Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, I'm McKayla Peterson, this is episode to Season four and in person podcast yet again. This episode is between Gregg Hurwitz and Jordan Peterson. It's called Build a Better Democrat and was recorded December 20th, twenty twenty before the most recent events on Capitol Hill. Gregg Hurwitz is an American novelist, scriptwriter and producer. He has my favorite thriller books, Hands Down, no question about it, if you like the Bourne movies, he writes novels kind of similar to that that are absolutely riveting.

I'd recommend The Orphan series. He actually has the newest orphan acts out on January twenty sixth as a preorder 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, we'll be up on YouTube tomorrow, Monday, January 18th. Twenty twenty one 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 ten thousand things buzzing around your head at one time.

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I'm talking today with Greg Hurwitz, president of Los Angeles, California, former student of mine from Harvard and someone I've known for a long time, Greg's a novelist and although he has very many other occupations, which we'll talk about today, it's a pleasure to see you. Greg, it's been a while since we talked. Good to see you. Jared, maybe we could start by you just outlining some of the things that you do. And then I think we'll focus on the political stuff more today.

Not necessarily from a political perspective, though. Well, I came in from novels and the novel, The Orphan 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 20, 16. 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 us.

And one of the things that I wanted to do when Donald Trump was elected, I was he was not a candidate or president to my liking or who was a match with my values set in. The first thing that I asked myself. It's funny you give that lecture about the Old Testament that one of the answers that the 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. And so I started to work with a lot of candidates. I was mostly interested in candidates in purple districts talking to red voters.

Right. And so for the midterms, we work with 30 candidates, Democrat and in 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 to try and win them over to a different point of view. We had a lot of success. We say the 30 candidates that we work with. Twenty one one in terms of flipping those seats when 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 was 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 of that, we started to I wrote a bunch of op ads or one with you for The Wall Street Journal, and I did a lot for the Bulwer trying to talk across the aisle. And I went out and talked to, I think about a three hundred and sixty degree or of Americans, whether it was military evangelicals, Black Lives Matter, Hispanic or Texas Mexicans, different population than Miami Cubans.

Right. Different population from California Mexicans really talking to different groups and listening and figuring it out. And I wound up doing about two hundred digital and television commercials, all this political circus pro bono with with a small team of us.

Do you want to describe the team? Yeah, I it was it's me. It's Marshall Herskovitz, who's a TV show runner, and Frater, he created 30 something. Billy Ray, Oscar nominated screenwriter. He wrote, Captain Phillips, you just did become your role. Shawn Ryan, the creator of The Shield, a TV producer and lead a calibrates. She has a ton of credits from Shutter Island to she work on Avatar, wrote a good amount of that with James Cameron.

And what was interesting was in terms of the Hollywood system, like 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 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, who 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 let me let me walk through this. So.

A couple of years ago, maybe that was in twenty sixteen, but you had some political awakening, let's say, and I guess that was attendant Donald Trump's election, 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, like what?

Let me start to explore in earnest my confirmation biases and blind spots and talk to everybody who has a different perspective or point of view than me in earnest to try to figure that out. Yeah, well, you guys decided that you were going to produce messages for the Democrat Party. Yeah, and that's that was you can do that on your own accord in some sense or on your own. On your own, on your own dollar, but also independently.

Yeah, I mean, the line we use was and I remember sitting in my living room talking about this, I said we ask for no money, no credit and no permission. And you said to me, that's exactly what Orphan X does. My 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. We 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 two hundred 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 because, look, you're if you're if you're messaging and making propaganda is really what it is, that's that's Goebels. You're in Goebel's Arena.

That's dangerous stuff. You got to take it really, really seriously to try to engage and make arguments without getting corrupted by what that is in the. Well, that's 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 you if you start playing in the domain of deceit, you'll get tangled up in not so fast and make your head spin and then you undo yourself.

I mean, you can undo yourself even if you stick pretty close to the truth. OK, so, I mean, what happened? What what you guys did in 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 organize yourself with a group of people, a group that was much larger to begin with, but did shrink quickly to those that were actually dedicated over some long period of time, 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 the at least in principle, with the Democratic Party. But you didn't get permission from the party brass, so to speak, to do that. You did that independently.

Well, there's a weird well, two things about the attrition rate.

One of them was I quickly discovered that a lot of people who are interested in the sort of loudest online outrage are equally devoted to the status quo as the opposition. And so one of the things I can move very quickly was it matters much more much more important than language policing. Right. And permission structures, if he'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 going to be useful if you roll up your sleeves and get in and 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 divide. 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 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 and or from the right. Basically, it's 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 have, you have to talk about those things.

And perfectly you have to show why would be why would people be motivated to not allow that to happen? Do you think?

Well, because it looks so there's different skewes and everything is a generalisation. Right. So I'm going to generalize a little bit. I think that there's in the far right, we see a kind of corruption in ossification around sort of Donald Trump and what he represents.

But he was saying things that hit people in a way that that were things that they weren't allowed to say. I have a whole bunch of theories about the Republicans. I'm going to keep it focused on my looking in the proverbial mirror. I think that a lot of the language policing of the left is actually a way to maintain the status quo, because what status quo? And to and to whose advantage? Let's say that you're a rich Hollywood elite, much like me.

Right, or or somebody who is who is in in the kinds of groups that that I move in that that you move in, but let's say further left of you like I am or more, we're both liberal, but.

If you can 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 Latin, when you do all this stuff, in a way, what you're doing is, is your 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.

So you can 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 singled out with you signal that with the language, but you're also you're you're casting like, look, I made it.

I'll give you an example. I made a video about the for me. I was I was exceedingly appose from day one to messages of chaos from the Democratic Party. Right. I think conservatives particularly have a reaction to 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 Birmingham, Alabama. Right. And there are going to be a sanctuary city for that. There's all these complexities around it. I made some commercials about black leadership calling for. A lack of violence in the protests, Keisha Lance Bottom, the mayor of Atlanta, gave a speech that I think was a speech with the most thundering moral authority that I've heard from a public figure when Atlanta was tearing itself apart.

Extraordinary speech. I reference to 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? You know, African-American people decrying violence when they watch somebody get murdered and they're protesting how they can and it's the epitome of white privilege and all this stuff. And what's interesting is I've long thought that Trump works through projects like Trump. Will everything with Trump that he that he makes 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.

Right. Whether it's a white working class community to simply say violent protest 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 the 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 want to keep letting people protest as loud as they want. It's in a way that won't ever affect me or my children at risk. My 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 wade into really like win an election so that we don't the African-American community doesn't have to contend with another with more I'll call it more voter rights being thrown out like real concrete issues.

There's real concrete issues there. But if you can talk 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, when 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 guess that would be language that's in alignment with. With 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 protest erupted with Georgia, Florida, there were video after video of African-Americans protesting. Some of them were like telling. Turning in people who were either anarchists, who were throwing bricks and committing property damage, of saying grabbing people, handing them over to the police, a lot of people in the African-American community were like, this is our community. We live here. And of course, I'm not implying that nobody in the African community, African-American community crossed a 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 off, nobody's going to come in and rebuild that community. And when all the tourists leave and everybody's had their march and their protests, they have to contend with that. And there was a measure of discipline in that community, whether it was Keisha Lance Bottoms, I think the president of the NAACP and either Oregon or Washington had a great op ed killer.

Mike, the rapper was out there saying we cannot have violence. We're not tearing down our own city. This isn't civil disobedience. The point of civil disobedience, of course, is that you bear the cost, you bear the moral responsibility of your transgression.

African community understood this by and large, and a lot of the loudest voices who were protesting against it, who were for me, was a frustration 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. Is that what's see Trump doing? Like screaming about privilege all the time? And you're like, how how do you not understand that that destruction of property, destruction of small businesses, risks to families? Look, somebody I'll give you a stat. That's an interesting stat here. The average voter who voted for Obama and then Trump thinks about politics on average, four minutes a week, four minutes a week.

Right.

So people in the bubble 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 hierarchy of needs. Right. You've got a sick kid. You're out of health insurance, you don't have a job. You might have a special needs kid. You might have a parent in a home you have covered hitting. You don't have time for any of this.

You don't have time to have the kinds of conversations around nuance of of whether and when everyone was shocked about the law, about the Latin vote, I was just thinking how many people actually have friends and family who are Hispanic who you talk to? I mean, the joke was that the big shock was that Biden won the Latin X vote and Trump won the Latino vote. But a lot of the Latino community, I mean I mean, they don't.

What do you think accounted for Trump's attractiveness to the Latino community? This kind of ties back in. This ties back into a broader question. I want to ask you it like I've been interested in what you've been doing and supporting it to the degree that I've been able to add 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 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. If you want as little stupidities as possible all across the spectrum. So it seemed to me that reducing some of the foolishness that characterized it, particularly the radical left, the careless radical left within the Democratic Party, and focusing on a more pragmatic, let's say, but also wiser and less resentment driven strategy would be a good thing overall.

So that opens up the broader can of worms, which is what exactly had the Democrats done so badly that. They lost to Trump. Well, to me, there's a couple of things and we can talk about Hispanic vote, we should talk about let's let's talk about that specifically and the broader question in general.

Well, so, look, if you I mean, I have friends and family. There's there's such an array of we talk about the Hispanic vote like it's a monolith.

Right. It's not remotely that Cuban-Americans are like anything ever resembling socialism. I will never vote for you. And if you compare Trump to Fidel Castro, read a fucking book. That's basically the attitude of the Cuban-Americans. Excuse my language. 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, it's.

So you think that's particularly true of the Cuban-Americans, human, Venezuelan Americans, Venezuelans? Yeah. Well, they have reason for it.

Like like my most kids, a lot of the most conservative friends and associates who I have, whether it's people who are friends of mine, whether it's workers or Mexican Americans in L.A., they also they don't want Mexico to come over here. They don't want open borders.

Many of them, they left that. Why is that? Hard to understand. They tend to be Catholic families. So if you think about politics for four minutes a week and somebody comes in all of a sudden and they're talking about socialism, defunding the police and then announcing all sorts of gender complexities. And I say this is somebody with a you know, I always I preface it to say, you know, I've I have a trans godson, lesbian sister.

This is not like where my personal politics are for what people should be allowed to do and where my personal politics fall are very different than what I think the priority and the ranking of discussion is. If you're going to go talk to somebody, things about politics for four minutes a week and bring up elaborate critical race theory and like and start to talk to them about the fact that boys aren't boys and girls are 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 last. But I don't think anybody has any idea the kind of transgressions that that represents to people who are either on the center or on the right.

And in the final minutes, a week thing really is interesting, too, because one of the things I was really struck by over the last four years with all my encounters with journalists, many of which were good, by the way, I had lots of good encounters with journalists, but the worst encounters I ever had were always, almost always with journalists as well, is that the journalists think about the world politically all the time. Like there every single decision they make every day.

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. Towards the end, I didn't think politically at all, I'm not even interested in politics.

I didn't. 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 I have a friend, one of my closest friends who you've met and born again Christian, who was raising a son of a missionary all through other parts of the world.

And, you know, but he lives in L.A. He worked a bit in the industry.

A very rounded conservative friend of mine has gay friends, friends from whatever. But he went in the booth and told me during the election of twenty sixteen, he said, I just went in and I thought, forget it, I'm voting for Trump. I can't I can't bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton. I was really angry at him at first because it was like and then I realized I shouldn't say really angry with him. But I, I realized that I didn't understand that for the things that I saw, for the clouds I saw massing on the horizon with Donald Trump.

And we're seeing some of that here with his legal threats of the election, trying to undermine the election security, his own large, largely appointed Republican judges shooting a lot of that down. There's a lot of things we don't need to get into all that because everyone can have an answer for everything that I say. But the realization I had with him was, oh, my God, he is a canary of a particular coal mine. He's a guy who rides a motorcycle and likes guns.

He likes kind of different kinds of freedoms 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, shadowy ness that I saw coming in with Trump. That's what I alerta 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 any more.

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 L.A., 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 that are awful and hard.

Like it's sort of like it's. We talked about this all the time, obviously with Young, with Freud, you get 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 he's stuck with me the most. And one of the things I'll say is I went in open eyed all the way down to assess my party, the political situation.

I've only gotten more disillusioned and angry with the Democratic Party.

OK, OK. So OK, so let's let's return to that. OK, I'm going to keep that in mind. Let's return to that. So you put together. This team or this team was organized to produce messages that would support the Democrat Democratic Party fundamentally, but the but the overarching philosophy was one of self-criticism, let's say, if the self includes the Democratic Party and. What other what are the rules, what were the other rules for the messaging?

Gee, 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 what were the rules that you used and agreed on when you were making the ads? And how did you agree on them? Sorry, that's a lot of questions, but part of this is it was so it was all entrepreneurial, it was all outside of the if I'd still be waiting for the first approval from the U.S. to do my first two thousand dollar commercial, we couldn't wait for it.

The fiefdoms and bailiwicks within the party, delusional, just bureaucratic mess is deficient that that a lot of what got done got done with a network of people, entrepreneurial and free market. That's pretty funny, really. Publican's. Yeah. And it gave rise to it.

And really all that it was was, was our own ethical barometer. I ran the thing and so I, we did testing to make sure we were that the ads were effective, that we weren't just shouting at each other on Twitter and getting the most likes and what would help define effective.

I mean, we there is a woman is incredible who did 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.

OK, so you were looking at you were looking at pre post exposures, shift in political attitude as a consequence of the advertisements. And what was nice was that our gut instinct by that I mean Marshall belly to shore, our gut instinct was we're not going to make Trump bashing ads. We made some when they were fair. That was a big, important thing like I did the one with four Republican voters against Trump, where it was, it was just Reagan's city on a Hill speech.

And I just showed Reagan 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. And 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 of terror. But I 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 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 save our day and of our generation that we did keep faith with our government, that we did act worthy of ourselves, that we did protect and pass on lovingly that shining city on a hill.

In the op ed, I was equally harsh on Democrats and Republicans both, but 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 hard core, life long Wall Street Republican to do all the fact checking.

And it was down to like even if we were kind of bullshitting about something so that 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, here's the claims we're making. Are they fair, Jack? 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 an enemy to tell you to point out your weaknesses. OK, so you set up this crew, which was quite large to begin with, and then got smaller. You went and met with Democrat leaders. We spoke and we spoke, Marshall and I addressed both caucuses, and we still we in an ongoing way, we do candidate training and we deal with we deal with leadership.

So so how is it that you manage 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 have to go do it. But. You still have positive relationships with. The Democratic Party persay, now, he's not weird, how the hell do you account for that?

Why not? I was because I was fair and I was respectful. And what we did was it's like that judge's 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 last 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 excesses of the left that that obviously you've discussed at great length for us on the right.

It is it is codified all the way through the Senate, all the way up to Donald Trump, who calls the nuclear football.

So I was trying to figure out why does this threat from the left that to me is is is much less, but just as dangerous. And there's a lot of canaries in 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 the 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 is the respectful conversation with Trump voters, or mostly I'm sure I screwed up plenty, but and to do a unifying message and to show them one of the things people don't realize is that is that messaging messaging becomes content. If we could get the message right, we could solidify the story and then that could change policy and then that can change the Democratic platform.

So we talked a lot about that when you first embarked on this venture. So and correct me if I'm wrong about 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, it 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 it's like the seed ground for for explicit policy. So you took you you got a hand, you got a grip on the story. Now, one of the things that concern 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 policy, so if you look at so ABC, did the Green New Deal push that through, which to me was not an adult piece of legislation.

It was a Trojan horse bill with everything. Zero votes in the Senate. Zero votes from the Democrats. Every measure. If you look at H.R., H.R. one is the anti corruption. It was prescription drug. There was the actual policies and body of who the Democrats are is much more moderate and capitalist than than than it is in policy. So what's being parroted loudly is not, in fact, Democratic policy. In my estimation, the law 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 stay who they are, to draw lines of 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 the police or to conserve or what I would say to them was, look, if you're scared of these 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 it 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 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 degree. And I think that's one of the biggest topics of friction you and I have had for a long time. Not not negative friction, but just we're we're 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 distorted and I can tell you, I don't really understand it myself to some degree, is that. I've been more and this is a surprise to me, I would say I've been more reactive to the threat posed by the radical leftists, and I think it's it's possible that it's because I'm in academia and so on. Can I tell you why I have a theory about why that is to OK?

Yeah. My theory is, is that the rise, 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 going to shrink it. Even the the the let's call it racism or anything that goes down from that pole to ingroup favoritism. Right. Like normal ingroup favoritism. There's plenty people 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 want to 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 like the examples I was giving earlier. We're going to say defund the police when we're rich enough to not be in the neighborhood, that that will have an effect of we we're 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 going to wrap ourselves in sanctimony. Right? We're going to wrap ourselves in sanctimony. We want to 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 that's that's shame inducing. That's like a maternal scolding instinct that elicits, I think, rage. And so. That's a that's a big difference in the two, and I think that accounts for why some people are like, hey, look.

It's just 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 about twenty six percent of evangelical vote. Hillary didn't go after it at all.

She got 13 and lost and Biden was back up at twenty to twenty three. 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 world view, you can dislike everything. You can dislike him legally. You can just like the policies. You can just like a lot of these politicians. But the deeming of somebody is morally inferior, right? Whether it's followers of Trump, whether it's now voters, 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 nadir of his existence and is going to turn around. And there's a bigger, weird moral frame that gets put on that. Of course, there's aspects of that that will come in from the right.

It's right with homosexuality, with the more racist element. But that aspect, if I if I'm arguing that the that the that the right has been more infected up the power structure by the worst authoritarian excesses of the right. 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 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 disturb me in a way that. Look, it's it's so. Here's another way to look at it. We've all seen Cape Fear right in Cape Fear. Guy gets out of prison, he goes after his defense attorney. Criminals who are escape to 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 source 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 prosecutor is doing their job. But if you're a 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 show. It's a betrayal. Yes, I think that that's interesting.

Here's here's the statistic for everything for me that when I arrived at, I felt like the scales fell from my eyes over the last 40 or 50 years, 50 trillion dollars with a T have moved from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top one percent. 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 parade of distribution. Right. The idea that of law that the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. It's unbelievable. Unbelievably difficult 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 brilliant.

So this is the largest transfer of wealth, I believe, in history. And it didn't go as socialist way.

That's when everyone pulling their hair out about socialism. I just look at it and go 50 trillion dollars. So if you're white working and that happened under Obama. That happened under Clinton.

Yeah, well, that's but see, that's the peculiar thing is that 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 Preto distribution is it's implacability. You know, as you pointed out, this this distribution happened even under systems of governance or etiologies 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 like that.

And I realized that I had a moment of realization. I'm going to tell you, this is really funny. So, you know, there was the target after 9/11. There was a TARP bailout and the airlines were in trouble and they were bailed out. My statistics might be slightly wrong because. Fifty three billion dollar bailout, OK, when Katrina hit, they needed another and we were Democrats.

We're hopeful that that would go into the workers and everyone else. They went into stock buybacks so that the stock prices rose. Right. Thirty five percent 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, two billion dollars. I got all mad.

I'm like, I'm going to call Marshall, we're going to commercial. And I stopped for a minute. And I said, You know what?

I'm the asshole who's being served by that, and I don't mean this in itself, flagellating 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 buyback, which I can get angry about, part of the thing is debt realization to go. Look, that's not that's not a good example because it shows that's a good. What would you say that sheds an interesting light on the implacability of the preto distribution? It's like you're part of the problem, even though you object to it ideologically and you're part of the problem because of where you sit in the economic structure 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, because I'm smart, that free market, 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, OK, so I'm a beneficiary. So what? So what a solution for a lot of things is you give money, you scream about privilege and you sell flagellate. As far as I'm concerned, that's that's all a self. It's it's a self focused reaction, as opposed to me saying how do we start to address that problem?

And the thing is, is it has to be partially, partially policy, partially regulation.

We can't we can no know. It is something that we fight all the time. That one of the things you just said shed light, I think, again for me on. My irritation with the left end of the ideological spectrum is that. It's just too much to see people who benefit, say, like who are in a position like you or like I am in. Because we're net beneficiaries of the distribution in a major way. Now, it seems to me too much for me to also expect to be admired as a a paragon of virtue in relationship to my attitude towards the poor, let's say, because then I'm asking for too much.

I'm asking to be a beneficiary of the system the way it's set up now. And I'm asking to be admired for my objection to the very system that is enriching me. And the second one of those is too much to ask for. And this is the solution for that.

Like when I had that realization, I was like, ha, let me get on. 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 thing pieces about it and talk about white privilege. It's a neat it's just more self focused bullshit for those people who think about politics for it's 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 across the aisle, across the whole spectrum who I reach out to. What do you think of this? Are there libertarian answers? There's got to be some there's got to be some regulatory answers because it's so out of control.

Well, hopefully because the the the end of the preto game is that far too few people have far too much of everything. And that's not even good for them. I mean, you're not rich if you have to live in a gated community, that's what it wants. That's a gilded cage. You know, it's not it's not an indication of wealth. Wealth is when you can walk around your city freely at night.

That's wealth. That's exactly it. And so that's so much of what we arrived at in the messaging. When we try to talk to people across the country, club Republicans, let's say there's a difference for me, for people who are at the wrong end of the people, were at the wrong end of this system. And this is me off point when people get so angry about the fact that, like, all these people are voting in ways that hurt their own interests, right 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 could be moral. Their interests could be familial, their interests could be religious. It's not just their financial interests. First of all, their interests could be their children's future rather than their current than their own current reality. I mean, I learned a long time ago that that small businessman 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 businessmen. So they were voting their dream, not their reality. And it's not obvious that that's a mistake, even though, well, you could criticize it and you could point out it's LAX, but it doesn't mean it's inadequacies, but that doesn't mean that it's a mistake. So let's get into our the canary in the coal mine discussion again. So I think, like for me, it's it's glaringly apparent. And I know lots of people, especially a good number of the people who are your listeners will in good faith disagree with me on that.

To me, it's glaringly apparent the difference in terms of what a Trump presidency, let's say 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 counterarguments. 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 of 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, do you see trumpets in Emoluments Clause and he's doing fundraisers on the South Lawn of the White House and that's unacceptable.

But the kind of fundraising and enrichment that didn't like 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. And that's a good question.

It's certainly possible he's a Trump presidency. There's no way now that we can move forward, I think, without having much more robust and dialogue about that fifty trillion dollar movement from the bottom to the top one percent. Right. And there's some race conversations beyond the I believe this the surface stuff that we distract ourselves with all the time, like cultural appropriation.

There's all these issues and there's like 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 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 preto 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.

In their more radical, in their 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 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 people.

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?

How badly did we fail that enough people went and picked up the shiny object called socialism or democratic socialism, which is different from socialism, and think that that's a good idea.

That's a well, 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 that and the right wingers, the more conservative types should be asking. We haven't been 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 we've also failed to embody the core values of free market capitalism, innovation, competition, where we have 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. So, so goddamn difficult.

It's so goddamn difficult, though, like, look, let me give you an example.

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

Sensitive to the problems caused by the Prita 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. That's part of the inexorable but I can't say that downward 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, it's the indirects inexorability of the preto distribution is very difficult to. Escape from be lovely, 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 shortly after college, you said there's only moral decisions. That's it. I was like, that's a weirdo. Because sometimes there's pragmatic, sometimes there's something. And the more you look at that, the more it's borne out that, in fact, like any shortcut you pay for any shortcut, which is I mean, look, we don't have to get all into union synchronicity, but 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 ideologically will ever work or function. And the only answer to it, like for me, part of what I realized was I realized I'm going to be arrogant enough to try to go on an adventure that tries to tell stories, not re message the Democrats that I'm lying and repackaging and putting pig on a lipstick that I can make an argument for. I think you've lipstick on a pig.

What you said pig on a lipstick, which gives the ratio of pig to lipstick seriously wrong.

That should appeal to the truckload of viewers of this of this broadcast. That's horrible. That's 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 before.

Hopefully, you also tilt the Democrats in that direction, like by producing that message, right? It gives us right. It gives them a center around which to align and necessary thing. You need that center.

But here's the 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 credits and we wouldn't have done any of this. Like the no permission part is like here we went off and did it. But 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, it could very well be off or overblown.

But there is 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 at evangelicals. We aimed at it in Hispanic communities and the places that really mattered a lot. That's a lot of value, even if it's off by 50 percent.

And the thing is, is 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 seeing 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 make a bunch of money off 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, that we don't 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 this 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 that's kind of rude.

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 more leaders of industry and more for it just.

We're so removed from our paragons 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 in university.

They'd wash out in the first month if they didn't deserve to be there in a way.

So we're 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. And part part of that, again, is that's a time frame problem, is that. The the more fundamental, the more and more 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 at the bottom of the hierarchy.

But short term considerations arise to make doing such things very, very difficult. Right. And if you keep doing it, if you keep making it difficult, another eight, 10, 12 years, then Aoki's the president and the whole system is going to change, let's say.

Right?

Well, that's the risk. If the system of 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.

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 and military 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 say empathy, but sort of seek to really understand the further elements of the last.

That was the hardest thing for me. Instead of just saying you're 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. Is that inside?

But, man, if I was I have my wife's college professors, you know, and she teaches at Zeeshan, which 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 no working two jobs there to help support their family. They're 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 didn't wind up in prison. They went and did this. They're holding their family together. They have like one hundred and thirty thousand dollars in debt coming out.

And there are jobs that they're earning. Maybe they have a master's in psychology at the end of it and they're they're making thirty three dollars an hour.

OK, so so that's so that means the the price to buy into the system at a point where you have a chance of thriving can't get too high. Student loan debt would would certainly contribute to that, as would the price entry price of of real estate. That's right. OK, so so that's a real danger. So but I think that people are going to 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 fun, like all these things you're talking about, the system are so. Well, I think I think you could look, the other thing that you can you can credit the especially young people who are attracted to the father 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.

Twenty dollars a month that fee to keep your bank account open if you're under a thousand dollars. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly that. And so that's the cost of being stuck at zero. And young people look at that and they think, well, that's a terrible waste of human resources, which it is. And it's dreadfully unfair, which it is.

The the problem is, 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 so many of them, when put into practice, don't produce the result that's intended. I don't see any evidence I've looked and it's it's tough to pass through it, but it isn't.

The evidence that left wing governments had have been better at controlling the Preto distribution 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 too academic abstract with it in a way. And I think that part of it is to say when they see that we go, here's a bunch of facts. And to me, that's the same thing with a Magga 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 know, you're twenty two.

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 hired teams of addiction specialist to throw shrapnel in your nervous system. And the biomed companies are all over you. They're being devoured from every angle. And we're coming in with PowerPoint presentations about why it's dumb rather than going, God, you're right.

There's a lot of problems here and you're on your own. Maybe some of the language and reasons and reasoning that you're that you're moving towards aren't the ones that will get you where you want to be. But, boy, you write about a lot. Let's start from there then. Like, you can't change somebody's opinion without seeking to understand them first motivations.

Absolutely. And you shouldn't assume that all the positive motivations are on your side. I want to ask you some some other questions here. So you you produced two hundred commercials. We're going to show some of those interspersed in this 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 arranged some of them. We ran during NFL games in swing states on television.

Some of them, like the Reagan City on a hill, won. 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 ours. Reagan's city on a hill one. Brian Williams asked James Carville about that on the show. So there was also a secondary sort of conversational aspect of of crossover into mainstream media in different ways, because people would then write, I did a whole series of Azamara commercials is a Fox Asmar.

Oh, it's the whisper.

Remember those videos where people would like Weisbord make sounds on the microphone that were super trendy?

I must have been out of out of function. I must have been malfunctioning during that period. But basically we realized that the commercials that a lot of the democratic agencies were putting were these like, you know, Trump. Trump is beholden to China and it would have the dark, shadowy Trump and all the stuff. And so a lot of they got tons of people are bashing the like button and sharing it. But what we found in some of the testing, it was a brilliant one.

When we work with the testing is it moved undecided voters 10 points towards Trump.

And the reason for that is if your nervous system is put in a fight or flight by the ominous score and the facts, then you move more towards you're more inclined or receptive to conservative messaging. That's right. Jingoism, xenophobia, strong man leadership. So I did this commercial series where we hired a wonderful actress to whisper. It's a sort of seductive whispering of the mike 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 politics. 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 just sort of whispered soft messaging.

Hi there. It's just you and me. And so after voting everything else, Donald J. Trump. Is there our election hired as rich buddy slash the postal service so our votes can be counted? Brush strokes vote early. Still some. Midas touch is responsible for the content of this advertising part of forex. So that was effective in a not 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 ad, but this is a typical because the in some sense, because the technological infrastructure for doing this is so new, I don't know what you compare it to because, I mean, an ad used to be an evanescent thing, right? You 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 get it. I mean, it would be Instagram.

It would be Facebook on Twitter that it shared widely. Then some of them would cut down. And we ran on television stations. But we got I think I could confidently say we got over one hundred million views of Stosz, if not more.

OK, 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 an 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 and bailiwicks. And so the House candidates are wonderful. We supported them. I mean, I think we we had a big I look, I would it's so hard to say and it's so hard to want to take. Credit. Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't want to 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 all their work and laid all their slices down, community organizers, the politicians and, yes, the democratic institutions with fundraising, the Pepsi, there is some credit that is there, too. But we put in 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. What do you mean? But what do you mean by theory of the case?

We didn't do anything that was politically correct.

I this was was ambitious. It was unifying. We had diversity in our ads. We did several sort of Black Lives Matter. We had the Lincoln project that 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 critics. I think some of the commercials with Trump here were there. We did get I probably I failed in getting snarky in ways that might not have been as fair or persuasive to you.

So you did get snarky in a way that was so so was was not as persuasive here.

There some of those two hundred ads, if I look back on it, go, yeah, but I had an instinct and I'd send them 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 we've 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, we early on it was funny. I joked 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 like, you can't 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 were 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 internecine bullshit. So knock it off. We're going to call you. We don't have time to break that up.

And everyone kind of went, OK, 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 policing 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 we've since no one had given us permission and no one was paying us, no one can 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 see 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 your arm.

Did you ask about the harm? Well, I also wanted to go more into the good. First, though, you talked about the the newly elected people. You didn't tie that exactly to the good that you've done, but obviously there's a link there. So I'm just going to ask you to make that explicit.

That's the they're the best home. We have amazing candidates.

If you looked up Elissa Slotkin, if you looked up Dean Phillips, if you looked up Hayley 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 tough on the police. But we work with candidates like Michele de la Cruz, the mayor of Topeka, Kansas.

OK, so you're 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 Elissa Slotkin, 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 she's an exception. So you go on how you think you were on the side of the high quality people. Yeah, OK, well, that's cool. All right. I mean, it's hard for me to see.

And I got us to more oriented on getting things done and accomplished than talking about them theoretically in terms of like here's how we get shit done now. It's enough with the abstract. People are hurting people in a bad place. And I think also to some extent, I've helped to untangle in in small it look, 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 Willson's in the David Fromm's and the Bill Kristol is of course, they're doing it on their own.

And a lot of people have. Ritsch But I was the center of a particularly diverse and interesting Chris Helverson, who you introduced me to. Right. The former chaplain of the Senate, evangelical leader. There's people who I called and pulled in to venturers 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 New Mexico. So I called Chris Halvorson, who introduced me to and I said she's a she's a Christian woman. 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 predominately Democrat who are who are Republican to you. 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. I would love to support Republican candidates who I felt like were a good faith.

Well, that's that's the question, 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 is are elevated, if the quality is elevated, and that's the only thing that keeps us.

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, you know, Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan, everyone can kind of 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. And 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 it.

And so, yeah, and you have social media driving that way. And you have capitalism by appropriating people for dopamine, heads 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 is we can get Republicans there.

And the other thing, just while that. OK, so that is that that well, that's that's the bat here. Right.

Is that and Jordan was just one thing that I've wanted to talk to you about this for for a minute, which is we talk about moderates and we talk about moderates and 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 to negotiate and understand that within a system of governance, no one gets everything they want. And we need imperfect, incremental.

Where everybody takes less of what they want and so I think that there is that 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 too tangled up in corruption.

It's all about the ability to engage properly and then people's politics can be wherever they are.

That sort of that 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, on. Well, take it all gets there that makes you a moderate. That's reasonable and reasonable for that makes you a kind of moderate and it's a reasonable. OK, I wanted to ask you to. 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? 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. So I was in large part engaged. And the Infowars, 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 with that 50 trillion dollars is moving to the top one percent. 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 one percent, 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 a. A view of the level of corruption, intricacy, difficulty that is that's 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, really, it like it's it's it's like most of what I've encountered online or a huge portion of it has been intensely positive. But even to positive, I would say is like so many people comment in the comments section, say on YouTube, that being exposed to my work and it's based on the ideas of other people, like it's not my work, you know. Exactly, because no one's work is their work. Exactly. But being exposed to these ideas, which I've been communicating, let's say, has so positively changed their lives.

But to hear that from thousands of people is just it's overwhelming. And that's the positive side of it. It's too much. You get amplified too much. And the negative side is just deadly.

Like on my YouTube channel, the positive to negative comment ratio is about one hundred to one. And that's about as good as you could ever hope for.

But the positive ones are overwhelming and the negative ones are deadly and, you know, you see this because people people will get attacked by 20 people on Twitter and they'll go into convulsions to apologize. And if you put yourself in the center of this monstrosity that's multiplied by thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.

And it's 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 men, kids screaming in the corner of a cafeteria, gossiping, well, it's real, but it's impossible to parameterize.

With when it's your family or your immediate community, you know these people and and you can put some walls around it, you can't give it the proper. We know. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. You can't give it the proper way if you don't know. Well, it's because we're not adapted to this environment. It's like. And so here we have these are kids who I am increasingly worried about, who we're where.

It's like it's like trying to exist and go through puberty and go and enter the academic world in the world of culture and ideas while being constantly blurred out with this dream 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'm you for a variety of reasons. And 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 one time I had a two hour conversation with Eric Weinstein, you know, about where he was on everything when I was right in the middle of it. That takes a while. 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 can get to.

And that's confusing them.

Yeah, to find your center and to accommodate, assimilate. And Eric raises a ton of stuff. He pokes at a ton of soft spot where we're friendly. It's a very respectful exchange. But then to come out, incorporate the parts that are right, get clarity on where I think he's he's argued for his reasons and his info tunnel. That's different from my info tunnel. And I was doing it in every direction. And so it felt like being torn apart to hold the center because I was just being torn every which way.

Well, it makes me it gives me more understanding even of why people will settle into their ideological bubble here.

Well, it's a relief. It's such a relief, you know, because you got to ask yourself, just how many questions do you want to ask yourself? Right. You know, and I've always thought that exploration in the world of ideas is of unlimited value, although I have a conservative element, but.

Man, too much of it can tear you apart. We have that, like, really, really high openness. Yeah, that's the danger of highlighting this 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 cross someone who wants to destroy you or scream at you or tell you why you're awful or make you make an accidental mistake, like when I was working.

When we were discussing this a couple of years ago, I swiped one of your videos, if you remember, and put a voiceover over it and, you know, I thought that was warranted. I mean, in retrospect, I did it without sufficient consideration.

And I mean, I realized that very rapidly. I did a voiceover of one of the videos that you'd produced because, well, I thought I had something to say about it. And I was irritated about. Well, I was irritated we'll leave it at that, and that was a big mistake and that caused a tremendous amount of friction between the two of us. And, you know, and it was also exposed to, I don't know, one hundred thousand people before I finally took it down.

I didn't take it down exactly, but I modified it. But when you're when you're connected in some high intensity fashion, your mistakes are exaggerated to a point that's just intolerable, you know? And then and again, it's not something that we're adapted to understanding it. Make a mistake in a million people watch it. It's like. It's 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. Rogin gave Ben Shapiro right. And I got I had some success. I got Stanley McChrystal. I helped go to talk to Japan 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 while 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. And yeah, but I had to be sort of a 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 one hundred things I would say or do differently.

There's no way to do that without Molly.

Nobody's an expert at it. It's like if you want to move politically, you're going to do it badly, especially to begin with. So that's right. And we don't. And this is one of the things that's troubled me a lot about, you know. So to answer your question, at the end of this, I was I was not in good shape for reasons you and I can get into later over bourbon in different and more deaths.

Now, I think I'll stick to sparkling water. Given the state of my nervous system. Sparkling water insulted me.

I'll do I'll drink enough bourbon for both of us. But, you know. Part of that process was. It's I don't know, it's like there's there's. It's so much to go into, it's so much to dive down to really try to figure it out, to hold the to really be open to what all those blind spots are and to come out 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, doesn't even make any sense if I look back on it, the amount of stuff we got done, your 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 as possible to try and just get better? I mean, we were we were I mean, we spun up an entire studio operation, fundraising, distribution, dissemination network.

I mean, was it was crazy.

Well, I realized what was hard on you.

What was hard on you was what the rate, the the intensity that exposure to the all the different opinions, the consequences of making a mistake. The consequences of making a mistake like it might, let's say my theory of the case had been wrong and it could have been a further left leaning and Biden wasn't the guy and all this other stuff.

And we lost because I would call it that, that that figure, which again, I'm saying is slightly overblown. If I targeted a billion dollars in advertising to the wrong people, giving the wrong message and blew the mark and we lost the election by one hundred and four thousand votes instead of winning it by one hundred four thousand votes, that's a lot to live with.

And I didn't even consider that till I was so far in that there kind of wasn't going out. I mean, you can't consider everything as you go. But the other thing is, is I start I saw with more and more clarity, I was I got way too much, not too much at a ton of information, constantly, daily, hourly about my blind spots and confirmation biases.

And a lot of anger and a lot of those things to the upside of a lot of those things, your blind spots, your confirmation biases, your prejudices, all those things as they protect you from being overwhelmed by their their their compression algorithms and they remove information, hoards of it.

And a lot of that information is valuable. But Jesus, it's like, how much information can you swallow?

I mean, so. That's right. And what was what was really and the only way that I determined to make headway in something that complex and that corrupt and I don't mean entirely corrupt, but I mean politics. And with that much anger and rage and outrage and frustration and pain and grief like it was it was was to try and go forth as cleanly as possible. And 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 I didn't need to know is there is there is no not failing if you're doing that all day, every day with those stakes 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 at. But so I got to the end of this and I was really seeing things only in moral terms. And what was interesting is at the end of this, after the week after the election, was really I was pretty. Dysregulated, let's just say most of the conversations I had with my conservative friends, I called my born again Christian friends, I call my Navy SEALs buddies because I was seeing I was seeing everything in, like mythological good and evil sort of terms.

And it's like what was so funny was at the end of this exercise for liberalism. Right. For moving towards enlightenment discourse, moving towards a Democratic Party that I thought was less imperfect, significantly less imperfect than the than the imperfections of the Republican Party as it stands under Trump was for me to need a lot of support from from my conservative friends and unfortunately, I have them. What kind of support did you get? And why why was it necessary to seek it out from those sources?

If you talk a lot about. Mythology, the seven deadly sins, right? If that's what you're conscious of and seeing right, because at a certain point there's so much information and you're so open that you're dealing constantly with your own failings. Right. And you're seeing others and you're trying to clean them up. And you're it just it's almost like I got stripped down to the bone. I don't have the sort of 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 of 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 are 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 it's strategy.

It's like it's you need people who think, well, that's 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 barring corruption, let's say you need to surround yourself with a full array of personalities from conservative to liberal, because that way the bases are covered and different people are going to be. Different situations are going to call for different people and thank God there are different people and actually that's a good way to end.

This is like thank God there are different people because no one can do everything all the time. And so we specialize. And that's true in the political realm as well. And we need to understand that and not assume that the conservatives are right or the liberals are right to understand that each of them is right now and then. Well, the thing is, it's also such an interesting part, you brought up that, that. Disagreement that you and I had that was pretty intense, but we worked it out and I work it out, and you knew we'd work it out, you know, 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 our mistake, let's say you can also feel like when we went through that we knew we would get through it.

We just knew it would be rocky in a way. And what's interesting is what I found was some of the people most adept at pointing out my blind spots when I then was in free fall as a result of being subjected to how many blind spots I had, of course, they'd be the ones who would be able to orient me, right. Because they're the ones who could see those things so. Right.

So that maybe that's part of the thing, too. Why part of that was in that that week where I was the most acutely flailing, let's say, of course, I'm going to go to the people who were the ones who had the most views that made me think about things because I was like, I feel lost and spun. I'm not going to talk to people whose views I feel like. That's a home base for me, because I'm not all my home base any different kind of input.

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

What's the name of that book, Prodigal Son, and your last book? The one that came out previous to the fire there, 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 it's like bizarre levels of synchronicity with this.

And so it's funny because I'm coming out and going right into a draft of it. Yeah, right. Well, you do. So you know so much more. I mean, I've watched you over the last four years, you know so much more about the way things work. Than you did before that that's going to have nothing but a beneficial effect on your ability to spin up stories. Well, they did try to address them in that way where it's easier and this is always why I started, I don't I don't want to write and make propaganda right.

This was a sort of necessity and it felt a bit like a call to duty. But I want to write and have people think through formats that are one step removed through science fiction, right through the thriller's, through orphan acts. And it's been really gratifying as those 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 of the politics. And I'm sure you know that feeling like when you're just I was going so hard and so long that part of it was like, well, I should be involved with these 50 things, but I've narrowed the scope. I have a few pet projects I want to keep working in terms of discussions with the evangelical community and doing across the aisle. The anti polarization stuff is really.

Yeah, yeah. I would I really like what we did some of that in Washington when we were bringing Republicans and Democrats, congressmen and senators as well. I believe I was really unhappy when I couldn't do that anymore because that was so worthwhile and the opportunity still sitting there. And so hopefully my health will hold. I love to do that again. It's such gratifying work. We should.

And I think what's funny with that is it's like, you know, here you and I are all tangled up in different political discussions in different ways. But neither of us were particularly political, really. You know, it's like that never was the source or draw animal.

I always made a decision. I've had to make a decision between politics and other roots continually in my life. And I always picked the alternative routes for me, too. So. All right. Well, we should wrap this up. I guess we've covered a lot of ground. I was really good talking to you. Great talking to you, Jared.