https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Rw34J5mnkTs
I’m talking today with Greg Hurwitz, resident of Los Angeles, California, former student of mine from Harvard and someone I’ve known for a long time. Greg’s a novelist, and although he has very many other occupations, which we’ll talk about today. It’s a pleasure to see you, Greg. It’s been a while since we talked. Good to see you too, Jordan. Maybe we could start by you just outlining some of the things that you do. And then I think we’ll focus on the political stuff more today, not necessarily from a political perspective, though. Well, I came in from novels. I’m a novelist, I write the Orphan X series. And I’ve also worked in screenplays and TV and comics and some other stuff. And I started to get involved in politics around 2016. In large part because before that, I kind of thought democracy would be fine without me. I didn’t really feel any responsibilities as a citizen. I kind of had a lot of opinions but didn’t do a whole lot about it. And one of the things that I wanted to do when Donald Trump was elected, he was not a candidate or a president to my liking or who was a match with my value set. And the first thing that I asked myself, it’s funny you give that lecture about the Old Testament that one of the answers that Old Testament answers is always like, God’s angry, we screwed up. And so I really took that approach all the way down. I thought rather than starting to go on offense and tackle people who voted or thought differently than me or had different ideologies, I would try and think about the failings of the Democratic Party, the status quo, all the parts of society that I was part of and how badly we would have to have fallen short for him to be seen as a viable and preferable alternative to the candidate that we were putting forth. And so I started to work with a lot of candidates. I was mostly interested in candidates in purple districts talking to red voters. And so for the midterms, we work with 30 candidates, Democrat, in deep red districts, talking about making good faith arguments the way it’s supposed to be. I have an opinion. I have a preference in political party to make good faith arguments to people to try and win them over to a different point of view. We had a lot of success. I’d say that the 30 candidates that we work with 21-1 in terms of flipping those seats. – Well, you all have foreign viewers here. So when you talk about deep red states, deep blue states, purple states, what do you mean? – Republican versus Democrat, right? I wasn’t interested in figuring out how… I’m not interested in any conversations that take place in the bubble of like-minded people. So I was interested in races in Oklahoma and New Mexico and Ohio and Virginia. And so we really went there. And long story short off that, we started to… I wrote a bunch of op-eds. I wrote one with you for the Wall Street Journal. And I did a lot for the bulwark trying to talk across the aisle. And I went out and talked to, I think about a 360-degree arc of Americans, whether it was military, evangelicals, Black Lives Matter, Hispanic, Texas, Mexicans, different population than Miami Cubans, different population from California Mexicans. And really talking to different groups and listening and figuring it out. And I wound up doing about 200 digital and television commercials. All this political work is pro bono with a small team of us here. – Yeah. Do you want to describe the team? – Yeah. It’s me. It’s Marshall Hirska. He’s a TV show runner and creator. He created 30-something. Billy Ray, Oscar-nominated screenwriter. He wrote Captain Phillips. He just did the Comey rule. Sean Ryan, the creator of The Shield, the TV producer. And Lita Calagridis. She has a ton of credits from Shutter Island to… She worked on Avatar and wrote a good amount of that with James Cameron. And what was interesting was in terms of the Hollywood system, after Trump was elected, I think the Democrats were humbled. And then they’re always willing to meet with Hollywood-y people. But the washout rate was… There weren’t a lot of people who were interested in having different kinds of conversations. And I decided if I could actually get in front of Democratic leadership, and Marshall too was on that first trip with me, that I would say exactly what I thought all the time to the best of my ability. – Okay, so let me walk through this. So, a couple of years ago, maybe that was in 2016, about? – Yep. – You had some political awakening, let’s say. And I guess that was a tendon on Trump’s election. And your response to that was, how did the Democrats sink so low as to allow this to happen? Is that a reasonable way of summarizing it? Rather, what the hell is wrong with all those Trump voters? – Yeah, and like, let me start to explore in earnest my confirmation biases and blind spots and talk to everybody who has a different perspective or point of view than me, in earnest, to try to figure that out. – Yeah, well, you guys decided that you were going to produce messages for the Democrat party. – Yeah, and that was… – And to do that on your own accord, in some sense, or on your own on your own? – On your own dollar, but also independently. – Yeah, I mean, the line we used was, and I remember sitting in my living room talking about this, I said, we asked for no money, no credit, and no permission. And you said, to me, that’s exactly what Orphan X does, my protagonist of my thriller series. It was this really funny confluence of my political life and the things that I was writing in the fiction world. And what we realized is we can’t go, we couldn’t go through everything we did was on our own. We raised our own money. One of the things we realized is the cost of admission for getting through messaging that I thought was, A, more persuading, making good faith persuasion arguments, but also that was fair. Every single economic fact that I put in any of the 200 commercials that I produced, I ran through a friend of mine who’s like a Wall Street Republican. I always wanted opposition fact testing. We tried to do nothing fair that wasn’t fair. I’m not suggesting we got this right all the time, but I tried to not do, I didn’t want ads that went after Trump’s kids in certain ways that were off bounds and personal. I was trying, because look, if you’re messaging and making propaganda is really what it is, that’s Goebbels. You’re in Goebbels arena. That’s dangerous stuff. You got to take it really, really seriously to try to engage and make arguments without getting corrupted by what that is in the world. That’s why it’s dangerous is that you don’t understand. People don’t understand when they start to mess with the truth, that they’re starting to mess with their own psyches. Because if you start playing in the domain of deceit, you’ll get tangled up in that so fast and make your head spin. Then you undo yourself. You can undo yourself even if you stick pretty close to the truth. What happened, what you guys did and the way you went about it has struck me as quite, I don’t know, unbelievable, I guess. That’s why I want to dwell on it a bit. You decided that you had a political responsibility. You organized yourself with a group of people, a group that was much larger to begin with, but that shrank quickly to those that were actually dedicated over some long period of time to putting a lot of work into this. It’s not surprising you got a bunch of attrition as a consequence of that. Then you decided that you would make messages that were in alignment with the, at least in principle, with the Democratic Party. But you didn’t get permission from the party brass, so to speak, to do that. You did that independently. Well, there’s a weird, well, two things about the attrition rate. One of them was I quickly discovered that a lot of people who are interested in the sort of loudest online outrage are equally devoted to the status quo as the opposition. One of the things I came to very quickly was it matters much more important than language policing and permission structures of who’s allowed to say what is an orientation on people’s intentions and the actual outcomes. That’s one way you can assess the groups of people of whether someone’s going to be useful. If you roll up your sleeves and get in to actually get something done, whether that’s winning a race in Oklahoma or trying to talk in good faith and respectfully to voters in Western Pennsylvania, it’s going to be messy. You have to, there’s no- Okay, if I describe that, what do you mean messy? What’s messy about it? We’ve talked a little bit about the psychological consequences of this, this kind of action, even these kinds of discussions. By messy, I mean good. Meaning, the further along I get with this, the more convinced I am that you cannot have a perfect conversation where everyone is contained and all the language goes seamlessly about race, about gender, and about class in America. When there’s too much constriction around language from the left and or from the right, basically, they’re barking around the perimeter of the fertile solutions. They’re barking around the perimeter to make sure that nobody can have the kinds of conversations that you need to have. You have to talk about those things imperfectly. You have to- So why would people be motivated to not allow that to happen, do you think? Well, because look, so for the, there’s different skews and everything is a generalization. I’m going to generalize a little bit. I think that there’s, in the far right, we see a kind of corruption and ossification around Donald Trump and what he represents, but he was saying things that hit people in a way that were things that they weren’t allowed to say. I have a whole bunch of theories about the Republicans. I’m going to keep it focused on my looking in the proverbial mirror. I think that a lot of the language policing of the left is actually a way to maintain the status quo. Because- What status quo? And to whose advantage? Let’s say that you’re a rich Hollywood elite, much like me, right? Or somebody who is in the kinds of groups that I move in, that you move in, but let’s say further left of you like I am, or more, we’re both liberal, but if you can talk and have all of the lingo and know exactly what the permission structures are, and you say Latin X instead of Latino, and you do all this stuff, in a way what you’re doing is you’re making sure that the conversations that are the real conversations that bring change that are messier don’t necessarily occur. But if you have all the language down, you can sort of maintain your position and your money and your relative stature. You can assume that if there was a solution that was being proposed, you’d be part of the solution and not part of the problem. You signal that with the language. But you’re also casting- Look, I’ll give you an example. I made a video about, for me, I was exceedingly opposed from day one to messages of chaos from the Democratic Party. I think conservatives particularly have a reaction to chaos. I think they have a legitimate reaction when people announce police-free zones in Seattle and in Portland. From day one, I was saying this whole notion of sanctuary cities doesn’t make sense to me for a variety of reasons. Let’s say we have the next president and people decide that voting rights are not going to be applied to in Birmingham, Alabama, and they’re going to be a sanctuary city for that. There’s all these complexities around it. I made some commercials about Black leadership calling for a lack of violence in the protests. Keisha Lance-Bottom, the mayor of Atlanta, gave a speech that I think was a speech with the most thundering moral authority that I’ve heard from a public figure when Atlanta was tearing itself apart. It’s an extraordinary speech. I referenced her. I referenced other people. The only blowback that I got from that was from incredibly affluent coastal elite saying, how dare you selectively close African American people decrying violence when they watch somebody get murdered and they’re protesting how they can. It’s the epitome of white privilege and it’s all this stuff. What’s interesting is I’ve long thought that Trump works through projection. Everything with Trump that he makes is a claim for others. There’s a lot of projection that goes on. I’ve increasingly seen that from aspects of the left where I thought, wow, how far do you have to be removed from the ramifications of violence to not be worried? How many houses and mansions and security guards and gated communities do you have to have access to to be unconcerned with violent action? Whether that community is a community of color, whether it’s a white working class community, to simply say violent protest is something that we’re not for. How dare you advocate that when you’re rich enough to never have to be there when the tourist violent protesters leave and let’s say the black community is left there with the wreckage of their community. To be opposed to that message is basically saying, I want to keep letting people protest as loud as they want. It’s in a way that won’t ever affect me or my children aren’t at risk. My family’s not at risk. My house doesn’t feel at risk. But I’ll use all the right language so that I can be protected and maintain all of that. When you’re trying to wade in to really win an election so that we don’t… The African-American community doesn’t have to contend with another with more, I’ll call it more voter rights being thrown out, real concrete issues. There’s real concrete issues there. But if you can chirp about something that’s a slogan like that, you don’t have to get into the real solutions or fixes. But at the same time, Right. But you can take on the assumed status of someone who’s actually working to solve the problem. I think a lot of that, a lot of politically correct language, I guess that would be language that’s in alignment with any given doctrine, is an attempt to take on the moral virtues of that doctrine without necessarily having to bear any of the responsibility for actions in alignment with that doctrine or to bear any responsibility for the consequences. Like I was furious. I was furious when the protests erupted with George Floyd. There were video after video of African-Americans protesting. Some of them were like telling, turning in people who were either anarchists who were throwing bricks and committing property damage of saying, grabbing people, handing them over to the police. A lot of people in African-American community were like, this is our community. We live here. And of course, I’m not implying that nobody in the African-American community crossed the line in the course of those protests. I’m not saying that, but I’m saying there was an awareness within that community that when the cameras are gone and lights go up, nobody’s going to come in and rebuild that community. And when all the tourists leave and everybody’s had their march and their protests, they have to contend with it. And there was a measure of discipline in that community, whether it was Keisha Lance Bottoms. I think the president of the NAACP in either Oregon or Washington had a great op-ed. Killer Mike the rapper was out there saying, we cannot have violence. We’re not tearing down our own city. This isn’t civil disobedience. The point of civil disobedience, of course, is that you bear the cost. You bear the moral responsibility of your transgression. African community understood this by and large. And a lot of the loudest voices who were protesting against it, who were for me was a frustration were from incredibly affluent and here I’ll use the word privilege, which I don’t like to use people in the white community. And that for me was, it’s a similar kind of projection as I would see Trump doing. Like they’re screaming about privilege all the time. And you’re like, how do you not understand that destruction of property, destruction of small businesses, risks to families? Look, somebody, I’ll give you a stat. That’s an interesting stat here. The average voter who voted for Obama and then Trump thinks about politics on average, four minutes a week, four minutes a week. Right? So people in the bubble don’t think about politics four minutes a week. And so four minutes a week is about what you can manage to worry about the emoluments clause and Russian hacking. When you’re at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right? You got a sick kid, you’re out of health insurance, you don’t have a job, you might have a special needs kid, you might have a parent in a home, you have COVID hitting. You don’t have time for any of this. You don’t have time to have the kinds of conversations around nuance of weather. And when everyone was shocked about the Latin vote, I was just thinking how many people actually have friends and family who are Hispanic who you talk to. I mean, the joke was that the big shock was that Biden won the Latin X votes and Trump won the Latino vote. A lot of the Latino community, I mean, they don’t want- So what do you think accounted for Trump’s attractiveness to the Latino community? This kind of ties back into a broader question I want to ask you. It’s like, I’ve been interested in what you’ve been doing and supporting it to the degree that I’ve been able to and to the degree that that’s useful, I suppose, because I was very interested in your willingness to look at what had gone wrong with the Democratic Party and to try to fix that. That seemed to me to be a win no matter- that’s a win for everyone no matter where they are on the political spectrum, because the higher the function of both parties, the better the political outcome as far as I’m concerned, right? You want as little stupidity as possible all across the spectrum. So it seemed to me that reducing some of the foolishness that characterized particularly the radical left, the careless radical left within the Democratic Party and focusing on a more pragmatic, let’s say, but also wiser and less resentment driven strategy would be a good thing overall. So that opens up the broader can of worms, which is what exactly had the Democrats done so badly that they lost to Trump? Well, so to me, there’s a couple things. We can talk about the Hispanic vote. We should talk about that specifically and the broader question in general. Well, so look, I have friends and family who- there’s such an array of- we talk about the Hispanic vote like it’s some monolith, right? It’s not remotely that. Cuban Americans are like, anything ever resembling socialism, I will never vote for you. And if you compare Trump to Fidel Castro, read a fucking book. That’s basically the attitude of the Cuban Americans, excuse my language. And they say, I don’t care what he calls us. I don’t care what he does to us. The only thing that we learned out of that is that the only power that you can trust is economic power. The rest of it’s an illusion. And socialism wants to come in and threaten that. I want business opportunity, right? I want less regulations. They won’t go near us. It’s very, very different. And the Hispanic community is incredibly- And so you think that’s particularly true of the Cuban Americans? Cuban, Venezuelan Americans- Venezuelans, yeah. Well, they have reason for it. Like a lot of the most conservative friends and associates who I have, whether it’s people who are friends of mine, whether it’s workers or Mexican Americans in LA, they also, they don’t want Mexico to come over here. They don’t want open borders, many of them. They left that. Why is that hard to understand? They tend to be Catholic families. So if you think about politics for four minutes a week and somebody comes in all of a sudden and they’re talking about socialism, defunding the police, and then announcing all sorts of gender complexities. And I say this as somebody with a, I always, I preface it to say, I have a trans godson, lesbian sister. This is not like where my personal politics are for what people should be allowed to do. Where my personal politics fall are very different than what I think the priority and the ranking of discussion is. If you’re going to go talk to somebody who thinks about politics for four minutes a week and bring up elaborate critical race theory and start to talk to them about the fact that boys aren’t boys and girls aren’t girls. And they should just announce this and have announcements at the age of 18. I don’t think any Democrats grasp when you think about politics four minutes a week and they talk about Trump and his transgressions, which I believe are more damaging and dangerous than those of the left. But I don’t think anybody has any idea the kind of transgressions that that represents to people who are either on the center or on the right. And the four minutes a week thing really is interesting too, because one of the things I was really struck by over the last four years with all my encounters with journalists, many of which were good, by the way, I had lots of good encounters with journalists, but the worst encounters I ever had were always almost always with journalists as well, is that the journalists think about the world politically all the time. Like they’re every single decision they make every, I mean, obviously this is a generalization, but if you’re in that world, everything is political. But for the typical person, that’s just not the case at all. And that’s actually good. One of the best political science theories I ever read was predicated on the idea or put forth the idea that in a highly functioning political system, especially a democratic system, the less people think about politics, the better the system is working. And towards the end, I didn’t think politically at all. I’m not even interested in politics. I couldn’t agree with that more. I mean, one of the things I think a lot about is I have a friend, one of my closest friends who you’ve met, born again Christian, he was raised as a son of a missionary all through other parts of the world. And, you know, but he lives in LA. He worked a bit in the industry, a very rounded conservative friend of mine, he has gay friends, friends from whatever, but he went in the booth and told me during the election in 2016, he said, I just went in and I thought, forget it, I’m voting for Trump. I can’t bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton. I was really angry at him at first because it was like, and then I realized, I shouldn’t say really angry with him, but I realized that I didn’t understand that for the things that I saw for the clouds I saw massing on the horizon with Donald Trump. And we’re seeing some of that here with his, the legal threats to the election, trying to undermine election security, his own largely appointed Republican judges shooting a lot of that down. There’s a lot of things we don’t need to get into all that because everyone can have an answer for everything that I say. But the realization I had with him was, oh my God, he is a canary of a particular coal mine. He’s a guy who rides a motorcycle, likes guns, he likes kind of different kinds of freedoms. He is a different relationship with freedoms versus security than I do. I’m a canary down a different coal mine, right? Part of that might be from me looking at the sort of authoritarian shadowy-ness that I saw coming in with Trump. That’s what I alert to. I can’t decide that my friend who I know and love and who has been in my house and accepts my friends, my family, everybody, and has a broad range of friends and family, I can’t determine that he’s either foolish or dumb or wrong or a bad person anymore. I can’t determine that he’s an ignorant canary down an ignorant coal mine, right? Because if he’s my friend and I’m that close to him and he’s here in LA and that’s a choice he made, I better listen to what that was, even if they got instinct for him. And so then I was thinking about this a lot. One of the things that I think has been a blessing of the Trump presidency is there’s some conversations we’re having now that are awful and hard. It’s sort of like, we talk about this all the time, obviously, with Young with Freud. You go through hell before you get anywhere else. We wouldn’t be having any of these conversations if we were now in year four of a Hillary Clinton presidency. We’re having different conversations. They’re worse right now in a lot of ways about race, about class. But the fact that has stuck with me the most and one of the things I’ll say is I went in open eyed all the way down to assess my party in the political situation. I’ve only gotten more disillusioned and angry with the Democratic Party. Okay, okay. So, okay, so let’s go return to that. Okay, I’m going to keep that in mind. Let’s return to that. So you put together this team or this team was organized to produce messages that would support the Democratic Party fundamentally. But the overarching philosophy was one of self-criticism, let’s say, if the self includes the Democratic Party. And what are the rules? What were the other rules for the messaging? See, I don’t think people are going to understand exactly what you did. You made these ads, but you went out and did it with your own team. And so who are the ads generated? How are the ads generated? Who are they targeted to? What was their consequence? And what were the rules that you used and agreed on when you were making the ads? And how did you agree on them? Sorry, that’s a lot of questions. But part of this is it was so it was all entrepreneurial, George, it was all outside of the political. I’d still be waiting for the first approval from the D-Trip C to do my first, you know, 50 trillion. So if you’re a white working class, and that happened under Obama, that happened under Clinton. Yeah, well, that’s the peculiar thing is that it’s not self-evident that policy can stop that. One of the things I’ve been terrified about since really learning about the Pareto distribution is its implacability. As you pointed out, this distribution happened even under systems of governance or ideologies of governance that hypothetically should have stopped it or at least slowed it. It’d be interesting to find out if that transfer took place more rapidly under Republicans than Democrats or not. Well, I think that whatever it is, if you look at that one fact, that is a failing of basically the entire ruling class in America. I realized that I had a moment of realization. I’m going to tell you this. It was really funny. So there was the TARP give after 9-11, there was the TARP bailout and the airlines were in trouble and they were bailed out. My statistics might be slightly wrong, but call it 52 billion. I got all mad. I’m like, I’m going to call Marshall. We’re going to do commercial. And I stopped for a minute and I said, you know what? I’m the asshole who’s being served by that. And I don’t mean this in a self-flagellating privileged way. Let me take a peek into my 401k. Guess what stocks I’m probably holding? A ton of airline stock. So when there’s a stock buyback, which I can get angry about, part of the thing is devralization and go look. That’s a really good example because it shows, that’s a good, what would you say? That sheds an interesting light on the implacability of the preto distribution. It’s like, you’re part of the problem, even though you object to it ideologically and you’re part of the problem because of where you sit in the economic structure. Right. But the thing is about this and you talk about regulation or policies not working, which I want to return to in a minute, but part of what I realized was that’s not because I’m a good investor, not because I’m smart. That’s not free market. It’s not because you’re cruel and malevolent either. No, it’s not. But this is not my investing genius or the free market at work. Right. We don’t have a transfer of wealth of that extent going the other direction. And so part of it is like, okay, so I’m a beneficiary. So what a solution for a lot of things is, you give money, you scream about privilege and you self-flagellate. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all a self-focused reaction, as opposed to me saying, how do we start to address that problem? And the thing is, it has to be partially policy, partially regulation. We can no longer- Well, it is something that we fight all the time. You know, one of the things you just said shed light, I think again, for me on my irritation with the left end of the ideological spectrum is that it’s just too much to see people who benefit, say like who are in a position like you are, or like I am in, because we’re not beneficiaries of the Pareto distribution in a major way. Now, it seems to me too much for me to also expect to be admired as a a paragon of virtue in relationship to my attitude towards the poor, let’s say. Because then I’m asking for too much. I’m asking to be a beneficiary of the system, the way it’s set up now. And I’m asking to be admired for my objection to the very system that is enriching me. And the second one of those is too much to ask for. And this solution for that, like when I had that realization, I was like, huh, let me get on that. Let me look at policies. Let’s have an economic summit, like the one you and I did. And I’m not claiming I’m going to go out and fix the whole problem. But if all I do is sit around and go, oh, I feel so guilty, let me do a couple think pieces about it and talk about white privilege. It’s just more self-focused bullshit for those people who think about politics four minutes a week, because they can only afford to think about politics for four minutes a week. So what do we do? And what I do is I try to advocate for policies that will work, even if some of those are conservative policies. I have a ton of people across the aisle, across the whole spectrum, who I reach out to go, what do you think of this? Are there libertarian answers? There’s got to be some regulatory answers because it’s so out of control. Well, hopefully, because the end of the preto game is that far too few people have far too much of everything. And that’s not even good for them. I mean, you’re not rich if you have to live in a gated community. That’s right. That’s a gilded cage. You know, it’s not it’s not an indication of wealth. Wealth is when you can walk around your city freely at night. That’s wealth. That’s exactly it. And so that’s so much of what we arrived at in the messaging when we try to talk to people across the aisle, country club Republicans, let’s say, there’s a difference for me for people who are at the wrong end of people are at the wrong end of this system. And this is me off when people get so angry about the fact that like all these people are voting in ways that hurt their own interests. Right? Yeah. Now we say, like, I vote in ways that hurt my own interest. I don’t just vote. Like, how do you know what their interests are? Their interests could be moral. Their interests could be familial. Their interests could be religious. It’s not just their financial interests. First of all, their interest could be their children’s future rather than their current than their own current reality. I mean, I learned a long time ago that that small businessmen didn’t vote for socialist policies in Canada, even when they were pro small business, because they didn’t want to be small businessmen. They wanted to be big businessmen. So they were voting their dream, not their reality. And it’s not obvious that that’s a mistake, even though, well, you could criticize it and you could point out it’s lacks, but it doesn’t mean it’s inadequacies. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a mistake. So let’s get into our the Canary in the Coal Mine discussion again. So I think like, for me, it’s glaringly apparent. And I know lots of people, especially a good number of the people who are your listeners will in good faith disagree with me on that. To me, it’s glaringly apparent the difference in terms of what a Trump presidency, let’s say, an Biden presidency in terms of the relative levels of corruption and undermining of the democratic norms. I know there’s a lot of counter arguments. I’m happy to have all of those. But for the sake of this discussion, what like, from my perspective, it’s this big slice here, like a totem pole, the vast majority of Americans are so far down, they’re so far down below that when they’re looking up, they can’t possibly distinguish some subtle. Well, you see Trump, it’s in a mulliams clause, and he’s doing fundraisers on the South Lawn of the White House. And that’s unacceptable. But the kind of fundraising and enrichment that that like, you know, the Clintons did was different for this other re they can differentiate that. So for me, what is and so then that gets to the question of was the vote for Trump like my friend who went in that booth and said, Forget it, I don’t care. Was that a wiser thing? Because that’s a higher disagreeable irritation structure before we get somebody who’s even more threatening from the right, right? That’s a good question. It’s certainly possible. Is the Trump presidency, there’s no way now that we can move forward, I think without having much more robust and angry dialogue about that 130,000 in debt coming out. And they’re in jobs that they’re earning, you know, maybe they have a master’s in psychology at the end of it. And they’re they’re making 20 a month the fee to keep your bank account open if you’re under 50 trillion is moving to the top 1%. We actually believe that we’re personally damaged if a black man yells on the sidelines of an NFL game to peacefully protest, or a white girl gets dreadlocks at Yale. The things that we come to believe are these giant stakes to me are all the distraction games for the movement of that $50 trillion to the 1% because we’re not talking about the prison industrial complex, right? We’re not talking about the real stuff. And as we’re fighting about this, all that keeps happening. So there is a view of the level of corruption, intricacy, difficulty that is dizzying. Being in there and online, I’m not sure that somebody can live any substantial portion of their life online and social media and not be insane. Oh, well, it really, like, it’s like most of what I’ve encountered online, or a huge proportion of it has been intensely positive, but even too positive, I would say is like, so many people comment in the comment section, say on YouTube that being exposed to my work, and it’s based on the ideas of other people, like, it’s not my work, you know, exactly, because no one’s work is their work exactly. But being exposed to these ideas, which I’ve been communicating, let’s say, has so positively changed their lives. But to hear that from thousands of people is just, it’s overwhelming. Like, that’s the positive side of it. It’s too bloody much, you get amplified too much. And the negative side is just deadly. Like, on my YouTube channel, the positive to negative comment ratio is about 100 to one, you know, and that’s about as good as you could ever hope for. But the positive ones are overwhelming. And the negative ones are deadly. And you know, you see this because people, people will get attacked by 20 people on Twitter, and they’ll go into convulsions to apologize. And if you put yourself in the center of this monstrosity, that’s multiplied by thousands or 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands. And it’s not real. It’s not real. That’s what’s so crazy. It’s not your family and your community. You don’t know what cross section that is. You don’t know like if you’re at high school, and there’s one table of mean kids screaming in a corner of a cafe or gossiping. Well, it’s real, but it’s impossible to parameterize. You know, with when it’s your family or your immediate community, you know, these people and, and you can put some walls around it. You can’t give it the proper weight. No, that’s what I mean. That’s what I mean. You can’t give it the proper weight. You don’t know what? Well, it’s because we’re not adapted to this environment. It’s like, And so here we have these are kids, you know, I’m increasingly worried about who were, were, it’s like, it’s like trying to exist and go through puberty and go and enter the academic world and the world of culture and ideas, while being constantly blared out with the stream of the most salacious, upsetting, and activating gossip that’s been algorithmically selected to target you. And that’s how politics is. That’s what we’re dealing with. Now I was in there. And the thing is, for me is I talked to, I talked to anybody. I mean, you know that I’m like, I’ll talk to you for a variety of reasons. And, you know, one, there’s all the obvious reasons for free speech and talking to people who don’t agree with you. But also it’s like, what are my blind spots? I always want to know that’s hard. It’s hard to go in. I had a, one time I had a two hour conversation with Eric Weinstein, you know, about where he was on everything, but I was right in the middle of it. That takes a while. You know, Eric’s, Eric’s incredibly bright. I’m talking to some of the brightest, most impassioned representatives all the way around. That’s all the spokes of the wheel that I could get to. And it takes a while. It’s confusing, man. Yeah. And to find your center and to accommodate and assimilate. And Eric raises a ton of stuff. He pokes at a ton of soft spots. We’re friendly. It’s a very respectful exchange, but then to come out, incorporate the parts that are right, get clarity on where I think he’s, he’s skewed for his reasons and his info tunnel that’s different from my info tunnel. And I was doing it in every direction. And so it felt like being torn apart to hold the center because I was just being torn every which way. Well, it makes me, it gives me more understanding even of why people will settle into their ideological bubble. Well, you know, well, it’s a relief. It’s such a relief, you know, because you got to ask yourself just how many questions do you want to ask yourself? Right. You know, and I’ve always thought that exploration in the world of ideas is an of unlimited value. Although, you know, I have a conservative element, but man, too much of it can tear you apart. It really can. We have that like really, really high openness. Yeah. That’s the danger of high openness for about six or seven months, that every day was a deep dive into something that was toxic and skewed to understand it, to try and come back out and put myself together. And by the way, going into it, you know, there was plenty of times you cross someone who wants to destroy you or scream at you or tell you why you’re awful or make you make an accidental mistake. Like when I was working, when we were discussing this a couple of years ago, I swiped one of your videos, if you remember, and put a voiceover over it. And, you know, I thought that was warranted. I mean, in retrospect, I did it without sufficient consideration. And I mean, I realized that very rapidly. I did a voiceover of one of the videos that you’d produce because, well, I thought I had something to say about it. And I was irritated about, well, I was irritated. We’ll leave it at that. And that was a big mistake. And that caused a tremendous amount of friction between the two of us. And, you know, and it was also exposed to, I don’t know, 100,000 people before I finally took it down. I didn’t take it down exactly, but I modified it. But when you’re connected in some high intensity fashion, your mistakes are exaggerated to a point that’s just intolerable. You know, and again, it’s not something that we’re adapted to understanding it. Make a mistake and a million people watch it. It’s like, it’s the sort of thing that can paralyze you into inaction. It’s too much. And the thing is, there’s also, like I was talking about that there’s no way to have a perfect conversation about race, class and gender. There was no way for me to do this. When I first was trying to get Democrats to go on you, Rogan, you know, Dave, Ben Shapiro, right. And I got, I had some success. I got Stanley McChrystal. I helped go to talk to Ben and to me, Sam Harris had Michael Bennett on, but they were, people were really tentative and afraid. And so the only way for me to do it was for me to go on a lot of these first. Well, I was a novelist. I wasn’t interested in all of a sudden being put out there on the ledge necessarily in that fashion, especially for the communities that I’m in, especially as a liberal, right. In the community that I’m in. But I had to be sort of the case study for it. And, you know, I did it. But what’s funny is there’s no, if I look back at that, there’s, there’s a hundred things I would say or do differently. There’s no way to do that without. Well, nobody’s an expert at it. It’s like, if you want to move politically, you’re going to do it badly, especially to begin with. So that’s right. And we don’t, and this is one of the things that’s troubled me a lot about, you know, so to answer your question at the end of this, I was, I was not in good shape for reasons you and I can get into later over Bob and in different, in more depth. I think I’ll stick to sparkling water, given the state of my nervous system, sparkling water and salted meat. I’ll do, I’ll drink enough bourbon for both of us. But, you know, part of that process was it’s, I don’t know. It’s like there’s, there’s, it’s so much to go into. It’s so much to dive down to really try to figure it out, to hold the, to really be open to what all those blind spots are and to come at feeling like you’re still intact. And I had to, I had to race to make mistakes. That was, I mean, we spun up this whole operation. I mean, it doesn’t even make any sense. If I look back on it, the amount of stuff we got done, you’re racing, make mistakes. You have that one lecture, the fool precedes the master. And it was like, how quickly can I be a fool on how many fronts the most rapidly as possible to try and just get better? I mean, we were, we were, I mean, we spun up an entire, you know, studio operation, fundraising, distribution, dissemination network. I mean, it was, it was crazy. Well, and then what was hard on you, what was hard on you was what the rate, the, the intensity, that exposure to the, all the different opinions, the consequences of making a mistake, the consequences of making a mistake. Like if my, let’s say my theory of the case had been wrong and it should have been a further left thing and Biden wasn’t the guy and all this other stuff. And we’d lost because I put, call it that, that, that figure, which again, I’m saying is slightly overblown. If I targeted a billion dollars in advertising to the wrong people, giving the wrong message and blew the mark and we lost the election by 104,000 votes, instead of winning it by 104,000 votes, that’s a lot to live with. And I didn’t even consider that till I was so far in that there kind of wasn’t going out. I mean, you can’t consider everything as you go. But the other thing is, is I start, I saw with more and more clarity, I was, I got way too much, not too much, I had a ton of information constantly, daily, hourly about my blind spots and confirmation biases and a lot of anger and, and a lot of those things, the upside of a lot of those things, your blind spots, your confirmation biases, your prejudices, all those things is they protect you from being overwhelmed. Like they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re compression algorithms and they remove information, hordes of it. And a lot of that information is valuable, but Jesus, it’s like, how much information can you swallow? I mean, it was so that’s right. And what was, what was really, and the only way that I determined to make headway in something that complex and that corrupt, and I don’t mean entirely corrupt, but I mean, you know, politics and with that much anger and rage and outrage and frustration and pain and grief, like there, it was, it’s, it was, was to try and go forth as cleanly as possible. And I, no one can do that. I tried the same thing, you know, cause I was dealing with people’s psychological problems and trying to step very carefully to not make a mistake, but there’s no, there’s no not failing if you’re doing that all day, every day with those stakes multiple times a day, and that’ll eat you up. And part of what happened for me, that was so funny, I do things that were funny, which you’ll be amused, particularly amused at, but so I got to the end of this and I was really seeing things only in moral terms. And what was interesting is at the end of this, after the, the week after the election was really, I was pretty dysregulated, let’s just say, most of the conversations I had with my conservative friends, I called my born again Christian friends, I called my Navy SEALs buddies, because I was seeing, I was seeing everything in like mythological good and evil sort of terms. And it’s like, what was so funny was at the end of this exercise for liberalism, right, for moving towards enlightenment discourse, moving towards a democratic party that I thought was less imperfect, significantly less imperfect than the than the imperfections of the Republican party, as it stands under Trump, was for me to need a lot of support from, from my conservative friends. And fortunately, I have that. What kind of support did you get? And why, why was it necessary to seek it out from those sources? If you talk a lot about mythology, the seven deadly sins, right, if that’s what you’re conscious of and seeing, right, because at a certain point, there’s so much information and you’re so open that you’re just dealing constantly with your own failings, right. And you’re just dealing with your own failings, right. And you’re seeing others and you’re trying to clean them up. It’s almost like I got stripped down to the bone. I don’t have the sort of that, the particular courage and drive of my friends who are SEALs who are in the military. But this felt like it was my version of confronting things psychologically, in the way that I could from a position of much more relative safety, where I was getting torn apart and trying to put back together and conservatives are, they understand, they understood that better. And if I start to talk about that in ways, it’s part of why I have such a wheelhouse of friends is like, it all comes very genuinely, but also it’s strategy, you know, it’s like, it’s unique people who think. Well, that’s a good, that’s, that’s an interesting observation because, you know, you could, you could make the claim that just as the world needs an array of political viewpoints, the full array of political viewpoints, you know, barring corruption, let’s say, you need to surround yourself with a full array of personalities from conservative to liberal, because that way the bases are covered and different people are going to be, different situations are going to call for different people. And thank God there are different people. And actually, that’s a good way to end this is like, thank God there are different people, because no one can do everything all the time. And so we specialize and that’s true in the political realm as well. And we need to understand that and not assume that the conservatives are right or the liberals are right, but to understand that each of them is right now and then. Each of them is right now and then. Well, the thing is, that’s also such an interesting part, you brought up that, that disagreement that you and I have that was pretty intense, but we worked it out. Yeah, Christ. And I knew we’d work it out. And you knew we’d work it out. Yeah, it shorted me right out, you know, I mean, I, yeah, partly because I was tearing myself apart about being impulsive, and also partly because of the magnitude of the mistake, the public nature of the mistake, let’s say, you know, when clearly, because it also like, when we went through that, we knew we would get through it. We just knew it would be rocky in a way. And what was interesting is what I found was some of the people most adept at pointing out my blind spots, when I then was in free fall as a result of being subjected to how many blind spots I had, of course, they’d be the ones who would be able to orient me. Right? Because they’re the ones who could see those things. So, right. So that maybe that’s part of the thing too, why part of that was in that that week where I was the most acutely flailing, let’s say, of course, I’m going to go to the people who were the ones who had the most views that made me think about things because I was like, I feel lost and spun. I’m not going to talk to people whose views I feel like, like that’s a home base for me, because I’m not on my home base. I need different kind of input, you know. And I think the same is true vice versa. So you’ve pulled back. What happens now, Greg, what’s like, you must, you’ve graduated from your new college, let’s say. And so that’s a tremendous relief, like it is when you graduate from anything, when you accomplish something, when you’re finished with something, but it’s also leaves a huge hole. You are obviously going to concentrate on your writing again, you have been you have a new book coming out in January. What’s the name of that book? Prodigal Son. And your last book? The one that came out previous is Into the Fire. I mean, so what’s happened that’s so amazing with this, I had a talk with a mutual friend of ours a while ago talking about this. And I was like, for me, one of the things that’s been so amazing is the amount that I’ve learned and the confluence with the series that I’m writing now with the orphan acts and what he’s doing. It’s like bizarre levels of synchronicity with this. And so it’s funny because I’m coming out and going right into a draft of it. Yeah, right. Well, you there’s so you know so much more. I mean, I’ve watched you over the last four years, you know, so much more about the way things work than you did before that that’s got to have nothing but a beneficial effect on your ability to spin up stories. Well, and to try to address them in that way where it’s easier, you know, this is always why I started, you know, I don’t want to write and make propaganda, right? This was a sort of necessity and it felt a bit like a call to duty. But I want to write and have people think through formats that are one step removed through science fiction, right through the thrillers through orphan acts. And it’s been really gratifying, you know, as those books as that series is built, that some of it’s in there. But so I’m having a renewed love affair with that. It was a little hard to take my hands off the steering wheel with the politics and ensure you know that feeling like when you’re just I was going so hard and so long that part of it was like, well, I should be involved with these 50 things, but I’ve narrowed the scope. I have a few pet projects. I want to keep working in terms of discussions with the evangelical community and doing across the aisle. The anti-polarization stuff is really yeah, yeah, I would I really like what we did some of that in Washington when we were bringing Republicans and Democrats, congressmen and senators as well, I believe I was really unhappy when I couldn’t do that anymore because that was so worthwhile and the opportunity is still sitting there. And so hopefully my health will hold. I’d love to do that again. It’s such gratifying work. We should. And I think what’s funny with that is it’s like, you know, here you and I are all tangled up in different political discussions in different ways, but neither of us were particularly political. Really, you know, it’s like that never was the source or drive. Well, I always made a decision. I’ve had to make a decision between politics and other routes continually in my life and I always pick the alternative routes. Yeah, me too. So all right. Well, we should wrap this up, I guess. Yep. We’ve covered a lot of ground. I was really good talking to you. Great talking to you, too, George. We’ll talk soon.