Based Camp - The Communism Paradox： Why A Classless Society is Impossible Even in a Post-Scarcity World

00:00:00.000 communism doesn't work even in a post-scarcity world. Yes, I believe UBI might work in a post-scarcity

00:00:07.640 world, but even in a world where you have people's universal basic income, where you have people's

00:00:11.860 basic needs taken care of, like you do food drop-offs, you do medicine as handled by the

00:00:16.360 state, you do all of that, you still have the class structure we have in our existing society.

00:00:21.460 And you will still have some resource which represents some form of scarcity, because there

00:00:26.760 is always scarcity in any system. And what people choose to value is always the thing that is scarce,

00:00:34.540 even if that thing is pointless. And what I find really interesting is it's actually the communists

00:00:39.800 themselves in our current society that are most drawn to artificial scarcity. It is much more the

00:00:48.560 communists who get drawn to brand name recognition like the Starbucks and the iPads and the etc.

00:00:53.860 Would you like to know more? And there is no such thing as a classist society. It's not possible.

00:01:01.300 No. Do the intro. Okay. Hello, everyone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today is going to be,

00:01:08.100 I hope, a Simone of the episode, because she was the one who made this point to me while we were

00:01:13.200 walking around a target. What a fitting place. It's what we do. It's what we do. We were talking

00:01:18.540 about communism and the cliche, real communism has never been tried, which we will also get to in

00:01:25.340 this video. But one of the things that you turned and said to me while we were walking was...

00:01:30.720 There is no such thing as a classist society. It is absolutely impossible.

00:01:35.200 Go into your argument because I find it very powerful.

00:01:37.840 Yeah. So no matter what happens in a society, there will always be scarce goods. As soon as you make one

00:01:44.200 good, not scarce, people will then sort into classes based on what is scarce. And this shows

00:01:50.280 up in various sci-fi novels that anyone can read. I really like stuff by Cory Doctorow. He wrote this

00:01:56.660 one book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which really influenced the way that I saw the world

00:02:01.520 in the future. It takes place in a post-scarcity environment, you know, post-singularity. You can live

00:02:08.560 forever. You have backups of yourself that you can just restore if you accidentally die or are

00:02:13.180 murdered. And in this world, you know, you don't need food, you don't need shelter, but there is still

00:02:20.140 a class system and there's still a currency that is limited and finite and it's called Woofie.

00:02:26.400 Woofie is social capital in this world. And so people form themselves into what are called

00:02:32.060 adhocracies in this world, which I love that word also. I want a world of adhocracies instead of

00:02:37.940 bureaucracies. Adhocracies are basically short-lived collections of people who get together to do

00:02:43.840 cool stuff to get social credit. And the- By the way, this governing system wouldn't be stable and

00:02:49.000 I'll get to why in just a second, but continue. I really like it nevertheless. This book is about

00:02:54.080 adhocracies that form and compete in Disney's Magic Kingdom in Florida in this post-singularity

00:03:00.920 world because some things never go away, thank God. And what they do is they'll like, they take over

00:03:06.380 the rides. So two rival groups in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom are kind of competing for more

00:03:14.580 Woofie. One is redoing the Hall of Presidents and the other one is doing the Haunted Mansion.

00:03:19.940 And, you know, it's all about like who can, you know, impress the world the most with their really

00:03:24.280 cool updates to these rides slash attractions. And it totally makes sense to me that that would be the

00:03:30.660 case. And when you say something that's unpopular, when you do something that really pisses people off,

00:03:35.560 if you go viral for something bad, you know, that's it. You're sort of destitute. But being destitute

00:03:40.200 doesn't mean you're starving or homeless. It just means you don't really get the cool stuff.

00:03:43.920 You don't get the cool stuff.

00:03:44.920 So let's talk about, I want to break down a few aspects of this. So, because I think it's a very

00:03:51.800 good description and it does a very good job of showing why you can't really have classlessness.

00:03:57.640 Yeah.

00:03:58.640 Because even in an environment where all our needs are met, there are still some things that are

00:04:06.000 intrinsically of limited value, i.e. Disney World. There is only one Disney World. You can create other

00:04:12.860 Disney World, but they won't have the same cultural cliche as the first or the main Disney World.

00:04:17.900 And so, who gets to work on that Disney World, that special thing, and who gets access to that

00:04:32.580 special thing? You would still need some metric for deciding these two things. In this, the metric

00:04:39.400 that they choose is attention. The reason that Disney World has more value than another random thing or

00:04:45.800 random park is because it is a thing that collects attention. And so, the very attention you collect

00:04:52.140 is what gives you access to it. Very interesting that he, one of the things I think he predicted

00:04:58.800 so wrong in that is that Disney World would always be a thing of value. Little did he know the wokes 1.00

00:05:03.280 would completely destroy the brand so much that nobody even wants to go anymore.

00:05:07.640 Oh, I mean, I think it's more, it was more an issue of poor planning and price gouging.

00:05:13.360 It's hard to, we could, we could get in. I mean, we love watching Disney analysts on YouTube for some

00:05:18.680 reason. I also want to talk about why adhocracies can't form. Okay. Yeah. Cause I love the concept.

00:05:26.520 So, suppose the world does work the way it does in that world and will be, or will be, or the amount

00:05:33.000 of attention that you have access to is the core thing of value in that society. There would be,

00:05:40.200 it'd be really dangerous to break up with other groups and form new groups all the time, because

00:05:45.900 that would lower the efficiency at the production of this, that you would have access to. And

00:05:51.000 therefore you would be outcompeted by the groups that mostly stayed together and was fairly discerning

00:05:56.940 into who they work with. So if you're discerning and who you work with, you know, you work with

00:06:00.420 people you have experience with and stuff like that. And you're not just working with random new

00:06:04.180 people who might have high woofy, but it might be towards a different community. It might be

00:06:07.620 towards a different, whatever you're just going to get outcompeted by the groups that are more

00:06:11.000 stable. Um, and so that's going to lead to more stable, like woofy corporations, you could call

00:06:16.860 them, i.e. large groups that work together to control an area or an attention resource like

00:06:23.840 Disney and work together to do high amounts of production. In many ways you can think of YouTube

00:06:30.960 as already being a woofy economy and the big creators, while they work in networks of big

00:06:38.980 creators. And in that degree, you do have a bit of an adhocracy. They all have fairly large teams that

00:06:44.240 are fairly consistent. And even the different people they choose to work with occasionally

00:06:49.140 is a fairly small pool. And those pools don't cross over as much as you would think they would.

00:06:54.740 So like actually more or less how it works in the book too. Oh, okay. Well, yeah. Like for example,

00:07:00.680 if you consider like the Simone and Malcolm, like wider network of intellectual thinkers we're in,

00:07:06.360 you know, we will use this also in the effective altruist and rationalist communities. And you even

00:07:11.760 see this, like, look at the PayPal mafia, right? You could kind of argue that the, the organizations

00:07:17.620 and investments across which the PayPal mafia have like spread is a collection of adhocracies that are

00:07:24.440 all, you know, they're kind of related. They share a lot of people and they form and dissolve as is

00:07:29.460 necessary. That's, that's what I like about adhocracy is the fluidity of them, the, the pragmatic,

00:07:35.120 the pragmatic nature.

00:07:36.300 If you look at the PayPal mafia, it doesn't function the way you're saying it functions.

00:07:40.460 It's a collection of literal companies based on nepotism networks.

00:07:44.420 No, no, no. I'm referring, no, the, the, by the PayPal mafia, I'm referring to people like

00:07:49.340 Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, like those early investors and people involved in PayPal.

00:07:53.320 Yes. And then they consolidated their power through the way they were investing,

00:07:59.020 forming an entrenched power network, which is the antithesis of an adhocracy. 0.97

00:08:04.120 Yes. A group of people might organically come together to then form an entrenched bureaucracy.

00:08:09.600 Well, I wouldn't describe them as a bureaucracy.

00:08:12.260 No, they're a peerage network.

00:08:13.860 Yeah.

00:08:15.020 And a peerage network is not, no, it's not.

00:08:17.600 Yeah. An adhocracy. So this is where you're getting confused. So I'll, I'll describe this 0.94

00:08:22.660 for you to help fix how you can understand how an adhocracy can't really form in these

00:08:27.440 sorts of societies. Peerage networks can absolutely peerage networks can. You have noticed that

00:08:34.020 the first time these groups came together to form this like competent, good at working

00:08:38.260 together community. They did really well.

00:08:40.080 Like an adhocracy because they were all coming together, but that all coming together accidentally 0.93

00:08:44.840 only happens once. And before most of them are super successful. Once a team becomes successful

00:08:52.240 together, it forms a peerage network. It no longer has a huge reason to continue to bring in outsiders

00:08:59.480 at the level of the initial team. That would just be stupid. It would be stupid to bring in another 1.00

00:09:05.600 individual who's not as wealthy or something as like the Elon Musk and the other people in the 0.99

00:09:09.580 community into that top level. And so it doesn't happen. That's how peerage networks form.

00:09:15.940 But anyway, I want to get into how in our own mostly post-scarcity developed world, we already see

00:09:25.160 the perpetuation of a class-based system through the consumer patterns of the Starbucks communists.

00:09:32.960 And we've done an episode on Starbucks communism, but I think it really matters. You know, when you

00:09:37.340 go to the classic Starbucks communists, you, I mean, it's got the name because they've got their

00:09:44.240 Starbucks, which is a brand, which has cost, like they spent extra on that for the brand than they

00:09:51.600 would spend for that coffee if they had just made it themselves. They'll have their Apple phone,

00:09:56.420 which they have spent extra on because of the artificial scarcity created by the Apple brand.

00:10:02.000 They have their brand closings. They have their brand associations. So much of the scarcity that

00:10:08.340 they face and in terms of the things that they are purchasing in the world is, is just due to the

00:10:15.060 scarcity of that thing. And even if it's not woofy or attention that is the scarce thing in a society,

00:10:22.800 you will always have something that is scarce because that's the way humans work. And then status will

00:10:30.140 be built around that scarce thing. Because if you don't have something that's scarce, then you can't

00:10:35.520 build status networks, right? And then you can say, well, what if you had a society where everyone

00:10:40.620 was totally equal, right? How could that society be stable if you have varying degrees of competence?

00:10:48.560 Some individuals within that community would just innately be producing more than other individuals

00:10:55.000 within that community. And they would want that to be recognized and then, you know, cut off access

00:11:01.640 to their productivity.

00:11:02.960 Or innately be more attractive. And then more people want to be their friends and they might go out of their

00:11:08.620 way to do nice things for those people. And then, you know, suddenly those people are getting like

00:11:12.460 double food rations, you know, like it gets weird.

00:11:16.440 Well, and this is why that just doesn't work. In a world of varied competence, you cannot have true

00:11:26.200 equality because scarcity organically comes out of that. Now, you could, however, have a future society.

00:11:34.540 And in some of the sci-fis that I've like written in my spare time, what becomes of the socialist

00:11:39.080 systems is systems where people's brains are edited after they are born to ensure that they are not,

00:11:44.400 they have no unique area of competence. If they have a gift in music, if they have a gift in math,

00:11:48.500 if they have a gift in, the only way you can have sustainable communist or classless systems

00:11:55.180 is if everyone's literally the same.

00:11:57.580 Everyone's literally the same. And that is mortifying, I think. But I think it's the only way

00:12:04.940 you can produce that outcome.

00:12:06.180 Yeah. But also you wouldn't really have a thriving society if everyone's the same and it would be 0.99

00:12:11.440 more society. And they could be made smarter than humans are today. They would just always be out

00:12:20.080 competed by societies that had specialization, which especially as genetic technology comes online

00:12:26.380 is going to become more and more important for families to specialize in specific fields. But that's

00:12:33.100 going to mean that they need access to different sorts of things and are able to compete in systems

00:12:38.840 over different sorts of things. Wait, so hold on. Is the most accurate depiction of communism,

00:12:44.700 real communism in the media, like those clips of the cloned stormtroopers in the new Star Wars

00:12:51.740 movies? What? Just, just the existence of a bunch of clones. Yeah. No, clone army is real communism.

00:12:59.420 That's a room and board is covered. It is a post-scarce world for them. They are all clones.

00:13:05.260 They wear the same clothes. They have the same job. That is real communism. We've done it.

00:13:12.400 Yeah. Congratulations.

00:13:13.780 But here's another thing that I also want to push back against here because we have done

00:13:19.300 other videos where we say, because I do think that this is where we're heading to an attention-based

00:13:23.720 economy. Specifically, friendships have become totally disintermediated for most of the people

00:13:29.980 that you are communicating with. And somebody can be like, no. And I'm like, do you watch more

00:13:34.580 YouTubers and podcasters in terms of the total hours of your day than you spend talking to other

00:13:38.800 human beings? If you do, then you have a disintermediated friendship network. Similar

00:13:43.720 to me. I spend more time watching stuff and then I go out and I talk and then people choose to listen

00:13:48.220 to me if that is the social connection that they want to engage with. It is a completely

00:13:53.120 disintermediated social network, which I think a lot of people are like, oh, well, you lose a lot

00:13:59.740 of the interpersonal connection when you get this disintermediated social network. But what you get

00:14:05.400 is access to higher quality or better tailored conversations for you than you would get without

00:14:12.040 the disintermediation. And so that's why you choose to do it. You could choose not to do it.

00:14:17.440 You could choose to just turn all the podcasts and YouTubes off. But you don't. Because we

00:14:22.960 actually, this disintermediation is better for us than talking to somebody and waiting to get to the

00:14:31.400 good parts of the conversation. I mean, keep in mind, one of the reasons why our conversations,

00:14:36.220 like when people listen to our conversations, they're like, oh, that was a uniquely enriching

00:14:39.960 conversation without a lot of dead air and stuff like that. And I'm like, that is because you are not

00:14:45.280 seeing this actual conversation. You are seeing this conversation after I spent hours editing out

00:14:50.880 every pause, every time we had to Google something we didn't know, every tangent, every, it is as

00:14:57.400 condensed as I can make it for you. So it is a super normal stimuli for you. It is a super normal

00:15:05.100 conversation. People who don't know what super normal stimuli is, this is the concept where like a bird

00:15:09.800 had the genetic impulse to sit on a blue egg. And then you put like an extra large blue ball

00:15:15.280 next to it that's bigger than any egg it could ever produce. It will still sit on the blue ball

00:15:19.400 because it doesn't have this disintermediating thing that's saying like, well, if a conversation's

00:15:22.940 too good, then go away from it. Because that's not a real conversation probably. That's some sort of

00:15:28.000 artificial thing in your environment. But I actually think that the end user benefits more

00:15:32.940 from this. This isn't like a maladaptive super normal stimuli. I think that this is actually an

00:15:37.820 adaptive super normal stimuli. And people can be like, why is that? Well, you engage in conversations

00:15:42.960 for typically two reasons. One is to gain access to additional information about the world slash

00:15:50.480 additional perspectives about the world. And the other is to build out your personal network.

00:15:55.340 The problem is, is that this is always going to be better when you can choose any conversation you

00:15:59.040 want within an online environment or have it served to you by an algorithm. The information and

00:16:04.220 perspective side is going to be better served. However, you can be like, well, what about the

00:16:10.020 interpersonal connection side? And the answer to that is, while that may be worse served for your

00:16:17.900 average person, it is going to be better served for a competent individual. Let me explain.

00:16:26.160 You, like us, could go out there and start a podcast or a Twitter account or a, you know, a YouTube,

00:16:33.740 right? And then thousands of people, hundreds of people, you know, whatever, might choose to listen

00:16:41.060 to what you have to say, which actually gives you access to, through parasocial connections,

00:16:47.060 a wider network than you would have been able to get had you focused on one-to-one communication.

00:16:52.740 However, if you can't compete in that environment and you're like, well, I can't create something that

00:16:57.540 a lot of people are going to want to listen to. It also means then you're, you're stuck in these

00:17:02.740 individual conversations, which become lower and lower quality for the people who are forced into

00:17:07.620 them. And that is, I think, really damaging for a lot of people. To put it another way,

00:17:13.040 a system for supplying a type of good, which is substandard for an average deliverer of that type

00:17:19.960 of good, but super standard for an above average deliverer of that good. And that doesn't constrain

00:17:27.640 the quantity of the good being delivered, i.e. an above average deliverer of that good does not

00:17:33.700 have their ability to deliver that good hindered by the number of people who are receiving that good

00:17:39.840 is always going to outcompete a system which is better for the average deliverer of a good,

00:17:48.520 and especially a system which constrains the amount of that good that a super standard deliverer can

00:17:55.060 deliver, i.e. a better than average conversationalist is going to be delivering less

00:18:03.840 conversations in person because only so many people can get access to that individual.

00:18:09.280 And here I would note another phenomenon that has come out of the disintermediated conversation

00:18:13.860 marketplace, which is if you are a competent individual who might be able to compete within

00:18:21.180 this marketplace, but you do not have time to compete within this marketplace. Maybe it's

00:18:26.500 because you are successful in finance, or you are a successful biologist, or you are a successful

00:18:34.000 basically your competence in some other area is eating your time. You are actually going to be

00:18:41.500 rewarded for engaging, I'd almost say negatively engaging with it, i.e. ensuring that you are as private

00:18:51.040 as possible. Because if you are a little public, if you post to Twitter sometimes, if you post to

00:18:56.880 Facebook sometimes, and you don't get a lot of followers because you just don't have the time to

00:19:02.200 put the effort into it, then it might signal to people that you are actually a very uninteresting and

00:19:08.520 uncompetent individual. And this is why you see so many competent individuals being so private these

00:19:15.500 days. Because they don't have the time to invest in these types of marketplaces. And if you are

00:19:21.160 competent, but don't have the time to invest in these types of marketplaces, it's often better not

00:19:26.000 to appear on them at all. This actually isn't just a problem for competent people in other areas. It's

00:19:32.540 even a problem for competent communicators. One friend of mine who is very, very, very famous in other

00:19:39.180 parts of the internet, but that doesn't have a YouTube yet. When I was talking to her about this,

00:19:44.020 one of her fears about starting a YouTube channel is that in the early days, she is going to be much

00:19:50.480 smaller on YouTube than she is on the other platforms, which could cause people to perceive

00:19:56.540 her as being much less successful or competent within online spaces than she actually is. And so

00:20:04.940 this is a big problem when moving to other platforms, if you have already established yourself within one

00:20:10.080 platform. So it's not just your competent banker who has to deal with this when moving into the

00:20:15.080 online sphere at all, but it's a person who is extra famous within one platform or media type moving to

00:20:21.680 a new platform or media type. I was actually talking with someone about this today about what we're doing

00:20:27.400 for our kids' networks. And a huge problem many of the traditional cultural and religious systems

00:20:35.580 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

00:20:43.900 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

00:20:50.340 through the local church group or the local synagogue or something like that, right? The problem with that

00:20:55.480 group is that that group will be outcompeted by the super normal communities that the child has access to

00:21:01.920 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

00:21:11.660 access to that'll, that'll give your kids access to people who are even more similar to them or might

00:21:18.460 seem more impressive to them or might seem, you know, so then they end up, yes, you provided them

00:21:23.480 with a peer group, but the peer group wasn't as compelling for to them as the peer groups you find online.

00:21:27.740 Now contrast that with what we're doing, where we take the most interesting, most successful

00:21:32.180 families we know, and we add them to this network of families that we are building, that our kids can

00:21:39.200 one, go meet once a year by going to like a summer camp thing that we rent out. And, you know, all the

00:21:44.440 families will keep in who send their kids and the kids can all get to know each other, but two, have

00:21:49.300 online forums where the kids can interact with each other. And if they build a good relationship with

00:21:53.680 another kid, we might send them out, send them out to the family of the friend because they're an

00:21:59.100 in-network family. And then that kid's family might send them over to us. So it allows you to have

00:22:04.740 a dispersed network of high competence individuals who can also through the family connections,

00:22:11.600 get my kids into good early jobs, get my kids investments, get my kids started on their first media

00:22:17.600 projects. So the kids are going to find this community disproportionately valuable to them

00:22:23.840 because of the way that we curated it when contrasted with the random communities they can

00:22:28.800 gain access to online. And so this is something I very intentionally structured. And I think that

00:22:35.440 over-relying on these older systems, like I'm just going to focus on conversations or I'm just going to

00:22:40.620 focus on, you know, my local church group. It's very difficult to have that work in the modern

00:22:46.760 environment, but it can work. So let's talk about where it does work. It does work when the in-person

00:22:52.140 connections due to cultural reasons, I think as a culture, that doesn't trust people who they don't

00:23:00.480 know personally and they're like older individuals and stuff like that, that can get you access to

00:23:04.060 capital, that can get you access to friendships that you can't get otherwise, or because you have

00:23:11.960 some capability due to... The problem is that those networks are just going to be out-competed.

00:23:18.020 This is the problem, like why I wouldn't invest in that. Some people are like, well, due to my

00:23:22.000 family's background or history, I have access to wealthy nepotistic networks, right? It's like,

00:23:28.740 unfortunately, in this new disintermediated economy, like social economy, the networks that were open to

00:23:36.620 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,

00:23:47.100 you know, that entrepreneur or those intellectuals are going to want access to the other, and they're

00:23:51.060 going to want their kids, more importantly, to have access to the other members of that network,

00:23:54.860 whereas the old money networks only have access to capital, which becomes increasingly less

00:24:00.380 important when contrasted with competence in this new world order that we're entering into.

00:24:07.280 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

00:24:16.380 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

00:24:37.200 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. 0.89

00:28:44.200 You know, that is just not a very valuable Woofie supply, except in terms of influencing the next 1.00

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

00:29:15.920 the influencer is. Okay.

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

00:37:35.040 post-scarcity world.

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. 1.00

00:38:46.260 And a lot of people misunderstand this. They're like, well, but isn't capitalism implicitly doing 0.99

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, 0.94

00:49:44.420 what would you like me to make?

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

00:49:54.160 communist. I don't remember the phrase.

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 1.00

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.

Based Camp - August 01, 2024

The Communism Paradox： Why A Classless Society is Impossible Even in a Post-Scarcity World

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