our Values
Intellectual Values
Our goal is to articulate a clear set of intellectual values that will motivate and moor us. We hope to integrate these values in every aspect of our company culture–from hiring to guest booking to the entire life cycle of content creation.
Ideally, this will be a living, breathing document and evolve over time. We’d love your feedback!
1. Intellectual Humility
In many ways, this is our master value: it is an awareness of ignorance, a call to acknowledge how little most of us know on the vast majority of topics, an appreciation of the deep complexity embedded in every social/political problem and the profound uncertainty inherent in policy prescriptions and interventions. On any issue, it requires open-minded, evidence-based exploration across a diversity of viewpoints. It’s not that moral clarity cannot be achieved; it’s that each achievement requires an arduous struggle and must be accompanied by the persistent rejoinder that, even as we bask in the warmth of the accomplishment, we still might be wrong.
2. Nonpartisan Truth
We are committed to the pursuit of truth regardless of the political implications. We believe that this is the only way to build a lasting, durable trust with our audience and to solve our most important political and social problems. This is not to say that we will never wrestle with the trade-offs between ideas and their real world consequences. It is to say: when wrestling, we will do everything we can to minimize the influence of partisan politics in our decision making.
3. Ideological Promiscuity
Our goal is to pursue the best ideas and arguments, regardless of their origin or current fashion. Whenever we cover a topic, we will seek out and engage in good faith with a wide swath of ideas and intellectual orientations. We’ll talk to the socialists and flirt with the libertarians. We’ll fall for the neocons and then cheat on them with the neoliberals. We will get weird with the populist left and the populist right (often at the same time) and then bring the centrists home to meet our parents.
4. Constant Correction
This spirit of promiscuity demands a complementary spirit of skepticism, refinement, and course correction. Ideas must be scrutinized, sharpened, reshaped, and sometimes discarded. There is only one way to go about this: rigorous, evidence-based disagreement. Disagreement is the engine of all human progress. It is our superpower. The biggest problem with the current state of podcasts (and media more broadly) is that there is almost no disagreement. Guests and hosts slip effortlessly into a groove of mutual affirmation. Ideas are propelled into the culture without any resistance; important facts meander into the discourse unscathed. We are committed to rampant, profligate disagreement in every aspect of our content and culture in order to interrogate our assumptions, expose the best ideas, and embed intellectual checks and balances.
5. Ethical Bothsidesism
In almost every case, there are interesting insights, compelling arguments, and kernels of truth on both sides of an issue. Ignoring them or pretending that they don’t exist doesn't make them go away – it just weakens one’s intellectual credibility. Arguing from a position of self-awareness is much more powerful than from a position of self-delusion, especially when advocating for a particular cause. Most importantly, ethical bothsidesism is the best way to intellectually exit our various echo chambers, find common cause across lines of difference, and lay the foundation for political convergence and compromise.
6. Take a Position (Not a Side)
Once you develop a practice of ethical bothsidesism, the idea of “picking a side” on any issue becomes intellectually indefensible: it is always a distortion and oversimplification of your ethical instincts. Taking a position, on the other hand, allows you to paint with a much more fine-grained brush. You can keep the baby and discard the bathwater; you can passionately advocate for a particular cause while signaling to your opponents that there is fertile ground for discussion. There are many ways to do it: You can say “I’m 90/10 in support of X…” or Frankenstein together a disparate set of ideas and arguments. Whatever the approach, you will be promoting intellectual honesty and laying the foundation for common ground.
7. Ideas Independent of Identities
Ideas exist independent of identities. When it comes to adjudicating ethical claims, policy prescriptions, or social scientific disputes, what matters most is the strengths of the arguments and the quality of the evidence. There are no Jewish ideas. There are no black ideas. There are no ideas of color. Individual articulations of lived experiences are critical; but they also offer an incomplete picture of the complexity, diversity, and richness of the collective experience. The key move is to incorporate these primary source accounts into broader frameworks of research and knowledge. Anyone, regardless of identity, has the potential to access or contribute to these bodies of knowledge because, as humans, we can understand one another. The subjectivity of lived experience gets filtered through universally accessible constructs: pain and suffering and joy and ecstasy and everything in between. While the experiences themselves remain inaccessible, the core insights and intuitions are always on offer.
8. No Bright Lines
There are often compelling reasons to platform people and ideas we find objectionable: combating the ideas, attempting to persuade, understanding a different perspective, forging common ground, or learning something that could be politically or strategically valuable. We reject the prevailing “ethical osmosis” where the platforming party takes on the moral valence of the guest being platformed (if you platform a bigot, you are a bigot). For us, it all comes down to the strategic goals of the conversation and the execution of the finished product. We will pair a deep sense of responsibility with a deep commitment to subvert the narrowing of the current norms.
9. We’re Not That Far Apart
The bad news is that we haven’t been this far apart in a long time. The good news is that our distance is a cultural construct. It is the direct result of a number of historically specific, highly contingent factors: Cable and social media incentives that reward rancor and extremism; the emergence of harsh, punitive accountability within left/right speech climates; political structures that engender partisanship (primary system, gerrymandering), amongst others. When you peel away a layer or two from this cultural matrix – when you get someone alone in a private setting, outside any social incentives or consequences–what you find is that we’re actually not that far apart: at the base level, the vast majority of us can converge on a common set of ethical intuitions and core values. To be clear, there will always be deep disagreements on foreign and domestic policy, a variety of overlapping tribal impulses, and imperfect political incentives. But we can do much better. We can anchor our divisions in our shared values. We can disagree without the dehumanization. Just as a toxic cultural cocktail spurred our descent into wherever it is we find ourselves, so too a rival mix could thrust us upwards towards something much brighter.