Based Camp - Based Camp： How AI Will Alter Class Conflict

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 1.00

00:00:14.540 less. They need the poor less. They need the disenfranchised less. Maybe they don't need 0.99

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 1.00

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. 1.00

00:03:04.120 Okay, why? 1.00

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

00:04:13.140 this wealthy class.

00:04:15.920 Would you like to know more?

00:04:18.160 Hello, Malcolm.

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 0.92

00:05:25.960 production, Malcolm?

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- 0.54

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 0.99

00:07:34.220 the disenfranchised less. Maybe they don't need them at all. And that changes the game entirely. 0.97

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 1.00

00:08:10.940 genetically modify themselves. Interesting.

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. 0.75

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 0.89

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 1.00

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.

00:11:35.860 It's not. And that's how they've kept us down.

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

00:12:32.740 humans.

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 0.99

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, 1.00

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. 1.00

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.

00:19:39.180 Right. Right.

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 0.99

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 1.00

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 1.00

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, 0.59

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. 0.61

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

00:35:26.540 to our next conversation. Bye, Malcolm.

00:35:28.940 Bye.

Based Camp - May 30, 2023

Based Camp： How AI Will Alter Class Conflict

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