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Feb. 19, 2025 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:59:16

The Battle for Truth: Gregg Hurwitz on Myth, Power & Cultural Control – SF540

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	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	We'll see you next time.
	out there. . .
	Hello there, you awakening wonders.
	Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	Whether you're watching us on X or YouTube or Rumble or Rumble Premium, ultimately our home is Rumble and we hope that you will join us there for a fantastic show that includes a conversation with Greg Hervis, a writer...
	Philosopher and political thinker who's fascinated with the way that potentially we could bring America back together again.
	Let me know in the comments and chat whether that's even a desirable outcome.
	We'll be talking about pluralism, diversity and variety, subjects that are significant and important if ever you want America to again be a United States of America.
	We're going to be talking as well about Trump's declaration that women's sports will be protected and the complexity that emerges.
	If you don't have Rumble Premium yet, get Rumble Premium now.
	If you use the code BRAND then we will definitely be acknowledged for that support and you will get additional content from me and Stephen Crowder and Dan Bongino and Glenn Greenwald.
	I want to say hello to those of you watching us on Locals.
	We will continue to give you additional content like Break Bread with Russell Brand where I have fascinating conversations with Christians but there's more to life than that if you're a member of our Locals community or Rumble Premium.
	You get all sorts of fantastic content.
	Here's just an example.
	We're on our way to the ocean church where I've been asked to...
	I actually don't even know what I've been asked to do.
	Do you know, I'd forgotten how this had happened.
	I was thinking, why is it that I am here?
	And then Michael said, you met Becky in Seaside.
	I was like, yeah, yeah, I remember that.
	And then you did a video where you spoke and said, Pastor Michael, I said, yes, this did all happen.
	And now I'm here.
	These actions have consequences.
	I've not been Christian very long.
	Like, eight months!
	Since April the 28th.
	So you all know more about this than I do.
	So, inadvertently, I've been worshipping false idols, the false idol of fame.
	And if you do something like that, if someone's more famous than you, Then you...
	Might feel inferior, because if you invested, it was Benedict Cumberbatch, is who it was.
	In England, it's like they've tried to make Jesus boring.
	No disrespect to the Church of England, because I've met some brilliant and beautiful people in the Church of England since coming to our Lord, and they've educated me, and they've helped me, and they've instructed me beautifully.
	But overall, it seems like in England, they're trying to make Christianity seem like it's boring.
	And like when you read from Genesis to Revelation, there's fire and power and angels and demons and resurrection.
	And amidst us now, beyond the limitations of our senses, surely if we could but see with new eyes, we would know that we are surrounded even now that they are among us, our guardian angels and other forces yet, which if we do not submit, which if we do not submit, might...
	So get Rumble Premium if you want more additional content like that.
	Tomorrow, Lara Logan and Neil Oliver will be with me for Russell Brand's Stay Free Oracles, and we'll be talking about the biggest stories of the week.
	We've got Greg Hervitz coming up, but before that, let's talk about perhaps the defining political issue of our era.
	Donald Trump has signed an executive order protecting women's sports and female sports.
	One of the moments that changed my perspective on this subject was this simple question.
	Why have women's sports at all?
	Why have them?
	Because presumably it's a separate category in some way, and some biologists believe that at every measurable level there are differences between men and women, whether that's bone density or their blood or their hair.
	I mean, it's just completely measurable.
	Having said that, As a spiritual man and a believer in God, there are some things that cannot be measured.
	Something like essence, some subtle forms of energy that are difficult to discern using purely material means.
	So how does the issue of gender get used in the culture?
	How is it deployed by both sides of the cultural argument to push home their claims for moral superiority?
	One of the people that's been very outspoken on this issue from the get-go is J.K. Rowling.
	She made this post about Donald Trump signing the executive order protecting women's sports.
	Now that is notable for a number of reasons.
	For one thing, Donald Trump is surrounded by female children and isn't sniffing...
	Any of them on the head.
	That seems to be an advance for presidential politics, if nothing else.
	Let's have a look at the legacy media news coverage of Donald Trump signing that executive order before discussing more generally gender and women's sports and how this issue gets used politically to divide people and obfuscate truth.
	You know, if you'd like to gather around me, I think I'm going to be okay.
	Come on.
	Wherever you are politically, I mean wherever you are on the political spectrum, it's difficult not to make assessments of people based on your own intuitive sense of whether or not you think you would like them.
	When you see Donald Trump doing that, do you find it difficult to kind of conjure up hatred and go like, oh, he must be a horrible, evil, racist, rapist person?
	You sort of see him around children and you think, Hold on a minute, he seems really nice.
	Now, I can almost feel people that are determined to continue to dislike Donald Trump saying, well, Adolf Hitler!
	Adolf Hitler was good with children!
	Adolf Hitler loved his dog, Blondie!
	And at that point, you have to kind of acknowledge that you're enjoying hating someone.
	It's just something you like.
	It's not really based on reason.
	And almost at this point, how are any of us supposed to unpick the impact of propaganda on our own apparently personal perspectives on a variety of issues, whether that's Donald Trump as an individual or the complex subject of gender and gender politics?
	We have now reverted, as a result of the rise of the MAGA movement and Trump's presidency, to a there are two genders.
	There are men and women, like in the book of Genesis.
	So what do you do if you are a caring and compassionate...
	I'm a follower of Jesus Christ and says that Jesus Christ would love anyone regardless of how they dressed or what they declared themselves to be.
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	Secret services worried about them?
	That kind of stuff is what I like about Donald Trump.
	Like, it sounds like someone in the background is going, oh, no, you weren't meant to do this.
	Secret Service is worried about them.
	Like, there could be, like, a tiny little spy with a sharpie pen with a blow dart in it.
	Got him!
	Ah!
	Oh, no!
	My ear!
	If we have to worry about them, we have big problems.
	Okay, do you want to have a camera?
	Do you want to do this?
	Watch what I do, and then I'm going to give you some pens, okay?
	I'm assessing here the easy affability of a figure like Trump that seems to me to be at odds with the declaration that he is sort of evil.
	If you watch someone like Keir Starmer and see how he is around people, there's a kind of resolute awkwardness, an inability to be at ease around people.
	And that don't mean that he's a...
	Bad person, but I would say it's likely that he's hiding something.
	He's not at ease.
	He's not fully comfortable with who he is.
	You will remember Joe Biden, or the variety of Joe Biden.
	Sometimes it appeared he had stand-ins, sniffing around kids' heads, saying weird stuff all the time.
	Or Kamala Harris' weird and jarring, awkward dancing, all triangles and elbows spilling across a dance floor in an attempt to appear human.
	And affable.
	What's curious, of course, is there's plainly some awareness of the PR perspective of this image because Donald Trump is signing what would have been regarded as a very controversial bill not that long ago, the protection of women's sports.
	But when you consider that someone like J.K. Rowling, and she's almost a peerless individual in anglophonic and global culture because she's come up with the artifact of Harry Potter, which is basically...
	Sort of like Tolkien or something.
	There aren't many...
	Tolkien or George Lucas.
	There aren't that many people that have made cultural contributions that are that impactful and varied.
	Now, that also doesn't mean she's a brilliant person or...
	Well, she's a brilliant person, but it doesn't mean that she's morally unimpeachable, of course.
	But it does mean you're dealing with an individual that in...
	Any sensible culture will be difficult to malign and condemn, particularly if they're saying something that doesn't seem that outrageous.
	In so much as I don't believe that J.K. Rowling ever hated trans people, I feel that J.K. Rowling was very interested in the rights of women.
	She's a single mum that's created a global phenomenon that's almost beyond compare, and she has a view on women's rights because she's kind of the age she is and would have...
	Gone through cultural moments where women are like, oh, women aren't being paid enough, or women are maligned, or, you know, like, she wouldn't remember women not having a vote, but she'd have a sort of an understandable feminist perspective.
	And that's when sort of a lot of woke culture started to fall apart in the eyes of many people from a kind of common sense perspective.
	Hang on a minute.
	What do we do about, like, weren't we all supposed to be...
	Concern about women's rights or gay people's rights?
	How come now we're advocating for the medicalisation of trans issues?
	If you care about, and I suppose you do, you're watching me, my personal perspective, I believe in non-judgement and I believe in love.
	Those are my two principles that I would be guided by.
	I love it that trans people would come to my shows, but when, as a father, I think about how I would handle it if one of my kids said, I feel like I'm a...
	Boy trapped in a girl's body.
	I'd say, let's see a feel.
	What do you mean by boy?
	What do you mean girls?
	What do you mean?
	Let's wait a while.
	We'll work this out when you're a little bit older, mate.
	It's probably what I'd say.
	And let me know in the comments and chats.
	Let me know in the comments and chat what you would say as a parent or what you'd say as a loving person.
	So it's complete non-judgment.
	But when it comes to your role as a person that is charged with the care of a younger individual, what stand would you take?
	And would you want the government intervening?
	I mention all of this because there's a conversation on Bill Maher between an MSNBC pundit and Maher himself on this subject that is interesting.
	Let's see a little more of Donald Trump signing this order.
	You ready?
	What a nice picture this is, huh, Governor?
	You ready?
	We'll do a good job.
	Wait a little, let me press that.
	I also like that Donald Trump's person who assesses and evaluates the merits of his own signature.
	So, we're going to do a good job.
	Presses it down.
	I'm like, this is going to be a good signature.
	He's got, like, a perspective on his own signature.
	Although it's quite trivial, I also see that as testimony to the sort of ludicrousness of the idea of Trump as a malign person, like an evil person.
	Because it's so sort of human and sort of sweet to care about whether or not your signature is good and to have that kind of direct affinity and affability and relatability around kids.
	I just can't imagine a person like that withdrawing to some dreadful private place and going, I hate N-words or...
	Now, of course, that sort of famous tape of grab them by the P-word was an indication that there are levels to people.
	And indeed, all sexual conduct is by its nature intimate and...
	And when you bring all sexual conduct into the public sphere, I think it seems a little bit icky, even if it is as it should be, entirely consensual with people that are able to give consent.
	So I would say this, when you watch Donald Trump around kids, doesn't it seem like he's in general a pretty lovely person?
	Let me know what you think about that in the comments and chat, even if you disagree with him politically and a whole host of things, and I'm sure any of us would if we were to scrutinise his political perspectives.
	But more important than that is where do you stand on this issue of the protection of women's sports?
	And what does it mean when a culture can take someone like J.K. Rowling, a sort of like Walt Disney, like a person that you would think is sort of an icon of a culture, a creator of the culture, abandon them, annihilate them, murder and condemn them, make them a pariah on the basis of opinions that are certainly, like, reasonable, like...
	In the same way that I would say, oh yeah, if you want to be trans, that's none of my business and I'll call you wherever you want me to call you, wouldn't you say that if a person says, no, I actually really believe in protecting women's spaces, you wouldn't go, the principle of tolerance can't be selectively applied.
	Otherwise it's not tolerance.
	It's a kind of expedience.
	Wouldn't you agree?
	Let's have a look at Bill Maher's Let's have a look at Bill.
	Wouldn't you agree?
	Let me know in the comments and chat.
	Let's have a look at Bill Ma's conversation with Chris Hayes, who seems to be a sort of semi-wake, liberalist, MSNBC host, who's advocating for a kind of my body, my choice perspective on the subject of trans care.
	Let's go back and look at what Chris Hayes was saying during the COVID pandemic.
	I bet he was all sorts of, let's vax the hell out of these people, and if you're unvaxed, you're a hater type stuff.
	I don't know.
	That's just an aspersion I'm casting on him without.
	Real evidential proof, so maybe I'll pause that for a moment, but let's have a look at his conversation with Bill Maher as the ongoing cultural conversation is explored on Bill Maher's real time.
	But I also think at the same time, there is a message of what I would call, like, common sense patriotic pluralism.
	Common sense patriotic pluralism, i.e.
	patriotic...
	If you're going to have a country, it's going to have loads of people in it, like 330 million people in it, and they're not all going to believe the same thing.
	Okay.
	Common sense means that there is a...
	That's the idea of a universal reason.
	Now...
	To have universal reason, you have to have a higher principle, don't you?
	Even to make claims to common sense, you are sort of saying that there is a God.
	If you're not saying the word God, because you're an atheist or a materialist or whatever, you are saying something that is compounded within the word God, there is an absolute reality, aren't you?
	Because otherwise you can't have common sense.
	You can't have common sense unless you're saying there's a consensual, universal, agreed-upon reality.
	And pluralism, which at some point in this conversation Chris Hayes says is a synonym for diversity, could also be considered a synonym for variety.
	Now variety is beautiful.
	We have a variety of people.
	Limitless variety in God's creation.
	Limitless variety between all of us as nations, as tribes, as individual people.
	Diversity suggests opposition.
	Between those people, pluralism is a kind of a word that indicates diaspora.
	Variety means we are all coming from a single center, one radiant creator, but we are different from one another, and we respect these differences.
	That is a majority message, which is like, if some father and mother have healthcare for their kid lined up who's trans, just stay the fuck out of their business.
	Stay the fuck out of it.
	If some people don't want to get a vaccine because maybe they want to see more clinical data, mind your own business.
	Particularly if those vaccines haven't been clinically trialed against transmission, then there's no moral component anyway.
	Mind your own fucking business.
	Suddenly so cavalier.
	Suddenly.
	So willing to say, I want the government out of my business.
	So extraordinary when the entire liberal movement was advocating for authoritarianism on the basis of protection and care.
	And who is more vulnerable than the children?
	I often think myself, I don't want, say for example, this is just a thought experiment.
	Should you be able to drive your car with your children with no seatbelt on if you consider that your driving is safe?
	Should you?
	Let me know in the comments and chat.
	I actually believe that I should.
	Be able to do that.
	I should decide for myself whether my children are safe in the car.
	Now, I know that there's many, many questions that could bounce back over the net of me.
	Well, what if another driver did something?
	Or what if your children being out of their seat caused them to do something in the car that made you swerve?
	But that seems to me to be the legitimisation of authority.
	Rather than the advocacy for sensible authority.
	However, I would acknowledge that if there was ever a situation where you felt that parents were not correctly looking after their children, or even were abusing their children, that you might want some authority to intervene.
	Would you say that's reasonable?
	So there is a point where even the belief that I don't think that I want anyone involved in my children's lives other than me and their mother...
	There's a point where you'd say, but what in instances where those children are being abused or exploited?
	Now that is the question that's used to legitimise state interventionism.
	And I would contest this, that therefore any authority has to either be divine or consensual, i.e.
	Democratically elected within agreed parameters.
	You can't have state intervention unless it's sanctioned by God or mandate.
	We all agree on that.
	So let's see where this conversation goes.
	Get the fuck out of their business.
	Yeah, I'm in the audience at Bill Maher, and I think I heard something I believe in.
	And let them make that decision.
	That's their decision to make.
	And you don't have to make that for your family.
	I'm not going to tell you what to do with your family.
	Well, I mean, but the argument is whether the child should make the decision.
	But the child is never making the decision.
	The parents are always making the decision.
	Parents consent to medical care.
	Well, here in California, you're allowed to hide it from the parents if the kid is...
	Yes.
	Thank you, one person.
	Somebody knows that.
	Significant difference there, perhaps, and I reckon if we agree that parents are ultimately responsible for their children, then perhaps you can make the argument that Chris Hayes is advancing there.
	Would you agree with that?
	I think in the vast majority, and we've been hearing from parents right now whose kids' medical care has been interrupted, I think there's a way to talk about...
	Well, of course, they would say it's not medical care.
	They would say it's disfiguring a child.
	I think they should mind their own business.
	I really do.
	I think they should mind their own business.
	Where would the principle of minding your own business appear on a continuum that likely includes propagandization of certain issues?
	For example, have you noticed over the last 4, 6, 8, 10 years very public advocacy for gender realignment therapies?
	Have you noticed that?
	Has it gone beyond the expression of the very human, decent and godly right for individuals to be whoever they are, whoever they feel called to be by God, to express themselves lovingly as long as they're not harming others however they want, a key principle of freedom and salvation, and potentially moved into propagandisation?
	Pushing and advocating for those measures.
	One way to test that would be, are certain states experiencing higher rates of trans kids?
	And do those states more publicly advocate for trans issues?
	My children, I want them to be whoever they are.
	And if my children say to me, I believe that I'm a boy born in a, you know, whatever, if they don't agree with their biological gender, inverted commas, then I'm going to support them to be whoever they are and whatever they want.
	But what I would do, and I would make a claim for common sense, is I would say, we're going to wait for a little thing called puberty to happen and adulthood to happen because your daddy was pretty crazy at various points in life, and I'm glad that I weren't able to make any permanent choices while I was a child because they may not have been good choices, and you're growing up in an environment and I'm glad that I weren't able to make any permanent choices while I was a child because So the principle has to be derived, in a sense, from a belief in God.
	Do you know what I mean?
	I'm saying love.
	As long as you're coming from a place of love, whether you're a family member or a participant in the politics of a nation, you're going to be okay.
	The problem comes when you believe in hate.
	Now, that's what everyone attributes to a figure like Donald Trump.
	He's hateful.
	He hates black people.
	He hates trans people.
	He hates women.
	Does he look hateful when you see him surrounded by children there, signing those things and...
	So, kind of dopely dishing out the pens.
	I don't know.
	You tell me in the comments and the chat.
	And any parent worthy of the name will do what's best for their children.
	So I would say yeah, I don't want the state involved in my children and I wouldn't command that the state get involved in other people's children So in a sense there is some truth in what Chris Hayes is saying but when you unpack and follow that you have to start looking at what's been advocated for and Propagandized publicly over the last four years.
	Is that a sensible question?
	Let me know what you think about that I think they should mind their own business and I think that's true about a lot I think there is this sense in which there was this sort of backlash politics, some of which I understood, some of which people I know felt that way.
	And I reckon if we are tolerant and loving people who believe that our duty here is to spread the kingdom of heaven upon the earth through love and service of one another, we have to remain entirely open.
	But we have to be alert to the idea of propaganda and the impact of a culture on an individual.
	If a culture doesn't have an impact on an individual, why have a culture at all?
	Certainly a culture that would abandon a figure or annihilate or purder a figure like J.K. Rowling is a culture that needs a bloody good looking at, is what I would argue.
	And when you look at Donald Trump, Trump's surrounded by kids.
	It's difficult to see the guy as evil.
	And if you're determined to see him as evil, then you might want to investigate where those ideas came from.
	But that's just what I think.
	Why don't you let me know what you think in the comments and the chat.
	We are comments and the chat.
	Wherever you're watching this, you can find us on Rumble Premium.
	That's our primary home.
	Consider getting Rumble Premium.
	You get additional content from me, Bongino, Crowder, Greenwald, a whole host of people, as well as supporting free speech.
	We've...
	You can also watch Break Bread.
	Break Bread is a fantastic show that I make.
	Here is an example of the conversations we have there.
	So you always have to be on your alert because, you know, there's corruption in the church.
	I live in Ireland.
	We've seen plenty of that here, right?
	So we know priests can be corrupt.
	Hierarchies can be corrupt.
	People are fallen.
	But the process that's going on, I think, is real.
	I think it's real.
	And I know that I'm changed by it.
	Now, if you're watching us on X or YouTube or wherever you're watching us, we are going to leave now and be exclusively over on Rumble.
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	If you're watching us on X or YouTube, wherever you're watching us, other than Rumble and Rumble Premium or Locals, I love you my friends on Locals, you are going to love our next...
	Our next guest is Greg Hervitz, whose new book Nemesis is out now.
	It's part of his Orphan X series.
	And the reason I like Greg Hervitz is he uses fiction to explore fascinating cultural ideas like freedom and liberty.
	He's a New York Times number one bestseller.
	And he's also...
	Fundamentally involved in addressing political and cultural polarization, producing numerous commercials and writing op-eds for publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Guardian.
	So he's certainly operated within legacy media spaces and probably has fascinating insights, I would say, on a variety of cultural issues, all of which we'll be discussing in the upcoming conversation.
	Click the link in the description to join us for what's sure to be a fantastic conversation about culture and power.
	Greg Hervitz, thank you so much for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	Congratulations on your new book, Nemesis, which is out now.
	One of the things that I know you do brilliantly well is wrestle into the form of fiction, complex, contemporary, cultural conversation.
	Congratulations on that success.
	and thank you also For sending me that amazing graphic novel.
	It's really beautiful and fantastic.
	I love the variety of media that you're able to work in.
	Congratulations on that.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	New Think, that graphic novel I wrote a couple years ago.
	It's very much about, it's sort of a black mirror-like take on technology and addiction and all the ways that it's warping our brains.
	Yes.
	Now, I wonder, Greg, how you have pivoted and altered your perspective.
	Because, I don't know, does everyone know about you that you actually were a student of Jordan Peterson?
	Do people know that about you?
	I didn't mention it in your introduction or anything.
	Do people, is that common knowledge?
	I think so.
	I mean, look, some people know and people saw me on Exodus and the Gospels on the Daily Wire with him.
	So that was a big point of overlap.
	But yeah, we go all the way back to college.
	But no, I'm primarily known as a thriller writer.
	The Orphan X series, that's what Nemesis is, my new series.
	I do some screenwriting and comics.
	But Jordan and I have crossed enough, publicly and otherwise, that some people are familiar with that relationship.
	So we go all the way back to, you know, I was 19 years old when we met.
	And, you know, he looked like a lead singer in a boy band.
	He was like sort of hunky.
	Psychology professor.
	He was incandescently sharp.
	And I took one course from him, personality psych, and then just signed up for everything.
	I did a young seminar with him that was life-altering for me.
	And then he was my thesis advisor on the psychology side.
	Oh, my God.
	I mean, so you could sort of tell that you were dealing with a superstar academic.
	Even then, were you a favourite?
	Because I, you know, I know I've been in educational, and I know that, well, like, for example, I went to a drama school, and we had a very, very charismatic principal, Christopher Fess, and by the way, everyone there's training to be actors, so we lived for that guy's attention.
	Was Jordan Peterson the kind of professor that everyone was kind of clamouring to be a sort of favourite, and where did you rank?
	I think I ranked pretty well.
	We got along really, really well.
	And yeah, I mean, there was something about him that was just foundationally different.
	I remember telling my college roommates back then, I said, look, if there's one professor, and I was at Harvard as an undergrad, back when that was still something to be proud of.
	And I remember, so we had some pretty great professors.
	I mean, Seamus Heaney was there teaching Yates.
	I had Helen Vendler for English.
	I mean, it was, you know.
	It was extraordinary.
	But I remember saying to my roommates, if there's one professor who I have had here who I think will be remembered just by his last name in 100 years, it's going to be Jordan.
	It was going to be Peterson, like Ibsen or Chekhov or Freud.
	There was something in his expansiveness of reach, and a lot of that was...
	Bringing together symbological and mythological structures of thinking with hard and intense science.
	One of the things that's so amusing to me is whenever you'd have these debates with like Sam Harris or somebody, they'd say, oh, well, Jordan is the sort of spiritual mythological thinker and Sam's the scientist.
	It's like, Jordan is like a knockdown, no shit, hardcore scientist beyond anything.
	He's published hundreds of papers.
	I mean, so the thing about him that's so extraordinary is the depth of wisdom, knowledge, And grasp across a whole bunch of different topics and then the ability to unify them.
	And I'd say this was also at a time when a lot of the great old professors were retiring.
	I had a professor named Roger Brown who taught, you know, he's one of the fathers of social psychology, but he could quote Shakespeare at length.
	He was an expert in etiquette psychology, which is fascinating, literature and film.
	And he would retire and somebody else would come along who was an expert on like one gene.
	And so we saw this sort of, you know, condensation of these massively educated generalists who were also exceptional in particular fields to somebody who was, you know, the specialist will be the generalist in the short term.
	And I think in Jordan, it was evident to me.
	I mean, my undergrad, I was English in psychology.
	I was writing about Shakespeare, but I did Freudian and Jungian analysis of Shakespeare and I used him to contrast them.
	And it was clear that his brain could sort of go, you know, anywhere through all these different fields while also pinning down his most obvious expertise.
	I mean, look, of all the things Jordan's brilliant at, he's brilliantest at being a psychologist.
	It's just staggering watching him work and move around that filter.
	And so, yeah, to me, it was just clear as day all the way back then.
	So I like to think I discovered him, and I'm responsible in large part for his success.
	Congratulations on that.
	Congratulations.
	Also, what's pretty interesting, it's not that we're going to spend the rest of our lives discussing this topic, but Jordan Peterson is in the kind of liberal publications that you've written for, I think somewhat extensively, like The Guardian, a kind of legacy media organisation in my country, Wall Street Journal in your country.
	Are the kind of criticisms that are offered at...
	Projected, fired off at John Peterson is that he's some kind of poor man's intellectual.
	That he somehow lacks veracity and depth and foundations.
	That he's like the stupid man's philosopher.
	Now...
	In a way, these are the kind of claims that make it difficult for me to take them seriously, because whatever you think of Jordan Peterson and the way that his story has played out culturally, it's pretty clear that he's a rigorous and brilliant intellectual.
	Well, you know, if you talk about he's a dumb person's idea of a smart person, it's pretty great.
	It's like, that's what we call an educator.
	You know, that's Jordan taking incredibly complicated ideas and boiling them down.
	But look, people have no idea.
	I mean, and I've been dealing with this a lot because, you know, Jordan and I have been friends all the way back.
	I think it's part of why even as somebody who had strong relationships coming from a liberal, and I say liberal, not progressive and not lefty, background and worldview, I've been undeceived from minute one.
	About the dangers of the far left, in large part due to my relationship with Jordan.
	I saw everything that came for him.
	I saw the ways in which the filters went up, the ad hominem attacks increased, things were taken out of context, things weren't researched, people didn't, you know, I don't need to read more about him than one stupid tweet.
	That defines the summation of everything who he is.
	And I sort of watch this idiocy come after and attack him.
	You know, it tends to be combined with crushing moral sanctimony and an utter and comprehensive lack of curiosity.
	It sort of is a devastating combination of incompetence and lack of curiosity and sanctimony.
	And so I really had my eyes open.
	And part of the very fruitful engagement I've had with Jordan is if he's someone who's center now leaning slightly right, whatever that means anymore.
	And I'm center, but coming from a liberal perspective, we've done a lot of work in terms of trying to bridge things across the divide because ultimately, you know, we need to get this country in the West and Western democracies really unified because there's a lot of people out there who love nothing more and are fueling us tearing ourselves into pieces.
	As other hostile regimes and players and psychopathic algorithms are marching and making inroads.
	So we do need a solidity among us, and I've been working with him to do that.
	But yeah, I think there's very few people taken more out of context than him.
	And I think that a lot of the people who criticize him, when people say that, you know, I always think, look, I could come up with, I could probably sit down and if I drank, you know, a cup of coffee, I could write down 100 topics that he could probably win an argument, an in-depth argument with, with people who are dismissing him as a lightweight. I could write down 100 topics that he could probably It's just preposterous.
	I mean, dismiss him for other reasons.
	You know, he doesn't like baseball.
	You know, he uses the term bucko too much.
	I mean, there's a whole host of reasons why we should eschew Jordan, but one of them is certainly not going to be lack of horsepower under the hood.
	One of the arguments that he's been at the absolute forefront of almost the sort of kind of, Harbinger of, in some sense, are the cultural arguments that unfold around women's rights, protected spaces and gender diversification, which has come to a kind of new head with Trump's recent executive order that women's sports will be protected.
	And we today talked about J.K. Rowling posting when she did the image of Trump surrounded by...
	Girls was a real positive thing, that people that had engaged in the cultural war had sort of brought that about.
	Now, when we were unpacking that, Greg, I felt...
	This is what I felt.
	J.K. Rowling surely is a peerless...
	Individual when it comes to her creativity and cultural impact, whether you want to look at that sort of economically or the sort of franchises that have flown out of her sort of individual endeavours.
	And any culture that would attempt to purge itself of her, malign and cancel her, must have a really kind of very particular purview and sense of itself.
	Because if you are interested in...
	The kind of cultural pluralism that progressives claim to be interested in, you would surely be able to accommodate a female writer that could probably only really be compared to someone like...
	Tolkien or Walt Disney, that you wouldn't just go, well, she's out because she's interested in protecting women's spaces.
	What do you think that when it comes to the issue of protected women's spaces and trans issues, it tells us when J.K. Rowling can find herself now only re-sanctioned by the ascent of a politician that most progressives are comfortable describing as being a contemporary Hitler?
	You know, that's a superb question and fertile grounds for discussion.
	The first thing I'm going to say about J.K. Rowling is she's one of our predominant myth makers, and I'm going to get back to why that's important.
	She's also, I don't want to say single-handedly, so let's think of an adjective that takes some of the absolutism off that.
	Largely, largely responsible for an entire generation of readers.
	And so as somebody who's a novelist, novels are my main, you know, this is my 25th or 26th novel.
	This is my career.
	I have watched her build out an entire readership.
	The Harry Potter books start at a somewhat more simple level on boarding people, and they grow more sophisticated and a bit darker as they go.
	She's been an extraordinary cultural impact.
	She's done a ton for women's rights, children's...
	Right?
	She, you know, she was homeless for a brief time.
	And I think one of the things that is really important, I also want to frame what her actual perspective was.
	Her actual statement was, I believe in trans rights, meaning if you are trans and you are being prosecuted or persecuted because you are trans, I will literally march with you for your rights.
	I don't care if you're trans.
	And in fact, I think that your rights are important enough that I will march.
	This is a tweet that she sent.
	Out.
	Early on.
	However, I believe there are certain spaces that need to be protected for women.
	My view to this woman who has been canceled from publishing, you know, when Warner Brothers had a reunion for Harry Potter, she was scratched from it and she wasn't invited.
	She's been sort of excised.
	If you think that there's another opinion, that that opinion is unacceptable for somebody to say, if you're being prosecuted because you are trans, I will march for you to protect your rights, but I have other opinions here.
	If that is so extreme that that person must be removed from the public record, then you're not...
	Living remotely in reality.
	What you're living in is this sort of totalitarian state of constant prosecution.
	And one of the problems with the victor-oppressor narrative is there's only room for three positions in that.
	You're either the victim, and who wants to be a victim?
	You're the oppressor, and who wants to be the oppressor?
	Or you're the tattletale.
	Now, the question that you asked, I think, is really important.
	Why did it land on her?
	And we've seen that this victim-oppressor narrative, which we now know leads to fascistic thinking.
	There's a new study from NCRI that's a network contagion research group that shows that if you start to frame things in this narrative, people tilt into more fascistic language.
	They get sort of totalitarian curious if we start to divide people into groups.
	So once Marxism was seen to profoundly fail in every regard, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong dwarfs the death count of fascists and dictators from the right, not that they're any picnic.
	What we saw was an attempt to warm over this whole sort of worldview, once it was unequivocally responsible for so much murder and mayhem and horribleness, through the Frankfurt School, but most importantly, I think, through the French deconstructionists.
	And that began the long march through the institutions.
	And one of the things that's so weird for me, so I was an English and psychology major, as we talked about.
	I was wondering, why is there this big insurge of French deconstructionist thinking, which basically reframes, instead of it being labor and capitalist, it reframes everything as victim and oppressor through the English department.
	When I was an undergraduate, this was starting to become widespread, though we could still make fun of it.
	It wasn't like I would get canceled for saying, I've had it with Deridara Foucault.
	Like, I kind of think they should be tied to an anchor.
	That's just my opinion.
	But the reason for that is, is if you really want to get at the roots of a culture and bring it down, the smartest place to attack is you attack the story.
	And so having Marxism through literary critics who are French come in through how we view texts, right?
	Can we really read Shakespeare?
	Do we have to read Shakespeare in context?
	Is Shakespeare really a white colonialist oppressor?
	What are all the ways we have to investigate that?
	What are the experiences we bring?
	If you can relativize everything and you attack the story at its base, which is going to be the attack in literature, which is where this onslaught started in academia.
	Then the footing goes everywhere.
	And so what seems like should have been an assault through the realms of history or political science or even feminist studies or other schools of study came in primarily through literature.
	And I think that's why it's so profound in the arts.
	If you can disintegrate and attack a story as not being anything that has absolute meaning or worth or value and that everybody can interpret through their own lens and you can turn everything into power dynamics, then you can bring down a cascade of the culture.
	The other benefit it has is that it cuts us off when you start to identify certain texts as being, let's say, colonialist texts, right?
	Let's say that that's Huck Finn.
	Let's say that's Orwell.
	Let's say that's Dostoyevsky, let's say that's Solzhenitsyn.
	We lose access to these great works that teach us about these dynamics and how they are to be avoided and what they ultimately lead to.
	And so I think it's very interesting you bring up J.K. Rowling.
	I don't think it's a coincidence that we go after and we start to want to lynch or burn at the stake our myth makers.
	That's fascinating because I suppose what she's doing is...
	Articulating contemporaneously universal and therefore ancient, pre-ancient ideas and themes and making in so doing claims for an objective truth, an objective reality.
	Now I'm fascinated by what you're saying about Derrida and Foucault because in a way, Greg, Foucault's claim that all power is undergirded by violence.
	I think could be utilised by those of us that are not post-structuralists, that do believe in an objective reality.
	And just to be less opaque, I believe in God.
	I believe Jesus Christ is God.
	I know that you're racially Jewish.
	I don't know about you religiously yet.
	But in any event...
	The way that even Foucault and Derrida have been utilised subsequently seems somewhat disingenuous because it is precisely this power that is backed by violence rather than truth that is in the ascendance when a figure like J.K.
	Rowling can be exited and exculpated from a culture on the dubious basis that she doesn't align 100% in a total way with the prevailing power.
	Fashions and trends that surely you know you can imagine that at some point in the future Greg they're gonna have to hold some big J.K. Rowling day at Warner Brothers or whatever conglomerate owns it in 10-20 years and sort of rehabilitate J.K. Rowling precisely because she owns a significant amount of their IP if no other reason and how are they gonna how are they gonna undertake that?
	But I'm also fascinated in how you say the post-structuralists were utilised in particular in literature, because I suppose literature is an outpouring of sort of divinity and divination, and I'm sort of, as an Englishman and as an actor, sort of astonished to hear, although actually I've sort of heard it before, some of the critiques levelled at Shakespeare, and I'm also additionally interested in your dissertation and how you applied Jungian motifs to the writing of Shakespeare, because it just sounds like a fascinating idea.
	But before we get to that...
	Could we just tell me a bit more about the application of post-structuralists and semiologists, I suppose, because it's likely Lacan can be baked into all this, when it comes to reframing narratives and stories which can't work without recourse to archetypes and absolute truths?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So, the first thing I'll say is that I believe that the hero's myth...
	Which is, you know, it's everything from Gilgamesh to the Terminator, right?
	So anyone who has read, I think of, you know, Jung and Newman are the masters of coming up with these archetypal stories.
	Joseph Campbell, in a lot of regards, is like the cliff notes to Jung.
	I find Jung incandescently brilliant, but he can be difficult to read.
	At times it feels like you're digging a hole in your face.
	And I think that Joseph Campbell came up and can kind of provide the cliff notes.
	But these are an integral aspect to human experience.
	If we find a tribe in the Amazon basin that has been cut off from any contact with other humans...
	We know they're going to have eyelids.
	We know they have opposable thumbs.
	And we know that they will have a hero myth with all of the constituent steps.
	So this hero myth, we are ingrained to perceive and engage in the world in ways through story.
	They teach us how to contend with the internal and the external unknown.
	So if you read one of my thrillers, in a way you can think of that as practice.
	You don't actually have to go get killed by a cartel member or like garroted in a banya in Moscow.
	It's practice for us to figure out how we can iterate these.
	I think there's, whether you believe that these are God-given or evolutionarily selected, depending on where your belief system comes from, either way, these are stories that have had so much pressure applied to them that they are perfect diamonds.
	We talked about this a lot in Gospels.
	The Gospel narrative, the four stories in the Gospels, are like a perfect gem of a hero myth.
	Everything about them aligns.
	They've just been compressed to almost perfection.
	So if you can invert that and you think about that every charge that somebody levels, that's not right.
	Many charges that people level not in good faith are confessions.
	And so when the Derrida's and the Foucault's and the modern carriers of their water say that everything comes down to a power dynamic, everything is power, power is what's at the top, it's literally because I think they can't imagine a world in which people are motivated by God.
	Let's say.
	Or truth, let's say.
	Or self-sacrifice for the longer-term moral betterment of a community.
	And certainly one of the things that you named at the top of this is truth.
	So then let's look at some other adjectives.
	If we've now scattered everything down because everything is on the basis of power, right?
	So some of the adjectives that are picked up, what should be the most descendant of all things in a value hierarchy?
	Let's say you don't have a definitional grounding.
	And we know what they are in stories and myth.
	We know what it is for Odysseus, right?
	We know what it is for all these characters and heroes that we've carried forth.
	But if you're choosing any of them, so let's choose some.
	Diversity.
	Is diversity a good thing?
	Sure.
	Inclusion.
	Is inclusion a value that we care about?
	Yeah, certainly.
	Can those two things be the top value for any venture?
	The absolute utmost top value?
	Well, if inclusion in, nothing works.
	It can't be a choir.
	It can't be a sports team.
	It can't be a robotics club.
	It can't be anything if it is literally the top value.
	And so when there's a confusion and a deterioration of a value set because everything is relative and we just get to choose anything, if we don't start with truth at the highest mooring, then we're immediately off course.
	And even these values that can have values, is empathy an important value?
	Of course it is.
	Should we make all of our decisions, military and public health, on a basis of empathy that's based on...
	You know, personal emotion that we bring to our personal relationships?
	Absolutely not.
	That's a disastrous way to make decisions.
	And so the hierarchical ranking of a story, of a value set, I'm sorry, is what stories teach us.
	That's what we learn about when we read Crime and Punishment.
	That's what we're exploring when we look at how things get out of whack with Animal Farm.
	Give us a bit of an example of that, would you?
	Of like how a story, could you just pick one?
	You seem to have access to quite a lot of them off the top of your head.
	How a particular story is demonstrating a particular value.
	I know because I've had the conversation with your old teacher, Jordan Peterson, that we could sort of distill to some degree the ultimate value of the Christ narrative if we were looking at it from, you know, not from a theological or spiritual perspective, but from an ironically somewhat post-structural perspective.
	Like, the highest value is power to sacrifice for the common good.
	That the greatest king that ever came died for the most vulnerable and weakest person.
	Like, it's an absolute value.
	You can imagine JP making those claims, I'm sure.
	But I want to just fold this in.
	As well, while waiting for you to give me a story that tells you an absolute value that we can sort of like, oh yeah, man, because I love that eyelids thing from the tribes there.
	He made me read Eliad Mercia, and I was thinking how in that...
	There was one line that really struck me.
	He said, it's not even, Mercia says, it's not even just homogeneity, which has its own form of cohesion, but an endless fragmentation, an erratic and incoherent fragmentation that becomes your reality.
	And it seems to me that that's part of the goal, to engender the sort of bewilderment that does indeed enable...
	Power, like, you know, whatever power you nominate to succeed, you have this sort of morass of relativism where you can't pick out anything, which is the opposite of how a story has to work.
	And I was wondering how, as well as a sort of secondary inquiry, how, you know, you must be pretty tough on yourself when you're writing them books of ensuring, like, oh no, that's not a good crisis in Act 2. Oh no, that's not a good enough revelation.
	So I wonder, what story demonstrates...
	One of them values.
	And then maybe you can sort of unpick a little bit of what I'm saying here about the benefits that come from chaos and bewilderment and how that advances human power over absolute truth.
	Okay.
	First of all, that's a world-class question, perfectly structured.
	You're like Christopher Hitchens that you speak in perfectly contained paragraphs.
	So there's three parts to the answer, which I want to hit.
	If everything is deteriorated within a story, If everything and all values are equal, there's a very interesting personality cluster for big five personality traits, which I know you're somewhat familiar with.
	A lot of people know the Myers-Briggs tests, right?
	But there's different ways we break down personality.
	For people who very much embrace this victim-oppressor narrative, there's a couple things they have in common.
	One of them is that they're very low in trait conscientiousness.
	So what's trait conscientiousness?
	Do you show up on time?
	Do you return phone calls?
	Do you work hard?
	It's the second highest predictor of success in the world after IQ. It's incredibly important.
	So if you're low on that ability, it means that you're not going to compete particularly well in the world.
	And so a lot of the people who love this narrative are low trait conscientiousness.
	And then they also have super high trait empathy.
	Where they're claiming and smuggling that their concerns aren't on behalf of their own inability to compete, but on behalf of these poor other people who they are now going to be allies for and get out in front of, even if, like many of the people who came and most loudly pushed through transgenderism with all of everything that happened, really damaged the people, the much more rare people who actually are transgender in the community, who are now furious that all these...
	Angry, affluent people got involved as like tourists on that front.
	And so if you can deteriorate everything, you have low conscientiousness, which means you're not confident in your own ability to compete and do well.
	So what you do is you piggyback or parasite on behalf of somebody else's perceived victimhood, which you're going to then promulgate.
	And we see this in a lot of movements.
	And the third thing is low verbal acuity.
	And what that means is that you can't...
	You don't want to have to debate.
	You don't want to sit down and have to debate Charles Murray or Ben Shapiro.
	What you do instead is you can scream or you can say words are violence or you can use old catchphrases that shut somebody down.
	Now, I certainly have differences of opinion with lots of people, you know, Ben included.
	It doesn't mean that...
	The engagement or the source of having it is respectful dialogue where I'm going to assume that I'm going to learn something in an engagement with him, but it's a total removal of that.
	So it's a very interesting cluster.
	I know that I can't compete well.
	I'm going to port this over and pretend I'm interested in other people, and then my tactics are going to shut down any actual communications and engagement.
	So that's number one.
	Number two, you mentioned the story of Christ, and I would say that the approach that we took in the Gospels...
	It's not post-structuralist, but it's actually just exploring, I would say, the beauty of this story from different perspectives that allow more people access.
	So if it's just psychological, if it's just narrative, it's not foreclosing on, as Bishop Barron reminded us, and as Oz Guinness certainly reminded us in the Exodus seminar, on the spiritual wealth and meaning, but it's finding different tracks in.
	So two values.
	I want to give two stories, one positive, one negative.
	In the Gospels, what we have is a story of somebody who is the least deserving person, who every single aspect of society turns against him.
	You have the church or the temple.
	You have the politicians.
	You have his own best friends.
	You have every single thing, and everything in the culture turns against him.
	It's the person who has the most virtue punished the most unjustly in the most inconceivably awful way, who then still elects.
	To embrace his suffering in order to be transcendent, to transcend the suffering as an example for others.
	So you have ultimately a sacrifice that is made that the marrying or the embrace of complete sacrifice, of carrying your own cross, if you take it on yourself, you can be transformative for others.
	It's an extraordinary, extraordinary...
	And it's also insane.
	We forget how radically revolutionary this is.
	This isn't like, you know, Christ doesn't ride in on a white horse with a flaming sword.
	He comes in on a donkey and is born in a stable.
	And what people worship, what people hold up, is the image of him at his most tortured and defeated.
	Like, who does that in anything?
	You don't see Ganesh that way.
	You don't see...
	Other gods represented in this way.
	And so it's this extraordinary inversion where, you know, the crown that is made to mock him, in fact, is a crown that's made for kings.
	And the thorns mirror the thorns, of course, from the fall when Adam and Eve first leave paradise, right?
	There's this whole return to paradise that's emblematic in the symbols that are used.
	And so there's this incredible transcendent imagery, right?
	King of the Jews is written as a sneer.
	But that's, in fact, what he is.
	So there's this incredible inversion of somebody who is the least deserving taking the most suffering in the most graceful, conceivable way.
	That's extraordinary.
	Now I'm going to give another example about archetypal narratives and how they function.
	And this one is in the negative.
	This is a morality tale.
	We all know the story of Hansel and Gretel.
	It's one of my favorite stories.
	So Hansel and Gretel are lost in the forest.
	They're two kids.
	The forest tends to represent our subconscious.
	So they're, let's just say that they're loose in a sort of metaphysical landscape.
	And what do they come upon?
	They come upon a gingerbread house.
	It's a house that's made of candy.
	It's too good to be true.
	And so they eat the gum, you know, gumdrops.
	They're eating the wall.
	They go inside.
	And everything is there that they could possibly want.
	It's like Pleasure Island in Pinocchio.
	But what lives inside is a witch who is fattening them up to devour them.
	Now, that's an archetype.
	That's the devouring mother archetype, right?
	So if you have a mother who gives you everything you want, who's sugary sweet, come, you can have all the sugar you want.
	Come into my embrace.
	I'll give you everything you want.
	That's the mom who's like driving over and doing her son's laundry when he's...
	26 years old so that he can't have a fiance and his girlfriend can't get the mom out of the way.
	That's Munchausen by proxy, moms who keep their children sick in order to be able to have a position where their empathy elevates them morally, right?
	And so it's this perfect jewel of a narrative that's embedded in this story, which is that the devouring mother will come in and offer you everything that's too good to be true, and the only thing it's going to cost you is any separation that you have, because you get devoured back into that morass of the unconscious unknown and into that maternal devouring feminine.
	Cool!
	Very cool.
	But I suppose from a Jungian perspective, the highest goal is individuation.
	And from a spiritual perspective, I wonder if these are synonyms.
	Self-actualization, realization, surrender.
	I mean, if sainthood is the goal to become, in a sense, not to absolutely become yourself.
	Well, I mean, in the end, you're going to find paradox and irony in these things.
	In fact, your rather lovely and brilliant answer was redolent with precisely such ironies, i.e.
	the use of dramatic irony in the pilot's declaration above the head of our Lord, the crown of fawns, that this is sort of a kind of irony.
	And indeed, I wonder, Greg, this is somewhat psychological, but when the devouring mother, Isn't too many degrees separate from almost the perfect mother in some way.
	You know, it's not an opposite.
	It's not an opposite.
	There's an odd Alignment and a peculiar and difficult alloying.
	Because, you know, a mother that says, no, you can't come in my house, there's nothing to eat, F off, wouldn't be perfect either.
	And just when I'm thinking of mothers that I know, I recognise their witch in the gingerbread house.
	I wonder if this might be an interesting time to touch upon what you brought up as being the subject of your dissertation, archetypes within Shakespeare.
	I used to be an actor, and maybe I will be again.
	Who knows, Lord?
	So if you're approaching, say, the Scottish play, or Othello...
	Or, you know, Hamlet.
	There's a few things I'd like to say.
	One, there is so much archetypal robustness available to us in the writing of Shakespeare that it can almost withstand any interpretation.
	You can set Richard III in Nazi Germany.
	You can have a woman play Hamlet.
	You can set all of Hamlet in a mental institution, as I once memorably saw.
	And it can, because there's such truth in it, or even take Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet.
	It can take it.
	If you want to make it sort of pop and Cubana, Latino version of it, because the truth in it is so powerful that it can be expressed through a variety of aesthetics or creative choices.
	So I wonder what our...
	I know it's a dissertation, so probably, I don't know, it's 10,000 or 30,000 words or whatever, but I wonder what...
	Because I actually...
	This might interest you.
	Some time ago...
	Pre-cancellation.
	I did a rather wonderful project with a brilliant English director called Ian Rickson.
	You'd like this, man.
	You would like this.
	I took, along with Ian, passages and pieces.
	From Shakespeare and told my own life story.
	My life.
	Russell Brand, My Life by William Shakespeare.
	In which I did Richard III as like, I'm an ugly adolescent.
	I'm ugly.
	I don't like myself.
	But I am going to glorify my ugliness.
	Caliban and Prospero.
	This is my island to my stepfather.
	My island!
	And then later on, Richard II in the cell of like...
	Time.
	Time devours me.
	I wasted time, now time wastes me.
	And Hamlet with the grave digger and going like what it is to...
	Like that Uric was kind of like a father figure to him when his own father was not available.
	So, yeah, I've looked at that.
	The idea in particular that Shakespeare could be categorized as a religious text rather than a literary text.
	And that, mate, takes us back to what you were saying.
	And about using Foucault and Derrida as kind of barracuda weapons in literature because what you're actually attacking is truth and faith and deep faith and truth.
	So yeah, that's a good framing for you, isn't it?
	Yeah, it's wonderful.
	And there's some ideas to think about here too with it because, you know, Shakespeare, he didn't write any original plays except for The Tempest.
	Everything is based on stuff that's pre-existing.
	And every time he did it, it's funny because some people will have objections that the Merchant of Venice has anti-Semitic elements.
	But if you compare it to the Jew of Malta that it's based on, he breathed so much life and substance into this.
	And so what I don't want to get mistaken for saying that...
	We don't want Barracuda-like attacks on the text, but it doesn't mean, as you said, that we don't want to innovate.
	Baz Luhrmann was brilliant with that with Romeo and Juliet.
	Shakespeare was somebody who experimented.
	He was a populist, and I want to get back to that in a lot of ways, because his primary aim was to be sort of a bestseller.
	Now, with Othello, for instance, there was a brilliant Othello.
	And so what that means is we can bring new...
	New voices and new identities and new concepts to play with the text.
	I think it was Patrick Stewart did A Brilliant Othello where he was white and everybody else was black.
	And the play holds in reverse.
	So it's this really interesting thing.
	It's not that we want to put our fists down and have some knee-jerk reaction to wokeism where there's not all sorts of experimentation.
	And movement and different voices and different approaches because that's the lifeblood.
	That's when liberalism is functioning well, that there's a fringe of ideas that sort of water and nourish what the center is and bring a new life to it.
	Iago, to give just a quick example about this, you're talking about archetypes.
	Iago's language, if you look at the five acts of Shakespeare in the beginning, he's filled with all sorts of, like he calls Othello the two back and beast.
	There's all this bestial, satanic imagery.
	And through the acts, if you rank the number of times he uses that imagery versus Othello, it starts off where it's all Iago and none with Othello.
	And the play is a seesaw tilt as he sort of infects Othello.
	All through the play.
	And by the end, Othello can barely find speech.
	Remember, he's incredibly articulate, though he claims not to be, right?
	Rude in speech am I. And by the end, he can barely speak.
	He's like, he has all these exclamations.
	And he's been infected and taken over with this language about like beasts and flies and like this horrible hellish.
	And you remember the last line that Iago says is that he will not speak anymore.
	He's silent.
	Because he has completed his takeover of Othello.
	So if you think of that as a sort of shadow takeover, right, from repression, because Othello has a lot of things that are repressed, when people repress things, I always think that one of the best pop culture references of this is Kathy Bates in Misery, where everything on the surface is like, you know, hey diddly-doo.
	She's like Ned Flanders.
	But what's beneath it is this monster that's controlling.
	And so we watch Iago sort of take over that way.
	I want to just talk real briefly.
	You touched on Shakespeare, just sort of his role.
	And I think it's very important that we remember that Shakespeare, we tend to think of as this sort of rarefied air that's being attacked, right?
	Like, so, you know, by this Barracuda metaphor that you're using.
	Shakespeare was, first of all, he was an actor, which, as you know, is considered the lowliest of the low, right?
	Everybody called him this, you know, meat puppet, upstart crow who spoke from his neck.
	He wasn't sort of an erudite playwright.
	And what he was trying to do is put asses in chairs and sell out the Globe Theatre night after night after night.
	And so he's constantly playing.
	He'll make a, you know, if you cut that Globe Theatre in half and you look at the dollhouse view of it, it's a perfect cross-section of all of Elizabethan culture.
	You have royalty up here, you have the groundlings.
	And so he's constantly modulating.
	He'll make a glancing reference to Ovid's metamorphosis for the educated, and then he'll throw in an impotence joke for the groundlings.
	So he's keeping everyone in thrall all at once.
	And he's designed, he's trying to actually sell out.
	I mean, he wasn't even really writing things down to record for posterity.
	He wanted to sell out.
	That was his aim.
	He was somebody who wrote so brilliantly and it was for the masses.
	And so he's a myth maker.
	Obviously, I think he's the greatest myth maker in the English language.
	But when we're talking and applying that form to J.K. Rowling, it's like, is there depth in her writing?
	Of course there's depth in her writing.
	Does it connect across all sorts of people?
	Of course it is.
	Ideological?
	When we talk about her semi-cancellation, is it because she's sort of this rigid ideologue?
	Absolutely not.
	There's all sorts of complexity.
	And all these other values that we discuss, inclusion, diversity, empathy, grace, forgiveness, these are all themes that she plays with.
	She's just not choosing one and elevating it.
	And people can do that from the left or the right.
	And that's where you cease creating art.
	And what you're doing is creating propaganda.
	You know all the answers before you begin.
	You're not discovering as you write.
	You're not having rounded characters bang into each other where the tension from what they're doing and how they bang into each other is going to produce the sort of drama that makes us think, that pushes it internal to us.
	If you're prescribing something, you might as well be Mao Zedong, like typing out the things and sending them out to the masses to be as a form of demanding and ideological worship.
	And that's where art has to get off a partisan track and an ideological track, because if it gets on that track, it's no longer art, nor is it good entertainment.
	No.
	It's interesting that iconoclasm plays its role in both of the lives of these myth makers, people often refusing to accept that Shakespeare's just one guy from Stratford upon Avon.
	He must have been a conglomerate.
	He must have been someone born of noble blood.
	And I suppose where Rowling's story takes place contemporaneously and under continual...
	Prudence and observation.
	We can't say, well, she didn't write that.
	Well, there's been claims, haven't I? I wrote that.
	That was my idea.
	She stole my idea.
	And people misfudging the difference between archetypes and plagiarism.
	And your earlier point that...
	You know, that Shakespeare was often using stories that were not original.
	Other than The Tempest, which is like many people, I'd love your take on this, Greg.
	Many people consider it to be his sort of last work.
	I wonder why that is.
	I was in it once, like a film version with the brilliant Julie Taymor.
	And there was...
	Oh, man, that was a good experience.
	I worked with some good actors on that.
	Alfred Molina, English actor, who, like, he's so good, man.
	But he's like Dr. Octopus in the Spider-Man movies.
	And I was in, like, a double act with him.
	And, like, he don't like...
	I did rather balk and recoil when you mentioned, what was it, trait conscientiousness, because I am...
	Often late.
	But I hope that it's not...
	I don't know, man.
	I consider that to be some sort of mad and giddy flow, and I hope that it's not an indicator of deficit elsewhere, something I'm willing to explore and change.
	Anyway, the Tempest, it seemed like a magnificent story, because a court, books, wisdom, magic...
	Paganism.
	But it struck me then as I was sort of like reflecting on the things that I've spotted in Shakespeare and my understanding of Shakespeare is by no means exhaustive.
	I've not even read all of it.
	It feels like I can't really, off the top of my head, think of many references to Christ, which is interesting, as it's near contemporaneous with the publication of the King James Bible, near enough.
	And that's surprising when I think about it.
	Other than I can think of in Hamlet, that the Almighty had not set his canon against self-slaughter.
	That's one sort of reference.
	But, you know, it's sort of almost deliberately pagan in a bunch of his plays, and sort of certainly kind of...
	And as you say, even Shylock, if you look at the source material, he's been, forgive the word, kind of humanised and fleshed out, pounder fleshed out.
	It's interesting that there doesn't seem to be a particular take.
	And it's interesting too to think of him as being a populist that was literally interested in selling out in the most literal way.
	Well, it's funny, because I get asked that a lot as a thriller writer, where people say, well, if you're a Shakespeare scholar, and I'm not, I'm a Shakespeare dilettante.
	I did a one-year master's in Shakespeare in England, and I love him.
	But it's so funny that people have this perception that he's floating up in some arid space.
	It's like he wrote highly structured, narrative-driven tales of lust, intrigue, and murder.
	And from borrowed texts, the same way that Ross MacDonald inherits...
	Raymond Chandler is inherited by Michael Conley and Robert Crace.
	These plots, the femme fatale, the archetypes that we have in thrillers are often received.
	And Prospero is amazing.
	I mean, I think that's his stand-in and his goodbye to the world.
	And for me, one of the most moving lines in all of Shakespeare is at the end when he sets Ariel free, the spirit free, and he points to Caliban and he says, this thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.
	And he takes the weight of the kind of shadow.
	Remember, Caliban's in a cave and he smells like fish and he's like this vile thing of earth and clay.
	And Prospero acknowledges that as part of himself.
	It's this beautiful parting image.
	And then Ariel is set free.
	Now, while we're talking about Christ imagery, you know, it abounds in Shakespeare.
	And I think one of the things to think about is we were talking about this.
	Sort of ranking values in a subsidiary value set, right?
	Which is, you know, do we like empathy?
	Of course.
	Do you want empathy in a mom or a dad?
	Yes.
	Should it be the top value?
	Absolutely not.
	There's a clear hierarchy in Shakespeare all the time of the great chain of being, which is God at the top, and then you have royalty, whether that's Queen Elizabeth.
	And you see that when he's writing, he's also writing, you know, one of the things I think about a lot is everyone's writing for the studio.
	You know, Michelangelo couldn't just do whatever the hell he wanted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, right?
	He has to appeal to, who is it?
	Pope Julius II, I think.
	I might have that wrong, so let's fact check me.
	But, you know, you need to, and so Shakespeare, when he's writing with Queen Elizabeth, there's a lot about virgin leadership.
	There's a lot that's an homage to her.
	And when he enters the Jacobean era, you start to see all this witchcraft and other things come in, like as you mentioned in the Scottish play, because that was a fascination of King James.
	So in that great chain of being, it's like sort of God, then royalty, then everybody else.
	And when that's torn or severed, when that hierarchy, like in Macbeth, you have the emergence of the satanic, and that's the witches, right?
	This bumbling, rhyming dialogue that's so weird, some people think he didn't write the witches scenes almost.
	But when you tear that fabric, it sort of opens the maws of hell.
	And we see that too in the way that Iago opens that up within Othello in the language that we discussed a little bit.
	And so that notion of a structure is there quite completely.
	But with Shakespeare, you know, he's burying a lot of this imagery further beneath the surface.
	And so I think that's part of what makes it so compelling is because when we're in it, we're just watching drama.
	Because we have to make a choice, as you say, around what are our values.
	And you're right.
	The truth I heard recently that never let...
	Truth outrun love, is what I heard.
	That love has to be...
	And I suppose that it's somehow in love, I sense...
	There is an acknowledgement in the cohesion and in our shared destiny, in our unity under God, that it is the felt and intuitive unitive principle, that we know somehow that love is our unity in action, that I must deny the subjective sense that what I want is more important than what Greg wants.
	And if I get back to our point about justice of a structural analysis of the Gospels, that that is, you know, in sort of a superlative demonstration of those principles, everything maximally expressed as poor as possible, as powerful as possible, as pious as possible as as powerful as possible, as pious as possible as it like all that everything is.
	And when you're writing, you know, like, because I was thinking, I was about to say, I don't really watch a lot of thrillers, but when you see it, because a thriller done bad is hackneyed, hokey and awful.
	But like a thriller, like in a sense, you want to be like on the edge of your seat and you want to be watching something or reading something that's like, oh my god, no!
	I love that feeling.
	I love like a rollercoaster in my own consciousness.
	But I suppose that we've become accustomed, because of bad art, of like seeing these things rendered.
	I'm thinking of Hamlet now.
	Speak the speech, I pray you.
	Like when he tells the players, don't mess this up, you know.
	You've got to do this so well that the people watching this actually feel like, oh no, they know that I've murdered my own brother.
	It must be interesting to have the kind of intellectual and academic rigour that means that you can participate with Jordan Peterson, of whom I would concur with you, in whom we have one of the greatest...
	Great analysts of culture, certainly of our time, but maybe beyond even that, as you said earlier.
	And then to get right in there with having to write a book like Nemesis or many other graphic novels and books we've written, do you sometimes feel a little encumbered by it?
	Do you not feel like sometimes...
	My best work, I think, is spontaneous.
	I enjoy spontaneity, both as a performer, As a writer, it's difficult to be spontaneous, I suppose, because it takes longer.
	But, like, you know, I find it sort of sometimes cumbersome.
	When I've written fiction and scripts, like, sometimes I'm like, oh, God, that's just not good enough.
	Like, I've...
	Bulk!
	My own indelicateness.
	So I wonder how you marry together this sort of academic and mathematical, almost algebraic understanding of structure and story with the necessity for liberating the muse when you're there on your own and you have to write a real character.
	It's a great question.
	I think so much of it is, I mean, I meet so many people who want to be writers and I meet very few people who want to write.
	And you have to love the act itself.
	And when I'm writing and when it's going well, there's a sort of zone that I'm in.
	And that has to take precedence.
	I don't have spreadsheets and elaborate arcs and I need my second act reversal.
	I mean, one of the things I tell people, I never really took a course on writing.
	I never read a book on writing.
	I just read 10,000 books, right?
	It's the same with movies.
	You have to love it.
	And then I wrote and I screwed up.
	In my first two books, I wrote 16 drafts of my first novel.
	I was very fortunate.
	I started young and I sold it.
	But I had to take the whole thing apart like an engine block.
	So there's this process of trying to figure it out.
	But what I want is to be writing from my gut.
	I think there's three kinds of writers.
	There's people who write from their head.
	To me, that's James Joyce.
	Very cerebral.
	Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake.
	Fitzgerald, who I love, writes from his heart.
	And that's beautiful.
	And then there's writers.
	Who I think I emulate, and it's a school that I come from, or that I strive to emulate, I should say.
	And that's writers who write from their gut.
	That's like Faulkner.
	Faulkner's just like, he's dirty and he's in there.
	And so I think part of it is to learn...
	As much as I can.
	And all of that goes into sort of the blender of what I know and how I think.
	But then when I'm trying to do it, what I'm trying to do is to actually have the story be in the driver's seat, not me.
	I don't want to appear in the story.
	I do a lot of crazy research for the thrillers.
	I've gone undercover into mind control cults.
	I've blown up cars on demolition ranges with seals.
	I've gone up and stunt airplanes.
	I've done all sorts of stuff.
	But what you never want, there's a line that a friend of mine said one time, and she was reading a book, and she said, oh, your research slip is showing.
	You never want to show off, right, like, oh, well, look at all this stuff Greg learned when he went and shot, you know, rocket-propelled grenades, and I want to be, you know, I want to write two chapters of gun porn or weapons porn.
	You don't need to do that.
	What you want is for the story to be predominant and for the author, in some sense, to recede into this flow.
	You mentioned two other things, which I just wanted to remark on briefly.
	You talked about truth and love as sort of these competing ideals for the highest value.
	And my wife, who's a psychologist, pretty amazing.
	She did a lot of work in the field as well, which is much like Jordan, which was part of what made him such a compelling professor was he had clients and he worked in prisons.
	He did all this sort of stuff.
	My wife was very similar.
	She worked with...
	Child prostitute.
	She worked with juvie facilities.
	She worked in HIV wards before there was a triple cocktail.
	She worked in addiction and then she taught for a lot of years.
	And she has a line that I love where she says, you can't, you shouldn't use truth like a baseball bat.
	And so...
	Truth to me is predominant.
	If you're not coming from a position of truth, you can't do anything.
	I see this all the time in politics.
	If you're trying to start with spin, if you're trying to start with marketing or messaging, you're doomed.
	But there certainly are ways to use force without the minimal necessary force.
	And I think it's something in particular that when people are more daring or entrepreneurial or muscular in their spiritual, business, intellectual, and emotional endeavors, There tends to be a roughness around it.
	And I think this is the tension that we're seeing the culture navigate right now, which is it is time for a reckoning as pertains to bureaucracy, as pertains to codified corruption, as pertains to...
	There's two facts to me that are way more important than anything else in the entire political landscape.
	Fact number one, since Reagan, $50 trillion with a T have gone from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.
	That's under everyone.
	That's under Obama's and Clinton's and Bush's and Reagan's.
	The other one is that the correlation between the American citizenry, whether they want a law or don't want a law, to the law actually getting passed is 0%.
	It's a 0% correlation right now.
	So if we understand those two things and we understand that sort of...
	I think it's incredibly important that we can get to truth in ways that aren't reactive, which means the other side, however you define it, is an absolute monolith that represents pure evil and must be opposed at all costs.
	And that anything they say, we will take the opposite of.
	We need to have these two different worldviews and different personality structures.
	The liberal personality structure, the tired trade openness, which is what you are.
	Very heavily.
	You were talking about the conscientious thing, but you're incredibly high in trade openness, which makes you a very interesting person with conservative viewpoints, because they're sort of expansive in ways that are...
	High trade openness is the highest correlation with liberal value set, let's just say.
	And then conscientiousness is one of the highest predictors of conservatism.
	And so that tends to fold walls around things.
	They're like borders around things.
	So build a wall is a good conservative slogan.
	They want boundaries around gender.
	But the job for liberals is to say, hey, wait, if you build a wall and you don't let in new ideas in people, we'll stagnate and we'll die.
	The culture won't be fed and nourished.
	We need new ideas.
	We need a fringe.
	We need carnival.
	We need play.
	We need artists.
	And we have to figure out how we get into that exchange where the reckoning isn't brutal in the process.
	We've had it with this bureaucracy.
	We've had it with all this.
	And we're going to smash everything to pieces.
	And tons of people are going to get hurt.
	Because what we want is maximal change.
	That does minimal damage so that we can most effectively move forward and govern as a unified country in the face of immense threats like China and Russia and the Iranian regime, all of whom are running all sorts of playbooks on us.
	So there's this balance that we're sort of dealing with there.
	Last observation I had, because we're talking about stories, and I feel like I'd be remiss to not mention when we're talking about the gospels, we don't just read the gospels and...
	Think that we are and emulate Jesus.
	We are all things in the Gospels.
	We're all those characters.
	That's one of the things that's amazing about when you're reading and you're embodying a story.
	We're Judas, right?
	We're denying Christ three times, our truest beliefs.
	We're the two thieves.
	We're Pontius Pilate, who's making a choice to preserve himself.
	We are all of those characters.
	And so we have to embody them when we read and integrate them.
	But also, man, and if you've not done this already, you're going to really dig it.
	As an actor, you would go, what does he do?
	What does the character do?
	What is the character like?
	What does he do?
	He tells stories.
	He tells stories the whole time.
	He communicates in parable.
	There are four men.
	Here's the address servant.
	It's a bit like two birds.
	When you throw seeds, he's a storyteller.
	And in so doing, he exemplifies something that he is, how we're going to experience him, you know, at least until he comes alive in your own consciousness, within.
	He is the vivification of story, and he is the apex and nexus of myth meets truth, because myth is truer than truth.
	And therefore, it sort of takes place beyond reality.
	He is a myth-myth-maker.
	He is a living myth.
	He is a living sign, as he has been called.
	I loved that thing you just said, like that you said, like we were talking about sort of like truth there.
	And like those competing value systems and how some harmony could be achieved in the tension between those two poles.
	But I suppose what the post-structuralists do, Greg, is say, I reject those taxonomies.
	And don't you sometimes feel that what we're experiencing now is the kind of collapse of category?
	Let me give you a real-time example, which obviously you'll have picked up on yourself.
	Like Bobby Kennedy...
	Is, like, if you had anything like an objective mainstream media, some of these organisations that I've worked for, that you've worked for, The Guardian, to name one, the BBC, to name another one, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, whoever, like, wouldn't you have seen some sort of documentary that's like,
	wait a minute, what's going on with MAGA? That they've got Bobby Kennedy, who is sort of more Democrat than Bernie Sanders or AOC, certainly more Democrat than Biden or Kamala Harris, has just glommed on to this movement.
	And wait a minute, Tulsi Gabbard, who surely would have been a better bet as a leader than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders or AOC, is now also nested within this MAGA movement.
	Doesn't it show you that what we've lost, as you said, like, I'd I hadn't spotted that before.
	Truth is non-negotiable.
	The problem is, is what they do, is they claim there is no truth.
	And that's the kind of berserk aspect of nihilism, is that it's a havoc machine.
	Like, you know, there is something in the prima materia, the spirit moving along upon the waters, that is like chaos, like order is coming sort of out of chaos.
	It's discernible within it, in its geometry, in its golden scale, in its arithmetic, in its fractals.
	But it's sort of ensconced somehow within chaos.
	But what they're doing now in their great heresy, in their blasphemy against God of gods, is claiming that order itself...
	Doesn't exist.
	And therefore, selecting and laying claim to whatever virtues they want to elevate on a particular day, and Lord alone knows it changes in accordance with their agenda, because their ultimate aim is control.
	And control is on the spectrum of violence.
	And so with peculiar irony, they are guilty of the sin that they declare to be the worst of sins.
	Well...
	Many accusations are confessions, as we said.
	And number one, nothing stands up to a story.
	Nothing can compete with the story.
	It's the most powerful thing that we have.
	When you're mentioning this, one of the greatest disappointments that I've had with the Democratic Party, which I was a member of for a great number of years and still engage with and try to help as much as I am right now with Republicans in the administration as well.
	Because I do think that no matter who's in power, we need a competent opposing party.
	We just need that, right?
	And I felt the same thing when Democrats were in power.
	I want the best of Republicans in there, too.
	But, you know, you mentioned some names, and I would say one of my biggest frustrations is that, and to me, it's close to an unforgivable crime to be allowed under the liberal tent, is a demand for conformity of thought.
	The fact that disagreement is no longer allowed and that bold and daring and innovative and courageous and adventuring and mold-breaking thinking has largely been a shoot.
	And at some point, a lot of thinkers are going to say, if I can't speak plainly in the language that I want to speak and think out loud and make mistakes and stumble and fall and need forgiveness.
	And with social media right now, we have a culture that never forgets anything and there's no mechanism to forgive anything.
	And so everything's sort of stuck in this frozen paralysis.
	It's not just who you named.
	Elon Musk voted for Obama twice.
	Jordan Peterson is not, you know, not only is he laughably not alt-right.
	I remember all these memes when he was a Nazi.
	I always say to him, I miss the good old-fashioned days when you were merely a Nazi.
	And I wish I'd known that before I asked him to officiate my Jewish wedding.
	Jordan was not a hardcore conservative.
	Joe Rogan.
	You think Joe Rogan is a conservative?
	That's insanity.
	And so there needs to be an allowance.
	Like, I always would say when people were burning books.
	When people were burning Lolita or Ulysses, liberals are the ones who are supposed to show up with buckets of water.
	We're not supposed to be the ones who are closing the high trade openness, demanding that we not be exposed to certain things.
	I also want to clarify that there is no such thing as meaning or value or truth is a fringe aspect.
	Of the far left.
	It doesn't represent a lot of liberals and Democrats.
	However, I do think there has been a crisis of cowardice among Democratic leadership in not naming the things that they do not agree with.
	That's another outcome of high trade openness, right?
	Every protester isn't Harvey Milk or John Lewis.
	They're just not.
	There's some people who want to skip the entire process of shouldering the responsibility of what a protest is.
	And they don't understand the sort of sacredness of the civil rights movement in America, which very much says that you take the full bearing and the full weight of the responsibility of your protest on.
	You go to jail if you're Martin Luther King.
	You get lynched if you're...
	I had a grandfather who went down south to represent...
	Black men during the civil rights movement were accused of looking at white women, and they tried to run his car off a cliff.
	Like, you go and you face the risk.
	You don't ask for class credit for it at Vassar.
	And part of you, when you hold up in the face of all that unjustness, the law and the culture crumbling across your unbowed shoulders makes enough people say, you're the one who's righteous, not the law.
	Let's change the law, and let's do so within the parameters of the legal system.
	And so a lot of that has been forgotten.
	You mentioned definitional collapse.
	I think that's a really important term.
	There's phrases that are super loaded.
	If somebody mentions MAGA on the left or on a meeting that I'm in with, let's say, leading Democrats, it means something completely different than if I'm with friends who voted for Trump or if I have different...
	The words don't mean the same thing.
	It's sort of even like Black Lives Matter.
	Are people talking about the...
	Lawless and illicit excesses that happened in the $2 billion riots that happened after George Floyd?
	Or are they talking about movements that are contained on college campuses?
	There's a whole variety of different ways that those terms are used, and we don't even know what they mean anymore.
	And basically, this is part of the Orwellian attack, is first you talk about, you know...
	Who are people who are acceptable?
	You, Russell, you're not an acceptable person.
	Neither is Jordan.
	Neither is Rogan.
	Neither is RFK. You're just not.
	Then it becomes topics of conversation.
	Can we discuss...
	Are we allowed to have a discussion about what spaces should be for women that separate and are just women?
	No, you can't have that discussion.
	Can we talk about what the checks and balances need to be on immigration?
	Even if our economy is dependent on immigration, America is a country of immigrants.
	We love immigrants.
	They're all part of our community.
	However, that's not a toggle that can only go straight to open.
	Can we differentiate it?
	No, we're not allowed to discuss that.
	And eventually it goes from people.
	To the Overton window in Top X, all the way down to words.
	You can't use that word.
	If you say this word, it means this.
	And so we're using all these words where I have friends, close friends, who are Black, who Black Lives Matter means one thing to him.
	It means something to somebody else.
	We can't use, what does patriarchy mean?
	What does choice mean?
	The words themselves get captured and claimed, and then we lose language.
	An interesting thing.
	About that that I find so fascinating, because you talk so compellingly and oddly in a way that I delight in about Scripture.
	But so one of the things that's interesting about Cain and Abel, which we've discussed at length, and Jordan has made this point quite beautifully, is when Cain kills Abel...
	He's killing the thing that he should aspire to.
	Abel walks with God.
	He makes proper sacrifices.
	Cain makes lesser sacrifices.
	And one of the things Jordan has pointed out is if you kill the thing that you aspire to, you destroy the future.
	Cain is cursed generationally.
	And one of the things that's so fascinating to me is the descendants of Cain who go on and build cities and Tubal Cain, who's the maker of tools, who's sort of a father of engineers is a way to think of him.
	Those descendants in that line, as distinct from Seth, are the ones who build the Tower of Babel.
	So what's the Tower of Babel?
	The Tower of Babel is something built by the makers of cities and the toolmakers and the engineers that is sanding up a structure that is...
	It's equivalent, they hope, to God and reaches just as high as God, but it's not in conversation with God.
	So what happens when you're going to assume and build your own thing?
	So that's AI, let's say.
	That's technology and iPhones.
	What happens when you start to build that is everybody starts to speak different language.
	Well, what happens when we're on our phones and somebody tweets?
	MAGA and they mean one thing.
	Or somebody says something and it's something else.
	We're in all these different silos right now and we've lost a shared basis of a story.
	And what's the most upsetting about this, but I think that we are, I hope that we're turning the corner on this.
	I did a bunch of polling.
	I do some extracurricular kind of spelunking into the culture when things need to be unstuck, usually around extremism.
	And we did a bunch of polling that shows that basically 90 to 100% of Americans agree on almost Everything.
	I'm just going to read you a couple of these because they're so great.
	I believe Americans should have equal justice under the law, regardless of race or religion.
	99% agree.
	We're talking social security.
	I believe in the freedom of vote.
	Have every vote counted.
	97%.
	Freedom of speech and religion.
	100%.
	The right to privacy.
	99%.
	It also pertains to topics that are more controversial, like immigration.
	And the key is, if you don't phrase things like a total asshole, Then you can get more agreement.
	But so much of polling is push polling.
	So if you go out and say, I believe in climate change, maybe you get 46%.
	I believe climate change is a hoax.
	Maybe you get 46%.
	But I wrote this question in a different way, which is to try and get at what people's real belief is, if we actually want to solve problems.
	It's important to take care of our environment and ensure that we have clean fields and streams, seas and skies.
	Americans are tired of political division.
	95% agree.
	Wow.
	And it's question after question like this.
	It's just incredible how much agreement we actually have.
	So we're filtered through A, psychopathic algorithms that make us insane when we're online, and they literally note in our phones, the sensors note literally when our eyes dilate when we see something.
	So the sensors are hacking our nervous system.
	We have bad faith foreign players.
	We know there's a ton of PSYOPs being run by China, Russia, and the Iranian regime.
	And then we have bad faith domestic players making money.
	And so there's all these networks that are controlling us that are driving outrage, fear, anxiety, and anger.
	And the news that filters in and back to us basically turns the opposition into a monolith.
	And what I want to do, what I think it's very important that we do, and what I think is important about conversations, Like this one, and like the ones that you have, and people from different backgrounds and affiliations coming together to discuss, is to shatter something that's called a state of pluralistic ignorance.
	Now, I mentioned earlier that for one of my books, my fifth book, I was still a kid, I went undercover in a mind control cult.
	And one of the ways that mind control cults work is that everybody is miserable, but they can't talk to each other.
	They only talk vertically.
	So think of all of North Korea as a mind control cult.
	Like everyone knows that they're starving and miserable, but you're not allowed to sort of speak it.
	And so what we have to do is shatter this state where people think, I mean, if 80 to 100% of people in America agree on literally almost everything, if it's not being spun for partisan fundraising, political races.
	News channels, outrage, send money.
	I mean, our phones are like these devices trying to hack our nervous systems.
	And if you're on a phone and you're feeling anything, someone's making money off you, whether you're donating seriously or doing anything.
	And we have to shatter that spell and remember that, A, we're in a world that isn't overwhelmingly safe.
	Like as Americans.
	As Western democracies, we have to get our act together because there's other people who are competing and working 24-7 with no constraints of a democracy to undermine us through psyops that are run through social media, through all sorts of insidious campaigns on us.
	And there's so much that we have in the way of shared value set if we can figure out how to talk and get back to that.
	And there's a lot of work to do because anyone who risks to dare cross the divide is risking Enormous reputational and financial damage, as you know.
	Yes, I do.
	I remember Musk saying that it was one of Stalin's paricheeks that said, show me the man and I'll show you the crime.
	And so whether you did a little list and I was on it, you just go, well, this guy, Jordan Peterson, what can we say about him?
	Russell Brand, where's that dude going to be vulnerable?
	You know, we're all going to have some vulnerability that can be tweaked, amplified.
	And manipulated in order to silence that particular voice.
	And you said so many things that were fascinating there.
	Earlier on, we'd just done a, sort of last week, we'd done a story about Trump and Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl.
	And what is it, when they cheer for Trump, what are they cheering for?
	When they boo Taylor Swift, what are they booing at?
	You know, when you excavate it, when you do the archaeology, you might make some...
	Interesting discoveries about what these people are representatives of.
	Truly, truly.
	And when you sort of touched upon the sort of sanctity of the civil rights movement and your own grandfather's activism and presumably sort of sacrifice or at least sort of fear and inconvenience based on the anecdote or story that you told, it's extraordinary to reflect that if Martin Luther King were operating now, we would say, that guy, that adulterer, he's a sex fiend.
	And like to your Cain and Abel point, I mean, it's like, it's so...
	The profanisation, if such a word is possible, of everything, the desacralisation of everything, it leaves us in such an extraordinary mess.
	Your point about, you know, I don't think or talk enough about external threats because I've...
	Just always been so focused on, you know, I've come up with, like, you know, oh, wow, wait a minute, maybe the IRA had a point.
	You know, that's been my little journey, like, you know, because I'm an English kid, and then I learned this about the IRA, and then I'm like, oh, right, oh, I see, that's the reason that that, you know, and so I come so far with, like, you know, getting educated, like, sort of, I suppose, countercultural narratives, but, you know, whenever I'm talking about, say, Ukraine, Russia, I'm always like, look, I recognize that Putin, as a former KGB, And current dictator is probably not a great dude.
	But I feel like our biggest...
	Challenge is sorting out the, you know, the Anglophonic or, in very commas, Western world, what once would have been Christendom.
	And, like, and so, like, I don't think so much about it.
	And because I usually, like, because whenever I hear, you know, the Russians stole the election, I'm thinking of, like, you know, Hillary Clinton not taking responsibility for the fact that the Democratic Party abandoned the working class and became sort of a hollowed-out and empty vassal and a conduit for economic and elite interests.
	But, like, yeah.
	I recognize that perhaps uniquely and immediately where we are now is we best start getting cohesive right now because there are barbarians.
	That's right.
	And that's the challenge, which is to say, okay, we're the Russia probe.
	Everybody who has an imprint against that, but to react against that completely.
	And look.
	Putin is powerful.
	He's brilliant.
	I mean, his ability to work psyops and to convey that sort of...
	Like, incredible KGB levels of manipulation.
	He's just, he's fascinating and powerful and brilliant.
	And we cannot underestimate him for that.
	And so having a reaction to one narrative that was in the news doesn't mean that we snap into a position of black and white rigidity opposite.
	It's something I'm trying to work on a lot with Democrats who are basically like, we're at Hitler 2.0, everything must be resisted at every cost.
	And it's like, wait a minute, guys, there's all sorts of disagreements.
	You know, Bannon doesn't get along with Musk.
	Like, J.D. Vance has a different worldview than Trump.
	It's not a monolith.
	If something is a monolith, the fantasy is, you know, and I had a very close friend who was saying when the vaccinations were coming up, was very upset about that with the polio vaccination.
	And I said, well, Trump just tweeted that he's a big fan of the polio vaccination.
	That should put it to rest.
	And they said, well, I don't believe anything that guy says.
	And I said, okay, I understand that.
	But if you don't believe anything that he says that can be interpreted as news or to find nuance within what he's signaling, but you believe everything that he says that's absolute opposite, that's awful, then you can't have, and I don't mean this rudely, but you can't have an adult engagement with how you're going to navigate the next four years.
	You'll be frozen in a state of abject terror.
	If everything that is the worst possible thing that can happen is true, and anything that might provide relief or comfort, or to be aware...
	There's different factions, and there's plenty of good factions.
	You and I know and have worked with some of them that are pure people who are working in very close to pure.
	Any human endeavor is going to be corrupt.
	Is there going to be corruption in this administration?
	Absolutely.
	Same with Biden.
	Same with if it was Vice President Harris.
	But there are strains that we have to look at and differentiate.
	You brought up something else to me that's really interesting, and I've been thinking about this a lot.
	My background, though I'm not secular, I don't consider myself secular, but I'm from a very sort of atheist, intellectual, liberal background.
	But my parents sent me to Jesuit high school, which was amazing because Jesuits, A, are incredible, and I love Catholics, and they're incredible educators.
	And so it's like, if you can get a Jesuit-trained brain, it's really worth doing.
	But I've been looking at the ways when we're talking about these stories, like our eyelids and opposable thumbs conversation, right?
	That there's things in these stories that are essential.
	Well, there's the aspect of original sin that's part of this jewel that's at the basis of all of Western civilization.
	Everything that we know and understand, whether it's, you know, Michelangelo and Beethoven and Caravaggio, go down the list.
	Everything, this is something that is a key and foundational element.
	You can't just get rid of the notion of original sin.
	Whether you believe that that's the case from the Bible and from Genesis or not, it's a key foundational mythological knot of wisdom that has been condensed into this diamond.
	And if you get rid of it, where are you left?
	What you're left with is saying, oh, well, like you were saying, what would we say today about Martin Luther King?
	What would we say about anybody?
	Any human being is not perfect.
	It's impossible to be perfect.
	And if you don't have some mechanism to understand that, then essentially all that you're doing is defining yourself by your own hedonistic individualism.
	And even if you're not hedonistic and you're sort of a self-flagellating, arid, you know, like ethicist, there's still no standard by which you are being judged besides your own, which constantly can move around all the time.
	And so if you don't have a basis to understand that we are, like, what does Jordan say?
	We're apes filled with snakes.
	If you don't have an understanding that's ingrained in you of what that concept is, and then we see it start to flip, which is, well, in the environmental movement, so Jonathan Pajot, who you're familiar with, I think, has become a very good friend, brilliant symbologist.
	He's a brilliant Orthodox Christian thinker.
	He talks about how when Adam named the animals, the animals came and kind of kneeled to him, or kneeled to Adam.
	And the imagery in medieval times shows a lot of this, that it's an active sort of...
	Dominance is the right word, but it's sort of an act of stewardship that places man above creation.
	And as Douglas Murray has said about the vehement fringe of the environmental movement, not what I just said.
	It's important for us to take care of our environment, ensure we have clean fields and streams, seas and skies.
	I'm with the 95% of Americans that I agree.
	But when we elevate that, we should get our tubes tied.
	Mommy, mother, nature is mad at us.
	We have an inversion.
	Back to paganism, where rather than the animals kneeling, all of a sudden, nature and the natural world are angry and tempestuous, and we are beneath them for the things that we build.
	So a beaver can build a dam, but we can't figure out how to dance or bioengineer or take responsible steps.
	And that little inversion is another thing that's very dangerous that shows that we don't have a place of where we're ranking our humanness.
	And the last thing that I'll say is, of course, you know, the story that we come back to a lot and which you reference as a Christian, of course, Christ on the cross, that is a clearing mechanism for the fact that we have original sin.
	So there's a mechanism that's in place to say...
	I'm filled with sin.
	I will make mistakes.
	I shouldn't judge other people and certainly dismiss them and deem them not fit for the culture, a la J.K. Rowling or Jordan Peterson or all these people who we've just excised insanely.
	There's some people who should be excised, and that's what courts are for, not extrajudicial exporting this to social media mobs, largely also driven by algorithms, many of them foreign.
	But if there's no mechanism to say, well, there's some other ideal that's more perfect than us that we always have to aspire to and we can never possibly reach, and in our recognition of the flaws and shortcomings that we have, and the fact that we can never reach that but aspire to it, it's a mechanism that doesn't ground us in total ossified rigidity.
	My moral position is absolute no matter what.
	And it also doesn't ground us in the solipsism and narcissism of endless grief.
	And depression and guilt because guilt is inward looking.
	And so you have to have a mechanism in the culture to say, oh, I went astray by X percent.
	Okay.
	I'm a flawed human like all of you.
	I'll accept that I'm a flawed human.
	What's a mechanism by which I can return?
	And you'll accept it because you know that you're also flawed, and I can reenter meaningful society.
	And in social media, where we don't forget anything now, any kid who has a phone now has recorded everything.
	We have a digital footprint.
	We have no mechanism to forget anything, and we have no mechanism by which to forgive in this part of the culture that's now crumbling and cracking up under its own weight and withering away.
	And we have to bring back...
	Not just enlightenment discourse across the aisle dialogue, of course, to strengthen and steal man opinions, but we have to bring back an ethic of genuine curiosity and respect and forgiveness.
	And the last thing that I'll add is something Jordan and I have talked a lot about.
	The movement that proliferated around viewing different perspectives, right?
	So you have it in the arts.
	You have it in Cubism, right?
	It's a new descending a staircase from 16 angles.
	You have it with Rashomon.
	You have it with Faulkner.
	You know, Sound and the Fury.
	You even have it with a theory of relativity.
	So it moves through the arts, this notion that different perspectives are key.
	And in psychology, there's a particularly fascinating one for me, which is when you see Freud sitting and he's smoking his pipe, the patient is lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, which is sort of like, what, the unmarked screen that's ripe for the projection of your unconscious content.
	And so they're like this.
	And Carl Rogers...
	Who, you know, I like to make fun of, like a lot of people with.
	He's the psychologist, the first who is, you know, how does that make you feel?
	He's the original kind of heavy, unconditional positive regard.
	He sat the patients up and they stare at each other face to face.
	And the unconditional positive regard from him comes from him setting his nervous system fully in tune to theirs.
	It's an openness.
	To understand and to take on what the patient is feeling.
	If it's their anxiety, you're trying to comprehend and understand them.
	And the dearth of this in political and partisan discourse to me, and the lack of practice by reading texts for what they actually represent.
	Are you Iago or are you Othello?
	Yes.
	Are you Judas or are you trying to be Christ or are you Peter?
	Yes.
	This lack of practice of occupying another space.
	Right?
	What's a belief system that is foreign to me that I don't come from?
	Some of these notions within Christianity are foreign for me from my family upbringing.
	But if I embody and open up to them and I try to occupy them with deep and intense curiosity, that's where all of a sudden you can join and you accommodate and assimilate different understanding of people and worldviews.
	And then you still come out.
	It's not like you're just taken over, right?
	Like, let's deplatform everyone who thinks differently because they'll infect me and then I'll be a zombie acolyte.
	What you want is to go in and encounter that, feel it in your nervous system, and then you come out and you integrate and assimilate the new information.
	And that's what all that nuance is.
	And we're lacking that so much.
	There's people who can't even entertain the notion that somebody who votes differently than them or believes differently than them has not just an incredibly meaningful value system, but one that we need.
	If we're just liberals with high-trade openness, what do we do?
	We stomp on the gas and we go straight into a fucking wall or off a cliff.
	Excuse my language.
	And if we're conservatives, we stomp on the brake pedal and we don't go anywhere.
	So the exchange of navigating complex change, we require each other so that we can function and so that we have each other's different personality constitutions, different methods of meaning-making.
	And if we can unify that under a combined story...
	Guess what?
	We're unbeatable.
	Especially if that story values above all else, love, self-sacrifice for the greatest good, minimal possible force, only a freely entered a new covenant.
	It's like, that's a good set.
	Innocent until proven guilty, English common law.
	These are things that expressly protect the rights of minorities in a proper way.
	Minorities from the literal sense of minorities, groups that are in the center.
	You'd be a good person to write a manifesto.
	I like also that...
	That the original sin is precisely about the disavowing of God's supremacy and the replacing of God's authority with personal authority, which is the drama that is playing out when you claim that that metaphor or history is untrue.
	It was from Neil deGrasse Tyson some time ago.
	I figure he says it a lot, but he certainly said it once when I was talking to him.
	I think we were discussing the veracity of the moon landings or some sort of conspiratorial matter.
	And he goes, if you go to Cape Canaveral, there's rooms full of filing cabinets with all complicated maths and stuff.
	He goes, they would have gone to a lot of trouble.
	Anyway, and then off the back of that he said that when he's having a conversation with some kind of heretic in the field of science, he'd go, is there anything that I could say to you?
	That would change your perspective, say to you or show you, that would change your perspective.
	And if the person says no, then there's obviously no point in having the conversation.
	That's a reference back to what you were saying about the people that will only selectively take on board what Trump says.
	And it's difficult not to imagine that whoever that sort of person was is, is that they're projecting their own outrage, i.e.
	prioritising their own internal cosmology.
	Over the potential for us to be having an ongoing, and you could look at this both rationally and materially from a biological and evolutionary perspective, or from a wholly...
	Perspective, and obviously that's the one that I would elect to, the idea that we are the living water, that we are to become conduits, not systems, that we are to become like the flow of him, to allow ourselves to be of maximal use by removing that in us which is, inverted commas, satanic, that which would set ourselves up as personal sovereign to the detriment of his limitless truth, i.e.
	how can you make a personal claim for truth, because by nature that will always be subjective.
	I love, too, what you said there about the animals bowing before Adam.
	Medieval art.
	And that is not just a sort of a subjugative act, but a kind of a consensual and harm, the establishment of a kind of consensual harmonic, as it were.
	And by making animals and nature sacred and disavowing our sacred role and our superior role within that hierarchy, you are kind of also yielding while...
	Rejecting these, inverted commas, animal within you, the humors, the archetypes, the strains.
	And if we all have, you know, eyelids and skeletons, it's likely that there are archetypal and molecular repetitions in the psyche and in the narratives that are playing out.
	Therefore, you can have common sense in the same way you can have a god.
	You could say common sense is a synecdoche for a...
	A secular god.
	Like, what are we saying when we say common sense?
	And if you sort of disavow that, that is, in a sense, the ultimate act of nihilism, isn't it?
	To say that there is no way.
	Relativism is so destructive precisely because it actually denies it.
	It denies the right.
	For us to even declare a common ground.
	And I think that with no common sense, there is no common ground.
	And also that thing you've done, like constructing a survey designed to show consensus, is precisely how we should proceed.
	And it shows you the, I would say, demonic appetites at play when in the...
	Inculcation of a new Babylon through technology that could be creating the ultimate community.
	Douglas Murray has this great line when we talk about the environment where he said, we're not humans, we're not the problem, we're the point.
	And if you forget that, if you forget that the worldview needs to be life-affirming, that unerring scarcity, an unerring perspective of scarcity and unclearable guilt, we can't live that way.
	Not only can't we flourish, it's like trying to have a plant without sunlight.
	We need optimism.
	We need to feel the value in each one of us.
	It's incredibly important.
	And if you are going to reduce everything to your own belief, one of the things I think about is A lot of things that happen in that perspective, if you're a hardcore, again, far left, I'm not grouping all Democrats or liberals in this, but if you have that belief that all things are relative, the full moral relativism, there's this perspective that's almost hard to imagine, unless we go back to, maybe you and me can go back to earlier versions of ourselves, where we might have had this, where literally you've never submitted to anything in your life in full.
	That's what Faustus is about.
	Like if you've never thought and beheld something with awe as being so much greater than you, if you've never experienced that, think about how amazing that is.
	If you've literally never learned submission to something greater than you, you can't function in a way because everything comes down to you have to then safeguard your own Complicated set of ideals that keep you on the right side of history however you define it and however it's being updated continuously all the time across the internet and news networks.
	It just becomes this crazy ball of yarn that it has to be this constellation of viewpoints that you're constantly reminding yourself that you're virtuous.
	And if you haven't felt that in some way, whether it's before the grandeur of nature, people have religious experiences with babies, people have...
	Experiences throughout, you know, talking to Catholics is different from talking to evangelicals versus the Orthodox, you know, church.
	They all have the, you know, Judaism, having a conversation with Ben about sort of ritual and meaning and how he finds it.
	There has to be some notion that there is something before which you feel awe and which you feel like that maybe your best self can be a tiny, resonant part of this greater whole.
	That's beautiful, Greg.
	Thank you so much, man.
	Oh, I will leave it there because our clocks nearly run out of minutes.
	This only goes up.
	This runs out of time.
	Like, I mean, it's my longest conversation, I think, that we've had since we've been doing this.
	And I really enjoyed every second of it.
	I really felt like on our previous encounter, I saw you break down some ideas very beautifully.
	I really felt like, between that survey and then that list of aspirational values, I don't know if you've, I suppose you must have written them things down before, I felt like, ah!
	We need that cartilage.
	We need that cartilage.
	Thank you very much for doing that work.
	It was amazing to listen to you and learn from you.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Love talking to you.
	Okay, well, I hope you've enjoyed that conversation with Greg Hervitz.
	Let me know what you thought in the comments and chat.
	We will be back tomorrow with Stay Free Oracles.
	I'll be joined by Lara Logan and Neil Oliver, and we'll be discussing the biggest news stories of the week.
	We'll be back then.

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