So here's the thing what's up with?
With Marxism is a there's a lot in marx critique of capitalism
That's actually right and so that kind of gets you through the door once you start looking at the analysis
And then there's the prescription which is toxic
 
But it's not obvious why it's toxic in other words
It's a pretty good story that doesn't happen to function and so people gravitate to it because the story is
Moderately compelling it's not game theoretically
functional or stable or viable and it does descend into this kind of you know inevitable grave violence and so
We know that now historically. It's not just a theoretical issue. We've now seen enough of it to know that as a fact but nonetheless
the fact that there are people telling the story to
Kids who don't yet know what to do with something?
That sounds like it might be true is very dangerous. If you don't mind break it down as to why it goes bad
Well, I mean it's sort of a tired critique
but I happen to think it's about right which is that it just does not take account of what the human being is and
What makes?
society function spoken like a true fascist
Well I think it might be related back to
Ok so let's go back to the idea that Marx had something to say ok, and we could clarify that a little bit
So here's a problem
This is the problem that that seems to emerge as the function of some really fundamental force that we don't quite understand
And that's this phenomena that I've been referring to as the Pareto distribution ok so here's the here's the situation
if you look at any
Creative endeavor that human beings engage in so that would be an endeavor where there's variability and individual production
It doesn't matter what it is. Here's what happens people compete to produce whatever that is and
almost everybody produces zero they lose completely a
small minority are a tiny bit successful and a hyper minority are
Insanely successful and so the period distribution for and the Pareto distribution is is the what geometric graph?
representation of that phenomenon and so
Here's how it manifests itself?
If you have ten thousand people a hundred of them have half the money
So the rule is the square root of the number of people under consideration have half of whatever it is
That's under consideration so this works everywhere so if you took a hundred
Classical composers ten of them produce half the music that's played and then if you take the ten composers
And you take a thousand of their songs thirty of those songs
Which is the square root of a thousand roughly speaking are played 50 percent of the time and so there's this underlying natural law?
Which is it's expressed as the mathieu principle which is from a New Testament statement the statement is?
To those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken it's a vicious statement
But it's it's actually here's one of those places where it's actually empirically true this happens everywhere
And so what Marx observed was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people and he said
That's a flaw of the capitalist system. That's wrong
It's not a flaw of the capitalist system
It is a feature of every single system of production that we know of no matter who set it up
And how it operates and so and then now we have a problem because what happens is
As soon as you set up a domain of production, and you need to because you need things to be produced
Then you instantly produce a competition and the spoils go
disproportionately to a tiny percentage of people
So then the quiz yeah
So then well, so what well so the rest of the people starve or the system becomes unstable because everybody's mad
It's like that's a big problem ok so how do human beings fix that well the first thing we did was
diversify the number of productive games
So you don't get to be NBA basketball star, but you know you can run a podcast
it's a completely different competitive landscape so we can fraction 8 the
The production landscape and then people who aren't successful in one domain might be successful in others. That's create human creativity
We're really good at that
But the problem with that is you still get a positive correlation among the successful people you know so because you're so successful
For example with your podcast your YouTube videos your connection network is insane insanely powerful
Right so you still have this tendency for what's useful and good to be
What
Distributed, let's call it inequitably, and it's it's it's got the power of a physical law in fact
There are people they call themselves econo physicists
No one knows that there's a field econo physicists the Econo physics, and they use the same mathematical equations that that
Represent the propagation of molecules into a gas molecules into a vacuum to describe the manner in which money distributes itself in an economy
Okay, so Marx pointed to a fundamental issue, but he said well. That's a fault with capitalism
It's like no it isn't
It's something way more pernicious than that and it's it's something like well when one good thing happens to you
it makes you a little more powerful and attractive and so that fractionally increases the possibility that another good thing will happen to you and
then that
Spirals out of control, and you get people who have well. They have all the money or they have all the podcast downloads
You're in that position. You know what is it 1.2 billion?
Like what the hell?
But it's to those who have more and it's not because there's something oppressive about you
It's because you you rode the wave of the Pareto distribution in it and it
Threw you way that way the hell up into the stratosphere
And we don't know what to do about that
Like should you be sharing your podcast views with the with the oppressed and downtrodden? I mean, you've well
You've got a few billion. You could spread the damn things around
It's not fair that you're the only one that's being listened to you know
It's the same argument and it's a compelling argument because why the hell should you have all that power?
If you call it power you could call it authority or competence this isn't that a different argument because no one's asking anyone to download
Anything in specific no ones no one's compelling anyone to download anything specific
You could download whatever you want, and if you put more effort and more time and more focus into your work
Whatever it would be whether it's a podcast or your YouTube videos or whatever if people enjoy it
They gravitate towards it and then over time it exponentially increases the amount of people that are exposed to well
this is why I think that the
And this is the other problem with the Marxist perspective is that and the post modernist in particular like they?
conflate
power competence and authority
Unfairly now your point it's sort of the point of free marketers. You're saying well look all I'm doing is offering a product
I'm not compelling anyone. It's a quality product or at least as far as the market is concerned
It is if it turns out that everyone wants that well
What's wrong with that and I'm not disagreeing with that argument in the least?
But but it's the problem is it doesn't it doesn't fix the problem like the problem with money
Let's say the problem is is that if you let a monetary system run
All the money ends up in the hands of a very few
Small number of people and you're saying this is also with any sort of creative and any creative endeavor man now
What is wrong like? I think the real issue would be to maximize?
potential output or
Maximize the amount of successful people you'd have to figure out what's don't concentrate on what people are doing right?
Concentrate on what people are doing wrong like what? Why what are the people doing wrong that are failing whether in any crowd
That's why we put together just to meet one yen at all. That's partly
Why we put together the future authoring program because we are trying to figure out what made people?
Successful and one of the things that makes people successful is they specify a target and then aim at it
right because if you're all over the
In a relatively functional society like ours. We know what predicts success
IQ and
Conscientiousness are the biggest predictors of success now. There's a genetic lottery thing going on there
That's kind of rough
but it does say that smart people who work hard are disproportionately likely to succeed and
then you might also say well you want to remove the impediments from people who have those capabilities so that they can move forward and
one one of the predictors of success as well is to
Decide what your success is going to be and then work hard in that direction and that actually works
so I think that is a
very useful thing to do and that's well like I said that's partly why we've been working in that direction so
But it there's other problems that it doesn't still still doesn't solve like one of them is
If you don't have any money
It's really hard to get some like once you have some it's not so hard to get some more all right
but if you're at zero
Jesus, man you're in this you're in the reverse situation
Mm. You're poor you don't have anything no one wants to talk to you
You can't get out of it because you're too poor to get out of it
You know you're penalized by the economic system because you can't even afford to start playing the game
You're stuck at zero you're stuck at zero and you can't get out and the revolutionary types
You know they go to the people who are stuck at zero and they say hey you're stuck at zero
Why don't you burn the whole goddamn thing to the ground right because maybe in the next?
Iteration you won't be stuck at zero and for young men. That's a hell of a call right because they're already
Let's call them expendable
Biological and that makes them more adventurous and risk-taking if someone says and maybe that's why they wear the Che Guevara t-shirt
It's like: 'hey I'm stuck at zero well
I'd rather be with the romantic who's burning the whole thing to the ground than to just you know to stay locked in my
immobile position'
