The debate on Rogan between and Douglas Murray and Dave Smith left everyone in a tangled mess. I don't think they - or the viewers now picking sides - realise what just happened. Or why so many arguments and debates unravel just like this one did.

Dave and Doug weren't really arguing about 'experts' or 'Israel'. They were clashing at a deeper level...in fact, I count 5 layers. Each layer is built on the previous, compounding the friction and disagreement. Those two were NEVER going to agree, and the people arguing now won't either. Here's what I see.

LVL 1: It starts with the surface clash, the part we are all arguing over. Murray defends Israel’s actions as a matter of survival, pointing to October 7th as proof of the stakes.

Smith pushes back hard, focusing on Gaza’s suffering—tens of thousands dead, entire neighborhoods flattened, kids crying, then dying under rubble.

They’re stuck on facts: dates of attacks, numbers of casualties, who’s to blame for what. It’s where most debates stall, spinning in circles over whose version of history is right. Arguing details while the real divide grows. This layer is the loudest, but it’s only the surface.

LVL 2: Dig deeper and it's clear that they have different ideas about the morality of war. Murray channels Augustine and Aquinas (Just War Theory) in presenting Israel's fight as righteous. The state's duty to protect its citizens is paramount and authorises heavy force. Almost any price is worth it to save the lives who are in 'the right' (not Palestinians) according to the jus in bello doctrine ('don't put rocket launchers in hospitals!').

Smith measures the cost differently. He questions the morality of any war that stacks up dead civilians and destroys homes and societies unendingly. Even IF Smith originally saw the war as just, it certainly isn't now that the bodies are piling up and potentially overshadowing the catalyst (Oct 7).

Murray measures wars as just by their virtue and Smith measures wars as unjust by their outcomes. But why? How can they see the same event so differently?

LVL 3: Murray and Smith seem to be operating from a different set of ethics (neither being more 'correct' than the other): Murray leans on deontology or, failing that, Aristotle's Virtue Ethics.

He often fails to answer Dave Smith's questions on collateral damage because that's not the main determinant in his mind of what is 'right'.

Instead, he champions virtues like duty, responsibility, and being anchored to what's 'right' even when it gets messy. For Murray, the moral imperative trumps the chaos. Principle > Fallout.

Smith on the other hand is a consequentialist (like most modern secular westerners) who relies on teleological arguments. Forget about why the war started, how is it going now? Who is suffering? What is being lost? When will Israel stop killing kids?

He is weighing good and evil based on results, regardless of intent or duty. For Smith, morality is determined by outcomes. Fallout > Principle.

Principled-focused people are more consistent. Outcomes-focused people are more adaptive.

Basically, you'd want a Murray writing your laws (legislative) and a Smith interpreting them (judiciary).

Unfortunately in the world today we mostly have the reverse: politicians passing laws all over the moral map and judges scrambling for some principled consistency. Society would be better if this was reversed.

Both are needed. Which are you?

And where do these moral roots grow from?

LVL 4: Deeper still, it’s about truth’s source. You can't make an ethical decision unless you know what is real, what is true. So who or what decides that? Where does truth come from?

Murray trusts those who’ve seen it - experts, people on the ground, those who’ve walked through Israel and felt the tension firsthand. He thinks that experience, credentials or proper training give you the right to define a narrative and set a truth, or at least name a truth when you find it.

For Murray, the truth is something valuable and worth searching for, like a diamond in the rough, and it's the disciplined and expert class who are better at identifying it.

It's an elegant path to truth.

Smith on the other hand wants everyone to question everything, no gatekeepers. He believes truth emerges from open debate and that after letting every voice challenge every narrative, the truth will remain because it is, well, the truth.

It's a messy path to truth.

They pull truth from opposite places, one from authority, the other from anarchy. Truth is more special but more fragile (susceptible to corruption/disinformation) for Murray. A diamond to be prized. Truth is more ugly but more uncorruptible for Smith. A lion to be unleashed.

They are talking past each other now, because at their core they see the world in different ways.

LVL 5: At the bottom, it’s core beliefs, the bedrock of how they see the world.

Murray thinks humans need order—clear lines to keep chaos out, structures like nations or institutions to guide us, to hold the darkness at bay.

He sees Israel as a necessary line, a bulwark against anarchy.

Murray expresses fear of disinformation and the damage it can do to society. With the unleashing of X post Elon, we've all had to learn how to filter out the noise for ourselves (censorship department gone) and sometimes it's impossible to determine.

We are entering into a world that Murray fears, and his fears have a logical basis.

Smith believes the opposite: that we need some chaos in the system because the 'order' imposed on us by 'experts' and the 'elite' is often itself disinformation.

We are leaving the world that Smith rails against, and entering into the experiment he craves - a world where both Noise and Signal are free to propagate. Hopefully we all learn to identify Signal and reject Noise.

Smith sees Gaza’s plight as a call to question those structures, to let chaos breathe.

They live in different worlds, one craving stability, the other craving liberty. But the world is trending toward openness, whether Murray, Smith and all of us like it or not.

This is the very reason why governments around the world are smashing the censorship button, because the world is becoming more free, not less. Their disinformation laws are a lagging indicator...a reaction to the tidal wave of decentralisation and rejection of the expert class.

That’s the Murray-Smith divide, from surface to core, five layers that show why they couldn’t connect—and why so many of us can’t either.

It’s not just about Israel or Gaza; it’s about how we think of war, what we base our ethics on, how we believe truth is derived, and ultimately how we see humanity.

I see layers like this in all debates, each side talking past one another. Fun to watch and moan about on X, but not very productive.

Now this is where I'm supposed to do a CTA. But I don't have one. You could take my ethics course but good luck finding a link. I'm not giving it to you.

I just want us to all look deeper than surface level debates and discern the drivers beneath the surface.

I really enjoyed the 'debate'!

Bitcoin ETFs were just approved by the USA SEC for the first time.

Along with generative AI (the rise of LLMs + Diffusion Models), I believe we are witnessing significant and historic inflexion points. The last time I felt this was 7th Feb 2018 (Sydney) when I witnessed the launch of Starman (pictured).

Today, my rural life is only possible because Starman became StarLink. I've had thousands of conversations with people predicting Tesla's 'imminent death' (I worked there in 2017) and many other conversations claiming that Bitcoin and generative AI is a fad.

Bitcoin, Machine Learning and electrified transport are not fads or second layer gambles (like NFTs or sh*tcoins can be). Though scams and fads layer on top, at their very core they contain first principles innovations and value that cannot be extinguished.

I also notice that the strongest opponents to these innovations do not understand what they criticise. 'Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme going to zero!' is case in point.

But it's not about Bitcoin. It's about the relentless momentum of humans seeking out independence, growth and self-actualisation that Bitcoin satisfies.

It's not about saving the planet through 'clean' (lol) electric cars. It's about the engineering reality that electrification of work output is far simpler, more efficient and enjoyable than fossil-fuel based designs.

As a farmer, there are many things that still require dead dinosaur juice but the most pleasurable and human-centric inventions are electric.

Honestly, who cares about 'carbon reduction offset blah blah'. Humans just want their devices, tools and vehicles to be freaking awesome at their job and pleasurable to live with. This often means electrification.

Who cares about Satoshi's 2024 planned halving of the block reward to ensure BTC is a deflationary asset. Humans just want a store (and medium of exchange) of wealth that is immune to the corruption of politicians and corporations that run our lives in 2024.

Who cares about the transformer architecture and the arms race due to the quadratic compute scaling limit. Humans just want the Star Trek Computer that makes our lives easier and supercharges our natural abilities.

Now...if you're under 50 years old, you've got a lot of decades remaining. You will reap a real return educating yourself on the 'weird' terms I've dropped above.

Start by googling 'inflation' and 'fiat currency' to begin building your defence against those who would rob you blind of the wealth you've worked so hard to accumulate.

Consider the major revolutions of history:

• Agricultural revolution 10,000-5,000 BC
• Printing press 1400s
• Industrial revolution 1700s-1900s
• Information revolution 1950s-2000s
• Digital revolution ~1990s-2005
• Mobile revolution ~2005-2020
• AI revolution ~2022+

This layout is time/event based. Another way to think of technological revolutions is systems based. This is why you keep hearing about 'the fourth industrial revolution' which looks like this:

No matter how you think of revolutions, they are all ultimately defined by how significantly they change the way humans live.

We have all become de-sensitised to claims of 'technological breakthrough!' because they are usually overblown, myopic and have no significant effect on how humans live. Sometimes they never will, sometimes they are simply early. Current example: the Metaverse.

This 'failure to launch' is normal and to be expected in the advent of new technology. Tech needs to be birthed, tried and tested in the natural game of 'survival of the fittest'.

Thus it's easy to dismiss the latest 'groudbreaking app' as just more hype designed to line the pockets of a corporation. It's probably just a fad that will die in a year's time right?

Park that cynicism for a moment as you watch this video from Microsoft. Ask yourself whether you are witnessing vaporware, empty hype, or something more:

I believe it's something more. Let me explain by way of a story:

In 2022 we shrank our staff count (deliberately - to extend our startup's runway). In the strive to maintain output we attempted to automate or accelerate much of our daily tasks. Nearly all automated tools and assistants were eventually jettisoned because their effort:benefit ratio didn't make sense.

Except for OpenAI's ChatGPT.

We have now permanently integrated ChatGPT3.5 into a large number of our workflows, and our day to day looks very different to just 6 months ago. Not only is generative, predictive AI speeding up and enabling content creation with fewer staff, it's changing the way we create.

But wait, there's more! We are hearing from housewives, seniors(!) and from nearly every business we consult for...everyone is experiencing the same paradigm shift.

The common refrain is that they now rely on AI to such an extent that they cannot imagine life without it. Kind of like imagining living and working without the internet.

AI is now a contagion.

We are witnessing a technological revolution with generative AI and few are ready to adapt like Millennials are. Fellow travellers born loosely around 1981-1996 will remember what it's like to learn and grow on both sides of 'the internet'.

Thanks to fortuitous timing, we Millennials understand the internet both natively and as adopted phenomena.

This is unlike Generation X whose young minds were formed pre-internet but have since adopted it as a tool for life.

Millennials are even more unlike Generation Z (so called 'Digital Natives') who were born into a digital era, their brains forming in a world rich with information and instant connection.

I truly appreciate and feel the wonder of broadband internet because dial-up, failed connections and information scarcity is a visceral and lived reality:

But I also share the natural fluency for the digital world that Gen Z has, finding it easy to be an 'early adopter' of tech.

That Microsoft ad above is actually just a collection of use-cases that are already happening TODAY. But it seems to be happening in the lives of the 'early majority', not just the 'early adopter' category.

With smart integrations, we are going to blow right past 'the chasm' or 'the tipping point'.

Why? Because this revolution is PRAGMATIC. It's practically improving the lives of people and businesses everywhere. The 'Early Majority' are in fact...pragmatists. They adopt tech if it makes sense. And large language models make sense to our everyday lives.

Despite all the false starts, inflated claims, utopian visions and fear-mongering we've endured this past decade, AI may finally be truly be revolutionising the world.

 

Less Skynet, and more J.A.R.V.I.S.

 

 

But where does that leave us poor humans? How do we adapt?

 

Creativity won't disappear, at least when generative AI is built on prediction algorithms on large data sets. In a sense, it's merely smooshing things together to generate something 'new' but not really seeding anything truly novel. But it will re-weight everything we create...

 

 

With retrieval of information and generation of content commoditised in the next handful of years, you may feel a little like a phone booth in the era of smartphones, or a steam engine in the age of Teslas.

 

But there's a new skillset up for grabs: prompting.

 

'Prompt engineering' is designing inputs for AI to process and work with. This is the new skillset required in the AI revolution. He who asks best, gets the best answers. Just like we spend more time teaching kids to type than write, we now need to learn to prompt.

 

 

The nerds took over as 'the cool kids' somewhere after 2000, but soon having a whole lot of knowledge in your head will be redundant. Even content creation is about to commoditise, and statistically barely anyone learned how to be a content creator instead of a consumer!

 

 

Don't miss this next revolution. It's a biggie. Start searching some of the keywords in this article like 'prompt engineering', and get familiar with the new world coming at you, where:

 

Asking questions is about to become more important than knowing answers!