Host (3:31)

And what have you learned? What is the evidence? What does the research that you've done show about political violence, attitudes to political violence? Obviously we've had the Luigi Mangione situation. Charlie, I mentioned as well. What can you tell us about people's attitudes and where this is all coming from?

Greg (3:49)

Well, I think there's three major factors and I think the first is hostile foreign regimes we almost can't comprehend. A troll farm in St. Petersburg or troll farms in China are run by the Islamic Republic with thousands of people and thousands of devices and tens of thousands of comments flooding into our networks and our social media and flooding into our kids. And the effect that has. So number one is there are people out there who do not want what is best for us, who are seeking to divide and destroy us. The second thing is we have psychopathic algorithms. The algorithms are feeding outrage and they're feeding, you know, they're onboarding. The recommendation structures are onboarding because they're designed to maximize for profit. And maximum stickiness is going to be things that are most atrocious. And then we have bad faith domestic players who are stoking this who have, you know, either interest in more greed or power or being overtly paid off by foreign companies. And so you have all these incentive structures that are massively off kilter and when you look at radicalization, when I went undercover in a mind control cults, it's funny. So I wrote a book about this, one of my fifth thriller, and parents would write me and say, my kid just went into a mind control cult. What do I do? And the first thing I said is, do not send them articles telling them they're in a mind control cult. Right. That, that play has already been anticipated and it's already been answered. And so one of the things that you try and do is you put people in touch with a previous version of themselves. So if someone's in a cult, you say, hey, when you were in college, what was your dream for yourself when you were in your late 20s? Now it's. You create a cognitive dissonance within them. And to see the process of radicalization with Charlie Kirk, I mean, for me, my first reaction, I was, it was, I was horrified. It was a, it was a major shift in a lot of things for me. I didn't know Charlie, but to me, there's a lot of my friends who could have been in that seat and in that chair. And then the other thing, I just thought back with the sort of confusion of this reaction that everybody seemed to have and beyond the dark tetrad types are going to celebrate this.

Host (5:59)

What's the dark tetrad type?

Greg (6:01)

Oh, it's people who are Machiavellian, sadistic, narcissistic and psychopathic. And all that they want is control of profit. And, and they, they want control and to maximize sort of evil and sadism online for power. And they gravitate wherever power is. So we saw a lot of that on the left. And then as Trump and Maga became ascendant, they're going to shift over to any place where there's more power. So they're going to celebrate anything. They're nihilists. But the, the ambiguity of the mainstream reaction or even the caveats, right? Like, well, I don't agree with everything flat. It was so striking to me. And I thought, well, and, and I, I wrote about this a little bit. If we were to rewind, I'm a bit older than you guys, I think, but let's rewind to when I was in college, which was a relatively more sane time in the 90s. There was a very prominent conservative professor called Harvey Mansfield who was on campus. A lot of the students didn't agree with him. He was one of the, you know, he was in a cohort with Bill Kristol. He was sort of a solid position there at Harvard, when I was an undergraduate, back when it wasn't embarrassing to go to Harvard. At the same time, there was a very prominent feminist called Andrea Dworkin, who you probably know, right. And she thought that all intercourse, all heterosexual intercourse was rape. She had very extremist views. Both of them were very much outside the mainstream of what would have been acceptable had one of them been executed on campus in the 90s in front of 3,000 kids, livestreamed to hundreds, thousands more. The reaction would have been unequivocal horror. It would have been unequivocal across the campus, across the city, the state, the nation and the mainstream media. It would have been unequivocal and radicalization. We have a saying, all right, thrillers, as I mentioned, there's a saying in thrillers, which is the bad guy never thinks he's the bad guy. You never think you're the one who's radicalized. But if you go back and look at that, the fact that people felt that they had to stammer, like they had to talk about with bangion to say, well, I really don't like some of the health care policies, but that's a sign of radicalization. And it happens as slow as a frog being boiled, I'd say. The other biggest lesson that I learned, and it's helped me kind of view the chessboard differently, is that particularly when we're dealing with these foreign hostile regimes that are fueling a lot of this, their aim isn't left versus right. The KGB in the Cold War did a lot of funding and logistics support for the Black Panthers. And they also wrote letters, forged letters from the KKK threatening black leadership. They want to fund both sides so that we destroy each other and we can't think about any of the topics. The real aim with, with these mechanisms that are out of control is to get the far left and the far right. And a lot of this is young men to meet at that horseshoe of nihilism. And that's where no lives matter is. And some of that confusion that we see where we're going, well, I think he was far right, but he had no Kings flyers in his car. There's a confusion. It doesn't mean that there aren't distinct threats from the left and distinct threats from the right. But they don't care once somebody arrives at that. They don't care if the next bus they get on is violent antifa or is your body my choice gripers. They just care that it will be destructive and that none of us can talk about it. Because we're so busy blaming the other side. That's what the win is.

Co-host (9:24)

And when you talk about these men who end up, let's just call the no Lives Matter zone, what it strikes me is that these men, these are men who are isolated. Because if you start to stray into this kind of dangerous territory and you know, you've got a girlfriend, you've got friends and family around you and you start saying this stuff, they're more likely to go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's have a conversation about this. But if you're isolated and you're online 24 7, that's when things start getting dangerous, isn't it?

Greg (9:55)

That's right. And the biggest predictor is Mac is. Is a ton of social media use. So the biggest Predictor, more than 50% higher than anything else for mangeon support, 50% higher than, than Discord or Reddit or anything, was Blue sky usage, which is ostensibly the safe space on the Internet. So there's a mirroring effect that happens there. And, you know, we have similar stuff that happens on the far right. We tracked last year 14 posts from the biggest hate accounts and unequivocal posts, like, not stuff that's like, oh, that's mean, or that's stereotypical or that might be funny in certain circumstances, but unequivocal posts. We track those to 6.5 billion impressions. And I think we still have a belief. I mean, I can't be in Twitter too long without starting to lose my mind a little bit. And you feel that and you have to pull out and you have to react. We still have a belief somehow that we can go into an arena that is designed by addiction teams of addiction specialists that is targeting us based on, I think there's 26 different ways they read, what our eyes track to, where our thumb snags, what grabs our attention, backed by deep machine learning algorithms. And we think we can hold our own, let alone kids, young, young people, let's just say kids. Prefrontal cortex doesn't myelinate till they're 23 or 24. They literally don't have grown in prefrontal cortexes. And if you take them out of a system where they're not educated, they don't have a robust, educated mind. They haven't been raised in places where you're arguing, you have to take the opposite of your opinion. You've read something of a canon, you've read something of, let's say, Dostoevsky, Orwell, you know, pick your poison, Solzhenitsyn, if you don't have any grounding for that and you're being inundated and targeted, that's full blown mind control. That's more powerful than we are.

Co-host (11:52)

Absolutely. And when you factor in that young men in particular are going to be far more extreme than a man in his 40s just because that's the way young men are, that's also a recipe for disaster, isn't it?

Greg (12:04)

Yes, absolutely. And then you add on top of this, a culture that has been pervasively telling them that any expression of their strength or solidity or properly targeted aggression into sports, into debate, into daring, is, Is a toxic notion that is inherent to them. There's not a lot of great places for them to go. And one of the things that the, that I hate using these terms, the mainstream, they're also captured, but let's just call it the left in the mainstream has really trained their targets on a body of people who were the most effective bulwarks against those young men being onboarded into actual alt right extremism. That's Charlie Kirk, that's Jordan Peterson. These are people who, you know, Jordan was my undergraduate thesis advisor. I go back a long ways with him. The amount of anger and victory, all I've heard about him from the far left, which is completely divorced from his actual viewpoints. They don't, they don't have a comprehension that with him, the message that he is giving is the message that these young men can hear that's going to be functional. He's an ally. And we've lost an ability to look at a chessboard because we pick out one thing that somebody said out of context and we dismiss them unequivocally. And that's something. It's just got to stop. And the same with Charlie Kirk. I mean, I had a, I wrote a piece on, on Charlie Kirk. There's a number of reasons why I found that particularly devastating. I think there were three. It was him. I think it was the preternatural grace of his wife. It was my shock at the reaction to the mainstream and to some of the people on, I'll call it the left side of the arena. And then also it was this feeling of isolation in the reasonable center to say, how does everybody not just get this, that this is a moment to get completely. And we've had these moments. We had it with Representative Hortman, who was shot in Minneapolis. But, you know, Charlie was the face of a movement and argued more articulately and beautifully and convincingly for a ton of values. That were around a free marketplace of ideas around including different people with different orientations and beliefs in the conservative movement. He was a bulwark to that. And people think you can just get rid of him and then some far left figure is going to speak to these people. It's a name. And so we have a lot of work to do on both sides.

Host (14:31)

Well, you're speaking of both sides and so far you've talked about this as an issue of the far left and the far right. But when we've spoken to people, everyone on the right, and this, we saw this after Charlie was, was murdered, you know, there were a lot of people saying, well, you know, the Democrats are the party of murder. This is the left that did this. That's the message from one side sitting in that very chair. Only, you know, a while ago, as we record this was Sam Harris who said, well, actually, you know, he's more worried about the threat from the right. You know, he mentioned Paul Pelosi, people laughing about the fact that he was attacked with a hammer and nearly killed on the right. Is this an all sides problem? Does it break evenly for each side? Is there a skew in attitudes to political violence? Can you tell us more about that?

Greg (15:26)

I think we've seen an authorizing environment for violence on both sides. I think that I always feel like when we're discussing this, we're taking our eyes off the chessboard to some sense. But it's a fair question to ask. Right? And I think that part of the.

Host (15:44)

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Co-host (17:17)

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Greg (17:33)

With a minor in finance, then interning somewhere and becoming fluent in all tax forms.

Co-host (17:38)

But that might be hard to accomplish before tax day. So maybe just stick with Tax Act. Tax act, let's get them over with.

Greg (17:47)

I think that for the first time this, we get into this problem with trusted experts and expertise. What stats are you looking at? Matt Walsh is going to look at one set of statistics, right? Sam Harris is going to look at another one. I think we see very, very troubling patterns on both sides. Some of the stuff that's happened online is insane. I think what Sam is referring to is when the angry far right gets woken up, they're very, very angry and very, very capable. And we've seen again and again the left playing around with these ideas that the left then can, that the right can pick up. And there's reasons why the right can do some things better that are both bad and good. Likewise with the left, but, you know, safe spaces on college campuses. Right? Let's, let's scream at Jordan Peterson so he can't go anywhere. Let's grab Ben Shapiro's notes, let's do all this stuff. And there's no thought to what will happen when that power gets transferred over to the right. The right is very capable in terms.

Co-host (18:42)

Of.

Greg (18:45)

If there's a war with guns and with organized militia groups. I think they're going to do a lot better than the antifa group, you know, who are holding down a zone in Portland. They're just going to, they haven't so far gone to that full extent. And there's also differences in what we're talking about between the political arena, which I know Sam is very concerned with. And things that we're talking about that are extracurricular. So it's, I think it's very difficult to untangle. And I think that in a lot of ways they're a mirror side of the other because somebody sees something happen and they say we have no choice but to align with the worst allies that we have on our side. And I've watched the Democrats do that. I think my position right now is I'm so, I'm so frustrated with the Democrats and their unwillingness to acknowledge the dangers of the far left. Can we talk about big five personality theory for a moment? Because I think this is an answer. I'm sorry, I'm taking some time with this.

Host (19:38)

You should take as much time.

Greg (19:39)

Complicated answer. And I don't want to give a pat answer. Big five personality structure determines our political orientation more than anything else, aside from the family that we're born into. And so there's something called high trait openness, right? Do you like new experiences? Do you like new people and foods? Liberals tend to be higher in high trait openness. And so that's a really interesting thing. That's how we congregate in cities, let's say, right? Different people and voices and accents. We're open to different kinds of experiences. My trait structure lies down that way along a very classically liberal trait structure. And agree. And there's something called empathy. There's empathy which tucks under something called agreeableness, right? So that's another kind of complicated thing. And Democrats tend to think that this is sort of superior, that all you need is to expose more people to more different viewpoints and higher empathy and then the world will be solved. Conservatives are lower in trade openness. And that codes for a lot of other things. They like borders around things. They like predictability, they like being surrounded with people who think and move like them, farmers and ranchers. There's a set schedule. This has nothing to do with race. It's not white people versus black or brown people. It's evenly distributed across every single group. Whether you think that that's a God given thing or evolutionarily selected for how we navigate. And conservatives are hiring a different trait, which is called high trait conscientiousness. So with openness they say, I want less openness, right? I want a border around the country, build a wall. I want borders around gender, right? If there's a couple examples that don't fit, that's fine. But we all know that there's two genders and that's what we define it. I want to border where my skin starts and your vaccination wants to begin. Okay? These are deep psychological traits. These are also very useful traits. Imagine the Native Americans, when the Europeans came with smallpox blankets, if they said, hang on a minute, like, we need to have a little bit more in group protection before we deal with this issue of, of infection from what can happen with different out groups. We've robbed the right in a lot of ways. I'm sorry, the prevailing ideologies of the left have robbed the right in a lot of ways of an organizing principle for the in group. So can it be that you're Christian and being Christian will exclude certain people from certain activities? As much as being Jewish does or being anything does? That's something that's called Christian nationalism. All nationalism gets grouped in with Adolf Hitler, if you can. You can't have pride in your country anymore. So here we have this, this more closed trait. But there's not a group that they can identify under with a structure that is acceptable to a lot of parts of the mainstream. And we need to untangle that. Now conservatives are also higher in something called trait conscientiousness. And trait conscientiousness is like, do you return phone calls? Do you show up on time? Do you do what you're going to say? So think about CEOs versus visionaries, right? Steve Jobs, big crazy. And then they're like, wait, we need to bring in, you know, conservative conscientious CEOs to make sure the trains run on time. They boot Steve Jobs, everything runs on time. Loses the vision you need to bring them back in. And the point of this, more than anything is, is that we desperately need each other. That's why there is an even distribution of trait structures, whether from evolution or from God. And we need to modulate because the job of liberals is to say, look, if you build a wall and you make it impenetrable, and new ideas can't get in and new people can't get in and new kinds of workers can't get in, and we can't infuse that with the center, which is something that, that the founding texts, from the Bible to the Constitution to the civil rights movement, which like every key juncture, has a plan for how the fringe interacts with the center, if we don't do that, we will stagnate and die. So one is the brakes, let's go a little slower and make sure things are working and make sure we're not doing away with our traditions that hold order. And the other Says we need to move forward and we need to keep integrating. Either one of those is a disaster. If you stomp on the brakes, Democrats will go flying off a cliff, following other lemming cars off the cliff, or smash into a wall, and conservatism will stomp on the brakes and not integrate. And so what we need to do now, I think, in a very significant way, is to upgrade our reference points. We're stuck with old reference points. We think every activist is John Lewis or Harvey Milk, right? We think that every notion of nationalism is Adolf Hitler. And we have to start. We think every intervention. Is it Chamberlain getting off the plane, waving the piece of paper, or is it Vietnam? Well, how about it's neither? How about we are in history in a way that's real and that the reference points of old that we use to point and blame, well, you have more violence here and you have more violence there. I see this as a mirror image that, that if we started sitting on a seesaw, bouncing back and forth, finding balance, if the left moves this way, the right moves this way, the left moves this way, the right moves this way, and the voices that will lift their. Can lift above partisan values to things that are transcendent, which is what I, I thought Erica Kirk did at the, at Charlie's memorial. Those are the things that are transformational when we say we're not looking here and here because we're squabbling here. And that's to the delight of, let's say, elements within China who want to see us weekend, elements of Russia want to see us weekend. And it also makes sure that we can't have any sane dialogue around solutions, because if all we're talking about is, well, is it the left, Is it the right? And we're warring ourselves where we're putting ourselves into war parties, we can't have the discussions with nuance to address the real issue.

Host (25:11)

Well, I totally see what you're saying. I agreed with literally every word you said until that very moment. And I really don't agree with you on that, because in order to solve any problem, you have to identify what's actually happening. So if it is something that is happening across the political spectrum and it's this mutual radicalization you're talking about, that's one problem. If you've got, quote unquote, assassination culture on the left, that's another problem. If you've got militias organizing in, in the, in remote parts of Idaho just to pick a state, whatever, that's a third problem, right? So I guess what I'M asking, first of all, what is the problem exactly?

Greg (25:50)

I think all three of those are problems and I think that the means by which we're having conversations to solve them are by design ineffective and aren't leading to better solutions for them. They're leading to more partisan warfare. I think all three of those are problems and they probably need different methods of address.

Host (26:10)

Well, that's what I'm thinking about because it's almost like you have these algorithms, you have these media ecosystems and you see it. I mean, one of the reasons I think a lot of the kind of online right is getting more extreme now is their party's in power in this country. And so beating up on the Democrats, who cares about that, it's not going to get any clicks. The arguments have been won. And so you have to amp up the conspiracy, the crazy, the whatever. You have to go further to, you know, to, to spice up the food, so to speak. Right.

Greg (26:45)

And you have a tilt of psychopaths who are moving when you have a certain group that's in power with a different set of rights, let's say with rapid onset gender dysphoria, where there's something you start to see a migration of dark tetrad types to that. So you see this movement wherever power is, because if you're a dark tetrad player, you go where there's power and then you have grift that you can manipulate people and get closer to power. And so we have seen a gravitation to that with ascendant conservativism, ascendant Republicanism, that a lot of bad faith players are moving over that way. Now, the one advantage that I think conservatives have is they're much better at drawing lines. We talked about that low trade openness and already in a lot of ways, I think that we're seeing some line drawing from the far right of people saying that doesn't represent us. And I, I, my hope is that conservatives, and I think they're already doing this in a good sense, will not make the mistakes that liberals made, because liberals said Trump is such a giant threat, he's such a unique threat in the history of the world. And I always say if Donald Trump represents the maximum version of evil that you can imagine, you have a very limited imagination. And I'm saying this as somebody who opposed him quite vehemently early on, but I'm also looking at and recognizing a lot of nuance in who he is and what he's doing and where the playing field actually is now in America. In the world, liberals basically reached for progressives, lefties. It went. It went all the way and there was very little line drawing. And I implored them at every turn. You must denounce antifa. The notion of sanctuary cities doesn't make sense. Words aren't violence. Topic after topic after topic, when somebody went and kicked down Tucker Carlson's front door, or tried to, and his wife locked herself in a pantry, I said, you have to denounce that. I don't care what you feel about Tucker Carlson. You have to denounce mob violence. Mob violence will not create the conditions. Right.

Co-host (28:48)

Your.

Greg (28:48)

Your own. By which a liberal society is going to thrive. It won't do it. And there is a real problem of drawing lines because of that high openness. What if I offend somebody? What if I have a junior staffer who just graduated from a liberal arts college who's offended with something? There's a lot more parsing around empathy and openness. And the right has an advantage. And we're seeing a lot of voices on the right say, nope, that's going to be out of bounds. And I think whoever does that is ultimately going to win the day, because I think there's. I think there's three groups right now that hold power within America in certain ways that are essential and that are speaking to the next generation. One of them is the dsa, the Far Left.

Host (29:29)

Democratic Socialists of America.

Greg (29:31)

Yes. Thank you. And that's Mamdani, that's aoc. There's variations between that. I mean, Bernie's in one place, AOC is in another. To my mind, Mr. Mamdani is. Is very further left. And there's an element of Islamicism that, that embodies that. You have moderate Democrats who have an incredibly important ballast right now, but virtually no reach into propagation, making their own weather in the news and speaking in the younger two generations. So to me, they're out of the running, and I think they're a very important counterweight. But they're not in this conversation. You have maga, let's just call it with reach through the center. And to some liberals who are now disaffected with what's happening with the left, and then you have the far right when we're talking about people who make their own weather, make things go viral, have posts regularly in the millions of views, are on podcast networks, and have speak and speak directly and clearly with views and followers into younger generation. Those are the three groups right now. And so I think that whichever group's going to tack more towards the middle of this is going to gather the 80% of Americans who in fact agree on everything.

Host (30:39)

Really? Are you sure about this? I am seeing the dynamic going in the exact opposite direction. It feels to me like the more extreme you are, the more views you get, the more boosted your content is, the bigger the audience, the bigger the podcast will go on. Isn't that happening?

Greg (30:55)

That is absolutely happening. Maybe I, maybe I didn't say it as clearly. Whoever can figure out how to do that and hold that center coalition right now, instead of the sort of cheap junk food of the sides, that's where the majority of Americans are.

Host (31:09)

I see.

Greg (31:09)

So if we can break out of this mind control. I did a set of polls. I was so you under. So push polling. You understand what that is? That's if you say, you know, I'm the most mad about Joe Biden's socialism for this, this or this, where you're getting a poll to get the answers that you want so you can weaponize it. It's, it's rampant, it's very hard to do good polling. And I have a bunch of team of polling of pollsters who I really, really trust and I want to do an experiment. So I wrote a whole series of questions, asking them in the least partisan, most open possible way about major topics. And I've talked about this at greater length before, but for instance, I believe in climate change. You know, maybe you get 55, 60%. I believe climate change is a hoax, maybe you get 40, 45%. But instead we wrote I believe in clean fields and streams and skies and seas. Taking care of the environment is something we should do. 94% agreement. So if you are a leader who can understand right now that we're at a breaking point and people are exhausted with nihilism and despair and hopelessness and you can be a guiding light in that regard and approach issues from a point of consensus and a shared value set. That's what's moving everything the right way. And we've done testing to prove that if you, if you come with a shared set of core American values and you can establish that base and grow from there. And we're seeing these tiny green shoots of it. Spencer Cox in Utah and Wes Moore just did it. Did a commercial Democrat and Republican saying, you know, giving each other's names, we're friends, we disagree. Here we are on different things. Now they're not in a head to head race, but them just going on and being humanized. If we have those discussions, what happens is the whole populace can start to calm down. And what's happening is, with mind control is. I think we're in a suspended state of. Of the word trauma is so overused. But I don't think we're in real time. There's a psychological phrase about being in real time. I think that our nervous systems are hacked. There's something called family systems psychology that basically talks about families as closed systems. So a lot of times, if you have, you know, most families have an identified patient, like the sick one, the problematic one, and one of the things you can see a lot is if that one gets well, the next kid will go down or the next problem will go down, or if that one dies. Because it talks about anxiety being closed and system and families bind it in different ways. And there's something called the Carpman drama triangle that's very, very interesting. And it talks about addiction loops and dysfunction loops and what it means when you're in a dynamic like this, when someone's the victim, someone's the savior, right? Someone's the persecutor. So Cartman has. There's three different roles. There's victim, rescuer, and persecutor. All of those are bad roles. Okay, so the rescuer isn't really rescuing. What the rescuer is really doing is saying, you know, I'm so pure and I'm so open hearted and I have so much good that we don't even have to examine my shortcomings or willful blindness. I'm here, I'm just serving the victim. And then at some point, the aggravation of the victim's unwillingness to heal gets so much, they turn into a persecutor. And so the roles change. And the victim role, we're aware of how bad that is, right? You're. You can be a victim. Nothing's ever your fault. And. But all of these roles shift. And when you're in these roles, you're in a dynamic which means you're not existing in real time. You're not really looking that each person is filled with nuance and contains multitudes, and we all can be all these things. And what is actually the thing that's going to break the cycle and move us out from that into transformational change away from addiction, away from bad family dynamics, the news cycle. Right now I see people constantly persisting where we have political leaders who are and. And influencers who are the biggest victims in the world, and then they're the biggest rescuers in the world, and then they're the biggest persecutors. In the world. And we're moving between these roles, which aren't real, and the only way to shatter them. As you're saying, those can get a lot of views, they can get a lot of following. And if we keep going this way, one side or the other is going to win. And that means we're back in that proverbial car with somebody stomped on the brakes or somebody stomped on the gas. And if we want to gather the majority of Americans who are outside these outsized, radical voices on the left that are exhibiting control mostly by threatening immense reputational and financial damage to people, right, that's mob control and cancellation. If we can crack through to that, there's a chance to break the dynamic and there's a chance to actually focus and clear our heads and look at the chessboard before us and say, here's where we are in America. Here's what we need to do for our kids. Here's how the chessboard exists right now in the world with Russia and China and the Islamic Republic and President Trump and, oh, here's a. Here's a Gaza peace plan that seems insane and unlikely. Maybe that's something that we support even if we have criticisms about him domestically. And here's something on our own side which is fairly vile and reprehensible. It's very difficult to do that when you're only convinced that the other side wants to kill you and both sides are convinced that the other side wants to kill you. And we're in scared, traumatic postures that we're struggling to break through.

Co-host (36:18)

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Greg (38:32)

Can I tell you just real quick?

Co-host (38:34)

Yeah.

Greg (38:35)

There's a flaw in that with them because they don't talk about economic injustice, they talk about economic inequality. And the opposite of that is, is economic equality. And even they don't want that.

Co-host (38:46)

Yeah.

Greg (38:46)

So proceed.

Co-host (38:47)

Yeah. Okay, so you've got maga. Yeah, but this is how the majority of people say it, maga. One of their key policies was we need to bring back the jobs that have been lost through globalization. We need to bring them back to America, America first. And the far right are touching on it as well in their own way. So I think that's one of the things we also need to talk about is economic inequality, particularly how it radicalizes populations. But in particular, young men, if they feel they've got no opportunity or no chance to actually move forward, have a family, buy a place, et cetera.

Greg (39:24)

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

Co-host (39:31)

Right.

Greg (39:31)

We all want that. So that's, that's a, that's a very important point. There's two statistics, I think more than any other that describe the state that we're in right now when we talk about the problems that we're facing. One of them is that since Reagan, 50 to 60 trillion dollars with a T has moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% of Americans. One of the problems with that is it didn't move that way through a free market. It moved that way due to regulatory capture and excessive lobbyism. Big Pharma has, I think it's 3.5 lobbyists per member of Congress. That's a rigged game. So we can't look at it and say, of course we love capitalism and free markets, because that was rigged. That's $50 trillion from the bottom 90 to the top 1%. The other statistic is for the past decades, the correlation between public support and desire for a bill to be passed and the bill actually passing is 0%. So people walking around, outraged, nihilistic, upset, don't know those statistics, but they feel those statistics, they know them to be true, even if that' not an analysis that they've done. And while those things happen, when we talk about, oh my God, you know, the democracies being shattered or this crisis is happening, or there's war in the Middle east or what's happening with Russia, they don't care. Everything's broken already. And one of the effects of the online world is, is that we can't talk about those things clearly. And so what you see is when every, when any issue gets politicized, everyone loses. Abortion, immigration, anti Semitism, you go down the list. Once it's political, it's being gamed. And that is part of the thing that we have to break, because there's very real discussions that we have to have that involve, okay, how are we going to put jobs back into place? How is the government going to partner with private industry? You know, I got one of the things that happens when you explore new spaces is Jordan says at times the fool precedes the master, right? And so if you go into more spaces, you're a fool more and more. And I've had a great number of those moments, but one of them, I was on a call with a prominent Republican congressman and we were talking about regulations. This was years ago, and I was kind of beating the drums on this. And he said, you liberals think every time that we want to roll back regulations, it's because we want to dump toxins in rivers. And I just laughed. He goes, what are you laughing at? I go, you're totally right. I have like a third grade understanding of this. And he was like, here's how you have to work with private business. It takes six or seven years to build an off ramp in New York. This is untenable. Here's codified corruption. And so I went, I went off, you know, and educated myself a lot on that. I Talked to people who were in infrastructure. We ran studies. I did a podcast that Jordan graciously invited me onto with somebody who's an expert in infrastructure. You have to go forth and recognize when you hit a wall and something doesn't make any sense because your presuppositions are still old. And we have to be able to accommodate and assimilate. I mean, that's the base level, you know, Piaget, with the stages of childhood development. Every stage, we accommodate and assimilate information. And when the stakes are made way too high for somebody to say, well, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not comfortable talking about Israel right now, and I feel like I'll get yelled at. And if we say you're a monster and you need to be removed and deported, we're not leaving people room to negotiate ideas around gender, around antisemitism, around immigration, around abortion. And if. And a leader needs to be somebody who makes those conversations safe to have. And the ways that we're fighting about the issue, the very real issues you're talking about, if we look at how those are being discussed, they are in a very. Your side's wrong, my side's right, in absolutely right mode. And nothing gets solved that way because reality is where ideology goes to die. I want to say something back to you. You had a piece that I, that I came across either serendipitously or because my phone's listening to me and knew I was driving to talk to you guys, where you were talking about this dialing up the crazy. And you said something very astute that I think is very important, which is it's not Jeff Bezos fault if you're radicalized. Right? It's not all. It's not your guy's fault if somebody has the situation wrong. We all have to make our individual choices of what news that we consume. We are the drivers of this. We. There's nothing more powerful than where we put our attention. And if we're choosing to eat a diet of junk food and onboarding, and it's onboarding, like if you study, you know, let's say that you're a young man and you go on because you want to look up your family ancestry and then you're being onboarded to street fights, and then it's race baiting, and then it's a diet of neo Nazism. There's. There's these onboarding structures that are insane, but we somehow have lost the locus of ourselves. And why I'm saying that isn't to scold but to say there's something incredibly empowering when we say, I'm going to fix things in reality around me. I'm going to fix what I look at, what my kids look at, and I'm also going to solve problems that aren't so far out of reach that I can't possibly find them, because by design, that's made for me to feel despairing and paralyzed. Right. How do I fix the environment? You can't. Right. Oh, my God. These, these. Health care for veterans just got cut. What do I do? Well, do you know a restaurant that is open to the cause? Do you know college students who will volunteer? Do you have some veterans in your community who need this? Solve the problem. We're empowered. And more and more people are saying, I'm frozen in despair.

Co-host (45:08)

Or what they're saying is, the game is rigged. Fuck your game. Yes, that's what I think of it. And that's where I get really concerned, because you have this anger, particularly from young men. And as we all know, young men are the ones that are going to be more likely to be extreme. You look at the Luigi Mangioni case, case in point, anger, frustration, for whatever reason. Here's my target. There you go.

Greg (45:33)

That's right. So C.S. lewis, in Screwtape Letters, he has this great line, which I'll hopefully not paraphrase too widely, where he says, you know, he's, he's, it's, it's a letter from a demon who's advising somebody on how to corrupt the mind of a human, of a man on earth to claim him for the underworld. And he says, keep him constantly obsessed and focused on the state of his mother's soul, but never on her rheumatoid arthritis. The more we can be worried of the abstract. I'm a voice who's going to save, you know, I'm going to have peace in the Middle East. I'm going to solve environmentalism by taping my hands to the Mona Lisa. I'm here. I'm, I'm, I'm solving things for the world. The further removed we are from our locus of control, which gives us meaning and which gives us choices and which gives us power. And part of. When, when the way you broke that down about the news consumption diet, I, I go back often, as I know you, you both do, to Solzhenitsyn, who wrote, of course, the Gulag Archipelago, which I think in a lot of ways was the moral argument that brought down the Soviet Union. And his question, dying of cancer in a Gulag Was, what are all the ways I contributed to me being here? What are all the times I didn't speak up when somebody did this bit of language control or somebody informed on a neighbor, how did I go along with this? And I think he's a wonderful counterpoint to the great man theory of history, where we're waiting for our next great man, we're waiting for our next great leader. Bless you. Who's going to come and save and vanquish us. And part of it is, is we all stitch the fabric of the culture together around us. We all have a role in that. And when it disintegrates, I mean, one of the things Solzhenitsyn said was that basically everyone in the totalitarian society lies about everything all the time. And that act of setting ourselves in order or saying, you know, I have a. Anyways, we don't need to. I talk to so many people, as I know you do, who are so despairing and it's almost like they lose agency to fix a problem in their backyard with their kid, their kid's friend with a neighbor. Some small effort you make in your community and we can keep trying to look for bigger and systemic changes, but we have to relocate that within ourselves.

Co-host (47:47)

And it's also as well, politicians really. And look, Maga said they're going to. So let's see what they're doing. And they're trying the tariff thing in order to bring jobs back to America. I really worry about this generation, Greg, particularly the young generation. There's a sense of hopelessness amongst them that we simply didn't feel at that age.

Greg (48:06)

No, we didn't imagine if we were going to school when we were 12 and our parents said, okay, here's this little device you're gonna take with you. It contains unlimited pornography, it contains unlimited fights and violence. Also, Khomeini can tweet at you during the day or any other group. Have this in your pocket, it can be in your. In your desk at school, it can be in your locker, it's in the bathroom, go have a good life. 12 year old with no myelinated prefrontal cortex, we'd be gone. And increasingly as. And for this, I put the weight much more squarely on the left. This removal of the cannon, this removal of the fact that there's a different established set of ways that we teach and learn in the world, world is absolutely brutal because if you sever people off from a colonialist past and you don't read Orwell and you don't read Dostoevsky. And you're not reading Plato or Socrates. Fill in the blank. If you're not reading Frederick Douglass, if you're not reading and understanding the actual civil rights movement and how the basis of that was in responsibility and accountability, not in whatever is passing. For some versions of activism we're seeing today, then everything's new again.

Host (49:21)

Well, you mentioned some versions of activism. One of the things we talked about before we started is how do you do something that's effective? And there are a lot of organizations, I mean, the ADL is just one example, which you found seems to want to quote, unquote, fight antisemitism, but actually it's very ineffective and in fact sometimes making things worse. Right? Yeah.

Greg (49:39)

Well, I've done a lot of analysis with a group, I have a partner group called ncri, which is the network Contagion Resort Research Institute. And we look at different plannings. I believe it's unequivocal that DEI and oppression and anti Semitism and microaggression training not only is ineffective, but that it drives the opposite effect. I believe that that is. I believe it's beyond debate. That's a very. I shouldn't say that everything's open to debate. I believe that, that a proper debate on this with experts on both sides who know more than I do from both sides. Everything that I've seen that is that, that to me is an issue that is provable. We looked at the types of training statistics and statements from the anti Defamation League. And one of the outcomes we saw was it drove 15x greater anti semitic responses. People felt more hostile, they felt irritated. And the thing is, that's really. And by the way, we did a test where we exposed, we looked at 30 different admission standards from everything from Canada to Harvard to Columbia to the UN to the State Department that looked at this anti oppression training network. And the results there were absolutely stunning. We saw 35% of people and we had control groups. 35% of people saw bias after a control where they saw none after this training, that there was more. 25% thought that damage had been done to the student when before they thought there was none. And 24% thought that the admissions officer or the interviewer had acted with violence against them. And then the punitive numbers of whether that person should be reprimanded went up double digits across the boards. And we did a similar thing where we did training. You know, we had one people read an essay on corn and other people read an essay on on again, anti oppression training. Let me use that as the umbrella term, that everyone's an oppressor or victim, which is a huge problem because I don't want to be an oppressor or a victim. Like there's no good role there. You're an oppressor, a victim or a persecutor on the side of good. None of those roles are good. And we were. And then afterwards we replaced Hitler's speeches using the caste system in India instead of Hitler's terms so that they were less familiar to American Americans. And we saw 25% of people would view the other group as parasitical who needed to be destroyed. So anytime you identify this, and I did some, a fairly set of deep dives around the explosion of anti Semitism after October 7th. Anytime that you identify a group as its own separate group and then you're beating your chest around grievance around that group, it drives more disdain, hatred, defensiveness and aggression towards that group. And we know this and it's fixable.

Host (52:32)

How do you fix it?

Greg (52:33)

You tack to universal values. Another thing we did in the control group was because we were dealing with anti Semitism. In one instance, we exposed people to just tenants of Judaism. Here's basic rules of Judaism shared universal values that were American. All of a sudden we're seeing double digits in the twenties of positive responses that go the other way. And so what's very important is, and I've, I've done some talk with, with Jewish institutions and Jewish groups and orgs as best as I can, which is to say, look, 52% of people in America don't feel that they can openly talk about anti Semitism or Israel or Jews or Israel. Right now. That's really bad. We don't want to keep foreclosing that because what you foreclose you make forbidden. And what you make forbidden becomes taboo. And what becomes taboo becomes sacred and alluring. And so we need to actually do the opposite, which is okay if you hate Jews, if you have a view, this particular view on immigration, if you have whatever you're allowed to have that what you can't do is stop traffic and make true threats and destroy property and shut down universities and commit violent acts. And so there's a distinction between what are, what are, you know, violent words and violent thoughts, let's say, not words that encourage active violence, which is illegal, and what we're going to do about it, but the reaction is the opposite, which is to say, look, you know, for a Jewish group, for, let's say it's a group of people with different Sexual orientation. Harvey Milk, the pathway he laid out. The pathway laid out by Frederick Douglass through John Lewis and the Civil Rights movement. The pathways that are laid out with different groups saying, we only want the same sort of rights and safety around us as every other group has. And our core values are, in fact, aligned with core American values. Or if you're in a Western country, core Western values. And that's okay. That goes back to the Greeks and the Romans, because those values are the ones that set the conditions to allow the center to hold and the fringe to thrive. They're the only ones that do that. And that there is a language for how the fringe needs to exist and how it negotiates and how the center. It can't get too rigid. And we need to be able to have that balance back. And we've done this forever. So a shared set of values that uplifts everybody as opposed to a continuous disintegration. You've talked, I don't know if you've had Jonathan Pageau on the podcast.

Co-host (54:57)

No, we haven't.

Host (54:57)

We've overlapped, but we're friends.

Greg (54:59)

Jonathan is a stunningly deep thinker, and he talks about how one of his lectures is. He talks about how a symbol is something that unites and upholds. And what the word diabolical actually means is to disintegrate into pieces. That's what diabolical means. The more we disintegrate and become zero sum of like, well, you know, do we need it to be. How many points of intersectionality do we line up to have rights that are different from everybody else? It's not going to get us there. What are the rights that we share? And the other thing I will say, just while we're talking about this is we don't have time anymore, I believe, to continue on a path of comparative grievance. And that's not something I'm limiting only to the left either. There's all sorts of tribal grievance that is happening right now. China is building 33 large nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors. I mean, the energy war is on. That's what's going to power AI. That's what's going to power drone warfare. We have seen from Ukraine that drone warfare is going to be everything. America now has zero in production. Okay? That's a tiny little microcosm of what we're looking at. If we are negotiating backwards and. And we're not going to have time in full to have more fundraisers and more elections, and then these guys are going to win without being corrupted. And then at the midterms, they're going to get control without being corrupted and they're going to pass the magical law laws and then we're going to reach a new utopia that's going to come in. We have to deal with the real world in real time. And that means that we have to look forward and we have to look at the chessboard before us now. And I think that the stuff that's trying to move backwards and is moving us into grievance, that has to be cleared and negotiated before we'll do deal in any way with anybody else around us and join those resources that we need, conservative and liberal, the more problems we're going to have in the world and we're not going to be able to keep up with countries that don't need to have this kind of negotiation because they don't care about free speech and they care way less about women's rights and minority rights than we do.

Co-host (57:01)

Which is why, going back to economic inequality, to me it's such a huge issue. We had Barry Strauss on the show, we've had him twice and we're gonna have him again. He's a brilliant, brilliant ancient historian. And he said one of the main reasons why ancient Rome fell was a growing disparity between rich and poor. Because when the poor feel that they can't have access to society, that they can't buy property or whatever, it may be that they are essentially third or fourth class citizens, then why are they gonna vote? Why are they gonna fight for a country? Why are they going to be part of a society if they feel that they have no chance of being part of that society? So this is why I think more and more we talk about race in America. We talk about all of these different issues. To me, this is the number one thing America really does need to solve this because you need to have people who are prepared to fight and die for this country. And that tradition, that ain't the middle class, that ain't the wealthy, that's a blue collar guys and girls.

Greg (57:58)

There's an amazing amount of arrogance that happened. You know, again, I hate using terms like the elite. We have so many terms that are captured and that's actually part of the Orwellian game. So I don't mean that in a, you know, screamy manner, but I do think that there's been a real separation from the people who keep the country running and moving, who are building things in the world and laying pipes and extracting oil and can keep the country running. You can't denigrate them with faculty lounge research and terms and henpeck. All of their, their notions and their use of language. There's an enormous embodiment of wisdom and common sense. And we, I think that's something that we've really forgotten. And there's been a lot of arrogance. And I think one of the things that's happening with an AI revolution, evolution right now is a lot of jobs that are previously sort of tony jobs that you're well taken care of are going to get eaten by AI and like, if you want to be a, you know, millionaire in America right now, if you're an electrician, if you're a elevator repairman, if you're a plumber with a fleet of cars like vans, those are going to be really good bets. And for some reason we thought that the people who were, who were down with their hands in the dirt, where theories have to meet reality. You need a crew. It doesn't matter if your crew's top value is inclusion, empathy, or some loyalty test to a party. What matters is they can get the job done and they're conscientious. And the further we get removed from this, the worse shape we are. And look, the other thing I like so much about dealing with problems in reality and fixing them is every time I've done that, so many of my suppositions are wrong. First of all, and you know, one of the things that, that I was counseled on enough to take really seriously was the majority of interventions in the culture make things worse. And if you want to make things better, you have to operate and deal with them in reality. Well, in reality, almost all your notions of the world are confused and out the window if you're trying to get a measurable income. And it's very, it's very humbling to try to make something work, a small business, a venture or anything to build or do something. Something in the real world, it's a process of undeceiving. But the other thing is in conflict resolution, one of the things you do is there's all these great programs where, like, if you're trying to get two gangs to stop having violence on the street is you take them away in a different context. You go out in the woods somewhere, you chop up the teams, and then you play capture the flag with the teams mixed in different ways. And the more we can do this with smaller strike teams, both politically, both within the kinds of ways that you guys try to have these different voices where someone comes on and you're like, well, Sam just said this last week, but here's somebody who's more conservative, has this view, the more we can get people working together in something that's in the real world, that's bent at fixing real things or that is based on cooperation. That's how these things fix. They don't fix from training. They don't fix by talking to your prefrontal cortex to tell you about what in group favoritism looks like and why that's offensive and what microaggressions look like in your face when you're an eight year old boy. It's way too abstract. And so when we get to fixing things, and that's why I have a sort of continued, I'm continuing to implore that we look at reality condition to condition to condition. You can be as mad at Trump as you want about a bunch of things, but it is important to look and to acknowledge, hey, wait a minute, he just raised sanctions on Russia and now China has stepped away and India has stepped away and that seems to be having a positive effect. And as Americans, with an American president who's leading in the world, those are probably things that we want to have because that's a peaceful resolution to a conflict that's killing now in the millions of people. Right. We have to be able to separate and look at that and hold another thought in our head, which is, oh, but I find this thing over here with the administration problem problematic. Guess what? Everything's problematic. We're humans, our institutions are corrupt, people are corrupt, everything is a mess. And if we can look in reality and see what impact our choices are having and where to criticize and where to view with nuance, I think we can start to go a much longer way. Instead of, you know, front towards enemy at all times, no matter what happens.

Host (62:20)

Well, one of the things for that to happen, I think, is you have to make certain changes to the way our social media algorithms are operating. And you've written quite a bit on some of the solutions around that. So as we wrap up, can you give us the basic Greg's plan on how to solve social media?

Greg (62:37)

Yeah, well, let's see, it's a, it's a, it's a, a tentative step in the right direction. I don't know about solving, but the first thing is, is I do think we need algorithms to be transparent. And you know, I know there's a lot of complication around what's proprietary that people can steal, but we need independent groups. Like what we want isn't to control freedom of speech. What we want is more transparency. Right now in every field across the country, there's massive distrust. And the only solution to distrust is transparency, because you need truth first before you can have reconciliation. You don't ever get to reconciliation without truth. So freedom of speech is not freedom of reach for profit. That's not what freedom of speech means. It doesn't mean that you can distort this through psychopathic algorithms, bad faith players and hostile foreign regimes. We need to know when the free market needs to know and advertisers need to know and parents need to know. What are we looking at and why are we looking at it? If I do nothing but put your attention on interracial fights in cities for 24 hours, you're going to come out thinking things differently. What is the aim of that? So we need to have those that are transparent and can also be assessed. And the other thing I like about that is, leaving aside, obviously the illegal, but we want people to dip into ideas that are maybe dangerous or menacing or fringe by their own choice. We don't want it governed by, you know, some Uber agency, what people can look at or can't look at, short of the illegal. Because those interventions into darker corners, they should be inoculative. Right. They shouldn't be deranging. And so if you know what's where. I mean, we've all, you know, we had this in context. I was talking about our phones with how phones work. Well, there's certain books we could get, there's certain things we could get when we were younger, but they weren't everywhere all the time being fed to us. Other thing is, is I do believe that we should privilege people who use their real name in their communications online. That doesn't mean that you get rid of people who are anonymous. You, there's whistleblower accounts, but there's, there's all sorts of everything else. But if you're going to say something and stand behind that with your own name, in a way, maybe there's a first tier of engagement that happens on social media platforms. And everyone else can be here and you can go sift down here and things can be borrowed from there and you can go explore all you want. But real people who are using their real voices should, and having some courage and some accountability and some reputational force that they're standing behind should have some modicum of, of privilege within the system.

Host (65:17)

Because anonymity breeds toxic behavior.

Greg (65:21)

Yeah.

Host (65:21)

In the same way that when we're driving a car and someone cuts in front of us. It's much easier to flip them the. But I would not flip you the bird right now for the same. In the same situation.

Greg (65:29)

Yeah, there's no. There's zero cost to being as reprehensible as possible.

Host (65:33)

All right.

Greg (65:34)

And then the other thing I would say is a. We also need to have. We can't get rid of human involvement and interference. There's a lot of like. Well, we have the software that analyzes what's legal or not, and it takes, you know, 50 days to do a review of what is and isn't. We need some human decency and some human common sense. And some people have to make that decision. I've long thought that, that you two would be really good arbiters of this. You know, if there's like a. I don't know what exactly the process is, but to have arbiters of what constitutes legitimate discourse and what can just be commonsensical to say that's clearly is geared for hellacious aims. We can't act as if everything can be AI assessing what AI is because there's infinite ways to game at. So don't be afraid of human judgment. We've used human judgment our whole lives. And the other thing I would say is we should identify and eliminate inauthentic content. If there's a bot swarm that's initiated and we've seen this around hate speech that's gotten initiated around debates. I've track this, you know, at different times for Jordan, for Douglas Murray. When things go sometimes 35% of it is false or 35% of it is from foreign regimes or is sourced outside the United States. Well, we should know that. We should know when there's a paper tiger effect, because one of the aims of onboarding with hateful, dangerous narrative is to create that permission structure. That's why Russian agents, for instance, went to France and they painted Stars of David on Jewish houses and synagogues so it just looked like anti Semitism was everywhere. So you can onboard it more. Well, we don't need that. Nobody needs that. Advertisers don't need it. Social media doesn't need it. So if it's a bot swarm and inauthentic stuff of one person who's sitting in a troll farm in Moscow, we should be able to identify that and call it what it is. Freedom of speech does not mean unlimited access through for foreign adversaries who want to divide and destroy us to speak to our youngest people. That's not what freedom of speech is about. It's Also suicidal.

Co-host (67:40)

Greg, it's been a brilliant interview. Thank you so much. Final question is always the same. What's the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be?

Greg (67:54)

That we. That there's been a disconnection between, I think, the secular and the symbolic world and wisdoms and, and means and methods of making meaning, and that those two things have come apart. And I think right now we're at a process of trying to, to reintegrate those two schools of thought of how people think. And I'm saying symbolically, that can be mythologically, archetypally, narratively, religiously, and a secular sort of more, you know, intensely fact based approach. These two modes of thinking are almost entirely disconnected. And when you're in one, it's very hard to understand and comprehend what the other is saying. We need a lot of translation and a lot of understanding. And those two things need to continue to be in conversation and feathered back together in the way that they have been in the past.

Host (68:44)

All right, Greg, thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to substacktriggerpod.co.uk where we ask Greg your questions. Is there any evidence that any part of the political left, including the media and movie studios, have taken any responsibility or feel any guilt or regret about legitimizing violence against conservatives?

Greg (69:17)

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