Why Companies Want to Be Inefficient: AI, Bullshit Jobs, and the Hidden Economics of Power

Michael Vassar [00:00:00] So you have to be able to act, you have to be able to get with the program enough or play enough with them to avoid threatening them, but like also understand that they're not going to help you do things that they say they're going to help you do.

Vance Crowe [00:00:21] This is Michael Ring. I'm a cattle and crop farmer from Northern Illinois and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. I have Michael Vassar back on the podcast and as you will hear, if you listen for just a little while, we're about to have a conversation that rocks me to the very core. I hear about ideas and concepts that are very difficult for me to wrap my brain around the nature of good and evil and really what is it that makes us who we are. This is one of those conversations that I highly recommend you listen to the entire thing because Michael has a way of slowly stacking on ideas and in the beginning as we're looking around for what are we gonna talk about and how are we gonna structure this, you'll see that we are building towards a conversation about the nature of good and evil that I've never heard before. We'll talk about Romeo and Juliet, Romans and Jews, all kinds of concepts about religion and even things like sexual morays. This is a phenomenal conversation and thank you for being a person that comes here and checks this out. If you really value these kinds of conversations, I hope you will go to whatever podcast app you're listening on and write a review and give us five stars. We have been growing rather rapidly in the last few weeks and it is all because you are helping us grow. Another big thing, one of the reasons I'm doing these online is because just outside there, we have been expanding the offices of Legacy Interviews.

Vance Crowe [00:02:01] We've been growing and doing so many interviews that we had to build out new office space, space for people to do their waiting while they're listening to their loved one or spouse. In here. We've got editors, all kinds of things going on, and that is a chance for me to sit down with your loved ones and have them describe for me their lives, their stories, the values and wisdom that they've picked up along the way. And we record that on video and even transcribe it and put it in a leather bound book. And this is so that you can pass this wisdom onto future generations. What you'll hear in this conversation with Michael Vassar is the extreme power of being able to pass down stories so that people can know how to live in a very uncertain world. And if you would like to learn more, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out. Alright, without further ado, let's head to the interview with my man, Michael Vassar. Michael Vassar, welcome back to the podcast.

Michael Vassar [00:03:01] Nice to see you again, Vince.

Vance Crowe [00:03:03] So since we did our first podcast, you and I have become quite good friends talking frequently. Just last week I had Malcolm Collins on who was recommended to me by you, and we were talking all about how the children are not all right. And it was kind of a mind blowing conversation for my audience because a lot of the things that he was talking about with population collapse is shocking to the ag audience because they've been propagandized for the last 10 to 15 years are advertised to saying, you have gotta become way more efficient way, way more productivity. You gotta get way more food out there. And so when he was saying, no, no, no, the population isn't expanding too fast, it's collapsing. This started quite a conversation. And so since it was such a good one, I decided to have you on to see if we couldn't carry this conversation in other interesting directions.

Michael Vassar [00:03:50] That sounds fun. Let's go.

Vance Crowe [00:03:52] So when you are looking around at the world these days, what are you paying attention to?

Michael Vassar [00:03:58] Well, I remember Will Eden posting on Twitter not that long ago that it seemed like the media had split into four completely un intersecting stories. The story of the Twitter acquisition for the very online, the story of, sorry, the story of embankment trade for the very online, the story of the Twitter, a acquisition for the mainstream, the story of Ukraine for the sort of policy of on internationals and the story of the elections for the like main, very mainstream or something. And I would've added the Kanye Hitler events for the group of people who would pay attention to that. But it seems like there was this final fragmentation of media stories around Christmas and then no new story has really consolidated. The war in Ukraine has escalated a lot. The SBF thing sort of went into hibernation and then recently GPT chat started getting a hell of a lot of attention and then Microsoft put out B Bing Sydney and a lot of journalists spoke with that. And so it seems like for the first time, really the all of the narratives have been cast away and the narratives that I've been at the absolute center of for 15 years has become the only narrative, which is the extremely rapid progress of AI and what it means for our society and what about what we are, et cetera.

Vance Crowe [00:05:21] So I've been using the open ais chat, I've used it to help me brainstorm. I use it to write emails that I've like struggling to get through. And I see that this is going to just wipe out all of the like middle grade copywriters that are out there. But what should people be thinking about that's beyond just blog writers?

Michael Vassar [00:05:42] So I think that there's not just the GPT chat, there's also things like Dolly and Whisper and the competition for Mid Journey and the fact that the competition Midjourney is running it with eight employees and a founder on out of pocket resources generating huge revenues not from ads, but from paying users and you know, producing a product that people are willing to pay a lot for rather than GPT than open AI's Dolly. So we can really see that this is not a big company game, even for big super new companies like OpenAI. It's more of a game of aesthetics and getting your branding right so that you can not be canceled and not become super boring and to not cause too many people to be upset while doing things that are exciting and you know, inspiring of wonder and a sense of possibility. Certainly MIDJOURNEY will put a lot of illustrators out of business. Certainly OpenAI will put a lot of copywriters out of business, but it'll help the good existing copywriters to work much faster and make a lot more money in the very short run. And that's true for a lot of other people who could be using OpenAI to boost their productivity if they're good at taking use, making use of a new technology before the productivity in their field folds. Very fun.

Vance Crowe [00:06:55] You know, the Dolly is one of those things that I use a bunch because I have to make, like I make these presentations. I'm giving a talk this weekend up in Iowa to a bunch of pork producers. I need to have an image for flaming war pigs. And I was able to just type in, you know, pigs on fire, you know, and make a photograph of it and it looks pretty good, it does the job. How much further forward is this technology gonna go?

Michael Vassar [00:07:18] So I think that Dolly and Midjourney and things like them are going to just fill the world with any sort of art that we have lots of examples for. And artists can still create new styles and get ahead of the curve producing the first, you know, few hundred instances of a new style or vibe or seen before the systems learn. Sometimes maybe there will be a possibility for people to produce, you know, thousands of works before they really get generalized into a GE show. But like it does mean that the implementation of an instance of an existing style isn't going to be very compensated once this technology comes into wines produce. And it also means that far, far, far more of this type of style material in any given style is going to be ave available. We're going to be inundated to with it and we're going to get whatever benefits there are from having it available in much larger quantities, which I think include getting people with much wider range of viewpoint, an opportunity to get their ideas out and getting people who are like, aren't willing to bend their mind in the ways that copywriters do, being able to get copywriting at all.

Vance Crowe [00:08:28] Wait, why do you think this surprising that you think it's going to open up the dialogue as opposed to restrict it?

Michael Vassar [00:08:34] So these technologies are freely available. They make it much cheaper to have the accoutrements of power and establishment position. You know, if you are doing prison advocacy, mental health reform, things like that, that I'm doing, the populations serving don't have to to speak a lot of them with a level of articulate mainstream western like standard American English that would cause their statements to be received in a non-ST stereotyped fashion by the large majority of people. So if you can translate across more dialects, more class boundaries, communicate with more people, you, you can disin, I mean, one way of thinking about this is that the whole professional managerial class and the whole of aesthetic professional aesthetic is about creating barriers to entry, making it impossible for people who are outside of these aesthetics to be received as legitimate sources of information.

Vance Crowe [00:09:41] So, whoa, this is really fascinating. So I, the way I hear you saying this is the type of people that know how to make a beautiful website, for example, are able to have their messages heard because you see it and you think, oh, that's way more credible than the guy that's just writing it and he's throwing it up with times new Roman font and it's, you know, the the, the text looks out of whack. And I'd never really thought about that being a managerial class way to create a barrier, like a barrier of entry.

Michael Vassar [00:10:10] Yeah, that's a lot of what mandarins are about in China where you have like extraordinary cultivation of calligraphic skill and if you want a message to be received, you're, it's gotta be a, a piece of art that could be sold in a museum hundreds of years later.

Vance Crowe [00:10:28] I mean, this strikes me as something that is right in front of you every day but never really saw it. I mean, I can feel it with my own, you feel it when you build a website when you're like, ah, I'm gonna have to spend the money to make this look better even though all of my ideas are here. It's not, it's not created in a way that makes it, people feel really good about it. And like you can see that happening across all kinds of domains.

Michael Vassar [00:10:52] Yeah, I could imagine like if we wanted to be really ambitious doing something like banning advertising for money and taking in, keeping the ad companies alive, but now they have to get their cust their resources from the consumers and implementing a guaranteed basic ad scheme where everyone has a certain amount of money to spend on ad AdWords and Facebook ads and on basic minimal web development skills from India for using open AI to produce a standard aesthetic. And like, you know, we could have a very, very different natural national conversation and a very, very different market.

Vance Crowe [00:11:28] Well, something like that is happening not in this like, you know, weird world where you're talking about you know com like turning it into a socialist utopia, but there's a platform called Noster out there now and Noster. But

Michael Vassar [00:11:42] How is basic ads a socialist utopia? I'm suggesting that you could have an equalization of people's communicative capacities, not an equalization of their ownership of resources, but equalization of their ability to ask for attention and to present messages in a ways that other people can understand.

Vance Crowe [00:11:58] Fair enough. But you're also asking for people's work to be socialized, right? That you're making it so they're not allowed to work on some things that they want and they have to work on other things. No,

Michael Vassar [00:12:09] So I guess I was, so, okay, I was suggesting that like Google can't sell its AdWords to corporations anymore for money. They have to buy, sell their AdWords to members of the general public for credits that the government's giving them for buying AdWords. And the government can continue to fund Google to keep doing this, but they, you know, the, now Google is competing with Facebook and Microsoft for their ability to appeal to the general public as a customer rather than for their ability to appeal to corporate media and the like.

Vance Crowe [00:12:43] Yeah, I guess the intervention of the government credit system might be the socialism that I'm describing.

Michael Vassar [00:12:48] Oh. But that's just having policies at all. And I agree that having policies at all could be considered socialistic by comparison to something. But like we have a lot of policies for how we implement like the communication spectrum. We're going to give it out to A-B-C-S-N-B-C and CBS and have it blocked out for the military in certain areas. And if you don't have policies about communication channels, then you have, you know, everyone talking over each other.

Vance Crowe [00:13:16] Well, we're about to see, because like as I was just about to say, the, the Noster platform is going to be a different way of people interacting and the way that money changes hands in advertising. So I actually just barely use Noster at all. It, it's like, it's totally the wild west, it's the very beginning of this new way of people connecting to the internet. Probably like a, like people talked about like Web3 0.0 or something like that. But this is like really on a different level and one of the things that's happening in that space is people are able to do what are called zaps. So you're able to take really tiny amounts of Bitcoin satoshi and be able to give them to people because they've done something you, like, somebody puts up a meme like you can zap them money. And unlike the, the, the regular system where you're having to use credit cards to be able to send money around where the credit card company's like, I'm not moving any money unless you pay me a $2 fee. The Zaps could be way, way, way less than even a single penny. And this is going to enable people to be creators in a really different way. So for example, people listen to this podcast on the fountain app and the Fountain app allows people to stream so that they can, if you're listening to my podcast, I get paid based on how much time you are listening from your wallet. And I think this kind of thing is going to benefit creators way, way more than any kind of weird government ad scheme.

Michael Vassar [00:14:47] I mean I don't think the scheme I propose is gonna happen. It would be a, you know, disintermediation of an enormous power base. It's just like an example of the sort of thing that might actually get us out of some of the, you know, social crisis we're in right now where no one believes any information that they can receive because it either looks wrong or it looks right, which means it's from bad guys.

Vance Crowe [00:15:08] So let's talk about this. Where, where do you, like, where do you think the media landscape is gonna go not just in the next year but in the next five years, like will CNN be around?

Michael Vassar [00:15:19] I mean it basically seems to me that at this point at like almost 10 years ago, Fox transitioned from positioning itself as a source of information about what's going on in the world to positioning itself as a source of information about what it wants. It stands to say what the talking points are and what it is telling people to do. And I feel like by like a few years later, CCNN and NBC and A BC, et cetera had also transitioned to that more openly authoritarian model. And I think that the customers for open authoritarianism are probably gonna stay with the type of open authoritarianism that's enabled by the traditional news interfaces and you know, but, but it seems conceivable that over the next five years the people who had been under the impression that they were getting news from these sources and had been getting news from these sources before the new business model will gradually turn around and look for things that are actual news sources. But there's going to continue to be enormously strong social pressures to cause anything that begins to emerge as a widely credible news source around which people are coordinating their actions to be asked to take on an authoritarian character or be under really aggressive attack with extreme dirty tricks as we see from things like the Twitter files.

Vance Crowe [00:16:46] Yeah, when you looked at the Twitter files, I mean you're kind of tapped into things way before other people are kind of what I call up the graph here on the podcast. Did anything of the Twitter files surprise you?

Michael Vassar [00:16:58] I think that I didn't feel like I had a strong opinion about the details and I feel I know the details better. I think the thing that surprised me most is the types of excuses and justifications that people made for claiming that this wasn't government tradition and freedom of speech or that these were not orders from the intelligence agencies. So it's perfectly legal and normal, like the way in which the mainstream media both totally blocked the information out and only used a few tiny cherry px, extremely shamelessly. And the way in which the people who supported the status quo defended it were interesting. And I think come down to a lot of people taking a political stance openly that they had previously gradually been coerced into, but which would've been a horror to them to know 20 years ago they were going to end up taking openly.

Vance Crowe [00:17:57] And you're saying like when the government would be like, Hey, this guy is kinda getting a little bit, you know, disinformation will you get rid of him? And they're like, no questions asked, just like, you know, shadow ban him and then like, but somehow they've convinced themselves that like, oh well this needs to happen for the security of the country kind of thing.

Michael Vassar [00:18:16] Yeah. Or like even maybe it's not great, but this is just, you know, normal government act activity, nothing to see here, folks move along, you know, what did you expect?

Vance Crowe [00:18:28] Yeah, I mean I think the craziest thing is how the media was able to bring the general population along to such an extent that when they finally came out and said there was a lab leak that people are like, oh, okay, well I guess the, I guess it was a lab leak and it was China and like these weird things were happening. Like I, it to me, it's hard for me to wrap my brain around the fact that the government could be that clever at propaganda, but now I'm like, no, they really are. They, they knew the whole time that it was, they knew if they denied it for long enough that they could get away with it. And then finally after people are exhausted on other things, they just slide it out and nobody cares. There's no outrage, there's no calling for people's jobs or giant trials. Like it's all just no big deal.

Michael Vassar [00:19:17] Yeah, I mean, we don't know yet what will happen eventually. And right now they're not saying it was a lab leak. They're saying it looks to us the Department of Energy who have a certain amount of expertise in this domain, like it was a lab leak. But like I think that if there were prediction markets at this point, they would put pretty high values on at least some governments, some societies, some advanced industrial societies coming to the mainstream consensus among the educated that it was a lab leak. I think,

Vance Crowe [00:19:47] I mean, and even, but let's just say now, let's say tomorrow the FBI comes out and says we agree that this is a lab leak. I think that people, at least the, there's no amount of outrage like, like if for as many people as we're harmed by this, both the actual disease itself and then the policies associated with it are far, far more wide reaching than the things that prompted the Black Lives Matter riots and the George Floyd protests and things like this. And yet we won't see any level of that amount of emotional pushback on this because I, I mean I think the government knew how to softly land this plane.

Michael Vassar [00:20:28] I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of the population have accepted that they're ruled by authoritarians, that they have no voice, that they should have no voice, that what would it even mean? We don't know anything. How could we, and that like to resist is just to be a loser, to be someone who ought to be shunned, who's gonna take you down if you are associating with them. I think that it's just very unclear to most people what to do when confronted with like holocaust sized death counts by their own government when it has not then suffered a military defeat afterwards and lost its position as their own government. You know, the large number of people would like the government to not fund game of function research in China. But, you know, well what you're gonna do is the attitude. And I think that the young people don't realize that things were different in the past. I think that if you're younger than 27, you don't have memories of a society where there was a credible sense that there's rule of law and not by men and that we have a say and we can prevent people from just murdering in unlimited proliferation in our names without our consent including killing us. That that that sort of attitude is characteristic of totalitarian regimes. And 20 years ago, basically everyone would know that and it, it like, it, it's, I don't think it's so much that the government is super sophisticated, it's that the government is operating from within a perspective that recognizes that the population has been subjugated has been more or less completely subjugated.

Vance Crowe [00:22:17] The hardest part for me is like, I don't wanna be a cynic, right? Like my, my life is made better by being, or at least it feels better by being positive and being like, no, it's, it's great. Look at the freedoms we have and I don't want to be down. But I will say over the last several years, like it does seem like many of those beliefs are naivety to a degree that is a blindness, right? Where, and and, and like you've said, if you become a person that is like, no, these things are really bad and you don't have a say in it and the government is doing, you know, really atrocious things, you do get kind of pushed out of the, the like larger mainstream dialogue and you really are, you know, pushed all the way to a corner of people that are, are not acceptable in wider society. And you, you wonder like what would, what do Chinese people think about what their government is doing to them? Of course they should know all these things and then you look around at ourselves and you're like, oh we fall for the literal exact same propagandizing tricks.

Michael Vassar [00:23:21] It seems like when Americans talk about China, they know they're living under such extreme propaganda against China that they don't actually have any information and that they're just support to support and repeat negativity and lies. And they're also going to be talking quietly about themselves by talking about China. You know, you can say we don't like these behaviors if you're saying the Chinese are doing these behaviors and so they can maintain some level of sanity inside of their heads where they're, you know, only hypocritically submitting to something but they can retain some like record of what their values used to be in a, you know, mitigated or confused form.

Vance Crowe [00:23:59] I, I've been convinced by your argument now over time that the young people don't realize that things were different at a different time and that and that like when you do talk with young people, because I thought that I was being propagandized that young people didn't believe in freedom of speech and then I started asking them about it when I would encounter them and they don't, they like, they really do think, well there's cer certain safety things we need to watch out for and it's better to have, you know, some control. So we don't have bad information getting out there. And when I was in grade school, high school, college, these were things that were hardcore audience. I mean I remember my communications classes in college talking about, you know, freedom of speech is sacrosanct, there's no, you know, without that value you can't have a whole bunch of other things, but that's just not what people believe today.

Michael Vassar [00:24:51] Yeah, that's just true. I think that the only people who, the demographic that believes it most are basically people who were into the internet before the mainstream. So like people who are the geekier you were, the earlier you got online, the more of the old attitude you were exposed to. But that attitude had already been driven out of all of the communication channels and all of the media vet long before you or I grew up. So we were kind of actually being duped by the pre-internet news and you know, which was already covertly authoritarian but through filtering. But it, it, you know, we also need to understand that the news was less authoritarian back in the sixties for instance, that like when Kennedy and Nixon were debating they were doing a fundamentally different thing from what Ford and Carter were doing when they debated 16 years later. And you know, it's very easy to look at the Ford and Carter debate and see it as similar to like the presidential debates we might have to today.

Vance Crowe [00:25:54] I don't have any context here. Tell me, describe it in more detail.

Michael Vassar [00:25:58] So Kennedy and Nixon seem to be basically trying to educate the public about what's going on in the world around them and how they each see it and what sorts of policies they think would be better and why while trying to impress the public with how smart and verbally deft and you know, quick thinking they are. That's like incredibly totally gone in today's presidential debate. But it was also totally gone in the very next presidential debate, which was not four but 16 years later between Ford and Carter.

Vance Crowe [00:26:29] And you're saying at that point they had already figured out the tool that was the television and, and the techniques of getting information out and so they were no longer talking about truth and they're playing a communications game.

Michael Vassar [00:26:41] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:26:44] Well where where do we go from here? Do you just like submit and you say, well we're in a totalitarian state, or how, how does one move forward?

Michael Vassar [00:26:52] Well it's a relatively nice totalitarian state. I mean it looks like it's on the way to being a much less sexy Brazil type thing. It's not like a, it's not an extremely racist totalitarian state and it needs to protect itself from the extreme risk of becoming a much more racist totalitarian state. 'cause those can go really badly.

Vance Crowe [00:27:14] It seems like a racist state to me. It seems like we are talking about race constantly. I remember being at the World Bank and and remembering like, oh Vance, you know, you're a white American male, it's gonna be really hard for you to get a job there. But that was acceptable because it was a, you know, an international organization and it was only five years later that I see this go talking about and and be and happening in, in corporate America. And so you, you know, like it might not be the sort of racism of, you know, lynchings in the south, but it definitely does seem like policies and ideas being put out that, that are based on race. And I'll give you a really good example. There was a guy named Chris Bennett who's an author. He writes in the ag world, he put up an article about how the USDA started allowing people that were like, i, I don't know if it was just not white or if it was black and Hispanic, I don't remember exactly, but they were allowed, the black and Hispanic were allowed to discharge their debt and the white people did not have this option. So it was basically allowing people to get rid of government

Michael Vassar [00:28:19] Loans, right? So there's a lot of, there's a, we are living in a totalitarian bureaucracy and a lot of the rules of that totalitarian bureaucracy refer to race explicitly or so strongly implicitly as it might as well be explicit as in for instance, apartheid South Africa where most of the policies were implicit, not explicit. Nonetheless, we are not anywhere remotely near lynchings or Crystal kn the, you know, worst things we see are like George Floyd and George Floyd riots and the, i i I want to emphasize the, the boogeyman of the right critical race theory is basically just saying we exist in a state where a lot of the policies explicitly or so strongly implicitly as to make no difference, do reference race and not in a society of rule of law. And then the proposals for reform for changing things have to take into account the fact that that's not basically where we are right now and have to take account into account the actual place where we are right now. So like if you've ever heard of the blog, the last Psychiatrist, I would recommend the article or the Terrible Awful Truth about supplemental security income, which is a wonderful article that could be described as a critical race theory article but written by a psychologist and without the sort of agenda that you might normally associate with the concept.

Vance Crowe [00:29:37] So say more about that. Well actually let me finish the Chris Bennett story. So the reason I'm telling this is because I if, if the ag audience understood this happened, they would be surprised. So Chris puts this article up, it goes up on Ag, ag daily and within like three or four hours Chris had already texted me and said, Hey man, read this article 'cause it's not gonna be around for long. And he was right boom, pulled down not because there was anything wrong with the article but because the sponsors didn't like it and they asked to have it taken down so it's gone. So now even somebody describing these things happened is like the, they're, they're at least not allowed to be on the most mainstream of channels within the ag.

Michael Vassar [00:30:14] Oh yes, the most mainstream channels are completely controlled already by these sorts. I mean like the basic fact about a caste based society is that it's a society where people can't talk about the systems of violence and oppression that they're living under. You know, that's a lot of what for instance postcolonial theory is about the concept of subaltern studies, like broadly the woke narrative, the more academic elite part is simply the narrative that spells out the nature of a totalitarian society. And it does it from the perspective of a group that accepts totalitarianism as a feta company and accepts that different groups are given certain accommodations so that they don't just plain get killed right now in a way that will force them to rise up. And so it talks about the nature of those accommodations and how they can be protected from being squeezed down in the name of false narratives that we all at this point know are false. So

Vance Crowe [00:31:13] You can finish your i'd, I'd be interested in pursuing the psychologist line of thinking that you were talking about because the, I don't have enough context to be able to know what the right next question is.

Michael Vassar [00:31:27] I think the right next question might be, so there really was at some point the United, United States of America as understood by people who are good historians of like the frontier. And there really was at some point the United States of America as understood by good historians of like 1900 and there really was a United States of America as understood by good historians of the fifties, but there really never was an America that roughly corresponds to the American dream, which is the sort of prestige of different themes from these different periods bring in values across periods and suggesting that some collage of the fifties, the frontier and the like immigrant era was, is like some American essence that ought to all be brought together under a shared set of values. There was never any hope or intention or way of doing that or way of articulating clearly what these different values of these different eras and cultural achievements and losses look like. So at this point we kind of have to figure out what sort of a society we want to build with the history we've got and with the people we've got and the people we've got definitely couldn't take a American frontier society. They would just starve to death and the people who we've got really would probably just starve to death in the early 20th century immigrant society too. And people like you and I would be lobotomized or given psychiatric drugs or at least I definitely would in the 1950s America, you know, 1% of the population was psychiatrically incarcerated At any given time 80,000 people were lobotomized.

Michael Vassar [00:33:11] We had a very large fraction of the types of totalitarian and horrors that we would associate with the other awful totalitarian regimes in that era. So like I

Vance Crowe [00:33:20] Didn't know this, how were they? They were just like pulling people off the street or if you said wrong, think like how did it happen?

Michael Vassar [00:33:27] Wrong think or pe political enemies, people who want to inherit from you, that sort of thing. There's lots of movies from the fifties and sixties about this sort of theme. It's based on a lived experience of a lot of people.

Vance Crowe [00:33:41] This is, I mean just like all my conversations with you so shocking as to seem almost unbelievable. You are saying that there were like at a scale that you would put at a total totalitarian regime in the 1950s that people were being horrifically locked up or having, you know, permanent mind alterations happening as a function of them not getting along with their political enemies

Michael Vassar [00:34:07] Or their family enemies corp corporate enemies just being weird. I mean, as I say, close to 1% of the population was psychiatrically incarcerated at a time they used the bad old timey psychiatric drugs that they don't use anymore. They did things like lobotomy, they did things like electric shock, not just as a therapy but as a torture, as a threat. People like Sylvia Plath give us pretty good documentation. Lots of artists of that era do

Vance Crowe [00:34:33] And do. Are you concerned that this will come up again? I mean somebody like you? No, no,

Michael Vassar [00:34:38] Not really. I'm, I'm just saying that there is no golden age to return to. There are ages with different very nice things. In the fifties it was really easy to raise four kids in a house in the suburbs on one white man working with a, with a wife at home with upward mobility improving standard of living and the kids who are disposed to can go to college for the ones who aren't can get a job and do the same thing without a college degree. But it also had like mass incarceration of people for psychiatric divergence and you know, massive influx of new mind control techniques and new techniques of schooling that we've organized, normalized now and can't even imagine not having but which were extremely mind destroying relative to the lived experience of the previous generations. There was like a very, very large amount of political control through violence that millions of Mexicans rounded up and kicked outta the country without checking whether they were citizens or not. You know, put late forties and fifties style America.

Vance Crowe [00:35:41] This is I think really important. I like to, to think through, I remember how astounded I was when I just like, I went to the Abraham Lincoln Museum one time and like first of all it didn't, never even crossed my radar until I was in my forties that there are some people that think that Abraham Lincoln not a good president, did a whole bunch of things that were not, you know, no bueno. 'cause this is the kind of thinking that gets you totally shunned from society. If you don't, if you don't hold Abraham Lincoln at Saint Status, then you somehow are a supporter of slavery and want bad things. So just the very idea that these kind of ideas can be challenged. But like I I remember always thinking like, oh, back in the olden times the media must have been a lot nicer, must have been a lot better to each other. And then you go into the Abraham Lincoln Museum and you see they were just as vitriolic and partisan and you know, propagandizing as they are right now is just a different time. But the 1950s does get held up in our minds as this like golden era that if we could just get back to that, everybody going to church and heaven dinner, at the end of the day, we'd, we'd finally be okay again.

Michael Vassar [00:36:53] Yeah, so I just checked, it's only 50,000 lobotomies, one in 3000 people, but like that's enough to maintain the state of real political terror, especially accompanied by lots and lots more of psychiatric incarcerations. Millions and millions of them. Like this is the sort of thing Tim o Leary who was of course a leader in the psychiatric establishment was horrified by and trying to go battle. Again.

Vance Crowe [00:37:23] Michael, I don't have like a, I I'm happy to walk with you down this path, but I don't even know what to ask or how to contribute.

Michael Vassar [00:37:30] So, you know, Timothy o Leary was a top criminologist. He did studies showing that LSD can reduce criminal recidivism, designed the tests that were used to assign people to tests in prisons, which is how he was able to escape when he was himself incarcerated by using the tests and his knowledge of the prisons and what tools would be available in different jobs in order to become a gardener who had access to unsupervised areas and could dig. Anyway, it's really an awesome story. Hasn't been told in a movie but could be an amazing movie. Anyway, so the, I mean where does one go? The average person was unbelievably much better off in the fifties than they are today. If they were white, the average person almost regardless of their ethnic properties, was probably a lot better off in the eighties or nineties than they are today. But like there's no golden age, there's, there's just the last 20 years isn't almost unbroken collapsing to totalitarianism with the first five years of that period also being a period of unbelievable technological progress and positive change in our material capabilities. But the, you know, we have to actually think about who are we, what are we, what do we know about the past that tells us about what humans can do and what they can't and what sort of a society does it make sense to build If something like the number of people who say they are traumatized for instance, are like clinically traumatized in the sense of not being able to meaningfully contribute to society the way like shell shark victims are not meaningfully able to contribute to military efforts.

Michael Vassar [00:39:13] We have to think about what, what we can do with the technology we have and what we, you know, we can obviously produce enough food for practically everyone. We can obviously build enough to give practically everyone a relatively good standard of living, but in order to do so, we need to be able to think about the limitations people are under as a result of the experiences they've had and the ways in which their ability to actually meaningfully participate in the type of civic society that America was built on is in fact gone, gone due to school gone due to professional participation but like gone. So totally now that there's no meaningful outcry with the, for instance COVID lab leak being semi revealed. The way you discussed,

Vance Crowe [00:40:00] I mean this is kind of the David grabber bullshit jobs I idea as I'm hearing you describe this. So for anybody that does I, well I wanna see is do do you see a connection here between what you're saying and

Michael Vassar [00:40:11] Yes, I think that having a bullshit job necessarily involves taking on moral injury and taking on complex trauma, complex PTSD in the manner described in, you know, by Jennifer Freight and others. Because I think that having a bullshit job necessarily involves going along with the concealment of the real reasons that you have that job and orienting your attention towards justifying things that aren't true in a reflexive way, which benefits from losing your mind in some important respects. So that, lemme let me explain

Vance Crowe [00:40:44] This because there's you and I know what that that writing is it Bullshit Jobs is written by David Grabber and it really is saying like you think that automation is coming for future jobs, but you're wrong. It's already here Excel has made it so you don't need thousands of eco accountants and you have emails so you don't need to like write letters and wait for them. Like all of this stuff, this technological work that came has made it so corporations don't need anywhere near as many people as they have. And so most of the people that are working are participating in a system where there's a managerial class that in order for them to have their jobs, they need to manage people and those people that are being managed only have maybe two or three hours of work in a given day or even week that they need to do and the rest of their time is spent trying to justify or give their manager reasons why they need to be managed. And then those managers take that and they hand it up to their manager and then up to their manager so that that way they are all justifying their work. And the real experience of this, if you're living in a corporation or working in it is you go to endless meetings that mean absolutely nothing. You have no authority to make a decision whatsoever. You just set up meetings in order to have other meetings or you, you, you, you're participating in like community groups, like not community groups, like teams that don't ever actually accomplish anything at all. Now the, as I'm saying this, there are people that are listening that are working on farms or have like are building apartments, they're like, this is insane, this doesn't really happen.

Vance Crowe [00:42:16] And that's the crazy thing is that millions and millions and millions of people, this is their entire experience every day they're going to work trying to hide and prove that they have something to do when they really don't and everyone in the system knows it,

Michael Vassar [00:42:32] Right? So it is very surprising to people who aren't in that system and usually people who are in that system would really like to take less money if they could take only moderately less money to do something that produced real value and they would really, really like to be able to come home from work and talk about what happened at work. I mean a basic way to think about this is if you can't tell your family when you come home, what you did at work, you have a bullshit job. I mean maybe not your five year olds, but your 10-year-old certainly

Vance Crowe [00:42:59] Yeah because you're on a sustainability committee or you're, you're like a part of this group that is a working group for all these other things and it's so complicated and so convoluted that you don't, you like aren't really doing anything and so you end up getting,

Michael Vassar [00:43:13] It's not complicated as part of production, it's not complicated. Like making a jet engine is complicated, it's complicated for the sake of obscurity, for the sake of creating an excuse.

Vance Crowe [00:43:23] And the theory goes, and I actually believe this is that the corporations are participating in this because they are getting government money in many of these situations and the way that they continue to get government money is that they give the government the number that they need, which is to lower unemployment will hire you to do things and then you guys keep people on as jobs and these people living middle class existence, they get to keep pumping money into the 4 0 1 Ks and the, and the whole system is built on this, like most of the people at a, at a job are not doing anything at all.

Michael Vassar [00:43:56] The government is an important player of Wall Street is also an important player. The way Wall Street in aggregate gets paid

Vance Crowe [00:44:03] Is

Michael Vassar [00:44:04] If the stock market goes up, the way the stock market in aggregate goes up is if the net present value of future cash flows of corporations goes up the way the net present value of future cash flows of corporations goes up is if it becomes more expensive to Substitute for those corporations. If there comes to be less competition, if productivity becomes less so the scarcity of the goods that the corporations produce rises and therefore the price rises. If every type of, if any given corporation becomes much more efficient, that corporation makes a lot of money. But if all the corporations become slowly less efficient in lockstep, they all make money. And so they can all enforce norms whereby they won't basically deal with and will say bad things about the other companies and the people leading those companies who are trying to make money instead and Wall Street will extend them credit at lower interest rates so that they can stay solvent for longer than their more efficient competitors can. So we get monstrosities such as Uber, which managed to lose money despite being like basically our biggest tech success for a long time and we get like we were,

Vance Crowe [00:45:12] Wait that seems like a non sequitur because Uber did all kinds of great things for me, right? All of a sudden I didn't have to wait in line for the the taxi cabal.

Michael Vassar [00:45:21] I'm not saying Uber is bad, I'm saying that Uber loses money. I'm saying Wall Street prefers to invest in the type of companies that they can be confident will lose money. The type of co companies that demonstrate a corporate culture that will be unproductive, inefficient, unreliable and will not compete away the potential profits associated with a given ecological economic niche or bring all of those profits to the founders and the people working in that niche rather than to the entrepreneurs and investors.

Vance Crowe [00:45:53] This is not computing for me.

Michael Vassar [00:45:55] Okay, so you know that if all of the farmers were 20% less productive there would be food scarcity and that farmers would make much more money.

Vance Crowe [00:46:07] Okay, sure.

Michael Vassar [00:46:08] Okay. So the banks have an incentive if they want to make money from the farmers to encourage them to inve, to invest their money in ways that will make them less productive, not more productive as long as they can get everyone to do it.

Vance Crowe [00:46:26] But wouldn't a single defector be able to just completely obliterate in this scenario?

Michael Vassar [00:46:31] That's depends on how competitive the sector is and it depends on how dependent on capital the sector is. And it depends on to the degree to which the sector, the economy as a whole can organize to shun or block regulate, not do deals with the people who defect a single defector in most fields. Unless you're, unless you know how to do things much, much, much more efficiently, just doing something somewhat more efficiently won't make up for the fact that people won't buy your product, won't sell you things will mess with you, will you know, mess with you in negotiations. All of the things that you need to do to have a successful business will go much more smoothly if you are being cooperative with the system as a whole. So like mosque is able to take over Twitter fire three quarters of the people there, everyone says the site's going to go down, the site doesn't go down. Those jobs actually were not producing value, but that involved him taking a two thirds hit to the price of Tesla as Wall Street coordinated to drive down the price of Tesla to punish him for driving up the productivity and efficiency of Twitter.

Vance Crowe [00:47:45] And you think that it's like, so it's funny because on the micro level I see entirely what you're saying and I I could be bridged over to the macro perspective. On the micro perspective, the same thing that we were just describing about the bullshit jobs. You don't wanna make waves. So if there's a bunch of initiatives at the company that you don't like, instead of complaining and getting up and walking out of meetings that are unproductive, you just sit there quietly because if you do, then at the end of the year you're gonna get a three and half percent raise or a four and a half percent raise. Whereas if you cause problems then you like it becomes more and more difficult or you get put on tasks you don't want to do or you get offices that you don't want. But like how on the macro scale does this work? Because the banks as far as I know aren't calling each other up being like, Hey let's cut the legs outta Tesla to make them pay for doing so well with Twitter.

Michael Vassar [00:48:36] So in the mainstream media people were talking about the banks doing just that. But also if you get to know the people at the banks, they do do most everything with subtext. What they're really displaying is the intelligence required to make the strongest argument that they can for the position that makes the least sense and moving as a herd in the basis of a pretend delusion. This is what a bull market is. It's when everyone expects everyone to get rich because we're all moving along with an argument that doesn't make sense and is therefore going to create scarcity and drive up profits. In aggregate. A bear market is when that runs out of steam and there's not a supply of capital to keep the bull market running and people are, outsiders are able to disrupt with much more efficiency.

Vance Crowe [00:49:24] So bull markets are in a way, a way for the economy to grow in the sense that it is clearing out the the the delusional actors. Yeah, bear markets, I'm sorry. Yeah, say more about this.

Michael Vassar [00:49:40] I mean like I feel like this is very standard economics, 19th century, early 20th century, you know, business, the real business cycle. People overinvest and they're un unable to pay for the investments. Then the rising, then the falling tide shows who's been naked.

Vance Crowe [00:49:59] So I have been feeling like the economy was going to drop out for a really long time. In fact I did several podcasts where I was like, yo, inflation is coming and it did come, but it like didn't wipe people out like it didn't cause this like ma massive or catastrophic recession. How does the, the economy still stay going or is it like, am I just unaware of what either is really happening or what's happening?

Michael Vassar [00:50:28] I mean I think the real wages of the bottom half of people in terms of their abilities to do things like buying housing and education and medicine have fallen through the floor over the last 50 years. The material conditions of the people who do real work instead of bullshit jobs have probably declined. I think if you'd look at things like the price of a can of Coca-Cola by like half, you know, the, maybe even by two thirds prob probably not more than that. The, we can always print more money until we can't, you know, we can probably print really truly enormous amounts of money. COVID showed that our old estimates were underestimates for how much money we could get away with printing. So like, you know, we know that if you print enough money then you're going to have some sort of major inflation, but like the demand to save maybe much, much larger than the demand to spend and the cost of production may be much, much lower than the, we may be able to easily produce much, much more than enough even, you know, with a relatively small amount of the labor force actually productively in involved.

Vance Crowe [00:51:42] Yeah, that's actually kind of what we're discovering. Right, and I, it's funny that you mention that because right before I got on here, I just happened to flip by Reddit and there was a person on the St. Louis page saying we can't afford a house. Like I'm finally coming to the conclusion that even though I make you know, way, way more than my parents did, I'm not able to buy a house that's even in the same neighborhood as they did when we were growing up. And I thought of myself as poor

Michael Vassar [00:52:07] And that partly means that he believes lies about the inflation rate and the real inflation rate if you're including things like the prices of houses is much higher than the number he's been believing.

Vance Crowe [00:52:19] So the answer to me looks like Bitcoin, but you are not a Bitcoin believer.

Michael Vassar [00:52:24] I'm not saying that Bitcoin isn't part of the answer. I think that crypto is a really cool invention. I think that proof of work is interesting. I think that there are better ways to do scalable cryptocurrencies that haven't been really implemented very well. But I definitely own crypto. I definitely will continue to own crypto and expect it to go up by a fair amount in the, you know, next decade. But less than say I expect Lyft to go up in the next decade since Lyft is like the example of the sort of company that tries to run relatively efficiently, tries to actually do something that might possibly someday make a profit rather than just trying to appeal to Wall Street and therefore employees fewer people and is less of a political player just trying to stay hold onto a niche until Uber runs out of money.

Vance Crowe [00:53:14] This is awesome Michael, you're the only person I know that as we're talking, I'm just so interested in hearing what you have to say that I don't really have questions for you. So I feel like I'm not doing a great job as a host, but like honestly I just want you to keep telling me interesting things.

Michael Vassar [00:53:30] Okay. I mean, let's think about the thing about reducing production. So since you said that didn't compute, if all of the car companies can establish regulations that require them to do things that make them able to produce 10% fewer cars, that makes them not compete as much with, for one, for car prices so they can charge more. This

Vance Crowe [00:53:52] Is the gen, this is the world of genetic engineering. What they do is they have figured out like just keep stacking on more years of testing and make all of the like amounts. You have to put in the, the complications of this testing. And all the companies all agree on all of them. They're not trying to fight it, they pretend like they're trying to bring back regulations, but the reality is they want to keep stacking them on. So they're making it way, way harder to get new genetic engineering solutions into the market,

Michael Vassar [00:54:22] Into right. So every well organized syndicate, every well organized industry consists of people who are doing this because every industry that doesn't manage to seriously reduce the ent, the entry of new actors and doesn't seriously reduce the productivity of established actors is going to shrink to a much smaller fraction of the total economy like agriculture did by working to be productive instead of working to make it complicated, shrink to being a very small fraction of the economy.

Vance Crowe [00:54:55] And it just goes until the party runs out.

Michael Vassar [00:55:00] I mean, I think we can look at India and say it goes until the K Yuga ends by default.

Vance Crowe [00:55:08] When in the hell is that

Michael Vassar [00:55:10] The K yuga means age of darkness. That's like all of human history from the Indian perspective. It, it's a period during which basically will and good intentions, good deeds or futile. And the only thing you can do to make things better is change the names of gods for, to appreciate them and to accumulate credit, the basic Indian perspective is presumably coming from a part of the world, which is a higher level of material abundance from more abundant nature and maybe from a disease burden that kept populations from really exceeding what nature could produce with only a moderate amount of assistance. And as a result, it was possible to oppress their agricultural workers very much more. They needed less ability, less tools, less support, less human capital to produce enough for the other types of workers, the people who held on to bullshit jobs. So you might say that polytheism is a bullshit job scheme in its mature state. You know, you have an infinite number of gods that need to be appreciated. An infinite amount of money can be spent on that. Any entrepreneur can launch a new God and start demanding, you know, food or libations or sex or whatever the new God demands through their mouth. And you know, the aggregate production of the society never really grows very much.

Vance Crowe [00:56:31] Did that happen in Greece? Is that how the Greeks got their many, many gods?

Michael Vassar [00:56:35] I think that that happens everywhere where we, where we see broadly a sky Father, probably theistic schema in a Indo-European sort, but the Greeks were unusually monotheist adjacent during their classical period. Like, you know, you have Zno and other Democrats, other early I guess Ian School, Greek philosophers who are promoting monotheism before the Hebrews really become very monotheistic. So to a really high degree, the polytheism of the Greeks is for the masses and the real religion of the Greek elites of more like worship of the body and of geometry and of mystical relationships between the body and geometry and sacred rights. That's what orgys mean. I mean, literally orgasm is not related linguistically to orgy or, or orgy means sacred ritual associated with honoring different gods. The, the Greeks believed in things like the Elian mysteries and the Oracles, but they didn't so much believe in this. I mean, the common people did, but I, no, they didn't have a rich entrepreneurial environment the way India did for setting up a new shrine to a new God and demanding libations because they're much less abundant. They, they're much less disease rhythm, they're much less material abundant from their agricultural capacity. People have to work harder as fishermen and herdsmen and farmers to make, to stay alive though.

Vance Crowe [00:58:10] Oh, that's very interesting. I mean, you could think about that as being the whole of, of like Israel and that, you know, the Lebanon, the, the whole area around there, it's a lot of work to be able to grow things. Bountifully. You have a lot of shepherds, you have a lot of fishermen, these kinds of things,

Michael Vassar [00:58:26] Right? And you need a relatively high level of social order enforcement of contracts, fulfillment of agreements, keeping records in order to keep the agricultural apparatus working, you know, irrigation ducks and things like that. So broadly, those mil near eastern societies didn't grow up around the same type of anything goes militarized, aristocratic, raiding, polytheism that the Indo-European cultures grew up event.

Vance Crowe [00:58:57] Well, and then you could even talk about like why this created, maybe not. We, we were talking about there was no golden age in America, but there certainly was a time the 18 hundreds and the early 19 hundreds on the frontier where all these social systems are being set up, the different farm bureau organizations and co-ops and churches and all of these things that are implementing very rigid social structure, but that social structure needed in order that we can all coordinate our efforts so that that way we don't die during the harsh winter.

Michael Vassar [00:59:28] Yes. With real material scarcity. Social structures tend to organize around overcoming scarcity rather than among keeping the masses in check and making more on their neighbors when you have a lack of real material scarcity to provide a basis for a class hierarchy, social structures reorganized to keeping the lower classes down in other ways.

Vance Crowe [00:59:50] And so are we headed towards a polytheistic culture? Is that what things like polyamory and woke are, are all about?

Michael Vassar [00:59:58] I I mean I think that the broad cultural movement since the sixties has been strongly towards a more Indian, Indian or Indo-European, but Indian in particular style of religion. Spiritual but not religious, relatively non literate, preferring, cyclical rather than linear time as a way of thinking about things rather than we've all built together towards a goal. Things go in cycles. Wisdom is going along with the cycles and expecting falls as well as rises and memories and records will be wiped out regularly. So you need to be positioning to opportunistically respond when they do.

Vance Crowe [01:00:37] Let's talk about the circular nature of time. What does this even mean? I mean to somebody like me, I, I think of time as, you know, just a straight line. I know Kate Crosby is just freaking out right now because she thinks of time as a wave and these other things, right? But what do you mean when you say circular time?

Michael Vassar [01:00:53] So anthropo, sometimes people talk about the Hebrews inventing linear time. That's probably a stretch, but it's not totally wrong. Anthropologists can identify cultures that are relatively literate, textual, legalistic and guilt organ oriented. And that tend to, ima imagine time as a sequence where things are building from something towards something and you can also observe less literate, usually less textual, less legalistic, more shame oriented cultures where time is normally imagined as cyclical and there's less of a distinction between mythology and history. The latter type tend to be idolatrous and, and polytheistic in more, not just into European styles, but all especially that, but basically orienting your attention towards accumulation is like, tends to suggest a gradient in the, in history towards greater accumulation. But like we don't see ourselves on top of an infinite accumulation. We see ourselves on layers of archeological strata where things accumulated and then declined. If your civilization has more recent exposure to material scarcity and the beginnings of accumulation, it's going to have a higher tendency to find appealing.

Michael Vassar [01:02:27] That sort of accumulation oriented view.

Vance Crowe [01:02:31] Well

Michael Vassar [01:02:31] If it has a more distant view of that, when, if it's material environment was made habitable to large numbers of people a long time ago is more likely that history is going to be based on an assumption of a basically long run steady state with social cycles making certain groups rise and fall at one another's expense.

Vance Crowe [01:02:51] As you had talked about the, the Jewish population being thought of as the ones that maybe created linear time. I was wrapping my brain around this and I think about the Bible, the Old Testament right, is really a long telling of things where, where like the marking of the, the biblical stories are totally done in time, right? So you have Adam and Eve, then Cain and Abel and like the mythology that gets built up like Jacob and Esau, Abraham, on and on and on. And all of the stories that are built and the, and the lessons that are within that are all done as one long thread that you can loop back. And then the Christian saying, ah, well Jesus is descended from the line of David and David is coming from this line that goes all the way down to Joseph and in order to connect things. But as my, as I understand it, you're right, like the Indo like the Indian culture, like the religion is much more oriented around in a circle as opposed to a long straight line.

Michael Vassar [01:03:55] Yeah. Like you're very interested in legacy. Legacy is something that only exists in linear time, in cyclical time. There's just position,

Vance Crowe [01:04:09] Oh man, this is mind blowing. And this goes along with what Malcolm Collins was saying in that progressives think of things like what's going on in the current moment. They aren't worried about the future, whereas conservatives in his view is trying to hand down an archetype into the future. They're like living as a, as a, as an avatar that's living what was given to them and they want to pass it on into the future. So you're fitting into that linear

Michael Vassar [01:04:37] Time, right? So you might say that the, the circular time attitude is assuming that the real inheritance, the real wisdom is more from y the Jungian shadow and less from the lessons that are transmitted verbally and explicitly more the dance of how to act orthopraxy and less the decisions and records and rules of what to believe and how you know, how to coordinate

Vance Crowe [01:05:05] This is mind shattering because one of the things I say when people do Legacy Interviews is when I get letters from people, they're from the kids that have watched their parents and they tell about the stories that they didn't know their parents had and they're so grateful that they have those stories because like just trying to be like, hey kids, you know, brush your teeth and you know, don't drink too much alcohol is a totally different thing than having the ar like the hero's journey of like, I thought everything was going great until I fell off with that vice and this took me down because the child can then take that story and internalize it and apply it into their own life. And they certainly have told me many, many times how much that has impacted their future decisions. I had never crossed my mind that there would be cultures that didn't think about things in this way.

Michael Vassar [01:05:58] I mean, people might think about things in terms of stories. There's, it's, it's not thinking about things in terms of cause and effect and rules and legalism not thinking about things in terms of right and wrong, but so, so much as being yourself, being your, the thing that you were meant to be by the gods that you're chosen is chosen out for you. You know, it's not so much thinking in terms of here are some lessons and commitments but like what would Jesus do That's a more circular time for you.

Vance Crowe [01:06:28] Oh interesting. That the what would Jesus do is not a a linear thinking, it's a circular thinking.

Michael Vassar [01:06:35] Yeah. Jesus is like a transition wherein a Indo-European civilization adopts the surface features of an older, you know, med me Mediterranean style, you know somatic civilization. So if your way of expanding involves imitating people's surface features, becoming enthusiastic about them forming sexual relations with their participants and then getting belligerent on their behalf in order to create military conflicts between them, that then your people are needed to protect them from the way Romans gods of love and war point at and the way Roman history points at you are prone to imitating things until you're able to get them to go along with your way of doing things. And so the Romans keep imitating the Hebrews until there are way more Roman imitating Hebrews than there are Hebrews, just like the FBI keeps imitating the KKK until there are way more FBI members paying all the dues for the KKK with the consequence of infiltration that the infiltrator can end up being a cult with deeper cultural foundations in something else but with the surface features of the thing that it has infiltrated.

Vance Crowe [01:07:55] I love the analogy but I don't know that I could repeat it in a way that's understandable. You are saying that Judaism was moving along in a straight line and then Jesus when Christianity comes along changes that to a more, it's not about progress, it's about the circle. I mean I would think that Christianity, it's

Michael Vassar [01:08:15] Not about the written law, it's about the law in your heart. It's not about consulting the knowledge your father conveyed and the rules, but the stories that he inspires in you. It's not about believing that everyone, that people can be truthful and honest and make, fulfill their commitments and holding them accountable and holding yourself accountable. It's about not hold forgiving others though debts and hoping that yours will be forgiven. It's not about pretending that there's a credit system which is, you know, that we can all participate in. It's about realizing that that credit system is fake and all we have is this moment

Vance Crowe [01:08:54] That is a very different description of Christianity than I've ever heard before. Where did you come to these realizations about Christianity?

Michael Vassar [01:09:10] I mean by thinking about Rome and what Rome was, what it worshiped, how it did its political expansion through alliances and cultivating conflicts between those who lied to it and by thinking about the way in which people have been obsessed with the Rome and Jewish conflict and encoded in a million ways like the names Romeo and Juliet. The basic

Vance Crowe [01:09:36] What

Michael Vassar [01:09:37] Sure, think about it, you know, it's this mutual suicide fact of, of the sort of enthusiast and the like thing that's overly attached to a certain type of purity and resolution. So like

Vance Crowe [01:09:57] Keep going, don't let me interrupt. So

Michael Vassar [01:09:59] Like you, you, you find yourself in a situation kind of similar to the Roman situation and you find the social pressures that it produces and you see how much easier life would be if in Rome you did what the Romans did. And you see that most people are doing that and you see the infiltration tactics of for instance, woke mobs or other corporate HR wherein people get into the school board or the corporate HR and they only support other people who have their own ideologies and and that entry them ends with the whole character of the institution being transformed. So if you have a core of that institution that doesn't get transformed but the entry is just keeps growing around it, you end up with like the Roman Catholic church and a marginalized Jewish population that are left to do the dirty work of having memory and having accounts.

Vance Crowe [01:11:07] You could talk more about this. I like I find myself again like I don't have a question, I'm just open to listening.

Michael Vassar [01:11:14] Alright. So like you might say that a basic Jewish Christian divide is, is it better to do something nice because you wanted to or because it was your duty to, and the Jewish attitude would be that it's better to do it from your duty because your duty is something that you can move you reliably. And the Christian attitude is it only matters if it's coming from you. You can see that there's a divide that involves splitting or dividing the self between the self that has a should and the self that's imminent and emotionally moved and a disagreement about which is the real self. And you can see that the broadly Christian style of textualism points back at the Jewish sources but doesn't do on its own initiative. The sort of debate and argument about them and trying to convert them into a coherent system of law. Instead it, you know, just like points at the bible and then says you're not holy enough to see the Bible, you have to talk to a priest. So like the substitution of people for records is like in that is basically how a class society subverts a legible society, a society of contracts. Once that society of contracts can support the inefficiency associated with the class type society.

Michael Vassar [01:12:45] 'cause the class type society then its nature isn't suspected by the society based on contracts. So people it can coordinate against it in ways that don't make sense from a individual self-interested society's perspective. Like the Jews who are being basically the center of Christianity at the beginning must be thinking similar things to what you're thinking when you are in corporate America about why they but couldn't one defector bring the whole thing down? And the answer is no. The aristocratic ways of silencing and suppressing defectors and preventing people from calling out enormous deviations between the practice of the organization and its narrative and interest are much more powerful than self-interest of individuals who don't have a good map of how you coordinate to do that.

Vance Crowe [01:13:44] Oh, that's so interesting because the people that are defectors are so decentralized that in order for them to have enough power to be able to make something happen, they would have to go against their nature. The very thing that keeps you from being able to get people together to push back on this thing is the thing that makes you able to resist it in the first place. And so therefore you don't like, it's very difficult to get a like, like a tipping point with a bunch of people that are like I I'm not going to go along with the group.

Michael Vassar [01:14:18] Right? Once the group is majority defectors, it's really, really difficult and especially if you don't basically understand what the a defector is, if you are okay, they're not defectors, defectors is a linear time way of thinking that's thinking that they are sacrificing the group's wellbeing for self-interest. They are transgressors, they are romantics. Romantic means Roman. There are people who are acting against the group's way of organizing in order to adver help. The other way of organizing that is infiltrating it not to help their individual selves. And since the people who are organized around rational self-interest under the constraint of law never suspect that there could be people organized against opposition to the integrity of law in a manner that does not serve individual interest but only serves the interests of the process of undermining the integrity of law, they don't see it's coming and it coming until it's way, way, way too late.

Vance Crowe [01:15:26] I'm as spell bound today as I was when we talked about the aristocracy way back when and if people haven't listened to that episode, you should definitely go back and check it out. But this one, again, the, the idea of being a romantic like that, that speaks to me, right? Where you're like, even though it's hopeless, you have to go towards this way because it's in your heart and it's the right thing to do, not because it's your duty, but because it's the right thing to do.

Michael Vassar [01:15:55] Right? That

Vance Crowe [01:15:57] Is that intrinsic in people though. Like I have a sense that everyone knows what is right and wrong and they just choose differently.

Michael Vassar [01:16:05] Ah, so I have a sense that everyone has a relatively easy process of learning the local cultural ways of doing right rather than wrong, which we call primary socialization when they're fairly young and this process works reasonably well at small scale and if no one is actively undermining it, but along with learning that process, they also have to learn certain wrong things that they, that are being forced on them alongside the primary socialization. Things that don't really fit into the story they're being told, but that they just have to accept as normal and those wrong things which often have to do with money and power and sex are not going to make sense for a long time until they're much older. The things that they are told they can't understand through reason that they can't understand analytically or rationally the part of the culture and tradition. All of that is there to directly but obscurely oppose the instinctive natural emergent process for doing what's right. And then there is another bigger process for doing what's wrong that comes together out of all of those subtle pieces that constitute culture as part of secondary socialization when people are under social pressure to go along with things that go against what they think intuitively or are told are right in it because they see other people who are supposed to be more credible than themselves doing the same thing and being rewarded because they find that they will be blamed if they don't.

Michael Vassar [01:17:44] And by learning to go against the the explicit rules of right and wrong as part of secondary socialization, people internalize a v reliably distorted intuitive sense of what's right that is very strongly committed to above all else opposing the innate early sense of right. So it, while superficially appearing to be a copy of it,

Vance Crowe [01:18:16] I'm sitting here thinking about like the, the role of a parent, right? And if you teach your child like fuck those people that tried to put a mask on you and we're not doing that and it doesn't matter what it costs us, like we're gonna do this, you're making a choice in the, in the mimetic, you know, like in the wiring of that child's mind and there's no going back once you've done the wiring, right? Like the, like that is your role as a parent is to either set them up to be follow what's right in your heart and like do the, do the thing that's correct or find a local, like find out what the local customs are and figure out how to get along. I just had never thought of parenting in that way. What, how do you think of parenting?

Michael Vassar [01:19:13] So I mean I feel like the challenge is to inform people that from the, that there is this past that comes out of the interplay of basically good and bad motives and both selfish and unselfish motives are part of good motives. Bad motives is a different thing that you'll learn about when you're older. I mean to some degree we can try to tell you about it analytically, but it's really going to be hard to understand until you're in a lot of situations. So the best we can do is give you a lot of analytic frameworks and indicators of what to look for and then you can try to see it. But bad motives aren't motives to not be moved by. Bad motives are motives that coordinate against the legibility of the shared narrative. The coordinate against our ability to occupy the same story and people acting from them aren't trying to kill you. They're trying to eliminate good motives from situations where those good motives might be able to move violence. And they're not doing it consciously, they're doing it compulsively. They don't have a choice. The way their attention is organized is such that they're going to do most of this work through the way they allocate their attention, not through decisions they make. So you need to like be able to understand that there are a lot of people who are in fact going to be working against you and it's not personal and it's also not vicious.

Michael Vassar [01:20:52] They'd like you to be happy, they'd like you to feel good. They don't want to exclude you, they want you to get with the program. It's just that the pro the nature of the program is to get more people with the program. So you have to be able to act, you have to be able to get with the program enough or play enough with them to avoid threatening them but like also understand that they're not going to help you do things that they say they're going to help you do. You might need them to do those things. You might need their, their approval or their endorsement in some way, but you can't actually fool them. They can see how your attention is allocated more clearly than you can see how their attention is allocated. Because to see how attention is allocated, that clearly is to instant fact be acting from bad motives in the relevant way. But you can like find people who are making sense, talk to the people who are making sense, try to find together the places where your perceptions differ, probe into them, figure out which stories you have don't really make sense and keep make in the pap sense, trying to falsify your story in order to get one that encompasses enough data. You know, you don't expect yourself don't, you don't have to be perfect. The standard for being basically positive and production is more like holding on to a willingness to keep learning and not making it about you.

Michael Vassar [01:22:33] One might say that being good is a bad motive and wanting ice cream is a good motive, whether it's you're wanting ice cream for yourself or others unless you're wanting them to get fat. You know, the basic, so you need to learn how to take turns in conversation and that's one of the major methods whereby people enlist others in the attention allocation pattern associated with bad motives. And you also need to learn that people don't know enough and are not in situations wherein they could be accountable in these sort of common sense morality, sense of accountable ex except to a relatively small number of people who they know really well. And you need to understand that like when people seem confused about sex, it's because they are lying, not because they are confused. To go a bit further, a lot of people have been sexually abused and permanently traumatized in ways that would keep their emotions and motivations from being the sorts of motivations and emotions that you would expect. We have a common sense that their minds have been changed by the process, but we don't inquire into the nature of that change. We don't inquire into how we ended up in a society where there was so much sexual abuse. Where the simple answer is that people sexually abuse other people in order to train them in bad motives, in order to train them in aristocracy, in order to train them in spontaneously coordinating around people's attention and around causing information not to flow rather than the natural impulse to cause information to flow in order to make things better.

Vance Crowe [01:24:25] I am brutally and painfully naive, like as you're saying this, I I realize like the of the people I know that have been traumatized sexually, they they were made to be complicit in things. They were made to say things they didn't believe they like they did end up, you know, like either coming very close to propagating the same problems or or doing it and you just never know about it. Is it that pervasive that it is a social control mechanism? Like I'm so naive? Yeah, I think so.

Michael Vassar [01:25:03] So like my really strong impression is that it's a pervasive thing within aristocracy. I mean the idea of a princess is literally the idea of a sex trafficking victim. The, this is an example of the sort of thing that will distort our common sense morality that we're teaching when people are learning the basics of common sense morality, they're taught to identify as figures for emulation and admiration figures who are actually, if you think about it, the maximal examples of violations of the common sense morality such as princesses.

Vance Crowe [01:25:35] You brought this up last time and it didn't make sense to me the way that it does this

Michael Vassar [01:25:39] Time. Like literally princess is a woman who is sold sexually for power and for alliance between power blocks usually at a very young age, way before a realistic age of consent.

Vance Crowe [01:25:50] Yeah. And we can, we are convinced that, you know, you want to be a princess, look at what happens when you're a princess. You get all these things and people adore you, but it's the the real inner workings of it or not that beautiful,

Michael Vassar [01:26:03] Right? So like aristocrats always have, you know, sexual exchange of women as part of their alliance building in one way or another and they always get to control the expressed morality and admiration of the larger society. And as they propagate down through the population, you get at some point as it's reaching enough people, as the aristocratic norms under conditions of abundance penetrate the middle classes, you get some level of shock and surprise and moral crisis and people worrying about sexual impropriety a lot and all sorts of confusion about what's right and wrong, what's normal behavior. And you end up with like news getting out about widespread sexual abuse and then you end up with huge amounts of obscuring news that makes it more confusing, makes it harder to interpret that news once people who have actual complaints start coming out. People, people who are trying to make things better start coming out, people who are trying to make things, keep things from getting better, also come out with all sorts of more sensationalistic claims and gather crowds around ex exciting diver diversive claims like Q Anon instead of Jeffrey Epstein.

Vance Crowe [01:27:24] Okay. I'm shocked and have like several questions, one of which is if princesses are the sexual like, you know, slavery or you know, the sale, what is going on with Disney, right? Like I, like I really am not a big fan of Disney, but I've never had like a thing to point at, but it is this like creation of a model that all girls wanna be like that they want to, you know, be held up in that esteem or is that just a coincidence of I

Michael Vassar [01:27:56] Don't think Disney is creating the model. I think it existed long before Disney. It's Disney is just using the models that the culture gives it and those models that the culture gives it contain things that are implicitly really bad.

Vance Crowe [01:28:10] And then when you describe the Q Anon thing, like I'm imagining the, the me too movement, right? Like where people were coming forward and being like, yo, these bad things were happening, these, these people were taking advantage of us sexually in order to do these things. And then it just got so big that it like burned out and there, you know, now, now people don't talk about it and in fact it's even turned into a joke in some way.

Michael Vassar [01:28:36] Yeah, I think that's kind of true. I think that's another example of this sort of thing, like the enough noise was made that people just went after some scapegoats like Harvey Weinstein, they didn't like look into the, the dynamics where someone like Harvey Weinstein can have that kind of power, can rape maid with impunity. Like something has to be incredibly pervasively wrong with the way our society is transmitting information and transmitting legal claims, legal information in particular for the sorts of things that me too unearthed to in fact be there. And our society is committed to keeping those things buried, those secrets covered up. It's committed to continuing to conceal these power, power dynamics in general and keep

Vance Crowe [01:29:24] But why it's so horrible it's children.

Michael Vassar [01:29:28] Yeah, but I mean why, so like you might assume that people are basically good or you might assume that people are basically bad and need to be made good by society. These are two different starting places you might come from.

Vance Crowe [01:29:45] I come from the school that they are asleep, that most people are just not awake.

Michael Vassar [01:29:50] So I would say that I would call that having been made bad and that's what some views would say having been made good. So there, there's a likewise a view about whether life is basically good or whether life is basically bad and a lot of other views, like whether it's good or bad to lie might under be understood as being downstream from the view that life is basically good. And if if lies contribute to oppose life and truth contributes to life, then truth is basically good. But if you assume that life is basically bad, then you might be prone to the opposite position that people should in general lie be should in general oppose clarity because that is by opposing clarity they oppose life and oppose the ben thing. And so like in the Indo-European traditions, it's normally assumed that wisdom involves coming to the understanding that life is basically banned. A lot of Greek philosophers take this position. Buddha basically takes this position well in the conditions, in the cultural traditions that emerge where if you aren't in favor of life, you can stop living pretty easily through just scarcity and not planning. The grounding assumptions that are going to be prioritized are more that life is basically good

Vance Crowe [01:31:19] To shed The idea that life is basically good would be like committing suicide in some way. For me, like, like you, you like, it's

Michael Vassar [01:31:30] A lot like being committing suicide and we have words for it like being born again that describe a sense of shedding an old life that's oriented towards there being more life and replacing it with a new life that's oriented towards there being less life, an old life that's oriented towards truth and building and accumulation and legacy and replacing it with one oriented around living graciously in a dying world and bringing soccer to those who you also bring death or non reproduction term.

Vance Crowe [01:32:06] You know, my first initial concept is that the thing that you're describing is like abhorrently cynical, but then I like I I expand my view of it and I say like, no, it's, it's like looking at the snow globe from the other side and, and it's, it's just very hard for me to just like the aristocracy thing, it's very hard for me to wrap my mind around and I'm like, I don't say this to be tongue in cheek. I'm, I'm mean it, I feel naive in this conversation

Michael Vassar [01:32:39] Like, life isn't necessarily good, we don't want cancer. When people say humans are a cancer on the planet and we shouldn't have them. It's the, it's a generalization of the life isn't necessarily good. You might find that it was based on reason or you might be pre-committed to it in a independent of reason way or you might, but like it's not self-evident that it's better that there be something rather than nothing. It's self-evident that people who exist try, struggle to keep trying to exist. And maybe you should help them to stop struggling. I'm not advocating this well. This is the

Vance Crowe [01:33:14] Concept of true detective, right? Well this is like, there is some darkness that's so bad in the world that once you've seen it and you accept that, that that like bad things are there then like you had said, opposing that bad theme through the, through whatever means necessary. Like I can wrap my mind around that. I I can, I can, I can see that I think of a time when the, when the guy is interrogating a woman and he finds out that she did all these horrible things to her child and so he tries to talk her into killing herself and you know, to to, if you just saw that scene without knowing what she had done to her child, you'd be like, this is horrible. And then you know what she did to her child and you're like, I don't know, maybe the world would be better if she didn't exist anymore. And I feel like that's kind of the thing that you're describing is that there's different ways to look at the same thing,

Michael Vassar [01:34:10] Right? So you could take it for people who abuse their child or you could take that attitude to people who eat meat or you could take that attitude towards people who have a carbon impact or you could just take it as an attitude to people who suffer more than they're happy or who suffering is deeper than their pleasure. You could easily conclude depending on your initial assumptions that you could argue either way in favor of or against being. And that the po argument, the position in favor of being isn't really coming from an argument. It's coming from actually more like neurological systems that are designed to bring about being, and the position against being isn't really coming from an argument. It's more like coming from other neurological systems that emerge against them.

Vance Crowe [01:35:00] And most of these things set in motion long before a child. They had no choice in this. They were, they were put into a system. The the nurture aspect of things being the thing that drives much of it for them.

Michael Vassar [01:35:12] Yeah. Like it, you probably don't for real have a choice about rejecting your programming from society in such a manner as to be moved in the same ways that a hunter gatherer would be moved and you would get arrested very quickly if you could.

Vance Crowe [01:35:33] Michael Vassar, this has been an awe inspiring conversation. I am so grateful you were willing to hop on here at the last minute and do this. I knew it would be a good conversation, I just didn't know what it would be like. So thank you so much for joining me.

Michael Vassar [01:35:49] Oh, it's been good talking, always fun talking and I hope that we can gradually build towards the, the question of, given that both of these ways of being exist in the world, how can we have space for both since we probably aren't realistically in a place to eliminate the being that is oriented away from accumulation. And we probably don't need to eliminate the being that is oriented away from communication. Even if we see that it is oriented away from law and obedience to law away from adherence to the explicit moral precepts that we pronounce. We've been alive in its presence for a long time and we're more dangerous to it than, than it is to us. If we know what we're looking at, it's much more scared of us than we are of it.

Vance Crowe [01:36:44] That's fascinating. And, and maybe the most hopeful thing you could have said to, to wrap it up, if people wanted to continue this conversation with you, where, where would they go? I

Michael Vassar [01:36:56] Mean I feel like the blogs of Benjamin Hoffman, compass Rose Sero, Constantine's, rough Diamond Substack, Jessica Taylor's unstable ontology blog, those are, and maybe some of Zi Ash's pre COVID stuff and post COVID stuff are good places to go. These are like places where people are thinking about these types of questions.

Vance Crowe [01:37:25] Well you created an amazing on-ramp. Thank you so much for coming on today.

Michael Vassar [01:37:30] You're welcome. Nice talking to you.