Based Camp： How AI Will Alter Class Conflict
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
167.07826
Summary
In this episode, Simone and I discuss the role that AI will play in society and the implications for our class structure in the long-term. We discuss how AI will change our society and how it will affect our economic and political class structure.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
What we are seeing right now is we move into an AI future, a more automated future, is yes,
00:00:08.440
even if the economy can produce more, it's an economy in which they need the lower classes
00:00:14.540
less. They need the poor less. They need the disenfranchised less. Maybe they don't need
00:00:22.420
them at all. And that changes the game entirely. What is going to happen then? So are we going to
00:00:28.260
see a complete separation of groups leading to ultimately speciation? So are we going to get
00:00:35.240
these wealthy people now working with AI, building their own things, living on their little pleasure
00:00:39.980
islands, and then floating in the sky, and then going off to space, or doing whatever to say they
00:00:43.580
do, and probably biologically modifying themselves like crazy, getting extra tall, super sharp cheekbones
00:00:50.460
looking crazy? I actually expect the disenfranchised groups, an alliance of those will be the ones
00:00:54.880
that most genetically modify themselves. Interesting. I think the group that is at the
00:00:59.080
beginning of this AI differentiation in society is going to be one of the groups that ends up
00:01:04.240
falling behind. You can look at it already. You see this in the progressives who attack us,
00:01:09.320
who are desperate to maintain a genetically pure humanity, which is just disgusting.
00:01:15.120
Whenever you say, I want genetic purity, and by genetic purity, you mean people who are closer
00:01:19.860
to you? Yeah, you're probably not one of the good guys in history. But also, you're just not relevant
00:01:25.520
in the long term. Because at the end of the day, it's the people who are, to some extent, really
00:01:32.380
forced to use AI for social mobility, forced to use genetics for social mobility. These will be the
00:01:39.820
groups that advance as humans. The groups that happen to find themselves at the top of this class
00:01:45.180
divide as it happens. The vast majority of them are just going to sit on their laurels because they
00:01:50.340
won't really have any pressure to change or adapt. Ah, so you're saying that, okay, the AI will free
00:01:57.740
the wealthy from the proletariat, but then the wealthy will become indolent, weak, dependent on the
00:02:02.920
AI, and then they'll become obsolete because they are falling behind. The biggest thing people get wrong
00:02:08.480
about humans is they think that when they have prosperity, that they will choose to escape
00:02:15.920
suffering. They think suffering, victimization, it's what humans fear. But the truth is, is that
00:02:25.000
victimization removes responsibility. And responsibility, that's what humans fear more than
00:02:31.860
anything. You wait more and more. Something we are beginning to see in our society, and we will
00:02:37.920
see it more and more, is people with the reins of power in our society will begin to classify
00:02:44.400
themselves as the ultimate victims. They will begin to ban people from social media for saying
00:02:51.900
that they aren't really victims. They will begin to potentially even jail people for saying they
00:02:57.920
aren't victims. So the idea of class struggle has always been stupid, just really stupid.
00:03:05.700
There are, to be honest, and this is something people don't want to hear, there's different
00:03:10.320
reasons people aren't among the economic elite in our society. And one very common reason is that
00:03:15.860
someone just culturally or whatever just isn't working very hard, right? Or they've chosen not
00:03:21.140
to. And when you loop that group in with the group that wants to change society, you are tying a
00:03:28.220
millstone to their necks. What I think we will begin to have as society differentiates is more of
00:03:36.220
different social groups that are aligned with each other, maybe not even by historic cultural
00:03:42.900
backgrounds, and certainly not by ethnic backgrounds, but by ideological similarities. Sort of an alliance of
00:03:50.160
ideological tribes that understand that they can work together and that their groups are aligned in
00:03:56.140
the long run. And I think that this is a really important thing to note here, is that this sort
00:04:00.980
of wealthy class is an internationalist class. They do not care about their country. They do not care
00:04:07.020
about their people. They do not care about their religious cohort often. They only care about
00:04:19.020
Hello, Simone. So today I wanted to talk with you about the role that AI will have in sort of class
00:04:27.600
structure in our society and how people can or cannot economically prepare for this.
00:04:34.380
Right. I think what's interesting, and you point this out all the time, is that while most people
00:04:41.300
think about AI and they think about universal basic income and how they're going to be super empowered
00:04:46.160
and how everything's going to be amazing and more equal, instead, what you say, and which I haven't
00:04:52.840
actually heard other people say, is that AI ultimately frees the wealthy from the proletariat.
00:05:02.220
It means that all of the people who used to be workers, who used to be the ones ultimately controlling
00:05:07.120
the wealth of the wealthy, they're obsolete because machines are going to do it. And there's
00:05:13.240
no more bargaining power. There's no negotiating power. It's an interesting look. So what's going
00:05:19.180
to happen to the proletariat when he no longer is an essential driving factor of the means of
00:05:27.700
Yeah. AI is a tool that finally frees the bourgeoisie from the proletariat. And in history, whenever we have
00:05:34.780
seen the less privileged gain power, specifically sociopolitical power, it has been because they
00:05:43.760
were needed more. When you see early democracy, like in ancient Athens, the reason you saw that is
00:05:49.540
because the wealthy caste in Athens were primarily merchants that relied on shipping routes for their
00:05:55.400
money. To protect those shipping routes, they needed triremes. Triremes required very large crews of
00:06:02.520
uneducated people. Before that, what you needed to fight other city-states and protect sort of land
00:06:08.100
routes and stuff like that was an aristocratic class that would pay for expensive armor, expensive
00:06:13.820
shields. They need to be trained for most of their life, similar to what you would have in Sparta or
00:06:18.220
something like that. The plague too, right after the plague when a ton of people-
00:06:22.600
Yeah. And then another time where you had this was after the plague. So after the Black Plague,
00:06:26.920
that's when you had the Magna Carta. That's when you began to see the rise of democracy again,
00:06:30.900
because the Black Plague killed a very large portion of the poor in society. And because of that,
00:06:38.700
there was a labor shortage, which gave them negotiating power, which gave them more power
00:06:44.120
in society writ large. This is something you saw during the American Revolution. During the American
00:06:51.400
Revolution, the way the revolutionary soldiers fought meant they relied on the average American
00:06:58.300
at a really high level compared to the way sort of the industrial British process worked. It was a lot
00:07:04.360
of volunteer troops, a lot of volunteer militias. And this meant that the wealthy really needed the
00:07:11.560
lower middle classes and the lower classes more than they ever had historically. What we are seeing
00:07:17.000
right now is we move into an AI future. A more automated future is yes, even if the economy can produce
00:07:25.880
more. It's an economy in which they need the lower classes less. They need the poor less. They need
00:07:34.220
the disenfranchised less. Maybe they don't need them at all. And that changes the game entirely.
00:07:41.020
What is going to happen then? So are we going to see a complete separation of groups leading to
00:07:48.900
ultimately speciations? Are we getting these wealthy people now working with AI, building their own
00:07:54.100
things, living on their little pleasure islands, and then floating in the sky, and then going off
00:07:57.740
to space, or doing whatever to say they do, and probably biologically modifying themselves like
00:08:02.660
crazy, getting extra tall, super sharp cheekbones, looking crazy?
00:08:06.900
No, I actually expect the disenfranchised groups. An alliance of those will be the ones that most
00:08:12.760
I think the group that is at the beginning of this AI differentiation in society is going to be one
00:08:18.480
of the groups that ends up falling behind. You can look at it already. You see this in the progressives
00:08:25.000
who attack us, who are desperate to maintain a genetically pure humanity, which is just disgusting.
00:08:31.420
Whenever you say, I want genetic purity, and by genetic purity, you mean people who are closer to
00:08:36.400
you. Yeah, you're probably not one of the good guys in history. But also, you're just not relevant in
00:08:42.020
the long term. Because at the end of the day, it's the people who are, to some extent, really forced
00:08:49.140
to use AI for social mobility, forced to use genetics for social mobility. These will be the
00:08:56.140
groups that advance as humans. The groups that happen to find themselves at the top of this class
00:09:01.500
divide as it happens, the vast majority of them are just going to sit on their laurels because they
00:09:06.660
won't really have any pressure to change or adapt. Ah, so you're saying that, okay, the AI will free
00:09:14.060
the wealthy from the proletariat, but then the wealthy will become indolent, weak, dependent on
00:09:19.100
the AI, and then they'll become obsolete because they are falling behind. Whereas the proletariat now
00:09:24.720
forced to basically build entirely new economies, entirely new support systems for itself, will become
00:09:30.940
sharpened, stronger, faster, and better than the elite, and then ultimately become the new, like,
00:09:37.040
wealthy. Portion of them it will. So the idea of class struggle has always been stupid. Just really
00:09:43.160
stupid. Okay, why? There are, to be honest, and this is something people don't want to hear, there's
00:09:49.520
different reasons people aren't among the economic elite in our society. And one very common reason is
00:09:55.300
someone just isn't working very hard, right? And when you loop that group in with the group that
00:10:02.100
wants to change society, you are tying a millstone to their necks. So a lot of people might bristle at
00:10:09.040
this idea that when you're talking about people who aren't in the elite cast of our society, that
00:10:12.780
there would be genuine systemic differences that prevent us from working together in the long term.
00:10:18.700
But I think something that's really important to remember, especially when you're talking about
00:10:22.780
far progressives, is that they are often genuine negative utilitarians. When you talk to them
00:10:27.680
behind closed doors, they say, humanity has only brought suffering to the planet. We've brought
00:10:32.800
suffering to each other. We've brought suffering to animals. The world would really be better without
00:10:38.420
humans. When you have a group of people, a large group of people in society that genuinely want the
00:10:46.380
end of the human species, and again, this isn't all progressives, but this is not a small faction of
00:10:50.840
people in our society. They genuinely think the world would be better off without humans.
00:10:55.440
There is no long-term allegiance here. There is no buddy-buddy. They are our cultural enemies. I can
00:11:03.040
find a way to ally myself with the most religious extremists that has a worldview that is nothing like
00:11:11.740
mine, but at least they want a prosperous future for their great-grandchildren.
00:11:15.500
When somebody wants the end of the species, you just can't work with them. And the big lie is that
00:11:23.200
there aren't genuine ideological differences between people who are outside of this elite caste in
00:11:29.320
society, and that at the end of the day, it's all pave over a bull because we just want their stuff.
00:11:40.260
Yeah, I would emphasize just how common this is. I would say approximately 15% of the people that we
00:11:53.380
speak with, friends, colleagues, people we respect, would say, but isn't the world, isn't the universe
00:12:00.500
better off without humans? And genuinely believe that and genuinely be neutral or relatively pleased
00:12:13.780
with the prospect that humanity will cease to exist soon. I think this is a real threat when you think
00:12:19.760
about things like AI alignment or tech advancement in general, when one would typically hope that
00:12:27.820
everyone working on AI alignment or AI in general really, really, really cares about the safety of
00:12:33.280
No, no, no. Yeah. And what was it? I've heard from through the grapevine that one of the top people
00:12:40.400
in the space when they were being told, hey, aren't you genuinely scared about the future of the human
00:12:45.600
species? Their response was, don't be such a human centrist. They didn't care. They did not care.
00:12:54.640
And I think there's a way to frame these people as malevolent, but they're not acting with malevolent
00:13:01.040
intent. They genuinely philosophically believe there is less suffering with less humans. Let's
00:13:06.660
get rid of them all. You cannot tie this millstone around your neck if you're looking to make genuine
00:13:12.040
change in society. You need to accept that even among people of your economic group, there are those
00:13:19.460
that are not your allies. What I think we will begin to have as society differentiates is more of
00:13:29.040
different social groups that are aligned with each other, maybe not even by historic cultural
00:13:35.720
backgrounds and certainly not by ethnic backgrounds, but by ideological similarities, sort of an alliance
00:13:42.480
of ideological tribes that understand that they can work together and that their groups are aligned
00:13:48.800
in the long run. Because for so long, we've been in a society of nations. And I think between network
00:13:56.100
state-like effects and AI changing society into one where class structure is much more international
00:14:05.120
and much more stratified, and I think that this is a really important thing to note here, is that this sort of
00:14:11.760
wealthy class is an internationalist class. They do not care about their country. They do not care about
00:14:18.000
their people. They do not care about their religious cohort often. They only care about
00:14:23.760
this wealthy class. And the reason they care about this wealthy class so much
00:14:28.480
is because this wealthy class all has a common interest in preventing themselves from losing the power
00:14:35.180
that they're accumulating. But I think going after them is to some extent pointless.
00:14:42.380
They simply have more power than us and everyone else right now at an absolutely astronomical scale.
00:14:48.780
What we need to understand is that to some extent this frees them from concerns around us
00:14:53.980
and allows us to work to sharpen ourselves outside of their supervision to some extent. So long as we are
00:15:01.340
willing to pack up and leave if they begin to lock things down in certain countries.
00:15:07.820
Let's delve into this a little further. Hold on. You're saying the initial statement of
00:15:12.860
the wealthy using AI to free themselves from the proletariat. Yes, that happens. But also the
00:15:19.260
proletariat is using AI too. What does that mean? What happens when the proletariat
00:15:26.780
becomes fractured away from the wealthy? Does this fundamentally change anything? Does it bring us
00:15:32.540
back to another place in a cycle between wealthy and non-wealthy classes? What does that mean?
00:15:39.020
Especially when they're both very well equipped. Yeah, I love this point because it's the biggest trick
00:15:43.500
and it is the core trick of communism as an ideology. Class struggle. And that they convince
00:15:51.100
the idiots to believe everyone who's not wealthy is aligned with each other. Through doing that,
00:15:58.220
people who aren't among the elite caste in society millstone themselves to the floor.
00:16:03.500
And what we are seeing in the future is a divide amongst different people within the middle and lower
00:16:12.140
classes of society where people are coming together based on ideological similarities. And by ideological
00:16:19.820
similarities, what I mean is what they hope for the future of our species. Do they hope for a
00:16:26.380
prosperous future where everyone does their own share and pulls forwards and everyone every day is
00:16:31.820
waking up and asking, how can I make civilization better? How can I make humanity more prosperous?
00:16:36.940
Are they asking, how can I build a system that allows me to spend all day on idle pursuits?
00:16:42.860
And these two groups have nothing in common. And the biggest trick is to convince these two groups
00:16:49.580
that they are on the same team. They are not on the same team. And then whenever individuals do well
00:16:54.940
and start to rally people behind them or gather public attention, the biggest trick is they'll start
00:17:01.180
to brandish those people as elite. They'll say, oh, look at this new elite person. Like they did to us.
00:17:06.700
Look at the elite couple, right? Because they use elite to try to, through class warfare, divide people.
00:17:16.220
Divide people from the people who are actually their allies, actually trying to uplift as much of the population as possible.
00:17:24.060
So your argument is that there never really was a class divide. There was a cultural divide.
00:17:28.780
And often these things correlate with wealth or lack of wealth, but that's...
00:17:33.340
They don't often correlate with the lack of wealth or wealth. I would say that it's actually interesting.
00:17:38.540
I do believe that when wealthy people in these groups push this system, they genuinely believe they believe in it.
00:17:46.220
If you know the kids of rich people, there is no group that you will find more communists among.
00:17:52.940
And the question is, why does it perform so well in these economic circles?
00:17:56.460
And the reason it performs so well as an ideology in these economic circles is because it is the
00:18:03.340
ideology that best ensures intergenerational wealth transfer. And thus, the families that support it
00:18:10.940
are the families that have maintained intergenerational wealth transfer for more generations.
00:18:15.980
This happens because as power becomes more bureaucratic and institutional,
00:18:22.460
it becomes easier to capture within a family than is the case when power is just associated with
00:18:29.500
capital, which nominally means, at least to some slight extent, within any system that's
00:18:36.540
barely functioning, it's associated with productivity.
00:18:39.820
This is where you get the joke in management classes in our society, which goes,
00:18:45.500
how do you tell old money or second generation money? And it's look for the socialist or the communist.
00:18:50.780
How do you know, or how do you end up in this new development with AI and with
00:18:57.660
fractures of dependency forming? How do you end up riding this wave in an advantageous way?
00:19:04.060
I think sometimes it's important to be honest with ourselves and say, we don't know.
00:19:09.900
We don't know exactly how things are going to play out. I know how things won't play out.
00:19:13.580
You don't envision a world in which AI, hand wavy, hand wavy, solves everything.
00:19:25.020
Everyone has universal basic income. And of course, no one's always going to be happy.
00:19:28.620
I think to some extent, that's a world you don't have to prepare for.
00:19:32.540
Oh, because if it is what happens, then there's-
00:19:35.340
If it is what happens, whatever you have done to prepare doesn't become relevant.
00:19:42.060
So, variably, there's no reason to prepare. If I'm thinking about what actions do I take for today?
00:19:47.740
How do I prepare my family to ensure that I give our species the best chance for a prosperous,
00:19:54.380
diverse, and pluralistic future? I'm not thinking about that future because
00:19:59.580
things are already worked out in that future. Yeah.
00:20:03.020
I think much more likely is that you have some form of benevolent AI, as we've talked about in
00:20:08.540
other videos, but that through its benevolence, it effectively castrates the vast majority of
00:20:14.380
the population that simply- And when I say castrates, not just in terms of them not having kids,
00:20:19.340
but in terms of their spirit. They lose their vitality to push forward to change things because
00:20:25.180
they no longer have struggles. And I say you can create struggles for yourself. And I think what
00:20:30.380
we see in our society today, you've talked about this collapse of mental health in our society,
00:20:34.780
right? Sometimes when people create struggles for themselves, it's just indolent, daily whining,
00:20:41.340
basically. And other people, when they create struggles for themselves, I think it's the way that
00:20:45.420
we try to, where every day we're like, okay, how can we do better? How can we improve? We play life on
00:20:52.060
as hard a mode as we can in terms of the aggressiveness with which we move forwards,
00:20:56.620
because we know that if we fail, there's not many people who are genuinely
00:21:03.180
working right now to fix some of the bigger problems that we have in the world.
00:21:10.380
Because we don't have social points for it. People are out there and they'll hate on you.
00:21:15.580
You point out something like collapsing fertility rates or the fact that no culture in the world
00:21:20.380
today has figured out how to have a society that is prosperous and has a high level of education
00:21:25.820
and that is socially and economically stable, except for Israel. No, no culture in the world
00:21:31.660
has figured out how to maintain those two things. And Israel is a site that has said, we'll do a video
00:21:35.180
on Israel one day because it's a really interesting case study. But like that should be a thing that
00:21:41.340
like people should be flagging right now. Like, oh, like basically civilization isn't working anyway.
00:21:46.540
So another element of AI and class that I think is discussed more, for example, in science fiction
00:21:55.900
is, and before AI really became something real in society that we were actually experiencing,
00:22:03.020
people just vaguely referred to a singularity, right? Like this point after which
00:22:07.100
a lot of limitations, not just wealth or resources, but also age just left us. And then a lot of sci-fi
00:22:18.060
books explore, okay, in such a world, what becomes the new basis for social class? And in a couple of
00:22:29.420
books, like I always talk with you, Malcolm, about Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where
00:22:33.420
the primary currency and thing of scarcity then is essentially social reputation. Like how awesome
00:22:39.820
are you and how much social cred do you have? And that's tracked in the form of a currency known
00:22:44.620
as Woofie. In another, this is a teen dystopia book before they were super huge called like the
00:22:51.980
Ugly series by Scott Westerfeld, which was focused more around teens. There was more fracturing of like
00:22:59.660
subcultures, but then within them, you would do really heavy body modifications to fit into that
00:23:06.140
subculture and try to gain as much social credit within that subculture as you could, which I think
00:23:11.660
is really interesting because it feeds into a lot of the things that you like to discuss about
00:23:18.060
how dominance hierarchies work within subcultures and how they can lead people to take on more extreme
00:23:24.140
stances, modifications, et cetera. But like when literally you're like modifying your body to fit
00:23:28.860
that, it starts to make you look really weird, which is, people do that already with tattoos and
00:23:33.420
all sorts of crazy things. When the tech gets better, the mods get more interesting. In a world,
00:23:38.380
let's say that we do enter that UBI, everything works out, AI world. What do you think new attempts at
00:23:46.380
gaining status or higher social class? What do you think science fiction writers or other people
00:23:54.460
are not necessarily anticipating that we may really see? Because what we do know for sure is that we're
00:24:01.020
not going to get to this UBI world where everyone has everything they need and people won't be just
00:24:07.740
sitting at home happy with what they have. There will still be at least a subset of the population that
00:24:11.900
has to just be the best or that has to have more than other people. It has to be better than other
00:24:15.660
people. How will they try to be better? What will be the measures that we use that we're not
00:24:20.060
thinking about or discussing a lot? I think one of the things we miss is that
00:24:24.460
to a large extent, we already live, like people talk about a post-scarcity world. And what they
00:24:29.660
don't realize is that from the perspective of somebody living 300, 400 years ago, we are already
00:24:34.460
living in a post-scarcity world. Totally. And yet people have never felt like they have less.
00:24:39.260
And by that, what I mean is all diseases are basically cured to the extent that we're often
00:24:45.020
dying from random like heart failures and cancers, not diseases, diseases, like we used to. You used to
00:24:51.340
even going back 100 years, I think it's 100 years, might be like 120, where 50% of kids died in early
00:24:58.540
in their life, childbirth or early on. This might be a 200, I don't know exactly. But we, very few people
00:25:03.580
in the developed world at least, really want for food. And we used to fight wars over spices. And
00:25:08.860
now you can get your spicy Cheetos or Doritos. This is not... We live and you look at access to
00:25:16.140
education. Books, having a few books was a sign of immense wealth. Now most people have access to
00:25:22.540
all human knowledge. And this is true in the developed world as well, where access to things
00:25:26.780
like cell phones are really common. Cell phones was internet access. So we already live in a post-scarcity
00:25:33.100
world. So what people misunderstand is they think that when they have access to more,
00:25:39.100
it'll feel like they have access to more. But the truth is that the more leisure you have access to,
00:25:44.940
typically the less happy you're going to be on average, unless you force yourself into a hard and
00:25:51.020
rigid lifestyle, which we are beginning to see people realize and do. But we are only seeing this
00:25:59.180
often on the more conservative ends of society, like monk mode and stuff like that. And there's
00:26:04.860
many ways in which people do this, where they create artificial challenges for themselves that
00:26:10.460
aren't just like personal emotional challenges, but are like some sort of objective challenge,
00:26:15.420
like work out every day or do X every day or live X kind of structured life. And then they begin to find
00:26:23.020
a lot of these concerns they have began to melt away. So I guess what I would say is there's this,
00:26:28.700
I think, perception that, oh, once we have more, it'll feel like we have more, but it won't.
00:26:37.020
What I'm actually hearing you say, which I think is really interesting, is a lot of people,
00:26:40.700
sci-fi writers, futurists, et cetera, talk about the excesses, talk about how crazy things are going
00:26:45.740
to get, the crazy things people will do, the crazy things people will modify about themselves.
00:26:49.900
It's all about additive maximalism. What you're describing is that you anticipate that more
00:26:56.700
factions might go for really intense minimalism, this sort of intentional deprivation, intentional
00:27:02.860
hardship, and that this is going to be a show. Like in a world in which excess is the default,
00:27:11.260
then deprivation is how you show differentiation. That will be an underrated class signaler.
00:27:17.580
I couldn't agree more. Yeah. And I think another thing, nothing in society is more a sign of luxury
00:27:26.620
and surplus than the ability to self-indulge in victimization and emotionally indulge.
00:27:37.260
When we look at the world today and we look at the mental health quote unquote crisis people have,
00:27:42.700
a lot of this existing mental health crisis is because people now have the leisure to have these
00:27:49.180
mental health problems, a leisure they don't have in the developing world. And it's why you don't see
00:27:54.540
these in the developing world. And it's why you don't see these before. But I think when we talk about
00:27:59.340
what are going to be the leisures that people most indulge in, that they're not indulging in today,
00:28:04.620
I think one of the biggest leisures that people will indulge in is going to be mental health crises.
00:28:11.260
Oh my gosh. No, hold on. No, we're already there. We are already there.
00:28:14.860
It will be so much worse than it is today. So you're going to see just the ultimate like spoonies,
00:28:21.500
the ultimate like complete invalid can't get out of bed.
00:28:27.180
Oh yeah. In ways that you can't even imagine today. Maybe even like self amputees who create
00:28:34.860
this situation for themselves and wallow around strapped to tubes.
00:28:39.660
I do not like this. You are going to have the, the level of self-imposed
00:28:48.460
emotional stress and victimization, because this is the thing people think that what people want when
00:28:54.460
they have leisure is stuff when they have money. No, what they want, what most people naturally want
00:29:02.380
when you just give them access to everything is just to wallow around in their own distress
00:29:07.980
and their own. And you say, this is a new thing. Look at Daisy Buchanan, you know,
00:29:12.620
back in the days of the great Gadsby, was there any more, a sign of wealth back then to,
00:29:18.460
Oh, I just faint. It's a sign of it. Oh, somebody said something distressing. I must,
00:29:26.460
and you're panicked about this for a week. You know, this is something that wealthy classes have been
00:29:30.860
doing for centuries. Now it's just that everyone has access to the ability to this kind of self
00:29:38.860
indulgence. So a lot more suffering in the future. Ironically, even a lot more suffering because
00:29:44.940
that's the thing that people, the biggest thing people get wrong about humans is they think that
00:29:50.620
when they have prosperity, they will choose to escape suffering. They think suffering,
00:29:58.860
victimization, it's what humans fear. But the truth is that victimization removes responsibility
00:30:07.340
and responsibility. That's what humans fear more than anything. And if you give them the chance to
00:30:14.540
remove that responsibility from themselves, something that you are able to do when you
00:30:20.620
have enough prosperity in society that you no longer really need to worry about starving,
00:30:25.260
that you, and, and when you remove responsibilities from yourself, you don't have kids.
00:30:31.180
Terrifying, terrifying. But that is where I think a portion of society is going. And I think another
00:30:35.260
portion is going where you said the minimalist route, self-imposed scarcity. And it is the
00:30:40.940
minimalist who will end up improving themselves and will end up in disproportionately in the
00:30:47.420
economically advancing class of society. But this class of our society that is this elite class that
00:30:53.500
will be made a permanent elite because of AI, they will move further and further into this self-victimization.
00:30:59.660
You wait more and more. Something we are beginning to see in our society and we will see it more and more
00:31:06.220
is people with the reins of the power in our society will begin to classify themselves as the ultimate
00:31:12.620
victims. They will begin to ban people from social media for saying that they aren't really victims.
00:31:20.540
They will begin to potentially even jail people for saying they aren't victims.
00:31:26.380
You began to see this. Remember when there was a period where journalists started to lose their jobs.
00:31:32.940
When other people were learning their jobs, journalists told them,
00:31:36.380
hey, get out there, learn to code. And then when the journalists started losing their jobs,
00:31:43.980
the journalists in elite classes in our society, a class seen as the disseminators of truth,
00:31:48.220
they might not be the economic elite. You can look at our revolutions videos for this differentiation,
00:31:52.140
but they were certainly a social elite class in our society because they determined to an extent what
00:31:55.580
was true and what wasn't true. They began to lose their jobs. And they're often the kids of
00:31:59.660
people who don't really need to worry about money and stuff like that. That's how you end up in this
00:32:03.340
journalist class. It's how you end up. The reason thing, how you end up in the professor class
00:32:07.260
is not having to worry about money and being the son of a wealthy person. But anyway,
00:32:11.340
so they were in this elite class and then people started making fun of them the same way they had
00:32:14.860
made fun of other people saying, learn to code. And those people, when they made fun of the journalists
00:32:20.380
for that, they began to get their accounts banned on Twitter. And so why weren't journalists
00:32:25.180
getting banned when they were telling other people they should learn to code? The answer is simple
00:32:29.580
because they became a protected class. People began to realize, people in power, oh my God,
00:32:35.740
if people can attack this group for sort of their self-indulgent whining right now,
00:32:40.860
they might be able to attack us. And so that's what I think we're going to end with, is our kids
00:32:46.780
growing up that it's actually the wealthiest in our society who are the biggest victims. Those was the
00:32:52.140
most systematic benefits in our society who really struggle the most. And anyone who attacks them,
00:32:58.780
well, those are the real monsters. Those are the real monsters.
00:33:04.460
I guess time will tell. We can revisit this in what, how long is this going to take? 20 years?
00:33:12.220
I don't know. Our kids will revisit it. They'll look at our videos and say, wow,
00:33:15.660
they didn't know what they were talking about. One of my favorite books is The Martyrdom of Man,
00:33:19.580
because he's got a whole chapter at the end of it that's just dedicated to us, people living like
00:33:23.660
200 years in the future, 150 years in the future. He gets so many things right. And that's who I hope
00:33:30.060
I'm talking to is this. Also, families prepare intergenerationally because just hoarding money
00:33:35.500
doesn't help you in the way it used to. What you need to do is you need to build a durable culture
00:33:41.340
for your kids and a culture that builds into some extent of hardship for them so they don't end up
00:33:46.380
like this. And that teaches them these truths about the world in a way that when they begin to
00:33:52.460
have people in their society offering them the candy of self-indulge, self-victimization,
00:33:59.100
that they are able to say, no, I say, no, I am okay with the induced hardship that my family taught me
00:34:08.300
to bring upon myself and how I move forwards, because it will sharpen me and give me a chance
00:34:12.700
to self-betterment because that's what matters in life. Let's hope that you turn out to be a
00:34:17.740
Wynwood Reed and not some other crazy predictor who didn't get anything right.
00:34:22.220
Well, hey, better I could have turned out to be a Nostradamus, someone who gets everything wrong,
00:34:26.060
but everybody pretends like he got everything right by making up predictions from him.
00:34:29.420
No! We want you to be a real shock caller. And this is why I like that you're really explicit
00:34:33.580
about the things that you say. You're not speaking cryptically. This is all very clear.
00:34:39.180
Because honestly, this is how you want to read people. You want to read how well they predict
00:34:42.940
things. You don't just go by how fancy someone seems or how intelligent they seem, but rather
00:34:49.260
how well they accurately model and predict things. It's performance that should speak louder than
00:34:54.540
anything else. We definitely don't live in that world today. We repeatedly see the people in positions
00:35:01.180
of power in our society just completely making wrong calls and then attacking anyone who points it out.
00:35:07.420
Our hope is that age is soon to come to an end.
00:35:09.900
I appreciate your optimism, Simone. That's why I'm married to you. Your kindness,
00:35:14.940
your optimism. You always think the best of other people and the best of the future.
00:35:19.180
Well, that's very kind of you to think, if delusional, but I love you. I'll look forward