In this episode, Russell Brand talks about his early Christian faith and how it led him to become a Christian. He also talks about the challenges of being a Christian in the modern world, and why it s important to have a spiritual relationship with God.
00:00:48.000Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:50.000Whether 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...
00:01:03.000Philosopher and political thinker who's fascinated with the way that potentially we could bring America back together again.
00:01:09.000Let me know in the comments and chat whether that's even a desirable outcome.
00:01:13.000We'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.
00:01:24.000We're going to be talking as well about Trump's declaration that women's sports will be protected and the complexity that emerges.
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00:01:47.000I want to say hello to those of you watching us on Locals.
00:01:49.000We 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.
00:02:01.000You get all sorts of fantastic content.
00:02:46.000So you all know more about this than I do.
00:02:49.000So, inadvertently, I've been worshipping false idols, the false idol of fame.
00:02:54.000And if you do something like that, if someone's more famous than you, Then you...
00:02:58.000Might feel inferior, because if you invested, it was Benedict Cumberbatch, is who it was.
00:03:03.000In England, it's like they've tried to make Jesus boring.
00:03:05.000No 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.
00:03:15.000But overall, it seems like in England, they're trying to make Christianity seem like it's boring.
00:03:20.000And like when you read from Genesis to Revelation, there's fire and power and angels and demons and resurrection.
00:03:30.000And 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...
00:03:51.000So get Rumble Premium if you want more additional content like that.
00:03:55.000Tomorrow, 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.
00:04:03.000We've got Greg Hervitz coming up, but before that, let's talk about perhaps the defining political issue of our era.
00:04:12.000Donald Trump has signed an executive order protecting women's sports and female sports.
00:04:18.000One of the moments that changed my perspective on this subject was this simple question.
00:04:26.000Because 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.
00:04:39.000I mean, it's just completely measurable.
00:04:41.000Having said that, As a spiritual man and a believer in God, there are some things that cannot be measured.
00:04:47.000Something like essence, some subtle forms of energy that are difficult to discern using purely material means.
00:04:54.000So how does the issue of gender get used in the culture?
00:04:59.000How is it deployed by both sides of the cultural argument to push home their claims for moral superiority?
00:05:05.000One of the people that's been very outspoken on this issue from the get-go is J.K. Rowling.
00:05:11.000She made this post about Donald Trump signing the executive order protecting women's sports.
00:05:16.000Now that is notable for a number of reasons.
00:05:19.000For one thing, Donald Trump is surrounded by female children and isn't sniffing...
00:05:24.000That seems to be an advance for presidential politics, if nothing else.
00:05:28.000Let'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.
00:05:41.000You know, if you'd like to gather around me, I think I'm going to be okay.
00:05:46.000Wherever 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.
00:06:02.000When 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?
00:06:11.000You sort of see him around children and you think, Hold on a minute, he seems really nice.
00:06:15.000Now, I can almost feel people that are determined to continue to dislike Donald Trump saying, well, Adolf Hitler!
00:06:33.000And 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?
00:06:46.000We have now reverted, as a result of the rise of the MAGA movement and Trump's presidency, to a there are two genders.
00:06:53.000There are men and women, like in the book of Genesis.
00:06:56.000So what do you do if you are a caring and compassionate...
00:06:59.000I'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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00:07:59.0001.5 million and 1, 1.5 million and 2. See?
00:08:03.000Go to livegood.com forward slash Russell and get 10% off your first order if you use my special code.
00:08:49.000Watch what I do, and then I'm going to give you some pens, okay?
00:08:53.000I'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.
00:09:01.000If 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.
00:09:16.000He's not fully comfortable with who he is.
00:09:17.000You will remember Joe Biden, or the variety of Joe Biden.
00:09:20.000Sometimes it appeared he had stand-ins, sniffing around kids' heads, saying weird stuff all the time.
00:09:26.000Or Kamala Harris' weird and jarring, awkward dancing, all triangles and elbows spilling across a dance floor in an attempt to appear human.
00:09:37.000What'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.
00:09:51.000But 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...
00:10:08.000There aren't that many people that have made cultural contributions that are that impactful and varied.
00:10:14.000Now, that also doesn't mean she's a brilliant person or...
00:10:17.000Well, she's a brilliant person, but it doesn't mean that she's morally unimpeachable, of course.
00:10:22.000But it does mean you're dealing with an individual that in...
00:10:25.000Any sensible culture will be difficult to malign and condemn, particularly if they're saying something that doesn't seem that outrageous.
00:10:32.000In 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.
00:10:40.000She'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...
00:10:50.000Gone 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.
00:11:01.000And 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.
00:11:09.000What do we do about, like, weren't we all supposed to be...
00:11:11.000Concern about women's rights or gay people's rights?
00:11:14.000How come now we're advocating for the medicalisation of trans issues?
00:11:19.000If 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.
00:11:25.000Those are my two principles that I would be guided by.
00:11:29.000I 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...
00:11:57.000But when it comes to your role as a person that is charged with the care of a younger individual, what stand would you take?
00:12:04.000And would you want the government intervening?
00:12:06.000I 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.
00:12:14.000Let's see a little more of Donald Trump signing this order.
00:12:34.000I'm like, this is going to be a good signature.
00:12:36.000He's got, like, a perspective on his own signature.
00:12:39.000Although 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.
00:12:48.000Because 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.
00:12:59.000I just can't imagine a person like that withdrawing to some dreadful private place and going, I hate N-words or...
00:13:06.000Now, of course, that sort of famous tape of grab them by the P-word was an indication that there are levels to people.
00:13:12.000And indeed, all sexual conduct is by its nature intimate and...
00:13:17.000And 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.
00:13:29.000So I would say this, when you watch Donald Trump around kids, doesn't it seem like he's in general a pretty lovely person?
00:13:35.000Let 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.
00:13:44.000But more important than that is where do you stand on this issue of the protection of women's sports?
00:13:49.000And 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...
00:14:09.000In 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.
00:14:40.000Let'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.
00:14:55.000Let's go back and look at what Chris Hayes was saying during the COVID pandemic.
00:14:58.000I 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.
00:15:03.000That's just an aspersion I'm casting on him without.
00:15:06.000Real 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.
00:15:18.000But I also think at the same time, there is a message of what I would call, like, common sense patriotic pluralism.
00:15:26.000Common sense patriotic pluralism, i.e.
00:15:31.000If 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.
00:15:44.000To have universal reason, you have to have a higher principle, don't you?
00:15:47.000Even to make claims to common sense, you are sort of saying that there is a God.
00:15:51.000If 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?
00:16:01.000Because otherwise you can't have common sense.
00:16:03.000You can't have common sense unless you're saying there's a consensual, universal, agreed-upon reality.
00:16:09.000And pluralism, which at some point in this conversation Chris Hayes says is a synonym for diversity, could also be considered a synonym for variety.
00:16:33.000Between those people, pluralism is a kind of a word that indicates diaspora.
00:16:38.000Variety means we are all coming from a single center, one radiant creator, but we are different from one another, and we respect these differences.
00:16:49.000That 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.
00:17:46.000I should decide for myself whether my children are safe in the car.
00:17:50.000Now, I know that there's many, many questions that could bounce back over the net of me.
00:17:54.000Well, what if another driver did something?
00:17:56.000Or what if your children being out of their seat caused them to do something in the car that made you swerve?
00:18:01.000But that seems to me to be the legitimisation of authority.
00:18:05.000Rather than the advocacy for sensible authority.
00:18:07.000However, 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.
00:18:22.000So 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...
00:18:31.000There's a point where you'd say, but what in instances where those children are being abused or exploited?
00:18:36.000Now that is the question that's used to legitimise state interventionism.
00:18:41.000And I would contest this, that therefore any authority has to either be divine or consensual, i.e.
00:18:50.000Democratically elected within agreed parameters.
00:18:55.000You can't have state intervention unless it's sanctioned by God or mandate.
00:19:37.000Significant 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.
00:19:49.000I 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...
00:19:58.000Well, of course, they would say it's not medical care.
00:20:00.000They would say it's disfiguring a child.
00:20:04.000I think they should mind their own business.
00:20:24.000Has 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?
00:20:44.000Pushing and advocating for those measures.
00:20:46.000One way to test that would be, are certain states experiencing higher rates of trans kids?
00:20:53.000And do those states more publicly advocate for trans issues?
00:20:57.000My children, I want them to be whoever they are.
00:21:00.000And 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.
00:21:11.000But 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.
00:21:39.000As 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.
00:21:46.000The problem comes when you believe in hate.
00:21:48.000Now, that's what everyone attributes to a figure like Donald Trump.
00:22:03.000You tell me in the comments and the chat.
00:22:05.000And any parent worthy of the name will do what's best for their children.
00:22:11.000So 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.
00:22:30.000Let 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.
00:22:45.000And 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.
00:22:56.000But we have to be alert to the idea of propaganda and the impact of a culture on an individual.
00:23:01.000If a culture doesn't have an impact on an individual, why have a culture at all?
00:23:05.000Certainly 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.
00:23:14.000And when you look at Donald Trump, Trump's surrounded by kids.
00:23:15.000It's difficult to see the guy as evil.
00:23:17.000And if you're determined to see him as evil, then you might want to investigate where those ideas came from.
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00:25:25.000If 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...
00:25:33.000Our next guest is Greg Hervitz, whose new book Nemesis is out now.
00:25:53.000Fundamentally involved in addressing political and cultural polarization, producing numerous commercials and writing op-eds for publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Guardian.
00:26:01.000So 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.
00:26:12.000Click the link in the description to join us for what's sure to be a fantastic conversation about culture and power.
00:26:19.000Greg Hervitz, thank you so much for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:26:25.000Congratulations on your new book, Nemesis, which is out now.
00:26:30.000One of the things that I know you do brilliantly well is wrestle into the form of fiction, complex, contemporary, cultural conversation.
00:28:26.000Because 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.
00:28:40.000Was Jordan Peterson the kind of professor that everyone was kind of clamouring to be a sort of favourite, and where did you rank?
00:28:52.000And yeah, I mean, there was something about him that was just foundationally different.
00:28:56.000I 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.
00:29:08.000And I remember, so we had some pretty great professors.
00:29:11.000I mean, Seamus Heaney was there teaching Yates.
00:29:18.000But 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.
00:29:28.000It was going to be Peterson, like Ibsen or Chekhov or Freud.
00:29:34.000There was something in his expansiveness of reach, and a lot of that was...
00:29:40.000Bringing together symbological and mythological structures of thinking with hard and intense science.
00:29:45.000One 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.
00:29:55.000It's like, Jordan is like a knockdown, no shit, hardcore scientist beyond anything.
00:30:02.000I 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.
00:30:14.000And I'd say this was also at a time when a lot of the great old professors were retiring.
00:30:20.000I 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.
00:30:27.000He was an expert in etiquette psychology, which is fascinating, literature and film.
00:30:32.000And he would retire and somebody else would come along who was an expert on like one gene.
00:30:36.000And 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.
00:30:50.000And I think in Jordan, it was evident to me.
00:30:53.000I mean, my undergrad, I was English in psychology.
00:30:54.000I was writing about Shakespeare, but I did Freudian and Jungian analysis of Shakespeare and I used him to contrast them.
00:31:01.000And 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.
00:31:09.000I mean, look, of all the things Jordan's brilliant at, he's brilliantest at being a psychologist.
00:31:13.000It's just staggering watching him work and move around that filter.
00:31:19.000And so, yeah, to me, it was just clear as day all the way back then.
00:31:23.000So I like to think I discovered him, and I'm responsible in large part for his success.
00:31:31.000Also, 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.
00:31:52.000Are the kind of criticisms that are offered at...
00:31:56.000Projected, fired off at John Peterson is that he's some kind of poor man's intellectual.
00:32:01.000That he somehow lacks veracity and depth and foundations.
00:32:05.000That he's like the stupid man's philosopher.
00:32:10.000In 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.
00:32:28.000Well, you know, if you talk about he's a dumb person's idea of a smart person, it's pretty great.
00:32:35.000It's like, that's what we call an educator.
00:32:38.000You know, that's Jordan taking incredibly complicated ideas and boiling them down.
00:32:45.000I mean, and I've been dealing with this a lot because, you know, Jordan and I have been friends all the way back.
00:32:51.000I 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.
00:33:03.000About the dangers of the far left, in large part due to my relationship with Jordan.
00:33:10.000I 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.
00:33:22.000That defines the summation of everything who he is.
00:33:26.000And I sort of watch this idiocy come after and attack him.
00:33:29.000You know, it tends to be combined with crushing moral sanctimony and an utter and comprehensive lack of curiosity.
00:33:35.000It sort of is a devastating combination of incompetence and lack of curiosity and sanctimony.
00:33:45.000And 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.
00:33:53.000And 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.
00:34:14.000As other hostile regimes and players and psychopathic algorithms are marching and making inroads.
00:34:19.000So we do need a solidity among us, and I've been working with him to do that.
00:34:23.000But yeah, I think there's very few people taken more out of context than him.
00:34:28.000And 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.
00:34:48.000I mean, dismiss him for other reasons.
00:34:51.000You know, he uses the term bucko too much.
00:34:55.000I 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.
00:35:01.000One 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.
00:35:29.000And we today talked about J.K. Rowling posting when she did the image of Trump surrounded by...
00:35:36.000Girls was a real positive thing, that people that had engaged in the cultural war had sort of brought that about.
00:35:41.000Now, when we were unpacking that, Greg, I felt...
00:35:51.000Individual 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.
00:36:02.000And 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.
00:36:17.000The 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...
00:36:27.000Tolkien or Walt Disney, that you wouldn't just go, well, she's out because she's interested in protecting women's spaces.
00:36:34.000What 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?
00:36:57.000You know, that's a superb question and fertile grounds for discussion.
00:37:03.000The 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.
00:37:10.000She'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.
00:37:18.000Largely, largely responsible for an entire generation of readers.
00:37:22.000And so as somebody who's a novelist, novels are my main, you know, this is my 25th or 26th novel.
00:37:29.000I have watched her build out an entire readership.
00:37:32.000The 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.
00:37:40.000She's been an extraordinary cultural impact.
00:37:43.000She's done a ton for women's rights, children's...
00:37:46.000She, you know, she was homeless for a brief time.
00:37:50.000And I think one of the things that is really important, I also want to frame what her actual perspective was.
00:37:55.000Her 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.
00:38:16.000However, I believe there are certain spaces that need to be protected for women.
00:38:20.000My 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.
00:38:33.000If 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.
00:38:45.000If that is so extreme that that person must be removed from the public record, then you're not...
00:39:13.000And we've seen that this victim-oppressor narrative, which we now know leads to fascistic thinking.
00:39:18.000There'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.
00:39:28.000They get sort of totalitarian curious if we start to divide people into groups.
00:39:33.000So 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.
00:39:45.000What 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.
00:40:01.000And that began the long march through the institutions.
00:40:04.000And one of the things that's so weird for me, so I was an English and psychology major, as we talked about.
00:40:09.000I 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.
00:40:22.000When I was an undergraduate, this was starting to become widespread, though we could still make fun of it.
00:40:28.000It wasn't like I would get canceled for saying, I've had it with Deridara Foucault.
00:40:32.000Like, I kind of think they should be tied to an anchor.
00:40:36.000But 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.
00:40:45.000And so having Marxism through literary critics who are French come in through how we view texts, right?
00:41:00.000If 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.
00:41:12.000And 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.
00:41:21.000And I think that's why it's so profound in the arts.
00:41:24.000If 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.
00:41:39.000The 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?
00:41:49.000Let's say that's Dostoyevsky, let's say that's Solzhenitsyn.
00:41:53.000We 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.
00:42:01.000And so I think it's very interesting you bring up J.K. Rowling.
00:42:04.000I 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.
00:42:12.000That's fascinating because I suppose what she's doing is...
00:42:15.000Articulating contemporaneously universal and therefore ancient, pre-ancient ideas and themes and making in so doing claims for an objective truth, an objective reality.
00:42:29.000Now 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.
00:42:42.000I think could be utilised by those of us that are not post-structuralists, that do believe in an objective reality.
00:42:49.000And just to be less opaque, I believe in God.
00:43:01.000The 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.
00:43:19.000Rowling 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.
00:43:31.000Fashions 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?
00:43:54.000But 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.
00:44:22.000Could 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?
00:45:27.000And we know that they will have a hero myth with all of the constituent steps.
00:45:31.000So this hero myth, we are ingrained to perceive and engage in the world in ways through story.
00:45:37.000They teach us how to contend with the internal and the external unknown.
00:45:40.000So if you read one of my thrillers, in a way you can think of that as practice.
00:45:45.000You don't actually have to go get killed by a cartel member or like garroted in a banya in Moscow.
00:45:50.000It's practice for us to figure out how we can iterate these.
00:45:54.000I 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.
00:46:08.000We talked about this a lot in Gospels.
00:46:10.000The Gospel narrative, the four stories in the Gospels, are like a perfect gem of a hero myth.
00:46:18.000They've just been compressed to almost perfection.
00:46:21.000So if you can invert that and you think about that every charge that somebody levels, that's not right.
00:46:29.000Many charges that people level not in good faith are confessions.
00:46:33.000And 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.
00:47:49.000It can't be anything if it is literally the top value.
00:47:52.000And 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.
00:48:04.000And even these values that can have values, is empathy an important value?
00:48:20.000That's a disastrous way to make decisions.
00:48:22.000And so the hierarchical ranking of a story, of a value set, I'm sorry, is what stories teach us.
00:48:28.000That's what we learn about when we read Crime and Punishment.
00:48:31.000That's what we're exploring when we look at how things get out of whack with Animal Farm.
00:48:36.000Give us a bit of an example of that, would you?
00:48:39.000Of like how a story, could you just pick one?
00:48:41.000You seem to have access to quite a lot of them off the top of your head.
00:48:44.000How a particular story is demonstrating a particular value.
00:48:47.000I 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.
00:49:05.000Like, the highest value is power to sacrifice for the common good.
00:49:10.000That the greatest king that ever came died for the most vulnerable and weakest person.
00:49:22.000As 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.
00:49:32.000He made me read Eliad Mercia, and I was thinking how in that...
00:49:38.000There was one line that really struck me.
00:49:41.000He 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.
00:49:57.000And it seems to me that that's part of the goal, to engender the sort of bewilderment that does indeed enable...
00:50:03.000Power, 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.
00:50:15.000And 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.
00:50:28.000So I wonder, what story demonstrates...
00:50:34.000And 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.
00:50:46.000First of all, that's a world-class question, perfectly structured.
00:50:50.000You're like Christopher Hitchens that you speak in perfectly contained paragraphs.
00:50:55.000So there's three parts to the answer, which I want to hit.
00:50:58.000If 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.
00:51:10.000A lot of people know the Myers-Briggs tests, right?
00:51:13.000But there's different ways we break down personality.
00:51:15.000For people who very much embrace this victim-oppressor narrative, there's a couple things they have in common.
00:51:21.000One of them is that they're very low in trait conscientiousness.
00:51:30.000It's the second highest predictor of success in the world after IQ. It's incredibly important.
00:51:36.000So if you're low on that ability, it means that you're not going to compete particularly well in the world.
00:51:43.000And so a lot of the people who love this narrative are low trait conscientiousness.
00:51:48.000And then they also have super high trait empathy.
00:51:51.000Where 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...
00:52:20.000Angry, affluent people got involved as like tourists on that front.
00:52:24.000And 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.
00:52:33.000So what you do is you piggyback or parasite on behalf of somebody else's perceived victimhood, which you're going to then promulgate.
00:52:40.000And we see this in a lot of movements.
00:52:42.000And the third thing is low verbal acuity.
00:52:45.000And what that means is that you can't...
00:53:08.000The 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.
00:53:20.000I'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.
00:53:28.000Number two, you mentioned the story of Christ, and I would say that the approach that we took in the Gospels...
00:53:34.000It'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.
00:53:44.000So 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.
00:54:00.000I want to give two stories, one positive, one negative.
00:54:03.000In 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.
00:54:18.000You have every single thing, and everything in the culture turns against him.
00:54:22.000It's the person who has the most virtue punished the most unjustly in the most inconceivably awful way, who then still elects.
00:54:32.000To embrace his suffering in order to be transcendent, to transcend the suffering as an example for others.
00:54:38.000So 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.
00:54:50.000It's an extraordinary, extraordinary...
00:55:46.000So there's this incredible inversion of somebody who is the least deserving taking the most suffering in the most graceful, conceivable way.
00:56:54.000That's the mom who's like driving over and doing her son's laundry when he's...
00:56:58.00026 years old so that he can't have a fiance and his girlfriend can't get the mom out of the way.
00:57:04.000That'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?
00:57:13.000And 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.
00:57:49.000I mean, if sainthood is the goal to become, in a sense, not to absolutely become yourself.
00:57:55.000Well, I mean, in the end, you're going to find paradox and irony in these things.
00:57:58.000In fact, your rather lovely and brilliant answer was redolent with precisely such ironies, i.e.
00:58:06.000the 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.
00:58:16.000And 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.
00:58:35.000There's an odd Alignment and a peculiar and difficult alloying.
00:58:40.000Because, 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.
00:58:47.000And just when I'm thinking of mothers that I know, I recognise their witch in the gingerbread house.
00:58:55.000I 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.
00:59:05.000I used to be an actor, and maybe I will be again.
00:59:43.000If 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.
01:01:10.000The idea in particular that Shakespeare could be categorized as a religious text rather than a literary text.
01:01:16.000And that, mate, takes us back to what you were saying.
01:01:19.000And 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.
01:01:31.000So yeah, that's a good framing for you, isn't it?
01:01:38.000And 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.
01:01:47.000Everything is based on stuff that's pre-existing.
01:01:50.000And every time he did it, it's funny because some people will have objections that the Merchant of Venice has anti-Semitic elements.
01:01:56.000But if you compare it to the Jew of Malta that it's based on, he breathed so much life and substance into this.
01:02:03.000And so what I don't want to get mistaken for saying that...
01:02:07.000We don't want Barracuda-like attacks on the text, but it doesn't mean, as you said, that we don't want to innovate.
01:02:12.000Baz Luhrmann was brilliant with that with Romeo and Juliet.
01:02:15.000Shakespeare was somebody who experimented.
01:02:17.000He 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.
01:02:24.000Now, with Othello, for instance, there was a brilliant Othello.
01:02:27.000And so what that means is we can bring new...
01:02:29.000New voices and new identities and new concepts to play with the text.
01:02:34.000I think it was Patrick Stewart did A Brilliant Othello where he was white and everybody else was black.
01:02:42.000So it's this really interesting thing.
01:02:43.000It'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.
01:02:50.000And movement and different voices and different approaches because that's the lifeblood.
01:02:55.000That'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.
01:03:06.000Iago, to give just a quick example about this, you're talking about archetypes.
01:03:11.000Iago'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.
01:03:20.000There's all this bestial, satanic imagery.
01:03:23.000And 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.
01:03:31.000And the play is a seesaw tilt as he sort of infects Othello.
01:04:03.000Because he has completed his takeover of Othello.
01:04:05.000So 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.
01:04:33.000You touched on Shakespeare, just sort of his role.
01:04:37.000And 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?
01:04:44.000Like, so, you know, by this Barracuda metaphor that you're using.
01:04:48.000Shakespeare was, first of all, he was an actor, which, as you know, is considered the lowliest of the low, right?
01:04:53.000Everybody called him this, you know, meat puppet, upstart crow who spoke from his neck.
01:04:57.000He wasn't sort of an erudite playwright.
01:05:00.000And what he was trying to do is put asses in chairs and sell out the Globe Theatre night after night after night.
01:05:08.000He'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.
01:05:15.000You have royalty up here, you have the groundlings.
01:06:35.000You'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.
01:06:47.000If 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.
01:06:58.000And 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.
01:07:08.000It'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.
01:08:53.000I 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.
01:09:02.000Anyway, the Tempest, it seemed like a magnificent story, because a court, books, wisdom, magic...
01:09:12.000But 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.
01:09:22.000It 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.
01:09:34.000And that's surprising when I think about it.
01:09:36.000Other than I can think of in Hamlet, that the Almighty had not set his canon against self-slaughter.
01:09:43.000But, you know, it's sort of almost deliberately pagan in a bunch of his plays, and sort of certainly kind of...
01:09:49.000And 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.
01:10:02.000It's interesting that there doesn't seem to be a particular take.
01:10:06.000And it's interesting too to think of him as being a populist that was literally interested in selling out in the most literal way.
01:10:18.000Well, 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.
01:10:25.000I did a one-year master's in Shakespeare in England, and I love him.
01:10:29.000But it's so funny that people have this perception that he's floating up in some arid space.
01:10:35.000It's like he wrote highly structured, narrative-driven tales of lust, intrigue, and murder.
01:10:40.000And from borrowed texts, the same way that Ross MacDonald inherits...
01:10:45.000Raymond Chandler is inherited by Michael Conley and Robert Crace.
01:10:49.000These plots, the femme fatale, the archetypes that we have in thrillers are often received.
01:10:59.000I mean, I think that's his stand-in and his goodbye to the world.
01:11:02.000And 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.
01:11:15.000And he takes the weight of the kind of shadow.
01:11:18.000Remember, Caliban's in a cave and he smells like fish and he's like this vile thing of earth and clay.
01:11:24.000And Prospero acknowledges that as part of himself.
01:11:53.000There'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.
01:12:02.000And 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.
01:12:11.000You know, Michelangelo couldn't just do whatever the hell he wanted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, right?
01:12:19.000I might have that wrong, so let's fact check me.
01:12:21.000But, you know, you need to, and so Shakespeare, when he's writing with Queen Elizabeth, there's a lot about virgin leadership.
01:12:27.000There's a lot that's an homage to her.
01:12:29.000And 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.
01:12:40.000So in that great chain of being, it's like sort of God, then royalty, then everybody else.
01:12:44.000And 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?
01:12:52.000This bumbling, rhyming dialogue that's so weird, some people think he didn't write the witches scenes almost.
01:12:58.000But when you tear that fabric, it sort of opens the maws of hell.
01:13:02.000And we see that too in the way that Iago opens that up within Othello in the language that we discussed a little bit.
01:13:09.000And so that notion of a structure is there quite completely.
01:13:13.000But with Shakespeare, you know, he's burying a lot of this imagery further beneath the surface.
01:13:19.000And so I think that's part of what makes it so compelling is because when we're in it, we're just watching drama.
01:13:25.000Because we have to make a choice, as you say, around what are our values.
01:13:42.000And I suppose that it's somehow in love, I sense...
01:13:46.000There 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.
01:14:11.000And 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.
01:14:31.000And 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.
01:14:43.000But 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!
01:15:09.000Like when he tells the players, don't mess this up, you know.
01:15:12.000You'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.
01:15:20.000It 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...
01:15:35.000Great analysts of culture, certainly of our time, but maybe beyond even that, as you said earlier.
01:15:42.000And 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?
01:16:22.000So 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.
01:18:22.000But 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.
01:18:30.000You 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.
01:18:43.000What you want is for the story to be predominant and for the author, in some sense, to recede into this flow.
01:18:51.000You mentioned two other things, which I just wanted to remark on briefly.
01:18:53.000You talked about truth and love as sort of these competing ideals for the highest value.
01:18:58.000And my wife, who's a psychologist, pretty amazing.
01:19:03.000She 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.
01:19:39.000If you're trying to start with spin, if you're trying to start with marketing or messaging, you're doomed.
01:19:44.000But there certainly are ways to use force without the minimal necessary force.
01:19:49.000And 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.
01:20:04.000And 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...
01:20:14.000There's two facts to me that are way more important than anything else in the entire political landscape.
01:20:20.000Fact number one, since Reagan, $50 trillion with a T have gone from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.
01:20:30.000That's under Obama's and Clinton's and Bush's and Reagan's.
01:20:34.000The 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%.
01:20:50.000So if we understand those two things and we understand that sort of...
01:20:56.000I 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.
01:21:09.000And that anything they say, we will take the opposite of.
01:21:11.000We need to have these two different worldviews and different personality structures.
01:21:16.000The liberal personality structure, the tired trade openness, which is what you are.
01:21:22.000You 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...
01:21:32.000High trade openness is the highest correlation with liberal value set, let's just say.
01:21:39.000And then conscientiousness is one of the highest predictors of conservatism.
01:21:43.000And so that tends to fold walls around things.
01:22:17.000And we're going to smash everything to pieces.
01:22:19.000And tons of people are going to get hurt.
01:22:20.000Because what we want is maximal change.
01:22:23.000That 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.
01:22:35.000So there's this balance that we're sort of dealing with there.
01:22:39.000Last 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...
01:23:38.000When you throw seeds, he's a storyteller.
01:23:40.000And 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.
01:23:49.000He is the vivification of story, and he is the apex and nexus of myth meets truth, because myth is truer than truth.
01:23:58.000And therefore, it sort of takes place beyond reality.
01:24:35.000Is, 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,
01:24:52.000wait 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.
01:25:07.000And 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.
01:25:19.000Doesn't it show you that what we've lost, as you said, like, I'd I hadn't spotted that before.
01:25:26.000The problem is, is what they do, is they claim there is no truth.
01:25:30.000And that's the kind of berserk aspect of nihilism, is that it's a havoc machine.
01:25:37.000Like, 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.
01:25:47.000It's discernible within it, in its geometry, in its golden scale, in its arithmetic, in its fractals.
01:25:53.000But it's sort of ensconced somehow within chaos.
01:25:57.000But what they're doing now in their great heresy, in their blasphemy against God of gods, is claiming that order itself...
01:26:07.000And 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.
01:26:18.000And control is on the spectrum of violence.
01:26:21.000And so with peculiar irony, they are guilty of the sin that they declare to be the worst of sins.
01:26:42.000It's the most powerful thing that we have.
01:26:44.000When 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.
01:27:02.000Because I do think that no matter who's in power, we need a competent opposing party.
01:27:08.000And I felt the same thing when Democrats were in power.
01:27:10.000I want the best of Republicans in there, too.
01:27:14.000But, 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.
01:27:28.000The 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.
01:27:41.000And 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.
01:27:50.000And with social media right now, we have a culture that never forgets anything and there's no mechanism to forgive anything.
01:27:57.000And so everything's sort of stuck in this frozen paralysis.
01:29:13.000There's some people who want to skip the entire process of shouldering the responsibility of what a protest is.
01:29:21.000And 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.
01:29:33.000You go to jail if you're Martin Luther King.
01:29:48.000You don't ask for class credit for it at Vassar.
01:29:51.000And 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.
01:30:05.000Let's change the law, and let's do so within the parameters of the legal system.
01:30:09.000And so a lot of that has been forgotten.
01:30:13.000I think that's a really important term.
01:30:16.000There's phrases that are super loaded.
01:30:18.000If 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...
01:32:00.000About that that I find so fascinating, because you talk so compellingly and oddly in a way that I delight in about Scripture.
01:32:10.000But 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...
01:32:20.000He's killing the thing that he should aspire to.
01:32:36.000And 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.
01:32:48.000Those descendants in that line, as distinct from Seth, are the ones who build the Tower of Babel.
01:32:54.000The 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...
01:33:03.000It's equivalent, they hope, to God and reaches just as high as God, but it's not in conversation with God.
01:33:08.000So what happens when you're going to assume and build your own thing?
01:34:34.000But 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.
01:34:41.000It's important to take care of our environment and ensure that we have clean fields and streams, seas and skies.
01:34:47.000Americans are tired of political division.
01:34:53.000And it's question after question like this.
01:34:57.000It's just incredible how much agreement we actually have.
01:35:01.000So 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.
01:35:12.000So the sensors are hacking our nervous system.
01:35:18.000We know there's a ton of PSYOPs being run by China, Russia, and the Iranian regime.
01:35:22.000And then we have bad faith domestic players making money.
01:35:24.000And so there's all these networks that are controlling us that are driving outrage, fear, anxiety, and anger.
01:35:33.000And the news that filters in and back to us basically turns the opposition into a monolith.
01:35:39.000And 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.
01:35:55.000Now, 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.
01:36:01.000And one of the ways that mind control cults work is that everybody is miserable, but they can't talk to each other.
01:36:10.000So think of all of North Korea as a mind control cult.
01:36:13.000Like everyone knows that they're starving and miserable, but you're not allowed to sort of speak it.
01:36:17.000And 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.
01:36:51.000As 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.
01:37:08.000And 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.
01:37:14.000And 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.
01:38:15.000And 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.
01:38:41.000And like to your Cain and Abel point, I mean, it's like, it's so...
01:39:07.000The profanisation, if such a word is possible, of everything, the desacralisation of everything, it leaves us in such an extraordinary mess.
01:39:19.000Your point about, you know, I don't think or talk enough about external threats because I've...
01:39:25.000Just 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.
01:39:32.000You 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.
01:40:01.000Challenge is sorting out the, you know, the Anglophonic or, in very commas, Western world, what once would have been Christendom.
01:40:07.000And, like, and so, like, I don't think so much about it.
01:40:10.000And 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.
01:40:30.000I recognize that perhaps uniquely and immediately where we are now is we best start getting cohesive right now because there are barbarians.
01:40:58.000I mean, his ability to work psyops and to convey that sort of...
01:41:04.000Like, incredible KGB levels of manipulation.
01:41:07.000He's just, he's fascinating and powerful and brilliant.
01:41:11.000And we cannot underestimate him for that.
01:41:14.000And 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.
01:41:21.000It'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.
01:41:30.000And it's like, wait a minute, guys, there's all sorts of disagreements.
01:41:34.000You know, Bannon doesn't get along with Musk.
01:41:37.000Like, J.D. Vance has a different worldview than Trump.
01:41:40.000If 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.
01:41:51.000And I said, well, Trump just tweeted that he's a big fan of the polio vaccination.
01:42:01.000But 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.
01:42:20.000You'll be frozen in a state of abject terror.
01:42:23.000If everything that is the worst possible thing that can happen is true, and anything that might provide relief or comfort, or to be aware...
01:42:31.000There's different factions, and there's plenty of good factions.
01:42:33.000You and I know and have worked with some of them that are pure people who are working in very close to pure.
01:42:41.000Any human endeavor is going to be corrupt.
01:42:43.000Is there going to be corruption in this administration?
01:42:46.000Same with if it was Vice President Harris.
01:42:49.000But there are strains that we have to look at and differentiate.
01:42:54.000You brought up something else to me that's really interesting, and I've been thinking about this a lot.
01:42:58.000My background, though I'm not secular, I don't consider myself secular, but I'm from a very sort of atheist, intellectual, liberal background.
01:43:08.000But 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.
01:43:16.000And so it's like, if you can get a Jesuit-trained brain, it's really worth doing.
01:43:21.000But I've been looking at the ways when we're talking about these stories, like our eyelids and opposable thumbs conversation, right?
01:43:29.000That there's things in these stories that are essential.
01:43:31.000Well, there's the aspect of original sin that's part of this jewel that's at the basis of all of Western civilization.
01:43:39.000Everything that we know and understand, whether it's, you know, Michelangelo and Beethoven and Caravaggio, go down the list.
01:43:47.000Everything, this is something that is a key and foundational element.
01:43:51.000You can't just get rid of the notion of original sin.
01:43:54.000Whether 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.
01:44:05.000And if you get rid of it, where are you left?
01:44:08.000What you're left with is saying, oh, well, like you were saying, what would we say today about Martin Luther King?
01:44:21.000And 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.
01:44:30.000And 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.
01:44:44.000And so if you don't have a basis to understand that we are, like, what does Jordan say?
01:44:51.000If 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.
01:45:04.000He's a brilliant Orthodox Christian thinker.
01:45:09.000He talks about how when Adam named the animals, the animals came and kind of kneeled to him, or kneeled to Adam.
01:45:17.000And the imagery in medieval times shows a lot of this, that it's an active sort of...
01:45:23.000Dominance is the right word, but it's sort of an act of stewardship that places man above creation.
01:45:29.000And as Douglas Murray has said about the vehement fringe of the environmental movement, not what I just said.
01:45:34.000It's important for us to take care of our environment, ensure we have clean fields and streams, seas and skies.
01:45:40.000I'm with the 95% of Americans that I agree.
01:45:42.000But when we elevate that, we should get our tubes tied.
01:45:49.000Back 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.
01:46:00.000So a beaver can build a dam, but we can't figure out how to dance or bioengineer or take responsible steps.
01:46:07.000And 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.
01:46:15.000And 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.
01:46:29.000So there's a mechanism that's in place to say...
01:46:34.000I 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.
01:46:46.000There'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.
01:46:58.000But 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.
01:47:18.000My moral position is absolute no matter what.
01:47:21.000And it also doesn't ground us in the solipsism and narcissism of endless grief.
01:47:27.000And depression and guilt because guilt is inward looking.
01:47:31.000And so you have to have a mechanism in the culture to say, oh, I went astray by X percent.
01:47:58.000We 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.
01:48:09.000Not 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.
01:48:21.000And the last thing that I'll add is something Jordan and I have talked a lot about.
01:48:26.000The movement that proliferated around viewing different perspectives, right?
01:48:41.000You even have it with a theory of relativity.
01:48:42.000So it moves through the arts, this notion that different perspectives are key.
01:48:46.000And 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.
01:49:31.000To understand and to take on what the patient is feeling.
01:49:34.000If it's their anxiety, you're trying to comprehend and understand them.
01:49:38.000And the dearth of this in political and partisan discourse to me, and the lack of practice by reading texts for what they actually represent.
01:49:57.000What's a belief system that is foreign to me that I don't come from?
01:50:00.000Some of these notions within Christianity are foreign for me from my family upbringing.
01:50:05.000But 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.
01:50:19.000It's not like you're just taken over, right?
01:50:21.000Like, let's deplatform everyone who thinks differently because they'll infect me and then I'll be a zombie acolyte.
01:50:27.000What 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.
01:50:38.000There'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.
01:50:49.000If we're just liberals with high-trade openness, what do we do?
01:50:52.000We stomp on the gas and we go straight into a fucking wall or off a cliff.
01:50:58.000And if we're conservatives, we stomp on the brake pedal and we don't go anywhere.
01:51:02.000So 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.
01:51:14.000And if we can unify that under a combined story...
01:51:19.000Especially if that story values above all else, love, self-sacrifice for the greatest good, minimal possible force, only a freely entered a new covenant.
01:51:51.000That 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.
01:52:11.000It was from Neil deGrasse Tyson some time ago.
01:52:13.000I figure he says it a lot, but he certainly said it once when I was talking to him.
01:52:19.000I think we were discussing the veracity of the moon landings or some sort of conspiratorial matter.
01:52:25.000And he goes, if you go to Cape Canaveral, there's rooms full of filing cabinets with all complicated maths and stuff.
01:52:32.000He goes, they would have gone to a lot of trouble.
01:52:35.000Anyway, 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?
01:52:45.000That would change your perspective, say to you or show you, that would change your perspective.
01:52:50.000And if the person says no, then there's obviously no point in having the conversation.
01:52:55.000That's a reference back to what you were saying about the people that will only selectively take on board what Trump says.
01:53:00.000And it's difficult not to imagine that whoever that sort of person was is, is that they're projecting their own outrage, i.e.
01:53:09.000prioritising their own internal cosmology.
01:53:12.000Over 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...
01:53:22.000Perspective, 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.
01:53:45.000how can you make a personal claim for truth, because by nature that will always be subjective.
01:53:51.000I love, too, what you said there about the animals bowing before Adam.
01:53:57.000And 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.
01:54:08.000And 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...
01:54:23.000Rejecting these, inverted commas, animal within you, the humors, the archetypes, the strains.
01:54:29.000And 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.
01:54:43.000Therefore, you can have common sense in the same way you can have a god.
01:54:47.000You could say common sense is a synecdoche for a...
01:55:12.000For us to even declare a common ground.
01:55:14.000And I think that with no common sense, there is no common ground.
01:55:19.000And also that thing you've done, like constructing a survey designed to show consensus, is precisely how we should proceed.
01:55:29.000And it shows you the, I would say, demonic appetites at play when in the...
01:55:36.000Inculcation of a new Babylon through technology that could be creating the ultimate community.
01:55:44.000Douglas 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.
01:55:54.000And 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.
01:56:11.000Not only can't we flourish, it's like trying to have a plant without sunlight.
01:56:25.000And 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.
01:56:58.000Like 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.
01:57:09.000If 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.
01:57:31.000It 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.
01:57:40.000And 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...
01:57:48.000Experiences throughout, you know, talking to Catholics is different from talking to evangelicals versus the Orthodox, you know, church.
01:57:56.000They all have the, you know, Judaism, having a conversation with Ben about sort of ritual and meaning and how he finds it.
01:58:04.000There 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.
01:58:26.000Like, I mean, it's my longest conversation, I think, that we've had since we've been doing this.
01:58:31.000And I really enjoyed every second of it.
01:58:33.000I really felt like on our previous encounter, I saw you break down some ideas very beautifully.
01:58:39.000I 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!