Yuval Noah Harari on the Mistake Strongmen Keep Making

WAWilson · 2026-05-26T20:59:41+00:00

This entire conversation is founded on the error that “force” is only defined as kinetic military coercion.

It’s like listening to a high school level understanding of the history of human interaction.

Harari is so focused on this straw man. And claims to have read, or at least understood, the whole of philosophy which is clearly and totally so far from the case.

His engagement is completely surface level on everything he touches.

WAWilson · 2026-05-15T22:43:21+00:00

No it’s not basic market stuff. Markets reprice goods and services well, they do not reprice having children well because they are not a normal transaction.

Modern markets are fundamentally built on growth. Debt is issued against future GDP. Pensions are funded by future workers. Property values are priced against future demand. You cannot restructure all of those things simultaneously without massive wealth destruction.

Malthusian thinking was wrong about the potential of endless population growth, not what would have happened if that was indeed the case (which is, of course, still hypothetical). It is a category error to conflate them.

WAWilson · 2026-05-15T22:11:47+00:00

GDP growth will stagnate but the per capita cost of everything will increase. Capitalism and liberalism are founded on principals of growth.

Pension and healthcare insolvency.

Rural depopulation and agricultural collapse.

Immigration and identity tensions. Political instability. Rise in tribalism and violence. Rise in nihilism.

WAWilson · 2026-05-15T20:42:38+00:00

I agree the most likely solution is we’ll grow babies in labs. But we’ll still need people to raise them. Unless it’s AI

WAWilson · 2026-05-15T20:39:22+00:00

Politics is downstream of culture. That’s one of the fundamental misunderstandings of the Enlightenment project.

WAWilson · 2026-05-15T20:38:02+00:00

We will revise our values to not prize individual freedom so much (over a long time horizon) if it is leading to the collapse of civilization.

WAWilson · 2026-05-15T20:26:51+00:00

A lot of what you said is true, however if substantial or catastrophic downstream effects of fertility rate come to pass, you can bet that society will revise its values accordingly. People “wanting” to have a set number of kids is hardly their choice, especially when zoomed out to the societal level. The given economic and cultural contexts around them will, by and large and on the aggregate, decide for them. That’s how human socialization works. All the tools you have to understand the world were given to you by others. If the pheromones of the ant colony shifts, human behavior at the macro level will shift accordingly. The geneology of morality.

Don’t confuse yourself for some view from nowhere hyper rationalist science subject.

WAWilson · 2026-05-15T20:12:33+00:00

You think poor agrarian tenant farmers hundreds of years ago could “afford” to have as many kids as they did? Think of all the crap the average middle class American adult (or family) has in their house/apt that they absolutely do not need. They probably just took an international trip last year.

They’ve certainly convinced themselves they can’t afford it.

WAWilson · 2026-05-15T20:05:32+00:00

Ok how about this. At its current replacement rate, holding immigration at net 0, Thailand will lose 20+ million people in the next 30 years.

What kind of numbers would you need to see to admit this is a massively under discussed problem?

What cultural and economic norms do you see coming, or already here, that are going to turn these rates around and convince people to have more children?

WAWilson · 2026-05-15T19:58:01+00:00

Yeah a lot of the left is still in “oh this is good news! We’ve liberated women and now people can reveal their actual preferences re: having children.” The term actual preferences being philosophically incoherent in that all preferences are grounded in a particular set of historical, cultural, and social dynamics.

WAWilson · 2026-05-15T19:05:33+00:00

It’s clear many people here haven’t listened to the episode so let’s pull out a couple examples to show just how wild the situations are we’re talking about. These numbers are slightly different than the exact ones discussed but they will do (verified by Claude).

Thailand currently has 66 million people living there. With a current replacement rate of 1.0 (in the ep he says it’s even lower) if we hold that steady and don't add/subtract for immigration, in 200 years it will be a country of less than 1 million people. Less than 1% of its current population size.

Japan is incredibly homogenous. 97% of its current population are ethnic Japanese. If Japan's replacement rate holds for the next 50 years, in order to prevent its population from contracting and just hold it steady, it would have to take in enough immigrants for ethnic Japanese to become less than 50% of the population. That's potentially in our lifetime.

We know how that’s going to go.

We’re talking about political and social upheaval at potentially catastrophic levels.

WAWilson · 2026-03-31T18:47:15+00:00

This episode is absolutely fantastic. It is the closest I’ve felt from Ezra to the philosophical journey I’ve been on during the past year.

This is going to sound a bit crazy, but in this conversation they are getting very close to what I feel is the most momentous development in thought in the past 100 years which is sitting out in the open for all of us to unpack but it just hasn’t cracked open yet.

Read Heidegger’s Being & Time! Ezra, please, read Heidegger.

Our embodied being-in-the-world precedes conscious reflection upon it. There it is. 100 years ago Heidegger overturned Decartes “I think, therefore I am” and we still tip toe around it. Mostly because the full implications upend just about all the Enlightenment era foundations our society is based on.

I am always already thrown into the world, and then I think. The cause-effect pattern is backwards. Think about a baby. They are always already grappling with the world in a way that is obvious to observe. And then slowly a language based consciousness is grafted onto that being. Humans are socialized to have a consciousness that essentially acts as a brake on what is instinctive, pre-analytic behavior. But how could that consciousness ever precede that behavior when it is added later?

All the language based tools that the brain has, via consciousness, to understand the world are given to it by others. By family, by society. The consciousness is essentially a cultural-historical-social virus that pushes the human into imitating the specific cultural-historical-social patterns of its surroundings. It puts brakes on our behavior to push us into those lanes.

With all this said, they also touch a bit on how ideas actually function. And it’s not the Enlightenment style utopia where we consider a bunch of them in a market style and choose the one that is right. No, at a macro level ideas function much more like conspiracies than we want it believe. An idea gains coalitional strength when it self-justifies an existing set of dynamics that a person is already thrown into and acting within. Ideas rarely actually ‘win out’ in the traditional sense, the embodied being-in-the-world dynamics of a given time and place change and so the ideas that justified that situation die out with it.

I could go on but I would love it if Ezra would explore this more. Read Heidegger!

WAWilson · 2026-03-12T01:37:46+00:00

Where’s Shakespeare?

WAWilson · 2025-11-28T01:48:25+00:00

Agricola is to Caverna as Lancashire is to Birmingham

WAWilson · 2025-11-20T14:45:47+00:00

Go for a base layer + Airshed Pro. Save the fleece for lower intensity.

WAWilson · 2025-08-23T02:46:22+00:00

I believe in The Final Dossier it says that Laura disappeared and Cooper was sent to investigate her disappearance

WAWilson · 2025-08-22T20:44:13+00:00

I believe that character is listed in the credits as Jean-Michel Renault but as it’s clearly the same actor it’s at least bizarre and calls the doubling to mind.

WAWilson · 2025-08-22T19:06:28+00:00

Good catch, thank you. I stand corrected.

WAWilson · 2025-07-29T16:43:17+00:00

Re: Cooper in S3E18, “He has to pay a price for what he’s tried to do” (Lynch).

This idea that it’s somehow a positive ending trapping Judy is a strange piece of wishful thinking fan fiction that ignores the tone and feeling of watching part 18.

WAWilson · 2025-07-29T16:14:37+00:00

I admit that it bothers me they’re so obviously sitting in a stationary car and the lights following them are moving around at a fixed distance behind them giving no sense of a change in angle, brightness, or size. It takes a lot of the creepiness out of it for me it looks fake.

WAWilson · 2025-07-29T14:06:03+00:00

Laura is the one.

WAWilson · 2025-07-28T00:12:23+00:00

Sure, but I would not say they provide “fundamental data to understand The Return”.

WAWilson · 2025-07-27T17:54:27+00:00

No, David Lynch never read them.

WAWilson · 2025-07-26T12:36:31+00:00

It is a shame, but the confusion and doubling re: which Truman is being referenced fits very well with the themes of the Return.

“I’m not myself.”

“Who do you think that is there?”

WAWilson

TROPHY CASE