What Werewolves Can Teach Us About Political Warfare
New Discourses
New Discourses
4.8 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2026
⏱️ 16 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody. This is James Lindsay and you're listening to New Discourses Bullets where I have a short bullet point like summary of a single topic from woke that we all need to understand so we can stop it. |
| 0:20.1 | I want to tell you about a game |
| 0:22.2 | on this episode, a game that in America has been called werewolves and in a game or in Russia |
| 0:30.6 | where it was invented was called mafia. This was invented by like a sociology student in the |
| 0:36.4 | university to kind of make a point, |
| 0:38.0 | but it became kind of a party game where you can have fun, kind of learn about each other, |
| 0:43.6 | maybe learn who to like and not like anymore. |
| 0:45.7 | I don't know. |
| 0:46.6 | But this is a game and it has a point. |
| 0:49.3 | And the point that the student who arranged it wanted to make was the power of a very small number of |
| 1:00.0 | actors who have an asymmetric knowledge advantage over a large group of actors who do not have it. |
| 1:08.0 | In other words, the intrinsic advantages of asymmetric warfare. The point being |
| 1:14.4 | that a very small number of werewolves or mafia assets can basically win the game against a whole |
| 1:22.0 | bunch of unknowing normal people, even though the normal people outnumber them tremendously. So in our kind of more |
| 1:31.2 | pertinent to our experience in our political warfare environment that we all live in, a small |
| 1:38.2 | number of coordinating actors can actually achieve a hell of a lot more against an uncoordinated group of people than you think. |
| 1:47.5 | In other words, a general population can be hustled by a relatively small group of informed, |
| 1:54.6 | knowing, coordinating actors. |
| 1:57.1 | And it's really interesting the way the game is set up because of the nature of the party game and how it has to be played. |
| 2:02.9 | What you actually have is a situation where the actors, the werewolves, we'll call them just werewolves, |
| 2:11.3 | but these are the people with the information advantage in the game actually are very low in how much coordination |
| 2:21.7 | they can do. All they actually have as an advantage is, they have two major advantages in the game, |
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