TRIGGERnometry - The Radicalisation Of America

00:00:00.000 When Charlie Kirk was murdered, you were actually the number one person I thought about.

00:00:06.580 Is there a skew in attitudes to political violence?

00:00:10.800 I think we've seen an authorizing environment for violence on both sides.

00:00:15.120 I know psyops when I see them, and I know persuasion techniques when I see them.

00:00:19.500 We almost can't comprehend a troll farm with thousands of people and thousands of devices

00:00:25.300 and tens of thousands of comments flooding into our networks and our social media

00:00:31.200 and flooding into our kids and the effect that has.

00:00:33.540 The real aim with these mechanisms that are out of control is to get the far left and the far right,

00:00:38.940 and a lot of this is young men, to meet at that horseshoe of nihilism.

00:00:42.640 I believe it's unequivocal that DEI and oppression and anti-Semitism and microaggression training

00:00:49.740 not only is ineffective, but that it drives the opposite effect.

00:00:54.040 Because what you foreclose, you make forbidden, and what you make forbidden becomes taboo,

00:01:00.060 and what becomes taboo becomes sacred and alluring.

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00:01:36.160 Greg, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:38.300 Thank you. Thanks for having me on, gentlemen.

00:01:39.740 It's good to have you on.

00:01:40.700 We're going to talk about assassination culture, political violence in America,

00:01:44.860 the divisions that this country is now experiencing as well.

00:01:47.940 When Charlie Kirk was murdered in the horrific way that he was, you know,

00:01:51.520 the initial reaction for me was obviously concern for his family.

00:01:54.640 You know, we didn't even know he was going to survive.

00:01:56.680 But when I thought a little bit later about the political ramifications of all of this,

00:02:00.580 you were actually the number one person I thought about,

00:02:03.460 because you've been thinking and researching and studying the issue of political violence for a long time.

00:02:10.540 Tell us a little bit about your background, how you've come to where you are and what you do now.

00:02:15.820 Well, I'm a novelist. It's my day job.

00:02:18.620 And I write spy thrillers and other kinds of thrillers,

00:02:20.920 which have had me in all sorts of unusual circumstances.

00:02:23.800 I've gone undercover in a mind control cult.

00:02:26.100 I've snuck on a demolition ranges with seals and blown up cars.

00:02:30.380 And I know psyops when I see them.

00:02:33.580 And I know persuasion techniques when I see them.

00:02:35.840 And so my interest in politics sort of came around 2015,

00:02:40.460 when I was noticing some of the language control happening on the left.

00:02:43.860 And I just thought there's no way that wouldn't lead to a big resentful populist tide.

00:02:49.120 And so I got involved initially trying to help pull the Democrats back from the far left,

00:02:53.840 where, as you might imagine, has had limited success.

00:02:56.840 And then increasingly starting to recognize that there are sort of these mirror images

00:03:01.480 that are happening within the culture and that the real lines are not red or blue.

00:03:05.840 The real lines are really going to be psychopaths and extremists and profiteers

00:03:10.480 versus everybody else in the middle.

00:03:12.960 And so I've devoted my focus to that and calling that out,

00:03:16.260 which means calling out things on both the left and the right,

00:03:19.740 the far left and the far right.

00:03:21.060 And also, it's a process of undeceiving,

00:03:24.040 because a lot of ways that I went in were proven wrong with contact

00:03:27.240 with reality and the real situation, which you hope happens.

00:03:30.360 So I've had to learn a lot, too.

00:03:32.160 And what have you learned?

00:03:33.120 What is the evidence?

00:03:34.460 What does the research that you've done show about political violence,

00:03:38.860 attitudes to political violence?

00:03:40.320 Obviously, we've had the Luigi Mangione situation, Charlie, I mentioned as well.

00:03:45.880 What can you tell us about people's attitudes and where this is all coming from?

00:03:50.080 Well, I think there's three major factors.

00:03:53.180 And I think the first is hostile foreign regimes.

00:03:55.720 We almost can't comprehend a troll farm in St. Petersburg

00:03:59.180 or troll farms in China or run by the Islamic Republic with thousands of people

00:04:03.980 and thousands of devices and tens of thousands of comments flooding into our networks

00:04:11.120 and our social media and flooding into our kids and the effect that has.

00:04:14.280 So number one is there are people out there who do not want what is best for us

00:04:17.820 who are seeking to divide and destroy us.

00:04:20.280 The second thing is we have psychopathic algorithms.

00:04:23.840 The algorithms are feeding outrage and they're feeding, you know, they're onboarding,

00:04:28.140 the recommendation structures are onboarding because they're designed to maximize for profit.

00:04:32.240 And maximum stickiness is going to be things that are most atrocious.

00:04:35.840 And then we have bad faith domestic players who are stoking this,

00:04:41.000 who have, you know, either interest in more greed or power or being overtly paid off by foreign companies.

00:04:47.280 And so you have all these incentive structures that are massively off kilter.

00:04:51.840 And when you look at radicalization, when I went undercover in a mind control cult,

00:04:56.960 it's funny.

00:04:57.580 So I wrote a book about this, one of my fifth thriller,

00:04:59.960 and parents would write me and say, my kid just went into a mind control cult.

00:05:04.000 What do I do?

00:05:05.220 And the first thing I said is do not send them articles telling them they're in a mind control cult.

00:05:09.600 Right.

00:05:10.080 That play has already been anticipated and it's already been answered.

00:05:14.080 And so one of the things that you try and do is you put people in touch with a previous version of themselves.

00:05:19.940 So if someone's in a cult, you say, hey, when you were in college,

00:05:23.140 what was your dream for yourself when you were in your late 20s now?

00:05:27.060 You create a cognitive dissonance within them.

00:05:30.000 And to see the process of radicalization with Charlie Kirk, I mean, for me, my first reaction,

00:05:34.860 I was, it was, I was horrified.

00:05:39.980 It was a, it was a major shift in a lot of things for me.

00:05:44.740 I didn't know Charlie, but to me, there's a lot of my friends who could have been in that seat and in that chair.

00:05:50.340 And then the other thing I just thought back with the sort of confusion of this reaction

00:05:54.700 that everybody seemed to have, and beyond the dark tetrad types are going to celebrate this.

00:06:00.020 What's the dark tetrad type?

00:06:01.740 Oh, it's people who are Machiavellian, sadistic, narcissistic, and psychopathic.

00:06:09.100 And all that they want is control of profit.

00:06:12.280 And they want control and to maximize sort of evil and sadism online for power.

00:06:18.080 And they gravitate wherever power is.

00:06:19.880 So we saw a lot of that on the left.

00:06:21.700 And then as Trump and MAGA became ascendant, they're going to shift over to any place where there's more power.

00:06:26.240 So they're going to celebrate anything.

00:06:28.660 They're nihilists.

00:06:32.060 But the ambiguity of the mainstream reaction, or even the caveats, right?

00:06:37.780 Like, well, I don't agree with everything he said, but.

00:06:40.600 It was so striking to me.

00:06:42.080 And I thought, well, and I wrote about this a little bit.

00:06:45.360 If we were to rewind, I'm a bit older than you guys, I think.

00:06:49.000 But let's rewind to when I was in college, which was a relatively more sane time in the 90s.

00:06:53.440 There was a very prominent conservative professor called Harvey Mansfield who was on campus.

00:06:59.640 A lot of the students didn't agree with him.

00:07:01.460 He was one of the, you know, he was in a cohort with Bill Kristol.

00:07:03.960 He was sort of a solid position there at Harvard when I was an undergraduate.

00:07:07.920 Back when it wasn't embarrassing to go to Harvard.

00:07:11.020 At the same time, there was a very prominent feminist called Andrea Dworkin.

00:07:14.540 You probably know, right?

00:07:15.540 And she thought that all intercourse, all heterosexual intercourse was rape.

00:07:19.180 She had very extremist views.

00:07:20.480 Both of them were very much outside the mainstream of what would have been acceptable.

00:07:25.340 Had one of them been executed on campus in the 90s in front of 3,000 kids, live streamed

00:07:34.560 to hundreds, thousands more, the reaction would have been unequivocal horror.

00:07:40.200 It would have been unequivocal across the campus, across the city, the state, the nation, and the

00:07:44.960 mainstream media.

00:07:45.960 It would have been unequivocal.

00:07:46.960 And radicalization, we have a saying, all right, thrillers, as I mentioned, there's a

00:07:52.260 saying in thrillers, which is the bad guy never thinks he's the bad guy.

00:07:55.920 You never think you're the one who's radicalized.

00:07:58.560 But if you go back and look at that, the fact that people felt that they had to stammer,

00:08:02.600 like they had to talk about with Mangione to say, well, I really don't like some of the

00:08:06.520 healthcare policies.

00:08:07.400 But that's a sign of radicalization, and it happens as slow as a frog being boiled.

00:08:14.000 I'd say the other biggest lesson that I learned, and it's helped me kind of view the chessboard

00:08:18.120 differently, is that particularly when we're dealing with these foreign hostile regimes

00:08:23.440 that are fueling a lot of this, their aim isn't left versus right.

00:08:27.440 The KGB in the Cold War did a lot of funding and logistics support for the Black Panthers,

00:08:34.140 and they also wrote letters, forged letters from the KKK threatening Black leadership.

00:08:39.600 They want to fund both sides so that we destroy each other and we can't think about any of

00:08:43.640 the topics.

00:08:44.500 The real aim with these mechanisms that are out of control is to get the far left and the

00:08:49.520 far right, and a lot of this is young men, to meet at that horseshoe of nihilism.

00:08:53.900 And that's where No Lives Matter is.

00:08:56.540 And some of that confusion that we see where we're going, well, I think he was far right,

00:09:00.380 but he had no King's flyers in his car, there's a confusion.

00:09:04.400 It doesn't mean that there aren't distinct threats from the left and distinct threats

00:09:07.400 from the right, but they don't care.

00:09:09.280 Once somebody arrives at that, they don't care if the next bus they get on is violent Antifa

00:09:14.140 or is your body my choice Groypers.

00:09:17.080 They just care that it will be destructive and that none of us can talk about it because

00:09:21.220 we're so busy blaming the other side.

00:09:22.760 That's what the win is.

00:09:24.400 And when you talk about these men who end up, let's just call the No Lives Matter zone,

00:09:30.260 what it strikes me is that these men, these are men who are isolated because if you start

00:09:36.440 to stray into this kind of dangerous territory and you know, you've got a girlfriend, you've

00:09:41.700 got friends and family around you and you start saying this stuff, they're more likely to

00:09:46.160 go, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's have a conversation about this.

00:09:49.600 But if you're isolated and you're online 24-7, that's when things start getting dangerous,

00:09:55.240 isn't it?

00:09:55.860 That's right.

00:09:56.500 And the biggest predictor is a ton of social media use.

00:10:01.060 So the biggest predictor, more than 50% higher than anything else for Mangione support, 50%

00:10:08.180 higher than Discord or Reddit or anything was blue sky usage, which is ostensibly the safe

00:10:14.360 space on the internet.

00:10:15.880 So there's a mirroring effect that happens there.

00:10:18.080 And, you know, we have similar stuff that happens on the far right.

00:10:21.620 We tracked last year 14 posts from the biggest hate accounts and unequivocal posts, like not

00:10:29.280 stuff that's like, oh, that's mean or that's stereotypical or that might be funny in certain

00:10:33.400 circumstances, but unequivocal posts.

00:10:36.200 We tracked those to 6.5 billion impressions.

00:10:41.540 And I think we still have a belief.

00:10:44.000 I mean, I can't be in Twitter too long without starting to lose my mind a little bit.

00:10:48.880 And you feel that and you have to pull out and you have to read.

00:10:51.780 We still have a belief somehow that we can go into an arena that is designed by addiction,

00:10:59.840 teams of addiction specialists that is targeting us based on, I think there's 26 different ways

00:11:05.320 they read what our eyes track to, where our thumb snags, what grabs our attention, backed

00:11:10.180 by deep machine learning algorithms.

00:11:12.300 And we think we can hold our own, let alone kids, young people, let's just say.

00:11:17.840 Kids, prefrontal cortex doesn't myelinate till they're 23 or 24.

00:11:21.680 They literally don't have grown in prefrontal cortexes.

00:11:24.580 And if you take them out of a system where they're not educated, they don't have a robust

00:11:29.080 educated mind.

00:11:30.100 They haven't been raised in places where you have to take the opposite of your opinion.

00:11:36.640 You've read something of a canon.

00:11:38.600 You've read something of, let's say, Dostoevsky, Orwell, you know, pick your poison, Solzhenitsyn.

00:11:44.200 If you don't have any grounding for that and you're being inundated and targeted, that's

00:11:49.260 full-blown mind control.

00:11:50.660 That's more powerful than we are.

00:11:52.700 Absolutely.

00:11:52.980 And when you factor in that young men in particular are going to be far more extreme than a man

00:11:58.400 in his 40s, just because that's the way young men are, that's also a recipe for disaster,

00:12:03.880 isn't it?

00:12:04.460 Yes, absolutely.

00:12:06.000 And then you add on top of this a culture that has been pervasively telling them that

00:12:12.240 any expression of their strength or solidity or properly targeted aggression into sports,

00:12:19.000 into debate, into daring, is a toxic notion that is inherent to them, there's not a lot

00:12:26.660 of great places for them to go.

00:12:28.980 And one of the things that the, I hate using these terms, the mainstream, they're also captured,

00:12:34.320 but let's just call it the left and the mainstream, has really trained their targets on a body of

00:12:39.480 people who were the most effective bulwarks against those young men being onboarded into

00:12:45.300 actual alt-right extremism. That's Charlie Kirk. That's Jordan Peterson. These are people who,

00:12:51.100 you know, Jordan was my undergraduate thesis advisor. I go back a long ways with him.

00:12:55.680 The amount of anger and vitriol I've heard about him from the far left, which is completely divorced

00:13:01.460 from his actual viewpoints, they don't have a comprehension that with him, the message that

00:13:08.080 he is giving is the message that these young men can hear that's going to be functional. He's an ally,

00:13:12.560 and we've lost an ability to look at a chessboard because we pick out one thing that somebody said

00:13:17.180 out of context, and we dismiss them unequivocally. And that's something, it's just got to stop.

00:13:22.040 And the same with Charlie Kirk. I mean, I had a, I wrote a piece on, on Charlie Kirk.

00:13:26.300 There's a number of reasons why I found that particularly devastating. I think there were

00:13:32.220 three. It was him. I think it was the, the, the preternatural grace of his wife. It was my shock

00:13:42.020 at the reaction to the mainstream and to some of the people on, I'll call it the left side of the

00:13:48.200 arena. And then also it was this feeling of, of isolation in the reasonable center to say,

00:13:54.180 how, how does everybody not just get this, that this is a moment to get completely. And we've had

00:13:59.700 these moments. We had it with Representative Hortman, who was shot in, in Minneapolis. But,

00:14:04.700 you know, Charlie was the face of a movement and argued more articulately and beautifully and

00:14:10.200 convincingly for a ton of values that were around a free marketplace of ideas, around including

00:14:15.940 different people with different orientations and beliefs in the conservative movement.

00:14:19.120 He was a bulwark to that. And people think you can just get rid of him. And then some far left

00:14:24.400 figure is going to speak to these people. It's a name. Um, and so we have a lot of work to do on

00:14:31.020 both sides. Well, what was you speaking of both sides? And so far you've talked about this as an

00:14:35.080 issue of the far left on the far right. But when we've spoken to people, everyone on the right,

00:14:41.760 and this, we saw this after Charlie was, was murdered, you know, there were a lot of people

00:14:46.720 saying, well, you know, the Democrats are the party of murder. This is the left that did this.

00:14:51.920 Uh, that's the message from one side sitting in, in that very chair only, you know, a while ago,

00:14:57.640 as we record, this was Sam Harris who said, well, actually, you know, he's more worried about the

00:15:02.680 threat from the right. Um, you know, he mentioned Paul Pelosi, uh, people laughing about the fact that

00:15:09.120 he was attacked with a hammer and nearly killed on the right. Um, is the, is this an all sides

00:15:16.100 problem? Does it break evenly for each side? Is there a, a, a skew in attitudes to political

00:15:23.280 violence? Can you tell us more about that? I think we've seen an authorizing environment

00:15:29.480 for violence on both sides. I think that I always feel like when we're discussing this,

00:15:36.840 we're taking our eyes off the chessboard to some sense, but it's a fair question to ask,

00:15:42.760 right? And I think that part of the problem is going into this year, I told myself I was finally

00:15:48.920 going to stop guessing about my health. Like most people, I want more energy, better focus,

00:15:53.700 and to be still strong and sharp years from now. But every time I've gone to the doctor,

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00:17:15.500 I think that for the first time, we get into this problem with trusted experts and expertise.

00:17:24.020 What stats are you looking at? Matt Walsh is going to look at one set of statistics, right?

00:17:27.800 Sam Harris is going to look at another one. I think we see very, very troubling patterns on both sides.

00:17:34.140 Some of the stuff that's happened online is insane. I think what Sam is referring to is

00:17:38.040 when the angry far right gets woken up, they're very, very angry and very, very capable.

00:17:44.560 And we've seen again and again the left playing around with these ideas that the right can pick

00:17:50.700 up, and there's reasons why the right can do some things better that are both bad and good,

00:17:54.900 likewise with the left. But, you know, safe spaces on college campuses, right? Let's scream at

00:18:01.500 Jordan Peterson so he can't go anywhere. Let's grab Ben Shapiro's notes. Let's do all this stuff.

00:18:06.060 And there's no thought to what will happen when that power gets transferred over to the right.

00:18:09.800 Um, the right is very capable in terms of, um, if there's a war with guns and with organized

00:18:17.820 militia groups, I think they're going to do a lot better than the Antifa group, you know,

00:18:21.960 who are holding down a zone in Portland. They're, they're just going to, they haven't so far gone

00:18:27.340 to that full extent. And there's also differences in what we're talking about between the political

00:18:31.920 arena, which I know Sam is very concerned with and things that we're talking about that are

00:18:35.200 extracurricular. So it's, I think it's very difficult to untangle. And I think that in a

00:18:40.420 lot of ways, they're a mirror side of the other, because somebody sees something happen and they

00:18:44.520 say, we have no choice, but to align with the worst allies that we have on our side. And I've

00:18:50.160 watched the Democrats do that. I think my position right now is I'm so, I'm so frustrated with the

00:18:56.040 Democrats and their unwillingness to acknowledge the dangers of the far left. Can we talk about big

00:19:02.980 five personality theory for a moment? Because I think this is an answer. I'm sorry, I'm taking

00:19:07.360 some time with this. It's a complicated answer. And I don't want to give a pat answer. Big five

00:19:13.300 personality structure determines our political orientation more than anything else aside from

00:19:18.000 the family that we're born into. And so there's something called high trait openness, right? Do you

00:19:22.620 like new experiences? Do you like new people and foods? Liberals tend to be higher in high trait

00:19:27.580 openness. And so that's a really interesting thing. That's how we congregate in cities, let's say,

00:19:32.140 different people and voices and accents. We're open to different kinds of experiences. My trait

00:19:37.520 structure lies down that way along a very classically liberal trait structure. And there's

00:19:43.880 something called empathy. There's empathy, which tucks under something called agreeableness,

00:19:47.760 right? So that's another kind of complicated thing. And Democrats tend to think that this is sort of

00:19:52.140 superior, that all you need is to expose more people to more different viewpoints and higher empathy,

00:19:56.580 and then the world will be solved. Conservatives are lower in trait openness, and that codes

00:20:01.960 for a lot of other things. They like borders around things. They like predictability. They like

00:20:06.120 being surrounded with people who think and move like them. Farmers and ranchers, there's a set

00:20:10.300 schedule. This has nothing to do with race. It's not white people versus black or brown people. It's

00:20:15.180 evenly distributed across every single group, whether you think that that's a God-given thing or

00:20:20.820 evolutionarily selected for how we navigate. And conservatives are higher in a different trait,

00:20:26.160 which is called high trait conscientiousness. So with openness, they say, I want less openness,

00:20:31.820 right? I want a border around the country, build a wall. I want borders around gender,

00:20:36.120 right? If there's a couple examples that don't fit, that's fine, but we all know that there's two

00:20:39.960 genders and that's what we define it. I want a border where my skin starts and your vaccination wants

00:20:45.020 to begin. Okay? These are deep psychological traits. These are also very useful traits.

00:20:51.700 Imagine the Native Americans when the Europeans came with smallpox blankets, if they said, hang on

00:20:56.300 a minute, like, we need to have a little bit more in-group protection before we deal with this issue

00:21:00.980 of infection from what can happen with different out-groups. We've robbed the right in a lot of

00:21:08.020 ways. I'm sorry. The prevailing ideologies of the left have robbed the right in a lot of ways

00:21:14.940 of an organizing principle for the in-group. So can it be that you're a Christian and being

00:21:19.500 Christian will exclude certain people from certain activities as much as being Jewish does or being

00:21:24.480 anything does? That's something that's called Christian nationalism. All nationalism gets grouped

00:21:29.780 in with Adolf Hitler. You can't have pride in your country anymore. So here we have this more

00:21:36.260 closed trait, but there's not a group that they can identify under with a structure that is acceptable

00:21:41.580 to a lot of parts of the mainstream, and we need to untangle that. Now, conservatives are also

00:21:46.460 higher in something called trait conscientiousness. And trait conscientiousness is like, do you return

00:21:51.220 phone calls? Do you show up on time? Do you do what you're going to say? So think about CEOs versus

00:21:56.140 visionaries, right? Steve Jobs, big, crazy. And then they're like, wait, we need to bring in,

00:22:00.560 you know, conservative, conscientious CEOs to make sure the trains run on time. They boot Steve Jobs,

00:22:06.060 everything runs on time, loses the vision. You need to bring them back in. And the point of this

00:22:11.080 more than anything is, is that we desperately need each other. That's why there is an even

00:22:15.540 distribution of this trait structures, whether from evolution or from God. And we need to modulate

00:22:22.700 because the job of liberals is to say, look, if you build a wall and you make it impenetrable and new

00:22:27.780 ideas can't get in and new people can't get in and new kinds of workers can't get in and we can't infuse

00:22:32.540 that with the center, which is something that, that the founding texts from the Bible to the

00:22:38.340 constitution, to the civil rights movement, which like every key juncture has a plan for how the

00:22:43.880 fringe interacts with the center. If we don't do that, we will stagnate and die. So one is the

00:22:48.860 breaks. Let's go a little slower and make sure things are working and make sure we're not doing

00:22:53.300 away with our traditions that hold order. And the other says we need to move forward and we need to

00:22:57.820 keep integrating. Either one of those is a disaster. If you stomp on the brakes, Democrats

00:23:02.900 will go flying off a cliff, following other lemming cars off the cliff or smash into a wall

00:23:07.440 and conservatism will stomp on the brakes and not integrate. And so what we need to do now,

00:23:13.060 I think in a very significant way is to upgrade our reference points. We're stuck with old reference

00:23:19.320 points. We think every activist is John Lewis or Harvey Milk, right? We think that every notion of

00:23:26.180 nationalism is Adolf Hitler. And we have to start, you know, we think every intervention,

00:23:31.880 is it Chamberlain getting off the plane, waving the piece of paper, or is it Vietnam?

00:23:35.980 Well, how about it's neither? How about we're in history in a way that's real? And that the

00:23:41.000 reference points of old that we use to point and blame, well, you have more violence here and you

00:23:45.480 have more violence there. I see this as a mirror image that, that if we started sitting on a seesaw,

00:23:52.060 bouncing back and forth, finding balance, if the left moves this way, the right moves this way,

00:23:55.940 the left moves this way, the right moves this way. And the voices that will lift their

00:24:00.760 can lift above partisan values to things that are transcendent,

00:24:06.620 which is what I thought Erica Kirk did at the, at Charlie's memorial. Those are the things that

00:24:14.220 are transformational. When we say we're not looking here and here because we're squabbling here.

00:24:18.500 And that's to the delight of, let's say, elements within China who want to see us weekend elements of

00:24:25.160 Russia who want to see us weekend. And it also makes sure that we can't have any sane dialogue

00:24:29.600 around solutions. Because if all we're talking about is, well, is it the left? Is it the right?

00:24:34.820 And we're warring ourselves where we're putting ourselves into war parties. We can't have the

00:24:39.600 discussions with nuance to address the real issues. Well, I totally see what you're saying. I agreed

00:24:43.480 with literally every word you said until that very moment. And I really don't agree with you on that

00:24:47.540 because in order to solve any problem, you have to identify what's actually happening. So if it is

00:24:53.760 something that is happening across the political spectrum, and it's this mutual radicalization you're

00:24:59.200 talking about, that's one problem. If you've got, quote unquote, assassination culture on the left,

00:25:04.900 that's another problem. If you've got militias organizing in remote parts of Idaho,

00:25:12.420 just to pick a state or whatever, that's a third problem, right? So I guess what I'm asking,

00:25:18.260 first of all, what is the problem exactly? I think all three of those are problems. And I think that

00:25:23.680 the means by which we're having conversations to solve them are by design ineffective and aren't

00:25:33.000 leading to better solutions for them. They're leading to more partisan warfare. I think all three

00:25:37.800 of those are problems and they probably need different methods of address. Well, that's what I'm

00:25:41.800 thinking about because it's almost like you have these algorithms, you have these media ecosystems,

00:25:48.200 and you see it. I mean, one of the reasons I think a lot of the kind of online right is getting more

00:25:54.960 extreme now is their parties and power in this country. And so beating up on the Democrats,

00:26:01.180 who cares about that? It's not going to get any clicks. The arguments have been won. And so you have

00:26:05.700 to amp up the conspiracy, the crazy, the whatever. You have to go further to spice up the food, so to

00:26:13.980 speak, right? And you have a tilt of psychopaths who are moving when you have a certain group that's

00:26:19.520 in power with a different set of rights. Let's say with rapid onset gender dysphoria, where there's

00:26:26.460 something, you start to see a migration of dark tetrad types to that. So you see this movement

00:26:31.860 wherever power is, because if you're a dark tetrad player, you go where there's power and then you

00:26:37.560 have grift that you can manipulate people and get closer to power. And so we have seen a gravitation

00:26:42.200 of that with ascendant conservatism, ascendant republicanism, that a lot of bad faith players

00:26:48.640 are moving over that way. Now, the one advantage that I think conservatives have is they're much

00:26:57.560 better at drawing lines. We talked about that low trade openness. And already in a lot of ways,

00:27:02.960 I think that we're seeing some line drawing from the far right of people saying that doesn't

00:27:09.080 represent us. And I, I, my hope is that conservatives, and I think they're already doing

00:27:13.400 this in a good sense, um, will not make the mistakes that liberals made because liberals said

00:27:19.520 Trump is such a giant threat. He's such a unique threat in the history of the world. And I always say

00:27:25.320 if Donald Trump represents the maximum version of evil that you can imagine, you have a very

00:27:30.740 limited imagination. Um, and I'm saying this as somebody who, uh, opposed him quite vehemently

00:27:37.500 early on, but I'm also looking at and recognizing a lot of nuance in who he is and what he's doing

00:27:42.760 and where the playing field actually is now in America and the world. Liberals basically reached

00:27:47.840 for progressives, lefties. It went, it went all the way and there was very little line drawing.

00:27:52.320 And I implored them at every turn. You must denounce Antifa. The notion of sanctuary cities

00:27:58.120 doesn't make sense. Words aren't violence. It's topic after topic after topic. When somebody went

00:28:04.520 and kicked down Tucker Carlson's front door or tried to, and his wife locked herself in a pantry,

00:28:10.480 I said, you have to denounce that. I don't care what you feel about Tucker Carlson. You have to

00:28:14.040 denounce mob violence. Mob violence will not create the conditions, right? Your, your own,

00:28:19.840 by which a liberal society is going to thrive. It won't do it. And there is a real problem of

00:28:25.660 drawing lines because of that high openness. What if I offend somebody? What if I have a junior

00:28:29.720 staffer who just graduated from a liberal arts college, who's offended with something? There's

00:28:34.080 a lot more parsing around empathy and openness and the right has an advantage. And we're seeing a lot

00:28:38.940 of voices on the right say, nope, that's going to be out of bounds. And I think whoever does that

00:28:43.700 is ultimately going to win the day, because I think there's, I think there's three groups right

00:28:48.680 now that hold power within America in certain ways that are essential and that are speaking to the

00:28:54.600 next generation. Um, one of them is the DSA, the far left. Democratic Socialists of America.

00:29:01.100 Yes. Thank you. And that's Momdani. That's AOC. There's, there's variations between that. I mean,

00:29:06.980 Bernie's in one place, AOC's in another. To my mind, Mr. Momdani is, is very further left.

00:29:11.660 And there's an element of, of Islamicism that, that embodies that. You have moderate Democrats

00:29:17.600 who have an incredibly important ballast right now, but virtually no reach into propagation,

00:29:24.200 making their own weather in the news and speaking in the younger two generations. So to me,

00:29:28.220 they're out of the running. And I think they're a very important counterweight, but they're not in

00:29:31.920 this conversation. You have MAGA, let's just call it with reach through the center and to some

00:29:37.900 liberals who are now disaffected with what's happening with the left. And then you have the

00:29:41.980 far right. When we're talking about people who make their own weather, make things go viral,

00:29:46.380 have posts regularly in the millions of views are on podcast networks and have speak and speak

00:29:53.320 directly and clearly with views and followers into younger generation. Those are the three groups.

00:29:58.220 Right now. And so I think that whichever group's going to tack more towards the middle of this

00:30:05.340 is going to gather the 80% of Americans who in fact agree on everything.

00:30:09.740 Really? Are you sure about this? I am seeing the dynamic going in the exact opposite direction. It

00:30:16.060 feels to me like the more extreme you are, the more views you get, the more boosted your content is,

00:30:21.420 the bigger the audience, the bigger the podcast will go on. Isn't that happening?

00:30:25.900 That is absolutely happening. Maybe I didn't say it as clearly. Whoever can figure out how to do that

00:30:31.340 and hold that center coalition right now, instead of the sort of cheap junk food of the sides,

00:30:37.260 that's where the majority of Americans are.

00:30:39.180 I see. So if we can break out of this mind control, I did a set of polls. I was so

00:30:44.780 you under, so push polling, you understand what that is. That's if you say, you know,

00:30:49.020 I'm the most mad about Joe Biden socialism for this, this or this, where you're getting a poll to

00:30:54.380 get the answers that you want so you can weaponize it. It's, it's rampant. It's very hard to do good

00:30:59.740 polling. And I have a bunch of team of polling of pollsters who I really, really trust. And I want to do

00:31:04.860 an experiment. So I wrote a whole series of questions asking them in the least partisan,

00:31:10.220 most open possible way about major topics. And I've talked about this at greater length before,

00:31:15.740 but for instance, I believe in climate change. You know, maybe you get 55, 60%. I believe climate

00:31:21.420 change is a hoax. Maybe you get 40, 45%. But instead we wrote, I believe in clean fields and streams

00:31:29.100 and skies and seas. Taking care of the environment is something we should do. 94% agreement.

00:31:35.020 So if you are a leader who can understand right now that we're at a breaking point and people are

00:31:39.820 exhausted with nihilism and despair and hopelessness, and you can be a guiding light in that regard

00:31:45.820 and approach issues from a point of consensus and a shared value set, that's what's moving

00:31:51.260 everything the right way. And we've done testing to prove that. If you, if you come with a shared

00:31:57.020 set of core American values and you can establish that base and grow from there, and we're seeing

00:32:01.580 these tiny green shoots of it. Spencer Cox in Utah and, um, Wes Moore just did a, did a commercial

00:32:09.260 Democrat and Republican saying, you know, giving each other's names. We're friends. We disagree.

00:32:14.540 Here we are on different things. Now they're not in a head to head race,

00:32:18.060 but them just going on and being humanized. If we have those discussions, what happens is

00:32:22.700 the whole populace can start to calm down. And what's happening is with mind control is I think

00:32:28.140 we're in a suspended state of, of the word trauma is so overused, but I don't think we're in real time.

00:32:36.220 There's a psychological phrase about being in real time. I think that our nervous systems are hacked.

00:32:41.820 Um, there's something called family systems psychology that basically talks about families

00:32:47.340 as closed systems. So a lot of times if you have, you know, most families have an identified,

00:32:51.820 um, patient, like the sick one, the problematic one. And one of the things you can see a lot is if

00:32:57.260 that one gets well, the next kid will go down or the next problem will go down or that one dies.

00:33:02.700 Cause it talks about anxiety being closed and system and families bind it in different ways.

00:33:07.580 And there's something called the Karpman drama triangle. That's very, very interesting. And it

00:33:12.540 talks about addiction loops and dysfunction loops. And what it means when you're in a dynamic like this,

00:33:17.660 when someone's the victim, someone's the savior, right? Someone's the persecutor. So Karpman has,

00:33:23.340 there's three different roles. There's victim, rescuer, and persecutor. All of those are bad

00:33:28.700 roles. Okay. So the rescuer isn't really rescuing. What the rescuer is really doing is saying,

00:33:34.220 you know, I'm, I'm so pure and I'm so open hearted and I have so much good that we don't

00:33:39.020 even have to examine my shortcomings or willful blindness. I'm here. I'm just serving the victim.

00:33:44.220 And then at some point, the aggravation of the victim's unwillingness to heal gets so much,

00:33:48.220 they turn into a persecutor. And so the roles change and the victim role, we're aware of how

00:33:53.260 bad that is, right? You're, you can be a victim. Nothing's ever your fault. And, but all of these

00:33:59.020 roles shift. And when you're in these roles, you're in a dynamic, which means you're not existing in

00:34:02.940 real time. You're not really looking that each person is filled with nuance and contains multitudes.

00:34:07.980 And we all can be all these things. And what is actually the thing that's going to break the cycle

00:34:12.860 and move us out from that into transformational change away from addiction, away from bad family

00:34:17.740 dynamics. The news cycle right now, I see people constantly persisting where we have political

00:34:23.260 leaders who are, and, and influencers who are the biggest victims in the world. And then they're the

00:34:27.180 biggest rescuers in the world. And then they're the biggest persecutors in the world. And we're

00:34:31.980 moving between these roles, which aren't real. And the only way to shatter them, as you're saying,

00:34:37.420 those can get a lot of views. They can get a lot of following. And if we keep going this way,

00:34:41.820 one side or the other is going to win. And that means we're back in that proverbial car

00:34:46.060 with somebody stomped on the brakes or somebody stomped on the gas. And if we want to gather

00:34:51.420 the majority of Americans who are outside these outsized radical voices on the left that are

00:34:56.300 exhibiting control, mostly by threatening immense reputational and financial damage to people,

00:35:02.540 right? That's mob control and cancellation. If we can crack through to that, there's a chance to

00:35:07.020 break the dynamic and there's a chance to actually focus and clear our heads and look

00:35:11.740 at the chessboard before us and say, here's where we are in America. Here's what we need

00:35:15.580 to do for our kids. Here's how the chessboard exists right now in the world with Russia and

00:35:20.380 China and the Islamic Republic and President Trump. And oh, here's a here's a Gaza peace plan that seems

00:35:26.700 insane and unlikely. Maybe that's something that we support, even if we have criticisms about him

00:35:30.940 domestically. And here's something on our own side, which is fairly vile and reprehensible.

00:35:36.620 It's very difficult to do that when you're only convinced that the other side wants to kill you

00:35:40.700 and both sides are convinced that the other side wants to kill you. And we're in scared,

00:35:44.300 traumatic postures that we're struggling to break through.

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00:37:45.420 Greg, this has been a fantastic analysis of everything that's happening online.

00:37:49.420 There is one thing that makes me think that is an important factor that we haven't discussed,

00:37:54.620 which is what's happening in the real world, particularly the ever-growing gap between rich

00:37:59.900 and poor. We've seen right the way through history, the moment people feel that they no longer can afford

00:38:06.460 basic necessities, when life is becoming more and more difficult, that's when they tend to gravitate

00:38:12.460 towards populism, whether it's left or it's right wing. And we've seen... Go back to those three

00:38:18.380 groups you pointed out. The far right, MAGA, and also the far left. The far left are talking about

00:38:23.980 economic inequality, which is a very real issue. The Mamdani's, the Bernie Sanders, they have a point.

00:38:30.380 I don't agree with their policies, but they have a point in pointing it out.

00:38:33.020 Can I tell you just real quick? Yeah. There's a flaw in that with them because they don't talk

00:38:38.460 about economic injustice. They talk about economic inequality. And the opposite of that

00:38:43.180 is economic equality. And even they don't want that. Yeah. So proceed. Yeah. Okay. So you've got MAGA.

00:38:49.740 Yeah. But this is how the majority of people see it. MAGA, one of their key policies was,

00:38:56.140 we need to bring back the jobs that have been lost through globalization. We need to bring them back

00:39:00.380 to America, America first, and the far right are touching on it as well in their own way.

00:39:06.460 So I think that's one of the things we also need to talk about is economic inequality,

00:39:11.740 particularly how it radicalizes populations. But in particular, young men, if they feel they've got

00:39:17.500 no opportunity or no chance to actually move forward, have a family, buy a place, et cetera.

00:39:25.020 Exactly. And they can't take any pride in who they are and who their, their ancestors are.

00:39:31.820 Right. We all want that. So that's, that's a, that's a very important point. There's two statistics,

00:39:37.820 I think more than any other that described the state that we're in right now,

00:39:42.060 when we talk about the problems that we're facing. One of them is that since Reagan,

00:39:46.060 50 to $60 trillion with a T has moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% of Americans.

00:39:56.380 One of the problems with that is it didn't move that way through a free market. It moved that way

00:40:01.420 due to regulatory capture and excessive lobbyism. Big Pharma has, I think it's 3.5 lobbyists per

00:40:07.660 member of Congress. That's a rigged game. So we can't look at it and say, of course,

00:40:12.620 we love capitalism and free markets because that was rigged. That's $50 trillion from the bottom

00:40:17.420 90 to the top 1%. The other statistic is for the past decades, the correlation between public support

00:40:24.940 and desire for a bill to be passed and the bill actually passing is 0%. So people walking around

00:40:33.100 outraged, nihilistic, upset, don't know those statistics, but they feel those statistics.

00:40:38.460 They know them to be true, even if that's not an analysis that they've done. And while those

00:40:43.420 things happen, when we talk about, oh my God, you know, the democracy is being shattered or this

00:40:49.580 crisis is happening or there's war in the Middle East or what's happening with Russia, they don't

00:40:53.580 care. Everything's broken already. And one of the effects of the online world is, is that we can't

00:40:59.180 talk about those things clearly. And so what you see is when every, when any issue gets politicized,

00:41:05.100 everyone loses abortion, immigration, antisemitism, you go down the list. Once it's political,

00:41:11.020 it's being gamed. And that is part of the thing that we have to break because there's very real

00:41:15.900 discussions that we have to have that involve, okay, how are we going to put jobs back in the

00:41:21.580 place? How is the government going to partner with private industry? You know, I got one of the things

00:41:26.220 that happens when you explore new spaces is Jordan says at times, the fool precedes the master,

00:41:32.540 right? And so if you go into more spaces, you're a fool more and more. And I, I've had, you know,

00:41:37.340 a, a great number of those moments, but one of them, I was on a call with a, um, a prominent

00:41:42.620 Republican, um, congressman and we were talking about regulations. This was years ago and I was

00:41:48.300 kind of beating the drums on this. And he said, you liberals think every time that we want to roll

00:41:52.620 back regulations, it's because we want to dump toxins in rivers. And I just laughed. He goes,

00:41:57.580 what are you laughing at? I go, you're totally right. I have the, I have like a third grade

00:42:01.580 understanding of this. And he was like, here's how you have to work with private business.

00:42:05.820 It takes six or seven years to build an off ramp in New York. This is untenable. Here's codified

00:42:11.180 corruption. And so I went, I went off, you know, and educated myself a lot on that. I talked to people

00:42:17.500 who were in infrastructure. We ran studies. I did a podcast that Jordan graciously invited me onto with

00:42:22.700 somebody who's an expert in infrastructure. You have to go forth and recognize when you hit a wall

00:42:27.340 and something doesn't make any sense because your presuppositions are still old. And we have to

00:42:31.500 be able to accommodate and assimilate. I mean, that's the base level, you know, Piaget with the

00:42:36.860 stages of childhood development, every stage we accommodate and assimilate information.

00:42:41.020 And when the stakes are made way too high for somebody to say, well, maybe I'm wrong, but

00:42:45.660 I'm not comfortable talking about Israel right now. And I feel like I'll get yelled at. And if we say,

00:42:50.140 you're a monster and you need to be removed and deported, we're not leaving people room to

00:42:56.060 negotiate ideas around gender, around anti-Semitism, around immigration, around abortion. And if,

00:43:02.300 and a leader needs to be somebody who makes those conversations safe to have,

00:43:06.540 and the ways that we're fighting about the issue, the very real issues you're talking about,

00:43:11.580 if we look at how those are being discussed, they are in a very, your side's wrong, my side's right,

00:43:17.020 in absolutely right mode. And nothing gets solved that way because reality is where ideology goes

00:43:22.780 to die. I want to say something back to you. You, you, you had a piece that I, that I came across,

00:43:30.060 either serendipitously or because my phone's listening to me and knew I was driving to talk

00:43:34.540 to you guys, where you were talking about this dialing up the crazy. And you said something very

00:43:39.660 astute that I think is very important, which is, it's not Jeff Bezos's fault if you're radicalized,

00:43:45.980 right? It's not all, it's not your guy's fault. If somebody has the situation wrong,

00:43:51.500 we all have to make our individual choices of what news that we consume. We are the drivers of this.

00:43:57.660 We, there's nothing more powerful than where we put our attention. And if we're choosing to eat

00:44:02.540 a diet of junk food and onboarding and it's onboarding, like if you study, you know, let's say

00:44:08.060 that you're a young man and you go on because you want to look up your family ancestry and then you're

00:44:12.940 being onboarded to street fights and then it's race baiting and then it's a diet of neo-Nazism.

00:44:17.740 There's, there's these onboarding structures that are insane, but we somehow have lost the locus of

00:44:23.100 ourselves. And why I'm saying that isn't to scold, but to say there's something incredibly empowering

00:44:30.060 when we say I'm going to fix things in reality around me. I'm going to fix what I look at, what my

00:44:36.540 kids look at. And I'm also going to solve problems that aren't so far out of reach that I can't

00:44:41.660 possibly find them because by design that's made for me to feel despairing and paralyzed, right?

00:44:47.500 How do I fix the environment? You can't, right? Oh my God, these, these healthcare for veterans just

00:44:53.420 got cut. What do I do? Well, do you know a restaurant that is open to the cause? Do you know college

00:44:58.860 students who will volunteer? Do you have some veterans in your community who need this? Solve the problem.

00:45:03.980 We're empowered. And more and more people are saying I'm frozen in despair.

00:45:08.700 Or what they're saying is the game is rigged. Fuck your game. Yes. That's what I think of it. And

00:45:15.580 that's where I get really concerned because you have this anger, particularly from young men. And as we

00:45:21.980 all know, young men are the ones that are going to be more likely to be extreme. You look at the Luigi

00:45:26.060 Mangione case, case in point, anger, frustration, for whatever reason, here's my target.

00:45:33.340 There you go. That's right. So C.S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters, he has this great line,

00:45:39.260 which I'll hopefully not paraphrase too widely, where he says, you know, it's a letter from a

00:45:45.580 demon who's advising somebody on how to corrupt the mind of a human, of a man on earth to claim

00:45:51.820 him for the underworld. And he says, keep him constantly obsessed and focused on the state

00:45:57.260 of his mother's soul, but never on her rheumatoid arthritis. The more we can be worried of the

00:46:03.740 abstract, I'm a voice who's going to save, you know, I'm going to have peace in the Middle East.

00:46:08.220 I'm going to solve environmentalism by taping my hands to the Mona Lisa. I'm here. I'm solving

00:46:14.380 things for the world. The further removed we are from our locus of control, which gives us meaning

00:46:19.260 and which gives us choices and which gives us power. And part of when, when the way you broke

00:46:24.860 that down about the news consumption diet, I go back often as I know you, you both do to Solzhenitsyn,

00:46:30.380 who wrote, of course, the Gulag Archipelago, which I think in a lot of ways was the moral argument that

00:46:35.820 brought down the Soviet Union. And his question, dying of cancer in a Gulag was, what are all the

00:46:42.060 ways I contributed to me being here? What are all the times I didn't speak up when somebody did this

00:46:47.980 bit of language control or somebody informed on a neighbor? How did I go along with this? And I think

00:46:53.260 he's a wonderful counterpoint to the great man theory of history where we're waiting for our next great

00:46:59.180 man. We're waiting for our next great leader. Um, bless you. Who's going to come and save and

00:47:05.820 vanquish us. And part of it is, is we all stitched the fabric of the culture together around us.

00:47:12.220 We all have a role in that. And when it disintegrates, I mean, one of the things

00:47:15.900 Solzhenitsyn said was that basically everyone in a totalitarian society lies about everything all the

00:47:21.420 time. And that act of setting ourselves in order or saying, you know, I have a, uh,

00:47:28.140 anyways, we don't need to do. I talked to so many people as I know you do who are so despairing

00:47:33.660 and it's almost like they lose agency to fix a problem in their backyard with their kid,

00:47:37.820 their kid's friend, with a neighbor, some small effort you make in your community.

00:47:41.740 And we can keep trying to look for bigger and systemic changes, but we have to relocate that

00:47:46.540 within ourselves. And it's also as well, politicians really, and look, MAGA said they're going to,

00:47:52.860 so let's see what they're doing. And they're trying the tariff thing in order to bring jobs

00:47:56.380 back to America. I really worry about this generation, Greg, this particularly the young,

00:48:01.020 the young generation, there's a sense of hopelessness amongst them that we simply didn't

00:48:05.420 feel at that age.

00:48:06.300 No, imagine if we were going to school when we were 12 and our parents said, okay,

00:48:12.540 here's this little device you're going to take with you. It contains unlimited pornography.

00:48:18.140 It contains unlimited fights and violence. Also Khomeini can tweet at you during the day

00:48:24.140 or any other group, have this in your pocket. It can be in your, in your desk at school. It can be in

00:48:29.660 your locker. It's in the bathroom. Go have a good life. 12 year old with no myelinated prefrontal cortex.

00:48:35.900 We'd be gone. And increasingly as, and for this, I put the weight much more squarely on the left,

00:48:45.020 this removal of the canon, this removal of the fact that there's a different established set

00:48:50.060 of ways that we teach and learn in the world is absolutely brutal. Because if you sever people

00:48:55.820 off from a colonialist past and you don't read Orwell, and you don't read Dostoyevsky,

00:49:01.100 and you're not reading Plato or Socrates, fill in the blank. If you're not reading

00:49:06.700 Frederick Douglass, if you're not reading and understanding the actual civil rights movement

00:49:11.580 and how the basis of that was in responsibility and accountability, not in whatever is passing

00:49:16.860 for some versions of activism we're seeing today, then everything's new again.

00:49:21.420 Well, you mentioned some versions of activism. One of the things we talked about before we started is,

00:49:26.540 how do you do something that's effective? And there are a lot of organizations, I mean,

00:49:30.380 the ADL is just one example, which you found seems to want to quote unquote fight antisemitism,

00:49:35.980 but actually it's very ineffective. And in fact, sometimes making things worse, right?

00:49:39.580 Yeah. Well, I've done a lot of analysis with the group. I have a partner group called NCRI,

00:49:44.700 which is the Network Contagion Research Institute. And we look at different plannings. I believe

00:49:51.820 it's unequivocal that DEI and oppression and antisemitism and microaggression training

00:49:57.980 not only is ineffective, but that it drives the opposite effect. I believe that that is

00:50:03.100 beyond debate. I shouldn't say that. Everything's open to debate. I believe that a proper debate on

00:50:12.780 this with experts on both sides who know more than I do from both sides, everything that I've seen,

00:50:18.860 that to me is an issue that is provable. We looked at the types of training statistics and statements

00:50:25.020 from the Anti-Defamation League. And one of the outcomes we saw was it drove 15x greater antisemitic

00:50:31.740 responses. People felt more hostile. They felt irritated. And the thing is that's really,

00:50:38.380 and by the way, we did a test where we exposed, we looked at 30 different admission standards from

00:50:43.980 everything from Canada to Harvard, to Columbia, to the UN, to the State Department that looked at

00:50:50.940 this anti-oppression training network. And the results there were absolutely stunning. We saw 35% of

00:50:58.220 people, and we had control groups, 35% of people saw bias after a control where they saw none after

00:51:04.700 this training that there was more. 25% thought that damage had been done to the student when before

00:51:11.340 they thought there was none. And 24% thought that the admissions officer or the interviewer had acted

00:51:17.180 with violence against them. And then the punitive numbers of whether that person should be reprimanded

00:51:22.700 went up double digits across the boards. And we did a similar thing where we did training.

00:51:27.980 You know, we had one people read an essay on corn and other people read an essay on,

00:51:32.060 on again, anti-oppression training. Let me use that as the umbrella term, that everyone's an oppressor

00:51:36.540 or victim, which is a huge problem because I don't want to be an oppressor or a victim. Like, there's no

00:51:41.820 good role there. You're an oppressor, a victim, or a persecutor on the side of good. None of those roles are

00:51:47.100 good. And we re, and then afterwards we replaced Hitler's speeches using the caste system in India

00:51:54.140 instead of Hitler's terms so that they were less familiar to Americans. And we saw 25% of people

00:52:01.260 would view the other group as parasitical, who needed to be destroyed. So anytime you identify

00:52:07.020 this, and I did some, a fairly set of deep dives around the explosion of anti-Semitism after October

00:52:12.300 7th, anytime that you identify a group as its own separate group, and then you're beating your chest

00:52:20.540 around grievance around that group, it drives more disdain, hatred, defensiveness, and aggression

00:52:28.860 towards that group. And we know this, and it's fixable. How do you fix it? You tack to universal

00:52:35.260 values. Another thing we did in the control group was because we were dealing with anti-Semitism in

00:52:39.660 one instance. We exposed people to just tenets of Judaism. Here's basic rules of Judaism. Shared

00:52:45.820 universal values that were American. All of a sudden we're seeing double digits in the 20s

00:52:50.860 of positive responses that go the other way. And so what's very important is, and I've done some

00:52:56.220 talk with Jewish institutions and Jewish groups and orgs as best as I can, which is to say, look,

00:53:02.140 52% of people in America don't feel that they can openly talk about anti-Semitism or Israel,

00:53:07.100 or Jews or Israel right now. That's really bad. We don't want to keep foreclosing that,

00:53:11.980 because what you foreclose, you make forbidden. And what you make forbidden becomes taboo. And what

00:53:17.980 becomes taboo becomes sacred and alluring. And so we need to actually do the opposite, which is,

00:53:23.420 okay, if you hate Jews, if you have this particular view on immigration, if you have whatever,

00:53:28.940 you're allowed to have that. What you can't do is stop traffic and make true threats and destroy

00:53:34.220 property and shut down universities and commit violent acts. And so there's a distinction

00:53:40.380 between what are violent words and violent thoughts, let's say, not words that encourage

00:53:46.220 active violence, which is illegal, and what we're going to do about it. But the reaction is the

00:53:50.700 opposite, which is to say, look, for a Jewish group, for, let's say it's a group of people with

00:53:58.540 different sexual orientation. Harvey Milk, the pathway he laid out, the pathway laid out by

00:54:05.020 Frederick Douglass through John Lewis in the Civil Rights Movement, the pathways that are laid out

00:54:09.900 with different groups saying, we only want the same sort of rights and safety around us as every other

00:54:15.420 group has. And our core values are in fact aligned with core American values, or if you're in a Western

00:54:21.500 country, core Western values. And that's okay. That goes back to the Greeks and the Romans, because those

00:54:26.700 values are the ones that set the conditions to allow the center to hold and the fringe to thrive.

00:54:34.220 They're the only ones that do that. And that there is a language for how the fringe needs to exist and

00:54:39.180 how it negotiates and how the center can't get too rigid. And we need to be able to have that balance

00:54:44.460 back. And we've done this forever. So a shared set of values that uplifts everybody as opposed to a

00:54:50.460 continuous disintegration. You've, you've talked, I think, I don't know if you've had Jonathan Pajot

00:54:57.020 on the podcast, but we've overlapped. But we're friends. Yeah. Jonathan is a, is a stunningly deep

00:55:02.940 thinker. And he talks about how, one of his lectures is he talks about how a symbol is something that

00:55:08.140 unites and upholds. And what the word diabolical actually means is to disintegrate into pieces.

00:55:15.100 That's what diabolical means. The more we disintegrate and become zero sum of like, well,

00:55:20.380 you know, do we need it to be, how many points of intersectionality do we line up to have rights

00:55:25.740 that are different from everybody else? It's not going to get us there. What are the rights that we

00:55:30.700 share? And the other thing I will say just while we're talking about this is we don't have time

00:55:37.180 anymore, I believe, to continue on a path of comparative grievance. And that's not something I'm

00:55:43.820 limiting only to the left either. There's all sorts of tribal grievance that is happening.

00:55:48.860 Right now, China is building 33 large nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors, I mean, the energy

00:55:56.700 war is on. That's what's going to power AI. That's what's going to power drone warfare. We have seen

00:56:01.660 from Ukraine that drone warfare is going to be everything. America now has zero in production.

00:56:08.060 Okay. That's a tiny little microcosm of what we're looking at. If we are negotiating backwards

00:56:13.500 and we're not going to have time in full to have more fundraisers and more elections,

00:56:19.740 and then these guys are going to win without being corrupted. And then at the midterms,

00:56:23.180 they're going to get control without being corrupted, and they're going to pass the magical laws.

00:56:27.180 And then we're going to reach a new utopia that's going to come in. We have to deal with the real

00:56:31.500 world in real time. And that means that we have to look forward and we have to look at the chessboard

00:56:36.140 before us now. And I think that the stuff that's trying to move backwards and is moving us into

00:56:41.580 grievance that has to be cleared and negotiated before we'll deal in any way with anybody else

00:56:46.540 around us and join those resources that we need, conservative and liberal, the more problems we're

00:56:52.220 going to have in the world. And we're not going to be able to keep up with countries that don't need

00:56:55.260 to have this kind of negotiation because they don't care about free speech and they care way less

00:56:59.420 about women's rights and minority rights than we do. Which is why going back to economic inequality,

00:57:04.540 to me, it's such a huge issue. We had Barry Strauss on the show. We've had him twice and we're going to

00:57:09.340 have him again. He's a brilliant, brilliant ancient historian. And he said one of the main reasons why

00:57:14.540 ancient Rome fell was a growing disparity between rich and poor, because when the poor feel that they

00:57:20.540 can't have access to society, that they can't buy property or whatever it may be, that they are

00:57:25.900 essentially third or fourth class citizens, then why are they going to vote? Why are they going to

00:57:30.140 fight for a country? Why are they going to be part of a society if they feel that they have no chance

00:57:35.820 of being part of that society? So this is why I think more and more we talk about race in America.

00:57:41.900 We talk about all of these different issues. To me, this is the number one thing. America really does

00:57:47.180 need to solve this because you need to have people who are prepared to fight and die for this country.

00:57:52.140 And that tradition, that ain't the middle class. That ain't the wealthy. That's the blue-collar

00:57:57.100 guys and girls. There's an amazing amount of arrogance that happened. Again, I hate using

00:58:03.820 terms like the elite. We have so many terms that are captured and that's actually part of the Orwellian

00:58:07.980 game. So I don't mean that in a screamy manner, but I do think that there's been a real separation

00:58:15.900 from the people who keep the country running and moving, who are building things in the world and

00:58:22.380 laying pipes and extracting oil and can keep the country running. You can't denigrate them with

00:58:30.140 faculty lounge research and terms and hand-pack all of their notions and their use of language.

00:58:37.500 Mm-hmm.

00:58:37.900 There's an enormous embodiment of wisdom and common sense. And I think that's something that we've

00:58:44.220 really forgotten. And there's been a lot of arrogance. And I think one of the things that's

00:58:47.420 happening with an AI revolution right now is a lot of jobs that are previously sort of Tony jobs that

00:58:54.540 you're well taken care of are going to get eaten by AI. And if you want to be a millionaire in America

00:59:01.180 right now, if you're an electrician, if you're an elevator repairman, if you're a plumber with a fleet

00:59:07.420 of cars like vans, those are going to be really good bets. And for some reason, we thought that the

00:59:13.420 people who are down with their hands in the dirt where theories have to meet reality, you need a crew.

00:59:19.340 It doesn't matter if your crew's top value is inclusion, empathy, or some loyalty test to a party.

00:59:26.860 What matters is they can get the job done and they're conscientious.

00:59:30.060 And the further we get removed from this, the worse shape we are. And look, the other thing

00:59:35.740 I like so much about dealing with problems in reality and fixing them is every time I've done

00:59:40.460 that, so many of my suppositions are wrong, first of all. And one of the things that I was counseled

00:59:47.580 on enough to take really seriously was the majority of interventions in the culture make things worse.

00:59:54.140 And if you want to make things better, you have to operate and deal with them in reality.

00:59:57.980 Well, in reality, almost all your notions of the world are confused and out the window if

01:00:03.420 you're trying to get a measurable income. And it's very humbling to try to make something work,

01:00:08.460 a small business, a venture, anything to build or do something in the real world.

01:00:13.260 It's a process of undeceiving. But the other thing is in conflict resolution, one of the things you do is

01:00:18.380 there's all these great programs where if you're trying to get two gangs to stop having violence

01:00:23.660 on the street is you take them away in a different context, you go out in the woods somewhere,

01:00:28.700 you chop up the teams, and then you play capture the flag with the teams mixed in different ways.

01:00:34.620 And the more we can do this with smaller strike teams, both politically, both within the kinds of

01:00:40.460 ways that you guys try to have these different voices where someone comes on and you're like,

01:00:44.140 well, Sam just said this last week, but here's somebody who's more conservative, has this view.

01:00:48.940 The more we can get people working together in something that's in the real world that's bent

01:00:53.260 at fixing real things or that is based on cooperation, that's how these things fix.

01:00:59.180 They don't fix from training. They don't fix by talking to your prefrontal cortex to tell you about

01:01:03.820 what in-group favoritism looks like and why that's offensive and what microaggressions look like in

01:01:08.620 your face when you're an eight-year-old boy. It's way too abstract. And so when we get to fixing

01:01:14.220 things, and that's why I have a sort of continued... I'm continuing to implore that we look at reality

01:01:21.020 condition to condition to condition. You can be as mad at Trump as you want about a bunch of things,

01:01:25.660 but it is important to look and to acknowledge, hey, wait a minute, he just raised sanctions

01:01:31.820 on Russia, and now China has stepped away and India has stepped away, and that seems to be

01:01:38.540 having a positive effect. And as Americans with an American president who's leading in the world,

01:01:43.820 those are probably things that we want to have because that's a peaceful resolution to a conflict

01:01:47.500 that's killing now in the millions of people, right? We have to be able to separate and look at

01:01:53.740 that and hold another thought in our head, which is, oh, but I find this thing over here with the

01:01:57.660 administration problematic. Guess what? Everything's problematic. We're humans. Our institutions

01:02:03.420 are corrupt. People are corrupt. Everything is a mess. And if we can look in reality and see what

01:02:09.180 impact our choices are having and where to criticize and where to view with nuance, I think we can start

01:02:14.540 to go a much longer way instead of, you know, front towards enemy at all times, no matter what happens.

01:02:19.980 Well, one of the things for that to happen, I think, is you have to make certain changes to the

01:02:25.180 way our social media algorithms are operating. And you've written quite a bit on some of the

01:02:30.540 solutions around that. So as we wrap up, can you give us the basic Greg Howard's plan on how to solve

01:02:37.180 social media? Yeah. Well, let's see. It's a tentative step in the right direction. I don't

01:02:42.940 know about solving, but the first thing is, is I do think we need algorithms to be transparent.

01:02:48.780 And, you know, I know there's a lot of complication around what's proprietary that people can steal,

01:02:53.340 but we need independent groups. Like what we want isn't to control freedom of speech. What we want

01:02:58.140 is more transparency. Right now in every field across the country, there's massive distrust.

01:03:04.860 And the only solution to distrust is transparency because you need truth first before you can have

01:03:10.140 reconciliation. You don't ever get to reconciliation without truth. So freedom of speech is not freedom

01:03:16.060 of reach for profit. That's not what freedom of speech means. It doesn't mean that you can distort this

01:03:21.580 through psychopathic algorithms, bad faith players, and hostile foreign regimes. We need to know,

01:03:28.140 and the free market needs to know, and advertisers need to know, and parents need to know, what are we

01:03:32.780 looking at and why are we looking at it? If I do nothing but put your attention on interracial fights

01:03:38.860 in cities for 24 hours, you're going to come out thinking things differently. What is the aim of that?

01:03:44.940 So we need to have those, um, that are transparent and can also be assessed. And the other thing I

01:03:51.180 like about that is leaving aside, obviously the illegal, but we want people to dip into ideas that

01:03:58.220 are maybe dangerous or menacing or fringe by their own choice. We don't want it governed by, you know,

01:04:05.340 some Uber agency, what people can look at or can't look at short of the illegal, because those

01:04:10.380 interventions into darker corners, they shouldn't be inoculative, right? They shouldn't be, um,

01:04:17.580 deranging. And so if you know what's where, I mean, we've all, you know, we have this in context.

01:04:22.540 I was talking about our phones with how phones work. Well, there's certain books we could get.

01:04:25.820 There's certain things we could get when we were younger, but they weren't everywhere all the time

01:04:29.340 being fed to us. Other thing is, is I do believe that we should privilege people who use their real name

01:04:37.660 in their communications online. That doesn't mean that you get rid of people who are anonymous.

01:04:41.980 You there's whistleblower accounts, but there's, there's all sorts of everything else. But if you're

01:04:45.980 going to say something and stand behind that with your own name, in a way, maybe there's a first tier

01:04:51.340 of engagement that happens on social media platforms and everyone else can be here and you can go sift

01:04:56.140 down here and things can be borrowed from there and you can go explore all you want. But real people

01:05:01.500 who are using their real voices should, and having some courage and some accountability and some

01:05:07.580 reputational force that they're standing behind should have some modicum of privilege within the

01:05:17.340 system. Because anonymity breeds toxic behavior. Yeah. In the same way that when we're driving a

01:05:23.340 car and someone cuts in front of us, it's much easier to flip them the bird. I would not flip you

01:05:27.180 the bird right now for the same, in the same situation. Yeah, of course. Yeah. There's no,

01:05:30.620 there's zero cost to being as reprehensible as possible. All right.

01:05:34.540 And then the other thing I would say is, A, we also need to have, we can't get rid of

01:05:43.500 human involvement and interference. There's a lot of like, well, we have the software that

01:05:47.500 analyzes what's legal or not. And it takes, you know, 50 days to do a review of what is and isn't.

01:05:53.580 We need some human decency and some human common sense. And some people have to make that decision.

01:05:59.260 I've long thought that, that you two would be really good arbiters of this, you know, if there's

01:06:04.940 like a, I don't know what exactly the process is, but to have arbiters of what constitutes legitimate

01:06:11.740 discourse and what can just be commonsensical to say that's clearly is geared for hellacious aims.

01:06:17.100 We can't act as if everything can be AI assessing what AI is because there's infinite ways to game at.

01:06:22.060 So don't be afraid of human judgment. We've used human judgment our whole lives.

01:06:26.620 And the other thing I would say is we should identify and eliminate inauthentic content.

01:06:31.900 If there's a bot swarm that's initiated, and we've seen this around hate speech that's gotten

01:06:36.620 initiated, um, around debates. I've tracked this, you know, at different times for Jordan,

01:06:41.980 for Douglas Murray, when things go, sometimes 35% of it is false or 35% of it is from foreign

01:06:50.620 regimes or is sourced outside the United States. Well, we should know that we should know when

01:06:54.700 there's a paper tiger effect, because one of the aims of onboarding with hateful,

01:06:59.260 dangerous narrative is to create that permission structure. That's why Russian agents, for instance,

01:07:04.540 went to France and they painted stars of David on Jewish houses and synagogues. So it just looked

01:07:09.980 like antisemitism was everywhere. So you can onboard it more. Well, we don't need that. Nobody needs that.

01:07:15.740 Advertisers don't need it. Social media doesn't need it. So if it's a bot swarm and inauthentic

01:07:20.860 stuff of one person who's sitting in a troll farm in Moscow, we should be able to identify

01:07:26.460 that and call it what it is. Freedom of speech does not mean unlimited access for foreign adversaries

01:07:33.100 who want to divide and destroy us to speak to our youngest people. That's not what freedom of speech

01:07:38.140 is about. It's also suicidal. Greg, it's been a brilliant interview. Thank you so much.

01:07:43.500 Final question is always the same. What's the one thing that we're not talking about that we really

01:07:48.300 should be? That there has been a disconnection between, I think, the secular and the symbolic

01:08:00.460 world and wisdoms and methods of making meaning. And that those two things have come apart. And I

01:08:08.300 think right now we're in a process of trying to reintegrate those two schools of thought of how

01:08:13.820 people think. And I'm saying symbolically that can be mythologically, archetypally, narratively,

01:08:18.700 religiously, and a secular sort of more intensely fact-based approach. These two modes of thinking

01:08:27.340 are almost entirely disconnected. And when you're in one, it's very hard to understand and comprehend

01:08:33.020 what the other is saying. We need a lot of translation and a lot of understanding.

01:08:38.220 And those two things need to continue to be in conversation and feathered back together in the way

01:08:42.860 that they have been in the past. All right, Greg, thank you so much for coming on. Head on over

01:08:47.020 to Substack at triggerpod.co.uk, where we ask Greg your questions. Is there any evidence that any part

01:08:54.540 of the political left, including the media and movie studios, have taken any responsibility or feel any

01:09:00.220 guilt or regret about legitimizing violence against conservatives?

01:09:12.380 Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare stick. I like to be

01:09:26.860 prepared. That's why I remember 988 Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline. It's good to know, just in case.

01:09:33.860 Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a trained responder, anytime.

01:09:38.460 988 Suicide Crisis Helpline is funded by the government of Canada.

TRIGGERnometry - January 18, 2026

The Radicalisation Of America - Gregg Hurwitz

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