What (Really) Happened in 1971 Was A Good Thing
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Summary
In this episode, Simone and I talk about what happened in 1971, and why it could have a big impact on the future of AI therapy and how it could change the way we do business. We also talk about how AI can be used to steal your money and make you more prosperous.
Transcript
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you go further, you'll see this more obvious in the data. But what really happened in 1971
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is the productivity continued to increase within the US, but the benefits of that productivity
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went disproportionately to the wealthy after that point. And the median and sort of below
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individual in the US stopped seeing an increase in compensation or benefits from that productivity.
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So the hypothesis that the person who created all these is pushing is that that was when we left
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the gold standards. Yeah, there is actually an answer to this question, by the way.
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Would you like to know more? Simone, it is so wonderful to have you back because there was
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this period where you weren't here for a bit. And I thought that I'd have to start pushing out
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episodes where it was just me talking to AI generated versions of you that I had somehow
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created on foreign websites. I was just like, I need my wife. Isn't that so funny that like
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the original AI sexy friends were created like first to like try to replace dead friends and
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relatives. And then people were like, I don't, I don't care about them. Screw them. I want someone
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to talk. Yeah. And then they started building like, like parasocial relationships with not parasocial,
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real social relationships with these AI things. And yeah, it's an interesting story. Yeah. And then
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of course they went exactly where humans always go, which is trying to romance them. And then I love
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the app really fell apart when they decided they pay gate the romancing option. So everything was
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built around the AIs who were built and sold as like therapists being really sexually aggressive with
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them. Upsell, upsell, always be closing. AI is not dumb.
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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
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therapists is there's going to be a huge motivation to build dependency. Like we've had with normal
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therapists. And that's why I always talk about how bad the normal therapy model is now, because it's
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all built around building dependency and patience. When it used to be something where you were supposed
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to go for a short period of time and then stop going, therapists realize, oh, that's a bad model.
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Yeah. And so I think with the AI, you're going to get the same thing. It's going to learn how to
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hijack people so that they need to keep seeing their AI therapist or whatever, over, over, and over.
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So just like real therapists, but hopefully more efficient and less expensive. Well, you know,
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one nice side effect of that might be that at least AI therapists will figure out how to make
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their victims more prosperous so that they can continue to pay for it. You know what I mean?
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I do not. I think it's always easier to get more money from people. And I think that this is what
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you see from churches and cults, right? Like- They don't have to be prosperous to be a source of
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wealth. Yeah. Actually, you're better off, instead of turning someone into a more prosperous
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individual, you're better off finding ways to get them to spend their additional time recruiting more
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people, specifically targeting prosperous people. So if you have an individual enthralled to you,
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you will make more money if you focus that individual on trying to recruit prosperous people
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than if you try to help that individual achieve prosperity. And this is why cults do that. And
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that's what these AI programs are almost certainly going to end up doing.
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What happened in 1971? You said that that's what you wanted to talk about. And I'm like,
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I don't know, like people wore bad clothes and they painted their kitchens this horrible
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olive green color. And that's kind of it. I mean, earth tones we're in, but like the worst
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kinds of earth tones. I want you to open the link I sent you. What happened in 1971?
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I put this graph on screen, right? And this is the famous graph here. And you can see that at this
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point, productivity continued to increase within the U.S. And, but compensation basically stopped
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Is this inflation adjusted? Hold on. Let's see. Compensation includes wages and benefits for
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So that's really important there for non-supervisory workers. Okay. So continue.
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Yeah. So here what you see, and you also see this in the next graph. So also go to the next
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What you're actually seeing is that the wealthy are continuing to get wealthier.
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Their salary is increasing within this period. It is median and below that is not seeing an
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increase in earnings during this period. So if you go further, you'll see this more
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obvious in the data. But what really happened in 1971 is the productivity continued to increase
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within the U.S. But the benefits of that productivity went disproportionately to the wealthy after that
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point. And the median and sort of below individual in the U.S. stopped seeing an increase in compensation
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Another way to look at this, which I hadn't actually noticed when I was first looking at
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these graphs, is this graph here shows income growth for the top 1% of earners and income
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And what you see is not necessarily a point at which now top earners' earnings grew with productivity
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and bottom earners' earnings stopped growing with productivity. But what you actually notice
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here is that for a period from 1940 to 1965, you had the exact opposite effect. The bottom income
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earners were growing really quickly and the top income earners were having no impact on their
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salary from this increased productivity the U.S. was having. And then after 1971, then the top
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earners catch up. But they haven't actually gone significantly above the boost to their salaries
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that the bottom 90% had from 1940 to 1971. So you could argue this is just sort of a delayed effect
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from the bottom 90% of earners having this huge boost to their salary that wasn't reflected in the top
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Oh, and you can also see when you look at the graph, America has become a nation of dual-income
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working couples, that you're also seeing the point at which there was sort of continued and widening
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divides between husband-only working households and both spouses working, right?
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Well, you're seeing one of the hypotheses sort of in action.
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Don't you figure it's because people just aren't making enough money for there to be a single-income
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Well, I think that what you're actually seeing here is just the increase of women in the labor
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force. So the hypothesis that the person who created all these is pushing is that that was
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when we left the gold standard. And a lot of people are like, oh no, we really left the gold standard
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in 1933. And it's like, okay, so this requires a bit of history to explain why they're wrong about
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So in 1933, it was the Great Depression, and they made this law that you weren't allowed to really
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own gold in the U.S. So we were still technically on the gold standard, but you were supposed to
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exchange the gold that you owned for paper certificates, i.e. money.
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So if you had a ton buried in your backyard, like Ron Swanson...
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Yeah, you were supposed to exchange it or you could be arrested.
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Ooh, no. So if I was like, hey, you want to buy this gold brick for...
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Well, governments really don't like these things like Bitcoin and stuff like that. Like when there's
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some external asset that can be easily used as an exchange, this creates a challenge to the power
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of the central government. However, this actually didn't really impact the dollar as much as you
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would think it would in terms of its floating value in relation to gold. Because for international
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trade, the U.S. still honored the gold exchange.
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Gold standard. Yeah, there was a physical thing backing it up.
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Yeah, at the international level, people could say, okay, here's my dollars that I've got. Can
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you give me gold in exchange for these dollars? That is what changed in 1971, is you can no longer
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do that. And so long as that was the case, that put significant limitations on how much the federal
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bank could increase or decrease the value of our money. And people argue that is what caused
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this to happen. I think that did have a few changes in U.S. policy, but I don't think that's
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what caused this to happen. But the other big hypothesis that people have is that it was the
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entrance of women into the workplace. And I will put a graph on the screen of the entrance of women
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into the workplace. But it just doesn't really match the severity and suddenness of this change.
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No. To me, it looks way more like a reaction to this new reality of couples just realizing,
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wow, we don't have enough with just one of us working.
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Well, so what you did have happen, and this was due to leaving the gold standard,
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This is a direct consequence of leaving the gold standard. Yeah, that's wild.
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It's not great. I also- And I didn't realize just,
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I would have thought that 2020 was worse for inflation than like 2008, but look at 2008 in
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that inflation graph. That's wild. No one complained about inflation that way.
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And I don't remember prices increasing insanely during that period.
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This guy is known for just like picking and choosing.
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It sounds like there's a lot of cherry picking going on here, but still, it's an interesting
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concept. It's an interesting, well, so there is a real phenomenon happening here, right?
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There's two phenomenons that I think we can talk about as separate from each other.
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Sort of happened to correlate with this here. Another really interesting one is this is also where
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in US politics, you begin to see the right and the left drifting apart. So very interesting.
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So, and there's actually another thing that he didn't notice in these graphs.
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This is also when you begin to see the significant fertility collapse in the United States.
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Oh, gosh. Yeah, you're right. Yes. Yes. It was in the 70s that it went from like a lot of kids
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per woman to very little. Oh, but this is also when birth control became very widespread in use.
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Yeah. There is actually an answer to this question, by the way.
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To me, it's astoundingly obvious. And specifically, I'm talking about the question of
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in the 1970s, all of a sudden, if you're talking about earners in the US, median and below stop earning
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more, but the ultra wealthy continue to earn more along with an increase in productivity.
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Yeah, I think this was more about tech and globalization picking up, meaning that it is
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not the piecemeal handmade labor of a human that produces value anymore. It's about your supply
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chains. It's about your connections. It's about the way you use tech, and it's about the way that
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you. This is also around the time, I think, when weird Frederick Taylor inspired things like Six
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Sigma and other forms of extreme optimization started arising. So it was no longer humans actually
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increasing productivity. It was systems of, sometimes humans, but humans became cogs instead of
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producers. So there's two true things that you are capturing here, and we need to talk about them
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separately with graphs. Okay, so one is technology, like the amount of automation that was responsible
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for the continued increase in productivity. And if you have productivity that is solely the result of
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automation, that isn't going to go to your bottom 50% of the population at all. Why would it? Because
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those are people that aren't needed anymore now. But I think the bigger factor here is actually
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globalization. If you look at the decline in it, like, like you look at this period where you see
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this continued increase in productivity. Now, if I overlay that with a global poverty index
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around 1971 and 1972, when you begin to see a collapse in global poverty rates, that money that previously
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was going to an increasing wage for the lower class in the United States is now being distributed
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to increase the quality of life in other countries. In the form of social services or in the, oh,
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outsourcing. Oh, that's what you're saying. Okay. So you're saying like all the starving children
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in China, suddenly we're now, you know, making piecemeal things for stuff. China is a really unique
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point here. So what happened in, so a lot of people are looking at these graphs and they're like, okay,
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so something happened in this 1971, 1972 range. 1972 is when we begin to normalize trade relationships
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with China. And that allowed for a form of outsourcing that we weren't really doing before,
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which was an otherwise like educated, competent country, like, like in terms of its citizen base,
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but that the, the wages were just incredibly low that we can begin to set up these massive outsourcing
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operations. Okay. So the average worker not only was not the thing driving additional value,
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meaning that their wages weren't going up, but also they began to face incredible competition from way
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lower wage, but equally skilled labor. Yes. At this level. Yeah. Yes. That is the core of the
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mystery of what happened in 1971 and 1972. It's, we started outsourcing a huge chunk of our labor,
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which is really interesting to me when I see leftists complain about this, right? You know,
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they'll point out the, they're like, what happened during this period? And they'll come up with some
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hypothesis that it's like, you know, the rich are screwing us all over and everything like that. And
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it's like, no, you could reverse this. You could change this back to the way things used to be.
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Wait, what? How? Because I mean, what I hear when you're talking about this is your line that it is AI
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that will ultimately once and for all free the wealthy from the proletariat. Like, I feel like
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we're only going to see this become magnified in the years that come. How on earth could this be
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reversed? Well, I'm talking hypothetically from the progressive, the ultra progressive. Okay.
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Okay. And they're like, oh, it must be like tax favoring policies or something like that.
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And what they're not seeing, what they would actually need to do to fix this problem in the
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US is not take wealth from the rich and give it to the poor. They would need to take wealth from
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the rest of the world that we had lifted out of poverty, out of Africa, out of China, out of Latin
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America, and give it to America's lower class. Become isolationist.
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Now, keep in mind, isolationism would hurt the economy overall. So overall, we would be less well
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off. But if you're talking about the relative wealth difference of the very poorest and the
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very wealthiest, isolationism would be beneficial to lowering that.
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Well, and the earning power of the average worker, especially the relatively uneducated,
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unskilled worker, although even educated workers are now super like on the chopping block now.
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So maybe like that South Park episode, maybe the unskilled workers, ultimately.
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I got work coming out my ears. It's like, I don't know, like nobody knows how to do
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shit anymore. What seems to be the problem? Eight years I spent wasting time at stupid
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college when I could have been learning how to do stuff.
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Hey, did you just outbid me to acquire Instagram? Yeah, I outbid you. I own Instagram now and you
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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
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you do. Well, no. So things are about to change in terms of skill versus unskilled work. And we can
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talk about that next. But I want to get to this point because it's really important. When somebody
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is bemoaning this change that happened in the 1970s, what they're really bemoaning is the
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eradication of global ultra poverty. That is what happened. That is what we are seeing here,
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is the eradication of global ultra poverty at the expense of people in the US with no skills
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being able to basically ride the coattails off of the people in the US who were improving our productivity
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and our output, which was not your low skilled factory worker. That person had very little role
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to play in the rise of productivity within the US. It was the the inventors and the capitalists who were
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increasing our productivity in the US. And this then comes to your second point, which is around
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automation, right? We also at that age entered a world in which before that what happened was is
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productivity increases where typically somebody would have an idea that would basically increase
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a factory lines like productive output, which really increased the amount that every individual
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person within that factory line was producing, but didn't always mean that you were like reducing the
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number of people in the factory significantly. Around the 1970s is when when you see these like fully
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automated factories and stuff like that, when those things were beginning to be developed,
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in which the American factory worker that was most productive moved from being a low skilled worker
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to being a high paid high skill worker. And this is another thing that you're seeing was in the US
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is we're not really defining this as individual groups, right? Like we're like a high paid versus low paid.
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And this changes over time within the US, you know, the factory workers who are working with
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these advanced machines are not low paid workers in the US. They're there. My understanding is
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upper middle class or middle class individuals when they're working as a very advanced types of
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And in the US, we're about to see another inversion where a lot of jobs that formerly were in this
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high paid group, i.e. lawyers, graphic designers, like middling income to high paid, you know,
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white collar office job type stuff is going to move to an ultra low pay group. And this is what that
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South Park episode was making fun of because AI is trivializing a lot of work that used to be,
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I mean, we use AI in our work, like this school system that we're building, we use AI heavily in
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building and we're so close to releasing and I'm so excited. And we would never be able to create
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something like this without that, you know, what I'd have to do is I'd have to pay PhDs to be writing
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the content that I am using AI to write right now and AI to double check right now. And that's just
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It would be prohibitively expensive and now it's possible.
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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.
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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
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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,
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.
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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
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-
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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
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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
00:24:27.240
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.
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
00:27:10.440
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
00:31:04.360
That, that, that too. But I'm just saying like, there was an actual motivation to do.
00:31:09.640
And they were put not in steerage, by the way, they were put in the ballast section of ships.
00:31:19.560
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
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.
00:32:05.960
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.