Beyond Talking Points

We talk about the reasons people vote for Trump and why his voters aren't inherently evil. We then argue about postmodernism after watching a debate regarding postmodernism and libertarianism that featured Thaddeus Russell and Stephen Hicks.

This episode is something. After a brief hiatus (we lost a couple episodes due to technical difficulties), we retread some ground from our missing episodes. We go down a rabbit hole of rants and come out the other side alive. Friedman, Yang, and AOC are all featured in this one.

Matt and Matthew have their first apolitical episode. We talk about if debate is good for public discourse. We then discuss a critique of Jordan Peterson by Philosophy Tube. We end up arguing about myth, religion, and JP's stances on these things. Matt tries not to get fired up during the debate.

Matt and Matthew cover more controversial topics this week than usual. We start with the recent news regarding abortion laws in Alabama and Georgia. After talking about abortion, we decide to be even more controversial and end up discussing the pitfalls of Islam (in the context of a hit piece on Tulsi Gabbard). We bring it all together by arguing about Dave Rubin. Lots of disagreement in this one!

Matt and Matthew broadly discuss their political foundations. We were all over the place. We first identified what we each thought the role of government in a society should be and riffed from there. We ended up discussing democracy. This is honestly a bit of a train wreck, but that makes it quite entertaining. We genuinely try to understand and hash out our differing intuitions.

Matt and Matthew cover a range of topics starting with the proposal to raise the smoking age to 21. We eventually talk about Ben and Jerry's 4/20 statement; that leads to a discussion of disparities in policing. We then take a complete 180 and end up talking about Nietzsche.

Matt and Matthew cover a somewhat random group of stories. Matt briefly rants about Social Security becoming insolvent. We both don't like Andrew Yang's News and Information Ombudsman. Gillibrand's public campaign funding plan isn't great. We have a long discussion about climate policy. Lastly, we touch on Facebook banning a bunch of people.

Matt and Matthew discuss their takeaways from the five CNN Town Halls that aired on 4/22/19 (Klobuchar, Warren, Sanders, Harris, and Buttigieg). We cover a lot of issues and have a few back and forth disagreements.

On the first episode of Beyond Talking Points, Matt and Matthew discuss a few stories from the week including the Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson debate, Ray Dalio's recent post about capitalism's shortcomings, and the tragedy in Sri Lanka.