This is THE Skill of the Moment

0:00 You're evidencing the key skill of the moment.

0:07 And I'm increasingly obsessed with it.

0:13 Acknowledging that you got stuff wrong is incredibly painful,

0:19 but necessary to coherent thought never has

0:24 been more necessary than in our current moment,

0:27 because the ability for pure fiction, not myth that's useful,

0:33 but pure fiction to be passed off as fact has never been greater.

0:39 The sophistication of the fiction mechanism is profound.

0:44 And so your ability to look at what you thought and say,

0:50 yeah, got that one wrong.

0:52 Don't love it.

0:53 But it's causing me to reinvestigate other things that I was pretty sure of.

0:57 That is that's the coin of the realm as far as I'm concerned.

1:02 And it's an incredibly rare skill at this moment.

1:05 People are punished for exploring it.

1:08 So even people who have a primordial

1:10 version of it are not elaborating that skill.

1:13 They're retreating from it.

1:15 So anyway, that's kind of I think why

1:17 you and I are able to have this conversation.

1:19 I got lots of stuff wrong and I'm investigating

1:21 lots of things that I was pretty sure of.

1:24 I'm alarmed to hear you say that Pearl Harbor was a false flag.

1:29 And I'm hoping that you're about to tell me false flag is the wrong term,

1:33 that the story is more complex and that the attack was known to be coming.

1:40 Are you going to tell me that there was an actual false flag?

1:44 I won't.

1:45 I know I don't know.

1:46 At a minimum, the story was far more

1:48 complex and they knew the attack was coming.

1:50 That much there is evidence of.

1:53 So.

1:56 I don't think it makes sense for us

1:57 that that's that's probably a whole show into itself,

1:59 although you should do a false flag show on Dark Horse,

2:02 because I'm sort of at the point where my assumption

2:05 is if I'm reading about it in The New York Times,

2:08 it is probably in some way, at least manufactured or distorted at a minimum.

2:15 And I'm far more interested in whatever they're not printing.

2:19 Oh, 100 percent.

2:21 As long as we are here, let me run something by you,

2:25 just a model for how to think about these things.

2:29 We have a unresolved conflict in civilization about how

2:34 to think about what I will loosely call history.

2:39 And the problem is there are a bunch of realms in which two distinct

2:45 things are filed under the same heading

2:48 and we keep tripping over ourselves over it.

2:51 So to give you an example,

2:54 psychology is a therapeutic art that is a replacement for a role

2:59 that used to be played by friends and family and clergy.

3:04 And it's now been turned into a commodity.

3:07 We can argue about the wisdom of that.

3:10 But the point is that therapeutic art psychology flies under

3:13 the same heading as an academic field in which we study cognition.

3:19 And the two things have very little to do with each other.

3:22 Right.

3:22 The person, the psychologist who sits in the chair

3:24 and is able to help you understand your own predicament so

3:28 you can improve the quality of your life is not

3:32 proceeding from what we know about cognition in a scientific sense,

3:35 because in fact, we know very little.

3:39 So the problem with history is that history is two things.

3:44 History is an academic discipline whose mandate

3:47 is to discover what actually happened and why.

3:52 History is also a set of myths that allow us to function.

3:56 And I don't mean fictions.

3:58 I mean, there are myths about a people who we are,

4:01 who the founding fathers were, what it means about our values,

4:05 what it means about our rights and obligations in the world.

4:09 Those stories have a relationship to the truth.

4:12 I assume that Ben Franklin and Thomas

4:14 Jefferson and Adams and all the rest existed.

4:18 And I assume that their story is not made up.

4:22 But I also assume that the picture that we hand over is

4:26 really about functioning more than it

4:28 is about the details that actually occurred.

4:33 And so the point is the academic historians

4:35 and the custodians of the myth are tripping

4:39 over each other because we haven't agreed whether

4:43 history is a functional phenomenon or an analytic phenomenon.

4:49 So.

4:52 There is I mean, you can see how that dynamic applies here,

4:56 but there's a question about.

4:59 What one needs to believe and.

5:05 What's true and we in the moment are in what I call the Cartesian crisis,

5:11 where because the fiction engine, which is not about myth,

5:15 myth is functional fiction is lies, right?

5:19 Now, obviously, there's fiction that is labeled as fiction in the bookstore.

5:24 That's not what I'm talking about.

5:25 But when The New York Times publishes lies to get

5:27 you to behave in a way that's not good for you,

5:30 but is good for whoever motivated the lying,

5:32 that's a whole different architecture.

5:34 It's something that should be resisted at all costs.

5:37 And I don't know that it's true,

5:39 but my guess is The New York Times at one time had a bias

5:45 that there were always fictions in it that served the people who motivated them,

5:52 but that it also had a truth seeking

5:55 element which has more or less evaporated over time.

5:59 And because The New York Times is a mirror for every

6:02 other truth seeking operation which has been captured and commandeered.

6:07 We now are left chasing our own tails over stuff like do viruses exist, right?

6:16 And at some point, you question everything such that you're completely paralyzed

6:19 by the fact that you don't know you're not sure of any of the basics,

6:24 either at the level of myth or the level of analysis.

6:27 You just don't know what you've been fed that's garbage.

6:33 Yes.

6:33 So, you know, it's cliche to say history was written by the victors,

6:37 but it seems to be the case.

6:40 I guess what I keep coming back to is two things.

6:44 That one, the lies must be really,

6:47 really significant for them to go to such great lengths to preserve them.

6:54 What are the fictions where I would use them interchangeably in this case?

6:59 And two, what else are they lying about?

7:03 Because the answer and which is why,

7:07 at least for my mileage is I need to consider

7:10 that everything I thought I knew may not be true

7:14 and that it does require some epistemological humility because I realized

7:20 that I'm a middle age man who actually doesn't know anything.

7:23 I went through the Prussian school system and took Rockefeller medicine.

7:29 And there's this architecture that in modernity we grow up with.

7:33 And to your point, you talked about it in the psychology frame,

7:37 but you can apply this broadly in terms of all the institutions.

7:41 So, yes, we've all been fed the same lines.

7:47 And it's I think at this point, you know,

7:50 and you have a very unique ability to frame

7:52 a particular thing in very accessible, simple terms.

7:56 And I love the Cartesian crisis.

7:57 I think it's perfect.

7:58 I think it's a perfect explanation of where we are at this particular moment.

8:03 And again, like, you know, my friend who my 9-11 friend was like,

8:08 hey, welcome to the party, man.

8:09 We're even for 20 years.

8:12 And, you know, to which I said, well,

8:13 you convinced me that that story didn't make sense.

8:16 I didn't understand.

8:17 I thought it was to start a war.

8:19 And it was about money.

8:20 And then I started zooming out.

8:22 I'm like, well, they control the printing press.

8:24 So they actually control the unit of they don't just control the money.

8:27 They they just find what value is.

8:29 So it has to be bigger than just that.

8:31 And then, you know, what I said to him, of course, is,

8:33 well, the JFK people wondered what the hell took you so long.

8:36 So, you know, but I think the thing is that the group keeps getting larger.

8:41 There's like a crack of light and it

8:44 doesn't seem like anyone's going to the other side.

8:47 Well, wait a second.

8:47 I agree with this completely until October 7th.

8:52 I think what you're you know,

8:54 the picture you paint where people wake up and they

8:57 don't go back to sleep is true in general.

9:03 Yeah.

9:03 But the unique thing about what happened in the aftermath of October 7th was

9:07 that it actually did pull a huge number of people back across the line.

9:12 And a that's just an interesting fact of history.

9:18 And B, I mean, I would say we're in an arms race at the very least,

9:24 no matter what version of October 7th, you believe.

9:29 We are in an arms race where even

9:31 if the enemy is just simply capitalizing on events,

9:35 the enemy is getting better at recovering its.

9:39 Unwitting foot soldiers by delivering events that are

9:44 targeted at particular locations in your psyche.

9:50 And to your earlier point.

9:53 I was raised with never again, too.

9:56 And as you say in your essay on the topic.

10:00 The fact of never again in a analytical Jewish home.

10:08 Came with an analysis of.

10:12 The fact that it could happen here.

10:16 Right.

10:16 It can happen here is an essential thing because

10:20 what it means it builds a an alert mechanism.

10:23 You must be alert to the things that tell

10:25 you it is beginning to happen here because why?

10:28 Because the people who survived were the ones who

10:31 didn't tell themselves this is bad, but it will pass.

10:34 Those people died.

10:36 And the people who said, Holy crap.

10:39 And fled.

10:41 They lived.

10:42 So I mean, I'm painting with too broad a brush,

10:44 but we have that alert mechanism.

10:48 And I think somebody found it.

10:49 And because it's it's not rational.

10:54 What it is is developmental.

10:56 It was built in in childhood and for good reason.

11:00 But because it exists, (Music)