The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.000 Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to continue an ongoing conversation with a

00:00:21.460 friend and colleague of mine, Greg Hurwitz. We've been talking intensely for 30 years and

00:00:26.980 have involved ourselves together in a multitude of projects, including one that was designed to

00:00:32.780 help pull the Democrats to the center. Greg has been involved more recently in an enterprise called

00:00:39.360 Us the Story, which is aiming at criticizing the victim-victimizer narrative that characterizes

00:00:48.360 our culture, at least the pathological elements of it, but also delving into the root causes of the

00:00:55.800 disintegration and polarization that now characterize our culture. Now, some of that's

00:01:01.400 a consequence of intellectual movement, but some of it is actually facilitated by a series of bad

00:01:06.720 actors, and those involve people who are agitating directly and consciously as well as indirectly and

00:01:12.200 unconsciously on the international front. Iran, China, and Russia, who are using the social media

00:01:19.480 access that they have, especially to young people and particularly to young women, to really

00:01:24.560 dement and distort their political view, and in a manner that's really, really hard on the culture.

00:01:30.240 And so Greg talks a fair bit about exactly how that's laying itself out. And on the optimistic side,

00:01:37.040 we talked a fair bit about, well, the counterposition to that, which is that there's mass, deep agreement

00:01:43.160 among the vast majority of Americans on key policy issues, both international and domestic.

00:01:49.720 And none of that gets any airtime. And so what do we do? Detail out the role of the bad international

00:01:55.440 actors, talk a little bit about the psychopathic trolls and the demonic algorithms, and stress the

00:02:01.500 fact that there is intense unity in a Central American story, hence us the story, let's say, that does

00:02:09.700 unite people properly and productively and passionately and psychologically and socially,

00:02:15.480 and that there's reason for real optimism in that regard. So join us for that discussion.

00:02:22.120 Well, Mr. Hurwitz, we meet again.

00:02:24.900 It's good to see you.

00:02:26.280 We've been talking for a long time about polarization and trying to ameliorate it, and probably adding to it, too,

00:02:37.320 inadvertently, because that's always a problem.

00:02:39.940 When the feedback loops that are producing something like polarization get raging, that's a good way of

00:02:48.340 thinking about it, it isn't always obvious how to rectify that without amplifying it. It's a big

00:02:56.460 problem. And so I've seen a tremendous increase in the power of that polarization process since October 7th,

00:03:06.760 and we've talked about that a lot, how that might be addressed. I've seen that polarization expand on the left

00:03:14.500 and on the right, and it's not a good thing. And so, while we've been talking about that, as I alluded to

00:03:21.460 for years, but also more intently in the last few months, and so do you want to start by explaining your

00:03:27.280 position on this and what you've been up to?

00:03:30.460 Well, I was tasked first as a point of entry, I guess, of going in to explore anti-Semitism.

00:03:36.760 And one of the things I found really quickly is it's not very much about anti-Semitism.

00:03:42.580 Anti-Semitism is just sort of a tool and part of a broader narrative. And when we explored it,

00:03:49.480 we found some extraordinary things. We found the extent of foreign operations coming into America

00:03:55.860 and manipulating opinion here. And the other thing that we found that was quite extraordinary is that

00:04:01.180 America, we have a lot of problems that we need to fix here. So, I'm under no illusion about that.

00:04:07.560 But America is in enormous agreement about a lot of things. America is sort of foundationally good

00:04:14.200 and still oriented to what America was with its values. And we can talk about that a little bit

00:04:18.620 more later. But we're enthralled to, I think, two major factors, foreign psychological operations

00:04:25.840 that are being run here. We see that in the university. We certainly see it through social

00:04:29.640 media. And a sort of profit center within the U.S. of people who profit from us being constantly

00:04:36.980 outraged all the time. And so, we have a very shifting view from what the reality is of the

00:04:42.460 country to the way that we feel that everything's falling apart. And there are, in fact, some concrete

00:04:47.020 steps that we can take towards trying to put things right again.

00:04:49.920 Okay. So, when you say we, talk a little bit about the organization that you've put together to

00:04:55.940 start to address this and let everybody know where you're coming from and also the nature of our

00:05:01.340 relationship with regard to that.

00:05:03.600 I come into exploration of the culture of politics as a novelist. That's my day job for as long as I

00:05:10.520 can remember. And it means I have a very different approach because as a novelist, I'm trying to

00:05:15.220 figure out how to embody characters to articulate them. And so, I'm interested in really deeply

00:05:21.080 understanding what the different perspectives are and how they're affected and what those value

00:05:25.480 structures are like in hopes of figuring out how to translate. And so, my venture has mostly been on

00:05:32.040 the basis of curiosity and trying to make connections between different methods that people have of

00:05:36.580 making meaning or thinking. And so, part of that is, you know, and then also, you know, I try to tell a

00:05:42.240 story to the broadest possible audience. And so, my exploration here into all of this really comes

00:05:47.320 from trying to figure out who people are and how they're thinking without judgment, you know, and

00:05:53.220 trying to identify which parts feel like ideology or feel like opinions that are received and where

00:05:57.980 they're really coming from. And the thing that's amazing is if you get to where people are really

00:06:01.940 coming from, that's where a lot of the divisions just collapse and you have massive consensus on almost

00:06:08.820 every major issue facing America. But if we can focus more and more on the ways that we misinterpret

00:06:13.720 a term or reference one thinker who we don't like, if we can have an outrage machine that's

00:06:19.380 constantly built to do that, then that's where all of our focus goes. And that's what happens.

00:06:23.240 And what's your team in this regard? And how much time are you spending not on your novel writing

00:06:29.220 and literary activities, but on the, what would you call it, political inquiry as well as

00:06:34.960 communication? And I'm curious about your, your strategy for doing your background research,

00:06:40.720 for example, but I'd like to know about the team or everybody needs to know about the team. And also

00:06:45.700 give us a scope of your activities over the last six or seven months. Yeah.

00:06:50.360 Okay. So I work with, with the team. What we say that we do is research through execution. So we

00:06:56.940 research into the culture. We're post-partisan. That's the most important thing because we need to get

00:07:01.720 opinions from a very, very broad range of people across the spectrum on sources, on opinions,

00:07:06.880 on what's happening and where the reality is. So that's immensely important. And we're anti-polarization.

00:07:12.120 And so our main client is just sort of the U.S. at large, because the better the U.S. does from our

00:07:18.800 initial entry point about antisemitism, it's not just the better Jews are, but every minority and every

00:07:24.220 majority. So we want to tack towards shared American values again and try and counter polarization.

00:07:29.020 And I work with a brilliant founder and CEO of her own sort of research through execution company,

00:07:36.040 Gretchen Barton. Mark Riddle, who is a brilliant political strategist and thinker. Johnny Potts is

00:07:43.560 running the studio part of this. And so we do, you know, polling, psychometrics, research. We go all

00:07:49.840 across the ecosystem. We have to talk to people way on the right and way on the left. And we take a big

00:07:53.900 consensus. And then we start to test messaging. We start to build creative messaging. Marshall

00:07:59.280 Herskovitz has been very closely involved. He's a brilliant director, and he's been helping oversee

00:08:05.000 some of the creative. And we start to see what ideas work, which ideas get blowback from which

00:08:10.140 quarters and what things were wrong about. Right. And so with this particular enterprise,

00:08:15.080 you've been involved in attempting to pull the Democrats back to the center for a long time.

00:08:21.120 But this particular enterprise was motivated specifically by the events that surrounded

00:08:26.920 October 7th and the dementing of the culture in consequence of that. But as you proceeded,

00:08:34.040 as I've understood from our discussions, you've realized that the essential focus here isn't the

00:08:41.360 rise of anti-Semitism on the right and the left, but the process of polarization in general. And it's

00:08:47.060 speeding along by people who are motivated to do precisely that and also motivated to profit by it,

00:08:53.520 some kind of evil dynamic between the two. And that's fair. And so one of the things we've talked

00:09:00.220 about is the fact that the rise in anti-Semitism, I've always regarded that as the Jews, for example,

00:09:09.280 as canaries in the coal mine because they're the perennially successful minority. In my sense,

00:09:14.620 is that when the mob on the right and the left comes for the Jews, that's a prodroma to the mob

00:09:21.960 coming for the successful in general. And that anti-Semitism is a manifestation of something that's

00:09:27.440 much more fundamental that should be addressed rather than something that should be considered

00:09:34.240 in isolation. And so we've talked about that a little bit. So you've been delving more into what

00:09:40.280 we might call the victim-victimizer narrative, for example, as well as the conscious actions of the

00:09:48.800 foreign manipulators that you've described and the collusion of the corporations on the social

00:09:56.520 media side and advancing their agenda. Fair enough? Is that okay?

00:10:00.240 Yes. And the button of anti-Semitism in some ways is the most effective switch to flip if you want a

00:10:06.780 culture to tear itself apart. Right, right. So that's a very effective entry point.

00:10:11.720 Yeah. And it's fueled. Like I heard a statistic yesterday from someone in the intel community who

00:10:17.560 thought that 60% of all anti-Semitic traffic on social media is from Russian bots. And what the

00:10:25.040 Russians did, and look, there was a measure that the Russians pushed forth in the 70s to conflate

00:10:30.160 definitions around terms. I mean, they've been playing this game for a long time,

00:10:35.100 sort of manipulation. There's a, you know, Iran, China, and Russia are working in concert. We can

00:10:41.280 talk about that more later. But one of the things they did in Paris is that they sent operatives to

00:10:46.440 paint Stars of David on synagogues and people's houses to mark them out. And that creates a 0.90

00:10:51.700 permission structure for more hatred because people then start to see this, right? Everybody's

00:10:56.860 eager for some sort of trend of being right in the political narrative, in this sort of frothy rage

00:11:03.120 that we're built up to. And they laser in on where that is. So their job is to create permission

00:11:07.740 structures to create Jew hate, which then can lead to the worst elements and leads to further and

00:11:13.180 further polarization. And that's how you disintegrate a culture, really, is you sow chaos. Like the

00:11:18.480 precursor of the KGB in the 70s, like they funded the Black Panthers and the KKK. They're not partisan

00:11:26.100 geared. And when we talk about, like, Iran is really in some ways the Democrats' blind spot,

00:11:31.320 as Russia is the Republicans. Like there's equivalent plays being had. And they don't

00:11:36.660 really want one party over another. They want us constantly fighting about all the wrong things

00:11:41.180 that don't solve the actual problems that the majority of Americans need solved in their life.

00:11:46.640 And the majority of Americans are actually decent people. And they don't care about screaming at

00:11:51.240 Jews or labeling oppressors or canceling people from a tweet they had 10 years ago. They're trying

00:11:57.340 to get on. And we're going to talk about them as well. Okay. How will we start this? You're going

00:12:01.520 to start with your methodology, I guess. Yeah. All right. All right. And it's a sociological and

00:12:07.300 political investigation strategy combined with an attempt to determine how to ameliorate the

00:12:14.060 worst of the negative consequences that you're discovering.

00:12:17.860 Right. And if you pursue any problem deep enough, ideally, you can start to reach the root of the

00:12:24.400 sickness. Right. And there's a real sickness. Once you get the diagnosis right.

00:12:27.860 There's a sickness at the base of America right now. And that is, however you want to call it,

00:12:34.200 the grouping of different people into different categories. The disintegration of an American ID 0.60

00:12:39.440 under a set of American shared value set is spectacular. It's the most spectacular shared value

00:12:45.320 set there is. Most of us agree with this. But if you want- But it's being fractionated into group

00:12:51.440 identity claims. And that has negative consequences in multiple dimensions.

00:12:55.140 Yeah. And a lot of that isn't us. A lot of that is foreign influence. And a lot of it is,

00:13:00.460 you know, ways that we have shifted away from shared American values that make sense. We have a template

00:13:06.560 for solving all sorts of problems here. If you want to protest, we have, you know, the civil rights

00:13:11.780 movement in America is American scripture. I mean, like the beauty and moral clarity of that movement

00:13:17.620 is, that's a foundational pillar in America. And of course, it's predated with a rich tradition that

00:13:23.940 was exemplified in the best way. Right. Okay. So your investigations really have

00:13:29.900 led you to a pessimistic conclusion or two pessimistic conclusions and one very optimistic

00:13:38.180 conclusion. And the pessimistic realization is the degree to which our discourse on social media

00:13:44.440 platforms is being shaped by bad actors on the foreign side and like psychopathic manipulators 1.00

00:13:50.880 and greed on the domestic side. And psychopathic algorithms. Oh, yes. Right. Right. Which we can 0.56

00:13:57.740 scarcely keep up with in our brains. Right. Okay. So foreign actors, people who are capitalizing on the 1.00

00:14:05.320 division that they're sowing for primarily economic reasons and for the opportunity for those

00:14:12.440 operations and propaganda to garner attention, which has value. And then that's amplified by

00:14:18.880 the AI algorithms that we don't even understand that are directing attention. That's polarizing

00:14:25.080 people terribly. But the optimistic issue is that as far as you can tell from your polling that the

00:14:31.000 core and the center of America is just as strong as it ever has been, or maybe stronger.

00:14:36.620 I wouldn't say just as strong. We have cracks and we're vulnerable, but everybody is ready and dying

00:14:42.180 to have to move back towards a sane version of America. And we're not helpless before this massively

00:14:48.480 accelerating change, even with algorithms. We have tools. We have to catch up to it. But we have tools

00:14:54.280 at our disposal for how to make things transparent and reset the value state. We have ways to put America

00:14:59.860 together. But as long as issues remain partisan, like the border or abortion, they get worse. The incentive

00:15:06.960 structures are too out of whack. But we are ripe for a movement to something that is new. And the resources

00:15:14.400 we have in America, I mean, the one thing I keep thinking is everyone's angry that this celebrity goes to

00:15:19.060 this party and this genius goes to that party, is the collective resources we have in the United States

00:15:26.040 of America are spectacular. If we could figure out how to get them all working together in a way that

00:15:32.400 makes sense and that is a fair set of values, that's smart capitalism instead of regulatory capture

00:15:39.560 and, you know, lobbyism. There's a whole way to make this work beautifully, but there's a lot of

00:15:46.020 other countries are incentivized to making us hate ourselves, despise ourselves, hate each other so that

00:15:52.280 we keep deteriorating. Well, you just said you were in Uzbekistan and they're building factories and

00:15:56.600 it's booming. I mean, other places are doing things. They're building. It's not to suggest

00:16:01.440 there's not a lot of people doing a lot of work in America, but our output rate and efficiency rate

00:16:06.060 is terrible. Most people look at screens, get outraged and mail checks off like we're rabbits

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00:17:23.420 Thanks. Okay, we kind of, we kind of skipped over something that in a way, or we haven't developed it

00:17:28.640 enough yet. That's really very, that's a claim that's very radical. I mean, I don't think anybody

00:17:33.920 who's watching or listening is going to be shocked by the fact that the social media algorithms

00:17:39.200 are prioritizing outrage to capture attention and that there's economic utility in that, but

00:17:44.820 you know, you're making a claim that's on the face of it in the realm of conspiracy theory,

00:17:51.540 you know, and that is that there are foreign PSYOP operations, foreign PSYOP operations that are

00:17:59.100 dementing the political landscape and that that's, that's a massive ploy that it's conscious that it's

00:18:04.880 led by Iran, China, and Russia, let's say. And so maybe we can, shall we, shall we break that down?

00:18:12.340 Yeah, let's do that. And because I would really like to see you prove that.

00:18:16.940 So the measurements, the first thing I should say is that when you're measuring how a culture thinks

00:18:21.260 and moves, it's incredibly complicated. And so the, obviously, right, you can push pull. I mean,

00:18:27.140 you talked a lot about this early in our methodology for outreach to one, not make things worse.

00:18:32.300 And two, I remember we showed you a poll from anti-Semitism in the 30s, and it said,

00:18:37.900 do you think Jews are clannish? Do you think Jews do this in business? And you looked up and you said,

00:18:42.140 I'm pretty sure if people weren't anti-Semitic before taking the survey, they would be afterward. 0.99

00:18:45.820 Right, absolutely. How you form questions in form, right? And they set the stage for dialogue and

00:18:51.960 the idea that a question can be neutral. I mean, this is, we're veering into postmodern territory here,

00:18:57.260 but I do, we do have that when we get to the agreement piece as well, that how you phrase

00:19:02.640 things matter. So the first thing is, is we have an approach that is based on genuine curiosity for

00:19:08.120 the longest term good. We do. It's not, we're not like sort of, that's what we're in it for.

00:19:15.260 And so we're asking, we make inquiries, there's a bunch of different things you have to study,

00:19:19.660 and then we try and fill in all the missing pieces as best we can. But I think it's a very,

00:19:23.880 I think that it's overwhelmingly compelling what the case is, but we take polls. Gretchen does stuff 0.99

00:19:28.940 for some people aren't as articulate in polling when we do the focus group, aside from the polling

00:19:33.000 that she has them bring up and do visual representations of how they're thinking.

00:19:37.120 There's a bunch of means of ingress that we try to have from all different sides of the culture,

00:19:42.520 small focus groups, running stuff by you, running stuff by progressives, running stuff by leaders

00:19:46.900 and people on the street. And so it's a, it's a combination of polls, but I want to highlight a few

00:19:52.640 things that we, or approaches. So we did this TikTok study about foreign psyops, and we found

00:19:58.340 that on TikTok, women between the age of 18 and 34 have an unfavorability, a view of America's

00:20:05.160 unfavorability that is 52 points up above the norm. So think about what an extraordinary outlier that is

00:20:12.820 for one demographic group, right? Opinions about Israel and Jews follow, as they often do, right? So, 0.95

00:20:22.980 you know, little Satan, big Satan, they're tied together in this sort of obsessive focus of

00:20:28.360 deteriorating that particular value set, an American value set. And so we were wondering why that was.

00:20:35.140 Yeah. So let's just reiterate that a minute, because it's, it's, it's a striking finding that

00:20:41.200 shouldn't be glossed over. So you've identified a, a subset of the American population, which is very

00:20:49.840 large, women between the ages of 18 and 34. So all young women, fundamentally.

00:20:55.460 Who also were opinion setters in a variety of ways that are important for the culture and how the culture.

00:21:00.920 Right, right. And that you've seen that their political views about the U.S. and about,

00:21:06.720 about Israel, for example, given the state of, of the Middle East at the moment, are wildly skewed

00:21:12.820 in contrast to virtually all other demographic groups in the United States. And that they get,

00:21:19.340 they primarily get their information from TikTok.

00:21:22.500 Well, that's the, that's the punchline.

00:21:24.640 Yeah.

00:21:24.840 So when we went to go find it and find out what accounted for this,

00:21:28.380 they were two standard deviations above the norm on getting their information from TikTok.

00:21:33.300 Now, TikTok, as we know, is owned by China and China exports very different TikTok than they 0.97

00:21:39.220 import. They import broccoli and export crack. So the students there have a time limit on it.

00:21:45.060 The last time I checked, it was 20 minutes a day and all the information is educational,

00:21:49.300 but they export stuff with choppier and choppier views. And it'll be like, you know,

00:21:55.260 girl in bikini. Was Hitler good? I mean, it's, it's vacillating constantly between all sorts of 0.97

00:22:01.780 sort of junk food. And so that's an effort to, A, you can shorten our kids' attention spans.

00:22:08.520 And how much of that do you think is a consequence of the relatively wild West status of the free

00:22:15.020 market of ideas in the West? And how much of it do you-

00:22:18.140 The best way to destroy the West is through its own goodness and highest principles.

00:22:22.660 If you come in through the door of free speech, that's a very valuable cudgel that you wield.

00:22:29.180 If you come in through diversity, which is in one context and definition is in fact the beauty

00:22:36.540 and power of America, which is different than when Trudeau says it, because America it is.

00:22:41.500 And you come in through that trap door, it gets very difficult and arguments get complicated.

00:22:46.580 People's reference points get jumbled. So it's like every protester isn't John Lewis, right?

00:22:54.660 Everybody who's, there's, we start to get confused about where, which things are off limits and which

00:23:00.860 things aren't.

00:23:02.060 And do you envision like cadres of Chinese communists sitting behind the scenes manipulating the

00:23:07.580 algorithms to twist and dement the US? I mean, the fact that what the Chinese feed their own 1.00

00:23:12.800 children and what they're broadcasting into the United States is market, but it's hard for me to

00:23:17.480 understand whether, how much of that's actually planned subversion and how much of it is an

00:23:22.760 inevitable consequence of the difference between the cultures at multiple levels.

00:23:27.080 A lot of it is planned subversion. I mean, Russia has, you know, Russia and China have bot farms.

00:23:33.520 We can get to this too. Iran is, I shouldn't say Iran, I should say the Islamic regime in Iran 0.96

00:23:38.520 are brilliant messengers and strategists, right? But a lot of the power for infiltrating through

00:23:46.320 social media comes from China and it comes from Russia. And part of it too, is like I mentioned

00:23:51.560 about Russia sending people to Paris to paint the Stars of David. A lot of it is you set a trend.

00:23:58.600 You don't need to do a whole lot. If you want to flip a trip wire to make a culture tear itself

00:24:02.980 apart, make people doubt, you know, everything. I mean, the efforts to make, to turn us against each

00:24:08.560 other on vaccination. I mean, I remember Russia was playing around back in early days when people 1.00

00:24:13.480 were talking about childhood vaccinations, early days and causing autism in the, in the, like, I mean,

00:24:21.220 they've been working on this for decades. So they work on a topic, they devolve it. And, you know,

00:24:26.800 like we have solutions. We have consensus in America for immigration. We're going to see how much we have

00:24:31.920 abortion. There's topic after topic that we could find reasonable consensus on. So why don't we?

00:24:37.940 And the answer is, you know, foreign operations that come in, domestic players who profit off,

00:24:45.640 you know, rage and polarization, and then a kind of de-evolution of our story.

00:24:53.640 All right. So you use the TikTok issue as a case study in foreign psyopsis. 0.96

00:24:58.380 So let's see, let's see if it's effective. So Ukrainian support in 2022, only 7% of the

00:25:05.920 Americans felt the U.S. was providing too much support. 85% of Americans supported Russian

00:25:11.460 sanctions. In 2024, 31% believed that it was too much support. So that's significant. That's 4x.

00:25:19.400 And this is how things are won too. It's not like a psyop is brilliantly executed. It's

00:25:24.920 what you want is to move things 10, 20 degrees. What you want to do is shift momentum and then

00:25:29.680 lean on it in different ways. And look at the difference here. 42% believe that U.S. was not

00:25:36.380 providing enough support. 24%. So that dropped significantly. Now, in fairness, two years later

00:25:42.320 in a war, people are tired. Resources are tired. There's a lot of different reasons for this.

00:25:47.380 However, and I also think, though, that the conviction and the basic moral underpinnings of

00:25:53.340 how the war is going in Ukraine haven't changed substantially from mission creep. It seems to me

00:25:57.840 that the people who are opposed to it were mostly opposed to it in concept of what the role was,

00:26:03.120 rather than it's something that people are now exhausted by the expenditure. But that certainly

00:26:07.360 plays a role, and some people are. But nonetheless, we know that Russia ran a giant multi-channel

00:26:12.740 disinformation campaign aimed at weakening international support. They had false narratives,

00:26:17.340 fake news, forged documents, tens of thousands of people of content.

00:26:20.820 So if you shotgun pellet shoot that into the culture, this influencer, this podcast, these

00:26:28.060 500 clips that are maximized by algorithms to drive outrage and more views, and you can

00:26:35.220 gig the algorithms, you can take an effort and really shift it. And we shouldn't have foreign, 1.00

00:26:41.680 people shouldn't be chanting foreign slogans and reiterating foreign talking points in America,

00:26:47.960 unless they're choosing to do so.

00:26:49.900 One of the things that struck me as miraculously insane and demented over the last few months was the

00:27:02.020 fact that Iran's head, Khamenei, tweeted out his congratulations to the protesters on American

00:27:10.960 campuses for supporting Hamas. And I thought the fact that that happened in and of itself was something 0.95

00:27:18.960 remarkable to behold. But also the fact that it flew by under the radar, essentially. I don't see much

00:27:29.060 difference between that and Hitler congratulating the neo-Nazis in the United States in 1939 for the

00:27:36.760 remarkable success recruiting in campuses. And so let's zero in and Iran again, because you, well,

00:27:43.200 you talked about TikTok in particular.

00:27:45.700 Well, here, I want to get to the Iran thing. I think that's a, that's a superb point.

00:27:49.360 Yeah.

00:27:49.760 So people here are not mirroring the voices of, of all the countries in the Middle East.

00:27:55.840 Yeah, right.

00:27:56.400 It's the Islamic regime. It's not Saudi, UAE, and Qatar, who, despite complications that are 0.85

00:28:02.460 significant, which I'm not downplaying, are building things and having trade, even if there's

00:28:08.100 resources going elsewhere.

00:28:10.080 Right. So it's not like Iran, the Iranian Islamic state is Islam or the Middle East.

00:28:15.960 Right. And it's not like it's Jordan.

00:28:17.780 It's the worst element of it.

00:28:18.220 That's right. And like Jordan, the king in Jordan has done spectacular things.

00:28:22.820 Egypt, incredibly complicated relationship with Israel, but I think they know how to contend 1.00

00:28:27.280 with each other. We're taking up the cry of a regime, a foreign regime that even its own people 0.72

00:28:33.880 hate, hate, and the diaspora do. 1.00

00:28:36.760 Incredibly, incredibly oppressive.

00:28:38.500 You don't meet a lot of, Sam Harris said this to me yesterday, said, I'm not meeting a lot of

00:28:43.300 confused Iranian Jews morally. It's like they have, they're really clear. And we did a documentary 0.99

00:28:49.060 we're going to show later that was like, let's talk to Muslim, Jewish, gay. Let's talk to a bunch 0.94

00:28:54.640 of different Iranians and talk Iranian Americans or Iranians in the diaspora and just talk about

00:28:59.260 what this playbook looks like. They're not quoting ideas in Jordan or Egypt or UAE. Like this is a

00:29:08.680 very particular choice. And to me, that is a state that the regime, and you can like that regime if

00:29:14.600 you want. But that regime has declared that what it wants is the destruction and death of America.

00:29:20.320 Right.

00:29:20.800 That's its long-term goal.

00:29:22.400 Right. It has been since 1979.

00:29:24.160 Right. It's not even, frankly, to me, that regime in particular, it's not even Russia or China.

00:29:30.760 Right, right, right. No, I think it's quite bloody miraculous.

00:29:33.000 I mean, not that Russia and China, we don't have a lot that we have to figure out with them. I mean,

00:29:37.160 there's no question that it's problematic the ways that they're working. But to me,

00:29:41.460 it's very puzzling because it's unequivocal that you're reiterating. And I'm not saying that this

00:29:46.740 is all protesters. And I'm not saying this is all people who are taking positions for Palestine and 0.67

00:29:52.180 arguing on behalf of Palestine. I'm saying that the threat of people within that, that are vocal 0.99

00:29:57.720 and are reiterating statements from a regime that has its express long-term goal, the destruction of

00:30:03.520 America, that's something that's noteworthy.

00:30:07.920 Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I can imagine peace with Russia. It's harder for me to imagine 0.94

00:30:13.520 long-term peace with China because the Chinese are communists and that actually turns out to be a 0.92

00:30:18.360 problem. But I still think that's imaginable.

00:30:20.620 But we do a lot of trade with China.

00:30:21.760 Exactly, exactly.

00:30:22.520 And China's amazing.

00:30:23.740 And they're quite pragmatic.

00:30:25.180 But Iran is a different issue, the Islamic State there, because their stated goal is enmity. 0.95

00:30:32.100 There's no desire whatsoever for peace. They're after a kind of total and genocidal victory.

00:30:39.600 And they're declared enemies of the United States and have been forever.

00:30:43.560 Right. And they're the ones saying it.

00:30:45.600 Yeah, it's not like we're inventing this and labeling them as such. This is by their own

00:30:50.500 definition. And by the way, the long-term relationship with Iran, I think, is at some

00:30:56.600 point, I think, is going to be incredible. The Iranian people are amazing.

00:30:59.920 Mm-hmm. Right. An educated population that was headed in the right direction until the

00:31:04.600 1979 revolution, which has been quite the ongoing catastrophe. Right. And so, okay, so

00:31:11.640 how do you see the, practically speaking, how do you see the trail of causality, let's say,

00:31:19.120 between the Iranian manipulators behind the scene, TikTok, American young women, and let's 1.00

00:31:26.240 say the campus protests that have been going on forever since, well, everywhere since October

00:31:31.000 7th? It's important to acknowledge that America isn't a hapless victim in this. Like, we have

00:31:36.880 not done a good job minding our institutions from capturing corruption, institutions from

00:31:42.880 the left to the right. So we have plenty to do with this. I'm not suggesting that we're just

00:31:48.200 sort of hapless victims in all this. If we had stayed on top of, look, what we allow with

00:31:53.020 kids with the internet is so insane. I mean, imagine if you're 12 years old and your parents

00:31:58.600 were like, you're going to go to school, but you're going to have in your pocket unlimited

00:32:02.360 porn, access to the world's greatest terrorists who can talk to you in person.

00:32:08.320 And the world's greatest criminals. 0.97

00:32:10.140 Right. And it's designed to shorten your attention span. And it's in your pocket, it's in your desk,

00:32:15.600 it's in your locker, it's in the bathroom at school. And we can't do anything about it

00:32:19.240 because free speech. That's an asinine position. And there's people like Jonathan Haidt, who 0.99

00:32:24.880 clearly is, you know, is brilliantly delineated where and how we can have this be one tool of

00:32:31.480 communication. Everything's not a free speech issue. This isn't the Nazis marching during

00:32:36.680 Skokie, where the ACLU, back when the ACLU was rigorously for free speech, defended their

00:32:44.700 right to march. That's not this moment. This is kids who don't have developed brains yet.

00:32:48.920 And we're blasting them with all sorts of information. And we have allowed that. We've

00:32:52.800 allowed, we've left the door open. And we're, I think that a lot of Americans are ready to start

00:32:59.420 to figure out how we can close that door through reasonable dialogue, if we can find it through

00:33:04.140 like the rage and the rage industrial complex. Yeah.

00:33:09.340 But they're ready now. Well, it's, it, there's a massive technical problem here too, which is that

00:33:14.860 the institutions necessary to allow for effective communication to take place, which is what

00:33:22.920 protections for free speech ensure, haven't kept pace with the technological transformation. And

00:33:29.860 the problem with communal existence in general, including communal communication, is the potential

00:33:38.600 for capture of the communication strategies by truly bad actors. Yeah.

00:33:44.020 By the sadistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic, narcissistic types. And then also- 0.92

00:33:49.760 Who now, who now have teams of addiction specialists and AI deep machine learning at their disposal,

00:33:56.180 which means every time a kid is scrolling through X and their eye snags, they're reading what

00:34:02.160 things are drawing his attention. Yeah.

00:34:03.960 Their brains are being hacked. I don't think you can actually be on certain kinds of rage,

00:34:10.420 social media and be sane while you're on it. I don't think it's you that's having your thoughts

00:34:15.420 and we're letting this go to kids unmitigated.

00:34:18.820 Do you think that's particularly true of TikTok?

00:34:21.480 TikTok, Twitter. I mean, look, it depends where. You can go down a podcast rabbit hole. You can go

00:34:26.540 down it on YouTube. I don't think it's, I don't think it's fair to call out the platform. It's

00:34:31.040 really like our willingness to have the platform. Well, it's just TikTok capitalizes on much shorter

00:34:34.500 form content. Yeah. And X2.

00:34:37.280 Yeah. Yeah. So I think there is a relationship.

00:34:39.280 But maybe it's onboarding to go deeper into YouTube and, you know, because that's-

00:34:43.540 Yeah. Fair enough. But there's probably something pathological. There's a pathological

00:34:48.040 inclination that's built into social media platforms that capitalize on short-term attention.

00:34:55.900 Yes. And shortening it.

00:34:57.360 Yeah.

00:34:57.560 So they have the control. We're turning over. One way to think of it is we're turning over

00:35:01.280 generational control of our children's psychological, emotional, and physical

00:35:06.140 development and nervous systems to hackers in big corporations and foreign governments.

00:35:11.920 Like, we don't need to do that. There's very clear parameters. We can have different ways that

00:35:18.060 we figure stuff out. We can design different kinds of phones. It's not perfect. But to throw up our hands

00:35:22.520 and act as if it's totally unreasonable that we want to build a healthy generation of kids and that

00:35:27.540 we don't want polarization and people who hate America as their clearly stated aim to be hijacking

00:35:34.380 our country.

00:35:35.220 Well, especially manipulated polarization.

00:35:36.140 Right. Especially when the majority of Americans don't want this. It's not like you're the majority

00:35:40.100 saying, let's have it. And we'll get to that.

00:35:42.920 Yeah.

00:35:43.020 Let's take a quick skip through a couple things we looked at. So anti-Semitism, it seems,

00:35:49.160 is sort of exploding. This is a stat from the ADL. Again, with any news source, there's

00:35:53.900 complications and issues. The FBI just released a report showing that hate crimes are exploding

00:35:58.580 against Jews. And it's pretty well received. So let's say that these stats are going to be-

00:36:04.420 Lay out the numbers for the listeners, approximately.

00:36:07.020 Well, 2023, we have 8,873 defined incidents of anti-Semitism up from 912 in 2014.

00:36:16.120 Right. And it's pretty flat from 2014 to-

00:36:20.380 So what happened in 2023? We know also that within hours of the attack on October 7th,

00:36:26.600 that the information and bots were primed to go into America to start switching that from-

00:36:31.700 How do you know that?

00:36:32.400 It's been tracked. People looking at the content saw the content that was sort of lined up and ready

00:36:39.020 to go. Look, it wasn't, even if it wasn't, like, let's say we're not explaining it by clean

00:36:43.380 conspiracy that phone calls went on between Russia, Iran, and China, and they all planned and spun up

00:36:49.440 factories. But this is just ongoing in material that they already have and are doing. And so it

00:36:54.080 found much more fertile ground. The conversation flared up around it. You infuse more bots into a

00:36:59.660 volcanic eruption and off it goes. So the conspiracy doesn't have to be a bond villain,

00:37:04.140 but this is the way that it moves. Domestic psychopaths are- 0.83

00:37:08.940 And we can talk about the dark tetrad later, because I've heard you're a psychologist,

00:37:12.980 so maybe you can lay out that part.

00:37:13.780 Yeah, some people think so.

00:37:15.660 You know, and so that's that. But the thing is, it's really-

00:37:18.380 So here's this kind of Venn diagram of the ways that Russia, China, and Iran are messing with us. 0.79

00:37:24.680 Iran is the Democrats' blind spot. Russia is the Republicans' blind spot, for the most part.

00:37:29.080 That's the most fertile ground. But again, they're not partisan. They want chaos. You know,

00:37:34.840 they want to fund, you know, pro-gay rights, anti-gay rights. They did that in Russia to distract,

00:37:41.600 right? I mean, so what they want is chaos and our distraction to be elsewhere, and all of our money

00:37:46.980 and resources, going to partisan, you know, organization, like just moving all of our-

00:37:54.180 getting all of our rage focused on one outcome. Because if you get angry enough and polarized

00:37:58.500 enough, then no matter what happens, the other side's an existential threat, and all other values

00:38:03.460 fall away. How about housing? How about insurance? It's like existential threat. And so that's what

00:38:09.380 they've been driving towards, is this polarization where we hate each other, which is totally new.

00:38:13.340 I mean, you remember McCain taking the microphone away from the woman when she said she was,

00:38:17.720 you know, terrified that, about Obama? And like, we have such a tradition that regardless of what

00:38:24.700 happens, we try to bring forth the best, however imperfectly and corruptly of the parties, and at

00:38:32.220 least have a surface narrative of wanting what's best for the country, because the narrative trickles

00:38:38.960 down in a reality as best it can. Well, that points to the necessity of an overlying-

00:38:43.340 Right.

00:38:44.020 Of an overarching union of identity, rather than the fractionation of the identity.

00:38:49.340 But if we're not even pretending, let's say people said, oh, it was all pretending. It's like,

00:38:53.240 it wasn't all pretending. The 1990s, like, we had a lot of things close.

00:38:57.480 It's clearly not all pretending.

00:38:58.200 I have a friend who's very interesting, conservative, you know, lives in Texas, the whole

00:39:05.740 thing. And he said to me, and we can get to this part later, he said, what's so amazing is he's

00:39:09.620 from a much more rigorously conservative background. But he said, we were almost there. I remember my

00:39:15.780 kids coming home, and they'd have a friend come over who was black, and a friend come over who was

00:39:19.780 gay, and everyone behaved. And they wouldn't even think to sort of mention it, because everything 0.92

00:39:24.760 was sort of clear. Like, we were in this place-

00:39:26.700 We had that in Toronto.

00:39:27.880 It was like, yeah.

00:39:28.380 Clearly, when my kids grew up, it was completely irrelevant.

00:39:30.220 It was like an idol. And we had it. And the answer is continuing progression and movement

00:39:37.080 towards division of groups, rather than acceptance of groups that point up towards the shared identity.

00:39:43.320 I mean, that's one of the things with, this is something that's worth getting to.

00:39:47.160 Yeah.

00:39:47.300 And we can get in turn to that. So, here's the thing that's also interesting. America isn't really,

00:39:52.500 aside from, obviously, explosive things that we're seeing on the fringes, which are scary,

00:39:58.500 and I think terrifying, and wholly unacceptable under American values. But aside from that,

00:40:04.820 America isn't actually real America, broad America, not captured America, anti-Semitic.

00:40:11.500 92% of Americans thought the October 7th attack was unjustified. 92%. 73% believe it's important

00:40:19.840 to maintain the U.S.-Israeli alliance. Whatever you think of that, 73% is a lot.

00:40:27.120 Terrorist attacks, here's a question we asked. Like, 9-11 in America and October 7th in Israel

00:40:31.360 should not be tolerated, and those countries have a right to defend themselves. 92% of people support

00:40:36.260 that, right? And then different people, like, we pulled out that, you know, the plurality, 46%

00:40:44.080 believe protests on college campuses are deeply troubling, while a third, 31%, believe college

00:40:49.220 students are always going to protest something. So you add those up, and you're at, what, 77%

00:40:54.040 of people who are, like, not on board or understanding that. I mean, these are really

00:40:59.480 significant. However, if you get a good foothold, like when Russia was allowed to paint Stars of David

00:41:05.100 on synagogues in people's houses, or when they sent operatives to do that, there's purchase,

00:41:10.040 there's a foothold. But there is for a lot of things. Jews aren't the only existential issue in 0.85

00:41:15.180 America.

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00:42:11.280 are endless. See, you know, on the philosophical side, the hallmark of postmodernism is disbelief,

00:42:21.220 is skepticism regarding uniting metanarratives, right? That's the core definition of postmodernism,

00:42:29.060 is skepticism of uniting metanarratives, and this insistence that true identity

00:42:34.980 has to devolve down the value hierarchy to something approximating group identity, and then that

00:42:41.660 morphs very easily into a victim-victimizer narrative. And so you can see that this polarization

00:42:49.160 is also being produced by the ascendancy of postmodernism as an intellectual exercise in the

00:42:56.400 universities. And your polling and work indicates that the center does hold, and that it's much more

00:43:03.900 solid than people believe, and that to the degree that we accept that postmodern doctrine, that there

00:43:09.660 is no such thing as a shared identity in the UK, because the UK people in the UK are debating that now.

00:43:15.620 There's no such thing as a Canadian identity. Our own bloody prime minister in Canada has said

00:43:20.000 exactly that, that the American identity, the American project is nothing but racist and oppressive.

00:43:29.540 That demolishes that transcendent narrative that actually constitutes social unity, and it facilitates

00:43:36.980 movement towards identity that's based on more fractionated elements of race or sex or ethnicity

00:43:44.920 or intelligence or wealth, whatever it happens to be. There's a million different ways to divide

00:43:49.800 people. And that that starts to, it looks to me like that starts to inevitably produce something

00:43:54.480 like a victim-victimizer narrative. And then that expresses itself, for example, in particularly toxic

00:44:00.280 forms of antisemitism, sort of as the canary in the coal mine. That looks to me like the causal pathway. 0.77

00:44:06.420 And you, you know, one of the things that you've noted and we've talked about before that's

00:44:10.220 fascinating is the postmodernists did not come in through political theory. They came in through

00:44:15.220 English departments. They came in to attack and deconstruct stories. That's fine for one class 0.99

00:44:21.340 in a seminar. Like, fine, we can read Derrida and Foucault. But, you know, when, when I was an

00:44:26.920 undergraduate, it was already creeping in where I, you know, wanted to just take Shakespeare. And I was

00:44:31.400 taught by brilliant, brilliant leaders in the field, Helen Vendler and Marjorie Garber. And Marjorie

00:44:37.320 Garber would do stuff with playing, you know, let's have a lecture on gender and sexuality in

00:44:42.460 Shakespeare. But she was teaching Shakespeare in a way that was kind of upheld rather than viewing

00:44:48.620 every piece, every, every sort of glowing icon in the culture, Plato and Shakespeare, viewing them

00:44:56.660 from a different dynamic that's outside of their genius and their intended work. But as what are the

00:45:02.240 dynamics of it? Douglas Murray said something, said something else, you know, brilliant the other

00:45:09.360 day where he said, well, he gave an alternate commencement speech at Columbia when they didn't

00:45:13.880 get to have one. And he pointed up and they have like Dante and Plato, these statues of everybody.

00:45:19.220 And he said, we think it's so, it's so interesting that you students who are here think that you can

00:45:25.560 judge, or not all of them, but some students here think that they can judge Shakespeare. But in reality,

00:45:31.360 Shakespeare should be judging us. We have that wrong. You can't go to school and not learn

00:45:36.760 about things that are greater than you, no matter what they are. But if postmodernism is about

00:45:42.760 attacking the story, that's very effective to study and to read and to think about that as a mode of

00:45:47.640 being, just like nihilism. There's plenty of things we should read and study. But to have that go in and

00:45:52.980 attack the story in universities through English departments, largely, to disintegrate narrative and the 0.83

00:45:58.280 notion of shared narrative, it's ridiculous. It's like if we decided to put everything through the

00:46:02.740 frame of cubism.

00:46:03.680 Well, then these fractional narratives come up immediately.

00:46:05.820 So, that's right. So, part of this is, so here we looked at what, how every minority group views

00:46:11.560 every other minority group on the issue of, do you share my values? So, Arabs- 0.98

00:46:16.680 Every minority group experiences some form of bias. Yeah, well, that's almost built into the

00:46:22.020 conception of minority.

00:46:23.300 Of course. But what's cool is what we're going to get to on the next slide, which is a

00:46:28.600 funny version. But like, so, you know, let's look at, you know, Jews. This is, do you share my 0.71

00:46:35.200 values? Do you have too much power? Do you exaggerate your minority status? And are you not 0.87

00:46:40.060 warm? Which is an interesting one. I think that Jews did way, they underperformed on warmness, 1.00

00:46:47.160 man, because I think Jews are pretty warm. But it's pretty funny if you look at this, it's like, 0.85

00:46:51.160 okay, these are different shapes and sizes. It's not like Jews are bigger than what is 0.54

00:46:56.660 happening within other groups. And every group is allowed to have opinions about other groups too,

00:47:01.240 right? So, I'm also, I'm not that concerned when people talk about anti-Semitism. To me,

00:47:06.600 it's like anti-Semitism is like if someone doesn't let you join your country club. 0.99

00:47:10.380 Jew hate is when they're running across campus at UCLA screaming, gas the Jews. So, you know, 0.95

00:47:15.460 some of this, there's some normal variations. It's not any worse for Arab, Asian, Black,

00:47:19.580 Hispanic, White, or Jews. Everyone's in the mix, depending on what it is. Some are slightly worse 1.00

00:47:24.240 than others. But what's interesting then is I wanted to look at how people view other things

00:47:29.260 like corporations, rich people, and Christians. And if you look at the bottom here, people like me,

00:47:35.880 this is how much do you matter in America? And the 41% of respondents said people like me are way down

00:47:42.360 at the bottom. But if you look at the top, it's corporations and rich people and Christians. 0.78

00:47:46.800 And so, that's a bit of a grievance narrative in a certain way because, you know, some rich people

00:47:54.220 have earned being rich and are good people and contribute and build the economy. Like,

00:47:58.160 it's not like you can just group rich people into one category of evil schemers. And Christians, 0.97

00:48:03.120 certainly, it's preposterous that they're up there. And so, what this in combination with this

00:48:08.000 and this shows me is that if you describe anybody as a group, of course, they're going to be starting

00:48:15.420 to peel out and they're going to start to differentiate in the numbers. And so, maybe

00:48:19.580 it's a good idea instead of talking about groups, whether that's Christians or Jews or Muslims, that

00:48:26.680 we talk about American law and the shared value set that we can all move towards because then

00:48:32.120 things get vastly better. Maybe it's also important. Like, this points to something deeper,

00:48:39.220 perhaps, at two levels of depth. I mean, it struck me for the longest period of time that there was

00:48:47.160 something pathological about the insistence that group identity should be privileged to use that

00:48:53.920 postmodernist parlance, that as soon as you make group identity category the

00:49:01.060 sine qua non of social discourse, as soon as you start to talk about people in relationship to their

00:49:08.220 group identity, everyone becomes a minority, all minorities are oppressed, and there's immediately

00:49:13.900 a victimizer. Now, you might say, well, what have we done about that historically in the West to

00:49:19.040 remediate against that tendency, which is deeper than the merely political, right? It's an inevitability

00:49:26.120 of categorization. Well, two things. At the deepest political level, that's the liberal project,

00:49:33.400 the classic Scottish Enlightenment liberal project that says we categorize people as individuals.

00:49:39.320 That's the hallmark of appropriate person perception. And then that's grounded in something

00:49:45.820 even more profound. And that's true technically, even for the Scottish Enlightenment, which is the

00:49:53.760 Judeo-Christian idea that every single person, man and woman alike, is made in the image of God.

00:50:00.100 And so there's a fundamental insistence there that when you're looking at a person,

00:50:04.520 you look at them as an individual, a multidimensional individual composed of a multitude,

00:50:10.080 you might say, of minority identities and positions of privilege, right? For every single individual,

00:50:16.240 that's all amalgamated into treating the person as if they're a soul with intrinsic value that's being

00:50:24.720 given dignity as a consequence of divine fiat. And if you don't do that and you devolve into

00:50:32.420 identity groups, you immediately get chaos and strife and pathology and the sense of personal

00:50:38.420 victimization. And when we talk about places attacking you for your virtue, right? That's

00:50:45.340 the most effective psychological attack is to attack someone for their virtue. Nowhere has that

00:50:50.720 experiment culminated so beautifully and for so long as in America. You can move to New York City from

00:50:58.040 Pakistan or Ireland and a week later, you're a New Yorker. I could go move to France for 20 years and I

00:51:06.580 wouldn't be French. Our assimilation process, the values that we have when done correctly and sanely and 0.98

00:51:13.500 not turned into a partisan nightmare. And when we have proper civic onboarding to make sure that the

00:51:18.460 communities are integrated into the American value set that allows us to take in immigrants, which is our

00:51:23.760 strength. It's remarkable. We have the best integrated ethnic communities in the world. It's amazing what can

00:51:32.780 happen here and so quickly. And I want to talk about, before we get to more agreement, I think it's

00:51:37.960 really important that we talk about some frames of how we look and talk about Americans when we're

00:51:42.960 trying to figure out what they're thinking. And we, like, a lot of the experts tend to do this really

00:51:47.160 anthropologically. You know, like, well, we need to get to this voter who's, you know, a single man who

00:51:53.760 owns one cat and lives here and what's the targeting for? It's like this weird, and it's, if you,

00:51:58.340 if you, you have to think about embodying the person's values, where they are, what their mindset

00:52:03.520 is, what their day looks like. And so this is a statistic that's, that's been floating around a lot and

00:52:10.660 is spoken of, of quite often out on campaign trails, which is that the average true swing voter, and the

00:52:16.360 best way that we like to define that, is an Obama-Trump voter. Like this, so, so whatever you want to call

00:52:22.300 that thing, but that clearly is somebody who can think broadly across the spectrum, who isn't going to be

00:52:27.160 inherently racist or anti, any notions that are conservative, this is somebody who's, who's

00:52:32.580 available across the spectrum, works two and a half jobs, commutes three hours a day on average,

00:52:38.780 and thinks about politics four minutes a week. So when we're crazed and we're talking about,

00:52:44.020 you have to understand the dual loyalty trope that's happening with Jews with Israel, why it's

00:52:48.560 an offense, right? You have to understand why wearing a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo and cultural

00:52:54.380 appropriation is a big issue. You have to understand why we should lose our minds if

00:52:59.100 somebody kneels at a, like, there's so much churn that we have. They've got four minutes a week.

00:53:06.840 They're, that means that what they're doing is solving problems, trying to pay bills, carpooling

00:53:11.340 kids. They're engaged with all sorts of people in reality of different political persuasions who

00:53:16.700 they have to get along with because they don't have the luxury of just, you know, furiously

00:53:20.300 interacting, not in the real world. So how much of that political activism per se, you know,

00:53:27.140 Rob Henderson has spoken about luxury beliefs is to what degree is political obsession, a luxury

00:53:33.780 lifestyle? A hundred percent. It just replaced branding because, you know, once the political

00:53:39.040 seeps into everything, the biggest celebrities in a way are political. And so we're, you know, if we,

00:53:44.480 if you lose the ethics of a field, the ethics of doctoring, the ethics of, of being a writer,

00:53:50.680 once things, once we start to reward more highly the political, which to me, for instance, as a

00:53:55.960 writer, that's the worst of it. That means you're writing propaganda. It's the same in psychotherapy,

00:54:00.820 for example, or in medicine. But once political creeps in, then what we're elevating to the highest

00:54:05.880 place for the most people interested in, with a lot of the unearned benefits of sudden status

00:54:12.060 grabbing is going to be hard, angrier, partisan. Well, let's just say you're opening up a very big

00:54:18.440 lane for partisan merchants of rage who can gather people around in their moral agreement and in

00:54:26.520 continuing to turn the other side into a monolith where the other side is both things that, you know,

00:54:31.860 they're every projection for everything bad that happened and you can't conceivably deal with them

00:54:35.880 and all of their experts are captured and all of their ideas are bad and there's no version of

00:54:41.200 nuance and everything is a cynical play to win power and then take over and do everything.

00:54:45.980 And I'm not just talking at a presidential level. I mean, pick a position that we've debated

00:54:50.960 reasonably in the public square. So these average swing voters, you said they're called low

00:54:59.260 information voters by academics and media. So here's what makes me angry about that.

00:55:04.560 Yeah. So they're low partisan information voters. A lot of the partisan landscape is polluted and

00:55:10.760 toxic. But to me, that's actually what high information voters are. A high information

00:55:15.760 voter knows and cares when milk is more expensive. They know what's happening at the gas station.

00:55:21.060 They know how the kids at their school are doing. They know what's happening with the peer groups at

00:55:24.920 the school. They have an- They're concerned with local issues.

00:55:28.380 Well, which is-

00:55:29.540 Right. But it's real because of that.

00:55:31.660 And reality is where ideology goes to die. And so when we talk about low information voters,

00:55:38.280 to me, it's always so amusing because if you could talk to them and consider them high information

00:55:43.020 voters, you might actually learn a lot more about the things that we need to fix in the ways that can

00:55:47.360 be more positive. And you can figure out where you get points of connection. And you also might run

00:55:52.280 into stubborn issues where they've been subjected to different ideological stuff. I'm not saying it's

00:55:59.620 like some- It's not like the myth of the diner patron who's American down to his apple pie heart,

00:56:06.400 because obviously people have different notions around it and different notions about partisan

00:56:10.780 issues. But they're engaged in the real world and need real- They don't just want real solutions.

00:56:15.440 They need real solutions. If the health insurance company denies your claim four times and you can't

00:56:21.340 get to it because you're working two jobs and you have a special needs kid, you're not engaged in 1.00

00:56:25.460 all this. You can't take up every- Why do you think the average swing voter has 2.5 jobs?

00:56:32.120 I think that they're scrambling to make things work and they're willing to try Obama and Trump.

00:56:38.120 Because they're scrambling, they're likely to be more experimental.

00:56:42.080 Well, and also that they're seeing that no big ideological answer is solving real problems.

00:56:47.940 So yeah, they're not locked in to say, you know, I got to be a Democrat. I got to be a Republican.

00:56:53.800 What kind of percentage of the voters are these swing voters?

00:56:57.780 Oh, I don't know that statistic. I do know that the election will likely be decided by 9 million

00:57:02.520 voters in seven swing states.

00:57:04.780 Right, right.

00:57:05.760 So that's-

00:57:06.060 Presidential.

00:57:06.660 So that's one-thirtieth of the population or something like that. It's about 3%.

00:57:12.220 And what's weird is that 3% actually represents a lot more where America is, the rest of America

00:57:19.460 who's looking at, you know, trying to figure out what to do. So even though they're inclined to

00:57:25.120 vote differently, it's not like people have- We need to keep moving America towards the middle

00:57:32.060 in discussion of what shared values we're going to have, no matter what happens. There's a lot of

00:57:37.080 work in front of us the next four or five years, right? There's a lot of work to resuscitate and

00:57:42.220 make this country unified again in certain ways. And there's concrete steps we can do that with.

00:57:48.120 And that has to be done regardless of the outcome of the presidential election.

00:57:51.580 No matter what. We don't have a luxury to just wait four years. We have to be incredibly vigilant

00:57:57.700 about what's happening right now. There's bad players massing. There's people on the world stage

00:58:03.180 who are seeking to outperform and disrupt and some destroy us. And we don't have time to be having

00:58:11.400 an endless food fight in the cafeteria on virtually every platform of engagement. And people, I think,

00:58:20.260 will be immensely rewarded who step forward. But the problem is a lot have not been, right? There's a

00:58:25.460 lot of penguins have been jostled off the cliff. But I think that if somebody strikes out with bold

00:58:29.660 leadership and continues that consistently, and everyone's got different opinions about who's

00:58:34.900 doing that more or less in the political space. Well, do you see positive signs of that? Let's see

00:58:39.160 if we can be optimistic in a bipartisan way for a moment. Do you see signs of that on the Republican

00:58:46.320 and the Democrat sides at the moment? I mean, with the Republicans, for me at least, what I see

00:58:53.280 gathering around Trump is a team of people that pull the emphasis in many ways away from Trump

00:59:00.480 himself. Trump has ex-Democrats surrounding him. You could argue that he's an ex-Democrat himself for

00:59:06.900 that matter. And so I can see a consensus that consists of a multitude of different ideas, many of

00:59:13.980 which are arguably more core to the American, the Central American enterprise than before. I can see

00:59:20.260 that developing around him. And so, and then on the Democrat side, we've talked about this a little

00:59:25.440 bit. Well, do you want to discuss what you see happening, for example, at the DNC and with

00:59:32.080 Harris's attempts to make hypothetical attempts at least, which is at least something to move things

00:59:38.180 more to the center? Well, I think that very clearly the DNC was an expression of a movement back to the

00:59:45.140 center. Okay, why do you think that was clear? What was clear about that to you? Well, look, there's a

00:59:49.680 counter-argument that people make where they say, this is all cover for a secret turgeon horse

00:59:54.880 Marxist operation to take over America. And to me, it's like, projection for me is when someone's a

01:00:01.380 monolith, but two things at once simultaneously. So she can't be, you know, a vapid empty vessel with

01:00:07.200 no brain who also is the mastermind of smuggling in another agenda. And so part of what happened, 0.52

01:00:14.240 this is just a differentiation issue. Do we want to decide that she's purely,

01:00:19.440 you know, evil in a monolithic way and that nothing can be learned? Well, then you don't

01:00:23.460 have anywhere to go. But she clearly moved towards the middle on a number of issues. 0.98

01:00:29.120 You know, people were chanting. She had the parents of hostages on stage.

01:00:34.520 Her husband, Doug Emhoff's children and her stepchildren were on stage during that. That

01:00:40.600 was a big moment. Who she chose to have speak was a big moment. Why? Why? Who she chose to

01:00:45.400 have speak? Every speaking engagement at the DNC is a carefully orchestrated set of real politic

01:00:53.300 calculations. And so is it different than if she hosted, you know, Islamic, Islamist protesters on

01:01:03.320 stage? Of course, it's different. Of course, that's a different image. And that's it's naive to

01:01:07.800 think that it's not the result of protracted negotiations and power dynamics that happen

01:01:13.060 behind the scene. And so even if she's staging it and a lot of people rightly, I think for anything

01:01:18.960 that happens in the political sphere, are cynical that that represents sort of a true more center.

01:01:24.640 In my estimation, I think that her behavior and movement around 2020 was an aberration from where

01:01:32.000 she is. She's a prosecutor from Oakland. She moved sort of too far in a sense of views. But I think this

01:01:38.820 is more of a return to where she naturally is. And I think people also have to be able to learn and

01:01:45.760 make adjustments. Well, and the overarching issue is regardless of all that, in some sense, the battle

01:01:51.440 to move the political system toward the center has to proceed regardless. That's right. Or we know

01:01:58.560 what the consequences are. Look, veterans were on stage. You know, Alyssa Slotkin got up and spoke

01:02:04.080 about USA. You know, I mean, who she chose and who she had there and what was said represented a very

01:02:10.800 moderate, ready view of America on the stage. Now, that's not to suggest that there's not

01:02:15.440 problems. It's not to suggest that I don't understand cynicism. It's not to suggest that

01:02:19.060 everything is solved. But what we're talking about is where we are seeing movement.

01:02:23.380 Well, that's also what's, well, the view that we're attempting to delineate and promote with

01:02:29.480 regards to the material we're walking through today. What is the central core? Now, I want to return to-

01:02:35.060 Can I say one more thing about that?

01:02:36.180 Yes.

01:02:36.660 So, I mean, the other thing that matters is, we were talking about this, the message matters.

01:02:42.560 And so, like I was saying, it matters what happened at the DNC, for instance. But the

01:02:46.480 message that she's promulgating has been met with very wide approval by Democrats and by other people.

01:02:53.740 So, she's choosing a path that the messaging that's people chanting USA, people chanting bring

01:02:58.760 them home, when she called out Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, though I still would like a lot more

01:03:03.700 definition under foreign policy, which I think a lot of people do. But that's being met very

01:03:09.340 positively. And I think that it is a better match.

01:03:12.840 So, you think that's the beginning of something?

01:03:14.700 It's a feedback.

01:03:15.140 Approximating a virtuous spiral.

01:03:16.700 Perhaps.

01:03:17.280 Perhaps.

01:03:17.480 It's a positive feedback loop.

01:03:18.760 It's something that could happen.

01:03:20.200 And it's more likely to happen than if all the messaging was going the other way,

01:03:24.300 just vitriol and anger and division and backwards.

01:03:28.140 Right. And so, your view is at least that that should be promoted and encouraged.

01:03:32.880 Yes. And also, just acknowledged and that it can't be completely locked behind this fear that

01:03:38.700 it's a massive conspiracy theory and we can't possibly differentiate movement. The other thing

01:03:43.020 I'll say about these issues of race that's very interesting is I think that she, as a Black

01:03:48.480 prosecutor in Oakland, which is a tough, pretty badass job, should she move to the middle and 0.99

01:03:55.320 should these indications that she's moving to the middle prove true, I think is in a very strong

01:04:00.340 position to create that permission for America to do the same thing. 0.89

01:04:06.020 Well, you've been trying to move the, we're in a bit of a, a bit of a partisan.

01:04:12.380 Yeah. Detour.

01:04:13.760 Detour here, but I think that's okay momentarily and we'll hit the main track again. You've been

01:04:19.120 doing what you can to move the Democrats away from the radical leftists or even to bring their

01:04:25.260 attention to the fact that those people actually exist and are serious toward the center. And

01:04:29.680 that's been going on for a long time. And so, what, what, what are your views with regards to

01:04:35.280 the success and perhaps also the dangers of the approach that you've taken, you know, and that I've

01:04:40.420 been involved in? How are you feeling about the consequences of that after doing it for a fair

01:04:45.760 amount of time?

01:04:47.060 So, I feel okay about it for a couple reasons. One is you've been involved. We've, you know, we've had a lot

01:04:53.680 of conversations and, and you've also involved me in efforts to do the same for conservatives and for

01:05:00.840 Republicans. And in a way, I feel like the more that I've learned about politics, such as I have,

01:05:07.460 the more that I've learned that, that you have to just move towards

01:05:11.980 any movement that's towards the good without lying or manipulation. And even when I did commercials and

01:05:20.000 spots that were, um, that were political, I always hired a Republican and do all the fact checking.

01:05:26.340 I ran a lot of stuff by you. We're in a lot of stuff by other conservatives at all levels of a

01:05:30.980 demographic, tried to make fair arguments. It doesn't mean that all of them were tried not to

01:05:36.380 drive the wrong instincts through messaging and tried to convey things that are truthful in fair

01:05:40.920 argument ways that people could relate to. To me, that's, and I didn't make it like when I do

01:05:46.440 partisan work, I don't do make any money or virtually nothing also to make sure that I don't

01:05:50.440 have a weird incentive structure. And I'm helping anytime that the phone rings from you with people

01:05:56.320 who you think are good faith players within the Republican party or conservatives of which I've

01:06:00.940 met an enormous amount who've had huge impact on my thinking. And so in a way we're a conduit of

01:06:07.140 ideas back and forth between both parties. And so, you know,

01:06:11.340 And this is a continuation of that.

01:06:12.700 It's a continuation of that work from an even more postpartisan perspective,

01:06:16.460 which means I do certainly have my own political ideas and preferences. They're just not,

01:06:23.620 I just don't view that as what's important. I can better report on what other people are thinking

01:06:27.520 than offer my own individual.

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01:07:36.280 So part of this is identifying the pathological players at the fringe who are amplifying and

01:07:43.480 capitalizing on division, as well as identifying, delineating, and strengthening the center.

01:07:51.480 And that's a bipartisan attempt. And it can be bipartisan partly. The reason it can be bipartisan

01:07:58.260 is because the pathological actors, the dark tetrad types and the foreign operators, they're not 1.00

01:08:03.560 playing a partisan game. They're either out for themselves 100% or they're operating under the

01:08:09.460 aegis of whatever their own political agenda is in relationship to their own country.

01:08:14.540 That has nothing to do with partisan politics, right?

01:08:18.200 Precisely.

01:08:18.680 Well, one of the things I've really learned about the dark tetrad types, the psychopathic manipulators, 0.89

01:08:23.600 and there are plenty of them online, is that they will use whatever is hot on either side

01:08:28.740 of the political spectrum to further their pathological manipulations. And that's a common

01:08:34.760 enemy of anyone who's aiming at the good, regardless of their partisan perspective.

01:08:41.380 Precisely. That's why we're called us the story. It's the US. It's the US sort of against all these

01:08:47.520 entities. And the hottest button issue that is obviously one historically that the world is

01:08:52.960 prime for is anti-Semitism. That's why there's so much laying of that groundwork from foreign 1.00

01:08:57.600 groups. And are there old hatreds that emerge if permission structures are granted? Of course.

01:09:03.360 And are there domestic players who hate Jews? Of course. But you're allowed to hate Jews. You just 0.99

01:09:08.820 can't break the law. Like, go hate them from your apartment. You don't get to deface property or

01:09:14.080 menace people or make true threats to individuals or fight and assault law enforcement officers.

01:09:21.280 You're not allowed to do that here. We don't do that. That's not an American playbook.

01:09:25.500 And however vehemently you feel in your hatreds, you're not in a morally superior position than

01:09:31.800 Martin Luther King, who managed to conduct himself in a different way in the service of

01:09:36.820 what he was trying to show America under far greater threat. So we don't get to get a free pass

01:09:43.520 to do that. It's not how America works and functions and resolves issues. This is not us.

01:09:48.840 Right. So one of the things that's emerged, too, it appears to me as a consequence of the

01:09:54.040 work that you've done, is a much more detailed appreciation for what constitutes the necessary

01:09:58.640 center and ideal. Right. And that there isn't anywhere near enough attention being focused on

01:10:04.400 that. I mean, it's not surprising in some ways, you know, because it's easy for the things that

01:10:08.820 everyone takes for granted to become invisible. And that is what happens to things that people take

01:10:13.940 for granted. Yes. Right. Is they become invisible. That's actually what them being shared constitutes.

01:10:19.940 That's right. But then if they're under assault, you know, people have criticized my work, for example,

01:10:26.440 the more supercilious intellectual types for being for merely stating the obvious. But there and

01:10:32.280 and, you know, I can actually appreciate that as a criticism. That is what I think I'm doing is I'm

01:10:37.700 stating what should be obvious, but also mounting an explanation for why it exists and then also

01:10:43.960 defending it. And that seems necessary at the current time. I guess the positive dovetailing

01:10:48.580 with your work at the moment is that there is a vast pool of shared principles that that constitutes

01:10:57.460 that's right. What constitutes that's actually what you're laying out is what constitutes the core

01:11:02.560 of American values. So here we go. Let's just jump right to it. So 80 to 100 percent of Americans

01:11:09.280 agree with the following. This, by the way, is all in the 90s. Okay. So I believe in freedom of speech

01:11:17.260 and religion. 100 percent agree. I believe in the freedom to vote and having every vote counted.

01:11:22.820 97 percent agree. We should stop scam phone calls and texts and loopholes that allow such activities.

01:11:28.820 97 percent. I believe in investing in our kids to ensure they have a brighter future. 98 percent.

01:11:35.320 So one of the lessons here is, you know, don't phrase your polling like a partisan jerk. 0.99

01:11:40.660 Right. Start with what's shared upon and then we can build. Right. So if we say, you know, 0.97

01:11:46.920 sex offenders belong in jail. 96 percent agree. If we try to ask. I believe that success from hard

01:11:53.340 work should be rewarded and emulated. Well, that's a very interesting phrase because it

01:11:58.740 implies that success can derive from hard work, which is, of course, something the radical leftist

01:12:04.820 communist types are always attacking anybody who's anti-meritocratic so that success from hard work

01:12:11.280 is actually a real thing. We know the best predictor of long-term life success on the personality side is

01:12:16.400 trait conscientiousness. And so that, you know, my suspicions are that- Yeah, better health care,

01:12:22.060 longer marriages, longer lifespan. I mean, like, conscientiousness is, it holds the world together.

01:12:28.640 Right, right, right. Well, I think, too, you know, an index of the health of society is probably a

01:12:33.180 correlation, the size of the correlation between conscientiousness and life outcome.

01:12:37.920 Right? The higher that correlation, the more, the healthier the society because you're rewarding

01:12:41.880 people that can delay gratification, will invest in the future, keep the word, who are diligent and

01:12:46.380 industrious. So if the correlation between conscientiousness and success in your culture

01:12:51.140 is zero, then your culture is pathological. And that's, you know, that's a more conservative

01:12:55.100 value, predictive for conservative. That's the center holding. However, that's also for the fringe to

01:13:00.720 thrive and for high openness ideas and people to get in and permeate the culture so that the culture

01:13:07.540 can navigate complicated change and it doesn't become brittle and shatter.

01:13:11.020 Well, it's also the case that without that core solidity that the conscientious provide,

01:13:17.380 the open people can't manage because you can't afford, if everything's chaotic, you can't afford

01:13:22.560 experimentation. It's only when the center is really, really stable that wild experimentation in

01:13:28.860 the arts, for example, is possible because otherwise it becomes so threatening that it tears the culture

01:13:33.440 apart. Or the conditions aren't met to even allow it. Like the number of conditions that need to be met

01:13:39.060 in a culture for me to do my job, which is be a novelist, are extraordinary. 0.97

01:13:43.700 Yeah, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. 0.99

01:13:44.640 And so one of the biggest things that I've learned- 0.69

01:13:46.340 Well, that's why, what are your royalties? 4%, 5%, 10%?

01:13:50.100 15.

01:13:50.780 15%.

01:13:51.100 Well, it depends on, yeah.

01:13:52.400 It depends. Okay, okay. So the reason I'm pointing that out is because you write the books,

01:13:57.420 but 85% of the book revenue goes to other sources. And you might say, well, that's radically unfair

01:14:03.280 because it's your ideas. It's like, no, the fact that 85% of what you're producing is distributed

01:14:09.720 to other sources is an indication of just exactly how much, on how much of those other sources,

01:14:15.580 your freedom as a writer actually depends.

01:14:18.700 That's right.

01:14:19.120 And it's kind of a shocking thing to realize, you know, because you think, well, I had the idea.

01:14:23.140 It's like, great. That and 95% of the effort will get you somewhere.

01:14:28.400 And, you know, publishers pay in advance. They pay a big livable advance.

01:14:32.820 Yeah, it was a huge risk.

01:14:33.520 There's a huge amount of gratitude for structures. Much of what I've learned in my intrusion into the

01:14:38.560 culture, especially with like deeper and deeper engagement with conservative thought and thinkers

01:14:45.080 is the necessity for defining and holding that center and how that functions in order to have

01:14:50.680 what, you know, I'm somebody who's more on the fringe, right? I'm an artist.

01:14:54.680 I mean, for that to function, the interplay and the relationship between the two and the need for

01:15:01.020 a healthy relationship between the two, because if either side dominates, it destroys. We go to hell,

01:15:07.620 literally. It's the gulags or the camps. Like there's no choice if one side wins, is ascendant,

01:15:14.720 completely turns the other side into a dehumanized monolith and crushes it. And America is 50-50.

01:15:21.500 One of the first comments. Well, you can also see that happening in a perverse way on the art side

01:15:25.960 in general in the US, because as the progressive voices have dominated, the amount of creative

01:15:31.080 freedom that the artists themselves have is decreased radically. And so is the quality of

01:15:36.280 the production. And so it's like, well, let's stampede in the progressive direction. So, well,

01:15:41.340 okay, now you don't get to say anything as an artist and everything becomes dull and not only dull,

01:15:46.540 but hateful and depressing. I mean, I've talked to so many people in the arts community who are

01:15:51.660 demoralized to the nth degree because they don't have that creative freedom of expression that is

01:15:56.660 so perversely associated with the necessity of maintaining that core conservative center.

01:16:02.060 Well, I thought this very much when you and I went to Comedy Mothership when we were in Austin,

01:16:07.560 and you have every shape and size and orientation on stage making fun of every shape, size and

01:16:13.520 orientation. And it was right when there was the Tucker Carlson, Daryl Cooper interview and sort of

01:16:19.160 exploded online. And it felt so much to me like it was this, that the psychopathic algorithms can lead

01:16:27.060 to explosions of people picking up all sorts of taboos. Like how about if women shouldn't vote? 0.99

01:16:31.880 How about if men should be pimps? How about if we can hate Jews? How about Hitler was a hero? 1.00

01:16:37.080 Like, so it's picking up different things, but just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

01:16:41.520 And when we were at the Comedy Mothership, I was watching, first of all, the mood in there is

01:16:45.800 spectacular. It felt like a comedy club from the eighties or nineties and everybody was making fun

01:16:51.480 of and dancing around all the taboos. And that's the way that you make it safe. That's the court 0.92

01:16:56.200 jester in Shakespeare. That's the play. And that's how we can approach ideas. If we joke and

01:17:01.840 make fun of our ethnicities and orientations and proclivities and all the taboo topics,

01:17:07.360 we make them safe. We laugh among ourselves. Our nervous systems are relaxed and it's moving

01:17:12.600 things, comedy of all things. The important thing about joint demonstrations of that,

01:17:17.020 I was at a comedy show in Toronto with Jimmy Carr and a couple of other comedians and there was 12,000

01:17:22.880 people there and the same thing was happening. And it is a celebration of unity because everyone's

01:17:27.980 there doing the same thing. And partly what they're doing is making light of their differences.

01:17:32.880 Right. And so that indicates something like a common core, at least a common core that enables

01:17:37.680 people to laugh in that way. And a lot of those things have to be done collectively because it's

01:17:42.000 very useful psychologically to be in a room with 12,000 strangers and have everyone make light of

01:17:47.840 their differences and everything proceeds peacefully and playfully. And it's a good,

01:17:52.740 and a good time was had by all. That's right. And you don't get to slap a comedian in a temple of

01:17:58.860 art devoted to them doing art. And it's inoculating. Well, sometimes you hear something where you're

01:18:05.900 like, I can't believe he just said that. Right, right. It's inoculating because there's this playful,

01:18:11.220 safe engagement about different things versus this sort of arid, sexless brittleness brought to

01:18:18.380 topics. Right. Well, and the comedians that are pushing the fringes are right out there on the

01:18:23.960 edge, you know, keeping the enemies and the censors at bay. They're the gargoyles. Yeah. And they always

01:18:28.220 go too far, the comedians, or just almost exactly too far, which is what makes it funny. And what that

01:18:34.500 means is that they're the people who are either maintaining the fences or pushing them farther out.

01:18:42.020 Mediating entry.

01:18:43.020 Well, and people are safe then to come in behind them in a more moderate way and to speak because

01:18:49.460 the extreme, the permission for the extreme version of that has already been granted. It's crucially

01:18:55.880 important. And the artistic community should be doing that all the time because they're pushing the

01:19:00.360 boundaries. Pushing the boundaries isn't the same as destroying the rules.

01:19:05.700 Well, and if you're mean-spirited and a comedian, people don't laugh and it's not funny.

01:19:10.460 Yes. Right. It's built in test. Like Dave Chappelle, always funny. Yeah. He says stuff

01:19:16.560 sometimes I don't agree with, but he's a genius. He's, he plays by fair rules, even when he's making

01:19:22.960 a point. Let's turn back to some more of these common values. Okay. That's, that's crucial.

01:19:27.400 Let's look over here. So, okay. So look at this top, this top one for me is so important. So it's

01:19:32.380 important to take care of our environment and ensure we have clean fields and streams, seas and skies.

01:19:37.040 Americans are tired of political division. 95% agree. Now fields and streams obviously talks to

01:19:43.220 rural America, right? Seas and skies, perhaps a bit more to, I don't know, liberal inclined people.

01:19:51.020 But the point is, if I were to phrase this and say, I believe climate change is an existential threat,

01:19:55.860 I get in the forties, I would guess. And if I say, I believe climate change is a hoax,

01:20:00.540 you get in the forties. So why, why would we start there? It's like, I used to talk to Democrats to say,

01:20:05.500 don't walk into a town hall and say, I believe healthcare is a universal right.

01:20:10.580 It's like, that's a very weird starting position. How about make arguments for its effectiveness,

01:20:14.420 for the robustness of the community and a value set that also makes sense financially.

01:20:19.480 So if we're willing to make arguments within other value structures, I mean, look at this.

01:20:25.900 I believe Americans love their families and the communities are the heartbeat of America, 94%.

01:20:30.980 84%. I believe in gratitude, not grievance, 86%. I believe in excellence, not mediocrity, 91%.

01:20:39.240 Right. That's a crucial one. That's a crucial one. The USA should have a sovereign border and

01:20:43.840 immigration should follow the laws and be safe for everyone. 86% agree.

01:20:48.640 So think about that when it comes to law. If we could start there, build consensus in a transparent

01:20:54.100 way with fair negotiations for people back to their districts at home and states. I mean,

01:20:59.640 there's so many things we can solve. Our greatest resources are people and we should invest in rural

01:21:04.800 and urban communities that have been left behind. 93% agree. There's ways that we can have interventions

01:21:11.400 with communities that have been legitimately left behind by corruption and nonsense. There's smart ways

01:21:18.320 to make investments that have measurable outcomes. And as long as we're willing-

01:21:22.080 What the hell do you think happened exactly? Because I mean, when I was a kid, which is getting

01:21:26.400 to be a long time ago, I mean, one of the things that was an absolute, was absolutely remarkable

01:21:31.760 about the United States, looking at it from a slightly paranoid Canadian perspective. Well,

01:21:36.920 when I was a kid, the huge concern in Canada was that we were just going to become

01:21:42.520 an American appendage, right? That Canadian identity would be subsumed into the US. And that actually

01:21:48.440 is not what happened. The countries are more different now than they were when I was a kid.

01:21:52.200 And Canadians don't obsess about that anymore. But one of the things that was absolutely remarkable

01:21:56.920 about the US was its ability to agitate for that core set of values, for the American dream,

01:22:04.680 for the melting pot, for the set of an overarching objective set of political ideas grounded in the

01:22:11.800 liberal tradition that did unite everyone. And what made America great was exactly that ability to

01:22:19.640 produce that shared central narrative. And you just saw it everywhere. It was implicit in almost

01:22:25.080 everything that came out of American pop culture. It was implicit in The Rock, even when it was

01:22:30.000 protest-oriented. It was implicit in the sitcoms. It was absolutely saturated everywhere. And I

01:22:38.520 wonder what it was that, I guess I would point to the bloody universities and the English departments,

01:22:43.240 again, fractionating everything and fragmenting everything. And it's part of that postmodern

01:22:48.920 assault on the main narrative. And so-

01:22:51.800 We're also two generations away from the last nationally shared American catastrophe,

01:22:58.440 which is World War II. Like, it's not a coincidence that the last Holocaust survivors are dying and the

01:23:04.280 greatest generation is dying. We're far enough away. We floated far enough away from recognizing the true

01:23:10.360 terrors of Marxism and communism and Nazism that they're sort of a memory. And I think we didn't

01:23:16.360 keep pace. We didn't stay solidified enough. And there's a bunch of different ways we could go

01:23:21.000 through what happened in the political system and gerrymandering and cameras in the chamber and in the

01:23:26.760 house, right? And people spending more time at home rather than in DC or politicians and shared

01:23:31.320 communities when everyone used to live there. But we didn't keep pace with the technologies.

01:23:36.120 Well, it also might be a consequence of something approximating the pathology of wealth,

01:23:41.640 you know, is that you have the luxury of- Tearing the world down to make it interesting.

01:23:47.800 Absolutely. Absolutely. And concentrating on the small divisions that plague you because you're so

01:23:54.360 comfortable in your life, all things considered, that you can-

01:23:59.400 And we're at an inflection point now where we can wake up that that game is not a great game

01:24:05.960 and set things right in ways that are long-term measurable and strategic and good for the American

01:24:11.240 people across the boards.

01:24:13.320 Right. So we talked about the fact that there is a core of shared values and ideals,

01:24:20.360 and then there's a periphery that has to experiment with that. And then outside of that,

01:24:25.560 there's the domain of the monsters, which would be the manipulators and the psychopaths who are warping

01:24:30.840 both the center and the experimentation to gain on their own ground by their own terms in a way that's

01:24:38.920 very hard on everyone else. And so now the practical question starts to become, how is it that we

01:24:45.240 strengthen the center while maintaining that ability for creative exploration and keep the psychopaths and

01:24:52.760 the bad actors at bay, right? That's-

01:24:55.480 First thing is we have to attack to shared American values. And we can talk about that in a minute of

01:25:00.520 defining what they are, but that's a headline. What do Americans actually agree on and agree with?

01:25:05.560 And that has to be about the process as well as particular political positions or cultural positions.

01:25:12.360 And you think it's possible to do that effectively on the political side? I mean,

01:25:17.080 because maybe you could make the cold-blooded case that if you're running a marginal campaign and

01:25:23.480 there's only a few percentage of people that have to flip you over the edge, that you speak to the

01:25:27.960 chronically disaffected identity groups to try to pull them on board. Can you make a reasonable case

01:25:35.400 from a political strategic perspective for tacking towards the center? You said it worked with Harris and the DNC.

01:25:42.200 Yeah, I think if we can have, I don't think we can look to our politicians as our saviors. I think we

01:25:49.640 can look to them as flawed men and women figuring out what to do, who are exposed to an enormous amount

01:25:55.560 of insanity and corruption in a system. And if we make, if I think part of our job, Ayaan Hirsi Ali at

01:26:02.520 ARC said that Western civilization is like this beautiful cut flower that's sitting on a table,

01:26:07.800 and our job is to plant seeds. If we plant seeds and if we can fertilize the American landscape

01:26:14.280 so that politicians can see that it is to their benefit to move to the center, which I think

01:26:20.600 that can embolden them in their leadership. Well, it probably worked with Harris. I mean, part of

01:26:25.720 what boosted her popularity as she took ascendancy, I believe, was an attempt to

01:26:33.480 lay out more centrist concerns, right? She tried to divorce herself from the more radical fringes of

01:26:40.520 the party and the more radical positions. So the empirical evidence that such a thing can work is

01:26:48.120 already at hand. Well, we know people are starving for it. People want solutions to their problems. People

01:26:55.720 want to be able to have their neighbors back, right? They want to figure out to not have everything turned

01:27:01.400 into. I mean, imagine growing up in this era where you're a 15-year-old kid in high school and you're

01:27:06.520 expected to have an opinion on every single political matter or cultural matter or sexual

01:27:11.720 matter. And if it's the wrong opinion, you're dead. It's impossible if your brain hasn't been 0.98

01:27:16.280 sufficiently trained. We need to move back to disciplines within their own, like, ethics that

01:27:22.280 exist within fields. Like, there's no reason why a college should be issuing a statement about every

01:27:28.600 ceasefire agreement that happens around the world. They're endless. Why are we focusing so much

01:27:34.080 attention on these specific things? There's no reason why every, you know, conversation that happens

01:27:40.280 in schools—I shouldn't say every conversation. That's a big overstatement. But there's such a strong

01:27:46.640 emphasis that is placed on sexuality and defining sexuality for kids in school where they have to

01:27:51.480 have all sorts of opinions to figure it out. It's a confusing topic to begin with. We know the basics of

01:27:56.320 education that work. We can have schools return to being a purview of actually training children

01:28:02.320 and students and young people for the world. That's a hierarchical boundary issue, right?

01:28:07.320 So they have to keep the monsters out there. We've opened all the doors to psychopaths and foreign 1.00

01:28:12.280 players, I think. And the fringe hasn't been—so the fringe is starting to deteriorate and the center

01:28:17.600 has all sorts of cracks in it. Right. And we have to remember with regards to the fringe that although

01:28:22.040 the fringe is where all the useful experimentation takes place and the creative endeavor that's

01:28:26.960 necessary to revitalize, there's a subset always of the fringe that is the pathological actors.

01:28:33.940 Right. And so—and that's a very difficult dancing job to allow for enough freedom. You know,

01:28:39.980 so here's a good example of that. You know, America is more creative than Japan and has a much

01:28:45.140 higher crime rate. Like those might be the same thing. In fact, if you look at crime age curves

01:28:51.640 and creativity age curves, they match perfectly. Right. So that issue of handling the fringe is a

01:28:59.360 very complex issue because you need that experimentation, but you have to differentiate

01:29:03.440 the genuine experimenters from the people who are attempting to demolish the culture only to further 0.99

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01:30:00.160 future you deserve. Positions.

01:30:05.240 And Pajot speaks so beautifully that the monster of the left, or the monstrous left, is too much

01:30:10.920 hybridization, so it can't hold together, a gargoyle. And the monsters of the right are too much sameness.

01:30:18.120 And so, yeah, the psychopathy of the fringe has a different effect that's self-cannibalizing and wild,

01:30:24.540 that's Mao Zedong and Stalin, than the rigidity and increasing sameness of a cycle like Hitler, 0.73

01:30:30.220 who's constantly... Okay, so merit and truth, not victim-oppressor narrative. There's only three

01:30:37.000 roles. If you view the world in an oppressor, in a victim-oppressor narrative, there's only three

01:30:42.160 roles available. You're a victim, you're an oppressor, or you're a persecutor. None of those

01:30:47.780 are good roles. You can't ever get to a place of stability in that. If you're a victim, what do you

01:30:53.280 want to be? A persecutor or an oppressor? Yeah. Right. I mean, all those roles are unpalatable,

01:30:58.880 and they're designed to disintegrate and sever the fabric of a culture. So, we need to get out

01:31:04.600 of that way of thinking that's constantly dividing and analyzing and measuring and grouping.

01:31:09.380 Well, that's why so much classical religious practice, let's say, focuses on gratitude.

01:31:15.420 It's because if you're focusing on what's good about the position that you're in and the

01:31:19.220 opportunities that are in front of you, it stops you from falling into that vengeful, resentful,

01:31:25.000 victim category. And you see clearly, like, that's a great example to dovetail with

01:31:30.860 the Russian operatives who are painting Stars of David. The culture will move in the direction that 0.74

01:31:37.300 it's nudged psychologically. So, if what's starting to proliferate everywhere is hatred and grievance,

01:31:43.420 that story starts to become the reality. If what we're permeating everywhere is merit and gratitude,

01:31:49.460 and we know this is true in our own households, in our own jobs, do you want to go work in a job

01:31:53.840 where everybody is divisive and out for themselves and comparing, or do you want to create a-

01:31:58.220 No, it'll just fail. The enterprise will just fail.

01:32:00.560 And that's where a lot of countries in the West, in America, we are on the precipice of that.

01:32:06.720 If we can't move to gratitude for what we have, we don't deserve to keep what we have.

01:32:10.760 Right. Well, and that gratitude isn't a kind of naivety about the past. That gratitude isn't

01:32:17.600 a constant, unceasing attempt to identify positive opportunity in the midst of chaos and strife,

01:32:24.920 and the understanding that that's a moral requirement. Right? It's not the insistence

01:32:29.660 that the world is just a rosy and positive place. It's the discriminating search for the kinds of

01:32:36.180 spaces that enable you to take an opportunity and move forward to the future. And that highlights this

01:32:41.980 moving forward issue too, how we move to peace and unity. One percent of people prefer to focus on

01:32:49.080 addressing past injustices to achieve justice compared to 57 percent who prefer to focus on

01:32:57.140 solving current and future problems to move forward. Right? And that's a healthy orientation.

01:33:02.100 That's a staggering finding.

01:33:03.540 Yeah. One percent is absolutely trivial. It's probably the percentage of the people who were

01:33:10.840 confused about the question. So you said tacking to shared American values, merit and truth,

01:33:16.940 rather than the victim oppressor narrative. Don't make demands that impinge on the rights and

01:33:22.760 freedoms of others. So that's something like an ethos of responsibility. Historical gratitude,

01:33:27.640 not grievance.

01:33:28.460 And that's worth pausing on just for a moment. We talk a lot about our historic grievances.

01:33:32.700 And anything in the world and anything that man is involved with is corrupt, whether that's going

01:33:37.960 to be America or the Catholic Church. You can pick anything and point to corruption because we're

01:33:42.800 human beings. But we forget, I think, a lot of times the level of gratitude. My primary identity

01:33:50.800 outside of my individual identity is as an American. I have so much historic gratitude for America in

01:33:58.440 its role in how it received my other identities, like as a Jew. America is incredible. And you

01:34:04.340 could focus on, well, Roosevelt turned the ships around during World War II, and he should have been

01:34:09.760 better, and he should have done this. But America went overseas, liberated the camps. When Jews were 0.99

01:34:16.640 trying to get visas, even when Roosevelt was hedging, who opened up and got them student positions as

01:34:24.280 professors or students, where the historically black college is. We've had it. And when my grandfather

01:34:30.020 went to college, there was quotas on Jews in medical school. When I went, there wasn't a trace

01:34:33.760 of it. America has been a dream. If you go and watch protests and vigils around Israel or around Jews, 1.00

01:34:43.620 there's constantly American flags in it. And I think part of what we have to do within whatever group

01:34:48.640 that we're in is not look as much back towards the things that we have grievance over. But even

01:34:54.380 some of them, I don't mean to dismiss grievance, and I don't mean to dismiss trauma. And the only

01:34:59.200 way to really eradicate it is through truth and reconciliation, which is a very different path

01:35:03.640 than this kind of path. So I'm not saying that there's not a dress that needs to happen. But we

01:35:10.060 have to, I think, in taking care of and shoring up our own communities, whatever they are and however

01:35:15.260 they're defined, none of which are a monolith. Not black communities, Hispanic communities, 0.98

01:35:20.040 Jewish communities. There's Jews who have every opinion across the political spectrum.

01:35:22.860 Yeah, well, there's certainly not a monolith of opinion in relationship to ethnic or racial identity.

01:35:27.760 None. And political orientation. It's like people who think like Hispanics and blacks are 1.00

01:35:32.500 liberal. 1.00

01:35:33.000 One of the reasons why it's such a foolish way of dividing people. 0.98

01:35:36.420 It makes no sense. But if the groups, like for me as a Jew, just part of how I feel

01:35:42.440 naturally is to look to all the shared American values that we have. And that to me is, there's

01:35:48.500 a lot of that that's shared within the Jewish community. And I think that there's an emphasis

01:35:53.320 on historic gratitude of what we've been given by America and what we have given, been allowed

01:35:58.040 to give to America. Jews have given everything they have to America and America has given 0.88

01:36:02.360 everything back. It's incredible. It doesn't mean there's not anti-Semitism. It doesn't mean

01:36:06.240 there are problems.

01:36:06.640 Yeah, well, I don't think there's an ethnic group for which that isn't true in the United States.

01:36:09.860 That's exactly right.

01:36:10.680 I mean, the contribution of the black community to American culture is absolutely staggering.

01:36:17.460 America is not America without the black community. It's interwoven from the beginning. 1.00

01:36:23.360 Like music, for example.

01:36:25.420 Oh my God. And intellectual thought. I mean, soul. And poets. And political leadership. And

01:36:33.340 moral leadership. And spiritual leadership. And I mean, it's, you know, I mean, look, I grew

01:36:38.280 up reading Langston Hughes and Ellison and Richard Wright, and that's, it's stitched into the

01:36:43.700 narrative. But, you know, I can't, all I can speak about in terms of where I think we should.

01:36:50.180 So this is a tilt, I would say. This is part of what I can see as a transformation in some ways,

01:36:55.960 or a further elaboration of your appreciation for the conservative viewpoint, which is that there

01:37:02.980 is a central narrative that's uniting and it's necessary to buttress that and to uphold it.

01:37:08.080 I mean, we've been trying to wrestle at ARC, for example, and in discussions with Pajot and people

01:37:13.280 like that with the idea of how you strengthen the center and maintain that experimental vitality on

01:37:19.580 the fringe. It's a very tricky thing to manage. But I would also say that the U.S. has managed that

01:37:24.300 historically better than any other country and continues to do that. And thank God for that.

01:37:30.440 Like, seriously, thank God for that. That's part of how we are, the world looks to America. It's

01:37:35.840 partially because of that. Yeah, definitely. Because we have integrated the best of every

01:37:40.020 community. We have the most integrated, you know, pick a category, Ethiopian, Muslim, Arab, Jewish.

01:37:47.480 It's everyone can be part of this fabric. Everyone is allowed to participate.

01:37:50.500 I saw that particularly, I would say, exemplified in the case of what's happened with Indians 1.00

01:37:57.200 in the tech industry. I mean, I don't know where do Indian Americans rank in terms of net income?

01:38:03.520 Is it number one? I think so. I think they're number one and by quite a substantial margin.

01:38:10.360 And so that's a really good example. I mean, I watched that massive influx of extremely bright

01:38:16.280 Indian engineers in particular into Silicon Valley. And that was part of what helped Silicon Valley

01:38:21.480 thrive like mad and produce the absolute economic miracle that constitutes Silicon Valley. And then

01:38:26.120 all that money got dumped back in India, so interestingly. And then India itself started 0.95

01:38:31.300 to thrive like mad. I mean, it's such a great model. And that's a very recent example of

01:38:37.240 very high level of immigrant success. You see the same thing with Nigerian Americans, for example.

01:38:42.480 Oh, yeah. Nigerians are amazing. Yeah. All right. All right. So.

01:38:46.480 Okay. So we have a roadmap in civil rights for how we handle disagreement and protest. We don't have

01:38:51.380 to reinvent the entirety of the wheel of determining how that functions. But right now, the difference is

01:38:57.240 we have this incredibly accelerated rate of tech propagation of mind control. So we need some new

01:39:01.920 measures. So what can we do? I wanted to focus on a few things that are concrete. What is an agreed

01:39:07.760 upon shared American value set? Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. And the

01:39:13.420 more the first gets corrupted, the more temptation there is to push for the second. Right? So people,

01:39:20.880 a lot of people have pulled up the ladder behind them. Well, one of the things we should focus on

01:39:24.980 very briefly with regards to equality of opportunity, too, is that we have to understand that

01:39:30.480 opening the door to opportunity for everyone, it's very good for the individuals involved.

01:39:37.920 But you could make a sociological case that that's not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is

01:39:42.960 you want to open the doors on the equality of opportunity side because you want the broad culture

01:39:48.300 to be able to benefit from the specific contributions of the most able people. And any arbitrary barriers

01:39:54.680 are going to forestall that, are going to work against that. Like the reason that you want

01:40:00.980 extremely intelligent, hardworking, creative kids at Harvard isn't so they can have stellar careers.

01:40:07.740 That's part of it and good for them. That's not the issue. The issue is you want to educate those

01:40:12.320 people like mad because they're going to produce products that are so useful for everyone else that

01:40:17.800 if those particular people have a few privileges along the way, that's just fine.

01:40:22.560 So equality of opportunity is the best sociological solution as well as the best psychological solution.

01:40:28.680 When I was there as an undergraduate, one of the first things they told us, they gathered everyone

01:40:33.280 in Seaver Hall and they said, you're going to learn more here from your classmates than from your

01:40:37.760 professors. And I thought that was, you know, a silly kind of old saw that you, and it's absolutely 0.89

01:40:45.260 true. And that cohort, which was, I mean, people all over the world, people all over the country, 0.65

01:40:52.560 and it was incredible in terms of the strengthening of one's mind to see people from every reach of

01:40:57.360 America internationally, all trained up under a joint narrative, that that's continuing friendships

01:41:03.200 across different states of being, every single kind of group.

01:41:06.880 And merit-based selection is the best way to ensure that. So we know, for example, that

01:41:12.440 the alternative to merit-based selection historically has been dynasty and nepotism.

01:41:18.000 And there's no productivity in dynasty and nepotism because it means that, you know, your right to a

01:41:25.680 position is determined by your birth, by your state of birth, has nothing to do with your confidence.

01:41:30.040 You do get good China, though.

01:41:31.740 Yeah, yeah, well, right, right. All right, so gratitude, not grievance, rule of law, pursuit of truth,

01:41:38.340 focus on outcomes.

01:41:40.120 Reality is where ideology goes to die. That's like, that's something I wrote and taped to my wall.

01:41:45.580 If you're solving solutions with measurable outcomes, look, there's a lot of libertarianism

01:41:51.940 has crept into my worldview much more as I've pursued things, right? Measure something not by

01:41:57.180 its intentions, but its outcomes. In a way, everything's irrelevant. I don't care what your

01:42:01.580 intentions are.

01:42:02.840 That's true on the social intervention side, because you have to ensure that your intervention

01:42:07.820 is producing the consequences that you desired. And it's very unlikely, because there's a million ways

01:42:14.420 things can go wrong, and generally only one or two ways they can go right. So concrete steps.

01:42:20.580 Uphold free speech, prosecute illegal action. It's fairly easy. If people are breaking laws and

01:42:26.500 throwing bottles at police officers and blocking traffic and making true threats against individuals

01:42:33.300 and vandalizing buildings and people's houses, they can be arrested and actually prosecuted. We don't

01:42:39.200 need to make exceptions for them any differently than were made for the Harvey Milk or the leaders

01:42:45.100 of the civil rights movement. But people are allowed to have their opinions. They're allowed

01:42:48.920 to criticize any states. That includes Israel, any leadership, which includes Netanyahu. They're

01:42:55.600 allowed to peacefully protest. They're allowed to compete in a free marketplace of ideas.

01:42:59.400 No problem. But we don't break the law, and we know that. And that's from both sides of the fence,

01:43:05.780 right? We have fringes who do that on both sides. You know, face coverings and masks at protests,

01:43:12.680 if they're being used to menace and terrorize, that should be illegal. That's the purview of the KKK,

01:43:19.280 right? That's not what we do. Stand behind. You know, you can't cover your face to do things that

01:43:27.320 are illegal or to terrorize people. And then the algorithms and social media, that's almost a whole

01:43:34.000 other discussion for, because you and I have been talking about this a lot about, but there's ways

01:43:37.520 to maintain freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean freedom of reach for profit, which means if I say

01:43:42.660 the most outrageous, misogynistic or anti-Semitic or insane thing, that the algos should drive that 1.00

01:43:49.960 for profit, for corporations, when the algos are hidden covertly behind firewalls that we don't even 0.99

01:43:55.640 know who we're talking to, or if they're American. We should also be aware of presuming that the tech

01:44:02.100 people themselves can solve these problems. Because it, like, I see this with Zuckerberg and with

01:44:07.860 with Musk, and perhaps they're on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they still have the same

01:44:13.580 problem. Corruption aside, no one knows how to regulate the, regulate online discourse, like to

01:44:21.020 bring the rule of law in order to online discourse. No one solved that problem. Half of online activity

01:44:26.340 is criminal across the board, right? Pornography, outright crime, and then the sort of quasi crimes that

01:44:32.980 constitute trolling and so forth. And no one knows how to regulate that. And we shouldn't expect the

01:44:37.800 tech engineers to be able to manage that without. But there's, as you've said, and we've discussed,

01:44:42.520 there are some concrete steps we can make. One of them is, we need transparent algorithms to know

01:44:47.880 if 60% of the people who are screaming about anti-Semitism and encouraging it are Russian bots.

01:44:53.240 Right. That's a good thing to know. That's not a freedom of speech issue.

01:44:56.240 Distinguish the human actors from the non-human actors. 0.83

01:44:58.660 And you discussed, if you're anonymous and don't want to stand behind your words online,

01:45:03.700 you don't need to be censored. There's a whistleblower issue,

01:45:07.000 but you could certainly be in a second tier of comments below an interface of people who are

01:45:11.300 willing to... That's not much different than stopping masking. Because online anonymity is the

01:45:17.000 virtual equivalent of masking, right? And the other thing is that you pointed to quite sanely is

01:45:22.440 everything, to some extent, needs some degree of human intervention. That's okay. Whether it's a

01:45:30.020 Tesla factory, whether it's... Everything cannot be automated.

01:45:33.700 Yeah. Well, you can't automate the edge cases. You can't. That's what consciousness... That's

01:45:37.920 actually what consciousness itself is for.

01:45:40.640 Yes.

01:45:40.900 Right. Because as we can transform something into an algorithm, neurologically speaking,

01:45:45.640 we become... It's unconscious.

01:45:47.360 Yes.

01:45:47.700 Right. We transform regulating our heartbeat into an algorithm. You're never conscious of that.

01:45:52.500 It runs on its own. And once you've got something down, it should run on its own. But

01:45:57.300 there's always an edge of transformation, right? The edge of transformation can't be algorithmized.

01:46:03.240 That's actually why we have consciousness itself. And part of the mechanism of that consciousness

01:46:08.120 is the thought, the abstract thought that thought itself entails. But that's very tightly

01:46:15.240 associated with free speech, right? Thought is internalized speech.

01:46:19.300 Yes.

01:46:19.820 And so the way that consciousness navigates that transformative edge that can't be transformed

01:46:25.020 into an algorithm is through the mechanism of free discourse. That's the mechanism.

01:46:30.680 Yes.

01:46:31.080 And so... And there has to be a wide variety of opinions because we don't know how to algorithmize

01:46:35.920 the edge.

01:46:37.520 And the edge causes most of the problem. That's the pride of distribution.

01:46:41.120 And that's where most of the opportunity is.

01:46:42.120 Yeah. But you said, I mean, I think you said something like 1% of the...

01:46:46.820 Criminals.

01:46:47.500 Criminals can cause 65% of the damage.

01:46:50.280 Yeah, that's what they do. Yeah.

01:46:51.380 So there's no reason that we can't go into, a private company can't say, look, we've identified

01:46:57.560 150 to 250 people who are clearly bent on sowing chaos, terrorizing America.

01:47:02.280 Here they are.

01:47:02.900 Here they are.

01:47:03.800 Here's the processes that we have undertaken. They're completely transparent.

01:47:07.560 And it doesn't necessarily mean you even deplatform them.

01:47:10.360 But could you perhaps turn down their reach that you're taking advantage of for profit

01:47:14.900 because they're driving outrage and hatred and more and more people are turned into swirl

01:47:18.920 of hatred? That is not a good long-term strategy for any company or any country.

01:47:23.540 Not unless it wants to be overrun by manipulative psychopaths. 0.97

01:47:26.760 That's right. And so any platform will get rife with it and people will leave. And look, 0.74

01:47:31.440 you and Michaela and Jordan Fuller have solved this. Peterson Academy, everybody has to have

01:47:37.320 their name who has comment. There's a social board.

01:47:40.360 People pay a reasonable but low price of entry to have access to the classes. And the discourse

01:47:45.580 on there is entirely sane.

01:47:47.440 Yeah. Well, we have something approximating an honor code, which is like, if you act like

01:47:51.820 a jerk, you can have your money back and leave. And you might say, well, who decides that? And 0.99

01:47:56.260 well, the answer at the moment is twofold. The community itself is deciding that,

01:48:00.280 but we are watching too. And we've identified three people out of 30,000 who've caused trouble.

01:48:05.240 Three people.

01:48:06.700 Right. And the discourse in there, especially as it builds out, we can have these interfaces,

01:48:12.320 just like kids. Jonathan Haidt is suggesting limitations on when kids have their phones.

01:48:16.640 Is there any reason we need like Comainy to have access to them from 8 a.m. or 4 in the morning if

01:48:22.060 a tweet alerts? We can have limitations on that. Private companies can also make limitations on how

01:48:27.980 they want to conduct their marketplace of ideas and what's one person in a classroom having a

01:48:33.780 constant temper tantrum that means nobody can learn.

01:48:36.100 I was trying to distinguish the other day between referee and censor. Like there are game rules by

01:48:42.100 which civilized discourse has to proceed. A referee makes sure that the rules are being applied

01:48:47.680 fairly and across the board. Everyone knows what they are. A censor is someone who's making arbitrary

01:48:53.400 behind-the-scenes decisions. And I think we can discriminate between censors and referees.

01:48:58.860 Especially if you do it early and you set the ground rules.

01:49:00.940 Yeah, right, right, right.

01:49:02.260 Okay, so American control. This is fascinating. Three and a half or 3.5 more Americans believe

01:49:09.620 that American news organizations and social media platforms should be owned by U.S. entities to

01:49:14.160 prevent the spread of foreign propagation and disinformation. Of course. Like would Iran allow us to have 0.99

01:49:20.540 a major networking effort through social media that goes to their entire populace? Would China allow

01:49:27.000 us to do that? Does Russia? Does Brazil? Right. Yes, most notably and recently. But so it's perfectly

01:49:35.580 acceptable to understand that America is allowed to have a national identity, one that is shared and good

01:49:41.420 and creates a lot of space for people of different groups to compete. Though we have a lot of obstacles

01:49:46.800 we have to get right to remove those obstacles to equality of opportunity. And that's what's driving

01:49:52.640 a lot of these problems. But the more we can focus on solving those real problems, we are certainly

01:49:58.140 allowed to have ownership of who is educating our kids and driving our discourse in the hands of

01:50:03.920 Americans. That's not an outrageous proposal. So this is a bill which is about, it's called PADA.

01:50:11.080 It is post-partisan. It's sponsored by Senator Coons, Cassidy, Klobuchar, Cornyn, Blumenthal,

01:50:17.480 and Romney. And basically, this bill that's right now is going forth is basically just causing

01:50:25.960 us to be able to have, us, them, someone, to have transparency on what the algorithms are.

01:50:32.860 It's not to attack free speech. It's not to give censorship control. But it's to say we and the

01:50:37.900 public have a right to know what is happening. We need more content moderation and viral posts.

01:50:43.620 We want transparency around that. What if something's being spread from a troll farm of,

01:50:47.660 you know, a thousand people in St. Petersburg? Don't we want to know that?

01:50:51.760 Do you see some size association with that? It's like, is there an indication of what size a social

01:50:57.540 network has to have before it's subject to that kind of regulation?

01:51:01.320 I'm not sure. The details will be within that. And there's a long ways to go on tack. But I think it

01:51:06.360 doesn't mean that we have to freeze up at the precipice of the problem and say,

01:51:10.280 oh my God, free speech, like the deep state will take control and my enemies will have this control

01:51:16.400 to destroy me. We can start with transparency. And this is a postpartisan committee that's pursuing

01:51:23.420 this.

01:51:23.720 To what degree that the free market solutions are actually appropriate with regards to

01:51:28.720 regulation of behavior online? Because it seems to me that, and I don't know this and I don't think

01:51:34.600 anybody knows, but I have been wrestling with the question of if accounts that are free produce

01:51:44.320 dark tetrad invasion and foreign agent invasion, right? Free is the wrong value for your online

01:51:54.020 identity because it gets gamed. And so, I mean, could there be Russian bought farms if every account

01:52:00.000 costs $40 a month? Or would it become instantly economically untenable, right? Free is... See, the

01:52:08.280 problem with free, as far as I can tell online, is that your attention is valuable. So, free is the

01:52:13.920 wrong amount of money to have to pay to get access to it. It's not right. It's not an indication of the

01:52:20.600 actual underlying reality.

01:52:21.880 And it doesn't work to say, I'm mad at experts or corrupt members of this institution or this party,

01:52:28.560 so all information should be equal. That's not a solution for that. We have to be able to moderate

01:52:34.600 and negotiate between sensibilities of people with different personality structures, high-trade

01:52:40.860 openness and high-trade conscientiousness. Whether you want to call that liberal or conservative,

01:52:44.800 it doesn't matter. But there's a reason that all humans have this across an evolutionarily selected

01:52:50.240 or God-given, however you want to view it. There's a reason we're distributed across this trait

01:52:54.860 structure. It's selected for, it's given so that we can contend with each other and move forward

01:53:00.240 reasonably. And right now, we don't have trained young minds. We have a lot of problems and holes

01:53:06.360 in discourse. We have a lot of people captured by mind control. We can have a whole conversation about

01:53:10.860 why these are actual cult mind control methods and techniques being used. And it's like we're

01:53:18.020 incapable of differentiating. And part of the problem is now we have to navigate who gets to

01:53:23.940 get control now over educating our kids, who gets to come in now and fix universities and schools.

01:53:28.280 So what's happened in a way, I guess, and maybe we can tie everything together with this

01:53:32.960 closing remarks, is that we have these new technologies that have leveled the communication

01:53:39.280 playing field. And that's opened up a massive amount of opportunity. But it's also destroyed all the

01:53:46.020 intermediary structures that were, that had previously regulated the manner in which we

01:53:51.760 communicate. And so now there's a free-for-all on that front. And the advantage of the free-for-all

01:53:57.600 is, oh my God, we can move information around at such a low cost to so many people. And isn't that an

01:54:04.180 amazing opportunity for all the long-form podcasters, for example, or for online educational

01:54:09.000 endeavors. But the downside is that it's also opened the landscape up to the vicious manipulators,

01:54:15.780 the criminals, the psychopaths, and the bad foreign actors. And that's a real danger. And it's 1.00

01:54:22.100 a danger, it's a cross-partisan danger, and it's a danger to the structure of civilization itself. 0.79

01:54:27.160 Not only because of the foreign influences, which is akin to war in the virtual realm, but also because 0.96

01:54:33.600 the criminals and the psychopaths and the dark tetrad types, I mean, they thrive in chaos and 1.00

01:54:38.540 they want to sow it and they do that only for themselves, right? And that's the perennial human

01:54:43.640 landscape, isn't it? Is that, you know, your culture has to be centered around some shared

01:54:48.240 structure of values. That's going to be, that's, and you're going to need experimentation at the

01:54:53.480 fringes to keep that vital. That's going to be threatened by the internal criminal psychopath

01:54:58.260 types, because it always is. That's the evil uncle of the king, which is the oldest possible story,

01:55:04.120 or Cain, or Satan himself for that matter, right? That internal threat of the pathological. And then

01:55:10.840 you have the threat of the foreign invader, which is exactly the same thing that's being playing out 0.97

01:55:14.660 in the virtual landscape with regards to the information wars that are being conducted by Iran

01:55:19.960 and by Russia and by China. The only, yes, and the only mediation that I see it for this is we have

01:55:27.400 to have some kind of return to the institutions that can, like, as much as we are angry or disgusted by

01:55:34.520 various levels of corruption and capture through them, and it's infuriating, if we don't have the

01:55:39.980 institutions, we don't have the structures in place to hold wild, brilliant personalities or psychopaths

01:55:47.100 in order that we're conducting it like an orchestra, that America can continue to be America.

01:55:53.780 So it's a return to first principles, and you're identifying that to some degree by what everybody

01:55:59.200 agrees on. And then there has to be something approximating a reinstitutionalization of those

01:56:05.700 first principles, both politically and technologically, so that the core is strengthened, and we know how

01:56:12.020 to do that. That's really the optimistic side of what you've been investigating, is that the center

01:56:18.900 is actually there, it's vital, its principles are correct, and it could hold.

01:56:24.560 Yeah, and we should water that, not the vines strangling it.

01:56:27.920 Right, right. Do you want to just talk about this documentary very briefly?

01:56:31.640 Yeah, well.

01:56:32.140 And then we'll fold up.

01:56:34.420 The Iranian community and the diaspora are spectacular. I mean, for minute one, part of what I noticed was

01:56:41.720 the moral clarity and the dignity and the strength of when Iranian voices were discussing this from

01:56:48.200 all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of religions. And we thought that rather than,

01:56:54.020 they're the best and most vocal speakers to what this playbook is. They lived through it.

01:56:59.760 They're the ones who, they remember their grandparents with their, having their hair down as their

01:57:04.260 grandmothers as young women and cooking in the kitchen. This is what the playbook successfully 1.00

01:57:09.780 executed looks like. And I think they're very important voices for us to hear. And so we got

01:57:16.960 together and produced this documentary with that direction. And we interview a series of people

01:57:24.380 to lay out and describe their background, the history of the revolution, and what they're seeing

01:57:29.460 here, and what is a familiar playbook, and also where that is like, where that playbook leads when

01:57:34.200 it is successfully executed. And so we thought that's a good sort of case study to be able to

01:57:39.760 close out on to see this is a cautionary tale for where we're going to go if we can't tack our way

01:57:48.840 back towards the reasonable center where 80 to 100% of Americans are waiting to be received

01:57:55.020 and to vote and to move forward and devote their resources together to investing in and fixing America

01:58:02.960 and the highly complicated problems that we have.

01:58:05.240 And where can people follow us, the story?

01:58:08.060 We're on X, Instagram, and YouTube. And we've been banned by TikTok.

01:58:12.980 Right. Well, congratulations on that front. You must be doing something right.

01:58:16.740 So, okay. So that's us, the story. Right. So I think for everybody watching, listening,

01:58:21.360 I'm going to talk to Greg on the Daily Wire side behind the paywall there. I think about the manner

01:58:28.400 in which his political views has shifted over the last decade. Really? Something like that. So let's

01:58:35.960 walk through that story. Your attempts to pull the Democrats to the center, the successes and failures

01:58:42.420 in that regard, your adoption, maybe, or your integration of some more conservative, and you said,

01:58:50.600 libertarian views, how that's transformed. And we can have a discussion about that, and I can do the

01:58:55.820 same. And so you can, Greg and I have been engaged in a discussion for a long time, often on quite

01:59:02.540 radically different partisan, from radically different partisan perspectives. You know, that's

01:59:07.840 varied as the years have gone by. But it'll be useful and interesting, I think, to delve into that.

01:59:14.960 And also to speak, to talk through more the issue of, well, say, writing the ship on the Democrat side

01:59:24.280 and trying to pull people to the center versus mounting an all-out assault on the Republican side

01:59:30.020 to push the Democrats into a corner so that they're required to do that. Because that's been a continual

01:59:35.360 conundrum for me, ethically and practically. And so, anyways, you can join us on the Daily Wire side for

01:59:41.000 that, and that would be much appreciated. Thank you to the film crew here today in LA for making

01:59:46.180 this possible. And Greg, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. And, well, onward and upward with

01:59:52.120 regards to us, the story, and the attempt to, what would you say, push back against the psychopaths and

01:59:58.760 the bad foreign actors and to strengthen the center and to rectify some of the informational

02:00:05.640 imbalances that are warping the culture online, particularly in relationship to young women

02:00:12.560 and TikTok. So, thank you very much, sir. Thank you. Thanks for the discussion.

02:00:18.020 The Ask an Iranian film by Us The Story is available on X. The link to the video can be found in the description.

02:00:23.740 The Gamble Show is available on X. The beard and the beard and the beauty of Dr.

02:00:24.140 Aaron and Herb.

02:00:24.560 The beard and the beard and the beard and the beard.

02:00:24.940 He can find about something he is known to have a villain in the boy's eye.

02:00:26.060 That's a beautiful person in non- IU of the beard and the beard.

02:00:42.400 See you later.

02:00:43.340 What?

02:00:45.660 Here are boxing techniques to Est Bahrain yet 0.77

02:00:48.660 are weapons up, as moons of e Rudy and Monter

Foreign PSYOPs in the USA ｜ Gregg Hurwitz

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