00:00:00.000hello simone today we are going to be discussing an exciting topic which is does communism make
00:00:07.160sense now specifically what we're going to be digging into here is like we are known as i guess
00:00:12.260far right wing youtubers or podcasters or intellectual influencers i don't know right
00:00:20.760but people consider us far right wing now a lot of our fans consider us very centrist so
00:00:27.020maybe but i i identify as is right wing so whatever right like i the the sane far right
00:00:33.480is where i think i'd put us right at least within like the tech right circles and stuff like that
00:00:37.480which puts us in an interesting position vis-a-vis communism because i'm not going to come out here
00:00:41.520and just be like we have said in the past on the show very clearly that communism may work in a
00:00:48.520post-scarcity economy and we have also a number of times gone into what it means when we say
00:00:56.280something like that right where like we are putting extremely heavy caveats on this when
00:01:02.560people have done ubi experiments and they have just handed people money they have seen extremely
00:01:09.180bad outcomes the most famous is the sam altman one where they gave people a thousand dollars
00:01:13.240every month for three years and the people who had been given the money they they had less money
00:01:18.360at the end of it total money than the people who had been given nothing in terms of like wealth
00:01:22.820increase right they they didn't spend any more time with their kids they didn't have any more
00:01:26.600kids they didn't spend any more time in education they really only spent more time in recreation
00:01:30.220that's it and they paid down their debt a little so that's nice
00:01:33.960that doesn't really mean they visited the doctor a little more it doesn't really mean anything if
00:01:42.940on net they had less money so yes they paid down their debt but on net they had less money so1.00
00:01:50.280just a disaster and we've seen this in communities that are offered UBI right like Native American0.96
00:01:56.980communities for example where we see them just completely dissolve in terms of productivity in1.00
00:02:02.180terms of drug addiction in terms of alcohol addiction the moment they get on something
00:02:06.860that is the equivalent of like UBI or like local communism or something like that and so then the
00:02:12.720question is okay how do we uh that that all being the case like also clearly ai is going to disrupt0.71
00:02:21.740what the economy means right and and and it may not happen this generation right it may not happen
00:02:29.400well it's probably going to happen in our lifetimes if i'm going to be honest like if we
00:02:33.560look at the speed of ai in relation to automated workers even even for physical labor from what
00:02:41.720we're sort of seeing behind the scenes that's developing a lot faster than people realize and
00:02:47.300that we may be replacing people in a lot more fields a lot faster than people think and so
00:02:52.600then the question is okay well if that happens then what does the economy mean how do you have
00:02:59.400a functional economy with struggle and some form of scarcity so people don't go crazy
00:03:03.940without what we've come to understand as like market labor, right?
00:03:09.420And so to explore this subject, I want to focus on a few areas.
00:03:15.840I want to focus on like underlying how does capitalism help people,
00:03:23.660examine the individual structures within capitalism
00:03:27.080that lead to the net outcome of positive human results
00:03:29.980and see how those can be potentially mimicked
00:03:33.820in a post-traditionally capitalist economy but then secondarily the big question we have is
00:03:41.360okay how does communism often fail and how could ai or even could ai realistically prevent
00:03:52.800these failure scenarios so a classic failure scenario in communism that will sort of walk
00:03:58.260people why communism almost always fails not almost always it literally always fails above0.96
00:04:04.220certain sizes communism works in small government stuff like it works with some of the kibbutzum
00:04:10.200it works with families every family is communist i'm sorry people don't understand what i mean by
00:04:15.620that like it's from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs
00:04:20.220right like my baby doesn't work right and i can't produce milk for them right you know the person
00:04:26.300who can produce milk produces the milk. The baby and the kids are not expected to bring in an
00:04:31.980income at this stage, right? You know, but we still support them. The types of jobs and roles
00:04:36.920that each of us take on are the types of jobs role that we're best at both due to our educational
00:04:41.560background, proficiencies, and yes, gender. So we live in a communist structure already. We live in
00:04:46.980a communist utopia already. It's just a very small one. But the question is, is why does it break down
00:04:51.740at a societal level we've written extensively on this so i'll keep it pretty short uh the key
00:04:57.760reason is is when you are creating a larger communist structure you need to centralize
00:05:08.940power in a way that rewards bad actors and a lot of people don't they're like oh it's that people
00:05:16.600aren't motivated when they just get money from the state or something like that or that you can't do
00:05:22.500advanced things in a communist system and that's not true like that that's actually like factually
00:05:28.340untrue like the one thing the soviet union was actually pretty good at was science like they
00:05:33.860were beating us soundly in the space race for quite a long period of the space race they had
00:05:41.140many excellent excellent scientists yes because of government bureaucracy and the way sort of power0.98
00:05:46.260gets captured in communist systems they also ended up making catastrophically stupid scientific0.98
00:05:51.520blunders that killed hundreds of millions of people the chinese did this as well this is0.98
00:05:55.840typically in fields like biology and and stuff like this but in in physics they did pretty well
00:06:00.540so no it's it's actually not that people are just unmotivated in these systems a highly motivated
00:06:07.760highly conscientious people are typically equally or if not even more motivated in communist
00:06:13.600ecosystems where communist ecosystems really break down is for less competent fields the the average
00:06:22.020line worker and stuff like that because at this point you don't want to do those jobs nobody wants
00:06:27.340to do those jobs people often end up doing them at the point of a gun barrel and maliciously poorly
00:06:31.760it's it's the average desk worker job it's not the i got my best job i could have ever gotten0.50
00:06:39.040because i'm literally one of the best people in the country at doing said job like i'm a gun nut
00:06:45.200and now i get to spend all of my day coming up with gun designs and now we have the ak-47
00:06:49.920right you know i'm a nuke nut right i'm really interested in cutting-edge nuclear technology and
00:06:55.700now we have a soviet atomic bomb right by the way like to put in context how impressive that is
00:07:01.180iran still can't make it admittedly like everyone's mad at them but like
00:07:06.000the soviet union was doing this stuff like over half a century ago right at this point so
00:07:12.800communism can actually motivate the very best to do the very best one of the problems you have
00:07:18.960with soviet science sorry if i'm getting on a sidetrack here but they like really screwed up
00:07:23.520their tank production for example simply because of like government politics that ended up0.97
00:07:30.120prioritizing one idiot's designs over the guy who is actually more competent because soviet systems0.85
00:07:36.720are not always good at finding the most competent person capitalist systems also struggle sometimes0.99
00:07:44.120to find the most competent person but generally like if the government turned me away in a
00:07:49.400capitalist system i could presumably go and build my own company separately off of my ideas it
00:07:56.400doesn't work that way especially not in a country like the united states like i go off and i want to
00:08:00.700build my own tank and because somebody else has like government crony contract that they still
00:08:04.760get the government crony contract because they're at boeing and they'll they'll kill you or something
00:08:08.440you know that's that's the way this works but again the point i'm making here is yes sovietism
00:08:15.500leads to catastrophic inefficiencies but you can get those within at least what we call capitalist
00:08:21.860ecosystems as well right so now back to what the real problem of communism is so when you're going
00:08:30.420down a communist path you essentially have two strategies that you can attempt you can say
00:08:36.420we're going to centralize all the power into one bureaucracy and this single bureaucracy is going
00:08:43.700to manage all forms of the economy and everything like that and everybody knows like generally this
00:08:48.980doesn't seem to really work for a number of reasons tied to like inefficiency but we'll
00:08:54.880put those reasons aside in a bucket for now so strategy number one centralize everything
00:09:01.500essentially you're creating a country that's ruled by a single monopolistic company that is
00:09:08.040that is functionally what what that form of communism is which is why i always say that
00:09:12.860the end state of communism and the end state of extreme libertarianism are the same well i mean
00:09:17.460a big part of this that tends to create huge huge problems is when you are creating one
00:09:24.020when you're consolidating everything you're also abolishing private property and markets and that
00:09:32.240people don't have the same reason to invest in their continued property and it requires a lot
00:09:37.460of coercion like people don't just oh sure yeah take my house that's fine i didn't i mean that's
00:09:45.420that's generally the lower bloodshed and the lower death toll is on the redistribution part
00:09:51.380that's the step one part but i'm just saying like as a little starting point there's also some
00:09:56.380friction obviously it involves robbing people of their property and everything like that i get that
00:10:00.620but that's usually the lower deaths i mean a lot of obviously conservative commentators are going
00:10:04.960to crash out about government redistribution everything like that i'm just pointing out
00:10:08.240that's not actually where the the vast majority of communist death tolls come from the vast
00:10:12.820majority of communist deaths come from the inefficient management that happens after that
00:10:16.680yeah so in terms of at least there's this one book that tries to give a full a tally it's called the
00:10:21.880black book of communism and they estimate that there have been 80 to 100 million deaths from
00:10:28.480democide famine and repression across implementations i think famine's the biggest
00:10:33.880killer right so let's we'll talk about okay i'll quickly explain why these things happen without
00:10:39.600going too deep into them i can't what we have within a communist ecosystem is that an individual
00:10:45.760has no reason to invest in anything that they own because they don't own anything so like if our
00:10:52.720house requires a ton of effort and work to keep from falling apart this is why if you go to many0.84
00:11:00.080communist countries you don't see tons of old houses or you see houses in a horrible disrepair
00:11:05.920or like giant blocks and horrible disrepair because people didn't have a reason to invest
00:11:12.000in the upkeep of their own property and the area around their property right like it's not just
00:11:16.720my house i want to be nice it's a region around my house because that increases its value
00:11:20.560and this is true of companies this is true of everything it's it's a huge positive cycle that
00:11:24.720you get out of this the secondary bigger thing is is inefficiency in the way things are operating
00:11:30.560And what people say, and I think incorrectly, is that you simply can not manage in a planned out format an entire economy.
00:11:39.800And it is in attempting to do that, that the Soviet systems begin to break down and the communist systems begin to break down in ways that lead to these famines and stuff like that.
00:11:50.440But when we look at the actual causes of most of the famines, it isn't actually due to problems in inefficient management.0.69
00:11:59.460it's it's due to explicitly bad policy like killing all the birds in china that were eating
00:12:07.700the pests on the crop they were mad that they sometimes ate the crops and then they had giant
00:12:12.540pests and then a bunch of people died because the way that they were measuring food is they would
00:12:18.060go to a town and they basically tell the person running the town well if you can't show me x amount
00:12:21.500of food you're going to be removed from your position right so now they're like oh yeah we've
00:12:25.940got that amount of food right and then they go to the people and they go hey the military works for
00:12:30.180me you give all your food for export now they don't have any food left because they were just
00:12:34.420pretending that they had x amount of food but they wanted to keep their position and they had the
00:12:37.940guns so they were in a position to do this because if they don't do this then they're put in it now
00:12:41.860this is all a problem of organization like all of these individual problems could be solved if you
00:12:48.640had an intelligent and conscientious person going through the system and attempting to address
00:12:54.580every one of these problems what we really need to get to is why that doesn't happen why these
00:12:59.140problems never get caused solved why bad ideas get pushed down we need to say can ai prevent this
00:13:03.900so thoughts before i go further simone i mean i i think you're focusing a lot on the pure
00:13:13.400governance problems but there's more to it than just that and so it's also important to address
00:13:18.480those other short shortfalls i'm i'm actually claiming there are not actually the problems
00:13:23.800that are not governance problems are not that big in communism. So what do you think they are?
00:13:29.560That we discount the extent to which markets are like an organism or ecosystem that is able to
00:13:37.220manage huge amounts of information in a very responsive, distributed, natural way. And that
00:13:42.400when you try to have a human run, mostly blind government system run it, you don't get the data
00:13:51.320you need like planners don't have enough information about relative scarcity and cost
00:13:56.500disagree with your thesis here there are ways within a communist system without yeah and the
00:14:03.360soviet like there's the soviet ogos system that they they tried to create this nationwide
00:14:08.100information network to to better manage this but they couldn't like just getting the information
00:14:13.800inputs in a pre-AI age was just not feasible. It isn't just unfeasible. They just did it in bad
00:14:23.940ways. You can create pseudo capitalistic systems in a communist empire that can measure supply and
00:14:32.800demand and react to supply and demand with rewards. I mean, you are creating essentially
00:14:39.160capitalism was extra steps but the idea of having distributive information networks that can
00:14:47.180recognize scarcity and demand is not something that is out of completely impossible in a communist
00:14:55.460system the point i'm making here is that if you actually look and i know from like a capitalist
00:14:59.920perspective the great machine and people have talked about like capitalism is the first ai
00:15:04.720right and in a way capitalism is kind of the first ai right um but the the capitalist machine
00:15:13.120or the ai that's created by the giant capitalistic network is not something that it is completely
00:15:20.580impossible to reverse engineer and the reason i say this is that when we look at the failures
00:15:26.200of communist systems demonstrably they are not due to failures of centralized control
00:15:34.240they are due to specific policy failures. I wouldn't say it's just policy failures, too.
00:15:43.980I think that the fundamental system whereby, again, in a pre-AI age, communism comes to exist,
00:15:52.940which is this process of like a revolution to socialism to then communism, is doomed to fail,
00:16:00.420right because you have this revolutionary fervor and then you have the purge where like a bunch of
00:16:08.520like people lose their property and there's the kulaks and then you get shortages and then you
00:16:13.740have the famine and then you have the backlash to that the blame we have to we have to handle this
00:16:20.100oh it's it's capitalism it's all these other things and then that means we have to implement0.98
00:16:25.280more controls and then that leads to corrupt and black markets and then that leads to reform
00:16:30.800or collapse and it's just like things it's it's an inherently unstable system the way you have
00:16:36.340to stumble into cap or to communism now and here's my fundamental thesis when it comes to communism
00:16:43.320and ai and how it's going to play out and why it's going to work and why many of the fundamental
00:16:48.200things that lead to this instability aren't going to be a problem one of the key things being i mean0.99
00:16:53.900I know you're talking about like human led governance being really stupid and AGI can0.97
00:16:57.400sort of in a hand wavy way, fix that. And the right AGI can, I think the other thing is that0.99
00:17:03.300communism is often a problem because a bunch of corrupt power hungry people are like scrambling
00:17:10.840for the governing power and for the resources of like the workers and all their possessions. Right.
00:17:16.460But what happens when you have a bunch of people who don't work and don't own anything? No one's going to fight over them. No one wants them. And what I think might happen is that a largely orphaned population, the bottom part of the K-shaped economy, is going to be left high and dry by governments that falter, both due to weird AI disruption, but also due to demographic collapse.
00:17:43.680and then also just left behind by the rich people who go off to their like
00:17:47.840that's an interesting thesis but i'm gonna push back on this let me finish with my thing then and
00:17:52.420then you'll push back and then basically i think that some some of the people who feel bad morally
00:17:58.780about leaving behind everyone else are going to send down some of their agi gods to just create
00:18:05.240little communist communities for the people who've been left behind and then those people will be0.82
00:18:11.460taken care of by mother AI that will handle all their stuff for them. So you don't have anyone
00:18:18.140having their property taken away. You don't have anyone, you know, being like accused of corruption
00:18:23.000or anything. You basically just have AI taking care of those who are left behind. Why is this
00:18:27.840wrong? So I will get to that in a second. You might get that, but like that is a possible good
00:18:34.820scenario. But the reason why I think that's wrong is because I fundamentally disagree with you about
00:18:39.860the first part the first part is is communism and i i keep trying to come back to this because
00:18:46.300it's actually central to understand why ai will likely fail even within a communist system right
00:18:52.220like why ai would break communism is that communism doesn't fail because of it prevents
00:19:02.040competent people for working or it doesn't motivate people enough or it's bad at determining
00:19:07.260on the ground risks because capitalism just works as this brilliant machine that can measure things
00:19:12.940about economic states that communism could ever measure and the evidence i used for that is again
00:19:17.980the failures and the successes we had under communism communism achieved some things that
00:19:23.240were enormously successful in terms of scientific progress industrial development etc but it also
00:19:30.960obviously super high does i'm not but what i'm saying is to just be like communism didn't function
00:19:36.040at all is is factually incorrect and to say that within a communist ecosystem i'm like let's look
00:19:42.780at a capitalist ecosystem right if you go to a factory what type of person do you want running
00:19:49.460the factory right the type of person you want running the factory is going to be the most
00:19:53.900competent person to run the factory who has the support of the the workers and can push them to
00:19:59.720work their hardest in a communist system what type of person do you want to run the factory
00:20:04.140it's the same type of person right the people who end up in the lower level management positions
00:20:11.440in communist and capitalist systems at least aspirationally and how these systems could
00:20:17.500should be structured are the same types of people like you don't have this and it's also
00:20:23.540communist systems don't send food to the wrong place you know malevolently or something like
00:20:30.160that when we talk about communist systems failing at determining what like where economic needs need
00:20:38.520to go right in the way a capital system would the biggest failures are virtually never because the
00:20:47.800the system wasn't good at monitoring things they are again when i was talking about like the the
00:20:53.940wheat famine right it was it was a twofold failure it was a failure of the the way that
00:21:00.180they were measuring like how much wheat each region had was a very bad way to be measuring
00:21:05.420each how much weight each region had that led to adverse incentives which led to them sending
00:21:10.820wheat to locations that didn't need wheat from locations that did need wheat and they created
00:21:15.980a pest problem because they couldn't tell people above them that they were wrong right now note in
00:21:22.060a capitalist system you might not be able to tell your boss that they're wrong right like it let's
00:21:27.320consider ubisoft or something like that i might even in a capitalist system not be able to tell
00:21:32.520my boss you make a video game about a a black guy in japan going around murdering people it's
00:21:39.500probably gonna cause problems and a lot of people are going to be very upset by that and then i get
00:21:45.540fire right but within a capitalist system the wider capitalist ecosystem actually punishes that
00:21:52.580person not because of an issue of supply and demand in a communist system you'd presumably
00:21:57.340want to punish the person as well if the goal of the company was entertainment and not spreading
00:22:02.200the ideology but in the communist system it's often spreading ideology so they probably wouldn't
00:22:05.800be punished in the same way but you understand i mean like suppose it's something other than a game
00:22:09.560company and i'm actually like oh the way you're doing this is functionally bad and going to lead
00:22:13.460to a bad product communist ecosystems should be determining oh this is a bad product and there's
00:22:19.100functionally ways that they can determine oh this is a product that people don't like but so another
00:22:24.060question is why do these systems fail in communism right like why do the people in the positions that
00:22:30.440would be equivalent to like running ubisoft in a communist system not end up getting replaced or
00:22:35.560not end up getting replaced in the way that they should get replaced and it's because going back
00:22:39.780to what i was saying originally communist systems fall into two broad categories one is they
00:22:44.940function like a giant monopoly like the entire government is one giant ultra libertarian monopoly
00:22:50.560where one company town has taken over everything and houses everyone and blah blah blah blah very
00:22:56.460dystopian whatever but the thing is is the moment i say that every communist is going to say well
00:23:02.500that's not the way i want to do communism you know they want to go in arco communism they want to do
00:23:07.180it's a syndicalism they want to do. Basically they want to have independently operating small
00:23:13.360communist groups, which extremely doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work is because it leaves
00:23:21.100a power vacuum. This is also why like extreme forms of libertarianism don't work and everything
00:23:25.840like that. So suppose I try to set up this anarcho-communist system or even a completely
00:23:33.060syndicalist system right where like everything is is totally decentralized anybody who decides to
00:23:39.700act as a bad actor and begin to aggressively and subversively acquiring both support and resources
00:23:46.160can exert power on anyone who's playing by the rules and this is like a problem like in the
00:23:52.300molyneux debate when i was trying to figure out how he thought that his weird libertarian utopia
00:23:56.420would work this is something that like he seemed to fundamentally not understand he's like no
00:24:02.880everyone will rise up against a bad actor as soon as a bad actor starts accumulating power
00:24:09.120and i'm like i'm sorry like we have history to look at we know that doesn't happen right like
00:24:16.060bad actors are actually very good at accumulating power and and then they they build an army and
00:24:21.820the army can go to the person next to them this is true even outside of even without a military
00:24:26.340right so this this came when i was talking like extreme forms of libertarianism with steven
00:24:29.840i was like how do you get something like a chip fat right that costs hundreds of billions of
00:24:35.140dollars to me yeah years of investment with no payout etc yeah and there might be no payout
00:24:41.200he's like well i guess we could get like hundreds of millions of workers to form like a cooperative
00:24:46.980to invest everything into this and then it's like okay then who's operating the cooperative
00:24:54.620right yeah and they're like well then we would have like some form of democracy and i'm like okay
00:25:00.700so as soon as somebody gains power was in this giant fabricator state right that's basically
00:25:09.000it's a state created to run a fabricator why would they not attempt to create systems that
00:25:15.600prevent them from being removed from power and the answer is of course well everyone would rise
00:25:22.040up against him if they did something like this the same way that he was like well he's like even if
00:25:26.820they got away with it even if they accomplished all of this then people wouldn't buy their product
00:25:31.540because they'd see that they're a bad actor and i'm like bro you have a product in your pocket
00:25:36.240that was probably made by slaves like you know that's not true you know that you know we're
00:25:41.080eating food that is or what any mixture of things yeah yeah so what ends up happening because the
00:25:48.700the wider point i'm making here here is customers don't really punish bad actors you as a watcher
00:25:55.100of this show likely barely punish bad actors even when you're i mean maybe video games have finally
00:26:01.680gotten punished because they screwed over gamers for so long but in the vast majority of cases
00:26:06.100bad actors don't actually end up getting public punished that much by a public sentiment you know
00:26:12.680even when they do something completely insane it's like their stock will fall like five percent it's
00:26:16.580like oh no you know i mean bad day to be the ceo because it's like billions of dollars but
00:26:21.240you know in the grand scheme of like society it doesn't matter so the problem is with the
00:26:28.520anarchists and all of these power distributed systems is whenever somebody says i'm not going
00:26:33.720to play by your distributed power rules i'm just going to accumulate all the power for myself
00:26:38.600they end up growing in influence and functionally that's what happens with most communist governments
00:26:45.560is they start with a bunch of people saying like let's genuinely try to make this work
00:26:51.180and then some people begin to gain positions of power and they're like what of instead of
00:26:57.160genuinely trying to get this to work i use the apparatus of the state to consolidate power
00:27:02.760around me now it's very hard if you are a faction so let's suppose large communist country two
00:27:09.600factions come to power with a legitimate government right like i'm not even talking about just like
00:27:13.500the warlords because you never even get to a stage where you have like pure autonomous regions for
00:27:19.580very long in these sort of libertarian communist fantasies because they immediately devolve people
00:27:25.720immediately consolidate power i mean within like a month of it entering any sort of state like that
00:27:30.660but so i'll function focus on it on the way it actually typically happens you have a bunch of0.98
00:27:37.100often sometimes bleeding hearted idiot leftists in a room and haven't really operated anything0.98
00:27:44.240before don't really know what they're doing but may have positive intentions for the state1.00
00:27:48.960and then you have the guy who comes in the room you're stalin or whatever right who's like
00:27:55.380uh-huh well let's try to be a bit more efficient about this i'm going to talk with my friends in
00:28:02.360the military and i tell them hey like these guys aren't really doing things the right way and you
00:28:08.500know i think you the heads of the military deserve a bit higher standard of living than everyone else
00:28:13.080don't you think i mean you're controlling you you work so hard compared to everyone else and you
00:28:18.380begin to instead of trying to distribute wealth and resources equally in the society you begin
00:28:26.080to distribute wealth and resources in a way that maintains your power within the society your power
00:28:34.120hierarchy was in the society but still this is all with the supposition that this is humans running
00:28:39.000and everything and calling the shots right i'm gonna get to the point because with ai it's the
00:28:44.340same problem right which is i'll get to that in just a second right okay but you need to understand
00:28:51.420why it fails with humans to understand why it would likely fail with ai so essentially everyone
00:28:58.900who is a bad actor because they're saying instead of taking all of the resources they can create
00:29:05.220and distributing them as much as they can they take resources they create they distribute 20
00:29:11.380and they take 80 to continue consolidating their position so one this leads to a ton of waste in
00:29:17.680the system in terms of the wealth that the people at the top are living etc but two it leads to
00:29:24.620all the way down within the power hierarchy bad actors ending up in the highest level power
00:29:31.400positions because it's basically dictator to dictator to dictator to dictator all the way down
00:29:36.100the people with with those sorts of mindsets and so you get this enormous corruption because0.89
00:29:40.480when i'm thinking about you know do i want to tell my boss that this planning has to kill all0.99
00:29:45.400the birds is a dumb idea. I'm not actually thinking about, is this going to help my0.94
00:29:51.660sub-state the most, right? Like my region or the people or the farmers, I'm thinking about,
00:29:57.340is this going to help me consolidate power within my position with the broader hierarchy, right?
00:30:02.160The problem with AI is AI fundamentally doesn't really change this. So let's assume that you
00:30:10.500create a truly post-scarcity system, which is essentially what Simone is positioning with her
00:30:19.620communist ecosystem. So what she's essentially saying, and I don't know if I, I don't disagree
00:30:24.960with this point, that if you could create true super abundance, the people who are either
00:30:33.820competent or corrupt enough to end up in the positions of power have so much wealth and
00:30:39.800abundance that the the coins that fall off their plates feel like ultimate luxury to the people
00:30:47.320that they're falling in it's not no there's additional motivation they with ai they could
00:30:53.280have the ability to create broadly from their perspective autonomous ai running communities
00:30:59.280that feed and house people like a new version of fiefdom you know how like the way that a lot of
00:31:04.940versions of fiefdom worked was you had the lord who lived on the state and one of the reasons why
00:31:09.300in these grand houses you had all these ridiculous roles where they were like essentially job
00:31:13.880programs you know the under butler and the footman and the the the various types of cooks and and all
00:31:20.700these people it was a jobs program and then everyone in the village i know they they had
00:31:25.060somewhere to live and then it was this whole little economy they could create presumably a
00:31:31.400bunch of these little things that are all run by ai that give people little things to do and keep
00:31:36.880people busy and feed people food and it's not just oh the you know they're eating like food runoff
00:31:43.660or something it's that it's better to have people be able to show up at these places and and get
00:31:50.720placed to get a house get a job you know a job have something to do in their life you know become
00:31:56.300some kind of artist and craftsman or something and live their little picturesque hobbit life
00:32:00.820than to you know die in large droves and look look bad and a lot of people just don't know right but
00:32:07.100this is this is the fundamental logical error that you're making here okay it actually comes
00:32:12.660from growing up in the urban monoculture that you're making this error which is very fun i
00:32:16.380think you'll see at the moment i pointed out okay when you look at the quality of life of people who
00:32:22.500are relying on our today version of the types of systems that you're talking about between states
00:32:30.780the amount of money that goes into these systems is often not just discorrelated but inversely
00:32:38.940correlated with the actual quality of life of the people living off of the system i think they're
00:32:43.620gonna know this you're seeing the very first version of ubi that people thanks to the
00:32:49.480experimentation being done now right they're learning from it they're going to discover
00:32:54.280no they're not learning okay like in the matrix right they're like oh well we made the first
00:32:57.820version of the matrix where everyone just had everything and it really didn't work and so we
00:33:01.380created this new version where everyone has a job and they're miserable and it's perfect
00:33:04.580and they're going to figure that out with ubi and they're going to already see the best thing to do
00:33:09.660won't so i'll i'll give you proof that they won't right okay what's right now when i'm talking more
00:33:15.780broadly if you look at like california's homeless they often live much worse lives and homeless in
00:33:21.600other areas despite all the money going into that they're trying to fix it they're trying to fix it
00:33:26.380right? And I'm pointing out to you, why are, because you've got to ask yourself, why are the
00:33:31.380lives of California's homeless so much worse than other states when so much more money is going to
00:33:36.200them? And it's because of the inefficient bureaucracy following the same sorts of failings
00:33:41.420that we see in communist systems. And so now what you're going to come and say is you're going to
00:33:44.440say like, well, these AI tech lords, they won't fall for these same types of errors. And I'm like,
00:33:51.880Hmm. Simone in the UBI study that Sam Altman did, do you remember how the team that did the study
00:33:59.940framed the results to Sam Altman? Did we already see an instance of them in the very first instance
00:34:07.580where we could be moving down a good pathway immediately lie about and manipulate the results
00:34:13.580to hide that it didn't work in a way. But Malcolm, those systems are going to collapse.
00:34:19.400like i'm not saying this is going to happen soon but it's going to happen what do you mean that's0.97
00:34:24.360the craziest fucking thing i've ever heard how did what do you mean they're going to collapse0.92
00:34:28.740they can't collapse they're ai tech moguls who presumably have near infinity money if you're0.99
00:34:34.740talking about in the future right like you think because people are living bad lives in their
00:34:40.340communist quote-unquote utopias that they're going to care right like they they don't care
00:34:46.300California, San Francisco doesn't care about its homeless drug addicts who are walking
00:34:52.180zombed out on the streets and sleep in the poo that's all around the financial district,
00:43:55.480i have severe doubts about that you can look at for example coverage of the mayoral race in los
00:44:04.360angeles in california and see the level to wait to which people are really really fed up with
00:44:11.520the homeless policy in california with the housing policy in california i think there's that that
00:44:17.840demonstrates that people aren't necessarily ideologically locked in to this system that
00:44:22.740you're describing. Beyond that, it is parasitoidal, this kind of approach to governance, this culture
00:44:31.920as well. It will kill the host and the host will die. Demographic collapse is such that0.98
00:44:36.600these things aren't going to be supported much longer anyway. They're going to collapse on their
00:44:43.240own. And I don't think AI in the time over the time period over which these systems are going
00:44:48.900to collapse, AI is not yet going to reach the place, in my opinion, where it will be able to
00:44:56.160sweep in and deus ex machina style, like fix it. So I really think that these systems are going to
00:45:02.960fully crumble, which is not the happier scenario. I'm like, I don't want this to happen. It's bad.
00:45:11.500But these systems won't be left. I do think that many people, when a communist utopia will be created, I think it will be in sovereign city-state style, essentially human reserves that are created for the people who were left behind but who survived.
00:45:31.880what you need to make ai communist like like post-scarcity worlds work and not lead to the
00:45:41.440same problems we have with like homelessness and stuff like that in democrat counties and the poor
00:45:45.160and democrat counties doing much worse is them being operated by an extremely austere and dedicated
00:45:53.900cast that is ideologically aligned at the level of like religious fervor so if you had like let's
00:46:03.280say techno puritans end up taking over and and and like really dedicated techno puritans were
00:46:08.020running everything it could work if you had a state with ai and somebody like the dalai lama
00:46:15.600like the last dalai lama and the top levels of like the tibetan you know that i'd like look i
00:46:22.000don't love everything he did i thought he was a bit foolish on a number of issues but that could
00:46:26.840probably work right because you need to be able to cast off if you personally are not interested
00:46:35.180either because you were raised this way or you have an extremist ideological commitment in power
00:46:39.800accumulation or luxury or anything like that outside of for the purpose of some wider objective
00:46:45.820function you have on reality if you have that then you can use ai to create post scarcity but
00:46:52.680i think without that being a person's fundamental driver above all other drivers you cannot get
00:47:01.320true post scarcity even with ai in sort of like how it reaches the masses
00:47:07.600i guess time will tell yep well we're gonna see and we can hear in the comments what people think
00:47:18.200basically my thought is the next society we're gonna have to transition into post demographic
00:47:23.220collapse and everything like that is one of a you know religious fanaticism essentially
00:47:28.760yeah i mean we can agree on that that's that's more about demographic collapse than it is about
00:47:35.020artificial intelligence or communism it has more to do with just who's going to continue to
00:47:41.220have a desire and an interest in reproducing in the face of demographic collapse ai and massive
00:47:49.800disruption so what's the story was dinner tonight i have one batch of the pork leftover and then
00:47:59.720after that or we so you can either have that tonight or tomorrow night what i could also do
00:48:03.260is just tomato soup and grilled cheese or tomato soup and quesadillas tonight if you prefer oh my
00:48:09.500god quesadillas your quesadillas are so good that's because they have msg in them
00:48:14.700is the back you have from batch one or batch two batch two
00:48:21.900yeah i'll wait on that i'll do quesadillas and tomato soup yeah batch two might be more tender
00:48:26.940since it's leaner meat after just sitting for a couple of days loosening up you know what i mean
00:48:31.740yeah that makes sense theoretically though i'm very excited the the the what she's talking about
00:48:38.440a slow cooked pork belly that she's gotten very good at making um and i am very excited for my
00:48:44.300oh quesadillas tomato soup and fancy fries no a quesadilla is your carb you get to choose one
00:48:54.480carb do you want tomatoes do you want tomato soup and curly fries no quesadillas okay you can have
00:49:02.280your curly fries with the leftover pork belly or well pork shoulder in this case tomorrow yeah
00:49:09.480you're so amazing simone the worst i know also there is not too far from us a an arboretum that
00:49:19.720we haven't gone to do you want to take the kids there tomorrow since what's an arboretum it's
00:49:24.320gardens it's it's a it's a garden they have trails like it's just a different place for us to walk
00:49:29.540yeah uh sure a you know oh wow it is close isn't that crazy never been before free admission
00:49:40.900that's the whole thing oh no that's not what i thought it was was it arboretum
00:49:46.660jenkins arboretum and gardens jenkins arboretum and gardens yeah oh it's really cool it's free
00:49:55.640to enter yeah it's free to enter always they have like a little kid play area i feel like the kids
00:50:01.760would really enjoy it okay if i'm making good progress on the vtuber thing i want to try to
00:50:06.600get the thing done before my call was leaflet i've just noticed that every weekend you want to do
00:50:10.840something special we can do this on a different weekend day but if we go tomorrow it will be the
00:50:17.660least crowded yeah okay yeah that makes sense let's do it okay i'm looking forward to it i mean
00:50:25.840i mean you know tomorrow is friday right yeah but we have the kids with us all day okay and you're
00:50:31.500sure we have the kids with us all day i'll confirm it right now but yeah okay all right love you i
00:50:37.320guess we're going straight to dinner that's the plan yeah we don't have enough time to record
00:50:42.920another episode in like 10 minutes love you i'll get professor jane ready for tomorrow yay because
00:50:48.660i like the title card i created for that plus it's trending stop thinking it's not a big deal
00:50:53.800but yeah you see we get the full vtuber exports now yeah it's really cool you gave yourself like
00:51:04.640blonde hair though are we why do you see me with brown hair is that what i'm yes you have brown
00:51:12.640hair i don't know what to tell you i had blonde hair when i was a kid and our kids have blonde
00:51:17.920hair so so you just internalize yourself as having blonde hair forever yeah i think it looks more
00:51:26.720like me when i when i put make them with blonde hair that's so funny like you just kind of
00:51:31.600of anchored to yourself as a team i wonder that that kind of sticks to my my feeling like everyone
00:51:41.020has a like a soul age like an age of their personality and yours is like 11 in a good way
00:51:49.160and mine is like 62 and hopefully a good way and i think honestly i would be more comfortable
00:51:56.080seeing like a vtuber avatar of like a white haired woman or something than i have anything
00:52:02.060that i looked like as a kid so i wonder if when people make vtubers of themselves that they just
00:52:08.080need to whatever their soul age is you know what i mean
00:52:11.920yeah you want me to kick us off with this one you'd like to do your own kickoffs
00:52:19.040so okay i'll do a kickoff with this one okay