Would never have seen visually unless you were like gingas K right because everything’s on demand and so the search for novelty uh I think is taking in some cases quite a dark term even for people who are pretty okay with the idea of pornography and eroticism as being a an important part
Of an adult diet for the Mind where where it worries me as kids for sure and I’m maybe even less worried about today than I am in 15 years when you have VR that is bordering on Photo realistic and that’s where Photoshop whoever you want in you know choose your own experience
That’s very disturbing but I I’ll be honest I’m more concerned right now about um people finding Partners to have children with I think that this is a an economic epidemic that we don’t feel comfortable talking about and why AR people comfortable talking about well because
For example if you have a fair idea that you’re at risk for not having the family thing work out like it’s gotten a little late in the day and you don’t see a lot of prospects lined up and you’ve had a few relationships that haven’t ended in commitment and resources in children and
The economy doesn’t seem to want to come up with a 30-year plan to fit a morgage and getting some kids through college um I think that the transition from the previous world has been pretty brutal and a lot of people don’t want to say yeah I really want a family and if it
Doesn’t work out I’m going to be it’s going to be a major hit to my life and my sense of myself and we need you know in part I think that a lot of us don’t want to see um young women forced onto the apps you know which seems like it
Turns life into this ever from a dating perspective yeah like a sing it’s just you know somebody somebody said this is a singles bar in my pocket and wherever I’m board I just go to the singles bar and start swiping and I thought okay and
How do you feel about he said well the aggregate I feel pretty terrible about that but I can’t stop and so now you’ve commodified all of this stuff and I don’t think it’s a good deal for young women at all um I think that you know young women
Have been used to putting men through their paces and demanding a lot and you know saying you know jump this high and seeing who can clear the bar and when that power is not present and when men can’t win these competitions and have those competitions really mean something we
Derange as a society because Society is about continuity and continuity is about babies so no matter what you want to do you can take it away from babies I remember um I was talking to a young woman who was like 26 or something and
She asked me if I had kids and I said yes and I said do you have kids and she like practically spit out her beer like what and I thought do you think it’s really the crazy question that I would ask a 26-year-old woman woman if she had
Kids um and then you know she thought about it it just feel felt very remote and this is the economy that would bething to people and my belief is is that if the median individual cannot count on being able to you know have a home in a reasonable city that has lots
Of jobs so that if one job doesn’t work they can switch and one person can stay home doesn’t have to be the dad doesn’t have to be a mom and a dad can any pair but you need some somebody with the freedom to stay home to raise children
While somebody else can be counted upon to go be the bread winner in an economy that isn’t you know absolutely Razor’s Edge this is nuts and you know was driven home to me recently my father turned 85 we were at a party for his friends and some of their closest
Friends lived in in our neighborhood when I was growing up they were saying oh yes you know when we moved in all those years ago so um there were 14 boys who used to play on the street and now there are none oh and I said what do you
Mean there are none she said what young families can’t afford to live on the street and I said do you have any thought in your mind that that was a catastrophe that happened to your street and that maybe your generation had some responsibility this is the silent generation so before the baby had
Something to do to say hey maybe this is not good for society if Young amilies she said well these homes are perfect for families I said but you just told me that there are no families on your street so this is an epidemic and this
Is deranging us and this is a lot of what’s behind this kind of sense of Injustice and people trying to um find groups I think to take care of because you have got a lot of maternal instincts that are not grounding in happy hopeful homes raising kids that’s
Really interesting what do you think is um the sort of key driver is this uh student loans is it um the average salary isn’t going up like and part of the what drives my question is I know what I pay so my my previous company I had at 1 Point 3,000 employees about
1500 full-time and then another 1500 part-time here I have 20 plus employees full-time and then another I don’t know seven or eight part-time and I know what I pay them and it’s it’s a good wage um it’s a hell of a lot more than I was making at their age that’s probably the
Easiest way to say it okay so where is it that just the way that we are and what we pay is not indicative of what other companies pay is it um is it something else is this it’s just going to be um really kind of brutal first of
All uh we we’re in an orchard with lots of lwh hanging scientific fruit where you could take the scientific fruit and turn it into technology in short order we’re still making scientific advances but most of those that are even fairly profound are not instantly convertible into technology so there might be lwh
Hanging fruit in a new Orchard but we haven’t found the new Orchard so we’re picking fruit that has a very different characteristic so that’s the first part is that our pipeline got screwed up but how does that really play out in like dollars and cents so I’m thinking of
This street right it’s the Perfect Analogy so you have a street the houses have a price to buy they have a price to rent so when I think about okay what is stopping somebody from either buying or renting so if the prices are too high
Prices are too high so then is it that the prices are artificially too high because we have a bunch of empty houses and people who are buying as an investment and they’re just being stupid so you’re fairly familiar with my theories and acronyms and things so you you’ve probably heard about the embedded
Growth obligation the ego but what I I and I get that and that scares me and I totally buy into it what I don’t and for anybody listening and tell me if I [ __ ] this up but like basically we have a system that’s entirely predicated on continued growth and that growth slowed
Down starting in the 70s or 80s and we’ve done a lot of [ __ ] Shell Games to make it seem like we’re growing the one that when you give I’m always freaked the [ __ ] out by is the essentially Ponzi scheme of Education where higher education you’re teaching people to be professors um but there’s
Only going to be so many professors or the law firm there only going to be so many partners so it’s like every graph tells the same story so but what I don’t understand is if that’s been the same since the 70s like I didn’t even graduate high school until the mid 90s
And this has nothing ever SE I mean look there were times I couldn’t quite pay my bills there were times where um you know I was sharing an apartment with a bunch of people but it’s like it it never felt like the system had broken in some
Impossible way and this isn’t me saying that it is broken this is me just saying I want to really understand like where we’ve gone wrong well so this is what I say to my friends in San Francisco so they’ve got good jobs they’re programmers they’re having a blast
They’re going to Tulum and you know traveling to Bali and all these things and so I say um you’re living in a group house what do you think about buying your own home and asking that gal you’ve been um going out with for a couple years to get married and like the
Conversation just gets really weird uh well I’m not not so confident that I can commit to a 30-year mortgage and you know prices are insane and I’m not positive that she’s the right one for me and you know all these things or if I talk to my female friends they have a
Set of different stories um which is like I’m so tired of little boys who never grow up um is this a psychological Mala like because that explanation I can understand we’re not excited about low variance Futures needed for children as we see because we don’t see things
Popping off like this isn’t uh Beijing in 2006 where it’s just like the sky’s the limit or well I think people have a have a pretty strong sense well like I hired a millennial who I’m very good friends with and I noticed that he was like not that committed to
Certain kinds of projects He would work hard but he also had a very clear sense of you know my obligation ends at this point I said I know this person I think they work here okay keep going and um I said well why why why do we have a
Difference in in a sense of work ethic and he said oh because my generation watched your generation get screwed by the Baby Boomers and we’re not falling for it do you buy that yeah that sounds like [ __ ] to me and and when I say I
Am happy to be convinced what I want is the [ __ ] truth dude because I have no interest let’s get to the truth because so I have a psychotic work ethic why because I didn’t used to and my entire life changed when I changed my work ethic but you f look you’re talk sounds
To me like you’re talking about founding companies I’ve done both I’ve been an employee and I’ve founded companies so I’ve played both sides of the fence and how did how did the employe well look I I don’t want to over index on I mean because you know there are particular
Lawyers in particular law firms who aren’t founding anything who doing just fine but it’s a minority position and what I believe is is that we are in a situation in which we are not excited by the future and the people who are real stakeholders in the system have in general been very focused
On making sure that the pyramid is always supplied so this idea for example of you have to go to college the debt has to become non-dischargeable in bankruptcy we get to load up the universities with administrators all that kind of stuff and then of course the main one which is really bizarre
Which is there’s the secret weapon and the secret weapon is immigration and the great part about immigration as a as a invidious tool for one generation to screw another generation with is that if you call it out there’s only one explanation for why you would fight having other people added to the bottom
Of a pyramid scheme which is you must be a xenophobe or probably a racist and the answer is no I’m really just trying to choke your supply of new virgins to add to this pyramid scheme so that you can continue to transfuse yourself yeah that’s interesting um so
Let me see if I can uh steal man this quickly I this is the one time in my life where I am the one that has a heart out in 5 minutes I’m so [ __ ] horrified this is so interesting to me um so I’ll try to do it quickly okay so
Um we have a pyramid scheme in that there are only so many jobs and I’ll even abstract it from being a lawyer which is very easy to understand there’s only so many people make partner being a teacher it’s easy to understand you can only create so many other teachers and
Obviously we’re talking at higher education um and I’ll just say your normal job I’ve told my employees this like look every step you go up you there’s fewer available positions until you get to the CEO and there’s only one so there’s only like you can get promotion I’ve never thought of there
Being sort of a a money does not strike me as the finite resource the promotion strikes me as a finite resource you can keep making more and more money depending on the health of the company and your contributions to it so that’s part of my bias is that when I try to
Use just first principles I’m like if this person is that valuable to me I’m going to [ __ ] pay them because I have fear of loss I don’t want to lose them so which is why default to create fear of loss in your employer if you want
More money but the company has to be doing well so let me stick to the Ponzi scheme here so um very interesting take on immigration so you have people coming into the system they’re willing to work cheaper than the other people would otherwise work in the system you got to
Be careful about that but keep going it’s interesting I’m trying to represent your position no no no but what I’m trying to say is that really the biggest issue is push out the labor supply curve you say that another way your wage is your price yep and I bring people
From foreign countries to make sure you can’t compete because they’ll do it for cheap no that’s not that I mean may maybe the idea is that you’re you’ll you’re a superior source of Labor who’s you whoever you are you’re the domestic let’s assume that you’re a
Worker inside of the US yep the big play in some sense of the previous generations the silent generation and more importantly the Baby Boomers was internationalism which they called globalization and the hidden part of globalization that wasn’t the United Colors of beniton was the idea if we can
Just break our dependence on each other other and look abroad and talk tell a beautiful story about what we’re going to do for Africa and Asia then the idea is is that we can continue to grow our slice of the pie even though the pie might not be growing at the same rate
Because from my perspective as a silent generation or baby boomer I’m focused on a slice not the pie and so there was a huge amount of value gotten from tricking people into thinking that globalization was this beautiful Davos inspired uh kind of philanthropy that was going to be a rising tide to raise
All boats and those Americans who had rights inside of our system and this goes for Brits who had British rights and French had French rights whatever had a right that was valuable which is I have asymmetric access to my labor market and that’s how we worked as
A nation so now you start the the world’s greatest PR Campaign which is patriotism doesn’t exist it’s only nationalism and of course nationalism is really Ultra nationalism which is jingoism which is a precursor to Nazism so you start saying you know I kind of believe in citizenship and patriotism
And now you’re telling me that that’s I’m a bad person and now you’ve got the Davos crowd talking about financial inclusion in Africa and Asia and you notice that they’re not really that interested in Michigan or Alabama and it’s a it’s an tell me why they’re not because I felt like I
Understood it until told me that I was getting because the amount of value you see if I had to purchase your rights uhhuh and I wrote to what well your asymmetric access to your labor market I wrote a paper called migration for the benefit of all published in the
International in the um International Journal of Labor I forget what the title is migration for the benefit of all which said if you pay people for their rights like if the Baby Boomers in silence said look we think we can get better labor outside and we want to pay
You for the right to shop elsewhere then the idea is that everybody would have been better off and we would have all screamed Kumbaya each other as we got rich together but instead what they said is you’re a protectionist and a jingoist and a xenophobe we loaded them up with as much
Negative imagery as we could POS you’re just a bad person and they were doing that though so they can get cheaper labor right so they can keep you from having leverage you keep saying it as we’re we’re willing to work below but my point is is that if this coffee mug MH cost
$10 and now we have 10,000 coffee mugs it’s not that those coffee mugs are are willing to be uh bought for Less the entire cost of coffee mugs plummets it’s just pushing out the supply curve on labor and wages its price so it behaves much as supply and demand should now you
Can then point out you can make lots of other arguments like well some of these people are starting business and people are not coffee mugs and these are the most vibrant members of our so you know you cue Stars and Stripes Forever you put your right hand over your heart but
The key point was is that all of these arguments were necessary to keep the institutional structure going as the Ponzi scheme ran out and a lot of this has to do with what I’ve called fake growth downsizing offshoring immigration securitization it’s just this mind numbing uh parade of different techniques that
These older Generations have used to keep a system afloat that has been saying we’re exhausted like the law firms are supposed to fail the universities are supposed to fail all sort the newspapers are don’t make sense as a business model and things that you’re creating and that we all might
Create would be replacing these things but instead what we’ve done is we’ve come up with an exotic kind of economic parabiosis where we’re going to transfuse our fellow Americans and the younger generations to pay for a group of people who are just far too expensive to keep living in the style to which
They have unjustly become accustomed so I’m sorry about your hard stop but I think that there’s a tremendous amount to be excited about and enthusiastic about because in essence getting back to your original Point you’re right about the Matrix for 50 years we’ve been in a constellation of ideas suppressing the
Really interesting new ideas and calling names on anybody who would propose ideas that would point out the unstable nature of of our Market democracy and right now what we’re doing is is we’re living through the beginning of a global lowgrade revolution of a type that we’ve
Never seen before if you like that clip check out the full powerful episode here and I’ll see you there
