meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
New Discourses

What Werewolves Can Teach Us About Political Warfare

New Discourses

New Discourses

Education

4.82.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2026

⏱️ 16 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 138 As it turns out, a small number of bad actors who have an informational advantage over a much larger but naive population in turn have a gigantic strategic advantage over that same population. In order to demonstrate this fact and make it popular, a Russian student some decades ago devised a popular party game called "Mafia" that, after spreading to Western nations, got rebranded "Werewolves." This game can teach us a lot about how a small band of actors who are deliberately coordinating with one another can extract an enormous strategic advantage over a population who doesn't realize who the bad actors are or that they're coordinating. Join host James Lindsay for this fascinating episode of New Discourses Bullets where he explains the relevance of this game and its lessons to our everyday experience of political warfare environments. Latest from New Discourses Press! The Queering of the American Child: https://queeringbook.com/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2026 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #Werewolves

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

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,

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New Discourses, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of New Discourses and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.