Welcome to the show.

Hope you had a good weekend.

I'm going to start with something a little different today.

You know, I've received a lot of emails lately, especially, I think, because with the book

out, there are people who are hearing about me from reading the book

and not the show and so I've been getting asked the question what exactly are your political

beliefs yes you're on the left but can you really lay it out where do you stand on different

issues and different principles and ideas and I think that this is an excellent opportunity to kind of lay it out and sort of like this

will be what I can refer people back to in a context where I've been critical before of those

who just want to talk about principles, principles, principles, ignoring difficult policy decisions.

I have a chapter in the book about avoiding these philosophical

black holes for two reasons. Number one, if I tell you my values are liberty, individual

autonomy, and egalitarianism. What does that really say in 2025 about what policy should be?

So one reason that I favor an approach of always talking

about our beliefs in the context of policy is that the beliefs alone don't actually tell you

what policy you should support or oppose. And secondly, we have right now in the American right

wing a movement that claims certain virtues and

principles, but then they abandon them immediately when those are politically inconvenient.

So for those reasons in the book I've said, don't get sucked into the black hole of exclusively

talking theoretically, abstractly about

principles.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about principles and policy and kind of lay out where

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