488. Foreign PSYOPs in the USA | Gregg Hurwitz

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast – "Foreign PSYOPs in the USA | Gregg Hurwitz"

Introduction

In this compelling episode of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Dr. Jordan Peterson engages in an in-depth discussion with his long-time friend and colleague, Greg Hurwitz. With a shared history spanning over three decades, they delve into the intricate dynamics of cultural polarization in the United States, the impact of foreign psychological operations (PSYOPs), and the resilience of core American values. This conversation offers a nuanced exploration of how external and internal forces are shaping American society and presents a roadmap for steering the nation back towards unity and shared principles.

1. Understanding Polarization and Its Roots

Timestamp: [00:14] – [06:50]

Peterson opens the discussion by highlighting the increasing polarization in American culture, attributing it partly to intellectual movements and significantly to foreign actors from Iran, China, and Russia. These entities exploit social media to manipulate political views, particularly targeting young people and women, thereby exacerbating societal divisions.

Notable Quote:

"Iran, China, and Russia... are using the social media access that they have... to really dement and distort their political view and in a manner that's really, really hard on the culture." — Jordan Peterson [00:14]

Greg Hurwitz introduces his enterprise, US the Story, which aims to dismantle the victim-victimizer narrative prevalent in American discourse. He emphasizes that despite the deepening divisions, there remains a substantial consensus among Americans on key policy issues, providing a foundation for optimism.

2. The Role of Foreign PSYOPs and Domestic Agitators

Timestamp: [10:00] – [27:19]

Hurwitz elaborates on the sophisticated PSYOPs orchestrated by foreign powers, particularly focusing on how Russia and China have historically manipulated social narratives to foster chaos. He cites instances such as Russian bots promoting antisemitism on social media and coordinated efforts to paint Jewish communities as targets, thereby weakening societal cohesion.

Notable Quote:

"The fact that antisemitism is the most effective switch to flip if you want a culture to tear itself apart." — Greg Hurwitz [10:00]

Peterson challenges Hurwitz to substantiate claims of deliberate foreign manipulation, prompting a detailed explanation of the methodologies used, including polling and focus groups. Hurwitz presents alarming statistics, such as the significant increase in antisemitic incidents in 2023 compared to previous years, underscoring the effectiveness of these foreign strategies.

3. The Decline of Shared American Values

Timestamp: [33:39] – [50:03]

The conversation shifts to the erosion of shared American values, with Hurwitz attributing much of this decline to postmodernist influences infiltrating educational institutions. He argues that the emphasis on group identity over individual merit has led to fractured perceptions and amplified divisions.

Notable Quote:

"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." — Greg Hurwitz [93:07]

Peterson concurs, linking the rise of postmodernism to the degradation of overarching narratives that once unified Americans. Both assert that returning to core principles such as gratitude, meritocracy, and law is essential for societal healing.

4. Strategies for Reinforcing the American Center

Timestamp: [57:05] – [85:06]

Hurwitz outlines concrete steps to strengthen the American center, emphasizing the importance of shared values like freedom of speech, investment in education, and excellence over mediocrity. He advocates for transparent social media algorithms to curb foreign and malicious influences without infringing on free speech.

Notable Quote:

"If we can have some clarity on permission structures to create Jew hate... we can, we have a template for solving all sorts of problems here." — Greg Hurwitz [25:23]

They discuss legislative efforts such as the Protecting American Truth Act (PATA), aimed at ensuring American ownership of major social media platforms to prevent foreign manipulation. Hurwitz underscores the necessity of bipartisan cooperation to implement these measures effectively.

5. The Resilience and Potential of American Society

Timestamp: [85:06] – [122:41]

Despite the challenges, Hurwitz remains optimistic about America's ability to recover and unify. He highlights the vast agreement among Americans on fundamental issues and the potential for centrist movements to restore balance. The discussion touches on the historical success of American integration and meritocracy, illustrating how diverse communities have contributed to the nation's greatness.

Notable Quote:

"America is not America without the black community. It's interwoven from the beginning." — Greg Hurwitz [97:30]

Peterson and Hurwitz conclude by reaffirming the importance of upholding shared values and fostering environments where creative and experimental endeavors can thrive without succumbing to divisive forces. They advocate for a collective return to gratitude, responsibility, and the rule of law as pillars for rebuilding societal unity.

Conclusion

This episode serves as a crucial examination of the multifaceted issues threatening American unity. Through a candid dialogue, Peterson and Hurwitz shed light on the external manipulations and internal fractures exacerbating polarization. However, their discussion also illuminates the enduring strength of American shared values and the actionable steps necessary to reinforce them. For listeners seeking to understand the complexities of cultural division and the path forward, this conversation offers both critical insights and a hopeful vision for America's future.

Additional Resources

• Documentary Mentioned: The Ask an Iranian by US the Story
• Follow Us: X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube
• Support the Movement: US the Story YouTube Channel

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Note: Advertisements and promotional segments (marked as "Unknown" in the transcript) have been excluded from this summary to maintain focus on the core content of the discussion.

Transcript

[Jordan Peterson]

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 exactly how that's laying itself out. And on the optimistic side, we talked a fair bit about, well, the counter position 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 in the 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

It's good to see you.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 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, 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?

[Greg Hurwitz]

Well, I was tasked first, as a point of entry, I guess, of going in to explore antisemitism. And one of the things I found really quickly is it's not very much about antisemitism. Antisemitism 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 enthralled 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

I come into exploration of the cultural 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. And so my venture has mostly been on the basis of curiosity in 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, you know, 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 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 give us a scope of your activities over the last six or seven months.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 US at large, because the better the US does, from our initial entry point about antisemitism, 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 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 Pottins 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 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 we're wrong about.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 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 antisemitism 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 antisemitism, I've always regarded that as the Jews, for example, as canaries in the coal mine, because they're the perennially successful minority. And 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 antisemitism is a manifestation of something that's much more fundamental that should be addressed 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 collusion of the corporations on the social media side in advancing their agenda.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Fair enough.

[Jordan Peterson]

Is that okay?

[Greg Hurwitz]

And the button of antisemitism, in some ways is the most effective switch to flip if you want a culture to tear itself apart.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. So that's a very effective entry point.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yeah, and it's fueled like, I heard a statistic yesterday from someone in the intel community who thought that 60% of all antisemitic traffic on social media is from Russian bots. And what the Russians did. And there was. 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. There's a. You know, Iran, China and Russia are working in concert, and 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 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 precursor to the KGB in the 70s, like they funded the Black Panthers and the KKK. They're. 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 a. 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 problem, problems 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, how will we start this? You're going to start with your methodology, I guess.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Right. And if you pursue any problem deep enough, ideally you can start to reach the root of the sickness.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And there's a real sickness at the. 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 this, but if you want.

[Jordan Peterson]

But it's fractionated. It's being fractionated into group identity claims. And that has negative consequences in multiple dimensions.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Which we can scarcely keep up with in our brains.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 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 strong.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 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. While 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 our output rate and efficiency rate is terrible. Most People look at screens, get outraged, and mail checks off like we're rabbits with pellets. Of being outraged about going online without.

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[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, we kind of, we kind of skipped over something that in a way or we haven't developed it enough yet. That's really very, 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that is that there are foreign SIO operations, foreign SIO 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Shall let's break that down.

[Jordan Peterson]

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

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 the obviously. Right. You can push poll. 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 antisemitism 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Absolutely.

[Greg Hurwitz]

How you.

[Jordan Peterson]

How you form questions, inform. 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

But I do. We do have that when we get to the agreement piece.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Greg Hurwitz]

As well. That how you phrase things matter. 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 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 where 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 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. It's a combination of polls. But I want to highlight a few things that or approaches. So we did this TikTok study about foreign psy ops and we found that on TikTok, women between the age of 18 and 34 have an unfavorability, 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Were opinion setters in a variety of ways that are important for the culture and how culture.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right. And that you've seen that their political views about the US and about it, 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 get, they primarily get their information from TikTok.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Well, that's the, that's the punchline. So when we went to go find it and find out what accounted for this, they were two standard deviations above the 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 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 age. You can shorten our kids attention spans.

[Jordan Peterson]

And how much of that do you think is a consequence of the relatively wild west status of the free market of ideas in the west and how much of it.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 in 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. Right. Everybody who's who there's we start to get confused about where, which things are off limits and which things aren't.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

A lot of it is planned subversion. I mean, Russia, as you know, 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 tripwire to make a culture tear itself apart, make people doubt 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 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

All right, so you used the TikTok issue as a case study in psyops.

[Greg Hurwitz]

So yeah, let's see if it's effective. So Ukrainian support in 2022, only 7% of the Americans felt the US 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 one too. It's not like a psy 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 multichannel 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. If you. Pellet, shotgun, pellet, shoot that into the culture, this influencer, this podcast, these, you know, 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 the neo Nazis in the United States in 1939 for the remarkable success recruiting in campuses. And so let's zero in Iran again, because you talked about TikTok in particular.

[Greg Hurwitz]

I want to get to the Iran thing. I think that's a superb point. So people here are not mirroring the voices of all the countries in the Middle East.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's not like Iran, the Iranian Islamic State is Islam or the Middle East.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Right. And it's not like it's Jordan. 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Hate, yes, hate.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And the Diaspora do incredibly, incredibly impressive. 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. It's like they have, they're really clear. And we did a documentary we're gonna show later that was like, let's talk to Muslim, Jewish, gay. Let's talk to a bunch of different Iranians and talk 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Greg Hurwitz]

That's its long term goal.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so it has been since 1970.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right. No, I think it's.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 are vocal and are reiterating statements from a regime that has its express long term goal, the destruction of America, that. That's something that's worth. That's noteworthy.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, 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 we do.

[Greg Hurwitz]

A lot of trade with China.

[Jordan Peterson]

Exactly, exactly.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And China's amazing, pragmatic.

[Jordan Peterson]

But Iran is a different issue. The Islamic State there, because their 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 is going to be incredible. The Iranian people are amazing, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

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 scenes, TikTok American young women and let's say the campus protests that have been going on forever since, well, everywhere, since October 7th.

[Greg Hurwitz]

It's important to acknowledge that America isn't a hapless victim in this. Like, we have not done a good job minding our institutions from capturing 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 and 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

The world's greatest criminals, right?

[Greg Hurwitz]

And it's designed to shorten your attention span. 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 because free speech, that's an asinine position. And there's people like Jonathan Haidt, who clearly is, you know, 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 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. Yeah, but they're ready now.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And then 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. And we're letting this go to kids unmitigated.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's particularly true of TikTok.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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. I don't think it's fair to call out the platform. It's really like our willingness to have.

[Jordan Peterson]

The platform capitalizes on much shorter form content. Yeah, yeah. So I think there is a relationship.

[Greg Hurwitz]

But maybe it's onboarding to go deeper into YouTube and you know, because that's.

[Jordan Peterson]

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. Right?

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yes. And shortening it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 in people who hate America as their clearly stated aim to be hijacking especially related polarization.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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. Y let's. 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, it's pretty well received. So let's say that these stats are.

[Jordan Peterson]

Are going to lay out the numbers for the listeners. Approximately.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Well, 2023, we have 8,873 defined incidents of antisemitism, up from 912 in 2014. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And it's pretty flat from 2014 to.

[Greg Hurwitz]

So what happened in 2023? We know also that within hours of the attack on October 7 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 in 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, this is the way that it moves domestic psychopaths. And we can talk about the dark tetrad later because I've heard you're a psychologist so maybe you can lay out.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, some people think so, you know.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And so that's that. But the thing is, that'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 the 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 they, they, 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, 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. 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. And we have such a tradition that regardless of what happens, we try to bring forth the best, however imperfectly, incorruptly, 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Points to the necessity of an overlying, of an overarching union of identity rather than fractionation of the idea.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's clearly not all pretending.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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. 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. 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

We had that in Toronto.

[Greg Hurwitz]

It was like when my kids grew.

[Jordan Peterson]

Up, it was completely irrelevant.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 shared identity. I mean, that's one of the things with. This is something that's worth getting to and we can determine 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, antisemitic. 92% of Americans thought the October 7th attack was unjustified. 92%, 73% believe it's important to maintain the US Israeli alliance. Whatever you think of that, 73% is a lot 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 right. And then different people, like we pulled out that, you know, 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 like not on board or understanding that. I mean these are, these are really significant. However, if you get a good foothold, like when Russia was allowed to paint Stars of David on, 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.

[Unknown]

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[Jordan Peterson]

See. You know, on the, on the philosophical side, the hallmark of postmodernism is disbelief, skepticism regarding uniting metanarratives. Right? That's, that's the, that's the core definition of postmodernism is skepticism of uniting metanarratives. And this insistence that true identity 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 a 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 identity, the American project, is nothing but. 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 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And, 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. Stories, that's fine for one class in a seminar like, fine, we can read Deradan Foucault. But, you know, when I was an undergraduate, it was already creeping in where I 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 let's have a lecture on gender and sexuality in Shakespeare. But she was teaching Shakespeare 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, said something else, you know, brilliant the other day where he said. Where 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. 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 Shakespeare when 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Everything into the frame of narratives come up immediately. So.

[Greg Hurwitz]

That's right. So part of this is. So here we looked at what. How every minority group views every other minority group on the issue of do you share my values?

[Jordan Peterson]

So Arabs, every minority group experiences some form of bias. Yeah, well, that's almost built into the conception of minority, of course.

[Greg Hurwitz]

But what's cool is what we're gonna get through on the next slide.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, okay.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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. I think that Jews did way they underperformed on warmness, man. Cause 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 antisemitism. To me, it's like antisemitism is like, if someone doesn't let you join your country club, 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 some rich people have earned being rich and are good people and contribute and build the economy. It's not 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 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Maybe it's also important. Like 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 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, that tendency which is deeper than the merely political right.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

An inevitability of categorization. Well, two things at the. 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 the.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And when we talk about places attacking you for your virtue, right. That's the most effective psychological attack, is to attack someone from 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, insanely, 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 wanna 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 we, like a lot of the experts, tend to do this really anthropologically, like. Well, we need to get to this voter who's 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 is spoken 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 like this. 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. Like, there's so much churn that we have. They 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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?

[Greg Hurwitz]

100%. It just replaced branding because, you know, once the political seeps into everything, the biggest celebrities in a way are political. And so 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's the same in psychotherapy, for example, or in medicine.

[Greg Hurwitz]

But once political creeps in, then what we're elevating to the highest place for the most people interested in, 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 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. Pick immigration.

[Jordan Peterson]

These average swing voters, you said they're called low information voters by academic, academics and media.

[Greg Hurwitz]

So here's what makes me angry about that. Yeah, 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

They have an interest, they're concerned with local issues. Proximal.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

But real because of that.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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, you know, 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, 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Why do you think the average swing voter has 2.5 jobs?

[Greg Hurwitz]

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

[Jordan Peterson]

So, Alyssa, because they're scrambling, they're likely to be more experimental.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Well, and also that they, they're seeing that no big ideological answer is solving real problems. So, yeah, they're not locked in to say, you know, I gotta be a Democrat, I gotta be a Republican.

[Jordan Peterson]

What kind of percentage of the voters are these swing voters?

[Greg Hurwitz]

Oh, I don't know that statistic. I do know that the election will likely be decided by 9 million voters in seven swing states.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. So that's presidential. So that's 1/30 of the population, something like that.

[Greg Hurwitz]

About 3%. And what's weird is that 3% actually represents a lot more where America is, the rest of America, who's, 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, make this country unified again in certain ways. And there's concrete steps we can, and.

[Jordan Peterson]

That has to be done regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, no matter what.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, do you see 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 American, the Central American enterprise than before. I could see that developing around him. And so. And then on the Democrat side, we've talked about this a little bit. 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?

[Greg Hurwitz]

Well, I think that very clearly the DNC was an expression of a movement back to the center.

[Jordan Peterson]

And why do you think that was clear? What was clear?

[Greg Hurwitz]

Well, look, there's a counterargument 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, this is just a differentiation issue. Do we want to decide that she's purely, you know, 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. You know, 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Why? Why? Who she chose to have speak?

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 that's. 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 morsenter 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And she or we know what the consequences are.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Can I say one more thing about that?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

So you think that's the beginning of something. It's a feedback, a virtuous spiral, perhaps.

[Greg Hurwitz]

It's a positive feedback loop. And it 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so your view is at least that that should be promoted and encouraged.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, you've been trying to move the demo. We're in a bit of a partisan detour, 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, what, what are your views with regards to the success and perhaps also the dangers of the approach that you've taken, you know, 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?

[Greg Hurwitz]

So I feel okay about it for a couple reasons. One is you've been involved. We've, you know, we've had a lot of conversations and, 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 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 that were political, I always hired a Republican to do all the fact checking. I ran a lot of stuff by you 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 it 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 have 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, you know, and this is.

[Jordan Peterson]

A continuation of that work.

[Greg Hurwitz]

It's a continuation of that work from an even more postpartisan 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.

[Unknown]

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[Jordan Peterson]

So part of this is identifying the pathological players at the fringe who are amplifying and capitalizing on division, as well as 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 tetrahed 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?

[Greg Hurwitz]

Precisely.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 antisemitism. 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 are there domestic players 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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. Right. And that there isn't anywhere near enough attention being focused on that. I mean, it's not surprising in some ways, you know, 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Is they become invisible. That's actually what them being shared constitutes.

[Greg Hurwitz]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

But then if they're under assault, you know, people have criticized my work, for example, the more supercilious intellectual types, for merely stating the obvious. But there. 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 principles that constitutes.

[Greg Hurwitz]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

What constitutes. That's actually what you're laying out is what constitutes the core of American values.

[Greg Hurwitz]

So here we go. Like we can. Let's just jump right to it. So 80 to 100% of Americans agree with the following. This by the way, is all in the 90s. Okay? So I believe freedom of speech and religion 100% agreement. 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 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 the, you know, my better.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Health care, longer marriages, longer lifespan. I mean like conscientiousness is, it holds the world together.

[Unknown]

Right?

[Jordan Peterson]

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. Right. The higher that correlation, the more the healthier the society because you're rewarding people that can delay gratification, will invest the future, keep the word, who are diligent and industrious. So if the correlation between conscientiousness and success in your culture is zero, then your culture is pathological.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And that, and that's, you know, 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 so that the culture can navigate complicated change and it doesn't become brittle and shatter.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, it's ridiculous.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And so one of the biggest things that I've learned, that's why.

[Jordan Peterson]

What are your royalties? 4%, 5%, 10%?

[Greg Hurwitz]

15. Well, it depends on.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, it depends. Okay, okay. So. 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 on how much of those other sources your freedom as a writer actually depends.

[Greg Hurwitz]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And it's kind of a shocking thing to realize, you know? Cause you think, well, I had the idea. It's like, great, that, and 95% of the effort will get you somewhere.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And, you know, publishers pay in advance. They pay a big livable advance. There's a huge amount of gratitude for structure. 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 in 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 us. And America is 50:51 of the first comic.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, you can also see that happening in a perverse way on the art side in general in the US 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Well, I saw 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 Darryl Cooper interview, It sort of exploded online. And it felt so much to me like it was this, that 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? Like, 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

The important thing about joint demonstrations of that. I was at a comedy show in Toronto with Jimmy Carr and a couple of other comedians, and there was 12,000 people there, and the same thing was happening. And it is a celebration of unity because everyone's there doing the same thing. And partly what they're doing is making light of their differences. 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 cycling logically to be in a room with 12,000 strangers and have everyone make light of their differences and everything proceeds peacefully and playfully. And it's a good. And a good time was had by all.

[Greg Hurwitz]

That's right. And you don't get to slap a comedian.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Greg Hurwitz]

In a temple of art devoted to them doing art. And it's inoculating. Well, sometimes you hear something where you're like, I can't believe he just said that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right.

[Greg Hurwitz]

It's inoculating because there's this playful, safe engagement about different things and, you know, versus this. This sort of arid, sexless brittleness brought to topics.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Well, and the comedians that are pushing the fringes are Right out there on the edge, you know, keeping the enemies and the sense.

[Greg Hurwitz]

They're the gargoyles.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. And they always go too far, the comedians or, or just almost exactly too far, which is what makes it funny. And what that means is that like they're, they're the, they're the people who are either maintaining the fences or pushing them farther out and that mediating entry. Well, and that 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Well, and if you're mean spirited and a comedian, people don't laugh. And it's not funny.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes. Right.

[Greg Hurwitz]

It's built in test. Like Dave Chappelle. Always funny.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Greg Hurwitz]

He says stuff sometimes I don't agree with, but he's a genius. He's, he plays by fair rules even when he's making a point.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let's turn back to some more of these common values because that's, that's crucial.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Let's look over here.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, okay, so look at this top.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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, season skies. Americans are tired of political division. 95% agree. Now, Fields and streams obviously talks to rural America. Right. Seas and 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 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

I believe Americans love their families and the communities are the heartbeat of America.

[Greg Hurwitz]

94% I believe in gratitude, not grievance. 86% I believe in excellence, not mediocrity. 91%.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. That's a crucial one. That's a crucial one. Look at the usa should have a sovereign border and immigration should follow the laws and be safe for everyone. 86% agree.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

What the hell do you think happened exactly? Because, I mean, when I was a kid, which is getting to be a long time ago, I mean, one of the things that was an absolute, was absolutely remarkable about the United States, looking at it from a slightly paranoid Canadian perspective. Well, when I was a kid, the huge concern in Canada was that we were just going to become an American appendage, right? That that Canadian identity would be subsumed into the US and that 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 US Was its ability to agitate for that core set of values for the American dream, for the melting pot, for the. For the set, for the set of an overarching, objective set of political ideas grounded in the liberal tradition that did unite everyone. And, and what, 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. Was implicit in the rock, even when it was protest oriented. It was implicit in the sitcoms. It was, it was every. It was absolutely saturated everywhere. And I, 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

But we're also two generations away from the last nationally shared American catastrophe, which is World War II. Like, 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 terrorist of Marxism and communism and Nazism that they're sort of a memory. And I think we didn't keep pace. We didn't say 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 D.C. or politicians and shared communities when everyone used to live there. But we didn't keep pace with the technologies. We opened the door.

[Jordan Peterson]

Consequence of something approximating the pathology of wealth, you know, is that you're. You have the luxury of tearing the.

[Greg Hurwitz]

World down to make it interesting.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

First thing is we have to tack to shared American value. 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

And you think that it's possible to do that effectively on the political side? Because maybe you could make the case, the cold blooded case that 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. Like can you, 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yeah, I think if we can, 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 Hircia Lee 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. 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it probably worked with Harris. I mean, part of. 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

What's the wrong opinion? You're dead.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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. Like, 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 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Hierarchical boundary issues.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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. So here's a good example of that. America is more creative than Japan and has a much higher crime rate. Those might be the same thing. In fact, if you look at crime age curves and creativity age curves, they match perfectly, right? 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 their own.

[Unknown]

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[Jordan Peterson]

Positions.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yeah, Pageau 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 mousy tongue and Stalin than the rigidity and increasing sameness of a cycle like Hitler who's constantly okay, so merit in 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, Agents or an oppressor.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And you see clearly, like, that's a great example, the 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?

[Jordan Peterson]

The enterprise will just fail.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And that's where a lot of countries in the west, in America, we are 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Well, and that gratitude isn't a kind of naivety about the past, that gratitude is at 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 highlights this moving forward issue too, how we move to peace and unity. 1% 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. Right. And that's a healthy orientation.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Like, that's a staggering finding.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. 1% is absolutely. 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 and he should have, you know, during World War II, and he should have been better and he should have done this. But America went overseas, you know, 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 were 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 us. Like it's America's been a dream. If you go and watch protests and vigils around Israel or around around Jews, there's constantly American flags in it. It's. 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 to. 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, there's certainly not a monolith of opinion in relationship to ethnic or.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Racial identity, obviously, and political orientation. It's like people who think like Hispanics and blacks are such a liberal, why.

[Jordan Peterson]

It'S such a foolish way of dividing people.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Oh, 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 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 have 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. It's incredible. It doesn't mean there's not anti Semitism. It doesn't mean they're.

[Jordan Peterson]

I don't think there's an ethnic group for which that isn't true in the United States.

[Greg Hurwitz]

That's exactly right.

[Jordan Peterson]

I mean, the contribution.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Exactly right.

[Jordan Peterson]

The contribution of the black community to American culture is absolutely staggering.

[Greg Hurwitz]

America is not America without the black community. It's interwoven from the beginning.

[Jordan Peterson]

Like music, for example.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Oh, my God. And intellectual thought. I mean, soul and. 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 we should.

[Jordan Peterson]

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. We've been trying to wrestle at arc, for example, and in discussions with Peugeot and people like that, with the idea of how you strengthen the center and maintain that experimental vitality on the fringe, which is a very tricky thing to manage. But I would also say that the US 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

That's part of how we are. The world looks to America. It's partially because of that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yep, definitely.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

I 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, where do Indian Americans rank in terms of net income? Is it number one? I think so. I think they're number one, 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 with MAD and produced 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 very high level of immigrant success. You see the same thing with Nigerian Americans, for example.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Oh yeah, Nigerians are amazing. Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

All right, all right.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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, mind control. So we need some new measures. So what can we do? I wanted to focus on a few things that are concrete. What is an agreed upon shared American value sas 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 people, a lot of people have pulled up the ladder behind them.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 what, forestall that, are going to work against that. Like the reason that you want extremely intelligent, hardworking, creative kids at Harvard is 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

When I was there as an undergraduate, one of the first things they told us, they gathered every in Seaver hall and they said, you're gonna 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, 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 that's continuing friendships across different states of being, every single country.

[Jordan Peterson]

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. By your birth, by your state of birth, has nothing to do with your confidence.

[Greg Hurwitz]

You do get good China, though.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, well, Right, right. All right, so gratitude, not grievance, rule of law, pursuit of truth, focus on outcomes.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 world view, much more as I've pursued things. Right. Measure something not by its intentions, but its outcomes. In a way, everything's irrelevant. I don't care what your intentions are. I don't care.

[Jordan Peterson]

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?

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 state 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 can't cover your face to do things that are illegal or to terrorize people. 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 about. 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 antisemitic 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

We should also beware of presuming that the tech people themselves can solve these problems, because I see this with Zuckerberg and with. 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 in 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 quasi crimes 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 antisemitism and encouraging it are Russian bots. That's a good thing to know. That's not a freedom.

[Jordan Peterson]

Distinguish the human actors from the non human actors.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And you discuss. If you're anonymous and don't want to stand behind your words online. Yeah, 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's not much different than stopping masking, because online anonymity is the virtual equivalent of masking. Right.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, you can't automate the edge cases. You can't. That's what consciousness. That's actually what consciousness itself is for.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Because as we can transform something into an algorithm, neurologically speaking, we become it's unconscious.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yes, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

We transformed regulating our heartbeat into an algorithm. 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. Right? Thought is internalized speech.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so the way that consciousness navigates that transformative edge that can't be transformed into a algorithm is through the mechanism of free discourse. That's the mechanism.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so, and there has to be a wide variety of opinions because we don't know how to algorithmize the edge.

[Greg Hurwitz]

And the edge causes most of the problem.

[Jordan Peterson]

And the opportunity is.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yeah, but you said, I mean, I think you said something like 1% of the criminals. Criminals can cause 65% of the damage.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, that's what they do.

[Greg Hurwitz]

So there's no reason that we can't go into a private company. Can't say, look, we've, we've identified 150 to 250 people who are clearly bent on so chaos terrorizing America.

[Jordan Peterson]

Here they are, here's the processes that we have undertaken.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 swords of hatred. That is not a good long term strategy for any company or any country.

[Jordan Peterson]

Not unless it wants to be overrun by manipulative psychopaths.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

We can have interfaces 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 Khomeini to have access to them from 8am 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?

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

It early and you set the ground rules. Yeah, right, Right. Okay. So American control. This is fascinating. Three and a half or 3.5 more Americans believe that American news organizations and social media platforms should be owned by US 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?

[Jordan Peterson]

Does Brazil?

[Greg Hurwitz]

Right. 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 postpartisan. 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 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?

[Jordan Peterson]

Do you See some size association with that. It's like is there a, is there an indication of what size a social network has to have before it's subject to that kind of regulation?

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 postpartisan committee that's wonder to.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 foreign agent.

[Unknown]

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[Jordan Peterson]

Right? Free is the wrong value for your online identity because it gets gamed. And so I mean, could there be Russian bot farms if Every account costs $40 a month or would it become instantly economically untenable? Right? Free is. See the problem with free, as far as I can tell, online is that your attention is valuable. 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 trade openness and high trade 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 university.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 and that's opened up a massive amount of opportunity, but it's also destroyed all the intermediary structures 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, 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 influence, which is akin to war in the virtual realm, but also because the criminals and the psychopaths and the dark tetrad types mean they thrive in chaos and they want to sow it. And they do that only for themselves. Right. And that's the perennial human landscape, isn't it? Is that, you know, your culture has to be centered around some shared structure of values that's going to be. 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 possible story, or Cain or Satan himself for that matter. Right. The eternal threat of the pathological. And then you have the threat of the foreign invader, which is exactly the same thing that's being. Playing out of the virtual landscape with regards to the information wars that are being conducted by Iran and by Russia and by China.

[Greg Hurwitz]

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 can. 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, 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, America. We can't throw them out.

[Jordan Peterson]

First principles. And you're identifying that to some degree by what everybody agrees on. And then there has to be something approximating a reinstitutionalization of those first principles, both politically and technologically, so that this, 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Yeah. And we should water that, not the vines strangling it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, Right. Do you want to just talk about this documentary very briefly?

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and then we'll. We'll fold up.

[Greg Hurwitz]

The Iranian community in 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 is like 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 gonna go if we can't tack our way back towards the reasonable center where 80 to 100% 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

And where can people follow us? The story?

[Greg Hurwitz]

We're on x Instagram and YouTube and we've been banned by TikTok.

[Jordan Peterson]

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, 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 you can. Greg and I have been engaged in a discussion for a long time, often on quite radically different partisan from radically different partisan perspectives that's varied as the years have gone by. But it'll be useful and interesting, I think, to delve into that and also to talk through more the issue of, well, say riding 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 LA 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.

[Greg Hurwitz]

Thank you. Thanks for the discussion.

[Unknown]

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