New Think - with Gregg Hurwitz (nR53MJd8VLI)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nR53MJd8VLI

It’s like your phone is basically a terrorist that’s trying to extort you for money. And so anytime you’re on your phone and you feel something, someone’s making money. So of course, here it is that it’s a tool that we need to use because, well, some of us do, right? Some of us don’t. We could always go off and live in a yurt and have a different existence that makes a lot of other kind of sense. But if we’re trying to integrate in the world, we need it. But I mean, imagine, like, these phones are so dangerous in certain ways if they’re not controlled. It’s like with our kids, we almost are ceding to be like, okay, well, you can have a little bit of crack so that you’re not left out of everybody else is doing crack all the time. Like, we don’t want you to be excluded from the crack community. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. All right. So hello, everybody. I am very happy to be here with Greg Hurwitz. Greg has been on my channel before you might have seen him. He’s also been involved with Daily Wire, the Exodus series that we’re doing. You’ve had great conversations. You might have also seen the conversation between Greg, myself and Jordan about Jordan’s tweets. And so I would say that in the process of this, we’re kind of progressively becoming friends and discovering our relationship, like discovering the similarities and differences between our position. Greg comes from a more democratic kind of, let’s say, left leaning world, but he’s been really great at crossing bridges and being able to discuss things in ways that sometimes it’s hard to do. So today, I want to talk especially about a new book that he, a new comic book that he put out New Think, in which he, it’s like a modern fairy tale that deals with AI and some of the problems of technology. So I’m sure it will veer to all kinds of things, but that’s what at least the beginning of the conversation. So Greg, thanks for coming. It’s good to see you, Jonathan. Yeah, it’s good to see you. So Greg gave me a copy of New Think a while ago, and I went through it and I was really excited to see, first of all, it’s beautiful, by the way. Like the art is just really beautiful. There’s something very poetic about the way that you do the work and the panelling. It’s almost non-linear in terms of the way the panel is set up and the text. You can read it. You actually create interesting ambiguity in the way that you set up the text in the pages, so that even if you could read it in different ways, but it would still kind of bring you the thrust of the narrative. I thought that was very fascinating, but mostly what I was fascinated by was this capacity to take fairy tale tropes, the vampire, this kind of possessing agent, this demon or something like that, but then frame it in the technological world. So the first question is, yeah, what is the thought process that drove you into that mode? Well, I was thinking about, I mean, there’s so much that’s happening in our world that is so utterly insane. And it’s like we’re like a frog being boiled one degree at a time. And so I keep thinking if we ported us in from 20 years ago and sat us down in this moment of what’s happening technologically, it’s bananas. We can’t even make sense of it. I mean, I sent Jordan an email the other day because we were talking about his Rogan interview and I just pinged him. I said, hey, I just watched that on 3.5x and he was like, yeah, me too. And I just said, imagine back when you were my advisor, if we were strolling across college campus, and I said to you, hey, 20 years in the future or 30 years in the future, however long it’s been, you’re going to be announcing a new project for sovereign nations in Europe and you’re going to go on the website of a media news demon who’s a former mixed martial arts fighter and professional comedian who is the biggest news interviewer on the planet and you’re going to have an exchange with him and I’m going to ping you and say that I watched the exchange at 3.5x speed and you’ll respond, yeah, me too. And there’s going to be nothing else we say about it. I mean, it’s utterly surreal what we’re living in right now in so many ways. And so I thought, I’ve written a lot of thrillers, fiction, horror, I’ve played around with a lot of different forms and I thought it’d be really fun to tell these black mirror-like tales, to have five of them. The first one is a science fiction thriller, the second one’s a fairy tale, the third one is a vampire horror stalker story, the fourth one is a time traveler story, and the fifth one’s a children’s tale, like a children’s story. And I wanted to take these tropes and twist them around so that I’m showing our reality through just a different lens, a different kind of frame break. And that’s something we do a lot in when we talk about things politically and culturally, right? If you want to make people think differently, you have to break the frame on how we’re viewing our own situation. And our own situation now, our reality is so surreal and so bizarre that I don’t even need to tell stories that are actual science fiction. I could just tell our current reality through a different lens to show the insanity. So I did five stories like that with five wonderful artists. Yeah. And so it’s interesting. I think it’s interesting, especially because, like you said, you almost don’t have to show a dystopian future. You’re basically representing something which is happening now, but you’re just framing it through narrative in order for people to be able to see it differently. And in some ways, it’s different from black mirror even, because black mirror, they’ve been very prescient. They kind of just look that one step ahead and they’ve been pretty good at it, but you’re just showing us the reality now. That’s right. And trying to get people to think about it differently. I mean, the first story is called The Screens. And I spell it with a K so that it sounds science fiction-y, but it’s screens, it’s computer screens. And basically, I show how they came as sort of a sentient being. If you describe them that they came to earth, and first they were like giant and corpulent and there was just a few and they were very expensive. And then through time, we basically worshiped them and then we became enslaved by them. They got smaller and sleeker and thinner, and we got kind of more obese and more dysregulated. And we worshiped them at our altars at home with our laptops, like the one I’m talking to you on now. And then we have these things we carry with us all the time. And we go to bed with them, we wake up with them, they’re monitoring our whole life, and we carry them on our transportation to work. And then we sit down at another altar, and then we deal with that screen at that altar. And we basically are constantly managing them and maintaining them and updating them and finding patches for them and making sure that they work. And so I just frame this as a story. Like if you view our relationship with our screens, with our computers through different lens, they basically come to earth and enslaved us. Yeah, but I mean, what’s interesting about to me in that particular video, what was interesting video, I mean, in a particular story, was interesting to me is that I’ve been, you know, for the last few years, I’ve been trying to talk with, you know, cognitive scientists and different people about the manner in which agency manifests itself, you know, and so like also help people understand in some ways, what even the ancients thought when they use the word demon or the word angel, you know, this idea of transpersonal agency that is coherent and acts upon us. And so, and there’s even in terms of mythological thinking in Christian, the Christian world, there’s this whole idea, right, you probably know these legends, these legends about how, you know, these fallen angels came to earth and taught people technology, and then that brought about kind of corruption and that’s what’s led to the flood, for example. But I feel like today, at least today, because we’re seeing what’s going on and we feel like we’re not in control of, and it’s interesting because I saw it with my own kids, you know, when we were homeschooling for a very long time. And when I finally put my kids in school, the first year, my daughter, I told her, you don’t need a phone, you know, why would you have a phone? Like this is ridiculous, you’re 13, you don’t need a phone. And she was like, Dad, I need a phone. If I don’t have a phone, I won’t be able to do anything. And we’re like, no. So she didn’t have a phone for the first year she was in high school. And then we realized that we had basically alienated her from every other child and that she had no friends, nobody talked to her, nobody wanted to see her because she just was out of the system. And then we had to give her a phone if she was going to go to school. And then you realize that you’re not in control, like exactly what you show in your video, that there’s a type of agency that is leading us and we just kind of play along. And if we don’t, we get so excluded that we can’t participate. That’s exactly right. I mean, I’ve been through this, you know, with both my daughters in different ways, but my youngest daughter doesn’t have anything. I mean, she has a phone to text, but she herself got off Instagram eventually. But I mean, the way I think about this is it’s like, we all know what’s happening. So look, I’m powerless in the face of it. If I go on Twitter every day, if I’m on, let’s say I’m out on a book tour and I’m, so I’m checking like reviews and where I’m supposed to be and stuff, I actually can see that my attention span is getting fragmented, right? So my own agency, my own intelligence, such as it is my own training, it’s not better than teams of addiction specialists hired by a social media company backed by deep machine learning algorithms. I can’t overcome that. That’s insane to think that I can. And they look, you know, when you’re scrolling on your phone or when you’re on a screen, they can see, they track like your eyes. Like if you hitch on one tweet a little bit or on one post, let’s say, they know where you’re hitching to give you more of that. And so I just keep thinking like, imagine if I was in seventh or eighth grade, right? I don’t even have myelination of my prefrontal cortex yet. And I’m being bombarded with the most salacious possible gossip that’s designed algorithmically to target my anxiety, outraged lust, right? To keep me glued to that screen. You know, it’s like your phone is basically a terrorist that’s trying to extort you for money. And so anytime you’re on your phone and you feel something, someone’s making money. So of course here it is that it’s a tool that we need to use because, well, some of us do, right? Some of us don’t. We could always go off and live in a yurt and have a different existence that makes a lot of other kinds of sense. But if we’re trying to integrate in the world, we need it. But I mean, imagine like these phones are so dangerous in certain ways if they’re not controlled. It’s like with our kids, we almost are ceding to be like, okay, well, you can have a little bit of crack so that you’re not left out of everybody else is doing crack all the time. Like we don’t want you to be excluded from the crack community. So why don’t you go on and have a ton of images of other kids, right? Who are posting an idealized version of themselves that you can look at this fake version and then know that you’re not living up to it because it’s fantasy, but you alone know that you’re not. Yeah. And my sister’s a pediatric gastroenterologist and she made an amazing point about this because she’s in the Bay Area and she sees kids all the time who are like, I can’t sleep. I have anxiety. I have depression. I’m not eating. And she goes, give me your phone. And they give the phone and she goes, oh, look, you’re on your phone 11 hours a day, right? How often you’re on your phone? They’re like, I don’t know, like two, three hours and you can look on an iPhone and they’re being eaten by it. And she also made a point that I thought was quite brilliant where she said, you know, it used to be, let’s say you go home for the summer and let’s say two of your friends or acquaintances went on a trip that summer together like to a lake or to Hawaii. If you go back to school on, you know, in September when school’s back in and they say, oh my God, we had so much fun, you know, at the beach, you feel really bad. And then you go to a homeroom and then you go to recess and you move on. But now you’re home and every single day they’re posting, like you’re looking at these other kids where you’re not posting. And what they’re not posting is the fight they got in or the fact that there was jellyfish thing or the fact that someone was super passive aggressive and they had a big fight or that someone’s boyfriend was mean or the food sucked. They’re posing, they’re posting these posed versions of themselves and it’s constantly in your face, this like sort of fake reality. I mean, that’s even before we get into the filters. So how do we navigate that without becoming like Luddites, right? Because that’s not going to be helpful either if we like exclude our kids from the modern world. And so it’s an unbelievable challenge that I don’t think we’ve figured out the appropriate ways to turn the dials on. Yeah, definitely. And what’s interesting is, like I said, the notion that it’s that it experienced as agency on us to a certain extent, and it has its own logic and its own kind of moving its feet in the world. That a good example is even now, my kids, the same with my youngest daughter, we try to hold back the phone as long as possible, but then the teachers give people their homework in class on their phones. So if you don’t have a phone in class, you can’t even function because the teacher is literally giving the assignments and will give quizzes on people’s phones. It’s like, man. My wife was a psychologist, is a psychologist. So she was in the field for a lot of years, which is great because she was very practical. She worked with like child prostitutes and kids one step before juvie. And then she went and taught. So she had a lot of clinical experience to bring to bear. And one of the things she would do is have her students get off their phones for just a long weekend, four or five days and keep a journal. And they exploded. They were sweating. Some of the kids in her class didn’t know how to turn their phones off. She had one person whose wife was emailing her because she thought that he was having an affair by not responding. And the other thing that happened is she had students who were dating. And what they realized was is whenever they had an argument, they couldn’t have an argument face to face. So they’d have to leave and then resolve their stuff over texting. And so what was very interesting for me about that is when we talk, and it particularly if you sing, for instance, we have Immunoglobulin B, which is a great autoimmune booster. Like if you sing, especially if you sing with other people, especially if it’s in a choir. So here we are back to the sacred, let’s say. It boosts it. It’s performance. Yeah, it boosts your sort of immune system as you’re singing, as you’re using your mouth, because our tongue’s wired to our brain, is wired to community. And so as increasingly you see kids kind of flatter of affect, right? Like we all have that story where we sound like cranky old people. We’re like, these kids are so disaffected, right? Like they don’t know how to express or make eye contact. But if your whole expression is that your face is blank and you’re here and you’re using a special language that’s designed to make it easier for the phones, not for us, or to make us more malleable for the phones, giant, laughy, cry face, LOL. And I’ve seen people do that where they’re deadpan, LOL, rolling on the floor laughing, right? And they’re deadpan. We’re actually moving off our evolutionary design. You’re not moving our mouths. We’re not engaging, right? If you’re in a conversation with somebody, oxytocin is the bonding hormone, right? It’s a release. And that’s not just for intimate engagement where it occurs, right? And not in individual engagement, let’s just say, but it’s also in conversation among friends. And so if you’re talking and you have a close relationship with your focus, I forget the amount of time, but there’s an amount of time if you’re sitting in a discussion or fellowship, whatever you want to call it with close friends, there’s a release that you get of a bonding hormone, right? But if you have a phone out and you check it every so often, you don’t get that release. And part of that has to do with us checking a close visual field, far visual field, close visual field, far visual field. It’s triggering different parts of the brain. And so we can’t settle into something that actually derives feelings of kind of bonding and community. But also, yeah, your mind is also just split when you’re doing that. If you’re with friends, but you’ve got your phone and every time you’ve got a chance, you just kind of check to see what your notifications are, whatever, and you are not there. Like you are, your attention is split. And it’s also weird because you think about this, like, let’s talk about this in mythological or religious terms. It’s like, we’re not God, we’re not supposed to have access to every single thing, every person in our entire community that’s even unimagined, like, oh, that guy who I had, you know, I was in Little League with, and the girl I had a crush with in fifth grade, like, oh, how is she feeling about her cat or President Trump right now? It’s this inundation, right of information. And there’s a sort of arrogance to think that we can moderate and dip in to the entirety of the world. Yeah, of course, it’s like, you know, again, what are we going to do? Because we can have a discussion, you know, when the print when the fabric looms were introduced, for instance, Austria’s entire peasant class, I think this is in the 1800s, was relying on making money with their hand stitching. So they just shut off, they had an authoritarian state and said, no, we’re not going to accept them, right. But England had an integrated them, and then continue to go take over the world. And, you know, Austria kind of shriveled up. So we also can’t stand in the way of it and have like our own little like Luddite circle where we’re, we’re removed from the world in a way that we need to engage. And so it’s a lot of what I’ve been thinking about since our Exodus seminar, Jonathan, because in particular, I think, for me, you have a way of talking about faith and organized religion that really resonates with me because you pay so much attention to aspects of the fringe and how the fringe negotiates with the middle and what the middle is right in a real openness about the fact that in any faith, and in or while certainly we were focusing in this instance in Judeo, we’ll call it Judeo Christian, because we all know where things are headed. Faith, that there’s an admonishment against too much pureness. Like one of the things that was so funny is we were talking about the story of Miriam, right, who came in all snotty pants about Moses when he wants to marry an Ethiopian. And she was, you know, clucking at him that he shouldn’t write, it’s too much outsider, right, skin color doesn’t match. And in one of the great strokes of humor in the Old Testament, God came down and turned her snow white. It’s like, Oh, you want to be pure? You want to be too pure? How about if I make you glow and now get out of the camp for seven days? So she’s this like glowing, unappealing, ridiculous version of too much pureness. Yeah. So there’s this negotiation which you illuminated for me in a way I didn’t understand coming from my world. I think, well, who knows what world I come from, but meaning a lot of people who are, let’s call it tilting more liberal have a view that if that religion only wants to impose sameness and only wants to have exclusion, right, but here’s this clear admonishment to say too much pureness, right, that’s the monster of the right. Like, how dare you? How dare you not allow integration of new ideas? And I was captivated also by the fact that, you know, after Moses strikes the stone twice, oops, and then gets excluded and his entire generation is excluded from entering the promised land also due to some of the lying about what they saw in Canaan. The only two people of that generation allowed to enter the promised land are Joshua and Caleb, and Caleb’s not an Israelite. Yeah. It’s like 50% of the elders who enter the promised land are foreigners, right? Like, why’s that, right? That’s not a lesson of ultimate purity. Yeah. I think you’re so right. I think you’re so right. I mean, the story of Exodus is you can see it as a mediation between, let’s say, unity and multiplicity, and that’s one of the tracks that you can follow to see the story of Exodus. And if you do it that way, it’s very powerful because, you know, in some ways there’s an ad, you know, it talks about the mixed multitudes. There’s a few times where it uses that term, and there’s a sense in which that’s not good. Like, you don’t want just a bunch of different people that coexist together without any sense of unity. But then there’s a covenant that binds them together, and that actually makes them participate. But in that participation, there’s differentiation, and there’s, you know, all the tribes continue to exist, and the strangers also exist in the land. Like, Caleb says that Caleb gets the fringe of the camp, gets the outside of the camp. So he participates. He’s not totally on the inside. He is, but he has the border, let’s say. And that, you could imagine that that’s like a normal thing in any state. Like, if you had two empires, the people on the border would necessarily be mixed with the other empire. Like, so they would get the border because they’re not, they’re kind of mixed, and that’s fine. That’s how it kind of works. You need those buffers between identities in order to function. So I think that that’s one of the places where I hope that the conversation, let’s say, about how traditional societies really function can avoid the problem of the opposite, right, like you said, of thinking that tradition is just like a kind of purity and that breaking tradition or modernity is just about kind of shattering that. But it’s, traditional societies are quite a way more organic than that in the actual way they function. Well, and you speak to them, to my mind, with a lot of openness and care about all these places. And that’s rare. Like, I think a lot of people, you know, they don’t understand, it’s not like faith, it’s not like religion has been uncorrupted any more than the rest of our institutions, right, or captured politically. And so I think people have a sort of pullback from any mention of it in a way, the same way that other people will if you talk about like a straight secular higher education, right, or your, you know, HR department, right, or like all these places that have gotten kind of overlaid in their own aspect, some of which, of course, there’s there’s uncorrupt versions of everything, faith included. But what was so interesting for me about that was it fits so much in a lot of the thinking I’ve been doing about kind of our culture, which is, we have to have conservatives, we also have to have liberals, and guess what, that bell curve of those traits, and not to detour too much, but there’s, we have big five personality traits that are integral to us, that determine very much which way we sort of will lean on a spectrum that can then be measured politically. And they’re the same across all races and cultures. It’s not like black people and brown people are liberal, they’re not. I mean, one of the big jokes in the 2020 election was that Biden got the Latin X vote and Trump got the Latino vote, right? It’s like, right, it’s, it’s not like, it’s not like we divide into these personality traits by the color of our skin. Yeah, no, that’s a reason for both of them, whether, whether one views that as evolutionarily selected, or God given, or is that the same thing? And part of that is so that, you know, conservatives who want to tilt more towards holding order, which is necessary, right, some in group favoritism, right, we need to build a wall, right? And you think about that for when, let’s say, the Native Americans, when Europeans were coming towards them with smallpox infused blankets, like, it made sense to have a bit of distrust, right, for an outsider. But, but liberals say, wait a minute, if you build a wall, and it’s not porous, and there’s no movement, then we stagnate and die. New ideas and people can’t get in, and we can’t revivify ourselves, culturally and artistically, we don’t let in the grateful immigrant, right, we don’t let in the things that feed the culture itself. And so getting that balance right, and this is this is me getting back around to what we’re talking about with technology. I mean, one of the things that was really, in some ways, the most compelling to me about Exodus, was the realization in some ways that that one of the key aspects, one of the key roles that faith can play when it is not corrupt or captured, right, when it’s embodied in people who are really talking about it through a lens of love and order, right, not just overwhelming empathy, not just overwhelming judgment, right, but really the integrated full embrace without hypocrisy, is that it’s one of the key aspects of how we order our communities, you know, and so the notion I had is almost like, you know, faith in the in the in this example, or in this frame that we’re discussing, it’s like it’s the conductor, right, that sets the sections of a community in place. And without it, all the sections are blaring discordantly. Yeah, right. But it also doesn’t mean you don’t want the conductor to go sit down in the sections and play the flute and play the trombone and do all that. That’s not the conductor’s job either, right. You can’t have faith shot through all of society, because then everything becomes too uniform. And so part of me is thinking a lot about the role that we need from all of our communities to find the aspects that are neither corrupt nor captured ideologically, right, and how to bring that community into harmonious relation, which of course, our faith and our faith communities have to play a big role in that. And if we have that, all of a sudden, we could set different parameters around technology to go, hey, you know what, maybe our kids in school, maybe everyone checks their phone at the front, at the front, right, they all put their phone in a box at the start of the day, and they get it back at the end of the day. Well, our communities aren’t harmonized sufficiently for us to like, we feel powerless to make that discussion because there’s so many fights and arguments. Right. And I think a lot about, you know, with TikTok, I’m going to get some of the specific facts wrong. But some of your viewers, I’m sure, can correct or update this. But, you know, TikTok, it’s kind of like a massive PsyOps operation, right. I mean, from China, they put all those filters, look, I’m a bunny, look, I’m a unicorn, right. It’s capturing facial recognition. And in the US, you know, one of the things that they’ve done in their export is to lower the amount of time that each video will take place. So it’s something like it used to be 14 seconds, then they lowered it to 12, now they lowered it to eight. They’re just scissoring our kids’ focus and delay of gratification and attention span and ability to focus. It’s literally doing that. That’s rewiring the prefrontal cortex of our kids. But in China, they’re only allowed 20 minutes a day. And it has to be educational. Yeah. So like at home, they’re eating broccoli, and then they’re exporting heroin, right. And we’re letting it happen. And we all know that it’s there. You can read an article about it, but we can’t get our communities and our politics and our businesses together to look at this and just go hang on a minute. Right. It’s like we’ve lost our ability to reach a sane consensus about certain things. That’s what we’ve got to get together. And that’s a lot of what we’re trying to discuss in Exodus. And I think what’s interesting, though, about technology that’s fascinating, because in some ways, it kind of raised the alarm in the sense that one of the things that I try to help people understand is that religion ultimately, at the first stance, has to do with attention. Right. That’s what it has to do with. So it’s worship. That’s what it is. And so I think that many people, they don’t totally understand like, why worship? What is this thing? You get together and then you sing songs, you know, you sing songs to God and you all pray to God. It’s like, it seems flaky and ridiculous. But the idea is to understand that it’s attention that binds us. Right. Common attention is what binds us together. And so if we have, if we’re together, and we’re focused on the same thing, like in a sports team, for example, then that will bind us, like we’ll experience togetherness in a way that is hard to describe. If you know that we’re all trying to score a goal in a soccer game, then all of a sudden it’s like things start to move together. You start to be aware of the other person without thinking. You make a pass without looking. The person is there for some reason. It’s like this magical cohesion that happens as you’re moving towards a purpose. But that has to do with common attention. So if we, so religion and faith, what it tries to do is to identify what’s the highest point. Like what’s the highest point of attention? What’s the thing that can bind us most, the most together in the most important way and the highest way? And so you could say, I mean, a simple way to say it’s like if we all stand together and worship the creator of the universe, who is also the God of love, you know, who loves us and made us in his image, it’s like maybe that would be the highest point of attention that would bind us towards. And then things will flow down from there. And so one of the things that’s interesting about the whole technology question, the capture of the screens that you talk about a new thing, is that it’s doing the opposite, literally in the algorithms. What it does is that it identifies your idiosyncrasy and then it feeds you more of that idiosyncrasy because it’s the most immediate way. Common attention is hard, right? It’s difficult to work together towards a purpose, but like that little kick of like, get what you want in your little private desires, that’s easy to give you. And if I can, the more I give you that, then we’re actually kind of fragmenting ourselves. Of course. I mean, you think about it like a 12 year old boy with an internet connection right now has more sexual images at his disposal than in a five minute surfing through the internet than his predecessors generationally to the beginning of time. Like a 12 year old boy’s brain is not designed for that. That’s like injecting cocaine directly into the lizard brain. It’s insane what that is, right? And, you know, so we were there with a good friend who is a giant AI brain who I was joking as like baby Hitler. Like we just have to take him out now right before he ends the world. But then of course the answer is like, well, if someone’s going to do it, it’s better if I do it or else the wrong people are going to do it. Like we’re in this runaway train situation. But if you think about it, we all know our silos, we all know our news sources, but the opposite of it, you know, with AI, I think what’s coming with AI, I don’t think I don’t think secular society has the answers for us unless it also thinks symbolically. Yeah. One of the things I want you to bring up because in another discussion you had this interesting point about AI and how the danger of AI devolving it into individual idiosyncrasy, how that at some point can’t hold. Maybe you can go through that because I think it’s very fascinating. Well, I mean, so you’re talking about this with faith, right? There’s a higher purpose that’s binding people, you know, whatever that means. And let’s say that there’s versions of that in secular society as well for people, right? Whether it’s the constitution, whether it’s art, when people are together creating art, when you’re in a symphony, right? And we can discuss, like I think there’s a reflection of different light on those activities also, right? So, but we needn’t detour here. Well, even the fact that we all have cultural markers that are the same, right? It’s like we know that Bach is important, Beethoven is important. We know that these works of literature, that we can read them and then talk about it because we’ve all read them. So there’s a kind of commonality of attention that holds us not at the highest level, but at a pretty high level, you know, nonetheless. Right. And even television, right, which came on and everyone thought it was the plug and drug and it was going to be the end of the world. And my parents did not let me watch television when I was growing up because they were convinced that it was the end of any focus. But we used to have appointment viewing. Everyone would wait to see like next week, like as a generation, as a community, right, you’re waiting to see, you know, what’s going to happen with Heather Locklear on the next episode of Melrose Place. Like people were talking about it. Things got revealed. The last time we really had that, I think, was Game of Thrones in a significant way. So basically, you know, everyone used to wait, like what’s the new episode? What’s going to happen next week? Right. And as soon as we went to streaming, it’s like, oh, this is so great, right? Netflix drops a whole season. I get everything at once. I don’t have to wait, but I can’t talk to almost anybody about any of the TV shows that I’m watching aside from saying, oh, I’m watching White Lotus season one. And they’re like, oh, wait till you get to season two. Well, don’t tell me anything, right? I don’t want spoiler alerts. I don’t want to talk to you because I don’t know what you’ve seen. And we’re in these different buckets already. And it’s like that’s to our benefit. You know, when I’m home sometimes, I mean, and I click on Apple TV, there’s like a half a trillion dollars worth of entertainment on the TV. But at times, none of that feels special. It’s like I have too much access to too many things. It’s not like I’m waiting for next summer when Return of the Jedi is going to come out, right? Or I’m standing in line for four hours to watch Tim Burt to get into Tim Burton’s Batman on opening night. You know, and so we’re fragmented. So now with AI, let’s take it one step further, right? Well, I want my so my book series is called Orphan X, right? There’s one book that comes out every year. Everyone can talk about it in my community, I go out on a book tour. What happens with AI when everyone can have their own version written for them, right? Where they say, well, I want Orphan X book, but I don’t want any harsh language. And I don’t want any threat to children. And I want to adjust the words down to a high school reading level. And I want it 30% shorter. Okay, being there’s your Orphan X. And somebody else says, well, I like I like the real violence, I want it more grotesque. And I want it to be, you know, epic and longer. So there’s theirs, and there’s theirs. And so you do the same thing with music, right? And we start to do the same thing with all of our AI interactions, we’re doing a version of this with our friends of who we’re liking and unliking, right? We’re curating our relationships, we’re curating our communities, we’re getting rid of things we don’t like. What if we say, well, I want to hear from my uncle, my crazy uncle, but I don’t want to hear anything that is his political views or anything that’s politically adjacent, right? So now what comes in, and it could be overtaxed over social media, is my safe version, I think safe of him and my entertainment. I don’t see him anymore. Like I don’t, I don’t have meetings, then I can almost live in that illusion of my uncle and it’s fine. That’s right. And by the way, I’m watching TV shows created for me, reading books created for me. There’s news stories. And this is what my friend was saying. He’s like, we’re on the verge where we can write a different news story. Let’s say it’s about the war in Ukraine. That can be tailored around the biases or outrage, let’s say, if it’s for nefarious reasons of every member of your family. So all five of your family members are reading a different news story that hits their trigger, their emotional triggers differently. Everyone’s reading different news. And so all of a sudden we’re like in WALL-E, the Pixar movie, where we’re just kind of floating around ingesting things, right? Coming into our system and our own little isolated bubbles. Well, that feels metaphorically, religious speak, that feels pretty distant from God, right? It’s like a vision of hell. Yeah, no, that’s a great image. Like it is a vision of hell. Like you’re alone and you’re in your own, you’re in a circle of your own desires. And the capacity you have to be with others is being diminished, diminished, diminished. So to a point where, you know, it’s very difficult to engage with people that aren’t exactly, exactly in the same line as you, right? Exactly. Almost like little mirror images of you. Well, we’re diminishing our ability to assimilate and accommodate information, which Pajot, the great developmental psychologist talked about. That’s the moderating aspect of development, right? It’s new information. What do you accommodate? What do you assimilate, right? What are things that come in? And we also, we have no idea what’s good for us. We have no idea what’s good news or bad news in the short term. There’s a hundred parables about us, right? And we don’t know if something comes in that’s traumatizing, that feels like the worst thing that ever happened to us, that three years later you go, well, that’s something that fundamentally changed my life based on my suffering. Who’s going to choose awful suffering for no reason upfront if you have a choice, right? So we’re losing the skills of, like, who knows when I, like, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s challenging. It’s rewarding, but challenging for me to go have a conversation with, let’s call it 10 of the most, you know, brilliant conservative minds in the Western world about religion, you know, about the Old Testament. It’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a different kind of corner of the universe where these ideas are being, and it’s a range of ideas, right? It’s like Ben Shapiro’s very different than Oz Guinness, it’s very different to you, it’s very different from, and there’s this kind of whole range of different ideas. And there’s so much where you have to modulate between holding your center and accommodating new ideas and having humility, but remembering there’s a very firm disagreement with some aspect of somebody’s, of thinking. And that’s a skill that you’re building. And we’re not only diminishing our world perception, the worlds we live in, we’re diminishing our ability to even contend with difference in any way that is illuminating. Yeah, and I think that actually does explain why the Exodus seminar is so popular for the strangest, like so, so strange to realize that this, you know, talk about 16 hours about a book and not get through it with a bunch of people and people, you know, and like, like 60% of daily wire subscribers watch it. And so, and so, but I think it’s because in some ways I, we are modeling, you know, the possibility of what you’re saying, the possibility of difference coming together or difference looking for, looking for an honest recognition of things we can see in common while recognizing the difference, you know. Sorry, go ahead. Well, and among our group, it’s not like if we look at the totality of each person, there’s plenty that I’ve done that certain members of the group wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t approve of, doesn’t match their value. Sad. Same for me with some members of that group. But the point is, is we’re not going in saying, let’s do a godlike x-ray of every single aspect of you and your conduct, right? And then make judgment and figure out who we’re going to vote off the island. What it is, is we’re going to meet in a consensus and a kind of fellowship around one topic, right? And everybody is going to be respectful in their engagement of that topic, right? But I’m not going to go back and dig out a tweet from, you know, 15 years ago where you like, you know, insulted Hollywood, pageau, like you do. Like I do. I think you’re referring to other people in our group, but that’s okay. But I think it’s interesting. I just hope like I, in some ways, I hope that it will be a model and not a, like it’s, that’s the problem with media. It’s like, how can I say this? It’s, I’m happy we’re doing it and I’m happy I’m doing this, but you could see how even something like the Exodus seminar could become like a fetishized externalization of the need to do it yourself. It’s like you watch it so you get the satisfaction of doing it, right? The satisfaction of speaking with people and everything without actually having to do it. That’s the, it’s always the danger. Here’s my hope. Here’s my hope. So I work with a woman called Samar Ali, who’s a brilliant international mediator and international, right? She helped mediate the Syrian civil war. And one of the things she talks about is how we’re creating, you can see when we start to create an authorizing environment for violence, right? And we all know what that looks like, right? If you, if you, if we turn on cable news and choose your home team, right, language is increasingly aggressive. The other side is increasingly a dehumanized monolith, right? And then there’s a lot of words that are edging towards violence or towards the suggestion of violence, by which I am not implying that words are violence or that that should be shut down or that we shouldn’t have free speech. I’m suggesting none of that. But I think we understand as we’re looking that we’ve been creating an environment where, you know, cities can get burned down. And one people don’t understand that where the husband of the speaker of the house can get, you know, battered with a hammer and people might make jokes about it. Like we’re inching into some pretty uncomfortable territory. And the solution for this is to create an authorizing environment for negotiation, compromise, right? Civil disagreement, opposing views. And so my hope is that, you know, one of the things I wrote a book that takes place in mind control cults, and why I went in and undercover in a mind control cults to research it. And one of the principles that mind control cults operate by is called pluralistic ignorance. And that means everybody’s really unhappy. But since they can’t share it with anybody, they don’t say it or believe it. They think everybody’s pretending that they’re that this is wonderful. And this is great, because they see the others pretending that this is wonderful. And this is great. Yeah. And it messes with your own perception. So think North Korea, right? Like, everyone’s not that delighted to have no electricity and be starving to death, right? But they can’t say it. There’s no environment to say as. And if you speak out, there’s some risk or danger, obviously, the risk and danger and the courage that takes in North Korea, we’re not holding a candle to, right? For the fact that we’re risking what we call cancellation or kind of outrage or reputational financial damage. But there’s some of that, right? It’s not it’s not a super easy endeavor for a bunch of people who think differently to come together and do this. But the hope is that it creates an authorizing environment for people to see other sides of different sides, right? There might be some people, you know, the daily wire subscribers are probably not going to be as aligned with me on average for some of my political views. But ideally, if they see me, they’re talking and engaging in a different way. There’s an understanding that we can have negotiations and disagreements in ways that are much more civil than we’re seeing in social media, maybe in the world, and vice versa is the hope. And by doing this, and by trying to model thinking and talking from kind of different perspectives, even as you and I do, you know, in our friendship and in our public engagements, whether we’re, you know, like, braiding Jordan for his tweets, you know, and braiding is the wrong word, right? It’s like it’s like a loving discussion about ways that he might be able to more maximize the ability for people to hear his wisdom is the fair version. But I like to just say braiding for his tweet, because it was really fun. But you know, you hope that people can see that modeled and it starts to create an authorizing environment to say, I want to start saying what I think more, I want to start telling the truth more. And I don’t have to scream somebody else down, because I can’t possibly contain it, right? My I’m so dysregulated emotionally, I can’t possibly talk to Jonathan Pagel, because here’s an interpretation of the worst thing he’s ever said, and I can’t even comprehend it, he must be deplatformed, he can’t be listened to, right? Or with me, and instead to recognize that not just that, but also the ways we might be prevaricating in our own communities to kind of fit in, because we really need in group protection right now, it’s really not safe to not have an in group that’s got your back. And so are there certain ways where you think, well, this part’s gone too far on the right for too much purity, this thing’s gone too far for the left and too much hybridization. But I can’t say anything, because I don’t want to be those other guys, I’m not going to be that across, I’m going to just let that go. And it’s like, speaking truth, right? That’s the, that’s, that’s our sultz and eats in, right? Like, don’t say little lies all the time. And so we’re trying to model that, you know, and let’s hope that there’s some measure of success, and it doesn’t just piss people off. Yeah, it’s a difficult, I mean, it’s difficult to navigate the things you’re talking about. Like, if you, if you try to try to, I always, the way that I always analyze things is I always try to apply it at different levels in my mind. So it’s like, I think of, let’s say, a family, for example, and that you realize that, you know, in a family, if you want the family to function, you have to, you have to kind of let some things go, because it’s the because it is in some ways, the inner group. And you also have to kind of iron over some of the fleets, like some of the things that are that are complicated, or else, you know, it’s gonna get stuck, and it’s gonna not the wheel is not going to keep turning. But then at some point, that can become a problem, right? You know, if you have serious problematic patterns in your family, and you keep ironing them over, and you keep ignoring them, and you keep kind of wanting to smooth it out, so that things function, then, then at some point, it can, it can lead you into into disease, really into a disease pattern. And so you have to find that weird balance. And it has to do with, in some ways, with that weird balance between something like rigor and mercy, something like, you know, focus and openness, like if you it’s like a dance that you have to play, so that you don’t you avoid the dangers of either because the thing about like, the thing about because sometimes when I hear someone’s like, just say that tell the truth, it’s like when I hear that, I’m like, well, and I know Jordan doesn’t mean it that way, because Jordan is very thoughtful about the way, most of the time, he’s very thoughtful about the way that he tells the truth, because he knows that some truth is can be said with a bad intention, right? And you know that, you know that, you know, if you’re in a couple or in a family, it’s like, you can say things that are true, but that the purpose is still like the stab, like you can use the truth like a baseball bat. That’s right. Exactly. And so there’s this, this, there’s this balance that happens between and that and the thing about that is like, because we talk about technology, because we’re kind of running around that is that there’s a there’s something about a face to face encounter. And the looking someone in the eyes that that mediates that, you know, because the problem a lot of that I see it because I’m the I fall into it too. It’s like on Twitter, for example, you know, it’s like you can say you just it’s like people’s people coming after you happened to be yesterday, some guy coming after me and I’m like, dude, this guy’s been coming after me for for months, like he keeps poking me poking me and then I just like, I lose it and I’m just like, and I tweet the thing. And it’s like, like if he had been in front of me, and we had been kind of arguing and we get your moment, your moment like in traffic, where you turn to your wife and you’re like, stay in the truck and you grab your like tire iron and got out of the car was like exactly, stop, yo, crazy. Yeah, so see, I wouldn’t like that definitely wouldn’t happen. And so that would be because I would have to face the person and then have to engage with them. And then he’s like six foot eight and it’s like oops, right. That’s the real reason, but you know, you don’t say it. But I’m just saying that there’s something about like, because you mentioned something earlier where you said these young young couples as a young people that when they get into a fight, then they they can’t deal with each other, they go back on their own and they start texting each other in order to to deal with it. It’s like, man, that’s it’s such a scary spot, because texts are cold, right? They have that kind of coldness to it. Where when you engage with someone, there’s a that you feel it if you’re if you love the person you’re talking to, it’s if you’re attentive to it, what you’ll notice, I mean, at least I noticed it to myself is that, like, I get angry. And then I get angry and I kind of let it out a bit, right. And then but then I let it out a bit. But then because I love the person, all of a sudden, like at the edge of that, I feel some compassion for them. And that’s that’s like something about a fight, which can sometimes be useful. Yes, like you you you let it out. And then it’s like, once you let it out, you see the effect of what you said on the other and you’re like, Oh, man. Okay, so now I have to I have to reel it back because I love that person. And I don’t want although what I said is kind of true. And that’s how I feel. It’s not the extent of what of what of our relationship. That’s right. Unless you double down, right? Unless you double down like the Pharaoh, then you can just write it all the way. I repent, I don’t. And even really interesting, you’re talking about brushing things under the rug. And there’s also, you know, like one of the things, there’s different personality types, how we come to things, right? Like, you can also be too confrontational, right, where everything’s a confrontation. And so one of the things that’s so interesting, for me, it was so illuminating to read Exodus with with so many scholars, and I hadn’t visited it in depth since, since high school, really, in really kind of any kind of depth. But one of the things is, is, you know, we’re talking about how the narrative structure, like what struck me coming from novels and screenplays and such is just looking at it. It’s like, there’s so much attention that’s paid in in building this up as perc into procedural memory, right? That’s the memory. If you get cracked in the head, and you lose your speech, you still know how to ride a bike. It’s the lowest level of memory that before that you lose, because it’s like, here’s what’s going to happen in the story. Here’s the story that just happened. This is sort of the structure of a lot of the things, right? Here’s, here’s what’s going to happen in what’s coming. Here’s the event that happened. And now we’re going to describe the event that just happened. Well, for a straight narrative story for a screenplay, right, everyone be falling asleep. But that’s not the point, of course, of, of what the sort of sacred stories are telling. They’re teaching us how to push it into procedural memory, right? It’s also because in Exodus, there’s so much of it that becomes ritualized. So, right, like the example, it’s like the Passover. So it’s like, here’s what’s going to happen, right? It Passover is the greatest example, because it says like, this is what’s going to happen before it happens. This is what you’re going to do, right? You’re going to eat the bread this way, you’re going to sacrifice the animal, you’re going to put the blood on the lintels. And then what you’re doing is so you remember what happened. And it’s like, whoa, you know, but you realize just how much it has to do with procedural memories. Like, here’s the story, here’s what you’re going to do. And then this is going to be the way you remember it, like bodily by engaging in it, through the rest of the through the rest of history, basically. And so like compare that to mission impossible action scene, right? Like, what do they do? They combine all of them into one thing to keep the audience moving, right? So it’s like, here’s going to be the plan. And as they describe it on the whiteboard, you cut forward in time to do it as they’re describing it, right? We’re not, you don’t want to tell an audience those things. Okay, so why is it procedural memory? Well, part of what I’ve been thinking about, it’s like, it’s asking us to be every single character in every single story. So it’s not like we all just get to be Moses, we’re all also the Pharaoh, right? So when you’re talking about figuring out, you know, like, do you sweep too many things under the rug, or are you too confrontational? Right? Are you too authoritarian? Are you too permissive? Like, we don’t all just get to be Moses, we’re also Aaron, right? We’re also like, you know, God comes down with his with thundering revelation with Moses. And Moses is like, Hey, man, I’ll be right back, like, don’t do anything dumb. And they’re like, let’s build a golden calf and have orgies, right? It’s like, he’s not even around the corner yet. And we’re all of those things, right? We’re trying to strive upward, but we also are failing. And, and if we try to really embody them, which is what procedural memory is, it’s the embodiment of a story, but we’re all the different characters. And, you know, that’s also true. When it comes to the Gospels, right? It’s like, we’re all Judas, we don’t all just get to be Jesus, everyone, right? We’re all the parts of that. And all of these reflections. And I think that’s so much of why it’s shoving it into our spinal cords, the very manner that we’re saying it, it’s ritual, it’s like, you’re all going to fail, you’re all going to build a golden calf and have proverbial orgies or literal orgies, I suppose, you know, you’re all gonna, but you have to constantly renegotiate and figure out the different veils of meaning and figure out the appropriate levels as you try to progress ever and perfectly upward, right? And we’re all going to have failings to hold things together. And we’re not all going to reach the ultimate ideal within our lifetime. And, and we have to own a lot of that. And what’s so interesting for me, there’s a sort of comfort in that too, because it’s like, you know, one of the things I say is I’m, I’m, I’m liberal, a classical liberal, right? In a lot of ways. Well, why is that? Like, part of that’s genetics, part of that’s my big five personality structure. Like, if I do the testing, I’m like, blown wide open and openness, like I’m as high as you can test and openness. That’s a very big liberal trait, right? I’m also an artist. And part of that’s my environment, right? Then part of that’s like, there’s all these things. And for so many aspects, like when I’ve delved into the culture or into politics or into really an exploration of things, one of the things that I realized is like, I’m coming from my own little lens, right? On the world. That’s the result of my experience, genetics, environment, and personality structure. We all do. And we all have different lenses. And all those different lenses are what let us view the common world if we’re doing it in a way that’s more comprehensive, as opposed to we have our own lenses and we just feed them. You know, there’s really cool shots in the matrix where it goes all the way around in slow motion sequence, like how they do that is they set up a giant like arc of different cameras, so that something’s being shot from every angle simultaneously, we all have these different lenses. And if we can integrate them, we get a very three dimensionalized view of a situation. Well, guess what, that’s how we navigate complex change in the world as a culture, right? We can’t navigate it with this set of cameras that are predominantly conservative or this set of cameras that are prominently liberal. Whatever that means. What do you think of the theory that I tried to bring up? I think I brought it up quite a bit in the Exodus seminar, which is that ritual participation is that’s what it’s doing. So if you think about a family meal is a good example where, you know, the structure, the actual ritualization of the family meal is creating outside of thought, the balance relationships between the different types of people and the different types of possible human interactions, right? So it’s like, we’re eating together, there’s certain things we know we have to do, like you don’t make noise when you’re eating, you have to be able to, you have to like speak, but listen, but you still have to finish your meal. So it’s like all of this is being being played together. You don’t want to take too much food. You want to leave stuff from others. You’re checking to see if everybody’s got enough. And so it’s like all this type of embodied action, right, is structuring your, the way in which you should act more in a more, let’s say intellectual or social in a looser way, right? And that ultimately religious rituals have, it’s not the only function they have, but one of the functions that’s what they have. So like Sabbath, you know, coming, getting together on Sunday, worshiping together, processions, all this stuff is doing that for people. I don’t know if you, how do you think about that? Well, it’s really interesting. And it’s along the lines of what I’m talking about a little bit is, so that’s really interesting. So let’s think about it this way, right? Like, so that example I gave of the matrix, right? So let’s say there’s a mini version of that at your table, like you’re sitting around a dinner table and you want to kind of accommodate the reality and story of your family and how your family exists in the culture within all the perspectives. And so when I was describing me and all the things that lead to me having, or arriving more naturally at a liberal mindset, the more that I approach any topic with humility, right? And I’m not suggesting I’m good at this, right? But this is, it’s a muscle we’re always building, right? That’s different. The more that I become, the more that I have a three-dimensionalized version of whatever the topic is. And so there’s a lot of times where I’m like, look, I feel like if I was the perfectly embodied human, if I had sufficient humility and understanding and grace, I’d be exactly 50% liberal and conservative, right? That’s the yin yang. And that sine line, that the sine wave between it is where you want to be between order and chaos. And the little eyeballs are the kind of feet that’s colossus of road standing astride that. And so it tends to be, like I had a really funny, I’ll give you just a quick example. I had a really funny conversation with a elected Republican congressman and we were talking about like infrastructure and regulation. And he said, you know, you liberals think every time that we want to roll back in regulations, it’s so because we want to dump toxins in rivers. And I just laughed and I was like, you’re completely right. That’s exactly what I think, right? Every time that I read a headline and it says like this environmental regulations roll back, I’m like, it’s just big business, right? Trying to like dump stuff. And so, you know, then I did an exploration with a whole bunch of stuff. And of course, like we do need some regulations, but they’re way too overburdened and some are ridiculous and some make sense. Like it’s way more nuanced than my little approach had led to believe. And so I think that what we want to be eventually is all the cameras that are filming Keanu Reeves, right? Doing his little limbo move. We want to be all the perspectives at our table. And in some ways, the wisdom that we want to embody or the grace, I think is the best word for it. We want to embody at our table is to understand and integrate all the perspectives of the family, right? And use kind of minimal possible force and have the discussion and the influence be freely entered into per oz is freely entered into covenant, right? And the more that we can embody the more views it’s like, it’s all the same thing, right? We don’t get to read a gospel and be like, hey, I’m just going to be Jesus. I’m not going to be Judas in my reading of this story. Because that’s just, that’s just how I identify. It’s like, I don’t care how you identify, right? You don’t get to just be Moses and not be the Pharaoh. If you’re reading a story and paying attention, you don’t just get to be you and not your daughter. You don’t just get to be you and not your wife’s perspective. But you can’t lose yourself into that either. So how do you hold your lens and understand all of the lenses? And when we do that, we have an integration, right, of all the mosaic pieces that we can step back from our natural proclivities, but also behold the bigger picture. And that bigger picture is what helps us navigate towards health or prosperity, or at least towards the least awful misery when suffering arises. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that the reason why I brought up the meal is that what I’m trying to push for is I’m trying to push for the idea that if you talk about procedural memory and procedural, you know, procedural participation, there’s a sense in which there’s a lower aspect to this, like a more grounded aspect. But what I think ultimately is looking up higher, which is something like, if you know how to pass, and this, it’s going to sound boring when I say it, but it’s like, if you know to pass food down the table, right? And if you know to be watching other people’s glasses to make sure that they’ve got enough water, enough wine, or whatever, if you have that attention, which is very grounded, and that you’re attentive enough to make sure that everybody gets a little chance to speak, even before the content of what we’re saying, that there’s an embodied procedural reality that’s ritualized, that makes it possible for the other part. Because what I’m trying to help people understand, it’s like, I’m really trying to help secular people understand religious ritual, like why religious ritual is useful. And so the idea is that, because you mentioned it before, like if we stand together and we sing together, right, in a choir, for example, and that especially in a choir, where let’s say you’re in a choir and you’ve got different voices, everybody kind of has to follow their voice, and then but also be attentive to the other voice, because you want to stay in line with what the others are singing, that that behavior, doing that, practicing that, will make it easier for you to then scale that up into the meaning, like the actual explicit meaning world, where you can then discuss with someone. But it’s actually grounded in a deeper thing, like it could be other things, like playing a sport together, you know, that kind of thing, playing games together, you play games together, then all of a sudden, there’s a kind of ethic of the game, which is not political, it’s not ideological, there’s nothing about it, but if you embody the ethic of the game, it puts you in a space where you’re able, then it trains you to be able to interact with others. And it trains you also for the transcendent, right? So what do we say when, you know, Michael Jordan’s Michael Jordan name, we’re like, God, he was out of his head today. He’s not, he’s not him, right? All of, we have so many phrases with that with sports. And like, watch, you know, watch any baseball players step into the batter’s box, if we want to see all the ritual, all the things that they have to do to get embodied in a particular space, right? There’s so many cues before you’re going to step in and engage in a game, which then needs to proceed in a certain way that’s harmonious. No, I think that’s, I think that that’s right. And if we don’t, if we don’t set those cues, right? Like I remember I had these, I had double hip surgery about like eight, nine years ago. And so I was going like, as part of rehab, like a year in, I was starting to go to yoga, which now I love, I do like, you know, hot yoga 110 degrees and whatever, but you know, it’s not like I was good at it. It wasn’t anything that was natural, but it was really funny because I was like working when I first was going and I’d go driving down there and I’d get like all aggravated if somebody was taking a lot in front of me in line, right? Like everyone hurry up, you know, I got to get in and do yoga and be like embodied and relaxed. Like what are all these people inconveniencing me? Right. And so there’s this funny thing that to like, to catch it and laugh at yourself and be like, right, everything that you’re doing, right, is trying to set a template. So of course that’s ridiculous, right? So how do you, how do you set your system down before you go to the gym, talk to your wife, right? Go online, right? Like anything that we do, we want to get into a space that we’re oriented towards where there’s some sort of ritual and engagement where we’re clear of mind that we’re bringing the right part of ourselves to that endeavor, right? The most valuable thing you’re talking about attention, the most valuable thing we have is our attention and where we put it. Like we, we are literally where we choose to put our attention, you know? And so what you’re saying about dinner is it’s like, do we all set the table? Right. You, how do we, how do we come to this, right? Where there’s already a bit of choreography that is ritualized, right? That starts to set the mood for whatever the discussion is to come. It can help people. I think that understand this can help people understand also the important, for example, of holidays, right? Why, why it is, why, for example, like why it would be important, I’m not American, but why would it be important to have a national holiday and why we have to celebrate that with things that are in some ways apolitical, right? Apolitical in the direct sense. It’s like, it’s like there’s a flag, there’s a, there’s just, you know, a parade, there’s a potluck, there’s whatever it is that, that sets a kind of a ritual space of participation in something which binds us, which is something like our nation and that, and that avoids. When we try to, like when we politicize holidays, for example, too much, then it can’t do that. Like it tends to, whichever way you will, you end up doing it, it can’t do that because it’s like, you’re not in the right embodied procedural space that you should be to create that, that ritualized participation. That’s right. And what we’ve seen with the elevation and in some ways, I think this is with the, you know, the leeching out of faith from society is that politics has filled that void. Right. And, you know, I don’t have a great explanation for it because it’s like, you can’t just like rush people into faith. And it’s like, people have a ton of trust in the religious institutions or in the secular world any more than people in the religious institutions have a lot of trust in the secular world and what’s happening. You know, it’s like, but everyone’s got to come back to the table and stitch together. But what we’ve seen, I see this so much in the arts, right? It’s like, for me, there’s a very clear value structure when I’m writing and it’s like art, politics. If you flip them, you’re doing propaganda. Right. So I’ve helped politically. I’ve written speeches and commercials for candidates or people or causes that I agree with, but I’m very clear when I’m doing that. That doesn’t come into books or screenplays or comics. And if you subvert it, and if I’m pretending to tell you a story, but I’m really indoctrinating you just a little bit in ideology, you’re going to get angry and rightly so. Because that’s not why you’re coming to read a comic or a book or many people. Some people just want to read propaganda. They want to be put in their little Wally seat. Right. Yeah, for sure. It’s easier to read the propaganda that you agree with. And so you don’t notice it as much, but we should still be careful because it doesn’t have, and it’s good that you bring up storytelling, right? Because storytelling also, if you have proper storytelling, it does end up being not in the argumentative state, not in the state of dialectic, let’s say, but it’s in the state of procedural relationships. And so you follow a character through events in their lives and you identify with them and then you’re challenged or all of this. That’s something that has a universal quality. They can help us then train ourselves for the other stuff, but you’re right. I mean, you can see it. That’s why right now, so many of the movies and so much of the media has been captured and it’s very difficult. I mean, it’s difficult because it is siloing us. I have a friend who’s conservative, pretty conservative. He said something really funny. He was like, look, in terms of watching the Oscars or something, he’s like, I don’t want to turn on the TV and watch a bunch of people tell me how stupid I am. Part of this in some ways is it’s like, I don’t want to take my politics and moral leadership from artists. I want to take wonder and awe and contrast and shock and surprise and be jarred into ways of thinking from some chaotic vision. I don’t want to read Faulkner and figure out then how to think. Faulkner writes about race in America. It’s just unbelievable. Southern writer, he’s just so nuanced. It’s so spectacular. It just feels like it’s turning your brain inside out or you read Richard Wright. When you’re reading real art, it shouldn’t be neat solutions. I think part of that is a loss of sacred rituals. I’m going to expand the term a little bit, but for me, when I’m writing, I’m trying to engage. I think for you, obviously, when you’re carving, obviously, your subject matter is also more specifically or more closely aligned with the sacred, but we have to hold those spaces in other ways. I have to have my writing or my art as something that’s sacred, that’s set above everything else. If I subvert it to the political, if I subvert it too much to the commercial, it doesn’t work. It becomes something else than what it’s supposed to be. In a world where we’re denigrating hierarchies with some haphazard and where everything’s political, all things are political, we’re losing the different aspects of our society that actually anchor in. The arts should speak differently to politics or should have a different place in the conversation than politics do. Education should have a different place than politics do. Faith should have a different place than politics too. If we see schools embodying ideology, if we see faith communities becoming overtly politicized with one side, if we see art and entertainment in Hollywood start to get hidebound ideologically in a different direction, all of a sudden it’s everywhere we look. It’s a capture because I think that’s the easiest lever for the hate industrial complex, cable news, fundraising letters from politicians, social media. That’s the easiest lever for outrage and terror and fear to have us just hit and be glued to. If we can turn everything about that, did this movie do the wrong thing politically? It’s just hitting the lever. Did this person do this? Do you have the proper stove? Are you adhering to the right regulations? Did the right movie get this award? If we can turn everything into that, it’s a constant churn of judgment and hate and outrage and insecurity and terror. Also, there’s a real pride to it too because then we all feel like we’ve cast ourselves in this immensely virtuous role in some moral pageant where we’re all standing forth against the inequities of the ages or we’re the last voice against mouth breathing reprobate seeking to tear apart the fabric of society on the other side that’s a terrifying monolith that can’t be distinguished. In reality, it’s like, dude, you’re tweeting. You’re not doing anything special. You’re tweeting into a void and you’re probably talking to a bunch of St. Petersburg troll farms or like, we’re not doing what we think we’re doing. We’re engaging in a fake dance with fake intelligence. Yeah. I think that that’s why in some ways when I tell people, there’s a catch phrase, I say people, I say go to church. What I mean by that is in some ways, you have to engage in the human relationships around you. That’s the best way to go about that. You have relationships, you have a family, you have some kind of community around you. That’s the best place to go because in some ways, that’s the place that will have this procedural aspect to it that will ground the other stuff. It’s like if you have to help your kids with their homework or you have to do this kind of really grounded stuff that has very little to do with the ideology, you get engaged in other people’s lives, then it binds you in a different way. It binds you in a way. You can’t outsource that. One of the things I say sometimes is that luxury will be the death of us. It’s like you could hire someone to go teach your kids, coach your kids soccer games. You could have someone else do that. We could always be way too busy with our own lives than to do the stuff that’s the real bonding. Then it’s not even just that you’re coaching your kid at soccer, it’s that you’re driving them. Then you have that car time that you’re not looking at each other. There’s more information and you’re driving them and their teammates. When they’re in the back, they’re talking differently and you get a different view of that. Then there’s discipline and there’s different rules that you engage with on the field. Then there’s different celebrations. There’s so much stuff to it versus being like, well, I’m busy, someone else can do that. You lose all of that texture. Yeah. It’s tempting. I imagine for you, for me, for sure, because there’s so much pulling. It’s so much pulling. There’s so much to do. There’s so many opportunities. It’s like, yeah, you got to be careful. Family, don’t bother me. I’m carving Jesus. Leave me alone. Yeah. I mean, like what? I know it’s like what? Yeah. It’s interesting when you talk about this with community though, because one of the things I think that I’ve been fortunate about is I’ve always moved between really actually diverse communities, not in the modern sense of it, but I’ve so many different communities or friends with really, really differing viewpoints. And that’s challenging. It didn’t used to be as challenging as it is now because there’s so much distrust, but learning to really negotiate that to really try to understand and see. You talked about when you get angry in your family and then you let anger out, but then you see the effect it has, and then you have to pull back. It’s like, if you’re doing that in different communities or different groups, especially in this environment where there’s so much distrust and there’s so much tribalism, it’s amazing because for me, I feel so much undeniable reality to not turn any one group of people into a monolith because once you turn people into a monolith, you dehumanize them. So you can talk about, well, the regressive left or the resentful right, but there’s so much nuance everywhere. And if you’re in real relation with people with really different views, like Jordan, I’ve been friends a long time. I mean, it’s been more than half my life at this point. So many people are like, here’s a tweet he said, how could you be friends with him? And it’s like, well, you think you disagree with him. We have tons of disagreements, right? Some of them even public. I always think like, imagine being so limited in the scope of your imagination that you think that you’d want to be friends with Jordan Peterson and agree with him on everything. What? Like, why would I want to have a relationship with you to try and like win you into my full set of views rather than have an engagement, right? It’s like, there’s so many things to learn and figure out and see differently and to hold the respect that we all come from different viewpoints, big five personality traits, genetics experience, and to really try to embody that, to try and listen. And that’s so much of what we’re doing when we engage with story. Like we’re taking our nervous systems, we’re trying to listen and take our nervous systems out for a test run. We don’t have to be the ones who get eaten by a bear, right? Or nailed to a cross. Like we get to try to experience this and see what it is. And parts of being in community are that way too. And if we lose that muscle to want to really understand and embody what somebody said, the other thing is, is that it requires a lot of security to be able to contain your own emotion about whatever political polarizing opinions you come from to really open up and let another perspective come in and come through. Yeah. And Carl Rogers talked about that, the psychologist, he was the one who, he was the one everyone makes fun of, of like, well, how did that make you feel, right? That he’s that psychologist. But one of the things he did was he sat patients up, like Freud would sit with his beard in his pipe, and then the patient would be laying on a couch and he was sort of sitting and they weren’t facing each other. Rogers sat him up, you’re sitting face to face, you’re looking at somebody. And one of the things he did was he talked about how, like to really listen, you have to embody with empathy in your nervous system almost, like what is being told, but then you have to have security, you’re not going to lose yourself, right? And all of a sudden come out and be like, I’m not going to come out of Exodus all of a sudden and become like a, you know, Christian warrior for the right, which is like a fear that a lot of people would have for, for that venture. Yeah. They’re like, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing over there? And it’s like, look, it’s amazing. Like if I have a chance to sit down and talk with Oz Guinness at length, that’s amazing, right? Do I want to resist that to get as little as I possibly can to make sure I’m always leading with everything that I think first? No. If I can open up to his perspective in a way that then is shared or that he opens up to my perspective in a way he’s so winning Oz, right? That it’s, it’s hard to not be engaged with him. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But if you have that relationship, it’s like, there’s so much kind of richness and then you can go away and figure out your accommodation assimilation, right? And then it’s hard, you know, it’s hard moving between communities right now. You know, it’s like reentry can be hard moving one kind of culture and community back to another, but it’s so worth it. It’s so worth it. So I want to, I want to bring you because right now you just, you’re going to leave on tour for your new Orphan X book. All right. And so one of the things that I found interesting about that is, you know, we were talking about AI and the problem of this idiosyncratic novel. And, and you also have a way with Orphan X, like you, you have a charity that is related to Orphan X that it’s kind of trying to connect into the world. So I’d love for you to just talk a little bit about that, because I think it is an interesting way, because sometimes like we talk about AI and like the danger of it coming and like, we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t, what do we do? And so I think that you found some interesting ways to connect your literary work into the real world to give people a sense of participation and community in something that’s more than just a novel. Right. So look, as we were talking about that, I mean, really over these last weeks, as we’re thinking about this fragmentation with AI, you know, one of the things that occurred to me was, you know, I want to have part of what is going to be special or worthwhile about this, about my writing, about me as a novelist, if pretty soon we can have AI write novels, it’s like we can have arguments about the spark of the, of the divine in humans, right? Like there’s a human governing aspect to, for when you create a novel or a series of novels. But I think in some ways, the thing that’s the most important that’s at the bottom of it. I mean, it’s, it’s really obvious in a lot of ways, but it’s community. It’s the fact that everybody reads the same book, right? I write one Orphan X book a year and the books are really about, I mean, Orphan X, for those of you who haven’t read it, you know, he’s a, he was taken out of a foster home at the age of 12 as like a very unwanted member of humanity and trained to be an assassin and off the books assassin for the U.S. government. He was trained up basically to be an expendable weapon. And one of the things that his handler, he’s a CIA handler who raises him kind of in isolation and puts him through very, very rigorous testing and training, but he tells him early on and he actually really loves Evan. And that’s one of the things that’s a bit different about this isn’t just that he’s trained, it’s traumatic and awful. It’s also the best thing that ever happened to him because it’s the first time somebody treated him with love and care. But so Jack Johns, who’s Orphan X’s handler and father figure, Orphan X’s name is Evan Smoke, he says to him when he’s 12, the hard part isn’t going to be turning you into a killer. The hard part is going to be keeping you human. And so the series is very much about his process of being trained under these, he has like the assassin’s 10 commandments, right? That he’s never supposed to break, but it’s very much about the process of him shattering through into a different understanding of, one of the things I say is he never learned the strange language of intimacy. It’s almost like he’s Pinocchio and he wants to be a real boy. And so it’s the process of his becoming, it’s the process of him learning to be human in a lot of ways. And so the thing that’s the most, I think, important about this is that everyone’s not reading a different storyline that’s designed just for them. Once a year, everybody can read the same story that comes out. And that’s what a fan base is. That’s what readers are. That’s what community is. That’s who shows up when I’m on book tour. We’re all there to talk about and discuss one arc that’s happening. But one of the other things that happens that I set up is that Orphan X, as you mentioned, there’s a charity. So he basically left the program, it’s called the Orphan Program at some point, because those two things, being human and being a killer, are like trains on a collision course. And he essentially becomes a pro bono assassin, like so he can align it with his own moral compass. He’s got unlimited resources. He’s got an insane skill set. And basically, he will help people who are being terrorized by other humans who have nowhere to turn and there’s no way the law can protect them. And so he has an encrypted line, phone number, it’s 1-855-2-nowhere. And you can call it and you can see if he answers it in the real world. And every time he answers that phone, he says, Do you need my help? And so I started a foundation called the Jean My Help Foundation, where we go into local communities. You don’t assassinate people, I hope. Depends who, Pago. That’s right. That’s right. But basically, you know, I do a lot of democracy unit and unity building work, pro bono. And so one of the things that we do is we go into through through organization called Millions of Conversations. I mentioned my the partner I work with in that, whose name is Samar Ali, who started it. And we go in and really left behind counties in a program and build kind of community leaders to then have them figure out what problems they want to solve. And then we bring in experts in, you know, rural economic development and mediation to try and help them out of it. And so really, what it is, is we’re trying to teach them to fish again, right? In this new world where everything has conspired to leave them behind. But one of the things is, is while you’re teaching someone to fish, you also need to give them fish, right? And so do you need my help is something that I set up that’s just a stopgap for some of those things where it’s like, you know, we had one family in the first place we went was in a Grundy County. That’s the most it’s the poorest county in Tennessee. And when we went there, I went there two weeks before the midterm elections. And nobody mentioned Donald Trump or Joe Biden or midterms or January 6, or China or immigration. All that they were talking about was, I don’t have enough gas in my car to drive 35 miles to talk to social services to get food stamps to feed my kid. Like, the problems they’re dealing with were so concrete that there’s no room for all the stuff that we’re screaming about on CNN and Fox News. And so there was, for instance, one of the first, the first kind of grant we made was there was a couple there, young couple, his car broke down, there’s no public transportation, right? The roads are terrible. His car broke down, he lost his job because he couldn’t drive to work, his landlord kicked him out. They had a newborn baby who developed a respiratory infection. And the landlord poured bleach all over their possessions, that’s kind of revenge for them not paying the rent. So there’s this young couple with a newborn who’ve always worked, right? He’s always worked up until now, who are literally out on the streets. And then you get into all these regulations, right? And issues. So there’s local charities who were there, but all of their funding can’t go towards kind of this relief in this particular example, like they can pay for certain different programs, but there was nothing there where the money had been earmarked to help them. So we just stepped in and got them a motel room for three weeks while the task force scrambled on the ground there, and eventually got them a place in longer term housing that didn’t open up yet, but they would have been homeless, right? Got the baby medical care, gave them a base so they had somewhere to sleep. And then they got moved into longer term care or longer term housing. And then the husband applied for a job in the military, right? And then needed some help because he failed the math part. So we have somebody who’s a military veteran, who’s amazing, who’s one of the founders of Millions of Conversations. And so we can point them to resources. And so it’s just sort of like when this little family kind of fell off the curb into the gutter, it’s just this little assist to pick them up and put them back on the curb again, right? And there’s other stuff we have, like a bunch of floods destroyed schools in Tennessee, and one of the schools just got wiped out. And we’re going to go in and just put in like a rural computer lab. I’m sorry, a computer lab for this rural high school, right? That lost all of that for the students. So we’re trying to go in while this longer action plan is kind of being built up. And that’s called Do You Need My Help Foundation so that the readers and the community of Orphan X readers can also kind of participate. And also then the cycle of charity and gratitude stays in the community, right? It’s given by and chosen by the task force, not by me, right? Not by me outside the community, right? So that everything stays within there. And so it’s just another way to try and stitch this community together around the story. And the story ultimately is about helping people, though, of course, it’s a thriller. So he’s, you know, executing. It’s killing people. But I mean, in some ways, I mean, I love it because you’re trying, I mean, I don’t know how consciously you’re doing it, but it’s basically you set up a narrative that is, of course, extreme because it’s in the story world. It’s about assassins, about this. But then you set up a structure and then you’re trying to help that structure inspire people and giving them a path for it to inspire people into their real life. Because I mean, the problem of entertainment is often that it can just be a supplement or it can just replace actual virtuous action, right? So it’s like I watch movies about great figure that did things that are inspiring, and then I can just go back and go back to sleep. You know, where else we found that in a study is that’s also what angry political tweeting does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did my part today, boy. I really told them off. That’s right. You go back to work and it’s like, right beneath the you screaming at your hated politician or celebrity of choice. Like, what’s the cause you’re really worried about if you can peel back all the layers of performative outrage that you’re trying to help? Do you really care about what’s happening at the border or immigration or like, you know, how are you trying to fix that from whatever side you’re coming from? What’s the action that you’re doing? And you’re right, we can sometimes just be blowing off steam. But with storytelling, and I’ve always thought in stories, like a lot of that is trying to challenge myself really, because I’m not, I don’t always know what the characters are going to do. I don’t know how things will turn out. I’m not just filling in the blanks when I’m writing a story. So it’s trying to be about kind of growth out of the chaotic, some organization into some new version of order. But the more that I can have that community around me, both online, and there’s a good use of online, like when I’m online, I try and be about the books and stories and joy and reading and right, it’s a there. That’s a nice way to have an established online community, new social media, at least for me. And when I’m on tour, seeing people who show up, right, who are interested in talking about ideas, who are interested in talking about orphan acts, and then trying to do a bit of good in these communities, while also deferring to and having humility that the communities will know how to help themselves better than I will. Right, we need to go get the local, we need to get the ground truth in those communities to choose where to put those resources. I can’t just come in from the outside and say, I’ve determined everybody needs education. It’s like, yeah, like, where you’ve been the last 40 years, while we were on a slow downhill slide, because everyone was ignoring us. Yeah. So So So what’s the name? What’s the name of the new book and tell people where they can they if they are into it, tell them if they can come see you somewhere. Oh, I’d love I’d love people to show up. So it’s called The Last Orphan. And people can find me my website’s gregherwitz.net. You can find me on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And I’m going to be in London, I’m going to be Northern California, I’m going to be in LA, I’m going to be in all across Texas, Austin, Dallas, Houston, doing an event in Fort Myers, I’m doing, I’m going to be in Tucson and Scottsdale. So it’s a lot of travel that the tour stuff is all on my website, if you want to come look for it. And if anyone wants to come say hi and, and talk story or, or, you know, orientation towards, towards meaning or order or anything else, you know, everyone’s welcome. It’s a there, there are a lot of fun. I love going on tour. Cool. Well, and everybody check out new thing, I really enjoyed it for sure. And I think like, I mean, if for people that have people that have followed my work, you know, some of the stories, like at least two or three, they say three of them of the total really just connect right to the time of things that I that I talk about that I care about. So, so Greg, thanks, man. This is as usual, we could, this is great. And I hope we see each other at if we’re going to do some kind of because we everybody people don’t know we finished the second part of the Exodus seminar. Now, there’s like talk of some other project which would bring us together again. That would be great. It’d be it’d be a lot of fun. But I’ll see you before then, I hope. I hope you’re back from beyond Jonathan. It’s a pleasure. Thanks, man.