Andrew Sullivan: evaluation

Transcript context

…What accounts for that? What variable in you, in them, has led that to be the equilibrium? Part of it is being gay, because you inevitably develop a social network that is independent of your professional network because that’s how you socialize in many ways, and from that, you generate a different kind of perspective. Also, I don’t know, I just get bored and irritated by my peers. I’d much rather listen and talk to someone with a completely different perspective. My best friend plays jazz piano, for example, and we talk about everything. We talk about politics, but he comes from a place where I can sit down with him and say, “What do you think about this? You haven’t processed this immeasurably, but what do you think?” Most ordinary people outside of that circle will ask all sorts of very straightforward questions that my peers haven’t even thought about, and will see things from a different perspective. I also think the fact that I come from basically a non-college-educated family, so that I grew up with people who didn’t have those esoterical, those academic skills, and certainly not the social skills to belong in the upper-middle classes — Same with me, I might add.…

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