In this 195th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode we discuss the attacks on Israel by Hamas on October 7. We discuss values: Old Testament versus the West. We discuss frontiers, both legitimate and illegitimate, and terrorism. We discuss land rights and first peoples. We discuss the “Coalition Slicer-Dicer” and the perverse incentives of those who would kee...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 195.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
I'm of course sitting with Dr. Heather Hying.
We are trying an experiment.
We are broadcasting for the first time live on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
So that is an interesting experiment.
I hope it works well and we will figure out what exactly to do with it.
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Please just sign up for it, that way you will see future materials that we broadcast here.
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Appreciate it.
All right, so here we are on Twitter.
We're on Rumble.
We're on YouTube.
Watch Party is live on Locals, and also, I guess, for your subscribers on Twitter, there's chat.
No, not happening at all.
Okay.
We're learning, folks.
It's a live fire exercise.
Not sure that's the right... Wrong week for that.
Yeah, it's the wrong week for that.
Um, so we're, we're doing this today.
We're going to have two more live streams, uh, coming up, um, Dark Horse Livestreams Evolutionary Lens coming up on Saturday and again on Tuesday, and then we're taking a hiatus.
Um, but we're also having a private Q&A this weekend through local, so lots of places to, uh, to, to see what we're talking about in the next week.
And then there'll be some wonderful guest podcasts coming out, uh, while we're on livestream hiatus.
I think maybe we'll just jump right into the ads.
We always have three sponsors at the top of the hour.
So let us just say we have to pay the rent.
Our predicament means that in order for us to do what we do, paying the rent is just simply something that has to happen and ads are absolutely required for that to be the case.
So let us do that and then we'll get to the heart of the matter.
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Actually, no, that's mine.
Sorry.
Armourah, MD Hearing Aid, and American Hartford Gold.
Somewhat out of order.
Here we go.
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You have a footnote.
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All right.
I do not know what the world looks like to other people.
I I will say there has been a lot of talk on TwitterX about the important difference between what those of us who use that platform are seeing and what people who use other platforms or pay attention to the mainstream media are seeing with respect to the conflict in the Middle East.
There's a lot to say about it.
There is certainly a huge amount of noise being circulated on X. It is not like a refined portrait of anything.
There's lots of garbage.
But what is being noticed by many people is that one does seem to have access to the signal buried in that noise.
There's lots of actual evidence emerging on on TwitterX and we are able to sort through it and sorting really is the key to understanding where we are.
So We have been looking at this unfolding picture in Israel as a result of the attacks on Israel on October 7th and yesterday I recorded and we released on the same day A podcast with an Israeli journalist.
She's a freelancer who also served in the IDF, as all Israelis do, 25 years ago, and she served on the Gaza border.
This is Ifrat Feniksen, and the podcast has produced a very intense reaction.
Most of it extremely positive.
People including, I've seen, there's lots of public stuff.
You can look at the reactions publicly, and there's a tremendous outpouring of gratitude for a perspective that is not widely being discussed elsewhere.
There's also a concerted amount of pushback of an interesting kind, which we will talk a little bit about.
And then there is the behind-the-scenes responses that I have received, and I know Ifrat has also received, from people, some of them very well-positioned, very careful thinkers, who have reacted universally positively to this pod... universally positively with one exception.
I did get one Push back from somebody I quite respect.
In any case, we are going to talk today about The predicament in the Middle East about the implications in the wider world, which I believe we have no choice but to discuss, even though in some ways this event forces us to narrow our focus, or it attempts to force us to narrow our focus.
And none of this is easy to do.
And so maybe the thing to do is to just surface what I think is the underlying fundamental tension that causes even an exploration between two people, both of whom, one of whom I know for certain is acting in good faith and attempting to do what he thinks is right, and another person who I believe to be doing exactly the same thing but can't know for sure because it's not me.
You wanna jump in?
Just that I was not present for your conversation with Efrat, but I listened to it afterwards, and we spent a lot of time together.
We spent a lot of time listening to each other, and I don't generally listen to the guest episodes of Dark Horse because there's just only so many hours in the day, and we are already in each other's heads quite enough.
This one I felt was important to listen to and expected to just have to do it, It wasn't a burden at all.
It's extraordinarily powerful and real and human and, you know, really, we're scheduled to be live right now.
And it just feels, honestly, like a bit of a mistake.
I'd like to just encourage people to go and listen to UNFRA talking, which is up on the Rumble channel and the YouTube channel and Spotify and everywhere.
It's an extraordinary conversation, and one of the kinds of pushback that I've seen has been, but she's not an intelligence expert.
Yeah.
And, you know, she never claims to be.
Right.
And this is also the nature of much of the criticism I'm seeing.
You know, I published a tiny little thing just behind my Substack paywall on Israel yesterday.
And some of the pushback I got was, you know, you don't know anything.
You know, you're not an expert.
You're not Jewish.
OK.
All, you know, except that you don't know anything, you know, didn't claim to be an expert, specifically said, I don't know all what to think.
But this is barbarism.
I don't know that I don't remember that I used that word in the piece.
But, you know, calling out Hamas as a terrorist organization is remarkably getting a ton of pushback.
So I'm going to pursue this a little bit.
I think for those, many of the people watching this have undoubtedly seen the conversation with Efrat.
It went out on Twitter, so the overlap in the audience is substantial.
For those who haven't, I think this conversation will work perfectly well as a prequel in some sense.
We will talk about the predicament of having a conversation, and then you can watch the conversation, and I think it will only enhance it.
Let me lay out the fundamental problem, and mind you, I feel that the peril of even talking about this is profound.
I could be totally wrong about that.
It could be that there's no peril at all and that this is just normal pushback and that there's no real danger beyond the simple danger that accompanies attempting to sort out the truth in a contentious moment.
Or it's possible that there is actual real peril.
And we're not going to know.
But here's the problem.
As described in the podcast, and as you and I have talked about many times on Dark Horse, and as we have talked about elsewhere, we've talked about it in our book, The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, there is a tension between two possible modes of interaction that we humans can engage in.
One of them, whether I have the terminology defensively correct or not, I would call the West.
And the thing that I believe is at the core of the idea of the West is that we put aside our lineage membership.
You might take that as a shorthand for race.
Race is a A broken term for reasons we won't go into here, but lineage would be the responsible biological way to talk about such things.
A population being the living portion of a lineage.
The lineage being the whole thing stretching backward into history and forward potentially into the future.
It is an individual and all of their living descendants.
The humans are one lineage.
We have a most recent common ancestor.
And so one way to view the world is by that lineage.
But there are many, many sub-lineages right down to you and all your surviving descendants.
That's a tiny little lineage.
So there is one way to view Our relationships to each other that puts lineage aside, and I will say what that means.
It does not mean abandoning your family.
It does not mean pretending that your history isn't what it is.
It doesn't mean giving up your traditions.
But it means not playing a game in which lineages have structural advantages over other lineages.
Right?
It means a level playing field in which You choose who to partner with based on who has something that they bring to the table that is worth partnering with, and you do not seek to rig the game in favor of your people.
Okay?
Now, I believe that this is the only viable future for the Earth.
There was a version of the Earth, I will call it the Old Testament version of the Earth, which is lineage-based.
I don't think the Old Testament, in that context, there was any choice about it.
Anybody who opted out of lineage versus lineage competition was going to be wiped out by people who didn't.
And so in the past, there was no choice.
Now, I believe we are in the opposite predicament.
If we fall back into lineage versus lineage competition, and we've never completely escaped it, but if we fall back into it with modern technology, including modern weaponry, I don't believe that humanity can actually survive through it.
So let me just lay out some values that I hold, that I know I share with you, that You will see if you view it from these two lenses create a terrible unresolvable problem.
Okay.
I am a believer in the West.
I believe that we are all dependent on this Western notion or an upgraded version of it coming to dominate the way we interact over the planet and that we exist in basically two camps with respect to that.
I am a patriot.
I will actually fight and die for my country and more importantly for the West.
I believe that my country effectively sparked the modern West and that that is an idea on which we are so dependent that it is actually it is a hill worth literally dying on if need be.
I will also say I am Jewish.
I am in no way ashamed of this.
I don't know whether it is appropriate to be proud of that, though I am proud of many things that exist in Jewish culture, which I believe are inscribed deeply into me.
And I have no ambiguity whatsoever on whether or not the Jewish people are entitled to Survive and thrive on planet Earth.
I believe Israel has a right to exist and I would fight and I would die to keep it in existence.
What I will not do is lift a finger to provide advantage to any lineage over any other lineage.
I'm not saying I would not work through merit to produce advantages, but I do not want any structural advantage for any lineage.
I don't want anybody displacing anybody else.
Now, the problem is, on the one hand, if you view that set of values from a Western mindset, that is a mindset that has already accepted that we should partner with people irrespective of their phenotype and the implication that it carries for what genes they have in their genomes, then this may seem obvious.
If, on the other hand, you view it through an Old Testament lens, it may seem like a betrayal.
I don't believe there's anywhere you can stand that actually allows you to embrace the values that allow humanity to continue going forward without committing this betrayal according to the old rules.
Now, I don't know what to do about that.
I don't like the idea that in a world where the West is actually falling apart and we are being dragged back into the Old Testament rules.
I have to commit myself to a betrayal of them.
But nonetheless, it is where I find myself.
And I believe in some sense, we are all caught in this bind.
And so let me say something very clear about the events in Israel and what they mean.
Hi.
Yeah, please.
Play devil's advocate for a moment?
Absolutely.
One thing I heard you say at the end of your explanation, of which I'm well familiar with, of why what you're calling Old Testament values in counterpoint to the West should not be allowed to triumph was, and I believe this is a quote, I don't want anyone to displace anyone else.
That seems naive.
Yeah, the planet is limited.
We have finite resources.
And history is long.
And one thing that is true, of course, is that different waves of people have existed in places.
And so claims of land rights are often legitimately confused because two people, two peoples, two populations, two lineages, if you will, actually truly do feel like this is their land.
And, you know, the game that many on the Pseudo-left, I don't even know what to call them.
The game that many play around things like first peoples is only the first inhabitants of a space have rights.
And this is naive and silly, right?
This is the same mistake that, frankly, ecology makes.
The moment that we decide that this is the thing that we like, that's the thing that we will preserve.
Not before then, not after then.
And there's sort of an illusion of the falseness of the claim by calling it First Peoples, but the First Peoples are almost never first.
How could we know, right?
So by starting the clock on Israel at, say, 1940, It can appear that there was a land grab.
If you start the clock at many earlier points in history, it is clear that people who are in the lineage of the Jewish Israelis were actually there with rights to land first.
So, you know, again, your argument, I don't want anyone to displace anyone else.
With finite resources, with finite land, there will be displacement.
Okay.
So let me address all those.
And none of this will be new to you because you've heard how I think about this over the course of many years.
The first thing to say is when I say nobody should displace anybody, there is a completely arbitrary agreement that we must start the clock at approximately now.
That if we attempt to relitigate history, there is no stopping point, and it just simply can't be done.
There is no solution that looks like that, which does not mean that you won't have grievances unaddressed.
And in fact, you know, I'm a European Jew by extraction.
It's not how I grew up.
I grew up very much as an American, and it's how I feel, but my people are all European Jews.
They were massively displaced.
I have friends in all of the populations that did the displacing, and we will get to the meaning of that soon.
But the point is, I am not looking to re-litigate even recent history, even with respect to my own lineage.
And, you know, do I like that?
No, but I just know that if there's no solution down a path, then going down the path is not sensible.
And I'm not saying there's never anything to be done.
There are things to be done, and I hope they will be done.
But anyway, here's the fundamental problem with displacement.
You and I know that ultimately displacement is about something absurd.
The proximate part of it is not.
The proximate part of it is the life and death struggles of people.
Right?
And that is the important part.
But what selection is doing through us is it is attempting to take spellings of your genes and lodge them as deeply in the future as it can.
And I cannot articulate just how insane that is from the point of view of a person with actual values.
Because literally the following thing is true.
If I have a gene or a respiratory enzyme and another person has a different spelling of the same gene, My gene, at any cost, would like to displace that competitor gene, even if the competitor gene is superior at doing the job of the enzyme.
In the environment where the individual has landed.
Irrespective, even universally.
Evolution is not about the beauty of what these genes accomplish.
It is about the simple fact that spellings that drive other spellings to extinction tend to be the spellings that we see.
Yeah, it is, in your language, inherently Old Testament.
It is inherently Old Testament, and it is completely absurd.
I have used the analogy of a cosmic spelling bee that ends in genocide, right?
People will literally kill each other over genes that they didn't know existed 200 years ago.
And they don't know that they're doing it.
They think they're doing it for reasons of ideology or reasons of those people are unforgivable and whatever it may be.
And so anyway, when I say nobody should displace anybody, I don't mean that there's not going to be ebb and flow of how many of each type of person there is.
And I don't mean that those things don't have consequences.
What I mean is that when people become committed to the idea that they have a right to x and that those other people don't and that's why they're going to rig the system to for this that and the other.
They are operating on a program they're not even aware of.
An evolutionary program that is completely amoral.
So anyway, now I do have to say there's another way our long-time listeners will have heard me talk about The fact that there are certain times in which it makes perfect sense to intellectualize questions and parse them as carefully as possible and talk about them.
And I have specifically discussed the fact of a hunting party that goes out in need of resources for the tribe and a fighting force that goes out into battle.
Terrible danger posed by somebody who walks onto a battlefield and starts intellectualizing.
It is not the place for it.
And I am aware that one interpretation of what I am doing and what we are doing is that we are making exactly that error.
At a moment of perfect historical clarity, we are muddying the waters with intellectual stuff that has to be sidelined until the affront that has just occurred has been addressed.
I do not believe that's where we are.
If I did believe that that's where we are, I wouldn't do it.
I would not be that person.
So if I am making an error, it is an honest error.
I am intellectualizing here because I believe that our future as a species depends on us doing it at this exact moment, because we are going to be dragged into a paradigm from which there is no escape if we do not figure out exactly where we are and why, to the best of our ability.
So, I do need to make a clear statement about what took place.
The Hamas attack on southern Israel was so unambiguously and intentionally barbaric that there is no nuance to be had about the people who conducted it.
These people are, they have begged to be wiped off the face of the earth for the safety of the rest of us, and I believe that that should absolutely happen.
The problem is... These people.
That's the point.
When I say these people, I mean the people who actually made the decisions to do that.
And they have tactically embedded themselves in a population that has a variance in opinion about those attacks.
There are those who didn't participate in them, who fully believe in them.
They have a status that is not quite that of the people who committed the crimes, but it is not innocent.
And then there are To be certain, a great many people who are innocent, either because they would not have done this if they had had the decision-making power, and more to the point, whatever else is true, there are children.
Those children are innocent by definition.
They are not old enough to have understood what is taking place, enough to make a wise judgment.
So, we are stuck with the fact that you have a Terrorist organization wielding barbarism in order to make sure that there is no choice in the response and embedded in a population that is going to be devastated.
That guarantees that the response will in turn hurt civilians.
Right.
And I believe, and as I said on Twitter and as I wrote in Salon in 2015 after the Charlie Hebdo attack, that this is the point of terrorism.
The point of terrorism is not to harm your enemy, it is to induce your enemy to harm itself.
And so I believe that whatever else is true, Israel was put in a predicament that is a trap, that the only response it can make is inherently a response that will, I don't know what the net effect will be, but will have severely negative effects on the way people view the state of Israel.
That said, with respect to the barbaric people who engaged in this act, I have no sympathy whatsoever.
Nor should anyone.
I am shocked but not surprised at the celebrations across the world that we have seen of these attacks.
And this is a predicament that we have been in many times in the last few years.
Shocked but not surprised.
I believe I am morally shocked to see people actually blind themselves to what it is that they are championing is My inner being is shocked, but my analytical mind is not surprised, because as people who watch this podcast know, we have been talking about an incredible growth in anti-Semitism.
And I don't mean bullshit trumped-up charges of anti-Semitism.
I mean outright, obvious anti-Semitism, right through the rationalizing of Nazi atrocities, We have seen a huge growth in this in the last... I've seen it in the last year.
Gad Saad has been talking about it for a couple of years.
And so anyway, to see it in the form of people chanting at the Sydney Opera House or, you know, from the river to the sea in Dearborn,
And, you know, in Toronto and London and New York, all of these places where we have seen these people who do not, either do not care because they are so, their humanity is so fundamentally broken, or do not register what it is that they are celebrating.
I wonder.
I don't know that it matters, but I wonder with regard to the celebrations of the barbaric attack by Hamas on southern Israel.
The celebrations in the streets across the world, I wonder what percentage of those people who are on the streets celebrating?
actually saw what we saw on, you know, videos on social media, which is unfortunately the source of many, much of what we think we know.
And I don't see how you can get to explaining away an entire crowd chanting, gas the Jews.
But we've seen individuals on camera Proclaiming that Gaza should be wiped off the map.
Yep, and we've seen individuals on camera Proclaiming that Israel should be wiped off the map.
Yeah, so individuals on both sides will have Abhorrent extremist End of times, you know and end times style beliefs for sure and I And people are getting whipped into a frenzy by forces that we cannot name yet.
But maybe it doesn't matter if the people on the streets who are saying, finally, Palestine is going to be free, don't know, didn't see the war crimes of the young women being paraded around, abducted, raped, killed, right?
Like, it's classic war crimes.
Maybe they didn't know.
But an entire crowd chanting.
I mean, gas to Jews is gas to Jews.
There's no amount of what did they know, what didn't they know, that can get to that being an acceptable behavior.
I don't think we have to worry that they didn't see it.
I mean, for one thing, gas to Jews is gas to Jews, and from the river to the sea is from the river to the sea, right?
These are unambiguous, and they are...
responsive to an Old Testament view of the world in which the displacement will happen and the question is who will be displaced, not whether displacement will occur.
So I would like to lay out what I think is the fundamental principle that divides the two sides, and I want to be very careful I am not talking about two sides in terms of people.
Anybody who wakes up to where we are and joins the right side, I would say is welcome, as long as they do it in good faith.
So it's the sides that are right and wrong.
It's not the people who are fundamentally right or wrong, though some people have done unforgivable things.
That's where Hamas is.
The principle is this one.
The Western view in which we do not displace other lineages structurally.
We might out-compete them, and they might out-compete us, but we do not seek to hobble them in the structures of society, to buy a society in the favor of lineages.
That viewpoint is inconsistent with notions of collective guilt and punishment.
And this is a much more difficult topic than people understand.
For one thing, I would point out that the antisemites, the real antisemites that we see so much of in recent times, I mean, at least if you're looking in the right place, make this error.
What they are saying is because of X behavior, which may or may not be real, that is being done by or has been done by Jewish people, that the Jews X. The Jews deserve X. And my point would be your error
is in imagining that the presence of Jews in something abhorrent like The vaccine campaign that surrounded COVID, the gaslighting of the vaccine injured, the establishment of centralized bank digital currencies that are clearly designed to control behavior.
The presence of people from any population in there does not indict all members of that population.
That is Old Testament thinking.
It is not consistent with the values of the West, which most of the people shouting these out anti-Semitic things would in their calmer moments say that they believed in.
So it is the collective guilt that is being imposed on a population and that collective guilt is wrong whether or not you are committing it against Jews or you are committing it against the entire population of Gaza on the basis that Gaza is in an inseparable mix of people who are guilty of this kind of thinking and people who clearly are not.
And if you don't think those people exist, consider that there are children.
So it is, I'm not arguing that we necessarily even know how to operationalize a program in which we do not end up inflicting collective punishment on people because we can't separate them.
You've just had a massive attack on southern Israel, and Israel does not have surgical tools to simply deal with the people who are connected and leave those who are not connected unmolested.
I don't know what Israel is supposed to do about that.
It clearly is going to have to respond in exactly the way you would expect, as Hamas understood that it would when it planned this attack.
I would just ask you, all of you, when you're trying to figure out if somebody is an anti-Semite, if somebody is making a rational argument in terms of what the response of Israel to the attack from Gaza should be, ask yourself the question, Are they at least formally recognizing a distinction between those who have actually committed a crime and those who are caught in the crossfire?
And we must separate these things.
It is as a formal matter at first and as a practical matter as soon as we can figure out how to do it.
But I want to say one other thing before I let you jump in.
The problem is that collective guilt and punishment is a morally offensive perspective.
But it is not without a rational explanation.
It'll be tempting to say it's irrational to punish people for the sins of their fathers.
The problem is the reason that this concept exists and that we have seen revivals of it in so many different places is that of course it works.
To punish somebody's descendants.
And in fact, one of the ways in which terrorism is fostered is to promise to enrich the families of those who commit it.
That's how as one, it's not the only component, but it is one of the components that causes this to be a wicked problem that we cannot shake.
Well, that's that's exactly right.
Liquidate a population and redistribute their wealth to the victors.
It's as ancient as – it's more ancient than humans, right?
Any social, long-lived organism that has territories, that has resources, wherein resources are limiting, which means for everyone.
is not driven primarily by hatred of other.
The hatred of other comes after, on top of.
It's a mechanism.
It is a mechanism by which to take the things that other has.
And the things include land, include food, include women, which have been a resource of war and which we saw when in the U.S.
we woke up on the morning of October 8th and saw what had happened.
Um, what's that?
Was it the seventh that we woke up to it?
Um, because they're ahead of us, yeah.
Um, so there are asymmetries always, but one of the asymmetries that it's somehow considered
Icky to talk about is that the redistribution of wealth that would happen with the ousting of the Jews would be far greater than the redistribution of wealth by the ousting of the Palestinians, which is not being attempted Anyway.
Okay.
Right.
And so, I also think that this is a moment to review the types of frontiers, which we talk about in the final chapter of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide.
That this, I mean, this is the illegitimate third frontier that we talk about.
Third type of frontier that we talk about.
And this is war.
This is what it is.
So, I think that's a good idea, and we will review Frontiers here in just a second, but let me just say the choice is between a Western view in which collaboration is done irrespective of lineage.
You collaborate with those who are in a position to collaborate productively with you, which produces A huge amount of wealth for everybody involved.
That's why it's one of the reasons it is so superior.
And when I say superior, I'm not talking about aesthetically.
It is safer.
It is fairer.
It is more liberating.
It allows all of the best characteristics of human beings to be augmented.
My argument would be it is Fortunately, stable under circumstances where growth is possible, and in contraction the reverse happens, and that's where I believe we are in history.
So let me just run through the frontier thing, if that's all right, so that people can just know the language that you and I used to discuss this.
Frontiers are growth opportunities, evolutionarily speaking.
This has nothing to do with people.
Creatures are in search of frontiers, which is underexploited or unexploited opportunities that they are positioned to utilize.
And what happens is when they discover such a thing, their population grows.
In the period in which it grows, those are the good times because there's literally more than enough to go around and all it takes to get it is work.
Over in ecology space, we would tend to use the language of niche.
Unexploited, undiscovered.
Yeah, or under-exploited.
Previously underused niche.
Niche, right.
So, the first kind of frontier is a geographic frontier.
Imagine a creature that swims across a channel and finds itself on an island in which it is well-suited ecologically and has no competitors.
Well, that creature, if it can find a mate, maybe, well, we could talk about how that happens, but that creature, if it can find a mate, may be able to beat the evolutionary odds by a thousandfold, you know, leaving a population behind, whereas under normal circumstances in a population that wasn't growing, it would only replace itself.
So that is a geographic frontier, and geographic frontiers are tremendous opportunities for a population to experience growth.
And at least in English, and I assume all languages, honestly, when you say frontier, it is the geographic frontier that the mind goes to.
That is what people assume you're talking about.
Yep.
But people have talked metaphorically about the next kind of frontier rather regularly, which is a technological frontier.
Technological frontier is one in which you don't find any new territory, but you figure out some way to utilize your territory so that it is as if you have found more territory.
And the obvious example would be the transition from hunting and gathering to farming, which can support a great deal larger population on the same patch of territory if the territory is hospitable to farming.
And it's fractal.
So within farming, how is it that you take advantage of steep slopes?
Well, you invent terracing.
And suddenly a landscaper, you knew how to farm, but you couldn't keep the seeds in place, the runoff was too much.
Suddenly you can make arable land out of land that was untenable.
Yep.
And then you've got crop rotation and So many.
All sorts of technology.
And each of these constitutes an as-if discovery of new territory, and the point is it creates a temporary period in which people are effectively wealthy because there's more resource than they are utilizing.
It's the good times.
And then the population bumps up against some new, what we call, carrying capacity, which is the limit of how big a population that niche can support.
And you therefore will have boom and bust cycles, the boom cycles being dependent on new technological frontiers.
Right, which can be closely spaced.
You can have a period in which frontier after frontier, and then you can have... Which looks like perennial growth.
Right, and it creates this fantasy that technology can create permanent growth, which is how we got ourselves into this terrible mess in the first place.
Okay, so you've got geographic frontiers, you've got technological frontiers.
When the technological frontiers run out, imagine for a moment that humans, as a special case of what's true for all creatures, are addicted to growth.
The reason that they are addicted to growth is because it causes them to pursue every opportunity that might be a growth opportunity.
And that means when they are starved for growth, they effectively end up jonesing.
The jonesing population is a dangerous population because there is a way, without creating any growth, without increasing the size of the pie, there is a way to bring your population something that tastes an awful lot like growth.
And that is to steal what somebody else has that they can't defend.
Right?
This is a transfer of wealth frontier.
And the point is, it's not a real frontier, because the pie actually shrinks.
If you make war on your neighbor and you steal their land, then what you're doing is not discovering some enlightened way of getting more from the world, either by finding a new landmass or some new way of doing stuff.
You're just stealing.
It depends on the scope of your view, right?
It feels like a frontier to you.
Wow.
And so a geographic frontier might well be global.
A technological frontier might well be global.
Good for everyone who finds such a thing.
But a transfer of wealth or a transfer of resource frontier is inherently positive for someone to someone else's negative experience.
Right.
And so anyway, in our book, the final punchline to this is, geographic frontiers were done.
We found them all until we get to some other planet, and we're a long way from doing that in any useful fashion.
Technological frontiers, there will be more of them, but you cannot rely on them.
They do not come regularly spaced enough to keep us from descending into this third frontier, which we must avoid, this Old Testament lineage against lineage transfer of resource frontier, because what it looks like is war and genocide, which is what history looks like.
And the technological frontiers often come with downsides that we can't predict in advance.
Quite.
So the argument that we make, and we're not going to explore it deeply here, is that there is actually another possibility, at least theoretically, which is to create circumstances that give the human beings the sensation of growth.
And I don't mean fooling them, but I mean giving them the sensation of growth so that the triggers that cause them to flip into that Lineage against lineage, genocidal warfare-making mindset do not get triggered.
And this is not some fantasy.
It's not utopian any more than the idea that you could have a house in which the temperature is always spring-like on the inside.
We do have those houses, and the fact is we do this through perfectly mundane means that cause us to, you know, arbitrarily dump heat into our backyard to keep the building cool.
It's not a violation of physics, right?
The physics held, but from the point of view on the inside of the building, it's nice and pleasant.
So there's a question about whether or not we could architect a stable, steady state that did not trigger people to become genocidal, which We believe is the inevitable outgrowth of just simply allowing the system of frontiers to run its course with the ebb and flow of technological things.
So anyway, not to over intellectualize a situation that is simply composed of barbarism and tragedy, but at some level the real question is if you care about the barbarism.
You want to see the barbarism stamped out forever.
Then the question is, what is forcing us back into that mode?
And it could be that it is just simple, the normal turning of history.
Or it could be that cynical forces are attempting to thwart the success of the alternative mode.
And unfortunately, recent history gives us an awful lot of evidence that something is working against our ability to complete the project of the West, which was, it was a prototype.
We never got to a place where lineage didn't matter at all.
We never got there, but we certainly did know that that was the direction to head.
And there was a time in the very recent past where effectively we all knew it and we have lost touch with that.
And so, um, That is, in some sense, what the podcast that Ifrat and I did yesterday was about.
It was looking at this tragedy that occurred in Israel and asking questions that are so painfully obvious that it cannot be the conscious mind, it cannot be the values that we claim to hold that would actually block us from asking them.
Why was arguably the most defended border on earth, undefended on the anniversary of a historical attack on Israel, the Yom Kippur War, to the extent
that Hamas was able to breach that border in many places simultaneously and bring a large force into the country that operated nearly unopposed for many, many hours.
That is a question that a rational person would have to ask, and maybe it has a perfectly mundane explanation.
But the problem is, if you search for that mundane explanation, it does not suggest itself.
This was such a failure that one has to bend over backwards to rescue the idea that it was organic.
So I don't know what that means.
There are lots of ways it could be inorganic, but the lack of interest apparently in figuring out which of those actually explains it is troubling in and of itself.
Well, it's reminiscent of three and a half years ago, of course, as as COVID broke and schools and businesses were closed and lockdowns ensued.
And the CDC and the WHO and in the U.S., the NIH, the NIAID with Fauci at the helm and such, just started putting in place things that didn't make sense.
Over and over and over again.
How?
How could it be this wrong?
Right?
What are the chances?
And this is something that we weren't saying then but we started saying soon thereafter.
It's one thing to have to come up with a lot of pronouncements or a lot of action and make errors.
This is both complex and complicated and there will be errors even if the people who are supposedly looking out for us are actually competent and doing their best.
However, At the point that nearly every response is the opposite of what turns out to be true or should have been done.
That is no longer something that would have happened by chance.
So it raises questions.
How could it be a set of responses that are extraordinarily unlikely to have happened by chance?
And this is both an entirely different situation and yet it raises, for me, the hardly ghosts, they're not dead, we're still living in a world in which many of us have come to be aware of how much more broken even the systems that we knew were broken are.
But I guess the question is, what does broken mean?
A system might be broken if it can't do what it is trying to do, because the world has become, again, perhaps more complex or even just more complicated than the system can handle.
Or a system might be broken in which it is, and here I am borrowing, I don't remember from whom, effectively a skin suit of itself.
Where it still appears to be the thing that it was in which we had our trust.
For instance, scientists in the US, NSF and NIH.
For many who have ever before considered public health, the CDC, the WHO, the United States government.
If those things are not actually what they used to be, but they still wear the label, if they still have the skin suit, then broken isn't broken.
It's only broken according to what we think, what we still believe these systems are supposed to be doing.
Yeah.
It's a feature-not-a-bug question.
Is this the bugification of everything, or are these features to some undeclared system that read as bugs to us because we can't imagine the level of dysfunction and skullduggery would be anything other than
um natural it's it's an almost an unthinkable thought and so let me right and therefore easy to dismiss right and i think um one of you says in the podcast you released yesterday you know actually a fan of the idea of conspiracy uh theorist i think i think one of you says this in yesterday's uh podcast yeah the question is because if you know if if you actually think that no conspiracy ever happens what are you doing
Yeah, first of all, I mean, we just simply know that they happen.
And so any epistemology that declares them fictional is inherently wrong.
Sorry, I was looking something up.
We are being asked not to register the level of dysfunction, and we are also being asked to focus on one crisis at a time, which, if Rot correctly points out, is part of the siloification that causes us not to see the anomalies is part of the siloification that causes us not to see the anomalies that Well, I guess I didn't hear in your conversation yesterday a, we are being asked to focus only on one thing at a time.
You know, when something extraordinary happens, you know, many of us will pivot.
But I don't know.
I think that is just part of it.
human nature.
We get both overwhelmed and full, and some new crisis comes, and some number of us are like, I just don't know enough, and I'm focused over here, and I can't do that now.
Right.
I can't become expert enough to say anything about that thing now.
It's a natural reaction.
You know, people have wisely discovered that multitasking isn't a real thing.
Right?
That it's, to the extent that you do it, you do it a great consequence, negative consequence to your ability to do either of the tasks well.
This is the same idea cognitively.
It's hard to pay attention to multiple things at once.
But here's what happens if you don't, I'm not saying you can pay attention well to two things at once, but you can pay attention to the meta pattern.
In other words, you can zoom out.
Yes.
And you can say, for example, in this case, here is something that I register as a meta-anomaly.
We are being asked to accept that the Israeli military and intelligence complex aired so massively as to allow this incredible breach of this border that apparently, according to a captured Hamas operative, shocked even them.
They did not expect to be able to do this.
Now, I don't know if that's true or not.
It could be propaganda.
Who knows?
But We are being asked to accept that there is some organic explanation and that we are furiously trying to figure out what it might be when that extends well beyond any plausible failure.
And I will defend that in a second if I need to, but superficially to say, if that failure is beyond what an organic failure could produce plausibly, then the question is, Has something gotten into the Israeli system that is ready to sacrifice civilians or some other purpose that has not been named and we do not know?
Now, that's an incredible thought.
It's a terrible thought.
On the other hand, if you look at what Israel did during COVID, The entire population was betrayed.
Israel had amongst the highest vaccination rates of any country on earth.
That was the result of whatever it is that controls the Israeli system of government inflicting unnecessary harm on the population of Israel.
I don't know what to make of it, but the fact that you have two historical events that appear to have nothing to do with each other, that share the characteristic of looking like something that must go Beyond the level of organic failure, both of which involve something in control that has asymmetrical access to information, putting the population of citizens in jeopardy of terrible things, and then not telling the truth about it.
Right.
And again, I think, you know, massive unprecedented error.
I would say that error there is doing the same job as broken in what I was talking about earlier, that error and broken can mean two totally different things.
You know, perhaps everyone involved is actually overwhelmed with with grief and a desire that this never, ever, ever happen again, because the system is what it appears to be.
And it is the thing that it came to be under normal circumstances or Perhaps there are those who have helped to make things happen who are benefiting.
Right.
And if this were a simple organic failure, then across the board we would be expecting to see people trying to figure out what it was, because the chances—I Did Hamas get into the military and intelligence?
Did it compromise Israeli military and intelligence and cause this breach?
That would certainly be a question you would want to... I'm not saying it happened, I don't think it did, but You would want to rule it out because something beyond normal has to explain this.
And let me just, again, you know, the point about conspiracy theory is this.
If you really believe that the idea that a hypothesis alleges a possible conspiracy is invalidating on its face, then you're not paying attention.
We have all kinds of collusion taking place, and the harm to the public if you didn't notice it over COVID, then you really got to go back and review what happened.
There was an awful lot of collusion to keep us in the dark, to cause us to do things that were actually not in our interest, To fail to register opportunities to protect certain populations, like young people, from dangerous things like so-called vaccines, from which they get no benefit.
In an attempt to memory hole all of that by the same players who effectively demonized those of us who were resistant in the first place.
Anybody who's paying attention can see it.
And so the point is really not, are you a conspiracy theorist or not?
The question is, are you any good at it?
Right?
Are you good at being rigorous in the confusing landscape where collusion may be taking place?
Can you avoid seeing ghosts where they're not?
You know, and it's not easy because, frankly, the nature of conspiracy is to create a phony story which then causes Occam's razor to trigger artificially, right?
So how do you tell the difference between an organically simple explanation for something and a phony baloney simple explanation that effectively obscures the truth?
That's the difficulty, philosophically.
And how do you do it when all of the emotional triggers are on high?
It's even more difficult.
Right.
It's that, if we can get you... You're scared for your life, maybe because it's a virus, maybe because it's barbaric terrorists.
But either way, you're scared for your life, and fear is running your decision-making apparatus, and it is affecting your ability to see what might be true.
Right.
By forcing your amygdala into a control position, you can sideline your conscious mind.
And the question is, is somebody doing that?
Because we will lose all of our best tools for all of the stuff that we as humans are capable of doing in a calmer mindset.
So let me lay out a couple pieces here.
One, let us just simply talk about the level of failure of what took place on the Gaza border.
We are told that the force that was supposed to be there and did not show up in significant numbers for many hours had actually been moved.
This is something Efrat calls our attention to, that they've been moved.
On the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, which is a strange choice because, of course, symbolically speaking, that would be a moment at which you would have to imagine at least some extra danger over your average day.
But let's imagine that somebody made an argument inside of Israeli defense circles that, in fact, in this case, the necessity of that force was greater at a remote location and that they needed to be pulled from the border.
I cannot imagine that some person would not have stood up and said, that can't possibly be right.
Because at the very least, we can't be totally certain of what our enemy is able to detect of our movements.
Maybe Hamas is connected to other nations with intelligence services.
Who's to say what they know?
And so at the moment that you argue to pull your force from the border that it protects, it may be that you are sending your enemy a message that this is a good time to attack because defense will never be more absent.
And...
And so inherently, if you were going to pull some large fraction of that force to somewhere else, you would leave another force in its place.
You would leave half of that force there in an activated form.
You would do something, but you wouldn't just pull them away because of some superficial need, which may be very real somewhere else.
That doesn't make any sense.
And so, so we are left with a paradox, which is behavior that appears to extend beyond incompetence, which is the exact pattern that we saw during COVID.
It was behaviors that were, are still being dismissed as incompetent, but can't be incompetent because it's not plausible.
That level of incompetence is implausible.
And so I think, can you look up Hanlon's razor?
Will Wikipedia suffice for this?
I think for this it'll work.
We don't recommend Wikipedia.
Okay.
Okay.
I'm going to argue that we are living downstream of this appalling principle.
That this principle is in fact a weapon of war.
Maybe it was not formulated that way, but it is functioning that way.
And my point is going to be Hanlon's Razor is a false corollary of Ockham's Razor.
Now Occam's razor is not a perfect principle in part because it's an ancient principle and it needs a little updating.
Occam's razor loosely states that the simplest explanation for a set of observations tends to be correct.
All other things being equal.
All other things being equal, and I would argue that the proper reformulation of Occam's Razor so that it becomes a rock-solid principle is, given perfect information, given perfect and complete information, the simplest explanation is always true.
And that we never have perfect and complete information.
So the point is we have to downregulate it to is generally true.
But the problem is Hanlon's razor is not a razor.
Occam's razor is actually a surgically precise, if properly instantiated, a surgically precise and operational framework for reason.
Hanlon's razor masquerades as a razor.
But not only is it not a razor, it's not even a hand axe.
It's a sledgehammer.
And the idea is that it is used to silence anybody who starts putting two and two together and seeing evidence of collusion.
And I am, hear me clearly, I am not saying that if you applied Hanlon's razor, you won't be right 95% of the time.
You will be.
In general, there's a lot of incompetence out there and it explains a lot of broken stuff.
Well, and as with so many of these things, it really depends on both where you're standing and what your scope of view is.
And so you can say about one thing that you see, now it can't have been, it's very unlikely to have been malice, it's probably stupidity.
But you go farther and farther back in either space or time and you see more and more of the things and If you're just finding stupidity everywhere, and there's one thing that could be making it happen, you have to start thinking that there is something potentially malicious as opposed to simply incompetent.
Because stupidity is a kind of incompetence, and malice is a kind of intelligence, right?
Like, malice requires Uh, at least across large scales, not just intelligence, but a kind of organization.
So, you know, malice is standing in for conspiracy here and stupidity is standing in for, um, incompetence and therefore to some degree chance.
And this, you know, this is consistent with like, Oh, most people are stupid.
I'm like, you know what?
Um, most people are convincible of things that aren't true, but actually the level of stupidity is a lot lower than people attribute.
Uh, and, uh, Though it may be rising.
But in any case, here's my point.
When is it really important that you not apply Hanlon's so-called razor actual sledgehammer?
In the 5% of cases where actually what you're looking at can't be explained by incompetence.
And so what it does is it puts in the hand of people who have no demonstrated capacity to sort between instances in which incompetence has created a failure versus something like sabotage.
It puts in their hands a way of silencing those who would explore the question.
So that is not something you want alive in the world, right?
To recognize, you know, if you've rephrased it so that it was actually a proper claim, you know, something like, Incompetence often explains that which we are tempted to ascribe to malevolence.
Something like that.
Okay, that's true.
But what the fuck is the word never doing there?
And when did we all take a class on what can be?
The point is, you have to have a standard in order to wield that in any useful way.
If you're going to have a never, then you have to have a rock-solid standard, a threshold in which you can say, in this case, we don't see enough evidence of something unusual to really say that we are outside the bounds of what can be explained by incompetence.
The level of incompetence that it would take for Is it the most modern military on Earth?
Certainly one of the top few.
Is it the most sophisticated intelligence service on Earth?
Certainly one of the top few.
What would it take for that combination?
I mean, in addition, it's not like the rest of the sophisticated intelligence organizations around the world.
It's not as if, you know, The U.S.
doesn't view its interests as tied up in events in the Middle East.
The U.S.
didn't notice Hamas for a year practicing and building for this operation.
Nobody noticed.
And now they're telling us that they are surgically attacking the installations that Hamas uses to conduct its operations.
We know where those things are, but we didn't know that there was an operation being planned.
And they pulled the The force off the border and crossed their fingers on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War?
Look, maybe there's a great explanation for how this happened, but it is the lack of curiosity about the oddness of that pattern that really tells the story, I suspect.
Yeah.
It is also, of course, true that malicious intent will be more successful if part of what it does, if one of its methods, is to increase incompetence, such that there are fewer individuals around to notice what is happening, to say, wait a minute, to, you know, to in any way deflect or resist the things that are happening.
And I have no idea about the IDF, but certainly in the U.S.
we see, I believe we see both things in the U.S.
military, right?
You know, it has been ever harder to attract people according to the old standards, and you have the feminization of the military through various means, And all of that is distracting a whole bunch of people, while who knows what kind of cover that gives to the other things that are happening.
Which brings me to the next facet of this, which is something I'm horrified to be watching.
But this turn of events, historical and whatever their nature, let's say that they're perfectly organic, that what took place is exactly what it appears to be, a massive intelligence and military failure.
In Iran, in Israel, a cleverly planned, utterly barbaric attack by Hamas designed to produce a massive reaction that will curry sympathy in the world, whatever. utterly barbaric attack by Hamas designed to produce a massive Let's say it's exactly what it appears to be.
The consequence of it, outside of the Middle East, is to make conversations that were taking place a week ago Very difficult to have, if not impossible now.
And what I would point to is that there is a, this has been quite true across multiple events in recent history, there's something that I would call the coalition slicer-dicer working on us.
And what it does, let's say that you have a group of people who have found each other and they have come to understand how to interact with each other and they have established Bonds of trust over their growing sensemaking surrounding COVID, right?
You have the COVID dissidents who are realizing that they're all seeing pieces of the puzzle and then they pull those pieces and they say, oh my God, here's what the larger puzzle looks like.
And they are empowered and they hold meetings and they become an important That is a very powerful force.
on the landscape because as the population wakes up to the fact that something was done to it that was unholy, these people have all been seen to offer pieces of the truth along the way.
That is a very powerful force.
That force is fiercely divided over the interpretation of what took place on October 7th in Israel to the point that it can no longer move in a coordinated direction because the tensions over the current thing are such that it has forgotten what
what it understood about the bonds of trust that were necessary for that to function are strained to the breaking point.
And that is not the first time it's happened.
When it happened with COVID, if we step back one phase into this landscape of heterodoxy, COVID absolutely divided the coalition that had formed around the danger of the woke revolution.
The woke revolution brought a great many people together.
It caused those same bonds to form.
People were actually an important force in the world, pushing back on this woke narrative, calling out ESG and all of those things.
That was devastated by COVID.
Those who could not see past the mainstream perspective on COVID took a different path.
And so that heterodox world was sliced right down the middle.
And we've now seen it happen again.
And this has impacts across the globe.
It has impacts on the U.S.
presidential election.
It has impacts on our understanding of U.S.
entanglements abroad generally.
And my concern is, you know, Divide and Conquer is a famously ancient strategy.
My guess is we would find the formulation of it in many different traditions.
Obviously Napoleon knew about it, surely Sun Tzu is going to have things to say about it.
But Divide and Conquer in an information landscape might look very much like a An ongoing slicer-dicer operation that simply tears coalitions apart so that they are never capable of making any meaningful change, which is, after all, I think, Goliath's purpose.
Frustrating, meaningful change, so that Goliath retains the control that he has engineered for himself, is the point.
And so, in any case, again, stepping back to the meta level, yes, you have this absolutely unignorable real phenomenon involving life and limb and absolute, unignorable barbarism taking place really on the ground amongst real people.
That is very difficult for a human being to step back from and try to place in any sort of context, because that almost feels disrespectful.
But the fact is that larger context, that larger context, to the extent that there is some amoral entity that might be commandeering our governance structures and causing them to act against our interests as citizens,
that it might be shaping world events to fuel the time-traveling money that it might be shaping world events to fuel the time-traveling money printer and, you know, and make its black budget flush with money, whatever it might be doing, we would be fools not to recognize that at the very least the following two things Thank you.
There are people who get rich when human beings need weapons.
Okay?
There are people who have a perverse incentive that their business interests cause them to view peace and war with an inverse valence of what a normal person would see.
That is true.
It's surely also true that there are people who profit from sickness, who view sickness and health also with an inverse valence, because their business is treating people who are sick.
So, if such forces exist, and if we do not live in a world free of corruption, we have to ask, to the extent that things seem to defy an explanation based on normal incompetence, is somebody else driving?
And are they doing so because they have a perverse interest and a great deal more power than any rational society would give them?
I think that's, yeah, I don't know what else you have planned, but that seems like, that seems like the culminating thought, right?
That we know, everyone, everyone knows that.
There are people who win when we are at war.
And there are people who win when we are sick.
Imagine what you will about why individuals got into the business that they did.
But weapons manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies as, frankly, at one level, sort of the shallow, the obvious end of the pool, which doesn't make sense as a metaphor, but you can simply point to they will win when you aren't doing as well as you want to be doing.
Yes.
That sentence could be reframed as a conspiracy.
Right?
Right.
It's simply true.
It's obvious.
It's obvious.
It's simply true.
We are humans.
We are social.
We come together over shared interests, sometimes needs, things that come to be shared because of how we have ended up in places.
And if you end up being someone who wins when the world is in conflict, You are not going to be interested in having the rest of us figure out how to get rid of the conflict.
I want to add two last thoughts and then I think it is a proper place to wrap this up.
One thought is that a week ago we were stuck in a predicament where some of us were seeing an appalling uptick in anti-Semitism and of a very disquieting kind.
Not just the standard tropes, but also people who I consider reasonable on the average day.
Accounts that I've known for years.
People who have defended me and others in circumstances where they felt it necessary.
Experimenting With anti-semitism.
They don't even think they, I don't even think they know they're doing it in many cases.
But experimenting, and what do I mean by anti-semitism?
Am I seeing phantoms?
No, I'm talking about people who violate the principle that I laid out at the beginning of this podcast, which is they are toying with the tropes of collective punishment and guilt.
That is to say, what can we say of the Jews?
And the answer is next to nothing, because the Jews is a large lineage.
It is composed of many sub-lineages.
It extends back into history thousands of years across multiple languages.
Generalizing is a fool's paradise.
But I do believe that one of the things that I've seen, I've seen the slicing dicing thing that we just, and it is most disturbing because it really is going to prevent us from making any useful progress against that which threatens us all.
But I have also seen many people who I think were agnostic on the question of whether or not there was anti-semitism afoot in some new way or whether we were imagining it or whether that was You know, the ADL shaking people down or whatever, which it may well be, but that's not what some of us were seeing.
Some of us were seeing a genuine uptick, and maybe that's because we stumbled into a place where it was taking place all along, and so it's our awareness that has taken an uptick, but it's also quite likely, especially in light of how many people's position has moved in this direction, that it's just a simple genuine uptick.
And one, frankly, My work on lineage selection has predicted for 20 years, right?
The contraction of our economy will trigger this uptick in anti-Semitism for reasons I've explained elsewhere.
I believe that what we've seen, people chanting fuck the Jews and gas to Jews in Australia, from the river to the sea in Dearborn, all of these unambiguous celebrations of barbarism against Jews, Caused a lot of people who I think were straddling a certain fence to wake up and see that actually this thing is real and it is much more widespread than they had expected.
And so I am hoping that at least we can stop having that mind-numbing discussion and maybe some of the people who were experimenting with thoughts in this direction will also wake up to what it is that they were becoming party to.
I think that would be perfectly natural.
Many of us on the left at some point had to wake up to what kinds of messages were circulating on the left and recognize, actually, these are not my people.
I don't know what they're talking about, but they're reviving racism of many different kinds.
That has nothing to do with any value I want any part of.
And this is that same thing.
That anti-Semitism thing is a feature of the landscape.
People have been way too comfortable with it, and it is time for people to recognize it's real, and we know where it goes.
You don't want to live through that, whether you're Jewish or not.
We cannot afford to have that thing happen again.
Yeah, let me just say the reprehensible responses, anti-Israel responses to the barbarism that happened on October 7th.
are an effect, a downstream effect, of things like the progressive stack.
You know, the progressive stack, which says you don't get to talk in this meeting, at this activist event, at this protest, until all the people with more points against them, whose populations have been more oppressed, have had their say first.
That is an insidious and insane rule and when you see people at the Sydney Opera House chanting, gas the Jews, that is one of the things that's downstream.
Yeah.
Okay.
Last point, or it's a couple of points tied together.
Ifrat was challenged rather directly by a couple of different people, including one person who I apparently know from the conference in Bath, which is where I first met Ifrat, the COVID conference, COVID dissidents in Bath a couple years ago.
And this person challenged her.
It was a very strange bit of pushback.
It was very personal.
Do you want me to show it?
I don't know.
I'm not sure I want to amplify it, but it appeared this person is somebody who had been aligned with Ifrat and had been a friend, and they have Had a falling out.
And this person leveled charges that I think carry no water.
Effectively, the charge is that Ifrat was misrepresenting herself as expert in things.
And I think it will be very clear to anybody who listens to the podcast that Ifrat has simply portrayed what her expertise is.
She said she was in the IDF 25 years ago.
She spent one day a week sitting on the border as an observer and the rest In intelligence, you can judge for yourself how relevant that experience is to a modern attack on that border, but it wasn't like it was being obscured.
So, I do think that in some sense what we did with that podcast was we violated a rule that is sacred to one party.
That because we talked about this in analytical and hopefully careful terms, that we got in the way of a program to accomplish something.
And it is those people driving a program to accomplish something that threaten to drag the Middle East and perhaps the entire world back into the Old Testament set of rules, which with modern technology is not something that we will survive.
The rule that you broke was engaging in speculation.
That is, I didn't say that well.
The rule that you broke was, you shall not say anything about which you are not 100% confident.
And we saw this also during COVID, right?
And, you know, part of the objections to what was happening during COVID was, no, they're saying things that couldn't possibly be true, right?
They have no way of knowing that these products are safe.
Just stick with safe.
They cannot know that given the time period for which they've been out.
Therefore, if they are saying that, what else are they saying that they can't possibly know or that they know isn't true, right?
But there's the idea that you shall not say anything about which you do not have complete proof is an absurd rule, so long as you are clear when you are engaging in speculation.
And you two in that conversation were extraordinarily clear.
I believe we were clear.
I would also point out that this account that came after Ifrat specifically said, to the extent that the complaint was specific, she said that she, the person leveling the charge, prefers to work from research and documents, she specifically mentions, and that Ifrat has taken to looking at other kinds of evidence and extrapolating from it.
Now in a perfect world, we had access to all the documents right away.
Sure.
But imagine in this case, what that rule does to us.
The documents that explain the failure of the IDF to defend the Israeli population on the Gaza border.
If we get to see those documents at all, it could be years down the road.
World War could have started as a result of what takes place in the Middle East over the next couple of months before we ever get a chance to look at those documents.
And we may never get a chance to look at those documents.
Nor would you be able to take them at face value if you did.
That is the problem of the modern era where we have called it here the fog machine of war before, which means the fog is intentional.
They're creating a situation in which we cannot figure out what is true, and that is not on us, but you cannot ask us not to notice obvious anomalies and attempt to figure out what they mean.
This is what human beings do.
This is how human beings upgrade their software.
They find anomalies, and they struggle to understand what could possibly explain them.
And when they succeed, they do so through a pattern of hypothesizing, making predictions, and then discovering that those predictions are either true or false.
This is the natural order of people left with a difficult puzzle to sort out, and to ask people not to do it is an absurdity, especially given how much the world has at stake in this particular situation.
Okay, the final thing I will say is that among the problems of the slicer-dicer program that I see operating, breaking coalitions, is a great many people Who have what I would call a deal-breaker circuit.
And I have a few of these deal-breaker circuits myself.
Barbarism is a deal-breaker for me, right?
You can't rescue yourself from having engaged in barbarism.
That is to say, inflicting torment on people intentionally for tactical reasons.
Deal-breaker circuits, though, are set on a hair-trigger for many people.
So, lots of people heard Bobby Kennedy appear to want to commit the U.S.
to a military entanglement with respect to Israel's defense against Hamas, and that for them was a deal-breaker.
Now, I think committing the U.S.
to an entanglement is a mistake.
I don't think we know enough about what happened or what our interests are and I just think that was an error.
On the other hand, The real question is, how are we going to regain enough influence over our system that we can navigate in a direction that serves the public?
In that landscape, you do not want deal breakers that cause you to abandon what may well be your best hope of having, you know, high levels of nuance dominate the conversations about our interests that take place at the highest echelons of high levels of nuance dominate the conversations about our interests that
So don't let them slice us and dice us and trigger your deal breakers so that you're constantly throwing people overboard because they've said that thing they mustn't have said.
They've signed up on the side of that conflict that has, you know, no humanity to it, right?
If they've signed up with barbaric people, yeah, that's true, right?
But that's not where we are with most of these things.
We have to get less hair trigger and we have to see more broadly Long term, there aren't very many solutions to the problem of wholesale capture of all of our institutions.
Which, you know, if you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm not talking to you.
But if you do know that all of our institutions have been captured, and that our well-being absolutely requires that we do something about that, and the number of things that one could conceivably do about it is very, very few, then the answer is, you understand that The chessboard is a very constrained place.
It's not a place for hair-trigger decision-making.
And so I would ask everyone to think all of the levels at which each of these crises function.
Who might be driving and why?
And what do they think you're going to do?
If they knew That you were going to lose the ability to trust people that last week you trusted, and they triggered this with that in mind, then you would be wise not to behave as they expect you to behave, because they did it because...
They basically transferred well-being from you to them.
So we have to stop behaving predictably and we have to stay out of our amygdalas.
And that's really, really tough in an era where we have absolute barbarism taking place on our screens, being celebrated across the globe.
But, you know, think about when we train people for special forces.
Maybe Special Forces people will correct this, but I'm pretty sure of it.
One of the key jobs is to take people, ordinary humans who will ordinarily react to terrifying situations with not their full toolkit, and to put them through situations so that they learn to become careful and able to reason under fire, under the worst possible circumstances.
And that is why those elite forces are capable of doing what they do.
Now, I'm not saying elite forces are always doing the right thing.
Obviously, they do whatever the chain of command tells them to do.
But we have to get good at not being marshalled around the chessboard by being triggered by events whose explanation we cannot understand. - Very good.
We'll be back in a few short days.
Alright.
We have another livestream on Saturday at 11.30 Pacific and another one after that on Tuesday at 11.30am Pacific.
We have a private Q&A at our locals at 11 on Sunday.
So lots more opportunities to find us and then a little break for a short time.
In the meantime you can find us all the usual places.
I think I'm not going to go through all of them right now.
We'll spend a little bit more time on that on Saturday.
A reminder of our sponsors this week, Arbora, MD Hearing, and American Hartford Gold.
You'll be able to find links to those authors in the show notes, as well as a link to that article that you wrote in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo Bombing.
No, not bombing.
Massacre.
Yeah, massacre in Paris in 2015 or something like that.
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