Cenk Uygur

Because if you were taught success is wealth, success is status, you're not going to get off that track, right?

But if you're taught

no wait a minute success is whatever makes you most satisfied you most fulfilled you the living the best life you can getting the most out of life then you'll be on a different track and the way you got there onto the correct track is that you kept an open mind if we don't learn from our mistakes we're wasting all those gifts that life gave us every mistake is a gift

because it lets you learn from it, grow and become a better person.

And I think all three of us have done that politically in different ways.

And I think it's a beautiful thing to teach our audiences.

Thank you guys.

Again, I can't appreciate you enough.

You're awesome.

Yes. So in order to do that, Lex, we got to talk about where we are in the political spectrum. And in fact, there's two different spectrums now. People often think of left-right, and that's true, that exists. But layered on top of that is now populist versus establishment. So I'm center-left on the left-right spectrum, but I'm all the way on the populist end of the second spectrum.

So where does progressivism lie within that? Well, I would argue that it's exactly in those places. It's populist. Uh, and it's on the left, but it is not far left. So far left is a different animal. Uh, and we could talk about that in a little bit. So in terms of what makes a progressive, uh, So expand the circle of liberty and justice for all and equality of opportunity.

Now people will say, well, that seems pretty broad and all American, but is it? Think about it. So expand the circle of liberty. Everybody's in favor of that, right? No, absolutely not. So, uh, certainly the King of England was not in favor of expanding the circle of Liberty and the founding fathers said, we're going to expand it. And they expanded it to property white men.

And then progressives have been their progressives because they expanded the circle of Liberty. They then from then on, as we were perfecting the union, uh, Progressives always say expand it further, include women, include people without property, include all races, and at every turn, conservatives fight against it.

So that doesn't mean if you're a conservative today, you don't want to include women or minorities, et cetera. But today you would say, for example, well, I don't want to expand the circle of liberty to, for example, undocumented immigrants. And maybe you're right about that, and we could have that discussion in terms of a specific –

And I don't believe that undocumented immigrants should immediately be citizens or anything along those lines. But I do believe in expanding liberty overall. And the contours of that are what's interesting. And then you see justice for all. Everybody's for justice. No. Right now, marijuana possession is still illegal in a lot of parts of the country.

Now a lot of right-wingers and left-wingers agree that it should be legal. But for my entire lifetime, black people have been arrested at about 3.7 times the rate of white people. and the entire country has been fine with it. So is that justice? No. White people, black people smoke marijuana at the same rate. Black people get arrested about four times the rate.

That is an injustice that an enormous percentage of the country was comfortable with. Well, progressives aren't comfortable with it. We want justice for all. So the equality of opportunity is an interesting one because the far left will say, So at least some portions of them will say equality of results, right? So progressives just want a fair chance.

So free college education, but afterwards you don't get to have exact same results as either the wealthiest person or we're not all going to be equal. We don't have equal talents, skills, abilities, et cetera.

So Lex, what we're probably going to talk about a lot today is balance. And so a lot of people think, oh, I'm on the right, I'm on the left. And that comes with a certain preset ideology. So the right is always correct. The left is always correct. So there's two problems with that. Number one, how could you possibly believe in a preset ideology if you're an independent thinker?

It's literally, by definition, not possible. If you say, I lent my brain to an ideology that was created 80 years ago, or eight years ago, or 800 years ago, and I'm not going to change it, you're saying, I don't think for myself. I bought into a culture, and by the way, there's a lot of different forms of culture you could buy into, religion, politics. sometimes racial, et cetera.