Difference is pretty small as time passes. To the point of my article above.
When you make good money by participating in debates that are opinion based you just start to say whatever aligns with a successful revenue stream as long as it doesn’t interfere with your future image of a wise guy.
I don’t think any of the Philosophers of the past made money this way so their opinions were less based on what the audience is gonna like.
All these guys have turned to selling snake oil for the masses.
I can’t see the article. I don’t subscribe to FT 
IDW…wow, that is such an inaccurate moniker on so many levels. It’s more like pseudo-intellectual mainstream. I actually enjoy that there is patronage for people discussing ideas and philosophy, but intellectual dark web just makes no sense.
Also:BS, just post the dang article, mang.
Lol… you guys are TOO COOL for me. Next month Jordan Peterson is debating Slavoj Zizek in Toronto. I heard it will be live streamed. Oh I’ll be there for that! Just get me my popcorn 
IDW? WTF?
It’s like the process of price discovery. Not pretty or elegant but serves a vital purpose. Limiting it creates distortions. Some people want that – people who hate freedom. #MakeSpeechFreeAgain
The speakers’ circuit is where original thinkers go to die
SIMON KUPER MARCH 01, 2018
I’ve never had great success, which is lucky, because I have seen it ruin many previously excellent writers and thinkers. This is an age-old phenomenon, but it has got worse in our era.
The best business nowadays is selling to the 1 per cent. A caste of pundits has accordingly arisen to supply them with thoughts, or at least talking points. These pundits make decent money themselves, especially on the speakers’ circuit, which is now the place where original thinkers go to die. Here are some case studies:
You are a historian. You spend years in the archives producing good books. You emerge blinking into the light, turn out to be fluent on television, and pretty soon are getting $25,000 to pontificate in Dubai on “What’s next for China?” (The 0.1 per cent want to know the future, because that’s where the money is.) When you aren’t being an oracle, you are explaining why you were right five years ago. Eventually you realise you aren’t a historian any more. You’re a content provider who plays a parody of himself on TV.
You are a reporter. You are multilingual, hardworking and sit in ordinary people’s homes trying to understand what’s going on in their country. But once you are a star, you become a talking head in a complimentary limousine, separated from your material. Now you’re sitting in a prince’s palace trying to understand what’s going on in his country. He’s charming, he loves your work, and over dinner you realise that his ostensibly self-serving power play is in fact intended only to root out corruption.
You are an economist. You spend decades doing brilliant, complex work. But on the side, you have standard political views, and suddenly you’re explaining every day why the other side is wrong. (To quote the journalist John Avlon: “Hyper-partisanship makes you stupid.”) Sometimes even you get bored listening to yourself.
You write an original political book. A party leader whom you admire calls to say he loved it. Soon you’re texting each other daily. You feel that you have graduated from describing reality to shaping it. In your TV appearances, you start explaining why the party leader is always right. Still, you tell yourself in your worst moments, it could be worse: you could have been Christopher Hitchens, who prostituted his talent in the cause of the Iraq war.
You are a journalist with an elegant style. But all the praise goes to your head. You become America’s prissiest prose-writer, crafting every sentence for a future book of Twenty-First Century Quotations.
You are a rightwing journalist. There aren’t many of those, so you are adopted by a rightwing press proprietor. You serve his empire and his friends, telling yourself that his cause is generally just, even if some of the details make you queasy. Reading Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, you used to identify with the naive young journalist. Now you are the editor who is always telling the proprietor, “Up to a point, Lord Copper.”
You are a revolutionary writer. You do this so well that you actually make money out of it. You acquire a fine house and even a porcelain collection. Ludwig Börne, the 19th-century German writer to whom this happened, told his rival Heinrich Heine (at least, according to Heine): “You have no idea, my dear Heine, how one is reined in by the possession of beautiful porcelain. Look at me, for instance, who was once so wild, when I had little baggage and no porcelain at all. With possession, and especially with fragile possession, comes fear and servility.”
Recently, Börne recounted, he had bought a darling tea service. Imagine if he had to flee – he couldn’t take it with him. Sometimes he suspected that the porcelain dealer was an agent of the Austrian state.
This list isn’t exhaustive. Being ruined by wealth comes in endless variants. Most thinkers imagine that money will liberate them from drudgery to do their best work. Instead, it removes them from the sphere where they were doing their best work. The effect is worst in the biggest economies. As Martin Amis wrote in 1983: “When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.”
And so the global conversation is degraded as original writers and thinkers get ruined. Only a few reject the world’s rewards. Philip Roth, for instance, sequestered himself in rural Connecticut, writing daily until he was nearly 80.
The work that survives from past eras often wasn’t done by the biggest names. John Galsworthy and JB Priestley were star writers in Britain in the first half of the past century but no longer. Meanwhile, George Orwell went almost unnoticed until 1945, less than five years before his death, when he finally managed to get Animal Farm published. By analogy, today’s most interesting thinker is not the fiftysomething multimillionaire giving the keynote address, but the ignored 30-year-old blogger.
Still, who can say no to money and fame? For speaking engagements, do contact my agent.
Thank you for finally acknowledging this clear truth.