Oct. 31, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:54
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on this people. | ||
| You're going to not get a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you're trying to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Good evening, Harnwell here at the helm on Steve Bannon's War Room. | ||
| Got a great show for you over the next hour. | ||
| In fact, we're talking to who many people consider to be the honorary chaplain of the Christian nationalist movement, Pastor Doug Wilson. | ||
| Pastor Wilson, many thanks indeed for coming on to the show. | ||
| Folks might know you somewhat in the press as being the lightning rod from liberals and progressives who believe you want to, well, with some justice, want to restore a theocratic state to fully submit the United States to the glories that it once was, which was a nation under God. | ||
| That is under God's holy law. | ||
| This is something that I think is going to be meat and drink to the war room audience. | ||
| And before I hand over to you, though, I've noticed that you have said that many people have said that if you get your way, and many people are listening to you, many people in the White House, many people in MAGA are listening to you. | ||
| You are an increasingly important voice in this movement. | ||
| But the accusation has been made that if Doug Wilson gets his way, then women are going to have to be put in the red robes with the white bonnets. | ||
| It's going to be pure handmade tail territory. | ||
| Is that a reasonable criticism? | ||
| Well, the last time I was in DC preaching at our church plant there, I actually talked to a couple of women in red dresses. | ||
| They were actually there. | ||
| Now, of course, I think they were paid to be there by somebody else. | ||
| But yeah, the whole idea. | ||
| Were they prepping for the future? | ||
| Yeah, they were in training apparently. | ||
|
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Yeah, so this is a scare tactic. | |
| It's scared tactics, right? | ||
| It's scare tactics. | ||
| Of course it is. | ||
| That said, I know many people will be slightly disappointed because that's exactly what they're hoping to see. | ||
| You're clearly on the liberal progressive wing of Christian nationalism. | ||
| Just shows that we interview a broad church on the war room. | ||
| Seriously, though, tell us that the war imposse, tell us more structurally about your thought here. | ||
| What does it mean to re-establish America as a nation under God? | ||
| And what does theocracy and theocratic state? | ||
| You have described yourself as a theocrat. | ||
| What does this mean in Doug Wilson's vocabulary? | ||
| Yeah, what it means is that is the recognition that the secular project, the secular liberalism project, has failed. | ||
| That is the claim that we can govern ourselves without reference to God. | ||
| We don't need a transcendent anchor to keep our thoughts coherent. | ||
| Such is the claim. | ||
| But after a generation or more of that, we've gotten to the point where we don't know what a woman is. | ||
| We have someone sitting on the Supreme Court who doesn't know what a woman is. | ||
| But if you don't know what a woman is, you don't know what a human being is. | ||
| And if you don't know what a human being is, you don't know what human rights are. | ||
| And if you don't know what human rights are, what are you doing on the Supreme Court of the United States? | ||
| So we've got the sexual revolution and the tranny insanity and kids dressing up like furries. | ||
| That basically this is what happens when you say, we don't need God. | ||
| All we need is science. | ||
| All we need is reason. | ||
| All we need is enlightened liberal thought. | ||
| Well, everything's coming apart in our hands. | ||
| Basically, the recognition is that we need Christ. | ||
| It's either, as I'm fond of saying, it's either Christ or chaos. | ||
| And you just need to look around to see the chaos. | ||
| Basically, the whole thing is coming apart in our hands. | ||
| And so consequently, I think we need to cry out to the Lord. | ||
| We need to say, God, we have painted ourselves into a very bad corner. | ||
| Well, many people will say amen to that. | ||
| And it's clear, especially from a Christian perspective, that Christ needs to be the center of our social life, of our political life, of everything. | ||
| Is there a tension? | ||
| Is there a tension? | ||
| But, you know, I'm going to ask you whether there's a tension there between having the sovereignty of Christ and a nation where the sovereignty, let's say, belongs either depending on your interpretation to the people or to the constitution. | ||
| Tell me something about the tension there. | ||
| And also, because I have to ask you this, what the role for non-Christians and religious minorities will be. | ||
| But more substantially than that, there's two points. | ||
| Tell me, because everyone who follows this show will agree to what you said. | ||
| It's either Christ or chaos. | ||
| But how does Doug Wilson's philosophy differ from the Commonwealth Garden evangelical viewpoint? | ||
| Why are liberals so terrified of you? | ||
| What's the theocratic element here behind your thought that is really driving them crazy right now? | ||
| The theocratic element is our recognition that all, I'm not arguing for us to become a theocracy. | ||
| We are a theocracy right now. | ||
| All societies are theocratic. | ||
| The only thing that distinguishes them is who the God is. | ||
| Every social order has a God of the system. | ||
| So in a democracy, a pure democracy, Deimos, the people, would be the God of the system. | ||
| The God of the system is the one past which there is no further appeal. | ||
| Now, I believe that since all societies are inescapably theocratic, and the only question is who's Theo, that theos, that God, that deity, should be the true one, should be the true God. | ||
| And of course, as a Christian, I believe the Christian God is the true and living God. | ||
| So that's the first thing. | ||
| The second thing is, just touching on religious minorities and people who don't agree, the heritage of the West that we're trying to preserve, that we're fighting to preserve, is the heritage that invented liberty of conscience. | ||
| That's our baby. | ||
| That's our legacy. | ||
| That's what we did. | ||
| It is the left that denies the right of personal conscience. | ||
| And so consequently, if we structure our laws in accordance with scripture, if we recognize the God of the Bible, the God of the Bible tells us that we are not to promulgate our religious convictions by force. | ||
| Our laws that require force, laws against murder and rape and so on, need to have a transcendental foundation. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that you get to prosecute sins as though they were crimes. | ||
| So in Christian theology, there's a distinction between a sin and a crime. | ||
| I believe that crimes ought to be biblically defined and we ought to leave a vast swath of sins alone. | ||
| So I don't want to establish a covetousness police, right? | ||
| Covetousness is a sin and it's a very serious sin. | ||
| It's in the Ten Commandments. | ||
| But I don't want covetousness police. | ||
| How do you choose? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Why don't you want covetousness police? | ||
| Why not go along the Persian route, the Iranian route, and have basically sin police? | ||
| How do you choose which of the commandments you're going to enforce and which you're not going to enforce? | ||
| Yeah, so the answer to that would be Bible study. | ||
| So for example, if you read the Bible carefully, there are certain things that the Bible prohibits and which the Bible attaches a civil penalty to. | ||
| There are other things that the Bible prohibits, but there's no civil penalty attached to it at all. | ||
| And so in my thinking, I call myself a theocrat, but also a theocratic libertarian. | ||
| I believe that in the vast swath of human endeavor, the government ought to simply leave us alone. | ||
| And if the Bible doesn't, and so for me, coercion is a big deal. | ||
| And so if the state is going to coerce me on some issue, I want them to have scriptural foundation for doing it. | ||
| So rape and murder and theft and those sorts of things are things that we find in the Bible, prohibited as sins, but also taught in the Bible as crimes, treated as crimes. | ||
| But there are things that are clearly sinful, like envy, right? | ||
| You've got envy in your heart. | ||
| But the civil magistrate is not competent to weigh whether or not I'm envious. | ||
| We leave that to God at the last day. | ||
| And the Bible never assigns a civil penalty for sins like envy or jealousy or hatred or things like that. | ||
| As long as you don't take steps to act on your hatred via murder, then the state leaves you alone. | ||
| And so this is the thing that a lot of people would be surprised by. | ||
| Under a theocratic libertarian order, the average citizen would have a great deal more freedom than he currently has. | ||
| We're not ushering in a reformed despotic regime where reformed clergymen with weird beards are telling you or orchestrating every detail of your life. | ||
| We have that now. | ||
| We have that now. | ||
| They tell me that I have to sort my garbage now. | ||
| They tell me what light bulbs I get to use now. | ||
| They tell me that I have to put a brick in the tank of my toilet now. | ||
| They're regulating every last detail of life now. | ||
| And we want to get away from that. | ||
| Here in Italy, the government tells you when you're allowed to turn your central heating on or off. | ||
| You know, George III, King George III, would blush with shame if he saw what was going on in America right now, that the long train of abuses that was the legitimate cause for the revolutionaries to throw off the English crown was minuscule compared to the size and scope of the U.S. government today. | ||
| So, you know, it's not often you hear these terms. | ||
| Theocracy and libertarian welded together in the same philosophy. | ||
| But it would make sense. | ||
| It's coherent what you're saying. | ||
| If you think about the Jews at the time of, I don't know, the time of the New Testament, the first century. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the code of law was effectively the Bible, the Old Testament. | ||
| And that was massively less invasive than the full gamut of local, state, and federal government today. | ||
| Just, I have to go to a break in two minutes, but here's a question for you when you're talking about bringing these two things, the state and religion faith, together again, bringing them back together. | ||
| The founding fathers were quite concerned about the possibility of state power to pollute the integrity of the Christian faith. | ||
| And that was the primary motive behind the concept, right, of the separation of church and state. | ||
| It wasn't remotely what the secularists had in mind. | ||
| They wanted a Christian nation, but they didn't want the political, the polluting political powers to corrupt the church as the crown had done with the established Church of England. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Which is the case that you see today. | ||
| But tell me, if you're bringing these two forces together, how do you keep the integrity of the Christian faith from being polluted by politicians, by the state? | ||
| I would say that I support wholeheartedly the separation of church and state. | ||
| But that's different than the separation of morality and state. | ||
| A church is an ecclesiastical government, and the founders did not want a national church of the United States. | ||
| There were soft establishments at the state level, and in three cases, hard establishments at the state level. | ||
| And I don't even think they're a good idea there, right? | ||
| I'm in favor of a soft establishment where the state simply says the Christian faith is true, but doesn't support any particular denomination with tax money. | ||
| That's the kiss of death for that denomination. | ||
| And it's just not good. | ||
| In Federalist 48, it says that power is of an encroaching nature. | ||
| And the Constitution is a work of theological genius because they spread the power as thinly as possible at the national and state levels. | ||
| And then the separation of powers. | ||
| That's profoundly Christian. | ||
| Just hold on, Pastor Wilson. | ||
| I'm going to come back to you in just two minutes to explore these themes further. | ||
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| Again, that's Bannon to 989898. | ||
| Back to Pastor Wilson. | ||
| So many people listening would be slightly surprised because the overwhelming cultural force is obviously the secularist establishment. | ||
| To find out that at the time of the establishment of the federal government, there were states that actually had individually on an individual basis a degree of establishment, what you call soft establishment. | ||
| But the point about the Constitution is that the Constitution is that no force, no legal force would try to impose that across the whole of the nation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The only entity that could violate the First Amendment is Congress. | ||
| Congress shall make no law concerning the establishment of religion. | ||
| But when the Constitution was ratified, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire all had established state churches at the state level. | ||
| And then the 14th state to come in, Vermont, came into the Union with an established state church. | ||
| That was hard establishment. | ||
| South Carolina didn't have a connection to any denomination, but they simply said the Protestant religion is the faith of this state. | ||
| They simply confessed that there was a transcendental grounding. | ||
| Now, I don't think that hard establishment at the state level is a good idea either. | ||
| I'm in favor of separation church and state everywhere. | ||
| But I can say that it's not an unconstitutional idea. | ||
| At the founding, the majority of the states had a formal relationship with the Christian faith, overwhelmingly so. | ||
| And I simply want to return to that. | ||
| One of the striking things is that in 1892, there was a Supreme Court decision, and this was over a century after the founding. | ||
| In 1892, there's a Supreme Court decision called Holy Trinity versus the United States, which is a funny name for this court case. | ||
| Holy Trinity was a church in New York. | ||
| And so they had hired a British minister and had paid his passage over. | ||
| And that was against the law. | ||
| And some zealous prosecutor went after them. | ||
| The Supreme Court decided in favor of the church in a common sense way. | ||
| Okay, that's not it. | ||
| But then Justice Brewer said, while we're on the subject, let us remind you that the United States is a Christian nation and has been since its founding. | ||
| And then Justice Brewer went through the history of the United States and showed over and over and over again how we were a Christian nation. | ||
| Now, that was in 1892. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Now, that means that when I was born, 1953, the day of my birth was closer to that Supreme Court decision than the day of my birth was to our conversation today. | ||
| It wasn't that long ago. | ||
| So we were and understood ourselves to be a Christian nation. | ||
| And this was common knowledge up until the Second World War. | ||
| And after the Second World War, federal courts started quietly insinuating that the wall of separation that Jefferson referred to in a private letter was somehow the way it was at the founding, the separation of church and state. | ||
| Well, yes, separation of church and state, but that doesn't mean separation of righteousness and state or morality and state. | ||
| Who in their right mind would say, I want to be governed by people who have absolutely no connection to morality? | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| This is why we have experts like you on this show. | ||
| And I thought I'd read quite widely about some of these things. | ||
| And you're absolutely right to point out that the prohibition is on Congress here, on establishment, right? | ||
| Now, you said that you are against the establishment of a formal church, but what you do want is to see Christianity have full space in the public square and people to publicly confess, obviously, that they are inspired by Jesus Christ. | ||
| But let me ask you this question, right? | ||
| Let me ask you this question. | ||
| Could President Trump, via executive order, establish, could he do, could he push out an EO that would broadly adopt what you're wanting here? | ||
| Because he's obviously, in and of himself, he's one of the three branches of government, right? | ||
| He's not Congress. | ||
| He's not the Supreme Court. | ||
| He's the president. | ||
| Could he do that? | ||
| Would that be constitutional for you? | ||
| Is that something that you would urge him to consider to establish Christianity formally as the religious and cultural basis of the United States? | ||
| I don't know that an executive order would be the way to do it. | ||
| I would prefer, just aside from a constitutional amendment, there are things that I think we could do, like a joint proclamation of Congress. | ||
| So all Congress has to do is pass a resolution saying that it is our conviction and it is the opinion of the Senate and the House that Jesus rose from the dead and have the president sign it. | ||
| That would keep the liberals busy for a while because that requires anything of anybody, but you're simply testifying. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's like that. | ||
| That mirrors the Polish situation and the Irish Constitution, which takes its inspiration from the Holy Trinity. | ||
| However, to stay on this point, to stay on this point, obviously some kind of law passed by Congress would be, or resolution passed by Congress, would be the most would be the most permanent way. | ||
| However, circumventing the fact that Congress shall establish no religion, why as a first step before you get your majorities in both houses of Congress, why not push the president to push out an EO adopted what you want to achieve? | ||
| Because he's not constitutionally prohibited, is he? | ||
| He's not Congress. | ||
| No, he isn't. | ||
| An executive order could be something like, I am directing all the offices in the executive branch to celebrate Christmas and the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. | ||
| But his executive orders have to be directed to entities he has actual authority over to tell them to do something, right? | ||
| So I would be in favor of something like that. | ||
| They can acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Savior. | ||
| They can acknowledge, they can acknowledge that Jesus Christ was born for the salvation of man, right? | ||
| That would be a phenomenal right. | ||
| That would be an absolutely phenomenal maneuver. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it would be pretty festival. | ||
| And it would keep it liberals busy, as you say. | ||
| Tell me a bit, because we've only got two minutes left now. | ||
| Tell me a bit about your book, the frequently shouted questions about Christian nationalism. | ||
| Yeah, a few years ago, our publishing house here, Cannon Press, published Stephen Wolfe's book, The Case for Christian Nationalism. | ||
| And then shortly after that, I published a book, Mere Christendom, and arguing for the basics of this whole approach. | ||
| On my blog and in other places, there were a lot of questions and accusations and things thrown at us. | ||
| And I spent a lot of time answering these FAQs on my blog. | ||
| And then I realized I'd written a lot answering these questions. | ||
| And so we edited the questions and assembled them into the book, frequently shouted questions on Christian nationalism. | ||
| And they address all the common, what about this? | ||
| What about that? | ||
| What about imposing morality? | ||
| What about separation of church and state? | ||
| What about, you know, so on. | ||
| And so these FAQs are the sorts of things that your worried uncle or aunt might be asking you about. | ||
| And it's a great resource for answering those questions. | ||
| So it's something to consider about for Christmas and Thanksgiving that are coming up. | ||
| Tell me about the reaction that the book has had. | ||
| I know that Tucker Carlson has said that you are the Christian nationalist they warned you about. | ||
| Tell me about the reaction of the book more generally. | ||
| Is this something that really gets the libs on edge? | ||
| It really does. | ||
| You know, I'm a pastor in the panhandle of North Idaho. | ||
| I don't have enormous connections and that sort of thing. | ||
| I'm a writer and a preacher. | ||
| But in recent months, I've been interviewed by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and Politico and the Associated Press and CNN. | ||
| They are really worried about this. | ||
| And I think they're worried about it because their project has collapsed and is not capable, therefore, of mounting the kind of resistance that they wish they could. | ||
| If people wanted to learn more about how to weld these two philosophies together, the libertarianism and the theocratic, together, obviously they can go to you on social media. | ||
| In fact, why don't we just quickly now recite your social media? | ||
| But I'll also ask you where else they might go. | ||
| Where do people go on social media to keep up with you? | ||
| Okay, on X, it would be at Douglas Wills, D-O-U-G-L-A-S-W-I-L-S, Douglas Wills. | ||
| And then my blog is dougwills.com, and it's called Blog and May Blog. | ||
| And pretty much everything I'm involved with is somewhere there on the front page of my blog. | ||
| Okay, so look, in the final 30 seconds, just tell me some of the key sources that you have found useful. | ||
| If people have listened to this, they'll get your books, they'll follow you on Twitter and they'll start reading. | ||
| Just give, where can people go to understand more? | ||
| Because it's a very rare thing to hear someone talk to say, I am a theocratic libertarian. | ||
| What else could you point them towards? | ||
| I would mention two books published by Canon Press, our publishing house. | ||
| One is Vindiciae Contra Toranos, a book from the 16th century, A Vindication Against Tyrants. | ||
| It's just a great, great book. | ||
| And then a history of Christian resistance called Slaying Leviathan by Glenn Sunshine. | ||
| That's perfect. | ||
| Pastor Douglas Wilson, very, very grateful that we've been able to get you on the show. | ||
| I hope you're going to come back and give us your analysis at some future points. | ||
| But many, many thanks for this unique synthesis of interpretation. | ||
| God bless for now. | ||
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| Welcome back. | ||
| Well, if I recited the full CV of my next guest, that's going to take up the full 21 minutes of this block. | ||
| Dr. Nicholas Wright, welcome onto the show. | ||
| You have been an advisor to the Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff, I think, for over a decade. | ||
| You're an affiliate scholar at Georgetown, etc., etc., etc. | ||
| Huge, huge academic CV. | ||
| And you've published this book with the title Warhead, How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain. | ||
| And that basically the thesis is, I think, to do the interplay between the amygdala and the pre-frontal cortex and the civil war, the neuron-civil war between the two areas. | ||
| And that somehow makes us hard. | ||
| Well, I'm not a neuroscientist. | ||
| That's my simplification. | ||
| But how that somehow hardwires aggression and war on the national stage when humans come together and act socially. | ||
| Just in your own words, in your words, explain to us this thesis and why it's important. | ||
| Yeah, so well, thank you very much, Ben, for having me on. | ||
| So as you say, the central idea is that conflict is part of us. | ||
| So throughout prehistory and history, humans have often faced life-threatening emergencies. | ||
| That could be starvation, it could be violence, life-threatening violence. | ||
| And that's why every brain, yours, Ben, and mine, and every viewer's brain, is built of survival-grade neural machinery, right? | ||
| It's built, every brain is built to win or at least survive a fight. | ||
| And now, as you travel from the brainstem right at the base of the brain through past the amygdala that you mentioned, all the way through to the frontal pole, this bit right at the very front of the brain that is the most distinctively human part of the brain, does our most sophisticated thinking about thinking, every part of the brain can drive us towards war. | ||
| There's not one simple reason why we're driven towards war. | ||
| Every part of the brain can contribute to driving us towards war. | ||
| But I'm actually optimistic. | ||
| I don't want this to be pessimistic. | ||
| I'm optimistic because I think we can know so much more about ourselves than we ever could before. | ||
| And if we can understand why humans fight, then we can reduce the chances that there will be wars or that wars will escalate if they start. | ||
| And I don't think we can ever banish war, but I'm optimistic that if we understand ourselves better, then we can harness what's always been the central weapon of war as well as instrument of peace, which is the human brain. | ||
| And so that means we can win wars if we must fight them. | ||
| And so I think, you know, Secretary Hegset, for example, a month ago also said, you know, peace through strength. | ||
| And I think there's a lot of truth to that. | ||
| But I think also, my main argument here is that we can build a more peaceful world through self-knowledge, through knowing ourselves as humans better. | ||
| So you have this tension between aggression and empathy, right? | ||
| Now, I happen personally not to believe that mankind is the product of evolution. | ||
| I think we were created in a straightforward act of God. | ||
| But put that to the side and we'll proceed in this conversation as if we are the products of evolution. | ||
| How is it that aggression would appear to have the upper hand between evolution in evolutionary terms? | ||
| Why does aggression appear to have the upper hand between aggression and empathy? | ||
| First question. | ||
| And the second question is, looking at your insights, can you give me some practical pointers as to the contributions your research at the cutting edge of neuroscience could have in the public policy sphere? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the first thing to say is this isn't based on evolution. | ||
| So my research is to research the brain. | ||
| You know, I use functional brain imaging, other technologies to understand how humans make decisions and how that arises in the brain. | ||
| So it's not based on evolution, it's based on how our brains work. | ||
| So I don't think it's inconsistent with your sort of philosophical basis. | ||
| So our brains have many different brain systems in them. | ||
| It's not just the amygdala and the prefrontal cortisol, it's many different brain systems. | ||
| And they create the, they're like an orchestra, right? | ||
| Each of these different brain systems is like a different part of the orchestra. | ||
| It could be the strings, right? | ||
| That could be the fine violins that do our most sophisticated planning, for example, or it could be the brass that does, you know, our big emotions like fear and so on. | ||
| We need all these different parts of our orchestra and they're all part of what makes up the symphony with which we live our life. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, it's not that we're only built for war because we're built for many other things too. | ||
| But the key point here is that that is an important part of us and we need to understand that. | ||
| But as you say, for example, reconciliation is also important. | ||
| You talk about empathy. | ||
| So reconciliation is also incredibly human. | ||
| So if you look at Winston Churchill's history of World War II, for example, the moral right at the beginning of that book, a key moral, right, he puts right at the beginning is in victory, magnanimity. | ||
| So reconciliation is every bit as human as conflict. | ||
| And we need to understand this suite, this, you know, we need to understand ourselves in our glorious true symphony rather than just one thing or the other thing. | ||
| Now, how do I use this practically? | ||
| So for example, I'll give you three examples. | ||
| So one thing I've spent a lot of time working on with the Pentagon, and in fact, the thing that first took me to Washington, D.C., was thinking about nuclear weapons, strategy with nuclear weapons. | ||
| And what you're trying to do there is, is like whatever the United States does, right, it cannot prevent Russia and China from retaliating with nuclear weapons, right? | ||
| And so what you need to do with nuclear weapons is you need to try and influence how the other side is going to choose to act. | ||
| Deterrents, for example, or controlling escalation. | ||
| And so what is often useful is insights about how will actions the US might take, how can they enhance the effectiveness of those actions? | ||
| Things like, for example, using surprise when you want to and not when you don't want to. | ||
| Another thing that I've worked on is information operations. | ||
| So how can we defend ourselves against things like adversaries like Russia who are very skilled at using things like active measures, right? | ||
| And we know that they do this and they do this in many different countries. | ||
| I'm not saying this is the most important thing in domestic politics in somewhere like Britain or the United States, but the Russians do do these things. | ||
| And we need to think about how they do that and how we can potentially defend against those types of activities. | ||
| And again, the central target of every information operation is the human brain, right? | ||
| And they will use very sophisticated techniques that look at emotions, that look at how we perceive things, how we misperceive things and so on. | ||
| So we need to understand that to defend. | ||
| And then a third thing is AI, right? | ||
| So I've just finished a big project and we had involved people from the director of DARPA, which are the people who invented the internet, lots of other people, the head of Army Futures Command. | ||
| And that was about how can we use AI, right, to win wars in the future? | ||
| Because it's not just technology on its own that wins wars. | ||
| It's humans using that technology effectively that wins wars. | ||
| And if we're going to control AI effectively, if we're going to control squads or swarms of robots, and we saw those for the first time used for lethal effect on a battlefield in Ukraine a few weeks ago, that's going to require understanding the human side of the communication with the AI robots, every single bit as much as the robots themselves. | ||
| And so those are all some practical areas that I've been involved with with the Pentagon over the last decade. | ||
| There's a phenomenal amount to unpack there. | ||
| Let's start at the back, the closing part of that. | ||
| And you mentioned AI. | ||
| You have said that AI really needs to, if I've got this right, to develop a pre-cortex, basically as part of its drive for consciousness. | ||
| Tell me how you'd go about doing that. | ||
| Yeah, so there's a difference between being clever and being wise. | ||
| So you're probably familiar with the TV program, the Big Bang Theory, you know, the comedy program. | ||
| And you have these very, very clever guys at Caltech. | ||
| They're very clever, but they often just get themselves into pickles. | ||
| They get themselves into mistakes because they missed obvious parts of the big picture and it leads them down, you know, into getting into all sorts of messes, right? | ||
| There's a difference between clever and being wise. | ||
| So AI, for example, can often be very clever. | ||
| So there was a famous example, which was an AI controlled a speedboat and it had to control this speedboat which was traveling down a course. | ||
| And the aim was to get as fast as possible to the other end. | ||
| But what the AI realized was that if it just circled around in the middle of the course, knocking things over, it would actually make a superhuman amount of points, right? | ||
| That was actually the most effective thing to do. | ||
| But that wasn't the point of the game. | ||
| That wasn't the purpose of the game. | ||
| The AI was being very clever, but it wasn't being wise. | ||
| So what is wisdom? | ||
| Now, obviously, that's an age-old problem. | ||
| I'm not saying, you know, I have every answer to what wisdom is. | ||
| But we're really beginning to understand really important things about the process of wisdom and how the wiser decision-making works in the human brain. | ||
| So let me give you one key example, which is right here, the frontal pole. | ||
| So the frontal pole is really important for thinking about thinking, right? | ||
| And this is what you do. | ||
| So you can, for example, think about your own thinking. | ||
| You can make a decision and then you can say, well, how certain am I about that decision? | ||
| You can set a goal getting to the end of this course, for example, and then you can say, well, how, is this the right goal for me to be pursuing? | ||
| So what we can do is we can now say, how does the brain do things like self-reflection? | ||
| How can we enhance that? | ||
| How can we make that better? | ||
| How can we think, for example, how humans consider their overarching purposes that they're going for in their lives, for example? | ||
| And then how can we make wiser decisions? | ||
| And I think that's what we're going to need to do with AI, because AI ultimately follows an objective function. | ||
| It follows an objective. | ||
| We set that objective, right? | ||
| Now, you may not have exactly the same objectives in life as every viewer out there or me or the people who, you know, cameramen, whatever, right? | ||
| Humans have very different objectives. | ||
| It's very difficult to know how we're going to set an objective that is the right objective for humanity, for AI. | ||
| So I don't think we can, I don't think it's possible for us to simply align an AI's objectives to exactly what we want for humanity because that's very difficult. | ||
| I think what we need to do is we need to create an AI that can make wiser choices, that can lift its eyes and see the bigger picture about itself and ask better questions and make wiser, not just cleverer decisions. | ||
| And I think that's what we're going to have to do with AI. | ||
| Stand by, Dr. Wright. | ||
| I'm going to come back to you in just two minutes. | ||
| I gave the number earlier on in the show for Bertrand Gold. | ||
| I'll give it again now. | ||
| It's 989898. | ||
| Philip Patrick and his team are standing by waiting for your call and they'll give you all the assistance and advice necessary on rolling an IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold. | ||
| And also, I just want to have a quick mention to my Patriot Supply, who encourage us always to ask the relevant questions. | ||
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| Our friends at MyPatriot Supply standing by, again, waiting to give you whatever advice necessary. | ||
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| That's mypatriotsupply.com slash Bannon. | ||
| Dr. Nicholas Wright, let's come back to you because we only have a few moments left of the show. | ||
| And it's absolutely fascinating what you're saying. | ||
| The necessity to think about thinking is the basic mandate of philosophy, right? | ||
| For two and a half thousand years, Western philosophy, that's exactly what it is. | ||
| It's the meta-analysis, using the reflective capacity to analyze the reflective capacity. | ||
| That would certainly be a sign, wouldn't it, of that AI has established true consciousness if it were able to do that. | ||
| But one question I have for you is that nearly every culture in one way or another through the course of time has found myths that sanctify war from the Iliad to Jihad. | ||
| Do you think that myth-making is a neural necessity, a way to make sense of that fear that the amygdala drives? | ||
| I think you're entirely correct. | ||
| So again, so people overstate this. | ||
| So it's not like myths are everything, but they're one of the important things, right? | ||
| We have a whole set of systems in our brain that are all important and that our capacity for myths is one of those things. | ||
| So I'll just give you an example, right? | ||
| Really important thing. | ||
| People worry about societies falling apart, American society falling apart, British society falling apart, whatever. | ||
| But the remarkable thing isn't that societies fall apart. | ||
| It's that we can form, humans can form groups of more than a couple of hundred individuals at all, because no other primates can. | ||
| No other primates can form a coherent group of more than a few hundred individuals. | ||
| And yet we can get to the point of tribes, which is thousands of individuals that can form a coherent group and up to hundreds of thousands, millions, right? | ||
| So how do we do that? | ||
| Absolutely central to that is something that I call social alchemy. | ||
| What we can do is we use, we create humans whose identities, their answers to the question, who am I? | ||
| Their identities are similar to enough, similar enough to each other that they can work coherently together. | ||
| And in addition to that, there is a culture, right? | ||
| And by culture here, I mean the basic idea of how are things done around here. | ||
| And that culture creates individuals with coherent identities and those identities help create the culture. | ||
| And that identity culture spiral is central to how humans can form huge groups, right? | ||
| Which is something, as I said, no other primates can. | ||
| And in that, our ability to speak, to communicate, to say, this is how you make a flint axe. | ||
| This is how you ford a river. | ||
| This is what God might look like or sound like or think like or whatever. | ||
| That is central to how we are able to create coherent societies and religious or mythological ideas were central to creating those at all times or rare of in human history. | ||
| That's why we're able to do that. | ||
| And no other primates can. | ||
| So I think you're right. | ||
| Myths are central. | ||
| One of the suite of capabilities we have that no other primate has. | ||
| Certainly not as well as us. | ||
| We literally only have three minutes. | ||
| But I think your area of study here is absolutely fascinating because you're starting off on the individual basis on the anatomy of the human brain and then expanding forward to how all the human exemplars react together and how they share social attributes based on the hardwiring in the brain. | ||
| Just in terms, because you mentioned Russia and Ukraine and China earlier on, using the insights of the specific anatomy of the brain, this tension between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. | ||
| So you're basically sort of suggesting that the element of aggression is always going to be there. | ||
| This is aside from the theological concepts of sin and what have you. | ||
| On the biological thing, that aggression is always going to be there. | ||
| It's always going to be there on the social and political level. | ||
| But as you said at the beginning, what you're trying to do is get from the understanding of knowing thyself to work forward and find a way of understanding that reality. | ||
| And that aggression is always going to be there to find a way to contain it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If we can understand, for example, how fear works better, then we can control our fears better. | ||
| If we can understand that, you know, when we feel these social motivations against injustice and that can help us, you know, really fight against things that are bad in the world. | ||
| And yet, on the other hand, when two groups have too exclusive an idea of justice, then that can lead to a tragedy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you talked about ancient Greece. | ||
| That was a classic example of tragedy in ancient Greece. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not right versus wrong. | ||
| It's two rights clashing. | ||
| And so those are the types of things where if we understand that better, if we understand how human morality works better in the brain, if we can enhance our ability to reflect so we can see ourselves in the world better. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that then we can make wiser decisions. | ||
| If we can do all of this, we can enhance all of these things, which, of course, we can also do in everyday life, too. | ||
| This is the same brain with which you and I go to the supermarket or, you know, drive our car or whatever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If we can understand ourselves better, then we can hopefully prevent wars from happening. | ||
| And as I said, if we need to fight a war, and I think we can never get to the point where wars will be completely impossible, then, you know, the reason why the Pentagon is interested in what I have to say and why I feel that I have really gained a huge amount of value working with them is that, you know, we can work out how to fight those wars better if we need to. | ||
| And both those things are important. | ||
| Why we fight and why we win wars. | ||
| Dr. Wright, could you just tell us where people can go to get that book that you published, Warhead, How the Brain Shapes War, and the War Shapes the Brain? | ||
| And where do people go to keep up with your research on social media? | ||
| Yeah, the books in any bookshop. | ||
| You can actually listen to me talking on the audiobook, wherever you get your audio books, and on social media, Nicholas D. Wright on X and I'm on LinkedIn and so on. | ||
| And I would love to speak to people if you want to get in contact. | ||
|
unidentified
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I would love to discuss these issues with people. | |
| Dr. Nicholas Wright, I'm very grateful for you coming on. | ||
| And I'm specifically grateful that you were able to handle these extremely complex terms in a way that I, as a non-specialist, can understand. | ||
| But it was very instructive. | ||
| Thank you for that. | ||
| Come on again at some point in the future for a further elucidation. | ||
| Folks, that's all we have time for today. | ||
| Thanks to Kyle and the great team at Real America's Voice in Denver. |
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