It's just really, really important in a functioning democracy to have
Americans see one another as fellow Americans as opposed to an identity that
needs to be super combative with a different identity and
I think that's what we've kind of turned into.
You and I clearly have a lot of disagreements on policy, disagreements on
culture, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're an awful person.
It doesn't mean that I should be afraid of you.
If anything, I should prove that I genuinely believe
my political views by engaging in these debates.
If I can defend what I believe with actual facts, statistics, empirical evidence.
Well, that only proves that there's good reason to believe in the policies that I'm
promoting and it's easy to be in an echo chamber where everyone already agrees with
you, but you're not really being challenged.
So I like to be challenged.
I like to put my political ideas to the test and
I think this is a good opportunity to do it.
>> Yeah, this is one of the things that I really like about you as a person.
We actually got to know each other when we did a debate about a year ago,
I think over in Pennsylvania and we were talking in the green room beforehand and
we got along as human beings.
And one of the things that's nice about conversations like this is again, what you
say, I think is is super important which is that the social fabric of the country
is going to be built on the idea that people can have conversations like this.
And yet, it's considered so unusual and so crazy.
Have you gotten any blowback for being willing to do conversations like this one?
>> I have, I will say, it is a small portion of a very loud group
of self-identified leftists on Twitter, for instance.
They'll get very upset.
They'll accuse me of plat forming you even though,
I don't know if they notice you've got a bit of a platform on your own.
I don't need to help you in building a platform or platform in you.
I think that there's this very real fear that in engaging
in these conversations, you are legitimizing the other side.
And my point is as long as the other side is coming at me with good faith arguments,
they genuinely believe what they're saying.
Having these debates is important in actually deciphering what you as
the viewer believe, right?
Because if you're only listening to one side, if you're listening to leftist
media, liberal media and you don't get the other side at all,
your policy ideas are never gonna be challenged.
You're not gonna hear the other side and I think it's led to this culture right now
where Americans overwhelmingly seem to have difficulty with nuance, right?
Everything needs to be black and white.
And honestly, political issues are usually a lot more complex, a lot more nuanced and
nothing in life is black and white.
>> And that's what makes them interesting in the first place.
>> Right. >> It was all that black and
white or that easy.
You wouldn't have to listen to shows like yours or shows like mine and
you wouldn't have to, I've always encouraged people to listen to shows that
are on the other side of the aisle.
Because otherwise, they don't know what I'm saying that's fact and
what I'm saying this opinion.
And so I think it's really important for
people to hear conversations between people who really, really disagree.
You used a phrase that I think is really important,
good faith and this is one that I've had to kind of think through myself.
Because obviously, there are conversations that are not worth having.
You have people online who will say you should go talk to this person,
you know this person happens to be like dregs of the Earth.
And then you say, well, I don't really wish to talk to.
And they say, well, you say you're willing to talk to pretty much anybody.
So how do you draw that line?
How do you draw the line between somebody who is worth talking to someone who's
acting in good faith and somebody who's not really acting in good faith?
>> Well, I think the interaction that you and I had both before and
during that debate was really important to me in that it gave me a better idea and
sense of who you are.
One of the issues I've had in recent years is the characterizing the or
the caricatures that are drawn of the other side and I think the left does it,
the right does it.
So just kinda like lumping you in with let's say, Tucker Carlson.
Lumping you in with, I don't know.
Someone else that I certainly don't think is coming at these debates
from a good faith perspective.
They're looking for clicks.
They're looking to build their public persona.
There's a lot of that going on.
You're a pretty respectful person when we're engaging in these debates.
I don't really see you trying to draw caricatures of me as we're in the middle
of these conversations.
So to me, that's important.
You can just tell, there's like toxicity and
then there are people that you disagree with politically, but
you can actually have a respectful conversation with them.
And because I had that experience with you, I was comfortable, again, having this
experience today in hashing out our differences, but also talking about
where there might be some similarities, where we want the country to go.
Because this country has always had a variety of political ideas,
political differences.
But there was a time in America where people can engage in these debates, engage
in these conversations and leave feeling that mutual respect for one another.
Seeing each other as fellow Americans, as opposed to my enemy, the other side.
We need to crush them.
We need to do that.
>> I wanna move away from that.
And honestly, during the coronavirus pandemic, I've opened my mind up to
some programming that I otherwise wouldn't have listened to.
So for instance, there's this show called the John and Ken Show it airs in LA, but
I think it's actually syndicated all over the country and I like listening to it,
because there are a lot of perspectives in that show that I disagree with.
But there have been moments where one of the host will
say something that in the short-term, I might be offended by or
angry about or whatever, but I have to do my due diligence.
So I'll investigate it a little bit and
think to myself, well, actually, he had a point there.
So I think the necessity for nuclear energy is a good example of that.
Once I realized right now, the technology for renewables isn't quite where
we need it to be, where we can just give up fossil fuels and be okay.
Well, a good clean energy solution to kind of close that gap,
at least for now would be nuclear.
And you say that and
a lot of people on the left have a negative reaction to it, but
I think it's partly because they're not typically exposed to other perspectives.
Everyone's kind of in their own ideological bubble.
It's a huge problem in my opinion and that's why I wanna have conversations.
>> And that's a great example.
So I've always used nuclear energy is actually the litmus test on people who
take climate change seriously.
There are people on both sides, you don't, right?
Their people on the right who will say that it doesn't exist that there has been
no global warming over the course of the last 100 years or who say that there
is no anthropogenic global warming, it's entirely the fault of the sun.
And my perspective has always been I don't have the expertise to challenge the IPCC
when they suggest that there will be a certain amount of climate change.
Their sort of outlying more extreme predictions are the ones that have sort of
the least predictability and they admit that.
And so the question becomes, what do we do do in order to prevent as much of this as
possible while still maintaining a lifestyle that westerners are used to and
that we should aspire to for for the rest of the world?
And nuclear energy has always been a great way of doing that.
And so that perspective has tended to draw fire from both sides.
You have people who say, well, why are you even acknowledging that this
sort of thing is that you sound like Greta Thunberg?
And then you'll have people on the left saying, well, he doesn't
even believe in global warming, because he is advocating from nuclear energy.
That sort of failure of nuance, I think has really deleterious effects.
Because it prevents us from accomplishing solutions that if you and
I can agree on a thing, it's a pretty good notion that,
that's a fairly common sensical thing, because we disagree on so
many things that we can agree on something like nuclear energy.
>> Right, right.
>> Then really there's not that much to argue about.
>> And I mean, nuclear energy does not emit the type of climate
causing emissions that other fossil fuels like oil,
natural gas that definitely does have an impact.
It contributes to the climate emergency.
So anyone who is against nuclear energy,
I think there are some points that are legitimate.
So for instance, people are concerned about another Chernobyl.
I totally understand that, but the technology has improved since then,
better safeguards.
>> Might run by the communist Russians.
>> Yeah, but look, these are conversations that should be had and
we should be fearless in having these conversations.
I feel confident in my beliefs and my values, but
I also really wanna get into basically, a culture that leaves ego aside and
helps people feel comfortable acknowledging when hey,
maybe I didn't get something right.
Because there are certainly areas where it turns out, I didn't get something right.
I used to be 100% against nuclear.
I thought nuclear would be super dangerous.
I totally bought into like the Chernobyl related.
>> Yeah, exactly.
>> But once you start reading into it a little more,
once you actually start thinking for yourself independently, independent of
some ideological model that you're supposed to fit into perfectly, it really
does open your horizons and it allows for you to learn and that's what I wanna do.
I wanna learn and I wanna make sure that the information I'm getting to my audience
is well-thought out, and accurate.