The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 151. Build a Better Democrat? | Gregg Hurwitz

Episode Date: January 17, 2021

This episode was recorded on December 20, 2020 before the most recent events on Capitol Hill. Gregg Hurwitz is an American novelist, scriptwriter, and producer. He has the newest book in his riveting thriller series Orphan X, coming out January 26, 2020, entitled  Prodigal Son: An Orphan X Novel. In the last few years leading up to the presidential election, Gregg has been working with an independent team of Hollywood writers, producers, and directors to design and promote a moderate political message for the democrats with wide public appeal. See Hollywood Reporter article for more information. Find Gregg Hurwitz on Twitter @GreggHurwitz, and check out Gregg’s books on Amazon Gregg Hurwitz Author Page Preorder: Prodigal Son: An Orphan X Novel-Thank you to our sponsors:Headspace - for a free one-month trial, visit: headspace.com/jbpTHINKR - to start your free trial, visit: thinkr.org-For advertising inquiries, please email [e-mail]

Welcome to the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. This is episode two season four and in-person podcast yet again. This episode is between Greg Herwitz and Jordan Peterson. It's called Build a Better Democrat and was recorded December 20, 2020, before the most recent events on Capitol Hill. Greg Herwitz is an American novelist, script writer, and producer. Greg Hurwitz is an American novelist, script writer, and producer. He has my favorite thriller books hands down, no question about it. If you like the born movies, he writes novels kind of similar to that that are absolutely riveting. I'd recommend the Orphan X series.

He actually has the newest Orphan X out on January 26. There's a pre-order link in the description that I would highly recommend checking out. Dad was also Greg's undergrad thesis advisor when he worked at Harvard. That's how they know each other. But more to the point of the episode, in the last few years leading up to the presidential election, Greg has been working with an independent team of Hollywood writers, producers, and directors to design and promote a moderate political message for the Democrats. Worth a listen.

And if you prefer to watch, the video version will be up on YouTube tomorrow, Monday, January 18, 2021, on Dad's YouTube channel. This episode is brought to you by two awesome companies, one headspace. I love headspace. It's an app that does guided meditation. When I was younger and stupider, I thought meditation was a complete waste of time, which is ridiculous given how long people have been practicing meditation. It can be hard to get into, especially if you have 10,000 things buzzing around your head

at one time. Headspace simplifies it. You also don't have to do it for very long to get the benefits. There are scientifically back benefits to meditation. I started with a 10-minute segment when I wake up. I highly recommend this rather than instantly checking social media or your phone and starting your day stressed out. I've found it very helpful. I've been using headspace for years before these advertisements started. It's simple, it's easy, and it works. You deserve to feel happier, and headspace is meditation made simple. Go to headspace.com slash JBP.

That's headspace.com slash JBP for a free one-month trial with access to headspace's full library of meditations for every situation. That's the best deal offered right now. Head to headspace.com slash JBP today. The second company that's gracious enough to sponsor this episode is called Thinker, THINKR.org. They summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in Bite Size form.

You can read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, to recent bestsellers like Never Split the Difference. I use it frequently after I read a book to try and really remember the key points, especially before a podcast episode. If you wanna get into reading and you don't have enough time or let's be honest, possibly not enough self-discipline,

thinker.org can really help you out. If you wanna challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons and become a better thinker, go to thinker.org can really help you out. If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons, and become a better thinker, go to thinker.org. That's THINKR.org to start a free trial today. Again, that's THINKR.org. Enjoy this episode. Remember to rate, hit subscribe, and don't forget to check out Greg's books if you're looking for thrillers. I'm talking today with Greg Herwitz, resident of Los Angeles, California, former student of mine from Harvard, and someone I've known for a long time. Greg's a novelist, and although he has very many other occupations, which we'll talk about today, it's pleasure to see you, Greg.

It's been a while since we talked. Good to see you, Tim Jordan. Baby, we could start by you just outlining some of the things that you do. And then I think we'll focus on the political stuff more today, not necessarily from a political perspective, though. Well, I came in from novels.

I'm a novelist, I'm at the Orphan X series. And I've also worked in screenplays and TV and comics and some other stuff. And I started to get involved in politics around 2016. In large part because before that, I kind of thought democracy would be fine without me. I didn't really feel any responsibilities as a citizen. I kind of had a lot of opinions but didn't do a whole lot about it. And one of the things that I wanted to do when Donald Trump was elected, I was, he was

not a candidate or a president to my liking or who is a match with my value set. And the first thing that I asked myself, it's funny, you give that lecture about the Old Testament that one of the answers that Old Testament answers is always like God's angry, we screwed up. And so I really took that approach all the way down. I thought rather than starting to go on offense and tackle people who voted or thought differently the mirror had different ideologies,

I would try and think about the failings of the democratic party, the status quo, all the parts of society that I was part of, and how badly we would have to have fallen short for him to be seen as a viable and preferable alternative to the candidate that we were putting forth. So I started to work with a lot of candidates, as mostly interested in candidates in purple districts, talking to red voters, right? And so for the midterms, we work with 30 candidates, Democrat and deep red districts, talking about making good faith arguments, the way it's supposed to be, right? I have an opinion, I have a preference in political party to make good faith arguments to people

to try and win them over to a different point of view. We had a lot of success. We, I'd say, the 30 candidates that we work with 211 in terms of flipping those seats. Well, you all have foreign viewers here. So when you talk about deep red states, deep blue states, purple states, what do you mean? Republican versus Democrat, right? I wasn't interested in figuring out how I wasn't, I wasn't interested in figuring out how, I'm not interested in any conversations that take place in the bubble of like-minded people.

So I was interested in races in Oklahoma and New Mexico and Ohio and Virginia. And so we really went there. And long story short, off that, we started to, I wrote a bunch of op ads. I wrote one with you for the Wall Street Journal. And I did a lot for the bulwark trying to talk across the aisle and I went out and talked to I think about a 360 degree arc

of Americans, whether it was military of Angelicals, Black Lives Matter, Hispanic, Texas Mexicans, different population than Miami Cubans, right? Different know, Texas Mexicans, different population than, you know, Miami Cubans, right? Different population from California Mexicans and really talking to different groups and listening and figuring it out. And I wound up doing about 200 digital and television commercials. All this political workers pro bono with a small team of us here. Yeah, do you want to describe the team? Yeah, I, it's, it's, it's me. It's Marshall

Friskavetz, who's a TV showrunner and creator. He created 30-something. Billy Ray, Oscar-nominated screenwriter. He wrote, you know, Captain Phillips. He just did the Comey rule. Sean Ryan, the creator of the shield, the TV producer, and Lita Caligridas. She, you know, as a ton of credits from Shutter Island to, you know, she worked on Avatar and wrote a good amount of that with James Cameron. And what was interesting was when, in terms of the Hollywood system, like, you know, after Trump was elected, I think the Democrats were humbled. And then they're always kind of willing to meet with Hollywood people. But the washout rate was, was was there weren't a lot of people who were interested in having different kinds of conversations.

And I decided if I could actually get in front of Democratic leadership, and Marshall too, was on that first trip with me, that I would say exactly what I thought all the time to the best of my ability. Just like crap. Let me walk through this. So a couple of years ago, maybe that was in 2016 about you had some political

awakening, let's say. And I guess that was a tenant on Trump's election. And your response to that was, how did the Democrats sink so low as to allow this to happen? Is that a reasonable way of summarizing it? Rather, what the hell is wrong with all those Trump voters? Yeah, and like what, let me start to explore and earn us my confirmation biases and blind spots and talk to everybody who has a different perspective or point of view than me in earnest

to try to figure that out. Yeah, well, you guys decided that you were going to produce messages for the Democrat party. Yeah, and that was, and do that on your own accord in some sense, or on your own, on your own dollar, but also independently. Yeah, I mean, the line we used was,

and I remember sitting in my living room talking about this, I said, we asked for nobody,, no credit, and no permission. And you said, to me, that's exactly what Orphan X does. My protagonist of my thriller series, it was this really funny confluence of my political life and the things that I was writing in the fiction world. And what we realized is we can't go, we couldn't go through everything we did was on our own, we raised our own money. One of the things we realized is the cost of admission for getting through messaging that I thought was a more, more persuasive, making good faith persuasion arguments, but also that was fair.

Every single economic fact that I put in any of the 200 commercials that I produced, I ran through a friend of mine who's like a Wall Street Republican. Like I always wanted opposition fact testing. We tried to do nothing fair, that wasn't fair. I'm not suggesting we got this right all the time, but I tried to not do, I didn't want ads that went after Trump's kids in certain ways that were off bounds and personal.

I was trying, you know, because look, if you're messaging and making propaganda is really what it is. That's gobbles. You're in gobbles arena. That's dangerous stuff. You've got to take it really, really seriously to try to engage and make arguments without getting corrupted by what that is in the world.

Yeah, well, that's why it's dangerous is that you don't understand. People don't understand when they start to mess with the truth that they're starting to mess with their own psyches. Because if you start playing in the domain of deceit, you'll get tangled up and not so fast and make your head spin. And then, well, you undo yourself. I mean, you can undo yourself even if you stick pretty close to the truth. Okay.

So, I mean, what happened? What you guys did and the way you went about it has struck me as quite, I don't know, unbelievable. I guess. And that's why I want to dwell on it a bit. So you decided that you had a political responsibility. You organized yourself with a group of people. A group that was much larger to begin with, but that shrank quickly to those that were actually dedicated over some long period of time to putting a lot of work into this. And it's not surprising you got a bunch of attrition as a consequence of that.

Then you decided that you would make messages that were in alignment with at least in principle with the Democratic Party, but you didn't get permission from the party brass, so to speak, to do that. You did that independently. Well, there's a weird, well, two things about the attrition rate. One of them was I quickly discovered that a lot of people who are interested in the sort of loudest online outrage are equally devoted to the status quo as the opposition. And so one of the things I came to very quickly was it matters much more, much more important

than language policing, right, and permission structures of who's allowed to say what, is an orientation on people's intentions and the actual outcomes. And that's one way you can assess the groups of people of whether someone's gonna be useful. If you roll up your sleeves and get in to actually get something done, whether that's winning a race in Oklahoma, right,

or trying to talk in good faith and respectfully to voters in Western Pennsylvania. It's going to be messy. You have to, there's no, okay, if I describe that, what do you mean messy? Like, what's messy about it? We've talked a little bit about the psychological consequences of this, this kind of action, even these kinds of discussions. By messy, I mean good, meaning, I don't, I'm, the further along I get with this, the more convinced I am that you cannot have a perfect conversation that where everyone is,

is contained in all the language goes seamlessly about race, about gender, and about class in America. And so when there's too much constriction around language from the left and or from the right, basically, they're barking around the perimeter of the fertile solutions. They're barking around the perimeter to make sure that nobody can have

the kinds of conversations that you need to have. You have to talk about those things imperfectly. You have to... So why would people be to have, you have to talk about those things imperfectly. You have to, so why would people be motivated to not allow that to happen? Do you think? Well, because look, so for the, there's different skews and everything is a generalization, right, so I'm gonna generalize a little bit.

I think that there's, in the far right, we see a kind of corruption and ossification around sort of Donald Trump and what he represents. But he was saying things that hit people in a way that were things that they weren't allowed to say. I have a whole bunch of theories about the Republicans. I'm gonna keep it focused on my looking in the proverbial mirror.

I think that a lot of the language policing of the left is actually a way to maintain the status quo. Because what status quo? And to whose advantage? Let's say that you're a rich Hollywood elite, much like me. Right? Or somebody who is in the kinds of groups that I move in, that you move in, but let's say further left of you like I am, or more, you know, we're both liberal. If you can talk and have all of the lingo and know exactly what the permission structures are,

and you say Latin X instead of Latino, and you do all this stuff. And in a way what you're doing is you're making sure that the conversations that are the real conversations that bring change that are messier don't necessarily occur. But if you have all the language down, you can sort of maintain your position and your money and your relative stature.

Yeah, so you can assume that if there was a solution that was being proposed, you'd be part of the solution and not part of the problem. You signal that with a language. But you're also your casting, like, look, I'll give you an example. I made a video about the, for me, I was exceedingly opposed from day one to messages of chaos from the Democratic Party. I think conservatives particularly have a reaction to chaos. I think they have a legitimate reaction when people announce sort of police-free zones

in Seattle and in Portland. And from day one, I was saying this whole notion of sanctuary cities doesn't make sense to me for a variety of reasons. Let's say we have the next president and people decide that voting rights are not going to be applied to in, you know, Birmingham, Alabama, right? And they're going to be a sanctuary city for that. There's all these complexities around it. I made some commercials about black leadership calling for a lack of violence in the protests. Keisha Lance bottomed the mayor of Atlanta gave a speech that I think was a speech with the most thundering moral authority that I've heard from a public figure when Atlanta

was tearing its off apart. It's extraordinary speech. I reference, sorry, reference other people. The only blowback that I got from that was from incredibly affluent sort of coastal elite, saying, how dare you selectively close African-American people to trying violence when they watch somebody get murdered and they're protesting how they can. And it's the pedigme of white privilege and all this stuff. And what's interesting is I've long thought that Trump works through projection. Like Trump will, everything with Trump that he, that he makes as a claim for others,

there's a lot of projection that goes on. And I've increasingly seen that from aspects of the left where I thought, wow, how far do you have to be removed from the ramifications of violence? To not be worried, like how many houses and mansions and security guards and gated communities you have to have access to, to be unconcerned with violent action. Whether that community is a community of color, whether it's a white working class community, to simply say violent protests is something that we're not for.

Like how dare you advocate that when you're rich enough to never have to be there when the tourist, violent protesters leave, and let's say the black community is left there with the wreckage of their community. Like to be opposed to that message is basically saying, I wanna keep letting people protest as loud as they want. It's in a way that will never affect me

or my children on a risk, my family's not at risk, my house doesn't feel at risk. But I'll use all the right language so that I can be protected and sort of maintain all of that. And when you're trying to wait in to really win an election so that we don't, you know, the African-American community doesn't have to contend with another, with more, I'll call it more voter rights being thrown out. Like real concrete issues, there's real concrete issues there. But if you can chirp about something that's a slogan

like that, you don't have to get into the real solutions or fixes. But at the same time, but you can, you can take on the, you can take on the assumed status of someone who's actually working to solve the problem. I think a lot of that, a lot of politically correct language. I don't know, I guess that would be language that's in alignment with any given doctrine is an attempt to take on the moral virtues of that doctrine without necessarily having to bear any of the responsibility for actions in alignment with that doctrine or to bear any responsibility for the consequences. Like I was furious, I was furious when the protesters were up to with Georgia Floyd. There were video after video of African Americans protesting. Some of them were like telling, you know, of them were like telling, you know, turning in people

who were either, you know, anarchists, who were throwing bricks and committing property damage of saying, you know, grabbing people, handing them over to the police. A lot of people in African-American community were like, this is our community, we live here. And of course, I'm not implying that nobody in the African-American community crossed the line in the course of those protests.

I'm not saying that, but I'm saying there was an awareness within that community that when the cameras are gone and the lights go up, nobody's going to come in and rebuild that community. And when all the tourists leave and everybody's had their march in their protest, they have to contend with it. And there was a measure of discipline in that community, whether it was Kisheland's bottoms, I think the president of the NAACP and either Ordan or Washington had a great op-ed, killer Mike the rapper was out there saying, we cannot have violence, we're not tearing down our own city.

This isn't syphilis obedience. The point of syphilis obedience, of course, is that you bear the cost, you bear the moral responsibility of your transgression. Right, exactly. African community understood this by and large. And a lot of the loudest voices who were protesting against it, who were for me was a frustration, were from incredibly affluent.

And here I'll use the word privilege, which I don't like to use, people in the white community. And that for me was, it's a similar kind of projection as I what C Trump doing. Like they're screaming about privilege all the time. And you're like, how do you not understand that the destruction of property, destruction of small businesses,

risks to families? Look, I'll give you a stat that's an interesting stat here. The average voter who voted for Obama and then Trump, thinks about politics on average four minutes a week. Four minutes a week, right? So people in the bubble think, don't think about politics four minutes a week. And so four minutes a week is about what you can manage

to worry about the emoluments clause and Russian hacking. When you're at the bottom of Maslow's higher give needs, you got to stick kid, you're out of health insurance, you don't have a job, you might have a special needs kid, you might have a parent in a home, you have COVID hitting. You don't have time for any of this. You don't have time to have the kinds of conversations around nuance of weather.

And when everyone was shocked about the Latin vote, I was just thinking how many people actually have friends and family who are Hispanic who you talk to? I mean, the joke was that the big shock was the Biden won the Latin X votes and Trump won the Latino vote. Uh-huh. A lot of Latino community, I mean, they don't,

what do you think accounted for Trump's attractiveness to the Latino community? This kind of ties back into a broader question I want to ask you. It's like, I've been interested in what you've been doing and supporting it to the degree that I've been able to and to the degree that that's useful, I suppose, because I was very interested in your willingness to look at what had gone wrong with the Democratic Party and to try to fix that. That seemed to me to be a win, no matter, that's a win for everyone,

no matter where they are on the political spectrum because the higher the function of both parties, the better the political outcome as far as I'm concerned, right? You want as little stupidity as possible all across the spectrum. So it seemed to me that reducing some of the foolishness that characterized, particularly the radical left, the careless radical left within the Democratic Party, and focusing on a more pragmatic, let's say, but also wiser and less resentment driven strategy would be a good thing overall.

So that opens up the broader kind of worms, which is what exactly had the Democrats done so badly that they lost to Trump? Well, so to me, there's a couple of things. We can talk about the Spaniard vote. We should talk about what it is. Let's talk about that specifically in the broader question in general. Well, so look, if you, I mean, I have friends and family who there's, there's such an array of, we talk about the Spaniac vote like it's some monolith, right? It's not remotely that. Cuban Americans are like anything ever resembling socialism. I will never vote for you.

And if you compare Trump to Fidel Castro, read a fucking book. That's basically the ad-sue to the Cuban Americans, excuse my language. It's, it's, and they say, I don't care what he calls us, I don't care what he does to us. The only thing that we have learned, that we learned out of that is that the only power that you can trust is economic power. The rest of it's an illusion. And socialism wants to come in and threaten that. I want business opportunity, right?

I want less regulations, they won't go near us. It's very, very different. And the Hispanic community is, it's, it's incredible. Are you think that's particularly true of the Cuban Americans? Cuban Venezuelan Americans. Venezuela and see how well they have reason for it.

Like my most, a lot of the most conservative friends and associates who I have, whether it's, it's people who are friends of mine, whether it's workers or Mexican Americans in LA, they also, they don't want Mexico to come over here. They don't want open borders. Many of them, they left that. Why is that hard to understand? They tend to be, you know, Catholic families. So if you think about politics for four minutes a week and somebody comes in all of a sudden and they're talking about socialism, defunding the police, and then announcing all sorts of gender complexities, you know, and I say this is somebody with a, you know, I always, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, discussion is if you're going to go talk to somebody thinks about politics for four minutes a week and bring up a elaborate critical race theory

and start to talk to them about the fact that boys aren't, boys and girls aren't girls, and they should just announce this and have announcements at the age of 18. I don't think any Democrats grasp when you think about politics four minutes a week and they talk about Trump and his transgressions, which I believe are more damaging and dangerous

than those of the left. But I don't think anybody has any idea of the kind of transgressions that that represents to people who are either on the center or on the right. And the four minutes a week thing really is interesting too, because one of the things I was really struck by over the last four years with all my encounters with journalists, many of which were good, by the way, I had lots of good encounters with journalists, but the worst encounters I ever had were almost always with journalists as well, is that the journalists think about the world politically all the time.

Like, they're every single decision they make, every, I mean, obviously this is a generalization, but if you're in that world, everything is political. But for the typical person, that's just not the case at all. And that's actually good. One of the best political science theories I ever read was predicated on the idea or put forth the idea that in a highly functioning political system, especially a democratic system, the less people think about politics, the better the system is working. At towards the end, I didn't think politically at all. I'm not even interested in politics.

You know, I didn't, I mean, it's, I couldn't agree with that more. I mean, one of the things I think a lot about is I have a friend, one of my closest friends who you've met, born again, Christian, who is raised in the son of a missionary, all through other parts of the things I think a lot about is I have a friend, one of my closest friends who you've met, born again Christian, who was raised as son of a missionary, all through other parts of the world. And you know, but he lives in LA, he worked a bit in the industry, a very rounded conservative friend of mine. Gays gave friends, friends from whatever,

but he went in the booth and told me during the election in 2016, he said, I just went in and I thought, forget it. I'm voting for Trump. I can't bring myself to it for Hillary Clinton. I was really angry at him at first because it was like, and then I realized, I shouldn't say really angry with him, but I would, I realized that I didn't understand that for the things that I saw, for the clouds I saw messing on the horizon with Donald Trump. And we're seeing some of that here

with his, the legal threats to the election, trying to undermine election security, his own largely appointed Republican judges shooting a lot of that down. There's a lot of things we don't need to get into all that because everyone can have an answer for everything that I say. But the realization I had with him was, oh my God,

he is a canary of a particular coal mine. He's a guy rides a motorcycle, he likes guns, he likes kind of different kinds of freedoms. He in a different, he has a different relationship with freedoms versus security than I do. I'm a canary down a different coal mine, right? Part of that might be for me looking at the sort of authoritarian shadowyness that I saw coming in with Trump. that's what I alert to.

I can't decide that my friend who I know and love and who has been in my house and accepts my friends, my family, everybody, and has a broad range of friends and family. I can't determine that he's either foolish or dumb or wrong or a bad person anymore. I can't determine that he's an ignorant canary down an ignorant coal mine, right? Because if he's my friend and I'm that close to him and he's here in LA and that's a choice he made, I better listen to what that was,

even if the gut instinct for him. And so then I was thinking about this a lot and one of the things that I think has been a blessing of the Trump presidency is, there's some conversations we're having now that are awful and hard. Like it's sort of like, you know, it's, it's, we talked about this all the time, obviously, with young with Freud.

You go through hell before you get anywhere else. We wouldn't be having any of these conversations if we were now in year four of a Hillary Clinton presidency. We're having different conversations. They're worse right now in a lot of ways about race, about class. But the fact that has stuck with me the most, and one of the things I'll say is I went in open hide all the way down to assess my party in the political situation. I've only gotten more disillusioned and angry with the Democratic Party.

Okay, okay, so let's go return to that. Okay, I'm gonna keep that in mind. Let's return to that. So you put together this team, or this team was organized to produce messages that would support the Democratic Party fundamentally. But the overarching philosophy was one of self-criticism, let's say, if the self includes the Democratic Party. And what are the rules? What were the other rules for the messaging? See, I don't think people are going to understand exactly what you did.

You made these ads, but you went out and did it with your own team. And so, who are the ads generated? How are the ads generated? Who are they targeted to? What was their consequence? And what were the rules that you used and agreed on when you were making the ads? And how did you agree on them? Sorry, that's a lot of questions, but part of this is it was so, it was entrepreneurial,

George, it was all outside of the political, if I'd still be waiting for the first approval from the D-trep C to do my first, you know, $2,000 commercial. We couldn't wait for it. The fiefdoms and Bailey Wicks within the party and the institutional just bureaucratic mess is sufficient that a lot of what got done got done with the network of people on trippinarily and free market. That's pretty funny. Really? So all the blickings. Yeah.

Yeah. And it gave rise to it. And really all that it was was our own ethical bearing. You know, I ran the thing. And so we did testing to make sure that the ads were effective, that we weren't just shouting at each other on Twitter and getting the most likes. And how to find effective.

How do you know? I mean, I mean, there's a woman is incredible who did, you know, we did testing focus groups. We saw how they move people. I mean, I can send you deck after deck after deck of the analysis. Okay, so you were looking at pre-post exposure shift in political attitude as a consequence of the advertisements. What was nice was that our gut instinct,

meet by that enemy, me, Marshall, Billy, Lee, to Sean, our gut instinct was, we're not gonna make Trump bashing ads, we made someone they were fair. That was a big important thing. Like I did the one for a public and voters against Trump, where it was just Reagan City on a health speech and I just showed Trump doing the opposite in every regard. For the first time in our memory, many Americans are asking,

does history still have a place for America? There are some who answer no. That we must tell our children not to dream as we once dreamed. Together, tonight, let us say that America is still united, still strong, still compassionate, still willing to stand by those who are persecuted or alone. For those who are victims of police states or government-induced torture or terror, let us speak for them.

I believe we can embark on a new age of reform in this country that will make government again responsive to people. We can fight on a new age of reform in this country that will make government again responsive to people. We can fight corruption while we work to bring into our government women and men of competence and high integrity. Tomorrow, you will be making a choice between different visions of the future. Are you more confident that our economy will create productive work for our society? Or are you less confident?

Do you feel you can keep the job you have, or gain a job if you don't have one? Are you pleased with the ability of young people to buy a home of the elderly to live their remaining years in happiness, of our youngsters to take pride in the world we have built for them? Are you convinced that we have earned the respect of the world and our allies? Let us resolve tonight that young Americans will always find a city of hope in a country that is free and let us resolve they will say of our day and of our generation that we did keep faith with our guard that we did act worthy of ourselves, that we did protect and pass on lovingly a shining city on a hill.

In the op-eds, I was equally harsh on Democrats and Republicans both. But, you know, so part of it was for me, as I said, we can never lie to any standard. I don't want to bend the truth. I don't want to lie. I went out and got a hardcore life long Wall Street Republican to do all the fact checking. And it was down to like even if we were kind of bullshitty about something. So, I mean, he'd respond. Sorry. You asked him to tell you if he thought that you had been even playing with the truth rather than breaking it. Oh, and I paid him as a researcher to say, you know, here's the claims we're making are they fair check multiple sources. And I wanted somebody who expressly was not a Democrat to do all of that.

Yeah, well, that seems to me to be you'd want to have someone like that around you if you're making complex political decisions. That's right. You need to tell you, to point out your weaknesses. Okay, so you set up this crew, which was quite large to begin with and then got smaller. You went and met with Democrat leaders. Yeah, we spoke at Marshall and I addressed both caucuses and we still, in an ongoing way,

we do candidate training and we deal with leadership. So we still, we in an ongoing way, we do candidate training and we deal with leadership. So, how is it that you managed to, look, one of the things you said was that had you waited around for permission, you'd still be waiting. And then another thing that needs to be pointed out to people is that without permission,

you could go ahead anyways and make your political statement, right? You just had to go do it. But you still have positive relationships with the Democratic Party, per se. Now, he's not weird. How do you count for that? Why not? Because I was fair and I was respectful. And what we did was, it's like that judges description of pornography. I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it. So Marshall and I would say,

look, we know how to make a unifying, uplifting message that's positive, that brings back sort of core democratic values and can speak across the aisle to people with a psychological profile that's more conservative, with an understanding and respect for the fact that conservatives and liberals in concert are what holds society together.

Now, Marshall and I have an opinion that is that the bad, the dangerous aspects of the left are embodied mostly in academia, culture, let's call it journalism, and then a small, tiny cabal of very far left members of the Democratic Party. And to some extent, it's crept through the party, some of the things that are the excess and the laugh that obviously you've discussed a great length. For us, on the right, it is codified all the way through the Senate, all the way up to Donald Trump,

who holds a nuclear football. So I was trying to figure out, well, why does this threat from the left that to me is much less but just as dangerous? And there's a lot of canaries and coal mines going, hey, man, pay attention. That's bad news. The same way that we were about Trump.

Why is it being given kind of this equal, if not more waiting to what I felt was the clear and present danger of the excesses of the Trump administration and what was happening there. And so part of it was is the respectful conversation with Trump voters, or mostly, I'm sure I screwed up plenty, but you know, and to do a unifying message and to show them, one of the things people don't realize is that messaging becomes content. If we could get the message right, we could solidify the story,

and then that could change policy, and then that could change the democratic policy. So we talked a lot about that when you first embarked on this venture. So correct me if I'm wrong about any, as far as you're concerned about anything that I'm saying. The first thing is is that if you produce a message a story, that story has an ethic, has an implicit ethic. And if the story is accepted, then the implicit ethic is accepted, and then the implicit ethic will be made explicit across time.

So a story is like the seed ground for explicit policy. So you got a grip on the story. Now one of the things that concerned me about the radical left was that because they had a story and it's a powerful mythological story, benevolent nature, tyrannical culture, the noble savage, that's another part of it. Because they had a coherent story, they had a disproportionate effect on policy. And the moderate Democrats policy. So let me just interrupt. OK, policy.

So if you look at, so AOC did the green new deal, push that through, which to me was not an adult piece of legislation. It was a charging horse filled with everything. Zero votes in the Senate. Zero votes from the Democrat. Every measure, if you look at HR one, is anti-corruption. It was prescription drug. The actual policies and body of who the Democrats are is much more

moderate and pro-capitalist than it is in policy. So what's being paraded loudly is not in fact democratic policy. In my estimation, the flaw or the fault in the democratic party is their failure to stand up and keep the elements of the party in their proper places to state who they are and draw lines with what they're opposed to. And I think that that act of them being like, well, we can't really, we're concerned to criticize, you know, defund the police. So we're too concerned, yeah, part of what I would say to them was, look, if you're scared of AOC's Twitter following, Americans are not going to deem you

to be worthy of carrying the nuclear football. Like that's just a very low checksum analysis. If you can't just clearly say that defunding the police, whether that means other things which it does is a slogan that makes no sense and terrifies the vast majority of Americans rightly so and a ton of immigrants rightly so like or or or you know people of Hispanic origin

if you can't understand and state that clearly because you're afraid of the blowback you're not going to be trusted to lead and that's and so it's a problem of of degree and I think that's one of the biggest topics of friction you and I have had for a long time, not negative friction, but just where we've been hammering away at that, where I keep saying to you, the radical left is not the kind of threat in America relative to the threat that's posed by Donald Trump

as it represents in Canada. And we can disagree about that because I think that the threats represented by the radical left represent an equally distrobed. And I can tell you, like, I don't really understand it myself to some degree is that I've been more, and this is surprised to me, I would say, I've been more reactive to the threat posed by the radical leftists. And I think it's possible that it's because I'm in academia. And so I'm- How can I tell you why?

I have a theory about why that is, too. Okay. Yeah. My theory is that the right comes in the front door. They're like, here we are. We want more money, we want more power, we don't like government, we're gonna shrink it. Even the, let's call it racism

or anything that goes down from that poll to ingroup favoritism, right? Like normal ingroup favoritism. There's plenty of people who are like, look, I grew up in rural North Carolina. I'm fine with having a black president. I'm fine with doing whatever. This is my culture.

I don't wanna be asked to celebrate another culture all the time in every way or else be called racist. That doesn't make sense to me. Whereas the left comes in and they say, well, we like all of our stuff and we like our whole situation, like the examples I was giving earlier, we're gonna say to fund the police

when we're rich enough to not be in a neighborhood that that will have an effect of. We're above the pale that if everything is moved through that lens, we're successful enough that we have money and we have resources anyways. And we're gonna wrap ourselves in sanctimony, right? We're gonna wrap ourselves in sanctimony, wanna maintain the status quo as much as you do,

but pretend it's because we're morally superior and you're morally inferior. And that's shame inducing. That's like a maternal, scolding instinct that elicits, I think, rage. And so that's a big difference in the two. And I think that accounts for why some people are like, hey, look, it's complicated. There's this element of moral superiority. And one of the things that I did so much work with the evangelical community, and they've been great, like making good faith arguments to reach out and talking about the values and attributes of Christ

and trying to talk to voters. And there were some voters who we were very successful in talking to. I want to say Obama got 26% of Angelico vote, Hillary didn't go after it at all, she got 13 and lost and Biden was back up at 2223. We thought that was a very important community talk to. What people don't realize is if you look at Trump,

if you look at anybody, from a Christian worldview, you can dislike him legally, you can dislike the policies, you can dislike a lot of these politicians, but the deeming of somebody is morally inferior, right? Whether it's followers of Trump, whether it's, you know, you know, no one can do that, but God, you're not allowed to do that. You don't know where someone is on their journey. You don't know if he's a sinner at the near of his existence and is going to turn around. And there's a bigger, weird moral frame that gets put on as. Of course, there's aspects of that that will come in from the right, with homosexuality, with the more racist element.

But that aspect, if I'm arguing that the right has been more infected up the power structure by the worst authoritarian excesses of the rights. I think that the narrative of moral judgment has infected a wider swath of the left, if that makes sense. Well, it's worth thinking about anyways. I mean, it's a real mystery to me because I suspect that if I particularly,

because I'm Canadian and so that puts me culturally to the left of the typical American, let's say. I suspect if I read through a list of policy decisions made by the Democrats and made by the Republicans over the last 20 years, and I was blind to the party who supported it, I would end up supporting more Democrat legislation than Republican legislation. But there's still something about the radicals on the left that that disturbed me in a way that look it's it's so here's another way to look at it right we've all seen Cape Fear right in Cape Fear. Guy gets out of, he goes after his defense attorney. Criminals who are escaped who do go after counsel, go after their defense attorney,

and not after the prosecutor. And the reason for that is percentage wise. And I believe that's true. I've heard that I haven't sourced it, but let's pretend it's true for the sake of this parallel. I think a lot of what has happened is people figure the prosecutors doing their job, but if you're defense attorney who's supposed to be looking out for you doesn't, there's a different kind of anger. I think that's what the Democrats are present for. So it's a betrayal. Yes, I think that that's interesting. Here's the Uber statistic for everything for me that when I arrived at, I felt like the skills fell from my eyes. Over the last 40 or 50 years,

$50 trillion with a T have moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. That's not through innovation, competition, and pure free market capitalism. It's just not. It's corporate giveaways. It's lobbyists writing bills. It's, there's a whole structure.

It's the weird inevitability of the Pareto distribution, right? The idea, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, to keep that under control. And it is definitely something that destabilizes societies. And that's the thing, and it's been done largely, that 50 trillion effects of globalization certainly play a role in that. But it's not like all of a sudden, everybody who's a CEO got that much more brilliance. So this is the largest transfer of wealth,

I believe, in history. And it didn't go a socialist way. That's when everyone's pulling their hair out about socialism. I just look at it and go $50 trillion. So if you're a white working client, and that happened under Obama, that happened under Clinton. Yeah. Well, that's, but see, that's the peculiar thing is that it's, it's not self-evident that policy can stop that. Like one of the things I've been terrified about since really learning about the pre-dostribution is its implacability.

You know, as you pointed out, this distribution happened even under systems of governance or ideologies of governance that hypothetically should have stopped it or at least slowed it. It'd be interesting to find out if that transfer took place more rapidly under Republicans than Democrats or not. Well, I think that whatever it is, if you look at that one fact, that is a failing of basically

the entire ruling class in America. And I had a moment of realization, I'm going to tell you this was really funny. So there was was the tarp give after 9-11 there was a tarp bailout and the airlines weren't trouble and they were bailed out I'm my statistics might be slightly wrong but call 53 billion dollar bailout okay. And we were, you know, us Democrats were hopeful that that would go into the workers and everyone else. It went in a stock buyback so that the stock prices rose, right? 35% of the stock market is foreign owned. It was a straight corporate giveaway. That's a transfer of wealth. It didn't go back to the workers.

That pissed me off. When COVID started, they asked for another bailout. And it was like the exact same number, call it the $2 billion dollar. I got all mad. I'm like, I'm going to call Marshall. We're going to commercial. And I stopped for a minute.

I said, you know what? I'm the asshole who's being served by that. And I don't mean this in a self-ladiating privilege way. Like, let me take a peek into my 401k. Guess what stocks I'm probably holding, right? A ton of airline stock. So when there's a stock right back, which I can get angry about, part of the thing is deferralization to go look.

That's not that's a good example because it shows that's a good what would you say? That's shed an interesting light on the implacability of the pre-dodistributions. Like you're part of the problem even though you object to it ideologically and you're part of the problem-dow distribution. It's like you're part of the problem, even though you object to it ideologically, and you're part of the problem because of where you sit in the economic structure. And- Right, but the thing is about this, and you talk about regulation or policies not working, which I want to return to in a minute,

but part of what I realized was, that's not because I'm a good investor, right? Because I'm smart, that's the free market. That's not because you're cruel and malevolent either. No, it's not, but this is not my investing genius or the free market at work, right? We don't have a transfer of wealth of that extent going the other direction.

And so part of it is like, okay, so I'm a beneficiary. So what a solution for a lot of things is, you know, you give money, you scream about privilege and you self-legilates. As far as I'm concerned, that's all a self-focused reaction, as opposed to me saying, how do we start to address that problem? And the thing is, it has to be partially policy, partially regulation. We can't, we can no one. It is something that we fight all the time.

You know, one of the things you just said, shed light, I think, again, for me on my irritation with a left end of the ideological spectrum is that it's just too much to see people who benefit, say, like who are in a position like you are or like I am in, because we're not beneficiaries of the pre-do distribution in a major way. Now, it seems to me too much for me to also expect to be admired as a a paragon of virtue in relationship to my attitude towards the poor, let's say. But then I'm asking for too much. I'm asking to be a beneficiary of the system, the way it set up. Now, and I'm asking to be admired for my objection to the very system that is enriching me. And the second one of those is too much to ask for.

And this solution for that, like when I had that realization, I was like, huh, let me get on that. Let me look at policies. Let's have an economic summit like the one you and I did. Like, and I'm not claiming I'm going to like go out and fix the whole problem. But if all I do is sit around and go, oh, I feel so guilty. Let me do a couple of think pieces about it and talk about white privilege. It's a name, it's just more self-focused bullshit for those people who think about politics for minutes a week because they can only afford to think about politics for four minutes a week.

So what do we do? And what I do is I try to advocate for policies that will work, even if some of those are conservative policies, right? I mean, I have a ton of people across the aisle, across the whole spectrum who I I reach out to go, what do you think of this? Are there libertarian answers? There's gotta be some regulatory answers

because it's so out of control. Well, hopefully because the end of the pre-do game is that far too few people have far too much of everything and that's not even good for them. I mean, you're not rich if you have to live in a gated community. That's right. That's a gilded cage, you know?

It's not an indication of wealth. Wealth is when you can walk around your city freely at night. That's wealth. That's exactly it. And so that's so much of what we arrived at in the messaging when we try to talk to people across the aisle, country club Republicans, let's say. There's a difference for me for people

who are at the wrong end of the, people who are at the wrong end of this system. And this is me off when people get so angry about the fact that like all these people are voting in ways that hurt their own interests, right? Yeah. Now we say, like I vote in ways that hurt my own interests. I don't just vote like how do you know what their interests are?

Their interests can be moral, their interests can be familial, their interests can be religious. It's not hurt my own interests. I don't just vote. How do you know what their interests are? Their interests could be moral. Their interests could be familial. Their interests could be religious. It's not just their financial interests, first of all. Yeah, their interests could be their children's future rather than their own current reality. I mean, I learned long time ago that small businessmen didn't vote for socialist policies in Canada, even when they were pro-small business, because they didn't want to be small businessmen. They wanted to be big businessmen. So they were voting their dream, not their reality. And it's not obvious that that's a mistake, even though,

well, you could criticize it and you could point out its lacks, but it doesn't mean it's inadequacies, but that doesn't mean that it's a mistake. So let's get into our, the Canary and the Coalmind discussion again. So I think, like for me, it's glaringly apparent. And I know lots of people, especially a good number of the people who are your listeners will, in good faith, disagree with me on that. To me, it's glaringly apparent, the difference in terms of what Trump presidency, let's say in a Biden presidency, in terms of the relative levels of corruption and undermining of the Democratic norms.

I know there's a lot of counter-arguments. I'm happy to have all of those. But for the sake of this discussion, what, like, from my perspective, it's this big slice here, like a totem pole. The vast majority of Americans are so far down. They're so far down below. That when they're looking up, they can't possibly distinguish some subtle,

well, you see Trump, it's in a Williamins clause and he's doing fundraisers on the South Law and on the White House and that's unacceptable, but the kind of fundraising and enrichment that, that like, you know, the Clintons did, was different for this other, they can differentiate that. So for me, what is,

and so then that gets to the question of, was the vote for Trump, like my friend who went in that booth and said, forget it, I don't care. Was that a wiser thing because that's a higher disagreeable irritation structure before we get somebody who's even more threatening from the right, right? That's a good question. It's certainly possible. somebody who's even more threatening from the right, right? That's a good question. It's certainly possible.

Is the Trump presidency, there's no way now that we can move forward, I think, without having much more robust and angry dialogue about that $50 trillion movement from the bottom of 90 to the top 1%. And there's some race conversations beyond the, I believe, this, the, the surface stuff that we distract ourselves with all the time, like cultural appropriations, all these

issues. And there's a lot of often, I've often thought, and I'm interrupting you partly because this is such a crucial point, that distribution of wealth problem. I've, I've, I've come to believe that even though the left focuses on that as the primary problem, they actually don't focus on it enough because the attribution of the problem is wrong. I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever that the pre-do distribution is a secondary consequence of the capitalist system. So what that means to me is that the left-wingers aren't actually taking the problem of relative poverty seriously enough because they've got a handful of stock answers that have been applied with absolutely no success whatsoever. And they're more radical, and they're more radical guises.

They're not looking at the problem with enough seriousness, but the problem exists. And it doesn't exist, too, because people are malevolent or greedy, although that might add to it. It's much more complex problem than one that's much more difficult to solve. But some of the greediness, like the level of lobbying in America and with lobbyists, literally submitting bills and forgetting to take the lobby firms heading off the paper. You know what I'm saying?

There's an aspect of that, but the other way that I look at that is to go, how badly did we fail is capitalists? And that's me, right? Yeah, how badly did we fail that enough people went and picked up this shiny object called socialism or democratic socialism, which is different from socialism and think that that's a good idea. Yeah, that's a good question. That's that's the reverse of the question the Democrats should be asking themselves. So the Democrats should be asking themselves, well, how did Trump become so attractive?

What did we do wrong? And the right wingers, the more conservative types should be asking themselves, well, how did Trump become so attractive? What did we do wrong? And the right wingers, the more conservative types should be asking, we haven't solved the problem of wealth distribution, well enough to stop socialism from being attractive as an option, even though the historical record with regards to its more radical forms is dreadful. and even though the historical record with regards to its more radical forms is dreadful. And we've also failed to embody the core values of free market capitalism, innovation, competition, where we have not pulled the ladder up behind us,

where we have allowed and built a robust system of smart capitalism all the way down that is a solid foundational base that we can stand on to win. It's so hard. Well, it's so god damn difficult. It's so god damn difficult though. Like, look, let me give you an example.

So I started a company 20 years ago and it struggled long for a long time. And then when I got better known, that solved our marketing problem. But it's a psychological testing company. And when we first designed it, we designed, we consciously designed a company that would require no employees that would have no overhead and that would be replicable. So it was computerized and so it can scale without an increase in cost. And like I'm sensitive to the problems cost

by the pre-distribution, but when I set up that company, I set it up in a way that absolutely contributed to it. Because we don't pay any, no one in this company gets paid except the three people that own it. That's it. And that's part of the inexorable, I can't say that damn word, inexorability.

I just did the audio version of my book and I had to redo all the times I said inexorable because I said it wrong. Anyways, the index, inexorability of the Pareto distribution is very difficult to escape from. Belovedly, if we could have a discussion politically where that problem became central and everyone's attention could be focused on that, the capitalists who we could admire, at least in some guises, could sit down and say, look, we have to figure out how to get more money to the bottom part of the population within this, within a structure that can also generate wealth,

because of course capitalism does that extremely well. So that problem has to be brought to the forefront. The thing is, the further I got into this, Jordan, the more that I realized that did everything foundationally is moral. That's it. You said once to me and I think like shortly after college you said there's only moral decisions that's it. I was like that's so weird though because sometimes there's pragmatic sometimes there's something. And the more you look at that the more it's born out then, in fact, like any shortcut you pay for, any shortcut pushes, I mean, look, we don't have to get all into union and secreticity, but you know that drill. And so one of the things that I think about a lot is that we can argue as if we're sitting

around in college, right, drinking, and there's a libertarian, and there's a conservative and there's a liberal, and we are a Democrat conservative and liberal, let's say. And we all know what we're going to say already. Nothing, did it have pure ideologically, will ever work or function. And the only answer to it, like for me, part of what I realize was I realize I'm going to be arrogant enough to try to go on an adventure that tries to tell stories, not remessage the Democrats that I'm lying and repackaging and putting pig on a lipstick, that I can make an argument for classic. I think you met lipstick on a pig.

What did I say? You said, pig on a lipstick, which gives the ratio of pig to lipstick seriously wrong. That should appeal to the Trump viewers of this broadcast. That's horrible. That's horrible. But it's not about, it can't be about deception, right? It has to be about making actual arguments for why the core liberal values that I believe are most imperfectly but approximately embodied by the Democrats can have appeal to conservatives,

right? And we've talked all that big story. Hopefully you also tilt the Democrats in that direction, like by producing that message, right? It gives them a center around which to align. I have a necessary thing. You need that center. But here's the complexity that I realize is we didn't make any money at all. We said everything is pro bono and we didn't have any credit. And we wouldn't have done any of this. Like the no permission part is like here we went off and did it. But when there's a ton of money to be made in advertising, I mean we have, I sent you that

article, right? There's an estimate that we created, you know, and it could very well be offer overblown, but there's an estimate that the ad structures that we put in place created a billion dollars of advertising. And we aimed it at the swing states, we aimed it at evangelicals, we aimed it at the Hispanic communities and the places that really mattered a lot. That's a lot of value, even if it's off by 50%.

And the thing is, as part of how we got there was people when they do an ad buy with a commercial, they make money on the ad buy, right? And so part of it was, we'd go off, we'd make some commercial, we'd test it, we'd make sure that it was honest, it would be saying something that's slightly different, but the cost of having our message conveyed in a way that might hope to be

transformational was for us to give it to them and say here, say that you did it, and if there's any sales or anything to do with it, you go make a bunch of money off it and just say it was you. And so that's the price of it, because if we said what we want to be cut in on the revenue streams, then they'd have a bunch of reasons to choose their own creative over our creative, right? So what you did by taking yourself out of the fee structure, you enabled your voice. That's right, and we allowed for other people, it's like you don't get to have all these things, right? We get to have all the credit and make a ton of money and also be adored by the Democratic establishment and then also be transformative.

And so I'm not saying that like it's any great shakes morally, but that was the part of me that was like, the solution is in doing. The solution is in when I realized the airline buyout thing that I was an inadvertent recipient of that in a way, it's kind of rigged. That's kind of a rigged game when there's a buyout and there's a stock buyout and I just make more money despite them being in failure is to do stuff and to try and do stuff properly.

And so I think that a lot of it is we have such a failure of moral leadership right now in corporations. I mean, I was thinking back to like, would it be amazing if we looked up to, you know, more leaders of industry and more, for the, it just, we're so removed from our parodons, from our avatars of meaning, I guess is what I mean to say. Like the fact that a politician's supposed to be there to help you and to do good for the community is almost laughable now. The fact that a college or university represents the production of a Renaissance man or woman

in pure form, I mean, the lie of that, I think, was laid bare by that college admission scandal. People were so furious about it because the answer to that should be no kid could cheat to get into university. They'd wash out in the first month if they didn't deserve to be there in a way. So we were removing ourselves like the money making mechanism of business like great businesses and business people should be building a whole pyramid and structure of success under them. That's how you win. Well, part of part of that again is that's a time frame problem, you know, is that the more fundamental, the more morally fundamental a decision is, the longer the time frame over which it operates. And so you might expect people who are benefiting from the capitalist system to set up their

structures so that capitalism itself would be supported across a long span of time. And that would mean cutting in the people that in the bottom of the hierarchy, but short-term considerations arise to doing such things very, very difficult. Right, and if you keep making a difficult another 8, 10, 12 years, then AOC is the president and the whole system is going to change, let's say.

Right, well that's the risk. If the system fails enough people, then there's enough people who are willing to, especially young men, who are willing to take their chances in the revolution, you know, at least it's exciting. So here's the hardest thing that I had to figure out, which was this. I had an OK time. I think part of this is my,

I've always had a very diverse background of friends. Because I write thrillers, I have a lot of friends in military and community, a lot of kind of hardcore conservatives, the hardest thing for me was to try to apply the same self-awareness of my blind spots. And I don't wanna say empathy, but sort of seek to really understand

the further elements of the left. That was the hardest thing for me. Instead of just saying your idiots and you're squawking, you're doing all this stuff to really slow down and listen and understand that a lot of these younger, especially the younger kids, younger who are coming up, who are very attracted to democratic socialism, who are way more radical

in a lot of their views than are appealing to me. When I stopped and looked at the world through their perspective and could get over my inherent, like, you're always more angry at your own side. It's always that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. like you're always more angry at your own side. It's always that. Yeah. Yeah. But man, if I was, I have, you know, my wife's a college professor, as you know,

and she teaches at CSUN, which is a lot of the kids, Cal State, Northridge, a lot of kids from tough backgrounds. Like, they don't have time to be political. Those are the kids she has. They're working to jobs, their self support, their family, their raising their younger sibling. Like, these are working kids.

So many of those kids come out of, and they made the right choices, not drugs, not, you know, didn't wind up in prison, they went and did this, they're holding their family together, they have like $130,000 in debt coming out. And they're in jobs that they're earning, you know, maybe they have a master's in psychology

at the end of it, and they're making $33 an hour. Oh, you know, maybe they have a master's in psychology at the end of it. And they're making $33 an hour. Well, you know, okay, so that means the price to buy into the system at a point where you have a chance of thriving can't get too high. So, student-load debt would certainly contribute to that, as would the price, entry price of real estate. That's right. Okay, so that's a real danger. But I think that people are, why would you look at other means and other systems?

And why wouldn't you just criticize the system? And for us to come along, me, to come along and say, well, that's ridiculous. And democratic socialism and defund all these things that you're talking about the system are so foolish. Well, I think you can look. The other thing that you can credit, especially young people who are attracted to the farther left ideals, is that there is genuine concern about the unfairness of the economic distribution. It's like, right.

And you know, so there are a lot of poor people who are at zero, which is a hell of a place to be because you get to the point where you can't get out because every you need what I don't know how to say it exactly. You can't afford a bank account, you can't afford an address, like you can't get the basic necessities that would allow you to play in the system. You can afford $20 a month to keep your bank account open if you're under $1,000. Right, exactly, exactly. And so that's the cost of being stock at zero. And young people look at that and they think, well, that's a terrible weight waste of human resources, which it is.

And it's dreadfully unfair, which it is. Now, the problem is that the solutions that are conjured up on the radical left don't seem to work, but I think not well anyways. So I think it's reasonable to say you can be sympathetic to the motivations that drive the attraction to those theories, and it would be lovely if they work, but so many of them many of them when put into practice don't produce the result that's intended. Like, I don't see any evidence. I've looked and it's tough to parse through it, but it isn't the evidence that left wing governments have been better at controlling the pre-dodistribution problem than right wing governments is very, it's very sparse. And that actually is unbelievably disheartening. But I think we're down, I think we're getting to academic abstract with it in a way,

and I think the part of it is to say, when they say that, we go, here's a bunch of facts. And to me, that's the same thing with a MAGA voter, let's say, of me coming in and going, here's a bunch of facts about Donald Trump's corruption, rather than joining and saying, look, you're 22. You're not supposed to have a world economic view and an understanding of the whole breadth of history, especially from our academic systems that are failing you as you're under crippling debt, and you're addicted to screens

because companies have higher teams of addiction specialists to throw a shrapnel in your nervous system system and the bio-med companies are all over you. They're being devoured from every angle. And we're coming in with PowerPoint presentations about why it's done rather than going, God, you're right. There's a lot of problems here. And you're, maybe some of the language and reasons and reasoning that you're moving towards aren't the ones that will get you

where you want to be, but boy, are you right about a lot? Let's start from there then. Like, you can't change somebody's opinion without seeking to understand them first. That's my motivation. Absolutely, and you shouldn't assume that all the positive motivations are on your side. Okay, I want to ask you some other questions here.

So you produced 200 commercials. We're going to show some of those interspersed in this video. Now how are they distributed? How many people watched them? That's the first question. We did a ton of online digital. Excuse me, they ranged. Some of them we ran during NFL games and swing states on television.

Some of them like the Reagan City on a Hill one. One of the benefits was some of the ones we did were really innovative in ways that are kind of fun that we could talk about in different ways. And so we got secondary like our, our ragan city on a hill one, Brian Williams asked James Carval about that on a show. So there was also a secondary sort of conversational aspect of crossover into mainstream media in different ways

because people would then write, I did a whole series of ASMR commercials. This is a fun. What's ASMR? Oh, it's the whisper. Do you remember those videos where people would like whisper and make sounds on the microphone that were super trendy? No, I must have been out of function.

I must have been malfunctioning during that period. But so basically, we realized that the commercials that a lot of the democratic agencies were putting where these Trump is beholden to China and it would have the dark shadowy Trump and all the stuff. And so a lot of, and they got tons of people are mashing the like button and sharing it, but what we found in some of the testing, there's a brilliant woman we worked with the testing, is it moved on decided voters 10 points towards Trump.

And the reason for that is, if your nervous system is put into fight or flight by the ominous score in the facts, then you move more towards your more inclined or receptive to conservative messaging. That's right, gingoism, xenophobia, strong man leadership. Yes, yes. So I did this commercial series where we hired

a wonderful actress to whisper. It's a sort of seductive whispering of the mic, because I thought we need to talk to voters nervous systems. That's another part of storytelling, right? You're not talking just to their prefrontal cortex. You want to talk to the decision-making mechanisms. We need to lower the guard because there's so much screaming about all attacks.

And so that was what we did. She said, there's so much screaming, you know, I want to, I want to tell you, this is the only way we can cut through the noise. And it's a sort of whispered soft message, Jay. Hi there. It's just you and me. And that's it, I'm finally.

So, after loading everything else, Donald J. Trump is loading our election. He hired his rich donor, buddy, to slash the postal service, so our votes can can be counted. Photo suppression is Trump's biggest graph. Vote early. Still some shell. Sounds, sounds. My Dis touch is responsible for the content of this advertising. Let's get his paws off of our eggs.

So that was effective, and that got written up in a bunch of places, secondarily. So how many people are typically viewing these ads? Most of the ones that we did with big launches were in the millions. And how would that compare to it? Well, I could say a typical political out, but this is a typical because in some sense, because the technological infrastructure for doing this is so new, I don't know what you'd compare it to.

Because I mean, an ad used to be an evidence and thing, right? You'd throw it up on a TV show. And I mean, it could run in sequential TV shows, but the ad would run and then people wouldn't have access to it. Now, of course, they have access to everything all the time. So I don't know what you compare it to. I mean, it would be Instagram, it would be Facebook, it's on Twitter, then it's shared widely, then some of them we cut down and we ran on television stations. I mean, but we got, I think I could confidently say we got over 100 million views of stuff, if not more. Okay. Okay. What kind of, here's a nasty question, I suppose.

I would, what good did you do and what harm did you do or what harm might have you done? Let's start with good. What good do you think you did within the Democratic Party, let's say? But we have advocated and elevated the purest place for me in the Democratic Party or the first time House candidates. That's the love for me to work with. Because it's so hard as people move up in the structure and make all the compromises that they have to make, it gets more and more sticky and the fiefdoms in Bayley Wix.

And so the House candidates are wonderful. We supported them. I mean, I think we had a big, I look, I would say it's so hard to say and it's so hard to wanna take. Credit. Yeah, I wouldn't wanna remove our efforts from the midterm or from the presidential.

I wouldn't be comfortable removing them and thinking that the outcome is the same. Now, whether that's a slice that we laid on top of, you know, tons of people who did other work and laid other slices down, community organizers, the politicians, you know, and yes, the Democratic institutions with fundraising, the D-Trep C, there's some credit that is there too.

But we put and targeted all of our messaging, our theory of the case was right. institutions with fundraising the D-Trep C, there's some credit that is there too. But we put and targeted all of our messaging, our theory of the case was right. We put it straight into the swing states, we put it straight into persuasion messaging for moderate voters, we went after a lot of Hispanic commercials. Like our theory of the case was right.

We went after evangelicals, we did. So what do you mean by theory of the case? We didn't do anything that was woe politically correct. Oh, I see. I see. I see. What was ambitious? It was unifying. We had diversity in our ads. We did several sort of Black Lives Matter. You know, we had the Lincoln Project. I got one to them. But it was, they were very clean on the parameters of what we were representing as a unified positive vision of America.

And our criticism, I think some of the commercials with Trump here are there. We did get, I probably, I failed in getting snarky in ways that might not have been as fair a persuasive. So you did get snarky in a way that was so was not as persuasive here or there. Some of those 200 ads, if I look back on, I'd go, yeah, but I had an instinct and I'd send up to testing and I'd get the answer back. I was like, I think I can try this way in of this kind of attack route. Okay. We got back. There was like, no, it's turning people off again. And I was wrong. So I was wrong, plenty.

I mean, I rushed into being wrong everywhere again and again and again. We didn't understand the permission structures. We didn't understand the etiquette. And at a certain point, early on, it was funny. I joke with Billy, he'd send an email out to like a bunch of senators and heads of different committees. And I'd get like a worried call

from one of our political people. You can't see all these people. There's all this internal stuff going on. And so the first reaction is kind of chagrin or embarrassment of like, oh, we stumbled into this not knowing anything. But then we're like, wait a minute.

That's idiotic. We're trying to win a race. If everything that you're saying you believe that Trump is that damaging and threatening, we don't have time for any of this in our nesting bullshit. So knock it off. We're gonna CC all of you.

We don't have time to break that up. And everyone kind of went, okay. Like we were so clueless in some ways that it almost benefited us because we were breaking a lot of established norms in little ways that if people came up with an issue about whether it was some subtlety of language leasing or hierarchical stuff or bureaucracy,

we just said, we're not doing any of that. We're here to win. If you don't want to be involved, we'll take you right off, but we're not going to navigate any of those things. And since no one had given us permission and no one was paying us, no one could fire us. And so it just worked. It was really weird.

Well, it is really weird that it was even possible, but it's less weird when you, the weird thing is that you did this without any payment that you just decided to do it. And the second weird thing is that you actually went ahead and did it. And as a project, it worked, even though the outcome of it might be very difficult

to measure. You were looking for harm, I did. You asked about the harm. Well, I also wanted to go more into the good first, though you talked about the newly elected people. You didn't tie that exactly to the good that you've done, but there obviously is a link there. So I'm just going to ask you to make that more explicit. That's the, they're the best home. You know, we have amazing candidates. If you looked

up a list of slotkin, if you looked up Dean Phillips, if you looked up Haley Stevens, if you looked up Lucy McBath, some people we lost this round because of the bad messaging, really bad party messaging and inability to draw a line against socialism and the fun of police. But we're working with candidates like Michelle De La Isla, who's the mayor of Topeka, Kansas. Okay. So you're pleased about the effectiveness of your strategy on raising the overall capacity for performance of a new generation or part of a new generation of political decision-makers. Who I admire and who anybody would, anybody reasonable if you sat down with a list of slack-in

who was 20 years in the CIA, you might not agree with her on all the politics, it's impossible to not completely admire her as a stateswoman. She's exceptionally important. So you got hype, you think you were on the side of the high quality people. Yeah. Okay, well that's cool.

All right. I mean, it's hard for me to see. And I got us more oriented on getting things done and accomplished than talking about them theoretically. Okay. In terms of like, here's how we get shit done now. It's enough with the abstract. People are hurting.

People are in a bad place. And I think also to some extent, I've helped to untangle in small, it's so hard. I think I've done a lot in, I helped build a coalition. I played a role in stitching together, you know, the Rick Wilson's and the David Froms and the Bill crystals. Of course, they're doing it on their own.

And a lot of people have reached, but I was the center of a particularly diverse and interesting, Chris Halverson, who you introduced me to, right? The former Chaplain of the Senate, Evangelical Leader. There's people who I called and pulled into ventures in a whole host of different ways. One of my favorite candidates who lost this time

due to bad, again, messaging that was unfair, wonderful woman, so she tore a small. She was in the most rural district of any Democrat. Democrats don't tend rural in New Mexico. So I called Chris Halverson who introduced me to, and I said she's a Christian woman, she's a woman of faith, she's bipartisan, she's in the most rural district,, she's a woman of faith, she's bipartisan, she's

in the most rural district, and she has concerns about rural medicine, or rural health care, and that's not predominantly Democrat, who are Republicans who you can get her in touch with to help solve that problem for constituents. It's a win for her. That just helps people in a rural district. It's politically agnostic. And ideally, we would be politically agnostic. Like I would love to support Republican candidates

who I felt like were good faith. Well, that's the question, you know, because you could look at this as a zero sum game and you could say, well, it's bad news for the conservatives if better quality liberals emerge on the political landscape because their probability of victory is higher. But then you could take the opposite viewpoint. You could say, no, everyone wins

if the quality of candidates on both sides of the spectrum are elevated, if the quality is elevated. And that's the only thing that keeps us, see, I view the extremism like we're on a seesaw, right? And so the game theory is, is that if people are in the middle and they're dealing with each other, like Tipo Neal and Ronald Reagan, everyone can be in the middle and you think the seesaw. But when one group starts to move and it's chicken or egg, the other has to move out

to hold balance. When you have the mainstream media divided since essentially the Gore Vidal, William Buckley Jr. debates, and there's a wonderful documentary, the best of answers. And so, yeah, yeah. And you have social media driving that way, and you have, capitalism by appropriating people for dopamine hits for the most extremism online, moving people that way. Everybody's moved out. And so part of it for me is if we can bring the Democrats back towards the middle, I hope as we can get Republicans there. And so part of it for me is if we can bring the Democrats back towards the middle,

I hope as we can get Republicans there. And the other thing, just while that, okay, so that's the bat here, right? Is that... And Jordan, just one thing that I've wanted to talk to you about this for a minute, which is, we talk about moderates and we talk about moderates in more extremes. And the distinction I make, it's like in psychology between process and content in a way. Like my politics are actually probably significantly more progressive than where I live to negotiate and understand that within a system of governance, no one gets everything they want and we need imperfect incremental progress

where everybody takes less of what they want. we need imperfect incremental progress where everybody takes less of what they want. And so I think that there's an aspect where we can talk about moderate in process. Like, I don't care how extreme within reason of reasonableness, like AOC holding her views. I don't view that as some moral issue if she was more willing to engage on more fair terms about them. Like I feel like we as a party could sustain a democratic socialist, weighing in once in a while from a deep blue district to hold us to account for ways that maybe we would get to tangled up in corruption.

It's all about the ability to engage properly and then people's politics can be wherever they are. Well, that sort of, that's, that is essentially the subordination of ideology to the Constitution, in some sense, right, is that regardless of your stated goal and regardless of your ideological position, you swear to abide by the process rules. Right. Yeah. Well, and it's, it all gets, that makes you a moderate. That's reasonable, a reasonable all get that makes you a moderate. And that's reasonable, a reasonable for that makes you a kind of moderate and it's a reasonable. Okay, I wanted to ask you to what so I know that the fact that you did this and the fact that it was successful at least as a project, let's say, and probably because of its consequences, but certainly

as a project, because it's been going on for four years and manifested itself on a pretty large scale. What were the consequences for you, personally, psychologically? What did this do to you? How did it change you? Wow. That's a, it was one of the best and worst things I ever went through in my life.

I feel like it was like going to college for four years. I don't have a belief that we, so I was in large part engaged in the Info Wars, especially in acutely the last seven months because I was on viewing sort of, people who are online are largely radicalized and weaponized. And I don't mean that flippantly. I mean that some of the playbooks that are issued

by the extremes politically are the ISIS playbook. A lot of the opinions that we believe that we hold are out of troll farms in St. Petersburg. So we're here as a country when that $50 trillion is moving to the top 1%, we actually believe that we're personally damaged if a black man deals on the sidelines of an NFL game to peacefully protest, or a white girl gets dreadlocks

at Yale. Like the things that we come to believe are these giant stakes to me are all the distraction games for the movement of that 50 trillion dollars to the 1%. Because we're not talking about the prison industrial complex, right? We're not talking about the real stuff. And as we're fighting about this, all that keeps happening. So there is a view of the level of corruption, intricacy, difficulty that is dizzying. Being in there and online, I'm not sure that somebody can live any substantial portion of their life online

in social media and not be insane. Oh well, it really, it's like, it's like most of what I've encountered online or a huge proportion of it has been intensely positive, but even too positive, I would say, is like so many people comment in the comment session, section say on YouTube that being exposed to my work, and it's based on that ideas of other people,

like it's not my work, you know, exactly, because no one's work is their work exactly, but being exposed to these ideas, which I've been communicating, let's say, has so positively changed their lives. But to hear that from thousands of people is just, it's overwhelming. Like, that's the positive side of it. It's too much. Right, right. You get amplified too much. And the negative side is just deadly. Like on my YouTube channel, the positive to negative comment ratio is about a hundred

to one, you know, and that's about as good as you could ever hope for. But the positive ones are overwhelming. And the negative ones are deadly. And you know, you see this because people will get attacked by 20 people on Twitter and they'll go into convulsions to apologize. And if you put yourself in the center of this monstrosity, that's multiplied by thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. And it's not real. It's not real.

That's what's so crazy. It's not your family and your community. You don't know what cross section That is you don't know like if you're at high school and there's one table of mean kids screaming in a corner of a cafe or Gossiping well, it's real, but it's impossible to parameterize You know with when it's your family or your immediate community, you know these people and you can put some walls around it. I can't give it the proper way. No, that's what I mean. That's what I mean.

You can't give it the proper way. You don't know what, well, it's because we're not adapted to this environment. It's like, well, and so here we have these kids, you know, I'm increasingly worried about who were, were, it's like, it's like trying to exist and go through puberty and go and enter the academic world

and the world of culture and ideas while being constantly blared at with the stream of the most salacious upsetting and activating gossip that's been algorithmically selected to target you. And that's how politics is. That's what we're dealing with. Now I was in there and the thing is for me is I talk to,

I talk to anybody. I mean, you know that. I mean, I'll talk to you. For a variety of reasons and, you know, one, there's all the obvious reasons for free speech and talking to people who don't agree with you. But also it's like, A, what are my blind spots I always want to know?

That's hard. It's hard to go in. I had a, time, I had a two-hour conversation with Eric Weinstein about where he was on everything, but I was right in the middle of it. That takes a while, you know, Eric's, Eric's incredibly bright. I'm talking to some of the brightest, most impassioned representatives all the way around. That's all the spokes of the wheel that I could get to. And it takes a lot of confusing, man. Yeah, and to find your center and to accommodate and assimilate and Eric raises a ton of stuff, he pokes at a ton of soft spot.

We're friendly. It's a very respectful exchange. But then to come out, incorporate the parts that are right, get clarity on where I think he's skewed for his reasons and his info tunnel that's different from my info tunnel. And I was doing it in every direction. And so it felt like being torn apart to hold the center because I was just being torn every which way. Well, it makes me gives me more understanding even of why people will settle into their ideological bubble. You know, Well, it's a relief.

It's such a relief, because you've got to ask yourself just how many questions do you want to ask yourself? Right. And I've always thought that exploration in the world of ideas is of unlimited value, although I have a conservative element. But man, too much of it can tear you apart. Well, you would die if we have that, like, really, really high openness. Yeah.

That's the danger of high openness, boy. I feel like for about six or seven months that every day was a deep dive into something that was toxic and skewed to understand it, to try and come back out and put myself together. And by the way, going into it, there was plenty of times you crossed someone who wants to destroy you or scream at you or tell you why you're awful. Or make here, you make an accidental mistake. When I was working, when we were discussing this a couple of years ago, I swiped one of your videos, if you remember, and put a voice over over it.

And, you know, I thought that was warranted. I mean, in retrospect, I did it without sufficient consideration. And I mean, I realized that very rapidly. I did a voiceover of one of the videos that you'd produce because while I thought I had something to say about it, and I was irritated about, well, I was irritated. We'll leave it at that. And that was a big mistake and that caused a tremendous amount of friction between the two of us.

And you know, and it was also exposed to, I don't know, 100,000 people before I finally took it down. I didn't take it down exactly, but I modified it. But when you're connected in some high intensity fashion, your mistakes are exaggerated to a point when you're connected in some high intensity fashion, your mistakes are exaggerated to a point that's just intolerable. And again, it's not something that we're adapted to understanding it.

It make a mistake in a million people watch it. It's like, it's the sort of thing that can paralyze you into inaction. It's too much. And the thing is, there's also, like I was talking about, that there's no way to have a perfect conversation about race class and gender. There was no way for me to do this.

When I first was trying to get Democrats to go on you, Rogan, Dave, Ben Shapiro, right. And I had some success. I got Stanley McChrestle. I helped go to talk to Ben. And to me, Sam Harris had Michael Bennett on, but they were, people were really tentative and afraid. And so the only way for me to do it was for me to go on a lot of these first. Well, I was a novelist. I wasn't interested in all of a sudden being put out there on the ledge

necessarily in that fashion, especially for the communities that I'm in, especially as a liberal, right? In the community that I'm in. Yeah. But I had to be sort of the case study for it. And you know, I did it, but what's funny is there's no, if I look back at that, there's there's a hundred things I would say or do differently. There's no way to do that without... Well, nobody's an expert at it. It's like, if you want to move politically, you're going to do it badly, especially to begin with. And this is one of the things that troubled me a lot about, so to answer your question at the end of this, I was not in good shape for reasons you and I can get into later over above and in more depth.

Now, I think all I'll stick to sparkling water given the state of my nervous system. Sparkling water insulted me. I'll drink enough bourbon for both of us. But, you know, part of that process was, it's, I don't know. It's like there's, it's so much to go into. It's so much to dive down to really try to figure it out, to hold the, to really be open

to what all those blind spots are. Yeah. And to come at feeling like you're still intact. And I had to, I had to race to make mistakes. That was, I mean, we spun up this whole operation. I mean, it doesn't even make any sense if I look back on it. The amount of stuff we got done, you're racing to make mistakes.

You have that one lecture, the full precedes the master. And it was like, how quickly can I be a fool on how many fronts the most rapidly is possible to try and just get better? I mean, we were, I mean, we spun up an entire, you know, studio operation fundraising, distribution, dissemination network. I mean, it was, it was crazy. Um, well, and what was hard on you, what was hard on you was what? The rate, the, the intensity that exposure to all the different opinions, the consequences

of making a mistake. The consequences of making a mistake. Like let's say my theory of the case had been wrong and it should have been a further left thing and Biden wasn't the guy and all this other stuff and we'd lost because I put, call it that figure which again I'm saying is slightly overblown. If I targeted a billion dollars in advertising to the wrong people, giving the wrong message, and blew the mark, and we lost the election

by 104,000 votes instead of winning it by 104,000 votes, that's a lot to live with. And I didn't even consider that until I was so far in that there kind of wasn't going out. I mean, you can't consider everything as you go. But the other thing is, is I saw with more and more clarity, I got way too much, not too much, at a ton of information constantly,

daily, hourly, about my blind spots and confirmation biases. And a lot of anger and yeah. A lot of those things, the upside of a lot of those things, your blind spots, your confirmation biases, your prejudices, all those things, they protect you from being overwhelmed. Like they're compression algorithms and they remove information, a hordes of it. A lot of that information is valuable, but Jesus is like, how much information can you swallow? I mean, it was so, that's right.

And what was really, and the only way that I determined to make headway in something that complex and that corrupt, and I don't mean entirely corrupt, but I mean, politics and with that much anger and rage and outrage and frustration and outrage and frustration and pain and grief, like it was, it was, was to try and go for it as cleanly as possible.

And I, no one can do that. I tried the same thing, you know, because I was dealing with people's psychological problems and trying to step very carefully to not make a mistake, but man, I didn't, I mean, there's no, there's no not failing if you're doing that all day, every day with those steaks multiple times a day, and that will eat you up.

And part of what happened for me that was so funny, I do things that were funny, which you'll be amused, particularly amused that. But so I got to the end of this and I was really seeing things only in moral terms. And what was interesting is at the end of this, after the week after the election was really, I was pretty dysregulated, let's just say. Most of the conversations I had were with my conservative friends.

I call my born-of-incrition friends, I call my Navy SEALs buddies, because I was seeing everything in like mythological, good and evil terms. And it's like, what was so funny was at the end of this exercise for liberalism, right, for moving towards enlightenment discourse, moving towards a democratic party that I thought was less imperfect, significantly less imperfect than the imperfections of the Republican party as it stands under Trump, was for me to need a lot of support

from my conservative friends. And fortunately, I have that. What kind of support did you get? And why was it necessary to seek it out from those sources? If you talk a lot about mythology, the Seven Deadly Sins, if that's what you're conscious of and seeing, because at a certain point, there's so much information in your so open that you're just dealing constantly with your own failings, and you're seeing others and you're trying to clean them up.

It's almost like I got stripped down on the bone. I don't have the sort of, that the particular courage and drive of my friends who are seals who are in the military, but this felt like it was my version of confronting things psychologically that in the way that I could, from a position of much more relative safety, where I was getting torn apart and trying to put back together. And conservatives, they understand, they understood that better. And if I start to talk about that in ways, in, it's part of why I have such a wheelhouse of friends, is like it all comes very genuinely, but also its strategy, you know, it's like,

yeah, it's, you need people to think about it. Well, that's a good, it's like, yeah, it's, you need people to think about that. Well, that's a good, that's, that's an interesting observation because, you know, you could, you could make the claim that just as the world needs an array of political viewpoints, the full array of political viewpoints, you know, barring corruption, let's say, you need to surround yourself with a full array of personalities from conservative to liberal because that way the bases are covered and different people are going to be different situations are going to call for different people and thank God there are different

people and actually that's a good way to end this is like thank God there are different people. And actually that's a good way to end this. Is like thank God there are different people. Because no one can do everything all the time. And so we specialize. And that's true in the political realm as well. And we need to understand that and not assume that the conservatives are right or the liberals are right, but to understand that each of them is right now and then. Well, and the thing is that it's also such an interesting part.

You brought up that that disagreement that you and I have that was pretty intense, but we work out. And I really work it out and you knew we'd work it out. Yeah, it shorted me right out. You know, I mean, partly because I was tearing myself apart about being impulsive and also partly because of the magnitude of the mistake, the public nature of the mistake. Let's say, you know, when it clear, because it also, when we went through that, we knew we would get through it. We just knew it would

be rocky in a way. And what was interesting is what I found was some of the people most adept at pointing out my blind spots. When I then was in free fall as a result of being subjected to how many blind spots I had, of course they'd be the ones who would be able to orient me, right? Because they're the ones who could see those things. So, right? So that maybe that's part of the thing too, why part of that was in that week

where I was the most acutely flailing, let's say. Of course, I'm gonna go to the people who were the ones who had the most views that made me think about things because I was like, I feel lost and spun. I'm not gonna talk to people whose views I feel like that's a home base for me, because I'm not all my home base. I need different kind of input, you know.

And I think the same is true vice versa. So you've pulled back what happens now, great. What's like you must you've graduated from your new college, let's say. And so that's a tremendous relief like it is when you graduate from anything, when you accomplish something, or when you've finished with something, but it also leaves a huge hole. You are obviously gonna concentrate on your writing again. You have been, you have a new book coming out in January. What's the name of that book? Protocol Sun.

And your last book? The one that came out previous, it's into the fire. They're, they're, what, I mean, so what's happened that's so amazing with this, I had a talk with a mutual friend of ours a while ago, talking about this and I was like, for me, one of the things that's been so amazing is,

the amount that I've learned and the confluence with the series that I'm writing now, with the orphan acts and what he's doing, it's like bizarre levels of synchronicity with this. And so it's funny because I'm writing now with the orphan acts and what he's doing. It's like bizarre levels of synchronicity with this. And so it's funny because I'm coming out and going right into a draft of an art. Well, you know so much more. I mean, I've watched you over the last four years.

You know so much more about the way things work than you did before that that's got to have nothing but a beneficial effect on your ability to spin up stories. Well, to try to address them in that way where it's easier, you know, and this is always why I started, you know, I don't want to write and make propaganda, right? This was the sort of necessity and it felt a bit like a call to duty, but I want to write and have people think through formats that are one step removed through science fiction,

right, through the thrillers, through orphan X. And it's been really gratifying, you know, as that series has built, that some of it's in there. But so I'm having a renewed love affair with that. It was a little hard to take my hands off the steering wheel with the politics. And I'm sure, you know, that feeling, like when you're just, I was going so hard so long

that part of it was like, well, I should be involved with these 50 things, but I've narrowed the scope. I have a few pet projects. I want to keep working in terms of discussions with the evangelical community and doing across the aisle. The anti-polarization stuff is really good. Yeah, yeah.

I would really like, well, we did some of that in Washington when we were bringing Republicans and Democrats, congressmen and senators as well, I believe, I was really unhappy when I couldn't do that anymore because that was so worthwhile. And the opportunity is still sitting there. And so hopefully my health will hold. I'd love to do that again. It's such gratifying work. my health will hold. I'd love to do that again. It's such gratifying work. We, we should. And I think what's funny with that is it's like, you know, here you and I are all tangled up in different political discussions in different ways. But neither of us were particularly political. Really, you know, it's like that never was the source or drive. Well, I always made a decision. I've had

to make a decision between politics and other roots continually in my life, and I always pick the alternative roots. Yeah, me too. So, all right, well, we should wrap this up, I guess. Yep. We've covered a lot of ground. I was We'll talk soon. you