Disintermediated Friendships and Digital Influence

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the fundamental flaws in communist ideology, even in a hypothetical post-scarcity world. They delve into the nature of scarcity, class structures, and the evolution of influence in the digital age. This video challenges common misconceptions about communism and offers insights into how modern society and economics are shaped by attention, competence, and disintermediated communities.

Key topics covered:

* The impossibility of a truly classless society

* Scarcity and status in post-scarcity environments

* The evolution of influencer culture and digital communities

* The role of competence and attention in modern economies

* Critiques of communist ideology and its practical applications

* The future of urban centers and distributed networks

* The importance of family and cultural identity in society

Whether you're interested in political theory, futurism, or the dynamics of online influence, this video offers a fresh perspective on age-old questions and contemporary challenges.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] communism doesn't work even in a post scarcity world. Yes. I, I, I believe UBI might work in a post scarcity world, but even in a world where you have people's universal basic income, where you have people's basic needs taken care of, like you do food drop offs, you do medicine is handled by the state, you do like all of that.

You still have the class structure we have in our existing society, and you will still have some resource which represents some form of scarcity, because there is always scarcity in any system and what people choose to value is always the thing that is scarce, even if that thing is pointless. And what I find really interesting is it's actually the communists themselves in our current society that are most drawn to artificial scarcity.

It is much more the communists who get drawn to brand name recognition, like the Starbucks and the iPads and the et cetera.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: And there is no such thing as a classist society. [00:01:00] It's not possible. No. Um, Do the intro.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Hello, everyone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today is going to be, I hope, a Simone Abigail episode because she was the one who made this point to me while we were walking around a Target. What a fitting place.

It's what we do.

Simone Collins: It's what we do. We

Malcolm Collins: were talking about communism and the cliche. Real communism has never been tried, which we will also get to in this video. But one of the things that you turned and said to me while we were walking was, There

Simone Collins: is no such thing as a classless society. It is absolutely impossible.

Go into your argument because I found it very powerful. Yeah. So no matter what happens in a society, there will always be scarce goods. As soon as you make one good, not so good, People will then sort into classes based on what is scarce. And this shows up in various sci fi novels that anyone can read.

I really like stuff by Cory Doctorow. He wrote this one book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which really [00:02:00] influenced the way that I saw the world in the future. It's, it takes place in a post scarcity environment. You know, post singularity, you can live forever, you have backups of yourself that you can just restore if you accidentally die or are murdered and in this world, you know, you don't need food, you don't need shelter, but There is still a class system and there's still a currency that is, that is limited and finite.

And it's called Woofie. Woofie is social capital in this world. And so people form themselves into what are called adhocracies in this world. Which I love that word. Also. I want, I want a world of adhocracies instead of bureaucracies. Adhocracies are basically short lived collections of people who get together to Do cool stuff to get social credit.

And the discovering system wouldn't be stable and I'll get to why in just a second, but continue. Yeah, I really like it. Nevertheless. This book is about adhocracies that form and compete in Disney's magic kingdom in Florida, in this [00:03:00] post singularity world. Cause some things never go away. Thank God. And what they do is they'll like, they take over the rides.

So, Two rival groups in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom are, are kind of competing for more woofy. One is, is redoing the Hall of Presidents and the other one is doing the Haunted Mansion. And you know, it's all about like, who can, you know, impress the world the most with their really cool updates to these rides slash attractions.

And it's, it totally makes sense to me that that would be the case. And, you know, and when you, when you, when you say something, it's unpopular when you do something that really pisses people off. If you go viral for something bad. You know, that's it. You're sort of destitute, but being destitute doesn't mean you're starving or homeless.

It just means you don't really get the cool stuff. You don't get the cool stuff. Let's, let's,

Malcolm Collins: let's talk about, I want to break down a few aspects of this. So, because I think it's a very good description and it does a very good job of showing what's going on. Why you can't really have classlessness because [00:04:00] even in an environment where all our needs are met, there are still some things that are intrinsically of limited value, i.

e. Disney world. There is only one Disney world. You can create other Disney worlds, but they won't have the same cultural cliche as the first or the main Disney world. And I, oh, sorry. What was the point? And so. Who gets to work on that Disney World, that special thing, and who gets access to that special thing?

You would still need some metric for deciding these two things. In this, the metric that they choose is attention. The reason the Disney World has more value than another random thing or random park is because it is a thing that collects attention. And so the very attention you collect is what gives you access.

to it. Very interesting that he, one of the things I think he predicted so wrong in that [00:05:00] Disney world would always be a thing of value. Little did he know the wokes would completely destroy the brand so much that nobody even wants to go anymore.

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

It's hard to, we can, we can get in. I mean, we love watching Disney analysts on YouTube for some reason. I also want to talk about why adhocracies

Malcolm Collins: can't form.

Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So suppose the world does work the way it does in that world and we'll be, or we'll feed or the amount of attention that you have access to is the core thing of value in that society. There would be it'd be really dangerous to break up with other groups and form new groups all the time because that would lower the efficiency at the production of this that you would have access to and therefore outcompeted by the groups that mostly stayed together and where it's fairly

discerning into who they work with. . So if you're discerning and who you work with, you [00:06:00] know, you work with people you have experience with and stuff like that. And you're not just working with random new people who might have high woofy, but it might be towards a different community.

It might be toward the different, whatever. You're just going to get out competed by the groups that are more successful. And so that's going to lead to more stable, like woofy corporations, you could call them, i. e. large groups that work together to control an area or an attention resource like Disney World.

And, Work together to do high amounts of production in many ways. You can think of YouTube as already being a Wolfie economy. And the big creators while they work in networks of big creators, and in that degree, you do have a bit of an adhocracy. They all have fairly large teams that are fairly consistent.

And even the different people they choose to work with occasionally. It's a fairly small pool and those pools don't cross over as much as you would think they would so like

Simone Collins: actually more or less how it works in the book, too. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: okay. Well, [00:07:00] yeah, like, for example, if you consider like the Simone and Malcolm, like wider network of intellectual thinkers, we're in,

Simone Collins: you know, we will.

This also in the effect of altruist and rationalist communities, you even see this, like, look at the PayPal mafia, right? You could kind of argue that the, the organizations and investments across which the PayPal mafia have like spread is a collection of adhocracies that are all, you know, they're kind of related.

They share a lot of people. And they form and dissolve as, as necessary. That's, that's what I like about adhocracy is the fluidity of them. The, the pragmatic, the pragmatic nature.

Malcolm Collins: If you look at the PayPal mafia, it doesn't function the way you're saying it functions. It's a collection of literal companies based on nepotism networks.

No, no, no.

Simone Collins: I'm, I'm referring, no, the, the, by the PayPal mafia, I'm referring to people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, like those early investors and people involved in PayPal.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And then they consolidated their power through the way they were investing, forming an entrenched [00:08:00] power network, which is the antithesis of an adhocracy.

Yes, a group of people might organically come together to then form an entrenched bureaucracy well, I wouldn't describe

Simone Collins: them as a bureaucracy.

Malcolm Collins: No, they're a peerage network. Yeah. And a peerage network is not, no, it's not. Adhocracy. So this is where you're getting confused. So I'll, I'll describe this for you to help fix how you can understand how to adhocracy can't really form in these sorts of societies.

Peerage networks can absolutely peerage networks can. You have noticed that the first time these groups came together to form this like competent, good at working together community, they did really well like adhocracy because they were all coming together. But that All coming together accidentally only happens once and before most of them are super successful.

Once a team becomes successful together, it forms a peerage network. It no longer has a huge reason to continue to bring in outsiders [00:09:00] at the level of the initial team. That would just be stupid. It would be stupid to bring in another individual who's not as wealthy or something as like Elon Musk and the other people in the community, into that top level.

And so it doesn't happen. That's how peerage networks form. But anyway, I want to get into how in our own mostly post scarcity developed world, we already see the perpetuation of a class based system Through the consumer patterns of the Starbucks communists. And we've done an episode on Starbucks communism, but I think it really matters.

You know, when you go to the classic Starbucks communists, you, I mean, it's got the name because they've got their Starbucks, which is a brand, which has. Cost like they spent extra on that for the brand than they would spend for that coffee. If they had just made it themselves, they'll have their apple phone, which they have spent extra on because of the artificial [00:10:00] scarcity created by the apple brand.

They have their brand closings. They have their brand associations. So much of the scarcity that they face and in terms of the things that they are purchasing in the world. is, is just due to the scarcity of that thing. And even if it's not woofy or attention, that is the scarce thing in a society, you will always have something that is scarce because that's the way humans work.

And then status will be built around that scarce thing. Because if you don't have something that's scarce, then you can't build status networks, right? And then you can say, well, what if you had a society where everyone was totally. Right? How could that society be stable if you have varying degrees of competence?

Some individuals within that community would just innately be producing more than other individuals within that community, and they would want that to be recognized and [00:11:00] then, you know, cut off access to their productivity. Or

Simone Collins: innately be more attractive and then more people want to be their friends and they might go out of their way to do nice things for those people.

And then, you know, suddenly those people are getting like, Double food rations, you know, like it gets weird.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and this is, this is why that just doesn't work in a world of varied competence. You cannot have true equality because scarcity, Organically comes out of that. Now, you could, however, have a future society.

And in some of the sci fis that I've like written in my spare time what becomes of the socialist systems is systems where people's brains are edited after they are born to ensure that they are not, they have no unique area of competence. If they have a gift in music, if they have a gift in math, if they have a gift in the only way you can have sustainable communist or, or Classless systems is if I was literally the same.

Everyone's literally the same. And [00:12:00] that is mortifying, I think, but I think it's the only way you can produce that outcome.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but also you wouldn't really have a thriving society if everyone was the same and it would be good to be

Malcolm Collins: society. And they could be made smarter than humans are today through genetic augmentation.

They would just always be out competed by societies that had specialization. Which especially as genetic technology comes online is going to become more and more important for families to specialize. in specific fields, but that's going to mean that they need access to different sorts of things and are able to compete in systems over different sorts of things.

Simone Collins: Wait, hold on. Is the most accurate depiction of communism, real communism, in the media like those clips of the cloned stormtroopers in the new Star Wars movies? Just, just the existence of a bunch of clones that are all over the world. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: clone army is real communism. If they're room [00:13:00] and

Simone Collins: board is covered, it is a post scarce world for them.

They are all clones. They wear the same clothes. They have the same job. That is real communism. We've done it. Congratulations. But here's,

Malcolm Collins: here's another thing that I also want to push back against here. Because we have done. Other videos where we say, because I do think that this is where we're heading to an attention based economy.

Specifically friendships have become totally disintermediated for most of the people that you are communicating with. And somebody can be like, no. And I'm like, do you watch? more YouTubers and podcasters in terms of the total hours of your day than you spend talking to other human beings. If you do, then you have a disintermediated friendship network similar to me.

I spend more time watching stuff and then I go out and I talk and then people choose to listen to me. If that is the social connection that they want to engage with, it is a completely disintermediated social network. Which I think a lot of people are like, Oh, well, it, you lose a lot of [00:14:00] the interpersonal connection when you get this disintermediated social network, but what you get is access to higher quality or better tailored conversations for you than you would get without the disintermediation.

And so that's why you choose to do it. You could choose not to do it. You could choose to just turn all the podcasts and YouTubes off. Yeah. But you don't because we actually, this disintermediation is better for us than talking to somebody and waiting to get to the good parts of the conversation.

I mean, keep in mind, one of the reasons why our conversations like when people listen to our conversations, they're like, Oh, that was a uniquely enriching conversation without a lot of dead air and stuff like that. And I'm like, that is because you are not seeing this actual conversation. Right. You are seeing this conversation after I spent hours editing out every pause, every time we had to Google something we didn't know, every tangent, every it is as condensed as I can make [00:15:00] it for you, so it is a super normal stimuli for you, it is a super normal conversation, people who don't know what super normal stimuli is, this is a concept where like a a bird had the genetic impulse to sit on a blue egg, And then you put like an extra large blue ball next to it.

That's bigger than any egg it could ever produce. It will still sit on the blue ball because it doesn't have this disintermediating thing that's saying like, well, if a conversation is too good, then go away from it. Because you know, that's not a real conversation, probably that's some sort of artificial thing in your environment, but I actually think that the end user benefits more from this.

This isn't like a maladaptive supernormal stimuli. I think that this is actually an adaptive supernormal stimuli. And people can be like, why is that? Well, you engage in conversations for typically two reasons. One is to gain access to additional information about the world slash additional perspectives about the world.

And the other is to build out your personal network. The problem is, is that this is always going to be better when you can choose any conversation you want within an [00:16:00] online environment or have it served to you by an algorithm. The information and perspective side is going to be better served.

However, you can be like, well, what about the interpersonal connection side? And the answer to that is. While that may be worse served for your average person, it is going to be better served for a competent individual. Let me explain. You, like us, could go out there and start a podcast, or a Twitter account, or a you know, a YouTube, right?

And then thousands of people hundreds of people, you know, whatever, might choose to listen to what you have to say, which actually gives you access to, through parasocial connections, a wider network than you would have been able to get had you focused on one to one communication. However if you can't compete in that environment and you're like, well, I can't create something that a lot of people are going to want to listen to, it [00:17:00] also means Then you're, you're stuck in these individual conversations, which become lower and lower quality for the people who are forced into them.

And that is, I think, really damaging for a lot of people.

To put it another way, a system for supplying a type of good, which is substandard for an average deliver of that type of good. But super standard for an above average deliver of that. Good. And that doesn't constrain the quantity of the good being delivered. E and above average delivery of that. Good does not have their ability to deliver that.

Good hindered. By the number of people who are receiving that good.

Is always going to out-compete a system which is better for the average deliver of a good. And especially a system which constrains the amount of that good that a super standard deliver can deliver. I E. A better than average [00:18:00] conversationalist. Is going to be delivering less conversations in person because at least so many people can get access to that individual.

and your window, another phenomenon that has. Come out of the disintermediated conversation marketplace. Which is, if you are a competent individual who might be able to compete within this marketplace. But you do not have time to compete within this marketplace. Maybe it's because you are successful in, uh, you know, finance or you are as successful biologists, or you are a successful basically.

Your competence in some other area is eating your time. You are actually going to be rewarded for. Engaging up. I'd almost say negatively engaging with it. I E. Ensuring that you are as private as possible, because if you are a little public, if you post to Twitter, sometimes if you post to Facebook, sometimes. And you don't get a [00:19:00] lot of followers because you just don't have the time to put the effort into it. Then it might signal to people that you are actually a very uninteresting and uncompetent individual. And this is why you see so many competent individuals being so private these days because they don't have. The time to invest in these types of marketplaces. And if you are competent, but don't have the time to invest in these types of marketplaces, it's often better not to appear on them at all. This actually, isn't just a problem for competent people in other areas.

It's even a problem for competent communicators. , One friend of mine who is very, very, very famous in other parts of the internet, but that doesn't have a YouTube yet. when I was talking to her about this, one of her fears about starting a YouTube channel, Is that in the early days, she is going to be much smaller on YouTube than she is on the other platforms, which could cause people to perceive her as being much less. It's [00:20:00] successful or competent within online spaces.

And she actually is. , and so this is the big problem. When moving to other platforms, if you have already established yourself within one platform, So it's not just your competent banker who has to deal with this. When moving into the online sphere is all, but it's a person who is extra famous within one platform or media type, moving to a new platform or media type.

Malcolm Collins: I was actually talking with someone about this today about what we're doing for our kids networks and a huge problem. Many of the traditional cultural and religious systems 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 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 through the local church group or the local synagogue or something like that. Right. The problem with that group. Is that that group will be out competed by the super [00:21:00] normal communities that the child has access to through the Internet, which will make it very easy.

You might want to unmute yourself. And the child's not making noise anymore. Thanks. So because you were like, yeah, right. Okay. So that will give you access. To that'll, that'll give your kids access to people who are even more similar to them or might seem more impressive to them or might seem, you know, so then they end up, yes, you provided them with a peer group, but the peer group wasn't as compelling for to them as the peer groups you find a lot.

Now contrast that with what we're doing, where we take the most interesting, most successful families we know, and we add them to this network of families that we are building, that our kids can learn from. One go meet once a year by going to like a summer camp thing that we rent out and you know, all the families will keep in who send their kids and the kids can all get to know each other.

But two, have online forums where the kids can interact with each other. And if they build a good relationship with other. We might send them out, send them out to the family of, of the friend because they're an in network [00:22:00] family. And then that kid's family might send them over to us. So it allows you to have a dispersed network of high competence individuals who can also through the family connections, get my kids into good early jobs, get my kids investments, get my kids started on their first media projects.

So the kids are going to find this community disproportionately valuable to them because of the way that we curated it when contrasted with the random communities they can gain access to online. And so this is something I, I, I very intentionally structured and I think that over relying on these older systems, like I'm just going to focus on conversations or I'm just going to focus on, you know, my local church group.

It's very difficult to have that work in the modern environment, but it can work. So let's talk about where it does work. It does work when the in person connections due to cultural reasons, either you can be seen as a culture that doesn't trust people who they don't know [00:23:00] personally, and they're like older individuals and stuff like that, that can get you access to capital, that can get you access to friendships that you can't get otherwise, or because you have some capability due to the problem is that those networks are just gonna be out competed.

This is the problem, like why I wouldn't invest in that. Some people are like, well, due to my family's background or history, I have access to wealthy nepotistic networks, right? It's like, unfortunately, in this new disintermediated economy, like social economy the networks that were open to the disintermediated nature are going to outcompete the ones that aren't because they are going to be able to access all of the best intellectuals and entrepreneurs of an age pretty easily because, you know, that entrepreneur or those intellectuals are going to want access to the other, and they're going to want their kids more importantly, to have access to the other members of that network, whereas the old money networks only have access to Capital, which becomes [00:24:00] increasingly less important when contrasted with competence in this new world order that we're entering into.

Then a person can be like, why is capital worth so much less than competence in this new world? Well, one, you look at what startups are doing these days. So, you know, we have a lot of friends and family. It used to be that you had. You know, the big startup teams, you know, forming and now most startups are like 2 to 3 people living in different locations working at home with a huge squad of A.

I. S. doing most of the work. And we're even seeing this in the traditional industries. You know, 1 of the leader in stuff these days is John deer, for example, like, that's farming and everything like that. No, they have, you know, Really cutting edge AI program. Simona's quietly talking to me while caring for the kid.

And so, you know, I think more and more we're going to see this eat other industries. And that means you need fewer and fewer, but more and more competent individuals to, to do stuff. And those individuals can really [00:25:00] name their price. As for the capital itself, it's useful in terms of setting up a big AI centers and stuff like that.

But the people who are doing that, then, like, you know, we have people working on stuff like that, who bring in people like Simone and I. To work on these projects because they know that the social capital that we have can be useful. And the competency that we have, we show through appealing to specific high competency communities.

Can, can be useful in getting these projects done more quickly in the same way that additional capital can be. But the problem with the problem was just capital is capital is. Very interchangeable with other sources of capital. Woofie is not. You can't interchange us for another person with a similar view count because they are going to appeal to a different audience.

And the various audiences do not have equal access to [00:26:00] competence. A lot of people have said, you know, if you dumbed down your content, if you went more, you know, Mainstream. If you just decided to fit one niche, like just preached to a classic conservative audience, you would get a wider audience and we would get a wider audience, but we would get a lower utility audience.

The interesting thing about Wolfie based economies is it matters much, much more who is is the people paying attention to you than, , the number of people paying attention to you.

Simone Collins: Oh, kind of like how on Twitter, if Elon Musk retweets you, then like, whoa, you know, everything changes. Versus like if just some random user.

No, no, no. I,

Malcolm Collins: I, I wouldn't say that at all. I, I, Elon Musk, because he has High profile has the normies following him. So, you know, if he retweets you, then millions of people are going to see that here. I'm thinking more of you know, it, it is more useful to me to be friends with somebody like Curtis Yarvin, than it is [00:27:00] for me to be friends with somebody.

Like, Windigoon, for example. Windigoon seems like a great guy, from all I've seen. He has a very big audience. But the audience is just not the audience that is, like, really, you know, it's not gonna have a huge overlap with, like, high competency and stuff like that. It's a generic audience.

Curtis Yarvin is a fringe individual.

Simone Collins: What you're, you're kind of saying is, like, there's different, Currency, like there's the, the Wendigo and peso and the Curtis, Curtis Yervin yen and the you know, Alan, the currency is the individual eyes on each of these. Yeah. Like the, the nature of the, yeah. And some currencies you can, you can transfer easily.

Sometimes the exchange rate sucks. That kind of thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Like, well, so here's an example of this, right? Like, okay. I would say that you're probably better off in terms of like the highest tier, biggest eye currency individual in the world is probably Scott Alexander.

Simone Collins: Oh, because the [00:28:00] eyes on him are also very high agency eyes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. If he, if he puts something out, it's probably being read by Mark Andreessen. It's probably being read by Elon Musk. It's probably being read By half of both a Democrat and conservative White House staff. Now it's not being read by the mass population, right? But it is being read by a huge chunk of the people who actually make the decisions which decide the future and who have access to capital and who have access to the gates of power.

So if you were going to, you know, change Woofie, somebody like Scott Alexander's Wolfie Supply, I would argue, is bigger than somebody like Mr. Beast's Wolfie Supply. Because who's Mr. Beast's primary audience? It's people under the age of 14. You know, that is just not a very valuable Wolfie Supply except in terms of influencing the next generation, which I do think matters and, and the eyes matter in terms of, like, selling Ads and stuff like that, not as big as influencing the [00:29:00] future of humanity.

But now I want to talk about the, the death. Of the online sphere. Oh, what Talk about, there's been a lot of talk about the death of the influencer, and I don't think that what we're seeing is the death of the influencer. We're seeing a transformation in what the influencer is.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Relate to their audience.

So how do I, how do I put this? So a lot of people, they've been like, what, how can you believe in this woofy concept if you know, influencers seem to be dying? Yeah. And, and I will argue that the age of the, you know, Pootie Pie and stuff like that is kind of over. Like the mega influencer is kind of past day at this point.

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. But they're not passé because fewer people are watching YouTube. They're not passé because fewer people are watching online content. They are passé because influencer networks disintermediated. The age of the mega influencer is over. The age of the disintermediated influencer is rising. If [00:30:00] you look at, for example, our audience and what they were watching online 10 years ago I'd, I'd argue the vast majority of them were not watching micro influencers like us.

They were watching mostly mainstream voices because that's the way the algorithms worked back in the day. Yeah. And before that they were

Simone Collins: watching TV

Malcolm Collins: which was even more constrained. Yeah, which was even more constrained and, and, and, and yeah,

Actually, this allows for a great analogy here. It would be like at the end of the era of TV and individuals saying, well, the age of the pundit is over. Know that YouTube is rising when really the age of the pundit wasn't over. It just became slightly more disintermediated.

And that process of disintermediation is just continuing into the modern era.

Malcolm Collins: now it's much more catered to individuals and you have much more the concept of like communities of influencers.

[00:31:00] Also the ways that people communicate is changing. It used to be that the disintermediated conversations happened. And that was the primary form of communication, whereas now what you have is the disintermediated conversations facilitate disintermediated communities. Let me explain what a disintermediated community is.

The disintermediated community is the discord group or signal group or what's that group which is increasingly becoming the most valuable small communities you can have access to where you know, you've got these investor groups and we're on lots of these investor groups. It's where deals come in and we see the deal and then people like talk about, you know, Oh, are you interested in this deal?

You're interested in this deal. And people would be like, why would an individual have it? Like, what's the utility? Why did these come to exist and come to dominate deal making spaces? When I say deal making spaces, I mean where capital is going. Well, it's because you've got to consider the alternative.

What's the alternative? The [00:32:00] alternative is you, you all live in like a Palo Alto area, which just doesn't happen anymore, right? Like you don't have these big collections of thinkers anymore because this became too expensive for the, you know, if you're like a young ambitious person who believes in your own competence, do you want to be spending like 70 percent of your income just because you're living in a fancy area?

Or are you going to go, you know, move to the woods because you know that smart people will come to you, which is largely what we're seeing now in terms of investments. You don't see as many. Concentrating in San Francisco as you used to, it's actually much more. And like, I'd actually said the digital nomad community is probably the biggest hotbed of talent right now.

And then outside of that is a, the, the, the just sort of spread out online community where people, when they're looking for deals, go to specific online community networks. Well, then within those networks they can source deals, disintermediated deals. From each other, all the various investors and then drop them into community channels where they get social capital from dropping them in.

If the deal's not perfect for them [00:33:00] and other people also get social capital for dropping their deals in and it helps them find deals that are more perfect for them in the future. It's just a better system than everybody living in Palo Alto and going to a party every night, which is the way it worked when I was at Stanford business school.

It was like, Not fun. The parties were business things. Do you remember these parties, Simone, where they'd always have like the most ridiculous, expensive swag. Yeah. You know, you go, you get your iPad as like a leaving present and stuff like that. It was whack. But what are your thoughts on this?

Simone Collins: I don't know if it's going to play out that way.

I, I think we still see a very significant network effect of cities and that even though, for example, the Bay area. Doesn't have that much going for it, you know, like I left it right there are still people who? Despite the cost despite the taxes despite increases in crime etc are staying and there's they seem like they're just in for life They may well actually I was

Malcolm Collins: I was talking with Scott Alexander about this and he was saying that he [00:34:00] Like he wanted to be able to form the same kind of community that he had formed in in you know, Silicon Valley area somewhere outside where it's cheaper, you know, and his kids can play more easily and stuff like that.

But the challenge is, is the very community network, you know, some people in that network Are are tied to the city for their jobs, i. e. they work at Google or something like that. And so they can't easily pick up and move as a community that is going to increasingly of your like, well, why would that effect not stay?

It's because these big giant companies are likely going to become less and less relevant economically as the new small players come up. I mean, so you look at the people in his community right now that are stuck at a company like Google. Like I now do personally, like if you look at Google's like search results, like, like the number of people searching on Google, it's been going down precipitously over time.

Even me personally, I use perplexity probably 70 percent of the time now and Google 30 percent of the time. Perplexity is a [00:35:00] small team. That was able to build a product better than the absolute mega corp of Google. So I think that you'll have that effect. But then I also think you will have the these sorts of communities while they exist in this generation.

I don't think they'll exist in the next generation. Because the people who lived in these communities, I just think are going to produce Disproportionately so much fewer competent kids than the people who are living in environments where it is cost efficient to have tons of kids that is going to be hard to keep them stable because to get a community like the one he built you don't just need like the competent people that a city brings.

You need a critical mass of ultra competent people. Who also get along with each other. And the question is, is, are these masses in the future going to be found more easily outside of cities or more easily in cities for people of our generation? I think they're found more easily in cities still for the people of the next generation.

I think they're [00:36:00] found more easily outside of cities.

Simone Collins: It could be. Yeah, well, we'll find out.

Malcolm Collins: I want to get your thoughts on the creator of like, like the death of the, the influencer. Do you think it's possible when people say like, that's a thing that could happen?

Simone Collins: No, I think it's, it's going to be a transformation.

Like you say, the influencers themselves aren't dying. The, the economies on which they were built have to evolve because people didn't understand in the first place, how they worked and how to get an ROI out of working with an influencer, you know, how to best sponsor influencers. And, you know, how to know what their networks are like and how to not.

Work with fake influencers. I just think it's about a maturing industry. That's all. It's nothing beyond that. But what, maybe you could help me with my like final communist question. Cause as you know, for our holiday of lemon month, where we explore a topic that we find deeply offensive, I chose communism this, this year.

And that's how I came to have this, this [00:37:00] concern with you. Cause I understand that communism involves It's a classless society at the end, but what also really confused me is that if I understand this correctly, and maybe you can tell me where I'm wrong, the, the concept of communism was just like, oh, well, wouldn't it be great if like.

We lived in a post scarcity society.

Malcolm Collins: What your, your reading of the communist works, what you have told me you read from them, is that they presumed a post scarcity world. Yes. And that they thought that they could only work in a post scarcity world.

Simone Collins: Yes, yes. And that, that you really couldn't have communism without it.

And that the, the point of like socialism at moving into communism is to just make sure that we get there eventually. But that doesn't make sense to me because if you really want post scarcity, probably like hyper capitalism in hopes that someone develops AGI, which then in turn creates a post scarcity [00:38:00] world is kind of your best bet.

Not, you know. Yeah. I want to try that.

Malcolm Collins: Communism in a pre scarcity, in a scarce, scarce world. Okay. In any scarce world, you still need people to produce the goods, right? Presumably in post scarcity worlds, you can have AI or automation producing the goods. In a scarce world, you need people to produce the goods.

The core economic difference between a communist and capitalist system is how they motivate people to produce the goods. A capitalist system motivates them to By giving them things, giving them more things for producing more things. The communist system does it at gunpoint, right? You know, it pushes, it says, if you don't produce these things, bad things will happen to you, I will shoot you, I will kill you, et cetera.

And a lot of people misunderstand this. They're like, well, But isn't capitalism implicitly doing the same thing by leaving the person without any money to begin with? And so they suffer if [00:39:00] they don't do something that contributes to society. And the suffering of hunger is astronomically less than the suffering of the gulag or the horrors that happened under most of the communist systems.

And people are like, well, not real communism. And it's like, yeah, but do you not think that the people who went into those projects were trying to create real communism? We have their writings. It's just that that was the direction that communist systems went when they realized they had to find a way to motivate people to work in a scarce world.

To put it another way in a world where scarcity still exists. You're always going to need a way to motivate people, to produce , the things that keep society functioning, , who don't want to produce those things. Will always say, this is one of the greatest richness is of coming ism. If you have any communist friends who, you know, are living in a group house, it is always the group houses that trend more towards communism, but where nobody ever wants to pitch in to do the [00:40:00] basic thing that need to get done.

So back in Silicon valley, I would go between group houses. And if you go to the more capitalist oriented group houses, everything was clean. Everything was orderly. Even though people were pitching in just because they wanted to pitch in, in the communist group houses, the dishes were never done. Everything was old moldy and gross.

There's actually a, one of my favorite stories about Bernie is that he was kicked out of a communist commune because he would always go to communist communes and just do nothing, but give speeches all day. And I think that's what a lot of communists think that their job is going to be in this new utopia.

They're creating. But obviously society can't function on speeches. You actually have to do hard labor. And so what's interesting is that the individuals who actually have this intrinsic drive that communist hope individuals have to go out and do labor tend towards capitalism because they're actually already being rewarded within a capitalist system.

So they're quite okay with the system as it exists. , it is , the communists who don't want to do [00:41:00] anything who want to be rewarded despite the fact that they're not doing anything that push the most for a system change. , But then , how did these two systems motivate people more broadly? In capitalism, it is through carrot.

That those people produce the things. In a communist system, there are only a few options. One is a direct stick. I. E we will kill you. However, another is that I didn't mention here is gated communist systems. These actually work pretty well, even in a modern environment. That is to say. , a kibbutz or the Haven state that I mentioned recently. , it's a small community that says anybody who doesn't chip in gets expelled. , that that can work. But it works even better when membership is explicitly optional. , and you not just born into it. This is why in the example I gave in the vignette.

In the last episode on fertility [00:42:00] collapse in the real estate market, you would have a ritual in which at a coming of age, as soon as somebody was mostly fully myelinated and could make decisions for themselves, they had to live outside the society and then had a choice of a rejoining the society that makes their joining the society explicitly a choice as it is with things like Amish communities.

, and here, I would note that I'm not saying that the havens will be communist, but I expect that they will have elements. Cements of that. I E they will have specific rules and expectations of individuals that individuals are supposed to adhere to. That go far, far, far beyond what is expected of an individual in modern capitalist societies, you will not be able to be lazy or indolent and be allowed to live within these communities.

, but what can't work is a total society. Now, some individuals will say, well, we can make communism work by convincing everyone to love their fellow man. And the love their fellow man so much. They'll just get out there and work. But here, what they're really [00:43:00] talking about is some form of systemic brainwashing.

They're saying we will no longer allow individuals who have value sets that are at odds with this value set that I have. And what's interesting about this value set that they have is that it's basically never existed in human history. , people predominantly love and care about the people closest to them, their friends, their family, not wider society overall, and therefore will do things that disproportionately benefit that closer network. This is why coming to them actually works at the family level.

I E and we'd say this in lots of our videos. , my family right now. The academy and assistant. , from each according to their ability to each, according to their needs, like my kids don't produce any income because they are not able to produce any income, but we give them what they need because we love them.

And we are invested in them.

You cannot force people to have this mindset to larger society without like [00:44:00] genetically modifying people. Because due to our evolutionary history, we are always going to disproportionately favor our families and closer relatives and closer kinship networks. And I should also know that it's not that the deep community thinkers are totally unaware of this either. This is why many communist groups today. I see the first goal in bringing about communism as the dissolution of these kinship and family networks, the dissolution of the family as a unit. , you'll see this in groups like black lives matter and stuff like that.

We need to dissolve the family. , this is also why, and we have another video recorded, but we haven't gone live yet. That was inspired by this video. Cause I started looking into it after the video was, I was like, wait, wait, wait.

If there's scarcity in a communist system., that scarcity creates a dominance hierarchy, which creates a class system. So what if somebody wants something like sex from an individual and that [00:45:00] individual declines? Access to sex. Doesn't that create a form of scarcity and class. , and then I was like, so how does communism deal with this?

And this is what I learned about coming as hymns, very big issue with PDA files, which are very, very common in Ubon major communist thinkers. And we will have a video on this coming up.

Because well, Just so you get to the point in here before we get into that video or, you know, As a prelude to that video, why are they so common? Well, it actually goes part and parcel with the dissolution of family units. And the basically taking of kids from families at a very young age. Or to put it to yet, another way communism's greatest enemy is consent.

And this often creates interesting problems where you will see was in the circles that lead towards communism. You see really high rates of stuff like grape. , actually, that's the huge problem itself, like chop or Chaz or whatever you want to call that breakaway state they tried to do. In [00:46:00] Seattle, , where there were huge, huge amounts of grape in that area. , and it is because the violation of individual consent is necessary. For there to be a classless society in any environment where some individual has something they want to deny another individual access to like their labor or their body. Final thing I'll note here, which I always find one of the silliest arguments for communism. Is there like, well, yes, communism may force some people to work at the point of a gun, but in capitalism, access to the rewards at the system are not equally distributed. Not everyone has the same ability to access and rewards. Due to birth conditions, family, et cetera.

And like, this is the wildest thing I've ever heard. You have one system, one table where there are rewards. But the game is unfair and you have another system where there are no rewards and your shot for not working. Which one are you going to want to be at?

Malcolm Collins: But the point, [00:47:00] or I guess the larger point of this video is communism doesn't work even in a post scarcity world. Yes. I, I, I believe UBI might work in a post scarcity world, but even in a world where you have people's universal basic income, where you have people's basic needs taken care of, like you do food drop offs, you do medicine is handled by the state, you do like all of that.

You still have the class structure we have in our existing society, and you will still have some resource which represents some form of scarcity, because there is always scarcity in any system and what people choose to value is always the thing that is scarce, even if that thing is pointless. And what I find really interesting is it's actually the communists themselves in our current society that are most drawn to artificial scarcity.

It is much more the communists who get drawn to brand name recognition, like the Starbucks and the iPads and the et cetera. And it's the extreme capitalists who often [00:48:00] have less interest in that stuff because they care about getting the best product for, to fit whatever, you know, In the moment need they have for the lowest cost possible.

You know, if you look between two groups, communist versus capitalist, you know, who do you think is using more Android phones? Who do you think is using more iPhones and paying more for like a lower quality product? Or who do you think is using more like Apple computers, right? You know, Oh, I'm gonna get some angry Apple users in the comments here, but it's just like objectively true.

You're paying more for a lower per per. Any spec that you're getting. So what are you paying for? If you're paying for more, you're paying for a brand. I mean, people will make up excuses to themselves like, Oh no, I'm paying for the network effects of the devices or I'm paying because it, it, it runs more smoothly or, you know, but we all know that's not true anymore.

This isn't like we're, we're in the Tim Cook era now. Okay. People we know what this is about. We know that you don't get the Starbucks coffee because it tastes better. Okay. You get the Starbucks coffee because you have built a habit. around [00:49:00] Starbucks coffee, or you have some sort of status associated with Starbucks coffee.

So I, I find that really interesting as well is that, that the communists actually seem more drawn to artificial scarcity than the capitalists is.

Simone Collins: I don't find that nearly as confusing as I do. Just capitalism as I understand it now from a technical standpoint is really just more Interest in a sci fi futuristic world and not so much about like actual, I don't know, I, I, like achievable things today.

It's, it's very bizarre to me, but let's just focus on the things we can control our own little communist home. Our children. What would you like me to make you say communist

Malcolm Collins: home? Because people might not be familiar with it

Simone Collins: makes sense. At a very, very local level. Where, like the family level is inherently communist.

I don't remember the phrase. From each according to [00:50:00] their ability. That is what our household

Malcolm Collins: is and don't contribute financially to the family because they can't, you know, we, we give them what they need because we care about them. And, and this is where communist networks have worked when people genuinely.

Care about the other people around them. And I think leftists are like, well, what if we could build a society where everybody genuinely cares about everybody else in a society? And it's like, well, you can't do that without making the entire society one culture, right? Because you're always going to have some degree of conflict with people of different cultures than you because they will have different values and different things they want for the direction of the society.

And And I think that this is ultimately why the urban monoculture is so monocultural, is because it's trying to create that single united class where everybody can value everyone else but the problem is that it doesn't work. They end up losing all sense of personal identity and then desperately trying to recreate some identity.

Because when you lose a connection to your heritage you then [00:51:00] are like, well, then who am I? How do I define myself? Right? If I'm not the. The culmination of my ancestors' efforts. And then they say, well, I guess I am you know, A-L-G-B-T-P-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B. I'm a demi queer squirrel goddess or something.

And then this culture, because it, it understands the importance of giving you an identity has this need to validate that whatever it is, but it turns out that it doesn't help mental health wise and leads to spirals pretty quickly. And I think that that's what we're getting here in the urban monoculture is it's, it's had to cut people off from their ancestral identities.

And as such, they are desperate to create something new to identify with and be proud of. And I think that's fundamentally what we see from this concept of, of capital puny pride, right? And that's why we advocate so much for choosing a family culture or an ancestral culture to learn about your ancestors and, and learn who you are so that you can take pride in that and see the value in [00:52:00] bringing that into the next generation.

Well, let's go

Simone Collins: pick up the next generation for

Malcolm Collins: dinner. Okay. I'm sorry. I love you.

Simone Collins: I love you too. What do you want me to make for you?

Malcolm Collins: Let's try the ravioli.

Simone Collins: Oh, with the pesto. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think I'm gonna use the, the sun dried tomato pesto so we can see if that's any good and just use any ravioli you want and what else?

Yeah, that's good for me tonight.

Simone Collins: All right, it's on. Do you want a little bit of anything else? Just a couple raviolis. I'm fine. You don't eat.

Malcolm Collins: I don't want to get obese, you know, I've got to look gaunt and beautiful and how can I do that with drinking as much as I do? Well, I love you. I'll see you downstairs in a

sec.

Guys, wait. Guys, where are we? We're on the boat. Do

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com