The Communism Paradox： Why A Classless Society is Impossible Even in a Post-Scarcity World
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about why communism doesn't work in a post-scarcity world, and why there's no such thing as a classist society in a world where all our needs are met on a basic level.
Transcript
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communism doesn't work even in a post-scarcity world. Yes, I believe UBI might work in a post-scarcity
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world, but even in a world where you have people's universal basic income, where you have people's
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basic needs taken care of, like you do food drop-offs, you do medicine as handled by the
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state, you do all of that, you still have the class structure we have in our existing society.
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And you will still have some resource which represents some form of scarcity, because there
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is always scarcity in any system. And what people choose to value is always the thing that is scarce,
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even if that thing is pointless. And what I find really interesting is it's actually the communists
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themselves in our current society that are most drawn to artificial scarcity. It is much more the
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communists who get drawn to brand name recognition like the Starbucks and the iPads and the etc.
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Would you like to know more? And there is no such thing as a classist society. It's not possible.
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No. Do the intro. Okay. Hello, everyone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today is going to be,
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I hope, a Simone of the episode, because she was the one who made this point to me while we were
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walking around a target. What a fitting place. It's what we do. It's what we do. We were talking
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about communism and the cliche, real communism has never been tried, which we will also get to in
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this video. But one of the things that you turned and said to me while we were walking was...
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There is no such thing as a classist society. It is absolutely impossible.
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Go into your argument because I find it very powerful.
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Yeah. So no matter what happens in a society, there will always be scarce goods. As soon as you make one
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good, not scarce, people will then sort into classes based on what is scarce. And this shows
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up in various sci-fi novels that anyone can read. I really like stuff by Cory Doctorow. He wrote this
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one book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which really influenced the way that I saw the world
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in the future. It takes place in a post-scarcity environment, you know, post-singularity. You can live
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forever. You have backups of yourself that you can just restore if you accidentally die or are
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murdered. And in this world, you know, you don't need food, you don't need shelter, but there is still
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a class system and there's still a currency that is limited and finite and it's called Woofie.
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Woofie is social capital in this world. And so people form themselves into what are called
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adhocracies in this world, which I love that word also. I want a world of adhocracies instead of
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bureaucracies. Adhocracies are basically short-lived collections of people who get together to do
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cool stuff to get social credit. And the- By the way, this governing system wouldn't be stable and
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I'll get to why in just a second, but continue. I really like it nevertheless. This book is about
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adhocracies that form and compete in Disney's Magic Kingdom in Florida in this post-singularity
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world because some things never go away, thank God. And what they do is they'll like, they take over
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the rides. So two rival groups in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom are kind of competing for more
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Woofie. One is redoing the Hall of Presidents and the other one is doing the Haunted Mansion.
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And, you know, it's all about like who can, you know, impress the world the most with their really
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cool updates to these rides slash attractions. And it totally makes sense to me that that would be the
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case. And when you say something that's unpopular, when you do something that really pisses people off,
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if you go viral for something bad, you know, that's it. You're sort of destitute. But being destitute
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doesn't mean you're starving or homeless. It just means you don't really get the cool stuff.
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So let's talk about, I want to break down a few aspects of this. So, because I think it's a very
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good description and it does a very good job of showing why you can't really have classlessness.
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Because even in an environment where all our needs are met, there are still some things that are
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intrinsically of limited value, i.e. Disney World. There is only one Disney World. You can create other
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Disney World, but they won't have the same cultural cliche as the first or the main Disney World.
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And so, who gets to work on that Disney World, that special thing, and who gets access to that
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special thing? You would still need some metric for deciding these two things. In this, the metric
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that they choose is attention. The reason that Disney World has more value than another random thing or
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random park is because it is a thing that collects attention. And so, the very attention you collect
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is what gives you access to it. Very interesting that he, one of the things I think he predicted
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so wrong in that is that Disney World would always be a thing of value. Little did he know the wokes
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would completely destroy the brand so much that nobody even wants to go anymore.
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Oh, I mean, I think it's more, it was more an issue of poor planning and price gouging.
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It's hard to, we could, we could get in. I mean, we love watching Disney analysts on YouTube for some
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reason. I also want to talk about why adhocracies can't form. Okay. Yeah. Cause I love the concept.
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So, suppose the world does work the way it does in that world and will be, or will be, or the amount
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of attention that you have access to is the core thing of value in that society. There would be,
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it'd be really dangerous to break up with other groups and form new groups all the time, because
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that would lower the efficiency at the production of this, that you would have access to. And
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therefore you would be outcompeted by the groups that mostly stayed together and was fairly discerning
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into who they work with. So if you're discerning and who you work with, you know, you work with
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people you have experience with and stuff like that. And you're not just working with random new
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people who might have high woofy, but it might be towards a different community. It might be
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towards a different, whatever you're just going to get outcompeted by the groups that are more
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stable. Um, and so that's going to lead to more stable, like woofy corporations, you could call
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them, i.e. large groups that work together to control an area or an attention resource like
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Disney and work together to do high amounts of production. In many ways you can think of YouTube
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as already being a woofy economy and the big creators, while they work in networks of big
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creators. And in that degree, you do have a bit of an adhocracy. They all have fairly large teams that
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are fairly consistent. And even the different people they choose to work with occasionally
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is a fairly small pool. And those pools don't cross over as much as you would think they would.
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So like actually more or less how it works in the book too. Oh, okay. Well, yeah. Like for example,
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if you consider like the Simone and Malcolm, like wider network of intellectual thinkers we're in,
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you know, we will use this also in the effective altruist and rationalist communities. And you even
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see this, like, look at the PayPal mafia, right? You could kind of argue that the, the organizations
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and investments across which the PayPal mafia have like spread is a collection of adhocracies that are
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all, you know, they're kind of related. They share a lot of people and they form and dissolve as is
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necessary. That's, that's what I like about adhocracy is the fluidity of them, the, the pragmatic,
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If you look at the PayPal mafia, it doesn't function the way you're saying it functions.
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It's a collection of literal companies based on nepotism networks.
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No, no, no. I'm referring, no, the, the, by the PayPal mafia, I'm referring to people like
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Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, like those early investors and people involved in PayPal.
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Yes. And then they consolidated their power through the way they were investing,
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forming an entrenched power network, which is the antithesis of an adhocracy.
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Yes. A group of people might organically come together to then form an entrenched bureaucracy.
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Well, I wouldn't describe them as a bureaucracy.
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Yeah. An adhocracy. So this is where you're getting confused. So I'll, I'll describe this
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for you to help fix how you can understand how an adhocracy can't really form in these
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sorts of societies. Peerage networks can absolutely peerage networks can. You have noticed that
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the first time these groups came together to form this like competent, good at working
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Like an adhocracy because they were all coming together, but that all coming together accidentally
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only happens once. And before most of them are super successful. Once a team becomes successful
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together, it forms a peerage network. It no longer has a huge reason to continue to bring in outsiders
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at the level of the initial team. That would just be stupid. It would be stupid to bring in another
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individual who's not as wealthy or something as like the Elon Musk and the other people in the
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community into that top level. And so it doesn't happen. That's how peerage networks form.
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But anyway, I want to get into how in our own mostly post-scarcity developed world, we already see
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the perpetuation of a class-based system through the consumer patterns of the Starbucks communists.
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And we've done an episode on Starbucks communism, but I think it really matters. You know, when you
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go to the classic Starbucks communists, you, I mean, it's got the name because they've got their
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Starbucks, which is a brand, which has cost, like they spent extra on that for the brand than they
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would spend for that coffee if they had just made it themselves. They'll have their Apple phone,
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which they have spent extra on because of the artificial scarcity created by the Apple brand.
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They have their brand closings. They have their brand associations. So much of the scarcity that
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they face and in terms of the things that they are purchasing in the world is, is just due to the
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scarcity of that thing. And even if it's not woofy or attention that is the scarce thing in a society,
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you will always have something that is scarce because that's the way humans work. And then status will
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be built around that scarce thing. Because if you don't have something that's scarce, then you can't
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build status networks, right? And then you can say, well, what if you had a society where everyone
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was totally equal, right? How could that society be stable if you have varying degrees of competence?
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Some individuals within that community would just innately be producing more than other individuals
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within that community. And they would want that to be recognized and then, you know, cut off access
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Or innately be more attractive. And then more people want to be their friends and they might go out of their
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way to do nice things for those people. And then, you know, suddenly those people are getting like
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double food rations, you know, like it gets weird.
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Well, and this is why that just doesn't work. In a world of varied competence, you cannot have true
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equality because scarcity organically comes out of that. Now, you could, however, have a future society.
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And in some of the sci-fis that I've like written in my spare time, what becomes of the socialist
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systems is systems where people's brains are edited after they are born to ensure that they are not,
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they have no unique area of competence. If they have a gift in music, if they have a gift in math,
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if they have a gift in, the only way you can have sustainable communist or classless systems
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Everyone's literally the same. And that is mortifying, I think. But I think it's the only way
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Yeah. But also you wouldn't really have a thriving society if everyone's the same and it would be
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more society. And they could be made smarter than humans are today. They would just always be out
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competed by societies that had specialization, which especially as genetic technology comes online
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is going to become more and more important for families to specialize in specific fields. But that's
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going to mean that they need access to different sorts of things and are able to compete in systems
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over different sorts of things. Wait, so hold on. Is the most accurate depiction of communism,
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real communism in the media, like those clips of the cloned stormtroopers in the new Star Wars
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movies? What? Just, just the existence of a bunch of clones. Yeah. No, clone army is real communism.
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That's a room and board is covered. It is a post-scarce world for them. They are all clones.
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They wear the same clothes. They have the same job. That is real communism. We've done it.
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But here's another thing that I also want to push back against here because we have done
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other videos where we say, because I do think that this is where we're heading to an attention-based
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economy. Specifically, friendships have become totally disintermediated for most of the people
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that you are communicating with. And somebody can be like, no. And I'm like, do you watch more
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YouTubers and podcasters in terms of the total hours of your day than you spend talking to other
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human beings? If you do, then you have a disintermediated friendship network. Similar
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to me. I spend more time watching stuff and then I go out and I talk and then people choose to listen
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to me if that is the social connection that they want to engage with. It is a completely
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disintermediated social network, which I think a lot of people are like, oh, well, you lose a lot
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of the interpersonal connection when you get this disintermediated social network. But what you get
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is access to higher quality or better tailored conversations for you than you would get without
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the disintermediation. And so that's why you choose to do it. You could choose not to do it.
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You could choose to just turn all the podcasts and YouTubes off. But you don't. Because we
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actually, this disintermediation is better for us than talking to somebody and waiting to get to the
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good parts of the conversation. I mean, keep in mind, one of the reasons why our conversations,
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like when people listen to our conversations, they're like, oh, that was a uniquely enriching
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conversation without a lot of dead air and stuff like that. And I'm like, that is because you are not
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seeing this actual conversation. You are seeing this conversation after I spent hours editing out
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every pause, every time we had to Google something we didn't know, every tangent, every, it is as
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condensed as I can make it for you. So it is a super normal stimuli for you. It is a super normal
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conversation. People who don't know what super normal stimuli is, this is the concept where like a bird
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had the genetic impulse to sit on a blue egg. And then you put like an extra large blue ball
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next to it that's bigger than any egg it could ever produce. It will still sit on the blue ball
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because it doesn't have this disintermediating thing that's saying like, well, if a conversation's
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too good, then go away from it. Because that's not a real conversation probably. That's some sort of
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artificial thing in your environment. But I actually think that the end user benefits more
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from this. This isn't like a maladaptive super normal stimuli. I think that this is actually an
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adaptive super normal stimuli. And people can be like, why is that? Well, you engage in conversations
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for typically two reasons. One is to gain access to additional information about the world slash
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additional perspectives about the world. And the other is to build out your personal network.
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The problem is, is that this is always going to be better when you can choose any conversation you
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want within an online environment or have it served to you by an algorithm. The information and
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perspective side is going to be better served. However, you can be like, well, what about the
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interpersonal connection side? And the answer to that is, while that may be worse served for your
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average person, it is going to be better served for a competent individual. Let me explain.
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You, like us, could go out there and start a podcast or a Twitter account or a, you know, a YouTube,
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right? And then thousands of people, hundreds of people, you know, whatever, might choose to listen
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to what you have to say, which actually gives you access to, through parasocial connections,
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a wider network than you would have been able to get had you focused on one-to-one communication.
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However, if you can't compete in that environment and you're like, well, I can't create something that
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a lot of people are going to want to listen to. It also means then you're, you're stuck in these
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individual conversations, which become lower and lower quality for the people who are forced into
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them. And that is, I think, really damaging for a lot of people. To put it another way,
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a system for supplying a type of good, which is substandard for an average deliverer of that type
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of good, but super standard for an above average deliverer of that good. And that doesn't constrain
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the quantity of the good being delivered, i.e. an above average deliverer of that good does not
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have their ability to deliver that good hindered by the number of people who are receiving that good
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is always going to outcompete a system which is better for the average deliverer of a good,
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and especially a system which constrains the amount of that good that a super standard deliverer can
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deliver, i.e. a better than average conversationalist is going to be delivering less
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conversations in person because only so many people can get access to that individual.
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And here I would note another phenomenon that has come out of the disintermediated conversation
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marketplace, which is if you are a competent individual who might be able to compete within
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this marketplace, but you do not have time to compete within this marketplace. Maybe it's
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because you are successful in finance, or you are a successful biologist, or you are a successful
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basically your competence in some other area is eating your time. You are actually going to be
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rewarded for engaging, I'd almost say negatively engaging with it, i.e. ensuring that you are as private
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as possible. Because if you are a little public, if you post to Twitter sometimes, if you post to
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Facebook sometimes, and you don't get a lot of followers because you just don't have the time to
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put the effort into it, then it might signal to people that you are actually a very uninteresting and
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uncompetent individual. And this is why you see so many competent individuals being so private these
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days. Because they don't have the time to invest in these types of marketplaces. And if you are
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competent, but don't have the time to invest in these types of marketplaces, it's often better not
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to appear on them at all. This actually isn't just a problem for competent people in other areas. It's
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even a problem for competent communicators. One friend of mine who is very, very, very famous in other
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parts of the internet, but that doesn't have a YouTube yet. When I was talking to her about this,
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one of her fears about starting a YouTube channel is that in the early days, she is going to be much
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smaller on YouTube than she is on the other platforms, which could cause people to perceive
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her as being much less successful or competent within online spaces than she actually is. And so
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this is a big problem when moving to other platforms, if you have already established yourself within one
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platform. So it's not just your competent banker who has to deal with this when moving into the
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online sphere at all, but it's a person who is extra famous within one platform or media type moving to
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a new platform or media type. I was actually talking with someone about this today about what we're doing
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for our kids' networks. And a huge problem many of the traditional cultural and religious systems
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use when they are trying to get a kid to stay in a family network is they will say like, okay, I want you to
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stay in our cultural network. So I will give you a peer group that you can play with and access. And I will do that
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through the local church group or the local synagogue or something like that, right? The problem with that
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group is that that group will be outcompeted by the super normal communities that the child has access to
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through the internet, which will make it very easy. You might want to unmute yourself if the child's not
00:21:06.420
making noise anymore. Thanks. So, because you were like, yeah, right. Okay. So that will give you
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access to that'll, that'll give your kids access to people who are even more similar to them or might
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seem more impressive to them or might seem, you know, so then they end up, yes, you provided them
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with a peer group, but the peer group wasn't as compelling for to them as the peer groups you find online.
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Now contrast that with what we're doing, where we take the most interesting, most successful
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families we know, and we add them to this network of families that we are building, that our kids can
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one, go meet once a year by going to like a summer camp thing that we rent out. And, you know, all the
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families will keep in who send their kids and the kids can all get to know each other, but two, have
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online forums where the kids can interact with each other. And if they build a good relationship with
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another kid, we might send them out, send them out to the family of the friend because they're an
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in-network family. And then that kid's family might send them over to us. So it allows you to have
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a dispersed network of high competence individuals who can also through the family connections,
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get my kids into good early jobs, get my kids investments, get my kids started on their first media
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projects. So the kids are going to find this community disproportionately valuable to them
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because of the way that we curated it when contrasted with the random communities they can
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gain access to online. And so this is something I very intentionally structured. And I think that
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over-relying on these older systems, like I'm just going to focus on conversations or I'm just going to
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focus on, you know, my local church group. It's very difficult to have that work in the modern
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environment, but it can work. So let's talk about where it does work. It does work when the in-person
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connections due to cultural reasons, I think as a culture, that doesn't trust people who they don't
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know personally and they're like older individuals and stuff like that, that can get you access to
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capital, that can get you access to friendships that you can't get otherwise, or because you have
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some capability due to... The problem is that those networks are just going to be out-competed.
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This is the problem, like why I wouldn't invest in that. Some people are like, well, due to my
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family's background or history, I have access to wealthy nepotistic networks, right? It's like,
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unfortunately, in this new disintermediated economy, like social economy, the networks that were open to
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the disintermediated nature are going to out-compete the ones that aren't, because they are going to be
00:23:41.840
able to access all of the best intellectuals and entrepreneurs of an age pretty easily, because,
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you know, that entrepreneur or those intellectuals are going to want access to the other, and they're
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going to want their kids, more importantly, to have access to the other members of that network,
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whereas the old money networks only have access to capital, which becomes increasingly less
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important when contrasted with competence in this new world order that we're entering into.
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Then a person could be like, why is capital worth so much less than competence in this new world?
00:24:12.600
Well, one, you look at what startups are doing these days. So, you know, we have a lot of friends
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that used to be that you had, you know, the big startup teams, you know, forming, and now most startups
00:24:24.440
are like two to three people living in different locations, working at home with a huge squad of
00:24:31.740
AIs doing most of the work. And we're even seeing this in the traditional industries. You know, one of
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the leader in AI stuff these days is John Deere, for example, like that's farming and everything like
00:24:42.080
that. No, they have really cutting edge AI programs. Simone is quietly talking to me while caring for the
00:24:47.060
kid. And so, you know, I think more and more we're going to see this eat other industries, and that
00:24:52.480
means you need fewer and fewer, but more and more competent individuals to do stuff. And those
00:24:58.940
individuals can really name their price. As for the capital itself, it's useful in terms of setting up
00:25:06.400
big AI centers and stuff like that. But the people who are doing that, then like, you know, we have
00:25:13.020
people working on stuff like that, who bring in people like Simone and I to work on these projects,
00:25:18.400
because they know that the social capital that we have can be useful. And the competency that we
00:25:24.820
have, we show through appealing to specific high competency communities can be useful in getting
00:25:31.320
these projects done more quickly in the same way that additional capital can be. But the problem
00:25:36.860
with the problem was just capital is capital is very interchangeable with other sources of capital.
00:25:43.760
Woofie is not. You can't interchange us for another person with a similar view count, because they are
00:25:51.980
going to appeal to a different audience. And the various audiences do not have equal access to
00:25:59.040
competence. A lot of people have said, you know, if you dumbed down your content, if you went more
00:26:04.520
mainstream, if you just decided to fit one niche, like just preach to a classic conservative audience,
00:26:10.640
you would get a wider audience, and we would get a wider audience, but we would get a lower utility
00:26:16.360
audience. The interesting thing about Woofie based economies is, it matters much, much more who is the
00:26:24.660
people paying attention to you, than the number of people paying attention to you.
00:26:29.400
Oh, kind of like how on Twitter, if Elon Musk retweets you, then like, whoa, you know, everything changes,
00:26:35.840
versus like, if just some random user. No, no, no, no, I wouldn't say that at all. I, I, Elon Musk,
00:26:42.560
because he has so high profile, has the normies following him. So, you know, if he retweets you,
00:26:48.460
then millions of people are going to see that. Here I'm thinking more of, you know, it, it is more
00:26:54.420
useful to me to be friends with somebody like Curtis Yarvin, than it is for me to be friends with
00:27:02.160
somebody like Windigoon, for example. Windigoon seems like a great guy from all I've seen. He has
00:27:08.720
a very big audience, but the audience is just not the audience that is like really, you know,
00:27:15.040
it's not going to have a huge overlap with like high competency and stuff like that. It's a generic
00:27:19.040
audience. Curtis Yarvin is a fringe individual. What you're kind of saying is like, there's different
00:27:25.040
currency. Like there's the, the Windigoon peso and the Curtis, Curtis Yarvin yen and the, you know,
00:27:32.740
Ayla. Yes, where the currency is the individual eyes on each of these. Yeah. Like the, the nature
00:27:38.340
of the, yeah. And some currencies you can, you can transfer easily. Sometimes the exchange rate sucks,
00:27:43.320
that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Like, well, so here's an example of this, right? Like I would say
00:27:49.100
that you're probably better off in terms of like the highest tier, biggest eye currency individual
00:27:54.880
in the world is probably Scott Alexander. Oh, because the eyes on him are also very high agency
00:28:02.460
eyes. Yeah. If he, if he put something out, it's probably being read by Mark Andreessen. It's probably
00:28:08.640
being read by Elon Musk. It's probably being read by half of both a Democrat and conservative White
00:28:14.740
House staff. Now it's not being read by the mass population, right? But it is being read by a huge
00:28:21.440
chunk of the people who actually make the decisions, which decide the future and who have access to
00:28:26.360
capital and who have access to the gates of power. So if you were going to, you know, change Woofie,
00:28:32.760
somebody like Scott Alexander's Woofie supply, I would argue is bigger than somebody like Mr. Beast's
00:28:38.920
Woofie supply, because who's Mr. Beast's primary audience? It's people under the age of 14.
00:28:44.200
You know, that is just not a very valuable Woofie supply, except in terms of influencing the next
00:28:50.060
generation, which I do think matters. And the eyes matter in terms of like selling ads and stuff like
00:28:56.260
that. Not as big as influencing the future of humanity. But now I want to talk about the death
00:29:03.280
of the online sphere. What? There's been a lot of talk about the death of the influencer. And I don't
00:29:12.280
think that what we're seeing is the death of the influencer. We're seeing a transformation in what
00:29:18.180
To relate to their audience. So how do I put this? So a lot of people, they've been like, what? How can
00:29:22.840
you believe in this Woofie concept if, you know, influencers seem to be dying? Yeah.
00:29:28.580
And I will argue that the age of the, you know, PewDiePie and stuff like that is kind of over. Like
00:29:35.820
the mega influencer is kind of passé at this point. But they're not passé because fewer people are
00:29:43.540
watching YouTube. They're not passé because fewer people are watching online content. They are passé
00:29:48.880
because influencer networks disintermediated. The age of the mega influencer is over. The age of the
00:29:56.500
disintermediated influencer is rising. If you look at, for example, our audience and what they were
00:30:03.620
watching online 10 years ago, I'd argue the vast majority of them were not watching micro influencers
00:30:11.120
like us. They were watching mostly mainstream voices because that's the way the algorithms worked
00:30:17.640
back in the day. Yeah. And before that, they were watching TV, which was even more constrained.
00:30:23.060
Yeah. Which was even more constrained. And, and, and, and, and yeah, actually this allows for a great
00:30:28.620
analogy here. It would be like at the end of the era of TV, an individual saying, well, the age of the
00:30:36.680
pundit is over now that YouTube is rising when really the age of the pundit wasn't over. It just became
00:30:42.900
slightly more disintermediated. And that process of disintermediation is just continuing into the
00:30:50.540
modern era. Now it's much more catered to individuals and you have much more, the concept
00:30:56.980
of like communities of influencers. Also the ways that people communicate is changing. It used to be
00:31:03.760
that the disintermediated conversations happened. And that was the primary form of communication.
00:31:10.680
Whereas now what you have is the disintermediated conversations facilitate disintermediated communities.
00:31:18.160
Let me explain what a disintermediated community is. The disintermediated community is the discord
00:31:25.220
group or signal group or WhatsApp group, which is increasingly becoming the most valuable small
00:31:33.440
communities you can have access to where, you know, you've got these investor groups and we're on lots
00:31:39.120
of these investor groups where deals come in and we see the deal. Then people like talk about, you know,
00:31:43.880
are you interested in this deal? You interested in this deal? And people would be like, why would an
00:31:47.700
individual have it? Like, what's the utility? Why did these come to exist and come to dominate
00:31:51.980
deal-making spaces? When I say deal-making spaces, I mean where capital is going. Well, it's because
00:31:56.560
you've got to consider the alternative. What's the alternative? The alternative is you, you all live in
00:32:02.380
like a Palo Alto area, which just doesn't happen anymore, right? Like you don't have these big collections
00:32:06.840
of thinkers anymore because this became too expensive for the, you know, if you're like a
00:32:11.740
young ambitious person who believes in your own competence, do you want to be spending like 70% of
00:32:17.000
your income just because you're living in a fancy area? Or are you going to go, you know, move to the
00:32:21.260
woods because you know that smart people will come to you, which is largely what we're seeing now in
00:32:26.140
terms of investments. You don't see as many concentrating in San Francisco as you used to. It's actually much
00:32:31.080
more in like, I'd actually said the digital nomad community is probably the biggest hotbed of talent
00:32:35.620
right now. And then outside of that is a, the, the, the just sort of spread out online community
00:32:41.680
where the people, when they're looking for deals, go to specific online community networks.
00:32:45.920
Well then within those networks, they can source deals disintermediated from each other, all the
00:32:51.500
various investors, and then drop them into community channels where they get social capital from
00:32:57.180
dropping them in. If the deal's not perfect for them and other people also get social capital for
00:33:01.600
dropping their deals in and it helps them find deals that are more perfect for them in the future.
00:33:05.620
It's just a better system than everybody living in Palo Alto and going to a party every night,
00:33:10.760
which is the way it worked when I was at Stanford business school. It was like, not fun. The parties
00:33:16.260
were business things. Do you remember these parties, Simone, where they'd always have like the most
00:33:20.280
ridiculous, expensive swag? Yeah. You know, you go, you get your iPad as like a leaving present and
00:33:26.540
stuff like that. It was whack. But what are your thoughts on this? I don't know if it's going to play out
00:33:31.200
that way. I think we still see a very significant network effect of cities. And that even though,
00:33:37.120
for example, the Bay Area, um, doesn't have that much going for it, you know, like I left it,
00:33:43.920
right. There are still people who, despite the cost, despite the taxes, despite increases in crime,
00:33:50.840
et cetera, are staying. And they're, they seem like they're just in for life.
00:33:54.560
Yeah. Well, actually I was, I was talking with, uh, Scott Alexander about this and he was saying
00:33:59.220
that he wanted to leave, like he wanted to be able to form the same kind of community that he
00:34:04.200
had formed in, in, you know, Silicon Valley area somewhere outside where it's cheaper, you know,
00:34:08.920
and his kids can play more easily and stuff like that. But the challenge is, is the very community
00:34:14.840
network. You know, some people in that network are, are tied to the city for their jobs,
00:34:20.960
i.e. they work at Google or something like that. And so they can't easily pick up and move as a
00:34:26.900
community that is going to increasingly of your like, well, why would that effect not stay? It's
00:34:33.500
because these big giant companies are likely going to become less and less relevant economically as the
00:34:40.820
new small players come up. I mean, so you look at the people in his community right now that are stuck
00:34:44.760
at a company like Google, like I now do personally, like if you look at Google's like search results,
00:34:49.960
like, like the number of people searching on Google has been going down precipitously over
00:34:52.880
time. Even me personally, I use perplexity probably 70% of the time now and Google 30%
00:34:58.480
of the time. Perplexity is a small team that was able to build a product better than the absolute
00:35:04.460
mega corp of Google. So I think that you'll have that effect, but then I also think you will have
00:35:10.440
the, the, the, these sorts of communities while they exist in this generation, I don't think
00:35:15.440
they'll exist in the next generation because the, the people who lived in these communities,
00:35:20.320
I just think are going to produce disproportionately so much fewer competent kids than the people who
00:35:25.840
are living in environments where it is cost efficient to have tons of kids, that it's going
00:35:30.080
to be hard to keep them stable. Uh, because to get a community like the one he built, you don't just
00:35:36.540
need like the competent people that a city brings. You need a critical mass of ultra competent people
00:35:42.120
who also get along with each other. And the question is, is, are these masses in the future
00:35:49.360
going to be found more easily outside of cities or more easily in cities for people of our generation?
00:35:55.240
I think they're found more easily in cities still for the people of the next generation. I think
00:35:59.760
they're found more easily outside of cities. It could be. Yeah. Well, we'll find out, but I also
00:36:06.240
want to get your thoughts on the creator of like, like the death of the, the influencer. Do you
00:36:11.940
think it's possible when people say like, that's a thing that could happen?
00:36:16.920
No, I think it's, it's going to be a transformation. Like you say, the influencers themselves aren't
00:36:20.860
dying. The, the economies on which they were built have to evolve because people didn't understand
00:36:27.040
in the first place, how they worked and how to get an ROI out of working with an influencer,
00:36:31.400
you know, how to best sponsor influencers and, you know, how to know what their networks are like
00:36:36.420
and how to not work with fake influencers. I just think it's about a maturing industry.
00:36:41.500
That's all it's nothing beyond that, but what maybe you could help me with my like final
00:36:47.140
communist question. Cause as you know, for our holiday 11 month, where we explore a topic that
00:36:53.900
we find deeply offensive, I chose communism this, this year. And that's how I came to have this,
00:36:58.880
this concern with you. Cause I understand that communism involves a classless society at the end.
00:37:06.160
But what also really confused me is that if I understand this correctly, and maybe you can
00:37:11.920
tell me where I'm wrong. The, the concept of communism was just like, oh, well, wouldn't it
00:37:18.820
be great if like we lived in a post-scarcity society?
00:37:23.620
Well, your, your, your reading of the communist works, what you have told me you read from them
00:37:29.380
is that they presumed a post-scarcity world and that they thought that they could only work in a
00:37:36.120
Yes. Yes. And that, that you really couldn't have communism without it. And that the, the point of
00:37:42.560
like socialism and moving into communism is to just make sure that we get there eventually.
00:37:49.480
But that doesn't make sense to me because if you really want post-scarcity, probably like hyper
00:37:54.220
capitalism in hopes that someone develops AGI, which then in turn creates a post-scarcity world
00:38:00.280
is kind of your best bet. Not, you know, I want to talk about communism in a pre-scarcity,
00:38:06.100
in a scarce, scarce world. Okay. In any scarce world, you still need people to produce the goods,
00:38:13.420
right? Yes. Presumably in post-scarcity worlds, you can have AI or automation producing the goods.
00:38:17.500
In a scarce world, you need people to produce the goods. The core economic difference between a
00:38:23.560
communist and capitalist system is how they motivate people to produce the goods. A capitalist system
00:38:29.200
motivates them through pull by giving them things. Yes. It's a carrot space.
00:38:34.060
Give them more things for producing more things. Yes.
00:38:36.700
The communist system does it at the gunpoint, right? You know, it pushes. It says, if you don't
00:38:41.540
produce these things, bad things will happen to you. I will shoot you. I will kill you, et cetera.
00:38:46.260
And a lot of people misunderstand this. They're like, well, but isn't capitalism implicitly doing
00:38:53.600
the same thing by leaving the person without any money to begin with? And so they suffer if they
00:39:00.000
don't do something that contributes to society. And the suffering of hunger is astronomically less
00:39:07.860
than the suffering of the gulag or the horrors that happened under most of the communist systems.
00:39:12.500
And people are like, well, not real communism. And it's like, yeah, but do you not think that
00:39:16.480
the people who went into those projects were trying to create real communism? We have their
00:39:20.700
writings. It's just that that was the direction that communist systems went when they realized they
00:39:25.940
had to find a way to motivate people to work in a scarce world.
00:39:29.620
To put it another way, in a world where scarcity still exists, you're always going to need a way
00:39:35.760
to motivate people to produce the things that keep society functioning who don't want to produce
00:39:43.980
those things. I will always say this is one of the greatest richnesses of communism is if you have
00:39:50.160
any communist friends who you know are living in a group house, it is always the group houses that
00:39:55.140
trend more towards communism where nobody ever wants to pitch in to do the basic things that need to
00:40:01.180
get done. So back in Silicon Valley, I would go between group houses. And if you go to the more
00:40:06.840
capitalist-oriented group houses, everything was clean, everything was orderly, even though people
00:40:11.940
were pitching in just because they wanted to pitch in. In the communist group houses, the dishes were
00:40:17.440
never done. Everything was old, moldy, and gross. There's actually one of my favorite stories about
00:40:22.460
Bernie is that he was kicked out of a communist commune because he would always go to communist
00:40:27.320
communes and just do nothing but give speeches all day. And I think that's what a lot of communists
00:40:32.480
think that their job is going to be in this new utopia they're creating. But obviously, society can't
00:40:37.800
function on speeches. You actually have to do hard labor. And so what's interesting is that the
00:40:42.800
individuals who actually have this intrinsic drive that communists hope individuals have to go out and do
00:40:48.180
labor tend towards capitalism because they're actually already being rewarded within a
00:40:52.420
capitalist system. So they're quite okay with the system as it exists. It is the communists who
00:40:58.580
don't want to do anything, who want to be rewarded despite the fact that they're not doing anything,
00:41:03.360
that push the most for a system change. But then how do these two systems motivate people more broadly?
00:41:09.820
In capitalism, it is through carrot that those people produce the things. In a communist system,
00:41:16.260
there are only a few options. One is a direct stick, i.e. we will kill you. However, another is that I
00:41:24.560
didn't mention here is gated communist systems. These actually work pretty well, even in a modern
00:41:30.280
environment. That is to say, a kibbutz or the haven state that I mentioned recently. It's a small community
00:41:38.920
that says anybody who doesn't chip in gets expelled. That can work. But it works even better when
00:41:47.520
membership is explicitly optional and you're not just born into it. This is why in the example I gave
00:41:56.740
in the vignette in the last episode on fertility collapse in the real estate market, you would have
00:42:02.360
a ritual in which at a coming of age, as soon as somebody was mostly fully myelinated and could make
00:42:07.700
decisions for themselves, they had to live outside the society and then had a choice of rejoining the
00:42:13.200
society, that makes their joining the society explicitly a choice, as it is with things like
00:42:19.700
Amish communities. And here I would note that I'm not saying that the havens will be communist,
00:42:24.740
but I expect they will have elements of that, i.e. they will have specific rules and expectations
00:42:30.320
of individuals that individuals are supposed to adhere to that go far, far, far beyond what is
00:42:36.800
expected of an individual in modern capitalist societies. You will not be able to be lazy or
00:42:42.300
indolent and be allowed to live within these communities. But what can't work is a total
00:42:47.620
society. Now some individuals will say, well we can make communism work by convincing everyone to
00:42:53.760
love their fellow man. And they'll love their fellow man so much they'll just get out there and work.
00:42:58.560
But here what they're really talking about is some form of systemic brainwashing. They're saying
00:43:04.300
we will no longer allow individuals who have value sets that are at odds with this value set that I
00:43:11.520
have. And what's interesting about this value set that they have is that it's basically never existed
00:43:17.040
in human history. People predominantly love and care about the people closest to them, their friends,
00:43:24.180
their family, not wider society overall, and therefore will do things that disproportionately
00:43:29.860
benefit that closer network. This is why communism actually works at the family level, i.e., and we'd say
00:43:36.160
this in lots of our videos, my family right now is a communist system from each according to their
00:43:41.620
ability to each according to their needs. Like my kids don't produce any income because they are not
00:43:47.400
able to produce any income. But we give them what they need because we love them and we are invested in
00:43:52.800
them. You cannot force people to have this mindset to larger society without like genetically modifying
00:44:01.060
people because due to our evolutionary history we are always going to disproportionately favor our
00:44:06.520
families and closer relatives and closer kinship networks. And I should also note that it's not that the
00:44:12.740
deep communist thinkers are totally unaware of this either. This is why many communist groups today
00:44:18.320
see the first goal in bringing about communism as the dissolution of these kinship and family
00:44:26.280
networks, the dissolution of the family as a unit. You'll see this in groups like Black Lives Matter
00:44:32.200
and stuff like that. We need to dissolve the family. This is also why, and we have another video recorded,
00:44:38.360
but we haven't gone live yet, that was inspired by this video because I started looking into it after
00:44:43.000
this video as I was like, wait, wait, wait. If there's scarcity in a communist system, that scarcity
00:44:50.080
creates a dominance hierarchy which creates a class system. So what if somebody wants something like
00:44:57.480
sex from an individual and then that individual declines access to sex? Doesn't that create a form of
00:45:04.220
scarcity and class? And then I was like, so how does communism deal with this? And this is what I
00:45:08.960
learned about communism's very big issue with PDA files, which are very, very common among major
00:45:16.400
communist thinkers. And we will have a video on this coming up because, well, just so you get to
00:45:23.140
the point here before we get into that video or, you know, as a prelude to that video, why are they so
00:45:28.660
common? Well, it actually goes part and parcel with the dissolution of family units and the basically
00:45:34.760
taking of kids from families at a very young age. Or to put it yet another way, communism's greatest
00:45:41.600
enemy is consent. And this often creates interesting problems where you will see, it was in the circles
00:45:49.700
that lead towards communism, you see really high rates of stuff like grape. Actually, this was a huge
00:45:55.060
problem. It's stuff like CHOP or CHAZ or whatever you want to call that breakaway state they tried to do
00:45:59.460
in Seattle, where there were huge, huge amounts of grape in that area. And it is because the violation
00:46:05.920
of individual consent is necessary for there to be a classless society in any environment where some
00:46:15.760
individual has something they want to deny another individual access to, like their labor or their
00:46:21.360
body. Final thing I'll note here, which I always find one of the silliest arguments for communism,
00:46:25.960
is they're like, well, yes, communism may force some people to work at the point of a gun, but
00:46:31.100
in capitalism, access to the rewards of the system are not equally distributed. Not everyone has the
00:46:36.600
same ability to access rewards due to birth conditions, family, etc. And like, this is the
00:46:42.820
wildest thing I've ever heard. You have one system, one table, where there are rewards, but the game is
00:46:50.900
unfair. And you have another system where there are no rewards, and you're shot for not
00:46:55.740
working. Which one are you going to want to be at? But the point, or I guess the larger point of this
00:47:01.680
video, is communism doesn't work even in a post-scarcity world. Yes, I believe UBI might
00:47:09.360
work in a post-scarcity world, but even in a world where you have people's universal basic income,
00:47:13.780
where you have people's basic needs taken care of, like you do food drop-offs, you do medicine is
00:47:18.500
handled by the state, you do like all of that, you still have the class structure we have in our
00:47:22.920
existing society. And you will still have some resource which represents some form of scarcity,
00:47:28.280
because there is always scarcity in any system. And what people choose to value is always the
00:47:35.500
thing that is scarce, even if that thing is pointless. And what I find really interesting
00:47:40.860
is it's actually the communists themselves, in our current society, that are most drawn to
00:47:48.380
artificial scarcity. It is much more the communists who get drawn to brand name recognition like the
00:47:53.800
Starbucks and the iPads and the etc. And it's the extreme capitalists who often have less interest
00:48:01.060
in that stuff, because they care about getting the best product to fit whatever in the moment need
00:48:07.700
they have for the lowest cost possible. You know, if you look between two groups, communists versus
00:48:13.160
capitalists, you know, who do you think is using more Android phones? Who do you think is using more
00:48:16.840
iPhones and paying more for like a lower quality product? Or who do you think is using more like
00:48:20.700
Apple computers, right? You know, oh, I'm gonna get some angry Apple users in the comments here.
00:48:25.000
But it's just like objectively true, you're paying more for a lower per per any spec that you're
00:48:31.260
getting. So what are you paying for? If you're paying for more, you're paying for a brand. I mean,
00:48:35.220
people will make up excuses to themselves like, oh, no, I'm paying for the network effects of the
00:48:39.940
devices, or I'm paying because it, it, it runs more smoothly. Or, you know, but we all know that's not
00:48:46.760
true anymore. This isn't like, we're, we're in the Tim Cook era now. Okay, people, we know what this
00:48:51.740
is about. We know that you don't get the Starbucks coffee, because it tastes better. Okay, you get
00:48:56.460
the Starbucks coffee, because you have built a habit around Starbucks coffee, or you have some sort of
00:49:01.000
status associated with Starbucks coffee. So I find that really interesting as well is that that the
00:49:08.700
communists actually seem more drawn to artificial scarcity than the capitalists is.
00:49:14.140
I don't find that nearly as confusing as I do. Just capitalism, as I understand it now,
00:49:20.700
from a technical standpoint, is really just more interest in a sci fi futuristic world and not so
00:49:26.620
much about like, actual, I don't know, I like achievable things today. It's very bizarre to me. But
00:49:38.860
let's just focus on the things we can control our own little communist home, our children,
00:49:45.420
Explain what you mean when you say communist home, because people might not be familiar with
00:49:48.920
communism makes sense at a very, very local level, where like the family level is inherently
00:49:56.020
What you mean by that is from each according to their ability. That is what our household is.
00:50:02.580
And don't contribute financially to the family, because they can't, you know, we give them what
00:50:06.760
they need, because we care about them. And this is where communist networks have worked when people
00:50:11.340
genuinely care about the other people around them. And I think leftists are like, well, what if we could
00:50:15.580
build a society where everybody genuinely cares about everybody else in a society? And it's like,
00:50:21.360
well, you can't do that without making the entire society one culture, right? Because you're always
00:50:26.340
going to have some degree of conflict with people of different cultures than you, because they will
00:50:29.920
have different values and different things they want for the direction of the society. And I think that
00:50:34.280
this is ultimately why the urban monoculture is so monocultural, is because it's trying to create
00:50:40.860
that single united class, where everybody can value everyone else. But the problem is,
00:50:48.300
is it doesn't work. They end up losing all sense of personal identity, and then desperately trying
00:50:53.740
to recreate some identity. Because when you lose a connection to your heritage, you then are like,
00:51:00.240
well, then who am I? How do I define myself, right? If I'm not the culmination of my ancestors'
00:51:06.700
efforts? And then they say, well, I guess I am, you know, a LGBT, I'm a demiqueer squirrel
00:51:16.740
goddess or something. And then this culture, because it understands the importance of giving
00:51:21.520
you an identity, has this need to validate that, whatever it is. But it turns out that it doesn't
00:51:26.720
help mental health-wise, and leads to spirals pretty quickly. I think that that's what we're
00:51:31.860
getting here in the urban monoculture. It's had to cut people off from their ancestral identities.
00:51:37.120
And as such, they are desperate to create something new to identify with and be proud of.
00:51:42.300
And I think that's fundamentally what we see from this concept of capital purity, pride, right? And
00:51:48.100
that's why we advocate so much for choosing a family culture, an ancestral culture, to learn about
00:51:52.860
your ancestors, and learn who you are, so that you can take pride in that and see the value in bringing
00:52:00.020
that into the next generation. Well, let's go pick up the next generation. Okay, I'm sorry. I love you.
00:52:06.260
I love you, too. What do you want me to make for you? Let's try the ravioli.
00:52:12.660
Oh, with the pesto. Yeah, I think I'm going to use the sun-dried tomato pesto, so we can see if
00:52:17.660
that's any good. And just use any ravioli you want. And what else? Yeah, that's good for me tonight.
00:52:23.580
All right, it's on. Do you want a little bit of anything else? Just a couple raviolis?
00:52:28.560
I'm fine. You don't eat. I don't want to get obese, you know? I've got to look gaunt and
00:52:35.740
beautiful. And how can I do that with drinking as much as I do? Well, I love you. I'll see you
00:52:41.720
downstairs in a sec. Guys, wait. Guys, where are we? We're on the big, big, big tunnel.