Foreign PSYOPs in the USA | Gregg Hurwitz
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Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to continue an ongoing conversation with a friend and colleague of mine, Greg Hurwitz. We've been talking intensely for 30 years and have involved ourselves together in a multitude of projects, including one that was designed to help pull the Democrats to the center. Greg has been involved more recently in an enterprise called Us the Story, which is aiming at

criticizing the victim-victimizer narrative that characterizes our culture, at least the pathological elements of it, but also delving into the root causes of the

disintegration and polarization that now characterize our culture. Now, some of that's a consequence of intellectual movement, but some of it is actually facilitated by a series of bad actors, and those involve people who are agitating directly and consciously as well as indirectly and unconsciously on the international front. Iran,

China and Russia, who are using the social media access that they have, especially to young people and particularly to young women, to really dement and distort their political view and in a manner that's really, really hard on the culture. And so Greg talks a fair bit about

about exactly how that's laying itself out. And on the optimistic side, we talked a fair bit about, well, the counterposition to that, which is that there's mass deep agreement among the vast majority of Americans on key policy issues, both international and domestic. And none of that gets any airtime. And so what do we do? Detail out the role of the bad international actors. Talk a little bit about the psychopathic trolls and the demonic algorithms.

and stress the fact that there is intense unity in a central American story, hence us, the story, let's say, that does unite people properly and productively and passionately and psychologically and socially, and that there's reason for real optimism in that regard. So join us for that discussion. Well, Mr. Hurwitz, we meet again. It's good to see you. We've been talking for a long time about

polarization and trying to ameliorate it and probably adding to it too inadvertently because that's always a problem when when the feedback loops that are producing something like polarization get raging that's a good way of thinking about it it isn't always obvious how to

rectify that without amplifying it. It's a big problem. And so I've seen a tremendous increase in the power of that polarization process since October 7th. And we've talked about that a lot, how that might be addressed. I've seen that polarization expand on the left and on the right, and it's not a good thing. And so

Well, we've been talking about that, as I alluded to, for years, but also more intently in the last few months. And so do you want to start by explaining your position on this and what you've been up to? Well, I was tasked first as a point of entry, I guess, of going in to explore anti-Semitism. And one of the things I found really quickly is it's not very much about anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is just sort of a tool and part of a broader narrative.

And when we explored it, we found some extraordinary things. We found the extent of foreign operations coming into America and manipulating opinion here. And the other thing that we found that was quite extraordinary is that America, we have a lot of problems that we need to fix here.

So I'm under no illusion about that. But America is in enormous agreement about a lot of things. America is sort of foundationally good and still oriented to what America was with its values. And we can talk about that a little bit more later. But we're on thrall to, I think, two major factors: foreign psychological operations that are being run here. We've seen that in the university. We certainly see it through social media.

and a sort of profit center within the US of people who profit from us being constantly outraged all the time.

And so we have a very shifting view from what the reality is of the country to the way that we feel that everything's falling apart. And there are, in fact, some concrete steps that we can take towards trying to put things right again. Okay, so when you say we, talk a little bit about the organization that you've put together to start to address this and let everybody know where you're coming from and also the nature of our relationship with regard to that.

I come into exploration of the culture of politics as a novelist. That's my day job for as long as I can remember. And it means I have a very different approach because as a novelist, I'm trying to figure out how to embody characters to articulate them. And so I'm interested in really deeply understanding what the different perspectives are and how they're affected and what those value structures are like in hopes of figuring out how to translate them.

And so my venture has mostly been on the basis of curiosity and trying to make connections between different methods that people have of making meaning or thinking. And so part of that is, you know, and then also, you know, I try to tell a story to the broadest possible audience. And so my exploration here into all of this really comes from trying to figure out who people are and how they're thinking without judgment.

and trying to identify which parts feel like ideology or feel like opinions that are received and where they're really coming from. And the thing that's amazing is if you get to where people are really coming from, that's where a lot of the divisions just collapse and you have massive contingencies

consensus on almost every major issue facing America. But if we can focus more and more on the ways that we misinterpret a term or reference one thinker who we don't like, if we can have an outrage machine that's constantly built to do that, then that's where all of our focus goes. And that's what happens. And what's your team in this regard? And how much time are you spending

not on your novel writing and literary activities, but on the, what would you call it, political inquiry as well as communication? I'm curious about your strategy for doing your background research, for example, but I'd like to know about the team or everybody needs to know about the team and also communication.

Give us a scope of your activities over the last six or seven months. Yeah. Okay. So I work with the team. What we say that we do is research through execution. So we research into the culture. We're postpartisan. That's the most important thing because we need to get opinions from a very, very broad range of people across the spectrum on sources, on opinions, on what's happening and where the reality is. So that's immensely important.

and we're anti-polarization. And so our main client is just sort of the U.S. at large, because the better the U.S. does from our initial entry point about anti-Semitism, it's not just the better Jews are, but every minority and every majority. So we want to tack towards shared American values again and try and counter polarization. And I work with a

a brilliant founder and CEO of her own sort of research through execution company, Gretchen Barton. Mark Riddle, who is a brilliant political strategist and thinker. Johnny Potens is running the studio part of this. And so we do polling, psychometrics, research. We go all across the ecosystem. We have to talk to people way on the right and way on the left. And we take a big consensus and

And then we start to test messaging. We start to build creative messaging. Marshall Herskovitz has been very closely involved. He's a brilliant director, and he's been helping oversee some of the creative. And we start to see what ideas work, which ideas get blowback from which quarters, and what things were wrong about. Right. And so with this particular enterprise, you've been involved in attempting to pull the Democrats back to the center for a long time. But this particular enterprise was motivated by

specifically by the events that surrounded October 7th and the dementing of the culture in consequence of that. But as you proceeded, as I've understood from our discussions,

you've realized that the essential focus here isn't the rise of anti-Semitism on the right and the left, but the process of polarization in general. And it's speeding along by people who are motivated to do precisely that and also motivated to profit by it. Some kind of evil dynamic between the two. And that's fair. And so one of the things we've talked about is the fact that

The rise in anti-Semitism, I've always regarded that as the Jews, for example, as canaries in the coal mine because they're the perennially successful minority in my sense is that when the mob on the right and the left comes for the Jews, that's a prodroma to the mob coming for the successful in general. And that anti-Semitism is a manifestation of something that's much more fundamental that should be addressed rather than a

Rather than something that should be considered in isolation. And so we've talked about that a little bit. So you've been delving more into what we might call the victim-victimizer narrative, for example, as well as the conscious actions of the foreign manipulators that you've described and the

of the corporations on the social media side in advancing their agenda. Fair enough? Is that okay? And the button of anti-Semitism in some ways is the most effective switch to flip if you want a culture to tear itself apart. Right, right. So that's a very effective entry point. Yeah, and it's fueled. Like I heard a statistic yesterday from someone in the Intel community who thought that 60% of all anti-Semitic

traffic on social media is from Russian bots.

And what the Russians did, and there was a, look, there was a measure that the Russians pushed forth in the 70s to conflate, you know, definitions around terms. I mean, they've been playing this game for a long time, a sort of manipulation. There's a, you know, Iran, China, and Russia are working in concert. We can talk about that more later. But one of the things they did in Paris is that they sent operatives to paint Stars of David on synagogues and people's houses to mark them out.

And that creates a permission structure for more hatred because people then start to see this, right? Everybody's eager for some sort of trend of being right in the political narrative in this sort of frothy rage that we're built up to. And they laser in on where that is. So their job is to create permission structures that

to create jew hate which then can lead to the worst elements and leads to further and further polarization and that's how you disintegrate a culture really is you sow chaos like the the precursor to the kgb in the 70s like they funded the black panthers and the kkk

They're not partisan geared. And when we talk about like Iran is really in some ways the Democrats blind spot as Russia is the Republicans. Like there's equivalent plays being had and they don't really want one party over another. They want us constantly fighting about all the wrong things that don't solve the actual problems themselves.

that the majority of Americans need solved in their life, and the majority of Americans are actually decent people, and they don't care about screaming at Jews or labeling oppressors or canceling people from a tweet they had 10 years ago. They're trying to get on, and we're going to talk about them as well. Okay, how will we start this? You're going to start with your methodology, I guess. Yeah. All right, all right. And it's a sociological and political investigation strategy combined with

An attempt to determine how to ameliorate the worst of the negative consequences that you're discovering. Right. And if you pursue any problem deep enough, ideally you can start to reach the root of the sickness. Right. And there's a real sickness. Once you get the diagnosis right. There's a sickness at the base of America right now.

And that is, however you want to call it, the grouping of different people into different categories. The disintegration of an American ID under a set of American shared value set is spectacular. It's the most spectacular shared value set there is. Most of us agree with that. But if you want... But it's being fractionated into group identity claims, and that has negative consequences in multiple dimensions. Yeah, and a lot of that isn't us. A lot of that is foreign influence, and a lot of it is...

you know, ways that we have shifted away from shared American values that make sense. We have a template for solving all sorts of problems here. If you want to protest, we have, you know, the civil rights movement in America is American scripture. I mean, like the beauty and moral clarity of that movement is, that's a foundational pillar in America. And of course, it's predated with a rich tradition that was exemplified in the best way. Right. Okay. So your investigations really have

led you to a pessimistic conclusion or two pessimistic conclusions and one very optimistic conclusion. And the pessimistic realization is the degree to which our discourse on social media platforms is being shaped by

Bad actors on the foreign side and like psychopathic manipulators and greed on the domestic side. And psychopathic algorithms. Oh, yes. Right, right. Which we can scarcely keep up with in our brains. Right. Okay. So, foreign actors, people who are capitalizing on the division that they're sowing for primarily economic reasons and for the opportunity for those people.

operations and propaganda to garner attention, which has value. And then that's amplified by the AI algorithms that we don't even understand that are directing attention. That's polarizing people terribly. But the optimistic issue is that as far as you can tell from your polling, that the core and the center of America is just as strong as it ever has been.

Or maybe stronger. I wouldn't say just as strong. We have cracks and we're vulnerable, but everybody is ready and dying to move back towards a sane version of America. And we're not helpless before this massively accelerating change, even with algorithms. We have tools. We have to catch up to it.

But we have tools at our disposal for how to make things transparent and reset the value state. We have ways to put America together. But as long as issues remain partisan, like the border or abortion, they get worse. The incentive structures are too out of whack. But we are ripe for a movement to something that is new. And the resources we have in America— I mean, the one thing I keep thinking is everyone's angry that this celebrity goes to this party and this genius goes to that party—

is the collective resources we have in the United States of America are spectacular. If we could figure out how to get them all working together in a way that makes sense, and that is a fair set of values, that's smart capitalism instead of

regulatory capture and, you know, lobbyism. There's a whole way to make this work beautifully, but there's a lot of other countries are incentivized to making us hate ourselves, despise ourselves, hate each other so that we keep deteriorating. Well, you just said you were in Uzbekistan and they're building factories and it's booming. I mean, other places are doing things. They're building. It's not to suggest there's not a lot of people doing a lot of work in America, but

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Okay, we kind of skipped over something that, in a way, or we haven't developed it enough yet, that's a claim that's very radical. I mean, I don't think anybody who's watching or listening is going to be shocked by the fact that the social media algorithms are prioritizing outrage to capture attention and that there's economic utility in that. But, you know, you're making a claim that's on the face of it

in the realm of conspiracy theory, you know, and that is that there are foreign PSYOP operations, foreign PSYOP operations that are dementing the political landscape and that that's a massive ploy, that it's conscious, that it's led by Iran, China, and Russia, let's say. And so maybe we can, shall we? Let's break that down. Yeah, let's do that. Because I would really like to see you prove that.

So the measurements, the first thing I should say is that when you're measuring how a culture thinks and moves, it's incredibly complicated. And so obviously, right, you can push-pull. I mean, you talked a lot about this early in our methodology for outreach to, one, not make things worse.

And two, I remember we showed you a poll from anti-Semitism in the 30s, and it said, do you think Jews are clannish? Do you think Jews do this in business? And you looked up and you said, I'm pretty sure if people weren't anti-Semitic before taking the survey, they would be afterwards. Right, absolutely. How you form questions in form.

Right. And they set the stage for dialogue. And the idea that a question can be neutral, I mean, this is, we're veering into postmodern territory here, but. But I do, we do have that when we get to the agreement piece. Yeah. As well, that how you phrase things matters. So the first thing is, is we have an approach that is based on genuine curiosity for the longest term good. We do. It's not, we're not like sort of, that's what we're in it for. And so

So we're asking, we make inquiries. There's a bunch of different things you have to study. And then we try and fill in all the missing pieces as best we can. But I think it's a very, I think that it's overwhelmingly compelling what the case is. But we take polls. Gretchen does stuff for some people aren't as articulate in polling when we do the focus group aside from the polling that she has them bring up and do visual representations of how they're thinking. There's a bunch of means of inquiries.

ingress that we try to have from all different sides of the culture. Small focus groups running stuff by you, running stuff by progressives, running stuff by leaders and people on the street. And so it's a combination of poles, but I want to highlight a few things that are approaches. So we did this TikTok study about foreign psyops, and we found that on TikTok, women between the age of 18 and 34

have a view of America's unfavorability that is 52 points up above the norm. So think about what an extraordinary outlier that is for one demographic group.

Right? Opinions about Israel and Jews follow, as they often do, right? So, you know, little Satan, big Satan, they're tied together in this sort of obsessive focus of deteriorating that particular value set, an American value set.

And so we were wondering why that was. Yeah, so let's just reiterate that a minute because it's a striking finding that shouldn't be glossed over. So...

You've identified a subset of the American population, which is very large, women between the ages of 18 and 34, so all young women fundamentally. Who also were opinion setters in a variety of ways that are important for the culture and how the culture... Right, right, right. And that you've seen that they're...

political views about the U.S. and about Israel, for example, given the state of the Middle East at the moment, are wildly skewed in contrast to virtually all other demographic groups in the United States. And that they primarily get their information from TikTok. Well, that's the punchline. So when we went to go find it and find out what accounted for this, there were two standard deviations above the norm.

on getting their information from TikTok. Now, TikTok, as we know, is owned by China. And China exports very different TikTok than they import. They import broccoli and export crack. So the students there have a time limit on it. The last time I checked, it was 20 minutes a day. And all the information is educational.

But they export stuff with choppier and choppier views, and it'll be like, you know, girl in bikini, was Hitler good? I mean, it's vacillating constantly between all sorts of sort of junk food. And so that's an effort to, A, you can shorten our kids' attention spans. And how much of that do you think is a consequence of the relatively Wild West status of the free market economy?

of ideas in the West and how much of it... The best way to destroy the West is through its own goodness and highest principles. If you come in through the door of free speech, that's a very valuable cudgel that you wield. If you come in through...

Diversity, which is in one context and definition, is in fact the beauty and power of America, which is different than when Trudeau says it. Because America it is. And you come in through that trap door, it gets very difficult and arguments get complicated. People's reference points get jumbled. So it's like every protester isn't John Lewis anymore.

Right. Everybody who's who there's we start to get confused about where which things are off limits and which things aren't. And do you envision like cadres of Chinese communists sitting behind the scenes manipulating the algorithms to twist and dement the U.S.? I mean, the fact that what the Chinese feed their own children and what they're broadcasting into the United States is market. But it's hard for me to understand whether how much of that's actually planned subversion and how much of it is.

an inevitable consequence of the difference between the cultures at multiple levels. A lot of it is planned subversion. I mean, Russia and China have bought farms. We can get to this too. Iran is, I shouldn't say Iran, I should say the Islamic regime in Iran are brilliant messengers and strategists, right? But a lot of the power for infiltrating through social media

comes from China and it comes from Russia. And part of it too is, like I mentioned about Russia sending people to Paris to paint the stars of David. A lot of it is you set a trend. You don't need to do a whole lot if you want to flip a trip wire to make a culture tear itself apart, make people doubt anything

You know, everything. I mean, the efforts to turn us against each other on vaccination. I mean, I remember Russia was playing around back in early days when people were talking about childhood vaccinations, early days, and causing autism. I mean, they've been working on this for decades. So they work on a topic, they devolve it.

And, you know, like we have solutions. We have consensus in America for immigration. We're going to see how much we have. Abortion. There's topic after topic that we could find reasonable consensus on. So why don't we? And the answer is, you know, foreign operations that come in, domestic players who profit off, you know, rage and polarization, and then a kind of de-evolution of our story.

All right. So you used the TikTok issue as a case study in foreign psyops. So let's see if it's effective. So Ukrainian support in 2022, only 7% of the Americans felt the U.S. was providing too much support. 85% of Americans supported Russian sanctions. In 2024, 31% believed that it was too much support.

So that's significant, that's 4x. And this is how things are won too. It's not like a PSI-OP is brilliantly executed. It's what you want is to move things 10, 20 degrees. What you want to do is shift momentum and then lean on it in different ways.

And look at the difference here. 42% believe that U.S. was not providing enough support, 24%. So that dropped significantly. Now, in fairness, two years later in a war, people are tired, resources are tired. There's a lot of different reasons for this. However, and I also think, though, that the conviction and the basic moral underpinnings of how the war is going in Ukraine haven't changed substantially from mission creep. It seems to me that

the people who are opposed to it were mostly opposed to it in concept of what the role was, rather than it's something that people are now exhausted by the expenditure. But that certainly plays a role, and some people are. But nonetheless, we know that Russia ran a giant multi-channel disinformation campaign

aimed at weakening international support. They had false narratives, fake news, forged documents, tens of thousands of people of content. So if you shotgun pellet shoot that into the culture, this influencer, this podcast, these 500 clips that are maximized by algorithms to drive outrage and more views, and you can gig the algorithms...

you can take an effort and really shift it. And we shouldn't have foreign, people shouldn't be chanting foreign slogans and reiterating foreign talking points in America unless they're choosing to do so. One of the things that struck me as miraculously insane and demented over the last few months was the fact that Iran's head, Khamenei,

tweeted out his congratulations to the protesters on American campuses for supporting Hamas. And I thought the fact that that happened in and of itself was something remarkable to behold, but also the fact that it flew by under the radar, essentially.

I don't see much difference between that and Hitler congratulating, you know, the neo-Nazis in the United States in 1939 for the remarkable success recruiting in campuses. And so let's zero in on Iran again because you talked about TikTok in particular. I want to get to the Iran thing. I think that's a superb point. So people here are not mirroring the voices of...

Of all the countries in the Middle East, it's the Islamic regime. It's not Saudi, UAE, and Qatar, who, despite complications that are significant, which I'm not downplaying, are building things and having trade, even if there's resources going elsewhere. Right, so it's not like Iran, the Iranian Islamic State, is Islam or the Middle East. Right, and it's not like it's Jordan. It's the worst element. That's right. And like Jordan, the king in Jordan, has done spectacular things.

Egypt, incredibly complicated relationship with Israel, but I think they know how to contend with each other. We're taking up the cry of a regime, a foreign regime, that even its own people hate. Yes, hate. And the diaspora did. Incredibly, incredibly oppressive. You don't meet a lot of—Sam Harris said this to me yesterday. He said, I'm not meeting a lot of confused Iranian Jews morally. Right.

It's like they're really clear. And we did a documentary we're going to show later that was like, let's talk to Muslim, Jewish, gay. Let's talk to a bunch of different Iranians and talk about Iranian Americans or Iranians in the diaspora and just talk about what this playbook looks like. They're not quoting ideas in Jordan or Egypt or UAE. Like this is a very particular choice. And to me, that is a state that the regime, and you can like that regime if you want,

But that regime has declared that what it wants is the destruction and death of America. Right. That's its long-term goal. Right, it has been since 1979. Right, it's not even, frankly, to me, that regime in particular, it's not even Russia or China.

Mm-hmm. Right, right, right. No, I think it's- I mean, not that Russia and China, we don't have a lot of, that we have to figure out with them. I mean, there's no question that it's problematic, the ways that they're working. But to me, it's very puzzling because it's unequivocal that you're reiterating. And I'm not saying that this is all protesters, and I'm not saying this is all people who are taking positions for Palestine and arguing on behalf of Palestine. I'm saying that the threat of people-

within that, that are vocal and are reiterating statements from a regime that has its express long-term goal, the destruction of America, that's something that's noteworthy. Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I can imagine peace with Russia. It's harder for me to imagine long-term peace with China because the Chinese are communists and that actually turns out to be a problem.

But I still think that's imaginable. But we do a lot of trade with China. Exactly, exactly. And China's amazing. And they're quite pragmatic. But Iran is a different issue, the Islamic State there, because they're...

stated goal is enmity. There's no desire whatsoever for peace. They're after a kind of total and genocidal victory, and they're declared enemies of the United States and have been forever. And they're the ones saying it. Yeah, it's not like we're inventing this and labeling them as such. This is by their own definition. And by the way, the long-term relationship with Iran, I think,

is at some point, I think it's going to be incredible. The Iranian people are amazing. Right. An educated population that was headed in the right direction until the 1979 revolution, which has been quite the ongoing catastrophe. Right. And so, okay, so how do you see the

Practically speaking, how do you see the trail of causality, let's say, between the Iranian manipulators behind the scene, TikTok, American young women, and let's say the campus protests that have been going on forever since, well, everywhere since October 7th? It's important to acknowledge that America is a nehopolis victim in this. Like, we have not done a good job minding our institutions, right?

from capture and corruption, institutions from the left to the right.

So we have plenty to do with this. I'm not suggesting that we're just sort of hapless victims in all this. If we had stayed on top of... Look, what we allow with kids with the internet is so insane. I mean, imagine if you're 12 years old and your parents were like, you're going to go to school, but you're going to have in your pocket unlimited porn, access to the world's greatest terrorists who can talk to you in person. And the world's greatest criminals. Right. And it's designed to shorten your attention span. Right.

and it's in your pocket, it's in your desk, it's in your locker, it's in the bathroom at school, and we can't do anything about it 'cause free speech. That's an asinine position.

And there's people like Jonathan Haidt, who clearly has brilliantly delineated where and how we can have this be one tool of communication. Everything's not a free speech issue. This isn't the Nazis marching during Skokie, where the ACLU, back when the ACLU was rigorously for free speech.

defended their right to march. That's not this moment. This is kids who don't have developed brains yet, and we're blasting them with all sorts of information. And we have allowed that. We've allowed, we've left the door open. And we're, I think that a lot of Americans are ready to start to figure out how we can close that door through reasonable dialogue, if we can find it through like the rage and the rage industrial complex.

But they're ready now. Well, there's a massive technical problem here, too, which is that the institutions necessary to allow for effective communication to take place, which is what protections for free speech ensure, haven't kept pace with the technological transformation. And the problem with...

communal existence in general, including communal communication, is the potential for capture of the communication strategies by truly bad actors, by the sadistic Machiavellian

psychopathic, narcissistic types. And then also- Who now have teams of addiction specialists and AI deep machine learning at their disposal, which means every time a kid is scrolling through X and their eye snags, they're reading what things are drawing his attention. Their brains are being hacked. I don't think you can actually be on certain kinds of rage social media and be sane while you're on it. I don't think it's you that's having your thoughts. Right.

And we're letting this go to kids unmitigated? Do you think that's particularly true of TikTok?

TikTok, Twitter, I mean, look, it depends where. You can go down a podcast rabbit hole. You can go down it on YouTube. I don't think it's fair to call it the platform. It's really like our willingness to have the platform. Well, it's just TikTok capitalizes on much shorter form content. Yeah, and X2. Yeah, yeah. So I think there is a relationship. But maybe it's onboarding to go deeper into YouTube and, you know, because that's a- Yeah, fair enough. But there's probably something pathological. There's a pathological inclination that's built into-

social media platforms that capitalize on short-term attention. Yes, and shortening it. Yeah. So they have the control. We're turning over, one way to think of it is we're turning over generational control of our children's psychological, emotional, and physical development and nervous systems to hackers in big corporations and foreign governments. Like,

We don't need to do that. There's very clear parameters. We can have different ways that we figure stuff out. We can design different kinds of phones. It's not perfect, but to throw up our hands and act as if it's totally unreasonable that we want to build a healthy generation of kids and that we don't want polarization and people who hate America as their

clearly stated aim to be hijacking our country. Especially when the majority of Americans don't want this. It's not like you're the majority saying, let's have it. And we'll get to that. Let's take a quick skip through a couple things we looked at. So, anti-Semitism...

it seems is sort of exploding. This is a stat from the ADL. Again, with any news source, there's complications and issues. The FBI just released a report showing that hate crimes are exploding against Jews, and it's pretty well received. So let's say that these stats are going to be- Lay out the numbers for the listeners, approximately. Well, 2023, we have 8,873.

defined incidents of anti-Semitism up from 912 in 2014. Right, and it's pretty flat from 2014 to... So what happened in 2023? We know also that within hours of the attack on October 7th, that the information and bots were primed to go into America to start switching that from China...

It's been tracked. People looking at the content saw the content that was sort of lined up and ready to go. Look, it wasn't even if it wasn't like, let's say we're not explaining it by clean conspiracy that phone calls went on between Russia, Iran, and China, and they all planned and spun up factories. But this is just ongoing and material that they already have and are doing. And so it found much more fertile ground. The conversation flared up around it. You infuse more bots into a volcanic eruption and off it goes.

So the conspiracy doesn't have to be a Bond villain, but this is the way that it moves. Domestic psychopaths are—and we can talk about the dark tetrad later because I've heard you're a psychologist, so maybe you can lay out that for us. Yeah, some people think so, Hunter.

You know, and so that's that. But the thing is, it's really... So here's this kind of Venn diagram of the ways that Russia, China, and Iran are messing with us. Iran is the Democrats' blind spot. Russia is the Republicans' blind spot, for the most part. That's their most fertile ground. But again, they're not partisan. They want chaos. You know, they want to fund...

you know, pro-gay rights, anti-gay rights. They did that in Russia to distract, right? I mean, so what they want is chaos and our distraction to be elsewhere and all of our money and resources going to partisan, you know, organization, like just moving all of our, getting all of our rage focused on one outcome. Because if you get angry enough and polarized enough, then no matter what happens, the other side's an existential threat and all other values fall away, right?

How about housing? How about insurance? It's like existential threat. And so that's what they've been driving towards is this polarization where we hate each other, which is totally new. I mean, you remember McCain taking the microphone away from the woman when she said she was terrified about Obama. We have such a tradition that regardless of what happens-

And we try to bring forth the best, however imperfectly and corruptly, of the parties and at least have a surface narrative of wanting what's best for the country because the narrative trickles down into reality as best it can. That points to the necessity of an overlying, of an overarching narrative.

union of identity rather than the fractionation of the identity. But if we're not even pretending, let's say people said, oh, it was all pretending. It's like it wasn't all pretending. The 1990s, like we had a lot of things. It's clearly not all pretending. I have a friend who's very interesting, conservative, you know, lives in Texas, the whole thing. And he said to me, and we can get to this part later. He said, what's so amazing is he's from a much more rigorously conservative background and

But he said, we were almost there. I remember my kids coming home and they'd have a friend come over who was black and a friend come over who was gay and everyone behaved and they wouldn't even think to sort of mention it because everything was sort of clear. Like we were in this place. We had that in Toronto. It was like, yeah. When my kids grew up, it was completely irrelevant. It was like an idol. And we had it. And the answer is continuing progression and movement towards division of groups rather than acceptance of groups that point up

Towards the the shared identity. I mean that's one of the things with this is something that's worth getting to yeah We can go ahead and turn that so here's the thing that's also interesting America isn't really aside from Obviously explosive things that we're seeing on the fringes which are scary and I think terrifying and wholly unacceptable under American values

But aside from that, America isn't actually real America, broad America, not captured America, anti-Semitic. 92% of Americans thought the October 7th attack was unjustified. 92%. 73% believe it's important to maintain the U.S.-Israeli alliance. Whatever you think of that, 73% is a lot. Mm-hmm.

Terrorist attacks, here's a question we asked, like 9/11 in America and October 7th in Israel should not be tolerated and those countries have a right to defend themselves. 92% of people support that.

And then different people, like we pulled out that the plurality, 46% believe protests on college campuses are deeply troubling, while a third, 31% believe college students are always going to protest something. So you add those up and you're at what, 77% of people who are not interested.

on board or understanding that. I mean, these are really significant. However, if you get a good foothold, like when Russia was allowed to paint stars of David on synagogues in people's houses, or when they sent operatives to do that, there's purchase, there's a foothold. But there is for a lot of things. Jews aren't the only existential issue in America.

Today marks a solemn anniversary, one year since a devastating attack that shook Israel to its core, claiming 1,200 lives and leaving 250 taken hostage. It was the most tragic day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, a moment that will forever be etched in our collective memory. But the story continues. The war in Israel rages on, with tensions escalating to new heights. Just

Just this month, Iran unleashed a barrage of nearly 200 ballistic missiles at the Holy Land. Israel stands besieged, facing threats from all sides. In these harrowing times, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews stands as a beacon of hope. They're on the ground providing vital support, food, shelter, and safety to those caught in the crossfire of this crisis.

Since the war started, thousands of reservists, everyday Israeli citizens, have left their families to serve their country. Soldiers have been injured and their families need support.

See, you know, on the philosophical side,

The hallmark of postmodernism is disbelief, skepticism regarding uniting metanarratives, right? That's the core definition of postmodernism, is skepticism of uniting metanarratives. And this insistence that true identity exists.

has to devolve down the value hierarchy to something approximating group identity. And then that morphs very easily into a victim-victimizer narrative. And so you can see that this polarization is also being produced by the ascendancy of postmodernism as an intellectual exercise in the universities. And your...

polling and work indicates that the center does hold and that it's much more solid than people believe. And that to the degree that we accept that postmodern doctrine, that there is no such thing as a shared identity in the UK because the UK people in the UK are debating that now there's no such thing as a Canadian identity. Our own bloody prime minister in Canada has said exactly that, that the American people,

The American project is nothing but racist and oppressive. That demolishes that transcendent narrative that actually constitutes social unity, and it facilitates movement towards identity that's based on more fractionated ideas.

elements of race or sex or ethnicity or intelligence or wealth, whatever it happens to be. There's a million different ways to divide people. And that that starts to, it looks to me like that starts to inevitably produce something like a victim-victimizer narrative. And then that expresses itself, for example, in particularly toxic forms of antisemitism, sort of as the canary in the coal mine.

It looks to me like the causal pathway. And you, you know, one of the things that you've noted and we've talked about before that's fascinating is the postmodernists did not come in through political theory. They came in through English departments. They came in to attack and deconstruct stories. That's fine for one class in a seminar. Like, fine, we can read Derrida and Foucault, but

But, you know, when I was an undergraduate, it was already creeping in where I, you know, wanted to just take Shakespeare. And I was taught by brilliant, brilliant leaders in the field, Helen Vendler and Marjorie Garber. And Marjorie Garber would do stuff with playing, you know, let's have a lecture on gender and sexuality in Shakespeare. But she was teaching Shakespeare in...

in a way that was kind of upheld rather than viewing every piece, every sort of glowing icon in the culture, Plato and Shakespeare, viewing them from a different dynamic that's outside of their genius and their intended work, but as what are the dynamics of it.

Douglas Murray said something else brilliant the other day where he said when he gave an alternate commencement speech at Columbia when they didn't get to have one and he pointed up and they have like Dante and Plato, these statues of everybody. And he said, "We think it's so interesting that you students who are here think that you can judge, or not all of them, but some students here think that they can judge

But in reality, Shakespeare should be judging us. We have that wrong. You can't go to school and not learn about things that are greater than you, no matter what they are. But if postmodernism is about attacking the story, that's very effective to study and to read and to think about that as a mode of being, just like nihilism. There's plenty of things we should read and study.

But to have that go in and attack the story in universities through English departments, largely, to disintegrate narrative and the notion of shared narrative, it's ridiculous. It's like if we decided to put everything through the frame of cubism. These fractional narratives come up immediately. That's right. So part of this is, so here we looked at how every minority group views every other minority group.

on the issue of do you share my values? So Arabs- Every minority group experiences some form of bias. Yeah, well, that's almost built into the conception of minority.

Of course. But what's cool is what we're going to get to on the next slide, which is a funny inversion. But like, so, you know, let's look at, you know, Jews. This is, do you share my values? Do you have too much power? Do you exaggerate your minority status? And are you not warm? Which is an interesting one. Mm-hmm.

I think that Jews did way, they underperformed on warmness, man, because I think Jews are pretty warm. But it's pretty funny if you look at this, it's like, okay, these are different shapes and sizes. It's not like Jews are bigger than what is happening within other groups. And every group is allowed to have opinions about other groups too, right? So I'm also, I'm not that concerned when people talk about anti-Semitism. To me, it's like anti-Semitism is like if someone doesn't let you join your country club, right?

Jew hate is when they're running across campus at UCLA screaming, "Gas the Jews!" So, you know, some of this, there's some normal variations. It's not any worse for Arab, Asian, Black, Hispanic, White, or Jews. It's everyone's in the mix depending on what it is. Some are slightly worse than others. But what's interesting then is I wanted to look at how people view other things like corporations, rich people, and Christians. And if you look at the bottom here,

people like me, this is how much do you matter in America? And the 41% of respondents said, people like me are way down at the bottom. But if you look at the top, it's corporations and rich people and Christians. And so that's a bit of a grievance narrative.

in a certain way because, you know, some rich people have earned being rich and are good people and contribute and build the economy. Like, it's like you can just group rich people into one category of evil schemers. And Christians, certainly, it's preposterous that they're up there. And so what this in combination with this is,

and this shows me, is that if you describe anybody as a group, of course they're going to be starting to peel out and they're going to start to differentiate in the numbers. And so maybe it's a good idea instead of talking about groups, whether that's Christians or Jews or Muslims, that we talk about American law and the shared value set that we can all move towards because then things get vastly better. Maybe it's also important, like this...

This points to something deeper, perhaps, at two levels of depth. I mean, it struck me for the longest period of time that there was something pathological about the insistence that group identity should be privileged to use that postmodernist parlance, that as soon as you make group identity category the norm,

sine qua non of social discourse, as soon as you start to talk about people in relationship to their group identity, everyone becomes a minority, all minorities are oppressed, and there's immediately a victimizer. Now, you might say, well, what have we done about that historically in the West to remediate against that tendency, which is deeper than the merely political, right? It's an inevitability of categorization. Well, two things.

at the deepest political level, that's the liberal project, the classic Scottish Enlightenment liberal project that says we categorize people as individuals. That's the hallmark of appropriate person perception. And then that's grounded in something even more profound. And that's true technically, even for the Scottish Enlightenment, which is the

Judeo-Christian idea that every single person, man and woman alike, is made in the image of God. And so there's a fundamental insistence there that when you're looking at a person, you look at them as an individual, a multidimensional individual composed of a multitude, you might say, of minority identities and positions of privilege, right, for every single individual. That's all amalgamated into treating the person as if they're a

soul with intrinsic value that's being given dignity as a consequence of divine fiat. And if you don't do that and you devolve into identity groups, you immediately get chaos and strife and pathology and the sense of personal victimization. And when we talk about places attacking you for your

virtue, right, that's the most effective psychological attack is to attack someone for their virtue. Nowhere has that experiment culminated so beautifully and for so long as in America.

You can move to New York City from Pakistan or Ireland, and a week later, you're a New Yorker. I could go move to France for 20 years and I wouldn't be French. Our assimilation process, the values that we have when done correctly and sanely and not turned into a partisan nightmare, and when we have proper civic onboarding to make sure that the communities are integrated into the American value set that allows us to take in immigrants, which is our strength,

It's remarkable. We have the best integrated ethnic non-communities in the world. It's amazing what can happen here and so quickly. And I want to talk about, before we get to more agreement, I think it's really important that we talk about some frames of how we look and talk about Americans when we're trying to figure out what they're thinking. And a lot of the experts tend to do this really anthropologically. You know, like, well, we need to get to this voter who's, you know...

a single man who owns one cat and lives here and what's the targeting for it's like this weird and it's if you if you you have to think about embodying the person's values where they are what their mindset is what their day looks like and so this is a statistic that's that's been floating around a lot and it's spoken of of quite often out on campaign trails which is that the average true swing voter and the best way that we like to define that is an obama trump voter

So whatever you want to call that thing, but that clearly is somebody who can think broadly across the spectrum, who isn't going to be inherently racist or anti any notions that are conservative. This is somebody who's available across the spectrum, works two and a half jobs, commutes three hours a day on average, and thinks about politics four minutes a week.

So when we're crazed and we're talking about, you have to understand the dual loyalty trope that's happening with Jews with Israel, why it's an offense, right? You have to understand why wearing a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo and cultural appropriation is a big issue. You have to understand why we should lose our minds if somebody kneels at a...

There's so much churn that we have. They've got four minutes a week. That means that what they're doing is solving problems, trying to pay bills, carpooling kids. They're engaged with all sorts of people in reality of different political persuasions who they have to get along with because they don't have the luxury of just furiously...

interacting not in the real world. So how much of that political activism per se, you know, Rob Henderson has spoken about luxury beliefs, is to what degree is political obsession a luxury lifestyle? 100%. It just replaced branding because, you know, once the political seeps into everything, the biggest celebrities in a way are political. And so, you know, if you lose the ethics of a field, the ethics of doctoring,

the ethics of being a writer. Once we start to reward more highly the political, which to me, for instance, as a writer, that's the worst of it. That means you're writing propaganda. It's the same in psychotherapy, for example, or in medicine. But once political creeps in, then what we're elevating to the highest place for the most people interested with a lot of the unearned benefits of sudden status grabbing is going to be hard-

angrier, partisan, well, let's just say you're opening up a very big lane for partisan merchants of rage who can gather people around in their moral agreement and in continuing to turn the other side into a monolith.

where the other side is both things that, you know, they're every projection for everything bad that happened, and you can't conceivably deal with them, and all of their experts are captured, and all of their ideas are bad, and there's no version of nuance, and everything is a cynical play to win power and then take over and do everything. And I'm not just talking at a presidential level. I mean, pick a position that we've debated reasonably in the public square.

So these average swing voters, you said they're called low information voters by academics and media. So here's what makes me angry about that. So they're low partisan information voters. A lot of the partisan landscape is polluted and toxic.

But to me, that's actually what high information voters are. A high information voter knows and cares when milk is more expensive. They know what's happening at the gas station. They know how the kids at their school are doing. They know what's happening with the peer groups at the school. They're concerned with local issues that are proximal, but real because of that. And reality is where ideology goes to die.

And so when we talk about low-information voters, to me it's always so amusing because if you could talk to them and consider them high-information voters, you might actually learn a lot more about the things that we need to fix in the ways that can be more positive. And you can figure out where you get points of connection. And you also might run into stubborn –

Issues where they've been subjected to different ideological stuff. I'm not saying it's like some, you know, it's not like the myth of the diner patron who's, you know, American down to his apple pie heart because obviously people have different notions around it and different notions about partisan issues, right?

But they're engaged in the real world and need real, they don't just want real solutions, they need real solutions. If the health insurance company denies your claim four times and you can't get to it because you're working two jobs and you have a special needs kid, you're not engaged in all this. You can't take up every- Why do you think the average swing voter has 2.5 jobs? I think that they're scrambling to make things work and they're willing to try Obama. And Trump, so Alyssa Slott- Because they're scrambling, they're likely to be more experimental.

Well, and also that they're seeing that no big ideological answer is solving real problems. So, yeah, they're not locked in to say, you know, I got to be a Democrat. I got to be a Republican. What kind of percentage of the voters are the swing voters? Oh, I don't know that statistic. I do know that the election will likely be decided by nine million voters in seven swing states. Right, right. So that's presidential. So that's one thing.

30th of the population or something like that. It's about 3%. And what's weird is that 3% actually represents a lot more where America is, the rest of America, who's looking at, you know, trying to figure out what to do. So even though they're inclined to vote differently, it's not like people have...

We need to keep moving America towards the middle in discussion of what shared values we're going to have, no matter what happens. There's a lot of work in front of us the next four or five years, right? There's a lot of work to resuscitate and make this country unified again in certain ways. And there's concrete steps we can do that with. And that has to be done regardless of the outcome of the presidential election. No matter what. We don't have a luxury to just wait four years. We have to be...

incredibly vigilant about what's happening right now. There's bad players massing. There's people on the world stage who are seeking to outperform and disrupt, and some destroy us. And we don't have time to be having an endless food fight in the cafeteria on virtually every platform of engagement. And people, I think, will be immensely rewarded who step forward. But the problem is a lot have not been.

Right. There's a lot of penguins have been jostled off the cliff. But I think that if somebody strikes out with bold leadership and continues that consistently and everyone's got different opinions about who's doing that more or less in the political space. Positive signs of that. Let's see if we can be optimistic in a bipartisan way for a moment. Do you see signs of that on the Republican and the Democrat sides at the moment?

I mean, with the Republicans, for me at least, what I see gathering around Trump is a team of people that pull the emphasis in many ways away from Trump himself.

Trump has ex-Democrats surrounding him. You could argue that he's an ex-Democrat himself for that matter. And so I can see a consensus that consists of a multitude of different ideas, many of which are arguably more core to the Central American enterprise than before. I can see that developing around him. And then on the Democrat side, we've talked about this a little bit, the

Well, do you want to discuss what you see happening, for example, at the DNC and with Harris's attempts to make...

hypothetical attempts at least, which is at least something to move things more to the center. Well, I think that very clearly the DNC was an expression of a movement back to the center. Okay, why do you think that was clear? What was clear about that to you? Well, look, there's a counter-argument that people make where they say, this is all cover for a secret turgeon horse Marxist operation to take over America.

And to me, it's like projection for me is when someone's a monolith, but two things at once simultaneously. So she can't be, you know, a vapid empty vessel with no brain who also is the mastermind of smuggling in another agenda. And so part of what happened is

This is just a differentiation issue. Do we want to decide that she's purely evil in a monolithic way and that nothing can be learned? Well, then you don't have anywhere to go. But she clearly moved towards the middle on a number of issues. People were chanting. She had the parents of hostages on stage. Her husband, Doug Emhoff's children and her stepchildren were on stage during that. That was a big moment. Who she chose to have speak was a big moment. Why?

Why, who she chose to have speak. Every speaking engagement at the DNC is a carefully orchestrated set of real politic calculations. And so is it different than if she hosted, you know,

Islamic, Islamicist protesters on stage, of course it's different. Of course that's a different image and it's naive to think that it's not the result of protracted negotiations and power dynamics that happen behind the scene. And so even if she's staging it and a lot of people, rightly, I think for anything that happens in the political sphere, are cynical that that represents sort of a true more center, right?

In my estimation, I think that her behavior and movement around 2020 was an aberration from where she is. She's a prosecutor from Oakland. She moved sort of too far in a sense of views, but I think this is more of a return to where she naturally is. And I think...

People also have to be able to learn and make adjustments. Well, and the overarching issue is, regardless of all that, in some sense, the battle to move the political system toward the center has to proceed regardless. That's right. Or we know what the consequences are. Look, veterans were on stage. You know, Alyssa Slotkin got up and spoke about USA. You know, I mean, who she chose and who she had there and what was said...

represented a very moderate ready view of America on the stage. Now that's not to suggest that there's not problems, it's not to suggest that I don't understand cynicism, it's not to suggest that everything is solved.

But what we're talking about is where we are seeing movement. Well, and that's also what's, well, the view that we're attempting to delineate and promote with regards to the material we're walking through today. What is the central core? Now, I want to return to... Can I say one more thing about that? Yes, yes. So, I mean, the other thing that matters is, we were talking about this, the message matters.

And so, like I was saying, it matters what happened at the DNC, for instance, but the message that she's promulgating has been met with very wide approval by Democrats and by other people. So she's choosing a path that the messaging that's people chanting USA, people chanting bring them home,

When she called out Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, though I still would like a lot more definition on her foreign policy, which I think a lot of people do. But that's being met very positively. And I think that it is a better match. So you think that's the beginning of something? It's a feedback. A virtuous spiral. Perhaps. It's a positive feedback loop. It's something that could happen. And it's more likely to happen than if all the messaging was going the other way. Just vitriol and...

anger and division and backwards. Right. And so your view is at least that that should be promoted and encouraged. Yes. And also just acknowledged and that it can't be completely locked behind this fear that it's a massive conspiracy theory and we can't possibly differentiate movement. The other thing I'll say about these issues of race that's very interesting is I think that she, as a black prosecutor in Oakland, which is a tough, pretty badass job,

Should she move to the middle and should these indications that she's moving to the middle prove true, I think is in a very strong position to create that permission for America to do the same thing. Well, you've been trying to move the – we're in a bit of a partisan detour here, but I think that's okay momentarily and we'll hit the main track again.

You've been doing what you can to move the Democrats away from the radical leftists or even to bring their attention to the fact that those people actually exist and are serious toward the center. And that's been going on for a long time. And so what are your views with regards to the success and perhaps also the dangers of the approach that you've taken and that I've been involved in?

How are you feeling about the consequences of that after doing it for a fair amount of time? So I feel okay about it for a couple reasons. One is you've been involved. We've had a lot of conversations. And you've also involved me in efforts to do the same for conservatives and for Republicans. And in a way, I feel like the more that I've learned about politics, such as I have, the more that I've learned that

that you have to just move towards...

Any movement that's towards the good without lying or manipulation, and even when I did commercials and spots that were political, I always hired a Republican to do all the fact-checking. I ran a lot of stuff by you. I ran a lot of stuff by other conservatives at all levels of a demographic. Tried to make fair arguments. It doesn't mean that all of them were. Tried not to drive the wrong instincts through messaging and tried to convey things that are truthful in fair argument ways that people could relate to.

To me, that's... And I didn't make... Like when I do partisan work, I don't do make any money or virtually nothing also to make sure that I don't have a weird incentive structure. And I'm helping anytime that the phone rings from you with people who you think are good faith players within the Republican Party or conservatives, of which I've met an enormous amount, who've had huge impact on my thinking. And so in a way, we're a conduit of ideas back and forth between both parties. And so...

And this is a continuation of that process. It's a continuation of that work from an even more post-partisan perspective, which means I do certainly have my own political ideas and preferences. They're just not – I just don't view that as what's important. I can better report on what other people are thinking than offer my own individual opinion.

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identifying, delineating, and strengthening the center. And that's a bipartisan attempt. And it can be bipartisan partly. The reason it can be bipartisan is because the pathological actors, the dark tetrad types and the foreign operators, they're not playing a partisan game. They're either out for themselves 100% or they're operating under the aegis of whatever their own political agenda is in relationship to their own country. That has nothing to do with partisan politics.

Right. Precisely. Well, one of the things I've really learned about the dark tetrad types, the psychopathic manipulators, and there are plenty of them online, is that they will use whatever is hot on either side of the political spectrum to further their pathological manipulations. And that's a common enemy of anyone who's aiming at the good, regardless of their partisan perspective. Precisely. That's why we're called us the story.

it's the us it's the us sort of against all these entities and the hottest button issue that is obviously one historically that the world is primed for is anti-semitism that's why there's so much laying of that groundwork from foreign groups and are there old hatreds that emerge if permission structures are granted of course and other domestic players who who hate jews of course

But you're allowed to hate Jews. You just can't break the law. Like, go hate them from your apartment. You don't get to deface property or menace people or make true threats to individuals or fight and assault law enforcement officers. You're not allowed to do that here. We don't do that. That's not an American playbook. And however vehemently you feel in your hatreds,

You're not in a morally superior position than Martin Luther King, who managed to conduct himself in a different way in the service of what he was trying to show America under far greater threat.

So we don't get to get a free pass to do that. It's not how America works and functions and resolves issues. This is not us. Right. So one of the things that's emerged, too, it appears to me as a consequence of the work that you've done is a much more detailed appreciation for what constitutes the necessary center and ideal.

And that there isn't anywhere near enough attention being focused on that. I mean, it's not surprising in some ways, because it's easy for the things that everyone takes for granted to become invisible. And that is what happens to things that people take for granted. Yes. Right? Is they become invisible. That's actually what...

them being shared constitutes. Yes, that's right. But then if they're under assault, you know, people have criticized my work, for example, the more supercilious intellectual types for being, for merely stating the obvious. But there are, and...

And, you know, I can actually appreciate that as a criticism. That is what I think I'm doing is I'm stating what should be obvious, but also mounting an explanation for why it exists and then also defending it. And that seems necessary at the current time. I guess the positive dovetailing with your work at the moment is that there is a vast pool of shared issues.

principles that that constitutes that's right what constitutes that's actually what you're laying out is what constitutes the core of american values so here we go like we can let's just jump right to it so 80 to 100 percent of americans agree with the following this by the way is all in the 90s okay freedom so i believe yeah yeah freedom of speech and religion 100 percent agree

I believe in the freedom to vote and having every vote counted. 97% agree. We should stop scam phone calls and texts and loopholes that allow such activities. 97%. I believe in investing in our kids to ensure they have a brighter future. 98%. So one of the lessons here is, you know, don't phrase your polling like a partisan jerk, right? Start with what's shared upon.

and then we can build, right? So if we say, you know, sex offenders belong in jail, 96% agree. If we try to ask- I believe that success from hard work should be rewarded and emulated. Well, that's a very interesting phrase because it implies that success can derive from hard work, which is, of course, something the radical leftist communist types are always attacking anybody who's anti-meritocratic. So that

success from hard work is actually a real thing. We know the best predictor of long-term life success on the personality side is trait conscientiousness. And so that, you know, my suspicions are that... Better healthcare, longer marriages, longer lifespan. I mean, like conscientiousness is, it holds the world together. Right, right, right. Well, I think too, you know, an index of the health of society is probably a correlation, the size of the correlation between conscientiousness and life outcome.

The higher that correlation, the healthier the society because you're rewarding people that can delay gratification, will invest in the future, keep their word, who are diligent and industrious. So if the correlation between conscientiousness and success in your culture is zero, then your culture is pathological. And that's a more conservative value, predictive for conservative. That's the center holding. However, that's also for the fringe to thrive and for high openness ideas and people to get in and permeate the culture. Well,

so that the culture can navigate complicated change and it doesn't become brittle and shatter. - Well, it's also the case that without that core solidity that the conscientious provide, the open people can't manage because you can't afford, if everything's chaotic, you can't afford experimentation. It's only when the center is really, really stable that wild experimentation in the arts, for example, is possible because otherwise it becomes so threatening that it tears the culture apart.

Or the conditions aren't met to even allow it. Like the number of conditions that need to be met in a culture for me to do my job, which is be a novelist, are extraordinary. It's ridiculous. And so one of the biggest things that I've learned- Well, that's why, what are your royalties?

4%, 5%, 10%? 15%. Well, it depends on, yeah. It depends. Okay, okay. So the reason I'm pointing that out is because you write the books, but 85% of the book revenue goes to other sources. And you might say, well, that's radically unfair because it's your ideas. It's like, no, the fact that 85% of what you're producing is distributed to other sources is an indication of just exactly how much

on how much of those other sources your freedom as a writer actually depends. That's right. And it's kind of a shocking thing to realize, you know, because you think, well, I had the idea. It's like, great, that and 95% of the effort will get you somewhere. And, you know, publishers pay in advance. They pay a big livable advance. Yeah, right, it's a huge risk. There's a huge amount of gratitude for structures. Much of what I've learned in my intrusion into the culture, especially with...

like deeper and deeper engagement with conservative thought and thinkers is the necessity for defining and holding that center and how that functions in order to have what, you know, I'm somebody who's more on the fringe, right? I'm an artist. I mean, for that to function, the interplay and the relationship between the two and the need for a healthy relationship between the two, because if either side dominates,

It destroys. We go to hell, literally. It's the gulags or the camps. Like, there's no choice if one side wins, is ascendant, completely turns the other side into a dehumanized monolith and crushes it. And America...

is 50-50. One of the first comments... Well, you can also see that happening in a perverse way on the art side in general in the U.S. because as the progressive voices have dominated, the amount of creative freedom that the artists themselves have is decreased radically. And so is the quality of the production. And so it's like, well, let's...

stampede in the progressive direction. So, well, okay, now you don't get to say anything as an artist and everything becomes dull and not only dull, but hateful and depressing. I mean, I've talked to so many people in the arts community who are demoralized to the nth degree because they don't have that creative freedom of expression that is so perversely associated with the necessity of maintaining that core conservative identity.

Well, I thought this very much when you and I went to Comedy Mothership when we were in Austin. And you have every shape and size and orientation on stage making fun of every shape, size, and orientation. And it was right when there was the Tucker Carlson, Daryl Cooper interview. It sort of exploded online. And it felt so much to me like it was this...

the psychopathic algorithms can lead to explosions of people picking up all sorts of taboos. Like, how about if women shouldn't vote? How about if men should be pimps? How about if we can hate Jews? How about Hitler was a hero? So it's picking up different things. But just because you can doesn't mean you should. And when we were at the Comedy Mothership, I was watching, first of all, the mood in there is spectacular. It felt like a comedy club from the 80s or 90s.

And everybody was making fun of and dancing around all the taboos. And that's the way that you make it safe. That's the court jester in Shakespeare. That's the play. And that's how we can approach ideas. If we joke and make fun of our ethnicities and orientations and proclivities and all the taboo topics, we make them safe. We laugh among ourselves. Our nervous systems are relaxed.

And it's moving things, comedy of all things.

Right, and so that indicates something like a common core, at least a common core that enables people to laugh in that way. And a lot of those things have to be done collectively because it's very useful psychologically to be in a room with 12,000 strangers and have everyone make light of their differences and everything proceeds peacefully and playfully and a good time was had by all. That's right. Right. And you don't get to slap a comedian. Yeah, yes, exactly. In a temple of art devoted to them doing art. Right.

And it's inoculating. Well, sometimes you hear something where you're like, I can't believe he just said that. Right, right. It's inoculating because there's this playful, safe engagement about different things versus this sort of arid, sexless brittleness brought to topics. Right, well, and the comedians that are pushing the fringes

are right out there on the edge, you know, keeping the enemies and the censors at bay. They're the gargoyles. Yeah, and they always go too far, the comedians, or just almost exactly too far, which is what makes it funny. And what that means is that, like, they're the people who are either maintaining the fences or pushing them farther out, and that means that... Mediating entry. Well, and people are safe then to come in behind them in a more moderate way and to speak because the extreme...

The permission for the extreme version of that has already been granted. It's crucially important, and the artistic community should be doing that all the time because they're pushing the boundaries. Pushing the boundaries isn't the same as destroying the rules. Well, and if you're mean-spirited and a comedian, people don't laugh and it's not funny. Yes, right. It's built in test. Like Dave Chappelle, always funny. Yeah. He says stuff sometimes I don't agree with, but he's a genius.

He plays by fair rules, even when he's making a point. Let's turn back to some more of these common values because that's crucial. Let's look over here. So look at this top one for me is so important. So it's important to take care of our environment and ensure we have clean fields and streams, seas and skies. Americans are tired of political division. 95% agree.

Now, Fields and Streams obviously talks to rural America, right? Season Skies, perhaps a bit more to...

I don't know, liberal inclined people. But the point is, if I were to phrase this and say, I believe climate change is an existential threat, I get in the 40s, I would guess. And if I say, I believe climate change is a hoax, you get in the 40s. So why would we start there? It's like I used to talk to Democrats to say, don't walk into a town hall and say, I believe healthcare is a universal right. It's

It's like, that's a very weird starting position. How about make arguments for its effectiveness for the robustness of the community and a value set that also makes sense financially? So if we're willing to make arguments within other value structures, I mean, look at this.

I believe Americans love their families and the communities are the heartbeat of America, 94%. I believe in gratitude, not grievance, 86%. I believe in excellence, not mediocrity, 91%. Right, that's a crucial one. That's a crucial one. The USA should have a sovereign border and immigration should follow the laws and be safe for everyone. 86% agree. So think about that when it comes to law. If we could start there...

build consensus in a transparent way with fair negotiations for people back to their districts at home and states. I mean, there's so many things we can solve. Our greatest resources are people, and we should invest in rural and urban communities that have been left behind. 93% agree. There's ways that we can have interventions with communities that have been legitimately left behind by corruption and nonsense. There's smart ways to make investments that have measurable outcomes.

And as long as we're willing...

concern in Canada was that we were just going to become an American appendage, right? That Canadian identity would be subsumed into the U.S. And that actually is not what happened. The countries are more different now than they were when I was a kid. And Canadians don't obsess about that anymore. But one of the things that was absolutely remarkable about the U.S. was its ability to

agitate for that core set of values, for the American dream, for the melting pot, for the set of an overarching objective set of political ideas grounded in the liberal tradition that did unite everyone. And what made America great was exactly that ability to produce that shared central narrative. And you just saw it everywhere. It was implicit in almost everything that came out of American pop culture. It was implicit in The Rock, even when it was

protest-oriented. It was implicit in the sitcoms. It was absolutely saturated everywhere. And I wonder what it was that, I guess I would point to the bloody universities and the English departments, again, fractionating everything and fragmenting everything. And it's part of that postmodern assault on the main narrative. Look, we're also two generations away from the last

nationally shared American catastrophe, which is World War II. It's not a coincidence that the last Holocaust survivors are dying and the greatest generation is dying. We're far enough away, we floated far enough away from recognizing the true terrors of Marxism and communism and Nazism that they're sort of a memory. And I think we didn't keep pace, we didn't stay solidified enough, and there's a bunch of different ways we could go through what happened in the political system and

gerrymandering and cameras in the chamber and in the house, right? And people spending more time at home rather than in DC or politicians and shared communities when everyone used to live there. But we didn't keep pace with the technologies. We opened the door. Well, it also might be a consequence of something approximating the pathology of wealth.

You know, is that you're, you have the luxury of tearing the world down to make it interesting. Absolutely. Absolutely. And concentrating on the small divisions that plague you because you're so comfortable in your, in your life, all things considered that you can. And we're at an inflection point now where we can wake up that that game is not a great game.

and set things right in ways that are long-term measurable and strategic and good for the American people across the boards. Right, so we talked about the fact that there is a core of shared values and ideals, and then there's a periphery that has to experiment with that, and then outside of that, there's the domain of the monsters, which would be the manipulators and the psychopaths who are warping both the center and the experimentation to gain control

on their own ground, by their own terms, in a way that's very hard on everyone else. And so now the practical question starts to become, how is it that we strengthen the center while maintaining that ability for creative exploration and keep the psychopaths and the bad actors at bay, right? That's

First thing is we have to tack to shared American values. And we can talk about that in a minute of defining what they are, but that's a headline. What do Americans actually agree on and agree with? And that has to be about the process as well as particular political positions or cultural positions. And you think it's possible to do that effectively on the political side? I mean, because maybe you could make the case, the cold-blooded case, that if you—

If you're running a marginal campaign and there's only a few percentage of people that have to flip you over the edge that you speak to the chronically disaffected identity groups to try to pull them on board. Can you make a reasonable case from a political strategic perspective for tacking towards the center? You said it worked with Harris and the DNC.

Yeah, I think if we can have... I don't think we can look to our politicians as our saviors. I think we can look to them as flawed men and women figuring out what to do who are exposed to an enormous amount of insanity and corruption in a system. And if we make, if I think part of our job... Ayaan Hirsi Ali at ARC said that Western civilization is like this beautiful cut flower that's sitting on a table, and our job is to plant seeds. Right.

If we plant seeds and if we can fertilize the American landscape so that politicians can see that it is to their benefit to move to the center, which I think that can embolden them in their leadership. Well, it probably worked with Harris. I mean, part of what boosted her popularity as she took ascendancy, I believe, was an attempt to –

lay out more centrist concerns, right? She tried to divorce herself from the more radical fringes of the party and the more radical positions. So the empirical evidence that such a thing can work is already at hand. Well, we know people are starving for it. People want solutions to their problems.

People want to be able to have their neighbors back, right? They want to figure out to not have everything turned into... I mean, imagine growing up in this era where you're a 15-year-old kid in high school and you're expected to have an opinion on every single political matter or cultural matter or sexual matter. And if it's the wrong opinion, you're dead. It's impossible if your brain hasn't been sufficiently trained. We need to move back to disciplines within their own... Like, ethics that exist within fields...

There's no reason why a college should be issuing a statement about every ceasefire agreement that happens around the world. They're endless. Why are we focusing so much attention on these specific things? There's no reason why every...

you know, conversation that happens in schools. I shouldn't say every conversation. That's a big overstatement. But there's such a strong emphasis that is placed on sexuality and defining sexuality for kids in school where they have to have all sorts of opinions to figure it out. It's a confusing topic to begin with. We know the basics of education that work.

we can have schools return to being a purview of actually training children and students and young people for the world. That's a hierarchical boundary issue. Right, right. So they have to keep the monsters out there. We've opened all the doors to psychopaths and foreign players, I think. And the fringe hasn't been... So the fringe is starting to deteriorate and the center has all sorts of cracks in it. Right, and we have to remember with regards to the fringe that although the fringe is where all the useful experimentation takes place and the...

creative endeavor that's necessary to revitalize, there's a subset always of the fringe that is the pathological actors.

Right. And so, and that's a very difficult dancing job to allow for enough freedom. You know, so here's a good example of that. You know, America is more creative than Japan and has a much higher crime rate. Like those might be the same thing. In fact, if you look at crime age curves and creativity age curves, they match perfectly. Right. So...

So, that issue of handling the fringe is a very complex issue because you need that experimentation, but you have to differentiate the genuine experimenters from the people who are attempting to demolish the culture only to further their own project.

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positions. And Pajot speaks so beautifully that the monster of the left or the monstrous left is too much hybridization, so it can't hold together, a gargoyle. And the monsters of the right are too much sameness. And so, yeah, the psychopathy of the fringe has a different effect that's self-cannibalizing and wild, that's Mao Zedong and Stalin, than the rigidity and increasing sameness of a cycle like Hitler, who's constantly... Okay, so...

Merit and truth, not victim oppressor narrative. There's only three roles. If you view the world in an oppressor, in a victim oppressor narrative, there's only three roles available. You're a victim, you're an oppressor, or you're a persecutor. None of those are good roles.

You can't ever get to a place of stability in that. If you're a victim, what do you want to be? A persecutor or an oppressor? Right. I mean, all those roles are unpalatable and they're designed to disintegrate and sever the fabric of a culture. So we need to get out of that way of thinking that's constantly dividing and analyzing and measuring and grouping. That's why so much like classical religious practice, let's say, focuses on gratitude.

It's because if you're focusing on what's good about the position that you're in and the opportunities that are in front of you, it stops you from falling into that vengeful, resentful victim category. And you see clearly, like that's a great example to dovetail with the Russian operatives who are painting Stars of David. The culture will move in the direction that it's nudged psychologically. So if what's starting to proliferate everywhere is hatred and grievance,

that story starts to become the reality. If what we're permeating everywhere is merit and gratitude, and we know this is true in our own households, in our own jobs. Do you want to go work in a job where everybody is divisive and out for themselves and comparing? Or do you want to create a- Just fail. The enterprise will just fail. And that's where a lot of countries in the West, in America, we're on the precipice of that. If we can't move to gratitude for what we have,

We don't deserve to keep what we have. Right, well, and that gratitude isn't a kind of naivety about the past. That gratitude is a constant, unceasing attempt to identify positive opportunity in the midst of chaos and strife, and the understanding that that's a moral requirement.

Right. It's not the insistence that the world is just a rosy and positive place. It's the discriminating search for the kinds of spaces that enable you to take an opportunity and move forward in the future. And that that highlights this moving forward issue to how we move to peace and unity. One percent of people.

prefer to focus on addressing past injustices to achieve justice compared to 57% who prefer to focus on solving current and future problems to move forward. And that's a healthy orientation. That's a staggering finding. Yeah, 1% is absolutely trivial. It's probably the percentage of the people who were confused about the question. So you said tacking to shared American values, merit and truth,

rather than the victim oppressor narrative. Don't make demands that impinge on the rights and freedoms of others. So that's something like an ethos of responsibility, historical gratitude, not grievance. - And that's worth pausing on just for a moment. We talk a lot about our historic grievances and anything in the world and anything that man is involved with is corrupt, whether that's gonna be America or the Catholic church. Like you can pick anything and point to corruption because we're human beings.

But we forget, I think, a lot of times, like the level of gratitude. My primary identity outside of my individual identity is as an American. I view...

I have so much historic gratitude for America in its role in how it received my other identities, like as a Jew. America is incredible. And you could focus on, well, Roosevelt turned the ships around during World War II, and he should have been better, and he should have done this. But America went overseas, liberated the camps. When Jews were trying to get visas, even when Roosevelt was hedging,

you know, who opened up and got them student positions as professors or students where the historically black colleges. We've had it. And, you know, when my grandfather went to college, there was quotas on Jews in medical school. When I went, there wasn't a trace of it. Like it's, America has been a dream. If you go and watch protests and vigils around Israel or around Jews, there's constantly American flags in it.

And I think part of what we have to do within whatever group that we're in is not look as much back towards the things that we have grievance over, but even though some of them, I don't mean to dismiss grievance and I don't mean to dismiss trauma. And the only way to really eradicate it is through truth and reconciliation, which is a very different path than this kind of path. So I'm not saying that there's not...

address that needs to happen. But we have to, I think, in taking care of and shoring up our own communities, whatever they are and however they're defined, none of which are a monolith.

Not black communities, Hispanic communities, Jewish communities. There's Jews of every opinion across the political spectrum. Yeah, well, there's certainly not a monolith of opinion in relationship to ethnic or racial identity, obviously. None. And political orientation. It's like people who think Hispanics and blacks are liberal. That's why it's such a foolish way of dividing people. It makes no sense. But if the groups, like for me as a Jew, just part of how I feel...

naturally is to look to all the shared american values that we have and that to me is is there's a lot of that that's shared within the jewish community and i think that there's a emphasis on historic gratitude of what we've been given by america and what we have given been allowed to give to america jews have given everything they have to america and america has given everything back and

It's incredible. It doesn't mean there's not anti-Semitism. It doesn't mean there aren't problems. Yeah, well, I don't think there's an ethnic group for which that isn't true in the United States. That's exactly right. I mean, the contribution... That's exactly right. The contribution of the Black community to American culture is absolutely staggering. America is not America without the Black community. It's interwoven from the beginning. Oh, just all the good things, like music, for example. Oh, my God. And intellectual thought. I mean, soul. I mean...

and poets and political leadership and moral leadership and spiritual leadership. And I mean, it's, you know, I mean, look, I grew up reading Langston Hughes and Ellison and Richard Wright, and that's, it's stitched into the narrative. But, you know, I can't, all I can speak about in terms of where I think

So this is a tilt, I would say. This is part of what I can see as a transformation in some ways, or a further elaboration of your appreciation for the conservative viewpoint, which is that there is a central narrative that's uniting and it's necessary to buttress that and to uphold it. I mean, we've been trying to wrestle...

At ARC, for example, and in discussions with Paggio and people like that, with the idea of how you strengthen the center and maintain that experimental balance.

vitality on the fringe. It's a very tricky thing to manage, but I would also say that the U.S. has managed that historically better than any other country and continues to do that. And thank God for that. Like, seriously, thank God for that. That's part of how we are, the world looks to America. It's partially because of that. Yep, definitely. Because we have integrated the best of every community. We have the most integrated...

you know, pick a category, Ethiopian, Muslim, Arab, Jewish. It's everyone can be part of this fabric. Everyone is allowed to participate. Yeah, well, you saw that particularly, I would say, exemplified in the case of what's happened with Indians.

In the tech industry. I mean, I don't know what where do it where do Indian Americans rank in terms of net income? Is it number one? It's it's I think so. I think they're number one and by and by quite a substantial margin. And so that's a really good example. I mean, I watched that massive influx of

extremely bright Indian engineers in particular into Silicon Valley. And that was part of what helped Silicon Valley thrive like mad and produce the absolute economic miracle that constitutes Silicon Valley. And then all that money got dumped back in India. So interestingly, and then India itself started to thrive like mad. I mean, it's such a, it's such a great model. And that's a very recent example of, uh,

Very high level of immigrant success. You see the same thing with Nigerian Americans, for example. Oh, yeah. Nigerians are amazing. Yeah. All right. All right. So. Okay. So we have a roadmap in civil rights for how we handle disagreement and protest. We don't have to reinvent the entirety of the wheel of determining how that functions. But right now, the difference is we have this incredibly accelerated rate of tech propagation of mind control. So we need some new measures. Right.

So what can we do? I wanted to focus on a few things that are concrete. What is an agreed upon shared American value set? Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. And the more the first gets corrupted, the more temptation there is to push for the second, right? So a lot of people have pulled up the ladder behind them. Well, one of the things we should focus on very briefly with regards to equality of opportunity too is that we have to understand that

opening the door to opportunity for everyone, it's very good for the individuals involved. But you could make a sociological case that that's not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is you want to open the doors on the equality of opportunity side because you want the broad culture to be able to benefit from the specific contributions of the most able people. And any arbitrary barriers are going to

to what, forestall that or going to work against that. Like the reason that you want extremely intelligent, hardworking, creative kids at Harvard isn't so they can have stellar careers. That's part of it and good for them. That's not the issue. The issue is you want to educate those people like mad because they're going to produce products that are so useful for everyone else that if those particular people have a few privileges along the way, that's just fine.

So equality of opportunity is the best sociological solution as well as the best psychological solution. When I was there as an undergraduate, one of the first things they told us, they gathered everyone in Seaver Hall and they said, you're going to learn more here from your classmates than from your professors. And I thought that was, you know, a silly kind of old saw that you, and it's absolutely true. And that cohort, which was, was,

I mean, people all over the world, people all over the country. And it was incredible in terms of the strengthening of one's mind to see people from every reach of America internationally all trained up under a joint narrative. That's continuing friendships across different states of being, every single kind of group. And merit-based selection is the best way to ensure that. So we know, for example, that

The alternative to merit-based selection historically has been dynasty and nepotism. And there's no productivity in dynasty and nepotism because it means that

You know, your right to a position is determined by your birth, by your state of birth. It has nothing to do with your competence. You do get good China, though. Yeah, yeah, well, right, right. All right, so gratitude, not grievance, rule of law, pursuit of truth, focus on outcomes. Reality is where ideology goes to die. That's like, that's something I wrote and taped to my wall.

If you're solving solutions with measurable outcomes, look, there's a lot of libertarianism has crept into my worldview much more as I've pursued things. Measure something not by its intentions, but its outcomes.

In a way, everything's irrelevant. I don't care what your intentions are. That's true on the social intervention side, because you have to ensure that your intervention is producing the consequences that you desired. And it's very unlikely, because there's a million ways things can go wrong, and generally only one or two ways they can go right. So concrete steps. Uphold free speech, prosecute illegal action.

It's fairly easy. If people are breaking laws and throwing bottles at police officers and blocking traffic and making true threats against individuals and vandalizing buildings and people's houses, they can be arrested and actually prosecuted. We don't need to make exceptions for them any differently than were made for the Harvey Milk or the leaders of the civil rights movement. But people are allowed to have their opinions. They're allowed to

criticize any states that includes Israel, any leadership, which includes Netanyahu. They're allowed to peacefully protest. They're allowed to compete in a free marketplace of ideas. No problem. But we don't break the law and we know that. And that's from both sides of the fence, right? That's we have fringes who do that on both sides.

You know, face coverings and masks at protests, if they're being used to menace and terrorize, that should be illegal. That's the purview of the KKK, right? That's not what we do. Stand behind, you know, you can't cover your face to do things that are illegal or to terrorize people. Mm-hmm.

And then the algorithms in social media, that's almost a whole other discussion because you and I have been talking about this a lot. But there's ways to maintain freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean freedom of reach for profit, which means if I say the most outrageous, misogynistic, or anti-Semitic, or insane thing, that the algos should drive that for profit for corporations when the algos are hidden covertly behind firewalls that we don't even know who we're talking to or if they're American. Right.

We should also be aware of presuming that the tech people themselves can solve these problems. Because I see this with Zuckerberg and with Musk, and perhaps they're on opposite sides of the political spectrum. They still have the same problem. Corruption aside...

No one knows how to regulate online discourse, like to bring the rule of law and order to online discourse. No one solved that problem. Half of online activity is criminal across the board, right? Pornography, outright crime, and then the sort of

that constitute trolling and so forth. And no one knows how to regulate that. And we shouldn't expect the tech engineers to be able to manage that without... But there's, as you've said, and we've discussed, there are some concrete steps we can make. One of them is we need transparent algorithms to know if 60% of the people who are screaming about anti-Semitism and encouraging it are Russian bots. That's a good thing to know. That's not a freedom of speech issue. Distinguish the human actors from the non-human actors. And you discussed...

If you're anonymous and don't want to stand behind your words online, you don't need to be censored. There's a whistleblower issue, but you could certainly be in a second tier of comments below an interface of people who are willing to... That's not much different than stopping masking. Because online anonymity is the virtual equivalent of masking. And the other thing is that you pointed to quite sanely is...

Everything, to some extent, needs some degree of human intervention. That's okay. Whether it's a Tesla factory, whether it's... Everything cannot be automated. You can't automate the edge cases. You can't. That's what consciousness... That's actually what consciousness itself is for. Yes. Right? Because as we can transform something into an algorithm, neurologically speaking, we become... It's unconscious. Yes. Right? We transform regulating our heartbeat into an algorithm. Yes.

You're never conscious of that. It runs on its own. And once you've got something down, it should run on its own. But there's always an edge of transformation, right? The edge of transformation can't be algorithmized. That's actually why we have consciousness itself. And part of the mechanism of that consciousness is the thought, the abstract thought that

thought itself entails, but that's very tightly associated with free speech. Thought is internalized speech. And so the way that consciousness navigates that transformative edge that can't be transformed into an algorithm is through the mechanism of free discourse. That's the mechanism. And there has to be a wide variety of opinions because we don't know how to algorithmize the edge.

And the edge causes most of the problem. That's the Pareto distribution. And that's where most of the opportunity is. Yeah, but you said, I mean, I think you said something like 1% of the criminals can cause 65% of the damage. Yeah, that's what they do. So there's no reason that we can't go into, a private company can't say, look, we've identified 150 to 250 people who are clearly bent on sowing chaos, terrorizing America. Here they are.

Here they are. Here's the processes that we have undertaken. They're completely transparent. And it doesn't necessarily mean you even de-platform them. But could you perhaps turn down their reach that you're taking advantage of for profit because they're driving outrage and hatred and more and more people are turned into swirl of hatred? That is not a good long-term strategy for any company or any country. Not unless it wants to be overrun by manipulative psychopaths. That's right. And so any platform will get rife with it and people will leave. And look,

You and Michaela and Jordan Fuller have solved this. Peterson Academy, everybody has to have their name who has comment. There's a social board. People pay a reasonable but low price of entry to have access to the classes. And the discourse on there is entirely sane. Yeah.

We can have interfaces. We have something approximating an honor code, which is like, if you act like a jerk, you can have your money back and leave. And you might say, well, who decides that? And, well, the answer at the moment is twofold. The community itself is deciding that, but we are watching, too. And we've identified three people out of 30,000 who've caused trouble.

Three people. Right. And the discourse in there, especially as it builds out, we can have these interfaces, just like kids, Jonathan Haidt is suggesting limitations on when kids have their phones. Is there any reason we need like Comani to have access to them from 8 a.m. or 4 in the morning if a tweet alerts?

We can have limitations on that. Private companies can also make limitations on how they want to conduct their marketplace of ideas and what's one person in a classroom having a constant temper tantrum that means nobody can learn. I was trying to distinguish the other day between referee and censor.

Like there are game rules by which civilized discourse has to proceed. A referee makes sure that the rules are being applied fairly and across the board. Everyone knows what they are. A censor is someone who's making arbitrary behind the scenes decisions. And I think we can discriminate between censors and referees. Especially if you do it early and you set the ground rules. Yeah, right, right, right. Okay, so American control. This is fascinating. Three and a half years

Or 3.5 more Americans believe that American news organizations and social media platforms should be owned by U.S. entities to prevent the spread of foreign propagation and disinformation. Of course. Like, would Iran allow us to have a major networking effort through social media that goes to their entire populace? Would China allow us to do that? Does Russia? Does Brazil? Right. Yeah.

Yes, most notably and recently. But so it's perfectly acceptable to understand that America is allowed to have a national identity, one that is shared and good and creates a lot of space for people of different groups to compete, though we have a lot of obstacles we have to get right to remove those obstacles to equality of opportunity. And that's what's driving a lot of these problems. But the more we can focus on solving those real problems, we are certainly allowed to have ownership of who is

educating our kids and driving our discourse in the hands of Americans. That's not an outrageous proposal. So this is a bill, which is about, it's called PATA. It is post-partisan. It's sponsored by Senator Coons, Cassidy, Klobuchar, Cornyn, Blumenthal, and Romney. And basically, this bill that's right now is going forth is basically just causing a

us to be able to have us, them, someone, to have transparency on what the algorithms are. It's not to attack free speech. It's not to give censorship control. But it's to say we and the public have a right to know what is happening. We need more content moderation and viral posts. We want transparency around that. What if something's being spread from a troll farm of...

you know, a thousand people in St. Petersburg. Don't we want to know that? Do you see some size association with that? It's like, is there an indication of what size a social network has to have before it's subject to that kind of regulation? I'm not sure. The details will be within that, and there's a long ways to go on tech. But I think it doesn't mean that we have to freeze up at the precipice of the problem and say, oh my God, free speech, like the deep state will take control, and...

My enemies will have this control to destroy me. We can start with transparency. And this is a post-partisan committee that's pursuing this. I wonder to what degree the free market solutions are actually appropriate with regards to regulation of behavior online. Because it seems to me that, and I don't know this, and I don't think anybody knows, but I have been wrestling with the question of if accounts that are free produce...

Produce dark tetrad invasion and and foreign agent invasion right free is the wrong value for your online identity because it gets gamed and so I mean could there be Russian bought farms if every account costs $40 a month or would it become an instantly economically untenable right free is the see the problem with free as far as I can tell online is that your attention is valuable and

So free is the wrong amount of money to have to pay to get access to it. It's not right. It's not an indication of the actual underlying reality. And it doesn't work to say, I'm mad at experts or corrupt members of this institution or this party, so all information should be equal. That's not a solution for that. We have to be able to moderate and negotiate between...

sensibilities of people with different personality structures, high trait openness and high trait conscientiousness. Whether you want to call that liberal or conservative, it doesn't matter. But there's a reason that all humans have this across an evolutionarily selected or God-given, however you want to view it. There's a reason we're distributed across this trait structure. It's selected for, it's given so that we can contend with each other and move forward reasonably. And right now, we don't have trained young minds.

We have a lot of problems and holes in discourse. We have a lot of people captured by mind control. We can have a whole conversation about why these are actual cult mind control methods and techniques being used.

And it's like we're incapable of differentiating. And part of the problem is now we have to navigate who gets to get control now over educating our kids, who gets to come in now and fix universities and schools. So what's happened in a way, I guess, and maybe we can tie everything together with this closing remarks, is that we have these new technologies that have leveled the communication playing field.

Like, and that's opened up a massive amount of opportunity, but it's also destroyed all the intermediary structures that were, that had previously regulated the manner in which we communicate. And so now there's a free for all on that front. And the advantage of the free for all is, oh my God, we can move information around at such a low cost to so many people.

And isn't that an amazing opportunity for all the long-form podcasters, for example, or for online educational endeavors? But the downside is that it's also opened the landscape up to the vicious manipulators, the criminals, the psychopaths, and the bad foreign actors.

And that's a real danger. And it's a danger, it's a cross-partisan danger, and it's a danger to the structure of civilization itself. Not only because of the foreign influences, which is akin to war in the virtual realm, but also because the criminals and the psychopaths and the dark tetrad types, I mean, they thrive in chaos and they want to sow it, and they do that only for themselves.

And that's the perennial human landscape, isn't it? Is that your culture has to be centered around some shared structure of values. And you're going to need experimentation at the fringes to keep that vital. That's going to be threatened by the internal criminal psychopath types because it always is. That's the evil uncle of the king, which is the oldest example.

possible story or Cain or Satan himself for that matter, right? That internal threat of the pathological. And then you have the threat of the foreign invader, which is exactly the same thing that's been playing out of the virtual landscape.

with regards to the information wars that are being conducted by Iran and by Russia and by China? The only, yes, and the only mediation that I see it for this is we have to have some kind of return to the institutions that could, like as much as we are angry or disgusted by various levels of corruption and capture through them, and it's infuriating, if we don't have the institutions that

We don't have the structures in place to hold wild, brilliant personalities or psychopaths in order that we're conducting it like an orchestra, that America can continue to be America. We can't just throw them out. So it's a return to first principles, and you're identifying that to some degree by what everybody agrees on. And then there has to be something approximating

a re-institutionalization of those first principles, both politically and technologically, so that the core is strengthened. And we know how to do that. That's really the optimistic side of what you've been investigating, is that the center is actually there. It's vital. Its principles are correct, and it could hold. Yeah, and we should water that, not the vine strangling it. Right.

Right. Do you want to just talk about this documentary very briefly? Yeah, well... And then we'll fold up. The Iranian community and the diaspora are spectacular. I mean, from minute one, part of what I noticed was the moral clarity and the dignity and the strength of when Iranian voices were discussing this from all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of religions. And we thought that rather than... They're the best and most vocal...

speakers to what this playbook is. They lived through it. They're the ones who they remember their grandparents with their having their hair down as their grandmothers as young women and cooking in the kitchen. This is what the playbook successfully executed looks like. And I think they're very important voices for us to hear.

And so we got together and produced this documentary with that direction. And we interview a series of people to lay out and describe their background, the history of the revolution, and what they're seeing here, and what is a familiar playbook, and also where that playbook leads when it is successfully executed. And so we thought that's a good sort of case study to be able to close out on to see this is a...

cautionary tale for where we're going to go if we can't tack our way back towards the reasonable center where 80 to 100 percent of Americans are waiting to be received and to vote and to move forward and devote their resources together to investing in and fixing America and the highly complicated problems that we have. And where can people follow us, the story? We're on X, Instagram and YouTube, and we've been banned by TikTok.

Right. Well, congratulations on that front. You must be doing something right. So, okay. So that's us, the story. Right. So I think for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Greg on the Daily Wire side behind the paywall there.

I think about the manner in which his political views has shifted over the last decade, really, something like that. So let's walk through that story, your attempts to pull the Democrats to the center, the successes and failures in that regard, your adoption, maybe.

or your integration of some more conservative and, you said, libertarian views, how that's transformed, and we can have a discussion about that, and I can do the same. And so, Greg and I have been engaged in a discussion for a long time, often on quite radically different partisan, from radically different partisan perspectives. You know, that's varied as the years have gone by. But it'll be useful and interesting, I think, to delve into that and

And also to speak, to talk through more the issue of, well, say, writing the ship on the Democrat side and trying to pull people to the center versus,

mounting an all-out assault on the Republican side to push the Democrats into a corner so that they're required to do that, because that's been a continual conundrum for me, ethically and practically. And so, anyways, you can join us on the Daily Wire side for that, and that would be much appreciated. Thank you to the film crew here today in L.A. for making this possible. And Greg, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. And, well...

onward and upward with regards to us, the story, and the attempt to, what would you say, push back against the psychopaths and the bad foreign actors and to strengthen the center and to rectify some of the informational imbalances that are warping the culture online, particularly in relationship to young women and TikTok. So thank you very much, sir. Thank you. Thanks for the discussion.

The Ask an Iranian film by Us the Story is available on X. The link to the video can be found in the description.