The Wednesday One Thing: Read the Other Half

If half of America believes something and you refuse to even hear it, you haven't beaten those people. You've blinded yourself to them.

That's the thing I keep coming back to. The right won't listen to the left. The left won't listen to the right. Both sides have decided the other is so wrong that there's nothing left to learn — and that's the part that should stop us cold. Because refusing to listen isn't a political position. It's a refusal to learn. And a country where half of us won't learn from the other half is a country slowly losing the ability to be one country at all.

So here's what I actually do, on purpose. I get my information from ten sources — four that lean left, three that lean right, three that sit closer to neutral. Not because I agree with all of them. I don't. I read them so that no matter what I already think, someone in my week is going to push back on it. Here's the whole list, and why each one earns its spot.

The neutral three

Bob Hoffman — "The Ad Contrarian." A former ad-agency CEO who turned into advertising's sharpest critic. His book ADSCAM argues that online and programmatic advertising has become one of the great frauds of our time — and a genuine threat to democracy — because it quietly decides what every one of us sees on a screen. Once you understand how the ads get targeted, you start to understand how opinion itself gets shaped. (https://www.bobhoffmanswebsite.com)

Rick Beato — a music producer whose YouTube channel is one of the most-watched independent voices in music, with millions of subscribers. When you have an audience that size and you're talking every day about what's actually happening in music — and how fast AI is moving into it — you end up with a real read on the culture, not just the charts. Plus the shows are just fantastic. (youtube.com/@RickBeato)

Seth Godin — a marketing legend with a shelf full of books, but it's his daily email that earns the spot. Short, plain, and reliably thought-provoking — he's the one who makes you reconsider something you stopped questioning years ago. It's part of my morning, every day. (seths.blog)

The left four

Scott Galloway — NYU Stern marketing professor, everywhere on the talk-show circuit, and author of The Four, his dissection of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google that still holds up today. He leans hard left and won't pretend otherwise — but he's genuinely sharp on business, tech, and money, and worth hearing even when the politics run hot. (profgalloway.com)

Bob Lefsetz — writes the Lefsetz Letter, the most-read newsletter in the music business. He's been fiercely political since 2016, which you may or may not want, but his feel for music and the industry is unmatched. He's also fearless: his public dust-up with Taylor Swift is widely credited as the spark behind her song "Mean." (lefsetz.com)

CNN — the left's mainstream anchor. I watch it not to nod along, but to see how tens of millions of my fellow Americans are being handed the story. If I don't know that, I don't know them. (cnn.com)

The New York Times — the old gray lady. For generations it was the standard of American journalism, and it's unmistakably left today. I read at least the lead stories daily. It's paid, not free — and I think that matters: paid journalism answers to its readers, and you can feel the difference in the reporting. (nytimes.com)

The right three

The Wall Street Journal — the bible of finance, with a right-leaning worldview on its editorial side. If you don't understand how people think about money, you don't really understand people — and nobody covers money like the Journal. (wsj.com)

Fox News — the right's mainstream anchor, and the exact mirror of why I watch CNN. Half the country sees the world through it. Refusing to look isn't a principle; it's just refusing to understand half of America. (foxnews.com)

Coffee & Covid — a Florida attorney named Jeff Childers writes this daily newsletter. It's very long, very right, and full of threads you simply won't find in mainstream coverage. I don't take all of it as gospel — but it consistently teaches me things the big outlets skipped right over. (coffeeandcovid.com)

Why it matters

I don't read these ten because I agree with them. Agreeing was never the point. Understanding is. When you only listen to your own side, you don't win the argument — you slowly lose the ability to even have it.

Here's what a decade of reading all of them has taught me: the other half of this country isn't wrong. They're not crazy. They just don't think the way you do, or the way I do. They think differently. So the questions I keep coming back to are the only ones that matter: why do they think differently, what can I learn from it, and how do we come back together?

There's an old, uncomfortable word for a person who refuses to learn. I won't print it here — but you already know it, and none of us wants it to be true of ourselves. So let's not make it true.

Read the other half