Yeah, it reminds you of what is real like and what is not real.
The online world is really in some ways like the chattering of demons like
these an anonymous troll type people. You know. You also know that not
all of them, but a lot of people that's not their whole personality.
Anyways. It's almost like I'm gonna go online and I can play this like
role, you know, and then they go back and they like live their
life almost like a little like a little video game. It's a first person
shooter video game. Right, I'm going online. I'm gonna own the lambs.
I'm going online. I'm gonna dismantle maga people. And that's my way.
I'm virtuos. This is Jonathan Peshel. Welcome to the Symbolic world.
So hello everyone, I am here again with Greg Hurwitz. Those of you
that follow my channel will have seen him on my channel. He is a
best selling authors written or fin X and several other series including Batman, which
I'm a big fan. But he was also part of the Exodus group that
met to talk about Exodus for like thirty two hours, and the videos of
Exodus have been doing It's crazy. The first episode is more than two million
views on YouTube, and they've also had you know, similar types of success
on the Daily Wire Daily Wire platform, And so I thought it would be
great with Greg to talk about our experience there, you know, kind of
where it led him in his thought and in my thinking, and hopefully,
yeah, start from there. So maybe Greg, if you want to start
us off, you were in some ways you were like the strangest character in
the group in the sense that came from from like, you know, you
came from a more secular world. You know, you're you're writing novels,
you're more You're not like someone who had spend that much time in the Bible
in your life. And so for you, as like a Discoveries I'd like
to know a little bit what your experience was in talking about this with us.
I mean the first thing that I thought about that, you know,
as you know, I moved between a lot of different communities and groups,
and it's one of the great things for me about being a novelist as I
get to just explore, I'm fascinated by how people think I'm nearly impossible to
offend. I don't share a lot of the kind of hard partisan ideological lines
and have lots of different discussions. I mean, the first thing that struck
me was, you know, just it was really an honor to be around
a table with that many people who have that level of expertise in something.
It's really it was humbling, really interesting. It's my favorite form of engagement.
I like doing things from time to time where I'm the kind of neophyte
or the one who's who isn't the expert? Right, So there's certain areas
and perspectives I had talking about narrative. I have, you know, I
have read the Bible, I have taken courses, but like you, you
put me next to you or you know Praeger or James Orr or Oz Guinness,
and you know, it's like a it's like a third grader playing basketball
of Michael Jordan. Now that said, you know, one of the things
that's amazing when talking about something is as you know, epic and essential and
enduring his exodus is it's like every view is welcome and value too, right.
So it's not like there was a bar that we were having conversations about
historical references. We're finding a way in towards meaning, and I thought that
everybody was very welcoming towards me, and it's what a great way too,
to engage with everybody's best part in a way. You know, It's funny.
It was a different deal for me probably than anybody else who was in
that seminar, in that there's certain people from certain communities who I'm from who
have very strong opinions about other members of the group in certain arenas, particularly
when it gets into partisanship. But it's like, you know, that's also
part of the problem is that we've made politics the sort of apex thing that
shines the light on top of everything. And the whole point of having community
and having intellectual discussions and having fellowship is that you meet people around common ground
and territory right where they have grace and wisdom and generosity. And I thought
that was very much on display. Yeah, but you know, in terms
of how it changed my thinking, it was pretty revolutionary for me on a
bunch of fronts. Yeah. I know that. One of the things that
you brought up in the during the seminar, but also doing conversation was this
vision in Exodus that they have about the relationship between the center and the margin,
between kind of identity and the fringe. So maybe you can tell us
a little bit about what, let's say, how that, how that surprised
you, or how that affected your thinking in terms of what's in the Bible.
Well, there's a line in it I forget where we were talking about
the fringe, and one of the things is is I like the fringe being
the fringe, you know, And we were saying, I was saying,
you know, we were talking about this with like gender and presentation and artists,
and I think there's a one point where I said, look, having
one Prince the artist, the artist formerly known as Prince is amazing. If
you walk in and there's fifty, you kind of don't know what to do
with yourself, you know. So it's sort of this interesting notion that that
in a lot of ways, I think maybe maybe certain secular thinkers have this
notion that when people talk about the center of the center holding, it's to
the exclusion of the fringe. And I think that in part that actually can
be a relationship if the fringe and the center are a raged properly that nourishes
and protects and holds the fringe in its meaningful place right, whatever the fringe
is. I'm not labeling that specifically, but you know, my understanding,
like from where I come from, my personal beliefs, the fact that I'm
a writer based on my you know, what are the things big five personality
traits? Right, I'm super high in openness, like I have traits that
map onto a more liberal worldview. You and I've talked about at length the
necessity for both liberal and conservative thinking to navigate complex change. Right. The
liberals are the breaks, and the liberals are the gas, and the conservatives
are the breaks. And if you stop on the brakes, you don't go
anywhere, and if you step on the gas, you go off a cliff,
run into a wall. And so the negotiation between those sides is essential.
But you know, I had this sort of reawakening that I really like
the fringe being the fringe when I'm visiting it on the fringe to have a
more open liberal artistic community or subcommunity. Right. And even I grew up
south, you know, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a lot of
the politics in that region are going to be more liberal, some of them
now ten left in a way that I'm not a particular fan of. I'm
much more of a liberal than I am a lefty. I mean, I'm
not a lefty at all. But also this awareness that like, that's a
beautiful thing about San Francisco, but it should be San Francisco, it shouldn't
also be Iowa and the whole Midwest and the South. And Oz said something
when we talked a little bit about Miriam. I think we might have discussed
this previously, but you know, two things that really struck me was,
you know, Miriam coming in and having her sort of excessively pure remark when
Moses wanted to have a Ethiopian wife, and then you know, the joke
of God coming down and turning her like you know, a leprosy snow white,
and she had to be excluded from the camp before allowed back in.
You know, the warnings against excessive purity, which makes the center unwell welcoming,
right and ossified. And so it was very interesting for me how that
was like built in with a ton of care and consideration, you know,
likewise the fact that you know Caleb and it's Jacob, Yeah, we're the
only one center of the problem, Josh, I mean, and that Caleb
was from the mixed multitude, right, he was not necessarily like you know
that that that that these different, different people outsiders were welcomed in and integrated
in certain ways, but there's also certain rules and structures that have to be
in place in order to accommodate that. So for me, it was very
eye opening to see the sort of care and thought morally and strategically and spiritually
and psychologically and lovingly about how these different parts play. And you told the
story which I don't want to share. It was a p story about in
the church and how you've managed to have certain members who felt more fringe almost
literally in terms of where they positioned in the church, and how the church
welcomed them. So that part was key and the other the other thing for
me, Oz genn has had a remark to me at one point, and
it was it was this funny moment. Sometimes you have a remark where you
feel like you cross a threshold and do a different understanding and it's something that's
really obvious. But you know, one of the things he was talking about
when we talked about globalism. You know, I come from a perspective,
a more liberal perspective of like globalism is great, right, It's we have
better trade, we have cheaper goods, we've lifted half the world out of
poverty. Right, there's all this positivity and Oz just in a in a
in a private conversation with me, just had this little reframing to be like,
but imagine a global morality that goes with it, right where everybody,
it's some at some higher level determines what's better down to the locality right of
every different choice, and what a horrifying vision that is right, that's like
a vision of such an author the amount of force and bureaucratic might and authoritarian
might to lock that into place, like in a China, let's say.
And in combination with the conversation we had about exodus about the distribution of power
across and vertically, it just really struck me and then I started to think
about everything in that regard to it kind of cracked open for me and understanding
of some of the criticisms of you know, carbon edicts handed down from Brussels
that need to pertain to Canadian farmers, right, or notions of trans rights
that get farmed out through social media, so that a you know, a
community with no elective body and no spokespeople, all of a sudden they're going
to have a mob mentality, or an online mob made up of people that
nobody even knows who they are. Half of them could be foreign players right
from a Saint Petersburg troll farm, screaming about how values have to be affected
in every sort of community all at once, and then also just about the
efficiency of moving resources up and down, and the more that they're moved up
at a higher level, there's more sort of codified corruption and rotten system,
which I'd understood already a good amount, but just thinking more and more about
the necessity for local kind of governance and value setting once a baseline has been
established. There's baseline American values right around dignity and freedom, but to allow
variance within the sub communities, because there's no other way to do it.
And for a long time I've been thinking about, you know, America right
now is in a standoff, and what is not going to happen is that
one side prevails and dominates and rules over the other side. That's not going
to be an outcome. That is a world anyone wants to live in.
There's got to be some sort of partnership and there has to be a return
to value sets and relationships that are differentiated at a local Lafeleve. So I've
been thinking really differently since those conversations and then also starting to understand much more.
You know, Dennis talked about, you know, one of the beautiful
things in Exodus is it's the law, but it's wrapped and the sacred right.
And if you don't have the wrapping of law in something transcendent, right,
then it will become overgrown, in cancerous and turn into hr departments or
endless countless regulations right or like you know, endless school administrator bureaucratic states within
educational environments where they start to eat the primary point of education. So I've
been chewing on a lot of this and it's been altering a lot my thinking
about how to balance and integrate the best of what liberalism needs to offer,
which is sort of watering and nourishing the culture with new ideas and people so
it doesn't stagnate and the essential nature of how you hold center. Yeah.
No, I think that's that's great, and I and I think that that
also, in some ways I think was the most striking thing for me during
the Exodus seminar, that that was able to come out, that that structure
like that kind of subsidiary structure where you know, even the twelve tribes exist
independently, right, they all have their own identity, but they nonetheless,
you know, all look towards the tabernacle. They all worship the same God
and that and they have some aspects like Moses and Aaron and the priestly cast
that act as an overarching structure. Interestingly enough, in Exodus, that overarching
structure, like the priestly cast, they don't have land, and so there's
like this trade off situation where you don't want to have them have land and
have power but then also be an overarching structure on others, like you kind
of say, okay, you'll have this, but you take this. There's
this very beautiful way in which they're able to to have something which which is
over all of them, but then remake keeping their crunchy you know, their
crunchy characteristics, you know, and that that is that's been even with ARC,
Like people were talking about ARK, and You're going to be there as
well. In ARC. That's one of the things that we're trying to help
people see is this need to understand identity that way, right, identity as
layers of participation, and not just the state and the individual the way that
we kind of tend to look at it in the modern world. And I
think your image of America in some ways that is the best vision of what
America could be, which is it kind of decentralized cultures that coexist, that
recognize each other's value and that understand they also that they don't necessarily agree with
each other in all the way, in all their alignment, but have enough
in common so that they exist together and yours should they And nor is that
the goal. The goal is not that we all agree. That is not
an American goal, and that's not what's best for America. Yeah, yeah,
so yeah, I really that was really for me one of the biggest
the biggest takeaways from makes of these two is that that vision came out so
clearly, and even rereading the text, you know, sometimes you know,
I'd read it, I reread it occasionally, but rereading it for that seminar
and then in the discussion, I was like, Wow, there's more about
this than I even thought, Like, there's just more of this. There's
even this idea in some ways that gets taken up and in some way that
gets taken back up in Jesus in the New Testament, which is that it
says if all the laws have to be contained in their allegiance to God,
and Jesus says, right, love your God and love your neighbor. It's
like, that's what the laws for. If you don't have that, then
the all these regulations and laws, you could keep making them more and more
explicit. And that's what happens. Right, If we lose trust within each
other, then we the more as the more society lose normal trust between people,
the longer our contracts become right, and the more like like this and
that because yes, account for every single possible behavior, whereas before the day
or in the family, or in a relationship of trust like the handshake.
It's like, that's what it's based in. Like there's an implicit laws are
there, but we don't have to spell them out because we know that we
act and trust and in love towards each other. One of the things I
that's that's yes, that's beautifully stated. You know. One of the things
I was thinking a lot about for me having come up, you know,
in a secular world. But that said, my parents sent me to Jesuit
High school, you know, I very great relationships with Jesuit priests. In
high school we read This is the first time I read the Old Testament.
I was in bar Mets futter Bummets. But nor were my parents, nor
were my grandparents. I mean, so I'm from a long line of sort
of more secular Jews. But really, you know, a lot of my
the embrace and attention that's been paid on the Old Testament of my identity has
been from non Jews. It was Jesuits the first year we read the Old
Testament. You know, I have a lot of friends who were uh,
you know, longtime friends who are Christian, who are very interested in that.
You know, this Exodus summer I was invited in, but I mean,
I knew you, Jordan and Blackwood were my three people I knew.
I wasn't invited in by you know, Praeger and Shapiro. So it's this
really funny thing that a lot of the sourcing of my identity or connecting with
that all the way back to high school was from Christians, you know.
So that's that's also an interesting point. But one of the things I was
thinking about a little bit since then is as we're discussing all these primary values.
Is that for me growing up, I had this amazing Ben made.
Ben made a comment that kind of blew my mind. He had two comments
that were that kind of blew my mind. But one of them was he
said something in the sort of critical, fast talking ben, you know,
machine gun fire voice. But he said, look, a lot of these
institutions are going on the fume are on the are on the fumes of the
value sets and structures that they had in place from let's just say, some
religious foundation. I forget what his exact phrasing was, but I was thinking
about that. I was thinking about when I went through and I had the
benefit of going through some really fine schools like this Jesuit high school colleges where
the structures were very, very intact. It didn't feel there was ideology creeping
in at the edges, but it was not predominant. But a lot of
what I felt was holy were the poets, right simp. It was Beethoven,
it was Mozart, it was Shakespeare, it was you know, Plato.
For me, it was a lot of the poets you know, Byron
Keats and Shelley, and so I was constantly reading and engaging with this stuff
that felt like it was sacred. And in a way, as I was
reflecting on our conversation, one of the things that, of course it's spectacularly
obvious to you, but less so for me, is that when you're having
a discussion that's simply about the Bible, what we're talking about is the thing
itself. You're talking about. Here are the seven virtues, right, here's
the seven deadly sins. And it's not proxy by a poem or by something
else, or by a play, or for me reading Shakespeare, for me
hearing Schumann, right, or hearing Beethoven's ninth. And there's something that's very
interesting in the space between it, because I think in a lot of my
upbringing I would see that sort of the sacred light shone through let's say,
the genius of creation or a brilliant thinker, right, even if it's a
scientific thinker. You know, my proclivity is more towards the arts and towards
opera. But you know, pick your genius, pick your physicists. You
know, ramonogen like where you see people are connected with an order that is
greater than them. But it's interesting because in a way, even if you're
offset just that much of admiring the people and the works that are a reflection
of the primary values, there is a tendency to move towards well, do
we value hard work, do we value brilliance? Do we value the beauty
primarily? Rather than always knowing that there's the foundational core value of you know,
like, what does true humility really mean? It's not like feigned humility.
And so I started to read C. S. Lewis more C.
S. Lewis, And what's so interesting is he has a remark in shoot
I forget where I think it's in Screwtape Letters where he says that the sort
of aim of true humility is not claiming you don't have the skills that you
want, or like fishing for compliments. But if you're an architect and you
build the most beautiful structure in the world, and you glory in that structure,
but you're just as happy in it existing if you creating it, as
if somebody else created it and it just existed. It's like, it's such
an interesting way of looking at it as opposed to me I was coming up
with sort of like the cult of Frank wood Wright. I mean, he
was so bombastic and brilliant, and my favorite stories with him, or like
you know, when if somebody had one of his houses and they put up
a fence, he'd get mad years later and just send a bulldozer to knock
off the fence because he's still considered his house. So he's in court all
the time. And one time he was, you know, they asked him
and he was on the stand and they said, are you're the greatest architect
who ever lived? And he said, yes, I am, and he
was walking out. It was like a courthouse scrum. And I think his
second wife was next and she's frank, dear, did you really have to
say that? He said, I did, dear, I was under oath.
That's hilarious, you know. So it's like, but the studying of
this is is for me of architecture. I thought of it more through the
brilliance of what he accomplished and the dance between space and psychology and having that
it's such a simple notion with C. S. Lewis of like, you
know, enjoy and embrace your uniqueness and whatever gifts you're blessed with, right,
don't eschew them with false shows of humility. But the humility is your
appreciation that it can even exist and that you're are there to observe it.
And so that's staking to primary values. I've been trying to think about that
comment that been made about how some of these secular societies are on the fumes.
So you get past let's say my dad's generation, and he didn't fight
in World War Two, Right, They're a generation passed a shared, nationally
shared crisis where everybody suffered and learned equally. That doesn't happen in America since
World War Two. So you have one generation. I'm in the next generation.
But by the time it comes to our kids, it's almost like that
gap between the core values and the geniuses and implementers and innovators, it sort
of widens in your understanding of how to bring them together without a foundational education
let's say whatever that means, whether that's formal or not. That brings together
intellectual venture and artistic venture with a spiritual foundation, right, that's you know,
Greek, Latin, the Biblical text, you know, different holy and
sacred texts. And then also what these fields of endeavor are, and then
the integration of the two and how they're foundationally tied to the real world,
and that's another essential thing as opposed to just sort of floating unattached up here
to be like, oh well, I've published eighteen different scholarly articles on you
know, you know, the Youngie and Shadow and Shakespearean tragedy, and it's
not fully connected and integrated all the way. And the process of education is
trying to get all of those pieces together. And if you have them,
I think you build obviously stronger relationships, stronger subcommunities, and you have yourself
organized with the communities across time with different codes and values and communities up and
down Mount Cy and I and I love that exodus, you know, is
so unabashed. The Jews are always so unabashed, and also showing the reality
of like you know, Moses is like I'm going to be right back.
I'm just going to go talk to God, like Aaron, just don't do
anything dumb. I'll be back in Like, just give you like a day
and I'll come back. And it'd be really good if there wasn't like a
golden calf and a bunch of orgies. So just you know, hold the
tent. So it's very open eyed about the fact that there's all sorts of
problems. But if that's the structure that you're constantly and imperfectly navigating up and
down, you can imperfectly and humanly move forward in a structure that works.
That is, that's reconstituting itself from tyranny and that little loop of fleeing tyranny
into the disintegrated unknown of the desert, and then reorienting in a way that's
embodied and solid to move forward towards the promised land that we won't reach in
our own time or way. It's this mini cycle, right, it's everything
with psychology. I'm going to give up the tyranny of, you know,
my victimhood about something. I'm going to give up the tyranny of thinking that
I have to rely on alcohol. I'm going to give up the tyranny of
an abuse story that is keeping me in a way where I'm powerles less.
And anytime you give up tyranny, obvious or not obvious, you know what
comes isn't joy in the liberation, but the dizzying terror of freedom of like
now it's me, it's it's me and God. I hope in a new
understanding and who where are my people? How do I do this, and
so that that loop is like it's it's fractal, like everything we talk about.
You know, it can be a choice you make, it can be
an emotional state, it can be the orientation of your whole life. But
the need to build these things solidly that all the pieces hold together is pretty
staggering. And so what so though this is in some ways one of the
things that also in the Exodus seminar that came out for me, no surprise
that came out was strong, But to me it was important because it's something
that I been trying to help people understand. It's is that in Exodus there's
a sensing with the center's worship like and that that it's hard for secular people.
And so that's why I'm asking it's hard for secular people because it's like,
oh man, that's a tough one, right, that's a that's a
tough level. But it seems like an Exodus, you can understand it.
It's that you have to keep your most precious and highest attention to the highest
thing. And it's like if you if you so, if you give your
praise and attention, because you're gonna do it anyways, right, You're gonna
worship all kinds of things. You're gonna you're gonna celebrate all kinds of things.
But if you celebrate the highest, and it's not just like a mental
exercise at least an exodus, it's like you have to do it. You
have to get together. You know, there's things you do. You you
kill the animals. We don't do that anymore, but like you sacrifice things,
you sing songs, you do all this stuff, and so and so
I'm wondering how that if that has messed with you or how what do you
how do you see that for for yourself? Like that that that that part
of Exodus kind of came out like you have to you have to in someone.
You have to pray, you have to worship, you have to you
have to give up praise to the highest. It's it's it's it's been.
It's been quite intense, man. I mean, I have my own rich
that like you know, Jordan and you and anyone could rightly make fun of
me, you know, from being a fruity Californian. You know. It's
like you know, so it's like I do I do this meditative yoga one
hundred and fifteen degrees often right, And one of the things I learned when
I go there, that's one of the ways that I'm the most I feel
the most connected. I try and do it every night when I'm in town.
I do it sometimes during the day, but it's a it's you know.
One of the things that I've discovered, and we talked about this a
little bit, is that some of the poses that you have, right,
a lot of them are like heart opening, but they're positions that are not
dissimilar from prayer positions that you're taking. And I've thought a lot about how
the physiology within our body. You know, if you stand in the rocky
pose, your self esteem actually rises, right, Like, there's different poses
we have. I mean, that's Jordan's you know, infamous essay on the
infamous and famous essay on the lobster right about. But it's so interesting for
me moving through this, which is, you know, a different ancient tradition.
But a lot of the postures are like you know, prostrating yourself for
prayer, like that's what they look like. And you hold it in heat
right for in one hundred and fifteen degrees sometimes for five minutes, and you're
and the necessity of ritual has always been essential to me. Right, I
don't just write when I feel like writing. I don't just sort of exercise
when I feel like it. Or you know, I've had a lot of
different skills or disciplines that have required ritualizing them. Right, What you have
to do with writing, what you have to do with carving, is just
decide that it's sacrican, right, because if you don't place it above everything
else, everything's more important than that. Acutely right that you know, you
can go to a movie, you can pick up your dry cleaning, you
could do whatever. We have to make these choices around ritual or what we
elevate. But one of the things I started to notice is that's a space
that I did a lot of really deep meditation and reflection around stuff. And
if I don't, if I fall out of that for two three days,
all of a sudden, the other parts of my life start to get disorder
goodnessed. And so after Exodus, I've started to view that time in a
very different light and started to view and start my mornings even in different ways.
And then as I've done that, there's been more rituals. I don't
want to say, demands but understanding of different ways to have threshold moments of
reorienting myself that feel different from just like a COGB right way of resetting,
like take five breaths and then go into whatever. It's not about just the
psychology and the nervous system. It's really about taking time to try and reintegrate
and orient to the highest version of something and to ask to ask for that.
It's very interesting in Orphan X when he answers the phone, he answers
the phone the same way every time he says, do you need my help?
And I never thought about that, right He's an assassin who helps people
who are in desperate need. But of course that's the first question, because
if somebody doesn't ask for help, they're not in a position that you can
help them, right. I never thought of it that way. But in
a way, that reflection towards the higher good is also an expression of humility
that you're open to what will come, Like you're leaving space for other solutions
and answers, which means I don't have them. I don't have them to
go out into the roar of a new day to control and shape the day.
You know, another thing C. S. Lewis talks about is he
says, the greatest trick that the enemy or that they can foist on other
people, sorry, to protect them from the enemy and screwtape letters. Of
course, the enemy's God, right, and the father is Satan. But
he says, is the belief that their time is their own. If you
can convince a man that his time is his own, everything's in imposition,
everything's caused for aggravation, right, anything that comes off their schedule, any
aggravation, anything like if you can convince him of that, like your gold,
that's a key thing. And so there's so many reflections like that.
And for me, a lot of what was been really meaningful in C.
S. Lewis is you know, clearly he's a spiritually he's intellectual spiritual genius,
right, it's but the acuteness of psychology is so amazing to me.
And so I think a lot of the way that I came into understandings of
sort of archetypes and spirituality and the way that actually they move in the world
in concrete ways and move the world and move you for me was through young
right, which which makes sense. It's coming from my background, right,
So I studied Young a great deal, right, and did a lot of
work on Young and you get to the bottom and you start to realize,
oh, this, there's this amazing overlap, like with my friends who are
born again Christian where all of a sudden it's like, oh, if I
convert some of these phrases and engage with this in this way, I understand
people who are speaking Jesus right, because it's a way into to understand and
go, oh when you say you know, it's you know, leave room
for God. That's like Young in synchronicity. Right, There's all these terms
that are just different slices and ways into it or into reaching a deeper reservoir
of understanding. And so C. S. Lewis like the acuteness of insight.
He's so perspicacious about like how our mind, how our minds work,
and the connection of those to a spiritual frame. For me was was pretty
spectacular. And you read The Great Divorce and that was and here's what you
thought about The Great Divorce because that's one of my favorite cs Was books.
I think it's one of the best representation of heaven and hell, like the
the idea of heaven and hell that has ever been put together. So I
don't know what you thought about that. Oh, and how like all the
ways he just lays bare that we get in the way of our own of
the gifts being offered every which way. It's like, here's here's every way
that you could show up and be offered everything you want and deny it due
to your own you know, blindness, or your your lack of cultivated humility.
It was amazing, right, And so you always think about that woman
who'd rather have her boy in hell with her so she could continue to provide
endless care and empathy and right like devouring mother witch and handsl and gretelness.
Right, she'd rather have that child devoured and taken down than to open and
release. You know, there's different value sets Old Testament New Testament in a
lot of ways. I mean, the Old Testament there's this like Talmudic reasoning,
right, and there's so much about work and discipline and law and code,
and I think a lot of the virtues of the New Testament are around
like surrender, right, Like there's I mean they're through both of them.
Of course, this is an oversimplification, you know, for giveness, grace,
there's so much it's such a different value set. And so watching this
bus ride you know, up to Heaven in person after person, I mean,
the other thing that was really interesting to me is there's someone who came
who is uh in the Great Divorce, who's a you know, great expert
in religion. I forget what they're going. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.
That's a great scene. Yeah. Yeah, the theologian who like couldn't
join Heaven or stay because you know, he needs to be able to have
arguments and differences and it has to be cerebral, and he has to retain
his own like you know, sense of intellectual curiosity and disagreement and like you
know, I never would yield, and how much we're lost in our prefrontal
cortexes all the time. Yeah, so he's he's amazing. I mean,
it was. That's been a pretty spectacular process. And I think about that
a lot in relation to people who we see who were and in ourselves,
primarily in ourselves first, all the ways we self handicap right, all the
ways we create obstacles based on our own ego or vanity, right, or
pride, and you see it reflected in those ways. But it also gives
room for allowing more space and freedom for others to sort of have to flower
in their own time right because you can't. I mean, that's another aspect
of freedom, is anything that's that's coerced. This is back to the discussion
about the sort of global or let's just say outsourced to like the insane roar
of the internet Bob mentality to dictate like our moral governance, which is it's
so insane it's almost hard to figure out that we're in America and Canada,
in these in these countries that are that where free speech is foundational, that
we've allowed a state of affairs that random mobs online on social media apps can
pay for blood and we have no idea who they are, how they're constituted,
how much foreign negative influences in them, how many psychopaths, what the
constitution is, and public figures will come out like to a town square and
apologize in a way that often is disingenuous, just to be left alone,
to be allowed to continue their lives without massive financial and reputational damage, Like
we've allowed that to happen. Someone's not been convicted of a crime, someone
hasn't been fired from a job, but just a random moob can constitute itself
and make that demand. It's insane. Yeah, you know, and yeah,
it's it's it's it is. It is insane, and it feels like,
yeah, it reminds you of what is real like and what is not
real. The online world is really in some ways like the chattering of demons,
Like because it's a people let's say Tiana, the people who these an
anonymous troll type people. You know, you also know that that not all
of them, but a lot of people that's not their whole personality. Anyways,
It's almost like I'm going to go online and I can play this like
role, you know, and then they go back and they like live their
life almost like a little like it's a video game. It's a first person
shooter video game. Right, I'm going online. I'm going to own the
limbs. I'm going online. I'm going to dismantle maga people. And that's
my way. I'm virtuous. I'm playing a game and i'm while I'm doing
it. But it's crazy that that level of like really like we had a
pretty good common loss system, we have pretty good courts. We did.
This is what we're going to decide to do. That anyone at any time,
or any member of one group can make a claim of being offended by
any member of another group, and if they get enough pitchforks and torches,
that other group has to answer to them. Yeah, it's it's it's really
crazy if you think about it, if we transport ourselves forward from the eighties
and said this is what it is now. Doesn't matter if you're a movie
star, a senator, a CEO, an athlete, you know, an
iron worker, a coal miner, a music anything you do. At any
time, a random mob can appear and just in a virtual world and make
you have to come. You either have be in the fight of your life
to stand up for your principles or like falsely apologize like you're being marched through
the streets and game of throne. That's wild. Yeah, And I mean
obviously that's in some part what's going on with Jordan right now. But I
just want to come back to the CS Lewis thing, just because when we
saw each other last time, you reminded me of a scene in Portrait of
the Artist as a young Man by James Joyce, and I'd read that in
my early early twenties and I had forgotten about some of the parts. I
re read it. And in that book there's a description of hell which goes
on for quite a long time. And it's interesting because that description of hell
is this like really punitive thing, right, It's like horrible punitive thing that's
going to last forever. And it's like, you know, imagine a bird
taking a seat of a mountain of seeds for you know, and it's like
it's it's like that's just one second in eternity. And and and what I
what I just found fascinating was because I also re read The Great Divorce.
I knew you had read it, you had read it something like I read
that a few times in my life. Uh, and I thought just how
powerful the difference is between the visions. On the one hand, Joyce,
you know, and you can understand when someone had let him away from the
church, if he really experienced something like that, where it's just this this
this arbitrary, almost in a horrible uh, imposition of of a standard that
you can't follow until you end up in this this torture forever. Whereas C.
S. Lewis has this amazing capacity to show how the suffering of hell,
like the suffering of Hell is out of your own desire, that it
actually is born out of something you want for yourself, ultimately without maybe admitting
it to yourself, but that you you want that that image that he has
of Hell, of people who have everything they want. So because they have
everything they want, they get annoyed at everybody's little differences. So they say,
they keep moving away from the neighborhood and building houses further and further away
from each other, and so all of a sudden they're like alone in these
giant mansions. But they're so they're like a million miles from each other and
they can't even fathom to be with another person. I'm like, wow,
that's a powerful image of suffering, but born out of our own desires.
It's amazing. It's also and I say this with great love for Catholics and
the Jesuits who partially raise me. I mean, somebody's that there. It's
like a Catholic Christian division there in some ways. And Joyce has like the
most hell fire and brimstone of anything, so that I think it's the third
chapter, A Portrait of the Artist is just it's worth just going into because
it's so kind of gloriously hideous. So first he goes through every single one
of our senses and talks about how awful it is in hell, like your
ears hear the screams, and your skin is on fire. So as they're
teaching him, you know, when he's young, in his Catholic school or
he's in church, you're taught all of the ways that your senses are in
a state of unbelievable inquisitional horror, right, and pain and excruciating. But
then he says, like you said, imagine there's a mountain that's a million
miles high and a million miles wide, and every million years a bird flies
and picks up one grain of sand and flies a million miles and drops it
somewhere else. When those mountains have risen and fallen a million times, that's
not even an instant in hell. Yeah. Oh, and so you can
see why one of the things Joyce said was to be an artist, he
had to be free from family, country, and religion. Those were the
three nets that were thrown to constrain an artist, right, and he had
to be free of them to be his own sort of brilliant embodied creative self.
And C. S. Lewis it's so much kinder. I mean,
it's you know, hell is locked from the inside and you have the key
and it's just right there, and the notion of God is it's so much
more patient and graceful. It's sort of like, hey, we're here.
You can take the bus back next year if you want. It's all right
here. But you know, if you want to still maintain your own theological
distinctions and that's important to you, it's okay. You can go back to
your house. That's you know, in this gray town, that's you know,
one thousand miles from the nearest home, where you're separated from an overarching
narrative and from each other, which, by the way, I think is
where AI is heading. We've talked about this, right, Like, oh,
I can get my own I can push a button ins on my own
book, Like I want a Faukner book that's dialed to my IQ that's one
hundred and seven with vocab words, that's hap the length using inside jokes from
my social media boom. I have what I want. It's like pornography,
right, the boys, I have everything that I want. What are all
my tastes and preferences and all of a sudden, you just floating away in
your own little bubble of a world, you know, like you know when
they die from the feast with the meat of the last like gorging, still
stuck in their chee as with the Oh, I have everything I want.
And it's like online I can do that. I can cultivate my own world.
I can move people, I can unfrend people I don't like. I
can put filters on everything. It's like, wow, So what you're doing
is is you're removed from an overarching story and from everybody else in reality,
Like why does that sound familiar? And so the but the but the depiction
and the great divorce is amazing, you know. So one of other things
I've been thinking about a lot since Exodus is this notion, like one of
the biggest, the biggest fury in a lot of ways that I see of
our stalemate in politics. There's two things I want to talk to you about.
The biggest one I see hypocrisy, right so, you know, and
it's it's abundant on both sides. We don't even get into specific examples because
like then the comments just blow up and there's a thousand things. But people
are outraged with the hypocrisy of why is this prosecuted this way not this way?
Why are you saying it's state rights but it's not state rights here?
And the church, you know, one of the things that's the most typical
thing to be said in a secular world. These words are so useless.
But you know, we're using these as imperfect proxies for what we're talking about
is the hypocrisy of the church, is the hypocrisy of church leaders. Right,
there's ways that like shockingly the churches haven't you know, as all the
institutions have allowed in corruption and capture right academia and the media and Hollywood.
Some of that's also true in religious institutions also that that has been allowed.
But it's a very interesting thing where there's this notion of like, well,
you say you're a Christian, but you had an affair. You say you're
a Christian, but you stole money, or you say you're a Christian but
you didn't show grace and humility of Christ, you know, or whatever.
And it's so interesting to me, like you know, having lifelong close friends,
I mean, it's such an amusing and callow disregard of it. It's
like, okay, because I say that I'm orienting myself to sorts of certain
belief structure, I'm supposed to exemplify the highest exemplar of that in the history
of the world. All the time I'm a hypocrite. It's like, that's
the way that I'm aiming as an individual. If you're a Christian, it's
like, of course you're going to people in that community are going to gamble
and have affairs and do all this stuff. That's like saying, oh,
you secularists, you have all these laws, but people are still committing murder
and people are still stealing things. Like what hypocrites you are to think that
you have a legal system you want to pay attention to when people don't abide
it. Yeah, And so this is the sort of plank in the eye
approach of like, we're so scrambling between these worlds of the of the religious,
spiritual, symbolic, and the secular, you know, aridly intellectual to
cast these aspersions on the other side. But you know, the one thing
I think that I will say is a base setting that I have found increasingly
useful since I had some pretty deep forays into the political space in hopes of
doing some good and moving parties towards moderation and discussion and negotiation, right,
Like, I think in a lot of ways, like I hope to be
a sort of bridge builder because as a novelist, the primary thing that I
like to do is to really embody other people in perspectives. But you know,
that sort of anger at the lack of embodied perfection. One of the
things that I find really wonderful in my friends and community who are more spiritual,
religious, or have a belief structure as part of that structure is we're
all flaws. We're all flawed, we all have a long way to go
right, and without that recognition, there's not a lot to go. You
know, if you have a view where you're like, look, I figured
it out. Here's my politics, you know, from either side. Here's
my politics. Here's my structure. There's my community, here's my values.
Here's all the ways that I fulfill those have codes in my life, and
I fulfill them perfectly. It's like, oh, I don't know how to
talk to you. Like if you really think that, like you're just not
looking, you're just not pulling the curtain back on your mind. That's right,
there's so many ways to do everything better all the time, and in
some ways it has to do with this question of idolatry. That's interesting to
think about that way, because what the surprise that we find is that,
you know, if we remove the absolute transcendence, like if we just like
you know, we don't need this, we just have the state, we
just have the we just have the social sphere, then what will happen is
exactly what you said, which is that we'll treat we'll do it unconsciously.
We'll treat others as if they should be God. And therefore as soon as
we find one little fault in someone, then we will want to tear them
down and destroy them. If you look at the way that the Medievals,
for example, saw so like history, there was a tradition that's called the
nine Worthies, and the nine worthies were were nine social leaders, three Jews,
three Christians. And then and then that we know there was three three
Jews, three like old school like Hellenistic Romans, and then three Christians.
And what the way they would do it is was say, like Julius Caesar,
right, they say, Julius Caesar was a great man. Here's the
reasons why we admire him, and hear all the horrible things that he did,
and there it was Alexander. Alexander was what was great. Here is
how Alexander was great, and with the great things he did, and here
are his sins, here are the things that he lacked. And there was
a sense in which they knew they of course these people had faults, right,
of course they had just like Moses in the in the in the scripture
hits the rock and Aaron builds the golden calf, and you know, King
David hasn't fair, and like we know that humans are are weak, and
and so there's a sense in which we can still say David was a great
king and know that he did these horrible things. Yeah. So in a
way it calls to mind two things. I mean, one of them is
the Vatican has the Devil's Advocate as a formal position. Right. Christopher Hitchins,
who I miss more than maybe anybody, just to know what he would
say in this moment. He was so singular, right, Yeah, I
mean I would love to hear what Christopher Hitchins would say about everything. But
he tells this story that he was a big critic of Mother Teresa in a
bunch of ways, and he describes the interview. So they got him on
like news, I forget what MSNBC or Fox or something as her caskets being
born lovingly through like the slums of Calcutta. And he said, here he
is with an ill advised goateee like saying why she was not word But the
Vatican actually contacted him to be the devil's advocate to make the case against her.
Yeah, there's a formal position to do that. But so we take
what you're saying right now about this about did we find one little flaw?
And then we move into a world where literally we have given up by ourselves
all of our not all of many of us have intensely given up a ton
of our freedom and a ton of our privacy. And so I had a
friend yesterday was talking about a lawsuit and they contacted somebody and they're going to
subpoena the texts. And my friend's like, how can they subpoena the texts?
And it's like, do you ever read the sixty page things that are
the contract agreements? Let alone Parson through a team of lawyers. You don't
own that, we don't own anything we've taken this and gone let me give
everything away. And by the way, also I'm going to go on social
media and post things and make jokes and come from one small culture community and
make a joke in another. That's happened. You know, one of our
dear friends has been caught out of that a number of times, colliding with
my various timelines. And basically what we're discovering is is that nobody, nobody
on the planet is perfect. And so if you want to put a target
on Tim Scott or Nikki Hayley or Nancy Pelosi or Ozzy Osbourne or you know,
Oliver Anthony, who's the guy who just sung that anthem, or you
or me, it's there. You can interpret anybody through a frame and find
something that's offensive online, probably because it's impossible with the it's impossible to maintain
the image like FDR when he was president, you know, suffering from the
ed polio as a kid and was in a wheelchair, and no one ever
knew. The press, like very respectfully, never shot him in his wheelchair.
They'd shoot him by the desk, they'd shoot him standing. We don't
have any of that anymore. So it's like you think you're going to pry
into any human And so this game where like hyenas right, like something gets
turned up, somebody reaches a certain level of ascendency in the culture. JK.
Rowling, Where do we find something anything even if it makes no sense
in Ripper to Shreds, it's it's just it's just horrible. And you know,
in a way, I think part of the solution is a recognition instead
of an apology when being caught out to go, this is, this is
where I am, this is who I am. I'm not going to purport
to be perfect under every which way. It's it's not having a react,
but we've turned people who want to engage on a more on a wider stage,
like the amount of hatred even you and I, which is a much
lesser level than if we talk about you know, Jordan, or if we
talk about you know, other people in our orbit on both sides of the
fence. You know, Dean Phillips is a is a close friend of mine
who's a congressman who just made some statements that we might want some more diversity
in the presidential race behind besides bided. You know, when people are at
a high level the amount of just like vitriol that's directed at them is incredible,
right, and then people get bellco some reaction. It's this horrible blood
sport that we've kind of allowed and entertained. Yeah, and it's weird.
People forget like I and you see it even from the Christian perspective, it's
like for forget the words of Christ, you know, to say judge not
lest you be judged, And it's not. And I really do believe though
that that statement doesn't mean that you should never judge anything anybody does, but
it's rather to always keep that eye inside first, like, always make sure
that you are aware that you're a hypocrite, that you have fault that you
you know, and and keep that as the as a as a something that
balances out how you pour out your criticism towards the outside world, because,
like you said, one of the problems with criticizing the outside world constantly is
that it makes us feel virtuous. And it's almost like it can be a
little addiction. Right, It's like it because it gives you a little kick
of a virtue to dispew out everything that's wrong about everybody and everything all the
time, and ultimately our eyes should be on ourselves first, that's for sure.
That's right, that's right. And that discussion I was talking about with
Oz of kind of like lifting and lowering my gaze simultaneously, right away from
sort of a globalist or a formed out a centralized morality was the part where
I was like, oh, right, I see this differently in a certain
way. But it's also you know, careful what we ask of people.
You know, you want someone who's a genius, a big out of the
box thinker who like moves fast and has thoughts and shatters things and moves the
world forward lurchingly like a Galileo, or you know the accidents and mishap that
lead to solutions, like how penicillin was discovered, you know, Picasso,
Beethoven, Mozart, you know Byron Keith Shelley, Like these people who were
just touched with fire were brilliant. To start to judge and constrict all the
sides of it, it's like, no, we just want all the genius.
We just want all the brilliant it. We don't want the messiness of
it, and we don't want we want to make sure that everything's aligned and
articulated perfectly and so I thought about this a lot since our conversation that we
had with Jordan. For instance, you know, one of the things that
really struck me and you and I laughed about this afterwards, was you know,
we're there. We were sort of discussing with Jordan how to tamp down
some of the stuff on Twitter, which I still think he should do in
a way, but he's also you know, it's look, he's figuring that
out, and he's figuring out a lot of things. But you know,
part of what we were talking about was like, look, like have a
more tempered or a wider view. And one of the things that really struck
me was, and Jordan's talked to me about saying, look, when you
get up for a fight with half the world, like you get up ahead
of steam, you know, if you know you're going to speak some truth
that people are going to crash in. And when you get up ahead of
steam, there's slop, there's mess, there's force. And one of the
things I thought that was so funny is we got to the end of that
interview and I thought I'd comported myself pretty well and went back and watched it
and I was like, I was way too, like coming in hot on
stuff and I needed an edit like literally to take down some of the ways
that I was, you know, like Jordan would see the point and I'd
like hit him again with it. Like in some ways, I was like,
wait, I need I need some grace shown to me for how I'm
you know, coming into a conversation about having more of a steady even cadence
and discussing issues as I'm giving that advice right to somebody else for doing it,
And it was kind of it was a great thing to go through because
you know, that was a stressful set of circumstances for me just coming in
to do that. Not bad stressful, you know, but a challenging.
Challenging is a better word. Like there's a lot of people who could be
upset with me from basically every angle with that. Yeah, and so to
notice and see, yeah, well when that happens, people feel that way
all the time sometimes, right. I think that in your case, it
was a tribute to you as well that you were able to see that in
yourself too, to see like, oh wait a minute, it's like,
oh, I also need to take my own advice in this case to some
extent, like in this context and I can be reliant on the grace of
others. Yes, right, It was like, hey, I don't want
to be you know, look Jordan, I go Jordan. I can have
a bare knuckle discussion that's super loving and great like as you've seen many a
time, but when it's in front of of of something that's like that,
it's like it's it's really difficult. I've been thinking a lot about this.
You know, my participation in Exodus had different ramifications in certain communities that I'm
part of. Like some people were you know, very upset with me for
sharing the stage with certain people who were there, or upset that I'd participate,
or you know, didn't understand when I came back and was talking about
things in ways that they didn't that weren't usual to them, And some people
just recoiled like I have some people I haven't talked to since almost and I
was put in mind of a couple of things. First reaction, I felt
more. I felt grievancy more immediately. This is kind of an interesting thing
that happened, since we're talking about excident. But first I was like,
oh, you just want all my input and insight about how to talk to
and engage with the other side, and all the persuasion stuff from my deep
dives in with with these bigger personalities and brains that I do with you know,
respect and trying to learn without any slop. That's what you want.
You want me to come to you and say, hey, here's a whole
framework of how to talk to people without my brain ever getting stretched or stretched
out of shape, or my language being imperfect or the mess of my processing
and swinging here and coming back to here and refiguring. And it's like,
I don't know how to do that, Like I can't. I'm not going
to come and give you a spit out set of widgets about how we start
to engage with different people without there being like room for problems. And some
people just simply don't want that. Here's the precepts, here's the ideology,
here's the ways you need to speak, here's the language that's acceptable. If
you're confusing anyway there, you've been infected and captured like you went on and
you're not who you are and I don't trust you and your excize it's kind
of wild, like what the range is that people are demanding of something and
I started to think about that a lot with people like, you know,
it's not like Elon Musk or Joe Rogan for instance, are like far right
conservative characters by any stretch of the imagination. But if if they're if they're
doing this these sort of bigger ventures and roaring around and and and and and
smashing their way to truth in ways that are imperfect, and trying to accomplish
things and making mistakes, if if part of the predominant culture is, oh,
you can't say that, you can't do that, please don't do this,
Please just get us to the moon and build tunnels. But like don't
do this piece or don't do that piece. Of course, Look, it's
a free marketplace, right Everybody can have corrections on people, no matter how
powerful or brilliant, and we should. But if it starts to become that
it every every bold venture gets you know, swarmed with mosquitoes, and people
are you know, like blood sucked a millimeter at a time and an endless
swarm, you start to understand why people start to disengage right from from work
that might be more obviously unity based. And that's a lot of what we're
trying to do with ARC I think is to figure out how to have sets
of values and make sure that we're not that were bearing them forward in ways
that are building bridges. Yeah, it's unbelievably hard to do. Yeah,
and you see, like I obviously I've had that issue with art myself,
where people are I mean some people criticizing me saying, well, here Jonathan,
you know, he's going to build a new WF, he's participating in
this new globalist initiative he's and and it's like, okay, so so so
so so what so you you're just allowed to complain, I guess right,
You're just allowed to complain that you see these great like globalist authoritarian things coming
towards you. But if you in any way tried to start a discussion with
people on how to find some alternative or how to see differently than you're,
then you're doing the same. It's like, well, I'm not like I
can't imagine, I can't imagine, just like bitching and not not not trying
to. It's the same with like the story the question, right, It's
like, you know, I've been watching people that I that I respect,
you know, and I've been doing it myself for the past five years complain
about some of the story tropes that are coming out of populast right, and
I've been and I've been doing it active. I'm like this, I think
this is not good. This is leading us towards towards towards kind of ideology,
and it's bad storytelling and everything. But at some point I also have
to tell if I'm not going to start trying to tell better stories, then
at some point I have to shut up, like I have to stop whining,
because then what are we doing? You know? That's right? Well,
there's another line in Screwtape Letters. H Rusie s Lewis is talking about
like a man in the house with his with his mom. He's living with
his mother and saying, you know, start to be annoyed with every way
she says stuff right, or like her tone or how she does this little
thing. Like if you can get somebody in a state of mind right,
because we're working for our father, Now, who's the devil? If you
can get somebody where they're annoyed by every little thing that somebody does, well,
assuming that none of that's true for you, and that every tone they
have with hidden meaning, you can be offended by but all of your hidden
meanings and energy is them being crazy. And he says something like, we
want them forever concerned with the state of her soul, but never her like
rheumatoid arthritis. Right, Like, if we can remove people to just only
be outraged by the abstract, right, then you can constantly be annoyed in
the details and in reality and you have your perfect moral equation is in place.
And so I've been thinking about that a lot, also with art,
but also this insane notion that like who you sit down with and learn from
and discuss and what you participate in means that you're fully endorsing everything that can
come of it. Like what a weird notion that I would want to go
to this Exodus seminar and sit down with Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro and in
doing so that I agree with every single thing that they think and every post
that they've made, an argument they've made, and them with me that somehow
association means not that you're learning. Right, I could take there's a couple
of things that Ben said that were, you know, enormously eye opening for
me. That's true, irrelevant if he tweets a bunch of stuff that I
don't agree with for reasons the same I mean same as with Jordan. There's
a totality of a human being and all the things that they do, and
the engagement and the dance with that, and ideas like what an utterly bizarre
notion that we should be that that represents platforming them or contributing to their wealth
or stature. It's so bizarre. It's like, oh, yeah, well,
we could we deplatform Donald Trump all the way to the most powerful human
being on the planet. Like, how did that work out? This deplatforming
notion, Let's deplatform Joe Rogan. It's like, Joe Rogan doesn't need that.
There's if there's engagement, and you know, for me, a lot
of the work that I do, there's these sort of quotations from Desmond Tutu
that that bookend a lot of my thinking. He always says, if you
want peace, you don't talk to your friends, you talk to your enemies.
And another thing he said is an enemy is a friend waiting to be
made. And this notion that more separate is good. Less tendrils. If
somebody's infected, corrupt, captured, judged in any way, sever all tend
sever all tendrills of connection from them, send sever all bridges and attack them
in full. It's like, well, what are they going to do.
They're gonna move in distant and fortify and come back. Oh well they're doing
that anyways. I hear this, I hear the exact same mirror argument,
both directions. I can have a conversation with conservative friends and the claims I
can pick them right up and put them down. When I'm talking two more
liberal friends over here, it's the exact same argument, the hypocrisy, divorced
from reality. Only believe in your own experts, mine can, And it's
it's it's like there's these these parallel structures of discussion and the arguments follow the
exact same course. There's like eight steps of them that you can walk through.
Yeah, but that that that's so. I mean, I don't understand.
I mean, I've always struggled too to understand. I don't know,
Like I'm trying, I struggle to get into a psychology of someone who like,
let's say, post a picture of a good example in my like from
the more right leaning type people, It's like they'll post a picture of someone
with epstein and they'll say like this, and they'll say, like that's it.
It's like this person now is like basically non human because there's this picture
that exists of them with someone who's a horrible human. And it's like that's
crazy, Like that's a frightening thing because can you imagine really seriously thinking that
that just because you met someone in some conference or in some context and there's
a picture that's taken of you that all of a sudden, we could compromise
you forever because of because of that, that's a that's wild. And I
also look at sorry and go ahead. Well, as a novelist, it's
like I've interviewed outlaw bikers. I've interviewed murderers. I mean, I've interviewed
like, you know, heist guys. That's all fine. I can go
conduct any interview to understand, to focus, to do deep dives on people
terrorists, that's all acceptable. But if somebody has a different about right,
it's done. And the thing that's also so weird is like, let's say
even that one of these people is is proves to be uniformly evil like that
that's also like an assumption you make when you cancel somebody they're so irredeemable.
It's also such an amazing notion that it's not that everybody's where they are on
their own journey of life and that there's always hope for grace or learning or
movement. It's like, no, it's it's done. It's locked right now,
like they're permanently awful. And so you think, okay, let's say
that's true. Even let's say that we take that leap, that that philosophical
leave. Don't you want to engage with them to comprehend how they think and
where the vulnerabilities are and where the weak spots are, and where the points
are for even joining or contending? Are there any ways you can align your
resources? Are there any ways you can understand the playbook better? Are there
ways that you want to deal with and wrestle with an adversary? Like just
in a straight sun SOUE know that even even seeing them as an adversary,
you should want to engage with them to some extent, because then, right
you don't know your enemy, then you'll be taken out without without you know,
you'll be taken out and you won't know why because you haven't let let
alone. If there are people with you, know giant you know, sets
of I mean, you know, scars of influence and relationships. Like I
always think of it as like if you're conducting a battle between good and evil.
You know, it's like, oh, well, this person over here,
who you've decided is canceled has like a battalion of tanks, right,
but oh they're bad. We just let's talk to them. Yeah we don't.
We don't want those tanks. Let's insult those tanks till they come for
us. It's like, what are you talking about? Right? Like,
this is this is it's it's time. I feel like it's time that we
have to You have talked about pluralistic ignorance, right is that? Do you
remember that? Cloristic? It's in cults. It's one of the ways that
colts operate. I mean there's a bunch of ways cults operate, like our
current culture is operating. You know. One of them is is they want
to cut off access to outside information. They divide people from your family,
and they do it in a way that's flattering because they're like, oh,
you're so amazing. Your family is always just wanted to hold you back,
like you're finally your full of self who we see. So you sever people
right all the and we think about all these people I haven't talked to my
my crazy sisters of you know, uh, a liberal lefty who's lost.
My uncle's a maga guy. You sever everybody so that you can't see the
humanity in them. So that's number one access, you know, limit outside
information. Then there's privacy deprivation. If you're up at a cult setting,
Let's say you have a part, you go, someone goes with you to
the bathroom, someone's with you first when you wake up in the morning,
and when you go to bed at night, and everywhere you go they're they're
dealing with Jonathan cult Jonathan, not Jonathan Jonathan. Then, so privacy deprivation
is this Now there's nowhere we go that this can't come and reach. Is
it? Dinner time in most households doesn't matter. You in class doesn't matter.
Are you at home in your dorm room at the end of a day,
at the end of a work day doesn't matter. It's with us everywhere.
And the other is pluralistic ignorance that everybody is sort of individually miserable or
unfulfilled or far from a truth. They want to speak, but they can't
share it because everywhere they look there's these teams of hyenas waiting to just descend
on them and tear them to shreds. So you're not safe to speak out.
And that's social. I went undercover to occult man. I went to
a thing outside Lax. I was researched a book. I wrote a book
that took place in my control cults. I was in a horseshoe, big
like ballroom where they have weddings in one of those big airport hotels. Two
hundred and fifty people, and they shape it like a horseshoe so you can
see everybody. And when they say everyone ready for growth, stand up and
you sit, and two hundred and forty nine people are standing and they all
look at you. That's powerful, it's powerful. Colts want people who were
healthy, who were responsive to healthy reactions like social embarrassment, right. They
don't want someone who's a delusional schizophrenic. They don't care. So these pressures
that are happening where people are like, I don't know, Like I believe
in the you know that people are allowed dignity and private choices and rights,
but I don't quite want to celebrate everything around that all the time. But
if I say that, I'll get killed. Let me just be quiet.
If eighty percent of people think that, but they're frozen in a state where
they can't communicate it, that's pluralistic ignorance. And so much of what I
preasingly see as the task that I want to help, or the way that
I want to help, is to try to shatter that through conversations rather than
well, if we elect this group of people here and this group of people
there, and they do these things and pass this legislation, then will be
good. It's like it's about foundationally rebuilding. Like like we discussed for thirty
two hours in Exodus, how are we going to how are we going to
orient a space in a world in which the center holds right and the fringe
holds and has its place, and that place will flourish and feed the center,
and the center can hold and protect and provide structure. And I think
a lot of that is having the kinds of conversations people don't want. There's
so many truths that they're just so foundational that people just won't speak that are
just obvious beyond compare. Yeah, listen, Greg, I think I think
we should end it there. That was a great That was a great finish.
So I appreciate your time and I'm looking forward to seeing you at ARC
and then possibly at another right discussion possible, we will see. It's still
it's still being discussed, but that is something that might happen. That would
be great. Yeah, it's always fun talking here man. It was good to see