Here’s my contention. The modern economy is more or less entirely fake.  It’s not really this hyper-productive engine that it’s necessary to grease the wheels of non-stop to create the productive economy we have.  If anything, I would say around 70% of all the effort that people put forth in the economy is mostly just vacuous.

 It’s doing basically nothing.  Now, the other 30% is extremely productive, and that’s basically paying everyone’s bills in effect,  but the rest of it is more or less entirely corruption. It’s entirely unnecessary,  and it exists for other reasons. And specifically, most jobs out there are utter nonsense.

 Most jobs, if you go to a big city, if you work in a big corporation or a university,  or you work for the government, your job is, to put it delicately, it’s useless.  But if anything, you are probably actually causing harm.  Most jobs, if anything, probably cause harm.  And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

 Now, around a month ago, you may have seen it.  There was this very cute thing on Fox News.  Now, I expect that very few of you actually watch network news, but this one made the rounds all over the Internet.  There was a member of a Reddit forum called Anti-Work. And the Anti-Work  people, the idea behind them is they are against the idea of work, that we shouldn’t have a  prolonged work week. They’re kind of like post-scarcity sort of socialist people.

 You know, it’s probably a mixed bag. But in general, they have the idea that we should not be working that much, right?  And so this guy, he goes on Fox News with his crappy webcam,  and the Fox News host just makes an absolute fool of him.  It’s actually pretty hilarious.  I might put the video, or in the video description, I might put a link to it.

 But it got a lot of people talking about this idea.  The idea that, I don’t know, a lot of jobs, they’re kind of soul-crushing.  And, of course, people were roasting this guy for going on because he made an absolute fool of himself and everyone who believes the same thing as him.  Now, I don’t believe the same thing as him, but I do think he believes it for a very good reason.

 I agree with the idea that most work nowadays is soul-crushing.  But as I said, I think that’s not necessarily because work itself is bad.  I think that there are particular things that have happened that we’re going to talk about  in the modern economy to give us this environment where jobs are fake, jobs are unenjoyable,  jobs are mostly wasting time.

 And I think most people, especially if you worked in an office setting, you will realize  that the difficulty of working in an environment setting, you will realize that the difficulty  of working in an environment like that isn’t so much because the work is stressful or hard  to keep up with.  A lot of times, it’s you trying to find things to do with yourself because you have so little  things to actually do, right?  So we’re going to talk about that.

 Specifically, there’s a book that I’m going to be jumping off.  Now, I’m not going to give a full-throated endorsement to this book, but I think it came out a couple years ago and it’s  worth talking about. There was a guy named David Graeber, recently late David Graeber. He died,  I think, last year or something. But he published a book entitled Bullshit Jobs.

 Of course,  sometimes it’s entitled BS Jobs. But nonetheless, he put out an article back  in 2013. Now, Graeber, I should probably give a brief biography of him. He’s your typical  leftist Jewish anarchist guy. He was foundational in the Occupy Wall Street protests. He’s kind of  of that milieu. But I think that this book that he wrote is, although I don’t agree with the ending portion of it, I’ll talk about that in a bit.

 I think it was really successful at highlighting this phenomenon of bullshit jobs.  So in 2013, after Occupy Wall Street, or as it was kind of toning down, he wrote this article that was published in a periodical.  I’ll actually link it.  this article that was published in a periodical. I’ll actually link it.

 But the idea behind it is that a lot, if you go around and ask people, I mean, you don’t even like, this isn’t him saying,  oh, I think there are a bunch of jobs out there that are nonsensical. But there’s a lot of way,  there’s a lot of senses when you meet a lot of people who work in white collar work, or even  sometimes non-white collar work, they will readily admit to you, sometimes with shame, that their job literally does nothing.

 And this isn’t a rare thing. This is something that at least a plurality of people have.  So in his book, Bullshit Jobs, he actually sums up his original thesis in four points. I’ll read  them out. Number one, huge swaths of people  spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

 Two, it’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all  working. Three, the moral and spiritual damage that comes from the situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul, yet virtually no one talks about it.  And four, how can one even begin to speak of the dignity of labor when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?  So the contention behind it, the way he introduced this is when he became a professor and he was working in more high culture,

 he’d meet a lot of people and he’d ask them what they did for a living.  And they would say something like, oh, you know, I don’t really do anything important.  And the way he put it is originally he thought people were being polite.  But the more he pried, he realized they’re not actually being humble.

 They’re actually telling the truth.  They literally do nothing.  They might work for a consulting firm or a bank or the government where they literally do nothing.  They literally push papers and accomplish nothing every single day.  So he wrote this book.  Well, after he wrote this original article in 2013, he ended up writing this book, BS Jobs, which is, you know, more or less an extended  version of the article.

 But I will read just to give you a little sense of, you know, what we’re  talking about here. After he did that original article, he did get lots of people sending in  messages and emails and stuff about the BS Jobs that they have. I’ll read one out. This is actually  from the first chapter of his book. This is him quoting  from a guy who emails him. The German military has a subcontractor that does their IT work.

 The IT firm has a subcontractor that does their logistics. And the logistics firm has a  subcontractor that does their personnel management. And I work for that company. Let’s say soldier A  moves to an office two rooms further down the  hall. Instead of just carrying his computer over there, he has to fill out a form.

 The IT  subcontractor will get the form. People will read it and approve it and forward it to the logistics  firm. The logistics firm will then have to approve the moving down of the hall and will request personnel from us.  The office people in my company will then do whatever they do and now I come in. I get an email, be at barracks B at time C.

 Usually these barracks are 100 to 500 kilometers away from my  home, so I will get a rental car. I take the rental car, drive to the barracks, let dispatch  know that I’ve arrived, fill out a form, unhook the computer, load the computer into a box,  seal the box, have a guy from logistics carry the box to the next room where I unseal the box,  fill out another form, hook up the computer, call dispatch to tell them how long it took,  get a couple of signatures, take my rental car back home, send a dispatch letter with all of the paperwork, and then get paid.

 So instead of the soldier carrying his computer for five meters,  two people drive for a combined six to ten hours, fill out around 15 pages of paperwork,  and waste a good 400 euros of taxpayers’ money.  So that is a quintessential example of a BS job. And that’s the kind of  thing that we’re talking about.

 And shortly after Graber published this article, there were actually,  there’s a lot of interest in it. And a couple of polling companies actually just went out and asked  people, do you have a BS job? A YouGov poll based off this article asked people, does your job  make a meaningful contribution to the world?  And just ask whoever would respond.

 And 37% of them said flatly, no, their job doesn’t do  anything. There is no contribution that they make whatsoever. 37%. That’s more than a third,  right? And 13% of them said they weren’t really sure. Maybe my job, it contributes, maybe it  doesn’t. And the other 50% said, yeah, my job contributes, but that’s a pretty bad rate. That’s  basically 50-50.

 50% of people either say their job just doesn’t have any effect or they’re at  least totally unclear if their job is something positive whatsoever, right? So that’s a pretty  good example. And Graeber notes that  other polls happen in other countries. And you find in a lot of industrial societies,  you see exactly the same thing.

 People are staffing all these jobs where they don’t really  feel like they’re doing literally anything whatsoever. Okay. So anyway, now Graeber notes  a couple of things. Now, as I said, Graeber is more like the kind of leftist anarchist thing.  And one thing he wants to make clear in the book, actually, is that, you know, I guess a lot of libertarians, like right libertarians, will try to make the argument that, oh, yeah, well, you can have a BS job.

 Like you can have a fake job.  But that’s like a government thing, right?  That doesn’t happen in the free market.  The free market, you know, it has to be efficient.  The private sector, it’s, you know, we’re not going to waste money on that kind of stuff.

 And Graeber, of course, includes in this book, it’s really  replete with examples of this not happening, not just in government, but in the private sector as  well. In fact, the thing that we just saw with the guy who theoretically, you theoretically, there’s the government who employs an IT firm, who employs a logistics firm, who employs him. There’s this big chain of command. And you could say, well, the public sector is involved, but you have all of these other companies that could optimize for free market credentials or whatever for efficiency’s sake, and they’re not doing it.

 free market credentials or whatever for efficiency sake and they’re not doing it and one of the things that he notes is in fact and this is totally true i think a lot of people  you know who are stuck on kind of internet arguments between like libertarianism and  socialism like they have this notion that there’s like the private sector and the public sector and  they’re two different things and the reality now is pretty much every corporation is more or less directly plugged into  the government and vice versa, right? There’s not really a, I mean, so many private firms nowadays

 work in essence for the government. They’re just subcontracted for via the government. In fact,  as governments during the 70s and 80s, when they started to privatize more of government  services, you actually see more and more of this, where a bunch of companies are actually sort of  working for the government, but they’re sort of, they’re private at the same time.

 And the whole  thing is just a mess. Now, you could take the, I do think that there is a sense in which public  firms, you know, there’s a general tendency for them to be less efficient. But I will just say in my personal experience as well, I’ve worked for many office jobs and things like that where let’s just say maybe 5% of the people at the job are actually really doing anything productive.

 I think I remember working for this digitization business back in my early 20s, right?  And I don’t know how many employees they had.  They probably had around 100 or so. And I was one of the wages. Like I was the one, you know,  I was one of the ones actually digitizing stuff.

 Like, you know, they would give us pictures of  documents and we’d have to type them in and stuff like that. And I couldn’t help but feeling,  you know, of all the 100 employees, there are only really five of us that are digitizing documents.  all the 100 employees, there are only really five of us that are digitizing documents.  Now, maybe the other 95 employees are doing something really important. They’re finding contacts and they’re, I don’t know, doing something else.

 But I couldn’t help thinking  that there was a lot of inefficiency going on there. And in fact, I remember when I,  being a good wagee and wanting to keep my scores high, you know, because they actually used to keep  on the board, like how fast you would digitize documents. And I was pretty fast. I want to say  I was the fastest one when I was there.

 But, you know, I remember going to my superior and saying,  hey, you know, could I do this? Like, you know, can I change the keyboard layout or do this so I  could type things in a little faster because, man, that’s actually  pathetic. I was like totally, that’s totally cringe as a wagee. But I remember doing that  and any attempt to like shake the boat, including to, I don’t know, increase efficiency was always  met with extreme skepticism.

 And I think a lot of people in the office work just inherently are  dragging their feet. Like they’re really playworking.  There’s a sense in which they are getting a salary and it’s not really tied to anything.  And they just want to have a good day, day in and day out.  And we’ll talk about that in a minute.  Now, Graber notes that there are actually other polls, not just of individuals, just  ask them flat out, do you have a BS job or not?  But he also notes that when you do an analysis of how  people spend their workday, even people who have theoretically real jobs, like that 50% of people

 who say that they contribute to society, if you look at how they actually spend their day,  it is not as if they are working 100% of the time. He quotes from  a poll or a survey called the State of Enterprise Work, which basically finds that of 100% of your  full day, only about 39% of it is actually doing the work that you are paid to be doing. 39%.

 Just to give you the other percent, 16% is responding to emails. 11%  is administrative tasks. 11% is useful meetings. 10% is not useful meetings. 8% is getting  interrupted for non-essential reasons. And 5% everything else. I guess that includes taking a dump or something, right?  So all of this kind of, this is kind of funny, right? Because it’s not just that you have this, these really bad, this really bad record of, oh, there are lots of jobs that are just nonsensical.

 You also have, when you are doing a job that theoretically contributes, you’re not actually  really working that much towards the end, right? And I want you to  bear in mind, you know, you can go ahead and guess, you know, what kinds of jobs are more BS jobs  versus ones which aren’t, okay? So I’m going to go ahead and guess that a lot of office jobs,  like construction workers are not going to say they have BS jobs.

 They might take a little time,  you know, they might not be working every single hour of the day. I can tell you whenever I’ve been a laborer, right? When I was younger,  the last hour, maybe the last hour or two of the day, you often wouldn’t have anything to do. So  you might just be, oh, well, let me sweep up the shop or something like that.

 But we’re talking,  let’s exclude those people for a second. And just think about the fact that if 50% of the jobs in the entire economy are BS jobs,  and a lot of those are jobs like, you know, you’re working in a store, even if you hate  the job, right?  Or you’re doing something else that’s tangibly productive.  Well, that must mean that 50% must have a significant chunk of office work.

 That’s  probably like most of office work, if anything. So, you know, once you, I don’t know, once you  realize that, it kind of, I don’t know, beggars belief almost. Now, especially nowadays, now,  I forget when exactly the book, I think I said the article that he originally wrote was in 2013.  I forget when exactly the book was written. Maybe I can look in the book. I think I said the article that he originally wrote was in 2013.

 I forget when exactly the book  was written. Maybe I can look in the book. I actually have it right here. But of course,  okay, so this is 2018. Now, since 2018, we of course had the big lockdown, right? So in 2020,  we didn’t use the term BS jobs, but there was the new concept of non-essential workers, right?  So when the lockdown happened and governments were telling people  basically they can’t work and businesses, you know,  couldn’t have people come into the office, right?  There all of a sudden arose this big distinction between

 people whose jobs are actually important and people whose jobs,  you know, maybe they’re contributing,  but they’re not really doing anything necessary, right. And I think this is a pretty great, I’m not saying if you had to go home,  you have a BS job by default, but I think there’s probably a significant corollary.

 I think,  you know, during the lockdown, it’s a pretty good example. I remember that around here,  and I think this is true in other places, there were times  where, let’s say, the price of food and other essential goods were a lot lower than usual  and sometimes a little bit higher.  But it wasn’t like we were having hyperinflation or anything like that, meaning food still  got to the table.

 Everything pretty much functioned as it did.  The only thing that was really different was a lot of restaurants, you know, didn’t have people in them and stuff like that. But really the total absence  of the entire bureaucratic class during most of 2020 really made not a lick of difference for  most people.

 Now that probably made a big lick of difference if you were employed in one of those  jobs or if you were reliant on one of those jobs.  But for the rest of us, it really didn’t mean anything.  And, you know, it’s funny to think that in a world where something like 80% of people might not have been physically working or they might have been going through this notional idea of working online, everything pretty much worked as it was.

 So I think the concept of BS jobs is very much vindicated by this event. In terms of even, you know, people who have not very  useful jobs, you realize, well, we could either lay these people off during the lockdown, or we  could have them work like an hour from home, and we can abandon the pretense of them constantly having to work all the time,  right? So anyway, if you go on from that, now one thing that Graeber notes that I actually really  like is that he says in comparison with the past, okay, if you look at, you know, medieval Europe

 and compare it to the modern world, we have this novel idea that you can  be this thing called an employee.  And what an employee does is he sells his time to his boss.  So you say, okay boss, you give me this amount of money for hourly work or you give me a  salary and I will give you an eighth of my living  hours, right? So I’ll give you eight hours a day and you can tell me to do whatever you want,  right? So as I mentioned before, a lot of times when you’re in a job nowadays,  in the last hour or so of work, even if you do have a very legitimate job where you’re

 accomplishing a lot of things, a lot of times you’re finished up and, you know, you don’t really have anything to do.  And of course, Graeber has pretty good examples of people who do this basically all the time.  So there’s a good example. Actually, let me go to it in the book.

 There’s a good example he gives  of a guy who worked, I think, in a museum. I’ll read it out for you. Clarence says,  I worked as a museum guard for a major global security company in a museum where one exhibition room was left unused more or less permanently.  My job was to guard that empty room, ensuring no museum guests touched the, well, nothing in the room, and ensure nobody sets any fires.

 the, well, nothing in the room and ensure nobody sets any fires. To keep my mind sharp and attention undivided, I was forbidden any form of mental stimulation like books, phones, etc. Since nobody  was ever there, in practice, I sat still and twiddled my thumbs for seven and a half hours  waiting for the fire alarm to sound.

 If it did, I was to calmly stand  up and walk out. And that was it. So this employee, right? So he has a job to do. He’s  supposed to guard this useless room, which I guess makes it a BS job. But it’s worse  than that. He’s not allowed to even read a book. He’s not allowed to use his phone or  do something else.

 I mean, he can’t actually do something productive at work, right? If  he wants to work on his side hustle, right? If he wants to bring his laptop and sit down in a chair and do  some stuff while he literally watches paint dry, he can’t do that. Because there’s this very modern  concept that when you’re an employee, you owe the person employing you time, right? Anyway,  as I was saying, Graeber notes that that is distinct from how things used  to be in, say, medieval Europe or really any other time and place.

 Whereas if you wanted to hire  someone, you would hire them for a specific task. You would basically hire them as we would call for,  you know, a subcontractor. You would say, oh, I want this guy to, you know, I don’t know,  redo my kitchen or something like that. Or I want him to do a specific  task and I’ll pay him to do that. I’m not going to pay him by the hour.

 That doesn’t make sense  because I know if I pay him by the hour, he’s going to stretch it out as long as he possibly  can. Right. I’m going to get ripped off. It’s stupid to do that. And he really says that back  in the day, the only people who, you know, for which there was this idea that they have to work  for particular hours was really slaves, right? So slaves, there’s a sense in which a slave’s time  belongs to his master, right? And the modern concept of a wagee, right, a wage slave is someone  who sells his time. Like he’s not in his contract. His contract doesn’t really

 say, I mean, it might nominally say this, but his contract is not talking about, well, you have to  do these tasks during the year. And hey, and once you finish them, you can just go home and do  whatever you want, right? It’s very rare that you see that kind of stuff. Instead it says, okay,  here are your tasks and you’re going to show up at work at 6.30 and you’re going to go home at 4.

30 or something like  that. And that is your life now, right? You are selling someone your time and you have to pretend  to be busy, right? So that is something particularly humiliating about any job, but especially a job  like the guy who’s guarding a museum or someone who’s doing regulatory compliance or sitting in  an office pretending to do something. That is particularly humiliating for those kinds of people.

 So anyway, now the book itself, I’m going to finish up talking about the book in a second  because I really want to talk about what has caused this.  What has caused BS jobs?  Because I’m going to go ahead and say I think it’s nice that Graeber has brought to the public attention this concept, but I think there’s a tendency of people like him to kind of put the cart before the horse and misunderstand cause and effect and get everything kind of backwards in terms of, or well, I’ll go ahead and say his solutions I would consider entirely backwards, but I’ll get to that when I get to that. One last point on the book, on the content of the book.

 He actually goes through, this is kind of hokey, but he goes through the different categories of BS jobs just to kind of categorize them in the kind of things that exist.  And he comes up with around four or five different names for them.  So firstly, they’re what are called flunkies.  for them. So firstly, they’re what are called flunkies.

 So when a company has someone who’s very important, someone who has a lot of authority in an important position and they have money to  throw around, one thing that you often want to get is flunkies. And a flunky in his view is  basically someone whose job is to be someone else’s servant in a sense, right? So if you’re some kind of office manager,  if you have some kind of, I don’t know,  you’re the head of research and development  or something like that,  even if you can do all the work yourself,  it’s pretty common to just buy some other people  just to do the work that you could easily do yourself  or even if you’re not doing work,

 just to have people, I don’t know,  check boxes and stuff like that.  And Graber really hypothesizes that a lot of this, he compares it to having like a feudal retainer where you just have like kind of a kingly court of, you know, a person of authority.  And he has a couple lackeys basically who go around with him.

 Kind number, or the type number  two of a BS job is what he calls a goon. And this is people  who are usually very aggressive and competitive with other goons and other companies. This could  be advertising people or, you know, it could actually even be military people if you think  about governments as being jobs.

 Now, I kind of object to this being a BS job because there is a sense in which, you know,  if the industry or other companies, if other countries have militaries, obviously you need  a military. I mean, it’s like a, it’s a Nash equilibrium. Like you basically have to do it.  So, but there is a sense in which he says it is kind of a BS job because if you’re in PR or if  you’re in ads, you’re really just competing with other people in PR and ads. And it’s, it’s kind of an annoying game.

 One interesting take that, um,  I remember hearing, so back in the nineties in America, when I was a little kid, I remember when  I was really little, you used to be able to have advertisements for smoking. Okay. You could,  I remember billboards for, you know, buy some Marlboro cigarettes,  right? Now, one funny thing is the American government basically eventually banned smoking  advertisements in the early nineties or mid nineties.

 I forget when exactly it was,  but you know, one interesting thing about that is it actually ended up being really good  for cigarette companies. Okay. Because, because ads like ads were not really getting them new users, right?  What ads were doing is that they were cutting into the resources, like they were cutting into  the users of other brands, right? You could snipe the users of another brand and get them to use  your cigarette. Whereas the people who don’t smoke, they’re not sold on smoking.

 They’re not  going to be sold on smoking. And there, of course, is increasing number of people back in  that time who were like, I’m never going to smoke. It’s stupid. Smoking is bad for me, whatever.  Right? So banning advertisements for smoking actually ended up being kind of in the favor  of smoking companies because they no longer have to waste their money on putting out ads because they’re no longer  competing for competing with the ads of other companies.

 So I think there is that sense in which,  you know, ads kind of are BS. Like I think there are a lot of companies, I mean, frankly,  you know, pharmaceutical ads, if you ask me should just be banned. But I don’t want to do the  pharmaceutical companies any benefits, but you know, whatever. So anyway,  flunkies and goons, but ones that I think people are more familiar with, the third one is duck tapers.

 And this is something he notes that he gets from the world of software that I think a  lot of people will know of, where people are basically employed to solve glitches in software  or glitches in, not just in software, but in other things that could have  easily been solved just by like principled solutions to problems. Oh, well, we can’t  figure out how to solve this or we can’t solve it for some particular reason.

 So let’s just employ  someone to do something stupid. He actually lists these out. On page 43, he says, he lists a couple  actually. He says, I worked as a programmer for a travel company.  Some poor person’s job was to receive updated plane timetables via email several times a week  and copy them by hand into Excel.

 Now you hear that and that is literally like you could sit  down. Most of the people on my channel could sit down right now and write a little cell script  that will do that automatically that can take timetables  and put them into Excel. In fact, arguably, depending on how you get the email, you might  be able to, you know, you don’t even have to copy and paste things, right? But that’s a good example  of a duct taper. It’s a person doing something that should be automated or it’s totally unnecessary.

 Or here’s another. My job was to transfer information about a state’s oil wells into a different set of notebooks than they were currently in. Or another. My day consisted of photocopying veterans’ health records for seven and a half hours a day. Workers were told time and time again that it was too costly to buy the machines for digitizing. I actually understand that. Digitizing machines, they’re very expensive. That’s less of a BS job.

 I actually understand that. Digitizing machines, they’re very expensive. That’s less of a BS job.  And here’s one more. I was given one responsibility, watching various managers that led to the higher-ups issuing a standardization  that nullified the automization, right? So those are examples of duct tapers, right? And that I  think is something that I am definitely familiar with.

 There’s a lot of, I think it’s partially  because there are a lot of companies that use particularly software that they just kind of get off the internet.  And they don’t really have a software person that could easily duct tape these together in a principled way.  You just have kind of doofuses doing it.  Or they look at software as being kind of a black belt.

 Or really, it’s proprietary software.  Let’s be real.  Because if it were free software, this would not  be an issue. You just fix it, you know, and that would be it. But you know, companies fall for that  kind of stuff because they want to pay for software because they think it’s good, but they’re wrong.

 Anyway, category four. So we have, anyway, we have flunkies, goons, duct tapers, and he also  mentions box tickers and task managers. Box tickers are mostly just companies trying to  compete with each other. Oh, they have like Office of Inclusion and Diversity. We should have one of  those too. Unnecessary jobs that they just want to comply with the standards.

 And taskmasters,  basically, he just means middle management and things like that, right? So anyway, BS Jobs.  I think, is it an interesting read?  Yeah, I guess it’s an interesting book.  I don’t know if I recommend the whole thing.  But I think it’s about time.  I’m going to take a little break.  We’re going to have, oh, I didn’t say at the beginning, but this is not related.

 This is the podcast, right?  So go to notrelated.xyz.  Leave a comment and donation at donate.notrelated.xyz.  And I’m going to take a little break, read some comments.  And when I get back, I’m going to talk about David Graeber’s supposed solution for this and why I think it’s exactly wrong.  And in fact, the exact opposite is needed.

 But, you know, that’s how it is.  OK, so let’s read some donations.  And I did say a second ago you can donate and leave a comment at donate.lukesmith.xyz  or donate.notrelated.xyz, although you could do it at lukesmith.xyz.  It doesn’t matter.  But one thing I have new, I have if you want to super chat or send a donation with a message  with Monero  XMR, you can now do that. You can go to xmr.lukesmith.

xyz and you can super chat with that  and just say in the comment that you have a not related comment and I will read it out next time.  Anyway, here’s a XMR donation from Optimate. He says, hey, Luke, I was wondering if you do any meal prepping and have some wisdom to share.  I love your podcasts.  Keep up the good work.  Meal prepping I do very little of except for I guess I use a slow cooker to cook a lot of meat.

 And I’ll just like eat the meat gradually over time.  I mean not really.  meat gradually over time. Uh, I mean, not, not really. I, I feel like since I eat a lot of meat in particular, you usually cook that right before you, I mean, it doesn’t take that much  effort, but, um, I, yeah, I do.

 The only thing I can say I do is I use a slow cooker and cook  Boston butts and eat that meat gradually over a week or so. Um, uh, uh, Carl, uh, sends in or makes a pledge of $20.  Khristov, pledge of $10.  Thank you, Luke, for the great content.  I’m curious to know what you find cringe about Nassim Taleb.  I feel like we talked about that in the last video.  He actually keeps getting cringier.

 I used to recommend Nassim Taleb a whole lot in his books.  I thought his books were really fantastic.  Anti-Fragile is the first one that I read that I really, really liked.  I remember, I think I read Black Swan before that.  But after Anti-Fragile, I was like, oh man, this guy, he knows where it’s at.

 And I recommended his books a lot.  But as time went on, I don’t know, it was kind of 2017, 2018, definitely into 2020, he kind of gradually started having more and more cancerous takes.  Just kind of cringe stuff.  Like the way I described it in a live stream a bit ago is he kind of turned into like a Twitter liberal about everything.

 I mean, you know, he became like a big lockdown proponent, just like totally nutty about it.  And then he was like, oh, I hate Bitcoin now because Bitcoiners are against the lockdown.  And then he started saying, yeah, recently he’s like he’s really gung ho.  Like anyone who says anything critical of the American foreign policy at this point, he will call like a Russian shill or something.

 He’s just getting like cringier and cringier. I don’t know what’s going on in his heart. I don’t want to like,  I’ve said good things about him in the past. I’ve even quoted from him and not related and stuff  like that. But I do feel like he’s kind of gotten cringe, but you know, there’s more to it than that.

 All right. Andrew says, oh, just renewing my monthly donations with updated card  info. All right. Thank you. Anthony sends in $20. As a linguist, are there any features of the  English language that you find particularly interesting, novel, or useful compared to other  languages? Useful, I don’t know.

 I mean, there are definitely weird things about English that  people don’t notice that are, well, maybe they’re annoying, but if you’re a native  speaker, you probably don’t know. I mean, like, do support. Do support’s a pretty good example. So,  if you don’t know what this is, like, you know, in a normal language, right, so you can, let’s say,  hablo espanol, right? I speak Spanish.

 If you want to say you don’t speak Spanish, you just put the  word no in front of it. No hablo espanol, right? But in English, you can’t do that.  Like you don’t, you say I speak English, but you don’t just say our word is not and it goes after  verbs, but you can’t just say I speak not English. We have this weird construction where most verbs  cannot actually take negation by themselves.

 And if they can’t, they have to have some kind of  auxiliary verb, which is often do,  which takes the negation instead. So you can’t say I speak not English, or that’s like archaic  English, right? So you have to say I do not speak English. Okay, that’s like a weird aspect. That’s  probably English is like weirdest single aspect. That’s so unlike normal languages.

 I mean, it’s  just kind of a bizarre a bizarre thing  So that’s the first thing that came to my head, but  Let’s see  So Sam says hey Luke keep producing high quality wisdom  I’m working on replacing our computers with lean based high quality alternatives.

 I’ll spare you the details, but how much money do you think people would be  willing to spend on a completely from scratch, completely from scratch, non-unix style, extremely  small source code, personal computing experience? The downside being no existing software supports  the new platform. Would be willing to spend on a completely from scratch non, I don’t know what you mean by like non-unix style. Uh, I’m not really sure what you mean.

 I mean, if, if I don’t  know, you can be more, you can email back with more specificity, but I’m not quite sure what that  means. Uh, I do not pay for stuff though. I mean, well, I guess for computers, I’ll pay a hundred  dollars. My computer now it costs me 90 bucks. Uh, and then, you know, I, I, I would feel bad  spending more than that  for a personal computer um joel makes pledge of ten dollars not related fan since 2019 thought  i’d finally chip in a little all right thanks great um aesthetic memes donates five hey luke

 thank you for bringing the podcast back i enjoy your ramblings on niche topics would you consider  an episode on graham hancock and randall Oh, yeah, people always ask about Graham Hancock.  And I did mention him, okay?  I mentioned him in a previous episode.  I will eventually do that.  But anyway, I’ll read the email.

 Their Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis in Pre-Ice Age Civilizations.  I would also like to hear your thoughts on pre-Christian traditional religion throughout Europe.  also like to hear your thoughts about uh thoughts on pre-christian traditional religion throughout europe i’ve recently gone down the varg and survived the jive rabbit rabbit hole and found  heathenism to resonate with me much more than christianity well paganism is actually  pretty cringe i mean varg’s paganism is literally just the religion he made up

 that has no correspondence to anything i mean survive the jive from what i can tell he’s more  like you know, what did  people actually believe and stuff like that. Whereas Varg and survive the jive, of course,  are not on good terms with each other or something.

 Cause Varg, you know, he picks fights with people  or something. I don’t really understand it. He would probably not like me, uh, since, you know,  I’m a Christ cuck or whatever, but, um, uh, yeah, paganism, like people have to distinguish between paganism as it used to exist,  as it really was, and people recreating a new religion that is based on pagan motifs,  which is what they’re doing.

 Like when you call yourself a pagan nowadays, you are not  reaching back to some archaic past. You really have this modernist  religion with, I don’t know, pagan archetypes sprinkled on top of it. I don’t know. I don’t  want to talk about that here, but maybe in a separate video. Irving donates five a month.  Thank you. Andrew says, since in 10, thank you for making what you do public.

 You’ve changed my  outlook on a lot of things in the past couple of years. I salute you.  Thank you, Andrew.  Andre sends in $10.  I recently set up my own email server with the email whiz script.  Thank you.  It is easy to set up two-factor authentication for it. I actually don’t have two-factor authentication.  I don’t know how to do that off DoveCot and PostFix off the top of my head.

 There probably is a way.  I’ve never thought to integrate it.  So I’m not a big fan of two-factor authentication.  I don’t know where the word divisions are there, but it donates $5.  Found you a while back via Sam Hyde’s New Pill channel, but just started bringing, but  just started binging your stuff recently.

 You’ve helped me through, think about things in a different, cooler way, and I’m happy  because of it.  Thank you for doing what you do.  Keep it up.  Thank you.  Let’s see.  So Dan the Man sends in 100 bucks.  Thank you, all right.  Thanks for all your life advice and videos  about Christianity, you rock.  Wish you would make more videos about life advice.

 Maybe I will.  Ralph sends in five.  Thanks for the tutorials and larbs, Luke.  And five from Jose.  Let’s see if there’s any other messages.  10, there are a lot.  I guess I haven’t done, oh my goodness, and there are a whole lot more.  Shoot.  I guess I haven’t done an episode in a while.  So Georgie sends in 10 a month.

 Hey Luke, here’s a modest monthly contribution.  I moved to the US from Eastern Europe, Bulgaria, about three years  ago, and I’m loving it here despite blue-pilled normies running rampant. I would love it if you  talk more about the parallels between pagan philosophy and Christianity, Aurelius’s meditations,  as well as those papal encyclicals you put up on Lindy Press. I’ll order some books soon.

 Yeah,  check those out at lindypress.net, by the way, if you don’t know about that. But yeah, I do plan on doing videos on the books that I republish.  So we’ll see about that.  So TW sends in $10.  Switching donation to my new card.  Unrelated, I got a copy of this for Christmas.  A very amazing wood engraving prints.

 Okay, I’m looking at that. Okay.  $5. Do you sneed or do you leech? I sneed, of course. Elise donates $20. The other day,  a thinkpad fell into my hands from the sky and spoke. Now you have no excuse to be totally ignorant. If you’ve  been wanting to learn about how to program for a while, and my moment has, or I’ve been waiting to  learn how to program for a while, and my moment has now come, where would you suggest I start?  That’s a really broad question, but is there any quintessentially relevant resource you could put

 me towards, or a project do you think would be ideal for a complete noob like me?  I usually recommend just, I mean, it’s an issue of what you want to accomplish on a computer.  This is usually what I say.

 Like there are something, there has to be something that you want to do, like, um, like that you want to make more efficient or that you want to do in your own  way or make some kind of environment for doing effectively. And you know, what I did when I  learned computers is just, I tried to hone an expert system for doing what I needed. And in  the process, you learn how to use a computer, right? That’s the deal. Thanks. I appreciate  all the ideas and based opinions you throw out there. Levi, Levi, whatever it is.

 When will you do season three of  Not Related? Well, I guess you could call this season three. I will just call it season two.  I’m not quite sure how many episodes I have, but he says one topic that might be of interest,  that might interest the listeners is Harold Hillman and his debunking of microbiology.  I have never heard of Harold Hillman. I will have to look him up because you never know. He might be worth it. Let me write that down. Okay.

 Yeah, I’m actually reading like  all the donations I’ve gotten in like the past five months. So that’s why there’s so many,  but there are only like five more. You can skip, you know, to the other side with the, uh, time codes, if you really want, uh, Leserax  donates $20.

 Um, how do you talk about a subject for an hour or more? It seems like you have  the ability to rare, rarely need any pauses and can transition between topics, topics  seamlessly. Some tips to become more like you would be greatly appreciate. It is, it  is a total skill. When I first started out, I couldn’t do this.  Like it was hard for me to record a video  that was like four minutes, but I just got used to it.

 And I think also when I started recording the podcast,  I would have to take breaks every three minutes,  every like five minutes.  So it would be just a bunch of cuts that I put together.  Now, like this one, you know,  I’ve probably made like three cuts.  I don’t know how long I’ve been going, like, but you know, you know, I’ve probably made like three cuts.

 I don’t know  how long I’ve been going, like, but you know, it’s, you get used to it. It’s, it’s just something you  get by practice. And he also says, also, how did you transition from a linguistics background to a  more computer science related field? I mean, I also have a degree in economics, right? I mean,  like I’ve done different stuff. It’s not, it’s not like a, it’s not like I have a brain for just one thing.

 So I don’t really think they’re related, my interest in linguistics and computers.  Okay, so Fred sends in $100. All right, thank you.  Recently came into some money and thought I would share the wealth with my favorite podcast.  I was listening to your old No Relation podcast, which is not the same as Not Related. That was a podcast I did one episode of with my roommate at the time.

 Anyway, he says,  I was listening to the old No Relation podcast and wondered whatever happened to your co-host.  I’d love to hear another good linguistics chat between the two of you. Well, I don’t actually  even know him anymore. I haven’t talked to him in years after I moved out of Arizona. That’s been a while.

 But, you know, linguistics, it’s kind of a boring,  like, I don’t know. It’s kind of a boring subject to me. I mean, there are things to say about it,  but I don’t think it would interest most people. P.S. If there was some kind of personal falling  out between the two of you, please feel free to ignore that. No, I just thought, like, I don’t  see him anymore.

 I don’t know where he lives actually.  Kumar sends in $10.  Thank you for your Linux videos, Luke.  Antonio sends in five.  Do you have any hints on how to start an off-grid life, live in the UK, but original from Latin America, probably returning to buy bigger amounts of lands and how to generate income  without intensive cultivation?  your amounts of lands and how to generate income without intensive cultivation. Uh, well, I mean, you’re going to, you’re going to want to cultivate food, um, but, uh, you don’t have to be a

 commercial farmer, but nowadays with the internet, I mean, you really have to make a way of making  money on, off the internet. Like that is the best asset you could have for pretty much anyone. Um,  you know, I, I can’t give you an exact, I can’t tell you exactly what to do, but you know,  that, that is what you really want to do.

 Um, but you know, just, just farm for yourself,  like grow crops and, and herbs and stuff for you. Don’t expect to sell them. Um, and you know,  have a job in your off time and off time in town or something like that. Um, Rob sends in 10,  thank you for sharing such valuable content for  free. And the broken metronome sends in $20 a month. All right, great. Thank you.

 Okay, that  was a whole lot of donations. I’m actually really tired. All right, episode’s over. I’m going to go  to sleep. Okay, back to the book. Actually, no, we’re done with the book. I’m going to talk about what Graeber actually views as the cause of BS jobs and why I think he’s wrong and what the actual issue is.

 I kind of alluded to this at the beginning when I was talking about the lockdown,  but if you want to understand the BS jobs phenomenon, you have to understand the fact that we have such a hyperproductive technological system  that we really don’t need everyone in the world working 40 hours a week.

 It’s totally unnecessary,  right? And if, you know, if people for cultural reasons want to work 40 hours because they think  it’s the right thing to do or something like that, or they feel like they’re wasting time  if they don’t do that, well, we’re going to have to find increasingly menial things for them to do or something like that, or they feel like they’re wasting time if they don’t do that,  well, we’re going to have to find increasingly menial things for them to do.

 All right. Now, Graeber’s view, Graeber has a bunch of different views of it, but I think he really views it as you have these hyperproductive capitalist enterprises, you have these big  businesses, right? And they are just swimming in money.

 And a lot of this is true, right? A lot of businesses, let’s say Amazon is so hyperproductive and their margins are so  razor thin that they can kind of, you know, they can waste money on some silly things. Now,  the Amazon wages who are actually getting the goods to your door, they are hyperproductive.  They are working 20 hours a day. They are sweating it out.  But you can have a kind of bureaucratic structure if you have a business that’s that hyperproductive.

 If you’re Google and you’re making billions and billions of dollars and you kind of have this  secured monopoly-like status, well, you can just hire whoever to be your diversity and inclusion magnates,  and you can employ lots of people basically just doing nothing, right? If you really wanted to.  And not just that, but even lower companies, not just Amazon or Google, but your average  white collar work, right? I mentioned the document digitization business that I worked for.

 work, right? I mentioned the document digitization business that I worked for. Realistically speaking, that’s a really in-demand field. And a company might make so much money that they don’t  really know what to do with. And if the entrepreneur in charge is not really concerned with, oh, let’s  expand, let’s do more, let’s make even more money.

 If he’s just content with that, well,  maybe he’ll start hiring some of his friends, hiring like a cute girl as a secretary, things like that.  And this goes into kind of what Graber gets into with flunkies and hiring people who you don’t really need or you might nominally need just so you don’t have to do things all the time.  But when you pull back from the scenario, you see that a lot of people are just not doing much of anything, right?  So that is kind of – now, Graeber, of course, his solution to the whole thing.

 What is his solution?  I would say it’s twofold, OK?  Because one of the sides is the fact that a lot of people have kind of a wagey mindset. Like there is this work ethic idea that it is somehow  ignoble if you refuse to work for 40 hours, right? So if you are like the anti-work people who say,  oh, we should only work 20 hours or I don’t want to work that much or something like that,  there’s something suspect about that, right?  And, you know, I agree that that is kind of a weird thing.

 But, you know, when I meet someone who says,  oh, I only work 20 hours a week or something like that,  you know, there is kind of like a, really?  I mean, what’s going on?  Now, maybe you, you know, you don’t have to,  you’re making plenty of money or something like that.  But we do very much have a culture of work,  you know, you want to work. Working, if you’re not working, there’s something weird like that. But we do very much have a culture of work, you know, you want to work.

 Working, if you’re not working, there’s something weird about that. And even having a BS job,  even having a job where you’re not really doing anything is better than having a job where  you’re working part-time and maybe you’re doing more for society and you might even be making  more.

 That is a little more suspect than a job that’s, you know,  where someone’s working nonstop. And I think that’s definitely the case in America. And I  think it is also kind of the case in Europe as well. I think America has more of a culture like  this. But either way, Graeber’s, the second part of his solution, aside from a cultural change,  is he is a big fan of UBI, universal basic income, right? So if you don’t know what this is,  I assume most people who have been kind of politically plugged in know what this is,  but universal basic income is this idea that let’s just give people lots of money, okay?

 Let’s just give people a monthly stipend. Let’s just pay them a salary just for existing.  Now this is popular in Graeber’s, I guess, his kind of people, like a lot of more radical leftists who want to have this reordering, post-scarcity reordering of society.  They are big fans of UBI.

 The idea being, well, instead of, you know, we have all  this welfare and stuff and that that’s not really sufficient. What we really want is we want people  to be totally independent. Now, Graeber is also kind of like a, he’s one of these post-scarcity  guys in general. I don’t know if he’d take the label. For those who don’t know, post-scarcity  is kind of, it’s, it also is kind of a leftist idea, I guess I would say, if you had to pin it to  something.

 But the idea behind post-scarcity is eventually we’re going to get to the point where  physical goods are just so common. They’re just all over the place. We have so much productive  capacity to produce them that they become as common as air. And we don’t really have to worry  about distributing them. You just,  oh, if you need food, you’ll just trip over it.

 If you need an iPad, we produce so many of them,  you trip over it. Okay. Now, post-scarcity economics is kind of, I think there’s something  to be said there. I think there is a sense in which you can get to a point where your technology  has produced something to such a degree that you don’t have to worry about it being scarce.  has produced something to such a degree that you don’t have to worry about it being scarce.

 But I do feel that we are nowhere near that point, right? Even if we can get raw materials and food and things like that to be produced very effectively, there are still massive distribution  problems. How do you move them from here to there? How do you incentivize people to move them from  here to there? Well, you have to pay them. You have to have jobs. They have to cost money.

 So I think post-scarcity economics in general is pretty  suspect. But UBI is this idea that if we have this kind of post-scarcity world where we have  so much productivity, really what we got to do is just allow people to redeem, you know, just buy stuff  for free. We’re basically creating it for free. If we’re so hyper productive, we should just give  someone a universal basic income just so they can be able to buy stuff, right? Now, I think when it  comes to UBI, you might remember that Andrew Yang in America, he’s this guy who ran for president.

 He actually ran on the platform of, we’re just going to give every American $1,000 a month.  That’s going to be our thing, that he ran on UBI, right? But I think UBI, there are probably  two kinds of critiques. One, I think is kind of superficial superficial. One I think is more trenchant. Okay.  So the superficial critique is the more obvious critique.

 And that is, hey, if someone gets a  thousand dollars a month, or let’s say more, let’s say, you know, 20,000, 40,000 a year.  Okay. If someone gets that amount of money, are they ever going to freaking work? Okay. Are they  going to contribute anything or are they just going to  play video games all day and watch porn and coom and basically accomplish nothing, right? How many  people are just going to do literally nothing? And even if we have a hyperproductive society  that can produce all these goods, there’s at some point we need someone doing some amount of work.

 They need to fix the robots, right? Something needs to be done, right? So that is kind of the superficial critique of UBI. Now, I will say economists,  you can look up studies of UBI, and I will say most economists nowadays are pretty friendly,  like they want to believe in it.

 And I remember back when I was doing my economics degree reading  a couple papers that were, oh, look, they did this experiment in Uganda  or something. And it was, oh, people didn’t actually quit their jobs if they got a big stipend  and stuff like that. I will just say that although you can find a bunch of support academically,  you know, in studies and stuff like that for the idea that people aren’t just going to stop working  if you pay them money, right? I am a little suspect, like, I am suspect of the studies for multiple reasons.

 And most recently, you know, in America, when we had the lockdown, at the tail end of the lockdown,  back when people started coming out of their houses and going back to normal,  the government decided to just give people more money.  Now, originally, they had given people $1,200, but then they decided to give them people more money.

 Now, originally they had given people $1,200,  but then they decided to give them two more stipends, one of like 600, one of 1,400.  And I remember when that happened, when they sent out those two stipends, mind you, this is not like  a monthly payment. This is just a one-time payment. And they did give some unemployment  benefits lasting a little longer, but they just sent out these payments.

 And what happened basically across America is not a single wagee was at work anywhere.  You couldn’t go to a fast food restaurant or even a sit down restaurant. A lot of retailers  didn’t have people working. People just literally like getting $2,000, which isn’t really  that much money, but a lot of wagees who just got $2,000 were like, well, I have enough money.

 I’m  just going to quit. Okay. I’m just going to quit. So I am very skeptical of the idea that if someone  got, let’s say 200 or $2,000 a month, or even $1,000 a month, that they would not do exactly  the same thing. So I know that there are a bunch of  positive studies on UBI, but I’m just going to say it’s very easy to concoct a study that gets  the results that you want. I’m just going to say it is the easiest thing.

 Lying with statistics,  creating a study that’s going to produce the results that you want is the easiest thing in  the universe, especially in economics, which is a fake science anyway. But anyway, that is the easiest thing in the universe, especially in economics, which is a fake science anyway.  But anyway, that is the one critique of UBI.

 But the second critique of UBI I think is much more important.  And I think it really gets at the problem of the real cause of BS jobs. This is not something Graeber is saying, but this is something that I am saying.  This is my editorial stance.  This is something that I am saying.  This is my editorial stance, okay?  The real problem with UBI is that if you give out, you know, trillions of dollars to people,  okay, over the course of, you know, if you say, let’s see, how many, let’s do some math.

 So let’s say there are 300 million people.  Let me type this in.  300 million people in America.  And you give them, let’s say, let’s be generous, let’s say $40,000 a year.  That is an expenditure of, let’s see, million, billion, trillion. Okay,

 that’s like the one after trillion, 120 of that. It’s a lot. There are a lot of zeros there. Okay. It’s a lot of money. Okay. People talk about how much  spending the government did last, you know, back in 2020, where they just created most of the  dollars in existence. And, you know, now it’s causing hyperinflation. Well, that is going to  be ripped. Even if people continue to work, we are going to be living in a place where inflation has  been mandated, right? And there’s a big difference.

 Even if you’re a  Keynesian economist, in fact, especially if you’re a Keynesian economist, you will realize there’s a  big difference between giving a bank a trillion dollars in a bailout, which I don’t endorse,  but giving a trillion dollars to normal people is actually going to be much more inflationary.  And that is because,  you know, if you give, well, let’s, let’s use a smaller amount. If you give the bank of America 20,000 bucks, right? They’re just going to put that in some account, 20,000 bucks. That’s like,

 you know, peanuts to them. They don’t care about it. We’ll put it in some account that who cares?  It’ll, it’ll be used for something, right? We’ll use it for something. But it’s probably just going to, they’ll loan it out.  They’ll do something with it.  But in the case, if you give just average Joe 20,000 bucks, okay, there are going to  be maybe 10% of people are going to save that.

 But I think your average Joe would spend that 20,000 bucks.  That could be a life-changing amount of money.  And this is why a lot of, you know, a lot of Keynesian economists correctly note, if  you want to stimulate the  economy, give money to individual people, right?  So let’s say we had this kind of stipend, these trillions of dollars going to individual  people, okay, every single year.

 You would have such velocity of change, such a large amount of just M1 in the economy,  that you would really have extreme inflation, and it would only be getting worse and worse and worse. So what does that mean?  Who cares? Oh, inflation, that’s, oh, the news media said that’s what rich people care about.

 Okay. Here’s why you need to worry about inflation. Okay. Here’s the actual cause of BS jobs.  You can’t save money. If you get money from the government in your UBI, and let’s say  you want to be a dutiful person and you’re going to put that in the bank. You say, hey, I’m set.  I have everything I need. I’m going to put it in the bank. I’m going to save it for later.

 I’m  going to save it for my kids. That’s a responsible thing to do. Well, if you’re in an economy where  everyone else is spending nonstop, everyone else is spending it on marble,  memorabilia, and OnlyFans, and all this kind of crap, your money, as time goes on, and of course  the government is creating more money, your money is going to be worth less and less and less and  less and less.

 So that $40,000, by the time your kids roll around, it might be worth, you know,  500 bucks or something miserable like that. I mean, maybe not that bad, but it might actually be that bad. So here is my contention. This is the actual cause of BS jobs. The actual cause of BS  jobs is as follows. We have a monetary system that is not quite that bad, but it is basically that  bad. We have a monetary system that is highly inflationary.

 In a normal world where we had harder money if we had gold and silver and we can store value in those quantities,  over time, gold and silver, historically, they tend to go up.  If you work early in your 20s and you save the equivalent of $100,000 or so, you do a lot of work.  You save that up and you put it in gold. As time  goes on, that becomes more valuable. You’re not losing value. It’s becoming more valuable.

 And  that actually makes sense because you did a lot of work early on. And that, let’s say you built  a building for $100,000, right? That building gets years and years and years of use of many  different businesses or people using it.  You know, many people go, you know, if you build a restaurant, many people have been fed there.

 Many people go on first dates there. Many people have coffee there. It changes a lot of people’s lives as time goes on. Your investment in the world is actually increasing and your gold value  actually increases, not necessarily exactly with that, but with the, you know, assessed value of gold, right? As time  goes on.

 And so in a society where we had a harder money that wasn’t constantly inflating,  it would be very normal for a person to work for, you know, several years, maybe a decade,  but not necessarily three decades of being an office worker doing nothing, right?  You could invest in your future.  Even if you wrote a computer program that is hyperproductive, you might be able to make  so much money off that that you could retire.

 You could basically have enough that you could retire when you’re 20 and you could live on  that for the rest of your lives.  That might sound a little crazy.  Of course, people weren’t writing computer programs in the past, but things are easier now because we’re  more connected with other people.

 We can make, we can, we can make technologies that affect their  lives in a positive way such that they are willing to give you money. Okay. That is something pretty  novel, right? So what are BS jobs? Well, BS jobs are a solution to a problem caused by inflation, right? So the problem with  inflation is when the government is printing money and when the government is giving it to people who  they like, maybe banks or maybe banks are creating money in effect by fractional reserve banking,  or when, you know, governments give it to NGOs or universities, all these things that the government gives money to, right?

 It is inflating the value of the dollar, or really decreasing the value of the dollar via inflation.  And now all of these agencies have currency, and they need to get the currency to people,  because if they don’t get the currency to people, no one will be able to buy their stuff.  because if they don’t get the currency to people, no one will be able to buy their stuff.

 So BS jobs are the bridge that connect money with the people who need to spend the money,  right? That is the goal. So a BS job is something that has to exist if you have one of these hyperproductive firms. And if you don’t, if you know, if you have this inflationary currency  where people can’t actually save, you need to get value.

 They need to have a way to be able to buy stuff because they can’t save.  So you need to just say, hey, we’re going to give you this money.  You just do whatever, right?  Because if we don’t just create these BS jobs where you’re doing literally nothing all the time, the economy will collapse and we’re going to be in an even worse  situation, right? So you have whatever job, you have flunkies that make you feel good about  yourself. You have box tickers that can pretend that they’re doing stuff. You create a bunch of

 jobs because you have the money and because you want to express a need. Oh, look, government,  I need more money. And that’s ultimately how it works.  So when I look at BS jobs, the solution is actually not UBI. It’s actually just the opposite.  The solution is harder money.

 Because if there was not this kind of government to, you know,  big business and universities and R&D, like, you know, if the government did not have this easy money that it was giving to  all the parties that it liked, those parties that it likes would not have to employ people to do  literally nothing. Okay. That, that is my contention that the actual cause of BS jobs are.

 Now, I, in fact, now David Graeber is not alive anymore. And I think that the explanation I just  gave probably sounds a little libertarian for him.  You talk about hard money and I don’t know, leftist anarchists, they might get a little  antsy.  But I think he would, in essence, agree with the general idea, right?  Because you have, in his view, oh, well, the corporations, they have a lot of money and,  you know, capitalism, it doesn’t have enough demand to consume the  product that it produces. So you have to get money around. I think he would kind of assent

 to what I’m saying. It’s kind of two different ways of looking at a similar solution.  I guess the issue to me in his interpretation, it is not paying attention to the monetary system,  which is arguably the most important aspect. And if you don’t pay  attention to that, you look at things in terms of, oh, well, who has the money, who needs the money,  and you fail to see that I think something like UBI would drastically exacerbate the issue,  right? It would just make things worse and worse. Really, that is the conundrum of the Keynesian

 economy, right? Because you have this inflationist  currency and because you want to solve alleged problems like depressions by stimulating the  economy, quote unquote, you really continue to make your problem worse. It’s harder and harder  and harder for people to save.

 Therefore, if you just sit there, like, I mean, the thing is,  if you have an inflationary  currency, this is the thing that people need to, I don’t know, remember, especially if they’re  leftists who don’t really get the hard money thing. And again, think it’s like something  weird and libertarian.

 But if you don’t have hard money, you are necessarily saying that  we can expropriate everyone’s wealth via inflation constantly.  And that necessarily means that every person who is lower on the income strata  will have to work and work and work and work every single year of their life  until the point, you know, just because the money that they would otherwise be saving  would not be able to go to actually help them out in the future.

 That is the big issue.  That is the draw of having harder money.  And I guess that is the annoyance a lot of the times when you hear these people talking about, you know, their MMT magic and how they, I don’t know, how what we need more in an economy is the same kind of problems we have,  right? Now, I have said this in other video, or not videos, I remember writing a blog post on this,  which I probably alluded to maybe in a podcast episode before, but you can look it up.

 I think  it’s called why it’s bad to have, or why it’s good to have low GDP. It’s something like that. Or maybe  why it’s bad to have high GDP. I forget exactly like that. Or maybe why it’s bad to have high GDP.  I forget exactly.  But the point I make in that video is that the goal of economic life is absolutely not to look good on paper.

 It’s not to have a high GDP.  Right?  That literally means nothing.  GDP is a metric not really of economic production, but economic inter-reliance.  Okay? of economic production, but economic inner reliance. So if you have an economy where no  one produces any, like you are 0% self-sufficient. You don’t grow food.

 You don’t create your own  products. You don’t reuse things. If you are constantly rebuying things, if you’re constantly  having to go to the store for your own groceries and everything, that will mean a society with a high GDP, okay? Having  a high GDP is not necessarily a good thing. It’s a supposed measurement of economic transactions.

 However, if we live in a world where everyone is self-sufficient, if we live in the Garden of Eden,  if we actually do live in a post-scare city society, right, then there is no GDP. There is no economic output because there’s no  need for us to transact or to buy things.

 If you can provide for yourself, your income is going to  end up a zero. Well, you might have an income, but the expenditure you use on products that you need  to live, if you are self-sufficient, is going to be zero. You’re going to be a net zero contribution to the GDP. So that is not necessarily a good thing.  And I think a lot of these people who are looking at things in terms of output and aggregates and  stuff like that are ignoring what’s actually going on.

 When you have fast money, when you  have fast and loose money, you ultimately have a situation where people are on a kind  of gerbil wheel or hamster wheel, whatever they’re called, where they’re constantly running  and they have to keep working and working and working in the economy so that they can  compensate for the money that is in effect stolen by inflation. They cannot store value.

 Right? So, I mean, this is the whole point that, and I know a lot of gold bugs will kind  of understand this. I guess a lot of Bitcoiners will kind of understand this because Bitcoin like  gold is an attempt of doing digital hard money, right? So, and if, actually, it’s a pretty good  example because Bitcoiners, I think, I don’t know, put in person this different mentality, right?  So when you really understand Bitcoin and you get into it, there are a lot of people who totally change their personal behaviors to adjust from an inflationary economy where money is easy and it’s not worth anything.

 So you might as well spend it on your Marvel toys and consume product and stuff like that.  If you’re now all of a sudden dealing with a scarcer,  harder money, your entire personal behavior changes. You want to save every single penny  every time you go out, every time you have a choice of consumption.

 You double think that  because if you spend 20 bucks on a meal, well, I mean, in the inflationary economy, $20 is not a  big deal. And you know, if you  save that in 10 years, it’s going to be worth half as much, right? Whereas if you spend  $20 of a hard money like Bitcoin on something, well, you just don’t want to do that, right?  I mean, that could be worth, you know, hundreds or thousands of dollars in the future.

 You  want to hold on to that. So, and the problem is there are so many people who are in this GDP mindset  where they’re not thinking about, are people providing for themselves? Can they be financially  independent? They’re not thinking about that. They’re thinking about things in terms of,  well, if we had hard money, if we had gold or Bitcoin, that would be a deflationary currency.

 And then the economy would go down. Well, yes, the economy absolutely would go. I mean,  it would probably long-term go up, but short-term, absolutely. It would go down because what people  are going to do is they are going to save and they’re going to use that on necessities and  they are going to cut out the BS jobs. That is the point.

 Around half of our economy,  if you look at the polls that we talked about in Graeber’s book, around half of the  economy is fake. And that’s half of the economy that people acknowledge. There’s probably even  more of that, even more jobs that are actually fake, where people try to convince themselves  that their jobs are useful.

 Actually, someone asked, I saw a talk by Graeber, and there was  one point where someone raised his hand and he’s like um so you talk about bs jobs  you’re a professor isn’t that a bs job and you know graber of course tries to defend it as like  a legitimate profession or something but in in real life we know being a professor is a bs job  everyone knows that it is probably the peak of the bs jobs in terms of i don’t know the little  work you do and the most money you get um so you you know, yes, we would cut out BS jobs, not just,  you know, the ones that people know about, but the ones that they’re in denial of.

 And Graeber even notes that there are many jobs that are probably real jobs, but they’re in a BS  world, right? So if you’re a janitor, let’s say there’s a company that is basically a nonsensical  company that has no economic function and it exists for the reasons we’re  talking about.

 Well, the employees of that company might know that they’re not really doing anything,  but there are also people like the janitors in that building where they might be doing stuff.  They’re cleaning the bathrooms. They’re jannying the halls and stuff like that, but they don’t  necessarily realize that their work is actually useless because they’re working for a useless firm.  they don’t necessarily realize that their work is actually useless because they’re working for a useless firm.

 Anyway, if we actually had any kind of economic improvement, this is kind of  a bitter pill. I mean, in long term, it’s a good pill, but it’s a bitter pill at the beginning.  We would have a massive economic contraction. That’s just the fact of life. And if we have a  harder money, yes, we would have a massive economic contraction for two reasons. Firstly,  yes, we would have a massive economic contraction for two reasons.

 Firstly,  consumption would not be anywhere near as a good idea. It would not be a good idea to buy a bunch of Funko Pops. I mean, it’s not a good idea now, but it’s more like your money, since it’s going  to be worth significantly more if you have Bitcoin or something like that, it is very stupid to spend it on trivial things.

 That’s number one.  And number two is a lot of the economy that exists is unnecessary.  It will be eradicated if people are making wiser financial decisions because they have  a harder money.  Now, that can mean two different things at the end.  What is the end game?  Okay, what is the end game of having harder money?  What’s the end game of cutting out BS jobs? Well, it means one of two things.

 It could mean that we get to a point where,  I said before, if you have a really hard money and you make some significant contribution to  society, you build some buildings, you write some software that’s very useful and you get some money  for that, it might be that a lot of people can retire in their 20s or something like that.

 That’s not a thing that’s out of the  realm of possibilities. Again, especially in today’s interconnected economy where it’s easy  to do something digitally that can have massive effects, right? And when you are saving the output  of your work in a hard currency, you can retire early. So it might be that people are going  to be working substantially fewer hours.

 They’re going to have less work and, you know, they’re  going to do what they want on their free time. That is, you know, one of the big possibilities  whenever you have any kind of deflationary currency. But even aside from that, it is going  to change the way that people look at the economy. It’s going to change the orientation from a consumerist economy to one where people are basically trying to be independent.

 They’re trying to spend actually as little money as possible because there’s no inherent good in just the GDP being higher or, quote unquote, the economy being stimulated.  They want to hold on to their savings.  And that actually, of course, increases the value of everyone else’s.  Either way, I think the supposed solution of UBI is absolutely insane and exactly the opposite of  what is actually required to resolve the problem of BS jobs, which is really an epiphenomenon of  the currency. UBI, I think, especially in the past couple weeks,

 if you’ve been paying attention to events, to tether your income to the government consenting  to give you money has got to be the most insane thing that you could possibly imagine.  Just a couple weeks ago, the government of Canada was talking about putting basically  freezing people’s money because they donate $20 to a cause that they don’t like.

 Or the American government is now launching this international embargo, not just on the  Russian government, but Russian accounts on, you know, they’re disabling bank account transfers  throughout the entire country of Russia and telling cryptocurrency exchanges and everyone else to shut things down.  So the idea that I want to have my income directly tethered to the government wanting to give me money, that just strikes me as the most insane thing you could possibly endorse.

 And it is a next level insanity for someone claiming to be an anarchist, let alone to endorse something like that.  Now, Graeber does kind of say, yeah, I know I’m an anarchist.  And I don’t know. Well, the thing the thing I think with a lot of, you know, this is not to put my horse in the race.  But, you know, if you look at like leftist anarchists versus, you know, anarcho capitalists, you know, you can say a lot of bad thing about anarcho-capitalism or those people, but they at least kind of think through their utopia,

 like what kind of incentives are going to govern people. I always feel like when I read someone  like David Graeber or I think leftist anarchists in general, they always have this lacuna in their  thinking. Like, things are bad now, I’m going to have this critique of  how bad things are, and here, you know, this is wrong and that is wrong.

 And then they sort of  jump into this magical thinking where they’re thinking of an alternative. They don’t have a,  they’re just sort of like, well, things are going to be better. So a solution of UBI,  having the government directly decide to give people money, strikes me as the most un-anarchistic  possible solution. And Graeber does admit this.

 He says, oh yeah, I am an anarchist,  so it is a little weird for me to endorse this, but oh, hopefully we’ll figure things out. And  see, my problem is I don’t think they will. I don’t, my, the way I feel about people like him  is that they never really have some long-term view. It’s  always just, they have this vaguely anti-establishment rhetoric, which will always make them endorse  everything the establishment likes, and then they don’t have a coherent view for the alternative.

 Whereas I do feel like libertarian, like right libertarians have more of a view of the alternative,  like how they view private property and society and stuff like that.  That’s not an endorsement of anarcho-capitalism.  I’m just saying that they think things through, I generally feel.  Either way, that’s about all I have to tell to you today.