How Foreign States Are Controlling Your Mind | Gregg Hurwitz | EP 488

The best way to destroy the West is through its own goodness and highest principles. If you come in through the door of free speech, that's a very valuable cudgel that you wield. If you come in through diversity, which is in one context and definition, is in fact the beauty and power of America, which is different than when Trudeau says it because America it is. And you come in through that trapdoor, it gets very difficult and arguments get complicated. People's reference points get jumbled. So it's like every protester is John Lewis, right? Everybody who’s there we start to get confused about where which things are off limits and which things aren't.

Hello everybody! I had the opportunity today to continue an ongoing conversation with a friend and colleague of mine, Greg Herwitz. We've been talking intensely for 30 years and have involved ourselves together in a multitude of projects, including one that was designed to help pull the Democrats to the center. Greg has been involved more recently in an enterprise called "Us the Story," which is aiming at criticizing the victim-victimizer narrative that characterizes our culture, at least the pathological elements of it. But also delving into the root causes of the disintegration and polarization that now characterize our culture.

Now some of that's a consequence of intellectual movement, but some of it is actually facilitated by a series of bad actors, and those involve people who are agitating directly and consciously, as well as indirectly and unconsciously. On the international front, Iran, China, and Russia are using the social media access that they have, especially to young people, and particularly the young women, to really de and distort their political view in a manner that's really, really hard on the culture.

So, Greg talks a fair bit about exactly how that's laying itself out. On the optimistic side, we talked a fair bit about well, the counterposition to that, which is that there's mass deep agreement among the vast majority of Americans on key policy issues, both international and domestic. None of that gets any air time. So what do we do? Detail out the role of the bad international actors, talk a little bit about the psychopathic trolls and the demonic algorithms, and stress the fact that there is intense unity in a central American story, hence "Us the Story," let's say, that does unite people properly and productively and passionately and psychologically and socially, and that there's reason for real optimism in that regard.

So join us for that discussion. Well, Mr. Herwitz, we meet again! It's good to see you. We've been talking for a long time about polarization and trying to ameliorate it, and probably adding to it too, inadvertently, because that's always a problem when the feedback loops that are producing something like polarization get rang. That's a good way of thinking about it. It isn't always obvious how to rectify that without amplifying it.

It's a big problem, and so I've seen a tremendous increase in the power of that polarization process since October 7th, and we've talked about that a lot, how that might be addressed. I've seen that polarization expand on the left and on the right, and it's not a good thing. While we've been talking about that, as I alluded to for years, but also more intently in the last few months, do you want to start by explaining your position on this and what you've been up to?

Well, I was tasked first, as a point of entry, I guess, of going in to explore anti-Semitism. One of the things I found really quickly is that it's not very much about anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is just sort of a tool in part of a broader narrative. When we explored it, we found some extraordinary things. We found the extent of foreign operations coming into America and manipulating opinion here.

The other thing we found that was quite extraordinary is that America; we have a lot of problems that we need to fix here. So I'm under no illusion about that. But America is in enormous agreement about a lot of things. America is sort of foundationally good and still oriented to what America was with its values. We can talk about that a little bit more later, but we're under I think two major factors, foreign psychological operations that are being run here.

We've seen that in the university; we certainly see it through social media, and a sort of profit center within the U.S. of people who profit from us being constantly outraged all the time. We have a very shifting view from what the reality is of the country to the way that we feel that everything's falling apart, and there are in fact some concrete steps that we can take towards trying to put things right again.

Okay, so, when you say we, talk a little bit about the organization that you've put together to start to address this and let everybody know where you're coming from and also the nature of our relationship with regard to that.

I come into the exploration of the culture of politics as a novelist. That's my day job for as long as I can remember. It means I have a very different approach because as a novelist I'm trying to figure out how to embody characters, to articulate them. I'm interested in really deeply understanding what the different perspectives are and how they're affected and what those value structures are like in hopes of figuring out how to translate.

So, my venture has mostly been on the basis of curiosity and trying to make connections between different methods that people have of making meaning or thinking. Part of that is, you know, and then also, you know I try to tell a story to the broadest possible audience. My exploration here into this really comes from trying to figure out who people are and how they're thinking without judgment, you know, and trying to identify which parts feel like ideology or feel like opinions that are received and where they're really coming from.

The thing that's amazing is if you get to where people are really coming from, that's where a lot of the divisions just collapse, and you have massive consensus on almost every major issue facing America. But if we can focus more and more on the ways that we misinterpret a term or reference one thinker who we don't like, if we can have an outrage machine that's constantly built to do that, then that's where all of our focus goes, and that's what happens.

What's your team in this regard, and how much time are you spending not on your novel writing and literary activities but on the, what would you call it, political inquiry as well as communication? And I'm curious about your strategy for doing your background research, for example, but I'd like to know about the team or everybody needs to know about the team, and also give us a scope of your activities over the last six or seven months.

Yeah okay, so I work with a team. What we say that we do is research through execution. So we do research into the culture, we're post-partisan; that's the most important thing because we need to get opinions from a very, very broad range of people across the spectrum on sources on opinions on what's happening and where the reality is. So that's immensely important, and we're anti-polar. So our main client is just sort of the U.S. at large because the better the U.S. does, from our initial entry point about anti-Semitism, it's not just the better Jews are, but every minority and every majority. So we want to act towards shared American values again and try and counter polarization.

I work with a brilliant founder and CEO of her own sort of research through execution company, Gretchen Barton. Mark Riddle, who is a brilliant political strategist and thinker, Johnny Paton is running the studio part of this.

We do polling, psychometrics research; we go all across the ecosystem. We have to talk to people way on the right and way on the left, and we take a big consensus, and then we start to test messaging, we start to build creative messaging. Marshall Hovitz has been very closely involved, who's a brilliant director and he's been helping oversee some of the creative, and we start to see what ideas work, which ideas get blowback from which quarters and what things we're wrong about, right?

So with this particular enterprise, you've been involved in attempting to pull the Democrats back to the center for a long time, but this particular enterprise was motivated specifically by the events that surrounded October 7th and the dementing of the culture in consequence of that. But as you've proceeded, as I've understood from our discussions, you've realized that the essential focus here isn't the rise of anti-Semitism on the right and the left, but the process of polarization in general.

It's speeding along by people who are motivated to do precisely that, and also motivated to profit by it. Some kind of evil dynamic between the two, and that’s fair. One of the things we've talked about is the fact that the rise in anti-Semitism, I’ve always regarded that as the Jews, for example, as canaries in the coal mine, because they're the perennially successful minority.

My sense is that when the mob on the right and the left comes for the Jews, that's a precursor to the mob coming for the successful in general, and that anti-Semitism is a manifestation of something that's much more fundamental that should be addressed rather than something that should be considered in isolation. And so we've talked about that a little bit. So you've been delving more into what we might call the victim-victimizer narrative, for example, as well as the conscious actions of the foreign manipulators that you've described, and the collusion of the corporations on the social media side in advancing their agenda. Fair enough? Is that okay?

The button of anti-Semitism in some ways is the most effective switch to flip if you want a culture to tear itself apart. Right, right, so that's a very effective entry point. Yeah, and it's fueled... Like, I heard a statistic yesterday from someone in the intel community who thought that 60% of all anti-Semitic traffic on social media is from Russian bots.

What the Russians did—there was a measure that the Russians pushed forth in the 70s to conflate definitions around terms. I mean, they've been playing this game for a long time. A sort of manipulation. There's a, you know, Iran, China, and Russia are working in concert. We can talk about that more later, but one of the things they did in Paris is they sent operatives to paint stars of David on synagogues and people's houses to mark them out.

That creates a permission structure for more hatred because people then start to see this, right? Everybody's eager for some sort of trend of being right in the political narrative in this sort of frothy rage that we've built up to, and they laser in on where that is. So their job is to create permission structures, to create Jew hate, which then can lead to the worst elements, and leads to further and further polarization, and that's how you disintegrate a culture, really, is you sow chaos.

Like, the precursor to the KGB in the 70s funded the Black Panthers and the KKK. They're not partisan geared. When we talk about, like Iran is really in some ways the Democrats' blind spot, as Russia is the Republicans'. There are equivalent plays being had, and they don't really want one party over another. They want us constantly fighting about all the wrong things that don't solve the actual problems that the majority of Americans need solved in their life.

The majority of Americans are actually decent people, and they don't care about screaming at Jews or labeling oppressors or canceling people from a tweet they had 10 years ago. They're trying to get on, and we're going to talk about them as well.

Okay, how will we start this? You're going to start with your methodology, I guess? Yeah, alright, alright. And it's a sociological and political investigation strategy combined with an attempt to determine how to ameliorate the worst of the negative consequences that you're discovering, right? If you pursue any problem deep enough, ideally you can start to reach the root of the sickness, right?

There's a real sickness at the base of America right now, and that is, however you want to call it, the grouping of different people into different categories. The disintegration of an American ID under a set of shared American values is spectacular. It's the most spectacular shared value set there is—most of us agree with that. But if you want to—it's fractionated into group identity claims, and that has negative consequences in multiple dimensions.

A lot of that isn't us; a lot of that is foreign influence. A lot of it is ways that we have shifted away from shared American values that make sense. We have a template for solving all sorts of problems here. If you want to protest, the civil rights movement in America is American scripture. I mean, like the beauty and moral clarity of that movement—that's a foundational pillar in America.

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The pessimistic realization is the degree to which our discourse on social media platforms is being shaped by bad actors on the foreign side, and like psychopathic manipulators, and greed on the domestic side, and psychopathic algorithms. Oh yes, right, right, which we can scarcely keep up with in our brains. Okay, so foreign actors, people who are capitalizing on the division that they're sewing for primarily economic reasons and for the opportunity for those operations and propaganda to garner attention, which has value, and then that's amplified by the AI algorithms that we don't even understand, that are directing attention.

Now it's polarizing people terribly, but the optimistic issue is that as far as you can tell from your polling, the core and the center of America is just as strong as it ever has been, or maybe stronger. I wouldn’t say just as strong; we have cracks, and we're vulnerable, but everybody is ready and dying to have to move back towards a sane version of America.

And we’re not helpless before this massively accelerating change; even with algorithms, we have tools; we have to catch up to it, but we have tools at our disposal for how to make things transparent and reset the value state. We have ways to put America together, but as long as issues remain partisan—like the border or abortion—they get worse; the incentive structures are too out of whack.

But we are ripe for a movement to something that is new. The one thing I keep thinking is, everyone's angry that this celebrity goes to this party and this genius goes to that party, is the collective resources we have in the United States of America are spectacular. If we could figure out how to get them all working together in a way that makes sense, and that is a fair set of values, that's smart capitalism instead of regulatory capture and, you know, lobbyism.

There's a whole way to make this work beautifully, but there's a lot of other countries incentivized to making us hate ourselves, despise ourselves, hate each other so that we keep deteriorating. While you just said you in Uzbekistan, and they're building factories, and it's booming. I mean other places are doing things; they're building. It's not to suggest there's not a lot of people doing a lot of work in America, but our output rate and efficiency rate is terrible. Most people look at screens, get outraged, and mail checks off like rabbits with pellets of being outraged about things.

Okay, we kind of skipped over something in a way, or we haven't developed it enough yet. That's really very—that's a claim that's very radical. I mean, I don't think anybody who's watching or listening is going to be shocked by the fact that the social media algorithms are prioritizing outrage, capture attention, and that there's economic utility in that. But, you know, you’re making a claim that's on the face of it in the realm of conspiracy theory, you know, and that is that there are foreign operations that are dementing the political landscape and that that's—that's a massive ploy, that it's conscious, that it's led by Iran, China, and Russia, let’s say.

So maybe we can—shall we break that down? Yeah, let's do that because I would really like to see you prove that. The measurements—the first thing I should say is that when you're measuring how a culture thinks and moves it's incredibly complicated. And so, obviously, right? You can push poll. I mean, you talked a lot about this early in our methodology for outreach: to not make things worse and two, I remember we showed you a poll from anti-Semitism in the 30s, and it said, "Do you think Jews are clannish? Do you think Jews do this in business?" And you looked up and you said, "I’m pretty sure if people weren't anti-Semitic before taking the survey, they would be afterward."

Absolutely, how you form questions inform, right? They set the stage for dialogue, and the idea that a question can be neutral. I mean this, we're veering into postmodern territory here, but I do we do have that when we get to the agreement piece. Yeah, as well as how you phrase things matter. So the first thing is we have an approach that is based on genuine curiosity for the longest term good. We do. It's not we’re not like sort of that's what we're in it for.

And so we're asking—we make inquiries; there are a bunch of different things you have to study and then we try and fill in all the missing pieces as best we can. But I think it's overwhelmingly compelling what the case is, but we take polls. Gretchen does stuff for some people aren't as articulate in polling. When we do the focus group aside from the polling that she has them bring up and do visual representations of how they're thinking, there's a bunch of means of ingress that we try to have from all different sides of the culture—small focus groups running stuff by you running stuff by progressives running stuff by leaders and people on the street.

So it's a combination of polls, but I want to highlight a few things that are approaches. We did this TikTok study about foreign ops, and we found that on TikTok, women between the ages of 18 and 34 have a favorability view of America that is 52 points up above the norm. So think about what an extraordinary outlier that is for one demographic group, right? Opinions about Israel and Jews follow as they often do, right? So, you know, little Satan, big Satan, they’re tied together in this sort of obsessive focus of deteriorating that particular value set, American value set.

Um, and so we were wondering why that was. Yeah, so, let’s just reiterate that a minute because it’s a striking finding that shouldn't be glossed over. So you've identified a subset of the American population which is very large—women between the ages of 18 and 34—so all young women, fundamentally, who also are opinion setters in a variety of ways that are important for the culture.

And how the culture operates, right? That you've seen that their political views about the U.S. and about Israel for example, given the state of the Middle East at the moment, are wildly skewed in contrast to virtually all other demographic groups in the United States and that they primarily get their information from TikTok. Well that's the punchline.

So when we went to go find it and find out what accounted for this— they were two standard deviations above the norm on getting their information from TikTok. Now TikTok, as we know, is owned by China, and China exports very different TikTok than they import. They import broccoli and export crack. So the students there have a time limit on it; the last time I checked it was 20 minutes a day, and all the information is educational.

But they export stuff with choppier and choppier views and it'll be like, you know, "Girl in bikini, was Hitler good?" I mean, it's vacillating constantly between all sorts of junk food. And so that's an effort to shorten our kids' attention spans, and how much of that do you think is a consequence of the relatively Wild West status of the free market of ideas in the West, and how much of it—

The best way to destroy the West is through its own goodness and highest principles—if you come in through the door of free speech, that's a very valuable cudgel that you wield. If you come in through diversity, which is a—in one context and definition, is in fact the beauty and power of America—which is different than when Trudeau says it because America it is—and you come in through that trapdoor, it gets very difficult and arguments get complicated. People's reference points get jumbled, so it's like every protester is in John Lewis right?

Everybody who’s there, we start to get confused about where which things are off limits and which things [Music] aren't. Hello, everybody! I had the opportunity today to continue an ongoing conversation with a friend and colleague of mine, Greg Herwitz. We've been talking intensely for 30 years and have involved ourselves together in a multitude of projects, including one that was designed to help pull the Democrats to the center. Greg has been involved more recently in an Enterprise called us the story, which is aiming at criticizing the victim-victimizer narrative that characterizes our culture at least the pathological elements of it, but also delving into the root causes of the disintegration and polarization that now characterize our culture.

Now some of that's a consequence of intellectual movement, but some of it is actually facilitated by a series of Bad actors, and those involve people who are agitating directly and consciously, as well as indirectly and unconsciously, on the international front. Iran, China, and Russia are using the social media access that they have, especially to young people and particularly the young women, to really de and distort their political view and in a manner that's really, really hard on the culture.

And so Greg talks a fair bit about exactly how that's laying itself out, and on the optimistic side we talked a fair bit about well the counterposition to that which is that there's mass deep agreement among the vast majority of Americans on key policy issues both international and domestic, and none of that gets any air time. And so what do we do? Detail out the role of the bad international actors, talk a little bit about the psychopathic trolls and the Demonic algorithms and stress the fact that there is intense unity in a Central American story, hence us the story, let's say that does unite people properly and productively and passionately and psychologically and socially, and that there's reason for real optimism in that regard.

So join us for that discussion. Well Mr Herwitz, we meet again. It's good to see you. We've been talking for a long time about polarization and trying to ameliorate it and probably adding to it too inadvertently, because that's always a problem when when feed the feedback loops that are producing something like polarization get ra in. That's a good way of thinking about it—it isn't always obvious how to rectify that without amplifying it. It's a big problem and so we...