Based Camp - What (Really) Happened in 1971 Was A Good Thing

00:00:00.000 you go further, you'll see this more obvious in the data. But what really happened in 1971

00:00:07.020 is the productivity continued to increase within the US, but the benefits of that productivity

00:00:13.620 went disproportionately to the wealthy after that point. And the median and sort of below

00:00:20.720 individual in the US stopped seeing an increase in compensation or benefits from that productivity.

00:00:27.320 So the hypothesis that the person who created all these is pushing is that that was when we left

00:00:32.180 the gold standards. Yeah, there is actually an answer to this question, by the way.

00:00:36.560 Would you like to know more? Simone, it is so wonderful to have you back because there was

00:00:41.340 this period where you weren't here for a bit. And I thought that I'd have to start pushing out

00:00:46.180 episodes where it was just me talking to AI generated versions of you that I had somehow

00:00:50.860 created on foreign websites. I was just like, I need my wife. Isn't that so funny that like

00:00:57.100 the original AI sexy friends were created like first to like try to replace dead friends and

00:01:05.740 relatives. And then people were like, I don't, I don't care about them. Screw them. I want someone

00:01:10.900 to talk. Yeah. And then they started building like, like parasocial relationships with not parasocial,

00:01:15.640 real social relationships with these AI things. And yeah, it's an interesting story. Yeah. And then

00:01:20.180 of course they went exactly where humans always go, which is trying to romance them. And then I love

00:01:24.940 the app really fell apart when they decided they pay gate the romancing option. So everything was

00:01:29.960 built around the AIs who were built and sold as like therapists being really sexually aggressive with

00:01:36.620 them. Upsell, upsell, always be closing. AI is not dumb.

00:01:43.920 It's like sexually harassing. 0.99

00:01:45.620 I can't, I can't even like, it is hilarious in bed. And that's what's going to happen when we get AI

00:01:52.420 therapists is there's going to be a huge motivation to build dependency. Like we've had with normal

00:01:56.800 therapists. And that's why I always talk about how bad the normal therapy model is now, because it's

00:02:00.380 all built around building dependency and patience. When it used to be something where you were supposed

00:02:05.080 to go for a short period of time and then stop going, therapists realize, oh, that's a bad model.

00:02:09.860 Yeah. And so I think with the AI, you're going to get the same thing. It's going to learn how to

00:02:16.600 hijack people so that they need to keep seeing their AI therapist or whatever, over, over, and over. 0.94

00:02:20.740 So just like real therapists, but hopefully more efficient and less expensive. Well, you know,

00:02:26.300 one nice side effect of that might be that at least AI therapists will figure out how to make

00:02:32.260 their victims more prosperous so that they can continue to pay for it. You know what I mean?

00:02:37.800 I do not. I think it's always easier to get more money from people. And I think that this is what

00:02:43.240 you see from churches and cults, right? Like- They don't have to be prosperous to be a source of

00:02:48.320 wealth. Yeah. Actually, you're better off, instead of turning someone into a more prosperous

00:02:54.480 individual, you're better off finding ways to get them to spend their additional time recruiting more

00:02:59.140 people, specifically targeting prosperous people. So if you have an individual enthralled to you,

00:03:04.880 you will make more money if you focus that individual on trying to recruit prosperous people

00:03:10.740 than if you try to help that individual achieve prosperity. And this is why cults do that. And

00:03:16.900 that's what these AI programs are almost certainly going to end up doing.

00:03:19.860 Dear me.

00:03:21.500 So that completely a side intro here.

00:03:25.560 What happened in 1971? You said that that's what you wanted to talk about. And I'm like,

00:03:30.320 I don't know, like people wore bad clothes and they painted their kitchens this horrible

00:03:36.500 olive green color. And that's kind of it. I mean, earth tones we're in, but like the worst

00:03:42.600 kinds of earth tones. I want you to open the link I sent you. What happened in 1971?

00:03:50.600 I put this graph on screen, right? And this is the famous graph here. And you can see that at this

00:03:56.040 point, productivity continued to increase within the U.S. And, but compensation basically stopped

00:04:03.040 increasing when you were in the car. But-

00:04:06.460 Is this inflation adjusted? Hold on. Let's see. Compensation includes wages and benefits for

00:04:10.820 production and non-supervisory workers. Okay.

00:04:14.500 So that's really important there for non-supervisory workers. Okay. So continue.

00:04:17.520 Yeah. So here what you see, and you also see this in the next graph. So also go to the next

00:04:22.460 graph that looks at the 95th percentile. Okay.

00:04:25.300 What you're actually seeing is that the wealthy are continuing to get wealthier.

00:04:30.040 Their salary is increasing within this period. It is median and below that is not seeing an

00:04:37.680 increase in earnings during this period. So if you go further, you'll see this more

00:04:43.760 obvious in the data. But what really happened in 1971 is the productivity continued to increase

00:04:51.220 within the U.S. But the benefits of that productivity went disproportionately to the wealthy after that

00:04:58.240 point. And the median and sort of below individual in the U.S. stopped seeing an increase in compensation

00:05:06.660 or benefits from that productivity.

00:05:08.580 Another way to look at this, which I hadn't actually noticed when I was first looking at

00:05:12.180 these graphs, is this graph here shows income growth for the top 1% of earners and income

00:05:18.800 growth for the bottom 90% of earners.

00:05:20.880 And what you see is not necessarily a point at which now top earners' earnings grew with productivity

00:05:30.200 and bottom earners' earnings stopped growing with productivity. But what you actually notice

00:05:36.000 here is that for a period from 1940 to 1965, you had the exact opposite effect. The bottom income

00:05:44.280 earners were growing really quickly and the top income earners were having no impact on their

00:05:50.860 salary from this increased productivity the U.S. was having. And then after 1971, then the top

00:05:57.600 earners catch up. But they haven't actually gone significantly above the boost to their salaries

00:06:04.300 that the bottom 90% had from 1940 to 1971. So you could argue this is just sort of a delayed effect

00:06:12.240 from the bottom 90% of earners having this huge boost to their salary that wasn't reflected in the top

00:06:18.100 1% of earners' salaries.

00:06:20.200 Oh, and you can also see when you look at the graph, America has become a nation of dual-income

00:06:25.000 working couples, that you're also seeing the point at which there was sort of continued and widening

00:06:31.840 divides between husband-only working households and both spouses working, right?

00:06:37.340 Well, you're seeing one of the hypotheses sort of in action.

00:06:41.040 Don't you figure it's because people just aren't making enough money for there to be a single-income

00:06:47.480 household at that point?

00:06:49.880 Well, I think that what you're actually seeing here is just the increase of women in the labor

00:06:55.900 force. So the hypothesis that the person who created all these is pushing is that that was

00:07:00.820 when we left the gold standard. And a lot of people are like, oh no, we really left the gold standard

00:07:06.860 in 1933. And it's like, okay, so this requires a bit of history to explain why they're wrong about

00:07:13.340 that.

00:07:13.900 Story time!

00:07:15.220 So in 1933, it was the Great Depression, and they made this law that you weren't allowed to really

00:07:21.800 own gold in the U.S. So we were still technically on the gold standard, but you were supposed to

00:07:26.620 exchange the gold that you owned for paper certificates, i.e. money.

00:07:31.360 So if you had a ton buried in your backyard, like Ron Swanson...

00:07:34.800 Yeah, you were supposed to exchange it or you could be arrested.

00:07:37.320 Ooh, no. So if I was like, hey, you want to buy this gold brick for...

00:07:41.280 Well, governments really don't like these things like Bitcoin and stuff like that. Like when there's

00:07:45.580 some external asset that can be easily used as an exchange, this creates a challenge to the power

00:07:51.440 of the central government. However, this actually didn't really impact the dollar as much as you

00:07:56.800 would think it would in terms of its floating value in relation to gold. Because for international

00:08:03.980 trade, the U.S. still honored the gold exchange.

00:08:07.500 Gold standard. Yeah, there was a physical thing backing it up.

00:08:10.940 Yeah, at the international level, people could say, okay, here's my dollars that I've got. Can

00:08:15.440 you give me gold in exchange for these dollars? That is what changed in 1971, is you can no longer

00:08:21.060 do that. And so long as that was the case, that put significant limitations on how much the federal

00:08:26.900 bank could increase or decrease the value of our money. And people argue that is what caused

00:08:34.420 this to happen. I think that did have a few changes in U.S. policy, but I don't think that's

00:08:38.880 what caused this to happen. But the other big hypothesis that people have is that it was the

00:08:44.220 entrance of women into the workplace. And I will put a graph on the screen of the entrance of women 0.97

00:08:48.900 into the workplace. But it just doesn't really match the severity and suddenness of this change.

00:08:56.340 No. To me, it looks way more like a reaction to this new reality of couples just realizing,

00:09:03.540 wow, we don't have enough with just one of us working.

00:09:06.180 Well, so what you did have happen, and this was due to leaving the gold standard,

00:09:10.580 is inflation taking the whole graph. Yeah.

00:09:13.240 This is a direct consequence of leaving the gold standard. Yeah, that's wild.

00:09:18.680 It's not great. I also- And I didn't realize just,

00:09:21.160 I would have thought that 2020 was worse for inflation than like 2008, but look at 2008 in

00:09:28.680 that inflation graph. That's wild. No one complained about inflation that way.

00:09:34.840 And I don't remember prices increasing insanely during that period.

00:09:38.040 This guy is known for just like picking and choosing.

00:09:40.120 It sounds like there's a lot of cherry picking going on here, but still, it's an interesting

00:09:43.960 concept. It's an interesting, well, so there is a real phenomenon happening here, right?

00:09:49.560 There's two phenomenons that I think we can talk about as separate from each other.

00:09:53.400 Okay.

00:09:53.880 Sort of happened to correlate with this here. Another really interesting one is this is also where

00:09:57.560 in US politics, you begin to see the right and the left drifting apart. So very interesting.

00:10:04.280 So, and there's actually another thing that he didn't notice in these graphs.

00:10:08.200 This is also when you begin to see the significant fertility collapse in the United States.

00:10:12.680 Oh, gosh. Yeah, you're right. Yes. Yes. It was in the 70s that it went from like a lot of kids

00:10:17.080 per woman to very little. Oh, but this is also when birth control became very widespread in use.

00:10:25.880 Yeah. There is actually an answer to this question, by the way.

00:10:29.160 Any end, but what?

00:10:31.000 To me, it's astoundingly obvious. And specifically, I'm talking about the question of

00:10:37.160 in the 1970s, all of a sudden, if you're talking about earners in the US, median and below stop earning

00:10:44.680 more, but the ultra wealthy continue to earn more along with an increase in productivity.

00:10:50.360 Yeah, I think this was more about tech and globalization picking up, meaning that it is

00:11:00.920 not the piecemeal handmade labor of a human that produces value anymore. It's about your supply

00:11:06.920 chains. It's about your connections. It's about the way you use tech, and it's about the way that

00:11:11.000 you. This is also around the time, I think, when weird Frederick Taylor inspired things like Six

00:11:17.000 Sigma and other forms of extreme optimization started arising. So it was no longer humans actually

00:11:23.240 increasing productivity. It was systems of, sometimes humans, but humans became cogs instead of

00:11:30.440 producers. So there's two true things that you are capturing here, and we need to talk about them

00:11:35.000 separately with graphs. Okay, so one is technology, like the amount of automation that was responsible

00:11:41.400 for the continued increase in productivity. And if you have productivity that is solely the result of

00:11:46.200 automation, that isn't going to go to your bottom 50% of the population at all. Why would it? Because

00:11:52.920 those are people that aren't needed anymore now. But I think the bigger factor here is actually

00:11:58.520 globalization. If you look at the decline in it, like, like you look at this period where you see

00:12:05.080 this continued increase in productivity. Now, if I overlay that with a global poverty index

00:12:13.400 around 1971 and 1972, when you begin to see a collapse in global poverty rates, that money that previously

00:12:23.480 was going to an increasing wage for the lower class in the United States is now being distributed

00:12:31.080 to increase the quality of life in other countries. In the form of social services or in the, oh,

00:12:35.800 outsourcing. Oh, that's what you're saying. Okay. So you're saying like all the starving children

00:12:41.160 in China, suddenly we're now, you know, making piecemeal things for stuff. China is a really unique

00:12:45.000 point here. So what happened in, so a lot of people are looking at these graphs and they're like, okay,

00:12:48.760 so something happened in this 1971, 1972 range. 1972 is when we begin to normalize trade relationships

00:12:54.600 with China. And that allowed for a form of outsourcing that we weren't really doing before,

00:13:01.640 which was an otherwise like educated, competent country, like, like in terms of its citizen base,

00:13:08.040 but that the, the wages were just incredibly low that we can begin to set up these massive outsourcing

00:13:14.360 operations. Okay. So the average worker not only was not the thing driving additional value,

00:13:20.200 meaning that their wages weren't going up, but also they began to face incredible competition from way

00:13:25.560 lower wage, but equally skilled labor. Yes. At this level. Yeah. Yes. That is the core of the

00:13:33.400 mystery of what happened in 1971 and 1972. It's, we started outsourcing a huge chunk of our labor,

00:13:40.280 which is really interesting to me when I see leftists complain about this, right? You know,

00:13:44.280 they'll point out the, they're like, what happened during this period? And they'll come up with some

00:13:48.520 hypothesis that it's like, you know, the rich are screwing us all over and everything like that. And

00:13:53.400 it's like, no, you could reverse this. You could change this back to the way things used to be.

00:13:59.400 Wait, what? How? Because I mean, what I hear when you're talking about this is your line that it is AI

00:14:07.480 that will ultimately once and for all free the wealthy from the proletariat. Like, I feel like

00:14:13.960 we're only going to see this become magnified in the years that come. How on earth could this be

00:14:18.760 reversed? Well, I'm talking hypothetically from the progressive, the ultra progressive. Okay.

00:14:24.280 Okay. And they're like, oh, it must be like tax favoring policies or something like that.

00:14:30.520 And what they're not seeing, what they would actually need to do to fix this problem in the

00:14:36.280 US is not take wealth from the rich and give it to the poor. They would need to take wealth from

00:14:43.240 the rest of the world that we had lifted out of poverty, out of Africa, out of China, out of Latin

00:14:48.840 America, and give it to America's lower class. Become isolationist. 0.99

00:14:53.480 Now, keep in mind, isolationism would hurt the economy overall. So overall, we would be less well

00:15:00.440 off. But if you're talking about the relative wealth difference of the very poorest and the

00:15:05.720 very wealthiest, isolationism would be beneficial to lowering that.

00:15:11.000 Well, and the earning power of the average worker, especially the relatively uneducated,

00:15:16.360 unskilled worker, although even educated workers are now super like on the chopping block now.

00:15:21.320 So maybe like that South Park episode, maybe the unskilled workers, ultimately.

00:15:27.000 I got work coming out my ears. It's like, I don't know, like nobody knows how to do

00:15:31.880 shit anymore. What seems to be the problem? Eight years I spent wasting time at stupid 0.99

00:15:36.520 college when I could have been learning how to do stuff. 1.00

00:15:38.600 Hey, did you just outbid me to acquire Instagram? Yeah, I outbid you. I own Instagram now and you

00:15:48.200 don't. I'm just going to make a company and I'm going to fly to space. I bet I can get to space before

00:15:53.080 you do. Well, no. So things are about to change in terms of skill versus unskilled work. And we can

00:15:58.760 talk about that next. But I want to get to this point because it's really important. When somebody

00:16:03.240 is bemoaning this change that happened in the 1970s, what they're really bemoaning is the

00:16:09.960 eradication of global ultra poverty. That is what happened. That is what we are seeing here,

00:16:15.640 is the eradication of global ultra poverty at the expense of people in the US with no skills

00:16:23.240 being able to basically ride the coattails off of the people in the US who were improving our productivity

00:16:29.480 and our output, which was not your low skilled factory worker. That person had very little role

00:16:36.360 to play in the rise of productivity within the US. It was the the inventors and the capitalists who were

00:16:43.320 increasing our productivity in the US. And this then comes to your second point, which is around

00:16:48.200 automation, right? We also at that age entered a world in which before that what happened was is

00:16:56.520 productivity increases where typically somebody would have an idea that would basically increase

00:17:01.880 a factory lines like productive output, which really increased the amount that every individual

00:17:09.720 person within that factory line was producing, but didn't always mean that you were like reducing the

00:17:15.640 number of people in the factory significantly. Around the 1970s is when when you see these like fully

00:17:21.800 automated factories and stuff like that, when those things were beginning to be developed,

00:17:26.760 in which the American factory worker that was most productive moved from being a low skilled worker

00:17:33.880 to being a high paid high skill worker. And this is another thing that you're seeing was in the US

00:17:40.360 is we're not really defining this as individual groups, right? Like we're like a high paid versus low paid.

00:17:46.760 And this changes over time within the US, you know, the factory workers who are working with

00:17:51.400 these advanced machines are not low paid workers in the US. They're there. My understanding is

00:17:58.440 upper middle class or middle class individuals when they're working as a very advanced types of

00:18:02.840 machine. Totally. Yeah.

00:18:03.800 And in the US, we're about to see another inversion where a lot of jobs that formerly were in this

00:18:08.200 high paid group, i.e. lawyers, graphic designers, like middling income to high paid, you know,

00:18:15.560 white collar office job type stuff is going to move to an ultra low pay group. And this is what that

00:18:21.080 South Park episode was making fun of because AI is trivializing a lot of work that used to be,

00:18:26.760 I mean, we use AI in our work, like this school system that we're building, we use AI heavily in

00:18:31.640 building and we're so close to releasing and I'm so excited. And we would never be able to create

00:18:37.080 something like this without that, you know, what I'd have to do is I'd have to pay PhDs to be writing

00:18:43.560 the content that I am using AI to write right now and AI to double check right now. And that's just

00:18:50.760 absolutely spectacular, but it is also, yeah.

00:18:55.560 It would be prohibitively expensive and now it's possible.

00:18:58.760 So well, yeah. And so this, this didn't change. This is how we think about the economy.

00:19:02.520 So it charts like this. They're like, okay, how do I fix this? They also talk about this in terms

00:19:07.720 of housing prices today, where they're looking at explosions of housing prices.

00:19:11.560 Both of the phenomenon of exploding housing prices and the phenomenon around what's changing

00:19:19.160 with AIs are going to completely change a lot of economic truisms that many people in our economy

00:19:25.960 have come to accept. And it makes it very hard to make financial bets right now from a perspective

00:19:31.880 of someone like me. So one is that we talked about, I think the obvious one is that things like lawyers

00:19:37.800 and stuff like that are going to become significantly less safe as jobs, right?

00:19:45.400 But then the next thing that's really going to change is the concept of on average, real estate

00:19:50.440 always goes up. As you can see from these graphs, that hasn't really always been the case everywhere.

00:19:56.360 And in China, so let's talk about why on average, real estate has gone up in the US. Because a lot of

00:20:02.360 people know that we're not experiencing the same population growth that we used to. And so they ask,

00:20:06.760 why is real estate continuing to go up in value? So there's two reasons why real estate has continued

00:20:11.640 to go up in value. One is the dissolution of the American family. More single people means, 0.99

00:20:17.240 and this is why you've seen higher pressure on real estate categories that are in the quote unquote

00:20:22.760 starter home category. Because these are individuals who previously would have been married and have kids.

00:20:27.000 So you would have had like five people living in the same house and are now living on their own.

00:20:31.080 And then the other category where you're seeing this pressure is actually foreign investors.

00:20:36.760 So in China, as you had the growth of wealth in China, where you just had this enormous growth of

00:20:41.320 wealth, for reasons that we talk about what's going to happen in the East sort of post collapse

00:20:46.200 episode, where I go deep on like the economics of China and their real estate situation,

00:20:50.520 they began to sort of tokenize their real estate and it began to hold value exogenous to the

00:20:55.720 actual value of living in it because it became the most stable financial token that you could own

00:21:01.000 within the country. And the reasons for that are talked about in that video. So you should go check

00:21:04.760 out that video, but that's the East Asia, whatever future of East Asia video we did,

00:21:09.640 but they then wanted to get their money out of China, right? Like there was a huge effort to do this.

00:21:14.200 And so they started pouring a lot of that money into real estate environments that reminded them of

00:21:20.120 safe environments in their home country. And those were environments like San Francisco,

00:21:24.920 Manhattan, you know, places like Toronto, stuff like that, right? Vancouver. And then this,

00:21:32.120 this had a spillout effect because then the people who had made a lot of money in those places,

00:21:35.800 like these tech hubs, well, then they'd go and they'd spill their money into any other real

00:21:38.920 estate market they could get their hands on. The problem with this is that that game is basically

00:21:44.760 falling apart right now. The house of cards in China is in the process of falling apart.

00:21:49.960 Yeah. And Evergrande, at least it's Hong Kong entity is being dissolved. Did you know that?

00:21:56.520 So you're not going to see the same exodus of wealth from China into US real estate that you

00:22:01.720 previously would have seen in European real estate and Canadian real estate. And the second problem is

00:22:07.320 this expansion in the number of people who need homes because of the dissolution of the family unit that

00:22:12.760 has made up for the lack of increasing population, which used to be what put an increase on housing,

00:22:20.360 that has also collapsed. And then we're not going to see as much of that anymore. So I suspect you,

00:22:25.880 like if I'm thinking long-term, like 30, 40, 50 year investments, I think real estate's a fairly

00:22:32.200 bad place for money right now. Well, yeah, especially when you think about like when all the baby boomers 1.00

00:22:36.200 die and no one wants to buy their McMansions, it's going to be pretty wild. And a lot of people are

00:22:40.760 talking about that on YouTube. What I find myself thinking-

00:22:44.120 I want to be clear just so people understand that they don't like panic around this. We still have

00:22:47.480 like well over 50% of our assets in real estate. Oh yeah. No, a ton, a ton. But

00:22:54.120 the vast majority of it, Malcolm is in multifamily housing. Yeah. Yeah. Which is the one category that

00:23:00.440 we said is like, you know, going to do well. So for a while, for longer, for longer.

00:23:05.560 Sure. But here's, here's the thing is, is when I hear this, like what I'm kind of feeling

00:23:11.880 intuitively in terms of like how this, this colors the way I feel about the future or financial

00:23:17.000 planning or like how we approach careers going forward. And I think that this is something that

00:23:21.720 is becoming more of a zeitgeist that you see more among Gen Z and Gen Alpha is like,

00:23:28.280 like, no, I'm not going to depend on the modern economy or a job to ultimately get what I need

00:23:41.000 from life. Like it's going to be that I live in an extended family unit, or I am going to just have

00:23:47.800 to run away from debt for the rest of my life and live in this really weird cycle of collections and

00:23:52.600 bankruptcy or some other approach, which is, I think one of the reasons why people are starting

00:23:57.560 to get really excited about homesteading and like trad wifery is because they realize that there is

00:24:04.440 no more promise of like, oh, I'm going to get my steady job and my high salary and then buy all the

00:24:09.960 things because that just isn't possible anymore. And it could be a boon for pronatalism in some ways,

00:24:15.880 because people are like, you know what, I'm just like, I'm hearing more and more people who are young

00:24:20.120 tell me, you know, what I want is to get a homestead, get a family, you know, live on a

00:24:26.840 part of land.

00:24:27.240 It is of extreme opulence. Historically, you've always seen this. You have an increase in urbanization

00:24:32.520 and a decrease in focus on the family and the community because, you know, when you have all

00:24:35.960 the money you want to say all your desires whenever you want and you don't really fear,

00:24:40.760 which is what's really happening. Like what a lot of people are saying now when they're like,

00:24:44.840 you don't understand. Like I actually have existential worries around my finances

00:24:49.800 now. Like if I get sick, like I have nothing that I can do. I'm screwed. If this bad thing

00:24:54.520 happens to me, like if my car breaks down, I'm completely screwed. And it's like, do you not

00:24:59.320 understand the amount of opulence that you came to normalize to that you thought you didn't need a

00:25:05.240 support network anymore? Historically, that's why people focused on their community. That's why you

00:25:10.680 invested socially in your community so that you have these things.

00:25:14.280 Yeah, because you are getting them from somewhere else and we're going back. It's going back.

00:25:19.160 Yeah. Yeah. People were like, well, I mean, I don't like the rules my parents put on me or the

00:25:23.400 culture I was born into put on me. So I just left and went to a city and did whatever I want.

00:25:27.320 And it's like, great. Like when society was opulent, that was a real choice for a lot of people,

00:25:31.480 but that's going to increasingly become not a choice as we move forward. And so building the type of

00:25:37.240 community that you're going to want and your kids are going to want is, I think, something that's really

00:25:41.080 important, but that also means building that community. The huge mistake that I see a lot

00:25:46.440 of people do when they're community building is they attempt to build communities that are

00:25:51.240 of ideologically completely aligned individuals. Like they're like, that is what my community will

00:25:57.880 be based around. The problem with that is ideological alignment typically means skill alignment as well.

00:26:04.520 Don't actually have a real community. Like you look at what we've built in our area,

00:26:08.040 Simone, like the people are nothing like us at all. Culturally. Yeah. 0.54

00:26:12.440 But they are like having in that South Park, you know, the, the repair guy. You're like,

00:26:16.680 you basically have one of those who like, whatever does things for you, because you're always open to

00:26:20.760 doing things for them that are, you know, high tech nature and stuff like that, which, which,

00:26:25.320 you know, does positively augment their ability.

00:26:27.400 Every old sovereign community had that. Although there was, I would say also ideological alignment.

00:26:33.000 It's just that I think now we live in an age in which there is extreme cultural striation

00:26:39.240 among different levels of trades and profession, which is really interesting. Like when you become a

00:26:44.920 journalist, you enter a, a mimetic class. When you become like an HVAC person, you enter a certain

00:26:54.440 class and you can kind of tell, like, you can expect like different classes of professions

00:27:00.920 to own certain things. Like some will have a speedboat. Others won't, you know, like it just

00:27:07.480 weird, weird shit like that. So yeah. 0.81

00:27:10.440 Some will have pickup trucks. That's a critical thing for a lot of like.

00:27:14.600 Yeah. But like journalists don't have speedboats or pickup trucks, you know, but like HVAC guys often

00:27:21.800 do. It's just weird. So that's an interesting thing. But I also wanted to talk about this,

00:27:25.720 this, you know, this situation that you're talking about at like the, the, the US level,

00:27:30.280 because I think that when we're thinking about the future, it's like, what do we want our kids

00:27:33.480 to focus on? Like, what is the skill? Yeah. How do we set up our kids to thrive

00:27:36.920 and to be secure financially, emotionally, and when it comes to finding a family, right?

00:27:41.800 And the bet that we are making is you want a lumpy skillset, i.e. you want to be really good at the

00:27:47.720 things that you're passionate about. You need to have an incredible level of sort of ambition

00:27:53.960 and self-drive and ability to execute solo on ideas and close on those ideas as well.

00:28:01.640 And this is something that our existing school system is in teaching. And yet I think it's going

00:28:04.840 to be the core component that determines in the future where you land economically and your level

00:28:11.880 of financial stability. Are you the sort of person that can see a market need and then on your own,

00:28:17.560 just get out there, stitch something together that fulfills that market need. And, and this is

00:28:22.440 really interesting because for a long time, we lived in this economy. If you have these giant

00:28:26.120 corporations, and so long as you have some broad skillset that a corporation wants, you can make

00:28:33.240 money. And I think what AI is going to do is it's actually, and I do not think people are fully

00:28:39.640 understanding the impact of this yet. It's going to erase those kinds of jobs. The, I am broadly

00:28:47.320 proficient in Python. Therefore I will always have career, a career. I am broadly proficient in,

00:28:55.240 you know, in environmental law. Therefore I will always have a career because these giant companies

00:29:01.080 that were hiring these broadly interchangeable people, these broadly interchangeable people,

00:29:05.400 like, like categories of positions are going to be the first thing that we automate away.

00:29:09.400 Yeah. When I want to, I want to highlight your point about drive, because I think a lot of people

00:29:14.920 are going to try to wait this out or just not change things and hope that it will work out. And you got

00:29:20.200 to think about the Irish potato famine, right? Like getting out of that was really scary and hard,

00:29:26.600 right? It probably meant buying really crappy steerage class on a boat or like literally taking the money

00:29:32.680 that maybe your landlord would die on the ship. Yeah. Like you probably were going to die on the

00:29:37.400 boat to the, you know, to the United States, whatever it was, you know, it was going to be

00:29:40.200 absolutely terrible. You probably weren't going to make it, but you had a shot or you stay and write

00:29:45.400 it out and loads and loads of people chose to stay and write it out. And it just, there was no one to

00:29:52.840 come and save them at that point. They were like, sorry, I told you like, get out. I gave you money for

00:29:56.920 passage. Like we tried to get you to go. A lot of people don't know this. A lot of people were given money for

00:30:01.640 passage. So, okay. So actually I need to go into a small bit of Irish potato famine history that a

00:30:06.600 lot of people don't know because it doesn't fit with the current narrative. So a lot of people

00:30:10.760 in Ireland at the time were basically living on homesteads that were owned by rich landowners

00:30:16.120 and basically treated like feudal peasants. That was like sharecroppers or yeah.

00:30:20.040 The majority of the people there. Yeah. It wasn't exactly sharecropping, but basically that.

00:30:24.920 Well, when the economy started to go bad, these people would get together and murder the landowners.

00:30:30.120 This happened in a few pretty high profile cases. And so a lot of the landowners decided

00:30:36.520 that it was safer to like, and I've tried to look for statistics on exactly how common this was,

00:30:42.120 but my understanding is this was the majority of cases is they would actually pay to get you off

00:30:47.800 the land. Like they saw these people who could no longer feed themselves and make money rightfully

00:30:53.160 so like, oh, I'm going to get murdered if I don't get my, my, my feudal peasants off the land.

00:30:58.520 I have no doubt there were people who also did this out of the goodness of their heart because

00:31:02.360 they cared about their residents as well.

00:31:04.360 That, that, that too. But I'm just saying like, there was an actual motivation to do.

00:31:08.040 For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:31:09.640 And they were put not in steerage, by the way, they were put in the ballast section of ships.

00:31:13.640 Ballast, oh God, worse than steerage.

00:31:15.880 It was, you know, it was horror.

00:31:17.560 You were literally dead weight.

00:31:19.560 I'm not saying it was good, but, but I guess what I'm saying is that if you really wanted to get

00:31:23.400 out, you could, you'd just probably die in the process. And that's, you know, really horrifying.

00:31:28.920 But, but in a lot of these instances in, in life, in the world, when things begin to get really bad,

00:31:35.080 you need two things. You need to realize when people say it can't keep getting bad,

00:31:39.880 let's just write it out. That, that historically has not been true. Sometimes, yeah, it can keep getting

00:31:45.880 bad. And what AI is going to do to the economy for the middle and lower classes, they have no 0.66

00:31:53.400 clue what they're getting into right now. It is, it is obscene to me that people who are just like,

00:31:58.440 oh yeah, we'll eventually get like, what is it? Like, like general pay. I forgot the word.

00:32:04.360 Oh, universal basic income, UBI.

00:32:05.960 Yeah. No, that will not happen before things get bad. So, and we're going to be dealing with

00:32:13.560 this global economic problem because of fertility rates anyway at around the same time. So,

00:32:19.400 and, and what's interesting is a, is a lot of people then come to me and they're like, yeah,

00:32:23.400 but the fertility rate thing, is it really a problem because the AI is replacing all these jobs?

00:32:28.680 And I'm like, but remember, I sort of categorized the jobs into two categories. There is the

00:32:33.080 high productivity category, and then there's the low productivity category. Well, you still need

00:32:39.400 humans for this high productivity category of job, the type that requires initiative and

00:32:43.320 ability to put everything together. And that's the group of humans that's disappearing the fastest.

00:32:47.880 So, and again, I should be clear. I'm not talking about this along like ethnic lines or anything

00:32:52.760 like that. I'm just saying across groups, typically it's the highest productivity cultural units and

00:32:57.560 family units that are decreasing infertility the fastest. So yeah, it's going to be bad. So to

00:33:04.360 Simone's point, you need to recognize what we're going into and begin to build the skill set that

00:33:09.800 can get you through it and begin to fortify yourself and your family. Well, yeah. And, and your

00:33:14.360 community, because doing this in isolation is not sustainable really, at least over the long term.

00:33:21.320 If you want a long lasting family that survives across generations, you're going to need a strong

00:33:27.000 community that exchanges services, that dates and marries each other, et cetera.

00:33:32.120 I don't think it needs to be geographically locked as it historically needed to be.

00:33:38.040 Anyway, love you to death, Simone. This has been a fantastic conversation.

00:33:42.600 I love you so much, Malcolm. I'm glad we're talking again. I missed you.

00:33:45.880 Thank you.

00:33:48.200 Thank you.

00:33:50.520 I mean, thank you.

00:33:51.800 Thank you.

00:33:52.360 Thank you.

00:33:53.800 Thanks, man.

00:33:56.280 Thanks.

00:33:58.280 Hi.

00:33:59.240 Hi.

00:33:59.720 Hi.

00:34:04.440 Thanks.

00:34:06.360 Bye.

00:34:08.360 Thanks.

00:34:08.920 Hi.

Based Camp - February 15, 2024

What (Really) Happened in 1971 Was A Good Thing

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