history, and more from industry experts. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform for automatic download.

Chang Rae Lee’s books include “Native Speaker,” “Aloft,” and “The Surrendered,” for which he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. His most recent book is “On Such A Full Sea,” a cool, sci-fi dystopia. It was published in 2014. His novels tackle some of the most important themes in American life today, including immigration, life after war, and even the divided Korean Peninsula. He was born in Seoul, South Korea, but moved to the U.S. with his family at the age of three. His home country has been in the news a lot lately. And we’ll be hearing about it for more cheerful reasons in February, when South Korea hosts the 2018 Olympic Winter Games.

He spoke to Vox's Todd VanDerWerff for this episode of Vox Media's "I Think You're Interesting."

In a special Olympics-themed episode of Worldly, Yochi, Jenn, and Zack look at how global politics will shape next year’s Winter Games in South Korea in a way that hasn’t been seen since the height of the Cold War. The International Olympic Committee has already banned Russia because of a massive doping scandal, and the nuclear standoff with North Korea could make some countries jittery about sending athletes to the games. Add it all together, and you have the potential for an Olympics like no other.

Plus, Jenn confesses to a passionate love of figure skating, Zack argues for taking the world’s guns and giving them to Olympic biathletes, and Yochi makes the case for why skeleton is the only sport you should watch.