Tactical Mastery: How Mossad's Ingenious Pagers Dismantled Hezbollah In this episode, the hosts delve into the meticulous and strategic operations of Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, that led to a significant strike on Hezbollah. They explore the sophisticated tactics used, including the installation of explosive devices in pager batteries and walkie-talkies, which effectively maimed Hezbollah operatives and disrupted their communication network. Through an in-depth analysis of these events, the conversation sheds light on the precision and ingenuity behind Mossad's actions, while intentionally setting aside the moral debates to focus purely on their tactical execution. Additionally, the hosts draw parallels between these intelligence strategies and modern marketing techniques, discussing relevance in business and non-profit advocacy. The conversation is rounded off with broader reflections on conflict resolution strategies and the responsibilities of leadership in making tough decisions.
[00:00:00]
Malcolm Collins: Hello simone today. We are going to be talking about an interesting topic, which actually Is transformed the way that we personally think about things like looking for jobs, attracting press and attracting donors, which was how Mossad, that's Israel's intelligence agency, pulled off the major strike on the On Hezbollah and a lot more information has come out about this over time.
So I'm going to try to paint a full picture, including a lot of things that I'm pretty sure that even you didn't know, Simone, here's, for example, an interesting one. I didn't know. Did you know about the security feature? A thing on this where to decode a message with the pager that they had sold to Hezbollah.
You needed to have both hands on the device.
Simone Collins: Oh, interesting.
Malcolm Collins: Wow. The way it worked is they built a security feature where you could only decode it encoded [00:01:00] Hezbollah message. If you had both of your hands on the device, like holding it in different locations, which ensured. When they send out the initial thing to make the devices explode it only exploded when people were answering this specific coded message.
So they had to have both of their hands on the device when it exploded, which ensured that bunch of their
Simone Collins: proximity, like someone didn't have a pager sitting on their nightstand and so
Malcolm Collins: there were two different instances of the explosion. The first instance was they sent out a coded message. And then anybody who hadn't answered that message, their pagers then later exploded like the next day or something all at once.
But the important thing about the message is it removed these people from fighter capabilities. If you don't have your two hands, whatever other injuries you have, you can't shoot a gun. And so the goal there was to remove them from fighter capabilities. There's all sorts of cool stuff like that, that you will learn.
And I just like to As we go [00:02:00] into this, I am not going to give my standard Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah rant this time. So just I'm sort of leaving morality at the door. What
Simone Collins: we're talking about here is the tactical that went into Mossad's actions, which for those who have been living in a cave. They managed to get that is to say, Mossad, Israel's intelligence apparatus, managed to get a hostile entity, Mossad to purchase a bunch of pagers that it had created that were, that had embedded bombs that were used for monitoring and this was done for years.
And then recently, this year, they detonated them, maiming quite a few people. Basically a huge devastating attack, not just in terms of one sort of violent strike that took place on one day, but also sort of dismantling their communication infrastructure. So this was a very impressive feat.
We're [00:03:00] not talking about what was right or wrong morally. What we're talking about is how they got to do this and what, in terms of operating tactically as humans. Businesses, non profits, advocates.
Malcolm Collins: So, again, just leaving all of the morality out of this, all of the, well, they killed this many people. Well, they killed this many people. That's not the point of this particular talk.
And if you want to see us go on and on about Israel, Palestine, the moral weight of the equation, we do that in plenty of other episodes. In this particular episode, we are going to focus on how this was all accomplished. So the gist,
the pagers went off around 3. 30 p. m. All in all, this particular attack injured around 3, 000 individuals. And keep in mind that for most of those individuals, it was losing both their hands. So it disabled them in terms of being fighters. Did it
Simone Collins: like completely lose their hands? Like, I just, I never really heard that much about what actually happened.
Like, how bad
Malcolm Collins: hands. As I said, they had to have both hands on it for it to go off. Wow. [00:04:00] Well, I mean, but that,
Simone Collins: like, were their hands just burned or were they literally blown off?
Malcolm Collins: Blown off.
Simone Collins: Wow. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: 30. Now, now, some of them were in the second round of the attack, but it seems like the vast majority were in this initial round because they, it went around.
Don't touch them after that. Get them away from you. So, 37 died in total, and that included at least, if we are to believe the governments that were in league with Hezbollah two children, one 8 year old and one 11 year old.
Sad, but again, I'm always a little skeptical of the governments that are involved in this stuff.
So, let's go and talk through how the plan actually worked. But, the fir And I will notice actually kind of remarkable how targeted this attack was when you consider broad attack operations that it didn't just mostly target individuals just in Hezbollah, but specifically high level command and operation individuals who would have had access to these.
And then it was [00:05:00] followed up almost immediately afterwards, a few days afterwards with. An explosion of a second booby trap device that many of them had, which was their walkie talkies, which had actually not just been booby trapped, but booby trapped in a completely separate instance of booby trapping, which we'll get to.
And I'd been transmitting everything Hezbollah had been saying over them to Masaad for the past 10 years. This is like
Simone Collins: a level of spycraft that I feel is, is, is cinematic. It is. Yeah. Unbelievable. In the sophistication
Malcolm Collins: specifically with the walkie talkies. The first part of this involved rigging the walkie talkies was oversized batteries that concealed explosives, allowing massage to ease drop on Hezbollah communications for nearly a decade.
The walkie talkies were distributed as early as 2015, giving Israel full access to Hezbollah's communication network while lying dormant as potential bombs ready to be detonated at a moment's notice. One interesting fact that we can now ferret [00:06:00] out is that it does appear that Hamas did keep the January 7th attacks secret from Hezbollah, because if Hezbollah had known Israel would have done
Simone Collins: right.
And you've kept saying, like, how could it possibly be that Mossad had this level of infiltration of Hezbollah when Hamas was planning all this and they didn't know that Hamas was planning for October 7th, but theoretically, it could be really nailing it in, you know, You know, he statistics and just bomb history like it.
It happens, right? So,
Malcolm Collins: yeah. So, in 2022, a new opportunity arose leading Hamas to focus on a more innovative device. The AR 924 pager. Now I will note actually with the walkie talkie device. One of the things that was actually in a lot of people consider this pretty bad form that this was done is because they went off so soon after the first device, many of them ended up going off at the [00:07:00] funerals of the first round of victims which is generally considered very bad form in conflict, but it was incredibly effective.
And we'll get to this at the end here, but Hezbollah has basically been almost entirely dismantled at its core. Network level and upper levels to the extent that people are calling this the best both intelligence and counter terrorism or operation run in the past century. And that it was like, like better than anything that was done during World War II, better than anything that was done during the Cold War in terms of its effectiveness and just completely taking this down.
And there's been Because they were also
Simone Collins: preying upon, basically, well, you can't Use email, you can't use cell phones, you can't use any modern form of technology because other intelligence forces, including facade are monitoring those. And so ultimately, it's the facade through it's it's. So many levels pushed, pushed Hezbollah to these devices.
It's [00:08:00] not like they want to just use pagers and walkie talkies. They were doing that because already Mossad's prowess in cyber warfare was so strong. So there's like attacks on all sides.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. And one of my favorite memes that came out of this with the Babylon Bee article, Rashib Taleb uninjured after her pager mysteriously explodes.
This is a very pro Palestine American politician. But anyway, to continue here, let's start with the construction of the pagers themselves. The explosive component, pentelthritol, tetrine, otherwise known as ketamine, P. E. T. N. Did the most damage. Massad technicians found a way to insert a very thin square sheet of P.
E. T. N. between two battery cells and a strip of highly flammable material to act as the detonator. The entire package was placed in a plastic sleeve, which was encapsulated in a metal case, roughly the size of a matchbox when the command was given, the flammable strip generated a spark to light the detonator and trigger [00:09:00] the PNTN to explode.
The explosives took away some of the battery's power, which Hezbollah noticed when the battery would drain faster than expected. However, they never put 2 and 2 together and continued use of the device. Now, This is really fascinating because it meant that these devices could not be detected in an x ray and they could not be detected even if the devices were dismantled because they did not use the things that you're typically searching for, which is traditional explosives or a wick.
So there wasn't anything to look for, which is kind of a bad thing because it means if any of them didn't explode now Hezbollah has plans for a device that can easily get through airport security, which they almost certainly did when they got these devices. They almost certainly scan them through x rays, dismantled them, look through them.
You would not have been able to turn this even as an explosive expert. And I note here that the point of putting it between the two batteries wasn't just to hide it, but it was also to [00:10:00] amplify the explosion using the power of the batteries.
Simone Collins: Oh, that makes sense. Because I was thinking, how could you possibly have something as small as a pager blow off someone's hands when the explosive device is such a thin film of material, but that makes sense.
Because there are plenty of concerns. I mean, anyone who's flown recently has been asked if they're checking luggage, if there are any batteries in their bag, because batteries can be explosive. So now it's okay. Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: we're very large, oversized batteries that were meant to last a month.
Simone Collins: Right. And this was a selling point of the pagers, just how quote unquote rugged they were.
And so there would be this oversized battery.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. How they explained that these had a unique battery that were non standard in other models.
Simone Collins: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: So the cover story was particularly interested here and this gets to like where we can learn personally from this.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: The PETN battery pack that Mossad constructed had a label on it.
L. I. B. T. 7 8 3. This was an issue because that specific battery did not [00:11:00] exist. Massad started by creating a custom model for the entire pager. A. R. 9 to 4. They approached a renowned Taiwanese brand, Gold Apollo, to add it to their catalogue. Huizhi the chairman of Gold Apollo, was approached by a former employee and her new boss, named Tom, to inquire about adding the model.
Qingquan said that While he wasn't impressed with the AR 924 when he saw it, he agreed to grant a license under the brand and add photos and description of the product to his company's website, thus unknowingly establishing the legitimacy of the Mossad pager. Oh, by the way, I should note here, I am reading an unrolled tweet here, and I'll add in post who it's by.
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone): Raelynn to givens.
Malcolm Collins: In September 2023, a website came online with the A. R. 924 listed as a product. This site was tied to a Hong Kong based company. Apollo Systems. H. K. of which no record exists today. In [00:12:00] late 2023 two additional. Stapes came online with the LIBT783 battery listed in their product list, amongst other legitimate units.
The sales pitch came from a trusted source, a marketing official with links to the Apollo brand. This individual, a former Middle Eastern sale representative of the Taiwanese company that manufactured the pagers, had Massad's involvement. She established her own company, Obtained a license to sell products and unknowingly facilitated the sale to Hezbollah, according to Israeli officials familiar with the operation.
She convinced Hezbollah leaders that the AR 924 pager was perfect for their needs. Quote, she was the one in touch with Hezbollah and explained to them why the bigger pager with a larger battery was better than the original model, end quote, said an Israeli official. So this is the thing that's really interesting about HALT.
All of this was laid out. They had no one implanted within Hezbollah in order to get them to [00:13:00] buy these. They didn't. In other words,
Simone Collins: they, they enabled, they set the gears in place for Hezbollah to independently decide that this was the best decision. So it's. There's a scene in, in my big fat Greek wedding where the, the, the protagonist's mother talks about how you, you have to, as, as a, a wife, get your husband to come to, to decide that it was all his idea in the beginning.
And she just lays the ideas and, and he sort of incepts his mind with ultimately the right course of action, but it all has to be his decision in the end
Speaker 3: We must let Costa think this was his idea that he came up with. Alright, now he's gonna figure it out. Don't you worry. I know what to do.
Speaker 4: I have your answer. Tula will go to the travel agency, and you send Nikki here to work for us. Oh,
Speaker: I can't believe that.
Speaker 4: Wonderful.
Speaker: Wonderful! [00:14:00] You see, a man You're so smart! Gus! Gus! Oh, Gus!
Simone Collins: is exactly what it like, is Israel or Mossad in this case, Greek mothered. Hezbollah into deciding for itself that it was going to purchase these pagers.
Good people? They're Greeks, and Greeks are just Jews without money.
Simone Collins: It was a total inception moment, and I find that really fascinating. And I also think that it's, it's a very relevant way for things to happen. In an age in which we have a new ways, I think of deciding whether something is true, whether a product is worth buying, right? Like we don't these days, I mean, okay.
A lot of people are really gullible and they just like buy something immediately on Tik Tok shop. But I think when most people are seriously deciding on a product, they're not going to believe ads. They're not going to believe what's website copy. [00:15:00] We're going to like Google around, look at forums, see what people are saying on Reddit.
And based on the breadcrumbs that they find online through sources, they trust through sources they think are legitimate because they don't look polished or they don't look promotional. Then they're going to buy it. And that is what's so interesting to me. What makes me think, okay, well, if we want people to make bets on us or to decide that we are good partners or friends or sources of help because we do want to be helpful to people.
How can we show up in places where people trust this isn't people used to invest in things like publicists and PR agencies and things like that. So that the New York Times would write about you. But now our times is shilling about someone. No one's gonna like that means nothing. You know, it just means that you played a particular pool or spent a certain amount of money with someone.
So this is fascinating.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it is [00:16:00] fascinating. And it's something where we personally, you know, before we go further with this. Think for yourself. How can you turn yourself into the page you're here? How can you ensure that you AstroTurf an online environment so that an intent driven buyer, whether it's an employer, like in our case, like maybe the Trump administration, when they are looking for a specific type of thing, they will find us.
And this is something we've been paying a lot of attention to recently. How do we get our, Because right now, the way a lot of people do searches is A. I. How do we get our content into A. I. Training data? And I actually had a big breakthrough on that today. Simone, you'll be quite exciting. Okay. We got to wait for a bit more follow up, but yeah, we might get into the core AI training data that's used in most AI models these days.
Yeah. All, all of our podcasts and books when they wouldn't have been otherwise, which I'm excited about.
Yeah, it's like, we want to be where the chatbots are. We want to see, want to see them search and [00:17:00] around. What's that word again? Deeds.
Simone Collins: We, we really like, but that's the point that, right, is, is you have to go where people are and you have to go where now AI chat like bots are searching.
And if you aren't there, I think this is something, I think it happens very slowly. Like, oh, indeed. For example there was a sort of a revelation maybe five to seven years ago that traditional ads just weren't working. And a lot of companies. Just turned off their marketing budgets and discovered, lo and behold, their sales were unchanged.
They just happened
Malcolm Collins: with Uber. They turned off, they, they shut down their entire marketing department, which was however many million dollars a year. And it had like a 0 percent effect on sales.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And, and a lot of companies followed suit. And I think this played a big role in the end. It's like. The New York times and a bunch of magazines making money from, for example, print ads.
And I think that also played a big [00:18:00] role in the fall of TV ads where now most of these platforms are making money from subscribers, not from ad revenue in this used to because audiences have shifted to new places. Now YouTube is making all that kind of ad revenue, but even that's kind of it. And it's really interesting.
And, And the problem is that when a lot of people are looking at things, and I see this, for example, with more junior employees at our business when they think like, we're going to promote something, they're like, let's buy ads. They're like, let's post something on Facebook. And that's just not, it may have worked like a long, long time ago, but it doesn't work now.
And the, the, the question now isn't even how are people finding things today, but how will people be finding things? And to your point, importantly, how will I be finding things in six months to a year?
Malcolm Collins: You know, not only was this a feat of engineering that was quite exceptional, it was a feat of [00:19:00] marketing that was quite exceptional.
Marketing to a specific end buyer through a third party that didn't know they were acting on behalf of, has Masaad, which
Simone Collins: is absolutely. I think this, this sure of both. Synthetic data, you know, these companies and these forum posts from people who probably weren't legitimate, you know, that was made up sort of synthetic data combined with legitimate data where they got that one business to list the product in its catalog and combining that because it's a lot harder to get that one.
Like that was a big get for them. I'm sure when they got that, that company's a list in the catalog. And then they knew that if they supplemented that with, with the other thing, that would be enough. Subtle proof points is enough astroturfing to convince the Hezbollah procurement leaders to make that decision and think this is legit.
This looks fine. So that's, I think that's really interesting too, is how do you combine stuff that you post with something else? I think another, another interesting and important factor going forward [00:20:00] is going to be costly signaling from third parties. Like to what extent is someone else willing to.
Invest their reputation and endorsing you in a way that, you know, you, you couldn't get yourself, which is why people are, for example, constantly trying to get on like Rogan podcast because that is a very costly signal on his part. And if we're going to Rogan endorses you. That means something to a bunch of people, but that can be done on a micro scale, a very meaningful way with micro influencers, or even just with very specific people and very specific industries.
Like, my dad works in the ophthalmic industry and he knows that if very specific surgeons. Are willing to be like, oh yeah, I've tried the cannula insertion system. Like it's it's it's legit You're you're good. And if you were to combine that with some synthetic endorsements from other people online, you've got a product So let's
Malcolm Collins: history let's talk about what what they actually ended up doing.
So Users of two [00:21:00] online forums discussing batteries even made posts about LIBT783 and the AR924 praising its quote great performance end quote and ruggedness for field use when Hezbollah searched for a new pager their procurement manager chose the AR924 so they keyword stuffed the astroturfing that they were doing probably on sites like reddit and other tech forums With the word rugged and long battery life which is the two things that they expected that Hezbollah would be looking for.
One of the key selling points was the oversized battery, which I said, which lasted, oh, sorry, not a month, months without needing to be recharged. But what's interesting here, Is this actually served both parties? It served Hezbollah because they could use it for people in remote regions, but it served the Israeli intelligence agency because it added more explosive to the device.
The salesperson who brokered the deal offered a quote very [00:22:00] inexpensive proposition in quote and continued reducing the price until the Hezbollah manager agreed. This is the person who they were selling through.
Simone Collins: No, I mean, I, I think that's also smart and it shouldn't be understated just how much you can leverage both. Just the, the general principle of conservation energy. And that is in the form of like, can you save people mental processing power money? Okay. That's an advantage that you should be leveraging.
And so there's, they're like, well, we're just going to make this an offer. You can't refuse by making these very, very inexpensive.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, also a thing to note here when we talk about how severely Israel was able to damage Hezbollah here, and I think that this is something that hasn't really been picked up by anyone officially yet but I suspect that this is a big thing that happened is Israel looked at who after the explosions like they used the explosions the trip build.
And the trip build. And locate Hezbollah members because immediately after the chain of explosions, they ended up [00:23:00] targeting a number of high level leaders within Hezbollah. Basically wiping out their entire leadership. And what I was mentioning earlier is there was a British spy who had worked. On Afghanistan.
It was like, how did they achieve this so quickly when we were unable to achieve this in a decade in Afghanistan? Bye bye. Bye. And specifically here the, the Hezbollah launched an internal probe of what went wrong. However, the senior official leading the investigation, Nabil Kwak, was himself killed in an Israeli airstrike just 11 days after the Patriots went off.
The internal investigation is supposedly still in progress, but The organization is mostly defunct now, at least from a high, high level position which is absolutely wild. And when I say defunct, I'm not talking about the political side of Hezbollah, I'm talking about the military side of Hezbollah here.
Also, an interesting thing to note here when you're talking at least about the walkie talkies is when Netanyahu came into office, they were already distributed to individuals. So he was just brought in on this project. [00:24:00] He was not the coordinator of it, although he was sort of, I think, in charge of the pager specific project.
And another thing to talk about here, if you're not broadly familiar with it,
on September 27th, they dropped a bunker buster missile on an operation beneath Beirut. It was personally authorized by Netanyahu. And it ended up killing the, I think the number one guy at Hezbollah who was Hassan Nasarallah, which everyone thought was basically untouchable. So, here, I'll also talk about because I did a deep dive into, like, why specifically Israel has been so much more effective than our own intelligence agencies.
And it appears to be 2 things. 1 is less concerned with civilian casualties. And so the guy who was doing this contrasted, for example, what happened in Beirut was what happened with Osama bin Laden. And he's like, we were fairly certainly knew where Osama bin Laden was.
So we went in with helicopters. [00:25:00] You know, protected even individuals on Osama bin Laden's compound and tried to just take out Osama bin Laden and anyone who is offering active resistance. Whereas when they targeted a group, they're like, yeah, I'll just drop a missile bunker buster all the way down.
Anyone who's in the surrounding buildings, whatever. And it's dramatically easier. And I should also point out that there was a, a, a nuance here, which is when Osama bin Laden was in a ally of ours country. Or at least a country that was pretending to be our ally. So there was a bit more of nuance to making absolutely sure that like, we really were getting Osama bin Laden and that we weren't causing an, I get that, but I do think that this is a big difference.
We see our head enemy and we go in and we land helicopters and we risk lives and we try to whereas Israel was just like, let's take out this entire, just whatever. We have him here for this day. Just take it all out. And I think that we, as we enter a new world, which, [00:26:00] which is what we're entering, it's a world where the U.
S. isn't so, what's the word here? Like unilaterally overpowered within conflicts. When we do get into conflicts where individuals are attacking the safety of our sovereign citizens we need, I think, to take more of an Israel mindset to this because it's the only, it leads to less suffering overall in that it ends conflicts.
Whereas, and people can be like, how could you say that when you look at how bad things are in this region, and this region that Israel's involved in? And I'm like, yeah, but they were worse in, Is the U. S. In Afghanistan, we ended up pulling out in the Taliban took control like we everyone who collaborated with us ended up likely having their families killed, likely ended up having their like we betrayed the people who trusted our intention to bring any form of real democracy to the region by not being harsh enough or strict enough in creating a long term peace in the region, which [00:27:00] we haven't done.
How do we have to do more like this on potential?
Simone Collins: Yeah, I think this is where military tactics and politicians being involved gets because how do you get reelected by people who have feelings and care about violence? And also, you know, make tradeoffs that involve short atrocities, essentially, short term violence, short term losses, because people don't hear in the news, like, many people have, you know, this many people have been starved in a famine, many people have been, you know, systematically Copyright 2020, killed as, as, as political dissidents in this is
Malcolm Collins: something that you don't hear.
You don't hear about the civilians of Gaza that Hamas was mass murdering. You don't hear about the people that Hezbollah killed within their own country. You don't hear about the dissenters who said, hey, maybe we shouldn't go total war against Israel on this stuff. You, you do not [00:28:00] hear this stuff because it is not in the interest of the narrative.
And I think that you're absolutely right about this. And I think it involves people. And a lot of people don't, they don't have like the level of incredulity. They don't, I think, well,
Simone Collins: this is also a classic trolley problem, right? That, that most people when asked like, well, if you. If there's a trolley and it's headed toward you know, five people and you could save those five people and you change its direction on the tracks and by then you're going to kill one person.
Yeah, most people are like, I'm not going to do that. I don't want to be responsible for killing one person. And this is a classic example of the trolley problem where, like, in this case, people were violently. Dismembered in some cases, or, well, dismembered, right? That's like, you lose your hand. And, and, you know, according to reports, some children were killed.
Like, this is, you know, an unforgivable atrocity, right? Like, no one, no one would want to do that. No one wants to pull the lever and do something that could kill children, or that could really hurt people in their [00:29:00] homes. You know, this is, this is horrifying. But at the same time, no one's looking at the other side of the tracks yet.
They're not looking at what is happening in the counterfactual, and it's just a typical situation. But yeah, I mean, like, gosh, girl,
Malcolm Collins: what's wrong? Hey.
Well, this is actually something I wanted to do a whole episode on, and I'll post a scene from Trigun here.
Speaker 6: That was the easiest way to stop him. You wanted to save the butterfly, right? I didn't want to kill the spider. I wanted to save them both. Unless the spider caught the butterfly, it would die of starvation anyway. You can't save both, don't you know that?
Speaker 5: It's not right to make that choice so easily.
Both of them are living creatures, Knives. But
Speaker 6: I'm not wrong about this, Rem. If you just keep saving the butterflies, the spiders will die. Yes, but Wanting to save both is just a naive contradiction. And what would you have rather had us do, just stand and think about it? [00:30:00] In the meantime, while we do that, the spider eats the butterfly
Speaker 5: What's
Speaker 6: wrong with
Speaker 7: you, Knives?!
Don't you understand?! I wanted to save both of them, you idiot!
Speaker 6: Don't make any sense, Bash.
Speaker 7: I don't think so, Knives! You're the one who doesn't make any sense!
Malcolm Collins: You have to make a choice here.
You can't always say that you're going to save both. And I think that the responsibility of a leader is accepting the moral weight of the trolley problem decision is to say I as a leader will make this choice. And I think that this is actually something that, you know, and I can trust, for example, Biden and Trump in their foreign policy.
The Trump did exceptionally well over and over and over again is he was willing to send the random missile onto like pseudo friendly territory. He was willing to like, whenever somebody would cross a line, he would swap them in the face. And [00:31:00] Biden was unwilling to do that. He was unwilling to send the targeted missiles into the caravans of countries, leaders, and stuff like that, because that required Accepting moral culpability for potentially lowering further escalation.
And that is a really scary thing.
Simone Collins: Well, and what's funny is I actually feel like these days there is more widespread moral interest, like moral openness to this kind of Behavior.
There's this really popular fantasy romance series out now called, I think like a court of thorn and roses. I think that's the first one.
The protagonist in it named Farah, spoiler, spoiler alert by the way, at the end of the first book to essentially save all the berries of this land. Decides to violently murder three innocent people, well, fairies in this case, like, stab them to death in front of a bunch of people and, and she does it, like, she, she could have chosen to to sort of surrender and let these fairies [00:32:00] continue to be enslaved by this evil regime, but instead she chose to murder these people.
As they were begging, you know, making eye contact and begging, like, please don't kill me. And she stabbed them to death, or slit their throats, or whatever it is she did. And then had to live with that for the rest of her life. And they frame her as a hero. I kind of hate her character. She's a terrible, whiny, mean, bitchy person, but she's seen as a hero.
She's seen as curse breaker in the land after that point. And here you have this really popular female protagonist in a very popular series, right? Because, right, like the only thing that women or people in general are reading is like fantasy romance novels, right? Who did this, you know, who did, who pulled the lever in the trolley problem.
So I feel like humans are capable of having this like intellectual debate. And making these decisions. It's just maybe politicians don't realize that or they don't know quite how to message it. But I do think that there is a way to thread this [00:33:00] needle and make people capable of recognizing the value of making very, very heartbreaking decisions in the name Of a better future to prevent overall fewer heartbreaking things from happening.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah No, I I think that you're absolutely right and I think that The goal and this is one of the things that you mentioned one of our friends who's mad at us for a recent israel video And you're like, yeah, but we were talking about hamas being a problem and hamas is a problem It's a problem for israel, and it's a problem for gaza and it's the same with hezbollah.
Hezbollah is a problem not just for israel But in the regions in which it operates if you are, for example, gay you know, it's not just the Jewish people have to worry about this. Or for example, somebody who thinks that maybe they shouldn't be as extreme with Israel. You are putting your life at risk.
You are putting your kids lives at risk.
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-1: And I think this is a big problem for people who try to draw parallels between what Israel is doing and what Hamas is doing. And it's real. On the, , seventh attacks. [00:34:00] One of the big events that was hit was a protest. Against.
The way the Israeli government was relating to the people of. Gaza. If someone in Gaza, protested pro Jewish pro the state of Israel, they would be killed and their family would be killed. It's a huge difference in Israel. People say that the government's wrong all the time.
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-2: Regardless of your thoughts of how evil Israel is Hamas and Hezbollah. Are definitely a net negative for the world. And even the people that they rule over would be better off if they were completely eliminated. That cannot be said of the state of Israel right now, whether you're talking about the Muslims who live within the state of Israel right now, or the Jews who live within the state of Israel right now, because there is a very large Muslim population that lives in Israel and quite well. That is not true of Jews living in say Gaza or Palestine, or really any of the Arab majority countries.
Malcolm Collins: And or if you're just not a state bureaucrat, you know, if you're a Hamas bureaucrat, you know, you're getting [00:35:00] food, you're, you're diverting aid payments to go to, for example, we know is Hamas go to tunnel that was supposed to go to aid payments. I'm supposed to feed children.
And so by destroying these organizations, you make people bet things better, not just for the people of Israel, but the people of these individual regions. And so if you can get a mostly targeted attack like you had with the pager situation, you are almost certainly saving more than two children's lives.
In terms of redirected aid payment and stuff like that. But this is something that just is really hard to communicate to people. Especially when you have this sort of latent anti semitism, which I think twists everything that's tied to this region for a lot of people. Or, I think more than the latent anti semitism, it's a belief that you get within the urban monoculture that the weaker party must be the more just party.
Or the less competent party must be the more just party. In the same way that in the U. S. you have this thing where it's like, oh, somebody robbed someone, well they must have been poor, or they must have been desperate. Oh, you fought back against a [00:36:00] OU monster.
Speaker 8: No! How could this happen? Where did society go wrong? How could the system fail this poor man? If only he'd had a better stool! Do you want some hot cocoa?
Speaker 11: Seems to be socio economics. Most likely an underfunded library.
Speaker 8: That's it! Ah! Ah! You shot this beautiful man for no reason! She's evil incarnate!
Speaker 10: He was stabbing Murderer! Murderer! He was
Speaker 8: expressing himself!
Malcolm Collins: And this is just a framing that we see over and over and over again now, but when it's applied at the country level, it becomes quite monstrous
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-3: And I note that this don't retaliate mindset. In the same way that [00:37:00] when it's held towards criminals, it's held by wealthy people who live in nice neighborhoods without a lot of crime. When it's held at the country level, it's mostly countries that don't have antagonistic countries next to them constantly saying they want to kill them. Which is why, if you look recently, one of Israel's recent really, really tight alliances it's been building is with South Korea. And I think it's because South Korea gets quote, get fit much more than a country.
Like the U S where, you know, we can say, oh, there should be norms about, you know, your neighbors. , that.
That are very much like a, you know, a wealthy person who lives in a wealthy gated community and says, well, you know, I never fight back when I'm attacked. Why would this person who lives in a very dangerous neighborhood need him? Concealed carry or something like that.
Microphone (2- ATR2100x-USB Microphone)-4: And this also reminds me a bit of, , an individual like this, where they're like, well, yeah, he lived in a dangerous neighborhood and now he's concealed carrying and he's defending himself, but he's doing that because he was part of a gang and his gang attack this other person's gang. And therefore [00:38:00] that other gang is justified to attack him, which is very, again, similar with what's going on with Israel right now.
All of these countries in this surrounded region are constantly at war with other countries in this region, , or having cous or having other sorts of bloodshed that we just don't need to deal with. If you're in Europe or America, And so you don't think about it, but when we're recording all this, and when we're talking about all this, we over-focus, I think on the points that involve Israel instead of the other country than the region, because there isn't a well, A narrative reason to focus on those, you know, I mean, I think the real reason is, is Israel has Jews. And the other countries don't have Jews.
And a lot of people don't like Jews. For religious or whatever reasons. , and so some people downstream of that who get their information from sources that they don't know are controlled by like Qatar, for example. , they think that Israel has been uniquely belligerent in this region.
, because the people who are feeding them information have no need to tell them.
Actually, every [00:39:00] country in the region had a grudge against every other country in the region for X, Y, and Z reason.
Malcolm Collins: And this is just a framing that we see over and over and over again now, but when it's applied at the country level, it becomes quite monstrous and I think that, you
Simone Collins: know, this comes back to one of the original sort of selling points of effective altruism is this recognition that human intuition doesn't always correlate with.
with the optimal choice or with the most altruistic outcomes for intervention.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I have absolutely loved talking with you today, Simone. I am excited for dinner tonight. She is going to cook down the pumpkin soup she made to create a curry that's going to go on top of rice. So, Which I am so excited to eat, it looks really yummy.
It was so yummy, yes, it was one of the best soups I've ever had. And I have had a great time talking with you, Simone.
Simone Collins: Now. Now it's happening.
Malcolm Collins: I realize to keep the scene visually interesting. I need something in that other corner.
Simone Collins: Yes, you do. Yeah. Why did that sword go away? You weren't letting the [00:40:00] kids play with it, were you? I was
Malcolm Collins: playing with it.
Simone Collins: Oh no. Yeah. It's time for you to play with it. I'm just, you know,
Malcolm Collins: well and the kids were playing with it a little bit.
Simone Collins: Oh boy. Okay. I guess it's good strength training for them Nothing is heavy
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and it's also good endurance testing You see this I learned this from marwan back in the day. You just get hit with a weak weapon over and over again It's just unfortunately we started our kids with a great sword. So there were a few injuries All right.
Speaker 13: March, March, March, March, March, March, March, March, March, March, March, March.
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