| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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Battle of Ideas
00:02:25
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| Hey everyone, we're going to be doing something a little different this week. | ||
| I've got Majid Nawaz jumping on a Skype call shortly. | ||
| He and Sam Harris are co-authors of a new book about Islam, and Majid is a former Islamic extremist himself. | ||
| A ton of you guys have been asking us to sit down, but he lives in London, so we thought we'd give the Skype thing a shot. | ||
| Actually, he's in New York at the moment. | ||
| I saw a picture of him and Morgan Freeman in a mosque yesterday, so I'm going to ask him about that and much more in a little bit. | ||
| But first, let's do a little housekeeping. | ||
| I want to talk about some of the principles we laid out in the first episode and some of the reaction to last week's show. | ||
| It seems that a bunch of you weren't thrilled with my guest Jimmy Dore. | ||
| Jimmy is a hardcore lefty progressive and uses some of the tactics I mentioned that I wouldn't be using on the show. | ||
| First, let me just say that I can only hold myself to the rules that I laid out. | ||
| If I stopped and mentioned saying every time a guest said something that goes against my personal rules, the show would be incredibly slow and horrifically painful. | ||
| More importantly, as we build a community based on tolerance and other ideas, it's important that we remain tolerant of ideas we don't like. | ||
| Jimmy is a great friend of mine. | ||
| We've worked together on-air for years, we've done stand-up gigs together, and I've had him and his wife over for dinner numerous times. | ||
| Yeah, we don't agree on everything, including some pretty big issues, but I think life is about more than just scoring who is right on everything all the time. | ||
| The most interesting part of last week's response was that some people said the episode was an echo chamber and I didn't push back enough. | ||
| Other people questioned why I even had people I disagree with on it all. | ||
| And that's the beauty of the internet, right? | ||
| We can all be part of the same exact conversation and still see it through our individual prisms. | ||
| Good journalism is the search for truth. | ||
| This show will be a battle of ideas, not just having our own ideas reinforced. | ||
| You know, there's so much intolerance of the other on both sides, and I think we can create something that's so much better than that. | ||
| Actually, I don't just think it, I know it, because I see it already happening. | ||
| Last week I had a hardcore progressive lefty. | ||
| This week I have a former Islamist extremist turned moderate trying to reform his religion. | ||
| Next week I have a gay conservative from Breitbart, Milo Yiannopoulos. | ||
| I won't agree with all of them all the time, but I most likely won't shout them down either. | ||
| I have enough faith in you guys that if we have an honest conversation here, the truth will present itself. | ||
| This of course reminds me of the Galactic Republic in the early days of the Death Star. | ||
| Grand Muff Tarkin wanted to stifle debate because they had the most powerful super laser in the universe. | ||
| Of course, let's not forget that Darth Vader said that the Death Star was nothing compared to the power of the Force. | ||
| The Force is on our side. | ||