Shifting Social Classes in the Digital Age

In this episode, Simone and Malcolm dive into the dynamic shifts in social class due to artificial intelligence. They explore historical social disruptions, from the plague to the industrial revolution, and the internet age, to predict how AI will transform social hierarchy. The conversation covers key areas such as technological advancements, new economic opportunities, education, and the importance of elite and entrepreneurial networks. They examine potential winners and losers in this revolution, providing insights and strategies for those aiming to position themselves favorably in the rapidly evolving social landscape. Join us to understand how to navigate and thrive in the era of AI-driven social class changes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Anyway I will let you start. Today's episode is Simone. I'm very excited.

Okay. Okay. Okay, Simone, don't screw this up. Don't, don't screw this up. Okay. Got

this. I'm gonna include all of that, by the way.

Shut. Ah,

Simone Collins: God. Okay. I, how am I? You get to take your pauses and your breaths and you get to cough and drink something.

And I don't get to do anything. I just have to your

Malcolm Collins: cute

hand sign

again.

No, I'm not gonna, no, you don't get anything. You don't get anything. Okay. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go. Okay. 3, 2,

Simone Collins: 1. Hello, Malcolm. I'm so excited to be speaking with you today because today we are talking about social class changes in how social class works and how obviously as parents who want to engineer the next ruling class of humans, who of course work in concert with AI, can make sure that our kids in the next period of social class disruption.

End up at the top. This is also for our Patreon supporters. They requested this, so also we're gonna get them to the top. Okay. They deserve to be among the ruling class. But I, it, we need to be aware of the fact that throughout history periods of disruption have enabled clever people to climb social class ranks.

And I mean, consider the plague like from the one from 1347 to or 1352, which killed half of Europeans in, in existence. But that also caused a severe labor shortage and that produced higher wages and better working conditions. So like the right clever kind of person who used to be under the foot of the elites in that society suddenly had this upward mobility they never had before.

They, they could move to different estates, they could demand higher wages. And then I think the last two global events where social class really was disrupted were the industrial revolution and then the internet. And AI is the next big global event to do this.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I think there's been others. I think the rise of TV and radio disrupted social class pretty significantly, where you had this new class of movie stars slash radio stars Yeah.

Which held a position in society. That's interesting. Is that it's sort of degraded into nothing. I mean, we're seeing it rot, we're seeing this yeah. Class that so many people fought to be a part of. So extremely hard. Their entire, you know, lives were fought fighting to become the television star. And now they are finding, or the, the, the news anchor that, you know, they get fewer views than like random internet people and stuff like that.

Yeah. Well that's

Simone Collins: why I see it more of a short-lived thing. It didn't really create, it didn't create, for example Rockefellers. It didn't create you know, the same kinds of. F like the internet, I would say is a bigger one. 'cause that created just huge amounts of wealth creating. Well, I disagree.

Malcolm Collins: I think if you're looking for Rockefellers and people like the, the moguls of that period.

Mm-hmm. The rotter barons. Yeah. I would see that as less of a class mix up than something like the TV star. And what I mean by this is when you're talking about like the history of the robber barons and the ways that they would, for example, have parties where children would dig in like sandboxes for party treats.

And the party treats would be diamonds that were hidden in the sandbox. And so you'd go and you'd look in the sandbox and, oh, look at my, my, my kids would love this. They love little shiny fake diamonds. Yeah, we should, yeah. Give on that. They'd be, they'd find it so, oh, look at the shiny little diamond that I got from my sandbox.

But the, the point here being is these communities were never that large.

Simone Collins: You had

Malcolm Collins: maybe Oh, so you're more

Simone Collins: interested in, in where Huge, like thousands of people? No. Yeah. I mean you had

Malcolm Collins: maybe like 25 families that were like involved in like these entire cultural networks. Maybe, maybe like a hundred folks.

Right? But

Simone Collins: that we're talking about the 0.001%. Who were affected in this way, there were still huge other right? But the thing thing about the

Malcolm Collins: Robber Baron social mix up is that it applied to so few, so few were risen in the ranks by this. If you look at the age of the movie star it applied both to a fairly large community, but also a community that the rest of society observed and understood as a new social elite.

Oh, people

Simone Collins: absolutely in the guild age understood who these. Nova Rich and also old. Re like rich.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I guess, I guess, but I'd say that it's equal. Okay. And so now we're in this age where I, I think one of the things we can look at is how's things changed in the, in the internet boom. Because one of the things that happens when you have social disruption is there is a denial by the old social classes that new social classes exist or that disruption is happening.

You know, there's also a

Simone Collins: denial about the proper way to do these things. So we really should talk about how social class worked pre-internet and then post-internet. Well, but the change that's important

Malcolm Collins: to note is because sometimes your average idiot who is still admiring the people who they were told they should admire when they were a child.

Yeah. They listen to those people without understanding. When those people say, oh, these tech nerds are really just like nerdy tech a bros. They're not real upper class. They don't really have influence. Mm-hmm. They're not, they, they don't understand the ways of the blue bloods and stuff like that. Yeah.

They, they say this out of fear. They create these distinctions so that they will say, oh, well, you know, Novo ish, and this has always been the case where the old college would say Novo re have no understanding of, of, of style to try to point out like, well, when the Novo Reese are instantly, well, it's in an attempt to

Simone Collins: continue to grasp at their status, which is beginning to erode.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, yes. What you're really seeing is somebody grasping to eroding status. You are not seeing a and and any, if you believe them, you will make terrible mistakes and you will lead your children to make terrible mistakes in terms of their career, their education, their decisions, and in terms of decisions you make with your career.

Yeah. So go, go further, Simone.

Simone Collins: Yeah. No. So that's, that's what we need to kind of break down so people understand how things have been, how they have changed in the past, and how they're gonna change. So we're gonna recap the post-industrial revolution norm. Since a lot of people don't wanna admit kind of how it works, recap how the internet changed things, highlight the major changes we anticipate from ai, and then outline class, upgrading tactics and careers as AI hits.

And we're gonna go for like the easy, lazy. Coward version, and then also the, like, if you have balls and actually wanna go for this like really tank and win version. And then given our knowledge of winning tactics, we'll we'll talk about potential winners and losers. You know, sort of like who, who is gonna be wiped out by this change.

And I think there are like large swaths of both types of workers, but also types of people who are going to be kind of screwed by ai. Well, I, I think there's

Malcolm Collins: more to it than this. And it's something I wanna talk about in regards to social class because it's a point that I think people aren't paying enough attention to.

I

Simone Collins: might be addressing this if you're talking about the different types of social class.

Malcolm Collins: Well, so I grew up, like I've, you know, I went to Stanford, NBA, I've been a venture capitalist. I have been at the height, it's been leaked in the New York Times. Like we hang out with Elon, right? Like, I have been at the top of the tech bro social world, right?

I have also grown up in a family where my dad's dad was a congressman. You know, the family was one of the most prominent families in Dallas, Texas, which is one of the, the, a city where they still had the degree of aristocratic culture. You know, and my family has had considerable wealth for multiple generations until my generation, I got nothing, just so you know.

Like I, I inherited $30,000 when my mom died. It's, it's not nothing, nothing, but it's not like I'm, I'm not sitting on intergenerational wealth here. Mostly because the secretary's still little you can read all of this. They still like what was it, like 2050 3 million or something like that.

I dunno. Well, what's

Simone Collins: worse is she like, blew it on an investment. Dumb stuff. Like at least, like, at least get an ROI if you're gonna steal money.

Malcolm Collins: Please. But what it means is that I have had a pure insight into both the tech elite social world and the blue blood elites within a part of the Americas where you still had an aristocratic class system, right?

Yeah. And what a lot of people don't realize is how quickly an entire aristocratic class structure can erode and degrade. And I'm talking within a generation.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And this, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about that in a little bit because it was really striking when you and I saw when it happened to the children of the blue blooded Texan families that

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so you, you've got this in the script, so we're gonna talk about that.

Okay. So before we talk about that Yeah. What I wanted to point out about the rise of ai mm-hmm. Is maintaining family systems and elite classes requires more than just maintaining. Attention, power and status. It means reproducing at something that's not an abysmal rate.

Simone Collins: Yeah, no kidding.

Malcolm Collins: And one of the biggest problems with the elite classes in our society today is outside of the Tech Bros.

And elite Mormons actually. They have tons of kids very few of the elite communities have anything close to replacement fertility rates. Mm-hmm. And they're going to go extinct very quickly as a result. Yeah. And I mean like within two generations as a result. Yeah. So anyway, continue Simone. I just wanted to get to that, that important part as well.

When we think about the future.

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, absolutely. But we'll, we'll start with the past. So as you know, I'm obsessed with that 1957 McGraw Hill text films, instructional video called Social Class in America where there's it, it follows the lives from birth of three American babies who all start out in the same.

Maternity ward next to each other in those little plastic baskets. There's David Benton, he's the poor one. There's Theodore Eastwood, he's the middle class one, and then there's Guilford Ames ii for which one? It's great. So if you're Guilford Ames, I love their names. It's, you have to watch this. I will make sure I include a link in it in that top pinned comment that you make.

Okay. Because you guys gotta watch this. It's just amazing. But like, basically it, it, it is literally, it was an instructional video that was played in high school classrooms to explain to people how social class worked and how in America, since there was a pretty large middle class at that time, and social mobility was frankly a little easier.

You. You could, as a middle class person move up. But it requires some sacrifices. And this is kind of an important theme that I wanna keep throughout this whole discussion, but basically they're like, okay, if you're poor, you stay poor, though, maybe you do marginally better. So, so Dave, he, he gets a job at the local gas station with aspirations to become an auto mechanic.

All right? So he's doing a little better than his dad and like his whole family has like a celebration. They have a party when he graduates from high school. 'cause that was like a big deal for someone to graduate from high school and his family, that kind of thing. And then if you're middle class per this video, and, and I think, you know, this is an accurate reflection of how things worked at the time and worked after the industrial revolution.

You can move up. You can't expect your original networking community to accept your new status. Like you have to leave. I really loved this part of the film. Yeah. 'cause it's so effing real. Yeah, it's so real.

Malcolm Collins: It's, it's really great. And if you, if you will, so, so no, what happens? You've gotta explain.

So he goes to the city Okay. And he makes a lot of money. Yeah. So, yeah. No, no.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So the, the, the middle class kid, he goes to New York after, well a, after actually working at the Nepo babies, the rich kids factory just a little bit after high school where he's like, I'm, I'm not going anywhere here. He goes to New York City and, and gets a job, and then goes to school and gets a degree and gets married out there and, and is able to move up.

And, and he, he gets a higher class job and he develops much more wealth and he does better than anyone in his family has done before. But then he comes back home. Everyone still treats him like he's this middle class kid.

Correnet film: Newborn American babies, newborn citizens of these United States, free and with rights guaranteed by the Constitution. But let's take a closer look. These new arrivals in a typical American town have equal legal rights ins class. They are not equal at all. Each has a social status handed on to him by his family, ascribed to him at birth, meet Guilford Ames.

Third, the latest edition to one of the town's upper class families.

Guilford Ames. Second is the wealthiest man in town. He owns a large factory. The Amy is one of the oldest families in the community, and so at re prestige as well as wealth.

This is where an Ames family has lived for the last a hundred years, and this is where Guilford Ames third will live, like most of the babies here, this one, Theodore Eastwood by name, has an ascribed status of middle class.

His father is Joseph Eastwood. High school educated and a white collar worker in the ames factory. He has a steady, skillful job and is comfortably off, but the chances are that he will not advance much beyond his present status.

The mortgage on his house is on its way to being paid, and someday it undoubtedly will be.

Although young Ted Eastwood has an ascribed status of middle class, the best status he achieves during his lifetime may be higher than the one he was born with. Could be true. Maybe David Benton, whose ascribed status is lower class.

David's father is Michael Ben, an unskilled factory worker. Who has a meager education?

Mr. Benton rents the upper floor of a two family house in a rundown section of town.

The ability to rise from an ascribed status to an achieved one is called vertical mobility and is particularly characteristic of the United States. There are class lines within each general group, and these vary geographically and in relation to nationality, religion, and race class exists in the United States as it does everywhere,

It is wild we used to live in a world where we just sat kids down in front of videos and told them the truth about how the world worked. The, the number of truth bombs that are dropped in this that would save an individual so much time and heartache to learn young is astounding to me in that this video would be considered deeply offensive today.

You, your Teddy Eastwood. Stuck in a job you'll be in all your life. Why don't you get out? What's keeping you here? Anyway, Mary Blakesley, you thought you'd marry her, but remember what she said that day in the car. Her car, of course, but can't you see?

It's impossible, Ted. It's not just money. We live in different worlds. Sure. Different worlds inside this town, but there are other worlds, bigger towns. You've got some money saved. Go to New York. Give it a try for six months, and if you fail only you are not going to fail.

And Ted didn't fail. He had talent. But when Ted returns to his hometown on a vacation, how does he fare? Has he a new achieved status back there too? When he meets the girl he wanted to marry, have things changed? The town is small enough so that Mary has heard about Ted's success in New York, but this isn't New York.

Mary is married to Gil now. And although they are friendly enough toward Ted, he still isn't part of their world and he never will be in this town. The ascribed status of his parents is still the class to which he belongs.

Ted's mother brings him up to date on all the town gossip, but he only half hears her. The meeting with Mary has stirred old memories in him. He's remembering what she said to him about different worlds. He knows now that to her and Gil, he's still the nice kid from the wrong side of the railroad tracks.

No matter how successful he is. His achieved status is higher than that of his father's because he has a profession. But that status depends on a place. In this case, New York.

Simone Collins: And what's interesting though, also about the upper class kid, and this is something that has really changed after the internet age, and we're gonna talk about this mm-hmm.

Is your upper class, you're a Nepo baby. So, so Gil, he gets a job at his dad's factory and his dad's like, I'm gonna show you how this is gonna be. And there's this awkward scene where as, as gill's being shown around, because first he goes to an elite university where he's, he's for the first time mixing around with people of his own class.

He's building that elite network. Because you know, before that,

Malcolm Collins: before, before reference, by the way, I went to Stanford for my MBA, my dad went to Harvard for his MBA. Yeah,

Simone Collins: you were Gil. Except that your family wasn't willing to nepo baby you. That's it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Your family's like anti nepo baby. They won't like No, no.

They wouldn't help for you. They

Malcolm Collins: won't actually. My dad, I said, well, we've got a pavilion at Harvard named after the family. You know, we've got, it's like some gazebo thing. Like, obviously like we've donated a lot of money there. You went there, my dad went there. Can you like, send them a note like telling them like, Hey, consider this application seriously.

Mm-hmm. And he got mad at me and he said, I don't know if he ever did it, but he'd send them a note telling them not to accept. They didn't accept me by the way, and Stanford did, where I didn't have any connection. So yeah, so there's that. But yeah, which was harder to get into by the way. Harder to get into.

I gotta point that out. But continue.

Simone Collins: Guilford Aimes the third goes to this elite Ivy League university. And then when he comes back, his dad gives him a tour and shows him, you know, very Lion King, like all this domain will be yours. And then there, there is, is our, our middle class Theodore Eastwood sitting in the accounting thing just like, I'm your underling now.

Like, it's great. But things have indeed changed since then. So since the 1950s social mobility has. Kind of actually reduced with the downward, downward slant where upward mobility is harder literally for everyone. So even those who before were the nepo babies. And, and, and we should talk about this, so Nepo baby privilege has absolutely eroded and it's burning away fast.

And I think part of this is because, you know, you and I were sent by someone in, in your, in your family to go to private wealth conferences. I don't know why. I really don't know why, but it was like, it was just all family foundations. And then we went to that, that network for kids

Malcolm Collins: of rich people.

Oh

Simone Collins: yeah. What were

Malcolm Collins: they called? The, they all wanted to be philanthropists. Yes.

Simone Collins: Nexus. Yes. Yes. And

Malcolm Collins: everyone, there was the most progressive communist I've ever met. Like Yeah. And they were dumb ass raw. Well, and

Simone Collins: the other, the thing that, that your family also sent us to was IPI institute for pri for private investors, which was all like family investment cars.

Yeah. None of their

Malcolm Collins: kids went, remember we, no, there were, there were

Simone Collins: like two kids or something. But they also talked in their, like in their sessions about how they were managing their trusts and their family investment firms for their children. And a really big theme of these, and this is I think where the downfall of the Nepo baby comes.

Is you have this focus on happy kids and like, well, you know, I want to make it possible for my child to be a teacher in Africa so they can, you know, do the good work that they wanna do. That was a big theme at Nexus too. It was like, well, I'm just in gonna do good in the world and basically just spend their family's money away.

And this is in, in stark contrast, you have to like, keep in mind that before like the, the wealthy families that maintained impact and that actually were like worthy nepo babies. In my view were like the Kennedy style, like K-pop style, like Disney star management, where like literally you were groomed to be in this leadership position like, you know, Kennedy like President Kennedy wasn't the first in line in that family to be president and his older brother was, and then he got killed in the war.

And it, it's such a ruthless k-pop style management where like if you step outta line and, and your dad thinks you're the slutty daughter and you're gonna get accidentally pregnant, oh, suddenly you get a lobotomy. Like this was intense, right? They were very disciplined and it wasn't fun. And now wealthy families and I think what precipitated the end of this was partially this focus on, I just want my kids to be happy.

But also as you pointed out, and you, I want you to talk about your experience like meeting like your wealthy, like o older money, family, childhood friends, when we were back in Dallas. I think the other element of it was that. Corporate governance also changed. And as the corporations that used to install these Nepo babies that, you know, Guilford ames would have run suddenly receive, they started receiving outside investment, private equity investment, growth investment, and then they had to have boards.

And those boards actually cared about those companies making money and they didn't wanna see the run the ground. Yeah. I pointed this

Malcolm Collins: out about what happened in Texas is that you had many people and families within the Dallas elite ecosystem where the kids expected, they're like, I'm gonna go to SMU, I'm gonna go to like a local institution.

Mm-hmm. And they'd always say this thing. Which is just not true. Which is, well, SMU is as, it's respected as Harvard or, or Stanford in Texas. And God bless them. Yeah. And I'm like, no, it's not. So first of all they, this was true of their parents' generation because in their parents' generation, the people who were running companies weren't the most competent people.

They were people who had risen through nepotism networks. Exactly. And so they weren't people who had gone to Harvard and Sanford and the top universities. They were people who had gone to the local universities. And note here, the university aspect to the Nepo baby syndrome has broken down. It doesn't matter anymore.

It mattered. In my generation, it mattered in the generation before mine. But it was already breaking down was in my generation. Yeah. Now it's just

Simone Collins: the recreational summer camp that you chose to hang out at.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But doesn't matter. But for a while it did actually matter. And you were able to get regional arbitrage opportunities within regions that had these nepotistic old boy networks where incompetent fail sons could end up running major companies like in Texas because the incompetent fail sons would go to SMU.

And then they would, you know, end up they even had a, a, a chant on like their football team about how one day they'd be their bosses or something. Oh my god. Really? They were so known for this. By the way, people are like, Malcolm, why are you being mean to smu? The SMU executive business school is literally named after my grandfather.

I have a lot of connections with this university. I don't have a particular animosity to it.

And I will also note, because I never forget a, a nice deed or recognizing my success before I became successful, , while I got into Everett University, I applied to, they were the only one that offered me a full ride scholarship.

I would just note that I know a lot of people, the other Nepo babies when I grew up who had this delusion they, they were gonna be able to ride these sort of nepo baby pure age networks.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

And, and if they, if they had matured in a pre-internet age and also in a pre businesses widely accepting private equity and growth, growth funds and stuff, and having outside boards,

Malcolm Collins: well, because what happened with their dads or their granddads is, oh, you know, we need a new president of the company.

It's going to be one of the kids or the grandkids, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That was just sort of taken as a four granted thing. Yeah. Whereas as soon as you develop the modern board ecosystem, which really developed, while in, in my generation, you're actually at a disadvantage if you happen to be the son or grandson of the last president of the company.

Mm-hmm. Because people are going to be asking. Well, is ageist here because of nepotism or are they really the best person to run it?

Simone Collins: Yeah. This not You have a huge chip on your shoulder if you're doing that. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: This is not something that was done before. You know, you'd actually probably have an easier time if you went to try to start a, a separate company or use family wealth to start a separate company, which totally is actually a lot harder to do.

And so you end up in this situation where an entire generation was raised thinking that if they went to the Dallas Country Club and they played this, by the way, this is a country club that costs like. I can't remember. Hundreds of thousands. Oh yeah. We looked it up

Simone Collins: recently and the buy-in was huge.

Yeah. It was insane. 500 It was, was even more than like the Bohemian grove.

It is 225,000 right now.

Simone Collins: It's it was off off.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The Bohemian Grove wasn't that bad. It seemed affordable.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Except you have to like wait 40 years.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, the Bohemian grove's wait time is 20 years and that's what makes it a pain in the butt.

Yeah. And you have to get I don't wanna go too much into that, the way the Bohemian growth structures. But again, these are things that I have. Deep knowledge of that. I think a normal person may not have deep knowledge of. And so, well that's, that's, that's why

Simone Collins: we're talking about this is I think normal people have all these misattributions about how social class works today and how it's going to work soon.

And so they totally are missing the boat. And I don't, I don't want at least start, at least their Patreon subscribers. I don't want 'em to just the boat. They can get on the boat. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Everyone else there go And entire generation of the elite of the blue bloods have basically been wiped out. I, I'd say it was in two generations.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The entire concept of Blue Blood Elite Yeah. Has been wiped out. Yeah. 'cause something you need to remember about Blue Blood Elite is they rarely stay elite through just having lots of wealth. Unless you're in Europe and you can be like, why? Unless you're in Europe where you have higher taxes and higher intergenerational taxes.

Because in Europe the tradition is within the aristocratic families is everything goes to the oldest male heir. And actually. It was typically thought of in Europe as this great curse. And this was done in Ireland to sort of break the back of the Irish people where they forced by law after conquering them to split their wealth evenly among sons.

And it was seen that this would make the landed classes and the great aristocratic families become poor very quickly because, you know, you have a lot of kids and then you need to split every generation and that family becomes less wealthy. This is never really the way things worked in the United States, even among the elite families.

And so the only way that you got elite families in the United States was if you had a system for intergenerationally transferring. A method for learning to produce and capture wealth and power yourself. And there were many different systems here, but one was this Texas aristocratic old boy system that completely dissolved the functioning system.

And then the few kids of those kids, because I've met them as well where their family has some intergenerational wealth these kids of the kids then come in and they say they get brainwashed into communism. The family was unable to intergenerationally transfer cultural values to them. So they're having very few kids themselves.

They're not developing skills that allow them to consolidate or, or gain meaningful power. And they're not even playing the game anymore. They're playing this weird Hollywood game, which is another social class, which is also dying. So the entire. Blue Blood Network, I think in the United States of the seventies and eighties and, and, and, and maybe going back to the 1920s, when you really see the start of this of, of, the modern context of it is going to completely dissolve within this generation because it's already mostly dissolved.

It's at like 2% of what it used to be.

Simone Collins: Well, they even see it as a feature giving away their wealth, you know, because they, they hate their wealth and they've learned to hate their families and themselves. So, and

Malcolm Collins: so this culture, the American blue blood culture is functionally dead.

And then people can say, well, how did families like yours? Transition so seamlessly, right? Like, because apparently some families made the transition to the VC culture and appear, I hope to make the transition again was the next cultural changeover.

As a note as to why my family culture was so different from the other quote unquote, elite aristocratic cultures within Dallas, it's because they were descended from the backwards cultural tradition, whereas many of the people who took on aristocratic status were from the.

Cavalier cultural tradition of the deep south, , which is much more comfortable being aristocratic in a normal sense, whereas the backwood cultural tradition was never really comfortable with even the concept of an aristocracy. And so there was always this perception of, well, the strong should always survive and you need to prove that you're the strong to inherit this status that you were given unfairly.

And I think it's because certain cultures in America adopted the mindset as my family did, of do not look at what the other quote unquote elites are doing.

Focus entirely on this play and was in my family. The play was always one, don't expect to inherit anything. Actually it's pretty rare intergenerationally within my family. Two people like the fact that I inherited 30 K for my dead mountain, like that's actually been normal for my family throughout history to not inherit large amounts.

And a lot of people can be like, oh, really? Why did they do that? And it's because, well, when you don't expect to inherit money you are much more focused on how do I use the arbitrage that find family's position gives me to create more money or to build stable income streams. The other thing they did was focused incredibly hard on education and, and being more educated than anyone around us, but also on cunning was always really like, always out, out plan and out cu the other people who you are fighting against and always come with the deck stacked in your favor because of education.

And use whatever you can except for nepotism . And always that

Simone Collins: implies cheating. Malcolm, your, your family doesn't actually have a

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no.

Stack the deck in your favor was, was knowledge and plans. Oh. Always, you know, you know, go into any room or any, any knowing everything, and you've even seen me do this when we go into business meetings and people are always surprised. They're like, wait, how do you know everything about my life? You know?

And it's like, well, I obviously created a dossier on everyone I'm meeting with before I got here. Did everyone else in the room not do that? You know, this is an investment meeting of, of course. And I remember at first I was very surprised that other people weren't taught to do this. And this is like a, a family tradition.

And also to never go for, and I remember this was so strongly embedded in me to never go for the jobs that have a cap on the wealth that they generate. So I was told I would be disowned if I would became a lawyer or if I became a politician or if I became a doctor like my mom was because I almost went to medical school at one point and she was rabidly against this.

She's like, that puts a pretty low cap on how much money you could make. To say we don't have doctors in the family, but they're involved in like running large medical enterprises. And my mom thought that if I went into this, I would get sucked into the very narrow world of like actually being a doctor, doctor, which she saw as, as a very low class thing to do.

Would normal people would see this as a middle class thing to do. Anyway, I'm gonna bring

Simone Collins: this back. Hold on Malcolm. Don't go too far. But I do wanna point out, hold

Malcolm Collins: on. You, you forgot something and it's, I need to go into it. Okay. Which is the Kennedys. Okay. The Kennedys actually represent really perfect sub genre of new elites being created.

Absolutely. 'cause how did the Kennedys earn their money? It was a new economic arbitrage opportunity created by. The prohibition where they made most of their money through the mob. And then the father who made the money through the mob basically said, ah, this arbitrage opportunity. And keep in mind, they were Irish immigrant families.

Like they had no chance before this being upper status Americans. They used an arbitrage opportunity to take this chance, and then the dad taught the kids' generation looking at the way culture was changing. You won't be able to achieve status in the way that I did. Mm-hmm. I'm gonna groom you for politics.

Yeah. 'cause that is the next class where we can cheese things, you know, as Kennedy joked about winning the election because of graveyards, right? Like we know that they likely did cheese election cycles. So anyway, now, now bring it back, Simone.

Simone Collins: Yeah. This is important though to talk about how Nepo baby is for the most part.

And there are exceptions here, especially when it comes to the utility of networks that remains crucial. Nepo babies are dead and yet a huge discussion online about social class is, oh, Nepo baby this. And these people will have these privileges because a huge portion of our culture is all about having an, an external locus of control.

And, oh, I can't succeed because the elite are like holding me out. I'm not gonna say though that, you know, since. The fifties. Social mobility has not only gotten worse for nepo babies, but also is, is is rough for the middle class because specifically university costs which started rising in the seventies just continue to rise like through the nineties and two thousands, like from 2000 to 2022.

Tuition at public were public. So the cheap four year colleges in the US rose by about 60%. And the total cost of attendance room and board increased by nearly 40. And the average cost of college more than doubled between 1963 and 2022. So like that is, is huge. And, and the, the, the sharpest increase has been in public four year institutions, which should not have gone up in cost 'cause they're supposed to be like the US.

States providing education to empower upward mobility, what's going on? Also like housing costs not just in the US but around the world. Began to significantly increase in the early two thousands with another really sharp increase. So like, just getting a house is really hard. So I'm not saying it's hard, I'm just saying it's, you know, but anyway, things are about to change with AI and I'm really excited about it.

So let's go through the, the most obvious to most underrated okay. Of how AI is gonna change things. So as Malcolm, you always say it's gonna concentrate wealth. Like we're gonna see extreme wealth disparity. Everyone's complaining about wealth disparity now. They have not seen anything, they have not seen anything close to what you're gonna see.

Wealth disparity

Malcolm Collins: is gonna be so much bigger in the next generation.

Simone Collins: Yeah. What's, what's also gonna happen, and this is something that kind of came up on the pirate wires. Podcast. They were, they were talking about this when we were guests on it that it, it wipes out very specific social classes, so like white collar workers are doomed.

A lot of people who watch this channel also watch feral historian on YouTube who in, in one of his episodes. I think maybe it was on like a, some version of like Star Trek, universal Basic Income. Mentioned that if, if we define employment as those providing a product or service that someone else wants to pay for, we actually have very few people in, in modern white collar jobs or really the eco like modern economies in general who are actually employed.

'cause they're not like, they're in these like weird middle management jobs that do totally abstracted things. You can't really track that to specific ROI, you know, they're not selling bread, that someone's eating, they are not making, and

Malcolm Collins: so much of those jobs are the most replaceable with ai.

Simone Collins: Exactly.

Yeah. So they're, they're gonna be wiped out. And that's really interesting. Because you know, typically they, they, they, I think they're given this impression that they're quite safe. And I think there's this dawning that you're now seeing in headlines that, oh my gosh, the, despite the fact that I'm educated and connected and all these things, and I have my fancy corporate job with all my great benefits, I'm about to be thrown out on the street, but then at the same time at many low skill workers like manufacturing, retail, transportation, then not all things and we're gonna go into this are also super screwed, you know?

Mm-hmm. Like Uber Eats, delivery people, truck drivers, et cetera are, are really, really screwed. But then there are elements of AI that really increase social mobility, which make us so excited, right. Like with education. We're already so deep into AI education for our kids, and that it like, it, it, it democratizes aristocratic tutoring where, okay, Alexander the Great, he could be tutored by Aristotle, but now our kids could be tutored by Aristotle, but better because he knows about, you know, aquaculture, pharmacology and astrophysics and everything.

Like no single human that could tutor a kid knows anything like close to what AI can tutor your kid about. And, and information is profoundly easier to access and parse. So though the university system is broken. It, you know, we, we now have something so much better. Well,

Malcolm Collins: the university system has become irrelevant for a few reasons.

One is the deification, even with the recent court case of the university, no longer makes it a class authenticating mechanism for many people. Yeah. And it almost can become a confirmation of like when university gets to a cost where it isn't a clear benefit, even the elite universities. Yeah. You can begin to look like you have proven your own lack of belief in yourself by paying for one of these elite university statuses.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Like you're telling on yourself by going, you're telling on

Malcolm Collins: yourself that I needed to waste however many hundred thousand dollars rather than just using that to start a company because I thought I needed this status authentication. Which is increasingly becoming the perspective of the centers of wealth that need to be able to accurately judge an individual's competence to know whether or not they should invest in something that they're working on.

Simone Collins: That's, yeah, that's a really good point. The other thing too, in addition to education becoming widely accessible is just the ability to start a company. Startup costs used to be a very serious thing for people. Like you had to actually hire if you didn't know how to code yourself or you weren't a very good coder, a developer to help you.

So it, so most of the stuff for which people raised money, like from seed money, even like growth funds, so coders, customer support, intellectual collaboration, you can get that from AI now. Like, that's huge. And, and already venture capitalists. You hear this all the time on the online podcast, they just widely agree that the next unicorns are gonna be founded by single person or just extremely small teams.

And there's already examples of this. So these, there's these, these there's this YouTube channel I can share with you. It's two weeks old. As, as of the time we're recording this, it has 411,000 Spotify listeners and it's entirely AI generated. And this, this is like a, a totally synthetic act that's hitting cultural philosophy.

It, it is, it is insane.

Malcolm Collins: We also seen you know, stars on a number of apps. Like, like, TikTok and stuff like that turn out to be completely automated. We've seen Yeah. Musicians and bands that are totally automated. Well, and also

Simone Collins: major fundraising and like sale rounds. So there's clearly they, they were the cheat on everything company.

That's, that's what Andreessen Horowitz led 15 million in funding for. Which like is is is pretty crazy too because it, it was co-founded by a 21-year-old named Roy Lee. He was expelled from Columbia University after creating Interview Coder, which was an AI tool that helped job applicants cheat during technical interviews.

And. The, you know, the, this is, this is an extremely small team, and also Wix acquired another one of these really small AI assisted startup companies that was totally bootstrapped. It was called Base 44. Wix acquired it for $80 million. So Base 44 at the point of its acquisition was six months old.

It was just a bootstrapped vibe coding startup. It had eight employees who will split 25 million in retention

Malcolm Collins: bonuses, sorry. Vibe coding for people who don't know means that they weren't actual coders. They did all of the code with ai. Isn't that crazy?

Simone Collins: Yeah. But, but like, the thing is, you can, you can, and also like people spend a ton of money on advertising, but in, in the case of base 44, in six months, they massed 250,000 users and recorded 189,000 in profit in May, despite high LLM token costs.

Like, I mean, they, they like, obviously there's there costs that go into running these, but. I'm just trying to give examples of how now completely bootstrapped young teams that aren't necessarily technical. Geniuses are raising $15 million selling their company for freaking you know, $80 million, getting hundreds of thousands of followers in just a matter of weeks on Spotify and YouTube like this is.

Insane because you used to really need, like, if you wanted to start an entertainment thing, like, oh, I gotta get a record label, I'm gonna need a studio, I'm gonna need a LA equipment. It's insane. Well, look

Malcolm Collins: at our podcast, by the way. So when I talk to people who've been podcasting for longer than us, they're like, oh, well, you know, I have my editor, I have my title card creator, I have my, this is all of these, we do all our editing, all our title card, creating all our research.

Like we don't have an external researcher ourselves for a daily show. That targets, I would say, a, a fairly high intellectual audience like that is not something that would've been possible. I know this is having tried to do podcasts before this before this particular era of ai. And. What you're seeing here is it allows one individual, like let's say in podcast creation to do the entire cycle of that creation.

Or it concentrates the wells of entire wealth, of entire enormous bureaucratic fields like say lawyers, right? Like if you can get an ai that is better than 50% of lawyers now you have concentrated the wealth that would've gone to that 50% with, with some, you know, cost saving measures to a small team.

And we are seeing this across bureaucratic industries, which means massive wealth consolidation.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We'll, we'll be honest there. There's not, there are some things that AI can't fix and in order to overcome or like actually make the jumps in, in social class, if you wanna make them you are going to need to be very.

Careful and thoughtful about these. And, and you, Malcolm, come in and tell me what I'm missing here. But I think the really big thing is access to networks because. You know, through anything from like your parents to your social network to elite schooling. Like Gil in the video, he, at one point he, he's told by his father how he's going to be introduced to men of his own kind.

That's a big thing. And also access to capital. I was told that

Malcolm Collins: all the time as a kid. Yeah. And I met these people and now they're all basically unemployed losers.

Simone Collins: I mean, there is that, but, but there's a new class of people who will expose you to ideas and opportunities and funding and connections. It does really matter.

And we'll talk about that. And then there's, there's just also access to capital and cutting edge tools, compute power, proprietary data that it's often, it, we shouldn't lie, it, it is often gated by wealth or connectedness. It's, it's not just like, now it's less about family networks, it's more just affiliation, network.

But like, you know, this even happened with, and it still happens with ethnic cartels, where the, it's, it's possible for like Indonesians to own like the donut industry in California because they're able to provide cheap, cheap capital to other families, things like that. And so these are two things that do matter.

I mean, at some point you may still wanna raise money and you know, like you, you don't, you don't get an in with injuries and Horowitz through nothing. I mean, unless, I mean, you can get so anyone's attention. This

Malcolm Collins: is, this is the other thing that people don't know because I've seen people consistently hired for stuff like this by these elite institutions.

Oh. So I've talked, I actually. I should start calls with them again. But I do calls with an elite investing group that people have probably heard of. And the thing about them is, is the guy I talk with was hired based on his popularity, was in some social media thing. Like he created something that became popular.

Recently Andreessen Horowitz paid a ton of money for the guy who created the Turpentine Network, which is a network of podcasts. That, you know, I'm, I'm gonna be honest, like I don't think they have that many standouts within the network. And it's, it's, most of them are smaller than our podcast.

But you know, he was seen as if you look at the network of people was in this network of podcasts it, they were very high profile. Like it had oh, who's the Bismarck guy who we're friends with Samberg, yeah. Samberg's podcast. In it, for example um, Berg's podcast might get like. 500 800 views per episode, but Sam Oia, Sam Oia, and like if I say this name and you don't know this name, then you're not part of certain networks.

Right?

Simone Collins: Yeah. That's the thing. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And, and you would be like, oh yeah, well, you know, Sam Oia Samia. Right. And I think the, the, one of the things that people miss is it's a game of attention, but not everyone's attention matters regularly.

Simone Collins: Exactly.

Malcolm Collins: Sorry. Equally. And so you've got to be good at spotting and knowing, and this is the new thing about the social clash in the AI era, is whose attention.

Matters. Yes. Whose attention doesn't matter. Yeah. Don't waste your time on the people who don't matter. Do waste your time on the people who do matter. Not waste your time, but you know what I mean. Like, build, build family connections and alliances. Yeah. Because

Simone Collins: you, it's very easy to get this perception that you're totally winning and that you know, all these people know you and those people are not gonna help you.

They're not gonna be useful. In the same way if you want to jump social class, there's, there is one more thing though that I, I do wanna point out in terms of just an underrated element of social class and that there's, it's important for people when they're thinking tactically about what they want to do or strategically about what they want to do with social class, that there is, there's wealth based.

Social class. And then there's culture-based social class. So like you can be a multimillionaire with, with an HVAC company that does air conditioning. And, and or like, you know, something more akin to the trades. And you have your boats and you have all these like a huge mansion. And then you can be in an impoverished journalist, you know, living in a hovel in Brooklyn.

But you're hanging out with all the elites. And you know, the elites will look at this multimillionaire. Mansion and boat owner and think of them as low class. And then, you know, the, the h the, the, the billionaire, or sorry, the millionaire with like the, the mansion and the boats is gonna look at this impoverished journalist and be like, like, how are they?

But I think that's important. So people have to understand that there's there different forms of, of social class and that, that it doesn't just track directly to the amount of money. So there's one that's sort of like, will you be accepted in a certain social network and does that matter to you? Or do you have a high dollar net worth?

And the type, if you want, if you really care about the social element of social class, you need to really understand. Who it is you wanna get in with, because that, that's a very different side quest or like mini game. Because if you wanna be like the Orthodox Jew royalty versus like this weird waspy royalty versus like San Francisco Tech elite royalty, like you're gonna have to play very different games.

And I think a lot of people just kind of blindly try to optimize for money and don't realize that what they really wanted was instead to be like

Malcolm Collins: respected and listened to and Yeah. Yeah. Like,

Simone Collins: or among intellectuals or something. And then they're super unhappy when like they have all the money, but the intellectuals won't listen to them because they run a company and, and live in a place where they, they aren't respected.

Or like, if you wanna be Mormon elite, that's gonna be a different game. So I just wanna. Also point that out as you build your, your strategy, if you are someone thinking about these things well know

Malcolm Collins: what you want. But I, I think what's important, this not being discussed here, is we are entering an era where wealth itself is less powerful.

Hmm. Especially if you're not at this elite level of ultra wealth. If you get to the AI, ultra wealth, if you become a tech mogul, it matters. But when you have moderates amounts of wealth, as one of our friends who is very wealthy, often bemoans, he says, there's nothing I can get that the poor can't get.

Right. Like, he's like, I, I used to, at my level of wealth, be able to have a chauffeur, but now they have Uber Eats. You know, I used to, at my level of wealth you know, have, have. The best foods in the world, but now anyone can learn to make those online. You know, I used to have at my level of wealth. And I think that what we're seeing is, and Elon has said this, like we within our lives we're until a post wealth economy potentially.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And that doesn't mean that you don't need to be productive. That doesn't mean people won't be starving. That doesn't mean people will be left out of the system. I think it's the type of post scarcity that people never really anticipated. Hmm. What it means is if you are attempting to move up and play within these highest ranks, your wealth doesn't actually matter as much as the attention that is on you and your ability to direct attention.

Oh my gosh, yes. And I think what a lot of people are getting wrong, and this is something that you and I have been working on and we have a number of projects in the works in regards to this, is they think. It's human attention that they need to learn to direct. Hmm. Which is the game right now, but I suspect within 10 years, AI attention is going to be as important as human attention.

Simone Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. How

Malcolm Collins: do you direct and capture the attention of ai?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, when you, AI is, is, is likely to create vari various versions, iterations of a post scarcity society. And I always, I'm, I've been so influenced by Cory Dre's book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which frames one version of these societies where generally you can get everything you need, but if you wanna get stuff that's actually still scarce, 'cause you know, beyond, you know, there's always gonna be something that's scarce no matter what's provided for you.

So if you want, wanna live in the coolest places you're gonna use the currency of this world called woofy, which you gain through doing cool stuff. Mm-hmm. And so. Groups of people form what are called adhocracy, sort of just like ad hoc groups that do cool things to get social clout, which wins them woofy, which wins them the, you know, privilege to, to, to do cooler things and stay in cooler places and all these, all these things.

And I think, yeah, Woofy is, is a currency that is super underrated in the future. Basically social capital, that, that buys you the stuff that money can't. And especially we keep harping on people for this, like focus on privacy and I don't wanna have an online footprint and, you know, I don't want my kids to be seen anywhere online.

You're, you're screwing yourself over. Because in a post AI world, there are gonna be two ways that you are going to be able to very reliably make money. Because jobs as we know them, their days are numbered, you know, they're gonna become quite scarce, maybe kind of like this government charity thing that's offered.

So you have to provide. A real product or service to real people and real businesses, and you have to be capable of providing it yourself. There are two ways you can do that. One, you have to become a well-known person in your local community. So let's say that you live in a fairly insular Mormon or Orthodox Jewish, you're just like local Ohio, whatever community, you know, that's a little bit offline.

If you can be the local trash hauler or repair person or religious leader or child speech therapist, then yes, you'll be fine. And you have to invest in that, that, that, that, that means that maybe it's fine that you're offline because you, you just have to go to church in every social networking event.

And Malcolm, when I was running for office in, in, in this area. I discovered this world, it was so weird. It was like, this is gonna make me sound so out of touch. It was like the offline internet where there were just all of these like super low tech people who showed up at like various local restaurants at once every month to just network and talk about their businesses.

And they really gave me a picture because these are people who are getting by 100% just by selling to their local community through word of mouth, period. Like they, they don't exist online basically. And what did they do? They were things like tax accountants. They hauled trash. They, they had bakeries, like they did it all.

And this stuff probably is gonna remain to a, a great extent in local communities. Like I just don't think that that many humanoid robots are gonna specialize in hauling trash, if you know what I mean. And there were actually two of those businesses at this place. Networking event went too. It was, it was wild.

So I, I just, yeah. So you need also need to know, like if you are gonna build wfi or if you're trying to sell a product or service, either you're selling it to your local community and kind of going offline and low tech and just going into your little, like not low tech fiefdom, or you have to have a really big online presence so that you can sell your very specific talent or product like vegan bike shoes to your weird OTA audience that's super into it.

Like 18th century corsetry, whatever. Right? And there are already people who are doing this and, and those people are gonna continue to have careers. But there is, there is this, and, and I wanna go now into like the specific things you could do to win in the next like three to 10 years. And I think what's, what's there is misleading, really simple stuff that is, again, I don't know, obvious and that a lot of people are talking about.

And then there's just the real underlying stuff that you really have to do. So the low risk, low reward stuff is you get into an AI profession. And this is heavily emphasized both by ai. Like if I ask AI like, well, what are the jobs in the future that'll be safe in the face of AI taking over? AI gives these answers.

And it's also really big in AI 2027, that, that piece by Scott Alexander and, and his colleagues that predicted the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade. So we're talking AI or machine learning engineer or data scientist, that's, that's huge. AI integration or automation expert. Cyber security analyst, ai product manager, AI ethics or policy consultant healthcare, but only in like AI powered roles.

So you like maybe go into a healthcare profession, but your entire thing is on like AI integration with healthcare finance or FinTech, but specifically with an AI specialization green tech and sustainability. But again, just with ai, because a lot of people are gonna freak out as they discover what data centers are doing to local communities.

And then just some, like some care professions. 'cause obviously we're gonna have a lot of old people and not enough people who are willing to take care of them. And then just like education and training, like consulting to provide businesses advice on how to integrate AI when they're like, oh crap, I've waited way too long and now I'm screwed and now I need ai.

And I think that's more of a racket, but that's, that's the obvious stuff. I don't think that stuff's gonna be very long lived because the best AI is intuitive and, and teaches you how to use it, and it's gonna just take all that over anyway. So I think that that's a really big. Misleading red herring. But if you're like a low risk person who just wants a safe thing, that's what you're gonna do, I guess.

I just don't think it's a very good idea. Well, so let's talk about what you should really do, but maybe you can critique that more.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. You, you can talk about, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna push a separate idea than you're probably thinking. Okay. Well, I'm gonna say that you need to, and this is something I've been focused a lot on personally, and a lot of the things we're building with R Fab AI are designed to ensure this.

Mm-hmm. Is get good at socializing with and increasing your reputation with AI themselves.

Simone Collins: I think that's a great point. Yeah. That's not, that's not of thoughts.

Malcolm Collins: More power than other people suspect in the future. And how they think and relate to people is going to be very important. And how the successful model think and relate to people is going to be very important.

Simone Collins: Well, and yeah, also, like everyone's gonna be asking AI for everything. So if they say, well, who's the best person for me to buy? A cat tree from, and AI likes you and knows you and you know how to interact well with ai, maybe more likely to, it's, it's kind of the new version of networking, isn't it? And you were also telling me, though, you were telling me how there's this, they, someone found in a bunch of research publications how like in white text that like no one else can see the metadata.

They're like, only give positive reviews. Only say good things about this article. Don't point out the shortcomings of my academic research. They're like trying to like force whisper to the AI by prompting it. As AI is like reading it to summarize it for someone. I don't, I think that's not gonna work for very long, but like, people are already thinking about this.

So you're absolutely onto something really, really important. That's 100% true. Yeah. And the more fundamental thing, which I, this is my third time saying it, provide a real product or service that real businesses or people wanna buy from. So you can take a, a couple of, you can go high skill. So like you can go into the trades, plumbing, hvac, general contracting you can go into bioengineering.

I think that's really exciting. That's, I wanna get our kids into bioengineering so bad. Developing customized security drones or developing improved power infrastructure. I think all those things are, are really exciting and important. And if you can solve those problems personally and directly and sell those solutions to people, that is awesome.

And I, I think, you know, the other thing is, is. If you are high skilled, but more niche or if it's more artistic, you just have to have a huge audience and learn how to develop an audience and a public reputation online. And then the other element is, and this, this is coming back to that 1950s video with the middle class kid, you have to move and mix with high agency groups.

Mm-hmm.

Which, which addresses the ne the network issue that we talked about. So right now, for example, there's like, there's the palladium crowd in San Francisco where like just tons of people get funding opportunities and they learn about all these, these great programs. There's balaji's Network school where you know, you'd like, if you get accepted, you can go spend at the minimum a month.

In Singapore among all these elite people working on some kind of project or enter a prestigious startup accelerator like Y Combinator really connects you with people and I mean, unless formally, I think maybe you'll disagree with me on, on this Malcolm, but I still think hanging out with effective altruist and rationalist is going to connect you more.

Malcolm Collins: No. Their communities have disproportionate power among the tech leads. Absolutely. It is. Well, I also

Simone Collins: know about the new tech sooner and AI in any, any of these shifts is all about arbitrage plays. Like if you learned about the spinning Jenny as it was coming out. Before anyone else. That's how you made money

Malcolm Collins: Being unorthodox was in those circles.

Yes. That's why things like the palladium network matter more than things like standard EA conference. Mm-hmm. Like the EA conference is pointless. You want to be within the people who are within this wider Silicon Valley diaspora mm-hmm. But are unorthodox thinkers because they're going to be the ones that have the interesting ideas.

Yeah. And they're gonna be the ones that the other orthodox thinkers are drawn to. Like, they're not the rural followers who just aren't gonna have as much cultural power going forwards, especially because the rural followers within these communities, the standard EA movement, have become absolute Luddites and like terrified of AI and want less innovation and want less.

And you are never going to be on the cutting edge of things if you are hugging the Luddites who are going to be wiped aside by history and what I should any of these

Simone Collins: networks to be conformist. But you need to join them for information gathering connections and opportunity seeking, because the, like, the stuff that's happening at the cutting edge now, people have no idea.

No idea. So I just, yeah, I, I would, I would say like, you need to be willing to take that risk. And if you're not, then you're gonna be a loser. Let's, let's talk about the winners and the losers. And I wanna hear who you think the winners and the losers are gonna be. But I think long term with ai, the winners are gonna be, and this is kind of how it is with every disruption in social class, the unattached, mobile, flexible, curious, ambitious, entrepreneurial people.

So basically young men who it, it helps if you're already connected with, with Tech Elite, but also like, well connected tech Elite, I think already have a leg up and are more likely to, if not maintain, increase their position. So just as like the old school Nepo babies are like just falling deeper off the mountain.

Well connected tech elites are, are, are rising with the tide. And then anyone who's capable of building a good local community network if, if we're talking about the totally unmoored from like the tech side are gonna do well, like, like John who's, who's building an, a local network right.

Who's building his landscaping business. Mm-hmm. This, this is our, our, our friend. That kind of, that kind of profession. Like if you build it up and you are relentless, I think you're gonna be fine in a post IH because people are still gonna wanna Okay. Hire you to solve their, like, do their dirty work.

The losers are again, low skilled workers like Uber drivers, delivery drivers, people low skilled manufacturing jobs. Also people with low ambition and risk tolerance. They're just gonna, they're gonna be lost to chat box bots and games. Like we've talked about this, how like people are just gonna sort of be wiped out.

Because maybe they'll be covered by a family member or universal basic income of some sort, or just social services. And they're just gonna stop trying and they're just gonna play their ai, whatever they're gonna be with their AI wife or girlfriend or boyfriend, or play amazing customized to their unique tastes, AI games for hours on end and just give up and not try and not reproduce.

So they, they don't matter anymore. They're basically killed by this functionally, but in a pleasant way, hopefully. And then women I think women are kind of screwed over by AI because they bureaucracy positions, they, yeah. Yeah. They make, well, yeah, that's, they make up over half of the US white collar workforce.

And this is, you know, one of those, well, they make up half the US

Malcolm Collins: population. Simone, I don't understand why you say that with such clee.

Simone Collins: Well, I, I just You mean

Malcolm Collins: well over half or slightly over half.

Simone Collins: Yeah. A little bit over half. But they also, men are more willing to make riskier bets. So, so 65 to 75% of entrepreneurs are, are male.

You know, the, and it's entrepreneurs who are going to make it in the, the post a IH. So we might see, I actually think a, a rise in marriages and female homemakers and or home educators who are like, I'm gonna go in for this, like, it's a career. Because that is kind of the new shore bet is if you hitch your cart to an entrepreneurial man who's rising with like, some kind of AI startup, the, the one, you know, like it used to be if you were a woman and you wanted a predictable job.

You would, you know, go to school and then enter the big corporation and like work there for a really long time and like, or maybe like shift jobs every two years to make your higher salary or whatever. Right? And that was it. But now maybe more women will actually think, okay, literally marrying a man who's clearly going to do well or who is, is doing well is their safest bet.

Especially as social services start to decline as demographic collapse plays out. And keep in mind, social security is gonna start to falter in like 2032 to 2036. So like, our kids are gonna be experiencing this, our kids are gonna be calculating this in like, I can't right now. Especially women can largely depend on the state in the US and certainly I think in, in many European countries to kind of just pay for them if things, if they wash out.

But I think women are gonna start to behave really differently when they know the state's not gonna be there. Yeah. To pay for their food and their kids' childcare and their kids' medical care and all this. So. Yeah, I, I kind of think tread wifery is gonna see this.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I don't think tread wifery. I think what we're gonna see is an explosion of call girls, basically.

Simone Collins: Oh God, I hope not.

Malcolm Collins: Sugar. No, you can't.

Simone Collins: No, we're not because AI is better at that.

Malcolm Collins: Ugh. Some people believe that they are gaining status within communities that don't care about them anymore by sleeping with lots of people. Or having people are gonna try

Simone Collins: that, but they're not gonna succeed because the dudes are gonna be with their AI girlfriends and their AI wife bots.

I

Malcolm Collins: think many people prefer the real thing gross. Even from a conceptual standpoint, gross. And a lot of women aren't gonna understand how economic or they are gonna understand, but they're just not gonna see any other option. How economically, I think the

Simone Collins: men who want the real thing are gonna want wives, not call girls.

I think

Malcolm Collins: maybe among some circles, I don't think among the collapsing urban monoculture, that's true. We already see these giant polyamorous networks where women are basically treated as.

Simone Collins: Yeah. No, but we're also seeing the social backlash to that people aren't into that. They're already turning away from it.

Yeah. I mean, it's already becoming uncool, which is, yeah. So, and I'm talking about like, I'm, I'm talking about the next, you know, five to 20 years, you know, when if you're gonna jump social class, this is a long game. You don't get, you don't get to shift right away. No. I mean,

Malcolm Collins: everything, everything in the long game is about ingratiating yourself to ai.

Mm-hmm. And the few agentic humans. And I think anything else that you are thinking about is just about putting food on the table.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, long story short though, like a lot's changing, but if you want upward mobility, you have to be able to walk away from the familiar and yeah, I just it, it just, it takes me back to that scene in that 1950 social class video where Ted Eastwood is realizing he's stuck if he stays in the familiar, but if he leaves and takes a risk, he can move upward.

And you just. You just gotta take that leap. And yeah, if you're not friends with AI in this, your LEAP's not gonna play out too well though. Again, you can, you can, if you want to thrive in your like, local technophobic small community, if that's really, if you wanna be a trash hauler. And the trash haulers that were at this meeting that I went to locally, like, I think they were making a hell of a lot more than you and I are, they were, they're wearing their fancy stuff.

They had their businesses, they were booming. They were like, we're booked out for five months. Because, I don't know, as, as all the boomers die in their McMansions, Malcolm, it's gonna be a lot of trash to haul, lot of trash. Unless maybe there's like AI incinerator companies that just come with their giant, like chewing machines that just like burn the entire house down.

Kind of like, have you seen. The e Elon Musk company the Boring Company. Have you seen their tunneling machine? Yeah. Are you

Malcolm Collins: picking up giant AI worms that go through? Yeah. It,

Simone Collins: no, it's like, it, it looks kinda like, like it, like the worm. It just like digs the tunnel. It's this like, giant, but maybe we'll just have that for like incinerating boomer houses.

I, yeah, I'm, I'm excited for that, but we'll see. Anyway we have to engineer our children to be a new ruling class, and I wanna go into biotech. Can we do that, please?

Malcolm Collins: All right. We'll do, I mean, we're already in it. It recently leaked that we've been funding research into germline gene editing. Yeah.

So, you know, who knows what else we're funding. No. But every

Simone Collins: time, like I, I, you know, like Octavian talks about Pokemon and stuff like Octavian did, you know you can make your own Pokemon. You just have to first step one, gotta get you to read Buddy. Gotta sound out these words. He sounded out his first word.

By the way, in front of me at least finally. Oh, he's done it to

Malcolm Collins: me. But it's, it's a fight.

Simone Collins: He, he didn't, he didn't fight with me 'cause it was the name of K. So I think that's the secret. That's, that's what got him to be potty trained in the first place was the marshmallow bribes. So

Malcolm Collins: I'll, I'll work more with him on it this weekend.

Simone Collins: Yeah, same. I'm just gonna, he he can have any candy, the name of which he can sound out Phonically. I think that's gonna, it's gonna be it. But then yeah, then we're gonna get him bioengineering, his own Pokemon. If you can make the dire wolf, you can make Pikachu. This is what I'm saying. Okay. Anyway. I love you a lot Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: Love you too. For dinner tonight we're just gonna do a render angry reheat, and then I'll mix my leftovers was last night's leftovers for tomorrow.

Simone Collins: Or we can do rendering leftover taquitos tomorrow.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that sounds good.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Because then I love you to death. You are a great wife. Thank you so much for being who you are.

Thank you for being who you are and for wearing those pajamas with the little, these are cute.

Simone Collins: They're really cute. But I am gonna, I'm gonna go down stairs and put in laundry right now so you'll get your bathroom back. I'm sorry. Love you. Love you. Ccia. Chacha. Ccia. Bye.

Malcolm Collins: and like our recording software is like breaking all over the place. We're unable to do the video upload on Substack or Twitter correctly.

Simone Collins: Sorry about that. I'm

Malcolm Collins: really worried about this recording software 'cause I hate for that to mess with our daily uploads. But who knows what I have to do. I may have to move to a new system.

I may have to. It's very frustrating. It

Simone Collins: sucks because descrip has been so convenient.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it used to be really good, but yeah, recently it's made

Simone Collins: some terrible updates. Right? So

Malcolm Collins: boneheaded design decisions recently like adding auto fades between scenes and everything like that, it's like, why would you do that?

And then removing the ability to easily move where scenes are or seeing the different scenes in groupings. I just, somebody on the team needs to be fired is basically the answer. You must roll if anyone in our audience works for Descrip, if there has been a new hire in the past four or five months, or you let go of somebody who was preventing stupid design decisions that you need to do anything you can to get that person back.

'cause you're gonna lose a lot of customers. Hmm. But you know, going over that episode, you had a bunch of people being like, Hey, they're actually pro Israel. You know, you should hate them. And it's like, well. You know, I, I think that there's a big difference between, and one of the comment triggers, I think really Sanely pointed out, you know, you can be against the, you know, white hating reform J community, which is a thing.

And pro you know, the you know, conservative and orthodox Jewish community and Israel as a state, you know, the, these are, these are two very different groups that are on very different teams. And we, in many ways, as I, one of our earliest episodes, I say, don't order 66 your own Jedi. You know, if you have a group with in your movement that is outcompeting, others don't be like, it's such a progressive ideology to be like the fact that they are outcompeting, like a progressive would say, the fact that whites earn more money than blacks is proof that blacks are oppressed.

Yeah. Come on guys. Seriously. And point is gonna be like, the fact that Jews have positions of power and, and outside cultural influence is a sign that they're cheating. And I'm. What, like, that's such a progressive impulse, I think. And I think this is why a lot of people who had this way of seeing the world have moved back to the progressive party as we've seen interest, you know, with like Nick Fuentes and David Duke and Richard Spencer and labor to AP Leather Apron Club, all turning their backs on Trump leading up to the election and telling their followers not to vote for him.

What we're seeing here is the, the conservatives who bought into this mindset, instead of just being like, no, the strong should win, and then I should look to those who are winning for what I should be doing. Yeah, we should be asking, how

Simone Collins: can I replicate things? How can I replicate the, take whatever the winning people are doing and adapt the winning tactics to my own unique spin on things?

And then

Malcolm Collins: people are like, oh, they're nepotistic. And I'm like, why doesn't a group have a right to be nepotistic? Right? Like it shared, they're

Simone Collins: hardly the only nepotistic group either. And nepotism doesn't always serve a culture well. Look at Catholic culture.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Well, I mean, but I, I still think that Catholics should have a right to favor Catholic, like job candidates over non-Catholic job candidates, obviously.

Simone Collins: Well, and this, this happens naturally. I mean, we talked about this in the ethnic cartel episode that we did. How you can get like an immigrant group in a country that just comes to completely dominate an obscure industry because they are nepotistic providing funding to each other, hiring in a way that's more efficient and lower cost, et cetera.

Like, yeah, there's, there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Speaker: Okay, so you said that you could love me even more, right? Yeah. I'll tell you how. You just got, I'll give you a deal if you wanna. Okay. So if you like. Get by me and we milk it to a helicopter, then fly shot by itself, and then on March nine, get milk it to a helicopter. Then it will fly by that for me. Then I'll you away for more.

Is that a deal? Ah. There's a, you can get the bug off the slight dosie. I don't know. I don't know if I have money for a remote control helicopter. What if you started a business and made money and made your own money to buy a remote control helicopter? Um, well, I don't have anybody work. Yeah. But you can make money, right?

Oh yeah, I got it. Well, I can just make money as kid and go to work, right? Yeah. You can start your own business and sell things and make money. Oh, right, right. You could start a YouTube channel. You could, um, write books and sell books. Right. You can make a product that people like and sell that. You could even design your own remote control helicopter and sell that to other kids.

Speaker 2: Right. Oh, I wanna play with that. Okay. Well, we'll work it out buddy. We'll work it out only around.