Stay Free - Russel Brand - The Battle for Truth: Gregg Hurwitz on Myth, Power & Cultural Control – SF540

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00:00:28.000 In this video, you're going to see the future.

00:00:36.000 We'll see you next time.

00:00:42.000 out there. . .

00:00:46.000 Hello there, you awakening wonders.

00:00:48.000 Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:00:50.000 Whether you're watching us on X or YouTube or Rumble or Rumble Premium, ultimately our home is Rumble and we hope that you will join us there for a fantastic show that includes a conversation with Greg Hervis, a writer...

00:01:03.000 Philosopher and political thinker who's fascinated with the way that potentially we could bring America back together again.

00:01:09.000 Let me know in the comments and chat whether that's even a desirable outcome.

00:01:13.000 We'll be talking about pluralism, diversity and variety, subjects that are significant and important if ever you want America to again be a United States of America.

00:01:24.000 We're going to be talking as well about Trump's declaration that women's sports will be protected and the complexity that emerges.

00:01:34.000 If you don't have Rumble Premium yet, get Rumble Premium now.

00:01:38.000 If you use the code BRAND then we will definitely be acknowledged for that support and you will get additional content from me and Stephen Crowder and Dan Bongino and Glenn Greenwald.

00:01:47.000 I want to say hello to those of you watching us on Locals.

00:01:49.000 We will continue to give you additional content like Break Bread with Russell Brand where I have fascinating conversations with Christians but there's more to life than that if you're a member of our Locals community or Rumble Premium.

00:02:01.000 You get all sorts of fantastic content.

00:02:04.000 Here's just an example.

00:02:05.000 We're on our way to the ocean church where I've been asked to...

00:02:10.000 I actually don't even know what I've been asked to do.

00:02:13.000 Do you know, I'd forgotten how this had happened.

00:02:15.000 I was thinking, why is it that I am here?

00:02:21.000 And then Michael said, you met Becky in Seaside.

00:02:25.000 I was like, yeah, yeah, I remember that.

00:02:28.000 And then you did a video where you spoke and said, Pastor Michael, I said, yes, this did all happen.

00:02:33.000 And now I'm here.

00:02:37.000 These actions have consequences.

00:02:39.000 I've not been Christian very long.

00:02:41.000 Like, eight months!

00:02:44.000 Since April the 28th.

00:02:46.000 So you all know more about this than I do.

00:02:49.000 So, inadvertently, I've been worshipping false idols, the false idol of fame.

00:02:54.000 And if you do something like that, if someone's more famous than you, Then you...

00:02:58.000 Might feel inferior, because if you invested, it was Benedict Cumberbatch, is who it was.

00:03:03.000 In England, it's like they've tried to make Jesus boring.

00:03:05.000 No disrespect to the Church of England, because I've met some brilliant and beautiful people in the Church of England since coming to our Lord, and they've educated me, and they've helped me, and they've instructed me beautifully.

00:03:15.000 But overall, it seems like in England, they're trying to make Christianity seem like it's boring.

00:03:20.000 And like when you read from Genesis to Revelation, there's fire and power and angels and demons and resurrection.

00:03:30.000 And amidst us now, beyond the limitations of our senses, surely if we could but see with new eyes, we would know that we are surrounded even now that they are among us, our guardian angels and other forces yet, which if we do not submit, which if we do not submit, might...

00:03:51.000 So get Rumble Premium if you want more additional content like that.

00:03:55.000 Tomorrow, Lara Logan and Neil Oliver will be with me for Russell Brand's Stay Free Oracles, and we'll be talking about the biggest stories of the week.

00:04:03.000 We've got Greg Hervitz coming up, but before that, let's talk about perhaps the defining political issue of our era.

00:04:12.000 Donald Trump has signed an executive order protecting women's sports and female sports.

00:04:18.000 One of the moments that changed my perspective on this subject was this simple question.

00:04:22.000 Why have women's sports at all? 1.00

00:04:25.000 Why have them?

00:04:26.000 Because presumably it's a separate category in some way, and some biologists believe that at every measurable level there are differences between men and women, whether that's bone density or their blood or their hair.

00:04:39.000 I mean, it's just completely measurable.

00:04:41.000 Having said that, As a spiritual man and a believer in God, there are some things that cannot be measured.

00:04:47.000 Something like essence, some subtle forms of energy that are difficult to discern using purely material means.

00:04:54.000 So how does the issue of gender get used in the culture?

00:04:59.000 How is it deployed by both sides of the cultural argument to push home their claims for moral superiority?

00:05:05.000 One of the people that's been very outspoken on this issue from the get-go is J.K. Rowling.

00:05:11.000 She made this post about Donald Trump signing the executive order protecting women's sports.

00:05:16.000 Now that is notable for a number of reasons.

00:05:19.000 For one thing, Donald Trump is surrounded by female children and isn't sniffing...

00:05:23.000 Any of them on the head.

00:05:24.000 That seems to be an advance for presidential politics, if nothing else.

00:05:28.000 Let's have a look at the legacy media news coverage of Donald Trump signing that executive order before discussing more generally gender and women's sports and how this issue gets used politically to divide people and obfuscate truth.

00:05:41.000 You know, if you'd like to gather around me, I think I'm going to be okay.

00:05:45.000 Come on.

00:05:46.000 Wherever you are politically, I mean wherever you are on the political spectrum, it's difficult not to make assessments of people based on your own intuitive sense of whether or not you think you would like them. 1.00

00:06:02.000 When you see Donald Trump doing that, do you find it difficult to kind of conjure up hatred and go like, oh, he must be a horrible, evil, racist, rapist person? 0.97

00:06:11.000 You sort of see him around children and you think, Hold on a minute, he seems really nice. 0.99

00:06:15.000 Now, I can almost feel people that are determined to continue to dislike Donald Trump saying, well, Adolf Hitler!

00:06:20.000 Adolf Hitler was good with children! 0.99

00:06:22.000 Adolf Hitler loved his dog, Blondie!

00:06:24.000 And at that point, you have to kind of acknowledge that you're enjoying hating someone.

00:06:28.000 It's just something you like.

00:06:30.000 It's not really based on reason.

00:06:33.000 And almost at this point, how are any of us supposed to unpick the impact of propaganda on our own apparently personal perspectives on a variety of issues, whether that's Donald Trump as an individual or the complex subject of gender and gender politics?

00:06:46.000 We have now reverted, as a result of the rise of the MAGA movement and Trump's presidency, to a there are two genders. 0.66

00:06:53.000 There are men and women, like in the book of Genesis.

00:06:56.000 So what do you do if you are a caring and compassionate...

00:06:59.000 I'm a follower of Jesus Christ and says that Jesus Christ would love anyone regardless of how they dressed or what they declared themselves to be.

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00:08:23.000 Secret services worried about them?

00:08:26.000 That kind of stuff is what I like about Donald Trump.

00:08:28.000 Like, it sounds like someone in the background is going, oh, no, you weren't meant to do this.

00:08:32.000 Secret Service is worried about them.

00:08:34.000 Like, there could be, like, a tiny little spy with a sharpie pen with a blow dart in it.

00:08:39.000 Got him!

00:08:39.000 Ah!

00:08:40.000 Oh, no!

00:08:40.000 My ear!

00:08:43.000 If we have to worry about them, we have big problems.

00:08:46.000 Okay, do you want to have a camera?

00:08:48.000 Do you want to do this?

00:08:49.000 Watch what I do, and then I'm going to give you some pens, okay?

00:08:53.000 I'm assessing here the easy affability of a figure like Trump that seems to me to be at odds with the declaration that he is sort of evil.

00:09:01.000 If you watch someone like Keir Starmer and see how he is around people, there's a kind of resolute awkwardness, an inability to be at ease around people.

00:09:09.000 And that don't mean that he's a...

00:09:10.000 Bad person, but I would say it's likely that he's hiding something.

00:09:14.000 He's not at ease.

00:09:16.000 He's not fully comfortable with who he is.

00:09:17.000 You will remember Joe Biden, or the variety of Joe Biden.

00:09:20.000 Sometimes it appeared he had stand-ins, sniffing around kids' heads, saying weird stuff all the time.

00:09:26.000 Or Kamala Harris' weird and jarring, awkward dancing, all triangles and elbows spilling across a dance floor in an attempt to appear human. 0.91

00:09:36.000 And affable.

00:09:37.000 What's curious, of course, is there's plainly some awareness of the PR perspective of this image because Donald Trump is signing what would have been regarded as a very controversial bill not that long ago, the protection of women's sports.

00:09:51.000 But when you consider that someone like J.K. Rowling, and she's almost a peerless individual in anglophonic and global culture because she's come up with the artifact of Harry Potter, which is basically...

00:10:04.000 Sort of like Tolkien or something.

00:10:06.000 There aren't many...

00:10:07.000 Tolkien or George Lucas.

00:10:08.000 There aren't that many people that have made cultural contributions that are that impactful and varied.

00:10:14.000 Now, that also doesn't mean she's a brilliant person or...

00:10:17.000 Well, she's a brilliant person, but it doesn't mean that she's morally unimpeachable, of course.

00:10:22.000 But it does mean you're dealing with an individual that in...

00:10:25.000 Any sensible culture will be difficult to malign and condemn, particularly if they're saying something that doesn't seem that outrageous.

00:10:32.000 In so much as I don't believe that J.K. Rowling ever hated trans people, I feel that J.K. Rowling was very interested in the rights of women.

00:10:40.000 She's a single mum that's created a global phenomenon that's almost beyond compare, and she has a view on women's rights because she's kind of the age she is and would have...

00:10:50.000 Gone through cultural moments where women are like, oh, women aren't being paid enough, or women are maligned, or, you know, like, she wouldn't remember women not having a vote, but she'd have a sort of an understandable feminist perspective. 0.97

00:11:01.000 And that's when sort of a lot of woke culture started to fall apart in the eyes of many people from a kind of common sense perspective.

00:11:09.000 Hang on a minute.

00:11:09.000 What do we do about, like, weren't we all supposed to be...

00:11:11.000 Concern about women's rights or gay people's rights?

00:11:14.000 How come now we're advocating for the medicalisation of trans issues?

00:11:19.000 If you care about, and I suppose you do, you're watching me, my personal perspective, I believe in non-judgement and I believe in love.

00:11:25.000 Those are my two principles that I would be guided by.

00:11:29.000 I love it that trans people would come to my shows, but when, as a father, I think about how I would handle it if one of my kids said, I feel like I'm a...

00:11:38.000 Boy trapped in a girl's body.

00:11:40.000 I'd say, let's see a feel.

00:11:42.000 What do you mean by boy?

00:11:44.000 What do you mean girls?

00:11:45.000 What do you mean?

00:11:45.000 Let's wait a while.

00:11:46.000 We'll work this out when you're a little bit older, mate.

00:11:48.000 It's probably what I'd say.

00:11:49.000 And let me know in the comments and chats.

00:11:51.000 Let me know in the comments and chat what you would say as a parent or what you'd say as a loving person.

00:11:55.000 So it's complete non-judgment.

00:11:57.000 But when it comes to your role as a person that is charged with the care of a younger individual, what stand would you take?

00:12:04.000 And would you want the government intervening?

00:12:06.000 I mention all of this because there's a conversation on Bill Maher between an MSNBC pundit and Maher himself on this subject that is interesting.

00:12:14.000 Let's see a little more of Donald Trump signing this order.

00:12:18.000 You ready?

00:12:19.000 What a nice picture this is, huh, Governor?

00:12:22.000 You ready?

00:12:23.000 We'll do a good job.

00:12:24.000 Wait a little, let me press that.

00:12:26.000 I also like that Donald Trump's person who assesses and evaluates the merits of his own signature.

00:12:32.000 So, we're going to do a good job.

00:12:33.000 Presses it down.

00:12:34.000 I'm like, this is going to be a good signature.

00:12:36.000 He's got, like, a perspective on his own signature. 0.98

00:12:39.000 Although it's quite trivial, I also see that as testimony to the sort of ludicrousness of the idea of Trump as a malign person, like an evil person.

00:12:48.000 Because it's so sort of human and sort of sweet to care about whether or not your signature is good and to have that kind of direct affinity and affability and relatability around kids.

00:12:59.000 I just can't imagine a person like that withdrawing to some dreadful private place and going, I hate N-words or...

00:13:06.000 Now, of course, that sort of famous tape of grab them by the P-word was an indication that there are levels to people.

00:13:12.000 And indeed, all sexual conduct is by its nature intimate and...

00:13:17.000 And when you bring all sexual conduct into the public sphere, I think it seems a little bit icky, even if it is as it should be, entirely consensual with people that are able to give consent.

00:13:29.000 So I would say this, when you watch Donald Trump around kids, doesn't it seem like he's in general a pretty lovely person?

00:13:35.000 Let me know what you think about that in the comments and chat, even if you disagree with him politically and a whole host of things, and I'm sure any of us would if we were to scrutinise his political perspectives.

00:13:44.000 But more important than that is where do you stand on this issue of the protection of women's sports?

00:13:49.000 And what does it mean when a culture can take someone like J.K. Rowling, a sort of like Walt Disney, like a person that you would think is sort of an icon of a culture, a creator of the culture, abandon them, annihilate them, murder and condemn them, make them a pariah on the basis of opinions that are certainly, like, reasonable, like...

00:14:09.000 In the same way that I would say, oh yeah, if you want to be trans, that's none of my business and I'll call you wherever you want me to call you, wouldn't you say that if a person says, no, I actually really believe in protecting women's spaces, you wouldn't go, the principle of tolerance can't be selectively applied.

00:14:30.000 Otherwise it's not tolerance.

00:14:31.000 It's a kind of expedience.

00:14:33.000 Wouldn't you agree?

00:14:34.000 Let's have a look at Bill Maher's Let's have a look at Bill.

00:14:38.000 Wouldn't you agree?

00:14:39.000 Let me know in the comments and chat.

00:14:40.000 Let's have a look at Bill Ma's conversation with Chris Hayes, who seems to be a sort of semi-wake, liberalist, MSNBC host, who's advocating for a kind of my body, my choice perspective on the subject of trans care.

00:14:55.000 Let's go back and look at what Chris Hayes was saying during the COVID pandemic.

00:14:58.000 I bet he was all sorts of, let's vax the hell out of these people, and if you're unvaxed, you're a hater type stuff.

00:15:02.000 I don't know.

00:15:03.000 That's just an aspersion I'm casting on him without.

00:15:06.000 Real evidential proof, so maybe I'll pause that for a moment, but let's have a look at his conversation with Bill Maher as the ongoing cultural conversation is explored on Bill Maher's real time.

00:15:18.000 But I also think at the same time, there is a message of what I would call, like, common sense patriotic pluralism.

00:15:26.000 Common sense patriotic pluralism, i.e.

00:15:31.000 patriotic...

00:15:31.000 If you're going to have a country, it's going to have loads of people in it, like 330 million people in it, and they're not all going to believe the same thing.

00:15:37.000 Okay.

00:15:38.000 Common sense means that there is a...

00:15:40.000 That's the idea of a universal reason.

00:15:43.000 Now...

00:15:44.000 To have universal reason, you have to have a higher principle, don't you?

00:15:47.000 Even to make claims to common sense, you are sort of saying that there is a God.

00:15:51.000 If you're not saying the word God, because you're an atheist or a materialist or whatever, you are saying something that is compounded within the word God, there is an absolute reality, aren't you?

00:16:01.000 Because otherwise you can't have common sense.

00:16:03.000 You can't have common sense unless you're saying there's a consensual, universal, agreed-upon reality.

00:16:09.000 And pluralism, which at some point in this conversation Chris Hayes says is a synonym for diversity, could also be considered a synonym for variety.

00:16:18.000 Now variety is beautiful.

00:16:19.000 We have a variety of people.

00:16:21.000 Limitless variety in God's creation.

00:16:24.000 Limitless variety between all of us as nations, as tribes, as individual people.

00:16:29.000 Diversity suggests opposition.

00:16:33.000 Between those people, pluralism is a kind of a word that indicates diaspora.

00:16:38.000 Variety means we are all coming from a single center, one radiant creator, but we are different from one another, and we respect these differences. 0.99

00:16:49.000 That is a majority message, which is like, if some father and mother have healthcare for their kid lined up who's trans, just stay the fuck out of their business. 0.99

00:16:59.000 Stay the fuck out of it. 0.99

00:17:00.000 If some people don't want to get a vaccine because maybe they want to see more clinical data, mind your own business. 0.99

00:17:05.000 Particularly if those vaccines haven't been clinically trialed against transmission, then there's no moral component anyway. 0.99

00:17:11.000 Mind your own fucking business. 0.99

00:17:12.000 Suddenly so cavalier. 1.00

00:17:14.000 Suddenly.

00:17:15.000 So willing to say, I want the government out of my business.

00:17:19.000 So extraordinary when the entire liberal movement was advocating for authoritarianism on the basis of protection and care.

00:17:27.000 And who is more vulnerable than the children?

00:17:29.000 I often think myself, I don't want, say for example, this is just a thought experiment.

00:17:34.000 Should you be able to drive your car with your children with no seatbelt on if you consider that your driving is safe?

00:17:41.000 Should you?

00:17:41.000 Let me know in the comments and chat.

00:17:42.000 I actually believe that I should.

00:17:45.000 Be able to do that.

00:17:46.000 I should decide for myself whether my children are safe in the car.

00:17:50.000 Now, I know that there's many, many questions that could bounce back over the net of me.

00:17:54.000 Well, what if another driver did something?

00:17:56.000 Or what if your children being out of their seat caused them to do something in the car that made you swerve?

00:18:01.000 But that seems to me to be the legitimisation of authority.

00:18:05.000 Rather than the advocacy for sensible authority.

00:18:07.000 However, I would acknowledge that if there was ever a situation where you felt that parents were not correctly looking after their children, or even were abusing their children, that you might want some authority to intervene.

00:18:21.000 Would you say that's reasonable?

00:18:22.000 So there is a point where even the belief that I don't think that I want anyone involved in my children's lives other than me and their mother...

00:18:31.000 There's a point where you'd say, but what in instances where those children are being abused or exploited?

00:18:36.000 Now that is the question that's used to legitimise state interventionism.

00:18:41.000 And I would contest this, that therefore any authority has to either be divine or consensual, i.e.

00:18:50.000 Democratically elected within agreed parameters.

00:18:55.000 You can't have state intervention unless it's sanctioned by God or mandate.

00:19:00.000 We all agree on that.

00:19:01.000 So let's see where this conversation goes. 1.00

00:19:04.000 Get the fuck out of their business. 0.99

00:19:07.000 Yeah, I'm in the audience at Bill Maher, and I think I heard something I believe in. 0.99

00:19:12.000 And let them make that decision.

00:19:15.000 That's their decision to make.

00:19:17.000 And you don't have to make that for your family.

00:19:19.000 I'm not going to tell you what to do with your family.

00:19:20.000 Well, I mean, but the argument is whether the child should make the decision.

00:19:23.000 But the child is never making the decision.

00:19:25.000 The parents are always making the decision.

00:19:26.000 Parents consent to medical care.

00:19:28.000 Well, here in California, you're allowed to hide it from the parents if the kid is...

00:19:33.000 Yes.

00:19:33.000 Thank you, one person.

00:19:35.000 Somebody knows that.

00:19:37.000 Significant difference there, perhaps, and I reckon if we agree that parents are ultimately responsible for their children, then perhaps you can make the argument that Chris Hayes is advancing there.

00:19:48.000 Would you agree with that?

00:19:49.000 I think in the vast majority, and we've been hearing from parents right now whose kids' medical care has been interrupted, I think there's a way to talk about...

00:19:58.000 Well, of course, they would say it's not medical care.

00:20:00.000 They would say it's disfiguring a child.

00:20:04.000 I think they should mind their own business.

00:20:05.000 I really do.

00:20:06.000 I think they should mind their own business.

00:20:07.000 Where would the principle of minding your own business appear on a continuum that likely includes propagandization of certain issues?

00:20:14.000 For example, have you noticed over the last 4, 6, 8, 10 years very public advocacy for gender realignment therapies?

00:20:23.000 Have you noticed that?

00:20:24.000 Has it gone beyond the expression of the very human, decent and godly right for individuals to be whoever they are, whoever they feel called to be by God, to express themselves lovingly as long as they're not harming others however they want, a key principle of freedom and salvation, and potentially moved into propagandisation?

00:20:44.000 Pushing and advocating for those measures.

00:20:46.000 One way to test that would be, are certain states experiencing higher rates of trans kids?

00:20:53.000 And do those states more publicly advocate for trans issues?

00:20:57.000 My children, I want them to be whoever they are.

00:21:00.000 And if my children say to me, I believe that I'm a boy born in a, you know, whatever, if they don't agree with their biological gender, inverted commas, then I'm going to support them to be whoever they are and whatever they want.

00:21:11.000 But what I would do, and I would make a claim for common sense, is I would say, we're going to wait for a little thing called puberty to happen and adulthood to happen because your daddy was pretty crazy at various points in life, and I'm glad that I weren't able to make any permanent choices while I was a child because they may not have been good choices, and you're growing up in an environment and I'm glad that I weren't able to make any permanent choices while I was a child because So the principle has to be derived, in a sense, from a belief in God.

00:21:37.000 Do you know what I mean?

00:21:38.000 I'm saying love.

00:21:39.000 As long as you're coming from a place of love, whether you're a family member or a participant in the politics of a nation, you're going to be okay.

00:21:46.000 The problem comes when you believe in hate.

00:21:48.000 Now, that's what everyone attributes to a figure like Donald Trump. 1.00

00:21:51.000 He's hateful. 1.00

00:21:52.000 He hates black people. 1.00

00:21:53.000 He hates trans people. 1.00

00:21:54.000 He hates women. 1.00

00:21:55.000 Does he look hateful when you see him surrounded by children there, signing those things and... 0.98

00:22:00.000 So, kind of dopely dishing out the pens.

00:22:02.000 I don't know.

00:22:03.000 You tell me in the comments and the chat.

00:22:05.000 And any parent worthy of the name will do what's best for their children.

00:22:11.000 So I would say yeah, I don't want the state involved in my children and I wouldn't command that the state get involved in other people's children So in a sense there is some truth in what Chris Hayes is saying but when you unpack and follow that you have to start looking at what's been advocated for and Propagandized publicly over the last four years.

00:22:29.000 Is that a sensible question?

00:22:30.000 Let me know what you think about that I think they should mind their own business and I think that's true about a lot I think there is this sense in which there was this sort of backlash politics, some of which I understood, some of which people I know felt that way.

00:22:45.000 And I reckon if we are tolerant and loving people who believe that our duty here is to spread the kingdom of heaven upon the earth through love and service of one another, we have to remain entirely open.

00:22:56.000 But we have to be alert to the idea of propaganda and the impact of a culture on an individual.

00:23:01.000 If a culture doesn't have an impact on an individual, why have a culture at all?

00:23:05.000 Certainly a culture that would abandon a figure or annihilate or purder a figure like J.K. Rowling is a culture that needs a bloody good looking at, is what I would argue.

00:23:14.000 And when you look at Donald Trump, Trump's surrounded by kids.

00:23:15.000 It's difficult to see the guy as evil.

00:23:17.000 And if you're determined to see him as evil, then you might want to investigate where those ideas came from.

00:23:22.000 But that's just what I think.

00:23:23.000 Why don't you let me know what you think in the comments and the chat.

00:23:27.000 We are comments and the chat.

00:23:29.000 Wherever you're watching this, you can find us on Rumble Premium.

00:23:33.000 That's our primary home.

00:23:34.000 Consider getting Rumble Premium.

00:23:36.000 You get additional content from me, Bongino, Crowder, Greenwald, a whole host of people, as well as supporting free speech.

00:23:43.000 We've...

00:23:45.000 You can also watch Break Bread.

00:23:47.000 Break Bread is a fantastic show that I make.

00:23:51.000 Here is an example of the conversations we have there.

00:23:54.000 So you always have to be on your alert because, you know, there's corruption in the church.

00:23:57.000 I live in Ireland.

00:23:58.000 We've seen plenty of that here, right? 0.65

00:23:59.000 So we know priests can be corrupt.

00:24:01.000 Hierarchies can be corrupt. 0.61

00:24:03.000 People are fallen.

00:24:04.000 But the process that's going on, I think, is real.

00:24:08.000 I think it's real.

00:24:11.000 And I know that I'm changed by it.

00:24:13.000 Now, if you're watching us on X or YouTube or wherever you're watching us, we are going to leave now and be exclusively over on Rumble.

00:24:20.000 Before that, here's a quick message from one of our partners, without whom we can't make this show.

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00:25:25.000 If you're watching us on X or YouTube, wherever you're watching us, other than Rumble and Rumble Premium or Locals, I love you my friends on Locals, you are going to love our next...

00:25:33.000 Our next guest is Greg Hervitz, whose new book Nemesis is out now.

00:25:39.000 It's part of his Orphan X series.

00:25:41.000 And the reason I like Greg Hervitz is he uses fiction to explore fascinating cultural ideas like freedom and liberty.

00:25:48.000 He's a New York Times number one bestseller.

00:25:51.000 And he's also...

00:25:53.000 Fundamentally involved in addressing political and cultural polarization, producing numerous commercials and writing op-eds for publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Guardian.

00:26:01.000 So he's certainly operated within legacy media spaces and probably has fascinating insights, I would say, on a variety of cultural issues, all of which we'll be discussing in the upcoming conversation.

00:26:12.000 Click the link in the description to join us for what's sure to be a fantastic conversation about culture and power.

00:26:19.000 Greg Hervitz, thank you so much for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:26:25.000 Congratulations on your new book, Nemesis, which is out now.

00:26:30.000 One of the things that I know you do brilliantly well is wrestle into the form of fiction, complex, contemporary, cultural conversation.

00:26:38.000 Congratulations on that success.

00:26:41.000 and thank you also For sending me that amazing graphic novel.

00:26:45.000 It's really beautiful and fantastic.

00:26:47.000 I love the variety of media that you're able to work in.

00:26:52.000 Congratulations on that.

00:26:54.000 Thank you.

00:26:55.000 Thank you.

00:26:55.000 New Think, that graphic novel I wrote a couple years ago.

00:26:59.000 It's very much about, it's sort of a black mirror-like take on technology and addiction and all the ways that it's warping our brains.

00:27:07.000 Yes.

00:27:08.000 Now, I wonder, Greg, how you have pivoted and altered your perspective.

00:27:14.000 Because, I don't know, does everyone know about you that you actually were a student of Jordan Peterson?

00:27:19.000 Do people know that about you?

00:27:20.000 I didn't mention it in your introduction or anything.

00:27:21.000 Do people, is that common knowledge?

00:27:24.000 I think so.

00:27:24.000 I mean, look, some people know and people saw me on Exodus and the Gospels on the Daily Wire with him.

00:27:32.000 So that was a big point of overlap.

00:27:34.000 But yeah, we go all the way back to college.

00:27:37.000 But no, I'm primarily known as a thriller writer.

00:27:40.000 The Orphan X series, that's what Nemesis is, my new series.

00:27:43.000 I do some screenwriting and comics.

00:27:45.000 But Jordan and I have crossed enough, publicly and otherwise, that some people are familiar with that relationship.

00:27:50.000 So we go all the way back to, you know, I was 19 years old when we met.

00:27:55.000 And, you know, he looked like a lead singer in a boy band.

00:27:59.000 He was like sort of hunky.

00:28:03.000 Psychology professor.

00:28:04.000 He was incandescently sharp.

00:28:06.000 And I took one course from him, personality psych, and then just signed up for everything.

00:28:10.000 I did a young seminar with him that was life-altering for me.

00:28:14.000 And then he was my thesis advisor on the psychology side.

00:28:16.000 Oh, my God.

00:28:17.000 I mean, so you could sort of tell that you were dealing with a superstar academic.

00:28:24.000 Even then, were you a favourite?

00:28:26.000 Because I, you know, I know I've been in educational, and I know that, well, like, for example, I went to a drama school, and we had a very, very charismatic principal, Christopher Fess, and by the way, everyone there's training to be actors, so we lived for that guy's attention.

00:28:40.000 Was Jordan Peterson the kind of professor that everyone was kind of clamouring to be a sort of favourite, and where did you rank?

00:28:48.000 I think I ranked pretty well.

00:28:50.000 We got along really, really well.

00:28:52.000 And yeah, I mean, there was something about him that was just foundationally different.

00:28:56.000 I remember telling my college roommates back then, I said, look, if there's one professor, and I was at Harvard as an undergrad, back when that was still something to be proud of.

00:29:08.000 And I remember, so we had some pretty great professors.

00:29:11.000 I mean, Seamus Heaney was there teaching Yates.

00:29:13.000 I had Helen Vendler for English.

00:29:15.000 I mean, it was, you know.

00:29:16.000 It was extraordinary.

00:29:18.000 But I remember saying to my roommates, if there's one professor who I have had here who I think will be remembered just by his last name in 100 years, it's going to be Jordan.

00:29:28.000 It was going to be Peterson, like Ibsen or Chekhov or Freud.

00:29:34.000 There was something in his expansiveness of reach, and a lot of that was...

00:29:40.000 Bringing together symbological and mythological structures of thinking with hard and intense science.

00:29:45.000 One of the things that's so amusing to me is whenever you'd have these debates with like Sam Harris or somebody, they'd say, oh, well, Jordan is the sort of spiritual mythological thinker and Sam's the scientist. 0.95

00:29:55.000 It's like, Jordan is like a knockdown, no shit, hardcore scientist beyond anything. 0.91

00:30:01.000 He's published hundreds of papers. 0.94

00:30:02.000 I mean, so the thing about him that's so extraordinary is the depth of wisdom, knowledge, And grasp across a whole bunch of different topics and then the ability to unify them.

00:30:14.000 And I'd say this was also at a time when a lot of the great old professors were retiring.

00:30:20.000 I had a professor named Roger Brown who taught, you know, he's one of the fathers of social psychology, but he could quote Shakespeare at length.

00:30:27.000 He was an expert in etiquette psychology, which is fascinating, literature and film.

00:30:32.000 And he would retire and somebody else would come along who was an expert on like one gene.

00:30:36.000 And so we saw this sort of, you know, condensation of these massively educated generalists who were also exceptional in particular fields to somebody who was, you know, the specialist will be the generalist in the short term.

00:30:50.000 And I think in Jordan, it was evident to me.

00:30:53.000 I mean, my undergrad, I was English in psychology.

00:30:54.000 I was writing about Shakespeare, but I did Freudian and Jungian analysis of Shakespeare and I used him to contrast them.

00:31:01.000 And it was clear that his brain could sort of go, you know, anywhere through all these different fields while also pinning down his most obvious expertise.

00:31:09.000 I mean, look, of all the things Jordan's brilliant at, he's brilliantest at being a psychologist.

00:31:13.000 It's just staggering watching him work and move around that filter.

00:31:19.000 And so, yeah, to me, it was just clear as day all the way back then.

00:31:23.000 So I like to think I discovered him, and I'm responsible in large part for his success.

00:31:28.000 Congratulations on that.

00:31:29.000 Congratulations.

00:31:31.000 Also, what's pretty interesting, it's not that we're going to spend the rest of our lives discussing this topic, but Jordan Peterson is in the kind of liberal publications that you've written for, I think somewhat extensively, like The Guardian, a kind of legacy media organisation in my country, Wall Street Journal in your country.

00:31:52.000 Are the kind of criticisms that are offered at...

00:31:56.000 Projected, fired off at John Peterson is that he's some kind of poor man's intellectual.

00:32:01.000 That he somehow lacks veracity and depth and foundations. 1.00

00:32:05.000 That he's like the stupid man's philosopher. 1.00

00:32:09.000 Now... 1.00

00:32:10.000 In a way, these are the kind of claims that make it difficult for me to take them seriously, because whatever you think of Jordan Peterson and the way that his story has played out culturally, it's pretty clear that he's a rigorous and brilliant intellectual. 0.64

00:32:28.000 Well, you know, if you talk about he's a dumb person's idea of a smart person, it's pretty great.

00:32:35.000 It's like, that's what we call an educator. 0.96

00:32:38.000 You know, that's Jordan taking incredibly complicated ideas and boiling them down.

00:32:43.000 But look, people have no idea.

00:32:45.000 I mean, and I've been dealing with this a lot because, you know, Jordan and I have been friends all the way back.

00:32:51.000 I think it's part of why even as somebody who had strong relationships coming from a liberal, and I say liberal, not progressive and not lefty, background and worldview, I've been undeceived from minute one.

00:33:03.000 About the dangers of the far left, in large part due to my relationship with Jordan.

00:33:08.000 I saw everything that came for him. 0.99

00:33:10.000 I saw the ways in which the filters went up, the ad hominem attacks increased, things were taken out of context, things weren't researched, people didn't, you know, I don't need to read more about him than one stupid tweet. 0.96

00:33:22.000 That defines the summation of everything who he is. 1.00

00:33:26.000 And I sort of watch this idiocy come after and attack him. 0.99

00:33:29.000 You know, it tends to be combined with crushing moral sanctimony and an utter and comprehensive lack of curiosity. 1.00

00:33:35.000 It sort of is a devastating combination of incompetence and lack of curiosity and sanctimony.

00:33:42.000 And so I really had my eyes open.

00:33:45.000 And part of the very fruitful engagement I've had with Jordan is if he's someone who's center now leaning slightly right, whatever that means anymore.

00:33:53.000 And I'm center, but coming from a liberal perspective, we've done a lot of work in terms of trying to bridge things across the divide because ultimately, you know, we need to get this country in the West and Western democracies really unified because there's a lot of people out there who love nothing more and are fueling us tearing ourselves into pieces.

00:34:14.000 As other hostile regimes and players and psychopathic algorithms are marching and making inroads.

00:34:19.000 So we do need a solidity among us, and I've been working with him to do that.

00:34:23.000 But yeah, I think there's very few people taken more out of context than him.

00:34:28.000 And I think that a lot of the people who criticize him, when people say that, you know, I always think, look, I could come up with, I could probably sit down and if I drank, you know, a cup of coffee, I could write down 100 topics that he could probably win an argument, an in-depth argument with, with people who are dismissing him as a lightweight. I could write down 100 topics that he could probably It's just preposterous.

00:34:48.000 I mean, dismiss him for other reasons.

00:34:50.000 You know, he doesn't like baseball.

00:34:51.000 You know, he uses the term bucko too much.

00:34:55.000 I mean, there's a whole host of reasons why we should eschew Jordan, but one of them is certainly not going to be lack of horsepower under the hood.

00:35:01.000 One of the arguments that he's been at the absolute forefront of almost the sort of kind of, Harbinger of, in some sense, are the cultural arguments that unfold around women's rights, protected spaces and gender diversification, which has come to a kind of new head with Trump's recent executive order that women's sports will be protected.

00:35:29.000 And we today talked about J.K. Rowling posting when she did the image of Trump surrounded by...

00:35:36.000 Girls was a real positive thing, that people that had engaged in the cultural war had sort of brought that about.

00:35:41.000 Now, when we were unpacking that, Greg, I felt...

00:35:45.000 This is what I felt.

00:35:47.000 J.K. Rowling surely is a peerless...

00:35:51.000 Individual when it comes to her creativity and cultural impact, whether you want to look at that sort of economically or the sort of franchises that have flown out of her sort of individual endeavours.

00:36:02.000 And any culture that would attempt to purge itself of her, malign and cancel her, must have a really kind of very particular purview and sense of itself.

00:36:14.000 Because if you are interested in...

00:36:17.000 The kind of cultural pluralism that progressives claim to be interested in, you would surely be able to accommodate a female writer that could probably only really be compared to someone like... 1.00

00:36:27.000 Tolkien or Walt Disney, that you wouldn't just go, well, she's out because she's interested in protecting women's spaces. 1.00

00:36:34.000 What do you think that when it comes to the issue of protected women's spaces and trans issues, it tells us when J.K. Rowling can find herself now only re-sanctioned by the ascent of a politician that most progressives are comfortable describing as being a contemporary Hitler?

00:36:57.000 You know, that's a superb question and fertile grounds for discussion.

00:37:03.000 The first thing I'm going to say about J.K. Rowling is she's one of our predominant myth makers, and I'm going to get back to why that's important.

00:37:10.000 She's also, I don't want to say single-handedly, so let's think of an adjective that takes some of the absolutism off that.

00:37:18.000 Largely, largely responsible for an entire generation of readers.

00:37:22.000 And so as somebody who's a novelist, novels are my main, you know, this is my 25th or 26th novel.

00:37:28.000 This is my career.

00:37:29.000 I have watched her build out an entire readership.

00:37:32.000 The Harry Potter books start at a somewhat more simple level on boarding people, and they grow more sophisticated and a bit darker as they go.

00:37:40.000 She's been an extraordinary cultural impact.

00:37:43.000 She's done a ton for women's rights, children's... 0.66

00:37:45.000 Right?

00:37:46.000 She, you know, she was homeless for a brief time.

00:37:50.000 And I think one of the things that is really important, I also want to frame what her actual perspective was.

00:37:55.000 Her actual statement was, I believe in trans rights, meaning if you are trans and you are being prosecuted or persecuted because you are trans, I will literally march with you for your rights.

00:38:09.000 I don't care if you're trans. 1.00

00:38:10.000 And in fact, I think that your rights are important enough that I will march.

00:38:13.000 This is a tweet that she sent.

00:38:15.000 Out.

00:38:16.000 Early on.

00:38:16.000 However, I believe there are certain spaces that need to be protected for women.

00:38:20.000 My view to this woman who has been canceled from publishing, you know, when Warner Brothers had a reunion for Harry Potter, she was scratched from it and she wasn't invited.

00:38:31.000 She's been sort of excised.

00:38:33.000 If you think that there's another opinion, that that opinion is unacceptable for somebody to say, if you're being prosecuted because you are trans, I will march for you to protect your rights, but I have other opinions here.

00:38:45.000 If that is so extreme that that person must be removed from the public record, then you're not...

00:38:50.000 Living remotely in reality.

00:38:52.000 What you're living in is this sort of totalitarian state of constant prosecution.

00:38:57.000 And one of the problems with the victor-oppressor narrative is there's only room for three positions in that.

00:39:02.000 You're either the victim, and who wants to be a victim?

00:39:04.000 You're the oppressor, and who wants to be the oppressor?

00:39:06.000 Or you're the tattletale.

00:39:08.000 Now, the question that you asked, I think, is really important.

00:39:11.000 Why did it land on her?

00:39:13.000 And we've seen that this victim-oppressor narrative, which we now know leads to fascistic thinking.

00:39:18.000 There's a new study from NCRI that's a network contagion research group that shows that if you start to frame things in this narrative, people tilt into more fascistic language.

00:39:28.000 They get sort of totalitarian curious if we start to divide people into groups.

00:39:33.000 So once Marxism was seen to profoundly fail in every regard, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong dwarfs the death count of fascists and dictators from the right, not that they're any picnic.

00:39:45.000 What we saw was an attempt to warm over this whole sort of worldview, once it was unequivocally responsible for so much murder and mayhem and horribleness, through the Frankfurt School, but most importantly, I think, through the French deconstructionists. 0.85

00:40:01.000 And that began the long march through the institutions.

00:40:04.000 And one of the things that's so weird for me, so I was an English and psychology major, as we talked about.

00:40:09.000 I was wondering, why is there this big insurge of French deconstructionist thinking, which basically reframes, instead of it being labor and capitalist, it reframes everything as victim and oppressor through the English department.

00:40:22.000 When I was an undergraduate, this was starting to become widespread, though we could still make fun of it.

00:40:28.000 It wasn't like I would get canceled for saying, I've had it with Deridara Foucault.

00:40:32.000 Like, I kind of think they should be tied to an anchor.

00:40:33.000 That's just my opinion.

00:40:36.000 But the reason for that is, is if you really want to get at the roots of a culture and bring it down, the smartest place to attack is you attack the story.

00:40:45.000 And so having Marxism through literary critics who are French come in through how we view texts, right?

00:40:51.000 Can we really read Shakespeare?

00:40:52.000 Do we have to read Shakespeare in context?

00:40:54.000 Is Shakespeare really a white colonialist oppressor?

00:40:56.000 What are all the ways we have to investigate that?

00:40:59.000 What are the experiences we bring?

00:41:00.000 If you can relativize everything and you attack the story at its base, which is going to be the attack in literature, which is where this onslaught started in academia.

00:41:10.000 Then the footing goes everywhere.

00:41:12.000 And so what seems like should have been an assault through the realms of history or political science or even feminist studies or other schools of study came in primarily through literature.

00:41:21.000 And I think that's why it's so profound in the arts.

00:41:24.000 If you can disintegrate and attack a story as not being anything that has absolute meaning or worth or value and that everybody can interpret through their own lens and you can turn everything into power dynamics, then you can bring down a cascade of the culture.

00:41:39.000 The other benefit it has is that it cuts us off when you start to identify certain texts as being, let's say, colonialist texts, right?

00:41:46.000 Let's say that that's Huck Finn.

00:41:48.000 Let's say that's Orwell.

00:41:49.000 Let's say that's Dostoyevsky, let's say that's Solzhenitsyn.

00:41:53.000 We lose access to these great works that teach us about these dynamics and how they are to be avoided and what they ultimately lead to.

00:42:01.000 And so I think it's very interesting you bring up J.K. Rowling.

00:42:04.000 I don't think it's a coincidence that we go after and we start to want to lynch or burn at the stake our myth makers.

00:42:12.000 That's fascinating because I suppose what she's doing is...

00:42:15.000 Articulating contemporaneously universal and therefore ancient, pre-ancient ideas and themes and making in so doing claims for an objective truth, an objective reality.

00:42:29.000 Now I'm fascinated by what you're saying about Derrida and Foucault because in a way, Greg, Foucault's claim that all power is undergirded by violence.

00:42:42.000 I think could be utilised by those of us that are not post-structuralists, that do believe in an objective reality.

00:42:49.000 And just to be less opaque, I believe in God.

00:42:52.000 I believe Jesus Christ is God.

00:42:53.000 I know that you're racially Jewish.

00:42:56.000 I don't know about you religiously yet.

00:42:58.000 But in any event...

00:43:01.000 The way that even Foucault and Derrida have been utilised subsequently seems somewhat disingenuous because it is precisely this power that is backed by violence rather than truth that is in the ascendance when a figure like J.K.

00:43:19.000 Rowling can be exited and exculpated from a culture on the dubious basis that she doesn't align 100% in a total way with the prevailing power. 0.97

00:43:31.000 Fashions and trends that surely you know you can imagine that at some point in the future Greg they're gonna have to hold some big J.K. Rowling day at Warner Brothers or whatever conglomerate owns it in 10-20 years and sort of rehabilitate J.K. Rowling precisely because she owns a significant amount of their IP if no other reason and how are they gonna how are they gonna undertake that?

00:43:54.000 But I'm also fascinated in how you say the post-structuralists were utilised in particular in literature, because I suppose literature is an outpouring of sort of divinity and divination, and I'm sort of, as an Englishman and as an actor, sort of astonished to hear, although actually I've sort of heard it before, some of the critiques levelled at Shakespeare, and I'm also additionally interested in your dissertation and how you applied Jungian motifs to the writing of Shakespeare, because it just sounds like a fascinating idea.

00:44:20.000 But before we get to that...

00:44:22.000 Could we just tell me a bit more about the application of post-structuralists and semiologists, I suppose, because it's likely Lacan can be baked into all this, when it comes to reframing narratives and stories which can't work without recourse to archetypes and absolute truths?

00:44:42.000 Yeah.

00:44:43.000 Okay.

00:44:44.000 So, the first thing I'll say is that I believe that the hero's myth...

00:44:49.000 Which is, you know, it's everything from Gilgamesh to the Terminator, right?

00:44:52.000 So anyone who has read, I think of, you know, Jung and Newman are the masters of coming up with these archetypal stories.

00:45:00.000 Joseph Campbell, in a lot of regards, is like the cliff notes to Jung.

00:45:04.000 I find Jung incandescently brilliant, but he can be difficult to read.

00:45:09.000 At times it feels like you're digging a hole in your face.

00:45:11.000 And I think that Joseph Campbell came up and can kind of provide the cliff notes.

00:45:16.000 But these are an integral aspect to human experience.

00:45:18.000 If we find a tribe in the Amazon basin that has been cut off from any contact with other humans...

00:45:24.000 We know they're going to have eyelids.

00:45:26.000 We know they have opposable thumbs.

00:45:27.000 And we know that they will have a hero myth with all of the constituent steps.

00:45:31.000 So this hero myth, we are ingrained to perceive and engage in the world in ways through story.

00:45:37.000 They teach us how to contend with the internal and the external unknown.

00:45:40.000 So if you read one of my thrillers, in a way you can think of that as practice.

00:45:45.000 You don't actually have to go get killed by a cartel member or like garroted in a banya in Moscow. 0.95

00:45:50.000 It's practice for us to figure out how we can iterate these.

00:45:54.000 I think there's, whether you believe that these are God-given or evolutionarily selected, depending on where your belief system comes from, either way, these are stories that have had so much pressure applied to them that they are perfect diamonds.

00:46:08.000 We talked about this a lot in Gospels.

00:46:10.000 The Gospel narrative, the four stories in the Gospels, are like a perfect gem of a hero myth.

00:46:16.000 Everything about them aligns.

00:46:18.000 They've just been compressed to almost perfection.

00:46:21.000 So if you can invert that and you think about that every charge that somebody levels, that's not right.

00:46:29.000 Many charges that people level not in good faith are confessions.

00:46:33.000 And so when the Derrida's and the Foucault's and the modern carriers of their water say that everything comes down to a power dynamic, everything is power, power is what's at the top, it's literally because I think they can't imagine a world in which people are motivated by God.

00:46:50.000 Let's say.

00:46:51.000 Or truth, let's say.

00:46:53.000 Or self-sacrifice for the longer-term moral betterment of a community.

00:46:59.000 And certainly one of the things that you named at the top of this is truth.

00:47:02.000 So then let's look at some other adjectives.

00:47:04.000 If we've now scattered everything down because everything is on the basis of power, right?

00:47:09.000 So some of the adjectives that are picked up, what should be the most descendant of all things in a value hierarchy?

00:47:15.000 Let's say you don't have a definitional grounding.

00:47:17.000 And we know what they are in stories and myth.

00:47:19.000 We know what it is for Odysseus, right?

00:47:22.000 We know what it is for all these characters and heroes that we've carried forth.

00:47:26.000 But if you're choosing any of them, so let's choose some.

00:47:28.000 Diversity.

00:47:29.000 Is diversity a good thing? 1.00

00:47:30.000 Sure.

00:47:31.000 Inclusion.

00:47:32.000 Is inclusion a value that we care about?

00:47:34.000 Yeah, certainly.

00:47:36.000 Can those two things be the top value for any venture?

00:47:40.000 The absolute utmost top value?

00:47:42.000 Well, if inclusion in, nothing works.

00:47:44.000 It can't be a choir.

00:47:46.000 It can't be a sports team.

00:47:47.000 It can't be a robotics club.

00:47:49.000 It can't be anything if it is literally the top value.

00:47:52.000 And so when there's a confusion and a deterioration of a value set because everything is relative and we just get to choose anything, if we don't start with truth at the highest mooring, then we're immediately off course.

00:48:04.000 And even these values that can have values, is empathy an important value?

00:48:08.000 Of course it is.

00:48:09.000 Should we make all of our decisions, military and public health, on a basis of empathy that's based on...

00:48:16.000 You know, personal emotion that we bring to our personal relationships?

00:48:19.000 Absolutely not.

00:48:20.000 That's a disastrous way to make decisions.

00:48:22.000 And so the hierarchical ranking of a story, of a value set, I'm sorry, is what stories teach us.

00:48:28.000 That's what we learn about when we read Crime and Punishment.

00:48:31.000 That's what we're exploring when we look at how things get out of whack with Animal Farm.

00:48:36.000 Give us a bit of an example of that, would you?

00:48:39.000 Of like how a story, could you just pick one?

00:48:41.000 You seem to have access to quite a lot of them off the top of your head.

00:48:44.000 How a particular story is demonstrating a particular value.

00:48:47.000 I know because I've had the conversation with your old teacher, Jordan Peterson, that we could sort of distill to some degree the ultimate value of the Christ narrative if we were looking at it from, you know, not from a theological or spiritual perspective, but from an ironically somewhat post-structural perspective.

00:49:05.000 Like, the highest value is power to sacrifice for the common good.

00:49:10.000 That the greatest king that ever came died for the most vulnerable and weakest person.

00:49:15.000 Like, it's an absolute value.

00:49:17.000 You can imagine JP making those claims, I'm sure.

00:49:20.000 But I want to just fold this in.

00:49:22.000 As well, while waiting for you to give me a story that tells you an absolute value that we can sort of like, oh yeah, man, because I love that eyelids thing from the tribes there.

00:49:32.000 He made me read Eliad Mercia, and I was thinking how in that...

00:49:38.000 There was one line that really struck me.

00:49:41.000 He said, it's not even, Mercia says, it's not even just homogeneity, which has its own form of cohesion, but an endless fragmentation, an erratic and incoherent fragmentation that becomes your reality.

00:49:57.000 And it seems to me that that's part of the goal, to engender the sort of bewilderment that does indeed enable...

00:50:03.000 Power, like, you know, whatever power you nominate to succeed, you have this sort of morass of relativism where you can't pick out anything, which is the opposite of how a story has to work.

00:50:15.000 And I was wondering how, as well as a sort of secondary inquiry, how, you know, you must be pretty tough on yourself when you're writing them books of ensuring, like, oh no, that's not a good crisis in Act 2. Oh no, that's not a good enough revelation.

00:50:28.000 So I wonder, what story demonstrates...

00:50:32.000 One of them values.

00:50:34.000 And then maybe you can sort of unpick a little bit of what I'm saying here about the benefits that come from chaos and bewilderment and how that advances human power over absolute truth.

00:50:46.000 Okay.

00:50:46.000 First of all, that's a world-class question, perfectly structured.

00:50:50.000 You're like Christopher Hitchens that you speak in perfectly contained paragraphs.

00:50:55.000 So there's three parts to the answer, which I want to hit.

00:50:58.000 If everything is deteriorated within a story, If everything and all values are equal, there's a very interesting personality cluster for big five personality traits, which I know you're somewhat familiar with.

00:51:10.000 A lot of people know the Myers-Briggs tests, right?

00:51:13.000 But there's different ways we break down personality.

00:51:15.000 For people who very much embrace this victim-oppressor narrative, there's a couple things they have in common.

00:51:21.000 One of them is that they're very low in trait conscientiousness.

00:51:25.000 So what's trait conscientiousness?

00:51:26.000 Do you show up on time?

00:51:28.000 Do you return phone calls?

00:51:29.000 Do you work hard?

00:51:30.000 It's the second highest predictor of success in the world after IQ. It's incredibly important.

00:51:36.000 So if you're low on that ability, it means that you're not going to compete particularly well in the world.

00:51:43.000 And so a lot of the people who love this narrative are low trait conscientiousness.

00:51:48.000 And then they also have super high trait empathy.

00:51:51.000 Where they're claiming and smuggling that their concerns aren't on behalf of their own inability to compete, but on behalf of these poor other people who they are now going to be allies for and get out in front of, even if, like many of the people who came and most loudly pushed through transgenderism with all of everything that happened, really damaged the people, the much more rare people who actually are transgender in the community, who are now furious that all these...

00:52:20.000 Angry, affluent people got involved as like tourists on that front.

00:52:24.000 And so if you can deteriorate everything, you have low conscientiousness, which means you're not confident in your own ability to compete and do well.

00:52:33.000 So what you do is you piggyback or parasite on behalf of somebody else's perceived victimhood, which you're going to then promulgate.

00:52:40.000 And we see this in a lot of movements.

00:52:42.000 And the third thing is low verbal acuity.

00:52:45.000 And what that means is that you can't...

00:52:47.000 You don't want to have to debate.

00:52:49.000 You don't want to sit down and have to debate Charles Murray or Ben Shapiro.

00:52:53.000 What you do instead is you can scream or you can say words are violence or you can use old catchphrases that shut somebody down.

00:53:01.000 Now, I certainly have differences of opinion with lots of people, you know, Ben included.

00:53:06.000 It doesn't mean that...

00:53:08.000 The engagement or the source of having it is respectful dialogue where I'm going to assume that I'm going to learn something in an engagement with him, but it's a total removal of that.

00:53:17.000 So it's a very interesting cluster.

00:53:18.000 I know that I can't compete well.

00:53:20.000 I'm going to port this over and pretend I'm interested in other people, and then my tactics are going to shut down any actual communications and engagement.

00:53:27.000 So that's number one.

00:53:28.000 Number two, you mentioned the story of Christ, and I would say that the approach that we took in the Gospels...

00:53:34.000 It's not post-structuralist, but it's actually just exploring, I would say, the beauty of this story from different perspectives that allow more people access.

00:53:44.000 So if it's just psychological, if it's just narrative, it's not foreclosing on, as Bishop Barron reminded us, and as Oz Guinness certainly reminded us in the Exodus seminar, on the spiritual wealth and meaning, but it's finding different tracks in.

00:53:59.000 So two values.

00:54:00.000 I want to give two stories, one positive, one negative.

00:54:03.000 In the Gospels, what we have is a story of somebody who is the least deserving person, who every single aspect of society turns against him.

00:54:11.000 You have the church or the temple.

00:54:14.000 You have the politicians.

00:54:16.000 You have his own best friends.

00:54:18.000 You have every single thing, and everything in the culture turns against him.

00:54:22.000 It's the person who has the most virtue punished the most unjustly in the most inconceivably awful way, who then still elects.

00:54:32.000 To embrace his suffering in order to be transcendent, to transcend the suffering as an example for others.

00:54:38.000 So you have ultimately a sacrifice that is made that the marrying or the embrace of complete sacrifice, of carrying your own cross, if you take it on yourself, you can be transformative for others.

00:54:50.000 It's an extraordinary, extraordinary...

00:54:55.000 And it's also insane.

00:54:57.000 We forget how radically revolutionary this is.

00:55:00.000 This isn't like, you know, Christ doesn't ride in on a white horse with a flaming sword.

00:55:04.000 He comes in on a donkey and is born in a stable.

00:55:07.000 And what people worship, what people hold up, is the image of him at his most tortured and defeated.

00:55:15.000 Like, who does that in anything?

00:55:16.000 You don't see Ganesh that way.

00:55:18.000 You don't see...

00:55:19.000 Other gods represented in this way.

00:55:21.000 And so it's this extraordinary inversion where, you know, the crown that is made to mock him, in fact, is a crown that's made for kings.

00:55:28.000 And the thorns mirror the thorns, of course, from the fall when Adam and Eve first leave paradise, right?

00:55:35.000 There's this whole return to paradise that's emblematic in the symbols that are used.

00:55:39.000 And so there's this incredible transcendent imagery, right?

00:55:42.000 King of the Jews is written as a sneer.

00:55:45.000 But that's, in fact, what he is.

00:55:46.000 So there's this incredible inversion of somebody who is the least deserving taking the most suffering in the most graceful, conceivable way.

00:55:55.000 That's extraordinary.

00:55:57.000 Now I'm going to give another example about archetypal narratives and how they function.

00:56:01.000 And this one is in the negative.

00:56:02.000 This is a morality tale.

00:56:03.000 We all know the story of Hansel and Gretel.

00:56:06.000 It's one of my favorite stories.

00:56:08.000 So Hansel and Gretel are lost in the forest.

00:56:10.000 They're two kids.

00:56:12.000 The forest tends to represent our subconscious.

00:56:14.000 So they're, let's just say that they're loose in a sort of metaphysical landscape.

00:56:19.000 And what do they come upon?

00:56:20.000 They come upon a gingerbread house.

00:56:22.000 It's a house that's made of candy.

00:56:24.000 It's too good to be true.

00:56:25.000 And so they eat the gum, you know, gumdrops.

00:56:28.000 They're eating the wall.

00:56:29.000 They go inside.

00:56:30.000 And everything is there that they could possibly want.

00:56:33.000 It's like Pleasure Island in Pinocchio.

00:56:35.000 But what lives inside is a witch who is fattening them up to devour them. 0.98

00:56:41.000 Now, that's an archetype.

00:56:42.000 That's the devouring mother archetype, right? 0.97

00:56:45.000 So if you have a mother who gives you everything you want, who's sugary sweet, come, you can have all the sugar you want.

00:56:52.000 Come into my embrace.

00:56:53.000 I'll give you everything you want.

00:56:54.000 That's the mom who's like driving over and doing her son's laundry when he's...

00:56:58.000 26 years old so that he can't have a fiance and his girlfriend can't get the mom out of the way.

00:57:04.000 That's Munchausen by proxy, moms who keep their children sick in order to be able to have a position where their empathy elevates them morally, right? 1.00

00:57:13.000 And so it's this perfect jewel of a narrative that's embedded in this story, which is that the devouring mother will come in and offer you everything that's too good to be true, and the only thing it's going to cost you is any separation that you have, because you get devoured back into that morass of the unconscious unknown and into that maternal devouring feminine. 0.78

00:57:34.000 Cool!

00:57:35.000 Very cool.

00:57:36.000 But I suppose from a Jungian perspective, the highest goal is individuation.

00:57:41.000 And from a spiritual perspective, I wonder if these are synonyms.

00:57:46.000 Self-actualization, realization, surrender.

00:57:49.000 I mean, if sainthood is the goal to become, in a sense, not to absolutely become yourself.

00:57:55.000 Well, I mean, in the end, you're going to find paradox and irony in these things.

00:57:58.000 In fact, your rather lovely and brilliant answer was redolent with precisely such ironies, i.e.

00:58:06.000 the use of dramatic irony in the pilot's declaration above the head of our Lord, the crown of fawns, that this is sort of a kind of irony.

00:58:16.000 And indeed, I wonder, Greg, this is somewhat psychological, but when the devouring mother, Isn't too many degrees separate from almost the perfect mother in some way.

00:58:31.000 You know, it's not an opposite.

00:58:33.000 It's not an opposite.

00:58:35.000 There's an odd Alignment and a peculiar and difficult alloying.

00:58:40.000 Because, you know, a mother that says, no, you can't come in my house, there's nothing to eat, F off, wouldn't be perfect either. 1.00

00:58:47.000 And just when I'm thinking of mothers that I know, I recognise their witch in the gingerbread house.

00:58:55.000 I wonder if this might be an interesting time to touch upon what you brought up as being the subject of your dissertation, archetypes within Shakespeare.

00:59:05.000 I used to be an actor, and maybe I will be again.

00:59:07.000 Who knows, Lord?

00:59:09.000 So if you're approaching, say, the Scottish play, or Othello...

00:59:14.000 Or, you know, Hamlet.

00:59:17.000 There's a few things I'd like to say.

00:59:19.000 One, there is so much archetypal robustness available to us in the writing of Shakespeare that it can almost withstand any interpretation.

00:59:26.000 You can set Richard III in Nazi Germany. 0.87

00:59:29.000 You can have a woman play Hamlet. 1.00

00:59:31.000 You can set all of Hamlet in a mental institution, as I once memorably saw.

00:59:37.000 And it can, because there's such truth in it, or even take Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet.

00:59:42.000 It can take it.

00:59:43.000 If you want to make it sort of pop and Cubana, Latino version of it, because the truth in it is so powerful that it can be expressed through a variety of aesthetics or creative choices.

00:59:55.000 So I wonder what our...

00:59:58.000 I know it's a dissertation, so probably, I don't know, it's 10,000 or 30,000 words or whatever, but I wonder what...

01:00:04.000 Because I actually...

01:00:05.000 This might interest you.

01:00:06.000 Some time ago...

01:00:07.000 Pre-cancellation.

01:00:09.000 I did a rather wonderful project with a brilliant English director called Ian Rickson.

01:00:14.000 You'd like this, man.

01:00:15.000 You would like this.

01:00:16.000 I took, along with Ian, passages and pieces.

01:00:20.000 From Shakespeare and told my own life story.

01:00:24.000 My life.

01:00:26.000 Russell Brand, My Life by William Shakespeare.

01:00:28.000 In which I did Richard III as like, I'm an ugly adolescent. 0.93

01:00:33.000 I'm ugly. 0.86

01:00:34.000 I don't like myself. 0.99

01:00:35.000 But I am going to glorify my ugliness.

01:00:38.000 Caliban and Prospero.

01:00:40.000 This is my island to my stepfather.

01:00:43.000 My island!

01:00:45.000 And then later on, Richard II in the cell of like...

01:00:50.000 Time.

01:00:50.000 Time devours me.

01:00:52.000 I wasted time, now time wastes me.

01:00:55.000 And Hamlet with the grave digger and going like what it is to...

01:01:01.000 Like that Uric was kind of like a father figure to him when his own father was not available.

01:01:08.000 So, yeah, I've looked at that.

01:01:10.000 The idea in particular that Shakespeare could be categorized as a religious text rather than a literary text.

01:01:16.000 And that, mate, takes us back to what you were saying.

01:01:19.000 And about using Foucault and Derrida as kind of barracuda weapons in literature because what you're actually attacking is truth and faith and deep faith and truth.

01:01:31.000 So yeah, that's a good framing for you, isn't it?

01:01:35.000 Yeah, it's wonderful.

01:01:38.000 And there's some ideas to think about here too with it because, you know, Shakespeare, he didn't write any original plays except for The Tempest.

01:01:47.000 Everything is based on stuff that's pre-existing.

01:01:50.000 And every time he did it, it's funny because some people will have objections that the Merchant of Venice has anti-Semitic elements.

01:01:56.000 But if you compare it to the Jew of Malta that it's based on, he breathed so much life and substance into this.

01:02:03.000 And so what I don't want to get mistaken for saying that...

01:02:07.000 We don't want Barracuda-like attacks on the text, but it doesn't mean, as you said, that we don't want to innovate.

01:02:12.000 Baz Luhrmann was brilliant with that with Romeo and Juliet.

01:02:15.000 Shakespeare was somebody who experimented.

01:02:17.000 He was a populist, and I want to get back to that in a lot of ways, because his primary aim was to be sort of a bestseller.

01:02:24.000 Now, with Othello, for instance, there was a brilliant Othello.

01:02:27.000 And so what that means is we can bring new...

01:02:29.000 New voices and new identities and new concepts to play with the text.

01:02:34.000 I think it was Patrick Stewart did A Brilliant Othello where he was white and everybody else was black. 0.68

01:02:40.000 And the play holds in reverse.

01:02:42.000 So it's this really interesting thing.

01:02:43.000 It's not that we want to put our fists down and have some knee-jerk reaction to wokeism where there's not all sorts of experimentation.

01:02:50.000 And movement and different voices and different approaches because that's the lifeblood.

01:02:55.000 That's when liberalism is functioning well, that there's a fringe of ideas that sort of water and nourish what the center is and bring a new life to it.

01:03:06.000 Iago, to give just a quick example about this, you're talking about archetypes.

01:03:11.000 Iago's language, if you look at the five acts of Shakespeare in the beginning, he's filled with all sorts of, like he calls Othello the two back and beast.

01:03:20.000 There's all this bestial, satanic imagery.

01:03:23.000 And through the acts, if you rank the number of times he uses that imagery versus Othello, it starts off where it's all Iago and none with Othello.

01:03:31.000 And the play is a seesaw tilt as he sort of infects Othello.

01:03:35.000 All through the play.

01:03:36.000 And by the end, Othello can barely find speech.

01:03:39.000 Remember, he's incredibly articulate, though he claims not to be, right?

01:03:43.000 Rude in speech am I. And by the end, he can barely speak.

01:03:46.000 He's like, he has all these exclamations.

01:03:48.000 And he's been infected and taken over with this language about like beasts and flies and like this horrible hellish. 0.95

01:03:57.000 And you remember the last line that Iago says is that he will not speak anymore.

01:04:01.000 He's silent.

01:04:03.000 Because he has completed his takeover of Othello.

01:04:05.000 So if you think of that as a sort of shadow takeover, right, from repression, because Othello has a lot of things that are repressed, when people repress things, I always think that one of the best pop culture references of this is Kathy Bates in Misery, where everything on the surface is like, you know, hey diddly-doo.

01:04:22.000 She's like Ned Flanders.

01:04:24.000 But what's beneath it is this monster that's controlling.

01:04:27.000 And so we watch Iago sort of take over that way.

01:04:32.000 I want to just talk real briefly.

01:04:33.000 You touched on Shakespeare, just sort of his role.

01:04:37.000 And I think it's very important that we remember that Shakespeare, we tend to think of as this sort of rarefied air that's being attacked, right?

01:04:44.000 Like, so, you know, by this Barracuda metaphor that you're using.

01:04:48.000 Shakespeare was, first of all, he was an actor, which, as you know, is considered the lowliest of the low, right?

01:04:53.000 Everybody called him this, you know, meat puppet, upstart crow who spoke from his neck.

01:04:57.000 He wasn't sort of an erudite playwright. 0.99

01:05:00.000 And what he was trying to do is put asses in chairs and sell out the Globe Theatre night after night after night. 0.93

01:05:06.000 And so he's constantly playing. 0.97

01:05:08.000 He'll make a, you know, if you cut that Globe Theatre in half and you look at the dollhouse view of it, it's a perfect cross-section of all of Elizabethan culture.

01:05:15.000 You have royalty up here, you have the groundlings.

01:05:18.000 And so he's constantly modulating.

01:05:20.000 He'll make a glancing reference to Ovid's metamorphosis for the educated, and then he'll throw in an impotence joke for the groundlings. 0.98

01:05:26.000 So he's keeping everyone in thrall all at once.

01:05:30.000 And he's designed, he's trying to actually sell out.

01:05:33.000 I mean, he wasn't even really writing things down to record for posterity.

01:05:36.000 He wanted to sell out.

01:05:38.000 That was his aim.

01:05:39.000 He was somebody who wrote so brilliantly and it was for the masses.

01:05:43.000 And so he's a myth maker.

01:05:45.000 Obviously, I think he's the greatest myth maker in the English language.

01:05:50.000 But when we're talking and applying that form to J.K. Rowling, it's like, is there depth in her writing?

01:05:54.000 Of course there's depth in her writing.

01:05:56.000 Does it connect across all sorts of people?

01:05:58.000 Of course it is.

01:06:00.000 Ideological?

01:06:01.000 When we talk about her semi-cancellation, is it because she's sort of this rigid ideologue?

01:06:08.000 Absolutely not.

01:06:09.000 There's all sorts of complexity.

01:06:11.000 And all these other values that we discuss, inclusion, diversity, empathy, grace, forgiveness, these are all themes that she plays with.

01:06:18.000 She's just not choosing one and elevating it. 0.99

01:06:21.000 And people can do that from the left or the right.

01:06:27.000 And that's where you cease creating art.

01:06:29.000 And what you're doing is creating propaganda.

01:06:31.000 You know all the answers before you begin.

01:06:33.000 You're not discovering as you write.

01:06:35.000 You're not having rounded characters bang into each other where the tension from what they're doing and how they bang into each other is going to produce the sort of drama that makes us think, that pushes it internal to us.

01:06:47.000 If you're prescribing something, you might as well be Mao Zedong, like typing out the things and sending them out to the masses to be as a form of demanding and ideological worship.

01:06:58.000 And that's where art has to get off a partisan track and an ideological track, because if it gets on that track, it's no longer art, nor is it good entertainment.

01:07:07.000 No.

01:07:08.000 It's interesting that iconoclasm plays its role in both of the lives of these myth makers, people often refusing to accept that Shakespeare's just one guy from Stratford upon Avon.

01:07:24.000 He must have been a conglomerate.

01:07:26.000 He must have been someone born of noble blood.

01:07:30.000 And I suppose where Rowling's story takes place contemporaneously and under continual...

01:07:37.000 Prudence and observation.

01:07:41.000 We can't say, well, she didn't write that.

01:07:44.000 Well, there's been claims, haven't I? I wrote that.

01:07:47.000 That was my idea.

01:07:48.000 She stole my idea. 0.94

01:07:49.000 And people misfudging the difference between archetypes and plagiarism.

01:07:56.000 And your earlier point that...

01:08:00.000 You know, that Shakespeare was often using stories that were not original.

01:08:06.000 Other than The Tempest, which is like many people, I'd love your take on this, Greg.

01:08:10.000 Many people consider it to be his sort of last work.

01:08:14.000 I wonder why that is.

01:08:16.000 I was in it once, like a film version with the brilliant Julie Taymor.

01:08:21.000 And there was...

01:08:23.000 Oh, man, that was a good experience.

01:08:24.000 I worked with some good actors on that.

01:08:29.000 Alfred Molina, English actor, who, like, he's so good, man.

01:08:33.000 But he's like Dr. Octopus in the Spider-Man movies.

01:08:36.000 And I was in, like, a double act with him.

01:08:38.000 And, like, he don't like...

01:08:41.000 I did rather balk and recoil when you mentioned, what was it, trait conscientiousness, because I am...

01:08:47.000 Often late.

01:08:49.000 But I hope that it's not...

01:08:52.000 I don't know, man.

01:08:53.000 I consider that to be some sort of mad and giddy flow, and I hope that it's not an indicator of deficit elsewhere, something I'm willing to explore and change.

01:09:02.000 Anyway, the Tempest, it seemed like a magnificent story, because a court, books, wisdom, magic...

01:09:12.000 Paganism.

01:09:12.000 But it struck me then as I was sort of like reflecting on the things that I've spotted in Shakespeare and my understanding of Shakespeare is by no means exhaustive.

01:09:19.000 I've not even read all of it.

01:09:22.000 It feels like I can't really, off the top of my head, think of many references to Christ, which is interesting, as it's near contemporaneous with the publication of the King James Bible, near enough.

01:09:34.000 And that's surprising when I think about it.

01:09:36.000 Other than I can think of in Hamlet, that the Almighty had not set his canon against self-slaughter.

01:09:42.000 That's one sort of reference.

01:09:43.000 But, you know, it's sort of almost deliberately pagan in a bunch of his plays, and sort of certainly kind of...

01:09:49.000 And as you say, even Shylock, if you look at the source material, he's been, forgive the word, kind of humanised and fleshed out, pounder fleshed out.

01:10:02.000 It's interesting that there doesn't seem to be a particular take.

01:10:06.000 And it's interesting too to think of him as being a populist that was literally interested in selling out in the most literal way.

01:10:18.000 Well, it's funny, because I get asked that a lot as a thriller writer, where people say, well, if you're a Shakespeare scholar, and I'm not, I'm a Shakespeare dilettante.

01:10:25.000 I did a one-year master's in Shakespeare in England, and I love him.

01:10:29.000 But it's so funny that people have this perception that he's floating up in some arid space.

01:10:35.000 It's like he wrote highly structured, narrative-driven tales of lust, intrigue, and murder.

01:10:40.000 And from borrowed texts, the same way that Ross MacDonald inherits...

01:10:45.000 Raymond Chandler is inherited by Michael Conley and Robert Crace.

01:10:49.000 These plots, the femme fatale, the archetypes that we have in thrillers are often received.

01:10:55.000 And Prospero is amazing.

01:10:59.000 I mean, I think that's his stand-in and his goodbye to the world.

01:11:02.000 And for me, one of the most moving lines in all of Shakespeare is at the end when he sets Ariel free, the spirit free, and he points to Caliban and he says, this thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.

01:11:15.000 And he takes the weight of the kind of shadow.

01:11:18.000 Remember, Caliban's in a cave and he smells like fish and he's like this vile thing of earth and clay.

01:11:24.000 And Prospero acknowledges that as part of himself.

01:11:27.000 It's this beautiful parting image.

01:11:29.000 And then Ariel is set free.

01:11:32.000 Now, while we're talking about Christ imagery, you know, it abounds in Shakespeare.

01:11:38.000 And I think one of the things to think about is we were talking about this.

01:11:41.000 Sort of ranking values in a subsidiary value set, right?

01:11:45.000 Which is, you know, do we like empathy?

01:11:47.000 Of course.

01:11:47.000 Do you want empathy in a mom or a dad?

01:11:49.000 Yes.

01:11:49.000 Should it be the top value?

01:11:52.000 Absolutely not.

01:11:53.000 There's a clear hierarchy in Shakespeare all the time of the great chain of being, which is God at the top, and then you have royalty, whether that's Queen Elizabeth.

01:12:02.000 And you see that when he's writing, he's also writing, you know, one of the things I think about a lot is everyone's writing for the studio.

01:12:11.000 You know, Michelangelo couldn't just do whatever the hell he wanted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, right?

01:12:15.000 He has to appeal to, who is it?

01:12:17.000 Pope Julius II, I think.

01:12:19.000 I might have that wrong, so let's fact check me.

01:12:21.000 But, you know, you need to, and so Shakespeare, when he's writing with Queen Elizabeth, there's a lot about virgin leadership.

01:12:27.000 There's a lot that's an homage to her.

01:12:29.000 And when he enters the Jacobean era, you start to see all this witchcraft and other things come in, like as you mentioned in the Scottish play, because that was a fascination of King James.

01:12:40.000 So in that great chain of being, it's like sort of God, then royalty, then everybody else.

01:12:44.000 And when that's torn or severed, when that hierarchy, like in Macbeth, you have the emergence of the satanic, and that's the witches, right?

01:12:52.000 This bumbling, rhyming dialogue that's so weird, some people think he didn't write the witches scenes almost.

01:12:58.000 But when you tear that fabric, it sort of opens the maws of hell. 0.99

01:13:02.000 And we see that too in the way that Iago opens that up within Othello in the language that we discussed a little bit.

01:13:09.000 And so that notion of a structure is there quite completely.

01:13:13.000 But with Shakespeare, you know, he's burying a lot of this imagery further beneath the surface.

01:13:19.000 And so I think that's part of what makes it so compelling is because when we're in it, we're just watching drama.

01:13:25.000 Because we have to make a choice, as you say, around what are our values.

01:13:31.000 And you're right.

01:13:32.000 The truth I heard recently that never let...

01:13:38.000 Truth outrun love, is what I heard.

01:13:41.000 That love has to be...

01:13:42.000 And I suppose that it's somehow in love, I sense...

01:13:46.000 There is an acknowledgement in the cohesion and in our shared destiny, in our unity under God, that it is the felt and intuitive unitive principle, that we know somehow that love is our unity in action, that I must deny the subjective sense that what I want is more important than what Greg wants.

01:14:11.000 And if I get back to our point about justice of a structural analysis of the Gospels, that that is, you know, in sort of a superlative demonstration of those principles, everything maximally expressed as poor as possible, as powerful as possible, as pious as possible as as powerful as possible, as pious as possible as it like all that everything is.

01:14:31.000 And when you're writing, you know, like, because I was thinking, I was about to say, I don't really watch a lot of thrillers, but when you see it, because a thriller done bad is hackneyed, hokey and awful.

01:14:43.000 But like a thriller, like in a sense, you want to be like on the edge of your seat and you want to be watching something or reading something that's like, oh my god, no!

01:14:52.000 I love that feeling.

01:14:54.000 I love like a rollercoaster in my own consciousness.

01:14:57.000 But I suppose that we've become accustomed, because of bad art, of like seeing these things rendered.

01:15:06.000 I'm thinking of Hamlet now.

01:15:08.000 Speak the speech, I pray you.

01:15:09.000 Like when he tells the players, don't mess this up, you know.

01:15:12.000 You've got to do this so well that the people watching this actually feel like, oh no, they know that I've murdered my own brother.

01:15:20.000 It must be interesting to have the kind of intellectual and academic rigour that means that you can participate with Jordan Peterson, of whom I would concur with you, in whom we have one of the greatest...

01:15:35.000 Great analysts of culture, certainly of our time, but maybe beyond even that, as you said earlier.

01:15:42.000 And then to get right in there with having to write a book like Nemesis or many other graphic novels and books we've written, do you sometimes feel a little encumbered by it?

01:15:53.000 Do you not feel like sometimes...

01:15:56.000 My best work, I think, is spontaneous.

01:16:00.000 I enjoy spontaneity, both as a performer, As a writer, it's difficult to be spontaneous, I suppose, because it takes longer.

01:16:08.000 But, like, you know, I find it sort of sometimes cumbersome.

01:16:11.000 When I've written fiction and scripts, like, sometimes I'm like, oh, God, that's just not good enough.

01:16:18.000 Like, I've...

01:16:18.000 Bulk!

01:16:19.000 My own indelicateness.

01:16:22.000 So I wonder how you marry together this sort of academic and mathematical, almost algebraic understanding of structure and story with the necessity for liberating the muse when you're there on your own and you have to write a real character.

01:16:37.000 It's a great question.

01:16:40.000 I think so much of it is, I mean, I meet so many people who want to be writers and I meet very few people who want to write.

01:16:49.000 And you have to love the act itself.

01:16:52.000 And when I'm writing and when it's going well, there's a sort of zone that I'm in.

01:16:58.000 And that has to take precedence.

01:16:59.000 I don't have spreadsheets and elaborate arcs and I need my second act reversal.

01:17:04.000 I mean, one of the things I tell people, I never really took a course on writing.

01:17:07.000 I never read a book on writing.

01:17:08.000 I just read 10,000 books, right?

01:17:11.000 It's the same with movies.

01:17:12.000 You have to love it.

01:17:14.000 And then I wrote and I screwed up.

01:17:15.000 In my first two books, I wrote 16 drafts of my first novel.

01:17:18.000 I was very fortunate.

01:17:19.000 I started young and I sold it.

01:17:21.000 But I had to take the whole thing apart like an engine block.

01:17:24.000 So there's this process of trying to figure it out.

01:17:26.000 But what I want is to be writing from my gut.

01:17:29.000 I think there's three kinds of writers.

01:17:31.000 There's people who write from their head.

01:17:33.000 To me, that's James Joyce.

01:17:34.000 Very cerebral.

01:17:36.000 Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake.

01:17:37.000 Fitzgerald, who I love, writes from his heart.

01:17:39.000 And that's beautiful.

01:17:40.000 And then there's writers.

01:17:42.000 Who I think I emulate, and it's a school that I come from, or that I strive to emulate, I should say.

01:17:47.000 And that's writers who write from their gut.

01:17:49.000 That's like Faulkner.

01:17:51.000 Faulkner's just like, he's dirty and he's in there.

01:17:54.000 And so I think part of it is to learn... 0.85

01:17:57.000 As much as I can.

01:17:59.000 And all of that goes into sort of the blender of what I know and how I think.

01:18:03.000 But then when I'm trying to do it, what I'm trying to do is to actually have the story be in the driver's seat, not me.

01:18:09.000 I don't want to appear in the story.

01:18:11.000 I do a lot of crazy research for the thrillers.

01:18:13.000 I've gone undercover into mind control cults.

01:18:16.000 I've blown up cars on demolition ranges with seals.

01:18:19.000 I've gone up and stunt airplanes.

01:18:20.000 I've done all sorts of stuff.

01:18:22.000 But what you never want, there's a line that a friend of mine said one time, and she was reading a book, and she said, oh, your research slip is showing.

01:18:30.000 You never want to show off, right, like, oh, well, look at all this stuff Greg learned when he went and shot, you know, rocket-propelled grenades, and I want to be, you know, I want to write two chapters of gun porn or weapons porn.

01:18:42.000 You don't need to do that.

01:18:43.000 What you want is for the story to be predominant and for the author, in some sense, to recede into this flow.

01:18:51.000 You mentioned two other things, which I just wanted to remark on briefly.

01:18:53.000 You talked about truth and love as sort of these competing ideals for the highest value.

01:18:58.000 And my wife, who's a psychologist, pretty amazing.

01:19:03.000 She did a lot of work in the field as well, which is much like Jordan, which was part of what made him such a compelling professor was he had clients and he worked in prisons.

01:19:13.000 He did all this sort of stuff.

01:19:14.000 My wife was very similar.

01:19:15.000 She worked with... 0.99

01:19:16.000 Child prostitute. 0.99

01:19:18.000 She worked with juvie facilities. 0.93

01:19:19.000 She worked in HIV wards before there was a triple cocktail. 0.95

01:19:22.000 She worked in addiction and then she taught for a lot of years.

01:19:25.000 And she has a line that I love where she says, you can't, you shouldn't use truth like a baseball bat.

01:19:31.000 And so...

01:19:32.000 Truth to me is predominant.

01:19:34.000 If you're not coming from a position of truth, you can't do anything.

01:19:37.000 I see this all the time in politics.

01:19:39.000 If you're trying to start with spin, if you're trying to start with marketing or messaging, you're doomed.

01:19:44.000 But there certainly are ways to use force without the minimal necessary force.

01:19:49.000 And I think it's something in particular that when people are more daring or entrepreneurial or muscular in their spiritual, business, intellectual, and emotional endeavors, There tends to be a roughness around it.

01:20:04.000 And I think this is the tension that we're seeing the culture navigate right now, which is it is time for a reckoning as pertains to bureaucracy, as pertains to codified corruption, as pertains to...

01:20:14.000 There's two facts to me that are way more important than anything else in the entire political landscape.

01:20:20.000 Fact number one, since Reagan, $50 trillion with a T have gone from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

01:20:29.000 That's under everyone.

01:20:30.000 That's under Obama's and Clinton's and Bush's and Reagan's.

01:20:34.000 The other one is that the correlation between the American citizenry, whether they want a law or don't want a law, to the law actually getting passed is 0%.

01:20:46.000 It's a 0% correlation right now.

01:20:50.000 So if we understand those two things and we understand that sort of...

01:20:56.000 I think it's incredibly important that we can get to truth in ways that aren't reactive, which means the other side, however you define it, is an absolute monolith that represents pure evil and must be opposed at all costs.

01:21:09.000 And that anything they say, we will take the opposite of.

01:21:11.000 We need to have these two different worldviews and different personality structures.

01:21:16.000 The liberal personality structure, the tired trade openness, which is what you are.

01:21:21.000 Very heavily.

01:21:22.000 You were talking about the conscientious thing, but you're incredibly high in trade openness, which makes you a very interesting person with conservative viewpoints, because they're sort of expansive in ways that are...

01:21:32.000 High trade openness is the highest correlation with liberal value set, let's just say.

01:21:39.000 And then conscientiousness is one of the highest predictors of conservatism.

01:21:43.000 And so that tends to fold walls around things.

01:21:46.000 They're like borders around things.

01:21:48.000 So build a wall is a good conservative slogan.

01:21:50.000 They want boundaries around gender. 1.00

01:21:51.000 But the job for liberals is to say, hey, wait, if you build a wall and you don't let in new ideas in people, we'll stagnate and we'll die.

01:21:59.000 The culture won't be fed and nourished.

01:22:01.000 We need new ideas.

01:22:02.000 We need a fringe. 0.53

01:22:03.000 We need carnival.

01:22:05.000 We need play.

01:22:06.000 We need artists.

01:22:08.000 And we have to figure out how we get into that exchange where the reckoning isn't brutal in the process.

01:22:15.000 We've had it with this bureaucracy.

01:22:16.000 We've had it with all this.

01:22:17.000 And we're going to smash everything to pieces.

01:22:19.000 And tons of people are going to get hurt.

01:22:20.000 Because what we want is maximal change.

01:22:23.000 That does minimal damage so that we can most effectively move forward and govern as a unified country in the face of immense threats like China and Russia and the Iranian regime, all of whom are running all sorts of playbooks on us.

01:22:35.000 So there's this balance that we're sort of dealing with there.

01:22:39.000 Last observation I had, because we're talking about stories, and I feel like I'd be remiss to not mention when we're talking about the gospels, we don't just read the gospels and...

01:22:51.000 Think that we are and emulate Jesus.

01:22:54.000 We are all things in the Gospels.

01:22:56.000 We're all those characters.

01:22:58.000 That's one of the things that's amazing about when you're reading and you're embodying a story.

01:23:03.000 We're Judas, right?

01:23:04.000 We're denying Christ three times, our truest beliefs. 0.84

01:23:07.000 We're the two thieves.

01:23:09.000 We're Pontius Pilate, who's making a choice to preserve himself.

01:23:12.000 We are all of those characters.

01:23:14.000 And so we have to embody them when we read and integrate them.

01:23:19.000 But also, man, and if you've not done this already, you're going to really dig it.

01:23:23.000 As an actor, you would go, what does he do?

01:23:26.000 What does the character do?

01:23:27.000 What is the character like?

01:23:28.000 What does he do?

01:23:29.000 He tells stories.

01:23:31.000 He tells stories the whole time.

01:23:33.000 He communicates in parable.

01:23:35.000 There are four men.

01:23:35.000 Here's the address servant.

01:23:36.000 It's a bit like two birds.

01:23:38.000 When you throw seeds, he's a storyteller.

01:23:40.000 And in so doing, he exemplifies something that he is, how we're going to experience him, you know, at least until he comes alive in your own consciousness, within.

01:23:49.000 He is the vivification of story, and he is the apex and nexus of myth meets truth, because myth is truer than truth.

01:23:58.000 And therefore, it sort of takes place beyond reality.

01:24:01.000 He is a myth-myth-maker.

01:24:03.000 He is a living myth.

01:24:04.000 He is a living sign, as he has been called.

01:24:07.000 I loved that thing you just said, like that you said, like we were talking about sort of like truth there.

01:24:13.000 And like those competing value systems and how some harmony could be achieved in the tension between those two poles.

01:24:19.000 But I suppose what the post-structuralists do, Greg, is say, I reject those taxonomies.

01:24:25.000 And don't you sometimes feel that what we're experiencing now is the kind of collapse of category?

01:24:30.000 Let me give you a real-time example, which obviously you'll have picked up on yourself.

01:24:33.000 Like Bobby Kennedy...

01:24:35.000 Is, like, if you had anything like an objective mainstream media, some of these organisations that I've worked for, that you've worked for, The Guardian, to name one, the BBC, to name another one, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, whoever, like, wouldn't you have seen some sort of documentary that's like,

01:24:52.000 wait a minute, what's going on with MAGA? That they've got Bobby Kennedy, who is sort of more Democrat than Bernie Sanders or AOC, certainly more Democrat than Biden or Kamala Harris, has just glommed on to this movement.

01:25:07.000 And wait a minute, Tulsi Gabbard, who surely would have been a better bet as a leader than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders or AOC, is now also nested within this MAGA movement.

01:25:19.000 Doesn't it show you that what we've lost, as you said, like, I'd I hadn't spotted that before.

01:25:25.000 Truth is non-negotiable.

01:25:26.000 The problem is, is what they do, is they claim there is no truth.

01:25:30.000 And that's the kind of berserk aspect of nihilism, is that it's a havoc machine.

01:25:37.000 Like, you know, there is something in the prima materia, the spirit moving along upon the waters, that is like chaos, like order is coming sort of out of chaos.

01:25:47.000 It's discernible within it, in its geometry, in its golden scale, in its arithmetic, in its fractals.

01:25:53.000 But it's sort of ensconced somehow within chaos.

01:25:57.000 But what they're doing now in their great heresy, in their blasphemy against God of gods, is claiming that order itself...

01:26:06.000 Doesn't exist.

01:26:07.000 And therefore, selecting and laying claim to whatever virtues they want to elevate on a particular day, and Lord alone knows it changes in accordance with their agenda, because their ultimate aim is control.

01:26:18.000 And control is on the spectrum of violence.

01:26:21.000 And so with peculiar irony, they are guilty of the sin that they declare to be the worst of sins.

01:26:32.000 Well...

01:26:32.000 Many accusations are confessions, as we said.

01:26:37.000 And number one, nothing stands up to a story.

01:26:40.000 Nothing can compete with the story.

01:26:42.000 It's the most powerful thing that we have.

01:26:44.000 When you're mentioning this, one of the greatest disappointments that I've had with the Democratic Party, which I was a member of for a great number of years and still engage with and try to help as much as I am right now with Republicans in the administration as well.

01:27:02.000 Because I do think that no matter who's in power, we need a competent opposing party.

01:27:07.000 We just need that, right?

01:27:08.000 And I felt the same thing when Democrats were in power.

01:27:10.000 I want the best of Republicans in there, too.

01:27:14.000 But, you know, you mentioned some names, and I would say one of my biggest frustrations is that, and to me, it's close to an unforgivable crime to be allowed under the liberal tent, is a demand for conformity of thought.

01:27:28.000 The fact that disagreement is no longer allowed and that bold and daring and innovative and courageous and adventuring and mold-breaking thinking has largely been a shoot.

01:27:41.000 And at some point, a lot of thinkers are going to say, if I can't speak plainly in the language that I want to speak and think out loud and make mistakes and stumble and fall and need forgiveness.

01:27:50.000 And with social media right now, we have a culture that never forgets anything and there's no mechanism to forgive anything.

01:27:57.000 And so everything's sort of stuck in this frozen paralysis.

01:28:00.000 It's not just who you named.

01:28:02.000 Elon Musk voted for Obama twice.

01:28:05.000 Jordan Peterson is not, you know, not only is he laughably not alt-right.

01:28:09.000 I remember all these memes when he was a Nazi.

01:28:12.000 I always say to him, I miss the good old-fashioned days when you were merely a Nazi. 0.73

01:28:16.000 And I wish I'd known that before I asked him to officiate my Jewish wedding.

01:28:21.000 Jordan was not a hardcore conservative.

01:28:23.000 Joe Rogan.

01:28:24.000 You think Joe Rogan is a conservative?

01:28:26.000 That's insanity.

01:28:27.000 And so there needs to be an allowance.

01:28:30.000 Like, I always would say when people were burning books.

01:28:33.000 When people were burning Lolita or Ulysses, liberals are the ones who are supposed to show up with buckets of water.

01:28:38.000 We're not supposed to be the ones who are closing the high trade openness, demanding that we not be exposed to certain things.

01:28:45.000 I also want to clarify that there is no such thing as meaning or value or truth is a fringe aspect.

01:28:53.000 Of the far left.

01:28:54.000 It doesn't represent a lot of liberals and Democrats.

01:28:58.000 However, I do think there has been a crisis of cowardice among Democratic leadership in not naming the things that they do not agree with.

01:29:06.000 That's another outcome of high trade openness, right?

01:29:09.000 Every protester isn't Harvey Milk or John Lewis.

01:29:12.000 They're just not.

01:29:13.000 There's some people who want to skip the entire process of shouldering the responsibility of what a protest is.

01:29:21.000 And they don't understand the sort of sacredness of the civil rights movement in America, which very much says that you take the full bearing and the full weight of the responsibility of your protest on.

01:29:33.000 You go to jail if you're Martin Luther King.

01:29:36.000 You get lynched if you're...

01:29:38.000 I had a grandfather who went down south to represent...

01:29:41.000 Black men during the civil rights movement were accused of looking at white women, and they tried to run his car off a cliff.

01:29:46.000 Like, you go and you face the risk.

01:29:48.000 You don't ask for class credit for it at Vassar.

01:29:51.000 And part of you, when you hold up in the face of all that unjustness, the law and the culture crumbling across your unbowed shoulders makes enough people say, you're the one who's righteous, not the law.

01:30:05.000 Let's change the law, and let's do so within the parameters of the legal system.

01:30:09.000 And so a lot of that has been forgotten.

01:30:12.000 You mentioned definitional collapse.

01:30:13.000 I think that's a really important term.

01:30:16.000 There's phrases that are super loaded.

01:30:18.000 If somebody mentions MAGA on the left or on a meeting that I'm in with, let's say, leading Democrats, it means something completely different than if I'm with friends who voted for Trump or if I have different...

01:30:28.000 The words don't mean the same thing.

01:30:30.000 It's sort of even like Black Lives Matter.

01:30:32.000 Are people talking about the...

01:30:36.000 Lawless and illicit excesses that happened in the $2 billion riots that happened after George Floyd?

01:30:43.000 Or are they talking about movements that are contained on college campuses?

01:30:46.000 There's a whole variety of different ways that those terms are used, and we don't even know what they mean anymore.

01:30:52.000 And basically, this is part of the Orwellian attack, is first you talk about, you know...

01:30:57.000 Who are people who are acceptable?

01:30:59.000 You, Russell, you're not an acceptable person.

01:31:01.000 Neither is Jordan.

01:31:02.000 Neither is Rogan.

01:31:03.000 Neither is RFK. You're just not.

01:31:05.000 Then it becomes topics of conversation.

01:31:07.000 Can we discuss...

01:31:09.000 Are we allowed to have a discussion about what spaces should be for women that separate and are just women? 0.99

01:31:14.000 No, you can't have that discussion.

01:31:16.000 Can we talk about what the checks and balances need to be on immigration?

01:31:19.000 Even if our economy is dependent on immigration, America is a country of immigrants. 0.54

01:31:23.000 We love immigrants.

01:31:24.000 They're all part of our community.

01:31:26.000 However, that's not a toggle that can only go straight to open.

01:31:29.000 Can we differentiate it?

01:31:30.000 No, we're not allowed to discuss that.

01:31:32.000 And eventually it goes from people.

01:31:34.000 To the Overton window in Top X, all the way down to words.

01:31:38.000 You can't use that word.

01:31:39.000 If you say this word, it means this.

01:31:41.000 And so we're using all these words where I have friends, close friends, who are Black, who Black Lives Matter means one thing to him.

01:31:49.000 It means something to somebody else.

01:31:51.000 We can't use, what does patriarchy mean?

01:31:54.000 What does choice mean?

01:31:55.000 The words themselves get captured and claimed, and then we lose language.

01:31:58.000 An interesting thing.

01:32:00.000 About that that I find so fascinating, because you talk so compellingly and oddly in a way that I delight in about Scripture.

01:32:10.000 But so one of the things that's interesting about Cain and Abel, which we've discussed at length, and Jordan has made this point quite beautifully, is when Cain kills Abel...

01:32:20.000 He's killing the thing that he should aspire to.

01:32:23.000 Abel walks with God.

01:32:25.000 He makes proper sacrifices.

01:32:26.000 Cain makes lesser sacrifices.

01:32:28.000 And one of the things Jordan has pointed out is if you kill the thing that you aspire to, you destroy the future.

01:32:34.000 Cain is cursed generationally.

01:32:36.000 And one of the things that's so fascinating to me is the descendants of Cain who go on and build cities and Tubal Cain, who's the maker of tools, who's sort of a father of engineers is a way to think of him.

01:32:48.000 Those descendants in that line, as distinct from Seth, are the ones who build the Tower of Babel. 0.96

01:32:53.000 So what's the Tower of Babel?

01:32:54.000 The Tower of Babel is something built by the makers of cities and the toolmakers and the engineers that is sanding up a structure that is...

01:33:03.000 It's equivalent, they hope, to God and reaches just as high as God, but it's not in conversation with God.

01:33:08.000 So what happens when you're going to assume and build your own thing?

01:33:11.000 So that's AI, let's say.

01:33:13.000 That's technology and iPhones.

01:33:15.000 What happens when you start to build that is everybody starts to speak different language.

01:33:20.000 Well, what happens when we're on our phones and somebody tweets?

01:33:23.000 MAGA and they mean one thing.

01:33:25.000 Or somebody says something and it's something else.

01:33:27.000 We're in all these different silos right now and we've lost a shared basis of a story.

01:33:32.000 And what's the most upsetting about this, but I think that we are, I hope that we're turning the corner on this.

01:33:38.000 I did a bunch of polling.

01:33:39.000 I do some extracurricular kind of spelunking into the culture when things need to be unstuck, usually around extremism.

01:33:46.000 And we did a bunch of polling that shows that basically 90 to 100% of Americans agree on almost Everything.

01:33:55.000 I'm just going to read you a couple of these because they're so great.

01:33:57.000 I believe Americans should have equal justice under the law, regardless of race or religion.

01:34:01.000 99% agree.

01:34:04.000 We're talking social security.

01:34:05.000 I believe in the freedom of vote.

01:34:06.000 Have every vote counted.

01:34:08.000 97%.

01:34:08.000 Freedom of speech and religion.

01:34:09.000 100%.

01:34:10.000 The right to privacy.

01:34:11.000 99%.

01:34:12.000 It also pertains to topics that are more controversial, like immigration. 0.98

01:34:18.000 And the key is, if you don't phrase things like a total asshole, Then you can get more agreement. 0.98

01:34:24.000 But so much of polling is push polling. 0.98

01:34:26.000 So if you go out and say, I believe in climate change, maybe you get 46%.

01:34:30.000 I believe climate change is a hoax.

01:34:32.000 Maybe you get 46%.

01:34:34.000 But I wrote this question in a different way, which is to try and get at what people's real belief is, if we actually want to solve problems.

01:34:41.000 It's important to take care of our environment and ensure that we have clean fields and streams, seas and skies.

01:34:47.000 Americans are tired of political division.

01:34:50.000 95% agree.

01:34:51.000 Wow.

01:34:53.000 And it's question after question like this.

01:34:57.000 It's just incredible how much agreement we actually have.

01:35:01.000 So we're filtered through A, psychopathic algorithms that make us insane when we're online, and they literally note in our phones, the sensors note literally when our eyes dilate when we see something.

01:35:12.000 So the sensors are hacking our nervous system.

01:35:15.000 We have bad faith foreign players. 1.00

01:35:18.000 We know there's a ton of PSYOPs being run by China, Russia, and the Iranian regime.

01:35:22.000 And then we have bad faith domestic players making money.

01:35:24.000 And so there's all these networks that are controlling us that are driving outrage, fear, anxiety, and anger.

01:35:33.000 And the news that filters in and back to us basically turns the opposition into a monolith.

01:35:39.000 And what I want to do, what I think it's very important that we do, and what I think is important about conversations, Like this one, and like the ones that you have, and people from different backgrounds and affiliations coming together to discuss, is to shatter something that's called a state of pluralistic ignorance.

01:35:55.000 Now, I mentioned earlier that for one of my books, my fifth book, I was still a kid, I went undercover in a mind control cult.

01:36:01.000 And one of the ways that mind control cults work is that everybody is miserable, but they can't talk to each other.

01:36:08.000 They only talk vertically.

01:36:10.000 So think of all of North Korea as a mind control cult. 0.89

01:36:13.000 Like everyone knows that they're starving and miserable, but you're not allowed to sort of speak it.

01:36:17.000 And so what we have to do is shatter this state where people think, I mean, if 80 to 100% of people in America agree on literally almost everything, if it's not being spun for partisan fundraising, political races.

01:36:30.000 News channels, outrage, send money.

01:36:33.000 I mean, our phones are like these devices trying to hack our nervous systems.

01:36:36.000 And if you're on a phone and you're feeling anything, someone's making money off you, whether you're donating seriously or doing anything.

01:36:44.000 And we have to shatter that spell and remember that, A, we're in a world that isn't overwhelmingly safe.

01:36:49.000 Like as Americans. 0.98

01:36:51.000 As Western democracies, we have to get our act together because there's other people who are competing and working 24-7 with no constraints of a democracy to undermine us through psyops that are run through social media, through all sorts of insidious campaigns on us.

01:37:08.000 And there's so much that we have in the way of shared value set if we can figure out how to talk and get back to that.

01:37:14.000 And there's a lot of work to do because anyone who risks to dare cross the divide is risking Enormous reputational and financial damage, as you know.

01:37:25.000 Yes, I do.

01:37:26.000 I remember Musk saying that it was one of Stalin's paricheeks that said, show me the man and I'll show you the crime.

01:37:32.000 And so whether you did a little list and I was on it, you just go, well, this guy, Jordan Peterson, what can we say about him?

01:37:37.000 Russell Brand, where's that dude going to be vulnerable?

01:37:39.000 You know, we're all going to have some vulnerability that can be tweaked, amplified.

01:37:44.000 And manipulated in order to silence that particular voice.

01:37:48.000 And you said so many things that were fascinating there.

01:37:50.000 Earlier on, we'd just done a, sort of last week, we'd done a story about Trump and Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl.

01:37:56.000 And what is it, when they cheer for Trump, what are they cheering for?

01:38:01.000 When they boo Taylor Swift, what are they booing at?

01:38:05.000 You know, when you excavate it, when you do the archaeology, you might make some...

01:38:09.000 Interesting discoveries about what these people are representatives of.

01:38:14.000 Truly, truly. 0.96

01:38:15.000 And when you sort of touched upon the sort of sanctity of the civil rights movement and your own grandfather's activism and presumably sort of sacrifice or at least sort of fear and inconvenience based on the anecdote or story that you told, it's extraordinary to reflect that if Martin Luther King were operating now, we would say, that guy, that adulterer, he's a sex fiend. 0.61

01:38:41.000 And like to your Cain and Abel point, I mean, it's like, it's so...

01:39:07.000 The profanisation, if such a word is possible, of everything, the desacralisation of everything, it leaves us in such an extraordinary mess.

01:39:19.000 Your point about, you know, I don't think or talk enough about external threats because I've...

01:39:25.000 Just always been so focused on, you know, I've come up with, like, you know, oh, wow, wait a minute, maybe the IRA had a point.

01:39:32.000 You know, that's been my little journey, like, you know, because I'm an English kid, and then I learned this about the IRA, and then I'm like, oh, right, oh, I see, that's the reason that that, you know, and so I come so far with, like, you know, getting educated, like, sort of, I suppose, countercultural narratives, but, you know, whenever I'm talking about, say, Ukraine, Russia, I'm always like, look, I recognize that Putin, as a former KGB, And current dictator is probably not a great dude.

01:39:58.000 But I feel like our biggest...

01:40:01.000 Challenge is sorting out the, you know, the Anglophonic or, in very commas, Western world, what once would have been Christendom.

01:40:07.000 And, like, and so, like, I don't think so much about it.

01:40:10.000 And because I usually, like, because whenever I hear, you know, the Russians stole the election, I'm thinking of, like, you know, Hillary Clinton not taking responsibility for the fact that the Democratic Party abandoned the working class and became sort of a hollowed-out and empty vassal and a conduit for economic and elite interests. 0.82

01:40:29.000 But, like, yeah.

01:40:30.000 I recognize that perhaps uniquely and immediately where we are now is we best start getting cohesive right now because there are barbarians. 1.00

01:40:42.000 That's right.

01:40:43.000 And that's the challenge, which is to say, okay, we're the Russia probe.

01:40:49.000 Everybody who has an imprint against that, but to react against that completely.

01:40:54.000 And look.

01:40:55.000 Putin is powerful.

01:40:56.000 He's brilliant.

01:40:58.000 I mean, his ability to work psyops and to convey that sort of...

01:41:04.000 Like, incredible KGB levels of manipulation.

01:41:07.000 He's just, he's fascinating and powerful and brilliant.

01:41:11.000 And we cannot underestimate him for that.

01:41:14.000 And so having a reaction to one narrative that was in the news doesn't mean that we snap into a position of black and white rigidity opposite.

01:41:21.000 It's something I'm trying to work on a lot with Democrats who are basically like, we're at Hitler 2.0, everything must be resisted at every cost.

01:41:30.000 And it's like, wait a minute, guys, there's all sorts of disagreements.

01:41:34.000 You know, Bannon doesn't get along with Musk.

01:41:37.000 Like, J.D. Vance has a different worldview than Trump.

01:41:39.000 It's not a monolith.

01:41:40.000 If something is a monolith, the fantasy is, you know, and I had a very close friend who was saying when the vaccinations were coming up, was very upset about that with the polio vaccination.

01:41:51.000 And I said, well, Trump just tweeted that he's a big fan of the polio vaccination.

01:41:55.000 That should put it to rest.

01:41:56.000 And they said, well, I don't believe anything that guy says.

01:41:59.000 And I said, okay, I understand that.

01:42:01.000 But if you don't believe anything that he says that can be interpreted as news or to find nuance within what he's signaling, but you believe everything that he says that's absolute opposite, that's awful, then you can't have, and I don't mean this rudely, but you can't have an adult engagement with how you're going to navigate the next four years.

01:42:20.000 You'll be frozen in a state of abject terror.

01:42:23.000 If everything that is the worst possible thing that can happen is true, and anything that might provide relief or comfort, or to be aware...

01:42:31.000 There's different factions, and there's plenty of good factions.

01:42:33.000 You and I know and have worked with some of them that are pure people who are working in very close to pure.

01:42:41.000 Any human endeavor is going to be corrupt.

01:42:43.000 Is there going to be corruption in this administration?

01:42:45.000 Absolutely.

01:42:45.000 Same with Biden.

01:42:46.000 Same with if it was Vice President Harris.

01:42:49.000 But there are strains that we have to look at and differentiate.

01:42:54.000 You brought up something else to me that's really interesting, and I've been thinking about this a lot.

01:42:58.000 My background, though I'm not secular, I don't consider myself secular, but I'm from a very sort of atheist, intellectual, liberal background.

01:43:08.000 But my parents sent me to Jesuit high school, which was amazing because Jesuits, A, are incredible, and I love Catholics, and they're incredible educators.

01:43:16.000 And so it's like, if you can get a Jesuit-trained brain, it's really worth doing. 0.73

01:43:21.000 But I've been looking at the ways when we're talking about these stories, like our eyelids and opposable thumbs conversation, right?

01:43:29.000 That there's things in these stories that are essential.

01:43:31.000 Well, there's the aspect of original sin that's part of this jewel that's at the basis of all of Western civilization.

01:43:39.000 Everything that we know and understand, whether it's, you know, Michelangelo and Beethoven and Caravaggio, go down the list.

01:43:47.000 Everything, this is something that is a key and foundational element.

01:43:51.000 You can't just get rid of the notion of original sin.

01:43:54.000 Whether you believe that that's the case from the Bible and from Genesis or not, it's a key foundational mythological knot of wisdom that has been condensed into this diamond.

01:44:05.000 And if you get rid of it, where are you left?

01:44:08.000 What you're left with is saying, oh, well, like you were saying, what would we say today about Martin Luther King?

01:44:15.000 What would we say about anybody?

01:44:16.000 Any human being is not perfect.

01:44:20.000 It's impossible to be perfect.

01:44:21.000 And if you don't have some mechanism to understand that, then essentially all that you're doing is defining yourself by your own hedonistic individualism.

01:44:30.000 And even if you're not hedonistic and you're sort of a self-flagellating, arid, you know, like ethicist, there's still no standard by which you are being judged besides your own, which constantly can move around all the time.

01:44:44.000 And so if you don't have a basis to understand that we are, like, what does Jordan say?

01:44:49.000 We're apes filled with snakes.

01:44:51.000 If you don't have an understanding that's ingrained in you of what that concept is, and then we see it start to flip, which is, well, in the environmental movement, so Jonathan Pajot, who you're familiar with, I think, has become a very good friend, brilliant symbologist.

01:45:04.000 He's a brilliant Orthodox Christian thinker.

01:45:09.000 He talks about how when Adam named the animals, the animals came and kind of kneeled to him, or kneeled to Adam.

01:45:17.000 And the imagery in medieval times shows a lot of this, that it's an active sort of...

01:45:23.000 Dominance is the right word, but it's sort of an act of stewardship that places man above creation.

01:45:29.000 And as Douglas Murray has said about the vehement fringe of the environmental movement, not what I just said.

01:45:34.000 It's important for us to take care of our environment, ensure we have clean fields and streams, seas and skies.

01:45:40.000 I'm with the 95% of Americans that I agree.

01:45:42.000 But when we elevate that, we should get our tubes tied.

01:45:46.000 Mommy, mother, nature is mad at us.

01:45:48.000 We have an inversion.

01:45:49.000 Back to paganism, where rather than the animals kneeling, all of a sudden, nature and the natural world are angry and tempestuous, and we are beneath them for the things that we build. 0.90

01:46:00.000 So a beaver can build a dam, but we can't figure out how to dance or bioengineer or take responsible steps.

01:46:07.000 And that little inversion is another thing that's very dangerous that shows that we don't have a place of where we're ranking our humanness.

01:46:15.000 And the last thing that I'll say is, of course, you know, the story that we come back to a lot and which you reference as a Christian, of course, Christ on the cross, that is a clearing mechanism for the fact that we have original sin.

01:46:29.000 So there's a mechanism that's in place to say...

01:46:32.000 I'm filled with sin.

01:46:33.000 I will make mistakes.

01:46:34.000 I shouldn't judge other people and certainly dismiss them and deem them not fit for the culture, a la J.K. Rowling or Jordan Peterson or all these people who we've just excised insanely.

01:46:46.000 There's some people who should be excised, and that's what courts are for, not extrajudicial exporting this to social media mobs, largely also driven by algorithms, many of them foreign.

01:46:58.000 But if there's no mechanism to say, well, there's some other ideal that's more perfect than us that we always have to aspire to and we can never possibly reach, and in our recognition of the flaws and shortcomings that we have, and the fact that we can never reach that but aspire to it, it's a mechanism that doesn't ground us in total ossified rigidity.

01:47:18.000 My moral position is absolute no matter what.

01:47:21.000 And it also doesn't ground us in the solipsism and narcissism of endless grief.

01:47:27.000 And depression and guilt because guilt is inward looking.

01:47:31.000 And so you have to have a mechanism in the culture to say, oh, I went astray by X percent.

01:47:37.000 Okay.

01:47:38.000 I'm a flawed human like all of you.

01:47:40.000 I'll accept that I'm a flawed human.

01:47:42.000 What's a mechanism by which I can return?

01:47:45.000 And you'll accept it because you know that you're also flawed, and I can reenter meaningful society.

01:47:50.000 And in social media, where we don't forget anything now, any kid who has a phone now has recorded everything.

01:47:56.000 We have a digital footprint.

01:47:58.000 We have no mechanism to forget anything, and we have no mechanism by which to forgive in this part of the culture that's now crumbling and cracking up under its own weight and withering away.

01:48:07.000 And we have to bring back...

01:48:09.000 Not just enlightenment discourse across the aisle dialogue, of course, to strengthen and steal man opinions, but we have to bring back an ethic of genuine curiosity and respect and forgiveness.

01:48:21.000 And the last thing that I'll add is something Jordan and I have talked a lot about.

01:48:26.000 The movement that proliferated around viewing different perspectives, right?

01:48:31.000 So you have it in the arts.

01:48:32.000 You have it in Cubism, right?

01:48:33.000 It's a new descending a staircase from 16 angles.

01:48:36.000 You have it with Rashomon.

01:48:37.000 You have it with Faulkner.

01:48:39.000 You know, Sound and the Fury.

01:48:41.000 You even have it with a theory of relativity.

01:48:42.000 So it moves through the arts, this notion that different perspectives are key.

01:48:46.000 And in psychology, there's a particularly fascinating one for me, which is when you see Freud sitting and he's smoking his pipe, the patient is lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, which is sort of like, what, the unmarked screen that's ripe for the projection of your unconscious content.

01:49:04.000 And so they're like this.

01:49:05.000 And Carl Rogers...

01:49:06.000 Who, you know, I like to make fun of, like a lot of people with.

01:49:09.000 He's the psychologist, the first who is, you know, how does that make you feel?

01:49:13.000 He's the original kind of heavy, unconditional positive regard.

01:49:17.000 He sat the patients up and they stare at each other face to face.

01:49:21.000 And the unconditional positive regard from him comes from him setting his nervous system fully in tune to theirs.

01:49:29.000 It's an openness.

01:49:31.000 To understand and to take on what the patient is feeling.

01:49:34.000 If it's their anxiety, you're trying to comprehend and understand them.

01:49:38.000 And the dearth of this in political and partisan discourse to me, and the lack of practice by reading texts for what they actually represent.

01:49:46.000 Are you Iago or are you Othello?

01:49:48.000 Yes.

01:49:48.000 Are you Judas or are you trying to be Christ or are you Peter?

01:49:52.000 Yes.

01:49:53.000 This lack of practice of occupying another space.

01:49:57.000 Right?

01:49:57.000 What's a belief system that is foreign to me that I don't come from?

01:50:00.000 Some of these notions within Christianity are foreign for me from my family upbringing.

01:50:05.000 But if I embody and open up to them and I try to occupy them with deep and intense curiosity, that's where all of a sudden you can join and you accommodate and assimilate different understanding of people and worldviews.

01:50:18.000 And then you still come out.

01:50:19.000 It's not like you're just taken over, right?

01:50:21.000 Like, let's deplatform everyone who thinks differently because they'll infect me and then I'll be a zombie acolyte.

01:50:27.000 What you want is to go in and encounter that, feel it in your nervous system, and then you come out and you integrate and assimilate the new information.

01:50:35.000 And that's what all that nuance is.

01:50:36.000 And we're lacking that so much.

01:50:38.000 There's people who can't even entertain the notion that somebody who votes differently than them or believes differently than them has not just an incredibly meaningful value system, but one that we need.

01:50:49.000 If we're just liberals with high-trade openness, what do we do? 0.99

01:50:52.000 We stomp on the gas and we go straight into a fucking wall or off a cliff. 0.99

01:50:57.000 Excuse my language. 0.99

01:50:58.000 And if we're conservatives, we stomp on the brake pedal and we don't go anywhere.

01:51:02.000 So the exchange of navigating complex change, we require each other so that we can function and so that we have each other's different personality constitutions, different methods of meaning-making.

01:51:14.000 And if we can unify that under a combined story...

01:51:17.000 Guess what?

01:51:18.000 We're unbeatable.

01:51:19.000 Especially if that story values above all else, love, self-sacrifice for the greatest good, minimal possible force, only a freely entered a new covenant.

01:51:28.000 It's like, that's a good set.

01:51:31.000 Innocent until proven guilty, English common law.

01:51:33.000 These are things that expressly protect the rights of minorities in a proper way.

01:51:39.000 Minorities from the literal sense of minorities, groups that are in the center.

01:51:44.000 You'd be a good person to write a manifesto.

01:51:48.000 I like also that...

01:51:51.000 That the original sin is precisely about the disavowing of God's supremacy and the replacing of God's authority with personal authority, which is the drama that is playing out when you claim that that metaphor or history is untrue.

01:52:11.000 It was from Neil deGrasse Tyson some time ago.

01:52:13.000 I figure he says it a lot, but he certainly said it once when I was talking to him.

01:52:19.000 I think we were discussing the veracity of the moon landings or some sort of conspiratorial matter.

01:52:25.000 And he goes, if you go to Cape Canaveral, there's rooms full of filing cabinets with all complicated maths and stuff.

01:52:32.000 He goes, they would have gone to a lot of trouble.

01:52:35.000 Anyway, and then off the back of that he said that when he's having a conversation with some kind of heretic in the field of science, he'd go, is there anything that I could say to you?

01:52:45.000 That would change your perspective, say to you or show you, that would change your perspective.

01:52:50.000 And if the person says no, then there's obviously no point in having the conversation.

01:52:55.000 That's a reference back to what you were saying about the people that will only selectively take on board what Trump says.

01:53:00.000 And it's difficult not to imagine that whoever that sort of person was is, is that they're projecting their own outrage, i.e.

01:53:09.000 prioritising their own internal cosmology.

01:53:12.000 Over the potential for us to be having an ongoing, and you could look at this both rationally and materially from a biological and evolutionary perspective, or from a wholly...

01:53:22.000 Perspective, and obviously that's the one that I would elect to, the idea that we are the living water, that we are to become conduits, not systems, that we are to become like the flow of him, to allow ourselves to be of maximal use by removing that in us which is, inverted commas, satanic, that which would set ourselves up as personal sovereign to the detriment of his limitless truth, i.e.

01:53:45.000 how can you make a personal claim for truth, because by nature that will always be subjective.

01:53:51.000 I love, too, what you said there about the animals bowing before Adam.

01:53:55.000 Medieval art.

01:53:57.000 And that is not just a sort of a subjugative act, but a kind of a consensual and harm, the establishment of a kind of consensual harmonic, as it were.

01:54:08.000 And by making animals and nature sacred and disavowing our sacred role and our superior role within that hierarchy, you are kind of also yielding while...

01:54:23.000 Rejecting these, inverted commas, animal within you, the humors, the archetypes, the strains.

01:54:29.000 And if we all have, you know, eyelids and skeletons, it's likely that there are archetypal and molecular repetitions in the psyche and in the narratives that are playing out.

01:54:43.000 Therefore, you can have common sense in the same way you can have a god.

01:54:47.000 You could say common sense is a synecdoche for a...

01:54:51.000 A secular god.

01:54:53.000 Like, what are we saying when we say common sense?

01:54:56.000 And if you sort of disavow that, that is, in a sense, the ultimate act of nihilism, isn't it?

01:55:01.000 To say that there is no way.

01:55:04.000 Relativism is so destructive precisely because it actually denies it.

01:55:10.000 It denies the right.

01:55:12.000 For us to even declare a common ground.

01:55:14.000 And I think that with no common sense, there is no common ground.

01:55:19.000 And also that thing you've done, like constructing a survey designed to show consensus, is precisely how we should proceed.

01:55:29.000 And it shows you the, I would say, demonic appetites at play when in the...

01:55:36.000 Inculcation of a new Babylon through technology that could be creating the ultimate community.

01:55:44.000 Douglas Murray has this great line when we talk about the environment where he said, we're not humans, we're not the problem, we're the point.

01:55:54.000 And if you forget that, if you forget that the worldview needs to be life-affirming, that unerring scarcity, an unerring perspective of scarcity and unclearable guilt, we can't live that way.

01:56:11.000 Not only can't we flourish, it's like trying to have a plant without sunlight.

01:56:17.000 We need optimism.

01:56:18.000 We need to feel the value in each one of us.

01:56:23.000 It's incredibly important.

01:56:25.000 And if you are going to reduce everything to your own belief, one of the things I think about is A lot of things that happen in that perspective, if you're a hardcore, again, far left, I'm not grouping all Democrats or liberals in this, but if you have that belief that all things are relative, the full moral relativism, there's this perspective that's almost hard to imagine, unless we go back to, maybe you and me can go back to earlier versions of ourselves, where we might have had this, where literally you've never submitted to anything in your life in full.

01:56:56.000 That's what Faustus is about.

01:56:58.000 Like if you've never thought and beheld something with awe as being so much greater than you, if you've never experienced that, think about how amazing that is.

01:57:09.000 If you've literally never learned submission to something greater than you, you can't function in a way because everything comes down to you have to then safeguard your own Complicated set of ideals that keep you on the right side of history however you define it and however it's being updated continuously all the time across the internet and news networks.

01:57:31.000 It just becomes this crazy ball of yarn that it has to be this constellation of viewpoints that you're constantly reminding yourself that you're virtuous.

01:57:40.000 And if you haven't felt that in some way, whether it's before the grandeur of nature, people have religious experiences with babies, people have...

01:57:48.000 Experiences throughout, you know, talking to Catholics is different from talking to evangelicals versus the Orthodox, you know, church.

01:57:56.000 They all have the, you know, Judaism, having a conversation with Ben about sort of ritual and meaning and how he finds it.

01:58:04.000 There has to be some notion that there is something before which you feel awe and which you feel like that maybe your best self can be a tiny, resonant part of this greater whole.

01:58:17.000 That's beautiful, Greg.

01:58:18.000 Thank you so much, man.

01:58:20.000 Oh, I will leave it there because our clocks nearly run out of minutes.

01:58:23.000 This only goes up.

01:58:24.000 This runs out of time.

01:58:26.000 Like, I mean, it's my longest conversation, I think, that we've had since we've been doing this.

01:58:31.000 And I really enjoyed every second of it.

01:58:33.000 I really felt like on our previous encounter, I saw you break down some ideas very beautifully.

01:58:39.000 I really felt like, between that survey and then that list of aspirational values, I don't know if you've, I suppose you must have written them things down before, I felt like, ah!

01:58:51.000 We need that cartilage. 0.88

01:58:53.000 We need that cartilage. 0.88

01:58:55.000 Thank you very much for doing that work.

01:58:56.000 It was amazing to listen to you and learn from you.

01:58:58.000 Thank you.

01:58:59.000 Thank you.

01:59:00.000 Love talking to you.

01:59:00.000 Okay, well, I hope you've enjoyed that conversation with Greg Hervitz.

01:59:04.000 Let me know what you thought in the comments and chat.

01:59:07.000 We will be back tomorrow with Stay Free Oracles.

01:59:09.000 I'll be joined by Lara Logan and Neil Oliver, and we'll be discussing the biggest news stories of the week.

01:59:15.000 We'll be back then.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - February 19, 2025

The Battle for Truth: Gregg Hurwitz on Myth, Power & Cultural Control – SF540

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