If you've been watching this show for a while, you know some of my favorite guests include
people who are firmly on the political left like Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein and Eric Weinstein,
some people on the political right such as Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager and Larry Elder,
as well as some people who are hard to place on the conventional spectrum, such as Jordan
Peterson, Phil DeFranco and Brendan O'Neill.
Of course if you've been watching for a while you also know I think the Left Right paradigm
of politics is becoming increasingly meaningless and the new, more relevant spectrum is one
of personal freedom v. state power.
You are either for a society based on laws which treat individual people equally with
minimal involvement in their day to day lives, or you prefer a society which treats certain
groups differently based on immutable characteristics and thus the government plays a major role
in whether they succeed or fail.
The simplest way to say this is you're either for your own determination, or you want to
hand it off to someone else.
If I've changed on anything in the past few years, its that I consistently find myself
agreeing with the people who fight for individual choice over governmental authority.
If you watch cable news or really listen to any of the mainstream media, this conversation
about your ability to live your life as you see fit, which I believe to be the most important
conversation happening right now, is barely happening at all.
Actually, I believe almost nothing of real value is happening anywhere in mainstream
media . Cable news is force feeding you an endless back and forth by pundits who consistently
get everything wrong...rememeber Hillary's 99% chance of winning in 2016....while at
the same time they mask their opinions as facts and argue about the endless minutia
of a broken Washington DC instead of arming you with real knowledge and new ideas.
I don't know that there's anyone specifically to blame for this other than mainstream media
is based on an old dying model that is being replaced by new media and new technology so
quickly that its fualts are becoming glaringly obvious.
Fortunately, thanks to YouTube, podcasting and however else you get shows like this one,
the mainstream media's stranglehold on information, which is really a stranglehold on your ability
to think clearly about the issues of the day, is crumbling at an incredible rate.
Now the question is who and what will rise to replace it.
A few months ago, one of my favorite people to sit across this table from, Eric Weinstein,
came up with the phrase 'Intellectual Dark Web' to describe this eclectic mix of people
from Harris to Shapiro to Weinstein to Petersen, who are figuring out ways to have the important
and often dangerous conversations that are completely ignored by the mainstream.
It's why I would argue this collection of people are actually more influential at this
point than whatever collection of cable news pundits we could be compared to.
And it's not just those names I mentioned above, but people like Joe Rogan, who is absolutely
killing it on his podcast every week.
It's people like Christina Hoff Sommers who is fighting the intersectionality of third
wave feminism while still holding hope for feminism's original ambitions of equality
of opportunity.
It's people like James Damore and Lindsay Shepherd who are fighting for the true diversity
of ideas at Google and at Universities.
This wide tent of people we're talking about have tremendous political differences when
it comes to taxes, abortion, foreign policy and more, but we've all committed ourselves
to fighting for our ideas honestly and passionately, but more importantly we've committed to the
open exchange of ideas and not silencing our opponents, no matter how many times they refuse
to extend that same courtesy
to us.